Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I finally saw the live show on Thursday at the ReBar.

It was absolutely fantastic. Darker, and a little more bitter and twisted than the movie... most likely the combined effect of being very close to the stage in a small performance space, and also that visceral connection that eye-contact with a performer will give you.

If you get the chance, go see it. It's great.

Halo 2 - E3 2k4

Oh. My. God.

Halo 2 Movies @ TeamXBOX

I love this time of the year. Spring is in the air. Redmond is soggy. And E3 happens in LA.

Next year, I'm there. But in the mean time.

Oh. My. God. I. Want. Halo. 2. Now.

(But I'll have to wait until November 9th)

Moral Equivalency

Remember folks; the term "Moral Equivalent" should only be used in a discussion of the relative 'goodness' or 'badness' of something. It's a judgement call. If thing A were put on one side of Anubis's scales, and thing B were put on the other side, and they weighed equally, then you would have something that was morally equivalent to something else.

It is not meant for use in technical discussions. Saying that this for loop:

for (int i = 0; i < 20; ++i)
{
}

is the "moral equivalent" of this while loop:

int i = 0;
while (i < 20)
{
++i;
}

is a pointless statement. What you really mean is that they're equivalent to one another, not that they're the moral equivalent of one another. The while loop is not evil. The for loop is not a noble act equivalent in nobility to the while loop. They're just equivalent.

Next time on pedant's corner: mute discussion points, things you do anyway irregardless, and if worse comes to worse I'll look at similarly mangled other phrases. Capeesh?

Seattle Monorail Project - A Mismanaged Waste of Cash?

The Seattle Monorail Project aims to build a monorail system in Seattle to reduce traffic, get people from place to place... you know... the kind of thing that most infrastructure projects in a big city aim at doing.

How are they funding this? By putting more taxes on vehicle registration. Sounds fair enough, right?

Well, never mind that Seattle voters already decided that paying more than $30 for car tabs was not something they wanted to do. (But hey... since when did the Washington state government listen to their voters? The population of Seattle voted against the new stadium - but it was still built. Who paid for it? The voters. With more taxes). What I care about is this:

They're already throwing the money away.

Everyone in Seattle already knows that there's going to be a monorail built. If they don't, they've been living under a rock - or not reading The Stranger, who have been covering the Monorail for a very very long time now. If you ask a random guy on the street what he thinks about the Monorail, his first reaction is not going to be "What Monorail?". He might have other opinions, but a vacant stare is not going to be one of them.

So all that said and done, and given that this is being paid for by taxpayers' money, why the hell is Seattle paying to play adverts on the radio for the Monorail project ("Breaking Ground This Fall!!!"), or more egregiously, paying for television adverts during primetime? During Survivor no less. That advertising ain't cheap.

They're already over budget. Stop the insanity.

Blogger Updated

Blogger

Wow. Looks like Blogger now lets you use comments. Woohoo :)

The Next Chuck Palahniuk?

So yesterday I was having a film meeting at Pazzo's, and the writer of the short we're going to be producing next month (weather and time permitting) handed me the manuscript to his novel The Dope.

I'm about 50 pages in so far, and it's excellent. Very stream of consciousness, and very Chuck Palahniuk. Now all I need to do is figure out if (a) I want to become his literary agent (after all, I'm used to talking to publishers - I had to do it all the time as a freelancer), or (b) if I just want to find an agent for him (in which case, if anyone knows how to contact Chuck Palahniuk's literary agent, please let me know). Either way, it needs to get out there. This is good shit. Needs a bit of reformatting, and there's a couple of mis-used words in there, but that's what editors are for.

The story itself strikes me as what you'd get if Chuck did Trainspotting instead of Irvine Welsh. Except without the phonetically spelled Scottish accent liberally strewn throughout the pages.

It's certainly a page turner. Just have to wait and see... Jay Passer is the name of the author. Keep an eye out for him. You heard it here first, folks.

(BTW.... just in case you're not aware, Chuck Palahniuk wrote - amongst other excellent books - Fight Club)

Slashdot | How To Get Googled, By Hook Or By Crook

Slashdot | How To Get Googled, By Hook Or By Crook

Looks like people are having a "hack google" competition. The only problem? Looks like it's a bunch of people who'd rather have google become their own personal advertizing playground.

The competition? Make a search for the phrase "nigritude ultramarine" bring up your site listed first on google. Sounds great, huh? Sure. Except for the fact that it's an advertizing company sponsoring the challenge, and this kind of thing will make google less useful as a search engine.

So please, follow my lead. If you're blogging, link to google itself with the phrase. That way Google will come up top on the list of sites - and they'll be stymied. Nyuk nyuk nyuk. In fact, to make it easier for you, just cut and paste this code:

<a href="http://www.google.com">"nigritude ultramarine"</a>

That way, none of this "nigritude ultramarine" stuff should matter in the long run. And we'll all have a happy useful search engine. Ahhhhh... bliss...

Welcome

Welcome to the Accidental Scientist. I'm Simon Cooke, and this is my blog. I'm a senior software engineer at a startup company in Seattle, where I program embedded and Windows software. I used to work at Microsoft (on the .NET framework), and at Sierra (on Generations and Photo Lab).

My interests include writing screenplays, making movies, and just general chicanery.

Once upon a time, I used to be a freelance journalist - but if you remember me, it's probably because of the regular column I wrote for Your Sinclair magazine (oh, the nostalgia!). Or you might have seen some of the articles I wrote for .net magazine, Internet Today, Internet & Comms Today, Net User, How To Get Online, or arcane.

How I got started on all of this was the SAM Coupé - a little-known British computer that came out in the early 90s (although my first system was a ZX81, it wasn't until I got the SAM that I started to accelerate). Once upon a time, I ran a demo programming team called "Entropy" - we put out a few demos, which you can run on the SAM Coupe Emulator SimCoupe.

So that's it. Welcome. You'll find all kinds of weird ramblings here - everything from snoring cures (no, seriously... I think about this stuff and dig out what info I can) to utilities and bits and pieces. At least, that's the plan.