AIDS is an epidemic. There’s a lot of money and research going to find a cure. Ebola; Not so Epidemic. Why is this?
AIDS transmits fairly easily, but slowly. Ebola is faster at transmission. Why is AIDS more common? It kills slowly. Ebola kills, fast and often. The solution?
Make AIDS more deadly. Right now, if you’re HIV Infected, you’ve got years to live. We need to make it far more deadly, far more of a threat, far more liable to destroy it’s population before it has a chance to spread.
It’s been three weeks since I posted that last entry, but it’s been a somewhat eventful three weeks. I moved the weekend after that. I’ve been on various spurts of productivity and non; Tonight, for example, was very productive. I did a fair amount of coding work on a project I’ve been working on; I figured out how to get my router set up with OpenVPN in a non-standard way (It’s mounting my windows box for it’s config files, as well as the OpenVPN executable, giving me a fair bit more flexibility than I’d otherwise have). I also dived some into Quagga, which I need to get working to make fullest use of OpenVPN. I configured my work Ubuntu box substantially; It’s now making pretty full use of it’s graphics card (though it turns out that there’s a nasty tradeoff involved; I can either have my monitor rotated the way I want or have full graphical effects; Since they’re both cosmetic, I went for the graphical effects.)
I’ve also, since last writing, gotten a significant amount done in my personal life: I’ve convinced myself to join a dating site and message a girl (Though not gotten a response from that one, I think I can do this once more). Aforementioned programming project took a significant amount of getting over mental blocks; I figured out how to use SVN properly, and have myself a repository now. It is also heavily perl and regex based, which is good for me.
In the past few weeks, I’ve managed to get a number of other things done; I got my PS3 and Xbox set up in my new place so they can browse media, I got OpenVPN set up between my work and cloud machines, as well as my work machine upgraded with my old desktop graphics card, enabling me to use it as a proper desktop.
Some of this progress has come at the expense of work, though; I know I’m not keeping up with my work as well as I used to. I did recently change to a new schedule, and that’s part of it, but a big part of it is just that I’m not doing anything. I’ve gotten some good insights, though, into many things; I’ve delved deep into areas that aren’t as common for the support team, and I’m certain that I have the best breadth and often depth of knowledge of the frontline group (and I think I stack favorably against the escalations group, too). We’ll see how it works out, though; Stuff has been bad at work for a few weeks, but maybe it is turning itself around.
My ego needs a boost (Ha!), so I’ve decided to write down an accomplishment each day. The past three days have been easy; Tonight is looking a little harder. On Saturday morning I wrote up a doc abotu dealing with “over protection” failure; What to do when a customer loses more drives than they were set to protect for. On Sunday night I figured out, finally, how to cause those in an elegant way. Even with our QA tools, this is not easy on OneFS. Monday morning I documented sparse file behavior, and filed a bug that has gained minor traction; One of our Engineering Managers chimed in approvingly. Today… I’ve survived. Dealt with a few cases, too. Not much more than that, sadly.
I have spent a good several hours over the past several months fighting with my ubuntu machine. It would come up and attempt to mount my raid (A simple RAID1 over two drives), and, upon boot, try and mount the MD device with /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb, not /dev/sdb1. It turned out that, while a mdadm -E didn’t show it, /dev/sdb had enough of a superblock on it that mdadm tried to use it as part of an array… And that prevented it from reading the partition table, preventing me from even manually mounting it. I used –zero-superblock to clear it, and suddenly my machine is booting fine.
I have recently acquired a PS3 and a PSP, so I am going back and playing all the games for them that I meant to, but missed. Unfortunately, I have not actually paid attention to what were good games for these systems. This has led me to pick up two very ill-advised games.
First is “Work Time Fun”, which is anything but. As minigame collections go, it is ass. There’s nothing redeeming. The only reason I bought it was because I thought it was from Lone Sausage, the creators of Dr. Tran, but it turns out that there’s simply a similar looking vietnamese kid on the cover. Bleh.
Next up is Noby Noby Boy. Noby Noby Boy is amazing. Never before has there been a game where the chief, and in fact only, game mechanic is filling up the creators ego. In Noby Noby boy, you play an earthworm-like thing called BOY, and you eat stuff and get bigger. If this sounds like Katamari, you’ve figured out it’s pedigree. About the only thing that Noby Noby Boy has going for it is that, as you grow, your gameplay statistics are uploaded to make the space-earthworm known as GIRL grow. There’s nothing else to do. There’s some cute psychadelic flavor, but if you’ve played the later Katamaris you’ve already gotten your fill of such. That’s all there really is to it. It’s a wank-fest for Keita Takahashi.
I am anxiously awaiting my 21st birthday; Like most people my age, I’m not actually a stranger to alcohol, but being able to acquire such myself will be a nice change. I’ve never been a fan of age-based restricions; I believe we should lower the voting age, lower the drinking age, lower the driving age, be more flexible in our age-of-consent laws…
I was looking forward to finally hitting the last age-based milestone, but then I realized that there’s one more to go. And, unlike the age of drinking, which is state decided though uniform aross the nation, It’s written into the very constituion. I cannot yet attain the office of President.
This really annoys me, actually. Not that I intended to vote for someone under 35, or would even really consider it. But it is another arbitrary age-drawn line. There are people I know who’re old enough to be my father, yet nowhere near mature enough. There are those whom are barely older than me whom I’d vote for any day of the week, if they decided they were going into politics. It’s unfortunate that we’ve got this restriction.
From: Ted Hahn
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 18:23
To: ‘tycho@penny-arcade.com’
Subject: Last Remnant, Controller integration
Tycho,
You mention in yesterdays post that my wish had been granted of playing The Last Remnant on the console. I see your point; Consoles offer several advantages over PC controls; Theres no question that for, say, Super Mario, a good joypad feels better than the keyboard does. However
When I get a PC port, I expect a /port/, which as youve described, is no longer necessarily the case.
I just finished Mirrors Edge for the PC, and while I was more forgiving than most of its combat (I generally found it fun, even in the bits where you were very forced into it), I was really disturbed by how little porting they had done. I expect that my PC game will have PC controls. I /expect/ it. Mirrors Edge popped up for every informational with Xbox controller mappings; I bought the PC version because, while I liked the 360 demo, I thought it would play better with proper FPS controls. Im going to grab a wired 360 controller from a friend and play it through again; Maybe it really is a platformer, but I expect that it will at least be less disconcerting if it tells me which buttons are which. I tried and quickly gave up with my Logitech gamepad because it was so off putting.
XNA is a wonderful thing. It makes it really easy to port games from 360 to Windows. However, it also makes it really easy for developers to take the lazy way out and not even bother porting; I cant honestly call Mirrors edge for PC anything more than the 360 version recompiled.
WARNING: HAZARDOUS CONTENT WITHIN
This is an attempt to journal the activities of a dangerous conspiracy. This conspiracy ranges far and wide, using a network of media outlets, artists and musicians in an attempt to spread their goals. The only know part of their agenda is this: Distribution of an insidious song, one that permeates our popular culture yet remains dangerously under-the-radar, out of sight and out of concious mind for most of the population. Here are but a few of the places where it has been subtly hidden:
There are merely the entries that I have yet discovered. More certainly lurk at the edges of our vision, silently poisoning our minds.
Edit: THERE’S A WHOLE SWARM OF THEM!
I have been reading through the Jargon File (again), slowly. Today, I reached the entry on Creeping Featureism. The source to hello, is, as it says, hilarious. So, I go over to my ubuntu machine, and get this:
ted@thahnubuntu:/$ hello
The program ‘hello’ can be found in the following packages:
* hello-dbs
* hello-debhelper
* hello
Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>
bash: hello: command not found
I think there’s a lesson here.
I don’t dream often. At least, I don’t think I do. So, from now on, whenever I /do/ dream, I will try and record it here.
Now, to not post for another month.