Where’s the peanut butter?!

I’m in the process of moving pictures from href="http://www.psoul.com/gallery/">my Gallery install to href="http://flickr.com/photos/slipperyp/">my flickr stream. The
following galleries now open under new management:

• 2003 trip to Manzanita
• the camelia outside our house in spring
• my first wedding anniversary
• the Naches Loop trail at Rainier

Many more still to come…

From the good folks at Modern Drunkard.

1. If you owe someone money, always pay them back in a bar. Preferably during happy hour.
2. Always toast before doing a shot.
3. Whoever buys the shot gets the first chance to offer a toast.
4. Change your toast at least once a month.
5. Buying someone a drink is five times better than a handshake.
6. Buying a strange woman a drink is still cool. Buying all her drinks is dumb.
7. Never borrow more than one cigarette from the same person in one night.
8. When the bartender is slammed, resist the powerful urge to order a slightly-dirty, very-dry, in-and-out, super-chilled half-and-half martini with a lemon twist. Limit orders to beer, straight shots and two-part cocktails.
9. Get the bartender’s attention with eye contact and a smile.
10. Do not make eye contact with the bartender if you do not want a drink.
11. Unacceptable things to say after doing a shot: Great, now I’m going to get drunk. I hate shots. It’s coming back up.
12. Never, ever tell a bartender he made your drink too strong.
13. If he makes it too weak, order a double next time. He’ll get the message.
14. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she refuses, she does not like you.
15. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she accepts, she still might not like you.
16. If she buys you a drink, she likes you.
17. If someone offers to buy you a drink, do not upgrade your liquor preference.
18. Always have a corkscrew in your house.
19. If you don’t have a corkscrew, push the cork down into the bottle with a pen.
20. Drink one girly drink in public and you will forever be known as the guy who drinks girly drinks.
21. Our parents were better drinkers than we are.
22. Never talk to someone in the restroom unless you’re doing the same thing-urinating, waiting in line or washing your hands.
23. Girls hang out, apply make-up, and have long talks in the bathroom. Men do not.
24. After your sixth drink, do not look at yourself in the mirror. It will shake your confidence.
25. It is only permissible to shout ‘woo-hoo!’ if you are doing a shot with four or more people.
26. If there is a d.j., you can request a song only once per night. If he doesn’t play it within half an hour, do not approach him again. If he does play it, do not approach him again.
27. Learn how to make a rose out of a bar napkin. You’ll be surprised how well it works.
28. If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to drink in a bar. Go to the liquor store.
29. If you owe someone twenty dollars or less, you may pay them back in beer.
30. Never complain about the quality or brand of a free drink.
31. If you have been roommates with someone more than six months, you may drink all their beer, even if it’s hidden, as long as you leave them one.
32. You can have a shot of their hard liquor only if the cap has been cracked and the bottle goes for less than $25.
33. The only thing that tastes better than free liquor is stolen liquor.
34. If you bring Old Milwaukee to a party, you must drink at least two cans before you start drinking the imported beer in the fridge.
35. Learn to appreciate hangovers. If it was all good times every jackass would be doing it.
36. If you ever feel depressed, get out a bartender’s guide and browse through all the drinks you’ve never tried.
37. Try one new drink each week.
38. If you are the bar’s sole customer, you are obliged to make small talk with the bartender until he stops acknowledging you. Then you’re off the hook. The same goes for him.
39. Never tip with coins that have touched you. If your change is $1.50, you can tell the barmaid to keep the change, but once she has handed it to you, you cannot give it back. To a bartender or cocktail waitress, small change has no value.
40. If you have ever told a bartender, “Hey, it all spends the same,” then you are a cheap ass.
41. Anyone on stage or behind a bar is fifty percent better looking.
42. You can tell how hard a drinker someone is by how close they keep their drink to their mouth.
43. A bar is a college, not a nursery. If you spill a beer, clean it up. If you break a glass, wait for a staff member to clean it up, then blame it on someone else.
44. Being drunk is feeling sophisticated without being able to say it.
45. It’s okay to drink alone.
46. After three drinks, you will forget a woman’s name two seconds after she tells you. The rest of the night you will call her “baby” or “darling”.
47. Nothing screams ‘nancy boy’ louder than swirling an oversized brandy snifter.
48. Men don’t drink from straws. Unless you’re doing a Mind or Face Eraser.
49. If you do a shot, finish it. If you don’t plan to finish it, don’t accept it.
50. Never brood in a dance bar. Never dance in a dive bar.
51. Never play more than three songs by the same artist in a row.
52. Your songs will come on as you’re leaving the bar.
53. Never yell out jukebox selections to someone you don’t know.
54. Never lie in a bar. You may, however, grossly exaggerate and lean.
55. If you think you might be slurring a little, then you are slurring a lot. If you think you are slurring a lot, then you are not speaking English.
56. Screaming, “Someone buy me a drink!” has never worked.
57. For every drink, there is a five percent better chance you will get in a fight. There is also a three percent better chance you will lose the fight.
58. Fighting an extremely drunk person when you are sober is hilarious.
59. If you are broke and a friend is “sporting you”, you must laugh at all his jokes and play wingman when he makes his move.
60. If you are broke and a friend is “making sport of you”, you may steal any drink he leaves unattended.
61. Never rest your head on a table or bar top. It is the equivalent of voluntarily putting your head on a chopping block.
62. If you are trading rounds with a friend and he asks if you’re ready for another, always say yes. Once you fall out of sync you will end up buying more drinks than him.
63. If you’re going to hit on a member of the bar staff, make sure you tip well before and after, regardless of her response.
64. The people with the most money are rarely the best tippers.
65. Before you die, single-handedly make one decent martini.
66. Asking a bartender what beers are on tap when the handles are right in front of you is the equivalent of saying, “I’m an idiot.”
67. Never ask a bartender “what’s good tonight?” They do not fly in the scotch fresh from the coast every morning.
68. If there is a line for drinks, get your goddamn drink and step the hell away from the bar.
69. If there is ever any confusion, the fuller beer is yours.
70. The patrons at your local bar are your extended family, your fathers and mothers, your brothers and sisters. Except you get to sleep with these sisters. And if you’re really drunk, the mothers.
71. It’s acceptable, traditional in fact, to disappear during a night of hard drinking. You will appear mysterious and your friends will understand. If they even notice.
72. Never argue your tab at the end of the night. Remember, you’re hammered and they’re sober. It’s akin to a precocious five-year-old arguing the super-string theory with a physicist. 99.9% of the time you’re wrong and either way you’re going to come off as a jackass.
73. If you bring booze to a party, you must drink it or leave it.
74. If you hesitate more than three seconds after the bartender looks at you, you do not deserve a drink.
75. Beer makes you mellow, champagne makes you silly, wine makes you dramatic, tequila makes you felonious.
76. The greatest thing a drunkard can do is buy a round of drinks for a packed bar.
77. Never preface a conversation with a bartender with “I know this is going to be a hassle, but . . .”
78. When you’re in a bar and drunk, your boss is just another guy begging for a fat lip. Unless he’s buying.
79. If you are 86′d, do not return for at least three months. To come back sooner makes it appear no other bar wants you.
80. Anyone with three or more drinks in his hands has the right of way.
81. If you’re going to drink on the job, drink vodka. It’s the no-tell liquor.
82. There’s nothing wrong with drinking before noon. Especially if you’re supposed to be at work.
83. The bar clock moves twice as fast from midnight to last call.
84. A flask engraved with a personal message is one of the best gifts you can ever give. And make sure there’s something in it.
85. On the intimacy scale, sharing a quiet drink is between a handshake and a kiss.
86. You will forget every one of these rules by your fifth drink.
    –Frank Rich

i seem to have set my quota too low on my own email account and i hit it about a week ago without realizing it. this is what happens when you feel you need to do everything yourself (and can be a meathead sometimes).

Well this is stupid. I recently rebuilt the fence in my backyard. In
doing so, I took all the nails out of the boards and separated the
untreated cedar from the treated posts and concrete anchors. I then
took the posts and anchors to the transfer station (”the dump”) and
cut the boards into short planks and intended to have a beach fire
party over the summer. Now I see that href="http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/parks/parkspaces/GoldenGardens/fire.htm">city
policy forbids anything but “firewood” in the fire pits. Huh? But
I’ve got clean, untreated cedar - shouldn’t that be fine? I called the
parks office and now I understand that the city decided that they
don’t care if I clean my wood (ahem) or that I’m not burning treated
boards because letting me do so opens the floodgates for every dumbass
in town to show up with wood with enough arsenic to kill everybody at
the beach and who’ll inevitably whine “but they’s burnin’ fences,
too!” Oh well - anybody want a bunch of old, short planks of cedar?

Adam (whose weblog requires I log in to leave comments directly) href="http://adammonsen.com/blog/index.php/2005/08/20/factorial_challenge_python_perl_ruby_and">notices
that python and ruby’s performance seem great while C is (naturally)
very fast. Perl is in the mix, too, and he kindly doesn’t tear it
apart though based on the numbers he would seem justified in doing
so. I wondered if perl was realy that slow so I decided to take
a look…

Let’s start with the listing:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Computes factorial for number passed as first command
# line argument.

use Math::BigInt lib => 'GMP';
$b = Math::BigInt->new([0]);
print $b->bfac(),"n";

This yields some pretty miserable numbers (mine):

bash-2.05b$ time perl facta.pl 40
815915283247897734345611269596115894272000000000

real	0m0.056s
user	0m0.050s
sys	0m0.010s

Yowza! But what if we don’t import the whole 140k Math::BigInt
namespace and new up one of its objects? That brings us a lot closer
to apples and apples…

sub fact {
    if ($_[0] == 0) {
	return 1;
    } else {
	return ($_[0] * fact($_[0] - 1));
    }
}
print fact ([0]);

Show us what you’ve got, Randall!

bash-2.05b$ time perl factp.pl 40
8.15915283247898e+47
real	0m0.003s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s

Bitchin! My moral is not “perl is just as fast as ruby or python” –
nor “perl gracefully handles big numbers just like python and ruby”,
because 5.8 doesn’t, though perl 6, which would be the ruby or python
contemporary, may — but that “a huge feature-rich class is usually
slower than a single dedicated routine.”

I spent some quality time with my favorite music player, href="http://www.foobar2000.com/">foobar2000 (or “:D” as it’s
affectionately known amongst the geeks who a) tolerate using software
named “foobar2000″ and b) highly prize content over style) cleaning up
the tags on all my electronic music. I thought I’d done this ages ago
but evidently I had not.

My music workflow (which I’m pretty happy with) goes like this

• Download it to some folder
• If it isn’t tagged, tag it. Usually I can use foobar’s “freedb >
  Get Tags” function to automagically retrieve the tags for any album,
  but if the album is not found, I can do one or all of the following in
  one batch operation: set the artist (”Kinski”), set the album (”Alpine
  Static”), auto-track number, guess value from filename (usually
  following a pattern something like: “%tracknumber% - %title%”). Now
  it’s tagged.
• Once it’s tagged, use foobar’s mass renamer to rename into the
  stage 01 (”renamed”) directory like so:
  (((%artist%,_, )),unknown
  artist)\(%album%,unknown
  album)\(%tracknumber%,(%tracknumber%,(%tracknumber%,2),__)-((%title%,_,
  )),%_filename%). That’s pretty hairy so commenting to show what’s
  going on (short story: “artist\album\tracknumber-title”):

  (
     ((%artist%,_, )), # artist based on tag, first words capitalized...
     unknown artist)                # ...or "unknown artist" if untagged
                                   # directory delimiter
  (
     %album%,                       # album based on tag...
     unknown album)                 # or "unknown album"
                                   # directory delimiter
  (
     %tracknumber%,                 # if we have a tracknumber...
     (                           # then...
        %tracknumber%,              # ...if the tracknumber tag is set
        (%tracknumber%,2),      #    tracknumber, padded to two chars ("2" becomes "02")
        __                          #    else two underscores
     )
     -                              #    hyphen
     ((%title%,_, )),  #    title from tag, capitalized, with _'s turned to spaces
     %_filename%)                   # else just use the filename

• Now that it’s all renamed, I load it back into foobar and can play
  it or convert it. If I’m ripping from a CD, this is the first step to
  adding it to my collection and I need to be careful that the
  formatting string use (%_diskwriter_index%,2) since the
  %tracknumber% doesn’t work like I’d expect from CDs. My converter
  settings are to generate ogg vorbis, usually at quality 3 which
  creates files that are a lot smaller than comparable quality
  mp3’s. This renaming moves the files from stage 01 (”renamed”) to
  stage 02 (”processed/new”).
• Finally at some later date, it’s no longer new and I move it to
  the stage 03 (”processed/collection”) permanent collection.

Normally that works great, but somehow a bunch of stuff in my
processed collection wasn’t tagged. How do I deal with this? Foobar
to the rescue, again!

My music winds up in the typical folder structure everybody uses:
03-archived\Husker Du\Ticket to Ride.ogg
03-archived\Husker Du\Metal Circus\01-Real World.ogg

Where album tracks collected together in “artist\album” and
miscellaneous tracks without tracknumbers are in the “artist”
folder. To get everything cleaned up, I set up a foobar script that
runs four actions to get the common four tags set:

• ALBUM =
  (((%_path%,3),03-archived),(%_path%),Unknown)
  - album is either the current directory of the file, or “unknown” if
  this is a non-album style miscellaneous track
• ARTIST =
  (((%_path%,3),03-archived),(%_path%,2),(%_path%))
  - artist is either the current directory of the file for non-album
  tracks, or the directory two levels up
• TRACKNUMBER =
  ((%_filename%,-),(%_filename%,1,((%_filename%,-),1)),1)
  - tracknumber is set to “everything up through the hyphen” if there is
  a hyphen, or 1 (this is broken but I can’t find any way using foobar’s
  tagging reference to ensure that “everything up through the hyphen” is numeric,
  but it’s right 95% of the time)
• TITLE =
  (%title%,((%_filename%,-),(%_filename%,(1,(%_filename%,-)),(%_filename%)),%_filename%))
  - title leaves the tag alone if it’s already set, otherwise it uses
  everything after the first hyphen (this is also imperfect but also
  almost always right).

Now my whole catalog is neatly tagged and organized again. Foobar is
the perl of music players: it makes easy things easy (well, mostly
easy) and hard things possible.

I wasn’t initially all that excited about this year’s href="http://www.bumbershoot.com/">Bumbershoot lineup. The
original headliners were: the New York Dolls on Friday (without Johnny
this seems almost like when the “Dead Kennedys” toured without Jello
recently), jam rock hippies on Saturday (no thanks), Ani DiFranco on
Sunday (ugh), and not men, but Devo on Monday (who would have probably
been really cool to see). But then Ani and Devo canceled and NOW the
lineup is: NY Dolls, hippies, Elvis Costello, and Iggy & the
Stooges. I’m so into that mainstage lineup! I think Elvis
Costello is playing solo, which will be weird for the mainstage
headliner, and watching Iggy and the Stooges play in a huge arena will
definitely feel a little wrong but that’s still a great collection of
some of the 70’s finest!

some spam i recently got from amazon:

IT'S BREASTFEEDING AWARENESS MONTH
**********************************
As someone who has purchased an item from Babiesrus.com or created a
Baby Registry, you might like to know that August is Breastfeeding
Awareness Month. And to celebrate, we've got a fabulous free
shipping offer on select breast pumps and breastfeeding supplies in
our Baby Store.     

FREE SHIPPING ON MEDELA BREAST PUMPS AND BREASTFEEDING SUPPLIES
***************************************************************
It's Breastfeeding Awareness Month! We have everything nursing moms
need, from the best selection of breast pumps and accessories to
helpful articles and advice. Shop now and get free shipping on all
Medela breast pumps and breastfeeding supplies.

i have a couple problems with this. first where did “breastfeeding awareness month” come from? i’m all for human and non-human animals nursing their young but do we really need a month dedicated to it? there really ought to be another way to get the “you really ought to do something” message out. second, i did buy a gift from a friend’s registry from babies ‘r’ us. maybe people with friends with babies are people who have babies, but i’m not. therefore the only use i have for a breast pump (as part of the childless, non-lactating male demographic) is as a gift. could you imagine??

FROZEN MEATS
BREAK-UP TOUR COMMENCES AND COMPLETES, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 17

Where: The Rendezvous, 2320 2nd Ave. (between Bell and Battery, in Belltown)

When: Wednesday, August 17th, starting at 7:45 pm

Brand new songs! Old favorites! And there’s no cover! There’s no
better deal in town.

ain’t no party like the jugend party cuz the jugend party don’t stop! do yourself a favor and go buy scandinavian leather now so you can sing along.

Drenched In Blood (D.I.B.)

It’s a tidal wave
A tidal wave
It’s a tsunami of Blood

Blood in your nose
Blood in your eyes
Blood in your mouth
Blood in your face, Blood every day

Blood in your hair
Blood everywhere
Blood on the scene
Blood where you’ve seen, much more blood that you ever have seen

When your eye’s all crazy, and your minds all hazy
Drenched in blood again
When you’re drowning in blood like a rat in a flood, now
You’re drenched in blood again
When it’s raining form the sky and you know you’re gonna die, now
Drenched in blood again
And again

Blood on your feet
Blood on your meat
Blood in your seat
Blood on your lens - on your Mercedes-Benz

Blood on your back
Blood in your sack
Blood in your crack
Blood in your tracks
Much more blood than you could ever pay back

When your eye’s all crazy
And your minds all hazy
Drenched in blood again
When you’re drowning in blood like a rat in a flood, now
You’re drenched in blood again
When it’s raining form the sky and you know you’re gonna die, now
Drenched in blood again
And again

You wanted blood
And now you got it
Hey, it’s only natural
And now you got it
And now you got it

One two cut you