It seems that a lot of computer projects/services get called Homenet - at OSU, it was the dialup service (ResNet being the ethernet in the dorms). I finally have a work environment set up (earlier today) at home for developing stuff for work. The boxes are shuttles - little rectangles that remind me of Pugs (dog breed). They're less awesomely small than a MacMini, but still pretty small. Pics:(view full entry for contents)

I'm slowly starting to use Firefox3's new features like search keywords (paired with the Add-To-Search-Bar extension, it's awesome - after some light set-up I can say "pirate artistname" in the urlbar and get piratebay's search results, and likewise, I can say "how_to_reach someplace" and have google maps give me bus directions there. I'm still getting started on using bookmark keywords. For how awesome this functionality is, it's not even close to intuitive enough.

Or, a (brief) secular investigation of a religious ethic.

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Tablet: ordered. Also, GIMP 2.6 came out! I hope it doesn't look/feel more like Photoshop (which IMO has a worse interface - far, far worse on windows than OSX though).

When my ankle gets better (thinking about seeing a doctor), I might want to try to learn Jumpstyle dancing.

Sleepovers: I remember particularly liking, as a child, staying over at a friend's house for the evening. It seems that ever since I've made my own living arrangements (beginning of university, ages ago), I've almost never done such things except when visiting people in other cities (and even then, it's generally one person in a city that I'll stay with) Why do we do this? We no longer need permission from someone else to do sleepovers, but now when we theoretically should be able to do it whenever we like, we largely don't do it at all (I am assuming that others are the same way and I'm not just analysing myself here), and when it does happen it's generally an accident (too much wine, etc). Pretty much any good friend in my childhood was someone I joined in a sleepover at least a few times, while nowadays, .... Of course, I have far fewer friends than I did when younger..(view full entry for contents)

I am beginning to suspect that the Beehive's 「Golden Nepal」 tea is not in fact a golden nepal - the taste is nothing like any Golden Nepal I've had anywhere else (it is exceedingly pleasant though, which is why I'm trying to convince the local tea/imports store owner to come down here, try it, and consider stocking it).

"Translucent" web proxies are really irritating.

I am thinking about setting up PPP-over-SSH for a project at work to provide consistent bidirectional networking across NAT - anyone have any experience with it or have any other ideas? The network would need to reconnect automagically after any breaks and update a SQL database with current IPs, and occasionally would see large file transfers but more often light ssh traffic. My past experience with this suggests it to be a mediocre solution.

Goggles with a small inner surface, semblance of gears surrounding vision, faint light pointing radially inward from gear spokes naturally divides vision into regions, which encourages structure and aids in measurement (or so the packaging says). Step forward 50 years, and there's a togglable switch labelled vector which causes builtin-and-trainable software to produce wireframe or ghost vectorisations of objects near the centre of vision suggesting rotations, twitches of the eye measure distances between points. Caution: may cause people to have the mannerisms to activate these features look odd when performed when not wearing them. But you wouldn't ever remove your goggles, would you?

I guess steampunk would become just a style, in personal technology, when implants become availabile.

Memory of artistic motions in Karate yields imagination of future society where gi-plus-sandals is a common garb yields musings on future clothing in imagination and science-fiction. (view full entry for contents)

From the not-very-interesting-department:

I've been befuddled all of today - (view full entry for contents)

If I do stick with the webcomic, I'm not sure whether I should spend more time having the main character explore their (view full entry for contents) condition and apparent world or talk more about the human condition and specific things in it. Brainstorming (view full entry for contents) at the 61c was pretty good today when I could keep my thoughts straight. I am slowly scratching deeper into the surface of GIMP's functionality. Intelligent scissors are feisty beasts (and really frustrating at times), but good for controlling bucket fills.

Tomorrow will hopefully be a better day.

Daydream: (view full entry for contents)

Academic secretaries are often amazing. The CS department's main office's secretary (who has a name, but I don't particularly want google to glue this entry to her) knows my name, the department I came from, when I have mail (offhand), and plenty of other details about me (and presumably everyone else in the department - I doubt I'm special). If I had that job, I'm sure people would get kind of tired of "who are you again?" the first 30 times they saw me. I suppose I can understand it by way of analogy of people not understanding how geeks can cuddle up in bed with ORA's Sendmail book or political philosophy geeks with Rawls' Theory of Justice, but it's still amazing. Tangent:(view full entry for contents)

Wow, whizzed it right down the leg today at work.(view full entry for contents)

Reminder: If you can bear the not-particularly-impressive art, My Webcomic, Oyschlisn, is here.

Frustrations at work: (view full entry for contents)

Scott Adams showing off how he draws Dilbert is pretty cool. It was also interesting - on the walk to work today I passed a number of art students on the golf course, all with easels set up so they could draw a pumpkin from across the street. Some part of me, seeing how serious they all looked, wanted to grab the pumpkin and run off with it.

Awesome things: (view full entry for contents)

Not-so-awesome things: (view full entry for contents)

Things: (view full entry for contents)

I've been thinking a bit about the little details and habits and preferences that make up one's everyday life that would be a barrier to someone impersonating someone else successfully. I had a good example of this earlier, but it's hard to keep a reference to these things in one's mind - habits become a carrier wave and out-of-band to our everyday thought. Something like "would not wear/own sleeveless shirts" isn't exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of (that's more of a conscious aesthetic/identity thing for me), more the sort of thing that one only notices in a moment of attention to worldly things that says "hey, what am I doing here, and do others do it too?"

For awhile, at least since Jon Stewart got Crossfire cancelled by going on the show and issuing some (fairly vague) complaints about it, I've been wonderng what a political talk show should look like. Bill Maher provided one example of a way to mix the idea with comedy/entertainment, pulling in movie/tv stars along with the very occasional political figure to discuss political issues. The show was moderately interesting, although much more interesting would be to discuss political theory (with figures as well as other people) on a one-on-one basis (talk show-style).(view full entry for contents)

It'd be interesting to have eyetrackers in coffeeshops and other places where people often do people-watching of the street to see what kinds of things they tend to look at.