So, I just finished watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I had previously seen a few episodes at CAS' summer showing and they showed it this year during the fall on the night that I don't go. I finally picked it up from Right Stuf a little while ago and it arrived yesterday.

Fundametally, the anime is about manliness and freedom, but it also includes mecha, drills (remember: "A drill is a man's romance!"), and bouncing breasts (it is a Gainax peice). Gurren Lagann has taught me that the solution to every problem is to hit it (or drill it, as appropriate). If this plan doesn't work the first time, the solution is to repeat while yelling louder and being more determined.

The show makes a point of doing things if only because they would be awesome. As an example, in the third episode one of the main characters ends up in close quaters combat. He gives a speech while drawing his sword at the start of this combat; however, his speech is longer than the amount of time that it would take to draw said sword. Solution? Make the sword continue to pull out of the shieth for the entire duration of the speech despite the sword reaching ludicrous lengths (far exceeding its holder). The show sort of continues like that for 27 episodes.

I would recomend GL to anyone as it is fun, fast, and has a little bit for everybody. Also, you can pick it up rather inexpensively subtitled only. This is due to the fact that Bandai initially put out a "speed release" of the show where they sold sub-only dvd 2packs for about $30. There were only 3 of these packs for the whole series, and now that dub/sub disks are out, the older releases cost around $22 per two pack.

Choice quotes:

"Don't believe in yourself. Believe in me who believes in you."
"Reject common sense to make the impossible possible!"

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So this morning I took a stab at making an Omelette for breakfast. I often buy eggs because they are a necessary ingredient of making cookies. Unfortunately, I rarely manage to use all the eggs (even when I only buy a half dozen) before I doubt their freshness. This time, however, I decided to at least use some of them to make myself a tasty breakfast.



It came out pretty well I think. It was a bit underdone on the far right side, but I'll attribute that to my not yet being very familiar with the technique. Should I try this again, I think it might be wise to obtain some bacon to create a real balanced breakfast. This is, of course, due to the rule of universe pork improvement: any meal can be made better by the inclusion of bacon.

The only downside with the omelette is the sheer amount of time necessary to make one. It took me about 25 minutes from start to finish to make the omelette. This is generally more time than I'm willing to waste before work, but since I was taking a telecon from my apartment at this same time it wasn't so bad. I have at least one early morning telecon a week, so I may experiment a bit more with this.

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So, as of today, I have no student loan debt. Both my Perkins loan (through RHIT and administered by ACS Education) and my Direct Loans (through the Department of Education) have been completely paid off. I made my final payments on both earlier this week and they finally cleared today. In anticipation of this, I've begun to change my paycheck allocation. Since I won't need to be able to pay a few hundred per month to my loans (though really I only needed a bit over $100 at minimum rates), I'm redirecting an additional $100 per month straight to my 403(b) account. I'm also going to bump my savings rate slightly from the current 10% to either 13% or 14% with the goal of using that savings to eventually buy a home. It's hard to say when such a thing will be viable because I'll have to do some hard number crunch with respect to how loan interest tax deductions end up fitting into the monthly recurring cost of a home.



I will continue to have debt as I make liberal use of my credit card, but so far I've been very careful so as to always pay off my card at the end of each month (if not earlier) and have thus never incurred any interest on the card. It is nonetheless nice to be able to say that I am (mostly) debt free.

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So, at about 6 am this morning, I lost power to my apartment. The outage lasted until 9am, but it led to most of my website being off until a few minutes ago as I couldn't bring equipment back online until I got back after work. I hadn't realized that the DSL modem was in an unpleasant state until a few minutes ago, so things like the link were down until then. Everything should be working again now.

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Somehow I managed to do something bad to my ankle yesterday. I'm not precisely sure what I did, but it has been somewhat painful to put weight on my left foot since yesterday when I was climbing the stairs in my building. There doesn't appear to be any bruising or swelling, so I suspect that I merely overextended some muscle. Thought it does hurt less today, it still hurts. Since I don't want to make it worse by either biking to work or hiking the half mile from the parking lot to my building, I'm working from home today. This will be the second time ever that I've worked from home rather than coming in. I may end up turning some or all of today into a sick day and just trying to sleep it off depending on how productive I find myself being.

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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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