Joe Auricchio

Can we go a full week with zero caffeine?

The Rules:

• No caffeine after 12:01pm Sunday 2 April
• Seven-day clock starts at 12:01am Monday 3 April; ends at 12:01am Monday 10 April
• Zero caffeine. No caffeinated sodas, tea, coffee; no chocolate; no Advil or other medicines containing it (unless medically necessary of course); no Penguin Mints or Jolt gum or other caffeinated candy; no Shower Shock; nothing containing caffeine or kola nut (as determined by ingredients); if in doubt about any prepared food (dining hall, restaurant), avoid it.
• No missing class due to oversleeping/overnapping, and no falling asleep in class — instant disqualification

I’m mostly doing this to see if I actually can. I average two to three large cups of tea a day, and often supplement it with Penguin Mints. Without a cup in the morning I’m absolutely useless. (That’s why we’ve scheduled this during first week: nothing important is happening)

This is, of course, completely on the honor system. There’s $10 each on the table, to be split among those who can do it.

Participants: Hanna, Jess (possibly on an alternate Sat-Sat schedule), Mooneer, Nik, and myself.

update: Scott wants in but he said something about “as long as I don’t think it has caffeine, it’s fine by me”. Which ain’t exactly the rules we’re playing by. We’ll see.

update: Jess is back in, but only until Saturday.

update: Nik is out!

update: Jess is back out again. She was sick for the first half of the week, so that kind of messed things up for her.

update: Scott is out! But for a terrible reason. If he hasn’t had any since then, I think we might not make him pay up.

This just in from the “Oh SNAP” department:

Isuzu Gemini stunt driving commercials.

Not quite as crazy as C’était Un Rendezvous (local copy, ~50MB quicktime), but great nonetheless.

<joe> Dude, I'm all about IE 7. It looks like they actually fixed shit.
<rushi> Yeah right. It's like the worst version of Mozilla ever.

Rushi on web browsers

I wonder how much time people spend on cutesy X interfaces without fixing the problem… that is X.

Chris on X11

I’ve turned off pretty permalinks. This means no .htaccess with mod_rewrite, which means I can move this vhost to lighty/php-fcgi easily. Should be a transparent change to all of you out there in audience-land, but it means things will be Harder, Faster, Stronger, Better on this end. Which is good. This also means any links or bookmarks you may have are now broken.

Update: Moved. What is this, Staples? Seriously dudes, lighty is the way to go.

I’ve had some downtime recently. First, DNS problems - ZoneEdit’s nameservers are apparently under attack. One has been nullrouted by the ISP for a while, they’re working on it. The other goes down occasionally… and when they’re both down, no DNS for us. With a 2H time to live, you really feel that.

Also, I had to move this machine from a campus office VLAN to Resnet in my dorm room. They seem to be blocking all incoming traffic from half the world. So… anyone on campus, or at Yale, UC Davis, or Charter Cable in SLO county can get to the machine; but Roadrunner in Fullerton, SBC (i think?) in La Jolla, Mindspring/Earthlink DSL, Sprint in the bay area, and the EVDB office cannot. I’ve already poked Resnet about this, and I really really hope to have it resolved before break.

Update: Upgraded the poke to a sharp jab in the ribs with a “When can I expect a response on this issue?” email. If they haven’t replied by, oh, noon Thursday, I’m going to roll up in to APM and lay about with a broadsword until I gets me some answers. Or something. I heard that someplace…

My textbook for COGS101C next quarter is entitled Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

That’s pretty much life in ten words or less.

<joe> But there are underprivileged white people too.
<rushi> Of course. Ever heard of the Midwest?

Rushi on white people

Ukagaka, from Wikipedia

It looks like this is a legitimate, respectable category of software. The closest analog I can think of in the English-speaking world is those endless “screen savers” and desktop “customizations” that are just vectors for spy/ad/crapware.

Can’t say this was really a surprising discovery. It is, of course, Japan. They do crazy things like this from time to time.

Code so ugly it shouldn’t be allowed to live. Most of it isn’t even Perl.

Forgot to add ids to your form fields? Let vim(ex) take care of it.

:%s/name="([^"]*)”/name=”1″ id=”1″/g

We reimplemented ls in CSE30. Want to test that you recurse right?

ls -aR | grep -v :$ | grep -v '^.$' | grep -v '^..$' | sort
find -exec basename '{}' ';' | grep -v '^.$' | grep -v '^..$' | sort

As I come up with more examples, I’ll throw them in here. Maybe I’ll make it a page someday. I’m mostly doing this because I know it drives Paul up the wall ;)

So our last Japanese lecture of the quarter has just ended, and I’m waiting to ask the prof a question. I’m wearing my always-stylish caffeine molecule shirt. One of my classmates, a biochem major, sees it, and in passing says

I’ve got a quarter kilo of that, if you ever need any.

That set me to thinking. What could you possibly do with that much caffeine? A quarter kilo is… kind of a lot. It’s 25 times the LD₅₀, and a thousand times more than the DSM considers to be an overdose.

And then again, perhaps caffeine is more psychoactive than we let ourselves think.

Boy, I feel like a good cup of tea now.