Last night, my laptop was clobbered by a mana potion falling from my top bookshelf at high speed. The bottle hit the space in between the ;, p, and [ keys, under which there were no vital components, as the manufacturers had left a large empty space for a DVD drive. Unfortunately, the shock was apparently still intense enough and spread out evenly enough across the keyboard to cause damage to the motherboard. The machine hung instantly. A hard reboot successfully started up Windows, but Task Manager reported 50% CPU and memory usage even when no programs were running, and a few seconds later it hung again. Second reboot hung indefinitely, but produced alarming whirring noise, confirming initial diagnosis of hardware failure. Surgery revealed no visible damage, although the processor, bus, and RAM were all not far from the impact site. Did not attempt third reboot due to concerns about corrupting the hard disk. The Vaio is officially dead.

Fortunately, I have a six-year-old desktop computer sitting in a box in my room, which I have not touched since college, and the new motherboard and graphics card I accidentally guilt-tripped my dad into getting me as an early Christmas gift. (Love it--am immensely grateful for it--but feeling somewhat guilty, as these things don't come cheap and I've done nothing to deserve it. Also feels weird being unemployed yet having a top-of-the-line graphics card and pretty damn good mobo.) Pulled off the box the desktop case had been sitting in since college. Snapped open the case.

Did not freak out until I started breaking shit trying to get my old desktop case open. Broke shit. Started freaking out.

Broke the head of my only Phillips head screwdriver trying to unscrew the hard drive from the hard drive bay, halting my progress immediately. (Must have put the screws in too tight before I packed it up two years ago--some came out easily but the rest felt like they were fucking welded in.) Damaged laptop hard drive bay in failed attempt to reassemble laptop, producing a sharp crack that better not have been the platter shattering. (Had four years of photos on that drive, including those of my college graduation. Most not on facebook. Was going to use the desktop to transfer all that data over. Not really possible now.) Went to bed with desktop towercase open and half the screws not even out, feeling like a failure.

There is no excuse for this. This isn't '90s computer hardware, which could be installed in fifty wrong ways and would short if you looked at it funny. This hardware was designed to be idiotproof. It was designed to be easy enough for a fifty-year-old aunt at Wal-Mart to put together, and this professional engineer with a B.A. in computer science, who can identify the function of half the chips on the motherboard and has a vague understanding of how they work and why they're put where they are, fatfingers it into a wreck.

No wonder I can't get a job.

It's one thing to fuck up computer hardware because you did something to the electronicky bits--desktop computer parts can be sensitive, and all it takes is one accident with a refrigerator magnet, one slip with the screwdriver, one rough bump in the moving van, to damage something beyond repair. It's another to cause failures in the more superficial parts of the hardware. Like bending a pin too far, or squashing a USB plug concave, or leaving a screw in too tight. Those problems seem so easy to fix! All the expensive, delicate stuff is in perfect working order! All you have to do is get a pair of tweezers and bend that pin back the right way, twist the plastic catch so the RAM snaps back into the cradle, or put a little more torque into your screwdriver. And yet it's never that easy.

Those, IMO, are the most frustrating hardware failures of all, and the hardest to accept when they're severe enough that you have to junk an otherwise perfectly good piece of kit. Like having to take a newly completed nuclear power plant apart because the button that injects the fuel rods is stuck.

That laptop was my life for two years, you know. It was great to be away from the computer for a while, but...there really isn't much I can do, usefully, without it. It's not a matter of technological dependence, it's a matter of vocation. You can't look for programming work--hell, good luck finding writing work--without a computer. Sure, I can do without Facebook apps or stupid flash games or even LiveJournal. But I can't write code samples without a computer. I can't send resumes, I can't know when to go to the park for volunteer projects, I can't get in touch with potential employers, I can't register for GDC (warning! a huge battle ship "volunteer registration deadline" is approaching fast!!), I can't even look for free concerts and accept invitations to my friends' parties and have any semblance of a social life at all...I guess I could, for a while at least, make some progress on "Null String" (thank God I keep regular backups of my progress on my webspace, and printed out a copy recently) but it'd be really slow doing everything by hand and I wouldn't be able to send it to any publications. I couldn't even find a hardware store to buy a new Phillips head screwdriver without calling Lisa for a Google Maps logistics check. Nearly everything I needed to get out of this shitty place in life was trapped in this little square rectangle, God knows I've tried elsewhere and had no luck, and now that rectangle was sitting inert and lifeless in front of me, a victim of my own carelessness, getting progressively more broken the more I tried to fix it.

I mean, I guess it could be worse. I could have ditched this old desktop years ago, instead of inexplicably going through great pains to transport it every time I moved. I could be clean out of money instead of on my way there in a matter of months. I could have not gotten all this new hardware from my dad recently, and be unable to afford to replace my dead laptop, and be doubly mad at myself for fucking up my old motherboard. And then I would be totally and completely fucked, by my own hand, and deservedly hating myself for it.

That this situation is one bizarre streak of luck short of being exactly the situation I am in just makes me more nervous. If I wasn't a computer person I could just throw up my hands and say, "I guess I'm just no good at computers," but if that's true then what the hell have I been doing for the past sixteen years.

I keep thinking about Benny, the high schooler I met in Washington Heights who loved computers and wanted to be a professional programmer with all his heart, yet didn't even know what a compiler was, because he lived in a neighborhood where no one had anything but donated Pentium IIs from ten years ago and he was the local computer expert. I ended up teaching him introductory C++ over AIM, and I was only able to do this because I started when I was 16 and I actually remember how to set up Borland compilers from the late '90s. (GNU snarkers: try explaining Linux to a contemporary kid who has only seen operating systems newer than Windows 95 on library computers. The software may be free but the background necessary to use it isn't. And yes, I did eventually point him in enough of the right direction to get him downloading and installing Ubuntu himself.) The kid was so dedicated and curious--he kept sending me AIM messages with these little C++ calculator programs he was so proud of, and kept asking me about config files and pipes and input/output streams. He was so desperately in need of a modern machine, and it was totally beyond his means.

We talk about computers as if they were this totally unnecessary privilege, this thing we can cast off in a dramatic gesture of Luddite anti-consumerist personal liberation (no small number of talented, aging writers have publicly entertained fantasies of doing this), and for most people I guess it's true. But if you're a professional coder--worse, if you're trying to get hired as a professional coder--it's like trying to be a seventeenth century American farmer without a horse. Even if you can afford a new one, how are you even going to get to the market to buy it? Oh hey, I could just get new parts for cheap from eB...oh.

My, how times have changed. I am just barely old enough to have lived through a time in which having a computer in your home was a new, ridiculous, absurd novelty. Now, just a couple decades later, if anyone ever asks me, "Do you really need to spend all that money on a new computer?" I am going to ask them, "I don't know. Do you really need to spend all that money on water and gas?"

Benny's in community college now. He's frustrated because they haven't even taught him up to the level that he read up himself. The guy loves coding and the art of solving problems in a way that I never could; he's the most curious and dedicated programmer I've ever met. Four years from now he should be in a polo shirt waving a laser pointer at a whiteboard in front of a dozen boxed-wine-drunk Google engineers at MIT. Instead, chances are he'll be stuck repairing printers in a Best Buy Geek Squad somewhere pinching pennies for a Stroustrup. Which is not a bad place to be...if you're in high school.

Here I am, trying to console myself over a computer I initially didn't need, and now can't live without. A metal rectangle. A fancy one, but a metal rectangle, that I had somehow invested all my hopes and dreams in like a reverse Pandora's box. One that my dad bought for me in my junior year of college, and spent far more money on than he should have, not because I needed one, but because he had money and he thought my desktop was getting old and I was in no position to complain. Fuck it, I should have given my old desktop to Benny, back when it was still almost recent. What did I need with two computers, one of them now aged to the point of impracticality and the other one now destroyed. I should be glad I had a safety net because if I had to spend a big chunk on my savings on getting an entirely new machine I'd be totally screwed, but instead I just feel kind of guilty. I used my Vaio so long and cared for it so well it took a freak accident to destroy it. And my desktop sat in a box.

It's a little shocking, even to me, that I let my new graphics card and motherboard just sit there unopened in a duffel bag since late October. I remember when I used to get so excited about getting shiny new computer hardware--like a little kid at Christmas, all tearing open the box and smelling the glossiness of the manuals, and incredulous about this amazing new plaything that was going to be a piece of my life and let me do all sorts of cool new things. There was a time when I would have installed all this new hardware the moment I got it instead of only doing it two months later because I had to. There's no excitement anymore to the shopping and the installing and the unboxing, just a vague feeling of resentment. Does this mean I'm not a geek anymore?

Anyway, one day later, I am $200 short, with a new case, DVD drive, and power supply, and a cheap but sturdy set of screwdrivers, and posting this on LJ. On my old machine, mind you. Thought I'd see if the old piece of junk was still running after being moved around from apartment to apartment after two years and butterfingered half to death with a magnetic-tipped Phillips screwdriver head. Surprisingly, despite all the superficial damage, everything is working fine, just as I left it in 2007--old desktop wallpaper, old bookmarks, Windows XP, Winamp playlist still open to an Ali Project song I was listening to on my last day of college. All the hardware is ancient (I bought this desktop almost six years ago), and might as well be fucking welded to the case because the Phillips screws have been worn from Xs into Os, but it's otherwise in good working order. It will be a good backup machine, maybe an FTP server or something to do non-programming computer stuff on, or at worst some kit to pawn off on eBay if my cash reserves run low before I find work. (Goodness knows if it comes to that I'll probably sell my newer hardware first, piece by piece.) But the new machine is coming along nicely, and it will be more powerful and open up far more opportunities (pixel shaders! DirectX 10! OpenGL test apps not running at a crawl!) than my dead Vaio ever could. It's such a stupid and absurd privilege that thanks to my dad's generosity I can build a new computer at a time when I have no job--especially since I have another one that works just fine, even if it's obsolete and a loud footstep short of falling to pieces. And yet, it beats trying to get to Carnegie Hall without as much as a violin to my name. Which is exactly what an aspiring game programmer without a computer is.

If you don't hear from me in the next few days, I am sitting on the floor of my room, having fucked up with the screwdriver yet again, and am trying to choose between drinking and having steady hands--a choice that grows ever more difficult as the night grows long.

So, yeah. All those Japan jokes I've made over the past few years?

I guess I had it coming: Taiwan has beaten out Japan with the lowest fertility rate in the world, at 1.07 children born per woman. (Lots of pretty charts, if you're interested. Or here, although Wikipedia puts Singapore lower.) That doesn't really scare me. Nothing wrong with small families, and there are still too many people anyway.

Less publicized projections of zero population growth in Taiwan by 2025, on the other hand...

This is going to bring about a whole slew of social problems over there: class conflict, ethnic tensions over immigration (already a growing problem), economic stagnation, a growing homeless elderly population, and possibly, in the long run, even extinction. We laugh at Japan for having negative population growth now, but it's not beyond reason that Taiwan will soon follow suit.

So...clearly, something has to be done.

...

*awkward*

No, in all seriousness, Taiwan might go to hell, but Taiwanese-Americans like me are doing fine. There are currently 23,046,177 people in Taiwan as of this year's census. There are an estimated 500,000 Taiwanese people currently living in the United States (exact numbers are hard to come by as identifying as "Taiwanese" is politically controversial, and the U.S. Census Bureau tries not to piss off Chinese-Americans of mainland descent). The U.S. annual population growth rate is 1.01%, which is expected to stay stable for the next fifteen years, with some U.S. Census Bureau sources (damn it I hate their website) hinting that the growth rate for Asian/Pacific Islanders may actually be much higher than the national average. So it might even be possible that there will be more second- and third-generation Taiwanese-Americans than Taiwanese people at some point.

At that point, the Taiwanese diaspora would be in the perfect position to invade and conquer Taiwan.

反攻小陸? ^_^

(Side note from finding this data: Apparently there are only 4,272 Taiwanese people living in all of New York City, out of a total population of 8 million. There are more people living in the small Midwestern college town of Oberlin, OH--not counting students--than there are Taiwanese people in all of New York State. Which explains why, me aside, they all seem to know each other. Not so much a diaspora community as much as a potluck.)

_{also, corruption Ma Ying-jeou KMT corporate jet motorcade partisanship blah blah blah I don't give a fuck.}

So, I spent the whole week or so dreading having to go to the Glamis sand dunes with Jessie and her family... i was only there like a day and a half.

The funny part is that since the moment I got home, the only place I've felt like I've wanted to be is back there with her and her family.

Strange how that works out....

Only compelling article I've ever read in Wired: Writer Evan Ratliff abandons his previous life, starts a new one, offers $5000 to anyone who can find him.

This is the ballsiest move I've seen a journalist make since Stephen Colbert talking smack to power at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2006. It's one thing to humiliate the most powerful men in the world right in front of them, it's another to invite every cyberstalker on the Internet to collect a $5000 bounty on your own head. You can hide from the government, but you can't hide from everyone. Not in this ultra-connected, instant-communication era. Not in the age of Chinese Internet lynch mobs leaving buckets of shit outside the Qingdao apartment of the parents of a Chinese exchange student attempting to mediate between pro-Tibet and anti-Tibet demonstrators in North Carolina, or 4chan vigilantes paying unsolicited visits to the homes of Wikipedia editors and inviting people to harass the friends, families, employers, and teachers of hackers, fetishists, porn stars, and anyone who doesn't pay Anonymous enough respect.

There is no privacy.

There is no escape.

There is no such thing as starting over.

It's funny how in the 1980s and 1990s people celebrated the anonymity of the Internet as our single greatest weapon against Big Brother, and now, in the 2000s, in an age where people put all their personal information on Facebook and broadcast their location live on Twitter, being tracked without their knowledge by GPS on their cell phones (how do you think 911 dispatchers know how to find you in an accident even when your phone is turned off?) and IP records on every instant message you send, every website you visit, every time you log in to check your bank statement or read your email. The public has become exactly what it feared of the government. None of this legal fiction about "public figures," now, anymore. On the Internet there is no such thing as a public figure. Or a privacy law, or a restraining order. Even the careful and the paranoid leave enough traces for anyone with Google to find real names, phone numbers, social security numbers, home addresses, work addresses, credit cards, screen names, email addresses, email passwords, driver's license registrations, satellite images of their homes, and those of friends and next of kin. I'm not exaggerating--I've done this sort of thing before. It's not like a '80s movie where it takes an awful lot of tech-savvy--the folks who do this are grandmas and bored teenagers. (I did it as a teenager!) Most of it isn't even illegal--and what the Internet lacks in rights of search and seizure it makes up for in sheer manpower.

Big Brother--ha. All this time we worried it'd be the communists, or the government. No, Big Brother is not the government. Big Brother is not the media. Big Brother is, to put it succinctly, you and me.

So it's strangely validating to see this one guy wipe himself off the Internet, anonymize his IP address, destroy his personal records, hop onto a bus to nowhere under an assumed name, and moon the Internet with "Come and get me, fuckers!" magic-markered on his ass as the bus zooms off into the desert. The guy prepared for months in advance; he knew all the tricks. He'd done plenty of research from when he'd written about it before. Left false tracks, took the battery out of his cell, logged in to the Internet via proxies, used gift cards, altered his appearance, infiltrated and misled his pursuers online in their private Twitter groups and IRC channels, told not a soul. His account of the experience is harrowing--the paranoia, dwindling financial resources, and soul-crushing loneliness became just as dangerous to him as the threat of discovery. Starting anew, making new friends, trying to construct a new identity--all of those efforts threatened to compromise his location. And yet, there was no way he could go without them.

He lived for twenty-five days as a fugitive before the Internet curb-stomped his dick.

In the end, one thousand minds are better than one. You can throw them off the scent for a while, but in the end, if you are an alleged traitor, a rebel, an outcast, or any other class of undesirable, the Internet lynch mob will get you. It does not matter if the charges are fabricated--all it takes to libel someone on the Internet is reasonable suspicion. And once the hunt begins, you are not safe anywhere.

Anywhere.

I couldn't sleep last night, so I sat up in bed with my Nintendo DS and made this goofy little song in NitroTracker. It is my first mod track ever! I am excited. (You can download the original XM here if you prefer.)

Most of the samples and instruments are cribbed from cybernitro.xm by atomtwist, since I was just dicking around and didn't have a sample library on hand. I later had to use Schism Tracker to lower the pitch of several instruments by about an octave so that they wouldn't sound weird on a pair of normal computer speakers, but aside from that the song was entirely composed on my DS. Yay for insane yet oddly practical homebrew software!

And yes, that last sample was recorded by me with the DS microphone.

High school peeps: Does it surprise anyone that Victor Lin became a U.S. Marine?

Dude, the clown-with-a-heart-of-gold personality, the mischeviousness, the love of approval, the parkour, the Counter-Strike obsession, the weird stunts during P.E.--Vic was virtually born for the job. (The shooting people part aside.) The international upbringing apparently is no longer an issue--I mean, he has a huge tattoo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima across his back; there's no doubting that he has embraced his new American heritage.

I just at Facebook pictures of his 2008 tour of duty in Iraq, and he makes war look almost fun.

Unlike, you know, this.



(Yes, that is authentic Iraq War footage.)

God bless you, Vic. I may not support the politics behind the war, but as a friend, an NEHSer, and a New Yorker I support the risks you've taken and the sacrifices you've made to make sure the terrorists stay on the other side of the pond. All the teachers, administrators, and Experimental Department disciplinarians who thought you would never amount to anything can suck my dick.

Tonight I'd like to talk a little about MUDs, the text-only precursor to MMOs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft.

( short version: go to your command line or 'run...' box and type 'telnet darkwind.org 3000' )