Recently I finished reading The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I had been reluctant to pick it up. The cover and the summary on the back gave me this dizzy “romance novel” feeling, but my father-in-law recommended it. Finally, when I hit a thin area in my reading list (and M essentially forced me to read the first chapter), I decided to give it a chance. Five pages later, I was completely and irreversibly hooked. That statement is NOT an exaggeration.

The story starts quickly, and the first couple of chapters give you the goose-bumpy willies when some weird stuff happens. The characters are totally believable even if their situation is (literally) incredible. The book started off very engrossing, and as it got more serious and intense, I couldn’t stop reading. I averaged more than 100 pages a day for a week, the first time I’ve done that with a book in a long time.

Here’s my suggestion: go to the library or the book store. Read the first five pages. The book will either purchase itself, or you will put it back. Oh, and don’t do any research into movie deals until you’ve finished the book, or you’ll be sorry.

Okay, I’m not sure if this is ridiculous, inspired, or over-the-edge. The surreal webcomic Goats has so-called “extended info” (the grey area below the strip) for each comic. This info includes the dialogue text, locations and props in each panel. Also, for each character that appears in the strip, it lists first appearance and the three storylines the character most recently appeared in.

This information goes all the way back to the very first strip.

Today is π (pi) approximation day. In a large portion of the world, the date is represented as dd/mm, or 22/7. Although 22/7 exceeds π, it’s actually closer to the true value than that of π Day is.

3.14159265358 - 3.14 = .00159265358
3.14159265358 - (22/7) = -.001264489277

I’m not entirely sure I’d vote to confirm John Roberts, Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court. I definitely disagree strongly with his ideological views. On the Court of Appeals, he upheld secret military tribunals for terror suspects. As an attorney, he argued that Roe v. Wade “was wrongly decided and should be overruled.” He’s also argued against environmental regulation a number of times.

On the other hand, this might be the wisest thing I’ve ever heard a judicial nominee say: “Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land… There is nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent.” How strongly should political views influence Congress' decision to confirm a nominee? The Left has only a certain amount of power in the current administration, but if Roberts was denied or filibustered, could a different nominee really be any better? I can’t see Bush nominating someone centrist, but there’s always the chance he’ll nominate someone more activist.

Update: More selected opinions.

Today, I gave an intro to wiki class at work. Ever since I moved the Unix group’s home page from a wad of hand-edited HTML files to wiki, it’s been a far bigger hit than I expected. There are now nine teams using wikis for their documentation or interested in migrating, and I expect there are probably a few more that will be converting soon. It’s great to be able to feel that I’m making a bottom-up difference at work, and that open source (not to mention Wikipedia) is touching a few more people who might not otherwise ever feel it.

Almost all digital cameras (with the notable exception of all but the newest camera phones) support a JPG comment format called Exchangable Image File Format (EXIF). When you take a photo, a lot of nice details about shutter speed and aperture are saved along with the image (and a lot of confusing and technical data, too). Unfortunately, if you take photos with a film camera and scan in the photos, the data is all missing.

Luckily, there are a number of tools made exactly for such a situation. Exifer is a good freeware option, but there’s also MaPiVi, which is open-source and cross-platform. There are a ton of them out there, if you ask the right people.

This post is going to be extremely unlike me. I'm going to quote the New Testament, and I'm going to say that it's an insightful passage that everyone could learn from:

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." -- Matthew 5:43-48

That's an insightful passage that everyone could learn from. Strip out the weird "tax collectors" and anti-pagan parts, and you have the core of Jesus' message: Unconditional love. What's so damn hard about that?

Last week, I was reading through some oldish posts on Websnark, and he pointed me towards “Nothing Nice to Say”, a hilariously tongue-in-cheek punk comic. I ended up reading all of the back strips and I liked it a whole lot. I added it to my daily reading, and thought “I should mention this on my blog”. Well, now that he’s done a guest strip for “Joe and Monkey” with Jerry Holkins from Penny Arcade, I thought I’d actually do it.

Precritic update: Batman Begins has 83% on the Tomatometer. If we had used my fancy scoring for our guesses, Nomad would get 2 points, and Manish would get 1. Chris and I were way too pessimistic.

Time to play again! Fantastic 4: the Tomatometer is here, for reference. The movie comes out Friday 8 July, and scoring will be done about 2 weeks later.

I was working on a Greasemonkey script yesterday, and I ran into a problem for a second time. I had data (in this case, XML, in the previous case, HTML) that I had retrieved via GM_xmlhttpRequest() (Greasemonkey's cross-site-capable and slightly more flexible implementation of the XMLHTTPRequest object). I wanted to grab some small piece of information out of the huge string, but the easiest way to do this that I could think of was with big ugly Regular Expressions. The data was goddamn XML, why couldn't I use DOM? The ideal solution would be if Greasemonkey added a responseDocument field to the data that it passes to the onload callback. Since the ideal solution is not currently available, I had to cobble something else together.

Update 9 Nov: I found a far better solution today. I can hardly believe it.

var xmlDoc;
if (typeof(DOMParser) != "undefined") {
    var parser = new DOMParser();
    xmlDoc = parser.parseFromString(x, "application/xhtml+xml");
}

Nomad refuses to carry coinage. I recall one time (likely apocryphal) he purchased a soda for $1.25 at a train station, and then put his change (all seventy-five cents) on top of a garbage can and left it. I can’t remember if I did the sterotypical thing and picked it up, but I’m sure I called it foolish.

But it got me thinking; is carrying change a waste of energy? If you carried a pocket-full of coins all day, could you purchase more calories of food than you burned carrying it? I thought about it for a while, and I couldn’t reason it out, so I decided to calculate it. The answer somewhat surprised me.

Coins are quite light. The U.S. Mint says that a penny weighs 2.5 grams, a nickel 5g, a dime 2.268g, and a quarter 5.67g. Figuring out how much walking “all day” is was difficult. I got numbers (for an average American adult) that varied from a quarter-mile to five miles. I decided to go with a middle-ground number, 2.7 miles. Looking at some numbers for calorie consumption during walking, I estimated that a person burns one calorie per pound of weight per hour of walking at 2mph. Once I had all of my data, the calculations were pretty easy.

Essentially what that means is that if you carried a whole dollar of pennies around for a day, you would burn almost three-quarters of an additional calorie. Even the least calorie-dense foods (like, say, Pepsi One) are enough to make it worth it, and some of the most calorie-dense foods (like the Big Mac) provide you with several hundred calories per dollar.

(Pennies require the most energy-per-dollar to carry. A nickel would cost 0.297 calories per dollar, and dimes and quarters both run a measly 0.068.)

A hundred thousand thanks to smackfu, my fellow MetaFilter user and Naugatuck resident. I added him to my contacts list on Flickr a few weeks ago to watch and see if he posted anything that might look familiar. Yesterday, I was greeted with this message when I logged into my account:

Subject: smackfu has given you a Pro Account!

smackfu wrote you a message: "Everyone I know on Flickr is Pro but you, and I have a free account to give away, so have fun!"

smackfu has given you a Flickr Pro account, good for one year. That means you can have all the benefits of Flickr Pro accounts: 2 gigs of uploads per month, unlimited storage, ad-free browsing, and unlimited photosets and features.

Check out his photostream.

Time to play precritic on Batman Begins. What will the tomatometer score for the movie be two weeks after release date? Release date is this Friday, June 17 Wednesday, June 15. As of this writing, the tomatometer is at 83% (with only 30 reviews).

Pink Floyd will reunite for the Live 8 show in London on July 6. Not just the latest line-up, but Roger Waters will be there with them, as well. Let us hope that this concert leads to a cessation of hostilities and a comeback tour.

So here’s the situation as it stands now. We know for a fact that there will be backwards-compatibility of some sort built into Nintendo’s Revolution console. We know (or at least are fairly sure) that online access will be free of charge. Unfortunately, we also thought that a huge number of first-party games would be free. We were amazed and incredulous, since that list included every Mario, Zelda, and Donkey Kong game ever made, as well as a number of other ground-breaking and phenomenal games like Gyromite and Goldeneye.

Sadly, it sounds like that’s not entirely true. Some games will be available for free to owners of certain other games, but let’s hope that Nintendo doesn’t go too far in the wrong direction with this. If Mario 128 (ooh, Brian’s gonna squirm about that) comes with every back Nintendo game, they’ll sell.. er.. okay, they won’t sell any more additional games. But they’ll get lots of love from the Nintendo community, instead of pushing away those of us who liked everything we saw about the Xbox 360.

I reiterate my derisive laugh at LA traffic: ha-hah! It took me more than three hours to travel the 42 miles to work this morning, and for about twenty minutes of that, I was travelling at 70+ mph. My math tells me that that I was travelling an average of roughly 7 mph for the remaining time.

My wife just sent me an email with a file called "ANUS.doc" attached. It wasn't quite as hilarious as I was expecting:

The dentate line- location of anal crypts and draining of glands
Superiorly visceral afferents, therefore non-painful; columnar epithelium
Inferiorly somatic afferents, therefore painful; stratified squamous epithelium

Doctors have to talk about funny things like anal crypts and gland drainage, but they have to be all clinical about it. It's sort of a shame.

It’s a little-known fact that with a library card in the state of Connecticut, you can take out books from any public library in the state. You also don’t even need to go to a library other than your local one to do it, and even then you don’t have to go until your book is in. Visit the Bibliomation global catalog and search for the book. If it’s in any of about fifty participating libraries, it’ll come up. Click the “Request Item” button to the right of your result and put in your library card bar code number.

It generally takes less than a week for your local library to get the book. They call the phone number associated with your account when they get it in, and you borrow the book for the lending library’s standard period (usually 2-3 weeks). I’ve got three different books out on inter-library loan right now. It’s easy, useful, and it increases the pool of available library books immensely.

(Note, also, that many libraries carry movies on VHS and DVD. Bibliomation includes these, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell what format the video is in.)

Today in 1495, the Friar John Cor made almost 1500 bottles of scotch whiskey from fourty-eight bushels of malt and thus distilled the first recorded batch. Happy birthday, my amber friend.

(Also, happy birthday to my father-in-law.)

Nomad and Mari converted his E3 Pac-man shirt from a XL to medium this weekend. I’m considering doing the same, because this shirt feels like an especially large XL, even after an I-hope-it-shrinks pass through the wash.

It’s fair to say that I was extremely impressed with the Xbox 360 at E3. The controllers are virtually perfect (and will be available for the PC), and going back to a (relatively) grainy PS2 after playing Full Auto at 1080i was palpably painful. A couple of hours into E3, we realized that all of the games were playing on dev kits (read: Apple G5 towers). Reports have started coming out that at HDTV resolutions, the Xbox 360 will not be able to render the games at full quality, which means that the final games will almost certainly not look as nice as they did at E3. Which is a damn shame.

All t-shirts at Threadless are on sale for only $10 apiece until June 6. Stock up!

A long time until the 24 Season 5 premiere.

E3 is over. We yelled ourselves silly for three days and played about a krillion games. Some of the most interesting things were the Game Boy Micro (so small, but so comfortable), Shadow of the Colossus, and just about everything about the Xbox 360. There’s a lot more, but I’m a bit exhausted and all of the muscles in my body (especially my throat muscles) are a bit tired.

This was totally awesome. I can’t wait until next year.

Day 0 of E3 is over. We survived some serious turbulence on the flight over the Rockies, and met boo_radley from Metafilter and his friend Dan. Plus, we met two people on the plane who are going to E3 (one of whom was the VP of Sales for Turtle Beach).

One of the rooms at the Westin is the perfect gaming room, because it’s right between two executive conference suites. We saw big groups going in and out of them a few times yesterday, but at night the doors were propped open and there was no one around.

Yesterday at the invitation-only presentations, Sony introduced their Playstation 3, Nintendo showed off the Revolution and surprised everyone with the Game Boy Micro (that thing is tiny), and several interesting games were demoed. I’m looking forward to the conference. T minus four hours!