Apparently one of our friendly (or not so friendly) neighborhood squirrels decided that my jack o' lantern wasn't quite finished. One day after we put it on our porch, i come home to find Veronica giggling uncontrollably. The little bastard chewed off my pumpkin's fangs! My evil visage looks like he's lost his dentures. The squirrels are no longer my friends.

By the way, happy Halloween!

kings and human beings standing in the way ignite the castle towers, then the hotel, make them pay naked on the inside, they're outside looking in seems a shame to spoil a game, but i know it aint the same it's a slow confetti western playing in my head oh waste my time, don't put a fire upon the bed just pretend we never met

Unofficial top five recent artists (until i can figure out how to get at the inner workings of iTunes, it's going to remain unofficial):

1.	South
	I seem to be perpetually revisiting With The Tides, and i am perpetually realizing what a brilliant album it is. Moreover, i think the Groove Decoration mix of "Dub Remedies" from the Constantly Burning ep is my favorite song of the last six months ... i find myself listening to it over and over. I just downloaded their first album From Here On In today, and i'm expecting more great stuff.
2.	Catherine Wheel
	Keep seeming to find myself lost somewhere in "Ursa Major Space Station" or "Strange Fruit" from Chrome.
3.	Stereolab
	The sheer volume of great music produced by these guys is staggering. You could spend hours listening to Refried Ectoplasm, Switched On, and Aluminum Tunes, and those are just the compilations!
4.	New Order
	A friend made me a copy of the bonus disc that came with a limited number of the US copies of the Retro box set. "Such A Good Thing" is one of my new NO favorites.
5.	The Boxer Rebellion
	I only have two of their songs, "Watermelon" and "Palisade", but they're being played over and over.

SSX 3 is so friggin huge it's almost ridiculous. You snowboard down a number of courses on a single mountain, with three different peaks. Certain events take you through mutliple courses, and others take you into the backcountry where you can almost go anywhere. When not entered in specific events, you can "free ride", where you can hunt for cash, goodies, or bonus challenges littered around the mountain. It's almost inconceivable that they fit all this on a single disc. Viewtiful Joe is a great game as well. I've now obtained all three of Joe's viewtiful powers: slow mo, mach speed, and zoom. When reading about this game i was a bit perplexed as to why these elements were so interesting, but in action they work great. They turn an otherwise ho hum platformer into a gaming landmark. The cel-shaded visuals are awesome too.

Cudicini
Johnson	Terry	Gallas	Bridge
Makelele
Veron		Lampard
Duff
Crespo		Hasselbaink

As i've moved on (at least temporarily) from Winning Eleven 6 International, i have no Master League squad news. Instead, i'll throw out the squad i would field if i were in Claudio Ranieri's shoes as Chelsea manager. With this formation starting regularly, Mutu, Grønkjaer, and Desailly coming off the bench, and a modest rotation system, we could be brilliant. Duff and Lampard particularly have shown in recent weeks that they have hit their stride. What needs to stop immediately is this bulls*%t about having one squad for the Champions League, one for the Premiership, and i imagine soon one for the FA Cup. The aforementioned Lampard and Duff have proved they are the spark plugs to get this team cracking, and deserve to play regularly, even in the Champions League where it seems Ranieri seems to favor the players with previous experience in Europe. If anything, the gutsy performance by those two against Lazio should dispel that line of reasoning.

Veronica and i carved pumpkins last week ... well, i did. Veronica's pumpkin is still sitting in its virgin state on our kitchen table. She did me the favor of emptying the guts from my pumpkin, since that smell makes me gag. I then carved out a nice malicious face. The pumpkin guts then proceeded down our sink drain and caused a pretty hefty clog, which then caused the p-trap under the sink to start leaking. We had to call our landlord to come out and fix it. I knew this pumpkin was evil ...

Good things have continued on into the rest of my week. Veronica's website is shaping up nicely. It puts mine to shame. Hrm ... may have to do something about that. I must admit that my Photoshop skills were culled in a version of the program that didn't utilize layers, and i'm having a rough time retraining myself to do things in terms of multiple layers. But i'm managing.

As we're beginning to emerge from our cocoon of debt, Veronica decided to swing by the mall and pick me up a new video game. I had expressed a primary interest in SSX 3, and offered Viewtiful Joe for the GameCube as a backup. That evening i found a shiny new copy of VJ waiting for me on the coffee table. I gave it a try, but several factors dulled my enjoyment. The first was that the voice track kept dropping out for some reason. During the opening scene, you'd hear the GameCube access the disc furiously for a second or two, then no more speech. After employing the old NES solution (blow on everything and try again), the problem seemed to go away. However, i wasn't digging the side-scrolling beat-em-up so much and quickly dropped it in favor of old faithful Winning Eleven 6 International. Still jonesing for some snowboarding action, i talked Veronica into attempting the return the game as faulty software and exchange it for SSX.

However, most stores have rather strict policies on what you can do with a game once you've opened it. Target let Veronica swap VJ for another copy, but no exchanges. We then tried exchanging the new, unopened copy at Electronics Boutique and Toys R' Us, claiming it was a gift, we already had one, and we didn't have a receipt. No dice ... those suspicious retailers won't do anything with video games without a receipt. Finally i decided to throw caution to the wind and just buy SSX 3, and keep VJ as well.

SSX 3 is badass. No surprise there. EA Sports Big has taken the joy that was SSX Tricky and made it bigger, more complex, and more challenging. Little things like having to hit a button repeatedly to regain your balance after bailing really add to the gameplay. Also, whereas in Tricky you could pretty easily max out your trick meter and start busting "Uber trick" after Uber trick, in SSX 3 you have to really work to achieve that level, and then work some more to stay there. No pushing your opponents around anymore, don't know how i feel about that losing that guilty pleasure.

After jetting down the mountain a few times, i decided to give VJ another shot. I again yawned through the first 10 minutes as you beat up a few robots as ordinary Joe, then meet your hero Captain Blue who bestows the power to become Viewtiful. With this power comes special skills, the first of which is the ability to slow down time. This is where things pick up. You begin to notice that the martial arts combos are looking pretty sweet, especially when you slow things down and watch a punch really clock your opponent. Within another ten minutes i was thanking my lucky stars i wasn't successful in returning this bad boy. At first glance it's easy to dismiss as a run-of-the-mill, Mega Man-esque action game, but with a little time you can't help but get addicted.

Also, now that my 3D geometry problem has been solved, my image display and analysis program is evolving rapidly. There remains a host of issues to be addressed, but having put the headache of 3D ROIs intersecting the view plane to rest, i'm cheerfully optimistic.

Veronica and i hit the town last Friday evening for sushi with Danny followed by Mark Gardener, Goldrush, and The Stratford 4 at Bottom of the Hill. We'd witnessed a f$@#ing brilliant acoustic set by Mark at the Middle East in Cambridge, and i was looking forward to seeing what he could do with a backing band (in the form of Gold Rush). Locals the Stratford 4 got things going. I really like their sophomore album Love & Distortion, and i had never seen them live so i was eager. Eager enough to arrive at the designated start time of a show, for a change. They were okay. Their songs are very nice, but seem to fall into a pattern after you've heard four or five. Also, they don't seem to have figured out how to orchestrate swells of feedback amongst themselves, producing a cacophonous drone rather than a song-ending climax. The members of Gold Rush, clad in outfits from casual to western wear to those awful hippie-esque blouse-like tops, then took the stage. I'd never heard them before, but they played some good country-tinged pop and rock songs. At long last (my feet just can't take four hour shows anymore), Mark came out. He played "See What You Get", "From Time To Time", and "Chrome Waves" on his own (three of my favorite songs from his acoustic set, luckily). Two Gold Rushers then joined him for a few more songs, including a version of "Vapour Trail" featuring the closing violin piece and Mark's debut solo single "Magdalen Sky" including the backing trumpet. Finally, the rest of GR emerged and Mark launched into full-fledged renditions of both new songs and Ride classics. The ones i remember: "In A Different Place", "Dreams Burn Down", "Snow in Mexico", "Where Did You Go", and a new song, "You're Always Out Of Reach" that sounded surprisingly horrible. A great show, one that got me excited about the prospect of Mark's new material. I picked up the 3 song tour ep that includes "Snow in Mexico" and a new version of "Dreams Burn Down", it's fab.

My Winning Eleven 6 International Master League squad has shifted to a past-meets-present all-star list: defenders Frank Rijkaard, Alessandro Nesta, Roberto Carlos, and Bixente Lizarazu, midfielders Edgar Davids, Francesco Totti, David Beckham, and the incredible Pele, and Argentinian strike team Diego Maradona and Hernon Crespo. We have yet to score less than 3 goals in a game. Veronica has taken it upon herself to buy me a new video game so i'll stop annoying her with WE6I every chance i get.

Over the weekend Veronica and i had my parents over, and had a great dinner at a Chinese place in downtown San Mateo, Little Sichuan. My dad informed me that Windows does have a number of inherent security flaws because of the way it was designed (security was apparently an afterthought). So my question about vulnerability versus popularity was off the mark. He was kind enough to have a look at our sputtering cable connection, and help me replace Veronica's broken headlight. Sunday however didn't go as well ... i got in one of my "cannot leave the computer" moods, trying to design Veronica's new web site. Let me tell you, sitting in front of the computer in your pajamas for six straight hours doesn't give you the best disposition.

That bad mood was exacerbated by a string of annoyances Monday and Tuesday, ranging from the trifling to the "put your fist through the wall" variety. The pinnacle was an unplanned four hour excursion to and from Sacramento. On the programming front, for the fourth or fifth time i had pronounced my geometry problem solved, then ran into a previously unforeseen complication requiring a complete rethinking of the issue.

At 11:45am this morning i eagerly logged onto Soccernet and pulled up the live commentary for the Chelsea/Lazio Champions League showdown at Stamford Bridge. Still smarting from successive losses to Besiktas and arch-foes Arsenal (we've played them fifteen times now without besting them), we needed this pick-me-up badly. After dominating the first half hour of play, my mood submarined as we got caught off-guard by a Simone Inzaghi header and found ourselves down 1-nil. Great ... just ruin my whole week, you good-for-nothing bastards.

But wait, Frank Lampard equalizes fifteen minutes into the second half! I was pumping my fist in my office, not caring if anyone strolling past my window may have thought i was a raving lunatic. And ten minutes later, Adrian Mutu latches onto a rebound of his own shot to put us in front, 2-1!!! At that point i was out of my chair. The final 25 minutes were tense, but in the end our Champions League adventure got back on track with a 2-1 win, putting us atop our qualifying group. This team will be the death of me, but if they can provide moments like these every now and then, it'll be worth it.

Meanwhile, i managed to definitively solve my geometry problem. Now there's just the simple matter of optimizing it for speed. Also, my paycheck today was fatter than usual by $600 to account for extra taxes that were erroneously deducted from a previous paycheck.

Hey, when it rains, it pours.

I'm giving the newly released iTunes for Windows a spin this morning. Not bad. Seems a little more functional than the heaping pile of garbage i remember fighting with on Veronica's eMac. However, the custom Perl scripts i've written for tracking my Winamp usage have now been rendered effectively useless, so there may be an interim while i try to get everything up to speed.

I'm a little taken aback at the radically different public appraisals of essentially identical technocrats Bill Gates (evil monopolist) and Steve Jobs (ambitious visionary).

And while i'm on this topic, let me voice this question: do the security problems of Windows really outnumber those of Mac OS, or are there just more hackers trying to crack Windows because it controls 90% of the OS market (particularly in foreign countries, where all these virus brewers seem to pop up)? If you're an aspiring hacker trying to have the largest possible effect on world computing, isn't it logical that you would try to penetrate the most popular platform? And finally, since no one is trying to crack Mac OS, is that proof that it is secure? Of course not!

One of the problems with this whole Mac vs. PC debate is that usage biases are inevitably argued in the same breath as technology. Do Apple users really like Macs because they are technically superior, or because they are more comfortable with them? Being a PC user, i can say that i tend to shy away from Macs basically because i don't want to take the time to learn a new interface. Not just the OS, but all the accompanying software as well. No task so far has arisen for me that has been a total headache on a PC and easy as pie on a Mac. So why switch? And i'm sure the reverse situation is true for many Mac users.

I use a PC. I don't hurt anybody. Get your propaganda away from me.

Does anybody still give a s*$t about Friends? Cynical old me definitely doesn't. I consider it a crime against nature that Interpol's "Untitled" served as the soundtrack for Rachel's "Joey or Ross?" decision. Note to NBC: IT'S NOT FUNNY ANYMORE!!!

Just wanted to report that i've figured out the problem for the case where the intersection of the plane with the volume produces a cross section with only one region. It's working nicely in my 3D volume viewer (the until now unmentioned cause of all these headaches). I'm now trying to sort out how to separate multi-region cross sections. Having made some significant progress, i'm proceeding with renewed confidence.

In news that may be of more interest to those of you not fascinated by mathematics, i'm on a neo-shoegazing kick today. I downloaded a few tracks by Alan McGee's latest charges The Boxer Rebellion. "Watermelon" and "Palisade" are simply stunning ... hopefully they'll spit out an album soon. Americans Helen Stellar have a few interesting songs also, particularly "Flutterby". Maybe they'll fulfill the promise made by PETE before they disintegrated.

I've spent the last two weeks trying to solve what is on the surface a relatively straightforward problem in 3D geometry. Maybe writing a little discourse on it will help me get things straight. Or maybe someone will read this and tell me this problem has been solved ages ago. Either way, let's go.

Say you've got a set of 2D vertices defining a region. The vertices are numbered 1 through N, giving the order in which you connect them to draw the region's outline. So far, no problem.

Now let's extend our region in the third dimension, giving it thickness. So now we've got TWO sets of identical vertices, offset along the vertical axis by the thickness of the region. All's still good.

Here's where things begin to get interesting. Now let's say you wanted to slice this 3D region with some plane and draw the cross section. Since the plane may slice between vertices, you have to look for intersections of the links joining the vertices, both the links within the upper and lower regions and the links between them, with the plane. This still is a relatively easy thing to do. So when you finish this, you've now got a set of M intersection points lying within the plane. Now you want to connect these points and draw your cross section. But in what order do you connect them? At first glance it seems relatively simple, but i can't seem to find a straightforward solution, either analytic or algorithmic, to this question. You have three types of intersections: intersections between the upper vertices, intersections between the upper and lower vertices, and intersections between the lower vertices. There should be some way to figure out, based on the connectivity of the original regions, the order in which the intersections are laid out.

This little sample case is just the tip of the iceberg though. What if your plane cuts a single region into two separate cross sections? For example, slicing a donut? You now have to figure out how to connect the intersections, and how to separate them into individual regions!

My common sense is telling me this is a problem that the graphics community must have solved long ago, but i can't find anything about it online. It's a subtly different question than your typical ray-tracing engine deals with, so it may not have been figured out. Or it has, but it's a proprietary algorithm that isn't freely distributed. At any rate, somebody help me! This is driving me nuts!

Seem to be falling into a regular weekly posting. I'll try to up the frequency.

Yesterday my beloved Chelsea were only able to manage a nil-nil draw against Birmingham City despite dominating the last 45 minutes and peppering City's goal with shots. However, that solitary point earned puts us top of the table, ahead of Arsenal on goal difference. With a showdown at Highbury on Saturday. Game on!

Current Winning Eleven 6 International squad: defenders Roberto Carlos, Lillian Thuram, Frank Rijkaard, and Marcel Desailly, midfielders Michael Ballack, Luis Figo, Harry Kewell, and Francesco Totti, and strikers Nuno Gomes and Hernan Crespo. I have got to stop playing this game.

Michael and i met up at the Edinburgh Castle last Friday evening for a few pints and a nice greasy newspaper full of fish and chips. We then picked up Victoria at BART and headed over to J-Town and the Fillmore to catch Paul Weller. We had a ticket for Veronica as well, but after expressing her desire to go a few weeks ago, she finally realized on Wednesday or Thursday: "Wait a minute ... i HATE Paul Weller!" Too bad for her, he was amazing. He played an acoustic set with just one accompanying guitarist, but created an awesome atmosphere with just a 12 string and a few simple effects. I particularly remember a few songs from his latest album Illumination, "He's The Keeper" from Heliocentric, and The Jam greats "English Rose", "Town Called Malice", and "That's Entertainment". Mike and i also managed to run into the majority of the old mod crowd, including Carlos and, surprise of surprises, Susan.

On Saturday i took Veronica to Stanford so she could take her business midterm online using my office connection. Instead of having to rely on our home connection and Comcast, which seems to be out about 25% of the time. We had cafeteria food for lunch, then headed home and bought tix online to see Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation. An excellent excellent movie with an excellent excellent excellent soundtrack. I came away with an existentialist slant on the film. I can't remember the last movie i saw where i was hanging on every movement and facial expression of the characters.

We met up with my mom for dinner on Sunday on Burlingame Ave., then picked up some goodies at Copenhagen Bakery and had a nice dessert at my auntie's. On Monday we finally got around to watching our DVD of Frida. Not knowing anything about Frida Kahlo, i was a little surprised at the amount of time the film spent focusing on Diego Rivera. But a good flick nonetheless. I couldn't get Salma Hayek's joking Oscar campaigining from SNL out of my head.

The Joe Schmo Show is friggin hilarious. At last, a reality show that is openly fixed, unlike all the other reality shows that are privately fixed. And it takes this opportunity to mock the ridiculous crap that happens on all these shows. The eviction ceremonies, the stupid challenges ... Joe Schmo extrapolates them to their logical end and with great comic effect. But they stole one of my ideas! Granted, mine was sumo wrestler poop and theirs was dog doodoo, but c'mon!

And, of course, last week's top ten:

Only 122 songs played this week, so these statistics don't have a very high degree of confidence. Gimme a break, i was in Houston for 3 days.

Every now and then i forget it, but Billy Bragg is f#@*ing brilliant. Good words to remember given that today California is voting to recall a governor on what amounts to a well-funded and ill-conceived whim.

The weekend before last i attended my third wedding of the summer, this one for high school chum Joe and his bride Cindy. I met Joe on the first day of 7th grade when i was late for science class (being the logical person that i am, i assumed that since the day is six periods long, lunch must be after third period). I took the only seat left, and ended up at a lab table with Joe, Justin, and Nishay, three of my best friends throughout high school. Joe got married at the Palmdale Estates in Fremont, where my sister will be wedded next summer. So i was not just a casual observer, i was also doing some reconnaissance for my mother. It was a nice garden service, including a minister who apparently wasn't used to being mic'ed as his whispered instructions to the bridal party could be heard even by those of us in the last row. The reception was a lot of fun as well. The MC altered the typical "clink the glasses to see the bride and groom kiss" so that whenever glasses were clinked, the couple picked another couple from the audience to kiss, and then the newlyweds had to duplicate their actions. That became very interesting. All in all, a final summer chance to see good old friends like Clement, Julie, Joe, Sung, George, Colleen, and Iqbal.

My time in Houston last week was fairly enjoyable, including several nice meals courtesy of Varian and a day at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center getting advice on how to run a Radiation Oncology PET/CT operation without losing money hand over fist. I was jonesing for some down-home Texas bbq but that didn't pan out. My sinuses didn't react so well to spending the night with the air conditioning on, so i've spent the last few days getting over an annoying bout of congestion.

It's been a dismal week in my sporting life. Chelsea got spanked in the Champions League, losing 2-nil at home to Turks Besiktas, but then managed to eke yet another unconvincing win at Middlesbrough, saving me from the taunts of Matthew. The Giants blew an extra inning lead in game 3 against the Marlins, and proceeded to lose the series. Shades of game 6 of the 2002 World Series? And the A's ... oh geez, the A's ... can't win a playoff series to save their lives. Not even with a 2 game lead against hapless Boston. Meanwhile in the NFL, the Niners managed to avoid an embarrassing loss to former coach Steve Marriucci and the Detroit Lions, but the Raiders continued to demonstrate that they stink. Ain't no two ways about it, they're crap.

Current Winning Eleven 6 International Chelsea Master League squad: central defenders Frank Rijkaard and Marcel Desailly, wing backs Lillian Thuram and Roberto Carlos, defensive midfielder Emmanuel Petit, wingers Tijani Babangida and newest signing Michael Ballack, offensive midfielder Luis Figo, and strikers Emmanuel Olisadebe and Nuno Gomes. We're kicking some serious butt. So much so i can afford to leave JFH and scoring-machine-turned-boring-machine Juninho on the bench. If only winning trophies in real life were so simple.

I have to admit i am nothing short of horrified by the news swirling about the London gang rape allegedly committed by a group of eight Premiership footballers. My friends know of my rape phobia well, an inability to watch scenes of rape, arising from childhood traumas watching Sudden Impact and A Clockwork Orange. If the story is true, there are some sick f&$#ers in the Premiership. Worse yet, the supposed orchestrator is rumored to be a Chelsea man. Disgusting. If it's true, i don't think i'll ever be able to support him again ... hopefully the club will do the right thing and release him.