indessed roscivs

On Wednesday, I got a frantic call from the wife—our water pipe had broken somewhere close to the sidewalk, flooding the sidewalk and gutter with lots and lots of gushing water. Fortunately, it was far enough away from our house as to cause little more than a nuisance, but unfortunately, neither of us had any idea what to do about it. She called the landlord and the water company, and they said they’d send someone out “ASAP” … but both she and I had prior commitments that evening. (I had Japanese, and she was going out with friends.)

I’m glad neither of us waited home for them—they didn’t show up until past seven o’clock, and they were called in the early afternoon. But they switched off the water and left a nice note saying that it was their fault, they would fix it (eventually), and gave instructions on how to turn the water back on.

Well, turns out there are a lot of household tasks that require water. Brushing your teeth, cooking pasta, washing your hands, going to the bathroom—all these things, apparently, require a working water system. (Although here’s a helpful tip—you get two flushes once the water has been turned off: one from the bowl, and one from the tank. So if it’s brown, flush it down, but if it’s yellow, let it mellow!)

I went to the store and bought a few gallons of water to hopefully get us through until they came to fix it (whenever that might be), but by morning it was still shut off. So, I hunted around for a wrench and went outside to turn the water on long enough to take a shower. The water pressure was terrible, since half the water was flowing down the sidewalk, but it was enough to get cleaned up for work. Probably the most expensive shower (water-wise) I’ve ever taken, though …

The tricky part was turning the water back off afterwards. Not only was water flowing everywhere, but the recess next to the sidewalk that housed the valve had completely flooded. So, I had to plunge my hands in icy cold water (good thing it’s not January), feel around for the valve, and somehow use the wrench to turn the valve underwater while basically blind. Eventually I got it, but of course my hands were a muddy mess. And how was I going to wash them off now?

Later that afternoon I received a joyful email—the water company had arrived and were in the process of fixing things. By the time I got home, the sidewalk was dry (although very muddy), the water was switched back on, and life was back to normal—for a while, at least.

There is a (perhaps relatively recent) brand of paranoid schizophrenic, who thinks their entire lives are recorded Truman Show-style and broadcast for the entertainment of millions.

As a director of psychiatrics at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center, Joel Gold has seen thousands of delusional patients. But a few years ago, he began noticing a different sort of paranoia: young white men who believed they were the subjects of their own reality-TV shows. Some, says Gold, who with his brother has written a preliminary paper and hopes to author a larger study, seemed pleased by their roles—excited by the anticipated million-dollar payout. Others were tormented. One came to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had actually fallen—believing 9/11 to be an elaborate plot twist in his personal storyline. Another came to climb the Statue of Liberty, believing that he’d be reunited with his high-school girlfriend at the top, and finally be released from the “show.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/150492

So, I just discovered that Elaine from Seinfeld (or, rather, the actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus) was in a movie—her first movie, in fact—back in 1986 entitled, “Troll”. It apparently was a thriller (i.e. “scary movie”) about trolls and witches taking over an apartment building and turning people into mythical creatures. Elaine, naturally, played a nubile young nymph.

Even more curious than this is that the young hero of the movie—played, coincidentally, by “Atreyu” of The Neverending Story—was named “Harry Potter, Jr.” This young Harry Potter fights the troll with the help of a witch, and (naturally) saves the day. Note that this movie was released in 1986—the more familiar “Harry Potter” didn’t arrive on the scene until over a decade later. An interesting coincidence, no?

We went to the UW vs. BYU football game today! It was pretty awesome. The action was back and forth, and it was a close game down to the last few nail-biting seconds. Unfortunately the game was affected by (in my opinion) one of the stupidest rules in college football—the excessive celebration rule.

I also got turned into a lobster. The cloudy Seattle morning turned into a sunny, toasty Seattle afternoon, with no clouds in sight. End result: one very pink roscivs.

Save functionality is now complete! The program now remembers where you left off, and when you start again it will know what kanji to quiz you on (and which to save for another day).

Governor Palin has sure been making a lot of news lately. What a controversial choice. Will the limelight be good for her party, or will the controversy end up having a negative impact on the campaign? It will be interesting, to be sure.

Political discussion has spilled over to work, too. I took the Political Compass quiz and scored 0.0 on economic issues and -6.1 on social issues—approximately the same as my coworkers. (They were both further left on economic issues, but only slightly.) Not a big surprise. We discussed universal healthcare for a bit while our code was compiling.

Japanese conversation exchange was cancelled today, so I thought I’d play Go at the weekly Wednesday meeting instead. Turns out that was cancelled too, due to some miscommunication and the person with the key to the boards and stones going home early. I didn’t get a chance to work on any of my Japanese project tonight, either.

I also discovered that the blue spots on my projector are probably due to heat damage to the LCD panel, more or less unrepairable. And, finally, I learned that my two-week vacation to Japan I’ve been planning for the Spring will have to be at least shortened, or possibly moved (again).

Hopefully tomorrow will turn out better!

It’s hard to really get into the zone when programming in the evenings. Most of my project work gets done over the weekend, when I have a few hours together to spend on it at once. So, today all I managed to do was make a half-hearted stab at serialization/deserialization of the Leitner decks. Not very much, but a step along the way towards saving state, to allow continuation from the previous time you ran the program.

In other news, have you heard that Google released their own web browser? It’s called “Google Chrome”, and it’s based on webkit (the rendering engine for Safari and Konqueror). Yet another web browser? Well, yeah—but the interesting thing is that each tab runs in its own process. This prevents one tab from crashing or slowing down the rest of the browser. It also enables you to see which tabs are taking up the most memory, or drowning your CPU, and kill them directly without affecting the rest of the browser. Interesting idea—let’s see how it turns out.

One of the factors contributing to my blog’s untimely demise was that I was running an old version of Wordpress, and got hacked. Somebody managed to exploit a flaw in Wordpress’s plugin system to gain access to my server. Fortunately, the shell access was limited to the same account as the web server (apache), which runs with very limited permissions, so it seems that the damage was minimal, and I was able to clean everything up with little difficulty.

As part of my recovery process, however, I installed a new version of Wordpress, which ate my categories. I’m not sure if it messed up anything else (I foolishly neglected to back up my database before the upgrade), but everything appears to be intact.

Today’s project was a little bit of GUI work and a little bit of glue code to hook up Japanese kanji prompts to the newly-created Leitner back-end. The quiz program works fairly well so far, but there are two major pieces missing. First, the main screen. Second, any sort of “save” capabilities. So, even though the Leitner system knows that it’s supposed to prompt you again with this particular kanji in four days to make sure you still remember it after a time delay, if you close the program, all that information goes away. I’d like to get that up and running as soon as possible, because I think the program will actually be a very useful study tool for me as soon as I have that part working.

“Outstanding” has two meanings: conspicuous, and unpaid. “Which meaning came first?” I wondered. Guess for yourself, then click here to find out:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=outstanding

This is my attempt to resurrect my long-defunct blog. My plan is to post small, but regular snippets, hoping to build up some momentum. Consistency is better than quality, that’s my motto.

My goal is to have at least two posts a week, one on Sunday, and one on Wednesday. The former will be about the programming projects I’m working on, and the latter will be about the normal happenings in my life.

Today’s project was implementing the Leitner system for interval-spaced repetition in Java.