RedBeard’s Curious Life

In a couple of days I will be flying up to Seattle/Redmond in order to start my new job with Microsoft on Monday. To anyone who’s out of the loop, I’ll be working as an SDET on the DirectX team. While I can’t (or don’t want to) go into the details of the offer, I’ll be making some decent money, and the relocation package is pretty sweet too. All my stuff is gone now, and I’m mainly just taking a bit of time to relax and collect myself before diving into the new life that awaits up there.

This move is a seriously big deal, bigger than I anticipated from my experience with college dorm movings. Before, I could leave behind the stuff I wouldn’t need during the year, and I could keep the same bank, cell phone, etc. But now I’ll be out from under the wing of parents, and have to make my own way and my own decisions. I must say that I’ve felt somewhat constrained by my parents, who have generally persuaded me into decisions that I wasn’t the most comfortable with. I think my first act of independence will be getting a single-bedroom apartment, despite Mom’s insistence that I get a two-bedroom so she can “come and visit”.

Another aspect of the move to which I’m looking forward is the opportunity to carve out my own space and meet new people under my own terms. I guess this doesn’t really differ immensely from college, but I felt like I was somewhat in limbo during college, as if it were all fleeting. I did make some good friends, but not as many good ones as I had back in high school. Perhaps the implied permanence of a full-time job will allow me to throw off my introversion shackles, at least to some degree.

/me raises glass, “to a new life!”

So apparently there’s a bit of an uproar about GTA:SA because there’s some “adult” content that can be accessed via modification of the game. While there’s no doubt that Rockstar actually made the content, there is doubt that they intentionally left it in the game. I would say that their testing process didn’t involve teenage kids trying to hack the game, and it’s likely that only a couple of people realized the content was still on the disc even though it wasn’t accessible through normal gameplay.

But honestly, I don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve seen the video, and it doesn’t look like anything you wouldn’t find in a few R-rated movies, except horribly lacking in detail and human expression. It’s more of a pantomime than a realistic depiction of sex. GTA involves carjacking, murder, prostitution, gang violence, drugs, and various other things we’re prohibited from enjoying in real life. It’s garnered a significant amount of press and controversy over that content, and it’s one of the best selling games around, so it’s little wonder that people tried to hack it or that the press instantly responds to this game that has already graced their headlines with sensationalistic melodrama.

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So I went to Hawaii a couple weeks ago. It’s a really nice place, but I think I would have had more fun if I wasn’t stuck on a cruise ship half of the time while there and for 5 days prior. This was an unusual cruise itinerary since it involved the long stretch at sea, and the ship will be spending most of its time just sailing around the Hawaiian islands now. You can follow along in my accompanying photo gallery (don’t forget to click “thumbnails”).

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So I had some expiring miles on an airline that I hadn’t flown for a while, and since I didn’t have enough for a free ticket, they sent me this offer where I could get a year’s worth of magazine subscriptions in exchange for some airmiles before they expire. There were 8 spaces for subscription codes, and I had more than enough miles to use them all.

And so I did, with selections like Wired, Time, Men’s Health, GQ, Forbes, and some other ones that I normally wouldn’t pay for. This of course is their entire ploy, to get you hooked on a “free subscription” and then try to wrangle a renewal out of you. In some cases, I got renewal requests before I’d even received any issues of the magazine. I also received solicitations for subscriptions to other magazines like The Economist, which I may in fact end up trying since many of these other magazines seem like such crap.

• Wired is decent, it has a nice mix of articles, but seems to focus a little more on form than I’m accustomed to, with many pages filled by glossy photos and fancy vector graphics.
• Time is an interesting read, but it arrives so often that I barely have time to read the captions of pictures, let alone full articles.
• Men’s Health seems to actually contain lots of decent information and health tips, but the mass of advice is different each issue, and it becomes difficult to remember what kind of vitamins are good, which exercises are recommended, etc. They also had a telemarketer call me trying to flog some new book they’re publishing and get me to “preview” it.
• Scientific American appears to be well-informed and timely, if a little dense and with sometimes confusing editing.
• GQ is just abysmal, I think the table of contents is on page 46 and is preceded almost exclusively by full-page fashion ads. The rest of the magazine isn’t much different – I feel like they should be paying me to read the thing. The content is also ridiculously politicized, with constant Bush-bashing that really just defaces otherwise informative content.
• The other magazines (Forbes, Money, OXM) I haven’t read more than a few pages into. They just don’t seem terribly interesting, with crap like “50 richest celebrities”, I mean who really cares? I’ll go buy a fucking Teen People if I wanted that shit.

In short, only about half the free subscriptions are worth what I paid for them.

I now have a stack of unread magazines about a foot high, which consumes valuable real estate. I have to either discard or store these magazines once I’ve read through them, and neither activity really makes it easy to find that tidbit of information that I found interesting. Computerized media seems like a much richer and cheaper delivery mechanism, but it’s unfortunately not very portable. Yay electronic paper?

I happened across the EROS website the other day, and browsed around looking at some of the experimental things they’re doing. The multi-threaded kernel seems to be a good idea to me, since I’ve never been a big fan of kernel-wide critical sections that can cause a total system freeze if the hard drive decides to be ornery.

Orthogonal global persistence seems like a very interesting and useful feature for any OS, especially if it can be applied locally to independent applications to “freeze” their state arbitrarily. The restoral process appears to only occur on reboot, but I could see it being extended to applications in general.

Think how handy it would be to suspend a program, store its state on a central server, and then load it up on a different machine later. You could transfer program state just like any other file, from your notebook to desktop to PDA to whatever. The logistics are of course rather intimidating, but it could definitely be put to use. The potential for gains in productivity and diminished downtime are excellent, but the programs running under a system must essentially be designed to run forever, which is hardly a design consideration for anything except server software currently.

I mentioned in my previous blogpost a little something about abnormality and treatment. But considering how much we supposedly value diversity, it seems we make great efforts to be as “normal” as possible. This is starting to change somewhat with the advent of internet publishing, which removes some of the inhibitions present in normal conversation and allows people to embrace their abnormalities while discovering they aren’t so isolated.

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I saw an interesting quote by Abraham Lincoln on my Google homepage today: “When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.” It set me thinking about some things I’ve been mulling for a while concerning the establishment of values in an individual. Religion has generally been a combination of doctrine and worship centered around one or more deities, but has also come to mean simply a set of beliefs or values, or even a particular zeal for a specific principle.

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The dog next door keeps escaping and running around in the street. He’s a big golden retriever, weighs about 120 lbs, and he’s really a sweet dog. His owner leaves the dog outside in the yard all day while she goes out, and the gate doesn’t latch properly and apparently has a tendency to swing open. Anyhow, the dog seemingly dislikes the loneliness of the back yard (we often hear him barking aimlessly in the evening), and makes a break for it whenever the gate presents him the opportunity.

Of course, the main reason I know this is because my house is apparently the call center for this dog’s antics. We also have a golden retriever, and at first people would think that it was ours running in the street. However, our dog doesn’t do that, and whenever people would bring the errant dog to our house, we’d show them our own dog sitting peacefully inside. Apparently this established a tradition of bringing the dog next door over to our house whenever he’s loose.

Yesterday he was out running in our cul-de-sac. Today he was apparently brought in from the main road nearby, where he was lying down in the middle of a lane. I think my dad is going to go buy some stuff to fix the neighbor’s gate. Perhaps a spring to keep it from swinging open, which we have due to the pool in our backyard. I think he might go yell at the neighbor for being so negligent with her dog, too.

I once told a girl that I see absolutely no satisfaction or practicality in studying purely theoretical subjects like advanced mathematics. Turns out she was a math major. Whoops.

It strikes me that a majority of a normal human’s time is spent on things they’d rather not do. Sleeping, grooming, eating, commuting, working, cleaning, etc. Of course with some of these things, the line between want and need becomes fuzzy – you could sleep 4 hours or 8, eat gruel or gourmet, work part-time, get married, hire a maid.

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