Robot Monkeys

It’s May 2008. Almost seven and a half years into the 21st Century, and with the exception of the lack of a Cold War, the world in many respects my life seems the same. I’m ready to move on. Give me The Future™ goddamn it. I’m not talking about atomic powered flying cars. Fuck atomic powered flying cars. That’s the fantabulous future of 1972. I’m ready for the post-oil economy. I want the post-oil economy to exist before there’s no oil. I’m tired of carbon emissions, and global warming, and all that shit. It’s well past time that we’ve solved the problems and moved on.

I’m still a slacker, and I’m mostly satisfied with my life, I want more. I’m ready to move on. (No. I’m not stopping before my PhD.) I want real money. I want a real place that I don’t have to move twice a year. I want new stuff. I wrote in my molekine back in September 19, 2006:

I’m at the point in my life where I want my own place. I’m tired of using other people’s stuff. Sharing and what not. I want my own couch, not someone else’s. I want to be able to paint the walls blue if I want.

and while the main impetus of that note has been fixed, it’s still a mainly unresolved urge. Give me the girl, the dog, and the half a million dollar condo in to The Mission. I want the new 17″ MacBook Pro (my G4 is on its last legs). I want espresso maker, the 43 inch lcd hdtv (well actually, I guess I sort of have that now), the htpc media center, and the swanky geeky pinball coffee table. I want the dinner parties and the vacations in Tahoe.

It’s time to move on.

So yeah, this isn’t so much a commentary on the state of the world, as much as it’s one on the state of my life, but still. It’s time to move on.

(And yes, I am well aware how materialistic this sounds, but honestly, it’s more existential than that. And yes, I’m also well aware of how this makes me sound like a yuppie and/or hipster, and I think I’m okay with that. It’s all about the attitude.)

“Fantabulous” is in my spell check dictionary.

I read Lincoln Chafee’s account of GWB’s first tax cut, and it’s completely unsurprising. I remember the battle. I remember how less than nine months into his presidency, he was already being considered a failure. It was clear that that the tax cuts were irrational and dangerous. Even his foreign policy was suspect as seen in “Time’s” September 10, 2001 issue.

If 9/11 never happened, he would have been a one termer and we wouldn’t be in Iraq. Still in a recession though.

I was called a “hipster.”

Of course, I was at DevHouse at the time, but the guy that said it wasn’t a loser geek. And I was wearing threadless shit and my custom Timbuk2 bag at that time. In fact, it was the bag that prompted the comment. (”Hey, you’ve got one of those bags. I see a bunch of hipsters have those. How is it?”) Geez, all I need is a fixie, and I guess I’m in total hipster horror. (Mark (Yes. That Mark Storer.) has a special hatred for hipsters on fixed gear bikes, and their ilk at Pergolesi.)

It just blows my mind. Jonathan Koren: “hipster.” Wow. What happened? Growing up I was pretty loser geeky. Not completely irredeemable, but close. In college, I hung out with pretty much just engineers. Not the loser geeks, but not the coolest kids by any means. As I told Andrew recently while watching “Superbad,” “As big of losers as these kids are, they are a thousand times cooler than I was in high school.” He was rightfully shocked.

I’ve always suspected that my taste in music sucks, and that I don’t own the number of CDs as someone should (This materialistic inadequacy comes from the fact that between 1992 and 1999, I owned a total of 14 CDs.). Now multiple people have asked for copies of my mp3 collection. What the hell?

I guess it just is more evidence that my Epiphany was correct. “Cool” is just an attitude.

I’m in Pergolesi, and the 30ish guy across from me is yaking on his fucking headset (one of two he’s wearing) plugged into a 17″ macbook pro trying to plan this big long trip through Europe. (”Florence is the best city! It’s so beautiful! So it Paris! We can drive!”) Whatever. Most annoying is how he’s talking Valley Girl.

There’s just a whole superior attitude yuppies exude, that I can’t stand. It’s just so condescending and self important, and at the same time they seem to try to act so chummy, like you’re their “best bro’,” but at the same time you the vibe they give is that they’d beat with cue stick until you’ve got detached retinas for $20. I think that superiority is what brings on gentrification. “Oh this is so cool! Oh know! Precious Boopsie! Let’s clean up the neighborhood and make it a soulless! No wait! We’ll give it that artificial hip feel that can only come from planned communities! A Starbuck’s! And a Panera Bread! And soccer field! And an MLK Boulevard to show that we’re friends with the urban youth!”

Fuck them all.

(Yes, I’m acutely aware that that I’m in my 30s, typing this a 17″ Powerbook G4, and have (sort of) vacationed Europe.)

Yesterday I spent several hours trying figure out why g++ couldn’t resolve a set of nested templates. I figured it was a strange problem with how C++ worked. It didn’t make any sense to me because I could see how the templates should be resolved. I just couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. It certainly looked like inheritance was screwing up the template resolution. (This is the code.) I emailed John the code, and he didn’t have any problems compiling it. That’s when I realized, it’s a fucking compiler bug in g++ 4.1.2.

fuckyou-cpp.cpp: In function ‘void serialize(std::ofstream&, std::vector >*) [with V = std::basic_string, std::allocator >]’:
fuckyou-cpp.cpp:100: instantiated from here
fuckyou-cpp.cpp:18: error: no matching function for call to ‘serialize(std::basic_ofstream >&, std::basic_string, std::allocator >*)’
fuckyou-cpp.cpp: In function ‘void unserialize(std::ifstream&, std::vector >*) [with V = std::basic_string, std::allocator >]’:
fuckyou-cpp.cpp:114: instantiated from here
fuckyou-cpp.cpp:38: error: no matching function for call to ‘unserialize(std::basic_ifstream >&, std::basic_string, std::allocator >*)’

Update: Sat May 10 19:04:30 PDT 2008
So after much tribulations, I thought I figured out how g++ resolved templates. In fact, I thought I figured it out, right up until the moment I tested my theory. Then it worked. Then I intentionally tried to break the code, and it still worked. Damn it. I thought I learned something, only for it turn out that I didn’t learn anything. I learned all about -frepo (and how it can cause an infinite loop in some versions of g++), #pragma implementation and #pragma declaration, and -fno-implicit-templates (and how it works on the entire file, thus breaking STL code), and even different template resolution methods.

Now the code I wrote works without any of those switches, and without shoving explicit declarations in a separate file. I have no idea why. I asked Arek to test it on a newer version of g++, and he said that my fuckyou-cpp.cpp didn’t work on anything newer. But he did mention that he got it to work by just flipping the order of template declarations.

So I guess these are the lessons:

1. Make sure you put the vaguest template declaration first.
2. If you need an untemplated version (i.e. the template is fully specified), then put that in a cpp file separate from the hpp file that will be included in the other files. If you don’t you’ll get multiple declarations of the untemplated version since it’s now contained in multiple files.

I heard about these document organizers Yep and Leap, and wanted to check them out. So I google yep. I a bit surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) that that were image results. I was a bit surprised (but again, shouldn’t have been) what the top result was.

(Yeah, its a guy with his dick hanging out.)

So I was looking at the CNN website and saw two icons sitting next to some of the headlines. One icon was a movie camera, which I knew meant it was a video link. The other icon is a t-shirt. Yes. You can get a t-shirt for selected hard hitting, breaking news stories like, LBJ Tapes reveal sudden about face.

So, why am I supposed to take CNN seriously again? And why can’t I get a t-shirt that reads “350 feared dead in Myanmar cyclone” or “Relative: Incest suspect served time for rape”?

All I need to do is figure out what they’re md5 hashing, and I can make my own!

April 24, 2008

To: Members of the UCSC Community
Fr: Ginny Steel, University Librarian
Re: Grateful Dead Archives Given to UCSC

It is a thrill to write to tell you that the surviving members of the iconic rock ‘n’ roll band, the Grateful Dead, have selected the UCSC Library as the permanent home for their substantial archive of materials documenting the band’s history. The collection will be the largest donation ever made to the library’s Special Collections Department, and it includes more than 2,000 square feet of memorabilia, artifacts, and other documents. This incomparable archive will undoubtedly become a major resource for research related to the Grateful Dead, the phenomenon of the Deadheads, American music, and popular culture during the last three decades of the 20th century.

5.4 in Illinois. I guess that’s means it’s not actually New Madrid. Looks like some concrete has fallen in Louisville. KFVS doesn’t have any reports of damage yet. They are reporting damage in Louisville. 5.4 isn’t that big, but it can damage some buildings and break dishes.

I’m sure everything is fine.