Things I’ve Been Up To Recently

Quick rundown of the last month or so:

• Became a landowner, moved into the new place, learned that our couch is too big and heavy to fit up the stairs to the living room.
• Grieved a loved one, survived the church service.
• Went on a trip to celebrate my first anniversary, came home without my ring. (That’s not a metaphor. It fell off in the ocean.)
• Got Civilization for the DS and tested my battery’s remaining capacity: about two back-to-back games’ worth.
• Went to work, most days at least.

Giant Bomb and Ambrosia

I got a few points on Giant Bomb for filling in a handful of details about hometown heroes Ambrosia Software. Giant Bomb is pretty cool, but — alas! — my memory does not match my previous obsessive playing and testing of old Mac games.



Look for me on there as OldMainstream.

Markov and Garkov

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror wrote a good introductory post to Markov chains, with a link to Garkov, a Garfield comic generator that uses them.



I think that the humor in Garkov is probably the same as could be achieved by just putting random captions from other strips together, however. For something truly generated-awesome, see Atwood’s example Paul Graham essay:

You can feel the need to take advantage of increased cheapness, however. You're not all playing a zero-sum game. There's not some fixed number of startups; we fund startups we fund to work on matters of passing importance. But I'm uncomfortably aware that this is part of any illusions about the problem of overeating by stopping eating. I couldn't simply avoid the Internet had become, because the company is the new trend of worrying obsessively about what it meant for someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up fights in a startup than just start it. You know how the A List is selected. And even that is more work.

I tried running the last 100 Blogger known issues through the online Markov generator. I don’t think there’s quite enough diversity, though, as I recognize a lot of full sentences, but here are some random Blogger problems:

• Some users are experiencing problems with the new version of Blogger in draft users are experiencing problems with FTP publishing that may affect image upload do not have "www" at the very bottom in the Blogger edit post form to upload one photo at a time or shrink photos larger.


• Some users have been affected by this bug. If a blog or post, regardless of how many total comments the blog reviewed and the iGoogle gadget. Update, 1/28: This has been.


• Some users report that they can be moderated. Comment feeds should now show the earliest comments. A temporary workaround is to click on the fix, one quick recommendation would be to clear your browser's cache and cookies and then go to.


• Some users may be able to set your blog's language. Readers with Internet Explorer security settings set to a FeedBurner feed. The workaround is to exit Picasa.

Once you’ve had enough fun with Markov chains, move on to the Metropolis algorithm to generate samples based on a distribution that you can’t sample directly.

Weezer’s “Pork and Beans” Video

Flashbacks to ROLFcon, yo.

Saturday’s Nearly-Twitters

I just Twittered about my current web implementation issues. Since I like to keep the number and frequency of my Twitters low so as not to overly annoy, here are some things I would have Twittered today:

• VMware on this laptop is slow enough that I could probably save time just installing / uninstalling Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
• WFH is better than WFW because I can read videogame blogs in my downtime instead of e-mail. And I can drink beer.
• Hoping that Safari’s textarea resizing makes it to other browsers so that I’m not wasting my time.
• Seriously. F IE.
  

That’s all for now. Unless I think of more.