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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Returning to all the interesting quirkiness of the mind I learned about in the [psych classes I took years ago, I'm wondering if one could build devices that would "correct" or "build humility" into the systems for each of them. For some of these (like memory), this would be more difficult for a number of reasons (memory being more internal and harder to mechanically manipulate than vision, and without the invisible reconstruction/fabrication, can we be said to have memory at all?), but it might be interesting to see what could be done for others (attentional preferences, for example, might be "trained away" or at least "corrected for" by making events "sparkle" or "brighter"?). It's possible that doing this systematically may make people less intelligent - maybe a lot of the "quirks"/"hacks" in our system are necessary to help us focus? Then again, being presumably outside the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (this world and sets of societies we've made), being better adapted for today's need may suggest such things.
This is an interesting issue for deep transhumanism - what kind of world do we envision for the future, and if we're not sure on that, what kinds of things should we focus on improving and what should we sacrifice as we begin to approach the pareto-surface of human potential? Would we want more memory? A different perception of time? More ability to focus? Memory systems with multiple input queues? Better modeling/simulation capabilities? etc..
Drawing LCD-Tablet has arrived.(view full entry for contents)
Little tech rant: (view full entry for contents)
Anyone on campus who wants to come by in the next hour or so to see the tablet in action should visit Wean Hall 3502 (my office). After that I'm probably going to the 61c café.
And another, with some commentary.. (view full entry for contents)
After playing it a bit (not as a DM, which I usually was back in my DnD days), I've come to the conclusion that D20 Modern (and likely the entire D20 genericised DnD setting) is both not much like DnD in the ways it is (was? I haven't seen 4th edition yet) and is lousy.(view full entry for contents)
When music and politics interact:
