I have a little gem I figured I’d share with the masses. I just ran through updating my Gentoo ~amd64 system (many many updates in the last 6 months) and found that there were still packages that had not been updated. I threw together a quick shell command to not only find all packages out of date but update them as well:

eix | grep '\[U' | perl -e '@p=<>;map{s/\[U\](.*)\n//;$i.=$1;}@p;print $i;’ | xargs emerge -uD

So if you use the eix tool to greatly speedup package lookups, it’s output can be utilized to find packages that were not picked up by a recent emerge -uD world. The perl script most definately could be golfed further but I’d like to keep things readable.

So this past weekend lived up to the mythos. In fact, the week leading up to it was something else as well. So my tale of last week is broken up into a few sections here, which I’ll go over one by one.

The Pee Pants

On Wednesday, during my tempo run, I noticed everyone I passed was giving me a funny look. An elderly couple looked at me as if they were confused. I jokingly thought to myself that they must not be used to seeing a lanky guy like myself expending so much energy to barely move. A mother and daughter walking their dog refused to respond when I greeted them. Then, one woman on a bike initially gave me a welcoming smile but then sort of glanced down and winced. It was then that I realized there was something wrong, so I checked to make sure my baggage was stowed (if you know what I mean) and everything was in order. Everything seemed fine except there was a sweat pattern developing around my crotch. I’m sure it looked like I peed my pants, but I didn’t and it could have looked far worse.

The Ulcer

Jay: I farted on Jason’s pillow, he farted on Jonah’s, thinking it was mine, and eventually pinkeye-d my pillow. I’m not proud of any of this.

Well, I didn’t develop pink-eye, but it sure felt like I did. Friday morning I stuggled to keep my eyes open and found it grew worse throughout the day, leading into light sensitivity and soreness. I assumed it was just something in my eye and a night’s sleep would clear it up. It actually became worse, so I went to the optometrist. Turns out I had developed an ulcer in my upper right eye and it had become emergent. I had to apply drops in my eye hourly and go back the next day to check to see if the prescription was effective. I took the opportunity to live like Batman the next day and avoided spending any time in the sun.

It cleared up by about 80% on Sunday and I was told I could scale back the prescription usage. I should be able to start wearing my contacts again by Friday.

The Stitch

As per our Sunday evening routine, I was finishing a few things on the grill (mushrooms and under-cooked pork) when yet another emergency occurred. Our cheap knives have this bad habit of not staying in the handle, which led to one of the steak-knives doing just that. From about 3 feet off the ground, it feel tip down into my foot. There wasn’t any pain, but gravity took over and blood starting spurting out. I yelled at Sunshine to try and get her to bring me a towel to stop the bleed. Her response: bring a towel and the Britta water pitcher, apply the later before the former. This just caused more blood to pour out, so I took the towel, wrapped the wound, and hurried into the bathroom tub.

I don’t claim to be even remotely medical, so I figured a hospital visit was in order. The hospital may be less than 5 miles away, but we had to wait 2 hours to see a doctor, bleeding wound and all. After a smart-assed male nurse came in to give me a tetanus shot, the PA decided I only needed 1 stitch, which was quickly administered.

She also recommended that I not run (the fact that I was a runner was only logical after she took my blood pressure and found it to be 104/55) until the stitch was removed next Wednesday. I said to hell with that and ran yesterday and today anyways, albeit slower than planned. I figured if there are people that can run without feet at all, then the least I could do was deal with a single stitch without whining.

So here are my pace charts for last week. I burned ~1500 calories and struggled with the heat all week. I took a few walk breaks due to the oppressive heat. Sunday was not a good run, as you can tell from all of the up and down motion in the chart. Hopefully this week will turn out better.

So I was listening to Car Talk on the way to work today (on a Saturday, bleh) after my run (more on that later) and I made special note of the puzzler. Usually the puzzler can be very tricky, but not this week, for me at least. They haven’t posted it yet, but it goes something along these lines:

Tommy went to a farmers market one day. He accidentally kicked over a big basket of eggs and broke every single one of them. Feeling bad, he asked the woman how many there were so he could compensate her appropriately. [author's note: this part gets a little fuzzy to remember] She says that she didn’t count them but had put them in paper bags earlier. When she put 2 in each bag, she had 1 left over (not placed in a bag). So she decided to put 3 in each bag, but still had 1 left over. Then she tried 4, 5, and eventally 6, but they all had 1 remaining egg, but 7 eggs per bag worked without any extra eggs. What is the minimum number of eggs Tommy has to pay for?

So obviously I wrote a perl script in my head while driving to calculate it. I figured I’d test it out when I got to work, but I had 30 minutes until I arrived. I decided to mentally golf my script to come up with the least amount of characters needed to provide the answer. I golfed out 2 more answers and came up with the following:

$_++ until $_%2==1 && $_%3==1 && $_%4==1 && $_%5==1 && $_%6==1 && $_%7==0;
print "Minimum number of eggs: $_\n";

It’s pathetically 2 lines of code, but 1 is a user friendly line to print the answer. I was starting to wonder if I could golf any more of that code down, but after reading some actual perl golf scripts, I came to the conclusion that I clearly a) do not know perl well enough and b) am not clever enough. So I think I am going to embark on trying to golf this down as much as possible. If you remove the unneccessary spaces and print statement, it’s exactly 63 characters.

If anyone has any suggestions, please drop a comment. I would really like to learn to play better golf and develop a much better understanding of perl. Also, if anyone wants to golf this out in another language, feel free to drop a comment (use the code tag).

Update: Refer to the on-going game at perlgolf.

So there was an article about a BitTorrent tracker admin who was recently convicted of 2 felony charges relating to copyright infringement. Apparently, he uploaded Star Wars Episode 3 just before it opened in the theatres, and then pleaded to conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and criminal copyright infringement. He took a plea bargin, served some jail time, and is now on house arrest. As part of his parole agreement, he cannot use a computer without the government’s monitoring software. That sounds reasonable given the charge; at least he wasn’t banned from computer use completely.

Well, apparently the monitoring software is windows only software. Or at least it was geared for Windows. He’s unemployed and is playing the “I have 2 felonies and cannot find a job” card, so Windows is out of his price range. Therefore, he’s taking legal action against the state that is trying to force his hand here.

There are 3 main things wrong with this. First, unless the agreement said he had to use Windows specifically, his lawyer might be able to argue that they test the software under Wine to ensure that everything executes to their standards. Running Windows software is not necessarily a new concept in Linux. I’m sure he should be able to find an “expert witness” willing to testify if the government’s standards are met for the software to be run from Linux.

Secondly, and more importantly, he is missing the big picture. He committed a FELONY (actually 2). That means as a felon he will no longer be treated as a full citizen. In most states, he cannot vote or serve on juries. While most people don’t want to do either of those things, they are absolutely critical in making American citizens free. Now that he is a felon, while still on parole no less, he is now awarded few rights most of us are granted. While on parole, he is expected to do as told or risk being sent back to prison. Since he has 2 felonies, he’s now one strike away from being sent to prison for some real hard-time.

Lastly, it’s very ironic that someone who was uploading bootlegged/free movies is now being forced to buy a legitimate copy of Windows. It’s also ironic that since he was unwilling to pay attention to the FBI warnings, he is now a second-strike felon complaining about being forced to use Windows. If he had heeded the warnings, perhaps he wouldn’t be in this predicament. Ignoring the law does not make you exempt from it; neither does ignorance.

After all, he did take a plea bargin. His chance to fight this was before he accepted the plea. Instead, he rolled over and only afterwards does he have a problem with the agreement. As the old saying goes, if he wasn’t willing pay for the crime, he should never have committed it. Take your lumps with the rest of the criminals of the world. As much as people dislike the copyright law, it’s still a law that must be treated as such (revoked by legal means only). It’s like the pot smoker who gets busted and then complains that he isn’t allowed to smoke it for medicinal purposes in his state, after pleading guilty.

Someone at work posed a riddle to me and I thought I’d share it with everyone:

Three women go to a motel. The manager charges them $30, so they each pay $10. Then the manager realized that there was a special on the room and it was really just $25. He sent the bellboy the $5 back to them. They decided that since $5 does not divide evenly 3 ways, they would get $1 back each, bringing their cost down to $9, and the bellboy could keep $2 as a tip. However, that total is $29 (3 x $9 + 2), so where did the remaining dollar go?

The answer will be in the first comment.

My dearest Video Games,

In the spirit of all of the farewell letters typically sent to soldiers from their two-timing worthless girlfriends, I felt I needed to finally make official my break up. It is with a heavy heart that I am going to have to break up with you, Video Games.

It’s been a 22 year relationship that has had its ups and downs. We’ve been through the arcade, the PC, the Atari 2600, the NES, the Sega Genesis, the Lynx, the GameGear, the Super Nintendo, the Turbo Grafx-16, the Saturn, the Virtual Boy, the Jaguar, the N64, the Playstation 1 and 2, the Gamecube, the Play Station Portable, the Game Boy, Game Boy SP, and the Nintendo DS Lite. We’ve played hundreds upon hundreds of great games (the list is simply too long to list). I still own most of the games I bought for the really good systems (NES, SNES, Genesis, PS1, PS2, GameBoy, Gamecube, DS). I didn’t keep all of those systems, I didn’t even own all of them (rented frequently at BlockBuster or a friend/relative owned it).

It’s a shame it has to end this way. Unfortunately, I have found someone else. Her name is Grad School, and she keeps me so busy, I simply don’t have time to waste with you. We had so many great memories and you’ve never let me down. I will always hold a special place in my heart for the interactive game. Any time I see a child playing a Virtual Console game as if it’s brand new, I will weep with all of the memories of days past. Any time someone rants about how great the new Mario game is or about how they’re tired of seeing MegaMan sequels, I will probably shed a few tears.

This has been a year in the making and I have been dreading making it official as I feel I will now be missing a part of myself. The seventh generation of console games has arrived with full-force and I am lacking the desire to continue our relationship at this point. The prospects look very promising as all the systems have something to offer a hardcore old-school gamer such as myself. I think this time, I’d rather spend my money and my time on other things.

I hope you understand. Best of in all of your future ventures; try to avoid the mediocrity of the movie industry and don’t over-glutton yourself like you did in 1983. In fact, I hope we can continue to still be friends. I have still have to ride a vanpool to work, which leaves me with about 6-8 hours a week to enjoy some great DS games. Also, I will probably keep my subscription to EGM (going on fifteen years strong).

Love,

s1n

I found this post I made several months ago but wasn’t sure why I never published it. So, here it is. Maybe in 25 years, my kids will dig this up and find it just hilarious that their old man was pickin’ on his old man for turning 50.

My father turns 50 today so I wanted to commemorate his old age by posting the whimsical comment I put in his birthday card.

Wow, you’re 50. That’s half a century! I thought I would help you get a grasp on how old 50 really is; at 50 years old, you are older than the following inventions:

White-Out
Lasers
Hula-Hoops
Integrated Circuits
Barbie
Halogen lamps
Non-dairy creamer
Audio cassettes
Acrylic paint
Astroturf
Contact lenses
NutraSweet
Compact Discs
Kevlar

As if that weren’t enough, I thought I’d show you what things cost in 1956:

House: $22,000
Average Income: $4,454
Ford Car: $1,748 - $3,151
Gas: $0.23
Stamps: $0.03

By now, you’ve probably already forgotten why you’re reading this card. Happy Birthday you old fart!

My mother turns 50 on 9/11 (that’s as wierd as being born on 7/4 or 12/25) so we will be throwing a combined “Half Century Celebration” for them somewhere in the middle. I’ll post more with pictures from the party and what we got him my parents on their big five-o.