Fun

It turns out the cool guys who made Trooper Clerks are Jeff and Kurt Allen. So which one of us is the evil twin?

I had forgotten it was St. Patrick’s day until I checked my personal email and discovered mail from Michael Mullen giving last-minute notice of a Tempest show in the City. Karl and I headed up around 7 pm on the train. We ate at Cha Cha Cha, which was interesting fare for an Irish holiday (things got stranger later when the Swedish lead singer of an Irish band started playing Swedish folk songs). We went down the street to 12 Galaxies to hear Tempest. ...

McDonalds is running a giveaway billed as a “thank you to our customers”. If you read the fine print in the advertisement, it turns out this giveaway is a settlement to a lawsuit. Here’s the allegation made in the complaint: The Complaint alleges that Plaintiffs and Class Members, were deprived of the chance to win certain prizes offered as part of McDonald’s Promotional Games, as advertised and promoted by Defendants. Specifically, the Complaint alleges that the promotional games were a sham because Jerome Jacobson, an employee of Simon Marketing, Inc., the company retained by McDonald’s Corporation to administer the promotional games, and others unrelated to defendants Simon Marketing, Inc. or McDonald’s Corporation, rigged the games by misappropriating many of the winning game prizes totaling at least $20 million. ...

Georgia is considering an e-Lottery because, according to the sponsor, “We’re trying to target a market that may not be part of the lottery now – techies or professional people tied to computers all day.” I’ve always been taught that lotteries are a tax on people who don’t understand probabilities. Perhaps the reason professional people don’t play the lottery is that they understand it is not a good investment.

Today I came up with a vegetarian food that doesn’t exist, and probably should not exist. Vegetarian procuitto could be simulated with heavily processed and colored shitake mushrooms. It would be called “pro-shit-o”. Cue rimshot…

Turns out plants are thinking too. So there’s only one non-sentient food product left on the planet: Right-wing Republican Ribs! Finger lickin’ good. (And if you happen to get Rush’s ribs, you’ll get a nice buzz from the residual oxycontin.) Seriously, this is neat stuff. It is further proof that cellular automata are a critical part of the working of the world. Far from being simply a mathematical curiousity, they appear to be the mechanism by which complex behavior emerges from simple systems. ...

This article details a successful attempt by a Chinese man to get real-world repayment for stolen virtual goods. What effect will it have on the economies of the world when the economies of virtual worlds are harmonized and integrated into the real economies? One of the central ideas of the Western, market based economy is that infinite growth (or at least, growth for the forseeable future) is possible. I’ve always considered that idea suspicious. Perhaps these virtual spaces will give the real economy more room to grow. At least the virtual economies do not yet seem to have the same old externalities (pollution, class divides, mono-culture, etc). What externalities do these economies have that we just haven’t noticed yet? ...

Karl’s been doing the crossword online at Yahoo for a while now. I worked one at lunch the other day with him, and found it really enjoyable. This was a really easy one, suitable for a newbie like me. When I was a kid I used to watch my grandparents working together on the crossword. I liked watching them do them, but I couldn’t get any clues, so I disliked the crossword itself. ...

Tonight I had a little get together for my closest friends for cocktails, cards, birthday cake, and good conversation. I don’t normally like card games too much, but under the right circumstances, they are a blast. The circumstances tonight was studying up for next weekend when I might need to know the details of some card games. As usual, of course, the studying will prove completely useless. So, not a blast, but worthwhile anyway. ...

Going through the transitions where your parents go from “the people who’s job it is to form you”, to “fellow adults living in this world with you” is tricky. Not everyone goes through it, but my parents and I did, a few years into college. Happily, it went so well that we even progressed to being friends, which I suppose some people never do. My parents came to visit California this weekend. They are homeless right now, because they’ve sold their house, but their new one is not ready to move in to yet. So they came to the cabin, and then down to Redwood City to see my house. We had a good time at the cabin, doing the normal 50% work, 50% play. ...