Ever have a dream where you have memories in the reality of the dream that are themselves false?  Like last night I had this dream that Stephanie and I were on Survivor, except that the location was some town in the Philippines rather than a deserted island.  And in the dream I remembered that Garrison and I were both on Survivor a while ago and that we both got eliminated early and that’s why Jeff didn’t remember me and let me back on the show.  This time Stephanie and I had managed to get pretty far by pretending not to know each other or something.  And we were at this immunity challenge at this Spanish-looking church (it was the Philippines so that makes sense) and we were about to have to eat some disgusting things when a group of like a thousand Japanese school children started walking through the church (they were on a field trip apparently) so Jeff had to delay the challenge.  But anyway what I thought was real weird was that I had a memory in the dream that wasn’t a real memory.  Then later we all went into the ocean with a bunch of the Japanese kids and there were these like twenty-foot high waves crashing into the shore but these kids were like surfing prodigies it turned out and one of them almost hit me in the head with her surf board and then I woke up to find I was neither in the ocean nor the Philippines.  And after further inspection, I determined that there were no Japanese minors in the room with me either.

Well lots of blogs out there on the internet exist solely to disseminate political opinions.  I tend to stay away from them on my blog, but I’ll weigh in on one that has been on my mind recently:

National Identity Cards

Sure, this isn’t as big of a political issue as social security or Iraq.  But it’s something I feel like discussing.  In short, I think a national identity card would be a good idea.  Not because I believe that it would somehow eliminate the threat of terrorism.  More than anything, I think I driver’s license should license you to drive, and an identity card should identify you.

Most countries in the world already have a national ID card, including most of those European countries that aren’t particularly fond of us.  A few months ago at work I was talking with a guy from France who was here on business and he showed me a French driver’s license.  It was about the size of a 5x7 index card (which is to say, approximately 5 x 7 inches), and I think it is typically left in the glove compartment with the registration and proof of insurance.  It had a small photo on it, but I don’t know how often they have to get it updated, because this guy still had a photo from when he was eighteen (and he’s like thirty now).

So back to the point.  With a single national ID card, security features could be designed to be more cost effectively and more effectively.  That just makes sense.  Then it would be easier to identify fake ID’s (a Food Lion near NCSU’s campus wouldn’t take out of state ID’s for that reason--they wouldn’t know how to identify a fake Arizona ID, for example).  Not that fake ID’s won’t get made.  They’ll just be harder to make.  The use of a driver’s license as ID should eventually be phased out, and they could be cheaply made things that you only really need when you rent a car or get pulled over by a cop for speeding.

Now, about an assigned number.  People seem to have a problem with being assigned a number by the government.  As a computer scientist, I submit that your name is already a number. “KIP” is the number 4,933,968 (or 4B4950, if you prefer).  And your social security number is already being used to identify you, and it wasn’t really designed for that purpose.  Why not let your social security number be simply a number that identifies you to the social security system.  Your national ID could have a number.  If it were up to me to design the number, it would look a lot like an IPv6 address (3ffe:ffff:0100:f101:0210:a4ff:fee3:9566, for example).  And some of those numbers would exist solely as checksums, so that you couldn’t just pull a number out of thin air.  Not that this would prevent anyone from making up a valid fake number, it’d just make them have to work harder.  Plus, such a long and difficult-to-memorize number would decrease the frequency with which you are asked for that number, which would make identity theft at least a little harder.

When I was in New York last summer for the HOPE conference, I heard some whining about ID cards.  People seem to think it’s very Orwellian.  This would be true if the card were a microchip implanted in your brain.  It would be true if you were required to present your card before entering a restroom.  It would be true if stores were required to scan your card whenever you purchased something and then report what was purchased to the government.  I’m not talking about anything like that.  I’m just talking about a better solution to the problem of identification, both photographically and numerically.  Having a number with no check sum used as an identification number, and fifty different types of driving eligibility documents used for photo identification, is not the best solution.

TV has become something like a responsibility in my life.  There are shows that I watch, and I watch every episode of them.  I can’t miss an episode.  That would be cheating on a show!  This leaves me with no free time at night.  We have DVR so we can watch the shows whenever we want and we can skip the commercials, but that really makes it more mandatory to watch every episode.  Plus now that I’m married there’s a whole new group of shows that have been added to my regular schedule.  Some of them are not shows that I don’t feel bad missing, but there are some that I have to watch now (CSI:NY, Numb3rs, and Extreme Makeover Home Edition come to mind.. and to a lesser extent CSI:Miami), so I still don’t get much time in the evenings.  I guess in a few weeks everything will be in reruns and I won’t be watching anything.  But the sad part is that Stephanie and I have planned that this is when we are going to start Paper Mario 2.  I also have plans to watch Lost this summer since so many people say it rocks so hard and I didn’t want to start halfway through the season.  In the same paragraph that I complain about watching so much TV, I talk about planning to add a new show to my required viewing list.  Meanwhile I’m still on page 800/900 of Quicksilver, and I was on page 700 about two months ago.  On the plus side I finally finished my second pass through Metroid Prime: Echoes (100% on hard mode so that I can open up everything).

Speaking of TV, Steph and I have started watching Grey’s Anatomy (Sunday nights on ABC).  I’ve never really enjoyed hospital shows, and this one isn’t really changing my opinion.  It’s not so much that I don’t like seeing blood.  It’s true that I don’t like seeing my own blood, but people being cut open on television doesn’t give me nightmares or anything.  I just like to pretend that doctors are omniscient beings without souls or personal lives.  Robots, if you will.  They certainly do not have sex lives or go to parties or drink alcohol before surgery or have sex with each other in the hospital.  Any hint that these robots are actually humans is an admission that they can make a mistake.  And I like to pretend that doctors don’t make mistakes or have opinions.  This will help me whenever I’m dying.  Presuming I don’t die suddenly in a plane crash or exploding gas truck or something.  Hopefully I get in another decade or five before that happens.

Oh it’s Friday The Thirteenth today.  Does anyone really care?

Today I’m going to discuss the small segment of the French language that I understand.  Which is to say, lets discuss the two and a half phrases I know.  Now, I will spell the French phonetically as I hear it in my head, because I don’t know the correct spelling of the words.

Zhyuh swee oon graund muh zee:  “I’m a big Muzzy!”

Zhyuh swee la zhyoon vee:  “I’m a little girl!”

Vool lay voo ka shay ah vec mwah, say swah:  “Sleep with me tonight”

Interestingly enough I was led to write about these things while thinking about how dumb a lot of the English language is.  Take “Marian” and “Mariah”.  Changing the very last letter of the word affects the way you pronounce the “a” that is three syllables away.  That’s dumb.  French is dumb like that too from what I’ve seen.  There are always 2-7 extra letters at the end of every word that are simply not pronounced.  Speaking of languages I’m working on a linguistics-related program in my spare time that is even more useless than PicTML, and probably not quite as fun either.  I’ll post about it when I’m done.

Wow it’s a time of big news if you’re into gaming at all.  I personally can’t remember being this excited about video games since 8th grade when the Nintendo 64 was unveiled.  I’m going to offer my predictions on the way it will go down over the next five or six years for the big three, based primarily on their conferences on Tuesday.

XBox 360:  This system will ultimately end up in last place.  Microsoft is hoping their premature launch will do for them what it did for the PS2.  I don’t think it’s gonna happen.  The XBox 1 had to work hard to get where it is today, and that was because (a) it has the best hardware, and (b) it has the best online capabilities.  This time around, they will not have the best hardware.  And they don’t have very many exclusive games.  And it’s only going to be kind of backwards compatible (still not sure how that’s gonna work).  But on the other hand, Microsoft has a bottomless bucket of money that might enable them to keep the system around long enough to catch on.  I guess we’ll see on that one.

Nintendo Revolution:  This system will start out in last place, and again battle with Microsoft for the title of Not In Last Place.  Ultimately I think it will come out slightly ahead of Microsoft this time around.  But I don’t know as much about the system so I’m basing this largely on gut feeling.  If, as Nintendo’s president (I forget his name.. not Miyamoto.. Iwata or something like that) claimed, Smash Brothers is a launch title that can be played online for free, I’ll hit that hard, and I know many other people that will too.  Nintendo has lots of nostalgia factored into their formula, that’s the one reason they haven’t taken the path of Sega.  Well that and the fact that they create these things like Pokémon and you just don’t realize how big they are.  Nintendo has made a ton of money off of Pokémon.  It’s kind of like how Lifetime is like the highest rated cable tv channel (or close), but if you asked people on the street what they thought it was almost no one would guess Lifetime.  Nintendo doesn’t have many Game Cubes out there, but the people who own them are loyal.

Playstation 3:  Yep, I think Sony’s gonna stay on top at least until the end of this decade.  This time around they’re going to have the best hardware, to add to the fact that they’ll have the most games out there.  I mean the system is still at least a year from launching and they announced like ten big name games.  Not to mention what this is going to do for their Blu Ray DVD format.. I predict that Blu Ray will win out over the competing HD-DVD, largely because of the PS3.  Much the same way that a lot of people’s first DVD player was the PS2 (since DVD players were just becoming affordable way back then).  The PS3 and it’s ability to play DVD’s in HD may even give more people a better excuse to buy an HDTV.  As much as I love Nintendo (and don’t get me wrong, I’m going to get a Revolution regardless), I’m actually excited about the PS3.  And I think that’s what Sony is good at- making people excited about their products.  Nintendo used to be a lot better in that department.

Well I’m done.  I have already talked at length about my inability to predict technology trends in a previous post..  Hopefully I’m wrong and Nintendo will become as big as they were from 1985-1995.  Hopefully Microsoft won’t be able to dump enough money into developers’ pockets to create a monopoly.  And there’s still lots we don’t know about each system.

Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!

People who get to yard sales first thing in the morning are crazy.

Today I helped Stephanie’s family in their annual rummage sale.  The thing was advertised in the paper as starting at seven.  But the first time we looked outside (at something like five forty-five) there were people out there, waiting.  I can’t possibly imagine needing someone else’s garbage so badly that I’d start my Saturday morning at five just to have first dibs on going through it.

So at like six fifteen we’re hauling the stuff out to the driveway/yard.  As soon as you set something down people converge on it like locusts.  So then we open the garage door.  In the garage are about four tables that have already been set up--but they are to be taken out on the driveway.  Well the people get in there before the door even finishes going up.  My father-in-law yells at them that we are going to move the tables out onto the driveway in just a second.  They continue going through stuff.  He and I pick up a table and as we are carrying it people grab things off of it!  Crazy!

Of course the real crazies only show up first thing in the morning.  After that it gets pretty slow the rest of the day.  And I’m pretty sure there are some professional yard sale goers--people who buy things at yard sales with the intent of selling them at their own yard sale or on e-bay or wherever.  I don’t really see there being enough money in that business to justify waking up that early on Saturday, but if they don’t have real jobs maybe they celebrate Saturday on Monday through Friday or something.