Kyle Smith

Well, this week has started off rather badly. This morning I was on my way to the mechanic when I bounced my car off a tree on the interstate, so I am temporarily without a vehicle. I emerged unscathed. I also snapped a few pictures before the state police and flatbed showed up which I’ll post the next time I’m out (no cell phone reception here at home). The jury is still out on whether or not the car is totaled but hopefully in a day or two I’ll hear from my insurance company.

Later in the day things did get better when I watched Dogville, which was a very cool movie. The entire thing was shot in one huge stage with the majority of the set just drawn on the floor (there were some real cars and furniture). Unfortunately I ended up falling asleep about two hours in and woke up just in time to watch the conclusion, which was very surprising. Although it’s a little long (~3 hrs) and starts off slow, I’d still recommend watching some or all of it given the opportunity.

Update: a few photos

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(14:32:44) cfusion997: damn do i hate hair!
(14:58:37) Eli Dow: haha
(14:58:43) Eli Dow: down with hair!
(14:58:45) cfusion997: right
(14:59:00) cfusion997: i realized just how much time i spend dealing with hair
(14:59:10) Eli Dow: far too much
(14:59:11) cfusion997: washing it, combing it, cleaning it off my jacket
(14:59:21) cfusion997: finding it on the floor or carpet
(14:59:34) cfusion997: cutting it…
(14:59:43) cfusion997: i mean honestly… do we *really* need it anymore?
(14:59:50) cfusion997: i say no!
(15:00:06) Eli Dow: NO
(15:00:09) Eli Dow: up for evolution!
(15:00:18) Eli Dow: less hair == more evolved!
(15:00:22) cfusion997: homo sapien sapien no longer has a need to keep its chapeau warm in a natural manner
(15:00:22) Eli Dow: think about dolphins man
(15:00:28) Eli Dow: indeed
(15:00:29) cfusion997: just slap a hat on that sucker and voila!
(15:00:53) Eli Dow: ever wonder why the typical grey “alien” had no fucking hair and large eyes!
(15:00:59) Eli Dow: its a sign of evolution bitches!
(15:01:07) cfusion997: right!

(21:53:20) shaggy: i have an awesome plan
(21:53:32) shaggy: follow along scooby, shaggys about to lay it all down!
(21:54:12) scooby: ruh-roh!
(21:54:24) shaggy: we need to trick velma into bringing daphne over to your place, then another 14 of their hottest single friends
(21:54:33) shaggy: then if they each bring their 12 hottest freinds
(21:54:38) shaggy: and so on
(21:54:43) shaggy: now heres where it gets good
(21:54:54) shaggy: we provide them with booze and music
(21:54:58) scooby: i reiterate… ruh-roh
(21:54:59) shaggy: they girate and such
(21:55:01) shaggy: and
(21:55:02) shaggy: and
(21:55:04) shaggy: !!!!
(21:55:18) shaggy: if we are not lucky they get horny and go home with a boy
(21:55:19) shaggy: hahaha
(21:55:24) shaggy: and if we ARE lucky
(21:55:28) shaggy: they dont like any of us
(21:55:31) shaggy: and dyke it out
(21:55:41) shaggy: this is where the magic happens
(21:55:52) shaggy: we pre-plan to have like 47 cameras
(21:56:00) shaggy: so then we sell the footage
(21:56:10) shaggy: 30 percent to cover booze and the shitty ass shakin music
(21:56:21) shaggy: then the other 70 percent to go buy hookers and beer!
(21:56:28) shaggy: MAN I AM BRILLIANT

For those of you that weren’t aware, our very own Donny Chevetty turned 21 yesterday. On Saturday night several of us decided to commemorate the occasion by preparing a variety of alcohol-laden Jello products. The photos are available here.

Not much else has happened since Wednesday. Several trips to Massena occurred and general laziness was the theme of yesterday. Except for last night, when for some reason I thought playing 40 hands was a good idea. It’s okay though, I needed to continue my training regimen. I think I’m ready now.

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The other day I purchased several items in Best Buy using a gift certificate from last Christmas that our (IBM) organization gave to it’s employees. Among the items were The Cure’s new album, Ninja Scroll, and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Vol. 1.

I finally watched the 4 episodes of GitS tonight and promptly pre-ordered the second volume (which comes out at the end of September) from Amazon. The CGI opening is pretty cool and the animation style used for the actual episode is also my favorite of all those that I’ve seen (think Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Bubblegum Crisis, et cetera).

Eli mentioned this quote to me today and I was compelled to record it for posterity:

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” — Brian W. Kernighan

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As some of you know I’ve had an idea for a particular web app in mind for several days now but have been struggling with the decision as to what language to implement it in. I really wanted to use Struts, but I currently can’t add servlets as an option to my hosting plan (I can add Java Server Pages, but I don’t see the point of doing that if I can’t use servlets too). I then started looking at Horde, which is a PHP application framework. It seems quite promising, but I still can’t bring myself to use PHP.

Rather than waffle around until the idea loses its appeal, I decided to bite the bullet and just start using Struts. So what did I do? I fired up Eclipse 3 and made a new project and started in. And that’s when I was reminded of just how crippled the base IDE is. I’ve been so spoiled using WSAD 5 for the last few months as it has full support for JSP, servlets, and Struts (to the point where it will generate just about everything you need for a Struts project).

I don’t see how people can claim that Eclipse is a successful open source project if the base IDE doesn’t have built-in support for anything beyond vanilla Java stuff. To which you, a hip young tech-ninja, replies, “But it’s open source and has a plugin API. You could write your own plugin!” My response: fuck that. In the past I’ve searched for a variety of Eclipse plugins, including Python, Subversion, Arch, servlet/JSP, and now Struts and what do I find? An endless trail of mangled corpses from prior plugin attempts. I have yet to find a single independent Eclipse plugin that works well. Hell, I’ve yet to find one that works as advertised!

I wish IBM would shock me by announcing that it was releasing the plugins from WSAD to the public so that I don’t need to hock body parts to afford the $4,000 price of a single WSAD seat.

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Since Bryan decided to mention the resurrection of Planet COSI, I figured I’d pipe up today. Thankfully one of the things that Donny and I insisted on this past spring was to start backing up config files and essential files from COSI’s 3 primary servers (statler, waldorf, and gonzo). Unfortunately, Planet COSI sprang up after the initial backup scripts were made so Bryan’s home directory (where the stuff was located) was not included.

Yesterday afternoon I began using our July 1st backup to restore the COSI website and Planet COSI on statler, as waldorf refuses to boot from its drive right now. I was rather amused when Russ IM’d me just as I was unpacking parts of the tarball. IM’d me to say PC was down. I managed to get Apache reconfigured and added the additional IP aliases to the system. Unfortunately, Apache is refusing to actually serve up pages even though it appears to be binding to the two additional IPs, so further debugging will be required.

Went and saw Fahrenheit 9/11 with Mike and Cheesefry yesterday (btw, Cheese, I like the new look, now you just need some more content). There were a definitely some interesting moments, but overall I don’t think it was as good as Bowling for Columbine. Later in the evening #7 and I watched Scarface while drinking tequila — it was a good night! Also got him hooked on Outlaw Star yesterday afternoon. He spent the entire day watching it.

If you’re having a drink this weekend, don’t forget to have one for Marlon Brando, who died yesterday.

“I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream. That’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight… razor… and surviving.” (as Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now)

“The horror. The horror.” (Kurtz’s last words)

“Do you spend time with your family? Good. Because a man that doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” (as Don Corleone in The Godfather)

I for one welcome our new fur-bearing overlords.

Update: the FBM is now gone! While Eli and I were in the kitchen just now the little bastard came out of nowhere and ran into the bottom of the refrigerator. We managed to extricate him, but he immediately ran into the other refrigerator (we’ve got 2 in the kitchen). Finally managed to direct the 2nd refrigerator towards the front door and get rid of him altogether.

We’re sorry to see you go, Pudge.

So many good books to read. The list of books on my shelf waiting for me to read goes on and on: How to be a Star at Work by Robert Kelley, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Emergence: From Chaos to Order and Hidden Order by John Holland, At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, Smart Mobs by Howard Rheingold, a book of short stories by Philip K. Dick, The Bhagavad Gita as translated by Eknath Easwaran, and various other technical books (i.e. Cooper’s The Essentials of Interaction Design, Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, and RML’s 2.6 kernel book). Thankfully I finished PKD’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? last night. I’m currently halfway through The Bhagavad Gita, about a quarter of the way through Zen, and I read Hidden Order last spring, but I’d like to read it again before I read his second book.

Throughout the spring when I bought the books I kept telling myself that once classes were over I’d sit down and just read for three weeks straight before heading to Poughkeepsie. Obviously, that has not happened. The currently lie I’ve been telling myself is that I’ll have plenty of time to read while I’m in Pok, although even that is starting to be suspect, as I’m supposed to do a bunch of prep-work for this fall for COSI as well as finish writing up a grant proposal and circulate it around IBM to gather support by July 12th.

In other news today, I believe I have temporarily triumphed over the kipple in my room, as I can actually see my desk, the top of my dresser, and once again there is space on my bookshelf — does this mean I need to buy more books?