Jaz's journal

The one unjust part of screwing with someone's confidence in you is that, as the one doing it, you've already talked yourself to a point where you don't give a flying fuck how the other will feel about it. They should be entitled to find comfort in hating your guts, but there's little comfort in hating someone who so obviously couldn't care less.

Doesn't that make it very easy.

I finally managed to sent off the proposal for my bachelor thesis with a request for comments. And that's just the proposal, not the real thing and I still managed to put this off for three long months, making it my personal procrastination record of late.

I've been repeatedly told not to take the whole project so serious, but when something is dangling in front of your head from the moment of your matriculation, you really want it to not suck. And here's the Catch-22: You may pick a safe topic that sucks or an interesting topic that might go horribly wrong and I couldn't even say which is the better choice.

If it comes back with a one-liner note saying that it's the stupidest idea ever, I think I'll just die.

Don't fuck with two-component glue.

This post was edited by Jaz on Mar 31, 2005.

When I first learned that new visitors to this site were perceiving Eliza as a real person, I asked myself if I should take her offline again. After all, I didn't want her to scare anyone away, annoyed by an unappropriate reply from a piece of software.

Today I think different. Eliza is Netalive's guardian angel that lets me sleep at night, knowing that she is bound to piss off the bottom 5% of the braindead population that's out there.

Notwithstanding a three line warning message shown in red, bold type in every message that originated from Eliza, and despite that her user profile clearly stating the nature of her existence, people keep sending her emails. Messages I receive and keep for my own pleasure.

Among these there are gems to be found such as:

plese rnd me amail about MP3

No, that really was the complete message. It must have been written by a paratrooper, nose diving into enemy territory at 200 km/h under heavy flak. There is no other way the spelling in this message could possibly be explained.

Or one of my recent favourites:

i am from thailand.can i am introduction with u?
try u visit my web.now!!! Thanks
now i am loking for an laptop. How i am get it for free???

I'd like to ask the author of the message above to contact me when he found the place where laptops are being handed out for free, because I am in dire need for one as well.

All joking aside, it is fascinating to read messages from people who seem to exist on a completely different plane of reality. The world you experience every day is nothing but a thin layer of sugar icing. Look below and you see stupidity reigning supreme.

I live in a town. In this town there is a bookstore, and in this bookstore, there is a book. Its title is Fermat's Last Theorem and it tells a story about a simple mathematical problem that has remained unsolved for centuries. This problem is not what I want to talk about today.

Everytime I came past this bookstore, I went in, retrieved the book from its shelf and read a page or two. This went on for a number of months. I thought I'd eventually buy the book, but until then I'd like the idea of having something to look forward to everytime I went downtown.

But one day I entered the bookstore and my book was no longer there. Vanished without a trace. Another book was occupying its position on the shelf. This made me very sad as I really wanted to know how the story would end.

I still visit the bookstore every time I'm in the area. Every time I walk to the shelf where I used to find my book, hoping for it to someday reappear out of nowhere, sitting on the shelf and smiling at me as if it had never gone away.

So why don't I simply head over to Amazon, order the book and finish the story?

Maybe its a secret yearning for the days when you couldn't look up the whole fucking planet at the other end of a Google search. Every day I'm helping to build this brave new world of information overkill which makes our lives so much easier, but also makes so many things so much less special. An exact copy of every item I ever deemed personally valuable to myself is for sale on eBay at this very moment. The proof that every thought I ever had has already been considered by a dozen other people is only one click away. The Internet took away the little slice of magic that was still left for everyone of us.

One day my book will be back on its shelf again. It will smile at me and I will smile back, look for the page where I left and finish the story.

Game programming is hard. It's like looking at the ten biggest problems in the universe, and then come up with an algorithm that solves them all, and can do so 30 times a second with time to spare. It's the kind of hard that makes you hide in a corner and just want to die quietly.

I think I need to cry.