News & New Stuff

Once more into the breach, dear friends.

Some might view the new "minimalist" website design as a step backward from my previous image-based glory, but those people don't read the site anyway, and I like this better, so fuck 'em. Some might try to view it in a retarded version of IE and see things disjoint and out of frame, but they're using IE, so fuck 'em. Some might even think that they'd rather I use PHP, ASP, or any other number of server-side protocols to load these pages, rather than using the HTML preprocessor I'm currently using, but I've tried it both ways, and the site loads faster if it's just straight HTML, so fuck 'em.

More sincerely, I just felt like the old site design left a lot to be desired. I still don't like the concept of dynamic webpages where they're not needed, so the site is javascript-, flash-, PHP-, ASP-, etc. free. It loads quickly, and it contains the information I want it to.

I've started biking the 17.1 miles to work on my road bike. It only takes me an hour and change, which is about 20 minutes longer than my normal freeway commute. Apart from saddle sores, it's a marvelous way to get my exercise in for the day, and I get to laugh at everyone who's paying three bucks a gallon for gas, as my only fuel requirements are burritos.

It recently struck me that all of the terrible things that human beings have done to each other (holocausts, inquisitions, infomercials, etc.) have all stemmed from a fundamental idea, that idea being that there is something (religion, power, money, a sandwich, etc.) that is more important than the basic tenet which civilization is based on, i.e. the social contract. They believe that this thing necessitates the violation of those tenets to achieve to the furthest end possible for it, and so, with great and enthusiastic zeal, they perform the acts which later generations are all embarassed of.

tl;dr: Nothing ever good ever came from the violation of the social contract. That seemed like a really really important idea, and so I wrote about it. Check it out.

Philosophy aside, I recently discovered the source of the sabotage I have been perpetrating against my relationships (thanks to Liz's patient but unyielding imperatives). When I first started dating, my girlfriend had, shall we say, a flair for the dramatic. Storybook endings and knights in shining armor were her things, and I was expected to follow suit, despite my rather pragmatic view of relationships. (Not that I'm not a romantic, but I also like to keep both feet on the ground.) As such, I "learned" that the only way to keep a woman happy is to talk about marriage, a future together, and a score of altogether ridiculous things to be talking about at the age of 16, basically showering her with every dreamy-eyed fantasy I could imagine.

Needless to say, this did not go over well with my subsequent girlfriends. I could never really figure out why they all seemed squeamish when discussing such, because hey, girls like this stuff, right? I figured they were just not ready for a serious relationship, while in reality, they were just not ready for an INSANE relationship.

Now that I'm aware of the discrepancy between being romantic and being dramatic, I feel much better, and I'm probably not going to be freaking the fuck out about my relationships anytime in the near future, unless there's actually a decent reason to.

So last week, I went to Chicago (really Schaumburg, which is a suburb of Chicago...EXCELLENT?!?) for training in mechatronics (which is a quick way of saying "any electromechanical system that moves"), as well as a national engineering meeting. It was kinda fun, and it's always hilarious to see how the geeky engineer stereotype is preserved not only across states, but countries and generations. (The 30+-year-old Canadian engineer and I had an interesting talk about Final Fantasy. Awesome.)

As I gradually get used to the entirety of my day being occupied by various things like fencing, friends, family, and fffengineering, I have realized a growing need for some sort of planner. I've always objected to them on principle previously, due to a fear of becoming dependent on such a device to think for me. (Few people realize that the Butlerian Jihad started when an advanced Palm OS decided it could run things better than people could.) I'm going to start with the planner built into my Treo, but if anyone has any super-successful suggestions for organization, I'd love to hear them.

Part of the reason my days are more filled with meaningful activity nowadays is because I've started dating an AMAZING girl. We met in drum corps (good start), hated each other's guts (not so good), and kept each other at arm's length for several years before realizing that we were actually pretty cool people. Nowadays, she makes a living researching neurodevelopmental disorders (autism, Down's syndrome, etc.) in Davis, trying to get into med school, being a more responsible person than anyone I've ever met, and saturating her immediate vicinity with awesome.

She has also beat me once at Trivial Pursuit: Star Wars Edition, but that was because my questions were all bullshit questions like "Who was the key grip in Episode II?" and hers were stuff like, "What is Darth Vader's given name?"

She's supposed to take me out swing dancing this weekend when she visits. I have often said that it would take a hell of a woman to get me to suffer the humiliation requisite in learning how to dance, but if anyone fits that bill, it's Liz. If anyone has any input on the quickest way to learn Lindy Hop, I could really use it.

I got tired of staring at my long-winded text-only posts, so I decided to toss in a few pictures for flavor. Now, they are long-winded posts...WITH PICTURES!

The Two Trolls forum has been chugging along like a car that's running on fumes. Every once in a while, there'll be a spurt of activity, but for the most part, it's pretty dead. I've been thinking of advertising somewhere to inject some new blood in the form of vociferous posters, but I don't know where to begin or what's appropriate for such a campaign. Maybe publishing the Trollcasts on iTunes will get us some membership, but I'm skeptical about such. (Especially, you know, with the anti-Mac podcast being our second subject covered.)

Regardless of my inability to make the proverbial horse drink deeply from the delicious pool of active forum posting, I have completed 9 of the Warhammer 40K "Horus Heresy" novels. Good stuff. I can't find the 10th one online, so I'm going to be taking a hiatus from reading them. In their place, I have mainly been consuming mechanical design papers, which are about as fun as smashing your hand in the door of an oven. Oh well, I'm sure I'm building character or something.

What HAS been a great deal of fun is my introduction to the world of fencing. As with many guys, I have dreamt of heroic swordplay ever since I've been old enough to hold a stick and make lightsaber noises as I swung it around. Now, in actuality, competitive fencing is less "swordplay" and more "dancing for a while before leaping into someone's arms and then seeing if either of you scored a hit." However, the theory that I'm learning in my introductory classes should be applicable to "historic fencing," which involves a great deal more "parry parry LUNGE parry riposte appel LUNGE fence fence fence." I'm not anywhere NEAR good enough yet to be picky about what style of fencing I'm learning, but I'm confident that epée is my weapon of choice.

Anyone who lives nearby should practice with me. That is all.

I've been sick the last few days. Being sick with a job and other responsibilities for the first time has been an interesting experience. Other people are depending on me, and I still have to do stuff to make sure they're taken care of, so I end up not doing my usual getting-better ritual of just passing out in bed and chugging massive quantities of orange juice. As such, it's been about 5-6 days, and although I feel much better than I did, I'm still coughing up stuff that looks like it would be a terrible color to paint a room.

Anyways, I went with Liz to DCI finals in Indianapolis, and it was fun, although I do feel uncomfortable with the recent change in direction from "powerful" to "artistic." Corps has always had an artistic element, sure, but the whole reason why I fell in love with it was the sense of unconstrained power, rather than cleanliness. The "clean" thing is nice, to be sure; I love watching a tic-less show, but for me, a few mistakes in performance are worth a show that leaves you screaming at the top of your lungs and still unable to hear yourself.

I've consumed 8 warhammer books in the past few weeks. I was right that the first one was simply a setup for what was to come. It's an interesting story. I was originally intrigued by how the multiple authors chose to write it by focusing on individual characters, some ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and watching events unfold around them, but in retrospect, writing about it any other way would have sounded like a history book. They're pretty awesome thusfar, and there's enough variety between them to keep the series from petering out. Fulgrim was a fucking trip; imagine that one scene from your favorite slasher flick, where you're given a glimpse into the full extent of the horror that the serial-killer-rapist who eats people alive and wears their skin has wrought, and then extend that out into a full novel, complete with backstory about the descent into madness. That's Fulgrim.

The allure of the epic nature of Warhammer 40K artwork, and the descriptions of the universe it is representing, have finally led me to begin reading the novels in earnest. The purchase of "Horus Rising" was not a BAD investment by any means, but after consuming it in 3 days (giving me some reassurance that my reading chops are not yet atrophied beyond recognition), I found it oddly hollow. Now, when I say "hollow," don't for a minute misinterpret that as "lacking in content;" over the course of the novel, no less than THREE planets are warred upon by armored space marines with chainsaw swords, a nameless horror from beyond space and time possesses a member of a warrior race and wreaks havoc on his entire company, a race of half-machine arachnid warriors slaughter a regiment and feast on their corpses...there is no wanting for stuff happening. However, the novel seems like it's just setting the stage for something bigger. Despite all of these events, it feels like the main purpose and focus of the novel is the development of characters and events, so we will sympathize with them when the inevitable tragedy (which looms on the horizon) occurs. I've started reading the next one in the series from an online source, with the hope that more awesome awaits.

Man, chess is awesome. I've started playing correspondence games on ChessHere, a free site for nothing but, and I've been getting my ass handed to me. (Just to get a feel for how much ass we're talking about here, the initial rating you're given, 1400, is incremented/decremented by around 5-10 points based on each win/loss as you play. I'm currently hovering at 1339 and plummeting with every stupid move I make.) The weird thing about chess is that it throws into stark relief how little of my brain's processing power is used on a regular basis. I mean, every time I look at a chessboard, it's a struggle to bash myself into enough focus that I can spend even 2 minutes crunching potential moves and payoffs. This has led me to a rather humbling observation:

I suck at thinking.

I'm really good at finding holes in other people's thought processes, at developing counterexamples, finding ways that the "obvious" isn't quite as clearcut as people would like it to be, following patterns, etc., but when it comes down to simple, honest-to-god crunch time, I can muster, at an extreme, probably 10 minutes of determined mental exertion before I have to check my e-mail, check my forums for new posts, write a blog post, clean my desk, find a snack, etc. I don't know if this is a method of interaction with my environment that has been cultivated through years of near-constant Internet usage, but I note it in many of my friends as well. I'm working to cultivate a longer attention span for processing, but it's slow going thusfar.

Finally, due to Robert's getting-married-shindig, I think the podcasting is going to have to wait for a good long while before we get into it again. More than the 'casting, I miss Rob. The dude's the closest thing I've got to a comrade, a fellow, and his absense has a noticeable effect on my attitude. Nonetheless, I think that the getting-married-shindig takes precedence over hanging with me, as it should. I will catch up with him later when he's settled in and looking for company, and we will rock out together.

I'm writing a novel.

I'm not writing a novel for any sort of gimmicky "write a novel" month, I'm writing a novel because I had an interesting idea, and I think it would be cool to tell other people about it. The difficulty with writing a novel, as you might imagine, is figuring out HOW to write a novel. Not that there's exactly a drought of information available about such, but that's exactly the problem: there is a veritable FLASH FLOOD of information. Everybody who has ever written anything has advice for budding authors, from Chekov to R.L. Stein, and often the advice is contradictory. Write whenever you feel inspired vs. write at a regularly scheduled time interval, use a typewriter vs. use a computer, write in a public place for inspiration vs. write in a dungeon somewhere so you won't be disturbed. It's daunting, to say the least, so, in my usual extremist way, I plan on ignoring all of it, and writing the way I want to write.

And if anyone asks me for advice on how to get into writing, I'm going to tell them to piss off.

Grad school looms large for me right now. I'm planning on Stanford. Of course, everyone tells me that getting into Stanford is impossible, and still more people tell me that getting in anywhere is impossible, so I should apply to a thousand programs and sacrifice to the gods of admission that one will be merciful and accept me. But you know what? Stanford's d.school program is exactly what I want. Well, that and cheesecake. But I would give up cheesecake if it meant that I got to get in.

That's how serious I am about this.

I need all sorts of advice on what to design for my portfolio. I have a great number of ideas, but they're all small-scale and, although they're good ideas, they're relatively unimpressive. I need something that will wow the common citizen, not just engineers like me who love simplicity and elegance in something as simple as a drawer hinge.

Finally, I've encountered a band (FUEL) that puts out pretty cool music which, although the actual LYRICS are kind of emo oh-please-don't-leave-me-how-can-you-do-this-to-me stuff, has titles that are fucking awesome. Titles like "Knives," "Ozone," and "Jesus or a Gun." Thankfully, the lyrics themselves are pretty incomprehensible, so I make up my own while I'm compulsively headbanging. Check them out if you like music that makes you pumped.

Often, I find myself in the not-so-unique position of arguing against the religious on the Internet. I feel somewhat like a sell-out every time I do this, because I pride myself on my ability to see both sides of an issue and argue for the underdog in any debate, but honestly, I can't find any rational justification for singleminded adherance to a text written more than a century ago, or any text, for that matter. It puzzles me that anybody would think that the bible is the unmitigated word of god, that everything in it must be true, or indeed that ANYTHING in it must be true. Anyways, I've taken to calling this perpetual argument against these individuals (who, generally, are extraordinarily stubborn and difficult to argue with on rational grounds) "Fighting the Good Fight." It's a constant source of amusement, as well as development, because I have to find ways to phrase my arguments that are more tactful than the obscenities that are actually flowing through my head.

Along these lines, I wrote a rant recently entitled "Note on Emotion and Reason." Anybody who's heard me go off on my concept of a second Enlightenment will hear several familiar themes, but I think that it's constructed well enough to make even those who were unconvinced by my earlier arguments nod along this time through. Check it out.

Finally, I've been playing Fable for the last few days, and I've found myself in the amusing position of being bad at evil. No, seriously. I tried really hard to create an evil character, but I felt so guilty every time I killed an innocent townsperson that I eventually just gave up and played the way I usually do, as a hippy love-child with nothing but joy and laughter in his heart. (And the capability to inflict massive damage on any opponent.)

/sigh, SOMEDAY I'll be enough of an asshole to rock the horns. SOMEDAY.

As people have begun realizing that I'm actually skilled at math and mechanical design, my job has gotten progressively more enjoyable. Customers have started calling me to get input on how to build their various contraptions, and I've designed stuff for people like Raytheon, Sandia, LANL, etc. It's still not what I want to be doing, but I'm working to fix that; I'm taking the GRE's on the 6th, which will make grad school a possibility, if I manage to rock them like I've been rocking the practice tests.

I've been definitively single for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, and it's a novel experience. It's odd that there's nobody upon whom I can shower attention right now, and it's positively peculiar. (I'd say "I've got so much love to give," but then I'd have to kill myself. Maybe twice.) It's significantly more difficult to meet people outside of a college setting, but I assume the method is similar, in that I'm going to have to find a group of some sort and join it. Either that or eHarmony. /shudder

Recently, I've been trying to devise, through my own means, how to calculate precisely how many possible (LEGAL) configurations exist for a standard chess board, and therefore how much data storage you'd need to store every possible configuration. There are two distinct methods, and I'm not sure how I want to approach it; theoretically, there are 13^64 "possible" board configurations that consist of some combination of white pieces, black pieces, and empty spaces, on the 8x8 board, although many of them are invalid (i.e. two kings, both kings in check, etc.). Either I can build the configurations by calculating the possible permutations of every concievable combination of chess pieces on the board, or I can calculate how many impossible configurations exist and subtract that number from 13^64.

Finally, I've been composing a series of short stories that are an exercise in creative writing. The fundamental premise is basically a metaphor for my mind if it were a physical place. Now, I realize that any time anybody tries to describe how their mind works, there's always a certain degree of "oh that's fucked up" that results because it's built in a way that differs from others'. However, I'd like to put forward a disclaimer and say that this isn't sincerely what things are like inside my head, but merely an artistic representation of certain aspects thereof.

I'm not crazy. Really.

First thing's first: The reason I haven't updated in almost a month is because I've recently implemented a project that I've been thinking about for a while. Two Trolls is a website that is home to both a podcast (which we haven't even recorded two episodes for yet, but it will happen) and a forum, the point of which is to promote my particular brand of argumentation/discussion. Along with Robert, I hope to develop a community of amazing debaters, with all sorts of viewpoints and cultures, etc., who all respect the dictates of logical thinking. It's an amazing idea, we'll see how it pans out in a month or so.

Secondly, I've been working out a bit, and, apparently, there's this exercise called tricep dips which I never knew existed. If you're like me and thought that the only ways to build arm strength utilizing only one's body weight were pull-ups and push-ups, check them out.

Finally, Riddick. Holy shit Riddick. Riddick is ridonc. I've always been a fan of characters who aren't badass for any particular purpose besides being badass, who have motivations about as complex as a lump hammer and who seem to be impervious to drama. Riddick fits the bill. He's an amoral self-serving killing machine for no other reason than it's what he's good at.

My favorite Riddick moment, undoubtedly, is in a movie where he's actually a hero, rather than an anti-hero (the way he should be). Condemned to an underground prison, Riddick happens upon some guards about to rape an acquaintance of his. As he drinks something from a cup in a badass fashion, he intones, in his gravelly hit-in-the-throat-by-a-two-by-four voice, "I don't think she likes being touched. I'd take my wounded and go...while you still can." The head guard laughs and says, "Is there a name for this private world of yours? What happens there when we don't just...run away? You gonna kill me with your soup cup?" Amid the raucous laughter of the other guards, Riddick says, "Tea, actually." "...What?" "I'll kill you...with my TEA CUP." He then sets his now-empty tea cup down on a ledge directly next to him, and stands quietly. Somewhat put off by this, the head guard looks to his comrades for support, and they smile at him, egging him on to off the silent convict with a combat knife. He lunges forward with the blade, and in a rapid motion, Riddick grabs the teacup and rams its lip into the guard's chest, twists it viciously, and then returns to his standing position as the unlucky guard falls lifeless to the floor.

The former guard's companions begin to move forward as a group to subdue Riddick, but before they take a step, he reaches down and picks up a small paperclip, holds it up for them to see, and then places it on the same ledge the cup formerly occupied. After a moment's hesitation, they grab the corpse by its feet and drag it out as fast as they are able.

Now THAT is bad-ass.

Picnic day was fun, if not really worth the cash spent. I'll most likely abstain from the journey next year, or perhaps I'll hop onto the bus purely for the pleasure of seeing my sister and Liz. My costume was good enough to get Tanya to talk to me again, though, so THAT'S nice.

Your link for the day goes to standard Mythbusters tomfoolery, in which they hit a car with a rocket sled going 650 mph at impact. For jaw-dropping goodness, watch the close-up speedcam about midway through, which shows the PAINT BEING KNOCKED OFF THE CAR.