Insignificant Bits

Whenever I happen to be in downtown DC, and I am hungry, and there is some sort of cultural festival going on (practically every weekend), I can’t resist heading for the food tent to see how other people around the world make cheesesteaks. This last weekend was the First Americans Festival (“First Americans” being the new vogue term for the indigenous peoples of this land to whom my ancestors gave smallpox). So, I wanted to see how the Iriquois make cheesesteaks; however the closest I could find was a cheese burger. It was pretty much like any other burger except made with buffalo meat and served on “fry bread” which is some really yummy sweet fried bread thing made with corn. I topped it with the finest in condiments known to the native Americans: Heinz ketchup. This is the second time I’ve had a buffalo burger, and both times the meat was a bit tougher than good old cow. But hey, you put any big slab of animal on a bun and cover it with cheese and lettuce and tomato and it’s good in my book.

I also tried the corn soup, which was very very nasty. But then the only soups I do like are chili, potato, and this chicken tortilla soup I make occasionally that rocks your socks on.

In short, the First Americans have a pretty good thing going culinarily speaking. I only wish I had first discovered the Aztec tent that was selling roasted chicken with plantains – that looked sooo good.

I am currently drinking this. The name definitely needs an “L” after the “Z.” Word.

I have new carpet.
The color I chose was beige.
Sorry Geckzilla.

Want to get the best possible view of the stars? All you have to do is go to Dome C, Antarctica, get a small Linux box, attach a robotic telescope and a jet engine, and you’re good to go.

If that doesn’t work, wiggle the network cable.

(Yes, someone hassled me for taking a picture at a *gasp* public bus stop.)

For some reason the other day I found myself wondering what it would take to write a ray tracer in XSLT. And not the beefed up kind with JavaScript but just plain old XSL and XPath. Luckily, I grew bored of this before wasting a lot of time on it. I think the biggest thing XSLT is missing is the ability to work on output. That is, you can’t generate a block of XML, then process the generated XML without using a second script. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong.) If XSLT had this facility, then you could, if you were a masochist, use templates as general recursive functions and accomplish pretty much anything. For example, I wrote a stylesheet to calculate square roots.

Given its limitations, I wondered if XSLT is Turing-complete. Guess what? It is.

Everyone, I want you to know that sudden riches haven’t gone to my head. You miserable unwealthy wretches, I take pity on you and shall still treat you as my equals, even though I am rich beyond your imaginings. You see, today I looked on the underside of the top of my Coca-Cola drink, and there awaiting me was news of a great fortune. I’m not entirely sure what my prize is, as it is spelled in a strange language, perhaps Icelandic, but I am sure it is grand enough to make kings jealous. Don’t worry, one day I will let you ride in my HKTB3 X2L62 MXWZW.

Man, so many people we interview don’t know how a hash table works. What are they teaching in CS these days? I should just quit asking that one.

So I was going to write about last weekend. Now it’s almost this weekend. I may never catch up. But here it is in brief:

DTB played a good set as always, though they seemed a bit off in the first song. I can’t remember any of the setlist at this point, but they did Soul Stew as an encore and might’ve thrown a Coltrane tune in there somewhere. Or maybe that was a different show. There were three tapers in the audience so maybe someday it’ll be up on etree and I can verify that. Kraushaar auditorium in Towson is a worthless place to see a show by the way. No dance floor, no booze, no thick cloud of smoke. Play the Recher next time boys.

On Saturday Angeline and I attended a dinner for the Hopkins residents at the well-appointed and sterile country home of the medicine department chair (or something like that). The food (beef tenderloin and sea bass) was really great, but eating The Man’s table scraps upset my street sensibilities. Stop the oppression!

Sunday we hit the O’s game with the Ga Tech crowd. Yankees won a super long, boring game. At least the weather was nice. Farewell summer, it was nice.

There is a variable in our source code called indexFieldNamesToListsOfErrorStringList. How am I supposed to wrap at 72 columns when using that?

It has a four line comment at the definition describing what it means.

Some days I walk down by the fountain, pick up lunch at Chipotle, and sit outside, relaxing in the sunshine while trying to keep from spilling my burrito everywhere. At this little park there in front of the patent office is a huge metal sculpture that has often intrigued that small group of neurons that fires whenever I look at an Escher litho. The sculpture is a large purplish number 9 (seen here), and it is in fact a Möbius surface. Curiousity got the best of me so I found his name, Charles Perry, on the sculpture, and read up on the guy. It turns out he’s the man behind this crazy mess in front of the Air and Space Museum. He also has some neat mathy puzzles and a chess set for surrealists on the go. Check it out next time you’re at the MoMA gift shop.