Selfish Crab

Went to a Rangers-Islanders game tonight. It was pretty intense, it became a blow out pretty early; it was 4-0 Islanders after the first period. After that, it got really messy and bloody. I like hockey because of the speed, the finesse, and the improvisational play-making. The physical aspect of the game can be entertaining when used cleanly. Apparently, much of the audience loves the hitting and gore the most. They roared and shouted encouragingly whenever players grew angry at each other; it was crazy. I could almost imagine what the Roman Colisseums used to be like: tiers and tiers of bloodthirsty spectators, crying out for not honor and grace, but dirty entertainment. After all, that’s what those guys down there are paid to do. It’s part of the job. Bleh. Some people have no class.

And I will never understand the Fan. What would ever possess a fan to boo his own team? Because the team is doing poorly? Is that who you inspire someone to improve and excel? “Boooooo.”?!? Sheesh. I personally am a fan of the game, and not any particular team. I like good games. Hear hear.

Also, right now, I’m trying to read Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. I’m noticing how our generation’s shrunken attention-span is making these classic texts extremely difficult to read. Here is a sample:

If I had had to choose my birthplace, I would have chosen a society of a size limited by the extend of human faculties, that is to say, limited by the possibility of being well governed, and where, with each being sufficient to his task, no one would have been forced to relegate to others the functions with which he was charged; a state where, with all private individuals being known to one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could be hidden from the notice and the judgment of the public, and where the pleasant habit of seeing and knowing one another turned love of homeland into love of the citizens rather than into love of the land.

That was one sentence. I had to read it aloud, just to try to hold together the connection of ideas in my head. I dunno, maybe I’m just stupid.

# 2002 Jan 31    {opine, rompin' years}    #

It seems that I am not alone in my problems.

Hey, I finally decided to buy a domain name. Can anyone suggest a good registrar? Are they all the same? Is reliability a factor? Because I did some shopping, I’ve seen some places go as low $10 per year! Let me know at [selfish crab's college email addr]

[Update: Thanks to Michael for recommending namecheap.com, who charges a whopping $8.88 a year. nice! I am now the beaming owner of [EDIT].com, as well as another domain name for a friend’s birthday. Now to learn Perl, ASP, CGI, TCP/IP and HTTP protocols, and maybe some php, so I make an interesting, well-orgainzed website.]

# 2002 Jan 28    {nerd, rompin' years}    #

Heh, just a couple of links to entertain. Some guy apparently challenged his friend and co-worker to the Cinnamon Challenge 2001, which means he has to “…in one mouthful, consume a tablespoon of McCormick Brand Ground Cinnamon without spitting it out or vomitting.” Hahaha. The results are … bloody and hilarious. The challenge is pretty well documented, color photos and all, and if you look closely, it looks like they’re in an office (cubicles and all.) I bet this stuff would never happen if business casual wasn’t so prevalent. Heh.

In other news, someone over at UCLA has too much free time and Legos and decided to tell the story of the Lord of the Rings, using only Legos. It’s neat; he created a couple distinct settings. The Lego playset has had many theme sets over the years, and it’s made it easy to do taverns, elfs, dwarfs, rangers, and swordfights. My favorite part is the interpretation of the Nazgul dark-riders.

# 2002 Jan 27    {rompin' years}    #

go lions

Sylvia Nasar Discusses Her Book, ‘A Beautiful Mind’:

In 1994, Nash shared the Nobel Prize with two other economists for the 1950 doctoral dissertation he wrote at Princeton on game theory. The next year, then-New York Times Reporter, Sylvia Nasar, who is Columbia’s John S. and James L. Knight professor of business journalism, chronicled his life first in a series of articles for the Times, and in 1998 as a biography called, “A Beautiful Mind.” And most recently, director Ron Howard translated Nash’s story into a major motion picture featuring Academy Award winner Russell Crowe as the professor himself.

# 2002 Jan 25    {rompin' years}    #

Last night, the suite watched Rounders. Guess what we did after the movie? Play no limit texas hold ‘em, of course! 5-dollar buy-in. How did I fare? Got cleaned out in the last hand (or what became my last hand.) I had flopped a flush. So did someone else. But, fricking Bern caught a boat on the river!!! Argh. What luck. Most of us went all-in on that one because each of us believed we had the nuts. Frag. Someone get me a poker book.

# 2002 Jan 23    {rompin' years}    #

New layout for this blog. What’s so special about it? Well, I used CSS for positioning, for one thing. That’s right, no more outrageous table nesting for me. I am standards compliant, baby. For icing, I tried to make sure it was XHTML validated too.

How’d I do it? I basically absolutely positioned the left menu, and gave the main content area a left margin the width of the menu. Also, to make my life easier, I used server-side includes for the header, footer, and left menu.

Where are good places to learn CSS? Well, there are always some good basic starting tutorials out there. Brainjar has a good write-up of CSS if you are already familiar with what stylesheets are and want straight up informative discussion. For ready-to-go CSS templates, try glish.

Ok, now for the laymen discussion. What’s the big screaming deal about Cascading Style Sheets? Well, CSS is a really powerful and convenient way to control the way your website looks and behaves. CSS is an official web standard, written up and published by the good samaritans over at World Wide Web Consortium. Assuming that the Big Browsers make themselves standards compliant (which is a OK assumption by now), webpages using CSS will look and behave the same across the different browsers. In the past, each browser used to have individually supported features and quirks that made it a pain in the ass to try to make one page look good, let alone the same, in all the different browsers. With CSS here, that sort of grief should become history.

Also, I am really anal and a purist and I would be the type of person to demand my webpage to be fully standards complaint, etc etc. Actually, the really boring plain layout before this one (with the go… / archive links on the side) used CSS too. I just thought it was time to take down that interim layout. Also, please note: I will be slowly tweaking this layout and styles as we go along. And most of the links on the left do not work yet. If you have any suggestions, feel free to send them to me. Looking up, I notice that I am quite verbose. sorry.

# 2002 Jan 20    {greatest hits, meta, nerd, rompin' years}    #

on someone’s AIM profile:

“Oh You hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”

# 2002 Jan 19    {rompin' years}    #

The eagle has landed. Hurrah.

# 2002 Jan 14    {rompin' years}    #

A random bunch of thoughts I had on the 8-hour drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles:

• The constant presense of mountains (in the fore- and background) sure must have a heavy impact on the mindset of Californians. Looming towering mountains tend to have a humbling effect on people; it helps them keep things in perspective. A person just driving to the local supermarket can always catch, in the background, the faint silhouette of overzealous hilltops. Contrast this with New Jersey. You can drive around, surrounded by a little 50 meter radius of Here and Now, with none of that giant perspective. Also, mountains sure are purdy.
• The full-service gas stations we have sure are convenient. I personally am rather adverse to getting out and pumping my own gas. Gasoline does not seem to be the healthiest thing to breathe in every 700 miles.
• This thought began somewhere in NYC, somewhere between 109 and 110th st and Broadway. I think most language programs are teaching foreign languages incorrectly. I have some friends with limited profiency in a foreign language, and they all testify that their foreign language ability is slowed because the Spanish/Chinese/etc translates into English first and then is understood. This happens because most courses revolve around the vocab list principle, the “in the left column you have the word and in the right column you have its meaning in English.” This seems very wrong to me. You want people to have that instanteous link between langage and their reality, not between language, another language, then reality.

  So the solution to this problem is simple. Teach foreign language like they teach English to elementary schoolers. Say “ball” and show them a round bouncy sphere. Say “caballo” and show them a picture of a horse. Say “gwut” and show some bones. Granted, this takes a bit longer, but not as long as it takes kids to learn their first language. The process is sped up by the fact that adults already have some experience with reality and little time is needed to actually explain the concepts behind the words. For instance, you would have to introduce to a child the idea of a large, predatious animal from the cat family before you say to them “puma”. But for adults, this step is not needed. The question may arise, well, how do you teach complex intangible words and ideas like “love”, “honesty”. You can shows pictures of balls and lions, but how would you depict “courage” or, say, “art”? I cannot find the answer to that question now; I am not really sure how I learned those such ideas in English. I’ll try to figure it out in future dialogue.

  and

• Incest is nicest when misspelled.

Well, I was not really too good at recording my trip. I still have LA, Las Vegas, and Death Valley to blog about. But I’m leaving for the airport soon. So..um… I will figure something out when I get back.

# 2002 Jan 12    {greatest hits, rompin' years}    #

The first several days in California were spent in the hills of San Francisco, visiting my Great Aunt and Uncle (“great” is both in objective modifier to describe familial relationship and subjective modifier to describe quality of person!). I managed to catch my brother’s cold after the first day (no matter how tight lodging may be, never sleep in the same room as a sick man) and did not miss much. My Great Aunt is a tremendous cook and we ate and ate, and since we (the sick) could not really go out and sight see too much, we ate a little more. I have surely gained in girth. Also, to my suitemates’ inevitable delight, I managed to swipe some simpilifed but delicious recipes; I hope they like pickled vegetables = )

Now the surreal part about staying at their house was that I felt like I was living in the 1950s. My relatives had been living there for a while and you could definitely feel the time bubble surrounding the place. The television had dials, rabbit ear antenna, and was its own piece of wooden furniture. Basically, the only readily enjoyable forms of entertainment were listening to the huge collection of classical music, reading books, and talking and telling stories. It was crazy. I hadn’t been without an Internet connection, let alone a computer for that long in a great while.

How did I spend my time? Well, between the long naps and the downing of honey/lemon/hot-water, I sat around and thought a lot, and listened to Chopin’s Nocturnes, and heard stories about great-great-grandfathers, and read Zen and the Art of Archery and Descartes’ Meditations on a First Philosophy. (The latter was unfinished ContempCiv reading that I thought would be nice to finish. Still reading it.) It was quite enjoyable to savor time and not burn through it like you do when you play computer games or watch Friends. I honestly enjoyed my time there a great deal and hope to return again in the summer for more time-warp action. I bet if I got a summer internship somewhere in Silicon Valley, I could stay at their place. Man oh man. I need to start looking for internships. Someone hook me up!

# 2002 Jan 7    {rompin' years}    #

Well, that was fun. It was my first time snowboarding, and without a lesson or otherwise useful help from the others I went with (including my brother), I think I did pretty darn well. In fact, I think I should start going on mountains some more. So, if you’re one of my friends back in Mobo, expect a trip as soon as I get back. (start saving.) Anyway, in the past week, due to lack of distractions (like typical excessive computer and television use), I have had lots and lots of time to think…. y’know, about myself, my future, my girlfriend, and what to blog about. And since I do not actually have a girlfriend, that means even more time devoted to what to blog about. heh. So here’s my past week (plus/minus) :

# 2002 Jan 6    {rompin' years}    #

Hey, I’m alive. and somewhere in California. For some reason, I decided that the best way to seize the opportunity of California’s beautiful weather was to go snowboarding. Like, tomorrow. I am dead exhausted right now. Next time I reach a computer and have an hour of time on my hands, I’ll blog again.

# 2002 Jan 5    {rompin' years}    #

Happy New Year

# 2002 Jan 5    {rompin' years}    #