I can’t figure out what to be for Halloween. I put too much pressure on myself to be clever. I wonder if I could force myself to do a very unmemorable costume.

Note: Fallback idea: Larry Whitman

Project idea:

Redesign site
Change backend from PHP to Ruby on Rails

So, I wanted to change it so that ctrl-alt-shift exited control from the VM, and not ctrl-alt. DOS games often have you jumping with ctrl and shooting with alt (or vice versa), so I didn’t want to lose control after a jump and shoot.

After digging, I found that you have to add the following text to preferences.ini, not the vmx file:

pref.hotkey.shift = “true”
pref.hotkey.control = “true”
pref.hotkey.alt = “true”

Add it to the bottom. In XP you can find this somewhereabouts under Documents and Settings\you\Application Data\VMWare. In Windows 7, it’s under Users\You\AppData\VMWare\Roaming.

After this, VMWare Player automatically updates the text to say you have to press Ctrl-Alt-Shift instead of Ctrl-Alt.

DOSBox is a great DOS emulator, but I wanted to be able to save my high scores in my games, so I decided to set up a DOS VM. I installed VMWare Player to set up VMs. It’s a good free option, but you have to fill out a ridiculous sign-up form to get to the downloads. I put up with it anyway.

Step 1) Download FreeDOS iso. I went with the base cd.

Step 2) Create a new virtual machine using that iso. For some reason, Player recommends a ridiculous amount of hard drive space. I put it down to .5 gigs. I left everything else using the defaults.

Step 3) Don’t use XFDisk. This thread helped me out.

Select this option: “Run FreeDOS from CD-ROM (return to command prompt)”

You’ll get a prompt that looks like you’re running from the X drive: “X:\>”

Step 4) Run fdisk. Select the defaults, say yes to everything. Reboot.

Step 5) You’ll probably get an error when it reboots. It’ll say Invalid operating system or something. This error happens because it’s trying to boot from the hard drive and you haven’t finished the install! You need to boot it from CD. So, get your fast fingers ready.

Send ctrl-alt-del to reboot the system. Quickly click the screen to get into the VM. Then, hit ESC to get to the boot menu. Select the cd-rom.

Step 6) Continue through the FreeDOS install, selecting defaults.

Tomorrow: BONUS STEP!

I hate the Niners QB so much. Ugh.

In other news, though, I won in both of my fantasy leagues, avoiding a 1-4 start. (Last time I started 1-4, I ended up becoming champion.)

A 2-3 record with good players means I’m primed for a run.

I actually kind of like what facebook is trying to do for once (not that my approval counts for anything). They’ve redone their groups, which had become useless after the introduction of pages. Now, you can share things with a select group of people. Cool. It’s a step away from the broadcast model, and I think it’ll be better for communication.

Today, I created a MS-DOS (Okay, FreeDOS) VM on my work laptop, and I created an Ubuntu Linux VM on my home laptop. Fun. I’ll probably install both OSes on both laptops. DOS is for games and Linux will probably be used for rails development.

Some people advocate extreme focus. Eliminate everything except the most important priorities. I’m not sure I accept this philosophy.

Compare it to the people I know. Not everyone is a close friend. It wouldn’t be right to eliminate everyone from my life who isn’t a close friend. I like having acquaintances and non-close friends. It makes my life much richer. Having varying degrees of friendship is a good thing because I like the variety. Not only that, but my weak ties are better if I’m looking for a job. I can have friends I wouldn’t confide in, but I’d love to invite to a party. My parties would be very small if I didn’t nourish friendships that weren’t super important. It would be a sad life indeed if I only focused on the most important people.

So, I think it’s a good thing to have varied interests and varying degrees of interest. I enjoy football, but I don’t want to declare it important. I also don’t need to eliminate it from my life so I could focus purely on programming, or whatever else. Having varied interests makes my life richer and it also makes me harder to categorize. Furthermore, I never know what can inspire new thoughts. Inspiration for comics can come from anywhere. Dabbling in poker can help me meditate on the difference between process and results. This doesn’t mean I should declare poker one of my five most important things and commit all-in to it.

I’ve been reading this book and enjoying it.

(9:18:21 PM) Shawn R. McDonald: I was actually at a concert last weekend. Arcade Fire.
(9:19:15 PM) NicholasChidiac: I heard about them when I went on a bing reading Questionable Content
(9:19:19 PM) NicholasChidiac: *binge
(9:19:28 PM) Shawn R. McDonald: good comic
(9:19:30 PM) NicholasChidiac: I wanted the context for that comic you posted
(9:19:43 PM) NicholasChidiac: a hundred or so in, I realized it was #1706
(9:19:50 PM) NicholasChidiac: I still cranked through several hundred
(9:20:00 PM) Shawn R. McDonald: wow

There was one year I played fantasy football and every quarterback I picked up got injured at some point. Had someone traded Tom Brady to me, I’m sure he would’ve got hurt that year instead of the beginning of the following year.

This year, I traded away Ryan Mathews and he got hurt the next week. I also traded away Johnny Knox and Jeremy Maclin in a package deal for Mendenhall. Both Cutler and Vick (their respective QBs) got hurt.

I’ve traded away Brandon Jackson too, so watch out Green Bay fans!

I doubt this will make any sense 5 years down the road, and I doubt anyone will care about this right now, but I want to keep track of my fantasy football trades.

After Week 1: Ryan Mathews (RB – SD) for Calvin Johnson (WR – DET)
After Week 3: Brandon Jackson (RB – GB) for Hines Ward (WR – PIT)
After Week 3: Jeremy Maclin (WR – PHI) and Johnny Knox (WR – CHI) for Rashard Mendenhall (RB -PIT)

Note: I picked up Brandon Jackson and Johnny Knox off the waivers.

I think I want to do too much at once. I want to blog a lot and write code and do a comic and a show and read and start a business and… Well, I think I should concentrate on moving out first and then becoming more awesome at other things one at a time.

Oops, I didn’t blog yesterday. But hey, I went to bed after 10PM for once this week.

Because of a score revision, I dropped from 2-0 to 1-1 in my money league. I went from a 1 point victory to a 1 point loss. Agh.

In my other league, I lost my first game by less than half a point.

Not a lot of luck for me.

Ah well, I’ve come back from 1-4 to win it. I’ve started every year 1-2. No panicking yet.

I’ve been looking at apartments recently. Exciting.

I decided I’m going to try to blog every day for the rest of the month.

I want to note here that last week, the premiere of Larry Whitman: Data Entry Maverick took place. It’s been a year in the making, but it’s not a year’s worth of work. I had a lot of fun creating this with Richard.

The premiere was a fancy party, and I had a lot of friends attending. It was awesome because now I don’t have to care about YouTube views or facebook fans. In my eyes, I already accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. Because of the party, this is already a success. I’ve already shared and celebrated with some of the most important people in my life.

I watched Reservoir Dogs for the first time the other day (surprising that it’s taken this long, given how much I enjoy Tarantino movies, but unsurprising given how rarely I watch movies), and this line from the torture scene really struck me:

Nice Guy Eddie: If you fucking beat this prick long enough, he’ll tell you he started the goddamn Chicago fire, now that don’t necessarily make it fucking so!

Torture isn’t very effective at getting the truth.

Moreover, the torture was perpetrated by a sick fuck, a veritable psycho, instead of the “hero,” a la 24.

Google Instant has been released. Google says this:

Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

It reminded me of this, from The Little Prince:

“Because they save a tremendous amount of time,” said the merchant. “Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.”

Google Instant will save me 2-5 seconds per search!

And what do I do with those 2-5 seconds?

I love the verb “steep.” It is one of my favorite words. What of “steep’ as an adjective? Meh. It is nothing special.

I finally have Gmail’s Priority Inbox. Google automatically labels certain e-mails as “important” and puts these e-mails at the top of my inbox. The rest are unimportant.

I was really excited about this feature. When Alex told me about this feature, he said it reminded him of my blog entry on realtime vs. relevance. I could ignore the stream of e-mail coming in and focus on the important! I would no longer feel overwhelmed.

Instead, the feature has temporarily left me depressed. I get a decent amount of e-mail and almost all of it is unimportant. I must not be very important. The important and unread portion of my mail box is empty most of the time. A depressingly large amount of my e-mail is impersonal.

At least in the throes of e-mail addiction, I would get a small hit of hedonic pleasure from a new e-mail. A new, but unimportant, e-mail no longer provides the same amount of pleasure.

I started reading Umair Haque because I thought what he was saying about changing capitalism might be useful. I also follow him on Twitter, but since then, I’ve been disappointed because his tweets are mostly meaningless bullshit. Here is an example: “The next decade in 2 sentences. The answer to the Great Stagnation isn’t more lameness and bogosity. Choose awesomeness.” We’ll get out of this recession by being less lame and more awesome? This reminds me of How I Met Your Mother. Barney declares, “Whenever I start feeling sick, I just stop being sick and be awesome instead.” Of course, the germs don’t care about this proclamation.

Now, if someone says “being awesome” means taking medicine, that makes it even more obvious that the phrase “being awesome” is meaningless. The phrase is so amorphous that it can express any concept. It’s like in Politics and the English Language when Orwell says no one will define democracy so they can have their own private definition.

[more later]

UFC is on TV and right now, and I heard one of the color commentators say, “The judges will render their decision.” A more concise version of this would be: “The judges will decide.” The former should never be seen in writing.

I’ve been on a political hiatus of sorts. Yesterday was my first vaguely political comment in a while, and I haven’t commented on current events at all. This is because I feel like keeping up with the news is mostly useless. After reading Fooled By Randomness, I stopped reading The New York Times. Shortly before reading the book, I had stopped paying attention to political blogs. I felt I was addicted and getting nothing out of it. I was always being carried by this stream of information. I decided to exit that stream, dry myself off, and try to figure out where the fuck it was all leading to. If I eventually wanted to create change, I couldn’t be carried away by the swift stream’s flow. I had to maybe get out and dig to affect the path. Maybe throw some rocks in the river. In any case, I’m done with this analogy.

One problem with the news is that it distorts our sense of reality. The news is supposed to inform us, but it very often does the opposite. That is to say, reading the news can leave us worse off than reading nothing at all. Let’s look at one case of how the media created a false perception about youth violence. I give you an excerpt from Killing Monsters: “Youth Vision in Chicago found that adults surveyed cited ‘a general feeling that youth are out of control’ and that most of them attributed their perception to the press. Surveys of newspaper and TV news content show why. One media study found that two-thirds of TV news reports on violent crime in California concerned juveniles or young adults, age groups that actually accounted for less than one-third of the crimes. Another found that news reports on gang activity increased tenfold in the state of Hawaii from 1992 to 1996, while police reports showed that real gang activity remained about the same and that the number of young people arrested for serious crimes had steadily declined” (125-126). Because of the media, people’s perception of risk is highly distorted. They’ll think crime is on the rise when the only thing that is on the rise is media coverage. I’m not going to go into why this happens (because the whole thing is rather complex and I doubt I understand it very well); I’m only going to point out that it does happen. So, I decided that constantly keeping up with the news was distorting my sense of reality (in a bad way), and I stopped reading the news.

With political coverage, I was sucked into the horse-race aspects. After every little thing, the media asks its so-called experts, “How will this affect the midterms?” In reality, it probably will have no effect. Yet they still argue over this. They argue over nothing. It’s rather frustrating, and I didn’t need that frustration. I stopped reading political blogs too. Not only was it no longer pleasurable, it was also distorting reality. It fostered short-term thinking, and I enjoy trying to think strategically.

Thus, you’ll see no return to commenting on the issue of the day. I’m done with that. However, I still do want to talk about politics. All this stuff — the fate of the nation — has interested me for a long time and still does interest me. I’m not done with politics; I’m done with the day-to-day nonsense. I feel as if political commentary is in my blood. I have an overwhelming desire to create, which is why I have to make comics. I’d explode without creative outlets. I also have a desire to comment on politics. I’ll always feel dissatisfied with my blog if I don’t comment on these things. This is why I want to comment on Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck is involved in a stunt where he’s giving a speech on the anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I learned about this via Roger Ebert’s twitterfeed. Glenn Beck is a right-wing talk radio host. His rally is some bizarre, audacious attempt to “reclaim” the Civil Rights Movement. Naturally, such a stunt has led to much outrage. AJ Calhoun says, “The ‘Restoring Honor’ parade tarnishes an event whose shared humanity was unlike anything I’ve felt before or since.” Unfortunately, by expressing such outrage, this only give Glenn Beck what he wants. This event is designed to piss people off so that Glenn Beck can get more attention for himself. The reason why I think this is true is because it fits his history in radio. This looks awfully familiar to the more juvenile pranks he used to play when he was getting his start in radio.

Although I’ve been expressing a contempt for the media, some journalism is actually very good. I recently read this profile about how Glenn Beck got started in radio. It chronicles his radio career from the beginning. Before talk radio, his shows followed the morning zoo formula. Zaitchik explains, “Before the X-rated in-studio antics of the shock jocks, there were the skit-writing shlock jocks of the zoo. In it purest form, the wacky, zany, fast-paced zoo formula consisted of an ensemble cast employing fake voices, loosely scripted skits, adolescent pranks, short topical rants, and spoof songs, backed by a Top 40 soundtrack and peppered with news and traffic reports.” His talk radio antics are influenced by this style.

Here’s one of his early stunts designed to get attention:

Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly’s market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. “I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning,” remembers Kelly. “When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks — everything. But I refused to mention Beck’s name on the air, which drove him nuts.”

And here’s one particularly nasty stunt he pulled on a rival dj:

“A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right — about he can’t even have a baby.”

Let’s look at one more stunt:

Along with a new partner, Beck wanted a new mascot. He spent two weeks calling veterinarians and pet stores live on the air, getting advice on gerbils. After choosing one, he announced that he was going to train the world’s first bank-tube astronaut. Every day Beck would announce an update, some new detail about the gerbil’s first mission. One day, he made a little cape; the next, he named the animal “Gerry the Gerbil.” Each development was accompanied by a press release. When all the pieces were in place, Beck and Gray visited a local bank and sent the animal to a teller with a known fear of rodents.

“The build-up was amazing, masterful,” says a former director at the station. “PETA was flipping out, picketing the station every day. Beck’s on the local news. He took a stupid stunt and turned it into weeks of compelling high-publicity radio. He always knew how to get attention, how to get people talking about him.”

So, this MLK stunt is nothing new for Beck. It’s nastiness designed to get attention. This is a prank that’s supposed to piss people off so Beck gets more attention. One get get much attention by generating outrage.

It’s the same as in his FM days:

“Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station,” says Kelly. “It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off…” [emphasis mine]

Even some of Glenn Beck’s ideological allies question his motives:

Meanwhile, at least one tea party group rejected Beck’s entreaties to assist with the march, concluding he was offering little in return for its organizational know-how and credibility, while giving preferential treatment to FreedomWorks, which is paying to sponsor Beck’s radio show. The group’s leader, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing Beck, said, “All he’s doing is trying to use us to promote himself.”

This seems to support my notion that Glenn Beck’s stunt is mostly attention-mongering and doesn’t really serve a political purpose.

I’m going to stop here before I descend into speculation about Glenn Beck’s motives. I don’t want to really talk about whether he’s in it for the money or he cares about politics or whatever. I don’t know Beck, so I can’t really say much about him. However, based on the profile of his early days in radio, this speech/rally feels very much like something nasty he would’ve done in order to get attention. It feels like a prank. Now it’s just dressed up in political clothing.

Recognizing US mistakes/atrocities doesn’t mean that I hate America or that I wish ill upon my fellow citizens. For example, the US murdered millions of Native Americans. Yet I don’t advocate modern-day scalping missions against US citizens. This isn’t even nuance; it’s just pure idiocy from people who can’t recognize the distinction.

I’m in two fantasy football leagues this year. Here are my team names:

1) The BART Police

I wanted something that said ruthless, that said I’d shoot you in the back of the head even if you were unarmed.

2) Hedonic Treadmills

Our motto is this: Win or lose, we revert to the same baseline level of happiness.

Rejected team name: Teacher, Can I use the Iupati?

I want to believe that there’s something different about the web today, and I’m not just being like, “Man, the internet was so much cooler when I was 12 years old! Now it sucks!” So, here’s my latest rationalization (or narrative construction). I think there has been a shift from relevance to realtime. Early bloggers liked the idea of filtering the internet. Facebook gave us updates based on relevance rather than in realtime. According to Alexa, Google is #1, and Facebook is #2. Search is all about presenting us with relevance. Facebook is about getting pageviews by constantly relaying our inane comments. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, huge difference between getting what’s new and getting what’s relevant. Undoubtedly, I’m smearing the future for a past that wasn’t so neat as I remember. After all, I still had e-mail. It still feels like a shift to me, though. At least from a personal standpoint, there was a shift in the way I consumed internet content.

I have a new mousepad. Yay!

Note: My old mousepad was a piece of binder paper.

I refuse to believe that I need to own a car.

I decided to go online to find a way to get rid of my books. I discovered BookMooch. You list your books, people request them, and you mail the books to them. If you mail a book, you get points. You can then request books using these points. Pretty cool.

I joined up and somebody in Denmark wants some of my books. I need to make sure to reply tomorrow.

This is pretty exciting. See, I don’t completely hate the internet. I’m just tired of going on it because I have to feed my addiction, rather than going on it for fun.

BTW, anyone have any suggestions for good webcomics?