So today I was watching the special order speeches on C-SPAN this evening while making dinner. The group that I happened to hear was a pair of pro-life/anti-abortion Republicans. I wasn't paying particular attention due to preparing my dinner, but I heard Steve King (R-Iowa, 5th District) quote a person on the pro-abortion side as wanting abortions to be "safe, available and rare". He responded by saying that "rare" was certainly the right direction, but actively ignored the other two adjectives. I found this bizarre because making medical procedures unsafe is in no one's interest. If the potential mother dies in the procedure, the fetus is almost certainly going to bite the dust as well. Even if the mother is merely hurt or rendered fallow, this is still not in their interest as it would likely lead to such a woman being less likely to want to conceive again. I suppose it could be some sort of twisted desire for "divine justice" on the pregnant woman which might prevent others from seeking such procedures.

I suppose that I'll never really understand the anti-abortion movement since it is fundamentally at odds with my thinking on long term sustainability and population control. We either need to cut the birth rate or increase the death rate in order to make Earth a long-term place for humans to live. To me, this makes abortion the sort of thing that should be encouraged (though probably not compelled [probably]) rather than something that should be made into a huge social stigma. Then again, I am not exactly in the majority on this issue.

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So today we had a fire alarm in my building. Everybody had to evacuate and the JPL fire department fiddled around for a while. It seems as though nothing burned down, luckily. It probably only wasted a few man-weeks of time (~30 minutes of waiting outside * 8 stories worth of people). Ah well.

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Earlier tonight, I finished the second DLC for Fallout 3--The Pitt. The premise of The Pitt is that you're going to the remains of Pittsburg to do something with the slaver colony there. I say "do something" because, like much of Fallout 3, there are always choices.

Much like in Anchorage, the game introduces some false difficulty by taking away all of your equipment near the beginning of the quest tree. They do not (and presumably cannot) take away my ridiculous 20th level skills, so I began my new life in the slave colony by pickpocketing a tire iron from one of the slavers and beating him to death with it. This provided me with a firearm which substantially increased the speed with which better equipment was provided. What disapointed me, however, was that my "kill them all" strategy was not actually viable. The Pitt includes a large number of doors which, in Neverwinter Nights parlance, were "warded against simple spells and too complex to pick". This meant that, even though I routinely slaughtered the slaver overlords, I could not actually advance the plot without finding and doing whatever chores were required. It also lead to odd conversations wherein I would be pointing a gun at a slaver's head and they would mock me. This would, of course, result in bullets going into their head and eventually (due to Bloody Mess) their bodies exploding. The whole experience was a bit surreal due to my unorthodox method of approaching the situation.

Aside from the fact that the Pitt is rather brief (maybe 3 hours, tops), I was a bit irritated by one of the Achievements added. Generally, most of the achievements for Fallout 3 were for doing quests. There were only a handful that were for doing collections (custom weapons and bobble heads being the only in the original). One of the new Achievements was to find 100 steel ingots in a large sprawling area. This achievement alone was probably an hour or two on top of the 3 hour play time simply because of the logistics of it and the tedium of searching such a huge area. Also, aside from the Achievement, there isn't much of a reward for completing it. It gives a few unique weapons (only one of which I bothered to keep) and for doing the whole set it gives a unique power armor. Unfortunately, this armor isn't as good at the armor that comes out of the Anchorage DLC, so it ended up sitting on the floor in some room once I got all of my equipment back.

Taken together, I don't think the sense of danger that the Pitt is supposed to represent came across well. At least it introduced a silenced assault rifle.

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So, apparently I lost power some time last night. This was annoying because it made all of my computers turn themselves off, but it did give me a chance to finally put my new fileserver into the rack instead of just leaving it on the floor. Apparently I need to reassess the status of my UPSs.

Whatever caused the power outage (my guess is rain) also flooded the laundry room with a thin layer of mud. I'm waiting until it dries so that a dropped piece of clothing won't cause it to be completely dirty again, but it may take longer than a day to complete.

I've updated XPost to support DeviantArt's new authentication url. I was planning to also update the MySpace code as well, but it seems like they've completely altered their authentication scheme, so it may be a while before I get it working as well (assuming that I don't get tired of fighting with it).

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So, I made my first profits in the stock market today. About 2 weeks ago, I bought 320 shares of Citibank @ ~1.18 / share. Today I sold half of them @ 3.09 / share which netted me the full initial cost plus a little extra. I'm leaving the other half as a "long term investment" since it is basically free money.

I've started to look for things that might be vastly undervalued in the current hyper-scared market and have some similar ideas about things that I'll reinvest the original "playing around money" into. Banking seems like an interesting bet given how ridiculously depressed the market seems to be, but there are some other ones that have my attention as well.

Hopefully, something interesting will happen.

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So, I'm going bald. Quickly. My hair was thinning rather badly even when I was in college, but it has accelerated since I entered the working world. As it is, the hair density on the top of my head is depressingly low. Part of me is still wanting to fight the trend, but I'm pretty sure it is a losing battle. What I'm not sure of is what to do about it. I've considered just shaving my head, but that will probably require me to keep shaving it continually to keep it looking decent (and the purchase of a wet/dry electric razor). Another possiblity is to try something like Rogaine and attempt to halt the progression where it is now. This, of course, introduces a long-term dependency on a strong medication. At the far edge of feasability is hair transplantation. Unfortunately, this option is probably out of my price range especially if not covered by my medical insurance (which it almost certainly isn't).

Regardless, it sucks. Neither my father nor either of my grandfathers had this sort of hair loss this young.

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So, when I got up last Friday, I heard a strange whirring noise. It sounded vaguely like a fan spinning up, failing, and then spinning up again. I quickly narrowed it down to the computer rack (it being about the only thing in the room with fans). Poking around a bit, I thought that I identified one of the fans that moves air out of the rack itself as the problem. Since I didn't want to just disconnect live power (sparks are bad), I shut off the ancient AT power supply that I use to run all of the fans.

After disconnecting it, I started the fans up again, but the noise was still occuring. Due to my position, however, I quickly discovered that it was the power supply itself that was groaning in pain. I lifted it up to examine it and it chose to spark quite brightly and release the smell of ozone. Unforunately, this particular failed device is a bit tricky to replace. I could probably just find a high-power 5v supplly to run the fans, but then I'd have to be careful to make sure that the devices are arranged such that they'll run (this could be an issue with a single rail source, maybe...).

This was not my only recent hardware failure. My RHIT laptop's fan is beginning to fail. It has recently taken to shutting itself down due to overheating, but now the fan has also developed a very sad noise when running at maximum speed. I suspect that the fan itself will only work for a few more months, perhaps a year at the outside. I should probably start planning on how I will replace it. Athough I have a newer laptop and it is good for carrying, but it isn't terribly powerful and its screen is microscopic in comparison. I've lately been using my laptop as a "living room computer" so that I can look things up while watching TV/playing video games and I rarely, if ever, move it from where it is.

It may be possible to replace the device with something other than a laptop, but that seems unlikely. Even the narrowest LCD panels are very large and also not designed to collapse on demand. Of course, some fools have decided that the 4:3 ratio isn't cool anymore so I'll probably have a lot of trouble finding a laptop with a screen that is acceptable.

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Also, I just hit level 1 in Project Euler. Of the problems that I've solved so far, I've solved about half the problems with scheme, half with perl and one with C. It turns out that C is still the best of the languages that I regularly use when it comes to deal with multidimensional arrays.

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So recently I've had to assess a few people to see if they were right for doing some work for me. Most of this work is programming work, so I've needed to determine whether or not these people would be competent programmers from a few minutes of interaction. Unforuntately, I'm beginning to see the difficulty of such an endevour.

My current thinking on the matter is to ask them to implement (usually in pseudocode) one of a handful of sort of standard algorithms. Currently, I always ask them to implement a function which produces the Nth fibonacci number and then ask them to implement one of [binsearch, quicksort, mergesort] depending on my mood. The thinking behind this is that if people have a fundamental understanding of the basics then I can feel confident in their ability to deal with more complex problems.

Fibonacci allows me to quickly see their ability to recognize recursive algorithms and, by picking at their answer if they go with the naive solution, their ability to self assess a peice of code. The other set is essentially a test of whether or not they can quickly implement a peice of (what should be) a well known algorithm when given a brief refresher.

I am not, however, sure that my set of assessments are very strong, so I'm looking for feedback or possibly other questions to ask. I'm not particularly interested in asking stupid brain teasers (like the flashlight/bridge problem) as they don't necessarily have a strong correlation with programming ability. I'm also not terribly interested in language specific questions because they don't really provide much interesting information (I don't care if you know what a C++ vector is and how it works though I may care if you know what a linked list is).

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So, I just beat Far Cry 2. It is an open-world style FPS set in one of those war-torn Central African countries. In case you're keeping score, that means that the game itself seems to have basically nothing to do with the predecessor aside from title. Gameplay wise it is fairly standard. FC2 adopts the recently popular tiered-regenerative health system. It also adds a bottom tier wherein you're bleeding and must perform first-aid on yourself in order to not die.

My main gripes with the game come from two areas: techincal problems and plot problems. For the former, there are several game breaking issues. Firstly, it is possible to somehow (I'm not sure how exactly) to make the game impossible to finish by doors getting marked unopenable. This happened to me at least once and made me restore from a save that was like 30 minutes old. Secondly, the game will periodically just stop. It doesn't crash, it just stops doing anything for 30 to 60 seconds. It eventually comes back just fine, but is extremely disruptive when it happens during a firefight.

The bigger issue, though, is with the plot. There seems to be no real rationale for your character doing any of the things that he does. There is a vague plot at the beginning whereing you are looking for "the Jackal", but that mostly get lost in the shuffle until near the end when the whole plot seems to go off the rails.

I honestly can't recommend the game until they fix the technical issues. Given that the game is over four months old, this seems unlikely.

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So, when I got home today, I realized that my sink was getting a bit full and started to do dishes. This was going as normal until I realized that my sink wasn't draining. A bit of fiddling by trying to run the garbage disposal to force things to clear failed to do any good, so I called my landlord and asked her to send a plumber.

The plumber arrived about 45 minutes later and began to work the sink with a narrow auger. This seemed to be going well, when suddenly he said that he needed some rags. I looked into my kitchen to see a giant blob of mostly black water spilling onto the linoleum. I quickly threw a bunch of my towels on it and managed to contain most of the damage. Apparently, he broke the sink's trap while trying to clear the jam. Of course, he didn't have an extra trap with him, so he's gone out to (hopefully) fetch a new one.

I find all of this annoying.

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So, this morning I had a pair of back to back telecons starting at 7am. Because of this, I took both telecons from home. While on the telecon, I was playing Ninety-Nine Nights and finally managed to beat it.

N3 is probably best described as mediocre. The gameplay is similar to Drakengard in the sense that it is one versus many action combat, but it is hampered by various bizarre bugs that make the gameplay less consistent. Notably among these are the game's strange behavior in deciding when an enemy has actually hit you. Sometimes, you are invincible during combo, other times an enemy will hit you and break a combo attack sending you flying. Despite this, the gameplay tends to be fun so long as you doing get killed by something arbitrary (I was once stun locked by about 5 dozen enemies and slowly went from full health to zero over the course of about two minutes without a chance to break out).

The game also has atrocious voice acting and what can generously be called lousy writing. Although you can play through several different scenarios, the first two available fail to make much sense. In them, you are hunting down and genociding goblins for reasons that are never well explained. In fact, it doesn't particularly seem like your characters are in a defensive war, more like they've decided to hunt down and destroy anything that isn't human in some sort of holy war.

Also, the final boss can only be beaten by reaching max level (nine) and hoping to find a specific random item drop in the final level. This is due to the fact that normal attacks do basically zero damage to the final boss and the special attack that can hurt it drains a non-renewable resource unless you have said item.

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So earlier today I opened up an investor account through Bank of America. I did this with one specific goal in mind: speculating on the recovery or acquisition of Citibank. Citibank is currently trading at its lowest ever share price, about $1.2/share. I have often thrown money away on silly things (random computer stuff, fuufs, etc), but I haven't yet really gambled any substantial funds away. As such, I've decided to throw a few hundred bucks at this struggling company to see what comes of it. I've been kicking myself ever since I failed to buy Qwest stock during the bursting bubble when it was sub dime, so I figure what the hell. When I inevitably lose my money, I'll probably go back to more conventional investment vehicles, but it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless.

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I've recently been watching Maria Holic and I suggest that other people watch it as well.

Premise:

A closeted lesbian enters an all-girls missionary school in an effort to find a true love (like her mother did). On the way into school on the first day, she meets the beautiful granddaughter of the school's board of director's chairman who turns out to be a boy crossdressing in order to attend to school. The boy uses the fact that he has power (by being the chairman) and the fact that he immediately recognizes her lesbian tendency to force her into a subserviant role. Hilarity ensues.

Although I initially found the show interesting when I saw the first episode, it wasn't until I saw the opening in the second that I realized the show was, in fact, brilliant. If nothing else, find a copy of the opening and watch it. Unfortunately, they seem to be pulling down the opening off of you tube (a copy with Spanish subtitiles).

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