MindlessCode.net

…have waay too much time on their hands.

Like this guy:

I’m kind of wary of a Cowboy Neal version of the Hobbit…

• Upon discovering the magical properties of the Ring, Bilbo comments, “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!”
• The Elven runes read, “First Post!” The fact that it can only be read by the light of the moon is denounced as a form of DRM.
• The Trolls are moderated -1.
• Bilbo shows Sting to Gandalf, who asks, “Yeah, but does it run Linux?” Bilbo responds by calling him an insensitive clod.
• When the large party of adventurers arrive in Rivendell, Elrond complains that the town has been Slashdotted.
• Smaug’s treasure pile sparks a heated debate about such uneven distribution of wealth. Numerous replies blame George W. Bush’s economic policies for the disparity. After such an intense flame war, having the dragon literally breath flames is determined to be -1 Redundant.
• The Battle of Five Armies is increased to six to provide a Cowboy Neal option.
• In the scene where the group meets the Wood Elves, they approach not to ask for food, but to complain that the Elves’ song is not in Ogg Vorbis format.
• Gollum’s pale, subterranean appearance is lost on test audiences, who when interviewed thought he had just been staying home playing World of Warcraft. Director Cowboy Neal digitally adds a Microsoft shirt and brown Zune to Gollum to emphasize the character’s wretched condition.

How come some people get all the comic genius?

Sometimes I’ll take fairly random screenshots on my computer. Here’s my latest selection:

A Job Advertisment on The Daily WTF. A little ironic, in my opinion.

When Batteries Die:

taj@moria:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info|grep mAh|head -n2
design capacity: 6000 mAh
last full capacity: 65157 mAh


taj@moria:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state|grep m[AV]
remaining capacity: 65157 mAh
present voltage: 12600 mV


That’s on a Intel Pentium 4 2GHz processor w/ 1GB of memory. Nice. (If you can’t read it, Firefox is using 93.4% of my CPU and 12.2% of my RAM)

GMail shows the weirdest “related content” sometimes…

On a side note, I’ve finally gotten a Flickr Account. It’s got some of my favourite photos from 2006. Who knows, there might be one of you there. Actually not, because “you” don’t read this.

Oh, and I’ve lost 7 keys of my laptop keyboard now. 1 Ctrl, 1 Alt, 4 Arrow Keys, and End. A new keyboard (if you can find it) costs at least $100. I’ll suffer.

I think it’s nice people put pictures in their blogs…sooo…you’ve got to tolerate some photos from me today. Sorry!

Click to enlarge:

(12:30AM) Jamming the last night at Mark O’Connor Camp. I look tired, huh?	(2:13AM) Kayla, Me, and Kit (R-L) at the last night of Mark O’Connor camp
Mary, Bowie, and I rest in the shade of the 40°C (105°F) day.	Mary, Kit, Frank, and I (L-R) harvesting lettuce
Threshing Mustard using our “seed cleaning machines” (Frank, Kit, Mary, Laurie, and Me)

I pretty much dropped off the face of the Earth for 3 weeks. Sorry. I’ve been having way too much fun and now my life is going to suck for a few weeks because I’ll be bored. Oh well.

So, to recap…the week after Mt Shasta Camp I took my GED so I could get my drivers license and take classes at the local community college. I passed. Easily. It really scared me how easy it was. Especially after I read this:

The GED Tests are rigorous. Those who pass the Tests have outperformed 40 percent of traditional high school graduating seniors.

American Council on Education

That’s from the pamphlet I get with my GED certificate. Doesn’t that seem a bit scary to you? Anyway, it was boring, boring, boring, and easy, easy, easy. Anyway, 7½ hours of tests is boring. I think I already said that. Enough.

After that we headed off to San Diego, CA for the Mark O’Connor Strings Conference. The drive down was fairly, um, exciting. Instead of just taking I-5 all the way, we decided it would be a great idea to drive down the coast on 101 and 1. Heh, great idea. It was beautiful, but it was very slow. We also started burning up our brakes on one stretch of road which was fairly exciting. Being in the middle of nowhere, on a road with hairpin turns, with a 9% grade over 1 mile, at 7:30PM is interesting. We survived, though.

The next night we stopped near San Luis Obispo, CA and tried to find a place to stay the night. All the camp grounds where full, as well as most of the hotels/motels. We finally found a place that was charging $200/night. The room was probably worth about $50. I mean, when you pay $200, you don’t exactly expect to wake up and find the police forensic unit a few doors down.

We did made it to San Diego on time. The camp was pretty great! There where tons of great teachers, and lots of great people too…but for some reason it just didn’t have the same feel as the other camps. It felt more…formal. I did of course meet some great people and got to hang out with some people who I kinda knew but now really know.

So yeah, O’Connor camp was fun. On the last day (Friday), after staying up until 2:30 AM jamming and generally having a good time with friends, I went to bed for 3 hours and got up at 5:30 AM to go to the Booher Family Music Camp in Sisters, OR. I was awake until 4:00 PM navigating, then I just kind of fell asleep.

O’Connor Camp Freakin’ Rocked!

Then we got to Booher Camp. I have to say, I just love this camp. There were about 250 people there (vs ~180 at O’Connor camp), but it felt nothing like O’Connor camp. I don’t know why. It just felt a lot more close and friendly. Maybe it was the round tables, I don’t know. There’s something about being crammed around a table eating good food. It was certainly a lot better than the crappy cafeteria food and long rectangular tables at O’Connor camp.

Jamming the First Night at Booher Camp

I took guitar at Booher Camp…this was the first time I had any lessons on the guitar (after faking it for about 2.5 years). It was neat, guitar is a very cool instrument.

What is it that causes the nerds to collect into 1 place? Let me rephrase that: What is it that causes nerds to be driven into 1 place? (Hi Eli, Annie, and Christy! Nerds Rule!). We had our own nerd table where everybody would assemble and have nerdy and geeky conversations. Very fun.

I already went on and on about how great Mt. Shasta Camp was so I’ll spare you… It’s also almost midnight, so I really need to go to bed–and I still need to slog through 96 emails. Read the post right before this and you’ll see how awesome Shasta Camp was–it totally rocked.

I had such a great time at all 3 camps this year. I met lots of great nice people, learned so much I feel like my head is going to explode, had serious sleep deprivation for 2 weeks straight, and generally had a blast. Yay for fiddle camp! And now on to seed field work–somewhat fun, but it just doesn’t have the same feel to it, you know what I mean?

EDIT :: Oh nice, “Listening to” isn’t working. Deal with it.

I just got back from the Mount Shasta Music Camp in (guess where), Mt. Shasta, CA. It was just incredibly, totally, awesome!

The camp was organized and run by Tristan and Tashina Clarridge. There were 16 instructors and about 50 students… Instruments included fiddle, cello, guitar, mandolin, banjo, hammer dulcimer, and a few others as well. We had five ~1hr classes a day (4 fiddle + 1 vocal), then we would go hiking and/or swimming around Lake Siskiyou (sp?). I have to say, the area around Mount Shasta and Lake Siskiyou is just gorgeous. Oh, and the water is freezing sometimes (snow melt).

The jamming that went on after dinner was just incredible–you would just sit on the floor and hear this wonderful music being played at all hours of the night. It’s pretty amazing when you have fiddles, cellos, banjos, guitars, singers, and other just going at it. Wow. I wish I would have recorded some of it, but a) I probably would never have listened to it after the first few days, and b) I ran out of MiniDiscs to record on. I guess I could rant about my love/hate relationship with Sony’s Walkman MiniDisc recorder, but I’ll spare you. I will say this though: Sony, please, just make a decent recorder that it easy to operate when you’re running on 4 hours sleep. That’s all I want. Oh, and don’t make track markers mysteriously disappear–that just isn’t nice. Thank you.

Everyone at this camp is so friendly and nice…it’s just great. Somehow it amazes me how you are around all these musical geniuses and you are sitting next to them eating oatmeal and having a perfectly normal conversation about books/broken bones/school/math/whatever–not you’re not hearing about how cool the diminished 5^th in some song is. It’s just so incredibly cool.

For some reason, when I’m in crowds of people who I don’t know, I’m not really an outgoing person (although I try to be, it just doesn’t happen–I donno why). If you were one of the people who came up and introduced yourself to me and said hi when you saw me–it really made my day, I know that sounds really sad, but it’s true–thank you, and I love you. I really do like being around lots of people, but living out in the middle of nowhere, half an hour away from civilization, doesn’t really allow for it to happen very often. The people are definitely one of the reasons I love fiddle camps, along with everything else, of course…like learning cool new songs.

I learned about 20 new songs at camp–all sorts of different styles: Old Time, Texas Style, Bluegrass, Scottish, Jazz, Eastern European, and other stuff I can’t think of right now because I’m about to fall asleep at the computer.

Oh, and do check out Old School Freight Train, Crooked Still, and The Wild Band of Snee–these bands are just amazing. If I wasn’t so incredibly tired, I would list every teacher, their websites, and their CDs, but I just can’t right now, I’m sorry. Maybe later.

Photos should be up sometime, we’ll see… There may be some very incriminating ones of me crashed on the floor that just happen to also have a clock in the frame… I will make sure the clock is censored sanitized before allowing them onto your computer, so it may take some time.

A few of the many things I learned outside of class:

• Rope Swings: Never, never, ever, again. Every single time I go off of one I get water in my ear and I go deaf for several very long hours. I basically can’t hear anything, just a bunch of people mumbling–it tends makes conversation a little bit hard. And it hurts like hell. I guess really need to learn ASL.
• Staying up into 3:30 AM three nights in a row is definitely no sort of condition you should be in if you want to learn lots of new songs. Oh well, it was certainly worth it (and fun) to lay there and listen to people jamming. And besides, that’s why we make recordings of the songs, right?
• Ultimate Frisbee is awesome.

If you were at camp, then please leave a comment and say hi! Also, if you have some photos you want to share with everybody else from camp, please email them to me and I’ll put them up in the gallery! If you have a bunch of photos (or a slow internet connection) then you can mail them to me on a CD. Thanks!

This post is way too long for me to proofread right now. I tried and just couldn’t do it. Sorry for all the incoherent ramblings and typos.

One last thing–I have my GED test on Tuesday (3 hrs) and Thursday (2 hrs), then we’re taking off on Friday for two weeks to go to two more fiddle camps. Maybe I’ll see you at the camps…it’s kind of scary thought that people who actually know me in real life could be reading this…and that I might see them in a week or two. So, if I don’t reply to your emails, I’m not ignoring you, well–I guess I am ignoring you–but I’m gone and having a blast, so don’t take it personally. OK?

Now I need to go to bed before it’s midnight again. I just can’t take 5 nights of going to bed “the next day.”

All I can say is that AAA totally rocks. AAA is a local theatre group made up of a bunch of teens who do all sorts of amazing acting in a basement theatre (which is also amazing, but that’s a different story). I just went to see Wicked: The Musical a few hours ago…it was totally awesome. You guys totally rock(ed) my world! (Although if you actually read this, then I’m a little worried–but leave a comment and say hi!. :))

Yeah, yeah, so you all already know, but Google released Google Checkout today. It doesn’t exactly seem like a “PayPal” killer, in that it’s an easy way to move cash around. Instead, it’s a way for people to buy stuff without creating a million account/password pairs and sending out their credit card info to everyone. Very Cool Stuff. It’s got what looks like a decent web API, which I’ve been toying with. I’m not sure if I’ll make www.wildgardenseed.com use it yet… Maybe yes, maybe no. Probably yes, though.

It seems like it might require some serious osCommerce hacking, as Google Checkout isn’t just a way of paying…it’s more a way for users to keep track of their web orders, view info about them, etc, all in one place. This means that the merchent needs to send the order data to Checkout in the form of a base64 encoded XML file. This means that the user isn’t entering all their info into osC, which means the order never shows up in the osCommerce admin section. I guess with a lot of hacking, it could be made to show up, but it would be hard. So…I’m leaning toward just having the product show up in Google Checkout and manually dealing with it there. We’ll see…

Need new music? Go check out Jonathan Coulton. You’ve probably already heard of him–his song Code Monkey was posted up on Slashdot a few months ago. Anyway, go check his music out! Chiron Beta Prime, Till the Money Comes, Madelaine, When You Go, The Presidents, Furry Old Lobster, Curl, and That Spells DNA…check them out! And the other too, of course.

Sleeeppp…iissss…gettttiinng…meeeeeeeee.

(12 + 144 + 20 + 3 * 4 ^ .5) / 7 + 5 * 11 == 9 ^ 2 + 0

That is:
A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three time the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more.

Oh, I am such a geek.

How to cook an egg using 2 cell phones — freaky:

Cooking time: This very much depends on the power output of your mobile phone. For instance, a pair of mobiles each with 2 Watts of transmitter output will take three minutes to boil a large free range egg. Check your user manual and remember that cooking time will be proportional to the inverse square of the output power for a given distance from egg to phone.

I always knew cell phones were scary!

Anyway, my laptop just got a brain tranplant this morning. I swapped my 80GB for my (now) blank 40GB. 40GB for doing the Wild Garden Seed catalog. So I’m visiting the dark side (XP) for about 2 weeks while I fight XP and InDesign/Photoshop. Fun!

Got home from the Gaston Fiddle Contest at about 12AM last night. As always, it was a lot of fun. Fun, yeah. Fun to hang out with friends, listen to music, jam, perform, all that good stuff. There were 23 kids in the Junior division (13-17 inclusive), vs about 14 last year, and every single one of them was good! Anyway, “Talj Moton” (people seem to have a hard time pronouncing my name sometimes!) tied for 6th. No photos, sorry. They probably wouldn’t be that interesting anyway.

Like someone said:

I don’t care how well I place, just how well I play.

Yes, that sums it up.

If you were at the contest and found this (how!?!), leave a comment and say hi!

…Thunder, and Lightning, oh my.

Rained about 7.5cm (~3in) on Saturday, had lots of wind (blew the cover off our wood pile at 3:30 AM), and some amazing thunder and lightening. Damn, it was very close to us too, shook the windows. There’s currently a flood watch on the rivers around here too. Wow, some weather!

Warning: Totally boring post that means nothing coming up
Fiddle Camps! Yay! Oh, they’re all still 6 months away, *sigh*. We’re planning on going down to the Mark O’Connor fiddle camp in San Diego, CA in July with a few other friends. Yeah, 8 of us in a van driving 1,643.76km (~1021mi). Map Quest estimates 16 hours to San Diego, but it’s probably more like 13–they estimate you’ll drive about 80-90km on the freeway, which is pretty slow…usually the freeway moves at about 100-112km :).

Oh, and Booher Camp starts 2 days after the O’Connor camp ends. Yes, Booher Camp is still on the table–I want to go to Booher Camp, I do! It’s not negotiable! Well, we’ll see, I’ll probably be totally tired and exhausted by time we get there, but hey, it’s fun!

Heh, I broke my low E string for the second time stringing up my Guitar. Very funny, oh very funny.

Finally, some visible progress on QuickI! You can create an invoice, insert it, and load up and invoice and edit it! Yay! I love OOP, I love Qt, I tolerate C++. Now I can only hope that Qt is as portable to Windows as they claim.