Bare Naked Larry

Friday, June 10, 2005

One Month and Counting

Nian chided me a little about my over the top complaints with HBO’s marketing practices. I assure you I am not as obsessed with this as my last post would suggest. On the other hand, I do suspect HBO and others do Google the blogs and I hope they notice my criticisms.

For those that want juicy details about my and Nian’s blossoming relationship, on to the small bits of drama. Nian worries a bit that I am an American playboy -- only time will convince her that I am not I guess. Today is our one month anniversary, one month since I asked her to dance at the High Dive -- so a night out is in order. Nothing fancy, just dinner and a movie. Yesterday I reinstalled my Ethernet Router (NAT) so Nian could plug her laptop into my network. I had taken it offline for a while due to instabilities with my cable box, hopefully it will stay up and running without problems this time. Nian had seemed decided unimpressed when I had mentioned I was going to get her a direct internet connection for her laptop when I mentioned it the day before, but once we got home and plugged in her laptop and it connected directly with no muss or fuss she became giddy as a school girl. She spent the remainder of the evening chatting with friends online through IM and other utilities that are more tailored directly to support native Chinese than my main machine. I was unable to tear her away as she teleconferenced with her friend Lucy back home in China. Since I couldn’t understand of word of what was being said, and because I had to keep the room quite I was getting a bit bored and edgy. Nothing would do also but that Nian get me in on the conversation with her friend Lucy in China on the Cell-Phone while Nian monitored and interpreted for Lucy over the internet. Lucy knows some small amount of English, but either far less than Nian gives her credit or she is just TOO shy to say anything. Most of the laborious overly long conversation was spent asking childish how-are-you and are-you-having-a-good-day questions, most of which Lucy couldn’t answer back for whatever reason. I know Nian wants all her friends to like and approve of me, but I can’t say the dialog with Lucy accomplished much except perhaps frustrating both Lucy and Myself.

I should have kept my tongue in my mouth, but I later told Nian that I really hadn’t enjoyed the forced conversation and felt a little ignored during the evening. Nian got very apologetic and defensive at the same time. We spent most of the rest of the remaining evening trading “I’m Sorry”s and “No I’m Sorry”s.

Still I plan on running a CAT-5 line out to the living room so she can network all she likes and I can just lay back and watch some TV with out me disturbing her -- or her disturbing me. I had already made a better study table arrangement in the living room for this anyway. I already know she will not like this solution completely as she wants to be in my presence at all times, but I think that is mostly insecurity and that it will lessen with time. While I like most of the shows and movies Nian likes to watch, she definitely has no taste for my favorite shows, which tend to be Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Nian only likes real life, and you can see her plotting the trajectory of her life through the lens of the social complications she sees the characters having on the screen. While she is lost to the world chatting to Chinese colleagues half a world away, I will indulge my pent up apatite for Sci-Fi and Fantasy (my worlds are more than half a world away).

There has been little interest in the Toy section of my left side bar. The stuff (so far) has been a little dull and amateurish I must admit. Even so, I do plan on improvements to what is there plus add three new items sometime in the near future. I have small Hiku like word game generator that I could put up now, but I am polishing it up so it will allow the best poems to be saved and voted on. This game requires a certain kind of structure to the poem, but I will leave you guessing what this structure would be. I haven’t written one line of code for Monkey-Typewritter yet, but the scope of the project keeps expanding and requires generating a special database of words and syntactical relationships for it to work. While contemplating Monkey-Typewriter a simpler toy to be called Errant Parrot came to mind. Errant Parrot will simply echo back text, but with word substitutions that are not quite random, relying on synonyms, antonyms or just close relative of words. If an especially amusing phrase is echoed (in relation to the original), the program will allow the user to save it and its mother phrase for all to see and vote on. This saving and voting thing is something I need to generalize because it really should be added to every interactive toy I make, which by and large will be word based baubles.