I just got an email from one "Nadiah J." at a Hotmail address, containing the single sentence:

May I have the username and password that goe with this email, please?

On the spectrum of social engineering attempts, I think this one actually gets a negative score. Was the sender genuinely so stupid that he or she thought it would work? Or are some people so dimwitted that such a lame attempt actually stands a chance of succeeding?

Note to self: if you're running a C IDE, two command prompts, an email client and a Web browser with ten pages open, on a 256 MB machine running Windows ME, with fewer than 40 MB free on the swap drive, don't open a 35MB graphics-laden PDF. Bad things will happen.

After hearing good things about it, I finally saw Donnie Darko.

Wow. That was a seriously screwed up, yet riveting movie. I think it's one of those movies that'll have to be watched twice just to make sense of everything. In some ways, it reminded me of Rushmore, though the characters were actually likeable, and it actually had a kind of message. It's not a typical Hollywood teen-angst film. I'm not sure actually how it should be classified. Horror? Science fiction? Comedy?

Two commentary tracks, and plenty of extras (including director's commentary on the deleted scenes) — this is a great DVD for geeks like me. I haven't listened to all of the commentary yet, just on a couple of scenes where I was curious to figure out what was actually going on. Infuriatingly, neither of the commentary tracks explained Donnie's science teacher's refusal to continue a conversation on time travel because he could lose his job. I have a suspicion why, but don't know if it's right or not.

The Web site is pretty interesting, too.

As if the incident here in Trimaris wasn't bad enough, I just learned about another one in the East Kingdom that, if true, was far worse. Even if the accusations are false, it's hardly great publicity for the SCA.

Whether they're true or not, it's clear that something needs to be done to prevent this sort of thing from happening. There are a lot of SCA parents who bring their children to an event, drop them off all day with the Minister of Children, and then forget about them for hours at a time. That's just a recipe for disaster, as the allegations in this case illustrate.

Background checks are a start. I don't think it's unreasonable to require them for all positions which entail working with children to any extensive degree. Yes, there is an expense involved, but if it prevents even one child from being molested, I believe it's worth it.

Background checks aren't a complete solution, however. Requiring a minimum of two — or, preferably, three — adults to be present at all times would help too. I'm sorry, but the idea of all-night sleepovers with only one adult present is just creepy.

Words cannot express just how disgusting and repulsive I find this situation. Yes, innocence is presumed until guilt is proven — but that the Society's regard for the safety of children is so lax that such opportunities for abuse exist is unconscionable.

Yesterday, we made sure to get in to Tampa International two hours before our flight was scheduled to leave. Thanks to the magic of electronic check-in kiosks, we were at the gate in fifteen minutes, giving us plenty of time to kill. (In one of the airport shops, we saw a frightening "interactive storyteller" toy. I Always Do What Teddy Says.) Due to weather in Cincinatti, our flight out of Tampa was delayed by two hours. I finished Fight Club and made a start on Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About before we'd even left the ground. Harrumph.

Today: Bummed around Miami University while Karen interviewed. Nice library. They do have the Early English Books series on microfilm, but it's in storage; you have to tell them what reels you want, and they'll send you an email when they've retrieved them. Bummer. Read a bit of "Wife No. 19", an autobiography of one of Brigham Young's many wives. Walked around a bit on campus and in town.

In the evening, got together with Jen of VeryBigBlog. From her writing, I imagined her to be fairly laid back, but she was quite animated and energetic. We visited "Jungle Jim's", a store with four acres of foodstuffs from all over the world. Got quite a haul: candies (including Jelly Belly candies which resembled M&Ms, but had flavored coatings), sodas (Vimto, Afri-Cola, caffeine-free Mountain Dew), a tube of German mustard, pears (which turned out to be disappointingly flavor-free), and more.

Got together with Ange and Michelle. We (and their kids) went to a children's museum. Which was not something I expected to be doing when we left for this trip, but it kept the kids occupied and gave us "adults" a chance to hang out together.

Sadly, Ange had to leave early to take her underlings out to dinner. We chatted with Michelle a little while longer, then went back to the hotel room, stopping first at Dick's Sporting Goods to see if Karen could get any double-entendre T-shirts (but they didn't have any), got some food and watched a Kevin Kline movie before turning in for the night. For some reason, spending the day in a building with five floors of running, screaming children was a bit tiring. I honestly don't know how full-time parents do it, and it cemented my conviction that I'm just not cut out to be a parent.

I've learned that my mother's parents' farm is up for sale. Nice to see some pictures of it again, even if they are small and don't really show things very well.

I've put a few of the pictures here. More to come, possibly, but these are the best of them.

Apparently, absolutely nothing of importance happened in the world today. Surely that must be the case, since the TV news is leading with a story about Tampa Bay Buccaneer Keyshawn Johnson being benched for the rest of the season.

Take a look at the White House's robots.txt file. This is the file that prevents (well-behaved) search engines and archivers from reading particular files and directories.

I wonder, why don't they want public documents about Iraq to be indexed and archived? A lot of the Iraq-related directories they're blacklisting don't even exist. That seems a bit odd to me.

Addendum: When you see files numbered sequentially, but discover that certain numbers aren't linked on the index page, it's interesting what you can find when you go looking for the missing ones.

Could we please clean up our existing messes before we start making another one? Honestly, what's wrong with some people?

I tried Enter the Matrix, the computer game which (according to the bonus materials on the Matrix Reloaded DVD) is the fourth part of the trilogy, without which viewers don't have the entire story. At Best Buy, it was $19.99 for the four-CD version, or $29.99 for the one-DVD version. Since the only real difference boils down to whether or not you want to swap discs when you install the game, I'm kind of glad I was feeling stingy.

You can play as either Niobe (Morpheus' former lover) or the Kirkegaard-quoting Ghost (her gunner aboard the Logos, who (in one of the game's only humorous moments, identifies onanism as his personal philosophy). While the two characters' storylines intersect, there are segments in which each character has different tasks to do. Unfortunately, this isn't consistent; there are large segments in which you have to perform the same tasks, even though it breaks continuity from the other character's storyline (for example, when playing as Ghost, you have to rescue Niobe from the Merovinginan; when playing as Niobe, you have to rescue Ghost). As storylines go, they're both disappointingly short. Whereas it usually takes me about a week or two to finish first-person games with storylines (Deus Ex, Medal of Honor), I got both storylines done in about a day.

The gameplay is frustratingly linear. I guess I was spoiled by Deus Ex, in which you frequently have multiple avenues by which to achieve a goal, and actions taken (or not taken) have consequences later in the game. With Enter the Matrix, you have to follow a set path (doors often stay locked until you've accomplished certain tasks, and nearly every door locks behind you, forcing you to go only in the direction the game designers intended).

Aiming — especially with sniper weapons — is another problem area. With non-sniper weapons, the game aims for you, at what it thinks you should be shooting at. Certain objects are highly explosive; it makes sense to take out several enemies by shooting these objects. Unfortunately, if there's an enemy near the object, the gun will shoot at the enemy even if you're aimed directly at the explosive object. When you use a sniper scope, aiming is erratic; the crosshairs frequently overshoot the mouse movements.

"Focus mode", the game's odd choice of terminology for what's called "bullet time" by the movie effects people, was practically unusable on my machine. Every time I entered it, my screen would alternately flash between the game and a pixelated version of my computer desktop. Since my desktop is much brighter than the game (which is horribly dark), it had the effect of obscuring the action completely. (The fix, which I discovered only after I had solved the game, is to download and install a patch from the Atari Web site, open the configuration file with a text editor, and change a setting to enable the "alternate focus" mode.)

Speaking of video, the configuration options are horribly designed. If you wish to alter brightness, contrast or gamma, you have to do so before the game begins. If you're in the middle of the game and want to change these settings, you have to exit the game completely and re-start it. Since the game only saves when you've reached particular objectives (there's no quick-save, and it doesn't offer the option to save when you exit the game), this means you have to wait until you reach a spawn point to quit, otherwise you lose some of your progress. Also, these changes frequently don't get saved to the configuration file, requiring one to either edit the configuration file by hand, or change the settings every time one runs the game. Other options can be changed within the game, but still require you to quit gameplay and return to the main menu (again, losing anything you've done since the last spawn point).

I do like the fact that health eventually regenerates, once you've gone for a specific amount of time without taking further damage. However, this is also inconsistent; in certain levels, you have a character (or, in one case, a helicopter) which you must defeat in order to progress, and your health doesn't regenerate until you've done so. Since ammunition is extremely limited, and Focus power runs out very quickly, it's almost impossible to win some of these confrontations (especially the helicopter) without enabling one or more of the cheats.

And then there are the driving segments. Control is nearly impossible; as with sniper weapons, the cars (and the Logos) respond poorly to the mouse and keyboard, apparently responding to speed of mouse movement (or duration of keypress) logarithmically. You'd think that perhaps Niobe, the best pilot in the fleet, wouldn't have so much trouble piloting a car, let alone her own ship, but for some reason they decided to make all the vehicles respond to a mere approximation of what the player asks them to do.

With the exception of the Merovingian's mansion, in which you're fighting vampires (and what might be werewolves who are also killed by wooden stakes through the heart), your opponents are limited to security guards, policemen and SWAT teams (with one or two unkillable agents thrown in just in case you get tired of killing cops). When you perform certain lengthy moves (such as choking an opponent from behind), all your other opponents stop shooting at you until the move is done. The opponents' intelligence is shockingly limited as well; if you duck behind a wall, they'll rarely come after you, preferring instead to vibrate in place until you present yourself as a target again.

And finally, the game is rife with bugs. Often, these present themselves in the cutscenes, which may play without sound or with the video going several times normal speed while the audio remains normal (or, in one particular case, without sound and in fast-forward mode). Occasionally, objects required for the completion of a level can't be picked up, and in one particularly annoying level in which you have to pilot the Logos through tight tunnels, I found myself frequently stuck (requiring a restart of the level) or somehow outside the map and unable to get back inside it (also requiring a restart). There are frequent visual errors as well. And this is with the patch applied!

So, on a scale of one to ten, I give this game a blue pill.

Oh, just one more irrelevant observation, as if this post isn't long enough already: judging from one of the live-action cutscenes, a plank of wood is a more passionate kisser than Jada Pinkett-Smith.

If this is true, it really sucks for iPod owners...

Years and years ago, a friend gave me his old electric guitar when he bought a new one. I've barely used it, and when doing an AudioEdit for a Fark contest this week ("Dies Irae" from Mozart's Requiem as a rock instrumental) I remembered why.

It's impossible to get into tune. If I tune the open strings, the notes go sharp when I fret the strings. If I tune the strings fretted in first position, not only do the open strings sound flat, but the higher frets still go sharp. When recording "Dies Irae", I had to retune the guitar for each part and avoid playing open strings. Oh, and the high E string isn't picked up as strongly as the other strings, even when I adjusted the pickup so that it was steeply diagonal in favor of high E.

So I guess I'll eventually need to get a new electric guitar if I do more projects which require the use of such an instrument. Hopefully I can find an inexpensive one that sounds good (and has a classical-width neck).