I actually can’t believe this is real: an online database containing the salaries of most federal employees (exempt are those who deal with matters of national security):

http://php.app.com/feds06/search.php

This sort of makes sense since we the tax payers are paying these people, however, it also seems a little wrong. Aren’t these people entitled to some amount of privacy? I’d be annoyed if someone could look up my salary, though then again, maybe if everyone knew what everyone else made it wouldn’t be so bad. You wouldn’t have people trying to cut backroom deals to get a higher salary.

Unfortunately I don’t know many Federal Employees. I tried most of the people on my facebook list and came up with only one hit (and it was the guy who told me about the site). This would be a much juicer find if Maryland State employees were listed, sort of like how New Jersey State employees are listed.

Anyway, I found this to be shockingly interesting site. If you know any federal employees you might want to point them to the site, just to see what they think :).

A couple of years ago one of my friends introduced me to a rather interesting research project that his friend Matt had preformed. Matt had decided to take pictures of his then girl friend and post them up on a popular online dating site. He then wrote a profile for her – creating in effect what he felt was the perfect girl: Chrissy Parker. Chrissy was basically described as being nice, fun, down to earth, smart and obtainable. Matt wanted to see the kind of responses he’d get from guys on the site. Pictures are important, but how important is the content itself, and would that effect the responses that he received? And what kinds of letters do guys typically write to girls on these kind of sites?

About two weeks ago I had a chance to talk to Matt and asked him about the site. He laughed about it upon remembering it’s conception. He also mentioned that once he started reading the letters he felt kind of bad. I don’t think he was expecting the guys who wrote her to be so nice. He said they sounded like the type of guys he’d want Chrissy to date. His girl friend apparently also found this project interesting and read through the letters herself, though it’s unknown what she thought of them. According to Matt she wasn’t anything like the profile he posted up, and instead of being 22, she’s really 16 or 17 in the pictures that were displayed.

Anyway, if you’re interested in seeing a copy of the profile and letters that were received, you can find them in a nice little write up at the following link:

The Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project

Reading over it again it seems a little unethical, but it’s a neat idea.

I found the following blog post about being a female gamer somewhat entertaining:

http://lostinazeroth.blogspot.com/2007/07/being-female-gamer-for-profitor-why-do.html

Here’s the bit that fascinated me the most:

Although it is reportedly not as common nowadays as it was in the earlier days of WoW, every once in awhile, I will receive whispered questions of “Are you really a girl?” or “What do you look like IRL?”. I usually just shrug them off, but sometimes the invitations can be tempting. If you are supposedly a true female AND a sexy race (Night Elf or Blood Elf in particular) the attention you may receive can be insane. Being offered 5G (which when you are lower levels can be a small fortune) to “talk dirty” to a male character or a purported male player, isn’t all that uncommon.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with WoW, it stands for World of Warcraft and it’s an online role playing game. The game itself costs around $50, and then you have to pay around $15 a month for a subscription so you can play online. I’ve never played myself, but I had a roommate who was hooked on it for a few months.

Anyway, the whole idea of spending fake money to have some supposed girl talk dirty to you reminds me of the whole “cybersex” phenomena that was big in the mid to late 90’s. I remember being 16 and having a couple of friends over and all they wanted to do was to get on the net and “cyber”. I remember it being this huge thing, I remember being asked several times by people, after they found out I had net access, “dude, have you ever cybered?” Nowadays I don’t get that question so much. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been asked that question since I was 16. I’d hypothesize that the majority of guys doing that kind of thing in WoW are just horny teenagers, though I’m sure there are older guys doing that too, which is a little creepy, and a little sad too, I suppose.

During the past 2 weeks I’ve had a few friends tell me that one of the local 7-Eleven convenience stores had been transformed into a “Kwik-E-Mart”, the cartoon convenience store that the Simpsons shop at. Being a huge Simpsons fan, I had to check it out.

It took us 45 minutes to drive down there. Luckily, and as you can see from the above pic, they went all out. They were even selling actual items from the Simpsons TV show, like Buzz Cola, Krusty O’s, pink donuts, and Squeeshies. Sadly, there was no Duff beer. Below you can see my brother Kyle holding a box of Krusty O’s.

I couldn’t resist buying a box, along with a huge case of Buzz cola, a Homer cookie, and a Squeeshy. The place was pretty packed, and it seemed like everyone else was doing the same. I’m glad I only bought one box though, I saw several people buying 2-4 boxes. They’ll probably be pretty bummed out when they get home and find out it’s just fruit loops inside (I was somewhat annoyed at this – come on, Krusty O’s != fruit loops).

Before this, I don’t think I’d ever been to a 7-Eleven. So even though there were decorations everywhere, I wasn’t sure how far they’d gone to make their business look like a Kwik-E-Mart. I thought it was cool they had gross looking hot dogs for sale though. If that’s what they normally sell, I’m surprised anyone eats them.

Everyone else in the store was taking pictures like crazy too. You couldn’t move 5 feet without getting in the way of someone’s photo. However, I highly recommend a trip up to one of these stores. It’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had in a convenience store. You can find the closest one to you here:

http://www.7-eleven.com/kem.asp

Here are some more photos I took:

http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/freezer_man.png – The freezer man!
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_buzzcola.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_comicbookguy.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/kyle_outside.png
http://www.patorjk.com/images/kwikemart/pat_chiefwiggum.png

As a side note, the Buzz cola is just generic soda, and it doesn’t taste that great. So don’t buy a huge case unless you’re doing it for the cans. Same with the Krusty O’s – they just generic fruit loops. The Squeeshies are good, you should definitely get one of those. They were out of pink donuts when we got there, but I imagine they taste like any other donut you buy with pink frosting. There were a couple of other Simpsons themed products, but those were the main ones.

It’s weird that I’m not getting much feed back on the TAAG program. Normally I would take that as a sign that people aren’t interested in it. But it’s definitely causing my bandwidth to go up and it’s causing me to get visitors from google. So I’m not sure what to make of the silence. It’s cool to finally get people from google though. I’ve almost always relied completely on word of mouth or links from other sites to get traffic for this site.

Top 6 keywords used in search engines to find this site (from the 1st of June to this posting):

For the whole month of April, the top keyword was “patorjk” (who searches for that?) and it brought in 39 visitors.

Today I modified TAAG and made it so it could work with FIGlet font files – however, I have NOT updated the version on this site. This is a pretty cool addition because it’ll let the program work with a ton of pre-existing ASCII Art fonts. After getting the app to load the files, I decided I’d implement most of the FIGlet font file parameters, which includes something called “smushing” which lets the author of the font determine the spacing between characters and how they should overlap. Me describing it probably sounds pretty boring, you can read more about it here:

http://www.jave.de/figlet/figfont.txt

Actually, that will probably be pretty boring too, unless you’re interested in developing your own ASCII Art font. Anyway, the reason I’m updating is to say I’m shooting for updating TAAG on Tuesday night. I’ll be in New York city the next 3 days (hanging out with friends), so I wont be able to work on it then, but I hope to polish off the small bit of coding I do have left on Tuesday (I’m taking the day off to rest). So if everything goes as planned, TAAG should have between 20-40 new fonts on Tuesday.

Until then, if for some reason you find yourself bored out of your mind and in need of something entertaining, check this out:

http://www.1-click.jp/

Hackers and Painters

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

One day while I was sitting in my graduate level Operating System class, bored out of my mind, the professor went on a tangent and started talking about coding styles. He mentioned a man by the name of Paul Graham and how Paul thought coding / hacking was similar to painting. This immediately caught my ear and I made note of a famous essay, entitled “Hackers and Painters”, that Paul had apparently written.

Reading Graham’s essay was like a shot in the arm. It reminded me why I was a programmer and why I went to school as a computer scientist. So many people go into computer science for the money, and so many of the people who teach it are “researchers” or theorists, I think it makes someone like me forget why they liked it in the first place. I related to that essay very well, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs as a hobby.

I’m starting to feel a little bad about always promising that stuff is coming, and then never posting anything up :P. However, this Friday, come hell or high water, I will be posting up something new. It wont be finished, but it will be usable and near completion. Here are some tidbits about it:

– It will be an online application, programmed in PHP and Javascript.
– It will mostly be for entertainment / fun, though it will have applications in Ascii Art.
– I originally had the idea back in 2000, but decided against making it because I saw it had been done. However, after thinking a bit, I decided that it’s pointless to try and make something 100% original. So I looked at the existing app and thought to myself “could I make something that was better?”, and I decided that I could so I started programming it up.
– It will be open source, but not until I’m done.

Right now I have something I could post up, but I hope to make a few updates before Friday. Tuesday I get to see Al Gore talk (he’s coming to UMBC and doing that global warming talk he does) and on Wednesday I’m seeing Spiderman. So I probably wont get a whole lot done, but even if I posted what I have now it’d still be a mostly complete application.