Weather has scaled back from bitterly cold, past cold, and down to chilly. With adequate layering it's pretty nice to be outside. The huge piles of snow are looking increasingly lonely and misplaced. Mostly working for a coffeeshop today - it's nice to be nearer the fresh air. Conference situation resolved, I'm preparing/polishing a demo and chewing on a poster design. It's funny how much stuff is best done by background tasks in the mind - with active effort, I might create an ok poster over a brief period of devoted time, but if I just start chewing on it alongside all the other things I'm chewing on, the work gets done with very little direct time or devoted effort, and it gets done more creatively. I find the majority of the design part of programming to be best done that way too - with experience, one can avoid most of the pitfalls of "just do it" by having one's mind play with the possibilities in the background for long enough, so that implementation is usually a short implement/debug cycle. I'd bet being an author is like that too (not that I have direct experience); maybe thinking in general is best not done at a sprint.
On my way here I tried to go to Brueggers, but failed twice because I passed an old dude playing awesome woodwind instruments where SqHill's Panera's porch used to be. Very good music, but totally distracting - had to pull my meandering mind entirely to not walking right past Brueggers for a third time. I felt bad for the poor employees there who had to listen to elevator music, but maybe it's just as well - people using sharp knives to make custom orders of food for people might not need music of ultimate distraction.
I'm not sure if I'm glad or not that I didn't run into the old Hare Krishna I sometimes see in SqHill (view full entry for contents)
Still kind of stuck between trying to hop right into grad school, getting another academic job, or maybe even working in industry. I am amazingly good at indecision on very important life-direction things where the data doesn't really point in a single direction! Still, I think not going to Santa Barbara was probably a mistake, and not going to Qatar was probably another one. Maybe that'll help inspire me to break inertia - there's hardly enough land left here to stand on. Moving probably won't help, but there's nothing else left to do.
Interesting thinking about risks and learning - learning from mistakes is an important part of intelligence, but it's undesirable to "learn" from managed risks. (view full entry for contents)
I try not to be generally excitable about Google things - apart from their HR people (as well as a former boss (and maybe friendish) of mine) jerking me around, and their being a mostly advert-supported company, I'm nervous at how much gets built on top of their technologies and I'm not sure what we could replace if they decided to close everything tomorrow (e.g. there's all sorts of cool stuff people do with google maps - are there public alternatives to all that sat data they licence from the various companies? Do we need a company like Google to sponsor the basics like this, or is decentralisation possible that would let us break their (so far mostly unexercised) options to restrict or ad-embellish things)? Relying on them is dangerous to the extent that we have. That said, it's pretty cool that they now have bike trails in Google Maps and let people get separate walking and biking directions to places (thanks to jwz for pointing it out). Although entering that mode takes one to San Francisco, it seems to know plenty of Pittsburgh trails too.
Just to top off this scatterbrained post (think of this as a cherry?)
Quote of the day:
CMU is always so empty this week. It's funny how much even not seeing acquaintances makes a difference - it reminds me of the occasional trips to NYC for Opera I make, sitting in my favourite places there watching people go by. It's not my idea of a good place to live, but NYC is a great place for self-reflection. I haven't been to Paris often enough to know for sure, but I get the sense it's good for that too, perhaps better. Maybe self-reflection doesn't adequately capture what I'm trying to get across - tragic emptiness? People-watching-with-envy? Isolation from grand flows? Farraday cage/Huis Clos? Different state of awakedness? I think maybe the last two - sleep and wakefulness is a big metaphor in my Weltanshauung - on one side of the coin I think being incredibly self-aware (in the way Zaphod Beeblebrox wasn't) makes one more awake than most people, on the other, withdrawl from everything and feelings of numbness represent a way to be more asleep than most.
Still trying not to be the kvetch-monster. It's probably a losing battle..
Amused that the US Census sent me a post telling me to keep an eye out for their next post. Good job! Also, the second best product on Amazon.com has acquired some awesome delivery options, including some clever person who for $2500 will hand-deliver the product and make a Tiramisu. Tempting!
I may have neglected to formally sign up for table space at the only conference I attend for work, which might mean no demo, which would make going there pretty pointless. *facepalm* This is a pretty big oops. I guess I'm hoping to leave vaguely soonish anyhow, but I don't like letting them down. Hopefully I can smoothe this out and snag space instead of cancelling.
Been wondering - communities that are big enough tend to attract trolls and nutjobs. (view full entry for contents)
Oddity when considering faces: (view full entry for contents)
Sketches with a plot, extended: (view full entry for contents)
Remembered quip: Sysadmins are like bats - both are nocturnal creatures awake late in the night doing things you don't understand, often going "Eep eep eep!" .
Today: Felt too bummed to get out of bed until around 5pm, then grabbed some tasty syrian food from Taza21, then spent many hours at Kiva Channukah doing sketches for the webcomic-that-may-never-be (I may upload these). Left, and while waiting for the bus a fellow waiter was busting out rap to his iPod.. surprisingly, he wasn't bad and it straddled the line between irritating and cool. While starting laundry, I did a 25 minute video for youtube discussing some basic philosophy, thinking I might possibly make it a regular thing. Alas, youtube's option to switch into "Director mode" to allow for longer uploads no longer is offered (more precisely, it doesn't allow longer uploads anymore, although accounts that were already in that mode can still do big uploads). Oh well, so much for that idea. I'm not sure what to do with my 25 minute would-be upload. Google_irritation++
Mundane details and other mundanities:(view full entry for contents)
I'm not much for TV, but the British show Psychoville looks fantastic. Kind of like 「the IT Crowd」, 「A Bit of Fry and Lawrie」, 「Mitchell and Webb Look」, 「Armstrong and Miller」, etc etc. Maybe if I lived in the UK I would actually watch TV. I guess we have MST3k and the Daily Show from the States.
Forgot to backup my mysql databases - lost all the work I did fleshing out the background for the webcomic... except that I oddly seem to remember most of the details. I'm also spending quality time grepping the raw device for the old HD (now in its enclosure) - I've repartitioned and put some new data onto it, but at least "grep" has found some relevant keywords that were only on the wiki, so perhaps with a bit of coaxing I can get the relevant pages back. On the upside, MediaWiki supports Postgres too now, so eventually I can look into ditching Mysql entirely on my laptop (w00t. I loathe MySQL).
I also found that my laptop exposes its brightness controls in /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness, so I can finally crank it up to something pleasant to read. Also, FC13 has Perl6, which .. would be great if the Perl Foundation would declare it done, publish the spec, and promote the hell out of it. Incompetent management of the rewrite has pretty much killed Perl though, and I don't expect them to develop a clue on that point anytime soon. Yeah, it's great to have a formal spec for the language, and the new design for Perl6 address a lot of the problems Perl has, but they've really managed to drop the ball in virtually every other way. Oh well, it's nice to finally have a "perl6" command even if it's not really released yet.
This promises to be another quiet weekend. I probably should've made plans to do something with someone, but that goes back into the wonderful circular thinking. I guess there are some cities I could visit despite not knowing anyone to visit, and .. there's ColumbusOhio too. Still... sigh. So much crap in my head and emptiness in my life. Upside: I have carrots, and the weirder of my two cats just stole one from the bag and will probably be eating it for the next hour or two.
Sciency people might find Stanfnord's The Energy Challenge and the Case for Fusion to be interesting.
I have come to think of base-10-unlimited plus a base60-pair as "microwave numbers". I wonder if there's a better term. Origin: when we type in 420 into a microwave, we mean 4 minutes 20 seconds, not 4.2 minutes nor 420 seconds. It's most interesting I think when the marker is removed.
I've been thinking about whether it's worthwhile trying to provide regular content on my Youtube channel, but it's puzzling what one might reasonably provide.
I sometimes wonder, when I hear people with neat ideas, when they stop talking about them if they've forgotten or shelved them - I tend to remember other people's ideas better than my own because I don't talk to people that often (and maybe they just have genuinely better ideas on average? I dunno). It seems like we all leave behind us a graveyard of good ideas... at least, the people who are in the habit of creative thought. I wonder what kind of social assistance technologies might help churn such ideas without relying on the relatively high attention that talklike interaction requires.
More unix/computer geekery - the results of the upgrade: (view full entry for contents)
Many years ago my mum gave me some nice (expensive) drawing things, which like many non-clothes things I promptly packed into a box and forgot about. I recently found some while cleaning my apartment; it's kind of goofy to discover things that've become useful in ones own long-term storage.
It turns out imagining (and sketching) younger versions of someone is very difficult - making it recognisably them but also recognisably younger is an exercise in brinksmanship and imagination.
Those into linguistics geekery who are a bit behind on their memes might like tonight's episode of Rocketboom.
Likely uninteresting to anyone but major geeks who have been lax about learning about SSDs: (view full entry for contents)
Dinner, possible teahousitude, and then this geekery.... I guess it's at least a little different than my normal evening. The cats will probably be happy with even more time spent at home. :P
Shipping madness (potentially dull): (view full entry for contents)
Finished: Libson's book on Jewish and Islamic Law(view full entry for contents)
Did more backstory for the webcomic-that-might-never-be-born - it's surprisingly enjoyable filling out details of a fictional university - a bit of research to find a suitable founder and tweaks to their history (in this case, I had Royal Governor Thomas Gage return to Mass with some of his family after the American Revolution and had him live a bit longer, long enough to found a University, bankrolled by one of his sons and some other financial schemes).(view full entry for contents)
Earlier this week I managed to drag myself to a PittCFI meeting (first time) - it was a private meeting in some guy's apartment, and I think everyone there was at least 10-20 years older than me.. but it was pretty decent - a topic, a discussion group, all among very bright, well-read, culturally engaged people (yes, there was some informal singing of Tom Lehrer songs, discussion of films, etc). It happened at a high point in my social ok-ness, but if the stars align I might go back the next time they meet. Apparently there's this whole community I somehow never noticed during the many years I've been here.
With the turning of seasons,(view full entry for contents)
Finally, a statement of a position on animal testing:(view full entry for contents)
