OK, so how did I do?

Visual Effects: Wrong. Spiderman 2 was the weakest of the three, showing that the academy is truly a confederacy of dunces. They should leave the choosing of this award up to people who are interested in effects for their technical merit.

Score: Won by a movie I haven't seen, so that's OK with me.

Animated Feature: Yes. Incredibles. Yes Yes Yes.

Sound Editing: Again, Incredibles. Yes.

Makeup: Lemony Snickett. Another winner.

So I got three out of five right, and one of the two I didn't guess was sort of no-contest. So I'm happy with my performance.

And now I have a much longer NetFlix queue.

Last night was a night of multitasking. I was running simulations for my thesis, which required no brainpower, so I also worked on my ROM archive while watching King Arthur. The movie suffers from a serious case of Bruckheimer, but I really liked seeing a popular piece of mythology placed in the confines of reality. Merlin is just the head of some band of rebels fighting the Roman empire in Britain, and Arthur and his knights are just Roman conscripts. Anyway the fact that it was all plausible while paying homage to the myth by providing events that could, over time, come to be retold as the story we're all familiar with... well I liked that.

Someone should do the same thing to the Bible. Like Life of Brian, only with less aliens.

Anyway, I think my favorite part of the movie was Mads Mikkelsen. Apparently he was a professional dancer for a long time before becoming an actor - and his command of movement shows in his fight scenes. He comes off as a swordmaster for whom aesthetics are an important part of fighting, as someone who pursues perfection in everything. Reminds me, in this way, of samurai. And, well... I like that too.

While I worked for Imaginet in Minneapolis, they tore down the skyscraper across the street and built a new one. In the early stages, when the concrete was being poured on the lower floors, they used a concrete pump vehicle which had a long arm on it and would deliver wet concrete to any point within about 50' of the vehicle. The name on the vehicle was "Schwing" painted in big blue letters.

This was right around the time when Wayne's World was popular and we all got a big kick out of the Schwing, and everyone clustered around the windows when the Schwing was moving.

Fast-forward to today, at LANL, where they are erecting a new building across the street from my office. Again they have a concrete pump truck, but sadly it is not a Schwing. It is, however, a... Putzmeister. And I guess that's just as good.

Well Roman seems to have added filtering into ClrMamePro, rendering my script uselsss. In his new FAQ section, he indicates that you can exclude all files with particular flags like this:

Settings->Sets->Select Sets: Enter *[[]b?[]]*. This will enable only the [b...] Sets. You can add (separated by ';') the similar expression for 'o' flags. Then click the 'i' button there and it will inverse the selection. Et voila...any set except the ones with [o] and [b] flags are enabled.

I haven't tested this out yet, but it shows promise. In other ROM news, I spent some time last night while my simulations were running to find and download the few scattered MAME 0.92 ROMs I was missing. I now have a complete set of ROMs and samples. For those of you keeping score, the complete MAME ROM set now exceeds 12GB of space and includes 5508 games. Still working on the CHDs, but there's something like 20GB of those out there that I don't have; so it'll be awhile.

And because I know you'll ask, Dan, what would I do without both Gauntlet Legends v1.2 AND v1.5, each of which have a separate >1GB CHD?

Umm... blow me.

I have an enormous collection of ROMs for various emulators. There are people who catalog the available ROM images for a given platform and make DAT files that list them. Each ROM has a checksum in the DAT file so if you have a file and you don't know what system it goes with or it has be renamed to something wrong, the DAT file will tell you what you've got.

Unfortunately, the original purpose for these DATs was to identify ROMs, so even versions of ROMs that were broken were listed in the DAT files. I personally use the DAT files to meter my collection, and I have no use for ROMs that will never work in any emulator. So when I use ClrMamePro to examine my collection for a particular system, it'll say that I'm missing x ROMs and I have to wade through the list of what's missing to see if there is anything there that I actually want. For some systems, I just download complete bundles of ROMs including all the hacks, overdumps, and broken versions. But for some systems, this is not an intelligent strategy. The N64 ROMs, for instance, comprise over 25 gigabytes - and at least 10GB of that is useless ROMs.

So I'm writing a parser that will filter the bad ROMs out of the DAT files and make my own versions. Then the ClrMamePro output will actually tell me what I want to know, and I won't have a mountain of gimpy ROMs in the file list when I play games on an emulator.

The question is: What to filter? I'm definitely ditching the bad dumps, overdumps, and bad checksum ROMs. Should I keep the translations? Fixes? Alternate dumps? Cracks? Any advice? Brent? :)

Once I get the tool finished, I'll produce a current set of DATs based on the latest releases of GoodDATs and put them online.

http://www.coudal.com/abbavideo.php

This reminds me of a time back at MIT when the All Your Base video was still making the rounds, and some guy proposed a contest to see who could dance to that awful song on repeat the longest. It lasted about 6 hours before Rhett and some other kid decided to mutually quit. Ouch.

Progging? Probling? Jason Kottke: Pro-Bling. I like it.

So Jason is a professional now. There's just something so odd about the idea. It's a business model that does not scale at all. His patrons are all, for the most part, other bloggers. If all bloggers tried this, then everyone would be contributing to everyone else. As there would be no outside sources of money, the total money in the system would remain constant and, in the ensemble average, everyone would donate out as much as was donated to them. And they would all starve.

Sadly, we can't all try this experiment. There has to be outside funding. Some of us have to keep slaving away for the man. But, in the end, that's probably for the best since my collective readership could probably swing together $10 or $20 for me in a pinch. The thing with Jason's website is that it is, how to put this... well, way way way better than mine.

I look at kottke.org as sort of the PBS of weblogs. I'm willing to donate some $$$ because the programming is good and there aren't ads. There are plenty of blogs out there that are supported by ads and are analagous to CNN or something. Then there's me. No ads, crap content. I'm like public access cable TV - I'm the ranting ultra-fundy that comes on Sundays at 3:30am. But when I'm not spreading the word on channel 37, I watch PBS.

This weekend was a three-day holiday weekend, and as such I figured I shouldn't spent the whole thing working. I took a few hours off each day and went outside, mostly on little hikes in the canyons and mountains near town.

I showed Bob the cave down in White Rock, and while we were there I discovered that the cave register I had placed inside had been damaged (the tupperware had shattered in one corner and it looked like an animal had gotten inside and started chewing on the paper). I spent some of yesterday buying an ammo cannister from the Black Hole and outfitting it as a critter-proof cave register. I went back to White Rock and placed it in the cave. While I was down there, I decided to do a nearby geocache.

The geocache in question was listed as not being very hard to find, though the previous two people to look for it failed. The coordinates put me on a basalt talus slope in White Rock Canyon, and basically there were an infinite number of places to hide it. The proximity of a nearby cliff was giving my GPS wacky reflections and its position estimate was wandering all over the place. I ended up searching through those rocks for over an hour and came up with nothing. I was rather irritated at the "difficulty 2" rating, because if it is there then it is really well buried.

When I got home, I had an email from someone who had spent the last week trying to do my most recent geocache. He had failed to find it. He sent me his solution to the puzzle and, using this information, I determined that I basically screwed up the puzzle royally. There was no way to solve it and find the cache. So I'm an idiot. I had to backpedal and fix the puzzle, apologize to the people who had spent real time trying to find something that wasn't there, etc.

Later last night I got an email from the owner of the cache I went looking for... he disabled the cache and indicated that it probably had been removed or buried by someone. I guess I got what I deserved.

Mikki wasn't carried away by gypsies or stampeded by rampaging moose. She went to Mexico with some friends. She told me this a thousand times - I just spaced it.

Don't you hate those mysteries where the solvency comes in the form of "The Narrator is a Moron?"

So Wikipedia went down today on account of a tripped circuit breaker behind the UPS of the colocation facility. WTF? This is even weirder than when more-or-less-exactly the same thing happened to LiveJournal last month. LJ's problem was that someone inside the server room hit an emergency shutdown switch when they shouldn't have - but the hardware did exactly what it was supposed to, someone was just a dumbass. At Wikipedia, either the hardware was installed with monumental stupidity or it was broken in a way that can only be described as a hideously un-robust single point of failure.

I have no idea how either of these events managed to occurr. That's the whole point of these giant facilities - they worry about this stuff for a living. Wow!

I am deriving enormous amusement from seeing Paris Hilton, once again, allow something very private to find itself spread to every corner of the internet. I guess the sex tape wasn't really her fault, and neither was T-mobile getting pwned (again!), but somehow she just seems to attract calamity. The thing with the sex tape was that there were just two people on it, and the non-Paris participant is the one who released it onto the internet in the first place... so the only loser was... Paris. So there's some grounds for pity there, I suppose, and if she wasn't such a self-absorbed clod I might feel bad about it.

The T-mobile hack, on the other hand, released Paris' entire collection of phone numbers and email addresses to the world at large. And since she's only interested in people if they are rich, famous, or well hung, most of those contacts I imagine are closely guarded secrets (for instance, she makes references to so-and-so's rich daughter's wedding, etc.). So last night, when it all went public and the poor souls like Vin Diesel and Fred Durst were probably getting prank calls all night from losers all across america... all eyes once again turned to Paris.

This time, people weren't saying "what posessed you to let your steakhead boyfriend make a porno tape with you in it?" Every single celebrity who Paris Hilton has ever sucked up to climb another rung on the social ladder is cursing her name as the total waste of air that she is. This time, they're all saying "what possessed me to give you my contact information??" Maybe it was that tape...

Of course, the winner in all of this is... the rest of us.

I feel bad for the numerous people who are probably now going through the huge annoyance of changing their phone numbers and email addresses. I hope that this causes some kind of backlash against Paris... if I were in that address book (she must have written my number down on paper or something), I'd be pissed at her. Since her only capital is social status... if all or even most of these people resent her for it... then she falls. And then I won't have to hear about her dumb ass anymore.

The moral of this story is that: all the money in the world and fancy social climbing doesn't make you any smarter, Paris. You're still an idiot and now a bunch of your friends probably hate you. And I'm amused. Thanks.

Canon has released a special version of their 20D digital camera specifically designed for astrophotography. It lacks the IR filter present on most modern digital cameras, allowing better response from H-alpha lines in emission nebulae. Also it has a live-focus mode which allows you to see the results of focusing the camera in real time on the LCD screen. Both of these are enormous improvements for astrophotography. I'm trying to find more information, but so far Canon's release information (which was made available yesterday) is only available in Japanese. DPreview has an early review up but they don't have much information either. Hopefully this will get released into the American market, right around when I graduate (2031) and have an increased income and the liquidity to afford an upgrade to my DSLR.

"Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day.
Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

At this point I have serious doubts about the feasibility of finishing a thesis that my advisor will approve before the deadline. I think his irresponsible behavior towards "advising" me is partly to blame, but the issue right now is one with the code framework I work in. To make a long story short, it is thoroughly fraught with errors. At my advisor's request, last night I worked until almost midnight preparing an example data analysis of the sort I intended to base the thesis on. And today we went through it and were basically able to prove that the code not only has approximation errors associated with it, but blatantly wrong behavior in certain areas and it turns out that some of those aspects are things I need to be able to prove my point.

We're scrambling to identify the problems and light fires under the feet of the responsible developers, but nothing at this lab happens fast. Even if the code was giving results sufficient for me to be comfortable with what I'm trying to demonstrate, there's still the issue of doing what my advisor wants and there's no sign of that being feasible either.

At least my thesis is better than these. Check out #18.

OK so today was not a good day in thesisland. My advisor became suddenly aware of how the code framework I work in has fundamental flaws. I have been working in this environment for years now and am well aware of its limitations, and I have designed my thesis algorithm and justification to work within the confines of the system. He basically indicated that this was unsatisfactory and that there had to be a rigorous physical justification for all results. Given that the code I'm using does not match analytical test problems, this is not possible. He says that if the numerics aren't right, then there is no way to justify the thesis. He wants first-principles derivations of things that I'm not sure can be done; he wants to know information that I don't think is available. The bulk of the background information in the thesis is paraphrased right out of the literature by the heads of the field, but he indicates that he doesn't like the reasoning or refers to it as "controversial." I tell other people in the group what he's asking for and I get the response, "that's ridiculous."

He is basically having me re-derive everything and re-write every chapter as we go through. Nevermind that these writeups have been available on my website for the better part of two years, and that I've sent him the link to it at least a dozen times. My emails and phone messages went unanswered. He showed up three weeks ago and decreed that what I had was not acceptable and is demanding changes, some of which I'm not sure can be done at all, and the rest I'm pretty sure can't be done before the deadline. Many of the things he wants to know are well outside of my range of expertise and aren't really relevant to the thesis as far as I can tell.

I need to be done with the entire document in 6 weeks if I hope to defend in time for the deadline.

On friday afternoon I left work, picked up James at his place, and headed down to McKittrick Hill for what was probably my last weekend off until I get my thesis submitted. Aaron had receieved permission to lead a survey expedition into Dry Cave (with co-lead Stan) and he invited me to join him.

Backstory: Dry Cave was the first gated cave on New Mexico BLM land. It was gated because it contained a lot of Paleo-era animal bones including sabretooth tigers, camels, and assorted other oddities. The bulk of the bones were removed for study and a few small scientific projects were undertaken in the cave, but they eventually stagnated and the cave was left closed due to assumed scientific value.

The group that was assigned the task of mapping the cave did what can only be described as a half-ass job, mapping one large passage to the far end of the cave, and a few side leads, but leaving numerous large going passages unchecked. The map they generated is truly an embarassment and all of their survey data was lost. Still, the measured length of the survey places it as the fourth-longest cave in New Mexico behind Lechuguilla, Carlsbad Cavern, and Fort Stanton.

Recently, the cave specialist for the local area BLM office decided [or was convinced, I'm not sure] that a better map was required and that significant cave was probably still unexplored. Only with a reasonably complete map could the magnitude of the scientific value of Dry Cave be understood. Anyway, he assigned Stan and Aaron to head up a multi-year project to survey and sketch the cave for the BLM. The three of them did one introductory trip to familiarize Stan and Aaron with the cave, and there have been a couple small survey trips since then. Aside from these trips, there have been people in Dry Cave maybe twice in the last three decades.

So, Aaron announces at the last grotto meeting that he is going to do a survey trip this past weekend and I jump on the opportunity to see a very long closed cave that has a high potential for virgin passage. James and I arrived at the camp site (which is a pleasant ~100m from the cave entrance) at 11:00pm on Friday night and met Aaron and Phyllis.

I set up my tent and had a very pleasant night's rest. I was able to sleep in (for the first time in awhile) and didn't wake up until 7:30. We were in the cave by 8:30 for what would be a 12-hour trip.

Stan and Aaron's survey strategy was to put the main survey down the main passage that had been surveyed before, then start at the entrance and shoot side surveys down each lead. Since this was among the first of the trips, we were doing leads that were literally within sight of the entrance. For the first portion of the day we choose a major lead near the entrance and surveyed the entire thing. It was a low boneyard maze that took a lot of time to work our way through, but we manged to close it up with the exception of two very tight bellycrawls that were beyond our effort threshold for this survey. The map that Aaron sketched looked great. It was nice to get an area of the cave checked off - we reduced a major lead on the main line to two uninspiring grode holes significantly off the main line. Comparing our new sketch map to the old cave map showed that everything we did was off the map.

Next we went over to the Balcony Room and Boulder Room, the two big rooms near the entrance. Aaron had negotiated permission to do the Boulder Room survey in return for Stan getting to do the Balcony Room (where a lot of the big bones were originally found). The Boulder Room was considerably decorated, whereas the rest of the cave, for the most part, had not been. I estimate that the main room was 30' tall, 20' wide, and about 100' long. Not huge by Guadalupe Mountains standards, but for a largely boneyard cave it is impressive.

We started surveying the main part of the room and got sidetracked by a dark hole up high which we felt probably wouldn't go, but decided to send a survey shot up there just in case. It ended up going strongly and we spend the rest of the day in this new area (which may or may not have been on the old map; it was drawn so badly that we couldn't tell). It was a heavily decorated series of small rooms along a joint in the limestone. There were some amazing sawtooth draperies and a lot of corrosion. Everything was coated in a brittle corrosion crust and Aaron ended up calling it Uncle Krusty's Playground or something like that. The passage runs above an easier-to-reach lower passage and the two are connected by a series of cracks and pits, two of which were climbable by James.

By the time we finished Uncle Krusty's, we looked at the time and were surprised to find that it was 7:30pm, so we packed up and headed back out. It felt good to have closed-out two big leads, leaving nothing major to investigate.

When we got outside, it was raining. It looked like it had probably been raining all day. My tent was keeping rain out of the inside, but the ground cloth was pooling up pretty badly. We ate a quick dinner in the rain (we were starving) and hit the sack before 10.

This was the most miserable night I've spent in a tent in a long time. The rain was strong enough that the sound of it was keeping me up. At about midnight, the wind picked up and became very strong. The tent pad I was on had bedrock down a few inches so I couldn't drive my stakes in well and the wind kept lifting them out and collapsing part of my tent. I had to get out in the middle of the night, in the rain, and readjust my tent. Anyway, the end result is that I got about 2 hours of sleep and was exhausted on Sunday morning.

When I got up at 7:30, the wind was still present and had dried out most of the exposed surfaces, though there was still a lake between my tent and ground tarp. It took awhile to pack up camp and get everything dried off.

We decided that rather than return to the Boulder Room and continue that survey we would grab one of the virgin leads right at the entrance and work on it. For this survey, I was on lead tape doing backsights, which meant that I was the first person going into the new areas. This was the first time that I've gotten to be the first person into virgin passage in a major cave! The area we were surveying basically bifurcated into two and we chose the less-bellycrawling way. This was divided up into an upper and lower area and we did the entire lower passage to its end. It apparently ends at a surface sink. The elevation of the highest point we got to was above the elevation of the main cave entrance and was very close to a small sinkhole in the surface. It was plugged in with chunks of limestone and dirt, and showed signs of water flow coming in the sinkhole and down the passage we surveyed. We didn't finish the entire area but got the main passage complete and survey points set up for the remaining two major leads.

We left the cave around lunchtime and headed home. I collected a benchmark nearby. It was a great trip, but I was really really tired. On the way home we had to contend with a blizzard around Vaugn. Ironic that on a trip to "Dry Cave" (which, by the way, contained several small pools and several areas of active wet formations), we got rained on bigtime and then had snow.

I managed to drag myself to a search & rescue meeting last night for the first time in several weeks. There was a presentation by the local canine search team about their recovery of a body during a search this past November. The body belonged to a subject of a search that I was on last July. The July search was enormous, with 16 teams working over 4 days to find the subject and never picking up a single clue.

The ~4 months between the death of the subject and the discovery of his body meant that there wasn't much left beyond bones. There was no sign of trauma of any kind, though it is difficult to make an assessment when so much time has elapsed. All signs point to him having died peacefully in the mountains that he loved.

The presentation focused on the search strategy that led to the find and on the crime scene investigation that followed (the location of a deceased subject is always considered a crime scene until the state police and OMI say otherwise). The search, investigation, and recovery were a textbook example of how to handle a situation like this and it was very instructive for me. It was also nice to hear about the lengths to which the searchers on scene went out of their way to help the family and bring closure to them, something the state police officers and medical investigator seemed more-or-less disinterested in.

I lived at Cruftlabs, a warehouse in Boston, at the beginning - when we were building walls and installing plumbing, etc. Just getting everything together. When I left it was really just coming into the golden age of Cruftlabs. That's when Ehren moved in. He epitomizes everything that was great about that place and the sort of wild creative freedom (with a nerd bent) it fostered.

Now he's traveling around the country in a 40' school bus that he bought, turned into an RV, raised the ceiling 2', and set up as his travelling home office. He does contract web work wherever he can find free wireless. Here's a shot of Ehren in the interior of the Wunderbus:

He stopped by Santa Fe yesterday and I took him to dinner at Gabriel's. Oddly, we got caught in a huge blizzard on 285 and had to wait in a traffic jam behind a jacknifed semi for what seemed like an eternity. Anyway, he's on his way, moving from Walmart parking lot to national park to wherever, etc. You can read about his adventures and see pictures of the modifying of the bus here.

So Mikki had some people over yesterday for what I can only describe as a peer-pressure pseudo-science-o-rama. Two ladies came over with a bunch of makeup stuff and proceeded to hawk it on everyone else. They sat around trying stuff on and making repeated trips to the bathroom mirror, "explaining" how it "worked," and then making very sleezy-salesman-like arguments for why they've simply got to have it.

I used the whole thing as an excuse to cook for people, so I made more homemade pizzas. I gimped up the first one but the rest came out well.

Anyway, so this lady tried to get me involved with the disgusting sales whoring that was going on in my living room and told me that their company has a men's line too. Gave me a sample pack. I tried to take her to task on exactly what a "balancer" does but she didn't seem to understand my question. She told me it balances the pH of my skin. I asked how a single product could correct for possible swings in pH in both directions... thinking that one material cannot be an effective donor of hydrogen ions and hydroxies. No answer to that one. I asked what pH we were shooting for and she said 7.3. Actually she said "point three" which made me very leery of trying her product. But she corrected herself. When asked why 7.3, she indicated that "it's the most healthy."

Something about essential oils and waiting for my hydrating cream to dry up... The whole thing amused me in a sort of sick dirty way. For someone purporting to be selling products to help us all feel clean and pretty, the whole episode sure made me feel gross.

Anyway, after accepting the sample pack mostly to get this freakishly made-up woman out of my face, I distanced myself from the whole thing and just giggled from my kitchen. Mikki got a lot of stuff put onto her face. First she had something done to her eye that, and I swear I'm not exaggerating, really looked like she had a bruised eye. She asked me how it looked and I told her that she looked like someone had hit her in the eye. No one asksed my opinion from then on.

Now I don't really care for makeup in the first place; I find that truly beautiful people don't need it, and people who wear a lot of it just seem to be saying to me "don't look at the real me; it's ugly. here's some makeup - look at that instead." And I've never really been attracted to low self confidence. So even if the product all over someone's face improves their appearance, it is generally obvious and it reveals an underlying personality that I find depressing.

Perhaps makeup could be done subtly, but there certainly wasn't any of that going on last night. Wow. The scariest part, I think, is when they were testing out different techniques and combinations on either side of their faces, then walking around with these two different grotesque masks. It was surreal and disturbing and I couldn't sleep well.