I constantly scan my credit card advance checks looking to borrow more money at a good price and stash it into a savings account. The offers I receive now are much worse than a year ago. I was receiving offers for 0% interest with a transaction fee cap of $75 to borrow $20k, now the offers are for 4% with a non-capped 3% transaction fee which is totally not worth it. Looks like the banks are trying to make back their subprime money in any little way they can.

A cool sci-fi weapon

Would be to shoot at someone and age them into an old man.

Tagged!

I got my ass tagged by Mary. I am now supposed to list 3 joys, 3 fears, 3 obsessions, and 3 surprising facts. I didn't originally feel like participating in this, but I've warmed to the idea.

Three joys:
1. hiking
2. the people I love (I hope you can tell who you are, or I've done a bad job!)
3. trading worthless bits of green paper for new experiences
4. and life would be a disgusting poverty without books

Three fears:
I won't list my fears because the honesty would rip a hole in the universe

Three obsessions:
1. Hiking
2. The game idea that's been with me since 2004 and won't let me rest
3. Unfortunately, women...*sigh*

Three surprising facts:
1. I used to want to be a backup dancer for someone like Usher or Janet Jackson if I wasn't in games.
2. The thought of being an outdoor Search & Rescue guy is very appealing.
3. When I was 15, I was in a fist fight with 2 18-year-old guys at the same time. I only remember 2 seconds from the fight, it was like another man took over my body when the fighting started.

The calculus of helping others

Is it better to help 100 people now, or 1000 people 5 years from now? How about 10000?

What if those people have not been born yet? We discount the value of future people to the point where we try to actively prevent their births with condoms. Once you make it out of the vagina though, you've got your free pass.

Word of the day

Homoskedasticity. I'd love to say this out loud in a meeting, unnecessarily but in the correct way so no one could fault me.

I am reading graphics papers about ocean rendering and really struggling with the math and concepts of level sets and the Navier-Stokes equations at the moment. Doing what has been over my head has been my strategy for a long while now, with computation on a grid for my aurora borealis stuff, and with figuring out how to program in general. I expect to break down the equations chunk by chunk with persistence.

Lazy online daters

Some chick on plentyoffish.com posted a profile with a nice picture, but no text, except two things she likes: sushi and horses. wtf lol? Either the laziest profile I've ever seen, or some kind of scammer.