My lips don't seal

For 23 years I did not have chronically dry lips and I did not use Chapstick. I don't understand why I have them now.


In my first two years of grad school, I developed a habit of "biting" my lower lip when thinking. I don't think that's the cause, as I think I've ditched that habit.

Anyway, let's go back to the beginning. Last April I developed a single blister on my lower lip after doing the Taste of Uptown/Hillcrest (if I remember correctly, Hash House-a Go Go was excellent). Within one or two weeks, the blister progressed from cracks and peeling to severe oozing/inflammation over both lips. I went to an urgent care center where they attributed the problem to sunburn and prescribed antibiotics and 1% hydro-cortisone. The oozing and inflammation stopped.

After a few weeks under the care of hydro-cortisone, I tried to wean myself of it but the cracks were back. I consulted the school clinic twice. One doctor gave me a stronger (2%) hydro-cortisone(?!). Wow, I still remember how much that stung. The next doctor told me that hydro-cortisone thins the skin if used too long. However, his only advice was to try an assortment of alternatives (Vaseline, Chapstick, Blistex, etc.) and give it time.

Well, it's been about 9 months. I could have produced a baby by now if I was a girl and pregnant. My lips still seem dry, but in a different way. It seems like it's encased in a low polygon-count shell instead of soft skin. I've stopped using Chapstick since about August and just drink lots of water, so it's probably not an addiction problem. Oh well, time to stop thinking about it.

Chess 4

For some reason people like to post their new year resolutions or TODO lists publicly. I assume it's not so much about attention as it is about permanence. Blogs are more robust than cocktail napkins (though I can only think of phone numbers fading from napkins, and those are different kinds of to-do lists).

Anyway, here's one bullet from my to-do list that's been carried over from past years. I want to make a 4-player chess computer game. I guess people like pictures, so here's one:



Yeah, this is not the most important thing in the world, but it seems like a good excuse to try other programming languages/frameworks. One good thing about delaying this production from 2005 and 2006 is advances in my own knowledge and available programming tools makes this easier to complete. E.g., if I make it a desktop app (like TetriNet), I'd probably write it in Erlang (language where network communication should be easy). Of course, as the years go on, my own time will be worth more. Hopefully, thee critical point has not passed yet.

Possible feature list:

1. It would be cool to make the game extensible. I know at least two ways to play chess with 4 people (with different board shapes even) and it would be nice to support other variants with little effort. The rules/board description can be written in a domain-specific language and the core game/communication logic can be reused.
2. On the extensibility front, the "community" should be able to submit other variants and chess end-games for these new variants. Yay, I think that covers a Web 2.0 paradigm.
3. Save/load. Never lose a users data, right? It should be easy, since it's like loading end-games.
4. Replays. Again, shouldn't be so hard if serialization is done right.
   
5. Send game configurations to your friends to see what they would do in similar situations. They could reply with the replay.
6. Should have chat. Bryon R. once said, "Every application should have chat".
   
7. A wise-man once said something like "Before you think about making another application (e.g., a web calendar), ask yourself it will help you or others get laid". I suppose chess 4 doesn't cut it with just these features (except maybe chat). Whatever feature 7 is, it'd better help people get laid (or at least give that impression like Myspace).
   

UPDATE: Bah... looks like someone's already done Chess 4 and explored the variants idea 100x deeper than I had planned: http://www.pathguy.com/chess/ChessVar.htm. The problem is, his chess applets run on a single machine; you can't play against a distant opponent, and obviously there's no chat.

UPDATE2: Seems like most of the features are elements of Starcraft/Warcraft

Bad Games?

What's more painful to watch?

• D-Wade shoots 23 free throws with a total of 99 free throws between the two teams. As a side note, I can't wait till Corey Maggette is traded to the Spurs, and the Spurs (w/ Ginobli and Maggette) play against the Heat (with Wade and Shaq). Bucket-fulls of free throws ensue.

21 Google image results for "Dwayne Wade free throws" (as of now)

• A blowout such as this one (but it's "your" team that won).
• Sacramento loses five in a row during their home-stretch, where 3 games went to overtime. My mom went to Arco Arena to watch the latest OT loss (to Houston), and Yao Ming didn't even play because of injury. EDIT: My mom ended up not going, but the losing streak is now 6.
  

Phone Pics 2006

I finally pulled photos off my phone (click to enlarge).

Books or short stories

Looking for more books to read. I think I've grown past playing RPG video games. I usually play them for the stories, but movies are a lot shorter, and books have better dialog.

So, where should I look, and what am I looking for? I just remembered The Past and the Punishments and thought I should either pick up another Yu Hua book (maybe To Live) or just a book of short stories. A couple warnings to anyone interested in reading The Past and the Punishments: it might take some background in Chinese lit. or history to appreciate, but, more importantly, it has more than a handful of grim and grotesque moments. I remember I let Ling's gf Jing read it, and after an hour she came back and yelled at me for not warning her. I think she continued and finished it anyway, but I don't think she slept much that night (because of the book).

Thinking about thinking

Most of what I do is find bugs in computer programs, but every once in a while, I sit and think about what might be wrong with my own thought process. The conclusions are usually laughable, but not funny

Example 1 (High latency):

Problem: I consider myself a slow thinker. At least, that's my excuse for being quiet person -- almost never dominating a conversation. By the time I think of something to say, others are already on a different topic

1. When I get a haircut, I usually ask to have the hair on the back/bottom of my head cut higher. Raise that line. It usually never happens.
2. One day, I share my haircut experiences with my brother, and he says the same thing happens to him. However, the barber once explained to him that his neck is real long and if there's no hair covering it, people will notice!
3. Maybe I'm like my brother, and I have a long neck?
4. Brain signals from body parts further from the head take longer to arrive at the brain (shoulder tap vs foot tap experiment)
5. Longer neck == slower thinker?
6. Haha right. I'd like to think my brain does the thinking, so a longer neck means nothing
   

Example 2 (Paging in):

Problem: It's very common for people to forget what they learn. Lagrange multipliers? Hell if I remember. I'd only remember where to look for a reference. Now, what I'm worried about is whether or not my daily routine accelerates this.

1. At "work" (i.e., school), I often need to look through GIGABYTES of boring text. Logs for debugging my own code, other people's code to see if the possible bugs my analysis program discovers are false positives (btw, if you know an efficient way to do that, let me know), etc. Sure this exercises the brain, but it teaches very little.
2. In undergrad CS classes, a common exercise is: look at what happens to caches with an LRU replacement policy when the working set is bigger than the cache. You get thrashing!
   
3. The amount of crap that streams through my brain probably exceeds whatever cache-like mechanism is in my head, hence the constant need to look things up again.
4. Thrashing in cache is probably not so bad because you still have other levels in the memory hierarchy that are relatively fast. Once you hit the disk though, you may as well forget about your computations ever finishing.
5. Is every useful thing I know on "disk" now?

Oh sorry, now that you've read this crap, you'll need to page things in as well =)