Well, I decided to post this pic in memory of my friend Tatsuya who died last year. The foremost gravestone in this photo is not his, but it is pretty and so I took this pic to commemorate the hill where he is buried. I posted this today not in conjunction with any fixed date or anniversary, rather, I just got to thinking about Tatsuya today as I made a left turn in the car he gave me, listening to an old song we both liked.
Some people say it is not right for me to take pictures like this or to post them, because it is disrespectful. I fail to see the logic in this. I am simply remembering a friend. If pictures of headstones make you uncomfortable, that’s your insecurity. We will all end up dead someday. Get used to it. (OK, maybe this post is a bit influenced by my curret rereading of Eiji Yoshikawa’s MUSASHI)
Month: April 2004
Riku & Yura
Tatsuya’s nephews. Live across the street from Nam’s old apartment in Tamade.
Pink Buta
Currently residing on my monitor.
Bit Serenade
You all must have seen these “keyword” spam messages by now, right?:
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Some of these spammers are real poets. He gets bonus points for using the words varistor, hyterectomy, and matisse all in the same message.
And now I have this sudden urge to “Get Harder Than Steel” and “Make Her Scream – with 100% EFFECTIVE Generic Vi@gr’a.”
Well, go ahead and sign me up for 50 cases, Mr. Chester Ott.
Do you take checks for international bulk orders?
That is all.
Cake
Today’s tip for lonely nerds: Forget the present, it is over by the time you think about it. Instead, relive the past and play a text-based adventure game. Like this:
Welcome to Zork. This version created 11-MAR-91 (PHP mod 25-OCT-2001)
There are 2 users playing Zork.
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
> open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.
> read leaflet
Taken.
Welcome to Zork!
Dungeon is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortal man. Hardened adventurers have run screaming from the terrors contained within.
In Dungeon, the intrepid explorer delves into the forgotten secrets of a lost labyrinth deep in the bowels of the earth, searching for vast treasures long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded by fearsome monsters and diabolical traps!
No DECsystem should be without one!
I get very sentimental playing these games. The simulated command lines and monochromatic display of modern online versions effectively invoke that special 80’s hacker nostalgia. I fondly remember going to basic programming workshops in the summer and coding my mom a scrolling ASCII birthday cake for her next birthday (“just type R-U-N, mom!”). My parents were pretty cool that way, come to think of it – maybe the reason I never really got into the dark side like some of the other kids was that I was raised in a home where computing was openly encouraged from an early age.
Disclaimer: I did get busted once by my parents at about age 13 for calling phone sex and dial-a-joke numbers. I had failed at my attempts to make the calls for free and charges showed up on the monthly bill for 1-900-SEX-TALK or whatever. That ended my brief career as a phreak, and quite possibly affected the timing of the “birds and the bees” talk from my dad a short time later.
Apple IIc
I recall the scrolling text adventures from my childhood with much fondness. My dad bought an Apple IIc for us when I was ten or so (without the standard 8-inch monitor luckily) and I basically wore out the keys typing in-game commands like “go west”, “kill goblin”, and “get dagger of fire”. The key action, by the way, was used as a selling point by the egghead at the store, but more on this later.
That IIc was way ahead of its time – I consider it the first truly portable Apple because of its relatively compact size for the time and the fact that it came with a padded carrying case. It had an optional LCD, but I carried that box all over because it had a video
One Hundred Days of Solitude
It’s Monday. My girlfriend went back to Thailand yesterday to do research for her doctorate. She will come back in a month or so, so the “hundred years” I used in the title are just my props to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote the only book I have ever attempted to read in Spanish. (Huge digression alert!) I can only speak enough cholo to bum a cigarette from Mexican kids smoking in the school bathroom, but I kept the English version of the book next to me for reference. It worked, in a way, but forever convinced me that mandatory foreign language classes in public high schools are good for mainly one thing: Emphasizing the gap between kids who can use their own native language well and those who can’t. Which is not to say that mandatory foreign language education is a bad thing. It is just disappointing that there is so little to be gained regarding practical usage at the mandatory levels; around my home in southern California, at least, you can practice more Spanish comprehension by ordering at certain drive-thru windows than you can at school, ese.
I ate two fried eggs and canned chili from the pan this morning because I was too lazy to go shopping last night and I figured it was a sterling way to kick off a month of celibacy: Table manners have been shed for the next month, and, knowing that I won’t get reprimanded from my better half, the world is now officially my blast radius. I should have written a warning on my name tag today, something along the lines of Danger: Toxic Fumes (w/New Spicy Jalapenos).
