I would like to draw your attention to waferbaby's new fusion. in case youre not familiar, waferbaby's fusions are typically 10 panel comics where each panel is drawn by one of ten different artists and each artist only has foreknowledge of the panel imediately preceding his own. in this way they usually tend not to make any sense at all, but they are still fun.

anyway I am one of the participants in this latest fusion, which incidentally is 100 panels long. I dont know if making fusions longer is really the greatest idea in the world since its impossible for these comics to maintain any reasonable continuity for more than 3 or 4 panels (much less 100) but daniel decided to do it none the less. regardless, go check it out. or if youre lazy and only want to read my panel, you can save yourself some time and go directly to this page.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 28 February 2002 at 12:58 PM

The following letter to the editor was printed in the current BusinessWeek. My comments follow the letter, but I must say now that the guy who wrote it is an idiot.

I'm sure Louis V. Gerstner Jr. did a good job during his time at IBM, but I'm curious about why he and his team did not exploit the business potential of Deep Blue's software, which in May, 1997, beat Gary Kasparov, the then-champion of international chess. For Deep Blue to have defeated Kasparov without qualification, IBM would had to have developed a class of software that would be capable of eliminating the need for bar codes—an acheivement that would be worth several trillion dollars a year to its owners in the initial years and untold amounts as time went on. If the Kasparov defeat was unqualified, and IBM failed to transfer this success to business software, is Palmisano going to set this situation right?

Thomas Wulff

Stoughton, Mass.

A few points regarding this letter:

Twelve years ago I lived in Effingham, IL and was in Mrs. Schmidt's fourth grade class at Eastside Elementary School. Mrs Schmidt's husband was one of the departmental mangers at the local grocery store, Martin's IGA. I remember him because in the spring of that school year I we took a field trip to the supermarket and met Mr. Schmidt. I remember that the managers for each of the departments did the buying for their departments, because the person giving us the tour thought the produce manager had a tougher job than Mr. Schmidt (he purchased non-perishables) because if the produce guy made a mistake in ordering, food would rot, but if Mr. Schmidt bought too mush, it would just sit on the shelves for a while.

Fast forward to last night, and I found myself reading an article about Pepsi's merger with Quaker Oats in the March 4, 2002 edition of BusinessWeek. About a full page into that article, in the seventh paragraph, I came across the following two sentences:

And Bill Schmidt, a buyer for Martin's IGA Plus, an Effingham (Ill.) grocery store, says he hasn't heard from his Gatorade rep since last summer. "I kind of think they're in limbo," he says.

What a small world. (And what a weird place to read about Mr. Schmidt and Martin's IGA.)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 25 February 2002 at 6:28 PM

Has anyone else noticed that even though the announcers on NBC refer to the event as the "Bobsled," all the graphics refer to the event as the "Bobsleigh?"

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 February 2002 at 7:57 PM

Sorry about not posting for so long, but this has been a very busy week for me. Sunday night I had trouble sleeping and was up most of the night. Tuesday night I did another all-nighter trying to get my Machine Learning homework done. Then last night michael and I stayed up all night to work on WUgrade. So I am very tired right now, but all of my work is done for a bit.

What made staying up all last night (well, until 5 am or so -- earlier than the last two times I stayed up late) particularly bad was the fact that michael, Chris, and I went over to the DeBaliviere apartments office this morning at 10am (so early!) and scheduled an appointment to meet with one of the leasing agents. Prior to this we've been getting our information through Pete, who we've come to realize is rather unreliable in that regard. So this afternoon we're going to talk to this agent and then decide what we want to do about housing for next year.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 22 February 2002 at 11:30 AM

other people I know have been getting even less sleep than I have lately, but all the same I feel a lot like a zombie right now. some kind of computer science zombie that has machine learning labs to complete, robotics milestone presentations to give, and gigantic school-wide grade-entry-and-access webservices to write. in the meantime this zombie must also find an apartment for next year and think of something romantic to do for his girlfriend this weekend for their anniversary.

(I wonder if sleeping for 48 hours straight is romantic.)

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 21 February 2002 at 4:07 AM

Remember "The Duke" that michael introduced you to last week? Well, this week we discovered that his name is Andrew Foerster and his website is at http://userfs.cec.wustl.edu/~amf3/. Be sure to follow all the links on his site; it's hilarity around every corner. (You have to click the green text on the buttons to the left; clicking the button doesn't actually do anything, oddly enough.) I particularly like his "Score Point Five" page and the "SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE" button. Be sure to mouse over his picture when you view that last one.

"The Duke's" webpage is too hard to do justice to in mere words. It has to be seen to be believed. And with that note, I bid you good night, and invite all WashUers to my Advanced Robotics presentation tomorrow morning at 11:30am in Cupples II 100.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 19 February 2002 at 2:50 AM

dave just hit me to prove that I was not a ninja. he said that if I was actually a ninja I would have been able to dodge it.

ow. I wish I were a ninja.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 18 February 2002 at 3:11 AM

Just so everyone knows, if you don't fill out the name field of the sticker request form, it will act like it sent your request correctly, when in fact it didn't process your request at all. So to ensure that you get some stickers, please include your name on the request form. Why the name field is the only required field is a valid question, but it is, so be sure to provide a name. However, if you'd actually like to receive some stickers, I'd recommend that you also fill out some of the other fields as well.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 17 February 2002 at 12:00 PM

I've been searching the Internet for a tool to help me do automatic backups of my various websites to my local computer, and I haven't been able to find anything like the program I'm looking for. Basically, I want a program that will, at specified times, automatically open an ftp connection to a website, download the entire directory structure to a unique directory, save that directory to a zip file, and then delete the directory. (Bandwidth is cheap, server-side disk space isn't, so the zipping happens on my end.) I usually do all these steps by hand on an as-often-as-I-remeber-to basis, but I'd realy like to be able to automate the process. The sad thing is that I think I could write a shell script to do this in UNIX, but can't do it in Windows where I'd like to be able to do it. If anyone knows of a Windows program that works like this, please let me know.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 17 February 2002 at 12:58 AM

My electronic fortune cookie tells me to "avoid a hasty decision." I wonder if this has anything to do with the housing decision that michael, Chris, Pete, and I need to make in the next few days? Well, good advice no matter what you apply it to, I guess. And with that in mind, I will avoid the decision about which class needs my attention most desperately, and skip the homework tonight. So I'm going to have some dinner and go to bed. I've slept for a total of six hours the past three nights. I have no idea how I've been able to stay up this late, really.

All of this talk about sleep has reminded me about something. Chris mentioned on his website a few days ago that going for ten days without sleep will leave you either dead or psychotic. Well, I'm on day four, so perhaps I should put this hypothesis to the test... Actaully, I think I won't.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 15 February 2002 at 7:30 PM

I'd like to point out that the electronic fortune cookie here at -273 is the number one electronic fortune cookie on the 'net.* It now has over 100 different fortunes, all taken from real fortune cookies. Just as a reminder, the electronic fortune cookie gives you a new fortune every day, but only one per day (assuming you restrict yourself to only accessing it from one computer).

Don't forget, we're giving away -273 stickers. Just fill out this form. michael, can we put up an image of the sticker for people to gaze at and ogle over?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 14 February 2002 at 6:19 PM

As if the Olympic coverage wasn't lame enough already, we now learn that the people at NBC are using a VIDEO TAPE of a fire rather than a real fire on the set where Bob Costas and Hannah Storm hang out. Is it easier to make a fake fire look real than to build a real fire? They could have at least compromised and gone with a gas fire.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 February 2002 at 1:06 AM

Rockford Files or Dragonball Z? Send your answer to david@negative273.com.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 February 2002 at 11:47 PM

did anyone else see that? just moments ago I watched as the u.s. womens curling team masterfully edged their final stone around swedens well placed guard and right into the center of the target for a narrow victory. it doesnt get any more dramatic. I know I havent been the biggest fan of the olympics in the past, but witnessing a true sports moment like that really changes your perspective. I really thing the united states womens curling team could go all the way.

go usa.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 12 February 2002 at 11:34 PM

That picture of "The Duke" getting hit by a car is quite funny. At least if you saw his crappy, crappy presentation it is. However, I'd like to mention that none of those pictures would exist without me, because I had to loan michael my pencil since none of his pencils had lead. So you should thank me for begrudgingly letting michael use my pencil during class.

As I'm sure you noticed, michael and I made a few changes to -273 last night. The page header is slightly different, with a few new internal links and a few new external links. We moved a lot of our content to the features page, so if you can't find something that used to be linked in the header, try looking there. (But don't go looking for the guestbook. It's been retired due to embarasssingly few posts made to it since we put it up.) Also, don't forget to request -273 stickers. We've had a number of requests already, and we're eager to give away these stickers, so keep the requests coming.

It seems that a lot of people have been reading the about page as of late, only to discover that neither michael nor I have anything written there. We'll be correcting that oversight very soon.

One final note. Frequent -273 guest author Chris Hill now has his own weblog. At some point in the near future you'll be able to access it at http://chill.negative273.com/, but for now you can head to http://negative273.com/chill/ to read it.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 February 2002 at 6:42 PM

cs456 (software engineering) is a completely worthless class. lecture today consisted entirely of presentations given by other students. these presentations covered the status of their individual projects, complete with use-case diagrams, gui-mock ups, and lots of boring power-point slides. and its important to note that the status of their projects has absolutely no bearing on anyones grade but their own, and further, their projects are all very boring. so basically, at any given moment there are three people standing at the front of the room talking about something they dont want to talk about and about 50 people sitting in the audience completely ignoring them. like I said, it is a worthless class.

however, it afforded me a lot of time to kill, and I chose to draw pictures. during the first presentation (our own group's), I drew up some enhancements to the red robot, depicted below.

I had intended to draw keith bennet running away in fear, but I got bored and moved on to the next drawing.

the second presentation was the Remote Planetary Exploration Testbed group, and for some reason or another they chose curious george as their mascot. so there was a picture of him on every slide. thus, I felt inspired to move away from robots (one of my favorite subjects) to monkeys (my other favorite subject) for my next drawing:

(obviously I added the stars in photoshop afterwards.)

I was still putting the finishing touches on the above drawing when the third presentation began. it started with a graphic of a satellite flying across the screen very rapidly with a "whooshing" sound effect. in retrospect, I should have taken this as a sign of things to come, but at first I didnt really catch on to what a bad presenation it was going to be. of course, I realized this rather quickly when I recognized one of the presenters. I dont know what his real name is, but I know that he is quite annoying, and judging from the nametag at his desk he calls himself "the duke."

unfortunately I knew him from other classes I have had with him, and so I expected some annoyance to follow. and as far as the presentation went, lets just say the duke didnt disappoint. he was apparently very fond of power-point transitions and sound effects. throughout the presentation words were flying all over the place accompanied by a host of distracting noises. much to the embarassment of the dukes co-presenter, chris, and the professor. in fact, when headings began to fly across the screen and chris had to pause for a three-second-long racecar noise ("VRRROOOM--- SCREEECH!") each time, dr. bennet felt the need to interupt. he told the class that sounds and special effects only serve to distract the audience, and that this presentation was an example of exactly what not to do. but to illustrate his point, he would not permit the group to turn off the sound. chris hill and I were cracking up after this.

all in all, I think it was the most annoying and embarrassingly bad presentation Ive ever wittnessed. although, terrible as it was, it did inspire me to do one final drawing:

the idiot on the right with the shirt half unbuttoned is the duke. please note that while the car has yet to collide with him in the above drawing, it is just about to. I assure you of that. as for his co-presenter, chris, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for that I am sorry.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 12 February 2002 at 2:08 AM

so remember how we mentioned negative273 stickers a while back? well, we still have tons of them lying around. and we are currently giving them away to anyone who wants them. of course, if theres one thing that Ive learned from this webpage, its this: if something takes even a little bit of effort, our readers wont do it. so I decided to make this as easy for everyone as possible. I put together a form last night that automates the process. if you want some stickers, all you have to do is fill out your address and we will mail them to you. you dont even need to send a self-addressed stamped envelope. we will cover the postage and everything.

yeah, so just go to this page and fill out the form and well have your stickers in the mail within the week. fun stuff.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 11 February 2002 at 3:19 AM

Alright, alright. My hiatus is over, and I'm back. Unknown to you, despite the lack of posts here, I have been actively working on -273. michael wanted to get a better idea of the people who visit here, so I wrote a custom counter-thingy that does that for us.

I also hacked up a few php scripts for acm to use this weekend. Nothing very impressive, and I can't use them until we get sendmail straightened out on our server, so that's rather boring.

Earlier this semester, I committed myself to doing an ACM Tech Talk on php. I've been thinking a lot about what I should include in my talk. There are so many cool things that can be done with php, I'll have to do a lot of pruning to fit it all into a one hour presentation. My current thinking on it is that most of the people at the talk will know something about programming, so I won't have to spend much time on the basic aspects of the language. Just spend a few minutes going over the integration of php and html, and then cover some of the more useful aspects of php, such as database integration and image manipulation.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 February 2002 at 2:44 PM

Damn Roger Ebert. At his suggestion, I rented Bully tonight. Bully is a very disturbing film from Larry Clark about a group of kids who kill their friend/tormenter. Larry Clark is the guy who directed Kids a few years ago, so I should have expected something strange, and I knew the plot, but the movie just floored me. I'll give Larry Clark credit for making a movie that definitely engages you. It's hard to watch it without having some kind of response. But the most disturbing aspects of the movie are these: 1) it's based on a true story, 2) all the kids were amazingly, exceptionally dumb, 3) the only kids who ended up showing any signs of intelligence still weren't smart enough to stop the killing.

The killing scene was very graphic, but the most disturbing thing in the movie was the lifestyle these kids led. Drugs, alcohol, and promiscuous sex were bascially the main aspects of these kids lives, but that description seems too tame for them.

I found myself wanting to walk away from the film a couple times, just because it was so disturbing, but I couldn't. I had to see what was going to happen next. I think I'd recommend the film, but with some caveats. This isn't the kind of movie you bring home and watch with the kids. It has tons of nudity, a graphical depiction of death, and the general tone of the movie is just very, very disturbing.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 February 2002 at 12:01 AM

I'm in my Machine Learning class right now. Dr. Goldman is talking about neural nets, which is pretty cool. The strange thing is that there are photographers walking around the class taking pictures for admissions. Every 45 seconds or so, a real bright flash goes off and the camera winds the film. Dr. Goldman is handling it very well; if I had those flashes going off in my eyes all the time, I suspect I would be having trouble seeing. In fact, the whole class is handling it really well. The only difference from normal classes is that no one is asleep. But it's still early, I guess.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 6 February 2002 at 1:39 PM

I just saw the new 10-10-220 ad. Alf is in it! He's hanging out with Terry Bradshaw talking about cats and lint. I can only hope this is the beginning of an Alf revival.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 February 2002 at 10:27 PM

I have a test tomorrow in money and banking. its at 4:30 in the evening, but Im going to be pretty busy tomorrow before then, so I dont think Ill have a lot of time to review before class. thus, I have to make sure Im prepared tonight.

Im not sure I really feel like taking a test right now. it seems awfully early in the semester. plus theres lots of other stuff I could be doing, and most of it is more important than money and banking. but then again, I need three social sciences to graduate, and graduating is pretty important, so I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

after the test, though, Im going to have to hit my 527 (machine learning) homework pretty hard. Ive got it just about half done points-wise, but thats a little misleading since the easiest problem on the assignment was worth half the grade. the rest is going to be a little more time consuming.

meanwhile, Ive been slacking on the WUgrade stuff the last week or so, and I need to get back into that. and my 553 group (robotics) has also been kind of behind on things, too, so we probably need to meet this week and get some things done. and knowing my 456 group (software engineering) they will probably want to meet again soon to waste two or three hours arguing about nothing. so this week will be pretty busy for me. sigh..

and as busy as I am, I still find the time to post to negative273. amazing.

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 4 February 2002 at 3:45 PM

I keep trying to use the mouse attached to my desktop computer to control the pointer on my laptop. And it always takes me a while to figure out why the pointer isn't moving. This isn't good.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 February 2002 at 1:23 AM

I had two free meal todays, and now I'm stuffed. On a related note, I ran into Scott's parents and brother when I was having dinner at CJ Muggs, but Scott wasn't with them. Scott goes home every Saturday night, so I wonder where he was.

I spent my evening working on my CS527 homework. If you're taking 527, I recomend you give problem 4 a go. It's worth 50 points and it is very, very easy. Now that I've made some progress on that assignment I can go to Chris's Superbowl party with a clear concious. Not that I would miss it even if I did have work to do: the look on Chris's face when he realizes that the Patriots are going to lose (by a huge margin) will be too good to miss.

On yet another different topic, I've been thinking about writing an article about for evolt about the color changing code michael and I wrote for -273. The idea, at least as we implemented it, seems pretty unique so I think it would make a good article. Of course, doing so would require that I clean up all that code, which prove to be a bit of pain since we wrote it in one eight-hour stretch.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 February 2002 at 1:14 AM

tonight rachel and I accompanied dave, chris, and some of chris' friends to the "just add water" show at the hi-pointe. (we of course took the opportunity to post some of our new negative273 stickers.)

all in all we had a good time. and I guess the show was good, but Ive come to realize that concerts are boring unless I know the words to the songs. the only part I actually like is singing along. the very loud noise and all of the smoke in the air is actually pretty unpleasant; but I do like getting to shout along to the music when I know that no one (myself included) can really hear me.

anyway, as I was saying, maybe concerts arent exactly my thing, since for me the highlight of the evening was in between bands when they played three smashing pumpkins songs over the speakers and rachel and chris and myself sang along to them. but still, perhaps shamefully, rachel and I had a very good time drawing all over the back of the little yellow fliers they had everywhere (rather than actually listening to the bands).

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 2 February 2002 at 2:10 AM

Last night as I tried to go to sleep, there were some noises coming from the general direction of my window. The noises sounded a lot like the clanging sound you hear when metal hits something. The sounds came at irregular intervals, often catching me just as I was drifting off into deep sleep and abruptly returning me to a concious state. I suspected that something was causing my (metal) mini-blinds to bang against the walls near them, but no matter what I did the sounds kept coming. I must have hopped out of bed and fiddled with the blinds ten times spanning about 45 minutes. I never did figure out what was causing the noise, but I now suspect that the high winds last night were rattling the screens, and that was what kept me up all night. But I guess I'll never really know.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 2 February 2002 at 1:19 AM

The Superbowl is this Sunday. Chris and I have made a small wager on the outcome, with Chris favoring the Patriots and me picking the Rams. Operating on the principle that time is money, whoever loses the bet has to cover the other person's TA hours next week, but the winner will still collect the money for working the hours. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the extra time I'll have next week when Chris is covering my hours.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 February 2002 at 6:28 PM