link

They are some awesome (expensive!) components. At the height of my gadget craze, I almost bought an Acoustic Wave, but just couldn’t justify it.

Tired.
Bored.
Lonely.
Bitter.
Angry.
Helpless.
Controlled.
Concealed.
Afraid.
Aggravated.
Imprisoned.
Obligated.

I really don’t have anywhere to hide today. I’ve ALWAYS had somewhere to hide–work, women, racing, ****, friends, school, academics, video games, chat rooms, reading. That’s the comforting thing about being obsessive–you lose yourself in things, easily. You’re not YOU when it’s uncomfortable to be there. Obsession, fantasy, denial–they all go hand-in-hand. They’re my trinity of “not dealing with stuff”.

I can identify with trying to remove distractions …

Jeff Roberts - Sep 5, 2007

I can identify with trying to remove distractions and make time to just be still.

We all need to be in our own little bubble sometimes it is what keeps us sane. And yes I think that everyone goes through the same struggles.

Probably the worst Disney animated film of the modern era. They sanitized the lusty, humanist story of Heracles. Example:

One of Heracles’s challenges was put to him by King Thespius of Thespiae who wished him to kill the Lion of Cithaeron. As a reward, the king offered him the chance to impregnate each of his 50 daughters. Accordingly, Heracles did this in one night (sometimes referred to as his 13th Labour).

I was sitting at a red light when they rolled up beside me, the guy riding his Suzuki Do-Me 8000 with his hot female companion on the back, her thongage pouring out of her low-rise jeans. Her blond hair fell from beneath the helmet and fluffed weightlessly in the hot breeze. Her skintight ballistic-armor motorcycle jacket was unzipped down to her navel. It’s a good look, I guess, if you go in for that sort of thing.

Scene: Kitchen table. Joey’s eating his A-B-C’s & 123’s. I’m reading the paper. The contents of my wallet lay spread upon the table, drying from their recent trip through the washer. (“But Honey, I was going to wear those shorts!”/“For the THIRD DAY IN A ROW?!”). Joey regards one card intently.

Joe: “Harold…umm….this doesn’t make sense.”

Me: “Huh?”

Joe: “Well…this says Auto-Zone Re-Wards.”

Me: “Yeah…”

Joe: “There’s nothing rewarding at Autozone.”

I believe the answer to “Honey, I was going to wea…

Whitney - Sep 3, 2007

I believe the answer to “Honey, I was going to wear those shorts!” was “I washed them because they were in the laundry pile.” Forget that you were gonna wear them for the third day in a row….the third day in a row out of the hamper? Now that’s gross. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my husband.

TCL goodness

One girl told me I loved my car more than I loved her.

I replied that I love my car. I don’t love you.

Oy. Make a girl feels special, whydoncha?

She: Your car is a hunk of junk.

Me: At least i… Jeff Roberts - Aug 2, 2007

She: Your car is a hunk of junk.
Me: At least it doesn’t belong to my Daddy.

Yeah, that was the beginning of the end.

Yeah, you knew it had to happen…I like football. Why not indulge in that national passion–Fantasy Football.

My team’s called the ‘Madden 09 Wannabees’, and we had our draft at Bufallo Wild Wings on Todd’s road:

View Larger Map

Anywho, Here’s the linueup I got (picked #8 in a serpentine draft):

Starters:

2. RB - Brian Wetbrook - Philly

3. RB - Willis McGahee - Balt’more

4. QB - Vince Young - Ten

Here is my team:

STARTERS:
QB: Carson P… BryanCombs - Aug 2, 2007

Here is my team:

STARTERS:
QB: Carson Palmer
WR: Chad Johnson
WR: Marvin Harrison
WR: Calvin Johnson
RB: Adrian Peterson
RB: Cedric Benson
TE: Jason Witten
K: Adam Vinatieri
DEF: Green Bay

BENCH:
QB: Tony Romo
RB: DeAngelo Williams
WR: Mushin Muhammad
WR Marty Booker
TE: David Martin
DEF: Cincinnati

We had GREAT seats. I’ve never had seats like that for anything…not a High School band concert, even. We were 2 rows back from “center stage”. When they were doing their skits, the performers were maybe 5 feet away from me. I could see the creases in the makeup, that some performers were a LOT older than they wanted to appear.

And then, it hits me. I’ve got highly made-up women on a platform above me dancing in spandex, sequins, and stockings:

You’d think the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Baily Circus is unchanging, right?

Wrong.

Two words for you: House Cats.

Yes, there’s an act in the middle of the 1st act of the Circus where a two trainers do an act with trained housecats. I’d pay real money if Letterman would do a walk-on and and make some quip about “Stupid Pet Tricks”.

But, it got better.

I’ve been to the circus in Lexington many times, most recently in 2001, when the “Red” Ringling Bros. circus came to town. This is the circus with Bello, a clown/aerialist/acrobat main character with Vanilla Ice’s haircut. It’s also the traditional, 3-ring “Big Top” show. What we got this time in Lexington is the “Blue” circus, a one-ring circus with a plot (trust me!) that plays like an amalgam of Cirque du Soleil and a broadway show.

“Gold” is coming to town where I live next month. …

Thomas J. Brown - Aug 5, 2007

“Gold” is coming to town where I live next month. I’ve never been big on the circus, but their female ring leader, Liliana Escobar, is pretty hot. Maybe I’ll go see the circus. -)

Back in the dark ages of 1998, I took my first programming class. As was the style of the time, the class was taught in Pascal, a language Nicklaus Wirth designed explicitly to teach structured programming concepts. Think of Pascal like an advanced jet trainer:

They teach you all the cool stuff with it, before they turn you loose in the F-15’s to wax some MiGs.

Anyway, Pascal had some neat concepts and quirks, one of which was the way it made a distinction between ‘functions’ (subroutines that returned data) and ‘procedures’ (subroutines that were passed data and operated on it). So, for example, you might have a function called ‘double’ that took an integer and returned that number times 2:

I went to my first meeting with my new division yesterday, and I must say, It sounds pretty good. A particular highpoint was The Wifi Guy. Nice idea for the new media–funny, viral, very over-the-top.

LXK’s making a big foray into wireless consumer printers. Thing that gets me–why aren’t we doing some sort of co-branding with Apple? Apple’s main selling point these days is cordless, wireless, de-cluttered desktops. With this new line, seems like we’d be right there.

I’m writing some toy apps that integrate with our libraries, and so I was looking for a good, Windows-compliant version of GNU Getopt. Cygwin has a version, but that ties me to the cygwin installation (I think…)

Anyway, Getopt is straight POSIX C, and googling around I found this C++ .h called TCLAP it’s well documented and implemented as inlines in the tclap/CmdLine.h. Seems very similar to the ruby ‘optparse’ module in spirit and implementation.

hello my name is harold and i like to spend my tim…

Whitney - Aug 2, 2007

hello my name is harold and i like to spend my time inventing my own language and pretending other ppl know what I’m talking about….

No! I don’t want to go on the cart!

Bring out yer dead

lollercart

Ah, Luc Besson (The man who wrote The Fifth Element) brings us another gem of style-over-substance.

If you could epitomize Eurotrash in a movie, this is it.

But, God, such fun!

Nothing like a man barrel-rolling a W-12 powered Audi A8 to remove a bomb attached to its undercarriage. Frank (Jason Statham), is a very, very bad man, but his schtick great–Always wearing a crisp suit, always in a clean car, always in control.

Ah, so two weeks have elapsed of my new job, two weeks that skated between elation, boredom, fear, and frustration. It’s a whole different world over here. Some people like it, some people don’t. Me? I’m withholding judgment for now. I do like my team–they seem like quiet, competent, hardworking folks. They’ve been helpful to a total outsider in all senses of the word–an old unix + java wonk who’s now playing in the world of C/C++ and Windows.