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).

Lantern

lantern-mon-color.jpg
I went after photos of a matsuri at Miwa Jinja today. It turns out that I like the photos of the grounds more than the ones of the actual festivities. Recently I don’t like taking photos of people as much as I do taking photos of things. It’s interesting: On one hand I find myself wondering if this somehow has a deeper psychological meaning and on the other, I really don’t care if it does or not.
I almost never feel guilty taking photos of random things, but human subjects sometimes cause me worry or even grief. This stems partly from the Japanization of my perception and values over the past decade, I’m sure. I still don’t bow when I speak on the phone at work to clients, although this is somewhat of a conscious effort not to do so when it’s a really high ranking executive who could affect our bottom line to any significant extent, or have my head by expressing displeasure at the tone of sincerity in my transactions.

Bonsai

bonsai-silhouette.jpg
I have determined that my Vaio U3’s screen is just too damn small for me too edit photos effectively when I’m drinking. I’m really curious as to how this photo will look when I’m sober, because it looks absolutely brilliant right now.

Japanzine Award

Last week I received an e-mail from Ed Jacobs, the editor at Japanzine stating that this blog had been chosen for a “Best of the Web” award. Japanzine is a free magazine of high quality distributed all over Japan and I have been reading it since its past life as The Alien. Anyway, they have an online version of the zine as well and the “Japan Blogging Scene” article this blog was featured in can be seen at:
http://www.japan-zine.com/0404/Feature1.htm (link updated 4/30/04)
C. Buddha’s Hasty Musings is sandwiched between Antipixel and 35 Degrees, two of my favorite photo blogs (if I can be so forward as to term them such). All I can say is: We’re. Not. Worthy.
Props to Japanzine!
P.S. to Bill: You should stock Japanzine at the bar. They are looking for new distros. I’ll bring the current issue this weekend to show you the ad (read: to brag with).
P.P.S. to Japanzine’s webmaster: Please fix my link! (It’s appearing as a relative URL because there is no protocol prefix.)

Violated by Nurse Naomi

Went to do the annual physical for work today. Came back with bruised needle tracks. It was frightening to watch this inexperienced nurse with sweaty, fumbly hands try to find a vein in my arms. I swear to god this chick was blind in a previous life, because she used that needle like a walking stick, tap tap tap on one arm and then the other. Frustrated by lack of success, she binded both my arms with surgical tubing at the same time and told me to open and close my hands and sit in a corner for a few minutes (bitch, my arms turned blue before you came back).
No longer willing to persevere with the standard setup, she pulled the QUEEN MOTHER OF SYRINGES from a toolbox of medical goodies and started waving it in front of my face, saying, “now this might hurt a little.” I started whimpering in protest right then and there – the goddam thing looked like a turkey baster with a really long bicycle pump needle fitted on it. In my mind, we had the following conversation:

“Now wait just a goddam minute – just how much blood do you need?”
“Just a bit”
“So why can’t you use a smaller syringe – the hollow tip of that needle looks like a fucking cookie cutter!”
“Why, you’re right. You know what? I’ve stabbed you so many times today, I’ll just collect the blood smeared on all the needles I’ve used and that should be enough for our purposes. You are free to proceed to the hearing test.”

In reality, of course, things happened differently. She sucked many shot glasses worth of blood along with half of my right bicep into that syringe like a Hoover and the high point of the entire day was that I got to yell “OOOW! YER SUCKIN’ TOO HARD!” in public and started trembling with the kind of laughter that causes physical pain (needle in arm), but is somehow worth it.
By the time my exsanguination was complete, there were fifteen other guys waiting to get poked and they all thought my outburst was pretty funny. Except for the next guy in line. He was visibly disturbed when Nurse Naomi started squirting my blood from the syringe into the vials.
Update: It turns out that about one in four people are getting poked in both arms by this angel of destruction. Those are some seriously horrendous numbers. I can understand that doctors suck at needlework, but for nurses this sort of incompetence is unforgivable. To my little sister who plans to start med school next year: Please take this advice. Practicing on lemons and oranges isn’t good enough.