Indistinguishable from Jesse

After Friday night anime, we had our first Tournament of Shame (air hockey). A tournament of shame is a sequential pairwise game in which the loser stays to play the next player in line. Very fun with a sufficiently silly group such as Michael, Erika, Jeff, Gabe, Calvin, Kay, Adrian, Helen, and me.

The idea of a tournament of shame is that no player will dominate the tournament: it's hard to be so bad that you lose to everyone else consistently. Or maybe the point is just to be silly by cheering players when they score on themselves.

Correction: It's called a "tournament of shame", not a "tournament of losers".

The correct answer to this question is an:

• A) aardvark
• B) rat
• C) cow

(Stolen from a Slashdot post by "j3110".)

Aurora Burd, Dave Gaebler, and I all have escheresque posters involving stairs behind our doors. I have Peacock's "The Courtyard", Aurora has Peacock's "Castle of Illusion", and Dave has Escher's "House of Stairs".

• Mars Society Toronto: "Mars: Object is closer than it appears". This shirt and the next one are my favorites.
• "It's not what you drive. It's what drives you." The shirt has a photo of a Mars rover. I saw this shirt at the 2001 Mars Society convention at Stanford but I don't know which chapter made it.
• Mars Society San Diego: "It's not just for robots".
• Mars Society Canada: Maple leaf window into Mars.
• Mars Society Winnipeg: "Who wants to climb Olympus Mons?"; Plain with small logo.
• Mythic Creations / Mars Society Northern California: various.

I want a shirt that says "Because it's there" under a large photo of Mars.

I've been addicted to the shareware version of Debris 32 for over a year. Debris 32 is like Asteroids: you pilot a ship and go around shooting large asteroids to break them apart and small asteroids to destroy them. Debris 32 adds mines, aggressive enemy ships, and power-ups.

It took me a month before I was able to beat the game on the hardest difficultly level, and I can still only beat it half of the time. The hardest levels are 4, which has a hard-to-destroy enemy base, and 6, which has crystals. Small crystals grow into large crystals if you don't destroy them quickly, and shooting a large crystal results in several small crystals.

The shareware version is addictive despite only having 10 levels. I don't know how to get the full version. The publisher (MVPsoft) no longer sells it and I don't know how to contact the author (David Bollinger).

Download Debris 32 shareware for Windows (4 MB)

Bigger screenshot:

There was a fire alarm in South Dorm last night. Unlike the first time I heard a fire alarm in South, I managed to leave my room quickly despite the deafening noise and strobe lights in the hall.

As I got to the parking lot where we gather after fire alarms, several South Dorm residents noticed 3 stacked boxes of donuts. We wondered what the donuts were doing unattended in a parking lot. Then we saw Dean Guy Gerbick carrying additional bags of donuts from his car. He told us the donuts were for us to eat during the drill.

Most of my "typos" add extra words:

mozilla crashes at with the instruction pointer at an address not in its address space. [bug 157845]

my high school has a comedy sportz team. the team and an informal club that exists around it, and my brother is part of that.

I think my typo pattern has to do with my typing style. I don't compose entire sentences in my head before I start typing them, and I edit heavily. I edit sentences as I type them. For example, a few sentences ago, I typed "before typing them[Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Left][Ctrl+Shift+Right]starting to type [End]". Later I changed "starting to type" to "I start typing".

I also move information between sentences in order to keep any sentence from being too complicated and to eliminate parenthetical phrases. When I'm done typing a paragraph, there are often lots of unnecessary parentheses around sentences, which I remove. Sometimes I spend more keypresses editing than typing new sentences.

In the first example, I probably typed "mozilla crashes at an address not in its address space" at first, and then realized I should make it clear that the instruction pointer was what was at an address not in Mozilla's address space. In the second example, I remember that the two sentences used to be one sentence, but I don't know how to explain the error.

Erika Rice also makes strange typos:

After about an hour we got bored (or, in my Case, started to get headaches) so we grabbed some other people and went and watched "Office Space" in the lack.

(Case is a dorm at Mudd and the LAC is the Linde Activities Center.)

I use a program called Sharescan to search the Windows network at Mudd. I have found students sharing archived mail, friends' backup CDs, photos of themselves naked, and entire hard drives. I usually look through the data to determine the owner and remind them that the Windows network is for sharing music inform them that they're sharing data that they probably weren't intending to share.

Today Selene told me over AIM that my shared folder was world-writable. Then she told me my printer was also shared and printed a page saying "Wuzza!" using my printer.