My girlfriend Nian is probably upset with me today because I didn’t call her last night. We had spent most of the last few evenings together and last night we were taking a break, and I had planned to go to the gym. We had exchanged a few short emails during the day and she was upset by something she and her friend Lucy had talked about. I asked if she wanted to get together and talk, but she replied no. I figured that whatever it was I would get it out of her more easily in person. I left for the gym, had a fairly exhausting workout. I thought about Nian and myself, it’s hard not to. We have only been together a short time, but it has been very intense and emotional at times.

Nian does not have a phone at her student housing, so if I call I have to call at the office where she studies. On evenings in the past when I have called I often get someone on the other end who doesn’t speak English very well and it is hard to know if I leave a message whether it is understood. So I didn’t dwell on whether I should try to reach Nian at her office.

Today I arrive at work and there is a letter about her waiting and waiting for my call. To be honest I don’t remember saying I would call, but I might have said I would call. I really just don’t remember. Still I am perplexed she would just sit by the phone and suffer rather than just call me herself. This tendency for women to read too much into every action or inaction by a man is quite frustrating.

I’m sure I will see Nian latter today, and there will be some words of rebuke or maybe a few tears. I don’t know. I’m sure it will all be OK again soon. Stay tuned, I’m sure there will be more soap-opera to come.

Oh, and Nian has been asking me about why I haven’t been keeping my blog up to date. I’m sure when she reads this one she’ll have mixed feelings about encouraging me to blog. :D

Things are going well with Helena and Myself. I might start on insisting on calling her by her real name of Nian, which was for some reason was hard to remember and pronounce when we first met (even though it is only 2 syllables), but now seems quite simple to remember. She is still after me to come up with a good pet-name for her. She is quite happy with the one she has given me which is “Old-Baby” since I’m 16 years older than her, but as you can imagine it makes me feel a little… uh… old.

Shakespeare-O-Meter is done, it isn’t much of a toy, but it was simple enough to code, so I did. I had a little more debugging to do than I expected, though this mostly turned out to be being caused by some unexpected characters in Shakespeare text like the Æ symbol and the Œ symbol which are used in some Shakespearean words.

Next up “Monkey Typewriter” which while I haven’t started to code it, I’m getting very excited about doing, because I have had some insights on how to make it work in a very clever fashion. I’m still not saying what it is exactly, but it is related to the concept of a million monkeys typing at random to produce a work of Shakespeare – so Shakespeare-O-Meter was kind of a warm up exercise. I’m pretty sure the final product will be of interest to those that like to debate Creationism versus Evolution and I’m predicting my program will show a decidedly pro-evolution outcome.

Not much progress on my other project with the strings and bike and model rocket. Hmmmm having a girlfirend can eat into one's time... in a good way of course!

As a bit of an aside, Nian and I went to Indianapolis over the weekend. While we where there we saw the IMAX file "Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees". That I should see a film this last weekend about chimpanzees while I am starting work on the "Monkey Typewriter" struck me as a little bit of a coincidence (and yes I do know that chimpanzees are apes and not monkeys). We both enjoyed the film greatly, Nian even more so.

I went and told Helena, my new girlfriend, where to find my blog, so I may be in hot water already (sigh). Nothing too severe I assure you.

I have put an improved version of StarshipTrek on the web. It now shows past moves for the Klingon ships you have battled when the game is over and also shows your own shots as play progresses (previously it only showed the Klingon shots).

I have begun work on my next Toy for this blog. Coming Soon the Shakespeare-O-Meter. The hardest parts are already coded. You type or paste text into it and it will return the percentage of Shakespeare likeness the text has. To do this I have downloaded two lists from the web. One a list of English word use frequency and the other a list of Shakespeare word use frequency. It will then scan your text word by word comparing it to the frequencies listed. The less common a word is in English and more common it is in Shakespeare the higher its score will be. Finally all the word scores are totaled for a final score. But to make it a little more fun, the words will be reprinted and color-coded to show which words got higher scores. So words like “Methinks” would be in bright green, while words like “Internet” would be in bright red. It will not be so sophisticated as to actually analyze the syntax of the text, and cutting and pasting snippets of Shakespeare might not always guarantee a 100% score. It will probably even have above 100% possibilities if you just string a bunch of Shakespearean words together.

Another Toy coming soon will be Monkey Typewriter, but I’ll leave you to guess how this toy will work for now.

I’m still contemplating how to implement MEME Image which will be a visual enhancement to MEME watch. Also to do, add VANITY Watch which would be nearly identical to MEME watch, but rely on Technorati to track the number of links to your website. This last idea comes from a suggestion by FGL.

I tripled the number of pictures in Zen Image so hopefully repeats will show far less often. I will still be on the look out for good Zen Images (still getting very few Zen Comments… except for FGL… so he doesn’t count anymore. Well he does, but you know what I mean). One last word about Zen Image, the images are often times just items that I thought looked like real unscripted moments of life, and aren’t supposed to have a deep meaning. Sometimes you can just imagine being where these people are, doing the things these people are doing, or you just feel like you could know these people because they seem so similar to people you know. I find something very Zen about that.

I now have a girlfriend. We met Friday night dancing. I hadn't expected things to move so quickly, but they have. She called me last night to come over to the quad and see her. By the end of the evening we decided to try the boyfriend girlfriend thing. We had exchanged a couple of short emails on Monday and Tuesday, so it's not even like we spent the weekend getting to know one another.

Still I'm optimistic that things will go well. I pretty much disclosed all the manufacturing defects that come with the product called Larry and that didn't scare her away. Her name is Helena and she is a graduate student studying economics at U of I. She is also from China. She has a very think accent but her English is better than I first thought from when we met on Friday, then again loud music makes conversation hard with anyone.

I don't need a lot of cautionary notes about how she may be more interested in being American than in being my girlfriend. I confess she pretty much threw herself at me, but she is smart, pretty, and pleasant and that has been a hard combination for me to find. I'm not unhappy that things are moving quickly, but I'm wary for this reason as well. She seems unhappy with the certain aspects of life back home and seems very much to crave attention. Maybe she would be unhappy that I have any reservations that things might not work out, but I have been in a lot of relationships and it is often the women that express the most interest initially that turn out to have the most issues in the long run. Not that Helena should be this way, but I do think there is a certain type of woman that tries to win a man over quickly before he discover flaws that might scare him away. Helena need not be perfect for things to work, everyone has flaws of one kind or another, I just hope she doesn't feel like she has to try too hard to keep my interest.

New Entry in Larry's Top Tens (this time I'm gonna make you click the link) If you enjoy this you might also like to check out Larry's Original Humor Pages

FGL asks where I've been so I guess I'll at least start a post tonight and see where it goes. As things are going my posts are probably going to be a little intermittent for awhile. I haven't gotten a new girlfriend if that is your first thought or question, just a lot of little activities eating up my time. I had also hoped to give some deep thought before posting seeking to improve the general quality of the postings -- maybe wait until I knew where some recent threads in my life are heading. But I have found I'm not very good at going back to document past activities if too much time has passed. I guess this is just the nature or peril of blogging. Events often don't play out in a definitive or conclusive way or on a convenient schedule. I tend to want there to be some point to writing before putting things down, though real blog readers probably enjoy having real stories play out over days or weeks. As a writer I worry a story might not go anywhere. Hopefully true blog fans will enjoy the occasion dead-end.

About my nights out on Wednesday and Friday -- I danced some and I met a couple of nice women. I doubt that anything will come of any of this, but you never know. I'm having just enough social success out lately that I'll just stay with my current Wednesday, Friday, Saturday routine and see if leads anywhere. Not so much of interest happened this week though as to be worthy of a "Larry's Life" entry.

Saturday I didn't actually make it out, I was just too tired from staying up too late on Friday and I got up early Saturday to deal with some computer issues. A new friend Hillary (not a girlfriend) came over to help troubleshoot the problem. The problem turned out to be that my 250Gig external drive was FAT32 file system and not NTFS. This had Hillary stumped for a little while as well, but she definitely gets credit for the fix. She told me to reformat to NTFS and I would be able to copy my video files to it. FAT32 can only handle up to 4-gigabyte (2^32) files, while NTFS can handle 16-exabytes (2^64). Of course I might have a little trouble fitting a 16-exabyte file on a 250-gigabyte hard-drive.

We didn't get all my computer issues fixed however, as my digital camera wasn't uploading files to my computer. Hillary was convinced it was a Trojan virus, but I'm pretty sure it isn't/wasn't. I had thought the hard-drive was related to the problem, but that proved to be a red herring as well. I tried to takes some pictures today and found I couldn't do that either. The problem turned out to be that the memory stick wasn't firmly seated in the memory slot. With that fixed the camera works fine both taking and uploading.

The error messages for both these problems were extremely unhelpful. When trying to copy NFST files to my FAT32 disk all the Windows would say is "Not enough disk space to perform copy" while both disks had over 100 Gig free. A more appropriate message would have been "Cannot copy file larger than 4 Gig to a FAT32 device. Recommend backup and restore as NFST file system device." The camera would not launch the camera wizard without the memory stick seated. In this case there was no error message, but a message like "Memory Stick not detected, check slot" would have helped me zero in on the problem.

A large portion of Saturday was spent looking for materials for a project of mine with Hillary along to help and advise, so that shot the rest of Saturday and put me out of the mood for going out at night on top of it. Hillary is fascinated by my project idea and is hoping to see me pull it off. Since I had specifically mentioned not having a new girlfriend, but have never mentioned Hillary before, I will say a few words about her. She is married, but her husband is in the military. She is a closer friend to my close friend A.C. who I have mentioned before. She has become a good friend quickly, but it is definitely platonic, and is mostly driven by her wanting to see my project finished before she heads to South Carolina to be with her re-stationed husband who has been in Iraq.

Oh, yeah the project -- what is it? I had said I was going to make it a guessing game. The picture shows some of the items collected so far. The bike looks like an unrelated background object, but it isn't. The yellow thing that looks like a kite, isn't a kite (it is fabric on a frame). The empty spools may or may not end up in the final construction. The little un-powered toy rocket definitely will end in the final project. Let the guessing begin. Tomorrow I hopefully will collect the last couple of items to finish what I'm working on.

My date with Audrey didn't happen this evening -- I'll probably have more to say about that later. Tomorrow may not have a post as I plan on going back to Lava for a night out dancing.

On to the geek stuff:

Hopefully my last few posts won't peg me as a Star Trek fanatic. Here is the latest news on the StarshipTrek game. I have added a High Score tracker and made it easier to replay the game reusing custom settings without having to go back to the entry screen. I now see that I never should have started coding this thing because I'm not sure I can stop tinkering. I have at least 3 more improvements to add.

FGL asks for details about a 3D version if I were to make one. A 3D version would feature 3 views (xy yz xz) each with same layout as is currently used by the 2D version. This would define a volume (cube) of space. An orthographic projection view might be possible in the remaining open quadrant, but wouldn't likely be coded into the first version (hard to do in ASCII, but not impossible). Those that have had drafting or have used autocad-programs should know what I'm talking about. Moves would require 2 position selections (one 2D xy selection and one z on a line in the yz or xy views). Since the possible number of hiding places for enemy vessels would go up, I would probably have to add some additional tactical aids to keep the game playable.

For those that care about MEME Watch (bottom sidebar) it is back up and running. Yahoo.com changed the placement of a quotation mark in their search results. I have made my pattern search template a little less finicky. The danger is that if I make the template too sloppy it might grab the wrong info from the page, I don't think I have reached that point yet. Ironically my meme-searches show a trend down while other people's memes are on the rise. Both Punchbowl Meme and Pope Conspiracy are showing impressive growth on the web.

Now that MEME Watch is fixed I am torn as to what my next project should be. I had thought to do something with random images grabbed off the web. This would use Yahoo.com's image search engine and would be nothing like Zen Image. Another possibility would be a Haiku generator that scans pages found by MEME Watch to find lines that match 5 or 7 syllables then paste them together to form a haiku. Most likely most will be total nonsense so 3 or 4 Haiku for each meme would be made. A voting mechanism would eliminate and replace the worse ones hopefully leaving some gems behind after a few days.

Zen Image has an annoying tendency to re-pick previously shown photos. I may have to make it cycle rather than pick at random. This requires sorting the images by date added before picking (or some other inconvenient solution). If I had known repeats would show up so often I would have done it that way before implementing. I had to erase the selected image 5 times after midnight today to get to a new one. With over 70 images I shouldn't be getting these many repeats yet. Perhaps there is a minor bug in the code somewhere (sigh).

I will probably revise this post later, but here is the StarTrack game I promised. I may still tinker with it later. I’m thinking about making a 3D version. For now… it is what it is. I’m also thinking about altering some portions of the random firing of the Klingon opponents to make it more strongly a strategy game than a game of chance.

MEME Watch is still down. I will look into fixing it tomorrow.

I don't know how sublime a realization this will be, but the topic of Star Trek and its various movies and spin-offs comes up semi frequently on Slashdot.com. Chief complaints with modern Star Trek series are lack of continuity and various other inconsistencies. On the other end of the spectrum is Orson Scott Card's recently posted article Strange New Wold: No 'Star Trek'"criticizing the original series for being unchanging, everything back to status quo by the end of every episode.

It then occurred to me that problem of writing episodic fiction, especially decade spanning episodic fiction, is that it is like maintaining an elaborate lie. Having to reconcile recent advances in science and past proclamations on the imaginary workings of Star Trek devices, ST-TNG used to lapse into near incoherent and overly elaborate "techno-babel" to motivate marginal plot lines.

Comic books have been dealing with these issues for far longer than television. Their solution has been to reinvent their more popular heroes from time to time. Battlestar Galactica is probably the only TV Sci-Fi to do this, and has done so to great and dramatic effect. Were I to revive the Star Trek line I would reinvent the universe from scratch and retell the story of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy with fresh actors and back-stories. Especially to be avoided would be reintroducing previous actors reprising roles from previous series in contrived and obvious attempts to boast ratings versus telling a good story. So many unlikely and incredible things happened in the course of telling a Sci-Fi story, why add to the improbability with time-travel and various other means of reincarnating characters? I'm not saying Sci-Fi time-travel stories can't be told, but of late in the Star-Trek universe time-travel has become a Band-Aid for explaining inconsistencies and a ratings ploy excuse to bring back popular characters [retch].

With the recent self proclaimed hiatus for Star-Trek TV series, I would be very surprised if they didn't go the Battlestar Galactica route when reviving the franchise at a later date.

I plan on going to the Masonic tonight and the High Dive tomorrow. I did manage to finally get last Saturday’s outing down in print. It is not well proofread and I may change the title later. For better or worse here is Amaretto Sour. 5000 words devoted to bragging about dancing with cute women too young for me. Hopefully over the weekend I will get some other projects finished as well.

I suspect that anyone who has visited BNL the last couple of days has been under whelmed with the quality of the entries. When I started this thing, I thought I had an above average life to write about and maybe an above average critical mind that would allow me to speak on the issues of the day. But I have to confess that maybe what I have to say is... well... boring from time to time. Maybe it would be better not to post on slow days.

I suspect that avid blog readers like personally oriented blogs telling intimate details of a person's life, entered daily in one and two paragraph slices. Trouble is my life seems to come in unexpected feasts separated by long famines. I'm still writing up the events of last Saturday -- one of those unexpected feasts.

Work has become a bit of a drag the last two weeks. I suspect I am too distracted by my blog projects to focus clearly. I'm hoping once I finish up my new game, get the latest "Larry's Life" chapter finished, and get MEME Watch fixed (it's registering all zeros on searches), I'll be able to clear my head for work. While I have blogged in various forms since 1999, I now feel guilty if I don't put something down on a near daily basis. I've gotten to the point where some things I do, I do just so it will make for an interesting blog entry later. I'm even thinking about going back to work part-time at The Canopy Club (a live music venue) just so I will have an endless string of music related events to write about.

Audrey said Monday looks good for going out when she gets back to town. [note to self, must work on segues] Audrey will be in my next "Larry's Life" Chapter -- we met Saturday. I give it about a 50-50 chance of happening.

As I mentioned MEME Watch is on the fritz. Either Yahoo.com has changed the format of their search results, or they are blocking non-browser queries (like Google.com does), in which case I may not be able to fix it. If they are blocking I'm glad they're doing it now before I get carried away with improvements to MEME Watch.

I have no idea whether anyone will like the Star Trek inspired web based board game I am coding. Maybe it will be received as so amateurish as to be considered a joke. It is at about 500 lines of PERL so far and each of those lines is far more complex than the TI-55 Programmable Calculator steps it was originally coded in 56 of -- each PERL line would probably be equal to 10-20 calculator steps on average. On the other hand, the original game required the player to mark moves on a board for themselves and the player had to read a set of numbers off the 8 digit glowing red numeric display to determine when they had made hits and whether they had won or lost. User friendly it wasn't, and yet it certainly impressed my peers in 1978 and got no end of play in an age before video games had arrived to any great degree -- we had Pong and maybe a Space Invaders at the Pizza Parlor. But of course the real popularity factor was that people were amazed that you could program something, anything to do something no one else had done before, crappy and trivial as it may be. Maybe they were all the more impressed because it wasn't a true computer, but just a calculator that had been programmed to play a game. That wow factor will certainly be lacking when I finish this thing today.

Oh and yes, those last two paragraphs would be examples of me lapsing into boring mode.

I was way over optimistic how little time this game would take to code.
Here is a sample shot of game play in progress.

	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H
1
2
3
4			]=O	2
5
6			3
7					1
8

Not sure how long this will take to get done, but it is looking like the weekend at the earliest. On the plus side I think this thing will be very playable when it gets done, so much so that I worry about getting too many hits to use it. Not that it will have anything on first person shooters, instead it will just have some sort of a minimalist charm. Very much like the Mine Sweeper game on PCs.

Not sure if this is worth the effort, but what the hell I’m halfway in now.

This would be another update post. I am still writing up a "Larry's Life" entry about last weekend. Up to 2,000 words so far. I expect it will top out at 4,000-5,000 -- so decent in length but not a record for these posts. I have some other episodes that I should fill the gaps in with. Maybe this thing will end up as a book someday. If so, I will have to go back and do a lot more proof reading. I browsed through some of the older posts and am amazed how many mistakes there are. Things like "their" for "they're" and "there", not to mention whole missing words that must have been in my head but never made it to my fingers.

I still haven't worked on improvements to MEME Watch or Zen Image, but only FGL and I are using MEME Watch. Zen Image has yet to have its first comment from someone other than myself. The Graffiti Board has no entries yet for May. I'm not really complaining, I still like the way Zen Image looks at the top of the page, and if I don't post, at least the picture changes. MEME Watch will eventually get graphs and Zen Image will eventually have a past posts page, but now I have a new toy in mind to code and may start tomorrow. The game will be an online version of Star Trek. Nothing fancy, a board based like game you play against the computer, but could play offline with a chessboard against other people. The thing that makes this project of interest to me is that it would be the resurrection of a Game I coded back in 1978 on a TI-55 calculator with a max of 56 calculator program steps and 8 variables. The game rules required typing in pairs of numbers representing board locations and reading pairs of numbers representing opponent's moves. The resurrection will be decidedly more user friendly. The basic premise was to find 3 cloaked Klingon ships and destroy them before their randomly fired shots depleted your shields. It borrowed a lot from battleship, though I never actually played that game. The challenge to myself will be to see if I can code this game in less than an hour in PERL and HTML. As I remember it was quite the chore to shoehorn this thing into a TI-55. In those days I salivated over getting an Apple ][ with 64k and a 1mhz 8 bit 6502 processor. My machine now is a 32bit 3ghz+ Pentium with 1 gig memory, 200 gig+ disk drive, Dual Monitors, and HDTV tuner card. Even without adjusting for inflation the cost was about the same as the Apple ][ I wanted back then.

Wow a wave of nostalgia washes over me having found a picture of the old girl to go along with this post.

Today is certainly a case of be careful what you wish for. The wish was to have a few more viewers to my blog, the result is being tagged with something called the Punchbowl-Meme. Since I have so prominently made my own meme project known I can hardly refuse to participate in a meme tagging. The challenge to create bad poetry with the phrase “Turd in a punch bowl” as the first and third lines. Here is my contribution to this feces related chain letter.

Turd in a punch bowl,
Why do you torture me?
Turd in a punch blow,
Hides more poorly than pee.

Don’t expect to see toilet humor here again -- for that you would have to visit Larry’s An Ill Wind Blue Humor Page a concentrated collection of school yard caliber humor.

Now I have to inflict this meme on someone else with a blog...
Sorry FGL

My blog was down for some period of time today because blogger.com erased it after someone left a comment and it auto-updated (no fault of the person leaving the comment). Damn blogger.com has been flaky of late. I just hit publish-all without any edits and it restored. As a fringe benefit it fixed the FireFox viewing of quotation marks that had been broken for the last two days (so at least they fixed that bug). Also two months and counting and Blogger.com stats are still not updating.

Quite the weekend, I am writing up a new entry for “Larry’s Life” hopefully to be posted soon.

Ann Coulter is on Fox tonight complaining about the picture of her on the current cover of Time magazine. A photo that is if anything flattering, in fact it has that sort of Rolling Stones iconic look, but she is going on and on about how it is not flattering. I have never cared much for Sean Hannity. Unsurprisingly he is in agreement with Ann's weird hang-up about the Time photo. These two people are so partisan they are forced to see conspiracies and insults everywhere when none are offered. Ann goes on to explain her reasons for not reading the Time article which she is inclined to believe she will not like, but doesn't know for sure because she won't read it. I have not always disagreed with all of Ann's positions, but I will never trust her uncorroborated judgement in light of her bizarre performance on Hannity and Colmes. I am extrapolating she would be similarly selective in her political readings or at least throw out inconvenient facts the way she is avoiding looking at anything she might find unflattering or challenging about her self image or beliefs.

Ironically the photo in question, shown at top, is in my opinion more flattering than the one of her on the homepage of her own web site (shown here).



The eagle eyed among you will notice I put the photos on the far right. I'm sure Ann would have wanted it that way.