me no feel so good

Okay, so apparently somebody gave me a cold. My nose is running, and I'm coughing and sneezing. It's times like these in which I wish the environment was a bit more hygienic, and filled with a lot fewer viruses. Why do viruses even exist, anyway? They seem to be some sort of permutation of DNA-carrying machine that evolution invented to thin the numbers of humans. But aren't there other things, like raspberry ants, that need their numbers thinned more? I'm also a little bit concerned that I might not be getting enough vitamin C. I don't know what the symptoms of scurvy are, but I do know that the foods I've been eating aren't very good sources of the stuff. Oh well, if it comes to it, I'll just have to get some supplemental tablets. To summarize, I feel like crap.

reverse-engineering as a form of masturbation

Someone I know online compared reverse-engineering to masturbation, stating that they were both as equally productive. After giving it some thought, I'm not sure that I disagree. There is some satisfaction to be had in the mental exercise of plugging away at someone else's code to figure out how it works. But is it really not productive? Well, I believe the reason I do it, other than for fun, and a playful mental exercise, is also for learning. It's true - in the past several year or two that I've reverse-engineered code, I've learned to approach problems of crafting algorithms for doing all sorts of things on computers and game consoles in many different ways. I like to think it has also helped my skills of investigation: some trickier portions of code I've had to look elsewhere and try to tweak things like entry variables and registers to get a grasp on what the code accomplishes.

on mice, keyboards, and wii remotes

So I typed in this post and part of the last one with a Wii remote (called a Wiimote by people who like puns and getting hit really hard), and I must say...the Wiimote sucks major ass for typing. This thing with its innate ability to point and click at the screen, makes a fairly decent mouse, but an abysmal keyboard. Honestly, a pair of Atari keypads would have made a better showing (imagine typing with one of the pads like on a cell phone). Sadly I do not at this writing have a USB keyboard to plug in to the back of my Wii console...and to be honest, doing so seems only slightly less cumbersome than simply using an actual computer like people are used to. Having said all of this, I do appreciate Opera's efforts to allow us Wii users the ability to surf the Internet without having to always boot up a computer all the time.

M*A*S*H ponderings

One of the TV shows I like to watch is M*A*S*H. If you've never heard of it, it's about the experiences of a fictional crew of doctors, nurses, and staff at the equally fictional Mobile Army Surgical Hospital number 4077. Anyway there was this one episode where B.J. Hunnicutt grows weary of Benjamin Pierce, aka Hawkeye, talking about how much of a better prankster John "Trapper" McIntyre was when he was there. So he makes a bet that if B.J. can successfully "get" everybody currently sitting at that table (they're in the mess tent at the time) with pranks, that Hawkeye has to take his pants down and sing "You're The Tops". And if he fails, B.J. has to do it instead. Well, B.J. manages to get *almost* everybody except of course, Hawkeye, who loses part of his sanity that night guarding himself against whatever horrible finale B.J. has reserved especially for him. He wakes up the next morning only to find that all the people that allegedly got pranked were in fact only pretending to be pranked, and were actually in on B.J.'s plan to pull the ultimate prank on Hawkeye, "the one that never happened." So Hawkeye ends up being the one taking down his pants and singing "You're The Tops" in the mess tent. Now this is the part that bugs me. The official bet was to see if B.J. could get everybody in that group, and Hawkeye *was* considered to be in the group. But by B.J.'s own admission, Hawkeye was the only one who actually got "got". That would mean, based on the conditions set forth in the wager, that B.J. failed, because technically, he only got one person. And so Hawkeye still won the bet (despite being taken down a few pegs). Why didn't the writers of this episode notice that?

on sleepaway camp and gratuity

So I had the grand privilege of watching an oldie from back in my younger years, Sleepaway Camp II, and it's sequel Sleepaway Camp III (which I did not see back in said younger years. My thoughts on the various death scenes was varied. Some were cruel and sadistic, some were almost funny and others were just meh. My favorite deaths between the two films were Judd (he gets slashed in the throat and takes the longest seven seconds of his life to die), Ally (damn, you so fine, girl, even when you drowning in leeches and whatnot), Tawny (was that sound in the background the sound of the inside of her skull being baked by all those chemicals she snorted?), and Peter (throws one firecracker too many at Angela, then gets his face blown off while he's asleep...this one made me laugh, Snowboy's screaming made it even funnier). Yeah, I get to thinking about Ally from the second film though, a lot. She was definitely very hot, and if I were in that universe, I'd definitely fuck her until she couldn't remember her name. Even when her number was up and she got shoved down that toilet, I just couldn't stop thinking about how hot she was. In fact, give me a moment and...oh...there we go...oooh...uuuuuunnnnnnnggghhh...yeah. :-)