Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Randall's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Friday, November 10th, 2006
1:06 pm	I'm in the new England I'm in the MIT bookstore right now, using their wireless (im in ur bookstor using ur internet). I'm going to be doing various things around the city this weekend. If you're in the area, a couple people from the xkcd forums are getting together with me in Harvard Square Saturday for general hanging out in the city and perhaps minor hijinks. Meeting place is that little area in the middle of the square behind the T station exit, at pi o'clock (3:14:16) PM. Feel free to come hang out! You should probably hold a little sign with your livejournal name if I haven't met you. And periodically everyone know your current music and mood. (16 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
5:44 am	Voter intimidation An acquaintence of mine living in a heavily Democratic district got a call from the "Virginia Election Commission" warning him that he was misregistered and he'd be arrested if he tried to vote. He is not misregistered and there's no such thing as the Virginia Election Commission. I went to report it, but it looks like the calls have been happening quite frequently; the Webb campaign is already on top of it, and they've reported it to the various police types. Audio of one of the calls here. Man, I try not to be too pessimistic, but there really are real people trying to steal this election, and I just heard from someone who was called by one of them. Voting machines are easy to hack. People are being intimidated. Please don't forget to go vote, enough of us that even with the cheating we can still have a voice. Assuming I vote on an electronic machine, which I think is what our precinct uses, I'm gonna ask for a paper receipt. And then when they can't give me one, I'll act confused and indignant. I don't know what else to do. (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 8th, 2006
3:16 pm	Goings-on The webcomic thing just continues to get bigger. The LJ RSS feed (xkcd_rss) will pass 3,000 readers shortly and is in the top 30 most-friended RSS feeds on Livejournal. The site itself gets about 50,000 visitors a day. I've been having to work extremely full-time to get t-shirt orders out. Conveniently, NASA didn't renew my contract for another term; I wouldn't have been able to keep doing both anyway. So I'll be spending most of my days for the immediate future just shipping t-shirts and drawing comics. Life certainly is getting interesting! During a free day I went up to see a Regina Spektor show at the 9:30 club in DC with Sarah. There were at least two guys with Toothpaste for Dinner/Married to the Sea shirts, and I regretted not wearing an xkcd shirt. We could've maybe had a fight! Anyway, if you were there, I was the one up front next to Sarah, who you could spot by her really cute black dress. I've only been to a couple concerts in my life, actually, but this one was just amazing. Miss Spektor is adorable, and she just did everything. I never realized how much of the sound in her songs is just her tapping on the mic, beatboxing, humming, or just smacking the chair next to her with a drum stick while playing piano with her free hand. I really, really like her music. Unfortunately, I was also really, really dehydrated (nothing to drink all day), and had to stand for about four hours total, half of it in the hot, packed club. I was desperately thirsty but couldn't really go anywhere because of the crowd all standing enthralled by Regina. So I finally got kind of nauseous and decided to head for the door anyway, but blacked out halfway there and collapsed. I vaguely remember some dudes helping me out, and I was fine once I sat down and had like four bottles of water and some orange juice. Apparently it's a pretty common thing there -- there was another girl who had roughly the same thing happen, and a helpful off-duty EMT club employee named Chris made sure we were both okay. I got to see the rest of the show from the back (Sarah not knowing what had happened) and it was really good -- better, because I was able to really pay attention without being thirsty. Sadly, I missed seeing what was probably my favorite song, Fidelity. But she performed it with the band and didn't do much with it (I could hear, just not see) so I'm not too sad about that. It was seriously an amazing concert, even with the passing out. And finally, for those of you who know James and Firefly, here's a picture I made while playing with image editing on my tablet: The original of James with Doug's toy guns is here. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 29th, 2006
2:19 pm	xkcd LJ icons annaonthemoon created some awesome livejournal icons from my comic. I just keep looking at them! It's a lovely little collage of stick figure life. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 9th, 2006
9:05 pm	That Irwin guy My roommate is generally known for sitting back and laughing at tragedy, so I was pleasantly surprised/startled to read his defense of Steve Irwin on a forum thread soon after his accident, and thought it deserved to be more widely read (so long as people are gonna be talking about the guy): Say what you want about how Steve Irwin was stupid or whatever. The dude *loved* animals, and he knew how to handle them. He did things with animals that would have killed any of us a million times over, and he did them without harming the animals themselves. That wasn't luck. Nobody is that lucky. That was skill. He wasn't just some yahoo in a set of Khakis gallavanting about the world poking animals with sticks. He was a zookeeper, an animal lover, and possibly one of the most skilled animal handlers in the world. He was injured repeatedly, nigh-constantly, in the filming of his show, and he never got angry at the animals or even stopped being good-natured about the whole thing. He knew what he was doing, and the risks that he was taking, and he took them willingly. He said that he wanted to bring people up close to animals, dangerous though it may be, so that he could show them what the animals were like, and maybe instill some of his love for the animals in his audience, so they would actually care about saving them. This is an uncharacteristic display of giving-a-shit on my part, but I actually got really choked up over Irwin's death. He's one of the few famous people I know of that I actually really admire, not just for what they *can* do (which, in Irwin's case, was considerable), but for what they *choose* to do. And now he's gone, and people are mocking him, saying he was "asking for it" or that he was stupid or whatever, completely missing the point of what he was trying to do, the skill with which he did it, and what he ultimately died for. That's not to say it can't be joked about. Everything can be joked about. It helps take the edge off things. But to actually seriously devalue the guy, his life, and his death, is kind of offensive. He was a guy who put his life on the line to do something he loved, and accomplish something he cared about. And while he was trying to accomplish important goals and do meaningful things, he also had a lot of fun, and provided us with hours and hours of entertainment, while never losing his own enthusiasm. That's a fuck of a lot more than I've done with my life, and I'm willing to wager it's a fuck of a lot more than you've done with yours. And maybe I'm reading some people wrong, and maybe this is all in fun, and maybe I'm just venting, but fuck it. The guy lived well, he died well. Can't do much better than that. Also, why the FUCK are the Wild Boys still alive? Can we please feed them to an alligator or some shit? Wow. Good call, Jordan. Everything is fair game for jokes -- thanks for recognizing that while at the same time explaining so well why he deserves some respect. (28 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 1st, 2006
4:51 pm	Tropical Storm Ernesto adventures Me and Matt and Alice are camped out at Donny & David's apartment right now as the power seems to be out everywhere else. Driving was an adventure, with no traffic lights and water to be forded. Spinfire was talking about how you're not supposed to drive through pools of water unless you're absolutely sure of how deep they are, and that people frequently die doing that, as their cars float off the road or whatever. But I successfully (though foolishly) forded some fairly formidable floodwaters without floating away. I lost some oxen, though. The worst of the storm passed right over the penninsula, so that was exciting. But I will only have internet while at Donny's, and that's assuming the power stays on. Although I doubt it's gonna go out now that the storm's passed. Yay for four-day weekends! And interesting weather. (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 27th, 2006
9:30 pm	The Longest Drive in the US So a friend and another friend and I were thinking of taking a weekend road trip up to New England in a couple weeks, and if we end up in Newmarket, NH on the first night, it will be the longest drive I've ever done. And that got me wondering -- what's the longest drive possible in the continental 48 US states, taking the shortest path between two points? Using Google Maps, I first tried going northeast to southwest, northern Maine to western California, with a max time of about 2 days 16 hours, but I found it was further if I went from Washington to Key West. I picked a road out on the edge of a point in Washingon State and a road down at the end of the Truman Annex in Key West, and got 2 hours 23 minutes. ALMOST three days! These were the points (paste into maps.google.com to see the path:) 48.374554,-124.722719 to 24.546323,-81.810776 I was trying to figure out if I could push it over three days somehow, since I was less than an hour away. I noticed that the final road (a loop) in the Truman Annex was one-way, so I shifted the endpoint down to the end of the road, just to squeeze out those extra few moments. Bizarrely, the total driving time DROPPED three hours. 48.374554,-124.722719 to 24.54605,-81.809714 It's still the same path into the Truman Annex -- it's just that somehow the lat/long shifting by a few feet changes the overall path taken. Specifically, making that lat/long change makes the course route through New Orleans, then along the coast. People have found similar quirky long paths that take you out over the ocean before, but this one raises two questions: (1) What does this quirk say about Google's algorithms? They're clearly not running full best-path finders on the road network, and there's probably some crazy geometric shortcutting going on. I'd love to learn more about Google/Mapquest direction-finding algorithms -- it's one of the problems that got me interested in those sorts of algorithms in the first place. (2) Are there two points in the contiguous 48 states that are three days apart, according to Google? Can anyone beat my 2 days 23 hours? (Note: to easily get the lat/long of a point to experiment with routes, just click "link to this page", and the lat/long of the point you're looking at are after the ll= in the URL) edit: gfish found a 3 day 2 hour route by going from the CA/OR border over to Maine with some particularly bad routing around the destination. I wonder what the longest honest route is, but I also wonder what the longest route Google will give is. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 19th, 2006
2:40 pm	Store, future, birthdays I just put up two new t-shirts in the xkcd store and I think they're pretty awesome. My job is sort of in a little question at the moment; I work on 90-day contracts and I don't know if they'll be able to renew mine for the fall. So I'm working on setting up a permanent store with stock at my apartment to maybe see if the site can start to support itself a little. The future is an adventure! (Speaking of which, today's the last day of voting in the date contest.) Meanwhile, I'd stay to play with the internet, but it's James's birthday! Time to go run around with him and Mandi! I'll be back in town sometime Sunday. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 13th, 2006
2:26 pm	Velociraptor dream Once every few months, pretty reliably, I have a dinosaur dream. Last night I had a dream about a baby velociraptor. It was about ten inches high, as smart as a 12-year-old kid, and was a total asshole. I was like, "c'mon, just stay in this box for a little bit so you don't jump out and get lost in the woods and die" and he kept escaping from whatever I put him in, including a safe (it was a cheap one where you can spin the dials on the inside, so he quickly figured out how to get it opened). I was just trying to get him somewhere safe and find him some food and document him for the purposes of Science, and hopefully get a DNA sample or whatever so the species wouldn't die with him, and he was all "screw this, I'm not interested. Let me out of this box." Eventually he escaped through a town and square and into the ductwork in the ceiling of a nearby high school, probably stalking the kids who stayed late for after-school activities. I imagine that he ended up as a full-grown raptor in the suburban woods somewhere. Maybe I should move to Asia? (29 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 5th, 2006
2:17 pm	My computer Okay, if you know me, you know I like all my computer stuff to be pretty utilitarian. I've never seen the point in translucent windows and my desktop background has always been a solid color. I even switched to Linux so I could use the ion3 window manager because I was tired of doing the work to keep my windows arranged how I wanted them, and of all the extra space title bars and stuff used. But I just tried turning on transparency in my consoles, and it looks really cool. This is spread over two screens, with Firefox taking up the right one completely: ( With another background ) I'll probably get tired of this soon, but right now it's so pretty. If you wanna check out ion, note that the default keybindings are pretty bad. It's kind of a pain; I almost want to take my bindings and make it a cleaner package so anyone can use them, like steve did, only his you need to switch his out of dvorak, and they're still not ideal. (22 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 28th, 2006
12:32 pm	Adventure NEW THING: xkcd.com/date Basically I asked Andrea on a date, the actual details of the date to be chosen by the BestThing system. This could end all sorts of ways! Uh-oh. Try to submit silly stuff; it makes voting and reading more fun, and we have already taken a long walk on the beach so that one is covered. Share the link! We have three weeks to get the entire internet to come vote and/or troll, either of which which the system should handle pretty well! (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 20th, 2006
12:22 am	Several hunks of news I just got in the mail (via a roundabout set of forwards) the book by Ryan North (qwantz) and Allene Chomyn (allenec). It is called Happy Dog the Happy Dog, and you can get it by scrolling down here! It is sixteen pages of pencil crayon and friendship. It's all about the fun a boy and a happy dog can have together as well as the ever-present spectre of death and failure. And happy dogs! Your whole family is made out of meat! We had a story time in our living room so it could be read aloud. It is based on this particular Dinosaur Comic, which you will not regret reading! I also started a side project, inspired by best_thing_ever's lovely quest to find the Best Thing Ever via majority vote. http://BestThing.info/ It uses some fun statistics to work out what's better than what, and keeps a constantly-updated list. It should scale nicely, with some tweaking, so submit and vote to your hearts' content! Moments after putting that up to the public, xkcd.com was again featured on BoingBoing! Hello, new people! I hope we can be friends. (27 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 19th, 2006
5:51 pm	"Everyone should read . . ." Everyone should read bradhicks. He's a mid-40-ish guy who writes articles every day, plus or minus. He brings a fascinating perspective to everything he writes about. He has a strong interest in the way history shaped the present, as well as a flair for the odd combined with a tendency to delve wonkishly deep into topics in a very Asperger's-y way. He writes about topics in great detail, but manages to retain an air of "hey, this is just an interesting thing" -- no pretention or constant trying-to-explain-how-this-fits-with-your-life. He's just interested in everything, and he writes about it. He got both me and Donny excited about locating our library to check out a 650-page tome on the Constitution, and strongly informed my opinions (as far as I have them) on the current situation with Israel's response to Hezbollah and Hamas. He writes about the influence of Carribbean military decisions on American TV and put together a long a four-or-so-part series on the ups and downs of a hypothetical Gore presidency. Here's another piece with a new perspective on the NSA spying thing, and an extremely enlightening essay on his father's experience pricing original art. I skip his essays on MMORPGs, but other than that, I come out the better for each essay I read. You should all check him out. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 3rd, 2006
6:42 pm	Some update things! My three-week break between contracts has been extended slightly by problems with mailing drug-test material to me. I've got it now, but I probably won't be able to get it all done and results back until Friday. Hopefully it won't be too many days until I can start working again! The t-shirt sales have also been encouraging, and help me worry less about rent and food and stuff. Drug tests: On one hand, I have never used illegal drugs. On the other hand, it's none of their goddamn business. Their business is whether or not I'm doing my job. The comic is going awesomely. Thanks to Ryan linking to me on Dinosaur Comics (and resulting links from a couple other fairly large sites) linking to me, my readership has grown quite a bit. The livejournal RSS feed has way more friends than this journal and I'm getting lots of great feedback, which is really encouraging. It's all very exciting, and I look forward to a bright and shining future, or whatever it turns out to be! (19 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 10th, 2006
9:49 pm	ACTION ITEMS I've gotten all the t-shirts packaged and ready to ship -- I'll mail them off first thing Monday when the post office opens! Thanks to everyone who bought them, and thanks for your patience! My laptop is now set up to be my phone. The number is 757-353-4128. Easy to remember -- 35, 34 (decreasing), then 128 (2^7). Simple! I'm still working out the kinks of using/answering/etc, but it should work! I think I'm going to Boston this week. davean came to hang out for the weekend and to work with me on the robot at NASA. I'm now off work for three weeks because of a break between my contracts, so this seems like a good time to take a trip. I'll tag along with him on the his drive back up and then take the train back down at the end of the week. Anyone in Boston want to hang out/offer me a place to crash at some point? There are still some of you up there who I haven't met, and this should be rectified! Andrea does incredible photography. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 4th, 2006
4:00 pm	My Books I'm settled into my apartment here, and I've realized that I've accumulated a number of books over the years. I think it's a pretty neat collection, and I thought I'd take this moment to take stock of the books I've gathered so far in my life. It's still a small enough number that I can write a little review of each one. This isn't every book I own (notably, there's none of my Orson Scott Card here), and there are a lot of books in my bookshelf back at home that I didn't bring with me. That said, here are my books, in no particular order. Hopefully you can find some recommendations in here. And anyone who, reading this, thinks of something they really want me to read, let me know! Bonus points if you own a copy you can loan me. Different Dances (Shel Silverstein) - Shel Silverstein's collection of very adult-themed drawings taking on society and sex. Awesome stuff. A Right to be Hostile (Aaron McGruder) - Treasury of The Boondocks, from his first strips to through and after 9/11. Contains some of the funniest comics around. House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) - One of my favorite books, a mindjob about a house with impossible depths presented through six or seven levels of narration and a satire of scholarship and literary theory. Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont) - An attack on the misuse of science in postmodern thought.</blockquote> The Sirens of Titan (Kurt Vonnegut) - A strange book about life and purpose. I'm not sure what I think about it. Godel, Escher, Bach (Douglas R. Hofstadter) - A wonderful romp through intelligence, language, meaning, music, and information from the point of view of late-70's computer science. Tremendous in scope, I can always open it anywhere and find something interesting and new. An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals, and Noise (John R. Pierce) - Revised from the 1961 edition, a good and clear text on information theory. The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Richard Feynman, Leighton, Sands) - (have not read all of) - A graduation present from my family. Feynman's lectures on all aspects of basic physics, equivalent to an entire undergraduate course at many colleges. The heart of physics laid out by one of its most brilliant thinkers. Defies description. Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) - A cyberpunk wet dream, both flashier and fluffier than Cryptonomicon. The Design of Everyday Things (Donald A. Norman) - An excellent book on how badly things like clock radios, doors, and car stereo adjustment panels are designed and how we can do better. The Mathematical Tourist (Ivars Peterson) - A relatively laymanish romp through late-80's mathematics, heavy on chaos theory. I learned a lot about topology from this book. The Meaning of Relativity (Albert Einstein) - (have not read) - A short book by Einstein explaining general and special relativity mathematically. Cruel and Unusual (Mark Crispin Miller) - (have only read a bit of so far) - A gift from Josh, argues that the Bush administration has completely subverted the Constitution. QED (Richard Feynman) Feynman's book on his treatment of quantum electrodynamics, for which he won the Nobel Prize. How to Solve Mathematical Problems (Wayne A. Wickeigren) - (have not read) - An old book I found at a thrift store. I will read it eventually -- it looks interesting. A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Young Man (Andrew Barlow and Kent Roberts) - Alternate title: The Case Against Yo Mama. This might be the funniest book I've ever read. At first I thought it was just a collection of yo mama jokes presented in a scholarly manner, a one-gag book. But it turned out to be something entirely stranger, a celebration of exactly the kind of surreal humor I love. Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) - Probably my favorite book I've ever read. 1100 pages of World War II, internet startups, and cryptography. Told in a style that captures the modern hacker/programmer/nerd mindset perfectly. I keep picking it up to glance through and then accidentally reading through to the end. The Museum at Purgatory (Nick Banto) - (borrowed from Andrea) - A strange illustrated book about collections of items that people put together while in Purgatory. Pretty neat. The Dictionary of Standard C (Rex Jaeschke) - Written by Scott's dad, who was on ANSII. The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene) - A very good overview of popular modern physics which sums up a lot of books very well. Was made into a PBS series. Relativity (Albert Einstein) - (Have not read) - Another book like the first Einstein one. I also haven't looked through it yet. Neuromancer (William Gibson) - (Have not read) - Supposedly the definitive cyberpunk novel. I just picked it up, and will read it eventually. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (Richard Feynman) - The autobiographical series of stories that firmly established Feynamn as an inspiration to generations of physicists everywhere. The Millennium Problems (Keith Devlin) - There are seven math problems whose solution carries a $1 million bounty, set out by the Clay foundation. This book is a description of the problems aimed at someone with a mathematical mind but not necessarially college education in the field. A really interesting book. Witches Abroad, Hogfather, The Color of Magic, Lords and Ladies, Guards! Guards!, Equal Rites (all by Terry Pratchett) - Excellent fantasy parody/satire novels. The Inflationary Universe (Alan Guth) - Alan Guth's book on his theory of cosmological inflation, which helps to iron out some problems with the Big Bang theory. Gives a very nice view of modern science from the inside. The Essentials of Differential Equations I and II (Research & Education Association) - Study guides which I keep around for reference. Toothpaste for Dinner: Hipsters, Hamsters, and Other Pressing Issues (drew) - drew's comic was one of my major inspirations when I started webcomicking, and this is a great little collection of his work. New Rules (Bill Maher) - Pretty funny Bill Maher humor. He can be a bit much sometime, but he's very good at what he does. Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut) - (borrowed from Charles at CNU, never got around to reading) - I should return this. The Pine Barrens (John McPhee) - (borrowed from my mom) - A great book on a region of southern New Jersey geographically distinct from everything around it. I'm really curious what has changed since this book was written 30, 35 years ago. Anyone up for a road trip? The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed (John McPhee) - (borrowed from my mom) - A book about a project around 1970 to construct a hybrid between a zeppelin and an airplane, a huge and wingless flying warehouse. An extraordinary story but in the end kind of unsatisfying to those of us who want to know about the future of these airships and what possibilities they really hold nowadays. Reach for Tomorrow (Arthur C. Clarke) - Clarke's favorites among his stories as of 1956. Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke) - One of Clarke's best books, about aliens shepherding the human race onward and upward into what lies ahead. The Nine Billion Names of God (Arthur C. Clarke) - A nice Clarke short story collection from around 1970. The Promise of Space (Arthur C. Clarke) - A fascinating book about the future of space exploration written before the moon landing. A little optimistic, but then, I think we sort of got sidetracked by computers and lost a little of the "omg space". We'll get it back, though, and continue on the way. Anansi Boys (Neil Gaiman) - A nice but not phenomenal Neil Gaiman book. Principia Discordia (!!??!!?!!) - A 60's religion disguised as a joke, or a 60's joke disguised as a religion? Remnants: Destination Unknown (K. A. Applegate) - The first book in the Remnants series, by K. A. Applegate (author of Animorphs, Everworld, and some crappy romance novels). They're ostensibly children's/young adult books, but they contain some of the most fucked-up imagery that I've ever encountered in a book or movie. K. A. Applegate is to "kids in weird situations" what George Lucas is to sci-fi. And true to the comparison, don't read the concluding three books in the series. They were easily the most disappointing reading experience I've ever had. Just make something up yourself. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly - (five Assorted issues) - A good little magazine about payphones and security. A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down (Robert B. Laughlin) - (currently reading) - Physics Nobel Prize winner argues that reductionism has given us a false sense that we've pretty much figured out physics, and that instead the truly interesting frontiers of science are in emergent phenomena as nearby as an ice cube. He makes an interesting case that NONE of the large-scale phenomena in physics are 'generalizations' of the math of quantum mechanics and are instead emergent phenomenon which we are dismissing at our peril. I wonder if his case is similar to the one in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, which I have never looked at but now might need to. Blankets (Craig Thompson) - A wonderful 600-page graphic novel telling an autobiographical story of first love. Signal to Noise, A Signal Shattered (both by Eric S. Nylund) - A really good, intense story about a group of people who make contact with alien civilizations. They get their hands on all sorts of technology while trying to play an elaborate game with everyone, and the story spirals completely out of control onto a grand scale. Don't read the back of the second book, it completely spoils the first one. Lockpick Pornography (Joey Comeau) - (loaned to Andrea) - A great little novella of young people with a lot of anger toward society and an exhilirating 'the world is ours' attitude. They also have lockpicks and loads of gay sex. (21 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 29th, 2006
10:33 pm	Pictures! Andrea and I went to the beach last night and did photography. We created the effect by doing a really long exposure, flashing a keychain light once quickly at the camera, and then using the rest of the exposure time to 'paint' her with the light to make it look more like the bright spot was the light source. ( Three more ) And lastly, here's my brother Ricky swinging burning steel wool around his head: If my desktop is turned on, you can see the full version of that one here. (17 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 24th, 2006
3:58 pm	Early 90's PBS Cyberpunk In the 1993 Ghostwriter episode "Who is Max Mouse?" which deals with the internet/hackers, there's 'cool hacker' character who frequently spouts very fun-sounding cyberpunk gibberish. I remember her disdainfully asking one of the Ghostwriter team, "Have you ever surfed the New Wave, Next Wave, Dream Wave, and [something, maybe 'cyberpunk']?" I want to find her quotes. My family might have the episodes reconstructable on VHS. Or maybe one of you can find them online somewhere? Interesting thing I discovered while looking around: the hacker character, "Erica", was Julia Stiles in her first role ever. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
10:05 pm	Finished college, moved out, etc So I graduated from college! I also moved into Jordan and Christina's apartment, where I will be living for some time. Moving on, I'm getting a laptop. I've never bought a new laptop before, so this will be cool. I narrowed things down to the Fujitsu Lifebook series after seeing Aelscha's P-series in action up in Boston. She had Linux and XP dual-booted and it handled them both quite well. The P7000 is the favored model of all those New England hackers I hang out with when I'm up there, so that was my starting point. Since I had a good experience with my (very old and brick-like) Stylistic 2300 (pentium 1) tablet last year, I decided to go for the P1500 line instead, the laptop/tablet hybrid. It was actually a bit cheaper, though the screen resolution was lower. This is an ultraportable laptop. And by ultraportable, I mean it's teetering on the line between laptop and large PDA. When I first saw Xavier's in Harvard square, I oogled. This one is even smaller. Here are some pictures: (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 8th, 2006
12:04 am	Shirts I've launched an xkcd.com store, featuring a t-shirt of today's drawing: The drawing is a heart colored from binary characters. The binary, decoded, is suitably sappy. This is very cool! I'm hoping it all goes okay. I'm getting preorders for the next two weeks and then I'll have the shirts printed and mail them out. I may or may not keep it up after that, depending on how well this order goes. I will get the shirts to everyone, one way or another. I'm just fretting about the packages catching fire or something else goes wrong and people get angry and someone shoots me with a rifle. Basically, I worry that any situation will disintegrate into someone shooting me with a rifle. But I think this will go well! And you'll be the first people in the world with xkcd t-shirts! BINARY HEART shirts, no less! Order at xkcd.com/store (12 Comments |Comment on this)