So, I've taken more than one picture since I left Indiana. As such, I've decided to put some of them here. Note that this may disrupt your friends page.


This picture was taken in the Indianapolis airport at the Sony expensive device despenser. If you look closely, you can see that there is a PSP stuck in the device that carries things out. I seriously considered trying to buy some cheap item to get a free PSP. That is when I remembered that there isn't any reason to buy a PSP. Ever.


The government is very serious about its tables.


This blurry device told me exactly where I was, thus making waiting on my flight seem all the more excruciating.

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I thought that I had more interesting pictures than that. Ah well, maybe I'll collect more later.

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So, earlier this week, I finally got everything that I needed to put together my new computer. I had a couple of odds and end before I got it to boot (improperly seated RAM, weirdness mounting the HSF, backwards SLI connector), but it didn't take too terribly long. I, of course, decided to install Vista on it since it will by my primary gaming computer for the forseeable future. I have to say that the machine is really quite a beast. It runs may things (LEGO Star Wars, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast) at max settings and native resolution (1600x1200) at over 60 fps. It is at least twice as powerful as any previous machine that I've had.

It does, however, have one major irritation: mouse problems. Now, I have a working MX 1000 Wireless Laser Mouse. I know it is working because I have it connected to a KVM switch, and the other 3 machines with GUIs work fine. Basically, it goes like this. First, the mouse will start jumping around and clicking randomly on screen. Usually jamming the buttons some will fix this. After it does that a few times, the mouse will simply stop responding in Vista. I've tried using it as both a PS2 and as a USB mouse. The only difference is that the former always requires a reboot to fix while the former can occasionally be coaxed back into working without one. I fear that I will have to have a seperate mouse just for the Vista box or that I will have to purchase a new keyboard and mouse (mine are a combo with a common receiver).

I must say that, of all things, failing to properly write a mouse driver should be embarassing for Microsoft. The failure is even more disgusting when coupled with the fact that this same mouse works fine in Windows 2000 and XP which means that it is their re-write of an existing driver that is broken. Hell, I'd bet that if I hooked up my Windows 98 box, the thing would work just fine.

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In other news, I've started watching Battlestar Gallactica. So far I've watched the first 5 episodes and I'm rather impressed. It is good stuff. I've also been watching a new anime: Murder Princess. It is suprisingly good. It reminds me slightly of Scrapped Princess, so if you liked that, you might like this. The show is coming out as a 6 episode OVA, the last of which is to be released in a couple of weeks.

I also watched the first episode of Powerpuff Girls Z. Note that the "Z" is pronouced as "Zed". I haven't seen enough to decide if it is good, but it does make several interesting breaks with the original PPG universe. I am sad that the PPG are no longer comprised solely of sugar, spice, everything nice, and chemical X. I suppose it is a silly premise, but still, it was the main premise of the show. Every episode started with a reminder of it!

Ah well. I think that's enough of that.

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Today, I gave Python its last chance. I know some people who are very strong advocates, and it is apparently rather popular at JPL. I have decided, however, that it is not worth using. This isn't due to the difficulty in programming in it--the simple things that I was trying to make today all worked fine--this is due to the idiotic language design choices made in it.

• Implicit scoping - This has always been my main problem with the language. Today, my opinion was only reinforced by learning that Python defines the width of a tab character to be 8 characters. I am aware that this is the Unix standard width, but it is also completely unreasonable when most text editors created in, say, the last decade use a tabstop closer to 4 or 5 characters.
• No ternary operator - The ternary operator is generally of the form ( condition ? trueval : falseval ) and is amazingly useful in the right situations--most notably for its ability to be used in other conditionals or as part of a compound assignment. There are work-arounds in python to get ternary style operation, but some require evaluation of all arguments (i.e., the (trueval, falseval)[conditional] method) and the new language construct added in Python 2.5 is ( trueval if condition else falseval ) which is just out of order.
• No increment operators - These are simply your ++ and -- friends. The explaination for their absence is something along the lines of "they let you write code that's hard to read". Unfortunately, it is my firm belief that it is always possible to write code that's hard to read and one shouldn't throw out language constructs on that basis alone.
• No explicit support for abstract classes - You can create things that are similar to abstract classes by creating methods without bodies. The problem comes in the fact that you can still instantiate a class with such methods and in fact you can call the methods without bodies. This leads to errors. I understand that the language is dynamically typed, but that doesn't mean that I should be able to instantiate anything willy-nilly.
• print is not a function - print is a syntactic form with strange syntax. For instance, if you want to write a line without a carriage return, you have to end the print statement with a comma. Why? Who knows? You can use it like C's printf, but then its syntax becomes even stranger
• Every function in a class must take the class as its first argument - That's right, when you declare a class function, it must take at least one argument, the instance of the class calling it. When you call the function though, you only provide it with values for the remainder of the arguments. For example, the function declared as def foo(self, blah, thing): would be called as foo(blahval, thingval). I'm sure there is a very good reason why they require every class function to have this argument, but whatever it is, the result is stupid.

There were other things that bothered me that I can't remember now, but I think this list is sufficient to get my point across. The language isn't a total wash--it at least has lambda expressions, but they alone are not sufficient to make me want to write anything in the language given its current handicaps.

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So, today I played my first game of the CalTech version of Dungeons and Dragons. This particular version of the game grew out of the original first edition of D&D and has been evolving since then. It is interesting in that it represents a divergent evolution compared to 3.5.

There are several things that make this particular D&D distinct. Firstly, you can see the first edition shining through--elves and dwarves are classes and there are no explicit races. Furthermore, classes have explicit stat requirements that dictate whether or not you can use such a class. The game also provides for explicit multiclassing in the form of 2, 3, etc class characters. The only requirement is that such characters must meet the stat requirements of both classes and often have some other stats rather high.

Another major distinction is that the armor and weapon rules are much more complex. The target number of any strike is based upon a combination of the weapon being used, the armor being worn, the attack number of the attacker and defense number of the defender. This results in common references to matrices.

The game makes use of 8 different statistics instead of the usual 6. Added to the list are agility and size. There are also interesting rules for rearranging points in stats. Generally speaking, it seems as though you can trade two points in one stat for one point in another so long as you don't drop the stat below 9.

The game also is played somewhat differently than I am used to D&D being played. Each player maintains (usually) 3 characters and runs two of them per session. They do this because character deaths are rather common. Unfortunately, needing more than one character significantly increased the burden of initial creation for me. Also, there are two character creation "modes". One of these modes is for the "design character". The DC character can have rolled stats rearranged in any way and get a few bonus points/free rearranges.

My DC was a Mage/Fighter with an 18 in strength and a 17 in IQ. Because of when I started in the yearly cycle (the universe resets every August), I began at level 12. This let me pick from the selection of spells which had been researched by the various players over the course of the year. One spell that quickly became my favorite was "Str X 1-5". This spell was a level 5 spell which multiplied the user's strength by 1d5 for 1d10 turns (1d10 * 6 phases). My character managed to roll max on both of these at the beginning of combat, giving me a 90 in strength for essentially the entire combat. The bonuses given by my absurd strength gave me 8 attacks per round which did 20d6+18 each if they hit. I would consider this something of an "edge case." Unfortunately, my character rolled poorly on her hit dice, and was at one hit point for nearly all of the combat due to a critical hit from an archer (while she was invisible) during the second phase of the first turn of combat.

My secondary character (a cleric) was able to keep my main character from taking any further damage, and the mage/fighter eventually found a good way to both attack and defend--she ripped the door to the fortress off its hinges and used it as a combination weapon and full cover. Good times.

Two characters in the party died, one we were able to resurrect. All in all, I think it was a good session and I'll probably stick with the game for a while.

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So, today was a weird day. All morning, I was dragging. It was all I could do to stay awake, and that was just barely working. I have no idea why, either. I didn't stay up especially late or anything like that, but everytime I blinked, it was a struggle to open my eyes again.

After lunch, I was able to get myself going and did some productive work. Unfortunately, the most productive thing I did this afternoon was discover a nasty corner case in an algorithm I was supposed to be implementing. If the psuedo-code was translated literally into C, then the code would read outside of the bounds of an array under certain very specific conditions. In C, this is especially nasty because it might result in reading invalid (or random) data instead of crashing like a Java or C# would. I sent a big email explaining the details to the author of the spec, but he's been on travel for almost two weeks, so I doubt that I'll see anything soon.

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I think that I'm going to have to take my bike into the shop where I bought it. On the way back, the back gear kept slipping while I was going uphill. It was only a tiny slip each time--the chain didn't disconnect or anything--but the slips were happening every 1.5 to 6 full rotations at one point. That is simply unacceptable.

I also finally got my new CA driver's license in the mail today. The thing seems to be made out of the same kind of plastic as those discount card you get at Kroger--very flimsy stuff. This inspired me to finally go get the smog check done on my car. There is a place to get smog checks done directly adjacent to my apartment, which was handy, so it only took about 20 minutes to get the whole thing done. Most of that was spent trying to determine if my car was 2 wheel or 4 wheel drive, though.


Only one other thing of note happened today, I beat Jade Empire. It is probably a 25 hour game, maybe 30. I only started playing it late last week, but when you really have absolutely nothing to do in the evenings/weekends, you can spend a great deal of time on a game in just a few days.

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So, for the last few days, I have been playing Jade Empire. It is a pretty good game, but it is making quite clear how old my gaming computer is. I am routinely seeing framerate drops to less than 10 fps.

I've priced out a new machine to replace my old one and it is less than $1500. The whole spec includes a quad cord Xeon, 4 GiB of RAM and even two 8800GTS cards in SLI mode. Hopefully, that will be enough to play Bioshock when it comes out. I'll probably order once I've paid August's rent.


In other news, I got my first credit card today. I had applied for it when I got a new checking account a few weeks ago. The thing I find most rediculous about it is that I have a limit of $500. I have more than six times that in each of two checking accounts. Somehow, I doubt the validity of whetever method they used to decide my limit.



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This week has been long and its only Wednesday. On Monday, I went to the Pasadena DMV. I was trying to register my car and get a California driver's license. I was doing this because, in California, you have to get a new license within 10 days of moving to the state and new registration within 20 days.

So, apparently you have to take a written driver's test every time you get a new license in California. I passed it, which was nice, but they punched a hole in my Indiana license and gave me a piece of paper as a temporary license until I get my real license in the mail. As for my registration, although you don't have to get a car checked for smog for the first 6 years after the car is built when you buy it in state, you do have to do a smog check when you bring a car in from out of state. I believe that smog checks take a relatively small amount of time, and I can mail in my documents to get the registration now that I've already been to the DMV.

Once I got to work that day, I found the east parking lot completely full. There wasn't a single free space in it. Instead, I parked about a quarter mile away at the entrance to the nearby national park. The walk took almost half an hour.

Finally arriving at my office, I found that the laptop that I'd been using since I got there (an old Compaq n600c) had begun to suffer disk failure. Luckily, Knoppix and a flash drive saved the work that I had been unable to back up on the previous day.

On Tuesday, I finally bought a bicycle. It is a pretty nice bike. The thing that sealed the deal, though, was the shifter on it. It has a very high quality shifter that I can only describe as being...ratchet-like. Basically, you press one of two buttons to shift up- or down-gear. If you press harder, you go through more gears and it falls back to the current gear plateau when you release. I rode it to and from work that same night to make sure that I could. It seems like the way there will be a lot easier than the way back since it is mainly downhill. I was pretty exhausted by the end, but I made it.

Today, I went to the Pasadena Apple store because my iPod had been acting up. It wasn't recognizing that it was being plugged in to computers, so I couldn't put more music on. After waiting 25 minutes past when my appointment was, they took a look at it and gave me a replacement.

Tomorrow, I will ride my bike to work for the first time. I didn't ride it today since I had the appointment at the Apple store and wasn't sure I could ride back home and drive to Pasadena in time.



Oh yeah, one other thing. Go buy and play LEGO Star Wars. It is amazing.

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So, my mother and brother have come out to California to visit me and help me "settle in." There isn't a great deal left to be done with regard to moving in; there are a few boxes (like 2) that need to be unpacked, a few things lying about that need to be put in their place. Unfortunately, unpacking is not something that can be easily placed in someone else's hands.

I did go to Target with my mother and picked up some household essentials such as a vacuum cleaner. I also picked up a rice cooker, so that should add a bit more variety to my meals (or perhaps revert them to the old summer style).

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Things that are irritating:

Trying to reverse engineer a binary file format from Fortran source code that is commented in French.

That adding another network card to eve makes it unable to read from the 1TB raid array.

Having to move said raid array into another computer because the problem seems to persist regardless of which network card is installed or which PCI slot it is installed into.

Arrays with dimensionality higher than three.

Having to get a new registration and license because I was supposed to have them two weeks ago.

That the closest Steak 'n Shake is in Texas.

That Darker than Black was licensed.

That the PS3 dropped in price by $100 yet I still can't think of a reason to get one.

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Today, I checked out of my hotel and moved into my apartment. I finally have cable and an internet connection, so I figured that moving in was a viable option. I'll have to go out and pick up a few things tomorrow, but that shouldn't be too big of a hastle.

Hopefully, I'll be able to get DSL service started sometime next week and bring blade.io back online.

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About an hour ago, I decided that I wanted to print off some BESM character sheets. I don't have a printer myself, but my hotel does, so I went down to the public-use computer which has a printer. I browsed to the White Wolf website and loaded the character sheet. The thing about BESM character sheets, though, is that they are actually designed to fill one-half of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Because of this, I wanted to print both halves of the character sheet on one page. This is usually accomplished by setting the printer to print two sheets per page. This particular computer, however, would have none of it. Whenever I opened the properties page to set the printer into two pages per sheet mode, a window popped saying "Unauthorized Function", and the properties window would close.

I found, though, that the amount of time the properties window stayed open was not constant. In fact, it seemed like whatever watchdog program was keeping the window from staying open was simply polling all of the processes and looking for things it did not like. Thus, I kept opening the window and attempting to change the setting before it closed until I was finally successful and printed off 5 properly sized character sheets. Luckily, the program closed the properties window by simulating a click on "OK", so all I had to do was select the appropriate number of pages per sheet. This particular choice was bad design.

The real difficulty came when I tried to change the setting back. I didn't want to inconvience others, so I tried to change the setting back. I had no luck at this, and after a few dozen tried, the machine locked me out with a "Sabotage cooldown". I found this humerous as what I was attempting to do was reset it to standard operating conditions. Apparently, the sabotage-prevention mode reset the page setup on its own, so I didn't have to worry about it.

All in all, I consider this program's behavior to be primarily annoying and not particularly effective at controlling access.

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Today, I had to get up at 6:45 just as I do during the week. I was up this early because I needed to be at my apartment by 8 am so that my things could be delivered. It only took about 2 hours to actually move everything into my apartment, but I expect it to take quite a bit longer to actually get myself unpacked.

So far, I have unpacked perhaps a dozen boxes. I have unpacked all of my clothes, most of my computers, and my dishes. Unfortunately, there is little point to moving in as of yet. I will not have power until Tuesday and I won't have internet/cable television until Saturday.

Speaking of the internet, I have decided to take a two pronged approach to my internet connection needs. Since I need to have a service that gives me static IP addresses (at least 2) and decent upload in order to continue to host blade.io, I have decided to get some form of business class DSL for my hosting needs. Unfortunately, this leads to ugly and slow download speeds which always come with DSL connections. As such, I have decided to also get residential class cable modem service through Charter. My current plan is to set up my network such that the two external machines (freasha and eve) are connected to both the DSL and Cable service. Eve, my current router, will also serve as a router for my internal machines which will remain behind a NAT.

This setup will likely require a fair bit of fiddling with iptables rules in order to get functioning correctly, but I do not believe it is impossible. I will likely have to buy a few more network cards in order to get everything going, however.

I've also been working on a monthly budget. So far, I have put in numbers that I know (such as rent, cell phone, etc) as well as numbers that are less certain (power, gas, food). Not counting Renter's Insurace (because I haven't bought it yet), It seems like my monthly budget is something like $2900. I expect this to be a gross over-estimate as I'm putting in very large numbers for some of the expenses (such as over $320 for gas per month when I plan on biking to work or $400 a month for electricity).

We'll just see what happens, I suppose.

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I've been watching a fair bit of anime lately. As such, I thought that I should share what I've learned about it. Everything here is still unlicensed, so you can find it floating around in the usual places.

Darker Than Black - Darker than Black is a near-future sci-fi anime. The premise of the world is that there are people who have special powers (such as teleportation, body changing, etc). People with such powers are called "Contractors" due to the fact that, in order to use their powers they must perform some task in order to "pay for" their power. One character from the first episode must place small stones in a perfect grid, for example. So far, 10 episodes have been released and I highly recomend it.

Kirarin Revolution - This show may be the most saccharine show I've ever seen. That said, every episode so far has made me laugh from beginning to end. This show falls into the romantic comedy/drama category. The show is still releasing new episodes in Japan (they're up to 60), but a group has only started subtitling them lately.

Shinigami no Ballad - Shinigami no Ballad seems to be a series of unrelated episodes aside from the primary character: a reaper named Momo. Each episode revolves around someone's death and how it affects the people around them. The reaper, aside from her primary task, attempts to give the people left behind hope by occasionally poking at them and being slightly cryptic. I've only watched 2 episodes (of the 6 that were made), but I will probably watch the rest.


That's it for now, I've started watching a few other series, but haven't made it far enough to make a real judgement yet. To be continued, I suppose.

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Bank of America sucks, and here is why:

Nearly a month ago, I signed up for a Bank of America account online. I did this because BoA has an ATM on the JPL campus and I'm always in favor of easy access to cash. Part of my deal with BoA is that I get free online banking, free bill pay, and an account with no fees so long as I have at least one direct deposity a month. I figured that would be easy since JPL uses direct deposit.

When I tried to set up my direct deposity with JPL, they told me that they absolutely, positively had to have some sort of authentication of my account number and routing number. They, of course, asked for a voided check. Since I have no checks with my BoA account, I told them that I couldn't give them one. They suggested that I get a letter from the bank simply saying what my account number and routing number were and that they were, in fact, mine. Sounds easy, right?

For my National City savings account (which I'm tithing into), all I did was call and my home branch faxed me over a letter by the afternoon. For BoA, I tried calling them twice. Each time, they told me that what I was asking was impossible. I then decided to try to go to a branch. There is a branch less than a mile from JPL, so I headed over after work. They told me that they couldn't help me. They couldn't even look up my account information since the account had been opened "out of state."

I thanked the people at the branch for their help and told them that I wanted to close the account since it was useless to me without direct deposit. Turns out, I couldn't even do that there since they couldn't look up my information. Thus, I called BoA support again and told them that I needed to close my account. THIS time, they were willing to help me. Once I explained the situation around my desire to close, the customer service woman immediately offered to have the exact letter I needed mailed to me. I decided to go ahead and have them do that as it was easier than closing one account and opening a new one elsewhere.

Moral of the story: A bank will do anything to keep you from closing the account--even what they told you was "impossible" just a few hours ago.

At least I'll be able to have my direct deposit.

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Today was my first day of work at JPL. Nearly all of the morning was spent in an interminable "orientation session" in a room whose temperature climbed continuously during the session. The experience was made tolerable by my striking up conversations with a few other people at the session. One of them is another hire from Rose whose name I have yet to learn (though he, of course, knows mine). Another was returning to JPL after spening the last two summers as an intern there. He was working on a project that is (according to the deputy director of the center) over-budget and late. In fact, the DD told this person that he was "screwed" when this person told him what project he was working on.



After the session, I met with my new 2nd tier boss. My 1st tier boss is going to be away for the next two weeks, unfortunately. My 3rd tier boss I have met before, but did not see today. I was told that I would be working on a cal-val system for the OSTM project. Since my 1st tier boss is gone for the next two weeks and the scientist in charge of this part of the project overall is out until the end of the week, I am in limbo for now. I'm likely going to use the time to get back up to speed with C programming (since I haven't programmed in C since Graphics last Fall).



I think JPL will be a very different experience for me. During my first year, I am supposed to come up with a plan to use half my time for "training." I'm going to use some of this time to get more familiar with C++ (despite the ugly thing that it seems to be). I don't have a firm idea of what I'll spend the other ~48 weeks training to do, though, so any ideas would be appreciated. Also, since I am a on salary, I can make my own hours. For now, I'll try to keep an 8 to 5 schedule, but part of me wants to try the noon to 9 approach.



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