random facts

I ate a cheese sandwitch.
Last night the full moon was glowing red. As it rose above the horizon, it became orange, then yellow. It was beautiful. I admired the reddish full moon for minutes.
Somebody loves me.
Tiamat rules.
The Romanian Patriarch (Orthodox Church leader) has just died. Rest in peace.
The nation is supposedly mourning. I'm happy for him, he's going to Heaven.
I feel like slacking, drinking lots of beer, performing simple fornication and advocating free love!
There. I've provided you with at least three hours of Wikipedia reading material on totally unrelated topics. Please edutain yourself.

press

I watch the news regularly and listen to the newspapers via the summaries broadcast on TV.
A few nights ago, the news reporter was reporting: Yesterday a very cool cultural event took place in Bucharest's Youth Park. Titled 'Reflections of Narcis' or something like that, it featured actors acting in a shallow part of the lake with lots of surrealist decor.
I stood thinking for 3 seconds and mentally shouted: NOW YOU'RE TELLING ME?! fuckers.
Today, I saw the same story in a newspaper. Of course, it's routine for the newspapers to report on events three to five days after they happen, but that's another story. So -- big title in the news, Narcis Reflections, bla-bla. DO I FUCKING CARE? Would it have been so hard to have told me this BEFORE it happened? So that I could have watched those dudes act in the lake? YES! Incompetents! I don't even know who I need to blame: the newspapers and televisions for reporting one to three days too late, or the organizers who didn't announce it in time? I don't know. Did they announce? Whose fault was it? Was it my fault maybe? Did they announce it before and I missed it? Could be.

slow and shallow

I set up a wishlist, because the old link in my profile was a localhost. I feel there is a strong need for love and understanding in the world, and for moderate vice as well, and that's what I'm wishing for.

South Park is a great show. If you took the 10 best episodes, it would be an absolute show. Any further comments are redundant.

I've finished reading SinFest. That's 2516 comic strips. It was time well spent.

I slacked all day and all night. Hell, it's summer, it's OK.

There's no beer in the house.

The light of a new dawn has started to show.

I've 3 PCBs to place and route.

I gotta clean the input peripherals. They're starting to get slimy.

Good night.

42nd post.

i am in love with myself.

the $2 handling fee does not include any tips or gratuities. gratuities accepted and appreciated.

i am in love with myself.

so much stupidity in the world. it's not even evil, it's just... hey God, i'd like to file a bug report! (xkcd.com)

i am in love with myself.

tonight i felt good for the first time in weeks. i felt really good deep inside. thanks shima.

but i still am, i really am -

i am in love with myself.

gone slacking. bbl.

code red

While just two timezones away the poor British are being savagely flooded, here in Romania the meteorologists have just issued a red warning code because of the heat. well, we've been on orange for a few weeks now, so the one or two extra degrees that pushed us into the red zone don't really mean more than media impact. More seriously, there's starting to be a shortage of bottled water in the stores, due in part to the fact that trucks are only allowed to travel during the night, but more likely due to the massive increase in demand. However, unlike some of my friends for whom I can only feel deeply sorry, I can still use my computer, which is the ultimate good thing. It shows no signs of severe overheating, and if it eventually does, I hope I'd be able to use the eBox, for it drains less power. Yeah. In conclusion, we're fucking the planet big-time. But hey, why not cut down 300 trees when there's millions to be made by building an office tower there and selling it. Right? Yeah. Why use the underground, which has 'natural' air-conditioning, when using a four-seat car just for myself is just much more comfortable, even though the trip may actually take longer because the streets are so crowded. Hell if I care, right? 6 people a day die in car accidents in this country alone. Good for them, they're leaving this red-hot red-coded hell. Yeah, and why write efficient code that results in less CPU power consumption when we can write sloppy code fast, requiring ever-faster hardware. Hell, I can't blame the economy for wanting to grow. After all, there's a lot of good stuff that comes out of this. I just don't care that much, really. 'Cause I dig it now, there's no heaven by default, and there's no hell, because we've been building and maintaining one up here for ages. Only one thing bothers me, when something bad happens and people start bringing in emotional crap. Oh my god what a disaster, oh the pain, bla-bla. Have the decency to shut up, we did it to ourselves. But then again, maybe I shouldn't care about that either. I can only hope there's never going to be a need to distill drinking water from the sea. When that day comes, my mind and soul would have been transferred to a computer. Hopefully.

deathoftime

all beautiful things pass. they end, they die, the fade away and get devoured by langoliers. every wonderful moment is just that, a moment. it fades away, it dissolves, it dies. this damned ebox 2300 is so slow. it can't keep up with my typing. and i'm a slow typist, particularly when i'm sitting in bed with the monitor between my legs. then again, i might just type in the text editor and then paste here. yup. now it works. the ebox 2300 is an interesting and not-so-wonderfully-designed piece of hardware, just as the ebox ii that i was using last year, but it's not that bad, and it only costs a hundred bucks or so. this model has two opportunities for a parralel port but uses none. and one for a joystick port. i might solder in the necessary connections, hack up some drivers and play skyroads or pacman or my asm-tetris homework using a joystick. but then again, i might not. who the hell invented uppercase letters. uppercase sucks. why would i use an uppercase letter to signal the beginning of a sentence when i have just signaled the end of the previous sentence with a period. granted, it makes seeking on to a sentence easier. so there, uppercase letters have a use. but as i was saying... time flies, or whatever it does, or we fall through time or whatever, and it just sucks. time may be an illusion, and lunch time may well be doubly so, but it's still depressing. but as my good friend WackyR said (there, another good use for uppercase letters, which still suck), all things end, really. good things and bad things alike. the rolling stones concert, my rotten last relationship, college, headaches, colds, hangovers, moon landings, floods, autumn, summer, life, life on earth, the universe, god maybe, sigh. what if things were immortal? what if we could live forever? that would suck so much. so you see, wacky r is right. everything ends, and that's a Good Thing. Damn, uppercase again. I might even start writing things hypercorrectly from now on. Or maybe not. so as i was saying, what if everything lasted forever? certainly that wouldn't be good. i mean, information kind of lasts forever some might say, but i say not. it also dies. everything dies. daylight dies to reveal the stars, sunlight dies for the air to cool down, nighttime dies for the morning to rise and our cells die to keep our bodies young. and we die so that we don't fight our children over finite resources. everything dies, and it's a wonderful thing.

3d acceleration sucks.

i remember when i used to play half-life 1 on a 233 MHz PC with no hardware 3d acceleration and no fancy software interfaces with ridiculously high version numbers. i remember when i used to play duke nukem 3d under dos on a 386. moreover, i have an old logitech camera that takes pictures at 640x480 and compresses them heavily. when i bought it, it cost something like 150 bucks, and only because it was both a webcam and a picture camera. btw, no graphical display, just the classical viewfinder. so my point is that, even with a camera that now costs maybe a beer, i can take a 30-kilobyte jpeg picture that looks like a picture. it looks like reality, eventhough it's just numbers and fourier transforms and filters and bidimensional. hell, i can even take a 320x240 jpeg and compress it to something like 4 kilobytes and stick three hundred of them on a floppy disk. wait, no one uses floppy disks anymore cause they suck, so i could just stick 60 thousand of them on a small flash drive. well, sure, they would look like crap, but they'd still look more real than the best computer-generated game graphics rendered on a state-of-the-art graphics card that eats as much power as the rest of the computer. and this just plain sucks. i mean, what's so hard? if a technology that's crap by today's standards can digitize reality to a 4 kilobyte file and allow it to still look real, why the hell can't we just generate that file in software?! it's stupid. i mean, it's just a few KB of information, it's not the human genome! why pay hundreds of bucks for the latest acceleration hardware when it can only render artificial effects? i want a game that looks like the street i live on, or the park i usually walk in, the school where i go or the bar where i drink. is it so hard? yeah, it is. i don't claim to know how it's done, because i'm not an expert in the field, though i might have some ideas. but there are people who claim to be experts. and there are people who write the software (badly) and people who design the hardware based on the concepts of the software people (again, badly) and people who market games and gaming hardware, and people who pay big bucks for those. and then there are those people who wrote those early games whose aim was never to create something real-looking, because they knew they couldn't. but they created something that's good enough to be exciting to play, intellectually challenging, and plain cool. and it could run on cheap hardware! now the games look just as artificial, though in higher resolution and with a lot more effects, but can't run on a 3GHz dual-core, or on a future 5GHz quad core for that matter, no, they need 3d hardware acceleration to go with that.

dawn

i can think of few things as glorious as the dawn. i mostly hate the sun because it's been so fucking hot around here lately, but i know that's stupid. the dawn is wonderful. it is fine to watch after a night out, after a night in, or just after waking up. it's fine to watch with someone and it's fine to watch alone. it's nice to see everything around you just wake up and come to life. it's horrible when it all gets so hot; it's depressing during winter when everything is gray and dead, and that's a wonderful feeling; whether it signals a new vibrant day or a dark gloomy one it's still glorious.
i am watching the light outside grow brighter and brighter and i am eating some yogurt that's best before my birthday.

booze

King_Alcohol_and_his_Prime_Minister :

Strong Beer,
WINES,
RUM, GIN,
BRANDIES,
WHISKIES,
COMPOUNDED
LIQUORS.

prototyping

from a post on the synth-diy list: don't prototype with hanging wires. solder the parts to a stripboard. that way, if your prototype works, you also get a finished circuit! :D
i hate stripboard. i like planning my layout beforehand and auto-checking with the schematic.
so i do { the schematic, simulation, layout } while(whatever), then etch and drill pcbs directly.
and then i correct them with hanging wires.
when i'm too lazy to print, transfer, etch and drill, i simply simulate again. dump the waveforms and play them as audio. or do something else.
the process is exemplified here while the site lasts. "iad" is .ro for hell, btw. i find that so childishly cool.
my first pcb was double-sided, made by toner transfer, with a 0.8mm pitch tqfp. got it right at the third try. with the help of two other people and a lot of wires to replace over-etched traces. during experimentation, one laminate exploded from overheating. it was fun. i vowed to never make another double-sided pcb by toner transfer. ever again.

supposedly

according to earthmove.info and google calculator, the earth moved approximately one billion miles while i was having sex.