Windows into other worlds

I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, but so far getting Nefarious, six, her own computer has been a really good decision. It’s been hard on her having parents that live at opposite ends of the continent, but now that both her and her mom have computers with videochat, it’s as if they have a magical window that connects them like a wormhole collapsing the distance to nothing. This is by far her favorite thing about the computer, and it’s interesting to see how second nature using it all is for her… I suppose that’s no surprise since she’s been surrounded by constant computer use since she was born, so she instinctively knows what to click on to make what she wants happen. I was surrounded by computers as a kid as well, but for me, computers were a technological toy and something akin to electronic building blocks, but for Nefarious, and I suspect most of her generation, computers are first and foremost a means to connect people to each other, which I hope will steer the world in the right direction.

In addition to video chat, she seems to quite enjoy typing away in a normal text chat window as well — it’s all new to her, so it’s funny to see her type things like “thank you for sending me a smiley face mommy”. Her account is locked down of course so she talks only to her mother right now, but she seems to also enjoy playing chess online against anonymous human opponents. Speaking of chess, I saw a great car today that was covered in chess bumper stickers like “I’M A CHESS NUT” (get it?) and so on. Our latest chess “inventions” include a new piece called a “bulldozer”. The bulldozer replaces the knight, and moves in the same L-shape. However, as it is a bulldozer, instead of just killing the piece it lands on, it kills everything in its path (friend or foe), making the piece slightly awkward to use, but much more powerful. It’s been a good addition.

The other chess addition that we’ve made, that I quite recommend trying, is a “double move” variation of the game. On a player’s turn, instead of moving one piece, they get to move two. The restriction is that the two moves can not be interrelated. That is, they can’t bump into each other, you can’t move one piece twice, or you can’t move one piece out of the way to allow the other to move. Or, to put it in another way, you have to be able to do the two moves in either order. Give it a try — it’s surprising the subtle ways this changes the game.

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We’re working away at Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the Harry Potter series right now. It’s a bit slow to get started, and since we’ve read them so quickly, the beginning is always repetitive as Rowling makes the story accessible to those who have not read the first two, but it’s starting to get good. One of my better childhood memories is having long books read to me, and I hope Nefarious will enter adulthood with the same feelings.

Other than that, I think I’ve got to watch Craigslist (which reminds me, I’m just putting the final touches on Backpage.com and Daype.com support to my search tool, and will post it before I leave on Christmas vacation) for some gym mats… I sometimes walk out into the big room to see Nefarious and Cassie performing stunts that could easily lead to a skull more cracked than I like!

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Caitlin has gone out with a friend tonight, but I can’t wait for her to get back. Tonight is the night that we’ll hopefully confirm our Christmas vacation, so we’ll spend some time browsing through the discount sites and see what strikes our fancy! I can’t wait! Oh and next door band stress got worked out… They’re playing a show this weekend at the Big Bop, so there are a couple practises this week to make sure Saturday’s show goes well. It’s not the sort of music I’m into, but they actually sounded really tight tonight as they did their set, so I think their fans will get one of their better shows.

Blah blah blah.

Judge a book by its cover

Edit: I’ve updated this post with some extra info on the alleged crimes.

Speaking of arrests (re: the comments in the previous entry), I was looking at the constantly updated “Mugs in the News” feature in the Chicago Tribune that posts arrest/booking photos of various people (way better than most of the mugshot galleries because they have the often kooky stories). I have mixed feelings about these because I am sure that a percentage of these people are innocent and are having a life-long stigma attached to them, especially as search engines improve and become able to do visual searches with face matching and so on. However, it’s always “fun” to work on improving my stereotyping skills by looking at what different sorts of criminals look like.

For example, all of the following people are sex offenders (of the child-abuse and kiddie porn sort — big surprise, one is a priest). Are you surprised? They all seem to have that “look” that one imagines sex offenders having. Perhaps there are genetic markers, a la the “gay face” (and speaking of search engines, it may be possible to program computers with gaydar) — not that I’m suggesting in any way that these people are gay (I’d assumed they’re straight, actually, although the middle one is a “boy lover“).

mugs1

Who hires the creepy old man on the right to babysit? I gotta say, those parents should have known better… There are so many disgusting sex abuse stories in the set, like the guy I just linked who was a nurse at a hospital raping old ladies… How low can you go?

The middle guy’s “I’m Popeye” shirt is pretty funny, but it can’t compare to the sadly mistaken “how to out run a cop” shirt that this guy, who was busted for “felony criminal damage to government supported property” (graffiti on a police car or something like that I am guessing taking an axe to a playground… wtf?). Inappropriate shirts are always one of my favorite sections of sites like The Smoking Gun.

mugs2

The people below were all charged with murder, each of them looking as if they just stepped out of a horror movie. The middle guy, who was charged with two counts of first degree murder? Holy hell, I’m sure he’s going to be chasing me around in my next nightmare. He burned his two kids to a crisp in what he claims was a botched suicide attempt. Ack! The first guy is scary in an altogether different way (he is “mildly retarded” and killed his dad), and the woman on the right appears to have been stabbed in the head by a cross, probably by someone who mistook her for some sort of demonic creature (she beat her child to death).

mugs3

I don’t know exactly what this next woman did, but The arrest below was for a “hate crime”, specifically, trying to yank the headscarf off of a Muslim. Does her expression ooze hate or what? Can you imagine if she was your mother? Worst childhood ever.

mugs4

Now for someone more cheerful. He actually looks happy to be there, so I’m guessing he’s guilty of a “love crime”, in a good way. In reality, he was busted for selling drugs outside a church. I’m not sure why, but it’s actually more illegal to sell dope (cocaine actually) when you’re within 1,000 feet of a church.

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I think perhaps my favorite of the set though were these two burglars, with what I assume must be the goofiest disguise ever… A mask drawn on with black magic marker? What kind of person actually thinks this is a good idea? Unless of course they just committed the robbery after waking up from a party they passed out at? I have to wonder as well if doing such a thing gives you a “not guilty due to mental illness” type defense as it clearly shows a fairly significant mental deficiency.

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Here’s their story by the way.

Finally, another interesting thing about looking at the mugshots is seeing groups of people who get arrested at once (like the two above). The six below were all busted for “mob action”. I don’t exactly understand what “mob action” is — I guess it’s just a way to collectively charge a bunch of people for a single crime (literally: “the use of force or violence which disturbs the public peace by two or more persons acting together and without authority of law.”). In reality, it seems like it’s also a way to up a small charge — I think these guys are the Olympic protesters who tore down a public poster — by turning a misdemeanor (tearing down the poster) into a felony (mob action). Doing some searches on it online, it seems like it’s not unusual for it to be used to intimidate civil rights activists from gathering together.

The first guy is the fun one of the bunch.

mugs7

I wonder as well if the left two in the bottom row are twins?

Holy cliche of anti-government protesters though!

And wow do I hate my host (dreamhost) more and more every day. If my sites weren’t so massive and difficult to relocate, I would have moved a long time ago. The amount of downtime I have is totally unacceptable.

Toronto Ice Rinks Are All Open

On Saturday Nefarious and I went skating, the first time we’ve gone this year. The temperature was wonderful down at Harborfront, just cold enough to keep the ice frozen, and I could have stayed all day. Being rusty, we had a particularly nasty fall at the beginning in which Nefarious fell right in front of me and to avoid running her over with my freshly sharpened blades I had to force a particularly unpleasant twisting fall. I didn’t feel it at the time, but later in the day it became obvious that I’d sprained my ankle quite badly and I spent the next couple days hobbling around and finding any escape I could to go prone on the couch (much to her delight, as this meant my co-fallee got to watch far more movies on her laptop than I’d normally allow). It’s almost back to normal now thankfully, although I’m still limping just a little.

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It didn’t help that the night of my “injury” the band next door played until midnight. Things had been going so well and everyone had been getting along, but now, boom, all out the window. Sleep is important to me for so many reasons, and I can’t sleep with a “concert” blasting songs I’ve heard over and over through the wall, let alone watch TV to wait it out. Very, very uncool, and since the singer is the building superintendent, who does one even complain to?

This is the last week of school before the Christmas vacation. Nefarious is probably going to visit her mother in LA (although because of the need to deal with BME transitioning to the new year and new software, that may not happen or may be cut short), which gives Caitlin and I the opportunity to go on a vacation as well. We’ll just go to one of the last minute sites and choose whatever strikes our fancy — I have to admit that I far prefer going out of the country for the holidays than a traditional Christmas. Of course, I’ll take any opportunity to find a beach to swim at. If the LA plans change, we’ll take Nefarious along, because she loves to travel as well. When I was a kid flying was hell, and I made copious use of the barf bags, as well as finding the duration miserable. I suppose because Nefarious has grown up making so many long flights (often all on her own), she has no problem with it and flys better than any of us, so she’s always a pleasure to have along on trips. The only problem is that not being able to enter the USA, it cuts out a lot of travel options since so many of the cheap flights route through a US hub… So there’s a good chance that we may go with Cuba again — I was really happy with the resort we stayed at and given the opportunity I’d stay there again. I wouldn’t normally be so repetitive, but the Christmas vacation isn’t meant to be exotic travel, it’s just relaxation. Heck, maybe we’ll do a cruise.

Zoology Fail

The commentary in this celebrity tattoos article on NBC was pretty lame to start with, but I think this one was the most ignorant of the bunch.

cheetah-or-tiger

In my morning reading, I was similarly annoyed at this “10 Technologies We Were Promised But Never Got” article, which includes the videophone. Huh? The videophone totally exists. Lots of people use video chat, and it’s fresh on my mind because I set it up on Nefarious’s computer last night so she could chat with her mother. Almost all laptop computers these days have a webcam built in for just that purpose. Sloppy journalism abounds.

Flaming Moon

The tarp over our skylight has been flapping in the winter wind, making a lot of noise at night, and it sounded like a house invader — or ghost — shuffling about where he shouldn’t be, and thus kept me up. Not so much kept me up, but kept waking me up, and as a result my sleep was in bursts. This meant that today during the day I was tired and couch-slept much of the day, but on the bright side it also came with vibrant and well-remembered dreams…

I dreamed that I was visiting at Ashley and Scott’s house, which for some reason has been the setting of my dreams the last few nights, although in dreamland they live in a similarly idyllic but otherwise completely different home. Last night they lived not in the countryside, but on a sandy beach. After a strange party, for lack of a better word, I walked out onto the calm of the beach and looked out across the water as the waves lapped the sand. It was dark, and the sky was full of stars, more stars than I’d ever seen. For some reason not only were the stars thickly spread and crowded, but they were flashing on and off quickly in unison. And even though it was dark, I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day — my gut saying day, but my senses saying night — so I turned around, searching the cloudy upper sky for the moon or the sun so I could estimate the hour. When I saw what I assume was the moon, which was full, it was shining brightly and completely engulfed in a heavy halo of blue flames. I wasn’t afraid and it wasn’t apocalyptic… but it was something important.

It looked a little like this.

problems-with-the-moon

Feel free to analyze me. Caitlin says the blue flame is just because our tarp is blue.

Last night Nefarious and I read for a solid two hours, and today for another hour, which got us through to the end of Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets. When she was in California a few days ago a babysitter played her the very end of the movie (I assume that was coincidence, not an attempt to be a spoil-sport), which I was worried was going to take the fun out of it for her because it gave everything away just before we were able to finish reading. Not to disrupt the sinister cackle that the end-wrecker-babysitter laughed in my imagination, but it actually made it even more fun because Nefarious kept shouting out what she thought was about to happen (75% accuracy) and I feigned disagreement, so fate’s evil plan failed. Tomorrow is movie night and we’ll watch the BluRay version in full, and then on the weekend we start reading the third book, Prisoner of Azkaban, which comes in at close to 500 pages — they seem to get longer and longer!

Assuming the weather stays cold enough for ice, and the forecast says it’ll be warmer but still freezing, we’ll spend the weekend skating and maybe even trying out our new sled if we get more snow (a possibility). I also want to start on a new art project. I don’t think I’ve painted all year!

I’ve posted the source code to the latest version of ZenCASH here, including the resource files, icons, and main code (which is a well commented 5,348 lines long, the equivalent of a 35,000 word essay). In the same spirit I posted the source code to DoDuck, the tool I use internally for speeding up my management of the Duck/Peanut blog. What it does is quite simple — it looks in my Eudora mailbox for that email address, and any time it sees a new email come in, it grabs the image (from either the attachments folder or the embedded files folder) and saves it alongside a text file containing the email (in both full “as-is” and simplified formats), and avoids doing it over again by keeping a little database of emails and message hashes using a very nice pure assembly FNV (Fowler-Noll-Vo) function that was taken from the exemplary PB Crypto Archives. It’s really nothing special. I did hit an interesting snag when the program was accessing files in the “\Program Files\” heirarchy — Windows 7 considers these “protected”, but instead of failing (such as giving a file access error), Windows makes a copy of the file you’re accessing and puts it in a new “safe” directory and accesses that file instead. It does this completely invisibly to your program, so your program thinks it’s accessing the file from inside the protected directory. The troubling part is that the very first time you access the file, you get a copy of the “real” version of the file that is up to date, but from that point on, Windows does not check if the original file has been updated (nor does the modified virtual file get pushed back into the true directory), and it keeps working with the file in the safe directory. As a result, the two files can become increasingly out of sync. However, I discovered that if you run the program as administrator — something that Windows is discouraging more and more — that it will use the correct file, and ignore the “safe” copy… I’m sure there’s a better way to do it (I imagine you can mark a directory as safe), but for simplicity I solved the problem by just setting that application to run as administrator. Annoying though because it’s a tricky bug to track because it all happens without Windows telling you.

do-ducky

I mostly like drawing the icons. I’ve been using IcoFX, which is free/shareware software…