Metablog

The Avacore CoreControl, sometimes known as The Glove, is an extremely neat idea. It regulates the core temperature of your body by directly cooling your blood. It turns out that by keeping your core temperature in the normal range, you can exercise a lot longer and more effectively than you could otherwise. I always wanted one because I play a lot of DDR, and I always get tired (and sweaty) more quickly than I get bored.

So for a while I thought about trying to build one using the principles in the linked article. It’s actually a very simple device, mechanically. All you have to is make a chamber that your hand fits in along with a source of cold, like an ice pack. You make the chamber airtight, with a simple seal around your wrist. Then you pull a slight vacuum in the chamber. Just enough to bring all the blood in your palm to the surface. The seal doesn’t have to be all that tight. Then you leave it for a minute or so while your blood circulates.

The vacuum counteracts the vasoconstriction effect that naturally happens when your skin encounters cold, allowing the heat to be transferred out much more efficiently than without a vacuum.

But I never did build it. I’m not a very mechanically-minded person. I’m much more of a programmer than an engineer. So when I discovered a few days ago that the product had finally come to market (a few years ago), I was pretty excited. How much would I spend on it? Oh, probably a few hundred dollars.

How much does it cost? They don’t say on their website. So I called them. $3000. Wow. So I told them, you know, you should consider offering a set of plans for hobbyists, who are most likely not among your potential customers at that price. (Nor are your potential customers likely to be frugal or nerdy enough to build one themselves.)

The fucking sales lady hung up on me. Not even a “no thanks”.

Fuck Avacore.

If anyone reading this has any talent for building things, how about let’s make some do-it-yourself instructions and post them online? You know, using basic tools and materials you can get from a general hardware store.

Watching some movies is like having schizophrenia. And not in a good way. Now, I liked Paranoia Agent. That managed not to have too many loose ends, and in the end, it sorta actually made sense. And I liked Paprika. While it was a wild, wild ride, it had a definite frame around the schizophrenic madness, and a real plot running through it, and eventually you could sort it all out. But Perfect Blue? Let’s see… Cuckoo Nest, Schrodinger’s Butterfly, oh and definitely In the Mouth of Madness.

Satoshi Kon, congratulations.

Runners up would be NGE, FLCL, and perhaps Jacob’s Ladder, although those first two managed to be entertaining enough to laugh off the lack of coherency.

Great name for a song. (I wouldn’t drink it that way myself, obviously. I take it neat. (I wouldn’t drink it that way, obviously. I take it intravenously.))

Thanks to drinking a tiny bit of Everclear in my PowerCitrus! soda and listening to Katamari On The Rocks, the a capella version of the main Katamari Damacy theme in the Moon level (the last level).

Check out all my awesome branches. To get one, download Bazaar, a pretty good revision control system, and type in (for example)

bzr branch http://pdf23ds.net/bzr/Common/trunk Common

I’ve put a lot of my source in there, including everything needed to build (if you dare) Lojgloss. Lots of projects depend on another project. Specifically, most projects depend on Common.

Of course, I can’t guarantee that anything will build or what-have-you. Assume GPL unless otherwise notified. (I don’t really like the GPL, and I’ll put something under a BSD license pretty easily, but there are a couple things I want GPL’d.)

If by some amazing chance you actually want to send me a patch, well, you have my e-mail. And I want to keep the copyright on all my code, so any changes you want me to include must have the copyright assigned to me or the public domain.

All this is a result of my finally getting out of SVN, whose limitations were getting annoying.

A cat
A flat
A spat
A splat
A vat
A hat

Little Nemo is destroying the clownfish! (Link in Spanish. Muy gracioso español.)

This.

My psychiatrist says I shouldn’t drink heavily.

I say, to hell with that.

When you’re a stuffy, meaningless nerd like I am, practically the only way you can get any meaningful emotional output is to drink, god damn it. If more depression is the cost for having a voice, then I say bring the depression on.

I fixed the arrow keys and made some other minor improvements to my Tetris game. I’m not bothering with release notes. Bleah.

I made a program based on Tetris (but not in any trademark-infringing way). Check it out.