Well after the first week, I'm enjoying the projects I'm working on at my big corporate internship but not the early hours. As my girlfriend puts it, I'm in a whole different time zone from everyone else, and I'm finding the Metrolink can be just as unreliable as the WashU shuttle.

Thursday morning I waited at the station for almost 30 minutes (trains run every 8 minutes) because a train at one of the earlier stops had broken down. This meant that they had to run both Eastbound and Westbound trains through one track, and while trains in one direction were going through the other direction's cars had to sit there waiting. Luckily not only was I late to work but pretty much everybody going downtown that morning was late for work.

I work on the 9th floor of a swanky office building downtown aross the street from the Edward Jones Dome (where the Rams play, by the time you read this post it may have changed names again), and to get there I have to take an elevator that is so fast it makes the Jolley elevator seem like it doesn't move at all. When it goes down, it literally feels like the floor is dropping out from under you for a good floor or two, and there are no handrails to hang on to, only carpeted walls.

Apparently someone read my post last week about the Objective Christian site, because I got an email from somebody who runs a Christian Music website who wants to "exchange links" with me. Is "Got to Get Her Out" a Christian Rock song?

Tomorrow I begin my new internship for 2 months at Stifel, Nicolaus, and Company downtown, across from the Edward Jones Dome, where I will be writing ASP code and database applications. But even before I've started, it has already made drastic changes to my lifestyle.

For the past week or so, I've been forcing myself to wake up early in the morning, say 8:00 or so, even over the weekend. This is because the workday will start for me at 8 AM tomorrow and every weekday from now until the end of July. I'll be taking the Metrolink to work every day, just like a real commuter, so that means I'll have to wake up before the sun at 6:30 in the morning. Every weekday. Until August. So I've been training myself for the past week to get up early, and I think my body is rejecting it.

I also went shopping for clothing the other day, for the first time in almost two years. Because I have not changed in height since 7th grade, I am able to purchase clothes and wear them basically forever. This means I only have to get new clothes when styles change, and since I usually don't pay much attention to being fashionable, I end up never buying clothes. However, my internship requires that I dress in a businesslike fashion, so I stocked up on dress shirts and dress socks for the upcoming weeks. Because I don't know how to iron, I figured I could just buy lots of shirts and then have the dry cleaners wash them for me. I still need some more ties though, so if anyone knows of a good place to get cheap ties, let me know (ties do not need to be stylish, but they should not be those rope ties that they wear in Texas, nor should they be neon colors).

But anyway, it's getting late. 9:00 PM for you guys translates to about midnight for me. It's time to get ready for bed...

I have found the most offensive site on the web, and it is here, a page which claims to offer an "objective Christian perspective" (thanks to Bob and Loren for sending it my way), although clearly "objective" is a subjective term here.

It's clear from the very beginning that this site is highly amusing, as they use such colorful language to refer to the "anti-Christian forces working inside Lycos, Inc.", but then it continues with a "cult alert" featuring equally colorful language: "For the safety of your soul, do not be tempted by the lure of impulse rock chip repair from strangers in parking lots. It may say free, but it could cost you your soul!"

Even the ads aren't objective! One at the bottom of the homepage advertises a company called "Straight Pride" which contains the offensive slogan "We're here, we're normal, get used to it".

The other sections on the site are equally humorous, and will get their own headings.

If You Own a Mac, You Are Supporting Satan! James and Charlie are Heathen Scum!

You CS majors out there will enjoy reading this page, which details, among other things, how Apple's Macintosh is a demonic campaign to convert America's youth to atheism and evolutionism! It contains these gems:

Chained to Evolutionism: Pokemon's pro-Darwinism propaganda is inescapable

The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh operating system (MacOS X) is called... Darwin! That's right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don't advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism.

Nothing like wild generalizations to really lend credence to your point.

the Darwin OS mentioned above now has a cartoon mascot (no doubt to influence children) named Hexley (pictured above) -- a platypus dressed as a devil who performs occult magic, i.e. hexes.

Ack! It's easy to support your wild theories when you make up your own word origins. Hexadecimal, anyone...

This OS [BSD Unix] -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensively use what are called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.

"Using that logic, I could say this rock keeps tigers away." "Lisa, I want to buy that rock..."

the new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666". What other horrors lurk in this thing?

Wow...

For instance, an industry standard connection for peripherals is idiosyncratically retermed "FireWire" (or should we just be honest and call it "HellFireWire"?) while the familiar Recycle Bin is given its new cult name of "Trash Can".

Hahahaha. I hate to break it to this guy, but Apple's cultish "trash can" predates Microsoft's recycle bin by, oh, a decade or so. This page is almost enough to make me switch to Mac...

The Mall Mission: Spreading Misinformation Wherever We Go

The Mall Mission page contains important instructions for how to harass fellow shoppers at local malls. But most importantly, it sheds light on the evils of purchasing things.

Christmas is a Christian holiday celebrating the miraculous birth of Jesus the Christ, Son of God, Lord and Savior of Mankind.

Wrong, wrong, a thousand times wrong. Christmas was originally a pagan holiday that Christians adopted for their celebration.

The most important part of this page, though, is the explanation of how the individual stores in the mall are seeking to drive us away from God through their names...

J.C. Penny - The J.C. makes us think of Jesus Christ, thus associating our Lord with the lowest monetary value, the penny (even Judas valued Him at 30 pieces of silver!).

Hallmark Gold Crown Stores - Purveyors of Santamas tree ornaments depicting anthropomorphized woodland creatures (reference to Evolutionism) and Harry Potter merchandise.

And what would this section be without crazy generalizations:

Secularized teens usually can't read too well, so hand out colorful stickers instead of pamphlets.

Halloween

The page suggests that in order to "take back Halloween", we should dress as biblical figures and give monologues in character to children who come by asking for candy. However, "it would be inappropriate to appear at your door as pre-Fall Adam or Eve or as a Sodomite." Inappropriate but damn funny...

And check out the hilarious scary John the Baptist costume photo.

Brainwashing UR Kidz

But possibly the scariest and most offensive part is the "4Kidz" page (make sure you have your sound turned on when you go here and click and mouseover "Lambuel"'s head...), which teaches children, among other things, that:

-Lions and lambs can not only live together in harmony, but also marry each other.
-Hindus (portrayed as stereotypically offensive as possible as an elephant dressed in a sari) are a confused and lost people because they have "too many gods".
-Atheists (portrayed as a coffee-drinking goat) are DANGEROUS! If you see one (because you can easily tell someone's religion just by looking at them), TELL YOUR PARENTS RIGHT AWAY! You should also avoid talking to them, because they often lash out at children.
-Dinosaurs are still alive and the Earth is only 10,000 years old, or so says a cartoon giraffe in a lab coat.

You can also shop in their store and purchase "abstinence shorts" (aka boxer shorts), a "matrimony thong", a mug portraying Jesus petting a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a mousepad that claims that God designed your hand the way he did so you could operate a mouse (I won't even begin to discuss the logical fallacy here...), and "Sergeant Al, the Anti-Lies Military Bear".

This post is already insanely long, but there is so much more offensive and humorous material here. I hope you're not reading this post on a heathen Macintosh...

Today I saw a pest control truck that promised to remove raccoons, squirrels, moles, foxes, and geese. I can understand the first four, as they carry disease, are dangerous, or destroy property. I'm a little puzzled about the geese though. Do people really have goose problems? I guess they could be very protective and snippy if they have a nest in your attic or something, but somehow I think I'd prefer to have a resident goose than, say, a fox running around in my apartment at night.

But then again maybe that's just because I envision the goose walking around trying to advertise life insurance but always being drowned out by appliances or other noises in a humorous fashion. I know in the ad it's a duck, but I'm sure if you gave a goose a chance it could stand in admirably.

The more movies I see, the more it becomes apparent that the best sequels are for movies that were initially intended to have sequels. Obviously this doesn't apply for movies like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter that are based on series of books, but it seems to hold very well for Xmen (good, original was written to support sequels), Men in Black (bad, sequel was decided on after the original was successful), Ace Ventura (once again, a horrible attempt to cash in on the surprising success of the first), and many other recent films.

Usually the problem is that the plot of the first movie doesn't lend itself to a continuation, but often the writers just pull a Sister Act and rehash the exact same story with the same characters.

Based on this postulate, we can form some theories about this summer's crop of sequels:

Terminator 3: Bad, although Arnold's hilarity may save this one
Legally Blonde 2: Bad
Dumb and Dumberer: A whole new level of bad, since the actor that made the first movie successful won't even be in it (a la Disney's straight-to-video animated sequels)
2 Fast 2 Furious: See the previous, same deal.
Charlie's Angels Full Throttle: Bad

Come to think of it, we may have already seen the best of what this summer has to offer as far as sequels. And then there is this, which makes my head hurt just thinking about it. How does an idea like this fly? What were they smoking when they decided to waste any amount of money producing this?

I saw the Matrix Reloaded today and was fairly impressed. Once they got the first half hour or so out of the way, it was a quickly-paced movie with some interesting plot twists and points about control and free will that I won't reveal so as not to spoil the movie for those who have no yet seen it.

Seeing this, along with the trailer for the hilarious Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3: Arnold Butchers English Once Again With Funny Catchphrases, really drives the point home that the whole futuristic "machines become too intelligent and destroy the means" genre of films is just our version of the campy 50's horror flicks where the monsters rose from nuclear fallout. Only these movies have bigger budgets and are not dubbed over Japanese.

Congratulations to all the graduating readers who are sallying forth into the real world. In honor of your accomplishments (and the fact that I got free food all day on Friday because of them), I've composed this short poem:

How soon this day has seemed to arrive
The quickest four years (for some of you five)

You've seen renovations, new dorms, and a bunny
Extravagant buildings that cost lots of money

Tulips that spring forth when parents are over
In all of April and a week in October

Dinner at Center Court, when your friends made you go
Bear's Den chicken tenders five nights in a row

Drinking without knowing just when to stop
And Ursa's fake sushi for 8 bucks a pop

Now you're moving on to a higher base pay
But it means starting work at 8 every day

The exams are finished, no more CEC
But then again, no more web surfing for free

Now you'll have to pay for and cook your own food
No time to waste every night playing Snood

So enjoy this short break before you have to get rollin'
If you're still in town, hope your car is not stolen

Your family assembles and pictures are taken
And afterwards you get to eat shrimp wrapped in bacon

It's St. Louis, so sunlight turns quickly to showers
Just hope the commencement last less than two hours

You're dressed in your fineries, I still look like a slob
But next year, like me, you still won't have a job.

Yeseen hit by a truck, took a half-hearted shower, and trudged to the shuttle stop, only to witness the shuttle drive by. So with 20 minutes to go before the meeting started and supposedly 15 minutes but who really knows when until the next shuttle, I started walking to campus.

Half an hour later, still half asleep, I arrive at school. After the meeting, I tried to pry my eyes open and start working, except my computer wouldn't let me log in. Neither did the computer at the next table. I sent a message to CTS, the folks that fix computers when they get screwed up, but they didn't come fix the machines for an hour and a half.

After what seemed like the longest day ever, I came home because I had arranged to show a potential buyer my old monitor. He checked it out and gave me $35 for it and left, then emailed me back saying that it "had hardware problems that I had to tell him about" and therefore he was returning it. All this for a secondhand monitor, in perfect condition, that I even still had the freaking manual for!

Apparently I didn't just sell him a monitor, I sold him a warranty and a service agreement. I wasn't aware I was running a damn Wal-Mart here. I'm surprised he didn't claim he saw the same monitor cheaper somewhere else and make me pay 110% of the difference. Maybe I should run a 24-hour tech support line out of my apartment for the hardware that I sell. I'm sure my roommates would have no problem with that...

Not only is it nerdy, but it also shows my advancing age. Last night I discovered and was summarily fascinated by this page, which at first glance is just a bunch of guys who play RBI Baseball, the greatest NES game of all time, a lot but also has some interesting CS-related stuff that kept me awake much too late last night reading it. For instance:

The instruction manual for the game graded each player in terms of their speed, contact hitting, and power hitting, on a letter grade scale from A-E, but it was pretty clear even when I was 8 that Vince Coleman was faster than Ozzie Smith, even though both were rated A for speed. Sure enough, someone monitored the values loaded into memory on an emulator and each player has a unique numerical value for speed between 78 (all the pitchers and Tony Armas) and 148 (Vince Coleman).

Ditto for power hitting, which is actually stored in a 2-byte field that has a decimal value between around 700 and around 900. These seem like strange numbers, but someone apparently hacked their ROM to give a player the maximum power value of 65280 and it caused a flyball to go so far they had to reset their game because it never hit the ground. Apparently the game designers used some sort of formula that calculated trajectory and velocity based on this number being in that specific range.

But by far the most interesting thing to me had to do with pinch hitters. I've had a theory ever since I was a kid that pinch hitters hit an inordinately large number of home runs considering their crappy stats and power rating. Thanks to this site, I have confirmed that I'm not nuts. Apparently the first time a pinch hitter comes to the plate, the game loads a power figure that is 64 higher than their actual figure, which explains why it's so easy to hit pinch homers but not as easy if they stay in the game. This was verified once again by monitoring the values loaded from the emulated cartridge during gameplay. So cool.

In freshman year, the guys on my floor and I used to play RBI a lot and I invariably beat them all handily. It's about time to awaken the beast again. I challenege anyone who reads this page to a game of RBI baseball. If you win in a reasonable matchup (i.e. no all-star teams, no Houston vs. Detroit) you get all the glory of your name up in lights on this webpage and possibly a better prize I haven't thought of yet.

On the heels of a recent announcement that a NY Times reporter faked many of his articles, I have a confession to make. Many of my posts to the Festival have been on the subject of the weather, traffic, and poor road conditions of St. Louis. However, I have never actually been to the city. I simply based my complaints on other peoples' posts about the 'Lou.

I also post frequently regarding events taking place at Washington University, while my test scores were only good enough to get me into Kennesaw State. Therefore I base most of my descriptions of WashU on pictures and descriptions I found in their bevy of viewbooks and brochures that got sent to me during senior year of high school.

Like Anime Amy I have only my Machine Learning exam remaining, and also like Amy I calculated that I need a 10.6% on it to get an A in the class. The brave amongst us would answer 1 question and then leave, but as a former TA I know that doing so would tempt the graders to take off just enough points on that question to ensure that I did not achieve my goal. This plus my less-than-stellar performance on the midterm (in which I answered one question "Boo!" and another by calculating the probability of me doing well in the class) will lead me to at least try all the problems. Especially since I spent much of yesterday studying.

But before then I get treated to a celebratory luncheon at Cunetto's House of Pasta and Yummy Cheese Bread courtesy of Ron. I am not the subject of the celebration, since I have not yet defended my thesis or graduated, but that won't stop me from eating way too much and falling asleep during my exam.

I saw X2: X-men United, formerly X2, formerly X-men 2, on Friday night along with the throngs of rabid comic book fans. Every single show was sold out when we arrived at 6 except the 11:30 showing, so we spent a delightful evening on West Olive for 5 hours and still were at the end of a huge line to get in. The movie was, of course, highly entertaining and excellent, and apparently the die-hards thought so too since they cheered and whooped and hollered whenever anything happened. I would post more about it, but any detail I reveal about the plot would spoil the whole movie for you, so I'll leave it at that.

Afterwards, as I so often do, I logged on to IMDB in order to find out all the trivia about the film. In doing this, I stumbled across the message boards, where legions of people who have been reading the comic books since 1965 have descended en masse to discuss how X3 needs to incorporate time travel, space travel, and every single remaining character that has not been introduced yet. This is why script writers write movies and comic book readers don't. Scriptwriters also don't have flamewars about whether or not Nightcrawler should have been furry or say things like "Storm has been my idol since I was 7".

There's something devilishly ironic about unsolicited spam that is peddling a pop-up advertisement blocker.

The following post was on everyone's favorite newsgroup, wu.forsale, under the heading "Friendship for sale":

Hi! I'm trying to figure out ways to make money, so I'm selling tickets to a fondue party at my place. It will be a special event for anyone who buys a ticket, it is a good way to meet people, and have somewhere to go. i was thinking of holding this party next Thursday, May 8th at 7pm. Tickets are $15 a piece, or 2 for 25. There will be great food and company. Please help support me through med school! Thanks, please email back soon if you are interested.

So let me get this straight, I can pay $15 to eat fondue at somebody's apartment with people I don't know? Sign me up!

After completing my Not Machine Learning exam on Friday (not too bad, but probably not easy enough to garner me an A in the class either), I immediately rushed to the campus bookstore to get my measly handout in exchange for the $89 textbook that I used very infrequently. Unfortunately, a new edition of the book (which itself was a new edition in 2002) is coming out in July.

So the bookstore offered to take it off my hands for $0, but instead I quickly listed it on Amazon, hoping to catch some people who weren't aware that the book would be obsolete in 2 months. Sure enough I found a buyer within 3 hours. Instead of getting $0 for this useless book, I get $40. Not bad.

I've spent most of this week working on CS527 and studying for my CS422 exam tomorrow. My girlfriend tells me I should wear my Linux shirt to said Operating Systems exam, but alas I do not own one.

Last night, in another effort to stop working for a moment, I attended yet another TV preview event in which my opinions were harvested for the betterment of television. This one was by a different company than the first, so Pete, Xiaoou, Lucas, and I got to not only watch parts of 2 TV shows, but also watch some stand-up comedians and of course some commercials.

The comedians...well...Jerry Seinfeld they ain't. We didn't get to see a lot of their act, just about 10 minutes or so, but it was pretty much the standard stand-up fare.

Unlike last time, we didn't get to see entire pilots, just 15-20 minute segments. The first was a generic police drama that could very well have been an episode of Law and Order or Without a Trace. The characters were not unique in any way and the plot was a typical hourlong cop drama plot.

The second show, on the other hand, was definitely unique. It was called "The First Gentleman", and was about a balding, ex-cop whose wife is the President of the United States. It featured entertaining silly exchanges like "Wait, so you're the first..." "Frank, just call me Frank", but at least it had an interesting premise and kept my attention. If you ever see this show on the air for half a season before it gets cancelled, you have me to partially thank.