Last night I ran into an old acquaintance of mine, the actor formerly known as Elizabeth. She waved me into the restaurant where she was sitting. I popped in to say hello. She introduced me to her dining companion, Yeardley Smith. That's right, I shook hands with the voice of Lisa Simpson.

If IMDB is to be believed, the two are working together on a project, "Waiting for Ophelia".

Okay, we all heard about Hillary's sudden outbreak of emotion in a coffee shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. What you don't know is that it's also my sister's favorite place to go for breakfast. I guess they have excellent cinnamon buns, although they've never moved my sister to tears. She wasn't present, though, at that fateful moment.

My grandfather, James Taylor, died on December 13th. Here's his obituary. We'll miss you, grandpa.

So I get really upset by unsafe driving, and the inevitable consequence of unsafe driving, traffic accidents. If it were possible for you to drive dangerously but for everyone else to be safe, then that would be a personal choice I'd be willing to let you make. One might claim that good defensive driving will inure someone from the consequences of another driver's unsafe choices. Keep safe following distance, be aware of the traffic around you, and if someone does something dangerous, you have a safe way out. While this may be true (ignoring the truly reckless driver who simply collides with you on purpose), even if you are not involved in an accident, it can have negative effects on you. I have observed many relatively minor accidents causing huge congestion on LA's freeways.

But here's where I start to wonder. How huge is that congestion in real terms? How many person-hours does a fender bender in rush hour traffic actually cost? Would people drive more safely if they knew this?

I also wonder if people realize their driving habits are unsafe. I recently accepted a ride from a friend of mine who I had always considered thoughtful and to have good judgment. She drove like a maniac, leaving no following distance, changing lanes erratically and generally not paying attention to the traffic around her. Of course, nothing bad happened during the ride. We arrived safely and probably got to our destination quite a bit sooner than we would have if I were driving. Because consequences can be so severe for something going wrong on the road (e.g. death), it seems smarter to me to err on the side of caution, but maybe I'm being overcautious.

How severe of a problem is, for example, tailgating? I think it would be neat (and here comes the call for action) to 1) look into the questions about the cost to society of (minor) traffic accidents and 2) develop some kind of simulator for tailgating. The simulator idea could even be kind of fun. Let the user select a speed and following distance. Then display a view out the front of your car of the car in front of you. It could be scaled for distance. After a random, short interval the car in front would suddenly brake. The user would then have to click a button marked "brake." Based on the user's reaction, the simulator would calculate if a collision occurred and then display the personal cost of the accident followed by an estimate of the cost to society of the accident. Of course, if there was no accident the user wins this round and tries again.

A lot of research would need to get done in order to make something like that useful. Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start. Leave a comment if you know the answer to these questions, or if you have a hint where I should look.

Ok, so here are a couple of fun LA moments from my life:

I was going out for breakfast with a couple people on Sunday two weeks ago, but for some reason traffic on Fairfax was moving super slow. It turns out the road was closed and everyone was being diverted. We went up a side-street paralleling Fairfax. As we stopped at a stop sign, I looked over toward Fairfax and saw a giant elephant just kind of walking around in this suburban neighborhood. There was also a film crew.

Also, I just got an email announcing that this Wednesday they are going to be using the building where I work to shoot part of an episode of nip/tuck. Fascinating.

Google whack: cromulent minuend.

So I've got my ubuntu server up and running. So far it's just acting as a file (samba) and print (cups) server for my local network. I got brave, though, and poked through my firewall/router to let ssh traffic through. I registered at no-ip.com and I think I have their ip updater client running, so now I can ssh to benvis.no-ip.org and poke around my files from an offsite computer. I was thinking of trying to setup my laptop to automatically back itself up to the ubuntu server, and I came across a nice how-to backup a windows pc to an ubuntu server over ssh. I'll be working through it later, but I thought I'd let the tubes know what I was up to.

There you have it, folks. Proof positive that spam is evil.

I was involved in the production of this video which was presented at the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program 2007 retreat.

Through no real fault of my own, I am now the owner of an iPod Nano.

Maybe it's because I'm a control freak, or maybe I'm just a bad person, but I don't really like software that Just works^TM. I want to be directing software to work, not watching it just kind of do its own thing. As such, iTunes and me don't get along. A brief googling (they hate it when you do that) turned up no real advice. Pretty much, everyone pats you on the butt (via html, of course) and says don't worry sweetie, it'll be alright. It just works!

So has anyone figured out how to bend the iPod to your will? I am willing to do the learning to make it work, and here's what I want to make it do:

I want to rip cds and put them on my ipod. I want to download podcasts (is that the right term? Npr shows are always saying I can download them somehow). I want to be able to do the downloading and ripping on whatever computer I feel like using without having to mess around. Any suggestions?

I'm in Galway, Ireland. I've been doing a lot of driving (on the left!) lately, but soon we're off to the Aran Islands, where there'll be no driving for me.

I'm leaving for Ireland (the republic thereof, to be specific) tomorrow. I'll be back in two weeks. Leave me a comment and I'll drink an Irish Stout just for you!

So, Brik Wars sounds like a whole lot of fun. Or at least it sounds like a whole lot of attempt to recapture happy moments from childhood. Either way, it makes me want to go out and buy LEGO stuff. Man, now I just need to get my old lego collection out of my Mom's attic. She'd probably appreciate that. And if this doesn't look like fun to you, then you're probably not half the nerd I thought you were:

I haven't been posting about Cal Rugby mostly because I'm no longer in the area. I tried to go to the UCLA tournament, but I'm kind of stupid so I showed up about 10 minutes after the tournament was over. I can, however, offer a brief summary of the season.

Cal took the national championship in a finals match against BYU with a final of 37-7. Cal took the 'Rugby World Cup' (awarded to the overall point leader in two matches against University of British Columbia) with two wins over UBC. Cal lost only one game by only 6 points, and that wasn't against another school but against the 2006 Rugby Super League champions.

In all, it was another excellent season. Goooo Bears!

Do you love to knulla? The owner of this particular automobile probably does.

I saw that outside a burger joint in Santa Monica. Camera phone + bluetooth laptop = win!

A hipster walks into a bar...

From Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade : A Duty-dance with Death

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922 - 2007

This game reminded me of the oldschool game called Harmony. Good times.

I was going to post about Senator Chuck Schumer (D New York) and his imaginary middle-class friends, the Baileys. I got sidetracked, though, by the New Yorker caption contest.

Are you bothered by the radical liberal slant of the media? Or maybe a better question is: are you bothered by the radical liberal slant of people on the internet? People in general? The Bible itself? Well, now there's a place for you to write stuff: behold, Conservapedia. Note most of the touted 4,500 articles are a sentence or less in length and contain no citations (so there's plenty for you to do). For some reason, I'm reminded of Bender from Futurama: "Yeah! Well, I'm gonna go build my own theme park. With blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the park!"

The debate pages are kind of interesting. As an example, the "Should Creationism/Intelligent design be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution in public schools?" debate manages to be pretty even-handed.

As part of the general effort to recruit new students, we had a graduate student research symposium today. After the symposium, we took the recruits on a photo scavenger hunt. It started on USC central campus, but then we hopped on the train up to hollywood and took wacky pictures. I mention this only as a vehicle to brag about my second celebrity siting. In front of the Kodak theater were David Beckham and Posh Spice. Woohoo.

I might even post some of the photos from the scavenger hunt if I can get them from the camera owner.

Update: here's the celebrity photo.

So thanks to Samay and a few other people, I was inspired to head over to LACMA (that's LA County Museum of Art) to check out an exhibit of Magritte and Magritte-inspired work. There was a pretty long line to get tickets (at seventeen bucks for students, 20 for general), and an even longer line to actually get in. this was at, oh, about 1:40 pm. Take note of that time before you click the next link.

About five minutes later, people seemed to be exiting the exhibit en masse. On their lips were incredible rumors of some kind of arthropod invasion. You can imagine what I did upon seeing that lines already close to my threshold for waiting were growing ever-longer in concert with the mass exodus AND the fact that nobody was getting in the door. It's true. I gave up and went to look at art with no waiting and no cost of admission.

Now, today, it's all over the news. Be warned. The ladybugs are back, with a vengeance.

ps I linked to LA Times because they, at least, got the story right. For some reason the A.P. thinks this all happened on Friday.

So I got a Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago. I have, in addition to wii sports, the newest Zelda game, plus two gamecube games. I'm posting about it now because I got it hooked up to these here internets and now have a ravenous hunger for friend codes. I don't even know what that means, really, but it grips me.

Remember, if your clothes catch on fire, Stop, Drop and Roll. Like a cookie monster. Unless you're in hell. I've heard it doesn't work there.

Witness my new-found prowess with photoshop and illustrator! Behold: my gorgeous poster.

Ok, here's the photo of the disasterous failure of the glass martini shaker.

And here are the dire results.

PS Thanks for the image shack idea, Ken. Also, from my initial observations, the bartender does pour into the pint glass first. This is consistent with my hypothesis, although it doesn't rule out many other hypotheses.

Google image labeler is a lot of fun, and it's right up my alley. Try to cooperate with an anonymous stranger on the internet. Also, "accretion" seems to be a popular choice.

And yes, I'm aware I'm voluntarily spending my free time enriching google share-holders. On the other hand, I just noticed I own like, 2% of one share of google.

Bed Bath and Beyond sells a very pretty etched glass martini set. Features include 4 uniquely styled martini glasses, glass olive toothpicks, and a glass shaker that explodes the first time you use it.

That's right. It shattered in my hand, producing minor lacerations in three places on my fingers. It wasn't serious, but it was kind of a downer on new year's eve. I'd stay away from this one. Also, I have pictures. Any recommendations for how to get them up on the webertron?

And a happy New Year.

Merry Christmas to all!

Ok, so I'm at a bit of a loss here, and I'm calling to the ether for help. My grandmother loves to play bejeweled. I want to give her another game for Christmas so she has some options. Can anyone recommend something?

Here's what makes bejeweled good for Grandma: large, colorful graphics (she doesn't see too well), no time limits, works by default, simple game play, flashy noisy rewards for doing well.

So. Any recommendations?

Ok, so:

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]
  1    3941946  Bentomere-Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha ascended to demigod-hood.   283 [284]

I beat nethack. I only cheated a little. Nethack is aggravating and tough to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it's pretty fun. It's free and more than 20 years old: Nethack.org. You'll also want: Nethack spoilers

Happy birthday to me.

This happened on Tuesday. He's in the class I had on Monday. He was acting weird in class on Monday. He interrupted lecture to deliver a rant on how the medical community shouldn't tell him how many hours of sleep he needs (I should mention the lecture was related to sleep research). Also, before class he explained to one of my classmates how most grad students are incompetent and their thesis work is bullshit. Then he handed her a book about the Rastafari movement. He excused himself from class nearly an hour early, telling the instructor that "he had a lot going on" and that he was hungry.

Tonight I went to a Snow Patrol concert (they do the "If I just lay here" song). Rufus Wainwright's sister opened, and then Augustana played ("I think I'll go to Boston"). It was pretty fun. One member of my party pointed out that Zach Braff was in the crowd. I think she saw Mandy Moore with him, but all I saw was some girl next to him. It's LA. It would be weird if the girl next to him *didn't* look like Mandy Moore.

Go go college football. I'm still rooting for the Bears, but now I can be happy about USC winning, too.

In other news, I think I'm going to be working for at least a couple months with a professor named Norberto Grzywacz. Yeah. Everyone just calls him Norberto.

Also, can anyone convince me to join this myspace craze? Frankly, it scares me.

It seems I've become an Angelino. I'm as shocked as you are. Contact me for updated address and phone number stuff, if you want. I'll probably get around to sending out some kind of mass email or something. Also, come visit.

How do you feel? We feel fine. I feel happy when I find something on the web that does something I had never thought of.

Also: The results of the Best Visual Illusion Contest. May also serve as a benchmark for a "can your browser display pretty much any junk format thrown at it?" contest.

And now I share with you, the intertrons, a quote I particularly enjoyed: "Ivan is properly disdainful of the directionless hedonism of the average, unfocussed American teen-ager, but directionless hedonism and lack of focus are powerful forces, and you never know." (from "Title IX Babies", by David Owen in the May 15, 2006 New Yorker).

A confession: I just accidentally cut myself. With my toenail.

Rugby update:

Cal won their first match of the season by landslide. Last weekend was the Pac-10 tournament. Cal also won that, but Washington State gave them a run for their money with an early lead. Cal came back to win 27-6.

The next home game is this weekend: Saturday the 28th 1:00 pm against UC Davis. I hope the weather is better for this one. Gooo Bears!

Also, some of you may know this fine looking fellow:

It seems he scored a try in the recent match.

Here is how to Restore the Show Desktop Icon in Windows XP. It works; I had to do it.

Cal Rugby starts up this weekend. On Witter field at 1:00 pm, Cal takes on Humboldt State. HSU's team should be pretty good. They are in division II, but they lost out on the division II championship by a mere two points. After the HSU game, Cal's second side takes on Maritime Academy.

The Pac-10 rugby tournament is next weekend at UCLA. I may try to head down to check it out. Contact me if you're interested. And R$, contact me anyway, 'cause I lost your phone number.

I have found that exaptation triumvirate is a google whack. yay for me!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! (with associated good tidings to you and your kin)

'Cause I know you love that Chronic
les of Narnia.

It's almost time for Christmas in the Balroom 2005, or XB2k5. I'm in it. It will be fun. Linkage to more information.

It's bad enough going up against number 1. Going up against number 1 and a self-defeating qb, well, that bird's not going to fly. The last five minutes, though, made me wonder about Levy. He played with some authority, and he showed some promise. Of course that fumble (and that almost fumble) didn't look good, but maybe we'll see him at the Big Game.

Since approximately half of the readership here is in to David Lynch, I thought you might be interested. David Lynch is coming to Berkeley on Sunday to talk about consciousness and meditation, or some such hippy nonsense. Anyway, he'll be doing an EEG demonstration to show the brainwaves of someone doing transcendental meditation. I'm into EEG as well as hippy nonsense, so I may end up going.

Here's a link with the details.

Believe your noodly master, hon

Being in power means there's always someone to take the fall.

The article mentions, though, that Cheney is still "under investigation and in legal jeopardy." We'll see where that goes in, what, another two years?

And what a game it was! Cal 42, WSU 38. It was a cliffhanger to the very end. Our defense really stepped up in the fourth quarter, and the offense did it's job. It's true: the fourth quarter's ours.

They did show off some of our weaknesses. WSU found a mismatch in our pass coverage, and they made scoring on us look easy in the third quarter. Their running game was more successful than I would have liked.

From where I was sitting, it looked like the officials made some downright terrible calls. What did it look like from TV land? Despite this, our team pulled out some clutch performances, and we're looking more like a team that's turning around.

And of course, Go Bears!

I just scored two free tickets to the Cal vs WSU game tomorrow. They're in the donor's section right next to the student section. Goooo Bears!

R.I.P Yvonne De Ridder Files 1908(?) to 2005. *

I wanted to believe we really were a great team this season, but I couldn't help but feel that we were a pretty good team getting lucky. I still have hope, but really I'm just hoping for more good luck. I don't see Ayoob making much progress, and we're just being worn down by injury after injury.

Well, at least we can still enjoy demolishing Stanford when the time comes, and anything can hapen in Cal Football.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, here is the answer to what exactly constitutes civilization.
Now that I'm sure you're wondering, I'm posting this so anyone hearing me say "x is civilization" can understand the depth of my dedication to "x"

Riddle me this.
I am trying to come up with a riddle based on the following notion: The better an arbitrator is, the less arbitrary his decisions are. Any help?

Here's my quote for the ages: Functionally organized visual cortex is a concept of post-Ford construction, and it is unlikely to arise in a biological system.

I don't have any evidence for my claim. The only thing I can indicate (and this sort of thing never proves anything) is a lack of evidence for a functionally organized visual cortex.

So this morning I stop by a campus cafe and grab an Odwalla drink. The sign says Odwalla Juice: $2.69. I grab one and head to the checkout. The lady says, "$3.49" and I say, "oh! I thought it was $2.69." She indicates the sign below the one I saw indicating Odwalla Smoothies are, in fact, $3.49. She looks at me and says,

"That's not juice. That's nutrition, baby!"

I've spent a lot of time in the magnet. Fortunately, none of these things have happened to me. [NY Times, reg required]

Photos upcoming. I am not dead. That is all.

Here's the deal: I'm supposed to be in Costa Rica, but I'm in Berkeley instead. Our flight out of oakland to phoenix was delayed to the point that, if we took the flight, we would miss our flight out of phoenix to costa rica. The nice lady at America West's ticketing counter booked us on a Taca airline flight out of San Francisco to Costa Rica. It was a red-eye.

So they put us on a shuttle to SFO, and we got there at around 3:00. The Taca desk doesn't open untill about 9:00 pm. We spent the afternoon in the airport reading Harry Potter.

Once the Taca desk opened, the agent told us there was a problem. The America West agent had booked us on the 1:00 AM for *Saturday* morning. I don't know how she managed to get a confirmation number on a flight that had left 11 hours previous.

Upon hearing this, we troop over to the America West desk (in a whole different terminal) just to find it completely desserted.

At this point it's about 9:30 and Nikki starts trying to get a hold of someone at America West on the phone. After telling the above story no fewer than three times--and it's a confusing story, so it takes a while to tell--the AW people tell us to go home and try again tomorrow.

So 16 hours later, here we are, back in Berkeley, booked on the exact same flights for Sunday.

PS The moral of the story is: don't fly america west.

I'm leaving for Costa Rica tomorrow morning. I'm very excited. The forecast looks a little dreary, but that's what I get for going to the tropics in the rainy season. I'll be sure to post some pictures when I get back. Don't go crazy while I'm gone!

So my boss had me helping him with a presentation he was working on. He wanted to use a frame from a Pogo cartoon (by Walt Kelly, for those who care) in one of his slides. He has some trouble interfacing with the intertron, so he asked me to help him find it. Apparently he had found what he was looking for by using google image search with the term pogo. I did exactly that, and to my horror, the first hit was [nsfw]this picture . That's right. My boss had essentially forced me to look at boobies while at work. I guess my job isn't too bad after all.

An article (by a findlaw writer) on CNN about the legal precedent that may apply to the Karl Rove identity leak case.

If manhattan can do it, so can you!

Ok, ok. I know. You're sick of me posting stuff from Penny Arcade. Well, I simply had to share with you a quote from today's newspost. For the most part, said post is similar to (albeit self-consciously) the impotent whining of a kid who can't play with his toy. The last bit, however, manages to turn into an acute sort of distopian consumerist manifesto:

"We purport to be angry, but it is largely an ethereal anger, suitable for forums on the Intertron. There is no connection between my willingness to purchase shoddy products and the continued production of said products. At any rate, there is no connection that I am able to perceive."

If you haven't heard of Project Gutenberg, I sugest you check it out. It's a huge resource of both free and public domain books, digitized for your electronic consumption. It's also a great resource for when you want to know how many times Shakespeare uses the word 'tup' in Othello, for instance. Just search over the whole text.

Anyway, it seems that in order to speed the digitizing of these books, someone scans all the pages and uploads them. The pages are then OCRed, but they still need to be checked. This is where the Distributed Proofreading system comes in. You go and get a page and check it for errors. Once all the pages are checked, it becomes an official e-book. Hooray!

I'm working on an online GRE prep course. It gives a question, then provides feedback. I got a tough one right, and here's what it said to me: "Wow! The light of a thousand suns is no brighter than you." Kind of effusive, if you ask me. Anyway, the prep is free to UC Berkeley people (and maybe others). Check it out.

My life is full of boxes. Some of the boxes contain memories. Mostly, they contain old phone bills and other junk.

How fast can you clickred? My best time in two tries is 74 seconds. It is supposed to be a demonstration that twitch gamers are better at tracking multiple objects than non-gamers.

I don't remember if I ever posted this, so here you go: Penny Arcade remixed by japanese school children.

You're in Cuba and you want to get to the US. How would you do it? These folks took a taxi cab.

Pretty Pictures make me happy.

Today's Penny Arcade post spoke to me in a way things on the Itarwebs rarely do. The sentence about his refrigerator magnets? Brilliant. The entire post drips with expression. Well, the first sentence in the last paragraph drips with ichor from the typographic morass from which it was dredged. Some random punctuation got stuck in there on the way up. Overall, though, I feel that grammar euphoria is an oft-overlooked topic and deserves more such rhapsodies.

Also, my dream last night was a survival-horror combination of World of Warcraft meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thrilling.

Things that suck:

• My cold-that-won't-go-away is back with a vengeance.
• My car with only 40k miles on the odometer failed its smog check this morning.
• The hard-drive on my computer at work died and I'm still trying to get the data back.
• On top of my general laziness, my cold plus an unusually busy schedule mean my apartment is an absolute sty. gross.

Things that rock:

• I'm learning how to use Linux as a desktop. Yay Knoppix!
• I'm going to Costa Rica in July.
• There's a long weekend coming up.
• WoW is a lot of fun.

My lack of updates has been fuelled by the failure of my commenting system and my bussiness with the Berkeley Opera. Here's a review of our opening night performance. The reviewer is a UC Berkeley alum, and as such was over-kind to the UC Alumni Choir (of which I am a member).

Instead of sets and such, Berkeley Opera hired some artist to put together some video that was projected on screens on the stage. The reviewer expressed pretty well how I felt about the results:

"One set of [projected] images was hackneyed. Macbeth becomes a tyrant and so we saw the familiar faces of twentieth century tyrants, including – surprise – Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld. Does the audience need this kind of prompting? Leave the simplistic parallels and polemics to Bill O’Reilly and radio talk shows."

How to write a lab notebook
Disclaimer: This link is not intended to be entertaining or even interesting to anyone not looking to learn the basics of keeping a lab notebook.

I should have read about quick-release bicycle wheels.

Be advised that blind people can still hear.

What do you call it? I call it "the city". It seems the hippest kids call it "tha 'Sco". The (only very slightly) less hip call it "Frisco". Some feel this isn't the right thing to do. And among those, at least one owns a laundromat.

Wired has a great article about some high-school kids in Arizona who won an undewater engineering contest.

One difficulty they ran into was a leak in their electronics component housing. It was a small leak, so rather than try to fix it, they went for absorption. What absorbs the best? Tampons!

When Luis lowered Stinky into the water for their run, Lorenzo prayed to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn't come up with an appropriate one. The whir of Stinky's propellers brought him back to the task at hand, extracting a water sample from a submerged container.

Yeah, so the reporter probably made the part about praying up, but the tampons were real!

Reefer Madness?

New Scientist has a bit of an article about various studies of the long-term effects of smoking cannabis at a young age. From the article: "those who had smoked cannabis three times or more before the age of 15 were much more likely to suffer symptoms of schizophrenia by the time they were 26 - they had a 10 per cent chance compared with 3 per cent for the general population".

So if any of you are under 15 and don't fancy more than tripling your chances for schizophrenia, stay off the dope! Of course, schizophrenia isn't the only problem for which cannabis use seems to be a risk factor. If you are 'at risk' of psychosis (whatever that means) and you use cannabis, your risk increases dramatically. One study found that "susceptible individuals who avoided cannabis had a 25 per cent chance of developing psychosis. Susceptible individuals who smoked it had a 50 per cent risk". So crazies, stay off the reefer!

Weather Underground

Which method would you choose?

So I didn't realize there was more than one Darkstalkers game, but I was in EB Games the other day, and noticed pre-orders for a new Darkstalkers for the PSP. I checked out the trailer, and one of the playable characters seems to be little red riding hood. Don't worry, your favorite characters will still be on hand. Oh, and it seems little red is packing some heat.

So, I don't know if any of you remember, but I posted some images of my head from an Anatomical MRI. Well, I've been working with this software called FreeSurfer to convert the slicewise images of my brain into a 3d render of my brain. The exciting (and difficult) part of this render is that it knows the difference between white matter (axons and such) and gray matter (cell bodies that do the real 'thinking'). I present you with a couple of views of my brain. (click for the larger version on a yafro page)

Bono: Rock Star? Yes. Head of the world bank?

Ack! I haven't been keeping up with rugby. A quick look at their main page shows everything is going well at 11-0, including a clean sweep of the Texas schools. But here's the big news:
Cal vs Stanford at Cal, Saturday 1:00 pm. I may have another obligation, but if things go according to plan, I'll be there, and I hope you will too.

If you don't know The Perry Bible Fellowship you might want to check it out. Funny. Sick. Maybe not something to peruse at work. I expect at least one of you (I won't say who) probably has at least seen this stuff before.

A bit about what the hell I do at my job:

I'm in charge of a group of 4 undergraduate students (we'll call them my minions) and we're working on a research project. We had our first meeting yesterday, and it went very well. Our project has to do with glare and a glare sensitivity test. As you may surmise from reading that page, there are no well-accepted tests for glare sensitivity in the clinical setting. We think we are on the way to getting something that would work for a clinic.

So what? Of course, that's the question. Well, one group of people who would really like to see an effective glare test are prospective LASIK patients. Some LASIK patients have complained of glare after having the surgery. This test would answer questions like "what are the chances I'd have glare problems?" and "how bad might it be?" I would certainly want to know the answers to those questions before doing LASIK.

So, my new graphics card is working nicely. I've noticed that desktop performance (window scrolling etc) isn't quite as good, but 3D performance is just swell. I haven't had a chance to really see what it can do, but preliminary results are good.

Now that i've got a machine that can handle newer games, do I go for Battlefield Vietnam or Farcry?

So, I took the plunge and got the XFX GeForce 6600gt AGP for about 225 incl. tax. There's a 25 buck rebate, but I almost always fail to get rebates, so we'll see. You can check out a comparative review of a few 6600gt cards from techreport.com for more info about my card. I'll undoubtably be putting rants or raves about it once I get the thing up and running.

If you're interested, I bought the card from ZipZoomFly.com and they've been alright so far. They had the best price and offered free 2-day fedex.

Let's say I'm willing to spend around $200 on games/electronics for the next, say 4 to 6 months. What should I do?

1. Replace my failing graphics card with a new one (~$100 - $160)
2. Buy a (pre-played) X-Box + controller + Halo and Halo2 (~$200)
3. Buy a (pre-played) Gamecube + controller + memory stick + Rogue Squadron (I and II) (~$150)
4. Buy some PS2 games

Going into this I was just planning on getting the graphics card, but then I saw the prices and began to think about what else I could do with that kind of money. Incidentally, the prices on the cards I was looking at last time I brought this up (around October maybe?) have not gone down much at all. The difference is that now my graphics card is dying, so it's a slightly more pressing issue. Anything using DirectX has horrible artifacting, making most of my 3d games kind of un-playable. Advice?

If anyone's interested, here's the perl script I wrote to check through a .pwf file and print the names of any users who are also using their username as a password. It's not documented, but I guess that'll be a feature of version 2.0.

while(<STDIN>){
        chop;
        next unless /^(.+):(.+)/;
        my $name = $1; 
        my $pwd = $2;
        my $salt = substr($pwd, 0, 2);

        if (crypt($name, $salt) eq $pwd) {
                print "$name\n";
        }
}

This iterates through whatever's coming in on stdin (so call this like perl foo.pl < bar.pwf) one line at a time. It chops the newline char off the end then skips the line unless it matches the pattern of one or more characters then a colon then one or more other characters. It then checks if the username encrypts to the encrypted password. If it does, the name gets printed to stdout. ta da!

Because penny arcade is down, here's the penny arcade remix project!

Argh, there's a browser problem out there. It affects every browser except Internet Explorer (and Lynx, as it turns out). To check it out, go over to schmoo and click the links. If the address bar says paypal.com but you're obviously not at paypal, I'd recommend not clicking on links to get you anyplace important until this is resolved. Really, you should type in by hand or use a bookmark to get anywhere important anyway. By important I mean anything someone would want to fool you about, such as money.

Of course, relatively speaking, I'd say you're still better off not using IE unless you're willing to wait around for Microsoft to tell you about flaws with their product.

Ok you geeks, I hate to admit it, but, much to my chagrin, I've discovered that Perl is fun. I just used it to parse a file (much like a .htaccess file) containing "username:encrypted_password" and test to see if the username was the same as the (unencrypted) password. (and no, i'm not breaking into anything, i'm supposed to be the admin for the system in question)

What astonishes me is how easy it was. It didn't take much work at all, and as I learn more about perl, I see how I could have done it even easier with built-in shortcuts and regexps.

The reason I'm astonished is because I used to hold a strong prejudice against perl. For those wondering why level-headed me would be so prejudicial, here's a bit of sample code I randomly grabbed from here
$drw =~ m/.*exception occurred:.*?pid=(\d+).*?\s+\1\s(.*?)\n/s;
Yeah. That's not real pretty. Perl jockeys seem to love code like that, and, quite frankly, it scares me. (and no, I still am not quite sure what that line is doing). Anyway, who knows? Maybe I'll be writing stuff like that in a few weeks. I kind of hope not.