By jerfunfin 28 Feb 2003
This morning I experienced the game of squash for the first time. It sort of feels like being locked in a 25’ square, un-padded cell with another player desperately swatting a large insect that refuses to die. Did I mention the lack of padding in this box? My heart rate was raised within 5 minutes of play.
While I didn’t get my ass kicked, I did lose all of the 5 matches I played. It was fantastic! I feel an addiction coming on. Squash anyone??
By anders pearson 27 Feb 2003
jPBy anders pearson 24 Feb 2003
this morning my cellphone rang. i was at work and the number came up as ‘withheld’ so i sent it straight to voicemail. 5 minutes later i checked it and found a message from some woman in what sounded to me like swedish or some other scandinavian language. i played it for <a href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“>peter</a>, who is our resident expert on scandinavian languages (i think he speaks swedish, icelandic, and danish). he was mystified. he said that the cadence was norwegian and he thought he recognized a couple icelandic words, but otherwise couldn’t figure out what language it was.
unfortunately i deleted the message. it would have been fun to digitize it and put it online.
in other news, this morning i woke up one minute before my alarm was set to go off. sweet.
By Mark Boudreau 13 Feb 2003
i just bought a tivo. I plan to now watch all of my tv on the weekends, in half the time because I can skip the comercials.
<p>color me psyched. also color me an electronic gadget nut. i just spent the past hour making sure it was set to record the shows I needed (the simpsons, the shield, buffy, the naked chef, some Dr. Who, Buck Rogers, and any movie featuring Michelle Yeoh).</p>
<p>no more will i have to be home in time to watch a show. no more will i have to wait until a commercial comes on in order to make a meal or go to the bathroom. i feel so liberated…kind of.</p> By anders pearson 12 Feb 2003
i must be getting old.
last night i went to see napalm death, strapping young lad, nile, dark tranquility, and berserker. the headlining band was Nile. who is Nile? i’ve been listening to death metal since high school and i’d never heard of them before yesterday. and there they were with top billing above Napalm Death, one of the most influential bands in the genre. apparently Nile is currently popular with the kiddies…
the other really strange thing about the show was the venue: BB King’s Blues Lounge. not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to see a metal show.
met up with angela before the show and we went to the BB King grill which is in the same building as the lounge so i could get a quick bite to eat before things started. about half an hour before the show was scheduled to start, the first band, Berserker, went on. we were in the restaurant part and we oould hear them pretty clearly through the walls. it was then that we realized that the staff pretty much had no idea what they were in for. when the band started playing, a couple of the waitresses disappeared off to the lounge to see what was going on. the came back in looking absolutely mortified. it was quite amusing.
we wandered back into the lounge with just enough time to grab a beer before Strapping Young Lad started playing. SYL was the main draw of the show for me. their set was unfortunately somewhat disappointing. they only got to play for about half an hour and the club’s sound still wasn’t well setup. it was about 20 decibels quieter than SYL deserves (and needs) and tinny sounding. even with the poor sound, the band was still fantastic. Devin is a pretty goofy guy (“water, water, it’s good for your heart, the more you drink the more you… have in your system”) which makes for an odd contrast with the sheer crushing heaviness of their music. Gene Hoglin, the drummer, is positively inhuman.
after SYL played, angela and i each ran off to our respective bathrooms. as i was coming out of the narrow hallway leading to the bathrooms, someone says 'excuse me' and slides past me and into the women's bathroom. i had to stop and blink a couple times. it was Juliya, the host of Uranium the metal show on Much Music, one of the few tv shows that i actually watch on a regular basis. 5 minutes later angela comes out of the bathroom. i'm about to say something to the effect of "do you realize who was just in the bathroom with you?" when angela beats me to it. apparently she had a long conversation with her while they were both applying hair spray at the sink.
after our little celebrity encounter, Dark Tranquility went on. like Nile, i’d never heard of them before that night. they were pretty good though. sort of at the goth end of the death metal spectrum. growly vocals and heavy guitars but mixed in with keyboards and occasional clean vocals. i’m really a sucker for that style of music so i’ll probably pick up one of their albums.
the Napalm came on and showed everyone how it's done. holy crap. the first two songs were a little muddy sounding but then the band really tightened up and they got the last kinks out of the PA. most napalm fans have been disappointed with their last couple albums. thankfully, they played almost all old material with just two or three songs off their new album. napalm's first album, Scum, is an absolute masterpiece of extreme music and single-handedly invented the grindcore genre. but it was recorded for almost no money and production wise was pretty terrible sounding. so i was thrilled when they played about half of that album live (the whole album was only 28 minutes so playing half of it wasn't that big a chunk of time) because i got to finally hear the songs with decent quality sound. the other highlights of their set were "Suffer the Children", "From enslavement to obliteration", and their cover of "Nazi punks, fuck off".
after Napalm was Nile. by now my curiousity was killing me. who the hell thought they could be billed above Napalm Death? being the headlining act implies that you're better than the opening bands. being presented as better than Napalm builds up some pretty high expectations. sadly, Nile fell far short of those expectations. they were pretty generic, cookie-cutter death metal. they played pretty well but not exceptionally so. angela walked out after 5 minutes of their set. i lasted another 20 minutes but i was getting tired by then and after seeing napalm play, Nile were just bringing me down.
By Mark Boudreau 10 Feb 2003
much work to be done
<p>new file server introduced</p>
<p>desktop now doorstop</p> By anders pearson 08 Feb 2003
ok. thraxil finally has an <a href=”/rss”>RSS feed</a>. i’m not sure exactly what to do with images; for now i’m just leaving them out. anyway, enjoy.
By Mark Boudreau 08 Feb 2003
Have you ever tried writing a application or a class from a book? I was writing a SMTP Mail Class in php from a pretty decent Wrox book (Professional PHP4). Everything was straight forward and I was getting a good lesson in object oriented coding. However, the code was wrong in a number of ways (functions misnamed, processes insufficient). Not to mention the fact that the code that the book provides for download was wrong in ways completely different than the code as it was written in the book. Have anyone else had this kind of trouble with books on Programming? You’d think they would at least run the code before they publish it.
<p>On the bright side of things, debugging this class taught me a lot more about socket programming and <span class="caps">SMTP</span> calls than I would have known before. </p>
<p><strong>shrug</strong></p> By anders pearson 04 Feb 2003
last night i watched Resident Evil and American Psycho 2.
RE was fun and cheesy. basically a direct ripoff of Aliens but with zombies instead of aliens. it had the strong female lead character surrounded by well trained and equipped soldiers trapped in an enclosed space with some relatively difficult to kill nasties. almost every character from Aliens had an equivalent. there was even a final showdown with one particularly nasty and powerful enemy. strikes against it: 1) complete and total lack of originality 2) uninspired dialog 3) no bishop. what it had going for it: 1) good soundtrack 2) milla jovovich 3) i actually got a kick out of how much it looked like a video game.
American Psycho 2 was just bad. i didn’t expect it to be any good but i was still disappointed. it had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. who’s stupid idea was it to follow up a fantastically good movie with complete crap?
By anders pearson 31 Jan 2003
just to make sure it was firmly established that she is the coolest girlfriend in the world, lani got me the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/ST_product.html”>Touchstream keyboard</a> that i had been yearning for.
the touchstream is a unique device. it is a combination of keyboard and mouse in one unit using something similar to a trackpad for the entire thing. there are no keys. the surface is totally flat and it uses a microprocessor to figure out where your fingers touch the surface and maps those to keypresses or mouse events.
there were basically three things that make it an attractive device: 1) it requires essentially no force to hit a key (since nothing is being depressed) which makes it very easy on your wrists. with practice, it is also potentially faster to type on than regular keyboards because your fingers don’t have to move as much. 2) you can use the mouse without moving your hands away from the keyboard; your keyboard and your mouse are always right below your fingers, you don’t lose any time switching between them. and 3) it also supports gestures. the onboard processor detects certain motions and converts them to multi-key sequences like Control-x or Alt-backspace.
i’ve only been using it for a few nights now and not that heavily (the docs recommend not using it more than an hour or two a day for the first few weeks because apparently, when you are learning to use a new interface device, you tend to tense up and that can lead to RSI). my impression so far has been largely positive.
first, the learning curve for being able to type on it is just as steep as you would imagine. without tactile feedback, you basically have to learn to touch type all over again. on a regular keyboard, i can probably type a nice moderate 40 words a minute without looking at the keyboard or making too many mistakes. after playing with the touchstream for a few days now, i could probably get about 30 wpm but with about a 30% error rate. i have to slow down considerably to eliminate mistakes. if you have any imperfections in your typing technique, the touchstream basically amplifies them into mistakes. eg, using the touchstream has made me notice that i have a bad habit of hitting the ‘c’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than my middle finger. similarly, i reach for the ‘p’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than using my pinky like i should. on a regular keyboard, i’m probably just barely hitting those keys. the touchstream is less forgiving and those and a dozen other bad habits i’ve learned to compensate for over the years just don’t fly. you also have to be really good about keeping your hands in the proper position hovering over the home row, just like typing instructors keep telling us is necessary for fast typing. all in all, using the touchstream is like having the ultimate fascist typing instructor scrutinizing your every keystroke and not letting you get away with anything. it’s slowing me down right now, but i can feel that if i keep at it, it will improve my typing overall.
for as much time as i spend on the computer, i’ve been pretty lucky with RSI. the only thing that really bothers me is using the mouse for long periods of time. because using a mouse hurts, i’ve gravitated away from GUIs and instead rely more on text and console applications. the bash commandline, emacs, ion, and mozilla/phoenix’s type ahead find are my bread and butter. once you get efficient with keyboard driven interfaces though, you start to become painfully aware of how inefficient most mouse driven interfaces are, especially the overhead of switching from mouse to keyboard and back all the time. the most appealing aspect of the touchstream to me when i was just drooling over pictures was that it would basically eliminate that overhead and make it possible for me to actually use the few mouse driven applications i need to deal with as efficiently as the key driven apps i’ve been spoiled on.
i was mistaken though. yes, having the keyboard and mouse both right there and having no overhead switching between mousing and typing has made a lot of applications easier and faster to use. but the killer feature of the touchstream turns out to be the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/touchstream_gesture_guide.html”>gestures</a>. unfortunately, they are awful hard to describe. the multifinger gestures start with the shift key. since drift can be a big problem on a keyboard without tactile feedback, stretching your pinky out all the time to hit the shift key is not such a good idea. instead, on the touchstream, you can just drop all four fingertips of one hand on the home row and that acts as a shift. control and alt are similarly easy. dragging the four fingertips of your right hand up or down will scroll up or down like using a mousewheel. there are also very intuitive gestures for back and forward in web browsers, cut/paste, and most of the common emacs commands. my favorite though is probably the cursor control. if you slide two left hand fingertips around, it will move the cursor around through text like it was a mouse pointer and you were using a trackpad. it doesn’t sound very impressive but it only takes about 3 seconds of actually playing with it before you can’t understand how you ever used the inverted T arrow key pad before; having to hit different keys to make the cursor go in different directions seems downright primitive.
overall it has pretty much lived up to all my expectations. the only negative things i can think of to say about it are that it isn’t wireless so i can’t sit on my couch and use it with the projector, and it isn’t customizable or programmable; you change between a few different preconfigured modes (windows, linux, mac, photoshop, emacs modes, etc.) but you can’t enable or disable specific gestures or define your own new gestures.
the device even gets good marks for durable construction. there are no moving parts so hopefully nothing to wear out. if you spill your drink on it, you can just spray some windex on it and wipe it clean.