-{ redgeek.net }-

My ear is a clitoris.

Well, both actually.

You don’t get to touch them without permission, and even if you do, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything right. In fact, touching my ears will probably just piss me off. But, as some of my past girlfriends could tell you, if I’m in the mood, and you can read me and breath and nibble just right, and everything moves just so, I’ll get extremely excited. There’s an art to it – you can’t just slobber and bat them around for a while. It requires alternations of pressure, breath, tongue, motion, teeth, sound – all that good stuff. You know, the foreplay thing. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.

Every girl I’ve ever been with has had one of these little magic buttons, these little seemingly innocent places where, if you dial the right combination, you unlock some imprisoned siren. I’m referring to those bits outside of the traditional erogenous zones: deep pressure on the bottoms of the feet, bites just above the collarbone, light caresses behind the crook of the knee, finger scratches at the small of the back. Combine these acts with the context, some previous experience of this button pressing as a precursor to something more; the establishment of sexual anticipation. Predisposed psychological conditioning, kinesthetically triggered. Like how roasting chestnuts remind so many of Christmas, only this is so much better.

These are the things that can halt your partner mid-sentence, anywhere, anytime. I think (or at least hope) everyone has one of these, and it in everyone’s best interest if their partner can find it. Besides, the exploration is half the fun.

J- found my magic button on our first date.

As of last night, I still hadn’t found hers. I knew where I could tickle her and she couldn’t surpress a laugh, but that a far cry from the magic button.

We’d spent the evening thick with grapes: sampling four different “Racy Red” wines at a small joint in Hillcrest, back to her place for more wine and Jeff Buckley, wine in coffee mugs for a trip down to the Landmark to see Broken Flowers. (Short review: quite good and quite unsatisfying. I liked it.) Back home, finish off the bottle, Portishead (hell yeah), camping out on the couch. Around 1am, I found her magic button.

I teased her with it, working her breath deep into her lungs, and left.

You should never abuse magic buttons.

Historically, guys are the ones famous, or infamous, for presenting some of the worst pick-attempts in history. Recently I’ve been privy to some from the female side, although not directed at myself (thank goodness.) Sadly, all these are true, and you’ll probably end up wondering where in the world I been hanging out. These all took place in relatively normal, out-about-town environments. So, girls, Ways Not to Pick Up Guys:

• Sticking your finger in his butt while walking past
• Getting ragingly drunk and bitching about getting just kicked out of some other bar for being too drunk
• Giving him a “Purple Nurple”
• “My husband just got out of jail, and we’ve decided we’re swingers. What are you doing tonight?”
• Having a farting contest
• Lactating in his drink

Small wrapper to CGI.pm to encourage the use of scrubbing input variables. SaferCGI.pm

Mach-o file format parsing. TODO:

• symbol tables data collection
• …

(Pre-release)

PowerPC disassembler library. Still needs work:

• validation
• double-word rotate simplified mnemonics
• altivec

(Pre-release)

Data Structures library. The one that just keep growing and growing … Currently implementations are in C, I’ve ported to C++/Objective-C/Ruby/Perl, hopefully get all of them there eventually. Documentation in doxygen.

Currently implemented:

• bitstring
• dequeue
• list
• queue
• ringbuf
• sequential-strage list (dynarray)
• stack
• heap
• priority queue
• avl tree
• binary search tree
• digital search tree
• splay tree
• treap

In progress:

• binary queue
• b tree
• b+ tree
• patricia tree
• red-black tree
• trie
• static hash
• dynamic hash table (single hasgin, double hashing ordered probing, chaining, quadratic, …)
• n-trix (n-ary matrix)
• tri-trix (n-ary triangular matrix)

(Not-there-yet)

Simple class for (hopefully) conveniently implementing perl DBI wrappers. Not performance oriented, but ease-of-use. Define the table’s schema as documented in the DBObject perldoc, nad you’re ready to go.

DBObject.pm

Ok, this is terribly geeky, but I like trying to find isomorphisms between ostensibly disparate realms. The preface here is requires knowledge of Distance Vector and Link State classes of routing protocols. Various details and optimization omitted, imagine a graph, similar to some spiderweb of connect-the-dots, where each dot is an airport and the line between cities is a flight. Not every airport has a direct flight to every other airport, so in order to get from one place to another, you may have to make several hops.

In Distance Vector routing, each airport sends out a list of how it knows how to get to every other airport in the world, but it only send this out to the neighbors it has direct flights to. So, if Phoenix International has direct flights to Dallas/Forth Worth (DFW), San Diego (SAN), and Oakland (OAK), it sends out a list to each of those three, saying “I can get to DFW, SAN, OAK, each in one hop.” Oakland might send out and update saying that it has direct flights to SFO, SEA, and PHX, each in one hop. From this, Phoenix Int’l can infer that in can also get SFO and SEA in two hops via OAK. Next time PHX sends out an update, it adds this information to the list. Basically, each airport broadcasts the path it would take to get anywhere in the world, but it only tells it’s friends.

In Link State routing, each airport only reports on the directly-connected airports, but it tells every airport in the world. So, PHX would tell DFW, SAN, OAK, SFO, SEA … you get the idea … that it can get to DFW, SAN, and OAK. That’s it. Then, each airport makes it’s own calculation to figure out “how to get there from here.” (Trust me, it can be done.)

Whew! Ok, that was terribly geeky. But, I see analogies in the way that people maintain interpersonal relationships.

Distance Vector (DV) relationships seem to parallel intimate relationships with close friends and lovers. Everything is shared, and communication is upfront, direct, honest, and continual. You’re either in the circle of close friends or your not - or perhaps, if you’re a close friend, you get direct communication, else nada. If the communication stops, the link is dead. The relationship is predicated on ongoing and frequent updates where you talk about the world, otherwise it’s relegated to gossip you heard through someone else. Low priority. If you’re in a good relationship with your SO, you probably use DV. (Wow, that a little sounded dirty.)

Link State (LS) relationships, on the other hand, appear to be similar to a looser approach to communication. You tell the world about yourself and your friends, unconcerned about who hears it. It’s a shotgun approach: “Hey, this is what’s happening in my sphere of influence. Do with it what you want.” However, it’s less constrained to an artificially binary “in crowd” and “out crowd”, and relationships are extremely resilient to temporary communication failures. There’s freedom to associate directly with whomever, although the such communication quite doesn’t have status DV has, and you don’t get the full picture from any one person. In a manner, personal blogs are LS communication.

There’s no big revelations here, and no one would want to walk around in the world categorizing their relationships in such a manner. However, I think some people get bound into thinking they must use, or at least get used to using, only one of the other:

“You’re not my friend if we don’t talk every day.”

“You don’t have to tell the whole world about me.”

There’s too much energy spent trying to change the way the world is, which you have very little control over, and the way you are, which you have a great deal of control over. Inevitably, the inability to control the world and every relationship you have in it will exhaust you; it will wear you down to an insensate nub.

I think successful relationships use both these approaches continually and fluidly.

I see these changes in my own relationships: I have many friends that live far away that I don’t get to see or even chat with on the phone very often, which is one of the reasons I maintain this blog. (Ok, yeah, we could call more often, and probably don’t because we’re all busy/lazy/whatever, but that’s beside the point.) I maintain a LS shotgun approach while we’re separated: “Oh, really, Joe got married? To whom? Oh, wow, good for them. Hey, pass it along that I just changed jobs.” Hearsay, second hand knowledge. But I retain it. When I next see Joe, we drop right back to a DV relationship: “So how are things going? Heard you got married, how’s it working out? Tell me about it.” This fluidity of form allows long-term, stable, lasting, and significant relationships, without exhausting myself or others, and most importantly, retaining the depth of the connection.