The Prize Is: A Tropicana Tie

Posted on 17th February 2011 in Something Daily

So you probably know that I wrote a fan letter to the makers of Tropicana Pure Premium No Pulp Orange Juice a few weeks ago, and you may also know that they sent me a very nice response that insinuated that they’d send me some kind of Tropicana-related treat. What you probably don’t know is that I received that treat in the mail today, in the form of a recipe book, info pamphlet-type-thing, and a tie with the Tropicana logo all over it…!

Here’s a detail of the tie pattern.

So I’m pretty happy about this. I was kind of expecting some free juice, but any amount of juice-themed gear is quite appreciated. Thank you, Tropicana, you’ve done a great job of making a lifetime customer out of me.

I decided that I maybe want to start hiding links to random stuff in posts, like yesterday where I liked the word “remember” to a page selling tons of sweet tiger posters. I think it’s funny. Also, today I got some sweet Nike Dunk Hitops, since my dad was in town and I needed new shoes. Thanks dad, they are totally sweet.

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What I was like in Elementary School?

Posted on 16th February 2011 in Something Daily

I remember a time in elementary school when I was walking along right down the middle of the playground with my friends Ben and David. There were kids playing and having recess all over the place – the cool kids were over to our right playing kickball (Eric, Greg, and Zach especially – they had an immeasurable impact on my personality. I got bullied a decent amount in elementary school.) and there were probably some girls (Natalie and Stephanie) over in the trees pretending to be horses and playing in the dirt. Ben and David and I were talking about which animal we would morph into if we were Animorphs, and just walking down the middle of the playground. I was probably in the middle of a sentence (one of us was, at least) when I was leveled by a kickball that hit me directly in the side of my face, having been kicked from about thirty or forty feet away. I remember getting immediately to my feet and continuing to walk as if nothing had happened. On a related note, if I were an Animorph, I would morph into a wolf. My roommate says he’d morph into a dragon, and my other roommate says velociraptor (my second choice).

There was also a time before the tetherball got removed from our playground (because this guy tried to strangle this girl with the rope, or because kids were hitting it too hard, or something) when I walked over to a group of girls who I probably thought were cute and addressed them with “hi guys.” This girl Grace responded with something like “uh, we’re not guys…” Since then, I’ve always had it in the back of my head that girls secretly don’t like being collectively referred to as “guys”.


Look how cute I was in elementary school. Were you this cute? Probably not.
Picture me with a Gameboy and a Lil’ Bow Wow CD.

I was pretty cool when I was around the ages of 7 to 11. I listened to Nirvana and Wierd Al, and I have several distinct memories of running around the playground with my shirt collar around the back of my head screaming something about the end of the world. I was certainly “that one kid”. I still am. I played a pretty substantial amount of Diddy Kong Racing, XG2, Lego Racers, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, 1080 Snowboarding, Pokemon Snap, Banjo Kazooie, Gex, Glover, Wave Racer, Mario Party 2, and Jet Force Gemini. But the first N64 game I ever played, before I even owned the console, was Rampage: World Tour. I was also a Pokemon card and game aficionado; I often brought my Gameboy Pocket to school to trade with people with the link cable. And I was crazy about Lil’ Bow Wow’s first album, “Beware of Dog”.

One of my best friends to this day is a person who I know because in elementary school, I heard that he knew all the lyrics to “All Star” by Smash Mouth, and I really wanted to meet this person. I was amazed that someone could actually remember all the words to a song so amazing.

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Programming Homing Missile Behavior

Posted on 15th February 2011 in Something Daily

Once again, I thought that my Tropicana stuff was going to get here today, and of course I have nothing in the mail. I did also order that Andrew WK shirt, but that was last night, and I don’t think it would have come in less than 24 hours. Still, I’m waiting for way too much stuff in the mail.

I spent a much longer time than I should have today reacquainting myself with right triangles and the unit circle as they relate to 2D game programming. I found a tutorial that shows one how to model “homing missile” type behavior, where one object moves toward the position of another. It shows how to use trig and the Pythagorean theorem to get the same result, and while reading it, I was a little embarrassed that I wasn’t totally conversant with those already. I did go through the admittedly arduous process of figuring out for myself how to make homing missile/physically “accurate” motion over the summer using the same techniques, and it took me a while to independently come to the correct solution. I thought today was going to be a lot easier, because I started with the goal of reading this guy’s C++ and translating it to Java. It was absolutely easier than the first time I tried homing behavior, but I still had to do a lot of thinking during debugging. I guess it’s just practice that will help, though.

In case you’re wondering, I came up with this upon completion:
int dx = target_x - missile_x;
int dy = target_y - missile_y;
double sep = Math.sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy);
double scale = length / sep;
missile_x += dx * scale;
missile_y += dy * scale;

All that said, I did succeed in my goal of modeling homing missiles in Java today. In the process, I also neglected a lot of homework. Now I have to make up for this. I’m going to go write some more code for my Data Structures class and listen to some Parliament.

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How to Turn off 3D dock in Mac OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard

Posted on 14th February 2011 in Tutorials

A little tip I found a while back that I very much enjoy: the default Mac OS X Leopard dock looks like glass and reflects the desktop and application icons. I wanted to turn that off (have it reflect nothing), and it turns out that this is how one does that:

In Terminal, to turn the glass dock off, type
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

and to turn it back on, type
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean NO; killall Dock

You’re welcome!

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Let it be known: I will eat my shoe

Posted on 14th February 2011 in Something Daily

I just got a package in the mail, and when I was going to get it I was so convinced that it was going to be my Tropicana gear, but it ended up being Valentine’s Day cookies from my mom. I was really excited for the Tropicana stuff, but cookies are very awesome too. Thanks mom. I’m expecting the gear tomorrow then, or (hopefully not) the day after that. It just needs to get here already. Along with letters from my friends and the confirmation of my double major declaration. I’m waiting for a bunch of stuff in the mail. And as I do so, I’m getting pumped up by I Get Wet. I honestly used to hate that album, but it’s growing on me rather quickly. I feel the same way about it as I do about Blink-182, in a sense – I acknowledge the fact that it’s simple and kind of idiosyncratic, and then stop worrying about it and jam out.

I finally finished getting all the star coins in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which took an ungodly long time, even with our whole suite playing in a shared account. I decided that I’d just go ahead and do it today, but level 9-7 is so unbelievably annoyingly difficult. I don’t want to talk about it. I have bad memories attached to that level. The second star coin is stupid if you don’t have the propeller hat – which I never did – and I ended up trying it about forty times. I did succeed though. This was about an hour ago.

I was playing Mario instead of doing something productive partially due to the fact that I chose today to once again reconfigure my MacBook Pro – I deleted the Ubuntu partition (decided I have enough Ubuntu on my old MacBook, and Portal 2 is coming out for Mac) and reinstalled Snow Leopard, crossing my fingers very hard that my automated backup scheme had been working correctly. Turns out it had been. It’s gone through a lot of revisions over the last few months, but it works awesomely now. I am, once again, proud of myself. Also because of that piece I wrote in LSDJ over the weekend; I still think that sounds rockin. I rerecorded the guitar since it was a little bit out of tune, it’s way more rockin now. Check it out.

And I finally preordered Portal 2 on Steam today. It comes out on a Monday, and let it now be known that I will not stop playing on that Monday until it’s finished. If I can’t, I will eat my own shoe.

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T-Shirt Fashion

Posted on 13th February 2011 in Something Daily

Having somehow become incredibly studious yesterday, I today find myself with nothing that needs to get done.

I decided that I maybe should probably get this shirt as soon as possible. I think one person has complimented me on my collection of sweet shirts, and being me, I have taken that compliment very much to heart. I can feel myself growing into the knowledge, that yes, indeed, I do have some pretty sweet awesome t-shirts. I’d better, because that’s actually all I ever wear. I tried to get into the whole “wearing nice clothes” thing in high school, and it kind of happened for a little while – I just ended up wearing blazers and scarves to school a lot. I remember some of my friends actually refused to talk to me the one time I defiantly wore a bandana to school in 9th grade. I have never had a spectacular relationship with fashion. But I won’t deny the assertion/fact that my t-shirts are totally rad. I just picked up a sweet shark shirt when my family was in Las Vegas, which I wear on Wolfshirt Wednesdays* (which is every Wednesday). It’s one of those ones where the shark is popping out of the front and tearing through the very fabric of the shirt itself, with little bits of shirt all over its teeth. So what I’m saying is that it’s totally sweet.

I also have a Keith Emerson Band Tarkus shirt (not ELP, I know it’s lame) that I got at Moogfest 2007 – people always ask me if it’s an armadillo-tank, to which I reply that it is, and it’s called a Tarkus (or rather the Tarkus). I got a Street Fighter 2 and a Mario shirt with all the characters from those games on them from Forbidden Planet, which is a wonderful wonderful store of nerdiness. I love those ones, and I get a lot of compliments on the SF2 one (all from guys, of course. The day a girl compliments me on that shirt will be a special one). There’s one with a dinosaur on it with a paper shell on its back, entitled “Paperback” that my suitemate last year designed. I think it’s such a funny pun, and everybody always asks what it is that’s on my shirt and then I explain it and they’re all “oh that’s dumb”. Come on, people. Seriously. The ODB/Andy Warhol shirt is also awesome, as is the big “W” Wu-Tang logo that I have. And there’s also one that just says “I Just Want to Ride Bikes with You,” which is cute and everything, but it’s also usually true. Let’s ride bikes together. I’m seriously. Oh and there’s the one I got from the HackNY hackathon back in October, probably less than a week before I started the glorious institution of Three Stegosaurus Moon[dot]com.

I think my shirts are good. I love them. And the Andrew WK one would also be sweet, not even because I love partying or anything, his bloody face is just a killer thing to have on your frontal region. Oh, and soon my Tropicana package will be arriving, probably on Tuesday, according to their email. There will be an abundance of Tropicana treasures, hopefully.

*By the way, Three Stegosaurus Moon defines a “wolfshirt” as a long- or short-sleeved t-shirt that depicts any animal with a decent degree of realism and detail. For example, the shirt pictured above is a wolfshirt, as is this one. This, however, is not technically a wolfshirt by my definition, as it doesn’t include the requisite detail in the wolf art. That said, the website that sells that shirt is an incredible wolfshirt resource. Wolfshirt.

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I am the Supreme Ninja!

Posted on 12th February 2011 in Something Daily

It had been a little while since I’d recorded or written any music, and today I had an excuse to do so again for my assignment in music theory. The assignment was to write something that uses an “exotic” scale, mode, quote, tone cluster, or something of that nature that was used a lot in 20th century composition. I sort of did the assignment, if you count writing a Mega Man-esque piece in LSDJ and including a few whole-tone scale runs and random note groupings as “doing the assignment”. I mean it fits the requirements, and nobody else is going to have one that sounds anything like mine (at least I feel like that’s a safe bet). I had intended to get a lot of homework done today, and of course I ended up getting totally caught up in the writing and recording of my Gameboy piece. That’s pretty typical of me – I always leave the work that’s not fun for last. Bad strategy. I still have to write a paper tonight (I know it’s Saturday, don’t worry about it). But check it out; this is the first thing I’ve written EVER to include a guitar track, let alone one played by myself. My guitar skills pretty much limit me to power chords, but that’s exactly what I wanted in this piece. I just finished recording and mixing it a few minutes ago, so here it is. I’m proud of it.

Level Two by Raised by Robots

On a totally unrelated note, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “Shogun Assassin”, but if you haven’t, you should probably get on that. It’s a samurai movie that’s actually a compilation of the best parts from the first two movies in the “Lone Wolf and Cub” series; as a result, the plot makes a marginal amount of sense. But it’s got some sweet fight scenes and a lot of awesomeness packed into a small space. It’s all original Japanese dialogue, and dubbed quite badly in English, which adds to its charm. The special effects are totally sweet, mostly the awesomely not-real blood squirts, and there are a lot of good lines. All around good movie. Also, I don’t know if it’s close enough to claim that it’s the “basis” for Kill Bill, but Tarantino sure owes Shogun Assassin a lot – he even acknowledges this at one point in Kill Bill volume 2 when Bill asks his daughter what video she wants to watch before bed. Check it out.

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In which I pontificate at great length about Andrew WK

Posted on 11th February 2011 in Something Daily

I watched about 30 minutes of a live Andrew W.K. webcast this evening…it was sweet. He seems like a stand up guy. All of his songs are about partying, which first of all is awesome. He also certainly knows how to have fun and be happy, or so it appears. He was taking people’s Twitter questions and sort of riffing on them; somebody asked him what the biggest dog in the world is, and he just told this sweet story about this one time where he saw some really big dogs. It’s awesome. And apparently “Party Hard” is a way of life now, which just means that you attain enjoyment out of everything you do, which I can certainly sympathize with. I don’t ever want to be doing anything that I’m not enjoying, if I can at all avoid it. Help me, Andrew W.K., to achieve my goal. Ok, thanks. I saw this one video of him doing the keynote speech somewhere that involved him throwing his chair around and eventually destroying it for no apparent reason – he was silent the whole time and then came back to the podium and just said “…any questions?” Cool guy, for real.

I still remember this one time when I was somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14 when a friend who was really into punk rock gave me some albums – they were “White Light/White Heat” by the Velvet Underground, “I Get Wet” by Andrew W.K., and “Bad Brains” by Bad Brains. I got to listen to them for about a day on my little Sony cd player (covered in Garbage Pail Kids stickers), and it was a great experience, because I’d never heard any music like that before in my life. I remember being kind of shocked especially by the Andrew W.K. just because of how upbeat and in-my-face it seemed, and I wasn’t totally sure, at that young age, that I was ok with it. I still really enjoyed listening to them all, probably because I felt like a rebel. But my parents pretty quickly caught on that I was listening to music that was probably not “developmentally” healthy for me (or perhaps they were just wary about the guy who gave them to me). But either way, they took my albums, and I was so sad about it. I still remember exactly which ones they were, and where I was when they took them away. I never saw those albums again, so for the longest time, Bad Brains, Andrew W.K., and The Velvet Underground were, to me, just “those bands that I’m not allowed to listen to.”

I’m waiting for a total of four things in the mail, and they need to get here now. Especially my Tropicana gear. I’m probably going to cry with joy when I get it. That’s not even a joke.

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The Infamous Thought Addiction

Posted on 10th February 2011 in Something Daily

I’m getting back into hacking like crazy. I think next time I start a project, it’s going to not involve coding. Like carpentry or something. I want to build my own desk with monitor stands and lots of space to spread out my stuff on. Just anything that won’t force me to obsessively try and retry the same error corrections time after time in the vain hope of making a little dinosaur shoot lasers out of his face on my computer screen. I’m getting slowly nearer to the end of my monstrous object-oriented programming self-tutorial, and I’m quickly remembering why it was that I took that big two month break in the middle of my work. I feel like my brain is going to fall out of my ear – that’s how concentratedly I’ve been thinking in attempts to fix the multilayered coding issues that appear without fail every time I think my game is going to do exactly what it shoud. I have spent the last two hours straight working on what amounted to one bug in my code – and it’s still not fixed. Every day is a new challenge with a project like this, especially if a lot of the code I’m using was written when I didn’t totally understand the power of OOP. It’s absolutely mind-numbing, but I’m totally glad I’m doing it; resolving code bugs comes with a feeling of great accomplishment (except on the rare occasion that I go to bed without having solved the problem, in which case I wake up a little pissed off).

Seriously, I don’t hate this work that I’m putting myself through, it’s just a task that causes a lot of mental strain, and for anything like that, you need a bit of a cooldown/decompression period after you’re done. Otherwise, your brain just continues on the same trajectory and you’re all distracted around your friends – you’re detached, spacey, and kind of annoyed that you can’t solve your bugs. That’s why you have to know when to stop. Any time that I make some definitive breakthrough, major or minor, in which I come to understand for certain something about a program’s operation that I didn’t before, that’s a good time for me to stop. That way, I can console myself in my failure to completely resolve a bug with the knowledge that I am, for certain, one step closer to doing so in the future. The problem with this is realizing when it happens and forcing myself to stop coding. It’s addictive, man. I think I have a problem. This and video games, right?

The moral of the story is, essentially, quit while you’re ahead when your brain starts taking off during hacking. Otherwise, the rest of your day may not go well (if you’re me (or if you’re you (which you probably are (I think)))).

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NetBeans in Ubuntu – “Project file is read only”

Posted on 8th February 2011 in Something Daily

This morning, I finally managed to ruin my Ubuntu installation for real. That is, the Linux partition on my MBP; I altered the X11 config file in what was aparently the wrong way, and I couldn’t even boot into single user mode. I had to reinstall the OS. It’s ok though, there were a bunch of things that were kind of messed up about it that I couldn’t fix. I’m just glad I posted some howtos here, because I didn’t write them down anywhere else and I need to restore my Ubuntu to its former glory.

Before that catastrophic failure, though, I did successfully install Steam under Wine, as well as solving an interesting NetBeans issue about which I couldn’t find any documentation online at all. For that reason, I feel like it’s kind of important to at least mention my problem here, in case you ever have the same issue and can’t find any help online. I’d been using NetBeans under Ubuntu 10.10, and the project that opened when the proram launched was one I’d been working on for a while. Yesterday when I tried to start Netbeans, the main window would show up, frozen, along with a dialog saying that the project file was read only. Netbeans was totally frozen, and I had to force quit. Updating the default JDK from the command line had no effect, neither did uninstaling/reinstalling NetBeans. It eventually occurred to me, though, that the default project data had to be stored somewhere, and I figured that place was probably the /home/emmett/.netbeans directory. After uninstalling NetBeans, deleting that directory, and reinstalling, the default project had been reset and my problem vanished. Great success.

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