Mizblog

new blog

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 09:30:49 GMT

I'm no longer going to post here. You can see all subsequent postings on my new blog.

parametric functions

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 16:16:26 GMT

The parametric function is the mother of all functions.

I'm going to try to remember that.

Quote of the day

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 08:12:18 GMT

An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.

-- Laurence J. Peter (1919 - 1988)

Monday

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:00:56 GMT

Let's see if this works...

sick of livejournal

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 03:05:20 GMT

I'm tired of writing crap for this site and having it disappear or be rejected because the server is down.

I'm tired.

seriously

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 16:05:48 GMT

Read-only for days. Is it my software?

Thursdays

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 04:17:08 GMT

Got the car back last night. New wheel, no alignment. Works fine.

Stayed home today and worked. It seems every day this week I've posted a final version of this Fractions experiment software, because every morning they've come back with another thing that's wrong with it. Hopefully today's the last one.

Tomorrow morning I get to see the dentist again. I'm getting a biteguard so I don't break my teeth off while I sleep. I might have mentioned that before.

My back is about 90% good now. It still makes me notice something's not right sometimes, but it doesn't hurt like it did the other day.

I'm reading a new book, and I'll tell you all about it once I've finished it. It's a page turner so far, so I should finish this weekend.

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 05:22:31 GMT

Feels like I pinched a nerve. Only really gets me when I stand or sit straight, or when I arch my back, or when I twist at the waist.

I need a new desk and I found the one I want.

Still waiting for that new wheel. Car's still in the shop.

my back hurts again, damnit!

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 06:14:36 GMT

When I twist to the right, it feels bad. Pinched nerve? Slipped disc? Ah well, if I just sit here and don't arch my back I feel fine. Is that a hint?

It's all a mystery to me. I don't know how it works or why it doesn't.

Today was a long day of designing a lot of code and writing a little of it. Put the new car in the shop for $300 worth of new wheel. The old one had a big ol' dent in it, which was keeping the tire from holding any air in. Luckily, the wheel absorbed the shock and the suspension is intact.

I'm learning how to use Propellerheads Reason 2.5. It's loads of fun! Cutting into guitar practice though. Damnit.

Friday

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 07:05:15 GMT

Today Sangeeta ran the new car over a concrete road divider while turning left out of a parking lot with a "No Left Turn" sign which she was trying to ignore. The alignment is whacked and the wheel might be bent. We'll have to take it in for service before we drive it very far.

Work sucked today too. I got very little accomplished and the little I did was very painful and unrewarding. At least my boss thinks I'm doing a good job. Of course, not a good enough job to pay me more than the 25th percentile for workers with my job in this area. Sangeeta likes to remind me of that. Still, working from home has its advantages, like the 4 second commute and the private refrigerator, so when I complain you should try to keep it in perspective.

virtual memory

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 07:10:58 GMT

Haha! I figured out why I was having so many problems with my new computer! It was set to not use a pagefile!!! I can't believe it. Everything works so much better now, even when I'm using nowhere near my whole 2GB of RAM. I guess WinXP does funky stuff when there's no pagefile, but wow that one little setting tweak really improved performance.

So I recorded my first guitar track on my computer in a song environment! Once I get a decent performance I'll post a sample for people to hear. Finally!

go fly a kite

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 05:29:41 GMT

So, I went to the beach again today. I brought my kite with me so I could try some new stunts I saw on a video. The wind was pretty strong, but I did get some practice in. After an hour, I realized that I no longer had my line reel. It was just gone. Curses.

Work has been fairly productive today. I'm building a new release of the fractions experiment right now, as well as downloading the latest copy of my website. Oh yeah, I'm reworking the theme. It's sort of half-assed right now, but you can see it at http://www.mizerai.com.

all the way down

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 01:50:59 GMT

I watched Donnie Darko - Director's Cut today. Summary: slightly disappointing.

It got me thinking though, which is usually hard but hardly unusual. I began wondering again about an analogy I read a couple years ago between holograms and consciousness. Holograms are created by interference patterns in the propagation of light waves. Consciousness might be created by interference in the propagation of waves of neural activation in the brain. It's not fleshed out to the point that it's an actual theory (at least not in my head) but it's got a good feel for me.

long day

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:56:35 GMT

This morning was the monthly update meeting for the DWP project I've been working on for the last (almost) three years. Up before 6am, showered and dressed, and out into the rain for a nice soggy commute downtown.

Aside from myself there were three people there to present information and one guy came to listen. I got a tour of the new control room they put in, and the whole thing was over in under 20 minutes. Then it took me 90 minutes to drive back home.

At home things went better. I resisted powerful urges to gorge on whatever food we had in the house, and instead spent the day trying to make my screen layouts look pretty and professional. The end result is pretty good, though it doesn't scale properly for different screen resolutions. I'll have to figure out a way to make that happen...

Now I'm uploading all my changes to the CVS repository. It's 1am.

I'll see if it's done by morning.

aftermath

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 23:34:32 GMT

I walked on the beach today, after the storms had passed. The thunderheads to the east towered so high over the city that it seemed a miniature. The sea was brown with silt, and the shore was littered with whatever the rains had had washed away.

I found a tennis ball among the jetsam, and kicked it along in front of me as I walked down the shore. After a while, I started running after it, kicking it ahead and chasing to catch it before it rolled down the slope and into the waves. I found it easier to run after a ball than to just run. It took my mind off my sore awkward muscles and gave me an external focus. I'll have to try that more often.

rain

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:25:44 GMT

Water from the sky. It's all so wet, somehow.

Today I celebrate the death of several people who I didn't know, but who died in spectacular ways and were shown on the local news. One girl died while using her computer in her room when a rock fell of the hill in the back yard, went through the wall and killed her. One man died by falling into a 30' sinkhole (he was the supervisor of a construction crew charged with shoring up the sides of the hole). One man died when is roof caved in under the weight of all the water.

Power irregularities took down one of my computers last night but not the other one. Gotta get a UPS for the new system. Doesn't look like anything was damaged though, which is lucky.

tolerance

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 06:20:01 GMT

My tolerance level is low. There's an edge to my consciousness that's seeping into my bones. Shapes seem more jagged than usual. I'm listening to very soft music and it's making me angry, mocking my mood with its soothing sarcasm. I want to break glass. I want to splinter bones. I want to breathe fire.

I need more violent music!

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 03:15:17 GMT

Yesterday Sangeeta and I drove down to Irvine for dinner Sam Woo restaurant. The best part was meeting friends and talking and joking around. The worst part was the 2.5 hour drive down there in rain and rush hour traffic. Still, we heard four whole CDs and were only half an hour late. 15 minutes of that I blame Sangeeta for, standing outside in the rain talking with her friend for 15 minutes after waiting all day for his lag ass to show up at the last second. Pissed me off.

It rained today too. Afterward we walked around the neighborhood.

I did some semifinal script tweaking on one of the experiments I'm developing. It took weeks for the designers to come up with the sequencing method they wanted to use for problems, so today I put the latest into effect. They'll be getting the rest of it to me next week, and I'll put up the final version.

Long weekend coming!

dreams

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 06:46:39 GMT

Isn't it nice how sometimes your dreams are so much better than your reality? I mean actual sleepytime dreams, not like abstract life aspirations or anything like that. I had a nice one last night, the details of which need not concern you. ;P

I'm having computer trouble (still!) trying to make music on my new computer. I'm just not getting any damn sounds to come out on playback. Infuriating. MIDI works but audio samples are dying somewhere.

I did some graphical layout programming today. Text layouts in the form of math problems. Trying to make sure the fit in a properly sized box. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing since you need to know how big the text is in order to figure out its bounding box but then you need to know how big the box is going to be so you can pick the proper size text. You've got to bootstrap from the size of the window in this case and make heuristic decisions early on. So far it mostly works. :)

Tomorrow I'll figure out where to put these boxes...

school

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 18:19:14 GMT

Turns out Sangeeta's classes start tomorrow instead of today. She was so embarrassed when she found out.

My hands hurt. I'm going to stop typing for a while.

good times

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 04:47:15 GMT

It's been a very productive weekend.

On Saturday I implemented a frame-based symbol table and integrated it into my PLM shell. On Sunday I used it to implement new features in an experiment I'm helping to develop. It's been challenging but enjoyable.

Last night I also figured out enough about the iostream and iomanip libraries to make functions converting a GUID into a string and back. That made for a scary moment today when I realized I had to deliver a working program but my iostream code was causing everything to fail. Luckily I was able to pull it all together and finish the job on time. :)

Tomorrow morning Sangeeta starts her accounting class at SMC. I'll be back at the keyboard, hammering out code. Aah, good times. ^_^

Happy Saturday

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 19:01:13 GMT

No hot water today. Something died yesterday afternoon, just about the time the service guys go home. Too bad.

Saw more Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex today. I like that stuff! I like thinking about a reality where your memory (or your ghost itself) can be hacked and manipulated, and where your body can be entirely replaced by machines. It throws a lot of philosophical and social problems into new perspective. Fun to think about, especially since someone else has already thought of it and has presented it to you in anime form. Makes it more digestible than a stuffy old text, though the messages do get pretty dilute.

Sangeeta's off in Encino, setting up her cart and planning to hang out with her friends later. So today I'm working. I've got three projects to work on, but of course I'm only going to work on one for now.

Happy Saturday.

The Dentist

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 19:00:58 GMT

I just got back from a visit to a new dentist. My regular dentist (well, his assistant, since he's gone back to school) was concerned that one of my molars was wiggly, so I got a referral to a gum specialist.

Turns out I have mild to moderate gum disease. They'll have to charge me $700 (and a similar amount to my insurance company) as well as gouging around between my tooth and gum to get the badness out of there. I'll also get a biteguard to wear when I'm asleep or at the computer, to prevent my teeth from pressing down too hard. Sounds ridiculous to me, but I don't really want to lose a tooth so I guess I'll play along. Scare tactics work.

Now to figure out what work to do today...

back to the blah

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:04:53 GMT

Last night was my third night in the gym in a week. I'm getting better, but I learned my lesson after the first time and have been driving there since. I don't like cold. Did I mention that?

Last night, after returning from the gym, was also fairly productive as far as work goes. You can probably tell from yesterday's rant that it wasn't all smooth sailing, but I did get a good chunk of a feature added in. Now I just have to make it look presentable. Hah, easier said than done.

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 08:35:32 GMT

It's been ridiculously difficult to sit down and dig into my work enough to complete a relatively simple task. The program in question is so complex that it takes a solid couple hours just to get a feel for what's going on in there. It was originally designed as a "fun side-project" and has now transformed itself into our flagship product. The reasoning was that it was our most complete and best-working project. The only problem was that it was designed as a hack over an ancient library that has changed significantly since those days, and the damn thing needs to be rewritten rather extensively.

The problem with inheritance (in the programming sense) is that having a subclass means you have to know not only all of its members and methods, but also all of the members and methods of everything that it inherits from! It makes for object-oriented spaghetti, and I'm apparently an excellent pasta chef. Or at least I used to be. My more recent code is far saner and more understandable, but we'll see in seven years or so what I think about it.

I've really been enjoying Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex lately. It's an animated Japanese TV serial that they've dubbed in English and released on DVDs. It's pretty good, and I'm in love with the opening theme (I'm listening to it right now). Reminds me of why I got interested in Cognitive Science in the first place. The episodes are 26 minutes each, and they pack a LOT in. You really can't pick up everything on the first viewing. I like that kind of show. You have to pay attention and you have to think. Very non-American way of approaching a TV serial, but that's part of what I like about it too.