Some dude found the first segment of our nasty cache Asymptotic Linked List. The first segment is easy, but what is interesting is that It's seen no activity between May and September, probably because it is like 110 degrees in the area.
Reminds me that we should set up some local geocaches.
HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - FX will not renew "Son of the Beach," the "Baywatch" spoof shepherded by Howard Stern. FX declined to comment on the cancellation. Insiders said the decision was based primarily on the fact that FX is trying to move its brand in a different direction from where it was when "SOB" debuted in March 2000 as its first original scripted series.
I'd like to have a more sophisticated version of the "comment" facility in excel (the ability to tag a note to a particular cell, which when hovered over, is displayed on the screen). What I would like to be able to do is select a cell or cell region, and insert a comment on that region that is actually a function() applied to those cells.
An example would be being able to hover over 5 cells and the comment has a "sum()" function in it, so the sum of them is displayed. This would be for information used only intermittently on the spreadsheet that is not worthy of an on-screen tally.
To keep it simpler, the values in those comments couldn't be referenced by anything else, otherwise you get this weird three dimensional spreadsheet.
So we are thinking of three significant vacations next year. In January a trip through the backwaters of Kerala, India. A horseback trip through the steppes of Mongolia. And finally, a 4x4 driving trip through the Australian Outback.
The Kerala trip is going to happen either early January or early February (during Chinese New Year), when Singapore is deadly dull. But when should the other trips be held? I thought the limiting factor would be the climate of Australia, but upon further investigation, this excerpt of Mongolia: Empire of the Steppes suggests we should be cautious when we go:
So what about the Outback? Basically the whole country appears to be criss-crossed by "tracks" (what australians call 4x4 trails). So we should have some lee-way about choosing when we want to go, and then selecting a track in an area that isn't deadly hot.
Here's an exerpt on climate in Austlian Outback from the Landrovers Club:
In spring, cyclones and sandstorms are quite common in the desert. Stay in your vehicle if you don't happen to be in the pub.
Winter can bring frosty nights in the desert. That means frozen water containers and the need to have a warming fire every night. You can expect cold nights in October or April, too. That won't happen in the tropics, though. Winter is just fine for Cape York. Far North Queensland only has two seasons: Hot and stinking hot.
So maybe the plan would be to goto Mongolia in June or July, and then in September get a convoy together for a ride through the Outback. The timing of all this still needs more consideration, but the short version would be that we'll source two identical serious 4x4's, stock them up logistically, and then go out in a convoy of Me, Ling, Matt, Mom, and Dad for ten days or so.
Links:
We're starting to sort out our gear for a trip to Chengdu, China on Thursday. I return on Monday and Ah-Ling goes on to Lhasa, Tibet for ten days or so.
Have collected our overpriced Chinese visas. Hers cost 25$ and was valid sixty days. They gave my US passport the China-insult 85$ with only thirty days validity.
Weather in Chengdu looks pretty mild,although it looks like there is frequently rain.
Lhasa is cooler and drier (which sounds good after living living 24/7 in Singapore's monotonous weather.
Trying to sort out all the random medicines I have, figuring out what they're for and how to use them. I sent Ling to the doctor to get a prescription for Diamox but the doctor didn't have it so he sent her off with a prescription to some garden-variety anti-puking medication and no instructions! Fucking turd. She'll have to goto a hospital clinic monday and get the proper drug.
Tried to clean my camera lenses and accomplished nothing but adding more water spots to them. Drives me nuts. And worse, I got water inside one lens of my binoculars, giving it an awful cataract. I guess I'll have to send it to get repaired. Now the binoculars are baking on the vents of my monitor.
Called EZ-Import 6294 6266.... Manager "Benedict" is supposed to call me back...
Tried to call Vincar, but their website so screwed up that I couldn't load the phone number.
Leco (6846 0020) "We don't import" "why?" "I don't know" "why?" "I don't know." "well can you import it?" "no" Why?" "I don't know"
Cycle and Carriage (6746 3000) is the sole Mitsubishi distributor in Singapore... Dumb as rocks, answers "no" when I asked if it's available. Can it be imported? "No" Why? "Don't know." People so fuckind stupid. Car salesmen about as interested in their product as a salesdrone at Dahlkempers...
Finally figured out Vincar's phone number (67491119). It's a shame I did. Because they are among the stupidest of all people I called. And ignorant, as well. They did have a different reason why it was not available, "It's not on the list." "Why?" "I don't know." "Well then add it to the list." "I cannot" "Why?" "I don't know."
Perhaps I figure out how to do this, I should start a business importing that specific model only.
I'll start by calling the Singapore LTA. (6225 5582). But of course their import department is engaged. Asses. However, their import guide suggests that I am going to have a major problem with the emissions. Firstly, Malaysia probably has non-compliant emissions in general, and even if this specific model could pass the requirements, there are no testing centers in Malaysia or Singapore. Only Hong Kong and Japan. Damn. FOLLOWUP: 'Gunalan' (6553 5117) called back and is going to fax me some detailed requirements. He sounded quasi-normal, so maybe a sliver of hope.
Ahh... One other idea is to try the local Malaysian manufacturer. Perhaps they have some ideas. "The Mitsubishi Storm is available from United Straits Fuso Sdn Bhd. For further information, you can contact USF Marketing Manager Amirudin Abdul Kadir at 03- 2306651" That number didn't work, so I called their dealership in JB. Couldn't find anyone useful, left a number, ostensibly someone supposed to call me bback, although my experience with "call backs" is zero-yield. Suspect I need to find someone at USF Mitsubishi, not necesarily the sales dept. FOLLOWUP: Some guy called back, who sounded intelligible, was going to check main office in KL, and call me back tomorrow.
Full article quoted as:
The rear wheels can be locked with an electronic switch in the dashboard at speeds under 12km/hr and the dash indicates where the rear differential lock is engaged. It also flashes to warn the driver to disengage when the vehicle speed is too high.
This is similar to the 'Trac-Lok Differential' feature of the Wrangler X.
Thanks to Phil Wainewright I have answers to two of three questions I posed last week...
Bullet lists disrupting the general formatting can be cured by adding the ",ul, ol" fragment to the following line in the template:
I did try also adding in ",li" as another tag to be included, because if you don't wrap the <li> inside <ul> tags, the formatting still doesn't hold. That solved the problem, but created a new one -- the Title headings were then turned gray (from black). So I rolled back the change to not include the 'li' tag. Thus you must wrap <li> with <ul>'s. That's ok... indented bullet lists look tidier anyway.
One other thing you must do is to terminate the </li> with a <p> tag to make the CSS resume the formatting.
Poorly-sized window shape was solved by replacing the three instances of "width="375"" with "width="72%"" and the same for "175", replacing it with "25%" -- this leaves a better utilized IE screen, with the touch of gray bar down the side.
Military hardware like something out of Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age"
So yesterday late afternoon I returned from a boat trip around the harbor and crashed asleep while reading The Master of Disguise. I ended up sleeping face first into a tall pile of pillows and woke up three hours later with the whole left side of my body face bright red from the pressure from the awkward angle.
So when I put my glasses on, I was shocked to find my left eye was totally blurry. Even with glasses it was blurry at any distance! No matter how much I squinted I couldn't see worth a damn. After the initial panic and idiot checks ("do I have a lense in each eye of these glasses?" "did I put one contact in today?" "does my eyeball show up in the mirror?") I figured I must have smooshed my eyeball while asleep, and now the shape was distorted, so nothing focused properly.
Normally I'd race straight to the web, read lots of things, and terrify myself into a frenzy. I resisted the urge, and instead took a taxi into town to a coffee shop in an effort to use my eye back into shape.
Sure enough, slowly over about 3 strange hours my eye returned to its old shape and I could see again.
Three months ago I began thinking about what car to buy. I would like some sort of 4x4 so that we can go on more adventurous roadtrips through Malaysia. The selection in Singapore a poor. There are small, soft SUVs (Ford Escape, Honda CRV, and Toyota Rav-4) which cost around $130,000SGD (approximately $70,000USD). Serious SUVs, like Toyota LandCruiser are closer to $200,000SGD. That's pretty painful.
Then my wife returned from Malaysia and told me about a truck her uncle had there, a Mitsubishi Storm. It was a medium-size 4x4 turbodiesel pickup with a four-door crew cab, and was less than 100,000 Malaysian Ringit (Something like $35,000USD). It sounded perfect. Of course it wasn't available here in Singapore. So I checked around with some of the parallel importers and basically came up dry. I was especially condemmed because the Storm was a diesel, it would be classified as a commercial vehicle. That meant it would be especially difficult to bring into the country. Basically I forgot about it, and put the whole project on back-burner.
Yesterday I got an SMS from my wife, in Malaysia for the weekend, that there is now a Petrol-based Mitsubishi Storm. I checked around, and sure enough have found a few specifications for this V6 4-speed automatic . Briefly, it appears that they just dropped in an old, apparently reliable V6 motor, the 6g72, which has been used in many chrysler/mitsubishi autos and suvs, including the Mitsubishi 'Montero'.
At any rate, the existence of a petrol-based Storm means the problem of commercial-classification may be out of the way. The next difficult issue will be getting the Singapore Land Transport Authority (LTA) to grant approval for the truck in Singapre. Perhaps I can find an agent to get all this done; I don't fancy the administrative crap involved.
Looking to buy a car in December or January, this might be my piece of serendipity. Even if the truck ultimately ends up costing as much as the CRV or Escape, it'd be fine with me. It's a more interesting vehicle to have in a land of tedious, gray sedans, and it is more useful for things we want to do.
It is not good for the Christian health
To hustle the Asian brown
The Asian smiles, the Christian riles
It weareth the Christian down
The end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased
And the epithaph drear "A fool lies here
That tried to hurry the East"
--Rudyard Kipling
Butterflies . . . turtles. Perhaps a pleasant walk in the woods comes to mind. But say those words to the average MTV-watching, Spin-reading, skateboard-wielding teenager or twentysomething, and he or she may envision a thin, wasted, 28-year-old guy—cigarette in one hand, can of Bud in the other—removing his leopard-print bikini bottoms, grabbing a staple-gun, stretching the skin of his scrotum so that it's flat against his upper thigh, and firing away. There's screaming and blood (and plenty of laughter in the background), but the man in the picture repeats this "move" on the other side, thus creating the beautiful image of—yup, you guessed it—a "butterfly." If that makes you squeamish, you probably wouldn't want to see a "turtle"—a scrotum stretched upward and stapled to a stomach.
Overheard: "I asked why he was staying at the Westin-Stamford instead of the Ritz? He said, 'because there are more entrances and exits' "
It is a story about a girl. While at the funeral of her own mother, she met this guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be, that she fell in love with him there and then but never asked for his number and then........
A few days later the girl killed her own sister.
QUESTION:
What is her motive in killing her sister?
[Give this some thought for a while before you scroll down... ]
ANSWER:
She was hoping that the guy would appear at the funeral again.
RESULTS???
If you answered this correctly, you think like a psychopath. This was a test by a famous American psychologist used to test if one has the same mentality as a killer. Many arrested serial killers took part in this test and answered it correctly.
So I turned back on HaloScan commenting. It's just too slow. Its comment retrieval takes forever; consequently affecting the pageload times of the blog itself. Just not a good scene. I wish I could have inline commenting functionality, but the public services available are too burdened to work well. I'll have to be satisfied with email feedback (black-coffee2002@karavshin.org), and adding it as-appropriate back into the blog.
Perhaps blogger will build in commenting functionality at some point. AFTER THEY FIX THE FUCKING EMAIL->BLOG FUNCTIONALITY....
This blog use's Mena's handsome "Currency" template. It's nice-looking and clean. However, I am having a few problems with it. Enough other people use it that someone should have solved these problems already, or at least have some insight... It's based on Cascading Style Sheets
1) I have a big monitor. My IE window takes up the entire screen. The grey bar to the right of the sidebar (where the "archives", "links", and "about" sections are) is disproportionately big, making the text part of the blog (the section you are reading now) too narrow.
2) If you use <li> or <ul> codes, it disrupts the template formatting for the remainder of the blog until the next formatting change. How can I add bullet lists but keep the formatting?
example:
now see the text has lost its formatting...
Reading in the local Singapore paper, "Singapore Exchange plans to offer a futures contract based on dynamic random access memory (DRAM) computer chips." The idea is "to help manufacturers and users manage their risks effectively." Little is said about the specific contract definition aside from, "[contract] to comprise 10,000 pieces of DRAM valued at about $70,000."
Here is yet another dead-contract-walking introduced by the SGX.
The problem screaming loudest about this contract is the contract specification itself. Whatever the specification of the DRAM the contract mentions today will be old in six months, out-of-date in a year, and an antique in two years. So what sort of future curve would that ever generate? One with enormous backwardation and no backend liquidity. State-of-the-art today will not be in a year, thus a futures contract for that DRAM will slowly slide into worthlessness.
Other problems? I've been told that there isn't good two-sided customer demand for this instrument. Lots of manufacturers would love to sell forward their DRAM production as a hedge, but there are no large stakeholders who want to purchase forward. Either the consumer just passes-on the cost of the DRAM into whatever product he's building, or for the end user, the price of the memory is a nominal percentage of the device they're buying. Regardless, there is no incentive for hedge buying forward at anywhere near the same scale as the DRAM manufacturers to sell.
I think the basic reason this idea is doomed is that the underlying commodity is technology and thus so dynamic you can't define a decent benchmark for it. There is a continual deprecation process at work plus the problem of technology step-changes that on short notice might permanently disrupt the entire market. DRAM manufacturers would probably be better served trying to find proxy-hedges in the equities markets or somewhere else.
I am unhappy that the blogger email -> blog functionality isn't working and
that I am getting no feedback from Blogger.
So haloscan is back-online, but I still have the comments disabled. I'll turn them on later.
A few template problems...
1) The use of some html, like bulleted lists, screws up the font-templating.
2) the archive links don't work properly because of a server-root labelling problem.
3) More info and links need added to the sidebars.
Haloscan, the commenting system I'm using, appears to be offline. This is causing this page to load slowly. Hopefully it's not a regular problem, else I'll have to pitch it away. Cannot expect too much from a free commenting service, but I also don't want to suffer slow pageloads.
Back from Johor State, Malaysia.
The mystery of the Toyota Soluna is answered. It is supposed to be an "asian car," designed with the Asian driver in mind. After two days driving it, it appears that what an asian driver needs is the same thing they called 1989 Toyota Corolla, sans heater. That's not necessarily bad -- the car was fine to drive, and totally familiar, since I'd driven its ancestor for the last two years. Enormously fuel-efficient as well, despite using the aircon the entire trip. It truly was identical to my old Corolla.
Our trip took backroads from the Tuas Causeway to Pontian to Batu Pahat to Muar (where we stayed for the night) to Segamat to Ayer Hitam back to Batu Pahat and Pontian before we crossed back over at Tuas.
Highlights included:
All-in-all a pleasant and cheap weekend escape. Next trip will run through the Southeast quadrant of peninsular Malaysia. Perhaps this time we'll find more remote rural areas that would be good hiking and mountain biking zones.
This story gets weirder faster than the translation gets worse... I truly don't understand how/why Pravda puts out this sort of stuff, or furthermore, why CI Centre would even link to this article. Oh well, since I moved back to Singapore I don't get to listen to AM Radio anymore, so this was like a little touch of home...
So the car is rented (a Toyota Sulana?) at a 100$/day for our roadtrip to Johor State, Malaysia this weekend. This mystery model car, only two years old, appears to be the same 1989 Toyota Corolla that I drove in San Francisco last year.
With the introduction of the new generation Corollas, I guess Toyota didn't bother to scrap the old assembly line. Instead just re-badged the 1990's era Corolla as a "Sulana" and starting separate production of the new Corollas, which look more like a Jetta. This Sulara? is just as minimalist as my old Corolla, except instead of a radio bay spilling the entrails of a hastily-stolen radio, this has an afternmarket stereo with bad bad ergonomics.
At any rate, this will be a perfectly usable car for our trip around the country lanes of Johor State. (It will also be my first right-hand-drive+manual vehicle.)
I finally was offered the thrilling Amazon Box of Gold... Five treasures.... offered to me... pick now, buddy... because it's FUCK or FADE...
My treasure choices?
Geez... decisions, decisions....
A month ago I went on a book-buying orgy at Kinokuniya (a massive and excellent Japanese bookstore) during their annual sale. Among other things, I bought By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades.
The book is a 500 page anthology of dispatches he wrote as a journalist. It's terribly entertaining because many of the articles aren't more than two pages long, yet the prose he paints is far beyond the corrugated cardboard five-w's fare you read in an AP/UPI dispatch. They're more like single espresso distillations of what could be novels. I've only read perhaps twenty dispatches (30 pages of text) so far, but I'm addicted, and look forward to each little break that gives me opportunity to pull another.
Here's a short excerpt from "Old Constan" (The Toronto Daily Star, October 28, 1922)
"If it doesn't rain in Constan the dust is so thick that a dog trotting along the road that parallels the Pera hillside kicks up a puff like a bullet striking every time his paws hit the ground."
RSS version of the Black Coffee Blog is now available
I don't use any rss news systems, so your debugging feedback is appreciated...
So one of the next steps is to add a commenting system to this blog.
The google results for "blog comment" listed YACCS as the best result. However, that system is closed to new subscribers, and my experience with YACCS has been that it is slow. YACCS lists a number of other alternatives:
I already registered with enetation, but when I came back tonight, the page was temporarily closed. Screw that. Netcomments was MIA. Haloscan setup in five minutes and is fully functional, so I am perfectly happy to use that. It seemed fast enough, too.
So last week, I re-read Bourne Identity, which I found to be pretty good, in retrospect. I'd burnt out on these novels way back in the early nineties. Perhaps enough time had passed that I can enjoy one now and again. Anyway, since I enjoyed that, I was more willing to watch the movie (which only premiered here yesterday).
I was wondering what sort of plot modifications they'd need do to condense 900 pages into two hours' film. At first they seemed to be doing a good job of taking shortcuts that kept the same linear path overall, but avoided long pieces of substructure.
Forty-five minutes into the movie I'm still waiting to see the Old Men of Carlos in the confessional carrying on about Angelus Domini, and to have Bourne ranting about 'Cain is for Charlie and Delta is for Cain.' At some point after that I realized that they had totally removed the spinal cord of the plot... Yes, that's right: Carlos the Jackal had nothing to do with the book, whatsoever, and in fact, yes, Jason Bourne really WAS an assasin, not an agent trying to flush out Carlos by posing as a competing assasin.
They took the book, used its husk, and replaced its meat with a very trite, stereotypical hunter-turned-hunted agent story.
Visually the movie was quite pleasing, but the denuded plot, and the ridiculous finale (where bourne leaps off the balcony of a fourth storey
walkup and uses a corpse as a pillow to give him a soft landing) left me feeling ripped off.