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It turns out I actually did go to school.

March 28, 2005 /

I just had a stupiphany that would have been great if it had happened six months ago, when I had the option of submitting a thesis. Whoops!

See, you could store bitmap indices on a varchar field in a database as a two-dimensional black-and-white image for each character position! Normally you wouldn’t use bitmaps for text because the density would be less than 1%, but what if you compressed them like PNGs? You could save a huge amount of disk space, because sparsity would improve the compression ratio, and clock cycles aren’t nearly as valuable as disk access in this kind of situation so the decompression would be parallelizable. The binary operations would reduce wildcard search time by like an order of magnitude! Hell, you could probably store an average-value flattened composite for returning more relevant results faster, and since varchars only go to 256 you could do it as a standard grayscale image! And imagine the data mining you could do on a map like that, pattern recognition, domain linguistics, not to mention just rasterizing it and putting it on your wall…

I promise there are people out there to whom this makes sense. Oh well. Maybe someday I’ll write a paper.

What I would like

March 26, 2005 /

Music that manages to combine bossa nova with breakbeats in a non-annoying manner. I’m not sure this is possible, although I’m sure people have tried (I discovered last night that “electrobossa” is already a pretty strong subgenre, but everything I heard was a bit milquetoast, even for me).

I’m not honestly sure I like either bossa or break, but everything I’ve heard of either genre I liked, which I think is encouraging. One of my favorite albums ever is a bossa nova album! Kind of. Most of the breakbeats I like are off soundtracks.

March 24, 2005 /

I’d just like to point out that you don’t actually care about Terri Schiavo. Thanks.

March 23, 2005 /

I’m glad to say that Bruce’s condition is improving. My uncle John is closer to the situation and has more info, so I’ll direct you to his journal instead of just repeating his entries.

March 22, 2005 /

I did my taxes last night. More importantly, for the first time since 1999, I did not complete the FAFSA. TAKE THAT, HIGHER EDUCATION!

Man, I really hope I graduate.

March 22, 2005 /

My cousin Bruce is critically ill in a hospital in Indianapolis. He’s had a transplanted kidney for the last seven years, and things have often been a little rough with it, but this time a viral infection in his pancreas seems to have caused it to fail entirely. The last I heard, things were improving slightly for him–they reduced some of the swelling and fluid buildup, but he’s still on oxygen and morphine. I hope things continue to improve.

Bruce lived with my family for a while, when I was in middle school and he was taking classes at EKU. He brought with him a huge and nearly comprehensive collection of first edition AD&D resource books, miniatures and modules, not to mention games like Paranoia and Gamma World. When he moved out, he left them to me. It was a huge and valuable gift, magnified by who I was (and am). I still have every piece of it.

He went to dialysis at the time, of course, and had for years, and would until 1998. I wonder what it was like when he went in for the last time. He showed me the scar tissue that had built up on his arm from the treatments, once, and the image has never left me.

March 21, 2005 /

It turns out rock ‘n’ roll is actually a pretty bad foundation for a city.

Hard Action Adjuster

March 21, 2005 /

There is a new Lady in the Next Cube.

LitNC: “You know what I think? They need to–grow some, and tell that bitch–they let her run that place. You know? She’s an adjuster.“

Strutting around like she owns the place! She’s a loose cannon! She can’t be trusted! Hand over your badge!