One of the things we’ve discussed in my Fieldwork class is the clinical basis of a lot of the human subjects testing regulations used even in the humanities. Thus, while children are rightfully considered a protected group requiring special handling, other groups you might not think about, such as pregnant women and prisoners, are as well. So when I saw a video of a huge room full of Filipino prisoners dancing, those issues were the first thing I thought about. But honestly, this is better than that, and ultimately, it looks like these guys are having a lot of fun. Without further ado, Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” (segues into MC Hammer):
And “Hare Hare Yukai,” the ending theme from the Haruhi anime:
I guess I should make this a private post, because I don’t really want people to come around and think I’m one of those hoaxers who post up fake screenshots of their programs and act badass for a few weeks before falling off the face of the planet. However, I don’t really care quite that much, so I’ll just leave this post up…
Anyway, something I’d fiddled with since I was a wee programmer in middle school was the idea of emulating one machine with another. That’s led to my current project, trying to emulate the original Nintendo (NES) on the Nintendo DS. I’ve spent the past few days working on a CPU core, and it’s more or less done and runs at nearly 4x the real NES CPU. What that means is that it’s taking up about 25% of the processor power, so I have the rest of the processing time for the PPU (the graphics processor) and the APU (the audio processor). Of course, I plan on putting most of the APU on the DS’s second processor, so I have a little more processor time for the graphics. Also, I figure once I fill out a few other things on the CPU (it doesn’t handle the special writes for I/O ports yet), that’ll take up a little more as well.
I still need to do a lot of reading on the PPU, so there won’t be working demos or screenshots or anything anytime soon. If you come across this post and get all excited about an NES emulator on the DS…just calm down. Use nesDS or nesterDS or something.
Wow. So this morning, I managed to sleep through two alarms and a call from my girlfriend, missing my morning class in the process and waking up at 11:30am. I guess it was going to catch up to me eventually, what with me sleeping 3-4 hours every night and spending all day reading ethnomusicology journals. On the plus side, I’m hoping the extra rest this afforded me will allow me to push forward and get a little bit ahead in my classes so that it won’t have to happen again. I’d been doing so well too, but everybody has an off day, right?
* * *
But the real point of this entry is to rant about something I read on the BBC News about the political activity and clout of Buddhist monks in Burma. 90% of the Burmese population is Buddhist, so the monks and monasteries command a lot of power. While generally peaceful, they do occasionally rise to political action when they feel the cause necessitates their making a move, and this tends to rally the people together. That’s all well-established in the article. But here comes the silly part. In reviewing the history of Burmese monks’ political activity, BBC News had this to say (underlined text by me):
Their political role stems from the days of the Burmese monarchy, which operated until the late 19th century, under which monks worked as intermediaries between the monarch and the public, and lobbied the king over unpopular moves such as heavy taxation, said Mr Aung Kin.
They became more confrontational during colonial times, in protest at the failure of foreigners to remove their shoes in pagodas, he said.
There’s no way white men wearing shoes could be the main reason the Burmese monasteries decided to rise up against British colonial power. No monk was saying, “these white men keep dirtying Buddha’s holy rug with their big nasty boots, we better go send the peasantry to kick their asses.” Now granted, it probably annoyed them, and may have even been the straw to break the camel’s back, but you can’t tell me that their political work in this case was because of some nasty cracka’s shoes.
When will people start realizing that people in 3rd world countries might just have mental acuity comparable to their own? “Oh look at the cute little Asians that get mad when you don’t take off your shoes.” Rawrgh.
I’ve had a thought today, that may or may not be continued and expanded upon in a later entry, but which I thought I’d put down briefly while it was still in my mind. In fact, the point is that the thought won’t leave my mind, and I’m hoping that putting it down in writing will be, in some small mmater, cathartic.
Anyway, sometimes, I get really fed up with the condition of the house I’m currently living in. I’m here at IU with two other guys, you see, and my tendencies towards cleanliness and organization, while not comparable whatsoever to either of my parents (whose hospital-influenced cleanliness borders on OCD), are still in the top 5% of all Y-chromosome-carrying graduate students. That said, I do let a lot go, and my room is not always a model of sanctity and germ-free living. Still, the entropic mess that is the community kitchen and bathroom drives me nuts.
I spend a good hour or two every day to keep things from falling apart, washing dishes, scrubbing counters, tossing out trash, making sure rags are clean, etc., and probably once or week or so, I have to buckle down and do a really good job of it. Otherwise, produce and trash would be left out, there would be no pots/pans for cooking dinner, etc. The house would reek.
Today, I received my sleek new Dell Inspiron laptop. I’m quite excited about it overall. It’s got a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a pretty screen, all the quirky little things I need like S-Video outputs and firewire, extra USB ports for my massive number of peripherals, and I’m overall quite happy.
With the hardware. The software, however, is another story.
First, Windows Vista is probably one of the more horrific things I’ve had to deal with in recent memory. First, you do not make an operating system better/more efficient by asking me MORE questions when I do something. It reminds me of something I read that was sent from my employer recently: if there is some tedious task, find a way to automate it instead of doing it yourself. Why, then, must I confirm every single thing I do in Vista? Yes, I really want to uninstall AOL Internet Offer. Yes, I really do want to run that program…I clicked on it, didn’t I?
Gah. That takes me to another thing. Not only does it ask for my confirmation for every other action, it does the asking needlessly slowly. Microsoft, just so you know, I did not buy a faster system so you could use up more of my system resources. I was hoping maybe, oh, I don’t know, I could actually…go faster? Vista is one of the biggest system hogs ever, so even though my Dell is immensely faster than my 3 year old Thinkpad, dumb stuff like uninstalling the stupid pack-ins takes much longer than it should.
(Okay, just now, I clicked on a button to change Windows features, and it asked for my permission. Vista is like the dog that doesn’t recognize it’s own tail so he decides to chase it. In fact, the little swirling loader icon looks just like that.)
Anyway, I’m going to install Command&Conquer 3 tonight. It better run like a dream, or heads will roll.
Wow. So this morning, I managed to sleep through two alarms and a call from my girlfriend, missing my morning class in the process and waking up at 11:30am. I guess it was going to catch up to me eventually, what with me sleeping 3-4 hours every night and spending all day reading ethnomusicology journals. On the plus side, I’m hoping the extra rest this afforded me will allow me to push forward and get a little bit ahead in my classes so that it won’t have to happen again. I’d been doing so well too, but everybody has an off day, right?
Today, I received my sleek new Dell Inspiron laptop. I’m quite excited about it overall. It’s got a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a pretty screen, all the quirky little things I need like S-Video outputs and firewire, extra USB ports for my massive number of peripherals, and I’m overall quite happy.
First, Windows Vista is probably one of the more horrific things I’ve had to deal with in recent memory. First, you do not make an operating system better/more efficient by asking me MORE questions when I do something. It reminds me of something I read that was sent from my employer recently: if there is some tedious task, find a way to automate it instead of doing it yourself. Why, then, must I confirm every single thing I do in Vista? Yes, I really want to uninstall AOL Internet Offer. Yes, I really do want to run that program…I clicked on it, didn’t I?