Despite a valiant attempt to forget my passport, I currently appear to be in London. I can tell because the Starbucks I'm sitting in is trying to sell me "crisps". If not for that, I'd probably have no idea. Jetlag is in full effect, and the last thing I ate was a microwaved airline croissant that I probably shouldn't have.

I'm over here for the training portion of our contract with Gre/enpe/ace UK. And while I recognize that it's pretty boorish to complain about free transatlantic travel, I'm going to do so anyway. Perhaps this trip will be better, but the last one consisted of a bunch of 14+ hour days and one of the worst periods in my personal life that I can remember. By the end of it the near-inevitability of getting creamed by a left-bearing automobile seemed like something to be embraced.

But I'll try to rouse myself. The beer's awfully good, and the folks we're meeting with are smart and fun. Once I've gotten some more sleep and internet I should cheer up pretty quickly.

Werewolves are the only movie monster that I've ever found really terrifying, as I mentioned in this unfogged thread. The loss of self and merciless, unstoppable ferocity that underpin the werewolf mythology have always added up to a particularly terrifying sum in my mind — and exposure to a memorable X-Files episode at an impressionable age didn't help matters. Besides, they have none of the saving graces of the other classic monsters: they don't possess any of the vampire's sexy villainy; they only shamble when particularly full, making them harder to escape from than mummies or zombies; and unlike the relatively rare creature from the black lagoon, blob or giant Japanese reptile, werewolves are completely ubiquitous (COMPLETELY. Look out your window right now — you should see at least two.).

I mention all of this because the United Kingdom is clearly ground zero for lycanthropes. This point was underscored by Emily forcing me to begin watching Dog Soldiers the day before my departure. It's a movie which — based on the admittedly limited part I've seen so far — seems to be about werewolves viciously disemboweling English infantrymen in the woods of their homeland. That's my understanding, anyway; Emily assures me that it gets much scarier after the point at which we stopped, which, given the inconceivability of further werewolf-terror escalation, makes me think that maybe it'll turn out to be an existential meditation on the banality of existence or something.

Anyway, to lay your fears to rest: day two of this London trip has now drawn to a close, and I have yet to be eviscerated, bitten, or even attacked by a mysteriously large dog that quickly disappeared into the brush. Going into this trip I was sure that at some point Michael would turn to me and say he'd forgotten the adapter for the projector, and would I mind running back to the hotel to fetch it? It shouldn't take me long, it's just across that foggy moonlit moor.

But so far we've managed to remember all of our technical gear. And if I'm under any supernatural curses, the folks from Gre/enpe/ace have at least been nice enough to utter them quietly.

Well, I'm back home, or at least on the Dulles toll road. We landed almost an hour late, but the flight was mostly pleasant and uneventful. I did sit behind a human being with what may be the worst sense of taste I've ever encountered — and if you've ever heard one of my own full-throated defenses of the movie Predator, you know that's saying something.

But picture, if you will, an individual watching a DVD set of the NBC series Las Vegas on her laptop. I mean, it's one thing if you're sitting at home on a Saturday night, desperate to have Nicki Cox distract you from the crushing weight of existence. But to see someone pay for the privilege of taking that experience with them anywhere... Well, it was troubling, at the least. Then, when I saw that the laptop was sitting next to a Lonely Planet guide to Florida, I knew that that pleasant-seeming lady was utterly doomed.

(I know that I've got friends, family and maybe readers in Florida. But c'mon — you know what I'm talking about.)

ALSO: can anyone explain to me why TSA insists on cell phones being turned off while you're in the line for customs or waiting for your bags afterward? I can believe there may be a good reason, but like most air travel regulations on cellphones, I have a feeling it's mostly just capricious, officious rulemaking. What could they be worried about, anyway? Someone cheating on their answers to the customs officials? "He's asking me whether I brought back any fruit... I need an answer, quick!"

I've now got an iSight camera built into the lid of my laptop. Naturally, I've been unable to resist the urge to play with it, so I spent about a minute on Wednesday morning writing a Perl script designed to take a steady stream of images. Then I let it run throughout the day. The results are pretty creepy, like a drug-use montage. And, yeah, a little longer than I'd like — but there are special guest appearances beginning about halfway through.

Click To Play

The Benny Hill music seemed like a much funnier idea when I was in a post-flight delirium. You should probably just mute it. Oh, and the weird chewing is from the cough drops that I was downing with disgusting regularity.

Lots of other people have taken videos like this one, and I'm sure there are better methods. But if you're curious to try it yourself, here's how I did it:

1. Download and install iSightCapture.
2. Copy this perl script to an empty directory and run it from there. Use control-C to stop it when you've taken enough shots.

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   
   while(1==1)
   {
           # grab a shot and name it in order
           my $time = time();
           `isightcapture $time.jpg`;
   
           # wait for one second. because of the 
           # time isightcapture takes to run, 
           # this results in roughly one exposure
           # every three seconds
           sleep(1);
   }

3. Download and compile JpegToAvi (it may be finicky about compiling on OS X — I had to run it from a Linux machine). Run the executable (while in the directory with all the JPEGs) like so:

   ls *.jpg | tr '\n' ' ' | /path/to/jpegtoavi -f 30 640 480 > output.avi

4. Edit the AVI in your program of choice — I used iMovie to add the music and strip out the parts where we went for lunch or coffee. Then export it to a compressed format and upload it to your favorite video-sharing site. Don't bother with YouTube: I tried it twice and with a variety of export formats, and it choked on the file each time, producing clips that were only one second long. Blip.tv worked great, though.

A second ago I needed graph paper. I went here, and suddenly I had some. Wow.

I'm sure that the existence of this site (and ones like it) is pretty well-known. But the awesomeness of having a need that the internet instantly fulfills can never be overstated.

Charles and I have now made a total of 15 visits to stores in an attempt to buy a Wii, including a number of trips where we got to the Best Buy/Toys R Us/Circuit City before it opened. Yet we remain Wiiless.

Charles has taken it hard, and seems to be considering going into seclusion. I remain optimistic, but in an increasingly Grapes of Wrath-ish sort of way. Will I take the clerks' advice and try again at the end of the week? I suppose I got to.

I've got a couple of projects in the works centering around novel interfaces — specifically, some hijinks with Asterisk and my poor, neglected Arduino. The only problem with this is that it means I have to have something to interface with. Drat.

So, to resolve this issue I went ahead and wrote an implementation of Tetris in Processing. Since that's kind of boring, I spent some additional time (okay, a lot of additional time) rewriting my one original contribution to the field of Tetrology: a fancy sinusoidal effect that I came up with in high school (let's hear it for Pascal!). I hope you'll find it as confusing as I do.

Of course, based on early reports from my expert beta testers, there's a fairly decent chance that this will crash your browser. If it already has, uh, sorry. I'm sure you'll take comfort in the fact that it runs fine on my machines.

UPDATE: That's enough browser crashing for one day. I've moved the applet below the fold so that this website doesn't mean instant death for affected users. It's weird that this is happening — I don't think I'm doing anything too exotic. And I'd expect Processing to protect me from causing these kinds of crashes (and expect the Java VM, upon which it's based, to offer further protection). I guess that's not the case. Well, maybe a future release of Processing will produce better results. Sorry for the inconvenience.

New header graphic, courtesy of C.P. Storm. Creative Commons = hereby satisfied!

Just to clarify:

In the meadow we can build a snowman
Then pretend that he is Parson Brown
He'll say: Are you married?
we'll say: No man
But you can do the job
when you're in town

This is about fucking a (potentially magical) snowman, right? I may be missing something.

But where's the can of Fosters and sharktooth-adorned hat?

Complaining about bad company Christmas parties? I'd like to get in on that.

Actually though, I haven't been to too many office Christmas parties. I've usually been lucky enough to be out of town or otherwise busy on the date in question. But right before I quit my old job I did attend one at my boss's house, and it wasn't too bad. Over the course of the evening I watched the Irish guys who populated the office gradually get drunker, redder and angrier, which was more entertainment than I had been expecting.

Eventually the situation was defused by the dissemination of the holiday bonus giftcards. After that, everyone left within five minutes. It wasn't a lot of fun, but it wasn't that bad. No worse than sitting through church, anyway.

But I was subjected to some entertainingly bad Christmas gifts from that job. I shouldn't really complain about the bonuses (or lack thereof) because I was generally compensated pretty well, particularly toward the end of my tenure. But there's no excuse for this:

Yup, the first Christmas bonus I ever received was a button-up denim shirt with the company logo on it (and a friendly reminder that we were HUBZone Certified). And it was at least three sizes too large. Admittedly, I'm a computer programmer — it wasn't wholly unreasonable to assume that I'd grow into it, so to speak. But size aside, there was no conceivable use for the shirt that didn't involve the phrase "booth at a trade show". It was more of a threat than a gift.

Things picked up, though. The next year I got some House of Representatives cufflinks that were actually kind of nice, but unfortunately not something that I would ever wear in this town. Call it a wash, I guess.

But my final Christmas at that job was indisputably great. The Amex gift card was a nice surprise, but the real treat was this:

I won it in the gift swap (my contribution to which was a pen that lit up when your cell phone rang, except actually didn't). Pictures can't convey how awful this ceramic sculpture is. I've seen this monkey elicit physical reactions of disgust in its viewers — it really does sort of make your skin crawl. This pleases me immensely, and it remains one of my most prized possessions.

But I think the era of the awful holiday party may be over for me — for now, anyway. EchoDitto's is on Monday, and it promises to be pleasantly full of booze and food. I begged out of last year's celebration since I hadn't yet started the job, but by all accounts it was pretty fun. So I'm looking forward to this one. The only problem is that I've got nothing lined up for the gift swap. I suppose I could always bring the monkey, but I don't think I'm ready to pass that torch just yet.

There's a new Arcade Fire track! The sound quality isn't great, but the song is:

Arcade Fire –Intervention

It's perhaps not the most mind-blowing thing they've ever recorded. But I'm glad to hear it for two reasons. First, it isn't a radical departure from their last album (I want more!). And second, it makes me think about what it'll be like to once again see Winn Butler singing it like he's never meant anything more, while the strings swell and the percussionists go crazy. More tour dates, please.

The above link is to a Coral Cache URL — it should hopefully work a little more snappily (and long-lastingly) than the original source, which still seems to be getting hammered (or maybe it's just my connection). If your network blocks port 8090, head to the source.

Via stereogum, who picked it up from a BBC show.

And help me test out a project I'm working on. The number of excerpt-only RSS feeds in my reader has finally hit the point where it began gnawing away at me. So I've taken a stab at writing a utility to automatically turn partial RSS feeds into full-text ones. If you've got any partial-text feeds that have been bugging you, I'd appreciate your giving it a try. If you run into problems, leave them in comments.

Be forewarned: it's far from perfect. There are some sites that it can't figure out — perhaps unsurprisingly, Wizznutzz is one of them. In other cases it'll include duplicate titles, or unnecessary dates, or irrelevant parts of the site design. And sometimes it reports that full-text retrieval has failed when in fact it was just a very short entry. Oh! It also won't be able to tell when an item has been updated.

But ignore all of that. I'm interested to know the cases (like Wizznutzz) where it fails completely. Functionality first, then beauty. Well, actually, functionality then optimization then maybe beauty — a general-purpose solution isn't likely to ever make every feed look lovely. More important is the fact that it's dog-slow when it's not serving cached content. If I leave it running on this server all hell will eventually break loose. So consider this just for testing — I'll get it to a stable point sometime soon, then move it to a more permanent residence.

I was wondering when this was going to happen: Perez Hilton is getting sued by the photographers whose photos he's been using. I'm a as sympathetic an audience as Mr. Hilton could possibly hope for: I'm generally pretty hostile toward copyright litigation and I consider demeaning celebrities to be the lord's work. But even so, this seems extremely clear-cut to me: Perez is fucked; and if he genuinely thinks what he's been doing counts as fair use, then he's an idiot, too.

I'm no lawyer, but Perez's inclusion of a photo in one of his posts doesn't strike me as a transformative act, and it seems entirely plausible to me that he's undercutting X17's ability to sell their work. I'm not allowed to steal content from The Onion, append my own witticisms and claim protection as satire. The fact that Perez is doing something funny with these photos does not automatically mean it falls under the fair use doctrine — besides, fair use is weak ground to stand on these days even when it's actually applicable.

So yeah: he's fucked.

This time has come to complain about Pitchfork's year end list. Allow me to join the terrifying din. Like Ryan, I've never heard of The Knife. In fact, there's a ton of stuff on the list that I haven't listened to. I suppose I probably should, although the rankings of the stuff I recognize do not inspire confidence (nor does the seeming overrepresentation of hiphop, electronica and hard rock — three genres that I only enjoy in intermittent doses, and almost never when recommended by Pitchfork).

We don't have the perspective to make a final judgment, but right now it seems like 2006 was kind of a thin year when compared to the last three. They say that the best music is produced when Republicans are in charge, so maybe the shifting national mood resulted in fewer great albums. Personally, I prefer to blame Canada: they've been propping up our indie rock economy for years, but this year were suddenly and strangely absent. I guess this is what it's going to be like when China stops floating the national debt. Here's hoping that our Northern neighbors have got something big planned for 2007.

Anyway, even putting aside all of my ignorance, ambivalence and vague hostility toward the p-fork list, there are a few things that I was surprised not to see show up there. Here are some albums that I thought ought to have been present, and which Amazon assures me were released in 2006:

A meme! Awesome. I never get these. Here we go, five things that I think most people don't know about me (but that I don't mind telling them):

1. I can juggle. I learned how during summer camp and eventually got pretty decent at it — for about a week I could do passing with clubs, if given a sufficiently patient partner. I've also juggled torches in a proof-of-concept sort of way (we weren't allowed to actually light them). But I'm self-aware enough to realize that juggling is not only a useless and highly dorky skill, but also one that it's impolite and annoying to force on an unsuspecting world. So I try to keep it under wraps. For a while I would use juggling as a rough sobriety test, but eventually I got too good at doing it while under the influence. Now I only ever really break it out when I need a flashy way to accidentally damage fruit. But I do credit it with rescuing me from being a completely uncoordinated disaster at all sports; now I'm a mere embarrassment. Thanks, juggling!
2. I didn't grow up with cable TV. This isn't much of a secret, but people tend to forget it in conversation. All of your gak-colored Nickelodeon memories are lost on me. Hey Dude, You Can't Do That On Television, Ren & Stimpy — these mean almost nothing in my mind. When they come up I'll smile and nod, then try to steer the conversation toward Family Double Dare, Transformers and other over-the-air shows that are enjoying an irritating ironic renaissance.
3. I'm not very good at math. People assume that I'm a math whiz because I'm interested in science, I program computers and I know what a THAC0 is. I suppose I'm decent at certain simple kinds of math, if only because I get occasional practice at them — I'll sometimes have to bust out some algebra to complete an algorithm I'm writing, and whenever I get in the mood to write something graphically flashy I'll enjoy doing the geometry that comes with it. But I've never been very good at calculus, and although I've encountered some slightly more advanced math during college, I've always forgotten it as quickly as possible. My eyes inevitably glaze over when I get to the formulae in the various pop science books that I otherwise enjoy reading. Personally, I blame all of this on my high school calculus teacher, who didn't manage to convey what the "dx" in all those equations was supposed to mean until about a week before the AP test. Looking back, I'm pretty sure she was busy having a lesbian awakening over the course of that year, so I guess I can understand her failure to impart these important concepts. Still, it was an underwhelming period of instruction, particularly when compared to my geometry class. That dude had a lazy eye — it was impossible to tell whether he was looking at you, which, as a teaching method, I can't recommend highly enough. It really kept me on my toes.
4. I used to be kinda chubby. Not ridiculously so, but at my peak I was about 35 or 40 pounds heavier than I am now. I was a bulky enough kid that I was half-heartedly recruited by my high school's football coach to be on our atrociously bad and understaffed team (I had enough sense to say no, thankfully). My sophomore year of college I decided I'd had enough soda and Taco Bell to show my junkfood-eschewing parents who was boss, and got my act together.
5. I'm not an atheist. I was raised in a protestant family and went to church and Sunday School every week. I hated it. I wouldn't say I believe in God — I figure I'll have some time to work it out when I'm on my deathbed — but I do know that I find people like PZ Me/yers and Richard Dawkins to be insulting, insufferable, and highly deserving of having their lunch money extracted from them by force. I don't know precisely what I believe, but I definitely don't believe in condescending arrogance. Not in other people, anyway.

Alright, there it is. This meme seems to have spread strangely quickly — it's made it to Dave Winer's blog, and Cyrus has already been tagged, too. Could it be that bloggers like talking about themselves? Hmm.

I'm tempted to try to slow the spread of the contagion by just naming one or two people... Aw, to hell with it. I'll tag Jeff, Caralyn, Genevieve and Emily, who should all feel free to ignore this if they're not in the mood for it.

It's a fascinating thesis. But what's the Marxist take on replica Rolexes as Christmas gifts?

I really, really don't understand why Indymedia exists. If they has some sort of editorial staff that cultivated, screened and ran leftist essays and reporting, that'd be one thing. But they seem to just take random crap from anybody and throw it up on the site — I recall one recent post from Indymedia DC accusing Google of having nothing to do with the internet (they're actually a narcotics cartel, see...) and another that consisted solely of a rambling apology to the author's AA sponsor. Hilariously, Wikipedia cites the DC chapter as one of the more regimented within the organization. I keep my RSS subscription because the local media doesn't bother to provide notice of upcoming protests, which, given warning, are frequently an avoidable inconvenience. But other than that, DC Indymedia seems hilariously useless.

I'm left to conclude that the only other function they serve is to lower the barriers that prevent dopes from publishing things on the internet. Which, if you haven't noticed, aren't particularly high to begin with. I can't believe that governments bother to seize these guys' servers.

I'm not sure what else I can do. I've been to the suburbs Sunday after Sunday — but there have been no Wiis. The last two days I've gotten up early and taken the Metro to Pentagon City before work, visiting the Best Buy within minutes of its opening — no Wiis. My agents friends have generously scoured Texas, Arizona and London on my behalf, like Nintendo Nazgul — no Wiis.

Tomorrow everyone will be off work, and it'll be too late. I may make the trek to Best Buy one more time, but I expect there'll be throngs waiting with me. My advantage will be gone, and my cause lost.

I suppose there's always the week after Christmas. But in the meantime I'm left seething at the thought of those who have successfully gotten their hands on the console. Have they proven their devotion? Did they deserve it more than me!? No, goddammit! I guess this is how conservatives feel about affirmative action.

Christmas Eve at the Red Room: hugely disappointing.

Does this look like a crushingly depressing Christmas Eve tableau? The sort of sight that Charles Bukowski might have seen before erupting in volcanic torrents of vomited eggnog? I submit to you that it is not. And that's a problem.

I suppose I had a good enough time hanging out with Matt and Spencer. But to be honest, we were all looking forward to a repeat of last year: a bar with few people, plenty of despair and "Fairytale Of New York" on a nonstop loop.

But instead there were no Pogues albums on the jukebox, there were lots of people, and I ended up having a pretty good time. Rats.

Sommer is the best person ever. I was hoping to sit on the news, taking my time to calmly and objectively evaluate how this triumph affects Sommer's place in history. I hate to be forced to make a decision prematurely, but right now I'd say she's coming in somewhere between the saints who died of puncture wounds and the ones whose deaths were related to being cooked and/or eaten. But it's hard to say — wherever she ends up, thanks, Sommer!

Now, the question: what games to get? I'm leaning toward Rayman & Zelda, for the sake of mini-games and single player obsession, respectively. But I could be talked out of it if anyone has a particularly strong case to make on behalf of Excite Truck (or anything else).

From the iTunes Music Store:

I suppose that this verbal use of "gift" isn't technically incorrect — that's what the internet tells me, anyway. But it still seems really, really ugly to me. I've given up on the rest of the American-speaking world, but I expect more from my turtleneck-wearing yuppie compatriots in Cupertino. They really ought to task some more people with editing. So to speak.

Other things! The Wii: pretty great, although potentially bad for my joints. Emily: currently stuck in Philadelphia. Myself: off to make half-hearted efforts at physical fitness. More on all of these later.

Hi everybody. Well, the New Year's party is only a few hours away, and vacation is winding down. Going into this time off I had grand, bloggy plans, nearly all of which went completely ignored and unfulfilled. Among my intended projects:

• Fixing my full-text RSS thingamajig. I ended up not touching a line of code. I'll get to it eventually.
• Building an extension cord that could toggle itself on and off based on input from my Arduino (the original plan was to have some Christmas lights blink a yule-appropriate message in Morse Code). I put some time into this one, but although I managed not to electrocute myself or blow any circuit breakers (to my astonishment/disappointment), I appear not to understand how transistors work very well. The relay assembly seems to work pretty well, and the Morse Code program blinks the Arduino's pin 13 LED reliably, but the transistor doesn't seem to do anything despite the input to its base. Anyone who's even slightly competent at electronics is hereby begged to have a quick look at the following diagram. I know I'm missing a protection diode across the relay coil, but I kind of doubt that's the source of the problem. Maybe, though! I'm just piecing this stuff together from the internet and this book, and consequently I'm probably making some obvious mistakes.
  
  
  
  UPDATE: Thanks to anachrocomputer, who figured out the problem for me in the comments on the photo. I'd accidentally made an emitter follower (aka common collector) circuit, which resulted in the transistor only allowing through as much voltage as was applied to its base — in this case, the Arduino's ~5 volts. The result was that the relay (which requires 12V) wouldn't fire. Whoops!
• My Javascript-powered automatic illustration doohickey: untouched!
• My Tetris project: well, finished before leaving work, actually. But the demonstration video: unproduced!
• And I'm pretty sure I've forgotten about a couple of other things I meant to do. Oh well. They probably weren't that great, anyway.

I did accomplish one or two small things, but mostly I just sat around, played with the Wii and worked to liberate Aether from the dreaded Ing (and hanging out with internet weirdos, of course). It's been a pretty unproductive break. But after a year without a real vacation, I think that's exactly what I needed.