I finally got tired of the web not looking all the same, so I created a user stylesheet.

body *, body {
background: #12110f !important;
color: grey85 !important;
}

a { color: blue !important; }
a :hover { color: red !important; }
a :visited { color: purple !important }

Not everything is perfect, but here are some screenshots:

Twitter

Wikipedia

It's all-out warfare against web designers. I enjoy my new, no-bullshit webernet, especially at night when my eyes aren't excited about looking into the sun. And, changing tabs doesn't turn my desk into a discotheque any more.

Mood: pleased

Today's stupid idea: Data transport mechanism, where the transport mechanism itself is magnetic tape running through an underground conduit. It dips into private buildings just long enough to contact a read/write head, and then goes along to the next building.

Kind of like token ring, I guess.

All the Google AppEngine Ruby tutorials say that you need to use this thing called DataMapper to talk to the AppEngine datastore. What they don't say is that it's an ORM that's not useful for some projects, and that you can go to the lower-level API (which is more databasey) if that suits you better.

(Yes, I'm working on bringing Numbertron back into the world of the living Internet.)

Mood: frustrated

Some days I feel like this gentleman. Shit, he's even got the same color scheme as I.

Wow, I actually got things done this week. Thanks, dextroamphetamine!

~/680$ git diff 230532164770650c105199a6da7bb178d3627b35 HEAD | diffstat
 Makefile                         |   53 +++++++++--
 README.markdown                  |   10 +-
 alu.asm                          |    2 
 flags.asm                        |   14 +--
 instruction-timing.gnumeric      |binary
 loader.c                         |    2 
 main.asm                         |   10 +-
 opcodes.asm.m4                   |  177 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------------
 opcodes.inc.m4                   |   10 +-
 ports.asm                        |    2 
 speed.txt                        |   17 +++
 testbenches/zexdoc.testbench.z80 |  154 ++++++++++++++++-----------------
 12 files changed, 289 insertions(+), 162 deletions(-)
~/680$

Mood: pleased

$ svn log -v -r 1377:1378
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r1378 | duncan | 2011-06-10 14:38:41 -0700 (Fri, 10 Jun 2011) | 2 lines
Changed paths:
   M /trunk/work/resume.tex

Graduated.  Shit yeah.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ svn diff -r 1377:1378
Index: resume.tex
===================================================================
--- resume.tex	(revision 1377)
+++ resume.tex	(revision 1378)
@@ -52,8 +52,8 @@
 \section{Education}
 \begin{itemize}
 \item Garfield High School, Seattle.  Graduated June 2006.
-\item University of Washington, Seattle.  Majoring in Geography, will
-  graduate in June 2011.
+\item University of Washington, Seattle.  Bachelor of Arts in
+  Geography, June 2011.
 \end{itemize}

I think I've figured out what mood I'm in. It is called "melancholy".

Mood: melancholy

Me can roll up two spliffs using one hand—dat iz why I iz known as bein' double-jointed, a'ight?

—Ali G (High Times interview, 2003)

Sleep and sunlight are both hard to find at night and impossible to get rid of in the morning.

My pet website, Numbertron, is currently busy ingesting about a hundred thousand numbers from Manila, Philippines. I'll go out on a limb here and say I'll probably have them online tomorrow.

Hi.

Been a while, hasn't it?

I'm studying Geography at the University of Washington. It's my last quarter. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with my life after that. Probably I'll work for a telephone company or a mapping company. Maybe I can do mapping for the telephone company?

I want to have this job, playing telephone man in Antarctica. To do that for the US Antarctic Program, you need to get Raytheon (the polar services contractor) to hire you. For that position (there are two positions, senior and junior, both for 1-year appointments), you need two years of industry experience. I'm not sure whether anything to do with mapping would count. I suppose I'll just have to see ...

My intention is that by the time I accomplish this, I'll be near 30 years old and have another plan. Maybe involving children.

Poll #5309 Useless Poll
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

I can create a poll. Is this awesome?

The word of the week is “plesiochronous”. Two clocks are plesiochronous when they are very nearly running at the same speed, and one of them is occasionally corrected to keep the error between them below an upper bound.

I just sent this email to the International Telecommunications Union, an telephone-related standards organization, asking about WTISD:

To: pressinfo@itu.int
Subject: WTISD 2010: Official Cake Recipe?

To Whom It May Concern:

My friends and I forgot to celebrate WTISD 2010 on time.  We were
going to have a semi-private party, with a cake.  Unfortunately, we
were all busy and forgot to do so.  (imagine that!)  So, we'll do it
as soon as we hear back from you.

What's the official ITU standard cake recipe?  We'd like to be
compliant.  :)

Thank you for your time,
(chronomex's legal name)

Mood: sleepy

I always feel a bit guilty when I sleep through half my classes and then skip the rest. That's what today is, though.

Fuckit, I like sleep.

I just paid my local highschool dance radio station $100 to remove Lady Gaga's “Bad Romance” from their regular rotation. He did it right on the air.

Totally worth it. :)

Mood: smug

Continuing this project:

The Star Trek Wiki takes itself much too seriously. As a result, the Star Trek Wiki is better at Star Trek than Paramount Pictures.

No, really. They have every single fact ever stated with authority on the show. The pages aren't very well written, but they're incredibly complete. With citations. For example, a quote from article about combadges:

A Starfleet combadge was one of the items the Dopterian thief put on the table after Constable Odo arrested him. (DS9: “The Forsaken”)

Reopen soon, Pizza Brava! I miss you!

I am really missing the house special, pepperoni and meatballs. They've been closed for at least a week now with a sign that just says “Reopening soon!”

Radio pledge drive season is right around the corner!

KUOW is actively pledging, KEXP is probably going to start soon, and I got a donation envelope from KNHC. Yes, I give money to radio stations.

I haven't left IJ permanently. I just haven't been back for a while.

Yesterday I turned in my last homework assignment of the year! All I have left now are two midterms, one easy and the other harder—but I'm prepared for it.

I'm starting something new with this post; perhaps it will continue for some time. Since I signed up for twitter, I've been posting far less on IJ. I consider this a problem, and on the bus this morning I came up with a solution that I like. I'm going to use each of my twitter posts as a heading for a paragraph or two in an entry.

Laser Mate sucks impressively. Thank goodness for IDA Pro Free.

My friend Matt Westervelt is opening a store. It's going to be the sort of place where you can hang out, renting tools and making cool things. One of the tools he has is a Red Sail Laser Engraver from China. To use it, you have to run this janky program (named Laser Mate) that takes one obscure file format and converts it into another obscure file format so that the laser can etch your design on things.

This is sort of a pain, so I'm trying to make a program of my own that does the same thing but far less awkwardly. That's the secondary goal, however; what we really need is a system to bill for etching and cutting. I'm more or less done with a program that accepts a vector graphics file, and outputs what Laser Mate wants to see. It also outputs a description of how long the cuts and engraves in the final product will be. We're billing by the linear centimeter.

I stayed up until like 3am trying to read the compiled software. It's not incredibly difficult, but reverse-engineering is a very thoughtful, detailed task. Proper tools are essential, and IDA Pro is worlds above everything else I have available to me.

Hopefully Red Sail is less pissy about sharing driver source code than American companies. I don't see what the problem is anyway...

For some reason, hardware companies are very guarded about releasing source code for the software that you need to use to run the hardware. It drives me nuts, and I can't figure out why they don't want to release it. If I were a hardware maker, I would want people to be able to use my hardware however they want to. If I inadvertantly build in really neat uses for my hardware, wouldn't the extra sales to hobbyists be worth the trouble of sending out some more files? Defining a narrow API and not letting people go outside of it totally derails that sort of opportunity.

Because reverse-engineering is slow and tedious, I emailed Red Sail asking for their source code. Hopefully they don't mind sharing.

Ambulance broken down on northbound 23rd Ave at E Union St.

There was an ambulance broken down next to the bus on my commute to work today. They lit flares and put them in the roadway; there's not much more else to say.

Does anyone know @kuzushi or @kaips1? Who are they?

Two random people started following me on Twitter. I have a fairly strict policy for approving followers, that is, I have to know them outside of Twitter. Well, it doesn't sound that strict when I say it so. I keep my feed closed because I publish my physical location using Foursquare. I just don't like random people knowing, is all.