Wanted: Greater Variety of Restaurants

The restaurants within walking distance to me are:

1. A southern-style diner with late hours. Lots of deep fried stuff. Good crab stew and hot wings. Expensive sandwiches. Fake scallops. Their food quality had plummeted the last couple times I was there, so I try to ignore it.

2. A Japanese restaurant. Good but not great sushi. Run by Mandarin-speaking Chinese people.

3. A Domino's.

4. A Pizza Hut that also has a WingStreet in it. Good wings, better pizza than Domino's, much farther walk.

5. A Sonic. This is a drive-in fast food place with burgers and shakes and stuff. It doesn't usually come to mind when I'm trying to decide on a restaurant to walk to.

Then there's an empty restaurant building. The last two restaurants in it were both deep fried chicken places. They probably went under from competition with the diner. The diner's food quality has probably plummeted due to lack of competition from the chicken places.

Me, I'd be thrilled to see something in it that offers food other than what we already have in the immediate area. A Chinese takeout, for example. Or maybe Mexican - we do have a fair number of Hispanics in the area. Or if someone could pull off an Indian takeout, or a Korean takeout, or Greek. I could do with a baklava stand. Anything besides more deep-fried chicken.

Flowering Chives

My chives are in full flower. I saw some bees frolicking in them this afternoon, but neglected to take pictures while they were there. The tomatoes behind them are also doing well. Still no fruit and only a few flowers.

Some Easy Arithmetic

Today I made graphs. Lots of graphs.

The goal was to make a two-month time series. I picked out 19 days. The figure for each day had four panels. Each panel had two lines. Each line had 110-190 dots.

So, that's 19 figures. 76 total panels. 152 total lines. 9,348 total dots.

Predictably, the first one was insanely difficult and took 5-6 hours. (Arrr Matlab.) After that, I had a script. The other 75 took maybe 20 total minutes (interspersed over a bunch of blog reading... >.>). Yay Matlab. :p

Printing involved some voodoo (is there any other software out there where, if something fails to work the first time you do it, it inexplicably works fine when you do it a second time? even if you change absolutely nothing in between?), but fortunately it didn't involve sacrificing any goats like the last time I had to work with YY-plots.

Tomorrow? I get to do it all over again with the same 9,348 dots - only this time, I'll be doing it in 3D.

random thought for the day (...or month)

If they have enough advanced planning and funds, anyone can do anything they want to us at any time. The key is not in stopping them from doing things. The key is to stop them from wanting to.

Closure

One hundred eighty two days after I swung the clue-by-four, he said "I'm sorry."

So I called him an asshole.

He said again, "I'm sorry."

I called him less mature than a 15 year old.

He said again, "I'm sorry."

So I forgave him.

The end.

Headlines of our Lives

Apparently we're having another UCF Bonding Event this week, so here's my placeholder post in case any of them land here. :)

Going off the deep end with geometry

[Warning to Nathan: Lots of math is about to ensue. You might want to cover your eyes...]

Yesterday it took me all night to learn that single precision numbers and double precision numbers are not at all the same thing. Not that Matlab will tell you this, of course. They'll look exactly the same to the untrained eye. No, you have to specifically ask, using an obscure function such as superiorfloat(). All Matlab will do is inexplicably refuse to make straightforward plots of those numbers until after you change them.

Today I learned that it's quite difficult to rotate the axes of a cartesian system to anything other than 90 degrees, especially if you've never learned any math past calculus (and you didn't do so good in calculus).

There's:

origin=newpole(polelat, polelon);
[lat_rotate,lon_rotate] = rotatem(lat, lon, origin, 'forward', 'degrees');

... which will indeed do some rotating of the data. However, the end result won't bear much resemblance to what you had at the start.

Then (via John) there's:

xdist = sqrt(((m*lat - m*b) ./ (1 + m^2)).^2 + (((1-m^2)*lat - b + b*m^2 + m*lon) ./ (1 + m^2)).^2);
or
xdist = sqrt((((lon + m*lat + m*b) / (m + 1/m)) + b - lat).^2 + (((lon/m + lat + b) / (m + 1/m)) - lon).^2);

... which uses linear algebra and vectors and dot products and all sorts of stuff that go completely over my head. I have no clue how the equations got derived, only that they don't seem to do what I want them to, and I don't know how to fix them. Also it occurred to me while I was fiddling with them that they'll only give me the x values, not the y values...

Snave tells me it's simple. Those matrices look scary to me. o.O

On Monday I'll reveal my utter ignorance to the local Matlab expert, and maybe she'll figure out how to do all this for me. Either that or I'll abandon this foray and go to Plan B (which is to do what my boss actually asked for as opposed to what he wants (and will probably be asking for when he finds out that what he asked for won't be sufficient)).

The Return of My Infamous Food Posts Part II: House Specials

Nathan asked:

What's really in the 'house special' fried rice?

At the takeout where I worked, it was chicken, pork, shrimp, and vegetables. You could get each of those separately, or beef fried rice, or scallops if you wanted to pay more. We also had 'house special' lo mein, egg foo young, chow mein, chop suey, and chow mei fun. And it was possible to get sweet & sour pork, chicken, and shrimp together, but we called that a "combo" instead. (Which was not to be confused with our "combination platters"...). Then there was Hunan Triple Delight, which was chicken, beef, and shrimp. And Four Seasons, which was all four of the main meats. There were other meat combination things too that involved various forms of seafood.

To answer the unspoken insinuation in the question that you may or may not have intended: no, we did not serve cat meat. Chinese restaurants don't serve cat meat, they're subjected to the same health dept regulations as every other restaurant - which includes checks of whether food suppliers are approved or not. Chinese restaurant owners are either confused by the concept or insulted, depending on how often they've heard it. Either way it isn't very funny from the kitchen side of the counter.

My Lush, Expansive Garden Volume Four

Here's what my garden looks like at the moment. To the left is the present state of my basil. I let five of the flower stalks do their natural thing, but have been trimming off any new ones I see. Still, it was too late, as you can tell by its pale yellow color... On the other hand, I have lots of little black seeds. I can make new basil! There are two small sprouts at the bottom, possibly the earliest seeds, which are making the original rounded leaves instead of the pointy ones.

Meanwhile, my chives are also flowering. None of the buds have opened yet, but I'll get closeups when they do.

The other two pots are tomatoes. These were originally planted by a neighbor who had 50 of them all in one tiny pot. He offered to give me a few. Somehow I ended up with 20 - about 15 in the two pots pictured and another 5 in a third pot on the neighbor's patio. (They're there because animals kept digging them up when they were on my patio.) Something keeps eating the flower buds, so I've sprayed them down with Sevin, so hopefully they'll actually manage to fruit at some point.

The Return of My Infamous Food Posts Part I: Soups

Jeri asked:

Do you cook? What do you like to make when you're cooking for others?

I do cook. By far I'm best at making soups. They're easy because it's much harder to burn something while boiling it than by doing anything else to it. It doesn't generally matter how much of any given ingredient is in it or whether I leave it out entirely. Textures aren't very important. They keep well and freeze well (try freezing them in individual portions for high convenience). Pre-boiling prep for the kinds I make tend to be limited to washing and chopping, as opposed to making dumplings or other heavily hands-on things (that is, I'm too lazy to make kreplach, even without chicken livers involved).

For every soup recipe I've developed, the important part is what order to add the ingredients. Things cook at different rates, so they go into the pot at different times. Dried beans take a long time and therefore go in first, while green peas are best if they're barely cooked at all, so they go in just before you turn off the heat. Meat takes a long time to get tender. Corn starts out tender, then becomes stiff, and then if you continue boiling it long enough it becomes tender again. Potatoes are a firm 20 minutes, even if the pieces are really small.

Additionally, almost all soups taste better if you leave it sitting around slowly cooling for several hours so the flavors can meld together. I generally leave it covered on the stove overnight, then move the whole pot to the fridge when I get up. Leaving it out doesn't seem to hurt the soup any, while moving a hot pot into the fridge right away does hurt other food already in it.

My main repertoire these days are Beef Barley Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup, Spinach Tofu Soup, Lentil Chili, and Adapted Canned Tomato Soup. I make these a gallon at a time, and they seem to still be good after two weeks, though your mileage may vary (I have an iron stomach). I used to make a pasta sauce that I adapted from canned clam chowder as well, but then Jim Wright posted an excellent recipe for making clam chowder from near-scratch, so I adapted a version of that into my regular rotation instead. (And speaking of Jim Wright's soups, he just posted a recipe for Sour Cream Potato Soup. I'm looking forward to trying it.) Last summer I often made this bizarre rendition of a gazpacho, but I'm not sure I like it enough to keep making it regularly.

As for what I make when cooking for others: well, unfortunately, I've yet to figure that out. I had a great tandoori chicken with green beans and basmati rice, but then I ran out of the tandoori powder that made it work - and haven't managed to find that brand again (Kissan Tandoori Masala, if anyone has heard of it; my empty bottle claims to have come from Canada). I can put together a decent basic lasagna, but that's not high on the presentation score. Then there's Pasta with pseudo-Alfredo, but I've yet to make it for anyone other than myself. It's colorful and tastes good, I just don't have houseguests anymore, like, ever.

These days, cooking for others mostly means work potlucks, and cooking for something to put on a buffet line is different from cooking a meal to be served at a table in one's home. I don't have a crockpot, which takes out anything that should be hot, such as soups. I'm not practiced in salads because I don't generally eat salads unless I'm at a potluck or buffet. My baking skills aren't worth mentioning (plus we always seem to have 50% dessert dishes). Mostly I just bring a big jug of fruit punch instead.

LOOT

My loot from Janiece has arrived. As with everyone else, I'll refrain from saying what it is until everyone else has theirs. ;)

Also arriving today is what appears to be preloot loot from Michelle.

And a postcard from Rebelcat and Galenthias while they were in Crete.

And a package of dried fruits from my mother.

It's been a loot-rich day. :)

The Severe Downside of Being Addicted to Sinta

Ninja Kiwi, the people who made Bloons (the latest rendition of which is Pop Three), have a new game out called Sinta. Basically you run around as a little white cat, armed with bow and arrows, in a trap-filled dungeon. It's very addicting. Unfortunately, there are some serious flaws with the game.

1. Unless you have extremely well-coordinated and dexterous left fingers (which I don't), it requires three hands to play - two on the keyboard to run and jump, and one on the mouse to shoot. It would work a lot better if shooting was also a keyboard button, such as the spacebar.

2. After you acquire your fire arrows, the game gets extremely lagged. It is impossible to get through the entire game without fire arrows - and because of the lag, it's also very difficult to get through the game with fire arrows.

3. Layout of the page it loads on is unspeakably bad. The game itself ignores scrolling, which is bad because the bottom part is cut off in every browser I have (Firefox, Safari). So, no idea how many lives I have, what my health is, how many arrows I have, how many stars I've collected, etc. Opera's true zoom function can zoom it down enough so that the entire game is within the window - but the game is unplayable in Opera because the keyboard buttons don't work the way they're supposed to.

Some of the browsers will also load advertisements over the top of the game - and although they can be scrolled out of the way, it's tricky to find a free spot where enough of the game is unblocked.

This is a problem with all of Ninja Kiwi's games. They recently did a revamp of their site's layout, and now it's a lot worse than what they had before. Also, every game has developed a slight lag that wasn't there before, and which gets increasingly bad the longer the game runs.

Even so. I like the cat, so I keep going back to play the early part of the game - before the lag sets in. I just wish I could continue on in the Wizard's Tower to find out what happens. :(

In which I belabor metaphors to their breaking points

Eric asked:

Whence Wikipedia?

I thought about elaborating on that, but every other question I came up with started to show my own prejudices; I'll leave it more open-ended and give you a chance (if you'd like) to riff on the future of Wikipedia.

Whence Wikipedia?

I think about Wikipedia in terms of the Greek Fates (or, more accurately (and this will highlight just how much of a total loser roleplayer I am), the Garou Triat of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm). The one who spins new thread, the one who weaves the thread into useful fabric, and the one who clips excess thread. The editor who creates new articles on interesting topics they've found or adds new content to existing ones; the editor who formats them to standards, revises them, organizes them into categories, and finds citations for them; the editor who scrutinizes them for notability and deletes or redirects the unacceptable ones.

In the beginning there was mostly content creation. Then came the other two kinds of editors, and shortly thereafter there were admins and bureaucrats - editors who wove or clipped other editors rather than articles themselves. From anarchy there arose a massive tangled bureaucracy - which, having grown organically rather than along any kind of plan, looks to the average outsider like a Gordian knot.

Hence Wikipedia?

Well, it remains to be seen whether we can have a proper balance between the weavers and the cutters - a stable, long-lasting one. In the cosmology of the Garou, the Weaver went mad with her thread and ensnared the Wyrm, who also went mad with destruction, and because of the struggle between the two, the Wyld is dying out. On Wikipedia, all the arguments about notability, citations needed, issues of format, following of procedures and protocols and so forth are driving away the spinners.

Some of the spinners are simply surprised and confused to find structure where they expected chaos, while others have trouble wrapping their minds around the prevailing paradigm (that is, it's not about editors, it's about articles). Even aside from those, however, many would-be spinners (and some would-be weavers) take one look at the Gordian knot and just turn around and go away.

Can the bureaucracy be woven into a useful tapestry that helps more than it hinders? Or do we need a hero to come along with a sword? I don't know, but I lean toward the former much more than the latter.

How Now Wikipedia?

Editting for Wikipedia is a lot like making sandcastles. At any moment, a big wave might come by and revert your masterful work of art to a pile of sand.

On Ordering of Siblings

Michelle asked:

Also, from out of left field, I have a bet with myself that you're the
oldest kid in your family. As the oldest kid in my family, I see in
things you say, things that I do, particularly a sense of
responsibility for the rest of the family, regardless of whether they
appreciate it or not, and that sense of responsibility stretching out
into your professional life (I'm thinking in particular of your not
complaining about your pay rate. (Another of my good friends is also
an oldest sibling, and we've often complained about how our siblings
can still get away with murder. (laugh) )

Are you in fact the oldest of your siblings?

As it happens, yes. Not that you can tell by looking at us standing next to each other, as our heights are in reverse order. Also I look the youngest.

You might find it interesting to know, however, that within the family, I'm notorious for shirking all duty and responsibility expected of me by my sister and mother, much to their annoyance. If anyone is being dutifully responsible, it'd have to be my sister (middle child). Plus she's, uhh, bossy. Just like you. :)

On Roleplay, Characters and Writing

Eric asked:

4E: worst thing ever or merely pretty awful?

The last edition of Dungeons and Dragons I played was AD&D 2nd ed., and that was back in 1992. I have no idea. :) Those of you who have it (or are looking forward to receiving it) may feel free to argue about it, however.

Michelle asked:

What's your alignment?

True Neutral.

That was what I got the last time I took an Internet test about it. I agree that it's accurate, and I like where I am.

To tie it back in with the first question, I'll add that one of the many things I dislike about D&D is the alignment system. I find that it's too artificial and arbitrary to pigeonhole people into nine categories of morality, and it's quite contrary to my preferred styles of roleplaying.

Jeri asked:

In your history of role-playing, what's your favorite character you've ever played and why? Describe the character.

Oh man... only one??? I think I'll do three. :)

1. Haywood Jablomey, a VtM vampire character in the form of an 8 year old boy (a Malkavian, for those who know VtM). His original name was John Smith, but the guy who took him in after his turning decided that it was a boring name and changed it. Said guy had a bit of a dirty mind... Anyway, Haywood is cheerful, friendly, and really not very bright at all. He's also a kleptomaniac, but don't ever confront him about it because "I don't steal! Mommy says stealing is bad!" Instead, he just "finds" things. Not necessarily shiny things or expensive things either - he'll unintentionally take just about any random thing that's sitting out somewhere not bolted down. One time he stole all the AA batteries out of some guy's TV remotes, then when the party moved on to ransack the guy's office, he dumped the batteries and took all the paper clips, and then when the party moved into a restricted lab area where everyone had to wear Clean Room suits and he was too small, he used the paper clips to make the suit fit him.

Haywood was my favorite character during the early-mid-90s, back when most of my social life consisted of tabletop roleplaying and LARPs. He's easy to play because I don't have to keep track of anything complex going on, and I don't have to think fast or intelligently. (I can think intelligently but only very slowly.) He was a hit with most groups I played him in because he made for great comic relief. In general, Haywood works best when he's actually part of a troupe, and not just running around doing stuff by himself.

2. Thomas Cougar, another VtM vampire character (a Gangrel), who started out as a Florida Seminole. After his turning, he exiled himself from his people and spent about 80 years alone in the swamps, until his great-granddaughter came along looking into her personal history, and dragged him back out. He then became a doctor who while he practiced western medicine, also knew a ton about the uses of plants (especially the ones from the swamps he was in) for medicinal purposes.

I made him for a realtime chat game in 2002. It became a solo game, and we basically went nuts with it for nearly a year. She was my best friend, and it was what we did. That game was the focus whereby she dragged me out of the abyss I was in at the time.

Later on, when we started drifting apart (as all my friendships seem to after a while), and we weren't playing as often, I started looking for something to fill the time while waiting for the game to continue, and that's how I came to RPoL in the spring of 2003. I put Thomas into a game there, and she made a character for the same game, which was called VtM: Eternal Nights. Umm. How to put it. Let's just say that it lasted for nearly a year and that there was a lot of drama. It took a long, long time before I could play Thomas in anything else (and now he's a minor NPC in a game I help run).

Thomas was also the seed behind just about all of my fiction. I made him, my friend really liked him and kept asking questions about his past, so I made an extremely detailed past (more detailed than any backstory I'd ever written for any other character). Then I made a city around him for where he was from before the start of the game. And in that city there had to be other characters of course... who were doing things of their own... and getting in each other's ways.... (For those familiar with my RPoLian history, "Detroit" originally started out as a game set in the city I made for him.)

So, yeah. Thomas was (and is) pretty important to me. ;)

3. Rumen Radomir, also a vampire, but one from the Anitaverse as described by Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series. He started out as a Hungarian monk in the Dark Ages who became the victim of an experiment on whether the purest of the pure (e.g. a monk) could avoid falling from grace if turned into a vampire - a test of faith. Since the answer is no, he was really mad about that and went on a rampage for a couple centuries revelling in monsterhood. After that he got better. He became friends with a necromancer during the 1400s, and the friend eventually became a human servant. Then a few centuries later (150 years before gamestart in modern times) the servant got killed by a vampire hunter. He got really mad about that and went on another rampage, until finally he calmed down about 50 years ago. He ended up in Sacramento, became the Master of the City's second after six years, and ... that's pretty much it actually because the game is dead now.

The game was set in 1990 in Sacramento, ran from late 2003 to mid-2007 on RPoL, covered all of two story days during that time, and got deleted three weeks ago due to inactivity. :( While it ran, it was by far the best freeform roleplaying play-by-post EV4R. All of my best writing was in that game, and it was the stepping stone between the roleplay writing I'd been doing (and steadily improving), and Nanowrimo 2004.

Rumen is now my top muse. He's very strong-willed and particular about me getting him down right. With as entertaining a past as he had, there are all sorts of stories I can write about him - and I've started to, trying to fill the void while waiting for the game to continue (which now it never will). Much of my past several months have been spent quietly worldbuilding for one of the bigger ones. In some ways he's a seed like Thomas. Same general fuzzy settings, except several centuries earlier in a different part of the world.

For short blurbs about some of my other favorites, there's my response to a meme back in 2006. For more about my trials and tribulations of fiction writing, I do have a blog for that over at Hobgoblin.net. That was my main blog where I wrote down actual bloglike material (stuff about daily life) before starting this one.

Global Warming Worldbuilding

From Jeri (via Eric):

I need some sort of event that will cause immediate global warming in the course of one summer/fall - to the point that it will not freeze come winter in the arctic and it will happen so fast it will surprise the world. What sort of event can you think of, outside of deus ex machina?

Umm. What kind of story is this? You could always blame it on space aliens with superior technology.

Barring that, basically you'd have to find a way to dump a whole lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A whole lot. Enough to overwhelm all the balances that are presently in place.

I used to have a book, Out of Thin Air by Peter Ward, that explained how the Mesozoic got to be as warm as it did. I no longer have it, so going entirely by memory here, but basically it was because all the accumulated plant detritus during the Carboniferous (which was called that for a reason...) suddenly released their stored carbon into the atmosphere. I think he said it was a really big fire.

So... maybe in your case, find a way to burn every single plant in the entire world?

I Got Nothing

Obviously I've not had much luck coming up with things to write about in here, for the better part of three months now, so I'm going to steal Eric's idea.

Anyone have any questions they want to ask me? :)

Vindication

One of the hallmarks of being a responsible moderator is that you never really know whether you're doing a good job. The second-guessing and self-critique is constant: am I being too harsh? am I being too lenient? is there a better way to approach the problem than what I'm doing? can I think of it in time to be effective? In the thick of the moment, when tempers run high from all directions and decisions must be made quickly with no time to think things through, when people you expected to count on for support and input during a difficult time instead turn on you, when even with people you can count on for support and input you still really stand alone: it's easy to fail.

Six months ago I tried, and stumbled, and failed, and wondered if I'd gotten any of it right. Three weeks ago I discovered just how much rage I still hold for how things turned out. One week ago I had cause to show the records to another moderator - one whom I highly respect and whose opinion I very much trust. She said:

"shit you're a lot more patient than I am."

Despite all the things that still remain unresolved, some peace of mind finally came. I wasn't harsh at all, and I did get it right in the end. And I think I can let go the worst of the rage now.

Recent Reading

I used to be a voracious reader in my youth. So much so that it interfered with my ability to get to school on time, my grades, and my (other) extracurricular activities. My parents learned quickly to not bother giving me any money, not even for emergencies, because I would spend it on books. They were never fond of my penchant for science fiction, claiming it was a frivolous waste of time when I should be reading classical literature or weighty philosophical matter (or doing homework). Once, my mother actually tore one of my books in half.

Then, at some point in grad school when I was reading tons of scientific papers all the time, I fell out of the habit of reading fiction. I no longer had days at a time to do nothing but read an entire book all at once. At the same time, reading became physically hard on me. No matter what position I sit or lie down in, some part of me gets stiff and sore - and by rotating through lots of different positions, my whole body ends up stiff and sore. It was like that in my youth, too, but I recovered faster back then. For a while I just read magazines instead (mainly Earth (RIP :( ), Discover, Smithsonian, and Science News), but eventually I stopped reading those, too.

Now I've been trying to ease back into reading. One of the writing groups I belong to started up a book reading challenge a year ago. Basically you declare how many you'll read that year, and then you list them as you finish each one. Last year I declared 12 (one per month seemed like a good way to ease back into reading when I hadn't read a thing for years) and ended up with 10:

1. Agent to the Stars - John Scalzi (sci fi)
2. Out of Thin Air - Peter Ward (science nonfic)
3. Memory of Running - Ron McLarty (mainstream fic)
4. The Paths of the Dead - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 1)
5. The Lord of Castle Black - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 2)
6. Sethra Lavode - Steve Brust (fantasy trilogy 3)
7. Core Performance - Mark Verstegen (nonfic exercise book)
8. Hellspark - Janet Kagan (sci fi)
9. Brokedown Palace - Steven Brust (fantasy)
10. Starcraft: Queen of Blades - Aaron Rosenberg (sci-fi)

This year I declared 12 again, and so far I have:

1. Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett
2. Dzur by Steve Brust
3. Old Man's War by John Scalzi
4. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
5. Thud! by Terry Pratchett
6. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

At the moment I'm working on Hogfather by Terry Pratchett and On Writing by Stephen King. Pratchett is going faster. ;)

The fact that I started visiting the local library helps; I have a deadline to read them by, and then if I'm going to the library anyway to return books I might as well get more... Their sci-fi/fantasy section is only four bookcases, but at my current snail's pace they should last me quite a while. Also, I've learned how to read only a chapter or two at a time. It's much easier to come up with the time for that than two whole days of doing nothing else.

Basil Flowers

My basil has gotten a lot taller in the past couple months. "Leggy" is probably a good way to describe them now. They do get full sun in the afternoons but apparently could use more than I can provide. Aside from longer stems and smaller leaves, they've also been flowering.

May 2

Jul 4

Basil flowers are tiny and white. They've decided not to all bloom at the same time on each stalk as I'd hoped, but to go a few at a time.

Now I'm wondering if I should be trimming the flower stalks off so they make more leaves....