Six to Midnight

meh

Fuck the NSA

I've known a number of...people...who do that thing where they think they don't do anything wrong, so its ok for law enforcement to spy on them and download their sex tapes off of their computer and do whatever they want with them.


This article presents the best counter-arguments to that line of thinking.

For the record, I have never owned, touches, seen, or been near, a lobster.  I have also never talked in an elevator in New York.  And etc.

The Spaghetti Monster

The coder grabbed his mountain dew and his lucky chair and prepared for battle.  He met his adversary on the plains of incompetence.  It loomed there on the mountain of technical debt, flaws piled together, grown for a millennia under the tender care of programmers who didn't understand the language they wrote, grown in to the most monstrous glob of spaghetti code.  It had no heart but triple pairs of mixed concerns.

"I've seen you here before, and I have ignored you.  Too long have you been allowed to live, sheltered by management's indifference.  Too many times have I written you off as someone else's aborted fetus of code.  Well," the coder chugged his soda and threw it on the ground, "not today."

The beast growled and charged down the slope.

The programmer raised his keyboard in the air and screamed "I will end you!"

And then he flipped off the people looking at him funny.

I don't know if this will actually work

I copied this from here, and haven't read it.   Thought I would do my part to waste the NSA's time.  More likely, this was a waste of my time.


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How to beat FTL on Easy

...even if you suck at it.

According to the internets, some people think easy mode is ridiculously easy.  It is not.  The number of times that I have died in this game is...incredible.  Apparently it is by design, because they styled it after Nethack, i.e. it is super difficult and you only win by playing hundreds of times.  Nethack was a little too much at once, and I never had the patience for walking around endlessly trying to find my way around yet another dead end.  FTL is fun though!

So, if you are wondering whether its possible to beat the game, it is, and I finally did it.  It seems that you only have a hope of winning if you die enough and read enough tips to start exploiting nuances of the game.  For example, apparently you can cloak after the enemy ship fires and that will make their shots miss. Logically, this makes no sense to me because its not like the cloak moves your ship out of the way, but, whatever, I'll take every little bit of help I can get.

I used the B type of the Stealth Cruiser, and this is what my ship had by the end.  I think the key, here, is that I got Ion Blast II super early in the game...those Ion weapons probably won it for me.

Weapons

• Glaive Beam
• Ion Blast II
• Ion Blast

Drones

• Defense I
• Hull Repair*

Augmentations

• Long Range Sensors
• Automated Reloader
• Adv. FTL Navigation

Systems

• Sheids 7
• Engines 5
• Oxygen 2
• Weapons MAX
• Drones 4
• Med 2
• Teleport MAX
• Cloak MAX
• Pilot 2
• Sensors MAX
• Doors 2
• Power MAX

Other

• Luck
• More Luck
• Play it 100 times
• Do not fight spiders

Real tips

• You must save up to buy shields as early as possible.
• Get extra scrap by boarding other ships

*however you should switch to Beam 1 before the last (3rd) battle with the rebel cruiser because it gets zoltan shields

Now, whats next? Shall we try normal difficulty?  Fuck no.  I'm going to play it on easy again.

Weight Games

I just measured myself...my weight is going up.  Up!  For the second week in a row.  However, I've dropped a belt notch in that time.

I would like to believe that the weight measurement is going up simply because I'm putting on muscle, however currently I only do four muscle building exercises:  squat, shoulder press, bicep curl, and pushups.  And my arms dont really look any bigger.  Nor my chest.  My legs might, but I haven't paid any attention to them because I've never heard a girl mention that she was attracted to/looked at legs.

So either I have to invest in some weirdass medical devices, to measure the body fat directly, OR simply try to ramp up exercise to the point where I lose so much fat the weight goes down despite weightlifting.  Oh, and another possibility is that I am failing at losing weight.

This is very sad.  I was having fun experimenting with different activities and seeing which ones lost the most weight.  So far, the winner is spending two days standing / walking around museums all day long with my Dad--that one dropped me 2.2 pounds.

So, I suppose that completely wild ass guesswork is back on the menu.

Note to self - good android UI resource

http://www.androidpatterns.com/