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classing up

Right now, I’m in a bubble. This is just one of those inexplicable absurdities of flight school: as flight training is very expensive and very perishable, one would expect to be rushed through as quickly as possible. Instead, there is a mandatory, months-long wait between finishing primary and beginning training in your advanced aircraft. It’s [...]

Engineered vs. Organic Code

The code I posted this morning is nothing I’d ever show to a prospective employer. It is sparsely commented, convoluted, and nearly impossible to expand. All I actually wrote of it last night was the part to prune down the source tree, so that the best-rated categories weren’t being spammed out by a bunch of [...]

Gift Cards

This Christmas, I got a Best Buy gift card and a Borders gift card. They’re nice gifts, given that I do tend to buy both consumer electronics and books in large quantities. However, the nearest Best Buy is two hours away from where I live. The nearest Borders is only half an hour away, but [...]

i don’t know about you but i got to the cake at the end

So, Portal. I just played it through in its entirety; it took slightly less than 90 minutes. On the other hand, this was my fourth playthrough since I got it for Christmas. Is it short? Very. Is it worth its price? Absolutely. This game has tremendous replayability; it’s got the same sort of fun as [...]

New Project: True Stories of Life in Japan

I’ve started writing the True Stories of Life in Japan because I figure I can probably tell some, and I wanted to see if I could handle writing a few hundred words every weekday for ten days. It’s more or less a way for me to brush up on my creative writing skills. As such, [...]

時間の無駄

About a month ago I bought half of all the books Terry Pratchett ever wrote. I was hoping they’d last until Christmas at least, but it turns out that a vacation is a really good excuse to stay up reading for 20 hours in a row.
In the course of the last book, I encountered the [...]

Suckers.

Why not to upgrade to Windows Vista. Deliberately constricting content that I’ve paid good money to allow my system to maximize makes me angry!
Also, merry christmas.

holiday roundup

Life is hectic. Current events: the latest news of general significance is that there may be flowing water on Mars. I still hope to see it for myself at some point. The latest news of personal significance is that the final review board for my helicopter flight application (and all the other similar applications filed [...]

Translation: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Prologue

Well, I finally finished translating the prologue of the novel. A bunch of people have asked me what it’s about, and until now all I could say was “I haven’t finished nearly enough to even know.” Now I have at least an inkling, and you can too.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Prologue
I don’t know [...]

I was going to post this earlier but I got distracted by the internet

I procrastinate, sometimes.
I took something like 250 or 300 pictures over the Christmas vacation. My family came to visit, and we travelled to a bunch of places over the course of a week.
Then, after the vacation ended, I didn’t offload the pictures from my camera. After all, I had a new computer to assemble–and after [...]