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Timmerov's Blog
Monday, November 30, 2009
  opengl fonts
opengl is a library of graphics primitives. it usually hooks fairly directly into the hardware. so it's pretty fast. and reasonably platform independent. it's pretty low level. so it often feels not much different from poking codes into magic hardware registers. but it's pretty darn cool. my big gripe: no font supports. want to draw a complex scene with aliens battling robots on a fractal landscape with two suns? no problem. but if you want to print "hello world" then you're out of luck. you pretty much have to roll your own. or grab something from the internet. which might be an okay starting point. but in the end, you're gonna roll your own.
 
Sunday, November 29, 2009
  very ants
october was one of the coldest recorded months in the united states. presumably since thermometers were invented and people started keeping records some 150 years ago. simultaneously, 2009 is likely to be one of the warmest years on record for the entire world. that kind of thing happens when there's lots of variance. from place to place. from year to year. if you think that's some sort of obvious contradiction nonsense, or you think that's some sort of proof that global warming is or isn't happening, you should probably stay out of the whole discussion. including when you go to the polls and vote.
 
Saturday, November 28, 2009
  recipe
i'm not a good cook. a long time ago a prepared this meal i called heap. it was a bunch of breakfast foods scrambled together. bacon eggs potatoes and toast. it was uh... novel. fortunately, the beautiful and talented alisa married me anyway. so it was with great surprise that she asked me to make heap for the family for dinner. oh dear. i must be pulling less weight than i thought. we had left over corned beef. that went in. one piece of shredded bread. two eggs. a splash of milk. season to taste. mix with a fork. fry in a pan. on the other burner i made mac-n-cheese for the boys. was pretty sure they wouldn't eat heap. which turned out pretty good.
 
Friday, November 27, 2009
  b-day
b's birthday was last weekend. he's like me. doesn't much care for parties. he didn't want one. aunt julie came over on thursday for carrot cake birthday cake. happens to also be my favorite. he failed to blow out all 11 candles in one breath. twice. saturday afternoon he went to a friend's birthday party. saturday night we went to youth theatre production of annie. sunday i threw him a surprise dnd game. joe and mary and the girls came over for a table top game. mary politely disappeared and took care of all the visiting of locals so joe wouldn't have to. the beautiful and talented alisa whipped up a lasagna, coffee cake, and seconds and thirds of broccoli. which just tickled her pink. a good time was had by all.
 
Thursday, November 26, 2009
  stats
global warming stopped. it's true. i read it on the internet. if you fit a line to temperatures from 1999 to 2008 it's flat. no warming. crisis is over. skeptics won. neener neener. go buy an suv. heh. funny thing though. if you do the same thing for a 9 year window, or an 11 year window, instead of a 10 year window, you get a line with a positive slope. ie a warming trend. a small warming trend. why? turns out that 1999 was exceptionally hot. anomalies happen. it's a mistake to make predictions without taking them into account. if we look at the 10 year window that ends in 1999, we find a very steep upward trend. it's just as much a mistake to go all chicken little in 2000 based on that flawed analysis as it is to go all head in the sand about this recent flawed analysis. junk science. both sides. get over it. or we'll all lose.
 
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
  bush lovers
it's kinda funny. some folks who a few years ago i would have put squarely in the bush lover camp suddenly profess they had never been very fond of him. wtf? am i not remembering things correctly? nope. a quick review of their blog shows i'm not crazy. they have clearly flip flopped. well. better late than never i suppose. any hope for some sort of bipartisan thing to say maybe get the us government's finances in order? heh. nope. seems their strategy is i'm evil. anything i support is evil. therefore anything i oppose is good. ta da! perverse. man i wish something could be done about people too stupid or too stubborn to think for themselves. maybe we could crash the economy and let em go hungry. hmm...
 
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
  evil spawn
why that little son of a gun turkey bugger. everyone gets to pick their birthday meal. b picked stromboli. that's one of the very few dishes i make. the beautiful and talented alisa was kinda hurt that he didn't pick one of her specialties. she was letting him have it with both barrels. he explained, you've been doing all the cooking recently. dad hasn't even done the once a week meal he used to do. it's clearly his turn to cook. the conniving bastage. i swear i have no idea where he gets it.
 
Monday, November 23, 2009
  bow
folks are giving obama a hard time about bowing to other foreign leaders. there's a bunch of ways to spin this. here are some of the more interesting ones. obama is as at least as stupid as bush. maybe even stupider. heh. he's the most powerful man in the world. he can redefine protocol at will. hrm. he's expressing the us's new position in the world. ie previous presidents squandered us prestige on stupid shit. in order to get that respect back we have to show respect. hurm. he's a black man at the top of what is effectively a white man's world. this bowing behavior might be part of the strategy that put him where he is. dunno. take your pick. ask him.
 
Sunday, November 22, 2009
  religious mates
some research was published recently. an extreme interpretation of the results is that religion is a mating strategy. rational measured interpretations are boring and don't steer eyeballs to your site like the sensational stuff. so onward we plow. the thinking goes like this. you're a male with a mate. a higher ranking male shows up and starts putting the moves on your female. you can't kick his ass cause if you could he wouldn't be higher rank than you. but you can't let him knock up your mate. so what do you do? play the god card. adultery is a sin. punishable by stoning. to death. you are effectively saying to your mate, if you fuck him i'll kill you. the male gets the message, too. you can't kill him. but you can kill his unborn children.
 
Saturday, November 21, 2009
  ceiling
the beautiful and talented alisa is slowly removing the acoustic popcorn cheese from the ceilings of the entire house. scraping it off is the easy part. then she has to apply new mud. texture it. prime it. paint it. it looks much nicer now. not like a cave with nitrates growing on the ceiling. she's done an amazing job of keeping the mess to a minimum. i was really expecting to find fine white dust absolutely everywhere. it sure would have been everywhere if i was doing this project. go alisa go!
 
Friday, November 20, 2009
  6box
b and i have been 6boxing ddo. usually people 2box. that means they run two characters at once. usually on different computers. though it works pretty well with one beefy box. i run the main on my laptop. and the other 5 in a single vm on my desktop computer. i get like 20 fps in dungeons and 5 fps in town. the wizard finally hit 5th level. haste! yay! that makes things so much nicer. i kinda like scouring dungeons. it takes a lot of time. and most other players don't want to do the side quests. there's no follow command. so each toon needs to be manually driven from point a to point b. the party is pretty well balanced. we don't have a ranger. will probably correct that after we unlock 32 point buys. we've been gathering up all the collectibles and turning them in. we haven't bought anything. our best weapon is a +2 cold iron returning axe. everything else is +1. at 5th level a normal twink would be using +3 stuff and loaded with clickies and buff items. it's not completely free. but it's free enough. i'm thinking of setting up a business that rents toons for people to 2box with. need a rogue? need a cleric? here ya go. have fun storming the castle. i'm gonna be so rich.
 
Thursday, November 19, 2009
  dollhouse
i watched most of the first season of dollhouse. except i missed the very first episode. so i put it in our netflix queue. it finally percolated to the top. i watched it with the beautiful and talented alisa. at one point she commented that that dress does not cover her bottom. i just kinda stared at her like i'd stare at an alien being that just arrived on earth. um, darling. that would be the point of the show.
 
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
  iphonlive
we so rock. link
 
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
  weight
my weight's been pretty steady for a long time. it does a sort of brownian motion random walk between 192 and 198. the pounds don't just sit there though. they move around quite a bit. at least as measured by my belt. and the jiggliness of my backside. which feels incredibly gross to me. and gets me to the gym. where i fix things. the beautiful and talented alisa seems to have partially succumbed to some of the diseases the children have been bringing home. so i've been biking them to school. i do not have pedaling muscles. well. didn't. over 8 miles a day kinda makes an impact in a short amount of time. a certain lady has a certain firmness to certain parts of her self that are very pleasing to a certain "gentleman". you'll just have to take my word for that.
 
Monday, November 16, 2009
  poligotry
a buddy of mine sometimes throws around the term lib'ral like white folks used the n-word fifty hundred years ago. i tend to agree with many of his political positions. but i'm really turned off by the presentation. it's so bad that i can't tell others he's right and they should do what he says. cause he comes across as such a political bigot. maybe he's doing it deliberately. cause he thinks it makes him cool. or because it's sensational. and folks gobble it up. sort of the ann coulter approach. course she's mostly disappeared from the most popular lists. thank gods.
 
Sunday, November 15, 2009
  kelo
some four years ago the supreme court ruled that the city really does have the right to take your home for any goddam reason it wants. heh. okay so that's a bit of spin. the plan sounded great. change this prime real estate from residential to commercial. build it up for the benefit of a major employer. get more taxes. everyone should be happy. except for the people that have been living on the water front property all their lives. and really didn't want to move. but had to. so the company has announced it's relocating its business. the land is condemned. vacant. and not producing any revenues. some folks are looking mighty foolish right now. justice is required to be blind. it's not required to be stupid.
 
Saturday, November 14, 2009
  taxes
a rather wealthy community recently voted to substantially raise their property taxes. people were all like what?!?!?!? rich people volunteering to pay higher taxes?!?!?!? that doesn't make any sense!!!! actually, it does. most of their federal and state tax dollars are spent elsewhere. the return on their irs investment is very low. now, if they pay $100 local taxes they lower their federal taxes by $80. so it's a $20 tax hike. but for their $20, the city spends $100 on local things like police, fire, parks, sidewalks, roads, schools, and perhaps most importantly, subsidizing utilities like water, sewer, and refuse. which is $100 they no longer have to pay. a net $80 gain.
 
Friday, November 13, 2009
  ailments
it was kinda chilly at the football game. did g wear his sweater? no. did he get sick? yes. he's been home most of the week. sigh. worst part is, the beautiful and talented alisa's got it too. i think i'll wait till he's feeling better before i spring that guilt trip on him. he's been sleeping a lot. so it's the real thing. not that fake bounce off the walls sick you sometimes get when you can't make yourself to go to school another day. in completely unrelated news, i've been a really great dad. i've been working from home so i can help out with the sick kiddie.
 
Thursday, November 12, 2009
  teacher
g's teacher's name is mrs p'TOK. i think that's klingon for teacher.
 
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
  sueage
riaa's strategy of sueing people at random isn't working very well. there are so many infringers out there that the probability that any one infringer gets caught is very low. the penalty would have to be huge in order to make the expected loss larger than the gain of getting free music. ie suing at random is not a good strategy. is there a better one? turns out there is. don't sue at random. sue infringers in a known well-defined order. like time. go after infringers in order starting at noon today. the smart infringer will wait awhile before stealing copyrighted material. that leaves the stupid ones. presumably they'll be a lot easier for riaa to find and fine. everyone wins!
 
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
  football
g and i went with his cub scout pack to a niners game. it was fun. even though the niners lost. none of the scouts really cared. was a tough day for the quarterback. three interceptions and a fumble. g and i are staying home today. seems like we brought home more than just memories from sitting in the cold for four hours. ah well. ah choo.
 
Monday, November 09, 2009
  fact bar
ever notice that people tend to ignore facts that don't fit their world view? heh. everyone does it. it seems to be a feature a humanity. as opposed to limited to a particular group. republicans do it. democrats too. rich and poor both. blacks whites browns yellows, all. the religious and the agnostic, same. myself included. heh. let me let you in on a little secret here, i am not a god. all evidence to the contrary. anywho, don't bother telling me about so-and-so who is the exception to the rule. i'll just ignore 'em. for obvious reasons.
 
Sunday, November 08, 2009
  gears remorse
i spent the whole of the other day fixing a few problems with the build. man. error messages. they suck. failed. yes, i see that you failed. don't make me figure out why you failed. you know why you failed. just frikken tell me. my time is worth way way more than yours is you stupid computer. don't just tell me that you couldn't read a resource. tell me what resource you couldn't read. if the error message said, could not read executable file "/Volumes/disk/path/", i would have felt dumb for how long it took me to notice that the actual name of the executable file was missing. but it would have been minutes nstead of hours. and i wouldn't have thrown my new iphone at anyone.
 
Saturday, November 07, 2009
  open voting
yay! sequoia announced recently that all of the source code used in their election machines will be made available to public scrutiny. this is really good. it's pretty scary for a for-profit company to disclose their trade secrets. but seriously, the issue of voter confidence is just too important for the type of company that's primarily concerned about selling its product. security experts have claimed for years that secret security systems are far less secure than open security systems. heh. sequoia for president.
 
Friday, November 06, 2009
  fan
so my computer was being extra loud this morning. the fan was running. seems to have gotten stuck on. weird. there's no shut off the goram fan control panel. so i rebooted. it fixed the problem. later at work i was explaining this unusual event to someone. they were really having a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around why this was unusual. then the ah-ha moment hit me. i was talking to pc person.
 
Thursday, November 05, 2009
  mismatch
define mismatch. when the orc coach says to the elf coach for the umpteenth time, i have dodge and you don't.
 
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
  strawberry butter aid
spoon fruit is yummy stuff. usually. it's also corn syrup free. and many flavors are seed free. it's really rare to find a brand that's both. it's especially good for the beautiful and talented alisa. she makes the treats around here. her husband is allergic to corn syrup. and her father cannot eat seeds. there are many many flavors. we try new ones every now and then. the latest experiment was strawberry butter. i'm pretty sure b tasted it at the store when we bought it. alisa does not like strawberry. heh. that's a wee bit of an understatement. she tries strawberries and strawberry flavored stuff every once in a while. it might just be to amuse her children. dunno. so anywho. she decided to test the strawberry butter. the poor dear has a cold. so it didn't smell right to her. heh. she says strawberries smell like rotting garbage. so she wasn't sure if it was the normal kind of bad smell or some other kind of bad smell. so anywho, after the theatrics i got to taste. i gave it a sniff and made a face. dang. i knew that smell. it reeked like bandaids. not the fresh out of the box bandaid. but the special unique smell they get when you've been wearing them for a couple of days. the boys did not have to try it. i think it went straight into the trash.
 
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
  global warming
the global warming arena has been pretty quiet in the main stream media. thank gods. though one wonders why. nothing has really changed. evidence keeps slowly coming in. but nothing is proven by any means. did people just get tired of the debate? did they find something more interesting to argue about? like health care insurance. did the weather change and the places that were hotter than normal are now colder than normal and vice versa? heh. those are my bets. people sitting around sweltering start yowling about how the world's on fire. couple years later, they're shivering in a cold spell with their mouths shut. wisdom? maybe. fear of looking stupid? absolutely. unwillingness to admit error? probably.
 
Monday, November 02, 2009
  gm
fisker is going to build plug-in hybrid cars at a plant formerly owned by gm. heh. this is something i tried to say a long time ago. you can let gm fold. other companies have been waiting in the wings to take advantage of just such an opportunity. which didn't exist because we kept propping up poorly run non-profitable companies with tax dollars. let em sink. bring on the new american car companies. give them a chance to become the powerhouses we always wanted gm to be.
 
Sunday, November 01, 2009
  pitch pull
i tell people that b pitch pulled his bicycle. and they're like pitch pull? heh. it's a sailing term. i picked it up from the beautiful and talented alisa. if i recall correctly, it was while swimming in a lake waiting for help to flip the boat right side up. anywho, back to b. remember the scene in one of the indiana jones movies where the two doctor joneses are being pursued by a motorcycle. and one of them jams a pole into its front wheel. the motorcycle and driver catapult high into the air, do several flips, and blow up. audience applauds. well, that's a lot like what b did. but without the pole or the blowing up part. pitch pull. now you know.
 
most every day i wander the corridors of my mind and open a door at random.

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