Month: April 2007

Also, during one of the talks on friday a speaker said something about Stryker’s Reagent. All I wanted to do for the rest of the day was play Ultima 6 & listen to .mods.

One of the Princesses of Thailand came to the university on friday for a symposium. She had an entourage of about 14 people.

Video from the zurich news station coverage (in german).

I installed the red carpet and helped with various logistics, but otherwise had no contact with her, thus missing possibly my only chance ever to high-five a real princess.

Later we went to Zeughauskeller and ate a meter of sausage.

I wanted to listen to Manowar’s classic Kings of Metal album on my linux box so I did what any sensible person would do: select the 10 music files and run “Open with VLC”. Little did I know that it would open them and start playing them ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Now, I’m sure that for most albums, this would result in an earsplitting cacophony of unlistenable cacophony. I would flail my arms in terror, involuntarily ejecting my expensive headphones from my head into the air, where they would accelerate rapidly away until the cord was fully uncoiled, at which time they would abruptly change direction and crash to the unyielding university office floor like a dalmation walking a 6-year-old.

But the Manowar album doesn’t care about any of that crap. Manowar–I’m now convinced–writes their songs intentially to be played on top of each other, intensifying the metal and revealing additional nuances of wrecking-your-neck-ness for anyone who can take it. What’s more, as far as I can tell the relationship is linear, meaning I experienced *9x* the normal amount of Manowar destruction contained in a single song (song #9, The Warrior’s Prayer is not really a song). It was far, far too awesome for me. Only a level 14 metal-warrior-mage or above could withstand such an attack for sustained intervals.

I lasted about 60 mouth-agaping seconds before having to close VLC and make a cup of soothing tea.

akzrh: so my computer should be a fully operational battle station by tomorrow I guess?
ghort: yeah are you still here?
akzrh: yup
ghort: if you want to come up and claim it in like 10 minutes that’s cool
akzrh: cool
akzrh: maybe I’ll do that
ghort: do you have any cheese?
ghort: on you
akzrh: yeah
akzrh: always gotta be rolling deep in zurich
ghort: i’m so hungry
ghort: trade you cheese for computer
akzrh: ok so I refer to money as cheese, but maybe you are actually hungry??
ghort: hahahaha
ghort: yes i was talking about actual cheese

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/robots/robot-sex-its-here-240486.php

re giving the british peeps back: “if this is some kind of bizarro power play, who won??” [second question mark mine]

if the US caught an iranian soldier in a rowboat anywhere in the goddamn western hemisphere we’d be invading faster than you can say amma jamma nimma jibba jabba

Took out maybe 4 old ladies in the brutal bastion of capitalistic carnage that is the Oerlikon produce market.

How will the Turtles fare against their newest, tangiest foe, Rhubarb-X?

Can Spider Man possibly stop the Hobgoblin’s relentless vegan protégé, Vegetal??

Is this tiny zucchini ON FIRE or merely flowering?!?!

Last weekend went to Milano.

Off the scale seafood food explosion. At a Sardinian restaurant called Osteria Al Molo 13 the waiter quickly picked up on our inability to order italian food, much to our benefit.

“Antipasti for 6?” said he.

“No, just for 3,” said we.

Even though we were 6 I think we were trying to be conservative so we would have room for more courses later. I don’t know if what he brought was intended to be for 3 or 6, but it was enough for 10.

Huge plate of perfect steamed mussels, huge bowl of mixed seafood with arugula + lemon juice, huge pan of shells baked with bread-crumbs and scallops or shrimp, tiny squid tentacles in chili sauce with polenta, undersea snails (not as good as escargot, but deadlier shells), all totally awesome.

Pasta course (a whole course just for awesome pasta, awesome) == fresh tagliatelle with seafood & minitomato sauce.

A whole lobster sliced in half cooked in OO, minitomatoes, onions, very simple. Perfectly cooked. I call them minitomatoes because it sounds cooler and they actually taste good, unlike most cherry tomatoes I’ve had.

After of course the espresso that somehow the rest of the world can’t figure out how to make.

Then they just leave chilled bottles of limoncello and a sardinian booze called mirto–which looks and tastes exactly like robitussin–on the table and walk away. I guess they assume that you won’t/can’t drink a lot of it; they are wrong.

I have a theorem that the Italians and French are the only ones who can make decent loaf of bread because they’re the only ones who can consistently make decent sauces that are *worth* licking the plate clean of. But as you know, noses get in the way of plate licking, thus bread was invented.

The only problem all command-line all-the-time in fullscreen-sized xterms or ratpoison, the bad-as-fuck windowless X window manager is that your cursor is always at the bottom of the screen, which is the least convenient place to have it, ergonomically. How does one solve that problem?

Does anyone actually like spell check while you type?