So I'm driving home from work today, and being distracted because the cold engine's autochoke makes the shift points feel funny. As I exit the parking lot and get onto the road, BOOM. I've hit the curb.
W. T. F. I drive this way *every single (week)day* and never does this happen.
Half a mile down the road, I realize, "oh %$#@, the tire's flat". So I pull off onto some random driveway and change to the spare, but GYAAARGH it sucks.

Last night I tried beating Metroid Prime 3 again. I've been stuck on the final boss for months now. After another series of failed attempts, I went upstairs to beat on the walls instead. Much less painful.

Dear old laptop, you're supposed to be high-quality hardware. Why are you breaking? The keyboard has been on the fritz for the past week or so, and is now totally dead.

Other shoddy hardware: the LCD hooked up to my desktop started dying last year, unable to sync the video signal, and it's gotten worse to the point where it will no longer display an image.

However, unlike the above complaints, this last one has actually been resolved: today I have a new Acer P223Wwd, veeery nice.

me: What did we learn about mythology?
poo-chan: Nothing.
khan: It’s freely interchangable.

(correct me if I got your lines backwards…)

Via Lemonodor:


Via elfs:  Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?

On that note, via Biella Coleman:  Major breakthrough in Christian genetics.

Okay, enough of that.

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Back in the day, I used to visit a bunch of websites regularly.  This list of websites went through several revisions.

Version 0:  Whatever I remembered.  Unfortunately, I have a very porous memory.
Version 1:  I kept a master list of “interesting stuff” in a HTML file in my homedir.  This kinda worked, but would get out of sync between my different computers, and occasionally was lost when I accidentally deleted it or when a hard disk crashed.
Version 2:  del.icio.us.  It was pretty good; I still use it for keeping up with webcomics which don’t all have feeds.
Version 3:  Akregator, a news feed reader for KDE.  It still had the problem of being out-of-sync between different machines and being lost in hard disk crashes.
Version 4:  Google Reader.  Not only is it a wonderful interface I can access from anywhere, from almost any browser (not very compatible with Opera and Konqui, but works fine on my n810), but also it’s got better keyboard shortcuts than most desktop feed readers!  Soon, Akregator synchronization with Google Reader will make life even more awesome.

As a side-effect of moving to news feed readers, though, I’ve been dropping any blog or site which lacks public RSS/Atom feeds.  Any former friend on Xanga/LJ who doesn’t have a public feed: dropped.  Any news site which doesn’t have a public feed: dropped.  Any … well, you get the point.  Webcomics are an exception, because too many that I don’t want to give up quite yet are feedless.

(BTW, Poodle!  Write a RSS/Atom generator for your blog already!)

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So what do I follow nowadays?  Lots of math and CS blogs; development of Linux, KDE, Gnome, Haskell, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, etc., tech news like ars and Phoronix, and…

In the “cute” folder: Cute Overload, I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, Lambdacats, Let’s be friends (hasn’t updated in a while), Meme Cats (hasn’t updated in a while), Stuff On My Cat, and The FAIL Blog, which isn’t cute, but falls into the general category of image macros, and is horribly amusing.

I missed the LiveJournal content strike.  Or maybe I participated in it, since I was too busy to be using LJ…

On Wednesday I went to a piano recital held by an acquiantance I haven’t seen since high school; there were lots of other people there that I haven’t seen in ages, mostly former classmates, but I ran into my old boss from a previous job too.  Needless to say, there were lots of people whose faces or names (or both) I’d forgotten in the intervening years… sigh.  At least the music was wonderful and amazing.

I found a pack of simfiles that turned out to be a lot of fun.


A couple weekends ago, Khan got Smash Bros. Brawl and invited Poodle, ’baasan, and I to come over and play.  We ended up playing all night, it was pretty awesome.  Last weekend J and I raided Khan’s for the Wii (Smash) and PS2 (Katamari Damacy), that was great too.  On the downside, it means that I’ve been missing my weekly dose of Metroid Prime 3 and Hayate no Gotoku for a while now…

This weekend, I drove down to J’s place to replace a computer fan that had died a horrible screechy death.  We dragged Poodle along and attended the local sci-fi/fantasy/anime/gaming convention.  I came back with a wallet about $100 lighter (in exchange for manga; GSC Revised 1-4 and Translucent 2-3) and a few sticks of Pocky from winning at the 2-hour “Name That [Anime/J-Pop/Game] Tune” panel.  (Not to brag, but I won quite overwhelmingly.  It was great fun.)  Most importantawesomest of all, though, we attended a panel by the artists/writers of The Devil’s Panties, Questionable Content, Minimalist Stick Figure Theatre, and xkcd, and I got to play some DDR.  I got A’s and B’s on 1234 while J and Poodle switched off.  Lazy slackers :P

Watching Moyashimon right now.  Up to episode 10.
ROTFL.  Kei pulls it off even better than Ayumi Saitō.
(Spoiler warnings if you click through to the Wikipedia links, of course.)