I just wasted my morning checking these loops out.

“Famous sounds” are sounds that have been created or used by somebody, liked and then copied by many others, and thus earned a “classic” status.

Setting: Underground skate party. A kegger two blocks from the convention center downtown. A live punk band, skaters taking turns in a bowl, skateboard art on display, skate video’s projected onto the wall outside, ~100 people present. I’m drinking a beer w/ Chambra, craning my head to look through a wire mesh into the bowl as skaters drop in for more vert than I’ve ever skated.

A Random drunk approaches.

“DUDE THAT’S FUCKING AWESOME!!”

hits fists

I had no idea wtf.

“What’s awesome?”

“I TRIED TO GET MY KID TO DO THAT! I JUST SHAVED MY HEAD!” removes hat “BUT I TRIED TO GET MY KID TO DO WHAT YOU DID!”

“Did what?”

“THE LINE IN YOUR HEAD MAN! THAT’S FUCKING AWESOME” high-five w/ fists again

I decided at that point not to tell him it was a surgical scar but before I could ask him what it meant to him, he was gone.

Guesses?

Update:

I got this shot on the very first try with my cameraphone. I tried a few more and none even hint at it as well.

It’s just hard to see the whole thing from one angle.

So I photoshopped a little. Levels and hue contrast can’t bring out what’s not there, so I embellished.

I couldn’t resist.

OK this angle actually shows it as he probably saw it:

I don’t know why my ears are on fire, someone must be talking about me right?

A photo gallery.

Brilliant.

The Bill of Rights: The First Ten Amendments to the constitution of the United States printed on sturdy, pocket-sized, pieces of metal.

The next time you travel by air, take the Bill of Rights - Security Edition along with you. When asked to empty your pockets, proudly toss the Bill of Rights in the plastic bin.

You need to get used to offering up the bill of rights for inspection and government workers enforcing the USAPATRIOT ACT need to get used to deciding if you’ll be allowed to keep the Bill of Rights with you when you travel.

Love it.

Ah, the irony.

The alley that my parking spot is on, off Kalorama between Champlain and Ontario, is getting re-surfaced. I knew about the construction further up the alley for the previous week but assumed that the part where my spot was would not need the work. I went out Wednesday morning to find a dump truck just barely not blocking me, but definitely blocking in the 8 spots next to me. Behind the dump truck was a back-hoe digging up the tarmac. I snuck out and have had to park on the street the past two nights. Tonight (Friday night) I am thinking I’ll just not go home.

I should have known - the alley across Kalorama was redone completely prior to starting on ours by the same folks. I have a nice driveway to look forward to.

I’ve gone from fish back to bash and now to zsh. Exciting times.

As Ben reminds me every time I bitch and moan when someone puts me in front of a shell that isn’t my own, I’m retarded and ought to use /bin/sh and be happy. Fuck that.

A client is delivering preloaded video ipods to a few thousand folks as a marketing campaign. I had nothing to do with getting them pre-loaded, when asked I suggested they go straight to apple, which they did.

I’m guessing they have a pretty accurate count of just how many boxes there are that make up this wall behind my desk. The wall comes up to my chin and spans the width of the office. Each box is about two and a half feet deep - 7 video ipods in each.

update: There are 1,250 of them.

Compare:

Alabama - If You’re Gonna Play in Texas

vs.

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

I know it’s only one extra chorus in the Alabama song but it makes me want to drive a pencil into my ear and the other doesn’t.

> grep "fiddle in the band" alabama If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band If you're gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band `

:suicide:

For Nirvana:

> grep "With the lights out" spirit With the lights out it’s less dangerous With the lights out it’s less dangerous With the lights out it’s less dangerous `

Of course, 'Teen Spirit has 42 Hello’s, so uh…

> grep Hello spirit Hello (x 16) Hello (x 16) Hello (x 16) `

I’m going to just give up.

If you want to Quake on a powerbook, the first of many problems you’ll face after getting over macs-can’t-play-games is that the resolution is funky. Quake 3 has a single widescreen resolution in the GUI but it’s not quite up to snuff for my needs, and it never remembers my settings for resolution, color depth, sound quality, and so on…

Fix:

In /Applications/Quake 3/baseq3 ~/Library/Application Support/Quake3/baseq3, create a file named autoexec.cfg with the following text in it:

seta r_fullscreen "1"
seta r_mode "-1"
seta r_customwidth "1680"
seta r_customheight "1050"
seta r_customaspect "1"

That resolution matches my 17" powerbook - adjust accordingly.

Here are a few of the other things I keep in my autoexec.cfg that you may or may not care for, lowering the graphics complexity and disabling/enabling some things for the slightly more experienced quaker:

seta com_hunkMegs "1024" // use more than the default amount of ram!
seta com_blood "0"
seta sensitivity "5.5"
seta cl_mouseAccel "0"
seta r_inGameVideo "0"
seta model "tankjr"
seta headmodel "tankjr"
seta team_model "tankjr"
seta team_headmodel "tankjr"
seta g_redTeam "Rudy's"
seta g_blueTeam "Theo's"
seta r_picmip "4"
seta r_detailtextures "0"
seta r_texturebits "32"
seta r_colorbits "32"
seta r_depthbits "32"
seta r_vertexLight "1"
seta r_fastsky "1"
seta r_flares "0"
seta r_dynamiclight "0"
seta s_volume "1"
seta s_musicvolume "0"
seta s_doppler "0"
seta s_khz "11"
seta cg_brassTime "0"
seta cg_drawCrosshair "5"
seta cg_drawCrosshairNames "1"

Any of these actually giving me a higher frame-rate is debate-able, most of the tweaks date back to when I was trying to squeeze a playable game out of a voodoo3 card on a PC. Give it a try! If you know of any other tweaks which improve playability, I’m definitely interested!

The Millennium Falcon 1 [went off course at about T+40 seconds and took a turn in the wrong direction, crash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Sponsored by one of the now wealthy founders of PayPal, the Falcon 1 design is the first commercial payload-to-orbit system and hoped to undercut NASA costs by 66%.

MJR recently posted an mp3 of a talk he gave on computer engineering and how it can be compared to NASA’s (and specifically Richard P. Feyneman’s) studying space ship engineering which sheds light on the engineering difficulties these folks are trying to overcome.

Pre-launch chatter:

Ben: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f1/status.html
Grant: what is that?
Ben: first commercial launch of a payload that isn’t affilicated w/ gov
Grant: oic
Ben: guy who started paypal’s new space company
Grant: lol
Grant: that’s awesome
Grant: if some sf author had that in a cyberpunk book in the 80’s, i’d have considered it laughable
Ben: yea, goal is to send payloads way cheap
Ben: http://spacex.com/
» Space Exploration Technologies Corporation
Grant: “founder of this first-to-launch commercial venture made his fortune founding a company allowing people to pay for things on the “Internet”, a network of computers which :confused: :wtf:...”
Grant: me in 1985: :laugh:
Ben: yea no shit
Ben: or carmack and his rockets
Grant: haha yeah