gwax’s rumblings

I spent this past weekend in Seattle at Penny Arcade Expo 2008, which is a great big convention for gamers of all sorts and those of similar persuasions. I met up with Riad, Gautham and Ariel in Seattle and we had an awesome time. Between the exhibit hall, the panels, the talks, the tournaments, the freeplay areas and all of the other people, PAX was three solid days of fun. I highly recommend PAX, in the future, to anyone with any interest in video games, board games, the Internet or good times in general.

For me, the major highlights of PAX were:

• Monsterpocalypse - Privateer Press was selling preview releases of their new game, Monsterpocalypse. Monsterpocalypse is a collectible miniatures game focused around destroying opposing monsters and cities. It is a very well constructed game and a heck of a lot of fun to play; I purchased enough for two people to play and I intend to get more when the game is actually released in October. I played two games at PAX, one more last night and I really like this game. Monsterpocalypse is awesome and I highly recommend looking into it.
• Starcraft II - Blizzard had playable demos of Starcraft 2 up and it seems really good. Starcraft 2 seems to have kept the feel and gameplay of the original while replacing some of the interface annoyances, improving the graphics and adding a few more units. I am now really looking forward to Starcraft 2’s release.
• Demigod - I hadn’t heard of Demigod before PAX but, as one of the random things I saw in the exhibit hall, it looks like a lot of fun. I probably won’t get Demigod because it seems like the sort of game that’s best suited to multi-player, which I haven’t really been in a good situation for since undergrad, but if I were looking for a fun multi-player game, Demigod would be on my short list.
• Minibosses - The Minibosses, a rock band that exclusively plays covers of video game music, were the last act at PAX’s Saturday night concert. I’ve seen the Minibosses before as they’ve played Steer Roast a couple of times but they’re still great. There is something particularly awesome about hearing the theme song to Ninja Gaiden, Megaman 2 or Metroid played on electric guitars, bass and drums. The Minibosses played a ~2 hour set that was solid glory and totally worth staying up until 3AM for.
• MC Frontalot - MC Frontalot is probably the best known and most popular nerdcore hip hop artist. Frontalot is pretty good and an awful lot of fun. He puts on a great show and his raps are really entertaining and well targeted at the audience. Heck, Frontalot is probably responsible for making nerdcore what it is today.
• Pitch Your Game Idea - We pitched the oft-discussed in Fort Awesome game idea for Eco-Slayer, which met with mass audience approval but didn’t win any prizes with the panel. The reactions and getting an honorable mention from three of the four judges was pretty great. Shout outs to Mar, whose idea Eco-Slayer was originally.
• DTS - PAX had this wonderful system called the Distributed Tournament System; basically they gave you two pins at the beginning of PAX to wear. If you were wearing at least one DTS pin and saw someone else wearing at least one DTS pin, you could challenge them for a pin. The challenge could take any form you wanted, in previous years it was only for handheld gaming, and the goal was to collect the most pins at PAX. I didn’t really collect as many as I should have but I had an awful lot of thumb wars, Indian wrestling contests and games of rock-paper-scissors. DTS made for a great way to interact with and meet random new people, even if it was just for a short competition and conversation. Seriously though, I had some truly epic thumb wars, one even ended in a draw after about 15 minutes of fierce competition.
• Other people - One of the best things about PAX was all the other people. Sure there were some annoying socially awkward people but there were also a lot of really cool people. It was a great big convention for people that like some of the things that I like and for which I, as a person, probably fell within one standard deviation of normal. It was a nice feeling being surrounded, in a sense, by my peoples.

I have just discovered that there is, not only, a name for the combination of the interrogative point (question mark) and the exclamation point but also a typographical symbol. The Interrobang is this combination and can be represented as ‘?!’, ‘!?’ or ‘‽’. In the past, I have used ‘?!’ because I felt that it provided an appropriate representation of questioning and excited emphasis; I prefer the exclamation after as it is the question that is being emphasized, not the emphasis being questioned. Now, however, the single typographical character provides me the opportunity to concisely express, in writing, simultaneous inquiry and surprise.

Unfortunately, although available in unicode, many fonts do not have ‘‽’ and there is no easy character combination that will lead to it.

I have finally decided, after 7 years of faithful service, that thevoid is due for decommissioning as my primary desktop. I love thevoid, she’s a great machine but at a 1.8GHz single core, 1GB of RAM, no USB2, no SATA, no PCI-E, no PCI-X and fans that are starting to make squealing/grinding noises, she’s fallen a little far behind the technology curve. My general view on desktops is, and for a long time has been, to get a core setup with the most expandability possible and then incrementally upgrade for as long as possible; following that principle, I am replacing thevoid with abyss.

Abyss (current specs)

• Lian-Li PC-A77B case
• Tyan Tempest i5400PW (S5397) motherboard
• 2x Intel Xeon E5420 2.5GHz quad core CPUs
• 4x Kingston 1GB 667MHz FB-DIMM RAM
• 2x Western Digital 500GB SATA HD
• Lite-On SATA 20X DVD±R

Abyss (planned upgrades) (as funds are available)

• 4x Kingston 1GB 667MHz FB-DIMM RAM
• Some medium-to-high-end nVIDIA video card
• some medium-end multi-channel sound card
• Highpoint RocketRAID2240 16-channel SATA controller
• 3x Icy Dock 5-bay SATA backplane
• 15x 750GB HD

The hardware in abyss has been specifically chosen to have support for Intel VT-x and VT-d virtualization technology so as to allow for as versatile a machine as possible. Abyss is already running Xen with Gentoo Linux as the primary, dom0, operating system and Windows XP as a secondary, domU, operating system. My hope, after adding a video and sound card, is to install another Gentoo Linux and Windows XP operating system, as well as a Windows Vista operating system. Ultimately, the current Gentoo and Windows operating systems will always run in the background, primarily acting as headless servers for underlying services, and for day to day usage I will be able to switch between Gentoo, XP and Vista domains based on my needs. In essence, I will have a dual-booting system of virtual hosts with direct access to my video and audio hardware.

Hopefully abyss, with some incremental upgrades, will serve my computation needs for the next five to ten years.

I’ve been drinking a lot of vanilla milkshakes recently. So we’re clear, I’m from New England and I’m not talking about frappes. My vanilla milkshake recipe is very simple, very quick to make and very good:

• glass cold milk
• couple or few teaspoons sugar
• tablespoon or so of vanilla extract

Stir ingredients with a spoon. Drink.

One central element of the recipe is that precision is not important; sometimes I completely leave out the sugar. Another thing worth noting is that while real vanilla extract is fairly expensive, artificial vanilla is really cheap, especially if you get it somewhere like CostCo. Do not dismay at using artificial components, vanillin is incredibly easy to synthesize with no loss of flavor. I find it to be an incredibly tasty beverage, in addition to being good for you (it is milk) and easy to make.

Enjoy.

I realized, this morning, that I objectify yeast. Sure I objectify meat, vegetables, trees and, heck, even some people but, even when I’m doing so, I don’t lose sight of the fact that these things are or were living beings. Yeast, however, I treat a great deal more like a chemical or tiny machine. Yeast is something that I add to wort to make beer; sure I need to temperature control it and keep things clean but that’s the case with lots of wet chemistry. If I didn’t know better, I might think of yeast as little more than a catalyst for converting sugar to ethanol and carbon dioxide; there are nuances and yeast imparts other processing to the wort but those are minor details. Continued thinking, combined with various old thoughts of mine and some of my personal philosophies led me to question the nature of life.

If I could replace yeast with a single chemical or mixture of a few chemicals that were capable of converting wort to beer, would that mixture be alive? By most definitions, probably not, but what then makes yeast alive? Is it perhaps that yeast separates its innards from the outer world? What if I made membrane bubbles filled with wort-to-beer chemicals that let reactants in and products out, would that be alive? Perhaps it’s self-replication that makes yeast alive? What if I put nano-machines in the membrane bubble that were capable of duplicating themselves and the chemicals in the bubble as well as increasing the bubble size and splitting it in half? Now we’ve probably stepped well past the gray area and have either made something that is either alive or nearly impossible to distinguish from something alive.

What if we extend our self-replicating ethanol bubble notion? Would a self-replicating mining robot be alive? Are computer worms alive? Is a lathe that can be used to make more lathes like a virus in being almost alive, save for its need of host (lathe operator)? If I write a piece of software that simulates yeast at an atomic level, is that piece of software alive?

Of course, already following pathetic and weakly emergent hylopathism, I’m of the opinion that every example I’ve given, from enzyme to yeast, from lathe to myself, is alive. My hylopathic view of aliveness, however, is quite at home coexisting with conceptions of other people’s definitions of aliveness in my head. I find that allowing contradictory and, possibly, mutually exclusive memes to live side by side in my head makes for some very interesting philosophizing and internal dialogs.

I’m wondering though, Internet, where do you draw your lines? What makes something alive?

Being hit on by gay guys is, for me, something of a combination of unwanted flattery and a mild nuisance but I’ve kind of hit my limit for tolerating it recently.

San Francisco, as a city, has a fairly large gay population and it happens to be the case that where I live (Dore St. and Folsom St.) is right near the center of gay leather/BDSM culture for San Francisco. There happen to be quite a few leather stores and gay bars within a few blocks of my place and, pretty much every time I take Baldr for a walk, I have to pass at least two gay bars. The situation is that Baldr is pretty much one of the cutest dogs most people have ever seen and almost everyone I encounter wants to interact with him. I don’t mind gay guys; I don’t mind walking past gay bars; I don’t mind gay guys wanting to meet Baldr just as I don’t mind lesbians, straight men or straight women wanting to meet Baldr; but when gay guys try to use Baldr as a way to pick me up, that’s when I start to mind.

Usually attempts are pretty tame, some guy saying something about how cute Baldr is and then adding a small comment to the effect of, “and he’s got a cute handler also.” Sometimes it’s a little cheesy, as when I took Baldr and Angus out, they, at one point, had my arms spread out going in opposite directions and some guy said, “I see you’re hung like this” and held his hands out like the classic Jesus joke punch line. Sometimes, though, body language and phrasing can really sketch me out, especially when someone tries to find a way to touch me, like the tap on the shoulder when making a statement that’s quite obviously more than just a tap on the shoulder.

All in all, I was doing a fine job of tolerating the occasional unwanted advance until about last Friday. This past Sunday, the Dore Alley Fair took place pretty much right outside my apartment. The Dore Alley Fair is, essentially, a less tourist-friendly version of the Folsom Street Fair, which is to say that it’s a huge, gay, leather fetish fair. This meant there were a lot more gay guys, than normal this past weekend and I got hit on a lot more. It also meant that, on Sunday, in order to walk Baldr, I had to carry him half a block through a solid mass of men in various states of dress ranging from clothed to fully naked. The number of comments and touches I received was a couple every few feet as opposed to a couple a day and it was just a little too much for my comfort. It was an interesting thing to witness but I’m not terribly pleased that I was forced to interact with it and I’m rather displeased that so many people took the context and Baldr as an excuse to make advances on me.

The experience does get me thinking: is this the sort of thing that straight men make women put up with?

This morning, I purchased a cup of coffee, a Café au lait to be specific. What makes buying a cup of coffee noteworthy is that it’s the first cup of coffee that I have purchased, or even consumed for that matter, in about 3 years. I don’t normally drink coffee for reasons that date back to my Junior year of high school.

I found high school exceedingly easy and, as a result, I was almost constantly bored. In spite of the fact that I usually did my homework during other classes so as to avoid doing it at home, I rarely slept sufficiently–a habit that I’ve carried with me since. The not sleeping meant I drank coffee in the mornings, rather a decent amount. The boredom, and who I am, led to experiments of all sorts. Eventually, the logical happened, I combined my coffee with my experimenting. I usually made coffee with our Moka Express–a phenomenal device for making good coffee by the way–so that served as the platform for my experimentation. Mokas produce rather tasty and very potent coffee. My first experiment involved the production of three Mokas worth of coffee, which were then boiled down to the volume of a single mug; the boiling down concentrated the caffeine but absolutely ruined the flavor. Experiment one was a resounding success; I was alert, wired and full of energy all day, though I did crash at the end of the day and become quite exhausted. At the time, I had a bit of a penchant for consuming cake frosting (if only I still had my teenage metabolism) and I suspect the container I ate that day helped maintain blood-sugar levels against the energy draining effects of caffeine. Obviously, my second experiment, which occurred a number of weeks later, involved the same process and four Mokas; again there was cake frosting and it was quite a success, though I did suffer some jitters and stomach discomfort. Worth noting, I estimate a caffeine content of approximately 200mg per Moka, with acute overdose levels starting somewhere around the 300mg range, modulo tolerance; hospitalization can be necessary for as little as 2000mg. Not willing to be deterred, or perhaps just being a complete idiot, later on came experiment three: five Mokas boiled down to one cup. Experiment three was a complete failure, perhaps there was too much caffeine, perhaps it was a lack of cake frosting; whatever the reason, I was done in. I couldn’t focus; my hands shook to a large degree; I was nauseated to the point of vomiting; it took a substantial portion of my willpower to hide my situation from my teachers and peers, eventually making it through the day, collapsing in bed and sleeping for an excessive period of time.

Aside from the negative effects immediately following experiment three, I developed a strong psychosomatic allergy to the flavor of coffee, as indicated by an inability to stomach decaffeinated coffee, coffee ice cream or anything with a hint of coffee flavor while still being able to consume large quantities of caffeinated soda. Every so often, I have tried to consume something coffee related, usually trying for very minimally coffee options, and I have slowly found myself more capable of stomaching them. Most recently, I think that I had a bottled Starbucks frappachino drink thing and was only somewhat nauseated by the experience.

Today, however, I would say that I have only been minimally nauseated; to such a minimal extent, I would say, that I may see about bringing coffee back into my life. My psychosomatic coffee intolerance is a weakness of constitution that I would really like to kick. Further testing is clearly necessary but I am cautiously optimistic.

Internet, meet Baldr. Sorry it took me so long to introduce you.

Post title plagiarized from Riad

For rather a long time, I’ve been a stalwart Marvel comics fan but upon seeing the Watchmen movie trailer, I find myself re-evaluating my stance a little. I’ve always liked the X-Men; Thanos, Galactus and Magneto are awesome villains; Superman is super lame; and there are so many other reasons to love Marvel, like all the cartoons. However, all that neglects some of the great things D.C. has been involved in, for instance, pretty much everything Batman except the movies between Batman Returns and Batman Begins. The Batman books are gold, the Batman cartoons have all been gold, Jack Nicholson’s Joker was gold, Batman Begins was gold and I am so psyched about The Dark Knight that it’s not even funny. On top of that, there’s a bunch of other things D.C. has done right, including Watchmen and Transmetropolitan, probably the two greatest graphic novels of all time.

Marvel, however has been putting out movies best classified as bad followed by worse, with the notable exception of Iron Man, which was pretty ok. Why then does Marvel deserve my praise? Their comics are still pretty decent but they certainly aren’t Dark Horse, though really, nobody else is. Are the X-Men really that great or is it that they were really cool when I was a kid and I haven’t come to realize how simple they really are?

You know, I think I’m switching my allegiances. As of now, I officially like D.C. more than Marvel, though I still prefer Image, Dark Horse and a few indie publishers more. Seriously though, The Dark Knight looks awesome as all get up and so does Watchmen.

Ok, I’m going to watch the Watchmen trailer one more time and then I’ll be done geeking out.

Yesterday, I went and picked up my new puppy. My puppy is a purebred Saint Bernard with strong champion ancestry from Conifer Creek Farm in Rough and Ready, CA.

After a great deal of consideration, I have decided to name my puppy Baldr, after the Norse God commonly associated with light and goodness. I had previously been considering Heimdallr and Odin but Heimdallr sounded too cumbersome and the breeder, a very friendly man by the name of David McKague, related to me the story of a Saint Bernard named Odin who had been nothing but trouble. As much as I like to be contrarian and see Baldr as a bit like the Jesus of the Norse, it really is a good name. Baldr was often called Baldr the Good for a reason and I think that it’s a very respectable and good sounding name for a dog.

I will post pictures as soon as soon as I get an xD card for the camera a friend gave me or am able to get someone else to take some pictures for me.

I am very saddened to report that my family dog, Browder, had to be put down. Browder was a yellow Labrador and had reached the ripe age of 13. Browder developed cancer in his abdomen about a year ago, which he recovered from after surgery. A month or so ago, the cancer came back and it was, once again, removed, though it was more invasive this time around. Sadly, it was not fully removed and, about a week ago, it started to make a really strong push forward. The cancer rather thoroughly overwhelmed poor Browder and he had to be put down yesterday.

When I last saw Browder, in early May, he had just had his most recent surgery and he seemed quite a bit more lively than I’d seen him be in years. It is my belief that, after the last surgery, he knew that he was on the way out and figured that he might as well live things up a bit with the time he had left. I’m so glad that I managed to get back east and see him one last time.

I am really going to miss that lazy old layabout. I remember so many times with him; it’s hard to accept that he isn’t anymore. I remember when he was young and would bring us things he found; he was an excellent retriever in spite of us never teaching him how. He once came home with a live baby owl gingerly held in his mouth; he caused the owl no physical harm, though I’m certain the shock ruined the poor little bird; he brought it in, placed it on the floor and looked at us for approval at the trophy he’d brought us. I remember when my brother, Joseph, was a toddler and he’d climb all over poor Browder, tormenting him as only a toddler can torment a dog; Browder would just lie there, gentle as could be putting up with it all. I remember visiting Tim Jessup place land in Norfolk, CT, taking a Sunfish out on the lake and sailing while Browder chased me around trying desperately to keep up; he wasn’t a big fan of saltwater but he was a fantastic swimmer. Sure he’d steal food sometimes, sure his hair was everywhere, but man was he a good dog.

I can’t write any more, it’s too sad. I’m going to go cry myself to sleep.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is not that bad. With the crap that George Lucas has been putting out recently, I’m surprised the new Indiana Jones movie was not worse. The increased use of special effects and CG definitely hurt the movie but not as much as that Gungan idiot hurt Star Wars. Ultimately, the goal and ending of the movie were pretty poor but the early and middle parts of the movie were plenty decent as far as Indiana Jones’ style is concerned.

Funny that aliens and flying saucers are less reasonable than the hand of God but I think that’s just the way my mind says the world of Indiana Jones is supposed to be.

Saturday evening, I went out with some friends and saw The Fall, which was, I must say, a gorgeous movie. The movie is quite artistic, pretty and rather fun. It gets a wee bit on the odd side at a number of points and there are a few WTF?! moments but, overall, the film is quite coherent and a very nice way to spend a couple hours. Unfortunately, The Fall, being thoroughly independent, is suffering very poor distribution and showing up in a rather small number of theaters but, in my opinion, it’s worth seeking out one of those theaters and seeing it.

There is a right way and there are wrong ways to add drives to a RAID5 array with mdadm. Annoyingly, I chose one of the wrong ways last week when I went to increase the hard drive space in thevoid. Thankfully, my mistake has proven more bothersome and time consuming than harmful.

Starting out last week, thevoid had 4x 500GB drives in an mdadm RAID5 configuration: /dev/hde1, /dev/hdg1, /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1. This had me sitting on 1.5TB of space with one drive worth of failability, which was proving insufficient. In order to resolve my space issues, I ordered 3x 500GB drives and proceeded to install them when the arrived: /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc, /dev/hdd.

In my haste to have more space, I proceeded to add them to the array and grow it:

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/hdb
mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/hdc
mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/hdd
mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --raid-devices=7

This process then got to work and took about 3-4 days to complete. I assume the time was on account of most of the drives being IDE drives, many sharing channels and there being an awful lot of space. Once the growing process was complete, I merely needed to resize the ext3 partition on the array:

resize2fs /dev/md1

This then took an hour or so and I was sitting on 3TB of total space. The only part of the process during which my drive was inaccessible was when I had to turn off the computer to physically install my IDE drives.

Everything is perfect now, right? Wrong. Guess who forgot that you should partition drives before using them? That’s right, me. I really wanted to put a linux raid autodetect partition on each of the drives before adding them to the array. Not that it really does much harm to add the drives straight to the array but it’s poor form and it might pose problems that I am not aware of in the future so, clearly, it’s a thing that should be fixed. Thankfully, being RAID5, my array is able to lose drives and still be fine, thus allowing the solution of failing, removing, partitioning and adding each of the new drives back into the array:

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --fail /dev/hdb
mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --remove /dev/hdb

partion /dev/hdb and then:

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/hdb1

now wait until the array has rebuilt itself:

cat /proc/mdstat

and repeat for the other drives. Overall, it’s not hard but it’s annoying and it does take about 1/2 to 2/3 of a day per drive to fix. Thankfully, though, now the endeavor is done and my array works correctly with no lost data and minimal down time. Hooray for software RAID and having 3TB in a single place.

Oh, and you don’t want to forget to update /etc/mdadm.conf after every step of the process of you could have some potential problems.

This past weekend, Memorial Day weekend ‘08, a couple friends and I set out to climb Mount Shasta; we did not succeed. Mount Shasta is the second highest of the Cascade Mountains, the fifth highest mountain in California and the fiftieth highest in North America. Shasta is noteworthy for being by itself; Shasta pops out of otherwise mostly flat land, making it a rather imposing sight. Driving down I-5 on the Seattle to San Francisco leg of my move from Greater Boston to the Bay Area, I passed Shasta and was absolutely blown away by the sight of such a massive mountain popping up out of nowhere.

Myself, Hippo and John, set out from the bay area Friday evening. Stopping at Chipotle’s en route, we got to Finlandia! Motel in Mount Shasta City, California sometime around 1 or 2AM. Repacking lightly and getting to sleep, we woke up rather early so that we could pick up our rental gear and meet up to take a basic mountaineering course with Shasta Mountain Guides. The rest of Saturday was spent at low elevations of Shasta learning how to mountaineer, including climbing steep snow/ice, self-arresting with an ice axe, etc. Personal, I felt the course was really informative, leaving me both glad to have the knowledge for the climb and glad to have the knowledge going forward. Saturday night, we dined in Shasta City, which, I might add, is an incredibly pleasant little town with very friendly people.

Sunday morning, we woke up bright and early at 7AM, getting to the trailhead at Bunny Flats by about 9AM. Bunny Flats is at an elevation of 6,800′, already more than 500′ higher than the highest thing I’d ever climbed previously, Mount Washington. From Bunny Flats, we obtained the necessary permits and set out. We reached, the first notable waypoint, Horse Camp at 7,800′. When making a two day trip of climbing Shasta, one usually makes camp at Horse Camp or Lake Helen; our initial plan was to camp at Lake Helen but the weather combined with the advice of the Horse Camp caretaker convinced us to camp at Horse Camp. Horse Camp also provided the benefits of outhouses (climbers are otherwise required to bag and carry out feces from Shasta) and a flowing spring. The spring water available at Horse Camp is reputed to be the best water on Earth and, having tried it myself, I must admit that I have not encountered better water to date. We took a short hike further up Sunday afternoon, leaving all of our gear behind, turning back when it started to snow heavily. Sunday night we cooked various dinner stuffs, repacked our bags with essentials and went to sleep around 7 or 8PM.

Monday, we woke up at 1AM, got ready and began climbing by head-lamp light around 2:15AM. The climb up from Horse Camp, is slow and rather arduous. The climbing was mostly up big, steep snow fields, which had nice fresh snow from the heavy snow that caused us to cut short our hike of Sunday. Thankfully for us, there were two guided tours that left around 1:30AM and had blazed the trail for us, making things a little easier. By around 5:15AM, we had reached Lake Helen at 10,400′. Although, Lake Helen is 2,600′ above Horse Camp, it’s only about ¾ of a mile laterally, in case you wanted a sense of the difficulty. By Lake Helen, I was starting to feel a little off, getting exhausted and losing my appetite, at the time unidentified early signs of altitude sickness or, if you prefer, acute mountain sickness. The sun started to rise while we were at Lake Helen and we set off for points higher. After Lake Helen is one of the steeper portions of the entire mountain and it’s really steep. From Lake Helen up is when the altitude sickness really kicked in.

Altitude sickness is when the lower pressure of the air prevents your body from getting as much oxygen as it normally needs, which poses rather substantial problems for your brain and body. Subjectively, for me, it felt as though my brain was falling asleep. I wasn’t tired, my body and muscles felt like they were in fine shape to continue but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was so exhausted that I was going to collapse. It’s somewhat like the sensation of being on the edge of passing out after you’ve been awake for a couple days, minus the being tired part. Altitude sickness, being altitude driven, gets worse pretty much every step up you take, which made continuing progressively harder and harder. We were following a hike one hour, rest a little, hike one hour, rest schedule and when we next rested, my GPS, which we were using as an altimeter read 11,242′. As we rested, I drank water and tried to eat but the altitude sickness was in pretty full swing. I was so worn down that chewing a granola bar took most of the effort that I was able to muster from myself. Imagine, if you will, the level of incapacitation that goes along with a very high fever but without the fun of delirium or the security of being in bed. Noting that I was in pretty poor shape and felt on the verge of passing out, it was decided that turning back was the best option. Another thing about altitude sickness being altitude driven is that as soon as you get back below your ceiling–mine is apparently about 10,000′ right now–you tend to start feeling better. By the time we got back down to Lake Helen, it was as though someone had lifted a great weight off of my brain.

It was a little frustrating to be at Lake Helen and feel mostly fine to go on but know that the altitude would make it too difficult. From Lake Helen down, it was mostly wading/jogging/trudging/hopping through a few inches to a few feet of snow, of which enough was powder to make me really wish that I had skis. Very soon after we started downward, it started to snow rather heavily with whiteout levels of visibility. The rapid drop in weather quality made it almost fortunate that my altitude sickness had forced us to turn around when it did as contending with whiteout conditions at higher elevations and greater exhaustion would have been rather hazardous. The weather events of the weekend seem to have prevented most, if not all, people from summiting Shasta over this memorial day weekend, so we may not have really missed out on too much. We got back down to Horse Camp by about 11AM, the bizarre result of starting at 2:15AM and all decided to take a nap. Unfortunately, when we got up from our naps to pack and leave, it was raining. It took us rather a while to accept the rain, get up and pack everything. From there, it was a couple hours hike out down the slow path from Horse Camp and we were done.

Ultimately, it was a grueling, sometimes unpleasant endeavor and I’m immensely pleased that I did it. I would very much like to try Shasta again sometime; perhaps I’ll try to do some altitude training or get a doctor to give me some Acetazolamide. Shasta aside, methinks that this whole mountaineering thing is a thing that I should be doing more of.

P.S. For those of you who are not Shadowrun geeks, Mount Shasta is the home of the great dragon Hestaby. For those that are, while I was hiking beyond Lake Helen and feeling the effects of altitude sickness, I got myself to keep going by telling myself to roll willpower.

In today’s edition of George brings you obscure movies that you should have heard of, District B13. This 2004, French film, produced by the great Luc Besson, stars David Belle, founder of Parkour and involves acrobatics and ass-kicking that easily match the better things coming out of Asia recently. Take one part post-apocalyptic action film, add a dash of drug lords, some neutron bombs, two parts crazy martial arts, a liberal sprinkling of really good French traceurs, bake for an hour and a half and you get, well, a pretty phenomenally awesome movie. No wires or special effects necessary.

I was talking with my brother, who is not a computer geek, and discussing variations on Linux when he came up with an amazing analogy that was so brilliant I had to share it with the rest of you. He said, “I guess it would be more like a blank piece of paper versus a color by numbers thing”. It’s exactly spot on, Ubuntu is the paint-by-numbers of Linux; it’s really easy to do the stuff it’s aimed at doing but going outside the lines doesn’t look as good as if you’d used a more general option. Of course, while you Ubuntu users are all kindergarteners, I’m busy ricing out my machines with Gentoo; I don’t actually know which is a worse thing to be analogized to.

Ralph Bakshi is a particularly interesting American maker of animated films. I expect relatively few of you have ever heard of Ralph Bakshi and almost as few have seen any of his works, which is why it is necessary that I bring Ralph and his works to your attention.

My first encounter with Ralph Bakshi came when, at a young age, I saw the box for his 1977 film Wizards at my local video rental location, Video Revolution, and thought that it looked phenomenally cool (same image as the poster image to the right). For reasons I do not recall, I didn’t manage to actually watch Wizards until I was in high school and, let me tell you, it’s a pretty fantastic movie. Wizards is set in the far, far, post-post-apocalyptic future and tells the story of a war between two wizard brothers, Avatar and Blackwolf of the land of good and evil respectively. If I recall correctly, the war is precipitated by Blackwolf’s discovery of ancient Nazi war propaganda. The film does a fantastic job of alternating between light, dark and flat out surreal; I highly recommend it.

It wasn’t until just recently that, in deciding to hunt down a copy of Wizards, I learned the identity of Ralph Bakshi. Being the obsessive consumer of media that I am, I decided to see what else Ralph has done and, lo and behold, Ralph Bakshi was responsible for Cool World. Cool World was a rather odd mix of cartoons and live action that I am rather fond of in spite of the rather poor critical acclaim that it garnered in its time; I must be a member of the cult for which it is a cult hit. Upon realizing that Ralph was responsible for Wizards and Cool World, it became necessary for me to track down his other works and what should turn out to be his seminal work? None other than the film version of Fritz the Cat. Fritz the Cat is noteworthy both as the first independent animated film to gross more than $100 million in the box office and as the first X-rated animated feature film. R. Crumb did not like Bakshi’s take on Fritz the Cat and killed off the comic character in retaliation but, by most accounts, R. Crumb is a whack-job and the film was great; I have obtained the film but have not yet had the chance to watch it so I must withhold my personal views for now.

Ralph Bakshi is one of the behemoths of mid-20^th century animation, responsible for many things beyond the few that I have mentioned, and I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t bring him to your attention. Having done so, the disservice of not watching Bakshi’s works is now yours to remedy.

The video game Gods demand much in the forms of financial penance and prayer time but they do much to reward their supplicants. I have just now obtained for myself a copy of GTA4 (I know that I’m slow but I’ve been traveling for the past week). While I was at the merchant of the damned, GameStop, obtaining the aforementioned game, I happened to notice a sign proclaiming the impending arrival of Ninja Gaiden II (NG2), sequel to what I consider the finest video game yet produced. Seriously, forget Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, Myst, Quake, everything; Ninja Gaiden (Xbox remake) was where it’s at and now it’s sequel time. Not only is Ninja Gaiden II coming, but Soul Calibur 4 (SC4), next in the finest fighting game series of all time, comes out in two months. It certainly is a summer of video game sequels but, man oh man, is it going to be a good summer of sequels.

Between GTA4, NG2 and SC4, I will, unquestionably, be devoting rather a fair amount of time to video games over the next few months. It certainly won’t help much that my enjoyment and commitment to Rock Band has not abated. I guess that’s really a matter of perspective; I am, after all, committing my time to video games because they do provide me with a great deal of enjoyment.

Thank you video game Gods for this bounty, which you are bestowing upon me over the next few months.

Back in late 2002, there was a great Internet phenomenon known to many as the Star Wars kid. As some of you may recall, I was one of the first people on the Internet to find the Star Wars kid video; I decided to host the video on my web server, ozone-beast at that time–God rest that wonderful ozone spewing hulk of a computronium–and sent an e-mail out to random-hall-talk announcing its presences. Within a few days, ozone beast was being deluged with hits from all over the world. I also happened to receive an IM correspondence from a girl in Bakersfield, CA. Being a sophomore at the time and having way too much free time, I struck up a correspondence. McKenzie and I have since maintained an Internet friendship without ever having met in person.

After moving to the Bay Area, I had been planning to drive down California a bunch, meet Kenzie, visit people in LA and do the whole SoCal thing but then, as you may recall, I ceased to have a car. This week, however, Kenzie was in Monterey with her boyfriend, who had business; Monterey being reasonably close by California standards, I grabbed a zipcar, ditched out of work early and drove down to say hi. We went to the Monterey Aquarium, which is fantastic by the way, hung out for a few hours and had a generally good time.

It’s a rather interesting thing to meet in person someone that you’ve gotten to know through other means. The meeting and the hang out were surprisingly not awkward, though I’ve always felt that the best way to avoid awkwardness is to just not act awkward. Sure it was a lot of driving but it was very nice driving, the Monterey Aquarium really is great and it is really great to finally meet someone that you’ve known for over five years.

Rest in peace, Albert Hofmann. 102 years is quite a good streak; too bad your work was hijacked and vilified in your lifetime. The world was not ready for your discoveries but, hopefully, one day it will be. Goodbye.

Last night, I attended the Bay Area Yuri’s Night celebration, which was a big celebration of Yuri Gagarin. Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space and the celebration was at NASA Ames, with a couple great big hangers full of art, science and/or engineering exhibitions, constant musical performances and some other wonderful stuff. It was an amazing celebration, my favorite parts included, but were certainly not limited to, the Amon Tobin set, the aerobatic show, Spore and, quite frankly, my roommate Gene’s dynamic fractal exhibition piece. It was an amazing event, made better by how many people I knew that were present but it was, at the same time, a sad reminder of how under-appreciated NASA is by our country, our government and our people.

Once, long past, Hell was Dinosaurs in my Head, but now there is a far more insidious Hell in my head. The Hell from which I suffer is the popular Van McCoy song known as The Hustle. As you might be guessing at this point, what makes The Hustle a Hell in my head is that I have the song stuck in my head. Sure, you might be saying, The Hustle isn’t a particularly great song and having it stuck in your head might be annoying but that alone should not constitute a Hell and you would be right. Unfortunately, my Hell is not that The Hustle is stuck in my head, it’s that it has been stuck in my head; by my estimates, The Hustle has been stuck in my head, on and off, for over a year now. I’m sure that I’ve been mentioning The Hustle being stuck in my head to people for quite some time so there ought to be someone out there that can back me up on this. I can’t say that I’m getting used to The Hustle being stuck in my head or that I’m starting to like it but I have been learning to live with it. Really, at this point, it’s kind of like Old Kentucky Shark; it’s been there. I can’t imagine why it got stuck there in the first place or what prevents it from fading like every other song that I’ve ever had stuck in my head, perhaps it is because I am of the same people as Fry and it is, thusly, the native dance of my people.

Do the Hustle!