Category: Connections

And I pretend I don’t care about having an audience

November 29, 2004 /

The NFD LJ feed and the Anacrusis LJ feed each have exactly 32 subscribers. Of those, 23 of the NFD subscribers are on my LJ friends list, whereas 12 of the Anacrusis subscribers are. Only 10 people on said friends list subscribe to both.

Interesting, but probably only to me.

I would like to have similar statistics for the regular RSS feeds, but of course there’s no big site organizing and tracking who hits those. Does anybody know a way to parse Apache log files and see who’s hitting a given location? My current (weak) webstats software won’t do it.

November 29, 2004 /

Hi, Mom. I finally put up a permanent link to Anacrusis on the right side of the page (I think you are now the only person who reads the NFD front page, actually). That’s the place where I do the stories that you haven’t read yet. I promise there is not very much cursing in them, usually.

For the rest of you who read both notebooks, I should take this opportunity to state that while I endorse certain political ideologies, Anacrusis does not–except that, universally, it should be difficult for one human to kill another.

Somebody Fark this

November 25, 2004 /

Lisa came over tonight, and two things happened.

  1. We thawed some pre-cooked shrimp and, lacking cocktail sauce, attempted to make our own. You need horseradish to make cocktail sauce; we lacked horseradish as well. The ingredients we did have were ketchup, lemon juice and worcestershire sauce. We decided to attempt to make it, with something (garlic? cayenne?) substituting for horseradish.

    Extrapolation of how this went is left as an exercise for the reader.

  2. We played some Halo 2, the first chance I’ve had to play co-op and a lot of fun. At one point, near the end, we witnessed something so fantastic that it forced the two of us to drag out my vidcapping equipment and record it for posterity. This is maybe the most important thing I have ever done.

    Ladies, gentlemen, I give you: Headless, Breakdancing Master Chief.

Master Chief Breakdancing in .MP4 (4.23 MB)

Master Chief Breakdancing in .MOV (10.9 MB)

Screencap 1

Screencap 2

Screencap 3

Screencap 4

Screencap 1 Zoom

Screencap 3 Zoom

Post script: the above video formats are the only ones in which I can get a workable file size. If you can convert to .wmv, .mpg or .avi (and either get it under 10MB or host it), write me and I’ll arrange to get you a copy of the 30-meg source file.

November 22, 2004 /

I love constrained writing, and I checked Constrained today and got reminded why.

While I recognize that neither of the two stories I’m about to link is particularly original, I admire them because they are brilliant exercises in form (some people use that term as a pejorative; I don’t). You can read them very quickly, and I recommend them to you with this note: read the stories before you click to see which challenges inspired them.

November 13, 2004 /

You know, Java is great until you have to design a user interface with it. Then again, I could say that about pretty much any language that isn’t PHP (which just delegates UI to HTML).

I plan on never designing a non-HTML UI, so it’s a good thing I know a fancy boy UI programmer already. I assume he works for pudding.

November 12, 2004 /

Okay, I have to concede that even if I don’t know what it means, “winglike alary processes” is a beautiful set of words. Winglike alary processes. It’s not a band name… maybe it’s a song name. It’s better than that, though. Accidental poetry.

Winglike alary processes.

November 12, 2004 /

The problem with doing research on any old thing that pops into your head, which I do, it’s neat, thanks to Google, is that you end up with sentences of which you understand maybe two words. To wit:

“Like myobatrachines, sooglossids have a ventrally incomplete cricoid ring, horizontal pupils, winglike alary processes on the hyoid, and a divided sphenethmoid. Amplexus is inguinal.”

From a page about Seychelle frogs. I mean, I understand “horizontal pupils” but that’s about it. As has been the case ever since I read Wuthering Heights, in high school and at gunpoint, I have this dark suspicion that the narrator is unreliable–that, in this case, the author of that page is just making up words to fuck with me (Kris Straub has actually done this). I mean, “sphenethmoid?”

Now somebody comment on my Livejournal feed explaining what that is, and how I’m dumb.