Archive for the ‘xkcd’ Category

Barack Obama

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

You should all head over to blag.xkcd.com and read his latest post. Yes that is right all six of you can make a difference next week. Well, except for the one who’s not voting, and the 3 of you in Ohio who have to wait until March 4th. That leaves 2 of you, humm, did I miss anyone? While you’re at it (and while i’m on this soap box, here’s a little bit from a conservative point of view that was on digg. I didn’t watch the video (follow the link) he mentions yet, but I probably will.

Since I’m already making a political post today, and there is FISA/Protect America Act stuff going down, another link for updates on that.

The Results are In

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

and in 2007 Paul once again topped the list of people I talk to on aim. One advantage of keeping logs of every aim conversation I have is that I can pull out fun but meaningless statistics and blog about them.

The results from 2007

Rank Bytes Name 2006 Rank
1
4261221 Paul
1
2
2088617 Kelly
3
1782259 OSU Paul
7
4
950551 Josh
2
5
871658 Jed
10
6
682480 Beth
3
7
615125 Rob
8
8
294982 Matt
6
9
268387 George
11
10
247025 My Parents
12

Lets compare the 2007 results to the all time list:

Rank Bytes Name 2007 Rank
1
14142297 Paul
1
2
9390234 Beth
5
3
4807056 George
9
4
4350718 Josh
4
5
4167148 OSU Paul
3
6
2956684 Matt
8
7
2457418 Kelly
2
8
2282025 Christy
9
2067038 Jessica
10
1839941 My Parents
10

The Moral of this story is that Paul better watch out or least he lose his top spot in 2008. Although, Beth and Paul’s all time placements are not yet in jeopardy everyone else may need to take notice. These are the numbers for the last quarter of 2007:

Rank Bytes Name
1
1627836 Kelly
2
1131700 Paul
3
250167 Josh

The last time Paul didn’t take the top prize for a quarter of the year was Q2 (April – June) 2005:

Rank Bytes Name
1
843586 Josh
2
701362 George
3
640133 Paul

Anyways, hope you enjoyed the random charts and tables. Making all of this reminds me of the girl’s comment in frame 4 of xkcd 314. Oh and the bash script that grabs all the data (sorry for the bad formating):

match="2007-*"; for f in `ls /home/liryon/.purple/logs/aim/liryon`; do du -scb home/liryon/.purple/logs/aim/liryon/$f/$match | grep total | sed -e "s/total/$f/"; done 2> /dev/null | grep -v aolsystemmsg | sort -n -r | head -n 10

A Little More xkcd

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007

On September 14th, Randall Munroe decided to go kite flying again, despite that he still hasn’t posted pictures from the last time, and his timing circuit was broke. The real reason for the event was that a girl from back in Virgina had come to see him that weekend, and they needed something to do. Wow it must be cool to have people, including me, drop what they are doing to go hang out with you and your friend. This was part of my really busy week, possibly the busiest yet in Boston. But hey, 3 dinners out in one week all with different people is the way I want every week to be, anyways there are some pics and some stories to share. Click on the picture for the story.


Listen to the Wind Chasing the Tail

Catch the Kite and Win A Prize Wait, I drew That…. and That

  • Also, now that there are like a million pictures of him on the web I don’t get to feel exclusive for being able to pick him out of a crowd. I do like how my video of the countdown tracks his entrance when people on most of the other videos are asking him to show himself. I do feel that I should have said, “hey Randall” when he passed, not “How’s it going,” just to alert those who could hear me. You know, provide a service and contribute knowledge wiki style.
  • I also don’t get to daydream about being confused for him just because I’m walking around MIT with a kite. Not that that would have ever happened. No sarcasm, it really never happened, I am not that cool.

xkcd Meetup – Dream Girl 2007

Monday, September 24th, 2007

This Sunday was Spetember 23, 2007, so naturally I was here:


View Larger MapXity of Kambridge, CD

And so were hundred of other loyal xkcd fans from all over the world. There was a guy from Russia, and from The United Kingdom. My friend and board gaming buddy, Post, hosted a group of his friends from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, and even my college and robotics buddy Josh drove up from Jersey to attend. Oh, and collect on one of his two free meals because the Red Sox came up short against the Yankees. At least the Sox have locked a playoff spot. Ok back on topic.

Me with the Cleveland Crew
Post, and his crew arrived shortly after Josh and I did. They planned a head and brought stuff, including two of the best costumes there. They also brought a conversation topics list, and a poster for people to sign. They eventually
gave the poster to Randall (that’s the poster back there to the left getting signed.)
, who promised to scan it in in high res.
Other Impressions
There is just so much to talk about, I’ll be telling stories from this weekend for a while, but I want to hit on some big things I can think of now:

  • There were a lot of hot girls[1, 2] [3, 4, 5] [6] there, hot nerdy, possibly lesbian girls. Well the last part is wishful, but I did read on the comment white boards that “The Dream Girl went home with a Wellesley Woman.” I mean, maybe not a lot compared to the general population, but compared to the expected audience, wow. Also of interest is how little photographic evidence of this there is, its like there was something more exciting that hot girls there ;-).
  • I didn’t get anything signed, I didn’t bring anything to get signed, and random bits of signed paper, well those seem lame, but I did stand in mob (thats kind of like line) to get Cory Doctorow’s blog signed.
  • Afterwards Josh, Post, his friends, me, and some random other people, including the guy from the UK went and had dinner downtown at Quincy Market. This was my first time eating there. I got some New England Clam Chowder, which was not as good as it should have been in the touristy part of town. The guy from the UK, Alex, was interviewed, and had his musings included in this article on the event. I was also interviewed, the reporter girl was riding in the subway car with us down to dinner, at least as far as Harvard Square. My contribution was a musing on “where are we going to do this next year!”

I guess that is it for now, nothing is sparking any stories. I did take some video’s while I was there, which went a long way towards filling up my 1GB SD card. The best of them are up on you tube now, and embedded below:

Randall Munroe Enters and the Dream Girl Countdown
Sorry, this one is a bit sloppy with the camera work.

Xkcd Meetup Conversation Game

Randall Munroe on being a Roboticist
This one follows the previous one by maybe 10 seconds.

Randall Munroe on Early Advertising for Xkcd
Later on, the crowd has gone down a lot so now you can hear him talk about interesting stuff

Fires and Kites

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

Today was a different in a good way day. There was an actual fire at work, something small in one of the semiconductor labs in my building. It was a bit strange, the first fire truck arrived, and then a few minutes later a second one, and then a third. By the time the third one showed up 10min into the ordeal we knew it was not a drill or a farce. The whole thing took maybe an hour and a half, but it canceled the 2:00 meeting that I decided I should goto. That, of course, got me off the hook that I personally hooked myself on, and it was a good thing.

When I got back to the office there was an e-mail about flying kites with camera’s over Boston with the guy from xkcd. Which, having missed the first time around, I was determined to goto. I ended up driving all the way to campus (default reference for the word campus has been changed to MIT’s main campus; consider this the memo), which violates my rule of not driving closer to the city than my apartment. But I was running late as it was and it was hot and humid and unhappy out so I drove, which also meant I wasn’t conspicuously carrying my acrobatic kite on the T (which I would totally do now, just hours later). It took me too long to find a parking spot where I could reasonably believe that I would not be towed or ticketed, but it was worth it as my car was still there when I went back for it 5 hours later. Not 5 hours of flying kites, a group from the kite flying went to dinner and then to play guitar hero at an MIT dorm. Not my first time in one, see the fireworks post. But this time I met a lot of new people, including some of those responsible for the hack at the xkcd @ MIT talk. Everyone was quite friendly, and well I’m sure I’ll be wishing I’d even attempted to goto MIT for undergrad if I hang out with MIT undergrads any more. I think I can deal with that.

So the kite flying, well I showed up a bit late, but just in time for writing on the kite in case it was lost, complete with URL, email, and of course a comic, of a kite being flow with the URL and email on it. On the first test flight the kite crashed into Simmons Hall, but it was able to relaunch from there with only some manipulation of the line and was safely recovered. That building, by the way, uses 1 foot square windows to make it seem huge and far away, its a very interesting illusion and it works well. Meeting Randell was cool, I didn’t actually meet him at the MIT talk because, I was rather busy that day, and he was swamped with adoring fans. Today he was really interested in meeting everyone.

Eventually there will be pictures at http://xkcd.com/kite/ from this run of the kite. As you will see from the pictures the kite few much father into Cambridge than it did last time. By all estimates the kite got higher than the first attempt, and definitely more string was let out. In the end it crashed onto the track/football field which was out of sight from the athletic fields, but recoverable!

Next time they go kite flying, which may be this weekend if it occurs before I have to leave for Vegas for work on Sunday, I am going to be flying my little acrobatic kite, that I keep in my car at all times. Yes that’s right I get to spend my birthday in Vegas on the office dime, score! Oh, or maybe you found it strange that I keep a kite in my car at all times, but why would that be strange? I really need to decide how I plan to protect the kite for my trip (via airplane) to the Outer Banks in a few weeks, any suggestions? This post really feels like I could just do a lot of free association and delve off into many other topics, but I think I’ll just save those for another time.

Familar Music

Monday, July 2nd, 2007

My new computer is so quiet that I can now spy on my bedroom window neighbors’ tv viewing habits. Well just the audio portion, which is currently playing some very familiar sci fi and/or science documentary music that I can’t quite place. It could be X-files, it could be something by Caral Sagan, it could be something else. If only I was enough of a music person to be able to turn the tune in my head into notes so there’d be some possibility of figuring it what it is! Or I could just ask them through the window, but that seems creepy. Why isn’t there an xkcd about this kind of thing?

In other news: Turns out that the loudest part of my old machine was the 13Gb hard drive I was using for the OS. Its been chugging along without a hitch since 1999 so I guess it’s earned the right to be loud. I’ve successfully saved all of my data from my 1 year old dying drive at this point, RMA request here I come. *Insert comment about just not making them like they used to here.*Update: I have confirmed that it was indeed music from the X-files, which, I never watched, and is not on my to get/watch list, but somehow I know the music.

More xkcd @ MIT Videos

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Exploring the xkcd forums with some down time I discovered that I missed Randell Flying a kite with a ridiculously long string over Boston while I was on my trip. I would have likely missed it even if I wasn’t on the trip as I don’t check the forums, well at all, but maybe I should. I definitely think I would much enjoy meeting some local xkcd fans, as I really need to meet more people around here. Images from the kite are in.

Anyways I found a link from the forum of some more, but still not complete videos from the xkcd @ MIT talk.

New Computer

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

It is unfortunate but I will soon be availing myself of Seagate’s wonderful 5 year warranty on one of my 500gb media hard drives. It has not failed completely yet, but it is having read/write errors when I put it under the stress of doing video compression. This is, as we say in the OMG my data is not backed up business, a bad thing. Luckily, these errors are being recorded into the drives error monitoring hardware, so it should be easy to prove the drive is malfunctioning and get an in warranty replacement.

Of course first I need to back up the data on the drive. The drive is 1/2 of my 1Tb media partition which has ~750Gb used on it. Because of the way its setup i have to back up all of the partition without using the other 500gb drive, a tall order that my ancillary drives simply cant handle. They total only 493Gb. So I need to buy new drives, thats ok, 750Gb’s just dropped to $200 and 500gb’s dropped to $100. So I’ll just get some more $500’s as thats a $0.066 price per GB difference (which adds up). Problem is that I haven’t gotten a new computer since the Athlon XP went out of style. That was before the rise of SATA over PATA. Now I could buy 2 500gb PATA drives and use them in my current system, but that path prevents me from future upgrades and locks me into the old stuff. As it turns out older stuff gets more expensive, so thats a bad thing. So that means that now is the time to upgrade and start buying SATA drives. So I’m building a new system, dual core, and all. The components:

ECS KA3 MVP Motherboard MSI NX7100GS-TD128E GeForce 7100GS AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+(65W) Windsor 2.0GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor

Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Seagate 500GB Serial ATA/300 16MB Buffer ST3500641AS-RK Seagate 500GB Serial ATA/300 16MB Buffer ST3500641AS-RK

Update: @ 10:30am 6.25.2007 Aww, still in Philadelphia.

Blast from the Stupid Past

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I just got hit up with a hoax email forwarding scheme, this one to be exact — talk about 1998. I must say with all the spam the flies around I thought this kind of thing at least was dead and gone. The oldest date on the copy I got was April of 2007, but snopes says this has been going around since 1997, with the text taken from a 2004 email (the text is exactly the same). I know that we may not always be able to trust snopes, but come on. In 1998 we didn’t have snopes, so realizing that the claim is ludacris took some kind of technical knowledge but today all you have to do is read.

Eve Was Framed

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

Eve Was Framed Bumper Sticker Since I posted my other geeky car image today, I might as well knock this one out at as well. Why is that geeky? I was introduced to to Eve (and company) by the xkcd comic Alice and Bob, not, as I should have been, in some sort of security class required of me in obtaning my CS degree. If you are still confused, consult wikipedia on the topic.