Anyhow, today I was cleaning out the Inbox for the addresses-of-questionable-utility. Note: I had my hosting company's spam filter turned on on that Inbox, and it caught zero messages. I had 2595 spam messages. I hit the Check All button. Then, I scrolled down through the list in the (probably vain) hope that if there are any real messages, I might spot them. Then, I hit the Delete button.

When the page refreshed, I had 630 more messages. I did the same for those messages. I had 21 more messages.

I have now turned off the catchall feature. I don't expect this to stop the flood control. In fact, bouncing all of the messages should take more time than filing them. And, I won't have any chance to catch the good-addresses that I didn't know I knew.

I have also resolved to switch hosting companies by the end of next week.

Isaac has a little catalog in his head where he stores every wrong that has ever been done to him.

• I: Why does that say Stee Ack House?
• P: It says Steak House. It is a restaurant that sells steak.
• I: Let's go buy some steak!
• P: No, we're not going to buy steak right now.
• I: Why not?
• P: Two reasons: first, they are closed; second, it's expensive to buy steak in a restaurant. I think we already have some at home in the fridge.
• I: One time, Grandma said she had steak in the fridge, and I trusted her. Then, she couldn't find it.

Oh, the humanity.

The second TC Lispers Meeting will be July 14th from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. It will be at the Common Roots Cafe on 26th and Lyndale.

Please check out the agenda at tclispers.org, and fill out the Are You Coming? poll over there, too.

For some reason, my All-Dish pass for Volleyball missed the first match of the US's World League season (also, against the Netherlands). I noticed the second airing of the match by chance, but the weather at the time scrogged my reception. I did manage to catch the second match, however.

A few things of note:

• Sean Rooney hit harder in the first set than I've ever seen him hit before.
• What's not to like about Patak? How did I miss seeing him in college?
• Anderson shows tons of promise and didn't seem nervous out there at all.
• I hope David Smith gets to block a whole lot more.

The subject of this post is the subject line of some spam I just got. There are two ways that I can picture home collider. I'm not so keen on a stainless steel one that will fit nicely on the kitchen counter. But, I love the image of houses zipping around a large ring at 95% the speed of light smashing into each other.

For a moment, there is a really unstable house with 9,000 square feet and 15 bathrooms. Soon, though, it decays into a studio apartment, two three bedroom bungalows, and a few negatively charged outhouses.

On a similar note, I found another house listing today with an amusing typo. This $250,000 house has 22 bedrooms. And, this is an empty lot that you could put 99 bedrooms and 99 full baths on.

Raphael loves to pull books off the shelves in the living room. Lately, he has been handing me Scientology: The Fundamentals of Thought by "L. Ron Hubbard". [all quotes there are mine]

I flipped it open yesterday. I have not tortured you all with the song that has been stuck in my head recently, but I am going to torture you with what I read in this "book":

Havingness

As there must be a playing field (see Chapter Twelve) for a game to be held, so there must be havingness. One must be able to possess.

There are millions of methods of possession in life. The obvious one becomes overlooked. If one can see a thing he can have it—if he thinks he can.

The degree to which one can live is the degree to which one can own. To own is not to label or cart away. To own is to be able to see or touch or occupy.

One loses to the degree he is forbidden to have.

But to play a game one must be able to believe he can't have.

Effect and Have

Effect and have form a pair like attention and identity.

An effect should be on or against something. Thus havingness. If one's attention never meets anything he doesn't always like it. Thus he wants objects.

Effect makes distance. Have shortens distance.

Now, because I am a nice guy, I will help you reset your brain with quotes not from "L. Ron Hubbard":

• If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college. – via Lewis Black
• The Linear and Inverse Vectors merge in Zero. – from Diuretics: The Science of Matter Over Mind.

Last night, I posted a long article on my website about How I Know I Don't Know Enough About Lisp Macros. For those who are unfamiliar with Lisp macros, you might enjoy reading the article. I spend a good deal of setup time talking about how Lisp macros kick the pants off of anything else you've heard called a macro before. For here, I will just excerpt the relevant bits for those already familiar with Lisp macros in hopes that you might give me guidance.

In the article, the main example that I work with is assuming that you want to think about your code in terms of jump tables, but you don't necessarily want to write a separate function for each item in the table. You might write some macro like this:

(defmacro do-jump-table ( choice &rest options )
  `(case ,choice
     ,@(loop for ii from 0
            for oo in options
            collecting (list ii oo))
     (otherwise (do-something-graceful))))

Then, you could use it something like this:

(do-jump-table op-code
               (write "NOOP")
               (write "SYNC")
               (when (>= +protocol-version+ 1)
                 (write "QUIT")))

Which would expand to:

(case op-code
  (0 (write "NOOP"))
  (1 (write "SYNC"))
  (2 (when (>= +protocol-version+ 1)
       (write "QUIT")))
  (otherwise (do-something-graceful)))

The do-jump-table macro we just defined expands to one statement (one lisp form): (CASE ...). There are many times when I want my macro to expand to more than one form, however. This isn't legit. I still end up wanting to do it. For example, I might think that since I'm doing things with macros, that I might want the whole (CASE ...) construct to be in the main code and just have the macro expand the different cases:

(case op-code
    (do-jump-table-cases (write "NOOP")
                         (write "SYNC")
                         (when (>= +protocol-version+ 1)
                             (write "QUIT")))
    (otherwise (do-something-especially-graceful)))

Lisp says no. I can understand why it says that. In this case, it's easy enough to work around. But, in other cases, I end up flailing.

I feel that once I understand Lisp macros more completely, I won't keep trying to jam that gorgeous, round peg into all of these square holes in my logic. Anyone have any guidance here?

Just put up a little bit of a website for the Twin Cities Lisp User’s Group at tclispers.org. Right now, it’s light on content. I don’t expect it to be particularly high-volume. It should at least start accruing slides from meetings as we get more of those under our belts.

While Google Maps rocks, GMail is less than intuitive sometimes.

I have my incoming mail sorted so the newest stuff is at the top. No big deal. Most mail programs in the last ten years have let you sort ascending or descending by date.

Now, if an email comes in that's part of a threaded discussion, the web interface to GMail puts the thread as the first thing in the mailbox, but then shows the thread with the oldest message in the thread at the top. The net result to me is that I printed out four drawings that I thought were brand spankin' new that I had really printed out two or three weeks ago.

*shrug*

Some time back, I noticed that Google Maps shows bus stops in some places. They just started showing them around my neighborhood. I clicked on one. Not only did it tell me what bus routes use that stop, it told me when the next departures are for each of those lines. Yay!

Go Google!