Playing Donna Lee is like participating in a dick measuring contest...

On a completely unrelated note, I think I'm going to learn Donna Lee.

At speed.

What is it at, like 220?

Fuck.

Let's overload some methods and listen to Pantera!

Fuck yeah!

Sometimes I have nothing to say and I just feel like maeking poast. Well, I guess that's why I have a blog in the first place.

The episode of BSG I missed, the one on the 18th, they evidently used the word clusterfrak. That's my word!

A long time ago I considered trying to become competitive with Soul Calibur 2, but then realized the first step in doing so for fighting games is to memorize the number of frames for every move and which frames are safe. Screw that, that's way too much effort.

Well, here's an interesting article to make up for my lack of substance. Passover seems an appropriate time to read about bagels anyways.

Oh Colonel Tigh, you're so crazy!

My OCD with music

Or more accurately my music library. I suppose this wouldn't come as much of a surprise for anyone who's seen my folder trees, but here goes.

It doesn't matter how obscure the song or where it's from, I must have the correct title, artist and genre.

For AC/DC, I tried to find a unicode character for lightning bolt for a while before giving up. The title has to be exactly as it is written, including all brackets (of the correct type), hyphens, semi-colons, tildes and stars (wtf). At one time I used to add the original artist on covers, but then I decided against it because sometimes a cover is more famous than the original (e.g. All Along the Watchtower: Hendrix vs Dylan) or in jazz where everything is pretty much a standard.

The genre must be labeled as category-subcategory. I don't label something as hard rock, I label it as Rock-Hard. That way I won't end up with bebop next to black metal when sorting by genre. I have special conditions for using the soundtrack and musical tags, I will tag something as soundtrack only if the source album is a soundtrack, and if I have no other entries by the same artist that are labeled otherwise. The logic being that if I downloaded a soundtrack in its entirety, I would probably want all the songs from the source to appear next to each other when sorting, but this is superseded by the fact that I want songs by the same artist to also appear next to each other as much as possible. Similar conditions for musical, with the additional disjunctive that any song that originated from a musical is automatically tagged as musical. That means "Seasons of Love" = musical, "I Wanna Love Him So Bad" != musical.

Secondary is the album, which I try find as much as possible, it's not hard most of the time.

Tertiary tags are the year and track number, which I won't bother looking up if the other tags are already correct. Honestly, when am I ever going to sort my library by year and track number anyways? Besides, I haven't got a system for labeling tracks on albums with A and B sides or albums that have multiple disks yet.

If you think that's obsessive, I calculate the ratio between all the categories frequently. For instance, J-pop must never exceed 5% of my library by track titles and I am trying to push metal under 40%.

I have lots of problems with jazz because most songs are standards and there's is a whole lot of mislabeling. Also because a lot of performers played with each other, not to mention that someone like Miles Davis had a famous quartet, quintet, sextet and god-knows-whatever-tet. I end up just putting [et al] at the end of the artist because damned if I'm going to keep three entries for a single artist. I still have this big 40min long track with filename "John Coltrane-Live at Birdland", that I have no idea where it's from. For all I know it could've been someone sitting in the audience at Birdland with a tape recorder, in which case, it would be live at Birdland indeed.

FYI Rob, Coltrane plays tenor mostly and doesn't play cool jazz, tag that shit properly.

That doesn't even come close to the trouble I have with classical music though. If it's a baroque concerto, what would I label it as? Should I put the composer or the performer down as the artist? Sometimes I have the latter but not the former and vice versa. What if it's an arrangement, what then? Finally I have the worst time tracking down albums for that stuff. It's all become such a pain that I just refuse to download any.

I've decided that I like my horn

No it's not pro like Mike's alto, it's just a student-level Conn.

But I know how to make it sing. I once tried a Yamaha from the school, I could not get a tone I liked from it.

V16s are nice reeds, they need to warm up before performing but they give a nice bright sound. Unlike the Ricos, which I can pretty much just play out of the box.

Now I just need to actually start practicing again.

Speaking of instruments, I find Crobert's guitar fascinating. It's like a Les Paul, but...not? Also, the black with gold trim and inlaid mother of pearl is gorgeous.

edit: It's an Edwards LP Custom, I don't know if that means it's a modified from a Gibson LP or an imitation. I told him he should find a red one with an antenna.

Holy crap Wikipedia

One would think the Yakuza has better things to do then to edit Wikipedia articles.

That's what one would think.

I recall something similar happening on the Hell's Angel article quite a while back as well. It's fallen off the talk page now though.

Naturally, being an article related to Japan, tentacles must be involved.

This comic is kind of awesome

The only problem is, who reads Korean?

What's a worse idea than Nicole in DoA?

Yoda and Darth Vader in SC4.

Everytime I am reminded of this, I facepalm.

I'm not even going to start on the bust sizes.

A sense of scale

Click for larger.


If you know me, you could probably guess how this ends.

Civil War: I'm with Caprica Six

In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the NERV HQ is run by 3 networked MAGI supercomputers: Melchior, Balthasar and Casper. A decision is made by a majority vote between the 3. Each computer is designed to analyze based on a personality trait of the designer, representing her as a scientist, a mother and a woman respectively. In this manner they were able to incorporate humanism into the decision making process*.

The Cylons take this idea further, with each of the 7 basestar human models representing a specific facet of human behaviour. When they vote, together they simulate how a human would make a decision. This is why One is able to predict how others are going to vote and why it becomes such a shock that Boomer votes contrary to the other Eight models. What this means is that the Cylons are becoming more human, against their original programming. Of course, the elegance of the system goes entirely to hell when Three is taken offline (meaning there's no tie-breaking vote) and Six decides to rebel. With guns.

See? I'm making connections. Mr. Panwar would be proud.

*In the end, when they attempted to self-destruct the HQ, it required a unanimous decision from the MAGI. Casper voted against the proposal out of spite. From this we can conclude...women are spiteful?

'Hogs are awesome

The A-10 is like my favourite aircraft. It is slow and lumbering, but it takes a lot of punishment and gives troops the CAS they actually need. It can return safely with literally half of its flight surfaces destroyed, one engine and wrecked landing gear. It survives 20mm cannon fire. Its Avenger cannon has recoil equivalent to the thrust of one engine.

Plus, I bet the Air Force never has to worry about protecting it from falling clams.

Dammit Adobe

When your program leaves an XML preferences file, you would assume that it's for user modification, right?

Then why the hell is the entire document written in one line?

I noticed Google does the same with its scripts, but I suppose that's because they don't want people trying to steal it.

What's Adobe's excuse?

Teal is nice, but it's time for a change

Here's my current theme:


I've wanted to re-theme for a while now. I am just starting to gather the required materials now.

Shell theme: Found
Wallpaper 1: Possible candidates, still looking.
Wallpaper 2: Found.
Winamp: Needs new skin.
Frostwire: Needs new skin.
Firefox: Possibly needs new theme.
Logon Screen: Needs major tweaking.
MSN: Needs minor tweaking.
Dock: Needs minor tweaking.
Icons: No change needed.
Rainlendar: No change needed.
Colibri: No change needed.
Boot screen: No change needed.

Thank god going to black is an easy transition, I dread trying one day to make my desktop coordinate with multiple colours.

Also, to whoever remarked that the Zune theme was awful: fuck, the Zune theme is awful. It's not really the black and white though, because you can in fact make a sexy black and white theme. It's just the Zune.

edit: Shell theme is going to need major tweaking because damned if I can read a thing as it is. God damn it, there's two tests tomorrow; I have no time for this.

So, what happened to the Amazon?

Did everyone just decide to move on? Desertification too, whatever became of that issue?

I can only conclude that the environmentalists moved on to the next fad, AKA global warming.

In great irony, as far as I'm aware, great swaths of the ancient forest are still being clear cut, now to provide room for growing bio-fuels. A scam in itself.

Fuck, this is why I hate environmentalists and find it hard to take anything they say seriously. So many of them can't even stand by their own causes for an extended period of time, and this is hurting people's perceptions of legitimate scientists and informed activists.

Fuck you Bono, and McCartney as well. Writing a hit song is not a qualifier for engaging in intelligent discourse.

Fuck those baby seals too, cuteness does not correlate to ecological value.

Maybe I'll elaborate on my position some other time, but suffice to say I am a seething pot of hatred over how things are being conducted right now.

217 ships

That's how many ships currently in the US Navy.

Well, actually no.

I didn't count the uncommissioned ships, the ships under construction, ships under the MSC, boomers and things like mine sweepers/hospital ships/etc. I did count all the ships related to amphibious warfare including landing docks and command ships.

Why, you may ask?

Out of all those ships, 4 have sunk an enemy ship.

1 of them is the USS Constitution, so it doesn't really count.

2 of them (USS Porter and USS Carter Hall) sunk little pirate skiffs off of Somalia.

That leaves the USS Simpson, which sunk a Iranian missile patrol boat during the Iran-Iraq war. The only active USN warship to have sunk another warship.

...

Maybe all those people who want to modernize the Iowas ought to think about that.

edit: On a similar note, 20 Bradleys were lost during the first Gulf War. 3 were due to enemy fire, 17 were due to friendly fire. Who needs enemies when you have teammates like that?