i’ve stopped counting

Grr… now that Josh wrote what I consider the wrong opinion of the new Steven Spielberg / Stanley Kubrick film Artificial Intelligence, I want to say some stuff. First of all, I’m not going to put any spoilers here. If you want spoilers, go to Josh’s page and read my comment to his complaint. Anyway, this movie is far and above more than I ever expect as far as overall quality is concerned. The creators’ vision of the future is very well thought out - there’s no Starship Troopers galactic battles for human existence or whatever crap that makes no sense. Hale Joel Osmet or whatever his name is sometimes seems like a 65 year old in a 8 year old’s body. It seems unlikely that anybody can just tell somebody that young how to act so well. Whatever his name is, midget genius acting boy did a much better job in AI than in the Sixth Sense. Mind you, there’s nothing short of really good that he did in the Sixth Sense, but with what he did in AI he can just take what he has done in past movies and just flush it down the crapper.

Sheesh. Long story short, go see this movie. If you’re a friend of mine and live in Gainesville and don’t have the $5 at the moment, I’ll lend it to you.

I am now cool like Josh. Comment away!

For those of you who are web scripting nerds, check out this md5 client-side javascript.

Four or five or something in the morning, and I feel like being in the strange conversation atmosphere of Josh’s lingering birthday party. Sit down to good ol’ Gordon, the craptop computer. Read slashdot. Geeknews. Arstechnica. New York Times. Psifertex. Dailyeatings. Anselor. Jayzee. Phorum. Slate. Bill Gates’ webpage - Hey Bill! Write something more often than once every six months! You’re the richest man in the world, you can find time to wax philosophical on your webpage. I read The Road Ahead and now I want your up-to-date thoughts without buying another version of your book. Smileasshole. Not working. Kuro5hin. Dailyslant. Run out of webpages to read. Read away messages on Gordon’s buddy list. Click every webpage link. [This portion of the update removed at a later date. Some people need to learn the difference between what others want them to gossip to the world and what others do not want them to gossip to the world. Some other people call those people assholes.]

And why do people not complain when those automatic weblog organizer things eat their posts?

“[Insert weblog program name here] ate half of my last 300 posts. I have no backups. Isn’t that neat?”

I’m finally getting phatplaya up and running. The plan so far is to add a new feature to the system every day. Today I added my ability to administer the system the way I used to be able to. Mind you, these initial ‘features’ are like adding vertebrae one-by-one to an animal to get it moving, but in a week or two, this thing should have lots more crap in it than it once did. I’ll be adding stuff to the phatplaya changelog whenever I do something to it.

One of my favorite programming events is when I finally find the bug in something that has been haunting me for the last few days, then quickly find another solution, then another. After I have been in the zone for a few hours, I actually run out of bugs and have a moment of zen not unlike that of the last man standing in 18th century hand-to-hand battles. No square of grass visible for miles, bodies piled three high, and everybody’s internal parts splattered on everybody else’s external parts. And me in the middle of it, coming out of my daze, realizing there’s an obviously used Giant Pointy Thing TM in my hand, yet not a scratch on me. I LOVE that.

Starcraft and Age of Empires have nothing in common. If you play Age of Empires, just play Age of Empires. If you play Starcraft, just play Starcraft. If you play both, you aren’t very good at either. Or you’re Josh.

My brain hurts. I’ve coded for maybe eight hours with just a half hour break. And I have what in Java is a NullPointerException, but this is VC++. And I have all the debug information I’ll ever need. And I still don’t know what’s going on. Waaaah!

I just got this poster in an impulse buy with Josh and Anselor (Seven posters total, i think). It’s a picture of Ella Fitzgerald singing in 1949 with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman in the audience. Ella Fitzgerald is by far the best recorded female singer I have ever heard, and I’ll bet she’ll keep that record forever. Just disgustingly good singing. I’m a screwball, but I sometimes listen to ‘Night and Day.’ Try to understand that!

I have this ideal mental picture of how I’d like my room to look and function, and it’s very slowly reaching that point. My mom is making window shades for the various holes in my walls that are supposed to look like bookshelves. That should work well. I need to move the dresser over a bit. I need to buy a nightstand. Oh yeah, FRIKKIN’ LEONARD PAVAROTTI-LOOKIN’ FURNITURE MAN NEEDS TO #@)($*@#)$(@ DELIVER MY BED!!!! I’ve slept on an air mattress for over a month now. It’s a comfy ride if you don’t move, but with the amount of tossing and turning I do, the thing can feel like a trireme in a tsunami.

I may use too many run-on sentences and I don’t care.

I added a cookie feature to my webpage that keeps track of whether you last looked at the internal or external links, so you don’t have to keep clicking “external” to get through to those links. And as far as fixing the iFrame thing for Netscape 4.x users, I decided I’m not going to do it. The Netscape browser is much like a torro two minutes before the end of a bullfight. AOL purchased it and killed it. AOL also purchased Nullsoft, creators of Winamp and Gnutella (2 of the most pervasive mp3-promoting programs anywhere). During all that, of course, they joined with Time-Warner, controller of most of the rights to popular music in America. Why do they throw money down the toilet and shoot themselves in the foot? I don’t know. Maybe they’ll shoot themselves in the kneecaps with a bazooka next.

I read Jordan’s little rant on inconsistent posters, and the fact that I’m the most inconsistent poster of four webpages. I don’t think I care, but it got me to write this, so who’s to really say?

Every day I go through my list of links, check for something new, then close the browser window. It doesn’t matter whether anybody has posted to the pages, it just matters that I checked. I guess this is evidence that it’s an addiction and not something I genuinely care about. Going through the motions seems to be more important than whether I get a buzz from the activity. Sure I like reading what people have to say, but I need my fix man! [Insert maniacal laughter and me showing the inside of my left elbow and banging it with my right hand.]

In computer gaming news, I have become the “great screwball patience man”. I covered the map in Age of Empires II with walls. I covered the sky in Starcraft with several hundred flying Terran Command Centers and Barracks, all following each other in a Massively Multi-Directed Disgusting Waste Of Time [tm]. And in Black and White, I let my semi-retarded cow Flava-Ade loose on the first map for days, where he covered several contiguous acres of land in what seems like a discoloration from outer-space, but is actually several tens of thousands of smaller objects — objects that, when pointed at by the mouse cursor and identified through use of the F1 button, are concisely described with the four letter palindrome, “Poop.”