Timmerov's Blog
syria2
maybe presidents shouldn't draw lines in the sand.
syria
can we just kill them all?
smog
when i lived in pasadena we would truck out to joshua tree to get away from school for a while. you know there's smog in la at some level. but when you're in it, you kinda ignore it. cause there's nothing to compare it to. coming back from j-tree though, you can see it. it's literally like a big sickly yellow dome. and you drive into it. and the transition is abrupt. moments ago, clear skies. fresh smelling air. utopia. then yick. gods. thinking back, i can't believe i breathed that stuff for 6 years. anywho, i was reminded of that flying out of chicago recently. we were at altitude. and had been for some time. yet when i looked out the window, there was a sea of that same sickly yellow brown smog. there were other planes flying with us just above the ick. they were easy to find because their downwash of clean upper air was carving long straight lines in the sky. we humans need to wake up. put the sugar down. turn off the electronics. take an honest look at what we're doing to ourselves. and knock it the fuck off.
masks
so i've been playing way too much puzzle and dragons. i've been getting as much help as i need from the intertubes. and not much more. which is pretty cool. there are a few things that when i discovered i felt pretty stupid. like the tutorial has you move orbs horizontally. and when i moved one diagonally it shook a finger at me. uh uh uh. as if i wasn't supposed to do that. eventually i figured that one out. and felt really stupid. there's a particular daily dungeon for hunting masks. masks have this colossal defense. damage done to an opponent is your attack minus their defense. i assumed it was pinned at 0. but really it's pinned at 1. masks only have 5 to 18 hit points. so you just need to smack things a few times with any monster and they'll drop. so you go a team leader that keeps you from dying in one hit. masks don't attack very often. so you have plenty of time to heal yourself. the strategy is to knock down all but one of the masks. and build a pretty pattern where you can set up a number of mass attacks in one move. go with a two color team. and low hit points. so an auto healer can get you back up above 70% in one turn. two color monsters work well too. cause they get two taps per turn.
achoo
i sneeze. you sneeze. we all sneeze. the beautiful and talented alisa hassles me sometimes cause my sneezes are somewhat more energetic than most. something about a powerful instrument. and pressure waves measured in kilopascals. yeah yeah whatever. so i was sitting in my car in the parking lot outside boy scouts. just chilling. playing puzzle and dragons on my iphone. listenin to tunes. and i sneezed. a perfectly ordinary sneeze as far as i'm concerned. but it made the cd player skip. so maybe. just maybe there's a grain of truth to the accusations. bless me.
poopst
we haven't had a good poop post in a while. if you've been wishing for one, today's your lucky day. course some folks hold there's no such thing as a good poop post. so anywho, last trip i did two things that i've never done before. i pinched a loaf on an airplane. and man, is it just me... or did those seats get smaller along with the coach seats? makes me wonder how the fatties get back up. maybe two fatties in opposite water closets. and a knotted rope. hrm. anywho, the other thing that happened is i got a boil on my butt. no idea if the two are related. don't care. you be the conspiracy judge. yeah, i've had little pimples before. okay okay. i've had some big pimples down there too. but sheehsumcrow. this thing was walnut sized. felt like i was sitting lopsided for a while. very little pus ever erupted. though it seemed to leak clear fluid more/less continuously. it didn't really hurt. which is good. was just embarrassing. not sure why. nobody could see it. (i hope.) and no one would know about it unless i posted about it on my blog. hrm. ah well. too late now. so now i have first hand experience re one of the disses in my repertoire. you sir, are a boil on the butt of humanity.
learnt
i learned today on the internet that obama is responsible for fox cancelling firefly. damn him. firefly is the last and probably best of the shows about people tootling around the universe in a space ship exploring other planets and making new friends and enemies. star trek was the first. apparently, the consumer market isn't interested in that any more. which is too bad. cause we're pretty close to the point where we can almost actually do that. send people to other worlds. and duh, it'll be nothing like what we've been led to believe. which might be why we've lost interest. bummer. space travel is for robots. not humans. heaven is for machines.
sailing
the beautiful and talented alisa and i have very different ideas about what sailing is all about. for me it's getting the pretty girl into a bathing suit (of the itty bitty kind) into your boat all alone on a lake with nice weather and nothing to do but grin like fools at each other. there's really no way to lose. for tbata though, it seems to be some sort of competition thing. even when it isn't. everything has funny names. it's like being at a ren-faire where everyone uses archaic terms for ordinary things. and the goal seems to be to maximize the wind chill factor. and the first step is get everyone wet. i like the catamarans better than the single hulled jobbers. the pretty girl can lie down and stretch out and just be ornamental on the comfy tarp between the floats. the trampoline in sail-speak.
homophones
so i took a little test on my sailing knowledge. and i was having word fun with the beautiful and talented alisa. the bow is the front of the ship. duh. which reminded me... not too long ago she read a book to g about this half-viking inventor kid who built a giant crossbow and mounted it in his war ship. i remember cause she sometimes had to read ahead and/or back up when reading aloud about the bow in the bow. it was kinda big. and only the hunkiest viking could man it. so there was a beau on the bow in the bow. but he was gay. and liked to wear pink ribbons. so there was a bow on the beau on the bow in the bow. one day they were rowing close to shore. and the bow got snagged by a tree branch. so now the bow that was on the beau on the bow in the bow is now just a bow on a bough.
work
developments at work are kinda creeping me out. i get a report every time one of our servers crashes. the report includes the revision number of the source code that built the crashy code. i blogged about fixing a hard to find boog a few days ago. since then the only crash reports have been with pre-fix revisions. which is totally creeping me out. i've seen the source. i cannot believe it's completely bug free. it's much more plausible to my freaked out brain that somehow the testing process has gone awry. but maybe not. here's a hypotheses. you write some new code. the program crashes. obviously it's your code. so you go over it with a fine tooth come. you get buddies to review it. you find some more issues. fix them. you add some unnecessary boilerplate. and the program still crashes. but you're pretty damn sure it's not you. so you give up and get on with your life. and now the real bug is fixed. and the code base is full of unit-tested reviewed rock solid stuff. which is really cool. so what happens now? will the quality level drop because there's no need to robistify new code to this nth degree? that'd be sad making. hrm. maybe i should put it back.
hela
i remember doing a report on henrietta lacks and her remarkable cancer when i was a freshman in high school. this was long before the internet. one had to find the printed copies of the annual indexes of all of the major science magazines for the past five years. then one had to search each page with one's own eyeballs for HeLa. this could take all day. but now you had a list of magazine articles to read. then you had to find the actual physical hard copy of the magazine. which was a pot shot. cause often other report writers had some of them. which makes google a frikken miracle. cause the time it takes to do all that work now is measured in milliseconds. which is a mixed blessing for students. cause my kids write a lot more reports than i ever did. cause the research part is trivial. and typing a report into a computer is a whole lot faster than writing it by had. well, writing legibly anyway.
weather
it's cold here. which is bad. cause usually the same weather pattern that makes the summer cold here makes it unbearably hot elsewhere. like pretty much the rest of the country. all that arctic air is blowing down here. it's no big deal. i just throw on more clothes. but that doesn't work for the hot parts. there's only so much clothing a person can legally remove in public. and given the obesity rates in said areas, the legal limit is way too high.
correction
the same colleague i mentioned yesterday pointed out that the bug in semaphore::signal existed in the previous implementation. so it had literally been there for years. and i copy-pasted the bug without noticing it for the rewrite. well, actually i think i noticed it looked funny. but i failed to realize it was an error. so anywho, who da the pumpkinhead? yeah.
absence
so i'll bet you're wondering why i haven't posted in a while. well, there was this bug at work. nobody could find it. did you know that semaphore::signal is atomic? but semaphore::wait is not? i hadn't really thought about it. even though i implemented our current semaphore classes. that's not exactly the bug. but it's related. we had some heated discussions about how code works. no name calling. though it was obvious folks were restraining themselves. i was considering pumpkinhead. i suspect my colleague was contemplating worse. so does that make him a better person than i? or worse? hrm. it was kinda like the out of gas episode of firefly. where they're gonna freeze to death and captain reynolds suggests something stupid. and wash berates him until he figures out that it's actually a pretty good idea. missed that episode? it's a good one. anywho, the bug was my implementation of signal wasn't atomic. oops.
