Work - Phone

All officers (commissioned, non-commissioned and academic) in my unit have been issued a cellular slavery device, carrying and answering which is mandatory. Stood half the day in the sun on god forsaken base waiting in line. Turns out their records indicate I'm not an NCO. Flashed shiny new NCO card I got especially for this occasion — no go. Faxed(!) a hard copy (!!) of my record over - all ok (!!!). World class authentication, that is. Seems our systems don't integrate too well with the civilian cell service provider's. At least free calls with colleagues should cut my phone bill in half.

Me - Haircut

Today I went to a barber and had him, besides the haircut, trim my beard, which was growing untouched since December (when I became an NCO and was allowed to grow a beard). I was unhappy with the unkempt look (think al-Qaeda), but I was afraid of change. I think my fear was justified. I hate the result. My consolation is that it seems to have a healthy growth rate, so I'll experiment more. People's reactions are the strangest thing.

FFDB - Quality of Writing

Have you read something that was obviously spell checked but not actually proofread? The way to tell is that all the spelling mistakes and typos are the kind that would fool a dictionary-based spelling checker (meaning they're actual words, just not the right ones, or words that would not appear in a dictionary even when spelled correctly (like proper names) so a person could still click "ignore" and not notice the typo).

Well, fan fiction that regularly misspells the Hogwarts houses and uses non-words like "comon" (as in, "comon dude, let's go") is painful to read, even if it has actual original plot twists (in this fandom?). So I want the FFDB to have a Quality of Writing score for stories. I just need to figure out the scale and how to make it difficult to abuse.

So far I have thought of these possible scores:

• Ready for the printing press
• Multiple editors, multiple passes
• Proofread by a literate human being
• Spell-checked
• Recognizable English
• AOL chatroom transcript

Please contribute!

FFDB/code - design

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Linguistics - Russians

It appears the Russian language has no distinction between "security" and "safety". Does it mean they are very paranoid and attribute all safety-related incidents to sabotage or do they understand the word to mean "protection from harm, caused by negligence or enemy action"? Think of the implications! To me, "safety officer" paints the picture of an anal-retentive civil engineer, and "security officer" of a counter-intelligence style paranoid ex-field agent. But it could also be so that the KGB's purpose would be more ambiguous…

Fandom - Censorship?

There are 131 missing author ids on sugarquill.net. They represent the 131 authors who were deleted, either for technical reasons or for not complying with something. I know of Kokopelli, and of Alec & Teri. I think some other were tossed out with Alec & Teri. Who else? What were the causes? I suspect canon interpretation fundamentalism. Or is this something one does not speak about in polite company?

TV - House 1x12 "Sports Medicine"

Oh, I get it. Cute innocent young doctor dating physically and emotionally crippled obnoxious over-confident (though it's well deserved) old doctor. Of course RJA is all over it.

Movie - "Mean Girls"

I've pirated and watched this movie. I've used keeping up with current trends as an excuse to ogle seventeen year-old starlets playing sixteen year old starlet wannabes.

The movie was bad in a crude humor, overuse of cliches, over the top kind of way, and it was good in a predictable good-vs.-evil kind of way, and it almost made up for it. Like candy that you know is not good for you, but you eat anyway, because your taste buds say "yum!".
The nerdcore was adorable. Ok, that sounded gay. It is cool that nerdcore is getting into mainstream.

It was both sad and predictable that success contributed to the lead actress' personal problems.

From a review of the DVD on Amazon:

If anything, the grownups-especially the school principal, played by Tim Meadows, of whom the picture needs much more-tend to nudge these pushy teen-agers into the wings. The movie, produced by Lorne Michaels and directed by Mark Waters, is often funny, but it was conceived by people who are plainly wiser and more worldly than their target audience, and there's something about that discrepancy that, you know, totally sucks. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

That's the problem with mass entertainment - they have a brilliant anthropological study of contemporary female highschool cliques, and they have to film slapstick comedy to try and make their point. I think it aimed too wide and missed.

Edit, 2006-05-11: I've watched Heathers because most reviews mentioned it. It needs to be watched with an audience and 80s clothes are a huge WTF, but yeah, Mean Girls is definitely a Heathers remake. They exchanged the horror for slapstick trying to retain the black humor, but as I already said it didn't quite work out.

TV - House 1x11 - Detox

I was watching the girlfriend Pam throughout the episode going "who is that?" in my head. And then I clicked through the credits and it's Lilly Kane! She's good looking, and then I see she's more than a year younger than I am! I'm getting old. Did House have a massage or a masseuse? Good acting.

FFDB - Working (Almost) Prototype

So, there's a bunch of pretty bad Python code that encodes the screen-scraped index of a very nice fanfic archive. I wish to fix as many things in the prototype stage. So, while I can fix the Ridiculously Redundant Recording of URLs by myself, I need some help with defining some of the metadata.

1. What is the Correct Way of writing a ship name? Is it Harry/Hermione or Hermione/Harry? Are both ok? Are they the same? What is The Rule? Is it ordered by gender, or focus? What if the entire story is written from an OFC's point of view, should it be Harry/Mary or Mary/Harry? Would Harry marry Mary? I would be very merry should Harry marry Mary! Some people seem to care about such things.
2. How do I map whatever some sites list as a fic's "genre" into something resembling literary genres (obviously, a story may fit more than one)? Because we know that despite being based on Contemporary Fantasy, the fan fiction varies greatly, from (teen-)melodrama to comic, heroic, romantic, erotic and even high fantasy. Some of what is specified in the archives just means mood (fluff, angst) rather than theme and convention (chick lit, legal thriller), which is confusing. All you people with degrees in English and whatever, have any lecture notes about genre studies? Epistemology geeks? (that's you, Ben!)

Edit: I completely forgot all non-prose (though I personally doubt the artistic merit of so called song fics, I am but a plebe and am willing to let history decide), and the vast amounts of farce (intended or not) as well as the token bit of genuine irony. Also, the fandom is an introspective (or just plain antagonistic) bunch and thus we have fan fiction about fan fiction, which lacking a better name, I'll call "arsficia". *snort*

Edit #2: from the findings of a depraved perv:

“This is really a wonderful thing, Harry,” I said, utterly sincerely. I slid my thumb across the tip.

He gave a breathless laugh. “Thanks,” he said. “I like it.”

I don't know why, but I find it very funny.

Life - Passover

I have to say my aunt's kugel rules!

While reading the Wikipedia article on shark jumping, I've clicked to Northern Exposure (that was a good show!) and then Rob Morrow. Did you know he and his wife called their first daughter Tu?

Update

• I've finished reading Glory Season. It was great. He has built a believable world within the constraints he'd set for himself, and the run of the mill plot offsets the intriguing setting admirably. The ending was kind of artificial, and it's a very hard sell, because so few men will read it and so few women read sci-fi. I'm sure I've missed lots of references. Looks like it doesn't have a following online, though to me it just begs for fan fiction (no, I won't attempt to write any). Brin has very professionally skirted around sex, amazingly well actually. R.: The cover has suffered substantial damage, I'm looking into replacement opportunities.
  Edit: procured, at very reasonable price, two personalized and signed beautiful hardcovers directly from author (see author's web page, seems author's wife handles shipping and handling). Am very happy with impulse shopping decision. R. seemed to like hers, making it even better.
• I watch the first season of House M.D. as it downloads, late as usual. It's good. Kudos RJA for watching the good stuff! It's the third series I've followed her, not disappointed yet. I hope I'm not in danger of becoming a little RJA clone, LOL. The rude sarcastic guy everybody hates but must tolerate because he's so competent, does he always have a beautiful soul? Maybe he's just a bastard. Or there might be hope for me yet. Oh, that girl doctor is hot.
• I've watched two episodes of Veronica Mars. It's BH 90210 all over again. rm -rf /mnt/series/veronica_mars
• Watched three episodes of The Unit. rm -rf /mnt/series/the_unit
• Today I've seen a guy walking a furry white Akita. Looked almost like a Samoyed. Great looking dog!
• Since the birthday meme is making the rounds again, I'll let you know I share birthdays with Johnny Carson and Weird Al Yankovic, and both the Parliament of Great Britain and the United Nations General Assembly first convened on that date. Oh, and Brutus killed himself because he has lost a battle to Mark Antony and Octavian. So, a good date over all, I think.
• My Python project has reached a complexity level where it seizes being a hack and requires actual design. That has made it less fun, but I'm struggling through it in the hope of building something useful. What fan fiction archive would you most like to search/filter using better searching and filtering than what they provide? I can make it happen.

Current Events - Elections

I've voted, but I don't really feel like it makes a difference. It feels as if politics is a sham to placate the media/public and evidencing is effectively decided behind the scenes. I really think that.

Coding - Geek

I figure what prevented me from building the ffdb was the need to get the data to play with, so I've decided to crawl archives to get the raw data so I'll have something to show real people I approach in soliciting help. Sounds like a job for Perl and regular expressions, right? I've read my jwz, so I know better. Also, perl is ugly. Python and BeautifulSoup, on the other hand, is… amazing is the only word that seems fitting. I've crawled FFA, and have done great progress in processing and normalizing the data. Of course, my data is the metadata, thus my metadata is the mata-meta-data? Harry Potter is character #1, anyway. LOL.
The interpreter-driven edit-compile-test loop doesn't scale to multi-class modules, and decent ORM is still hard. I have not even begun to contemplate user interface implementation (typical me).

A coworker asked me today how does a jpeg gets sent in an email, since SMTP is a text based protocol. I said: "enlarged by 33.3% via base64 and with the correct mime type, as specified somewhere under rfc822", and he thought I was totally geeking out. I've only remembered the number because I've (re-)read about it recently (in relation to parsing dates), but simply knowing about mime and that there's an rfc is like… in the job description, for a web apps team. I mean, the world doesn't start and end in the JVM, for crying out loud!
I'm way too judgmental of people.

Geek/Work - Women in Industry

I just wanted to say that unlike poor Alice here(alt), my boss has never asked my help with his pr0n, but then I thought about the broader problem of women in programming (or the IT industry, or science & technology in general).

For one thing, over launch a few weeks back, I have tried and failed to explain to a novice (a very wet behind the ears, non-geek, Comp.Sci. grad) what is meant by:

The saddest example of the overly homogeneous work group is the all-male team. Women are obvious victims of the sports analogy: The same male establishment that excluded them systematically from team sports for so long now compounds the felony by insinuating that they're probably bad team players. Of course women function as well on teams as men. Any man who has worked on mixed teams would find it hard to imagine ever again working in the all-male environment. That was our fathers' sad lot.

Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Peopleware 2nd ed, p. 156

For another, today, one of our big design whiteboards showed evidence of immature and inexperienced adolescent males who lack artistic talent discussing breast size preferences. In the room sits a female developer. A very good looking one (shush mom, she's taken). This is not an uncommon occurrence. Oftentimes, the office sounds like a thread on Slashdot, just not as sophisticated (due to the participants' smaller total erudition).

And then we ask why so few females major in computer science.

And the ones who do, turn out to be like Scott Adams' Alice. The joke goes like this: female programmers are like guinea pigs. Why? Well, guinea pigs are neither from Guinea, nor are they pigs.

It's very sad, and I see no way to end this. I'm not alone.

Edit: If anyone cries "sexual harassment", I'd like to say this: Yes, and no. The situation is suboptimal, but we're in the army. It's a thinly veiled patriarchal system populated by teens who are led by people in their early to mid twenties. If the letter of the law was strictly enforced, we'd probably all be in jail. So we don't point fingers, we try not to stare, and mostly the situation does not get out of hand. Did I ever feel uncomfortable for the females present, because of something that was said? Many, many times.
To the Neanderthals who would call me "gay" for thinking like this: date rapists get caught.

EDIT: Added Google Images alternate link to Dilbert comic.

Tech - Be gentle with your laptop

Righteous techie anger is amusing when the spit is not in your face.

Before my project was moved to the IT division, it existed in the main (or rather, first) client's IT department. When main development goals were reached and we have entered the maintenance stage, the client decided our premium treatment was unwarranted and cut our budget, our ability to filter personnel and finally our offices (That's how I found myself in our barrack).
The IT department still uses our cool brand, but since the advent of centralized IT they have no directory, mail, file or database servers of their own — they just manage their own users. Anyway, since we were buddies we've heard their war stories, and I can tell you non-combat officers and company executives are the same, and they ruin laptops just as frequently, just their replacements don't lower their shares' value, they cost the taxpayer money.

Geek - Programming languages and their relationship styles

This is the funniest thing I've read in a while.

Geek - Linux administration for sexual favors

Apparently the software giant recommends this way of hiring sysadmins / getting laid if you're a *NIX nerd.
For the record, I've never been paid in any commercial goods for working on a Linux system. While in highschool, I did take cash for installing and maintaining operating systems from Redmond. I do not wish to do that again.
Also, as a guy completely ruined by feminine fiction, it's a complete turn off for me to think she'll have that expression on her face after the fact.

General - Status Update

I don't remember what I should blog about.

I am frustrated at my new boss, but more at myself, as it is my fault I have him in the first place.

I need to but a new computer, but I can't get myself to either settle for what I'm comfortable spending or spend the cost of what I'm comfortable to aquire.

Thanks to Kokopelli, I've discovered FanFicAuthors.net and am reading through some of its archives. Quality varies, but some of it it very good.

I have been working on a cool but completely pointless project on company time, out of frustration. I'll see about open-sourcing it, as it's very generic and doesn't reveal anything other than the fact we use computers.

Glory Season goes very slowly.

Still can't get myself to do any of the things need doing. It's beginning anything that is so hard - once I get started it's hard to stop. Do any of my readers follow any fanfics? At all? It would be a help if someone answers.

Have been on a trip to Jerusalem. Was surprisingly good. Pics.

Found on the Web - Rollerblade-Barbie

This. is. so. funny!