Father

I just spoke to a very good childhood friend of mine, and he tells me he's going to be a father in June. That's awesome! I wish him all the luck in the world. Not that I'd like to be in his shoes, but what the hell, if he likes it, then I'm all for that!
Also, I have another very good friend who's going to be a mom somewhere in mid-December. Also very cool.
Not only is it cool because my friends are becoming parents, but it's also cool because it makes me feel so young!

Personally, I don't see myself becoming a father ever. EVER. I really really don't like kids.

Almost Shameful

I really really like UK/happy hardcore with vocals.
When I'm just popping myself, in my room, in my car, on my iPod.
However, when I listen to this stuff with other people in the room, even people who actually do like this kind of music, I feel like I'm 16 and trying to justify my taste in music to someone who obviously dissaproves. It's a weird and horrible feeling.

I showed one of my roommates the wonderful world of trance the other day. Recommended some tunes he could listen to. Dunno if he'll fall for it the same way I have, but that remains to be seen I guess.

Going to England tomorrow. Going to be a blast!

On Lumberjacks

I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK
I sleep all night and I work all day.

Chorus:
He's a lumberjack and he's OK
He sleeps all night and he works all day.

I cut down trees, I eat my lunch
I go to the lavatory.
On Wednesdays I go shopping and have buttered scones for tea

Mounties:
He cut down trees, he eat his lunch
He goes to the lavatory.
On Wednesdays he go shopping and has buttered scones for tea.

Chorus:
He's a lumberjack and he's OK
He sleeps all night and he works all day.

I cut down trees, I skip and jump
I like to press wild flowers.
I put on women's clothing and hang around in bars.

Mounties:
He cuts down trees, he skips and jumps
He likes to press wild flowers.
He puts on women's clothing and hangs around in bars?!

Chorus:
He's a lumberjack and he's OK
He sleeps all night and he works all day.

I cut down trees, I wear high heels
Suspenders and a bra.
I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear papa!!

Mounties:
He cuts down trees, he wears high heels?!
Suspenders...and a bra?!...

Just the Lumberjack:
I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear ma'ma!!


WATCH

Who is responsible?

Why do I hear things like "why didn't you talk to me last night?", or "why didn't you call?"?
Since when it is my implied responsibility to make sure I speak to everyone who wants me to talk to them? Has it not dawned on these people that maybe they should come up and talk to me?
Sure, when I'm doing my best to avoid people, this comment might be justified, but there's got to be an equal responsibility built in here somewhere. If you want to talk to someone or if you want someone to talk to you, you are just as responsible for making that happen as the other person.
Sure, I'm generally the guy who calls people, or who initiates contact, so to speak, but just because that's how it usually is, doesn't mean that I don't want to be approached by people.
In fact, if people took it upon themselves to be a little proactive every once in a while, instead of waiting for other people to do everything for them, people wouldn't be so disappointed all the damn time.

If there's something out there that you want, it's up to you to seize it. Don't ever expect anybody to do anything for you. You are in charge of your own life!

Actually, there's a pretty good quote that goes with this, from Ferris Buellers Day Off:

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it. /Ferris Bueller

Southern Comfort

Man, a whiskey and coke would taste really good right about now...
It's like the taste rolls off my tongue.

Prediction

If you tell someone about a prediction you have made about them, does that make it more or less likely to happen? Especially if it's something out of their control? Even more so if they don't care if it happens or not, or are equally satisfied with the outcome of the prediction.
I have made a prediction about a friend of mine, that I don't much want to happen, but I don't know if I should tell, for fear that it might interfere with the prediction itself.
I should just write it down, dated, somewhere, so that I can show afterwards that I had predicted it.
But then again, if you predict enough things, some of them are bound to happen, and that doesn't really make you Nostradamus, it just means that you have a lively imagination (and, to some extend, have way too much time on your hands).

I've written about this very prediction before. It's based on statistics, and it involves having a connection to me, but for fear of jinxing it, or letting it slip, as it were, I will not reference to it here.
It is the prediction that shall not be named!

Now, after getting that off my chest, I shall return to my studies.

Korea

I've noticed that I have regular visitors from Korea in my stats. How cool is that!
Normally, it's just the Dutch people around here, and my Swedish friends who read this thing.
Make yourself known!

I see a lot of "Universiteit Twente, Netherlands" in the stats, for obvious reasons, hehe.

Stalker

People leave way too much information lying about the internet. I mean sure, there's a reason that they put it there, but with just very few pieces of information, anyone can dig up and make whatever use they want of a persons complete personal information. Maybe you don't get credit card statements, but you can find EVERYTHING.
When I do find people who I know, I'm afraid that I might come across as a stalker for finding all this information on them, but it's there for the taking, and at least I don't have a malicious intent.

This girl I'm talking about, whom I spent a lovely afternoon with btw, has given me her first name, the fact that she has skype, and her age. Armed with that, I could mine the internet for information about her and her friends. It's scary sometimes. I am aware of the trace I leave, because I check it regularly, but people should google themselves every now and then, to see what information they are leaving behind, and if it's actually something they want to share with the world.

On a not completely unrelated note, I had an epiphany today. I guess it's information that I've always known, but I realize that the people you don't immediately get comfortable with or get along with, very rarely turn out to be people that something interesting is going to happen with.
It doesn't matter if it's your future girlfriend, or just someone who's a good friend, if you don't hit it off comfortably in conversation from the get-go, it's doomed to fail. Not saying that it might not still fail, which it could, but these people that you see and you've known for a while, that you haven't instantly gotten to know really well, are never going to be "it" for you.

Exceptions to the rule, of course, but in general, I think this is the case. Based on my own experience, people who I've thought are nice, and in the case of girls, pretty or cute or whatever, but that I haven't really hit it off with, never amount to anything. Like my roommates for instance. I got along great with them from the first moment I set foot in this house, and now we're like best friends.

And girls, don't even get me started. People who I find cute, and can maybe have an awkward stuttering conversation with, NEVER, infallibly, work out in the long run.
For me, it's got to be great at the start, otherwise it'll never survive.
From now on, this is what I'll look for. I know myself better, and with that information, I can better predict the outcome of any given situation.

I was going to include a classic Sun Tsu quote about knowing things, but I realized that framing my potential new best friends in the guise of Sun Tsu's "enemies" might not be a good thing, hehe.

Drunk Blogging

NO!
No no no no no!

Sucky Sucky

This day sucks. It really does. It starts by me waking up and not at all wanting to get out of bed.
I keep nodding of during my lecture. I have a lunch meeting that doesn't really yield anything for me (other than seeing this really cute girl, who I do nothing about). I come home, expecting myself to get some reading done for ANY of my courses, really, and I don't manage to read a single page.
I also can't bring myself to do something else either, because I'm guilting myself into not having fun because I haven't done enough work.
The essays and stuff that I have to read are fascinating, but I just can't bring myself to actually read them. I have no idea why. It really, truly sucks.
And to top it all off, I've had a massive headache all day.
Not even music sounds good to me.
Welcome to my own personal hell, and it's going to last until AT LEAST April...

There is the option of getting wasted tonight with a shitload of dutch people, and going to a rave or a housewarming party tomorrow, but I'm not sure I'll do any of them. Maybe I'll just hide under my pillow until the sun comes out again. I don't even want to write code, that's how miserable I am.

Maybe some light therapy to fix my ailments. Or some ecstasy perhaps?
Doesn't last long enough anyway.

Fuck it..

Eagerness

Nobody is eager anymore.
People don't get excited about things. There's no childlike glee from adults with regards to things to come.
Am I the only one who gets excitd about things anymore?
It's like everybody I talk to have just given up and accepted the fact that their being hearded like sheep through life.
I can't remember the last time someone came up to me with excitement and anticipation in their voice and told me about something nice that was going to happen, or that they wanted to happen.
People don't "want" anymore.

Maybe it's because of the fact that if people don't want things, they're never dissapointed when they don't get them. I want things all the time. Not material things, but I want events to happen, I want to see the people I like and have fun. These are things I want all the time, and sometimes I get dissapointed when they don't happen. I don't EVER hear this from anybody else, and I don't perceive that anybody else has these feelings either.

It's a sad state that humanity is in.

Or maybe I'm just tired of always being the active one. I talk to people all the time to get them to come to parties or go out or do whatever. I can't remember the last time anybody asked me this. Sure, I suppose it could be because nobody wants me there, but I doubt that's it.
People just don't get engaged in their lives anymore, and it's sad. I'm sad for them. I'm sad for me. I'm sad for all of us...

If you think that this applies to you, then try it. Try being eager and excited and happy about your next encounter with someone. Try to make that person feel like you are actually passionate about something. It doesn't matter what it is. Just to show the rest of the world that there's actually a flame of life burning inside that husk that most people call a body.
Most people classify themselves as humans.
I'm going to take a page from Korben Dallas and classify people as meat popsicles, until things change around here...

Engineering Sleep

Today I stumbled across an article about using drugs other than caffeine, amphetamines, cocaine and their ilk to change your circadian rhythm. This article from newscientist.com talks about a handful or drugs who may or may not become my favourite drug in the years to come. Who needs sleep, right?

I don't know if I've mentioned this other article previously or not, but it's a pretty good one, and it touches on some of the same subjects: 11 steps to a better brain. (Also from newscientist.com, I'll be damned!) It's a bit older, but still a very good article.

For someone who thinks that the day is about 8-12 hours too short, this comes as great news!

Fruitfucker Prime

SWEET FANCY MOSES: 6 foot wide Norwegian King Crabs
Ok, so the crabs seem to be Russian, but they are showing up in Norway...

Project Terminated

I just sent an email to my advisor about how the project that I was supposed to work on this semester is technically infeasible, and that I would have to stop working on it, if it couldn't be turned in to something else. I really hope that we can turn it in to something else, because I'd love to do project work instead of class work (even though the classes I have for this semester are really interesting).

I hate to see things turn like this, but I think that had we both done the appropriate research before embarking on this, we would have seen that it's damn near impossible to do without throwing heaps of money on it. Especially since the companies that supply solutions for this kind of thing charge everywhere between USD 10k to 70k (Yes, 70000 US Dollars. It boggles the mind)

I guess I'll have to make do with my 3½ course load for this quartile, and see what shows up next semester.

Comments

Why is it that C-coders don't know how to comment code. Almost every piece of source code written in C/C++ is been utterly without comments. MAYBE they'll put a line or two at the head of a function, but after that, it's completely devoid of comments.
Compare this to Perl coders who will deliver an app of 200 lines, where 150 will be very explicit comments.
I know that when you've had your head in a certain piece of code for a long time that you know if inside and out, but when you open source code, you need to make some kind of effort to help others understand what you do. This might not sit well with the elitist jackass crowd, but to you I say this; fuck off!

I can understand what something does without comments, but it helps me to get quirks and odd design choices if there are comments explaining what happens.

Reading Linux kernel sources to figure out how to manipulate a device at the lowest lever might sound like a fun thing to do, but it's not that exciting when there are no comments.

Dead End

Would you start on a project if you could prove that the basis of the project made it impossible to pull off?
I'm in, what seems like, such a project right now. The project is based on not false premises, but more like hopes that didn't come true. I'll do my best to continue on the project and see if I can't find ways around this, but it's looking very dark at the moment.
It's a shame, because I think it could have been a cool project, and my supervisor (who happens to be the same age as me, go figure) is a really cool girl.
We'll see what develops I guess. Quite literally.
If you have any knowledge of bluetooth, I could use the help!

The Wave of the Future

So, I guess I'm using the new blogger beta now. Dunno if it's actually visible, I guess I'll see when I publish this post.
A company called Mobience has come out with a concept that I think is going to revolutionize mobile input.
It's called MobileQWERTY, and I think it's a really cool thing, and I wonder why people haven't thought about it before. The basic letters-to-digits setup that phones have now is pretty good, but as can be expected from a first draft, it certainly has performance issues. I think that if I was given the chance, I'd change to MobileQWERTY in a heartbeat.

Also, yay for the new labels system! I doubt that I'll use it, but it might be cool. I know a lot of people who would.

Spiderman 3

The new trailer for spiderman 3 is out. Looks pretty good to me!

Watch

Visit to Utrecht

Yesterday saw a visit from tons of tiny SMIT people to the city of Utrecht in Holland.
We got on the train at 11 in the morning, and proceeded to fuck about on said train for 2 hours, until we reached our destination.
Utrecht really looks like a nice city. It's got these former store rooms just on the canals, that have now been turned into stores, homes and restaurants. Very shaggadelic, if I do say so myself.
We went on a boat tour that took us around the old canal, and showed us some nice parts of the city. We, unfortunately, didn't get to walk around that much in the city to look at it from a pedestrian point of view, but people tell me that the canals are what you are there to see anyway, so I guess we came out ahead.
We also climbed the 468 (or so) steps to the top of Holland's highest church tower. Standing at 95 meters above the ground, I really got to work on my issues with falling. The stairs were kind of a bitch, but not so much because there were many of them, but the fact that the top most 40 meters took place in a really really small spiral. Walking up was bad, walking down was terrible. I felt like I was going to either fall out of every window I saw, or fall down the stairs and take the entire group with me. Luckily, none of those things happened, and I found myself safe back on the ground.

While most people left sometime after dinner, 7 brave people defied the weather and stuck around to get hammered. The concept was, drink as much as you can, so that we're still drunk on the train home. It worked. As I was getting off the train back in Enschede, I was getting pretty sober. I figured "hey, it's just 2 o'clock, I'm going to call my house mates and see what's up". Of course, I didn't, but went straight home, to find an extremely empty house.
In retrospect, I should have called them, because at around 5.30, when I was trying my best to get some sleep, the entire house came home, and made it extremely hard for me to sleep, so on came the clothes, and down to the kitchen I went.

All in all it was a good day and a good night. I do believe that I'll go back to Utrecht, but I think I'll wait until spring, when I can walk around properly and not have to look at the rotting flora everywhere.

New blog to read

As the topic says, I need a new blog to read. Something interesting, something that updates more or less daily (or preferably several times per day) and something that won't get boring really quickly. I read a bunch of webcomics, and a couple of links beside those on the right here, but I need more. My boredom states that I should read more, and I don't much want to read the assigned stuff for this exam. Not that it's not interesting, because it is, it really is, but right now, it's not very entertaining.

Any anybody has any suggestions, drop me a line!

(Also, you'd think that bloggers spell checker would understand the word "blog", but apparently not...)

ioFTPD

So, I guess ioFTPD was opensourced under the GPL.

The sourceforge site can be found here. The announcement for iniCom Networks can be found here.
This will be of interest to very few people I guess, but I have written software that works with ioFTPD, so I find it somewhat interesting.

From what I hear though, ioFTPD doesn't have the same market penetration as its rival glftpd. Granted, ioFTPD is a Win32 application, while glftpd is a pure UNIX variant. glftpd is not open source though.

The software I've written that works with both these two servers (and any other server that implements the ftp protocol) is called cubnc, and can be found on sourceforge.net here

It's going to be fun to download ioFTPD and see what their code is like. I don't know what language it is written in, but I'm sure I'll find some of it interesting.
I hope that this spurs the glftpd devs to release glftpd to the public as well, but in all honesty, I think that might be as probable as hell freezing over.

Letter Opener

BUNNY!

The Last Page of the Internet

This is the last page of the internet. You've reached the end, now go outside and play with your friends!

I miss the days when I could just log on to the internet and surf around in wonder and amazement about all the cool things. Right now, when I've finished my 30, or so, minutes of reading news, comics and blogs, I have nothing. Waiting for unsolicited email doesn't get me there either.
I know I have other things that I can entertain myself with, but the internet, as such, has lost most of it's appeal. At least the www-part.

I have 6 documents in front of me in acrobat reader that I need to read for my exam tomorrow, but I'm not feeling very inspired or enthusiastic about it at all.
To top it all off, it feels like I'm coming down with a cold. All the symptoms are there, PLUS the dryness of winter is wreaking havoc on my skin and, more importantly, on my nose. Getting impromptu nosebleeds 5 times a day is not my idea of a good time.

*cough*

I've spent the better part of the morning watching the midterm election coverage on CNN, and a biker build-off on discovery. I liked discovery a lot better before the age of "American chopper". Back then it was actually interesting content. Television in the age of Pimp My Ride is definitely going to hell in a hand bag.
I'm just happy the idiot-box is downstairs, so I don't idly watch it while I'm sitting at my computer. I'm passive enough as it is. Having a cold also isn't doing much for my happiness. Right now, as far as I'm concerned, the whole world should just be sucking on the barrel of a shotgun with their toe on the trigger. Why the HELL don't humans come with a better immune defense system. It's not like we're not exposed to these diseases YEAR AFTER YEAR!...
You'd think that we would have developed a way to cope with them by now. I guess I should be happy I'm not flat out dying from this.

Exam time tomorrow. The last one for this period. I'm getting royally tired of exams. Why do I even need grades? Can't I just get a certificate of participation or whatever, and then it'll be up to me whether I learn from the experience or not. Handing in assignments is ok, because it's a learning process, but this now-or-never, no questions, high pressure exam situation is just bullshit.

I realize that I may have been misspelling "pressure" as "preasure" all my life, but at least I can own up to my mistakes and learn to live with them.

For a boyish finish of this, I leave you all with a hilarious fart joke. (girl or boy, you really should watch this!)

(I'm sure glad that this thing has a spell checker...)

Travel

London, here I come!
Every time I am there, it feels like I've set foot in a damn 3rd world country. If it hadn't been for my wonderful friends, I wouldn't see a real reason to go there.
But, since one of my best friends lives in London (outside London actually, in Reading), I'm going there, and it's going to be a blast!
I'm scheduled to fly out from Amsterdam on the 30:th of November, and then back on the 4:th of December.

Speaking of travel and third world countries, I saw Borat!: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan yesterday with a friend. Normally I don't like these types of movies, but I must say that Borat had me laughing my ass off. If you haven't seen it already, you should!

Industry

I followed a wikipedia link today from someone's presentation online.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288

There's something perverse and exciting about machines of this size. It's a no-holds-barred, evolution-could-never-come-up-with-something-like-this, freak of nature.
It's a machine that is 240 meters long and 96 meters high. Can you even perceive the sheer size or a man made moving object of that size? It boggles the mind!
13500 tones. Comparing it to 1350 cars just doesn't seem to do this justice, because just the fact that 1350 cars boggles the mind too.

Man is the master of nature, and not the other way around. It's so clear to me now.

Neil Gaiman

I don't normally do quotes, but I ran in to these just now, and damn if they aren't true!

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ’maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
-Neil Gaiman

“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”
-Neil Gaiman

I can't say I've ever read anything by the man, but my friends tell me that he's the shit. Maybe I should collect a top-3 or something of his books and get readin. Who knows, I might just become a fan.

Tetris

A BBC documentary about Tetris, one of my all time farvourite games.

From google video:

A hard to find documentary about Tetris and its creator Alexey Pajitnov. Also covers the rivalaries between Nintendo and Atari and the absurdities of buying copyrights for software from a country that doesn't believe in property, much less intellectual property. Ultimately, a great documentary about a very important game.

Watch the video

Utube sues YouTube

How could you possbily hold someone accountable to someone ELSE's stupidity?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. They should make stupidity more painful...

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/02/0357210

I'm so happy don't live in a country where these things happen!

Unique Identifier

When I got on the train for Amsterdam (again) yesterday, I became intently fascinated by my fingers. Thumb, fingers and their fingerprints, to be exact. I know how we have unique parts of our bodies like fingerprints, retinas, irises and DNS, but what I don't know is WHY.
DNA has a clear reason, but fingerprints? What mechanism of evolution saw it fit to equip us with unique identifiers that left a trace on whatever we touch. How was it that when this mutation surfaced, that beings with it fared better than beings without it?
And what the hell is it for? Very few people use it for proper authentication. It's almost exclusively used to identify people when some crime has been committed. If the police didn't have the ability to use fingerprint evidence to solve crime, they'd be crippled beyond compare. I'm not saying taking advantage of biological evolution is bad, everybody does it, all the time, but the police got a much larger helping of good luck than other people.
This is not an anti-police rant though, it's more of a reflection about how our fingerprints came to be. Fascinating and dangerous stuff.

On the train FROM Amsterdam, however, it got stuck with a bunch of singing and screaming football fans. At that point, I wish my body came without fingerprints, so that I could have happily strangled each and every last one of those loudmouth motherfuckers. I don't care what team you root for, do it when I'm not around! When you're at a game, scream all you want, but don't try to out-scream the train on the other side of the yard on the way home. When you are part of civilization, there are some things you have to do, and one of those is show some goddamn respect for your fellow man. Especially at 2 am in the morning. STFU!

Amsterdam <3

Ahh, Amsterdam, such a lovely city.
Even though my first 5 minutes in the city saw one of the worst hailstorms I have ever witnessed, closely followed by the wind uprooting a massive tree just outside the central station, I instantly fell in love with the city.
The weather was crap, but the city took me into it's arms.
Not only was it a nice city, but I went there to visit one of the cutest people it has been my pleasure to know. She's a great friend, and we had a blast spending the day together. It turns out that she's moving down here on a permanent basis. Happiness all around!
I didn't get very many pictures of the city, since the weather and the light was against us, but I am going back there tomorrow to meet another friend, so hopefully the weather will be nicer to me then.
On the train back, I thought of a bunch of really profound things to blog about, but I have completely forgotten what they were. I need to start writing this stuff down.

Jelly

Why is there no jelly candy in the house when I need it. Here I am, hungry for something, but it's way too late to make food, and it's way to annoying to eat cookies, what with all the stuff that gets in your teeth, but you're still a bit peckish (and drunk., I must admit).
This is where jelly-based candy would be perfect. Any candy at all really, as long as it's not chocolate.

Tomorrow and the day after is Amsterdam day. I do hope that I can find a place to sleep in Amsterdam tomorrow night, so I don't have to go home to Enschede just to go back to Amsterdam on Thursday again...
We'll see what happens.