My children decided, collectively and without each other's knowledge, to be "Internet Cliche" for Halloween this year. (Correction: I have been reliably informed that my wife was heavily involved in the outcome of costume selection)

My oldest son decided he wanted to be a Ninja.
My youngest son decided he wanted to be a Pirate.

Together, they combine to form ....

So check this out -

We have some people coming over to do some work on the house, so we put some food & water in the laundry room and put Chaos in there so that she won't get in the workers way while they're here. (there's plenty of room in there for her to move about and the like, confined on a temporary basis - she's usually got the run of the whole house).

She is launching herself at the door handle and OPENING THE DOOR. She is doing this repeatedly, it is not an accident.

NINJA KITTY!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113349/

The house I lived in from the time I was six until around twelve is in this movie for a quick split second at the start.

My wife rented E.T. for the boys a while ago, and they didn't want to watch it. I saw it today on one of the free on-demand channels we have, put it on, and tried to get them to watch it. I knew they'd avoid "E.T." ... so I told them they should come watch "Dude, Where's My Alien?".

They didn't buy it. But they giggled a lot. ;)

There are people on top of my house tearing the roof off.

I have White Wedding stuck in my head, but Billy Idol is wailing about how it's a nice day for new roofing.

(We needed a roof, bad - and the hailstorm that hit a while ago cracked one of the glass pieces on the overhang, one of the ones that covers the inside - so we did an insurance claim for whatever damage the hailstorm did and we're using ti to put a new roof on)

I keep seeing people write effect when they mean affect. Effect and affect as verbs have different meanings, and ... I wouldn't call it annoying, it just jars my reading flow a little.

But I don't want to be that guy who runs around correcting what people write on the Innernets. That guy can be an asshole. ;)

I'm not sure he's thought this through:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090414/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_iran_journalist_detained_2

Jamshidi criticized the United States on Tuesday for saying Saberi was innocent and
calling for her release.

"That a government expresses an opinion without seeing the indictment is laughable," he told a
press conference.

The coin flips of randomness in the NCAA tournament bracket brought me 4th place in the group of people playing at work and dropped me in the 69th percentile overall.

Obama beat the coins by 180 points, and I'm wondering if Nixon ever played fantasy football.

Hmm.

I'm dead last in the bracket standings for the March Madness thing at work. If UNC wins twice, I come in third. Not too bad for flipping coins ...

Every year, my boss sends out a link to the ESPN march madness bracket thing. Last year was the first year I actually made a bracket. Understand, now, that I know jack about basketball - so last year I just picked based on what teams I thought were cool, and did OK at the very start but ended up at the bottom of the group by the end of it all.

This year, I ran down each game, flipping a coin, starting with the first round of games, then going to the next one, etc.

I expect it to be much like last year, but at the moment, the coin flips are three for three.

Edit: Currently ahead of President Obama. (That will probably change, but it's funny ;) )

About to fall asleep, watching court TV ...

There's a show called "Principal's Office".

I just watched a coach at a high school somewhere give about ten or so kids detention for standing and talking at the back of a truck in the parking lot. At a high school with a grand total of 509 students. The rule they broke was that they're supposed to go straight in to the cafeteria after parking their cars. The justification for this rule was "sometimes kids do drugs or make out in their cars"

So bust the kids that do drugs or make out in their cars. Seriously. "You get detention because you're standing in the parking lot" just seems so insane to me. To be fair, one kid made a slightly smart alec remark ... but still, all of them? I can understand that kind of discipline (if one messes up, all messed up) in the military, especially in boot camp, but in high school?

I mean, technically they were in fact breaking a school rule. The rule they broke just seems so ridiculous to me in the first place, though.

I used to listen to Suicidal Tendencies just cranked to the max - and I liked pretty much every song. There's a song here and there now that I can still get into - but I'm all up on pandora radio right now, and "I Feel Your Pain And I Survive" came on - and I'm not into it. I used to really, really like that song.

Cake's "The Distance" falls into the queue, and I'm all into it.

Maybe I was a really, really, pissed off at the world kid back then. And I'm not that kid anymore.

There really ought to be a simple protocol for network card games that's standard. As far as I can tell, there isn't one.

I'm going to be making one, loosely modeled on the IRC protocol, but initially I'm only going to handle one game type.

Basically, what I'm doing is building a Hold-Em server, and I want it to be extensible enough to handle any game that can be modeled as one or more players sitting at a table with cards.

My deal-card function is basically a Knuth shuffle spread out over multiple calls to the deal-card routine. E.G. (shuffle-deck deck) just resets the card count, the actual "shuffling" is done by deal-card.

I originally implemented this by making my deck type a vector with a fill pointer - the fill pointer being the means to hide the already dealt cards in the deck. In other words, I'd grab a random number from 0 to the fill pointer (which is (random 53) for a newly allocated deck, making the range 0-52 inclusive, exactly what we want for a proper Knuth shuffle), get the new fill pointer value (one less than whatever it was before), and do the card swap, returning whatever card was at the random offset we picked.

This worked great - but when I told the compiler to be fast, it started complaining about not being able to optimize away a call to one of SBCL's internal access functions.

; note: unable to
; optimize
; due to type uncertainty:
; The first argument is a (VECTOR FIXNUM 52), not a SIMPLE-ARRAY.

( Stuff always gets longer )

This may just be because I've only ever had cream corn from a can, or the fact that I haven't had cream corn in forever, but ...

The cream corn at Rudy's is some magical awesome substance that I can't get enough of.

I converted http://www.suffecool.net/poker/evaluator.html to Common Lisp code. Instead of looping/recursing over all 21 seven-card hand combinations, I wrote a macro to expand to what is basically an unrolled loop that checks them all and returns the best value. I have implementations of both versions, the original binary-search version, and the faster perfect hash version. The hash function depends on 32 bit word overflow occurring (but ignores the overflow bit), so I had to (ldb (byte 32 0) ...) around any calls to + in the hash function to get it to work.

Using a test function that loops over every possible five-card hand, the perfect hash version evaluates them all in about one second - most of that is hash-table accesses to keep the hand statistics. The binary search version takes a little over two seconds.

Now that I have that evaluator, I'm pondering converting the 2+2 evaluator as well, assuming I can write code to generate the lookup tables correctly. (The code for that evaluator is dead simple, and the card representation is just a positive integer less than 52)

We'll never get away from William. (I reissued a command from my history buffer just now - !1066)

Youngest son likes to sit at the Linux box starting a ridiculously large number of xcalcs. Like, forty or fifty xcalc processes, his display is literally tiled with them. And then he starts giggling, as he's starting up more. So I decided I'd ssh in, su to root and issue 'pkill -f xcalc' to kill all the processes - he's watching his display all confused, then started giggling more and ran away ;)

Then with my older son ... "Did he break it? Can you check you can still start that calculator?" ... looking directly at him while with my right hand I'm surreptitiously moving one line up in the history buffer, and hitting enter right after he starts the calculator ... "Ok, what's going on???" ... more giggles, "I don't know" ... this went on for a while until he finally saw my shell commands on the other computer, then he *really* started giggling. :)

I was pondering how I learn stuff and was thinking - I might have been pretty good at electronics, too, if components didn't tend to do things like pop and start smoking when you put them together slightly incorrectly. :D