At Long Last

Eagerly anticipated, often imitated, never duplicated, ridiculously dated (I've been a little busy. And lazy), it's...

New York through the eyes of a J Lo 3: Because All Great Trilogies Come In Threes:

On monday evening we picked up some cheap ass pizza and spent some time at Beth's. We watched Eurotrip - Beth's first time - and worked on the rest of our beer supply. Eventually I get a call from the woman who wanted to go out and we agree to meet her at the Sidewalk Cafe. Dave was hanging with his big sis for a while so T and I headed out into the big bad city all on our lonesome. It was easy to find but odd in design so that it would've taken a lot of effort to look for anybody inside and since T was smoking, we sat outside at some tables. We figured that since it was her place, she'd find us. Also, we didn't remember what she looked like and were pretty content sitting and drinking our beers. This outside patio area turned out to be a lot more fun than expected. We were sitting two tables away from a quite drunk couple who were amazing douchebags and next to a couple 24 year old yuppie debutantes.

T stepped up and managed to strike up a conversation with one of the women. They were pretty funny and seemed to enjoy us, so we all hung out for a while. Eventually drama arose between the douchebags and the debutantes which was quite a show for mutant watchers like ourselves. The clashing of the drunk and ignorant against the psuedo-intellectual and self rightious was nothing short of spectacular. The threats under breath and all the backhanded comments were awesome. Both sides seemed to want a fight while not actually wanting a fight at all. It felt like high school when people got into scuffles from just trying to look cooler than someone else. The night was off to a great start.

There was one thing missing though. We were there for about an hour and the woman from online hadn't found us yet. I eventually got a really pissy call accusing me of standing her up. Being the man that I am, I quickly, calmly, and rationally conveyed to her that we were in fact there, that she hadn't found us either, and that I didn't really care. I wasn't about to let her unresolved issues of abandonment bring my night down.

Dave showed up about an hour and a half and X number of beers later. The girls were getting pretty tipsy by this point and we all enjoyed ourselves. They turned out to be pretty cool. I was by no means as impressed as the other two, but I also had fun hanging out with them. I must say though that I think they were far less intelligent than either they or T thinks, but that's just my opinion.

The cafe closed at midnight so on we went. The ladies decided to come with even though they had to work the next day. Way to goat up, ladies!

This next event was one of those things that only happens in the movies. While walking down the street in New York City I ran into someone I hadn't seen in years. Mr. Adam Badwound. Adam was my roommate during the summer after Sophomore year (2001) when I was working for NASA. Certainly one of the sweetest guys I've ever met and managed to put up with my sorry ass pretty well. Anyways, he just happened to be walking home from the grocery store on the same street and at the same time as we were walking to the bar. We chatted for a bit and managed to convince him to come out for a while, too. Our party had tripled since the beginning of the night. It's also important to note that during the chatting with Mr. Badwound there was this very excited man wondering around near us. He went around hugging us and exclaiming that he just arrived to America and absolutely loved it. It was quite cute and he smelled of flavored tobacco...

I make the claim that the next bar we went to, Welcome to the Johnson's, was the best bar I've been to in a really long time. Having a nice pool table that only costs a dollar is a requisite of any good bar. Being in a cool area of one of the most interesting cities in the world helps. Serving hip, interesting, friendly clientele is always appreciated. But nothing, NOTHING compares to $2 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Everyone in the place was rocking the PBR. Boys, girls, hippies, hipsters, it didn't matter. Everyone had a can in their hand. It was awesome.

We went in and worked on getting some table time. It took a while, though. Travis and I just sucked. We couldn't win the table to save our lives. Luckily for us, one of the girls we brought, Thya, didn't suck. She was actually really good. Eventually we won the table and pretty much kept at least two of us playing for the rest of the night. Katie and Dave seemed to hit it off really well. They wandered around, sometimes inside, sometimes out. They chatted about this, that, and the other. I'm pretty sure they figured out the meaning of life or some shit. But then, I wouldn't know. I wasn't invited. Hehe. Ok, ok, maybe I was drunk and not paying attention.

Eventually Adam and then the girls all went home. That was ok with us as we had a date with Jak. Jak had told us the night earlier that he would be back at Max Fish and both Travis and I wanted to play pool with him again. We stumbled our way over there and didn't even get a drink at the bar; we went straight for the pool table in the back. Sadness set in as there was no Jak. It was 3:20am at this point. I can't really hold it against the guy for not being there. We put our names up on the queue and sat back to wait our turns. This latino man with a shaved head was just smashed. I mean, he was drunker than we were. He was having a blast and talking a lot of shit, but he was rocking that table. No one was coming anywhere near beating him. My turn came up before T's and I was on a mission. I was still warmed up from the last place and was very focused on the game. I played a near flawless game and it was enough to take TK down. I think he was happier than I was. He was complaining about having played 12 games in a row and he just wanted to be done. He partied with us for a while. He was crazy.

We left Max Fish just before they closed and made our way back towards Beth's. On our way we figured we should stop at this 24 hr McDonald's Travis was at that morning before. It was SOO good. The service, however, was just atrocious, just like every other place in the goddamn east coast. There was one person working the counter with about 8 people there trying to order at the same time. This person wasn't too ambitious about it either. The rest of the employees were kind of mulling around. One was wandering around checking to see if the trash needed to be taken out, but it took us about fifteen minutes just to get our McDonald's food. Lame. WEAK. But it tasted awesome.

The last adventure of the night happened on our walk home. This guy on the street was drinking a beer and just sort of hanging out. Travis thought the guy was going to come up behind him and break the bottle over his head (drunken paranoia), so he decided it would be best to talk to him. The first thing he asks Travis is, "Are you a cop"? When Travis says no the guy tries to sell him some "nose candy". Travis quickly rejects and the guy comes back just as quick asking him if he thought I wanted some. Dave and I are about 15 feet in past them at this point and Travis just kind of dismisses him and leaves.

Ah the beauty of the big city.

Trip Video

So over a month later, I have some more to post from the great east coast trip. And Jeremy, I promise I will get the last part of the New York chronicles up by the end of the week.

Without further ago, The Great East Coast Adventure video slideshow. It's a 28 MB Quicktime video. If you don't have Quicktime, it'll probably prompt you to go download it. Or you can just go to the Apple Quicktime site and download it from there.

I made the video last Wednesday starting at about 10 PM and finishing about 8 AM. If the video seems completely random, chalk it up to me being random as well as the fact that I was juiced up on nicotine and caffeine (or, as Jody puts it, vitamin C2 and vitamin N). Enjoy.

J-Lo Speaks. Again.

I know you've been waiting for it... It's been worth it. And now sollaires.net presents...

New York through the eyes of a J Lo - Episode 2, Attack of the Goat:

So, while doing our best to straddle the line of poisoning and enjoying ourselves we managed to produce some wicked hangovers. I was up and ready to rock around 10. Don't ask me why my body was convinced it only needed 4.5 hours of sleep after that night. I was all better and fully functioning in about an hour. Remind me to thank my mom when I get home for the apparent second liver I was born with.

While up and with nobody to play with, I jumped online on Beth's sweet ass computer. Out of random surfing came a beautiful, clear, and obvious plan. It was one of those moments when you realize that this plan is so simple and right in front of your nose that you shouldn't really feel proud of yourself for thinking it, but the value and glory this plan could bring back to you induces nothing less than a huge rush of pride. I went on OkCupid and searched for women in NY and messaged every worthy candidate. Worthy meaning anyone I thought we could have a non-zero evening with... and was hott. The message went something like this:

-------------
Hi,

My name is Jeremy and I am in town for 24 more hours. I'm here with two friends of mine and we're planning on having a wild night on the town. If you happen want to join us, that would be great. In case you're interested in them (and really, if I'm not enough to convince you, they certainly aren't) their screen names are sollaires and agoginnashell.

Hope to see you soon.

Jeremy
---------------

I think I messaged a total of 11 ladies. So much awesome.

Beth and Dave had a meeting with somebody about something at 1:30, so I had to make myself scarce for a couple hours. What better way than to go to a movie. Travis was still sleeping on Beth's bed, so I headed out on my own. I went and saw the new Metallica documentary and was thouroughly impressed. The rises and falls of emotion and tension were better than most written movies. I recommend this movie to anyone who can sit though 2 hours and 20 minutes while only hearing Metallica music on the soundtrack. I really wanted to see The Machinist, but couldn't find anywhere that was playing it. And by that I mean the first movie place I saw didn't have it.

Got back to Beth's around 5:30 to find 5 messages in my OkCupid inbox. My first thought was, "Holy shit! We might actually get Travis laid." To no one's surprise, this would turn out not to be the case. So I checked to see the messages and sure enough, 3 were from the same woman. That's ok I thought, I have 3 people, one of whom is quite enthusiastic. So I went through and read them. The first was from the woman who had written 3 times. It was unimpressive but a positive response. I mean, she was actually interested in meeting us and going out for a night on the town. The next message was a woman saying that it sounded like fun, but her boyfriend would not approve. Understandable. The third was a response written by a 20 year old saying that while she wanted to, she had gotten her fake confiscated last week and couldn't join us in our debauchery. Again, understandable. So, after cold messaging 11 women, we got 1 positive response. Not too shabby.

Next up, the adventures of that night.

Creepy

Direct from Entertainment Fundraising:

Set Kids up for Success with a Selling Script.
If a student in a school fundraiser is selling Harry London gourmet chocolates, suggest saying, "These candies are so good that they've been served at the White House!" Or, if selling the Entertainment Book, students can say, "Mom, I know you're really tired tonight. Why don't you buy this Entertainment Book to help my school fundraiser and we can go out to dinner and save 50% using one of the coupons!"

Now, while it looks like this company does make money for schools, that paragraph just creeps the hell out of me. Teach your kids psychological tricks to make them better at selling! We've got scripts to help your kids bully others into buying! Never let anyone say "No!" Very Boiler Room-esque.

What I Learned Today

I've got to remember that I know nothing and that I have a lot to learn from people who have been developing web applications longer than I have. To wit: character encodings are something you should know about. I've read about them many times from people imploring you to know about character encodings. I always assumed I didn't have to worry about them since we build an internal project where we control the environment. This is not true. Any time you have a system that people will use, they will find ways to make things break. To grossly simplify the current problem, people are using text in ways we never thought they would. This causes problems with some of our systems. A week later, I finally understand something about character encodings. Which is something I've read about so I should know better. So my lesson to myself and others is to really read and understand the stuff that smart people say you should know. I didn't do that and I've lost a week of work. Back to hacking...

Recovering

So I was busy when I got back. Then I was sick. Now I'm busy again. Jeremy's finished up his recollections of New York and I've been too lazy to put them up yet. Shame on me. I've also got to go through and finish posting photos from the rest of the trip. Shame on me again. Right now, I'm going to nurse this hangover from the bonfire last night by letting my head fall on the keyboard. ;W IOOGSDDDDDDDDDDBNNN NNNNNLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

I'm An Asshole

Maybe this code is a little too obfuscated.

foreach( array( 'max', 'min' ) AS $var )
{
    $method_name = 'get_'.$var;
    $e = $year_es->$method_name( 'datetime' );
    $dt = $e->get_value( 'datetime' );
    $year = substr( $dt, 0, 4 );
    $month = substr( $dt, 5, 2 );
    $new_var = $var.'_year';
    $$new_var = $year;
    if( $month < $this->cutoff_month )
        --$$new_var;
}

I kind of feel like an awful person for writing that. The worst thing is that I wasn't trying to write something that unclear. It seemed like a clear solution as I was writing it. How's this: let this be a lesson to you - never write code like Dave.

Back

We're back. 20 hours strong from Virginia Beach to Saint Paul. Tired. Lots of meetings tomorrow at work. Lots of things to do. Awesome.

Heading Home

We're on our way back to Minnesota right now. We decided to leave Saturday night rather than Sunday morning so I could get a little sleep before work on Monday. And of course we drove through the beautiful parts of the country in the dark. Now that the sun is up, we're in Ohio. Which isn't beautiful. And Pennsylvania should really use their toll money for improving their roads instead of whatever it is they do with that toll money.

New York through the eyes of a J Lo

[Dave: J's written a good chunk of text that I'll be throwing on here as he finishes them off.]

Got into New York around 6 on Sunday. It certainly had a different feel than Boston. Dave's sister, Beth, lives in the lower east side which is the hippest area to be in, or so I've been told. I can believe it though after spending a couple of nights here. Sunday night may have been one of the more exciting nights out drinking I've had in quite some time. We met up with Elise (Dave's ex from 8th grade) and two of her awful friends at a shitty bar that charged too much but had the cutest little pool table EVER. It must have been no bigger than 6' X 3'. Luckily we ditched that place and her friends early and embarked on an adventure.

We bopped around for a bit never staying at any one place for too long. One place we were at closed up at 1 or 2 (it was Sunday after all) which sent us out in search of still open bars. During this drinking hiatus we ran into some Polish girls on a similar mission. At first they were enthusiastic about our chance encounter, but when it set in that we had no idea where we were going, that we were far more drunk than they were, and that Travis was a goon, they bugged out. C'est la vie. We didn't need any damn Poles dragging us down anyway.

Details start to get a little fuzzy after that. We had been drinking for about 7 hours at this point. No problem, we just goated up and eventually found our way to a place called Max Fish. This place was amazing. It apparently had a lot of interesting history that wasn't worth remembering. No beer on tap, but they did sell $5 drinks that were 60/40 booze to mixer. I did not have just one. They also had a good pool table with good pool players. Jak was the star of the place though, and he certainly looked the part. Travis and I both knew who we were gunning for and put our names on the queue. We played great and everybody was really friendly.

We closed Max Fish up at 4 and wandered about in the rain. IN the RAIN! We were so alive! hehe. Anyways, despite being ridiculously drunk and in NYC we somehow found our way back to Beth's. I'll give Dave mad props for managing to get our asses back there, even more for not booting after getting just obliterated. We managed to collapse into sleeping arrangements around 5:30. Pictures exist, but neither Dave nor myself have any actual recollection of the seemingly lost hour between arriving and falling asleep.

Travis decided that he was more hungry than tired when we got home and immediately, and very ninja-like, disappeared off on yet another mission. He aparently tooled around for two hours and came across a 24 hour McDonald's. Having huge cravings he somehow managed to get them to make and sell him two super sized fries during the breakfast menu. A commendable feat to be sure.

So ended our first day in the big apple. I was very impressed with the city; we all were.

- Jeremy

New Strategy

So I'm just going to post photos and give little stories about it. No more of this long drawn out narrative bullshit. Jeremy has also written up a bunch about our New York adventure which I'll be putting up at some point. So, photos from last Wednesday.

This is the machine responsible for all the updates. This is in Jessie's apartment.

Jeremy and I have decided to put together themes as shown through photos. The "Travis sleeping" theme probably has the most photos.

As of today, Travis is pretty much broke. We haven't been able to figure out why.

In case I haven't been identifying people, from the left it's Travis, Jeremy, and Jody. I'm taking the picture.

We went to Red Bone's to get some barbeque. The wait was too long. So we just ended up getting some beers there and later getting some tasty burritos. We were amazed at the beer in the center of the photo. Notice how you can't see the candle through the beer. That's a dark beer.

This is Jeremy in my car rocking out to some shitty techno. We were trying to revved up for this party we were going to. It turned out to be not quite our scene.

Other highlights from that day: saw Before Sunset (well, J and I saw it again), wandered around Harvard Square, and hung out at an Irish pub with a girl that J met online. Those are things I failed to photograph. I also decided my birkenstocks were finally dead and got a cheap pair of flip flops from Urban Outfitters. Excitement!

Busy

Got to New York safely. I just finished a meeting with my sister and her boss. I'll be doing some work for her organization. Which is awesome.

We went out carousing last night in New York. Left at 9 PM. Got back at about 5 AM. It was a busy night. Got to hang out with Elise which was way more fun than I expected. The scene from the night was the two of us sitting on a stoop outside a bar arguing about the nature of relationships as it started pouring. And we didn't stop talking when it started raining. We just got soaked for a while. Jeremy kicked ass at pool after a rocky start to the night. Travis had a good time and wandered around the Lower East Side looking for food. More pictures will show up eventually.

I also have hundreds of photos that haven't gone up yet. I've been picking out the best ones that fit with the posts. I'll be putting up the entire trip in photos when I get back to Minnesota. So expect those in a little over a week.

Lazy

Still haven't had time to update. Fallling behind further. We're about to leave from New York where I won't have time to update. Maybe on one of the drives I can take a few hours and update.

TO NEW YORK!

The Traffic in Boston is Crazy

Current Location:: Jessie's in Watertown once again

I know - I'm falling behind. I'll see how much catching up I can do tonight.

Tuesday's where I left off. I woke up pretty early and hung out with Great Uncle Tom for a while on his awesome deck, drinking coffee and playing with Chooch. Once I harassed Travis multiple times Travis woke up, we caught a quick lunch at the Lobster Tale where I got my first real seafood of the trip. Fish and chips are tasty.

Then, we began our adventure into downtown to meet Amanda for a romp in the city. Let me tell you something: technology, reason, and intelligence balk in the face of Boston's infrastructure. We were trying to get to Quincy Market. By car. This was a mistake. We had two cell phones, a laptop, maps, and access to the internet (MapQuest - you should sponsor me). We had 3 or 4 people who were or are living in Boston available on the phone. Despite all of this, we managed to frantically meander through dozens of wrong places in our attempt to get anywhere close to what we wanted. Until that day, I have never though to put the words "infrastructure" and "dynamic" together. The running joke is that no one could help us because their maps were over 3 days old. Much like Minnesotan's phrase about construction ("there are only two seasons: winter and construction"), I learned that this saying was not hyperbole. When we left the parking lot we had finally found at the end of the day, we saw that there was no longer a path to get to said parking lot.

Once we had finally found ourselves a nice cheap parking spot (read: $28 for the day), we hooked up with Amanda and began exploring Quincy Market and the surrounding areas. We briefly ran through Faneuil Hall (one of the great public debate spaces of the day), sat by the water front and watched the boats, almost jumped on a Water Taxi, and just enjoyed the beautiful weather. Amanda and I continued catching up on our lives and just generally had a nice time exploring that whole area. I've got to say that Boston's North End is gorgeous. The tiny streets, cool cafes, and interesting people were awesome.

We had a chance to walk through the Holocaust Memorial in Boston. Amanda gave us a lot of background and some of her experiences. The memorial itself is both beautiful and terrifying.

The full quote of the last photo engraved in the stone memorial is from Martin Niemoeller and says this:

"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic.

Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."

According to Amanda, the rocks on top of the stone in that last photo are the equivalent to flowers on a tombstone. Rocks are used, however, because they never wilt or die. They will always be there.

Amanda had to leave to get back to work the next morning, so from there, we headed away to meet up with Jody and Tammy. The original plan was to meet to see Maria Full of Grace, but Jody and Tammy were running a little bit late and it took us a while to find the theater, so we got to see Garden State instead. Travis, Jody, and Tammy all really liked the movie. I almost really liked it and this made me really upset about the movie. They'll probably chalk it up to my total and utter exhaustion, but I'm not totally sure that's the case. There is something more to the argument that I had seen Before Sunset recently and that film dwarfed this one solely in maturity of content. It is good though and is a good counterpoint to the new Star Wars - Natalie Portman can act. And she's pretty good at it, too.

Here are a few more random shots from the day:

I've also offloaded all posts that are not the most current to the older page. I'll keep doing this manually for now. I like to try to keep the front page small, especially since I am relearning what it is like to surf from a dial-up-equivalent net connection. So this page is much smaller. Turns out the older page is weighing in at a hefty 150K. I feel pretty good that I've written 150K worth of text in the last 6 months.

Fake-Time Posting

Current Location: Watertown - Jessie's apartment

So the whole "real-time" publishing tends to take too much away from actually doing stuff. So I'm just doing this when I have a free hour or so. It's really surprising how long it takes to write this stuff up and process all the photos. Much longer than you'd think. So I'm going to sum up Monday right now and maybe get to Tuesday if we don't make plans before that.

So, on Monday we ended up going to the mall. Which sort of defines a lot of what we did while we were in college. So it was somewhat comforting, somewhat terrifying. But Jody was right. The mall's Indian food was really, really good. We checked out a Newbury Comics, I found some CDs (I didn't know RJD2 had released a new album and I found a new copy of Shadow and Chemist's Brainfreeze is apparently pretty hard to come by). I also tried on many pairs of glasses. And Travis and Jeremy got really big plastic cups.

So once we were done with those shenanigans, we all went into the city. I met up with Amanda and got a little bit of dinner and caught up with her completely drama-free life. We couldn't figure out the last time we had seen each other which troubled us slightly until we just gave up and decided to enjoy our current time together. And I've got to say that it's always awesome to see a friend that's been away for too long.

We had a drink at Grendal's (which is a great name for a bar) and wandered over to John Harvard's. As it turned out, there was trivia that night. Did you know that cenosillicaphobia is fear of an empty glass?

The trivia guy, while not liking us for our behavior, did like our team name and made sure to say it right every time he announced how far behind we were. We were actually doing pretty well until we totally bombed the last question after wagering a huge chunk of our points.

And while it had been a long time since I had seen Amanda, it had been even longer since I had seen Jessie. She showed up and ignored the macho trivia shitheads and instead caught up with Amanda. Which is fine since Amanda was only around for the night and we're around all week.

When we left John Harvard's, I thought we were going home. However, there were other plans. We ended up at Whitney's just a couple streets down. That's when the night got really interesting.

I suppose the only real summary I can provide is that there was too much booze and a LOT of miscommunication. A group of 3 or 4 girls was just about ready to start a brawl in the street with us because of some things that had been said. But what started as a fight pretty much ended up as flirting. I pretty much just stood outside and ignored the whole thing and talked to one of the girls who was also ignoring the whole thing. However, due to the fact that shit was going down, I failed to get her number, which totally sucks. She was bright, into South Park, reminded me of a movie from my childhood that's been on the top of my tongue for something like 5 years, and wants to be an astronomer. She constantly impressed me throughout the night and I'm kind of slapping myself for not getting any identifying information about her. So, Shelly (or maybe Shellie or Shelley - I don't even know how to spell your name), if you found my site somehow, drop me an email. You kick ass. And if anyone here knows a Shelly in New Hampshire who used to teach algebra II, loves Phish, and is looking to do astronomy, point me in her direction.

We closed the bar at 2 AM. Well, J, T, and Jody closed the bar at 2 - I was the sober cab. We got back to Jody's place and found out that Jody didn't have any keys with him, so Jeremy threw him onto the roof where he could sneak into a window to let Jeremy in. You guys are awesome.

Today (Wednesday), we're going to chill in Boston and go to some party with lots of smart people. The feeling is that it will be really awesome or really lame. I just hope it's not mediocre. I'm going to start processing the photos from yesterday right now, but I can't guarantee they'll be up today. In fact, there is little chance they will be up today.

A Day Later

Location: I-95 heading North to Sudbury from Duxbury

So we made it to Boston in about 24 hours of driving. We got lost in downtown Boston but Travis was smart about things and we found our way back to the highway. After getting lost for some time south of Boston, we finally found our to my Great Uncle Tom's.

I'm going to start recording how many times we've gotten lost or gone the wrong way. Travis asserts that we haven't done anything of the sort so far. My count is at 3 or 4. Happily, when we couldn't find Uncle Tom's road in Duxbury, I did meet some parents of a Carl (Taylor Coughlin, I believe). I was wearing my Carleton hat and the father recognized the C and asked me to turn around to see the back of the hat. We talked about Carleton for a while and they gave us directions to get to Tom's. At Tom's we hung out on the deck and just relaxed. Elizabeth has known about the calming power of his deck for some time now and I have also come to understand. We talked and played with his new puppy Choo Choo for some time until we got in touch with Jody.

We've always known the contempt Jody has for Minnesota drivers. Since starting at Carleton, I've experience the same feeling in spades. But I know understand why Jody likes Boston drivers: they're aggressive and selfish. I've got to say that driving from Duxbury to Sudbury the first time was a revelatory experience. Drivers are much less dumb here than they are in Minnesota. Well, that may not be true. Regardless, the behavior that is somewhat expected in Boston is much more suited to making me a happy driver.

At Jody's place, which is gorgeous, we drank some beer, grilled some food, and fell into our old group habits of quoting obscure movies and cartoons and just ripping each other apart. We'd all missed each other. I'm very afraid that I'm going to be pretty sick for the next day or two as I was sneezing all day and just basically feeling like shit. Hopefully I won't get a debilitating fever tomorrow (this is the usual pattern of things when I feel like this).

We went back to Sudbury, Travis went straight to sleep, and I talked to Elizabeth and Siobahn helping them to figure out how to use their website. The site looks good but the CMS they're using is pretty aweful. But don't me started on that vein of conversation. We slept for about 13 hours (which was good since our sleep for the last 3 days has been sporadic and shoddy at best), so we're now reinvigorated and ready to tear up this town. Next update may be from jail.

Highway Meditations

I've said it before and I'll say it again. You need to go on a road trip. I find the driving portions of road trips to be one of the most relaxing experiences. For me, driving is pretty much instinctual so I really don't need to devote much thought to the activity. So driving long distances gives me time to just sit back, relax, and meditate. Here are some thoughts from tonight. I suppose I should thank Travis for being so tired. He slept for the last 4 hours while I just chilled out.

A city with a name like Nantecoke shouldn't be as large as it appears to be. (Turns out it wasn't Nantecoke - it was Wilkes-Barre. But that's also kind of a lame name for a city)

Mapquest is more accurate than podunk gas station guys. But gas station guys sell you donuts and coffee. Point for gas station guys. But point for my cell phone since I can access Mapquest on the road. I'm becoming more and more convinced that net access on the road is a pretty awesome thing.

Four Tet and DJ Shadow still rock.

I want to add some features to Audioscrobbler. I emailed one of the guys running it last week with the offer to help out. Something specific I want to do is to add the ability to look at the music you've listened to by date ranges. With something like this, you could plot your most played artists month-to-month instead of just seeing the overall listing. This could be cool to track ephemeral and permanent choices in taste. For me, DJ Shadow would reach back years.

I was poking around IMWatching the other day (which is both creepy and cool) and ended up checking out the author's MIT home page. He describes his interests as "studying techniques for visualizing and analyzing simple, trace signals generated by people over long time periods as they interact in a minimally instrumented environment. with enough data, its possible to automatically generate a model of each person's behavior...." This is really similar to things I've been doing (like the Dave locater, playing with Audioscrobbler, and my desire for a GPS photo gallery). I haven't really gotten to the modeling part, but that sounds cool, too. For me, I think that some of the underlying desire to do this kind of work is simply to look at things that I do without thinking about it. It's really wild to look at accumulated data about yourself and get a better understanding of yourself this way. Looking at my audioscrobbler profile it becomes painfully obvious who my favorite artists really are. I've started some work on analyzing the data collected by my laptop locater which should give me some more information about how and where I spend my time. It will probably be clear that I spend a huge amount of time on my computer, although that isn't quite something that the data supports explicitly since it's often on and connected to the internet when I'm doing something else.

In some larger sense, most projects I want to work on have aspects of organization and analysis of personal information. My photo gallery is not meant to just be an archive of all my photos. Some of the most interesting things come from some visualization of the data. If you check the stats, it becomes very clear that most of my picture taking happens during the summer. Or when I get a new camera. Things like that. That's why I want to add location information to the mix to see my physical traces over time and space. Because that shit is cool.

The previous meditation makes me want to go to grad school of some sort or another where I can study this stuff since, you know, you can study basket weaving if you can bullshit enough about it. I need to seriously look into schools and costs and things of that nature. Jesse's experience at Carnegie Mellon makes me think that I want to look there.

When I get to New York, I want to work with Jean Grae's record label so I can meet and marry her. Because she's awesome.

I need to try to convince Ondich or Schott to let me teach with them. Because that would be awesome.

I use the word awesome way too much. But that's because the word awesome is awesome.

Wow. That's a lot of babble. Back to being a passenger.

More Photos: Ohio and Pennsylvania

Location: Pennsylvania I-90 heading East, Mile 241

So, somehow we missed I-90 in Ohio and just stayed on 80. So we've gone through just about all of Pennsylvania. Which was exciting. Hopefully, we'll find 81 soon so we can actually start heading North to Boston. We shall see.

We shall also see if I can actually get a GPRS connection with my phone in these states. I don't know too much about it, but I'm thinking that I may only be able to connect through T-mobile towers. Or at least GPRS capable towers. And I have no idea which ones those are. Or perhaps it's only with towers that have some agreement with T-mobile. I downloaded this article on cell phones from howstuffworks so it might answer my question if I get the chance to read it. Regardless, this post may not show up when I intended it to. Scratch that. Found a T-mobile network. We're good.

For now, photos.

I love my new camera. Just look at the colors.

My car rocks. It's doing well so far.

Co-road tripper with his shake. He looks sleepy.

Fun with no flash.

More fun without a flash.

Refueled the car at about midnight in Pennsylvania. Also refuled ourselves with donuts, coffee, and No-Doz.

Creepy

Location: Ohio I-90 heading East, Mile 59

I can't really get a good picture of this, though I did get a little movie that I'll put up at some point. Anyway, both in Indiana and Ohio I-90 is a toll road. There are several "oases" with a gas station, food, and lame gift shops. Kansas has a similar set up except that all the shops are in the center of the road and both sides have access to the same place. In Ohio and Indiana, both sides of the road have exact duplicates of each store. When you look right, you see a BP and a McDonald's. Look to your left and you see a BP and McDonald's. With exactly same layout and architecture. It's just weird.

On the Go Research

OK. The cell phone net connection is turning out to be useful, insofar as resolving random arguments in the car.

On the toll road in Indiana, several miles of road have these signs in place. Travis thinks there is no way that the signs are economically useful attributing their existence to a mismanagement of funds. While I don't necessarily agree or disagree with him, it was fun to look up information and find out that the company that made them also makes missile systems. Which is nice. Here's a photo of one of the signs.

We looked into the contentious history of the "birthplace" of flight. Did you know that the Wright brothers were born in Ohio and made their plans and constructed the plane in Ohio? Those lying North Carolinians would have you think otherwise. It's a good thing U.S. House voted 378-3 to make Ohio the birthplace of flight. That'll teach those uppity North Caroliners.

Some Photos

Heh. That bus is lame

Bad shot of the Chicago skyline

The bridge between Illinois and Indiana

Shot of the bridge through the Civic's moonroof

On the Road

On the road with Travis. We're currently in Indiana. And it sucks. A lot. This is by the far the bleakest portion of this country that I have ever seen. And the Hardee's at the first rest stop on the tollway is really bad. So don't go there.

The idea of having internet access in your car on a roadtrip is much more glamorous than the reality. For example, right now my connection is super busy downloading tons of spam for getting rid of stretch marks. Ah, technology. But I will see if I can post some photos in a semi-live manner. Because that would just be cool.

Internet Dating: UPDATE

So, there was another in a long line of failed dates last night. I haven't quite figure out how to rate this one, but I can certainly say it was the most awkward and the most surreal. You all know me. I can be pretty talkative at times. And I'd like to think that I often have interesting things to say. Last night, the two of us had nothing to say to each other. It was terribly impressive. I also felt like she just thought I was dumb or at least not at her level. "I'm taking a class next semester called Sexuality and Culture. We're reading Foucault and Butler. Have you heard of them?" The tone was easy to discern: you've never heard of them, but I thought I should ask and unmask your ignorance. (For the record, I have heard of Foucault and have read a little bit, though it was a long time ago. I had not heard of Butler. But I was interested in knowing more). We had pretty opposite taste in music. Well, I was lukewarm about her music and she straight up hated mine. Fuck. She didn't even like Duran Duran. But she wouldn't go into why she didn't like my music. I tried to press her on it and at least get a conversation about music going and maybe get into why we liked what we liked but that went nowhere.

So it was weird to have absolutely no ability to communicate with each other. That is extremely rare for me. To ice the cake, there was this guy Kyle who was drunk off his ass that was hitting on her all night. Eventually, she and I basically just watched this guy in awe. The two of them talked about music and dancing. Apparently, this guy is quite the dancer. He wouldn't show us his moves in the bar despite his drunkeness, but he would tell us about how all his family and friends thought he was gay because he liked dancing. And he assured us that he was not gay. He has a daughter that lives with her mom in Florida that he hasn't seen in 8 months. When pressed on why he hasn't seen his daughter, he could only muster that he didn't know. Which impressed me.

I sent her an email last night to let her know I had a really good, surreal time. And I'm intensely curious as to why she seemed to dislike me. So I asked her. I'm expecting a response, but if I get one, I'm sure it will be interesting.

My track record for the whole online dating thing seems pretty poor. Well, that's not quite true. It looks like on average the whole thing has been alright. I mean, I did make a girl cry, I met the Queen of the Dead, I've met one really good friend, made a couple other acquantances, and I have some good stories to tell. It's just too bad I haven't actually met anyone that's truly impressed me or that I've really been attracted to. I suppose my pickiness is getting the best of me. But, I'm a stubborn, optimistic bastard, so I'm more than likely going to keep doing it.

I feel like I agree with Jody. Most of the people I'm meeting are Minnesotans born and bred. And, at least about 95% of the time, I hate Minnesotans. There are some cool ones out there, but they are extremely rare. And I'm also guessing that the really cool ones won't be online dating because they've got better shit to do. And if they are on there, there's still only a 20-30% chance they're actually going to respond to me. Even then, I've only met about half of the people that I've talked to online. So according to statistics, my chances are piss poor. Which is too bad. This only more reason why I want to get out of here and move to New York. If nothing else, I've got the law of large numbers going for me in New York.

Artificial Life

Breve is fucking awesome. It's a simulation engine with its own language to make complex graphic representations to study artificial life, genetic algorithms, and more. It fucking rules. For the most part, I've just been playing with some of the demos that come in the downloads (mainly the walker demos), but I really want to play with some of the research projects linked off of the Users page.

Modifying the code is pretty simple. I've only done cosmetic and data collection things like keeping track of the longest distance and displaying how many runs/generations have occurred, but I have some plans to play with the fitness functions of some of the current demos (I want to see how the walkers evolve when they are trying to be jumpers). I also just like to let it run all night and watch them in the morning.

I'm really jumping into the dark here. I suppose I should read up on artificial life to get a good understanding of how to do some of this stuff. Some more ideas involve making the walkers more sophisticated. Since the fitness function for the demo walkers is simply a determination of the distance from their starting point, any method is fair game. This usually means that the most successful creatures simply hurl themselves as far as possible without caring about their orientation. I want to add some constraints like some sort of balance or consistent orientation thresholds that force the creatures to stay straight. And I haven't dug deeply enough into the genome of the current walkers to know how complex their movement can become. It looks, on initial inspection, to simply repeat a series of motions. Simple neural networks may be the way to get more complex behavior. Yeah. But I'm having fun geeking out in a huge way right now. Don't hold it against me.

I keep thinking I'm done with this post and I remember something else I want to write down so I don't forget it. One more thing I want is the ability to automatically save the top twn performers and load them arbitrarily. I also want some more control and interfaces into selective breeding.

More AI concepts keep creeping back into my head. I'll have to figure out how to effectively deal with the local maxima problem. Again, the current demo seems to quickly find the best performers out of the initial random configuration, but is very bad at finding other solution. I suppose I should just go get some books on genetic algorithms and artificial life so I can get myself up to speed on these things. If I actually continue to enjoy this stuff, I might actually have something else besides the vague "web systems" concept to look into if I do decide to do some more school.

And my day is shot

Great list of classic computer science articles online.

Spamtastic

Title of a spam email: "Your Friends Will Envy You." As you've already guessed, it's for acquiring, as another email so succinctly put it, a mega pole. Now here's the thing: Do friends generally go around bragging to each other? Am I missing something here? If spam is any indication of social norms, I think I've got to change my tune, starting right here. Hey Seth and Andrew, I've got a huge cock. Envy me. What's that, Jody? You look a little green. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Not everyone can have a gigantic cock. (It's all natural too. I swear)

Dave now awaits awesome traffic to come his way after google indexes "mega pole" and "gigantic cock."

Hacker Wannabe

Great Hackers

Awesome article. It totally jives with my views on programmers and, in some sense, people in general. I know I've read sci-fi writers and other futurist people try to use the hacker term to describe people in some general sense. In Neil Stephenson's Quicksilver, the members of the Royal Society are either alluded to being or straight out defined as being hackers. I feel like similar sentiments are in all of his books. Cory Doctorow often does it too. So I feel I'm not too far off my mark by trying to generalize those same ideas.

For Carleton people - tell me how this stands up with that article in mind. Ondich is a hacker. Musicant is a good programmer but not a hacker. Does that make sense or sound right? I think it does. And I might even go so far as to say that the people who preferred Jeff over Dave are more likely to be the hacker types as well.

Something that's talked about a little bit is the practical use of hackers for actually getting stuff done in a business world. Now, I'm going to make what some may consider a leap and define myself as a hacker. In my experience, a bunch of hackers together working on a project will get nowhere fast. No one is willing to do the grunt work that is always required of a real project. Even a hacker alone will often never finish something or really bring it all the way to fruition. I can list countless personal projects that have suffered this fate. Probably my biggest personal success is Reason. (Digression - naming a system Reason sounds really clever initially but then you realize that it is a PAIN IN THE ASS to talk about. You'll see why in a second). Probably the biggest reason that Reason (see?) has succeeded the way it has, at least in the petri dish of Carleton, is not because I'm super great. Well, that's part of it. It would have gone nowhere had I not worked with Brendon Stanton so early on. Stanton is so much more practical and would always get fed up with my blitherings about proper decoupling and conversations about what it should or shouldn't do and would actually go and do things. Without him, the system would still be disconnected pieces of flotsam and jetsam that did next to nothing.

SDS was a really, really shitty place to work for me because there was nothing do but fix up bugs and implement customers. There was no creativity nor new problem to solve Even when there were interesting things to do, the lead tech took them on and never worked with anyone else. Not just that - he often times solved them incorrectly. Which brings me to another recent pet peeve - passive aggressive control freak paranoid people. Engineers in particular. I've dealt with a few and am dealing with a few more right now. One of them isn't even an engineer but the same patterns are emerging. They want to control things but they don't trust anyone else with the responsibilities they control. For many things, this can be a useful pattern. But in many cases, these people will hold onto their perceived responsibility with a fucking deathgrip even though letting go will not only result in a better solution, it will also make that person's life easier as well. They basically can't admit that someone has a better solution - even when the solution directly benefits them. This pisses me off when I have to deal with it. Because when you have the better solution that solves all the problems, they fight you tooth and nail to make sure that it won't happen.

Jumping context again. In my current binge of internet dating and trying to meet people, I keep falling back to one characteristic that trumps all others when I consider someone for friendship or a relationship. The best description I can muster is that they've got that "spark" that sets them apart and indicates intelligence, creativity, passion about what they do, and desire to do something about it. It's also curiousity and a bunch of other things. I would say that most, if not all, of my closest friends have that spark. In some sense, they are hackers in their own right whatever it is that they've found that interests them in their life. Which is why we talk and talk and talk but never act on those ideas. Talking about the ideas is often times far more gratifying than actually doing it.

I think I had a point somewhere in there. I really don't know what it was.

To The Wind

I've decided to throw practicality out the window and just go ahead and get a new camera. I'll probably be at Best Buy tonight getting something new. Can I afford it? Not really. But I really, really want to have a camera that won't die while I'm on the road. And to really drive the point home, I think I might also get a cheap GPS device as well. Just because I'm a masochist for credit card bills. If I actually do this, I'll be on my way to creating my location based photo system. Because I'm not busy enough already with the thousand other projects going on. If I do get these toys, I can do ridiculously geeky things on the road. Since I'll have a mobile internet connection with my phone, if I so desired, I could keep a real time updated site with new photos, current location (down to a few meters) and trip history. Is it a bad sign that this really excites me? I think not. All my friends will make fun of me for being such a hardcore geek, but deep down, they're jealous they didn't do it first. Take that, subspace!

Resources/References for me about GPS photo stuffs.

• GeoSnapper - closest thing to community, open GPS photo site
• Tokyo Picturesque - Flash based GPS Photo tracking system. Very cool.
• GPS Photo Linking on the Mac

OK. Reel in the geekiness. Or, at least, shift to another media. Before Sunset was unbelievably good. I was totally and completely taken in by the movie. I don't think I have ever been as emotionally attached to a movie before in all honesty. It reminded me in large part of some friends of mine and the time we used to spend together. However, if you are not taken in by the story, you will not like the movie very much. Because that is all there is to it. It is just the two characters hanging out in real time. Yeah. I likey.

And this is for Seth...

A Quick Message

I'm posting this from Perkin's. Cell internet rules. Although it is a little slow.

Devious Meanderings

Updated the EXIF post a little bit. I could link to the EXIF post, but I have no permalinks nor anything very programmatically useful on this site, so you'll have to scroll.

I got really angry at an article called "PHP in contrast to Perl" and planned to write a long rant on it, but I've decided to hold off on that. The summary is pretty simple: "so what." And it's pretty annoying that there is no author attached to the document. I find accountability to be a more and more important thing in today's increasingly virtual world.

So Blogger has a whole new spiffy editing system. I logged into an ancient account to go check it out but was prematurely stopped by some of my old posts. I belive they are from the summer of 2001, between my freshm(a? e?)n (fuck it. freshperson. or freshpeople. stupid words.) and sophomore year. Wow. Pretension ahoy. I feel like sharing...

"Had I realized this thing which I am about to reveal to you special readers of my site, I may have been able to save oodles of pain and trouble."

Who in their right mind says "oodles?"

"Not a decision I really wanted to make, but something I feel like I have to do. I just haven't been able to give it the attention it needs, nor have I been able to even keep up with the influx of new users and suggestions for celebs to put in the database. Add to that all the countless bugs that are there and have been there and my inability to get them fixed. I feel that I just need to let it rest for a while and then re-release it in a spectacular show of uber-ness."

Well that never happened. And I love how important I make uberbooty sound.

"I have resigned myself to the fact that no work shall be accomplished and I will fare poorly in my classes."

Who writes like this? Wait. That'd be me.

"There is something so magical about leaving the college bubble. The outside world has so many things to offer, so many new ways to feel without chafing. So much comfort. So much 2-ply toilet paper."

I've always been funny, at least.

"In the crafting of this post, I realize again how self-referential my site is. I just don't surf that much and I feel that links to other stuff is better covered elsewhere. My site is about me, dammit. Get used to it."

It's nice to know I've always been full of myself.

Well that was a fun trip down memory lane. Figured out when I started smoking the brand I smoke now, to the very goddamn day (June 1st, 2001 - "And I got these cool Turkish Gold Camel cigarette tins." - marketing works, apparently). Remembered some plans that never happened, revisited some bad breakups, some fun flings, and lots of reminiscing about college work. I'm really glad that Blogger has stayed around. Now I need to get the info out so I can have a permanent backup for myself. It's like finding trashcan gold, people.

New Phone and Thoughts

New phone number. Email me if I'm a terrible friend/lover/relative that forgot to put you on my mass email.

Since that's out of the way, now I can talk about my new phone. Sony Ericsson T610. T-Mobile. Unlimited internet addition. A bunch of text messages. Bluetooth. Bluetooth and Apple fucking kicks ass. Matt Haughey gave me the inspiration. Once I get the internet connection working, I am totally connected whenever I want to be. Bluetooth lets me control iTunes from my goddamn phone. I can sync my meetings from iCal to my phone and have it automatically silence itself when I get to the meeting. When I get a phone call, my computer pops up a message where I can route the call to voicemail. And, thanks to T-mobile, I can actually use text messaging now. If I set up my machine at home with Bluetooth, it can start playing music when I'm in the room. My computers can automatically pause my music and set me away on IM when I get a call. It's like, a cell phone that does the things that cell phones should do. It's kind of incredible. And if I didn't mention it already, I can control my mouse from my goddamn phone. You can't argue with that.

One of Those Long Rambling Updates

Strap in. It's time for a speedy update.

I'm in demand right now. Besides working at Carleton, I'm contracting/consulting with SDS once again and freelancing with Wilbur. As if that wasn't enough, random job offers have been coming at me from all angles. In spite of this, nothing is offering anything close to what Carleton is offering. While there is more money elsewhere, Carleton is the only place where I get to develop my own system on my own terms. Plus, there's a good chance that this project will be open sourced in the future which creates the possibility that I will have a reputation in the larger world.

Andrew's moving to Uptown in a few weeks and we're getting Travis in instead. Andrew's going to be working at Secure Computing and he just got a sweet new Civic. Bring on the partying in Uptown. Well, more partying in Uptown. With a place to crash.

The 19th grandchild on my father's side was born late last week. No one in this world deserves a child more than Aunt Polly. I'm pretty sure she exceeds all the criteria to become a living saint.

OKCupid is the coolest site around right now. And I'm not just saying that because I'm meeting cool people - well, I should hold off on that statement since I haven't met anyone yet. I'm at least exicted about the potential of meeting cool people and it seems like this place is better than any other way I can conceive of right now. Regardless, It appeals to my nerdy side in a giant way. A) They use lots of statistics and math that seem to work, B) they share a similar style of humor with me, and C) C++ is an option in their list of languages. Now that's impressive.

The 2 week Greater East Coast Adventure trip is being planned and is going to happen. If I haven't talked to you recently and you're out in Boston, New York, Philly, DC, or thereabouts, let me know because I love you and I want to see you.

My brother has decided on Lake Forest in the northern suburbs of Chicago which means I'll be heading out there more often to hang with him. If he wants me out there. But I like Chicago anyway, so I'll get to use him as an excuse very good reason to get out there more often.

Cornhole is an awesome game. And, yes. There really is a thing called the American Cornhole Association. There's something about this that reignites my love for this country. We need to play more. And you need to make your own. We did it for about $30 in 2 hours, more or less. And double-stitching your bean bags is not an option - it's a necessity.

I need a new camera. But I don't have any money. However, I don't think I can go on my trip without one. Thus, the credit card will get a work out. If only someone would release a small, durable, GPS-enabled camera in the next few weeks. For a reasonable amount of money.

Anchorman was pretty terrible. -2. Need to scale it.

Regarding the "kistehen" thing in the links - looks like it's some random Hungarian animation. The website has versions of the cartoons in English. They are just as incomprehensible as the Hungarian versions.

The Dave locater now works while I'm at Carleton. Turns out firewalls and active FTP don't get along so well. ftp_pasv($ftp_conn, true) to the rescue. I've also started writing some code for the Laptop Locater to generate random, uninteresting facts about where my laptop spends its time. I'll be able to pretty easily figure out how often I'm on time to work, amount of time spent at bars with my laptop, and other such interesting things. I've also got to figure out how to get AppleScript to use drop down menus. Sweet.

And a ridiculously cute 4th of July photo. Because at sollaires.net, we're thinking about the children.

That's it for now. Back to Reason!

The Cow

Not only does the Contented Cow have good beer and Black and Tans that flow like water, people you know and like that work there, a nice outdoor patio, fires outside when it's cooler, and an open WiFi spot. It also has power outlets on the damn patio. At times I have doubted the Cow since I can't smoke inside. But my faith has been reaffirmed in spades. Maybe it's because I'm here right now and having a good time. Maybe it's the Guinness. Whatever it is - well, I can't lie to you, it's probably the Guinness - I'm digging the cow.

On EXIF

<rant>

The EXIF standard is a beautiful thing. It really is. It allows digital camera manufacturers to automatically store all the information about a photo in a standard format that any program can read. PHP, for example, has EXIF functionality that allows you to determine the date and time the photo was taken so you can automatically sort photos chronologically, much like my gallery. Here's a tip for application developers that create image editing programs. DON'T FUCK WITH THE EXIF HEADERS. I'm looking at you, GIMP. If someone crops, sharpens, or otherwise modifies an image that has pre-existing EXIF headers, do not, repeat, DO NOT overwrite those headers. You are doing no one a favor. And I can only imagine that you are putting work into this "feature" that breaks applications like my photo gallery. It's OK to modify the DateTime field, for example, since this, by the spec, is meant for "file change date and time." This is good. This tracks the last modification to the photo. DateTimeOriginal, however, is meant for "date and time of original data generation." This is an extremely important field. Don't erase it. As fun as guessing the date and time of a photo based on its sequence number is, wait, it's not fun. While there are dangers related to improper or hidden use of EXIF information, overall it makes far more sense to maintain this information that delete it. Also, apparently, EXIF information can be saved by the GIMP and may be the default now. I'm not quite sure. I just know that the files I had to work with today had not saved the information. In fact, the GIMP had written in its own information which was not helpful.

</rant>

Update on 7/16/2004 - well, I've thought a little more about this issue and it's not quite that simple. If you are compositing images or creating something new, then it makes no sense to use the existing EXIF information. Well, it rarely makes sense. If you are simply overlaying a copyright image or watermark or some such thing, it still makes sense to maintain the information on the original photo. If you are changing the image into something that is no longer identifiable as having anything to do with the original, then it makes no sense. But it seems to make sense to maintain information when there are no other images involved. The only drawback to this is the whole thing happened with some TechTV hostess person that didn't realize the EXIF thumbnail was a full shot of her after she had cropped the image. I forget her name and don't feel like googling it right now, but she had a nude pic of herself that she cropped to just show her face. She put it on her website, and the EXIF geeks out there found the full thumbnail. With her boobies. Which caused them great excitement. So there are problems. But most of them are manageable.

In Tune and On Time

DJ Shadow's new In Tune and On Time is awesome. If anyone is interested, I ripped to mp3 the tracks from the DVD that don't appear on the CD. 8 tracks total: The extended intro, Six Days, You Can't Go Home Again, Midnight In A Perfect World, High Noon, the Malcolm on the Drums extra, the Live Pushin' Buttons, and the trailer for Keepintime. Here you go: In Tune and On Time Extra DVD Tracks. The usual mp3/mp3 auth to keep mp3 robots at bay.

Are You Fucking Serious?

People always make fun of the media for reporting on the lamest, most trivial celebrity gossip instead of focusing on real news. Nothing new here. But, this article really drove the point home for me. I'm in awe of CNN. I really am.

Slashdot Posts

So la-de-da, weblogs.com shut down. I really don't care. But the slashdotters have some pretty funny comments about the whole thing. Some gems...

"Locking out the owners and only allowing guests would probably cut the bandwidth usage by about 95%" [link]

"Having your blogging service totally shut you out without notice finally seems like the perfect thing to blog about." [link]

and my favorite...

"Blog to the hand, cause the server ain't listening." [link]

Oh weblog humor. It never gets old.

Getting Worse At This Blogging Thing

Yeah. So there's not a whole lot to say. This is the obligatory "I'm not posting enough" post. New job is good. Actually working on stuff I care about and am good at. Had a wild night with Larry. Drank until about 6 on Saturday night/Sunday morning. Felt super awesome in the morning. Planning a trip out East. Probably going to hit Boston and DC. Getting my mad farmer tan back. It always rules. That's about it. Check back in later.

New Job

I've started at Carleton. It's everything I'd hoped it would be. And, really, everything I already knew it was. It just hit me how much I like this job, though. Here I am, sitting in my apartment at 9 PM, and my thoughts drifted to improving our office and our system. This is something my previous boss really wanted me to do (he thought I was a very talented programmer, but lacked "intensity," in his own words), but I never had the desire to think about medical claims processing in my off hours. This is probably due not just to the fact that medical claims processing is one of the most boring problems out there, but also because my direct manager made iit abundantly clear that any thought outside of his plans was, to put it lightly, not welcome. I will say that perhaps the most unmotivating experience was going outside the call of my job to implement some features that directly helped each developer and essentially getting yelled at for not clearing it with him. Unfortunately, this seems to be the way of the world rather than an exception. Jesus. That's depressing. But my current job fucking rocks. So I am really excited about that.

10,000 Photos

So I think my camera hit its 10,000th shot sometime recently (I think. It's not totally clear). My camera names every image or movie by number. So it recently reverted back to IMG_0001.JPG. It looks like it may have jumped back to 0001 after 9900 instead of 9999, but I'm pretty sure I've taken 100 more photos since it turned. So that's pretty fucking cool. It may also have something to do with the messed up order of some of the photos on my photo site. I'll look into deeper some other time (read: probably never).

And, new photo! You may need to reload the page a few times if you've visited recently and the link color hasn't changed to match. Stupid CSS.

Dallas

"Vacations" in Dallas never are. Once again, I'm exhausted and looking forward to having several days with nothing to do so I can recover from my vacation.

So it turns out the weekend of my brother's graduation was the same weekend as my high school class' 5 year reunion. It was... strange. I got to see some old friend I hadn't seen in a while. It turns out, though, that most of the people that attended were the same people I never really liked in high school. So it was really weird when they started buying shots for me and inviting me back to the party - this is the constant party in high school that I was never invited to. It was pretty wild. Doing tequila shots with David Spiegel is something I never thought I'd do. Some other funny random reunion stuff... Several of my friends didn't recognize me. Apparently I had made a bunch of mix tapes for Regina Merson in high school that she still remembers and listens to occasionally (I had completely forgotten about them). Nick Williams bought me a tequila shot. I think the best piece of gossip is that one person in our class is having some wild relationship and gender issues recently. Let's just say that he's comfortable that she wants to be a he. Wild stuff.

Apparently, about half of the class is in Austin and they all love it. Why did I sign up for several more years in Minnesota again? Oh yeah. Because I hate myself.

I got to spend a lot of time with Morgan, geeking out and sharing stories. Morgan is probably the developer I respect most of all programmers I have met. The most surprising thing is how much respect he has for me. I didn't realize it until we had been drinking for about 3 hours and were talking at his apartment at like 4 in the morning. We had some really interesting conversations, one topic I'll spend some time on right now. Morgan was arguing that geeks currently hold a position like doctors did decades ago. At parties, everyone would come up to the doctor at the party and ask them about whatever ailment they were currently experiencing. It didn't matter what the doctor's specialty was, they were viewed as experts on health. So now are geeks. I can't count how many times that someone asks me to fix their internet connection when I tell them that I am a programmer. "Good with computers" tends to make these people think that I have mastered every aspect of computer technology. What this tells me is that the real opportunity today is to be the guy that can talk to both people. Someone who understands geek but can translate sensibly to non-geeks. I'm not totally sure what this job is yet, but I'm pretty sure I can do it. Software project manager? Director of Technology? I have no idea what positions I'm looking for, but I'm pretty sure I can do it.

My brother graduated from high school. That makes him 4 of 4 that have graduated from the same school. A) he rocks and B) it's a pretty impressive achievement for my family. However, the graduation ceremony itself was long. And boring. The entire school faculty (about 200 teachers) processed. This took a while. And 2 of my classmates walked in the faculty procession which caught me off guard. Also, most 18 year olds should not be allowed to give speeches at graduation. If nothing else, their speeches should be edited to eliminate cliches and triteness. Although, I suppose that would have been problematic for the two speeches yesterday. Since there would have been nothing left. But it's OK, because graduation is a beginning, not an end. It's not an end. It's a beginning. Did I mention it was a beginning? And not an end? Because it is. A beginning that is. My sister next to me and I were about to gouge our eyes out with the program.

Finally, I'm hoping the ladies will start knocking down my door. My oldest sister spent about an hour with me rewriting my personals profile on Nerve. Which was a bizarre experience. It's is definitely for the best though. If nothing else, a woman's eye has now scrubbed my personal ad. And scrubbed thoroughly. It was definitely the most embarassing event of the weekend.

And I've been harassed to write about Vim after asking to be harassed. Nothing quite yet. But I can point you to a hacked together list of my favorite Vim stuff. Somewhat indeciphrable, but useful nonetheless.

More Command Line Love

So I've finally got something pretty awesome for movies in my photo gallery. As it turns out, none of the cameras I have played with support date metadata in the actual movie files. But at least on my machine, when I pull the movies from my camera, the creation/modification dates are left intact. A little scp -p and I've got the movie on my server with the correct date.

Here's the set up: PHP, mplayer, and ImageMagick are doing the heavy lifting. PHP coordinates everything in the program, mplayer converts an AVI into a series of JPEGs which I then resize the first of and composite a movie icon onto. It's pretty sweet.

Make a movie into JPEGs: mplayer -vo mpeg filename.avi. All frames are converted into images name by frame number. I just use the first frame because it's convenient, though I could pick any of the files at random to use as a poster frame. Installing mplayer on Mac OS X with the right libraries for JPEG video output is a place worse than hell. It was much easier on Debian: apt-get install mplayer-i386. Although, I did have to find the correct package repository.

Overlay an icon on an image in the bottom right corner: composite -gravity SouthEast -geometry +4+4 overlay_image base_image output_image. Composite is cool. Part of ImageMagick. Gravity tells imagemagick to use that direction as its origin and all -geometry offsets work from there.

There needs to be a metadata standard for videos. I was poking around and found a few standards in progress that apply to all media. That'd be good, but I want it now.

WATCH MOONTRAP. Wow. Amazing. -10. SO GOOD.

I've got loads to say about Vim, so harass me if you want that sooner.

Updates

I played my first game of golf ever on Friday. I think my score was in the low 300s. After 14 holes, when we finished. It's much harder than it looks. But we had beer. So it was good.

Jamie's friend (now mine as well) Amy rocks. We had fun partying, playing with Jamie's kids, and talking about GPS. I now very much want a GPS device. So many neat things to do.

My car is fucked up. Possibly the 02 sensor. It likes to shake when idling. And the Check Engine light blinks nonstop. Which is not a good sign.

Had some wild experiences with the SDS crew this weekend most of which are not appropriate for a public website.

Maybe I'll write something of substance at some point. But then again, maybe not.

Archive.org

I've posted about it before, the but moving images section of archive.org can easily take up an afternoon. There's so much cool stuff in there.

New photo, also.

MP3s and Backups

My bandwidth usage increased a bunch this week. Looking at my logs, it looks like some random sites had picked it up and were linking to it on mp3 searches. It looked like mp3.baidu.com and download.joyyang.com were the offenders. I have no idea what these sites are. Anyone want to translate?

For now, I've just thrown up a simple authentication challenge. The username and password are both 'mp3'.

I've also got a simple backup system running between my home machine and the new webserver-in-progress (aka nonninja). rsync is pretty cool. We'll see how well it does as it's running for a while.

And another song is up in the mp3 list. Prefuse 73's Storm Returns. It's currently the song I've listened to most on my laptop. It's just fucking incredible.

It's Oh So Quiet

I'm not saying much of substance because I've been jamming on a new web toy. Seth, Dave, Andrew, and I are setting up our own virtual dedicated server and we're having a really good time with it. At this point, we're just trying to get the basics up and running before moving on to really cool shit. Expect fun things from us. Now that we're all working with each other, we're really getting things done quickly. Having other people that really know their shit and are showing what they know daily really pumps you up. It's a pretty sweet viruous cycle. Dave and I talked about photo systems for a couple hours last night. You can see our napkin diagrams on the photo site, but don't go stealing our ideas.

I do know that getting trashed on a Thursday night, getting 3 hours of sleep, and then getting to work at 8 is not fun. My friend told me that. Yeah... my friend...

Oh so tired.

Fire the Cigarettes Missiles!

Audioscrobbler is back up. Which is cool. The best part is the link to explain the submission queue length on the System Stats page. Just a little link. [wtf?]. That's the best help link I've ever seen. And it reminds me of this cartoon that's been on my quicklinks for a while. So. Much. Awesome.

New Playground

So Linode is ultra-fucking-cool. I got one of their virtual machines and have started playing with it. I'll probably be moving shit over there at some point soon. I'll let you know when things are changing. If you want to play with it, get in touch with me and we can talk. A few of us are playing with it and might decide to chip in some money to get a better server as we feel it's needed. Cool, cool stuff.

Trip Notes

I chipped one of my top front teeth trying to break open a pistachio shell. It's not too bad; more than anything else, I'm surprised. My teeth have got to be pretty tough little muthas. You can tell by seeing, or, really, not seeing, all the pens I've destroyed at my desk over the last year.

I highly recommend Douglas Adams' Salmon of Doubt (iTMS audiobook link). The first half is full of interviews, essays, and speeches about evolution, technology, the Beatles, and dogs. It covers an amazing amount of material and has made me realize what a brilliant guy Douglas Adams was. I haven't finished the fiction at the end, but it's the high quality Adams you would suspect.

I also highly recommend the idea of taking a short weekend trip to see friends in some nearby city if you have the means. I love driving cross-country, especially with good listening material (in this case, the previously mentioned Douglas Adams). It was nice to get away from just about everything for a little while.

Shui Wah in Chicago's Chinatown has really, really good, really, really cheap dim sum. Check it out if you can.

The Cooler makes absolutely no sense when you're really stoned.

A tiny bit more on audiobooks: I think I might become addicted to 'em. Especially given that I will have a 40 minute commute each way to and from Carleton. They may be my new driving entertainment. Plus I can say I've been "reading" all kinds of cool books.

I'll be in Dallas May 29th to the June 3rd. If you're around, let me know. It'll be busy since my brother is graduating, my sister is searching for a wedding location, and I'll have the scary yet intriguing opportunity to go to a high school reunion (for which several friends I haven't seen in years are showing up. I'm psyched). But I'll make time for you.

There's a new little widget at the bottom of the left column. My laptop now pings sollaires.net every 15 minutes or so and tells the site where my laptop is. So it's a pretty good indicator of where I am. It's a cool little script. I got to use a little command line AppleScript to pop up a dialog and ask me for a name of a new place if I haven't been there before. The command line interface to AppleScript, osascript, is pretty cool - it returns values in a parsable format with information like the button pressed and any information that was entered. Figuring out where I am is accomplished by parsing the IP address that IP Chicken reports. I use the FTP extension of PHP to upload a small file to sollaires.net that a script up here parses and displays. I even got to use a little of my relative time code from the scale to provide info like "2 hours ago" instead of just a timestamp. I'll be tinkering with it some more as time allows and adding some more information as to how it works and what it all means. If you're interested in it for any reason, drop me a line. And I think I'm going to change the position of the thing right now, also. Because I can.

Heading East

Only a little east, though. I've decided I've got to get the fuck out of Dodge and go see some friends I haven't seen in a while. So I'm heading off to Madison for Friday night and Chicago for Saturday night. I'm just excited about driving for a while. It'll be a good initiation to my forthcoming 40 minutes commute to Carleton. It's also cool because I've never taken a vacation on my own or just because I want to go. So I'm psyched.

Technology is Awesome

So it's 80 degrees and beautiful out. The trees are nice and green. I've got a beer, a cigarette, and my laptop. WiFi rules.

More About the New Gig

So I'm going to work at Carleton once again. More specifically, I'm going to work with the web guys again. I worked for them for just over a year before and during my senior year where I built a bitchin' system to handle most of the new websites on the Carleton network. So I will be the Web Communications Technologist in the Web Communications and Development department. Whatever that means. The position is a full-time, indefinite position. I won't be an intern, I will be a full-fledged staff member.

I'm actually really, really excited to get back there. I'm going to get to work on my own system (which rocks), program in PHP again (which I like very much), and have a lot of control over where we go (which I don't have now). One of the nicest aspects of the job is that, as a department, we'll be deciding what we want to do more than being told what to do. And I will be a large part of that which should work out well in the long-term as I can say I've been a lead rather than just a developer. So I'm really excited. I get started June 7th, so I'll be there really soon.

Also a quick camera update: I was too lazy to actually go find the right screws for the camera, but I did find an alternate solution. Scotch tape is my hero.

Photo Geekery

OK. I have more to say about digital photography, this time from the code side of things. I'm a little closer to the automation of frame grabbing from AVIs. It looks like mplayer can do what I want it to, provided I have the correct libraries available. I played with installing libjpeg yesterday without much success, so I'm going to try again on the actual photo gallery machine. I'll let you know how it goes (it didn't work. dammit). Currently, it can only convert frames into PGM format (a simple grayscale image format), which is a start.

Additionally, I packaged up some of the photo gallery code for Seth and it is available here. It's all PHP and really rough right now, so it'll take a lot of work to get running. This is also a less stable version than what is actually running the site. I've separated the code and layout using Smarty, but it's not completely done. I also think that the .htaccess file that handles the URLs may not have been included in that tgz. I'll check it out later (it's there now).

My Camera

I just changed out the battery on my camera since, in my orgy of photo taking this weekend, it was dry. As I was opening up the battery compartment, I was pressing parts of the case with my fingers to get a better grip. As it turns out, parts of the case don't feel as solid as they once did. Upon further inspection, every screw on the bottom of my camera appear to be on vacation, by this point probably in some landfill somewhere after an exciting first class journey from my pocket to the dryer to the lint collector to the trashcan. Bon voyage, oh tiny screws. It still seems that the camera is fairly sturdy, however, which is a testament to Canon's Powershots. There is one disturbing symptom of the lack of screws though. There is absolutely nothing holding on the back plate of the camera. Nothing. At. All. Except for some tension. I have yet to take the little sucker apart, but since I realized this, I do not believe I will be using the camera very much anymore. Until I find some tiny screws. Another testament: that sturdy little fucker stills takes pictures regardless of the back plate predicament. Color me impressed.

So, I'm in the market for a new camera. I know Dave just got a new one that he really likes, so I'll probably play with his at some point. A few of the features I've wanted for a while in my current camera are things like arbitrary length movies (mine only supports up to 30 seconds at a time) and auto-detection of camera orientation (meaning it knows if you are taking a landscape or a portrait shot). I've waxed on about movie metadata, but I don't know if any cameras support that. The camera needs to be sturdy as hell. And small. But still have cool manual features. I don't know if this camera exists, but hit me up with your ideas if you know anything.

Finally, an update to my metadata post a while back. Some guy did something along the lines of what I was talking about earlier by mixing information from a camera and a GPS device. This guy took trip information from a GPS device and matched the timestamps from the camera to get a pretty accurate map of where he took his photos. This is super cool and something I will be looking into. If only I had the money to support my technolust...

And, put up a bunch more quiklinks I've been sitting on for a little while now.

Movie Title

Luxembourg Throws Down. If not a movie, then at least an episode of South Park.

It's Official

I'm going to work at Carleton again in about a month. I'm really, really excited to go back and kick some serious ass with those guys. I'll write more about it later. And I know I'm a bad person for not updating the site. For now, you'll just have to deal with it. You do get a new photo though. That's how much I love you.

More Music

Here's another ridiculously compelling beat (6MB mp3). Talib Kweli's Africa Dream is so uber-cool. Starts out with this jazzy drum beat that drops out to a guitar loop with Talib rapping on top, and then Hi-Tek drops this ridiculous beat. Even better, there's a cello that builds in the background. On this mp3, I "mixed" it together with Kweli's Good To You instrumental version, which is also really good. Mixed might be a strong word. I just joined them at the right moment. But it still sounds pretty good. Ignore the fact that Good To You is a much, much lower quality mp3.

New Song

I just remembered I have this song. Wild Wood(4MB mp3) by Paul Weller, remixed by Portishead. It's from the album Special Brew which was a totally random compilation mix album from '96. It was one of the many CDs that was stolen from my car my senior year of high school. Damn, there were a ton of CDs in that car. I was pretty upset. Anyway, a few months ago, a ridiculously strong nostalgic impulse led me to purchase the disc again. So now, I'm sharing it with you.

Also, the apartment internet connection is down. Which sucks. It also means that all my photos and all older songs are not accessible right now since they reside on my machine in there. Hopefully that'll all be back up on Sunday.

A Tax Story

In 2003, I worked at a variety of places in a variety of roles. More importantly, I had a variety of different tax statuses. Because, really, I only worked at two places, but between those 2 places I racked up 5 tax forms (2 W-2's and 3 1099-MISCs if you're curious).

Andrew did his taxes about a month ago and wasn't very pleased with the outcome. He ended up owing the government a lot of money. You see, we both contracted with the current gig for a while and then later became actual employees. I happened to not only contract with the current gig; I also contracted with Carleton for a couple of months. So, seeing as Andrew and I had a similar employment record, I was worried. Because I had contracted much longer than he had.

As I was contracting, I knew, in my mind, that I needed to save money so when the inevitable hit came, I'd be ready for it. However, there were drinks that were suffering in bottles, and I had to help them. So I did.

Imagine my surprise when I finished the federal tax portion of my return. $400 were coming back to me. I knew not how this could be. I checked with the parents to make sure they hadn't claimed me as dependant (which they hadn't) and after some talking, my mother and I had determined that I may actually be in for some money back. It sounded good to me.

My excitement was bubbling as I worked through the state tax portion, telling the government that I had not sold a farm in Minnesota in the last year nor . It came as a shock to see my status on the Minnesota tax return. They owed me money. But something wasn't quite right. Maybe it was the fact that they owed me

$17,000

Try as I may, I could not convince myself that this number was correct, seeing as I did not make much more than that last year. Slowly I had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not the best data enterer. I went back and checked out all of my W-2s and 1099-MISCs. It seems that last year I paid $182.00 in state taxes. Not $18,200.

So I owed a bunch of money. But not as much as I thought it would. So it ended better than I hoped it would. It would've been nice to get that 17 grand though.

Linky, Linky

Added a links page because I was bored.

Games Should Be Fun

This Wired article touches on something that Jeremy and I found out about Mario Party 4. It's meant to augment a party, not be the party. A number of games only require one hand which means you can be drinking your beer and playing at the same time. That's the total opposite of most Xbox games where it takes all your concentration and, increasingly, all your senses if you're using a headset. The all-encompassing games shut you off from the real world. It'd be kind of cool to see these party games require some other types of interaction outside of the game itself. Something like getting the players to do something in real life and then key in the winner or have everyone vote for the winner.

As a lifetime gamer, I'll throw in the usual games-aren't-as-good-as-they-used-to-be comment. There are certainly exceptions, but it seems like with the unbelievable advances in graphics and computing technology, too many game developers focus first on the technology instead of the fun-ness of the game. It seems very similar to the problems inherent in most applications - usability is tacked on at the end instead of being the first thing considered.

One more game tidbit. It's just a quick two part quiz: What is the Konami code? If you knew the code, you played too many video games as a child. But, did you say "select" near the end? If yes, you played too many video games but at least you had friends to play with, you lucky friend-having bastard, you. (For those socially well-adjusted and not in the know, the Konami code is Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, [Select,] Start. If you press select, you're choosing two players instead of one in the old Nintendo game Contra)

Update: I just got an email from a friend of a friend regarding my last post. This article talks about technology that can be used in phones/cameras to do automatic location awareness. The intended use is for finding out where you are and getting somewhere else, but really, just the ability to tell where you are is really, really cool. Where can I sign up to beta test this stuff?

I Yearn For Metadata

My photo gallery (login required. email me) is pretty sweet. It does a lot of things that I want it to do, such as chronological ordering and automatic EXIF metadata extraction. EXIF rocks my world. And PHP has an EXIF extension which blew me away. When creating my gallery the first time, I was about to write my own EXIF parser in PHP to get at the info I wanted. Studying the file specs for EXIF is not a fun task. I won't lie to you.

A major feature I want to add is the ability to handle the movies that my digital camera can shoot. Unfortunately, my digital camera doesn't add any metadata to the movie file. Additionally, there are no easy ways at programmatically getting at QuickTime metadata even if it was there. At least from PHP, which is my language of choice. So I'm forced to create a system that relies on me manually adding metadata for all my movies. Which I never, ever do. So, I think the best alternative is to use the file creation date to give a rough ordering of movie files. The problem with that approach is the creation date is the time that I downloaded the movie from my camera to my machine, not the datetime that it was actually shot. I should take a look at mounting the card itself to see if the creation date on those files is correct, but that messes up my usual workflow of getting photos and movies off my camera. Does anyone know if newer cameras have implemented better support for movie metadata?

While I'm at it, I might as well ask for a GPS enabled camera so I can automatically extract where the photo was taken. But why stop there? I should be able to train my camera on faces so that it can automatically tag each photo with the people that are in it. With that information, it would be easy to look at all photos with a certain person in it. Maybe even automatically scan incoming photos are alert those people that there are new photos of them on my site. With the GPS information, you could create a map interface to get an idea of where I take all my pictures. You could chart my whereabouts over time and see me hop around Minnesota and the rest of the country. Or do neat searches such as "show me photos of Minnesota in spring that are landscapes," if I had some sort of "landscape" tag or category on my photos.

Hmm. Maybe I should slow down and actually get movies working on the site. I think that's the first step.

Briefly

I left my apartment Thursday morning. It's 7:30 on Sunday and I'm still not home. 4 days without a change of clothes is not an idea I recommend.

Saw the Quannum/DJ Shadow show Friday night. I've been waiting to see Shadow live for something like 6 years now, so it was a little disappointing that he didn't do any solo stuff at the show. Otherwise, the show was amazing. I brought a guy I worked with for about 6 weeks and one of his current coworkers and they loved the show having never heard any of Quannum's stuff. Although, one of the things that struck me as we waited in line for almost an hour was that the entire crowd was white. While this is in no way surprising in Minnesota, it has to be weird for Quannum to perform in front of a crowd like that. Not that I'm any different. In some senses it's really cool, since hip-hop is all about coming together regardless of who you are.

The new photo above is from Thursday night. I harassed Anne for 3 hours. Nuno showed up and also harassed her. She's fun to annoy. The link color also kind of works as a post-Easter kind of color scheme. God bless pastels.

There's a new track up in the "you should listen to" sidebar. It's a fucking amazing 4 minute selection from DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist's Product Placement Side B. Those first two drum loops kill me everytime, and the scratching about a minute in is just unbelievable.

Keeping to music, I finally got a full copy of the White Album. Holy fucking shit. That's all I can say.

Had dinner with John Sheesley. I now understand what he was saying all that time. Carleton is indeed a resort. It took some time in the world for me to realize it. Relative experience strikes again.

Meeting People

So it seems all of the energy I expended trying to meet people has finally paid off. Finally. For 6 months I was trying everything I could to meet new people, but it never seemed to go anywhere. But this weekend is an indicator that I've finally managed to break through a bit.

On Friday, Jeremy, Andrew and I hung out with Dave. We went to Williams and got a little drunk. J and Dave hit on women, we attempted some darts, I got nailed in the balls, and we closed down the bar. Dave was tired so he went home and went to bed. J, Andrew, and I were up for more destruction, so we assaulted Hennepin. By God, did we hump everything (amusing photos in the usual spot). We also flashed a security camera and got kicked out of a diner. We're good citizens. But, we had fun with Dave who I would never had known was in the cities if Seth hadn't clued me in a few weeks ago. Hooking up with fellow Carls is always fun.

Saturday saw a park grilling-and-bocce event with Andrew, Jeremy, Laura, Jamie, who I met through friendster because she is a friend of Matt's whom I once worked with at Carleton, and a few of her friends. We ate meat, we played bocce, and harassed the children with us. It was a little cold, but the weather will only get better for these days as time passes. Jamie ended up bringing us along to a console LAN party at Dave P's place. There, we met most of the guys at Monster Games and proceeded to play Halo, DOA 3, and Double Dash until 3 in the morning. There was much killing, much beer, and much trash talking. The Monster guys are all really cool.

Sunday was a time for sleep. Which was good. But I ended up doing a bunch of work stuff and had immense help from Spike, who I know through Erin who I know through Nerve Personals (the only person I've met who wasn't awful). Thank you again, Spike.

Additionally, I'm going to be helping out Kristian with some work this week. We've been meaning to hang out for a while anyway. He's a friend of Seth's that I saw at a show about a month ago and we've been keeping in touch, always meaning to go out and share work for some time now. It looks like that's actually happening now.

So, really, after all the work I put into blindly meeting new people, almost everyone I'm meeting now are friends of old friends. The attempt to forcefully make friends failed utterly. It's much more of an organic process that's been spurred more by those I've forgotten I know or never thought of really hanging out with than anything else. So not only have I reconnected with people that rock, I've been meeting their friends who also rock. So I'm pretty pleased with the whole deal.

Orthogonal Guest Post

Seth just wrote me with an additional, more general discussion of orthogonality. I share it with you now, without his express permission because I'm a bitch. It's very good and very clear, which I expect from Seth. Because he rules. But, really, I was hoping for some wild metaphor that explained orthogonality by using cars and/or chickens. So if you can do that, Seth, I'll have your children. Or at least buy you a beer the next time I see you. Here he is.

"each of your beloved command line programs does one task very well (I love them too). this, i assume, is opposed to programs that do many tasks (i'll call them composite programs, for the sake of having something to call them), but not as well. consider three command line programs, each of which does its respective task vey well. by mixing and matching these command line programs, you can do any combination of those three tasks very well. by contrast, say you have three composite programs, each of which can do each of the three tasks, but none of which can do them as well as the command line programs. thus, even if i use the best composite program i can for each task (which i wouldn't do - the whole point of the composite programs is to only have to use one), i can't get the same effect. there's too much *overlap* between.

really, the key is that the command line programs don't generally bother with trying to do any peripheral tasks. they are highly orthogonal, which is to say they each focus on doing their own thing as well as possible. as a result, if you know how to use and combine them, you can do much more with them. even if you could combine the composite programs together, and mix and match their abilities, it wouldn't be as effective as using a mix of command line programs.

think of the programs as vectors starting at some given point. consider each task/feature to be an axis (x,y,z). the command line programs might have equivalent vectors of <10,0,0>, <0,10,0>, and <0,0,10>, while the composite programs might be something more like <6,6,3>, <4,2,7>, and <5,5,5>. when you take the cross product of the command line vectors, it will be larger than the cross product of the composite program vectors. i think that saying that is the same as saying that the smallest containing box that encompasses the CL vectors (10 x 10 x 10) will be larger than the smallest containing box that encompasses the composite vectors (6 x 6 x 7), where the extra volume can be seen as extra functionality that you can get in one case and not in the other. i think. i didn't never do too good at math.

the way this applies to programming: don't make a program that does three things like shit, if there are already programs that do those three things. instead, do one new thing really well, or come up with a novel way of combining existing programs. that's orthogonal thinking."

Dave here, again. To add to this, I think the real key to successful programs isn't just that they do one thing well; it's as important to be to arbitrarily connect them.

Apple has been doing some really cool things with a bunch of their OS X apps in that respect. The new OS X Address Book is getting plugged into more and more programs meaning that one change is reflected everywhere (in Mail, iChat, and iChat all draw from the Address Book, for example). The iLife apps all use each other for their strengths. iMovie doesn't need its own music storage functionality - it just relies on iTunes for that. The same goes for photos. The programs are not closed silos - they actively share and use each other which really increases their usefulness overall.

Really, though, what it all comes down to is laziness. All programmers are lazy and hate doing the same thing over and over again. So they attempt to write programs once in a generic, orthogonal manner so they don't have to do it again and again. And it pays off not only for the developer, but for the user, as the Apple examples show. User don't have to reimport or reorganize photos or songs in iMovie; they've already done it in iPhoto or iTunes. So what have we learned today?

Laziness is a virtue.

Orthogonality

Warning: this is another geek post. God I love these.

Orthogonality is definitely my favorite concept in computer science. I can't give you a precise mathematical definition because I never did that well in math, but I can certainly try. I think the math definition is simply perpindicularity in multiple dimensions. So, for example, the x, y, and z planes are all orthogonal to each other since changes in one dimension do not affect the others.

The basic idea is that systems can be more than the sum of their parts if the parts are designed the right way. There's also an element of decoupling at work. I'm not so good at real world examples, so pardon me for weak metaphors. In fact, sitting here for a minute trying to come up with something, I realize that I just can't do it. Seth, I'm sure you'll think of an excellent (or at least amusing) example as you read this, so just send it my way when you've got it.

Have I mentioned how much I love the command line recently? No? Well, good. Because that's one of the best computer examples that exists. Every command line tool is an extremely simple program that does one thing very well. You've got sort for sorting, diff for finding differences, find for searching your hard drive, and loads of other extremely simple tools. The power of the command line is that any of these tools can work together via a few simple mechanisms. find doesn't need too many sophisticated sorting algorithms or options because sort already does it better. ls can't list directories in file size order, but that's simply accomplished by sending the results of ls to sort with a unix pipe (the '|' character). So we get ls -l | sort +4. Since neither program is tied to anything but their own purpose, we're never limited to just what it can do. Every program has a huge amount of possibility attached to it just because they just try to one thing well. Do you want the total size of the files in a directory? Let awk, a simple yet powerful scripting language, take the results of ls and sum the size column. Yeah, it could be done by du, but ls -l | awk '{total += $5} END {print total}' is way cooler.

Programming languages utilize this. Simple action are defined for operators and they can be combined in any way that makes sense. Just about everything returns something that can fed to something else. One of my favorite constructs, though a little obfuscated, is the blah = foo = gar construct. if (bar = goob) is another good one, though it's good to avoid that since it's easily confused with if (bar == goob). But you get an assignment and a comparison! How can you not love it? I mean, really?

Designing this way is much, much harder than just figuring out what needs to be done and then just putting all of that into one program. But it pays offs if you do it intelligently. Monolithic systems tend to be fragile. The slightest change can send the whole thing tumbling down if you're not careful. And orthogonality is just plain cool in my book.

The Malaise of the Post-College Life

Apparently I'm onto something. A friend sent me an email echoing the sentiment of the mediocrity post and I got a call tonight from another good friend who's in a similar place. He's having trouble dealing with a job he hates, which, in turn, is leading him to perform poorly at something that should come easily. Life after college is apparently not it's all cracked up to be.

Graduation carried with it a feeling of unlimited opportunity and possibility. If you're not living up to that potential, you've feel that you've failed. Learning to deal with a shitty job and the realities of life has been one of the hardest experiences I've had to deal with. When I left school, I felt invincible. The whole "world is my oyster" syndrome. And it is, really. It just takes more time than I want to think it does and getting there isn't easy.

There are certainly those that find fantastic things after school. I'm not sure if I'm envious of those people, though. This year has certainly hit me upside the head. But I believe that I'm better off for it. I now know much more about jobs than I once did so I don't think I'll make the same mistake in job choice. Meeting good, new people has taken almost 6 months, but I'm finally establishing myself and finding groups I feel I fit with. Money is becoming less of an issue as I've learned to budget a little better. It's certainly not easy, but I feel like it's paying off.

While I was vising my sister in New York, she told me that the best people face the hardest challenges. In a previous life they've decided they've decided to come back together and up the difficulty a little bit. While I question the accuracy of that statement, I like the thought.

And again, I certainly feel like I'm whining in some sense. I know people who are dealing with a lot more shit than I am. My problems are pretty nice ones. But perspective and experience are everything. As I've already said, this is the hardest time I've ever faced because I've rarely had real problems in my life, for which I am grateful.

 

Unrelated: I desperately need a system here. It's getting bad. I have finally moved a bunch of crap to a separate page to trim the front a little bit, but I need something a little more encompassing than that. I'll get to it, I'll get to it.

Oh My Fucking God

I feel like a giddy schoolgirl. Look:

64 degrees! Look at the sky! It's clear and blue and warm!

Here's the thing - Heaven is supposed to be this magical everlasting happy place. But I don't think Heaven is as good as a Minnesota spring. Unless you're in Purgatory first, and you have to go back every 6 months. Otherwise, Heaven doesn't stand a chance against this weather right now.

ESL

HOLY SHIT! This is incredible. Go listen now, I implore you. All the way through. It's amazing.

I owe a lot to Andy Baio and his links. He finds amazing stuff. I dig it.

PROOF!

So Jeremy and I have been wading through the OBJECTIVE: Christian Ministries (the extra capitals are for extra emphasis that they're objective. Maybe. I'm not too sure) site a little more (it's linked over in the quiklinks from a while ago). Every. Single. Page. is amazing.

Check out the Christian Game Theoretician. No, really. Go check it out right now. Read the whole page. Soak it in. Don't think about the numbers involved. They're God's word. Really. Let me sum up the last example for you, if I may. The one about Pascal's wager:

Eat game theory, atheist BITCH!

God I love dumb people that think they are smart. If they see this, they'll probably start a campaign against me. So much awesome.

There's so much more that you'll just have to uncover yourself. Tammy gave this site a little treatment of her own in her post God Damn Christians. It's good stuffs.

I should postface this post with the fact that I have very little against Christianity or most Christians. This is simply about dumb people that entertain me.

20 Minutes Later

OK. It's not nearly as bad as I made it out to be. There's a ton of good shit going on. Things are changing for the better. I do have great friends and an amazing family. I've got so many oppurtunities that I'm trying to take advantage of, I'm wearing sandals and a short sleeved shirt because it's fucking gorgeous out right now, I'm getting a lot of credit and respect for previous projects (last night I was at a show for a friend's band and it seemed like everyone knew about Reason because Matt talks about it so much), and I kick ass. There's just some shit that tends to overshadow those that really bums me out a lot of the time. So there's the other side. I think everything in the previous post holds, it just varies in its significance in my life. And it's kind of fun to be melodramatic every once in a while. So take me with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila.

Bathing in Mediocrity

Mediocrity seems to be my new fixation, or, at least, the avoidance of. Although for all the effort I put into new things, it still surrounds me.

I should feel blessed to have a mediocre life. I'm not hungry, I have a job that pays decently and is probably advancing my career, I've got a place to live, friends, and all kinds of good things surrounding me. I get to go listen to great music, see amazing movies, and meet great people. I have a fantastic family that's always there behind me if I fall. And, really, all the problems I complain about are great problems to have.

In spite of this, I really feel like I'm just sitting here, spinning my wheels. I'm not really happy with much of it. I don't feel like I'm being really challenged or expanding my abilities or knowledge at work. The work I do is so far removed from anything tangible that it's meaningless to me. I'm living some sort of Office Space/Dilbert-esque life right now (which, by the way, I understand so much more fully now). While I'm meeting great people, I'm not really that close to any of them. All of the great things I experience make me look at what I'm doing and get a little bummed out about the nothing that I'm doing. And further, I feel extremely pretentious and disproportionally priviliged getting upset and depressed about my piddly problems while there's so much more shit out there that is infinitely worse.

In some sense, this looks to be a common feeling among college graduates in their early 20s. School was exciting, fun, and, really, an amazing experience. As we graduated, we believed we were going to change the world with our superior intellect and capabilities. But most of us end up in mediocre jobs and realize that work is work. The real world doesn't respect intelligence or creativity in the same way that academia does. So we're just bumbling along feeling like we should be doing more without knowing how to do more outside of school.

Now, this is starting to sound like a love letter to academia. It's really not. Academia has just as many issues. It just looks so much better in retrospect, and I'm sure this is just a grass-is-greener effect. I certainly don't want to be the person that says that college was the best time of my life. I don't think it was. There's a lot of time ahead of me and I've got a lot planned for the world. It's just a matter of getting through the current slog and finding out how to make something happen. Which I'm getting to. It's just tough. But what is life without challeneges? Boring and mediocre. Which is exactly what I want to avoid.

A Message

Windows, Apache, and SSL can suck my dick. Don't even get me started on Tomcat. Fuck beans.

Cults and Other Fun

So I've pretty much spent my night reading about cults. Scientology has come up a few times in the past few weeks with friends, so I thought I would refresh my memory about them as well as learn something about Opus Dei, an organization that Kristen brought up. I also have finally looked into the Landmark Forum that my sister has participated in and talked about at length.

But, right now, I really just want to go to sleep. However, you should really check out the Skeptic's Dicionary (this site freaking rocks. I've been reading about est, scientology, mind-control, and landmark), Operation Clambake (anti-Scientology site), and various other sites (just google "cults","opus dei","landmark forum"). There's a ton of info out there, both for and against. The internet is a wonderful thing. Maybe I'll write up some coherent thoughts on cults at some point. Although it really just boils down to learn how to think critically and be comfortable with yourself. If you can do that you probably won't have a problem with cults or other pseudo-science-psychology institutions.

Update: March does not have 43 days like this post said earlier. The cults want you to believe that March 43rd is a special day - don't believe them.

Zebra Porn

So Travis was over the other night and he was using my computer. He was surfing around and "somehow" he got himself to some really disgustingly awful porn site. Sure, Travis. Anyway, one of the sites caught my eye. In the list of random sites they were advertising, this one caught my eye (NSFW zebra sex). Yes, that's right. They were advertising women having sex with zebras.

Naturally, I had to find out more. I mean, how often do you get to see women having sex with zebras? Granted, it's not that different from your normal women-horse beastiality sex, but the aesthetic qualities of a zebra demanded that I look into it further. So I checked out the free preview hoping to find the elusive pictures of women and zebras. Much to my dismay, there weren't any. I was disappointed to say the least. Now, there may the real thing if I pay for the site, but that's a little much.

Quick Request

If, for whatever reason, you decide to get Andrew, Steve, or I a house-warming-type gift, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY, DO NOT GET US MORE GLASS. I broke what we believe is the sixth or seventh glass in my room tonight. We're now keeping track on our whiteboard. I'll keep you posted.

On the upshot, I had a good reason to sweep my room. I've been meaning to do this for about, oh, since we moved in 6 months ago. Dust bunnies the size of small dogs. Fierce ones, too. Wouldn't go down without a fight.

Geek Notes

Have I mentioned how much I love the command line recently? No?

find . \! -path "*CVS*" -type f -exec cvs commit -m "your message here" {} \;

That finds all regular files beneath the current directory and commits them to CVS with the same message. If you're saying to yourself "why not just use cvs commit *?," give yourself a point. For whatever reason, CVS doesn't like me and won't let me commit more than one thing at a time. So it goes.

I'm becoming more and more a fan of find, especially with the -exec flag.

Also, screen rules. I've started using it again. Notes to self: C-a _ : monitor for silence. C-a A : change name of screen. C-a M : monitor for activity. Some of the config directives that come in the standard .screenrc are really cool, too. The hard status line at the bottom of the screen makes me happy. I have the date, time, and all windows down there. Dig it.

Cross-Site Coding

New feature in my right column - the recent ratings section that pulls live data from my ratings site. It was actually simple to put together. All I did was write a PHP script that writes our a javascript file that's filled with document.write()s. Wrap the output in some divs and spans, and you have a fully functional live inter-site data feed. It really should be an RSS feed, but that's harder for me to write and also harder for anyone to use. RSS to HTML transformation can be a pain in the ass. But that's all coming. If you want to use this on your own site, just look at my code and insert your own user id. If you need more help, contact me.

The Wrens

Seth and Kristian, you missed an amazingly kick ass show. It was really good. The two opening bands were pretty mellow, but then the Wrens came on and, as Jamie promised, rocked my socks off. Having no idea what they were going to be like, it came as a surpise when they started with a slow piano and guitar piece that fucking slammed into a hard rocking song. The bass player/lead singer guy (which is something of a misnomer. They had 2 guitars and a bass and kept trading around. And all but the drummer sang) had an insane amount of eneregy and it looked all 4 of them were having a great time.

There were also some amazing groupies. On the other side of the stage from us were these 3 women that were totally trashed and loving every minute of the show. They didn't really seem to have any real idea of what was going on, but loved everything regardless. In the middle in front of the stage was this big guy who was rocking out the whole time. I really enjoyed the way he tried to sing to every song and never quite had it rights. Finally, there was this young kid who looked stoned out of his mind that was really, really excited to be there. At one point he looked back towards us and just stared at me for like 15 seconds. It was a little weird. So we made fun of him amongst ourselves. Turns out, his mom was right behind me. We felt like assholes.

I also got to see some kids I haven't seen in a while. Big shout out to Joe Kreuser and Andrew Eppig. Those guys rock. I got to hear an amazing story about smashing into a bus with a delivery truck that then went into a convenience store. Nicely done, Joe. It's been a weekend of seeing people I haven't seen in a while. Now I want to see Dave Seelig, but apparently I'm not good enough to warrant a quick email response. So, I'll resort to public blog shaming. Take that, bitch!

I Love Carleton People

I don't usally write about personal event type stuff (I love how important that makes the rest of my blog sound), but I had a fantastic night.

So, Jesse was on his way back to Pittsburgh from California and he happily got delayed enough to require a night in Minneapolis. Jesse, Steve, Brian, and I went out for some drinks and had a great time. Seth and Jody, I got a ton of amazing music from him. It'll be you-know-where soon.

But the reason I love Carleton is because the 4 of us sat down for 2 hours and had great conversation, from music to movies to politics to school to user interface design to shitty internet dates. And more. I've been finding it difficult to come across good times like these as of late. Part of it is that none of us had really spent much time together in the last 6 months, so we had a lot to work with. So it was good.

I also had really good sushi earlier in the evening with Erin. Mmmm. Tasty. Sakura in downtown St. Paul is good shit.

Overall, a kick ass night.

International Film Trailers

The trailer for The Barbarian Invasions (or, really, Les Invasions Barbares) pisses me off. I loathe trailers for foreign films that cut out all dialogue. If the movie is going to be subtitled, subtitle the damn trailer too. Don't try to hide the fact that it's a foreign film by translating the title and just showing images of people looking at each other, yelling, cring, or kissing. It's lame and it doesn't help anyone.

Thankfully, the trailer for Evil is subtitled. That makes me a little happier.

Also, the trailers on the Apple trailers site are always so much better than Yahoo's or anybody elses in terms of video and sound quality. I think. I haven't done an exhaustive look at the Yahoo site. It doesn't even look like many of the trailers on the Yahoo Movies even use QuickTime. Which is so much better than fucking Windows Media or Real. Wait. Looks like some of their exclusives are QuickTime.

My only gripe with the Apple site is the layout. First, finding a movie by studio is a pain in the ass. Second, when looking for a specific movie, you have to use the browser's search function. It will find the word and drop you down to the appropriate vertical positioning of the movie, but generally, you still see the entire list of small font movies and my highlight color doesn't show up very well on top of blue. Yeah.

Scale This, Biatch

The Scale received some major updates tonight. Categories, the ability to have discussions, flagging, and more! I'm so excited!

I Hate CSS

Is it too much to ask to have this page line up properly? Is it too much to ask to have browsers implement CSS in the same ways? Is it too much to ask to have CSS make any shred of sense?

It's much more apparent now that there is a permanent photo up top. The title of the page doesn't look centered compared to the rest of the page. It's really the rest of the page isn't centered. Trying to get 3 static columns centered and playing nice with each other is difficult at best. I probably just don't understand CSS well enough to really lay everything out properly. Ah well.

This does bring up an interesting thought, though. I always code all my HTML and CSS by hand. My primary reason is one of control and machoness. But, really, getting a program (ala Dreamweaver or Frontpage) to be able to generate good CSS is something I can't even begin wrapping my head around. My reasoning is that CSS, while a styling language, has no real visual analog. HTML and CSS together are not static at all, especially when considering dynamic content. I take that back, designing with CSS can be a static, graphical process. But, as I was saying, once you bring in any sort of dynamism, you're almost creating a system rather than a design. It's no longer I want this box with this text over here; it becomes how do I want this box to act when these other factors come into play. I'm not an interface designer, so maybe I have no basis in saying that no interface could ever really capture the complexity inherent in CSS. But maybe I'm an idiot.

New Motto

See top of page.

Lightsabers

In episode 1, they had the double bladed lightsaber. In episode 2, they had dual lightsabers as well as some funky custom sabers. This led to a discussion amongst friends: how will they outdo themselves in the next installment? Lightmace? 4-bladed lightsaber? Well, apparently, the robo-evil-jedi-dude (spoiler article with pic of robojedi at the bottom) busts his arms into 4 arms. With 4 freakin' lightsabers. Well done, you dumb bastards.

This whole do-everything-by-hand thing is getting out of hand. I suppose the necessity of a management system begins to manifest itself. And maybe I should come up with an actual design.

Winter and Bars

Winter is the bane of my existence. Spring is nearly here, but it can't come soon enough. And, really, Winter will keep sticking its neck into Spring's business for quite some time. Winter and Minnesota are too good of friends for my taste.

Steve mentioned that he felt guilty about not making it to Perkin's last week. While I'm impressed that Steve feels guilty about anything (oh, you know I love you Steve), it did get me thinking generally (as I am wont to do) about groups of friends. For us, Perkin's is the most convenient place to meet since we have radically different schedules. It also satisfies a distance constraint since we're somewhat split between St. Paul and Northfield. Travis also works there and we get free coffee (and sometimes food, but don't tell anyone). This also helps.

But most folks in their 20s tend to go to bars for happy hours after work. It's an easy way to see friends that you wouldn't otherwise see that often and it gets you out of your house/apartment/shack/cardboard-box-on-the-side-of-the-road. I don't know if this actually has any significance, but it seemed interesting to me.

A Real Friendster

Tammy wants me to write more and I can't deny her devilish good looks. So here I am.

Here's some random tech-talk that I've been meaning to dump somewhere. I have recently learned of the power of instant messaging. We've all been keeping in touch, having chats pretty often, talking about movies, life, and everything else. Basically, what we'd do when we were in the same place, but now I don't have to deal with Jody's foot stank. Which, really, is a blessing. Especially in the spring and summer when he never wears his shoes. Damn hippy. Where was I? Oh yeah. IM.

But, really, it's a fantastic way to keep in touch with people that are far away from you without really having to spend extra money on a phone call. And it's a computer mediated environment. With this is mind, Seth and I have decided to do something about it. We keep having great conversations about politics, culture, technology, female hygiene, and movies. Interesting things are said. Interesting links are passed around. We also occasionally have to step out to go look something up (definition, movie information, etc). What Seth and I want to do is both keep some record of these conversations as well as enhance the discussion. So we've been toying around with IM bots. Well, Seth's been toying around with bots. I just talk a lot.

The functions of the bots are really pretty simple: look up a word, grab a little info from imdb, do a quick google search. I really want to start adding web services to some of my random apps out there, i.e. quickly rating items on the scale with a /rate command. Hook up a blogging system and implement a /blog command. Maybe have a bot in all chats that automatically scans for links and auto-posts those to a communal website so we don't lose links that we can't look at at the moment. Have the bot watch for our preferred method of correting typs (*typos) and automatically tally who the worst speller is and who corrects the most words. If we have a bot recording all conversations, I could create a conversational corpus for each of my friends and then start generating random sentences using a statistical model of their speech.

The bots are just a start. They're an easy interface to a lot of cool friend apps. But, really, I want to put together a web site for any group of friends: photo storage and sharing, blogs, links, the scale, quotes, contact information, etc. It's almost not even a technical question of can it all be done - none of it is very complicated. It's really an interface challenge. A lot of the social network sites are already sort of trying to do these things, but small groups are not their focus. The group of friends site isn't about meeting new people, it's about keeping friends connected. LiveJournal is probabaly the closest analog I can think of, but even LiveJournal is primarily a publishing tool that's becoming a community tool.

Yeah. That's the high level concept. Um, and web services would be the glue to hold all these independent apps together. Felt like I should say something about that since I said that I would.

Oh, and I had soup for lunch today.

Well, Crap

Synchronization is such a pain in the ass. I clobbered the post from a couple days ago because I'm a moron. Ah well. Backups are in order.

The Grey Album

It's my birthday! Wheee!

About the Grey Album. I love it. At least parts of it. If you haven't heard it already and you're a fan of hip-hop, Jay-Z, or remix culture go to Illegal Art and grab the Grey Album. Aside from all the controversy around it, it's a really good album. I heard the Grey Album first, so that may color my opnion, but I like it better than most of the Black Album.

It's actually pretty amazing. On a couple of songs, the beats on the Grey Album bring out the feeling of Jay-Z's raps more than the original beats. The most striking example is December 4th. On the Black Album, the tone has a lot of pomp and celebration about it. The beats on the Brey Album fit much, much better and actually underscore the emotion of the track much better. The track is about hard times growing up and the end of Jay-Z as a solo artist. The more I listen to the Black version, the more I think the producer (Just Blaze, I believe) just totally sucks. Danger Mouse does such an amazingly better job.

The Scale

It all started with movies. You see, I love great movies. I am a cinemaphile. But I, as well as my friends, have a dark secret.

I love bad movies.

So, when discussing movies and trying to come up with some appropriate way of comparing them, we ran into a problem. On your traditional movie rating scale (5 stars, 0 to 100, what have you), there is no way to differentiate between so-bad-it's-fun and mediocre. Both kinds get extremely low scores. This would not do.

A new paradigm in movie ratings was thusly born. To properly signify the inherent interesting-ness of a movie, negative values were allowed in the scale. 0 is perfect mediocrity. It's a movie that is neither good nor bad. You walk out and immediately forget the movie. There is no post-movie converesation praising or destroying the movie. There is nothing.

A 10 maintains the same meaning as in older scales; it is as good as it can possibly be. A -10 is reserved for movies that are so bad they're good. These are the movies that you openly mock during the showing. These are the ones that spawn 4 hour conversations about all the problems and mistakes that occurred. These movies are a good time.

Some quick examples:

• City of God: 10. A thoroughly amazing movie in all aspects of moviemaking.
• Manos: Hands of Fate: -10. Made famous by Mystery Science Theater 3000 as quite possibly the worst movie ever conceived in the history of man. It's that bad.
• A Man Apart: 0. There was nothing good or bad about this movie. It was just boring as the filmmakers went through all the appropriate motions of a good cop turned vigilante movie.
• Big Fish: 6. It was good, but not great. It was worth seeing, but it couldn't been much, much more.
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: -2. On the bad side of things, but not very far over. Had I been with a more incisive group that wanted to make fun of it, this couldn've been higher on the negative side.

So you've gotten the basics there. The other thing that happened with this scale was that we found it to be extremely appropriate in all areas of life. That date I had last night? Straight up 0. How's that restaurant? Definitely a 7. What's your opinion on shitty dance techno? I can't help loving it - definitely a -10.

This scale has turned more into a philosophy on life for us. It engenders the desire to find intersting things in life. Mediocrity is what I avoid right now. If it doesn't make me feel something, it's not worth my time.

The scale is also not without its problems. Both Manos: Hands of Fate and The Core get a -10 in my book, but for very different reasons. We have not yet developed a way to differentiate between so-bad-it's-good and so-bad-it's-painful-in-that-kind-of-masochistic-good-way.

What this has all led to is a site dedicated to rating everything. It's still in pretty early beta, but it's coming along. Come join us talk about the movie The Order (-9), the real world (-3), and the weekday monday (-3). The scale provides some interesting information when collected from several people. How much do people disagree about something? Check the standard deviation of the set of scores. What's the overall interesting-ness of something? Take the average of the absolute value of the set of scores.

So what are you waiting for? Let it change your life.

The Scale Site (Beta) »

Next up: Another geek post - why IM rocks, a possible social app for groups of friends, and why web services could be amazing.

The Command Line is My Hero

find . -name "*.java" -exec wc -l {} \; | sort -g | awk '{print $1,"\t",$2; total += $1} END {print total,"\tTotal Lines of Code"}'

That fuckin' rocks. Counts lines of code in .java files in your code directory. Sorts the whole list by number of lines, giving you a nice look at how big your files are. It's also completely incomprehensible. And I like that. I'll write a longer love letter to the command line later.

The Social Network Post

Friendster, Orkut, Tribe, Spring Street Personals (a.k.a. the personals sections on Salon, Nerve, The Onion, ad infinitum), Match, and countless other sites are all trying to do the same thing: provide, as Rebecca Blood puts it in Jakob Nielsen's terms, "better than reality" services that allow people to meet each other. If nothing else, these sites are attracting people by the millions, so they're certainly striking a chord with people.

Here are the biggest problems I see with these sites right now. Most of them just aren't deep or expressive enough. They're profile based - you only have X amount of space to sell yourself to other people and, usually, you only have certain questions or prompts to put those into. Yeah, they all have a general "About You" section, but that's too broad. Some sites certainly have better prompts than others; Nerve, for example, has some fun questions that can get some interesting answers that give you a clearer concept of someone else. LiveJournal is probably the biggest exception since it is primarily focused on your journal and has the community and networking features as a secondary bonus. Orkut tries to jam all of these together and sort of loses everything. Friendster is extremely sparse on good prompts. I can't stress enough how important good prompting questions are for the success of these sites. Without good information, you're just as well off going to a crowded bar and trying to meet people that way. Which is exactly the situation these sites are trying to one-up.

It does seem like these sites are progressively getting better. Orkut doesn't have the userbase that Friendster does, but it'll probably get there. It has all the features of Friendster and then some. I want to see more incorporation of blogging or journaling on these sites. It gives an entirely new dimension that profiles and testimonials can't provide. Live chat is another vehicle that gives further dimension to people. Flickr is attacking that road - they just don't have anyone on there yet.

I really, really want these sites to work. I've found that meeting new friends has been the hardest part of graduating from college and living in the real world. I've been trying (with little success) to find like-minded, intelligent, fun people in any way possible. Social networking sites have worked in small amounts, but in the age of instant gratification or in the words of an obnoxious graduate art student, I want more.

Interesting Further Reading:

• Meatmarket.com by Heather Havrilesky
• Thirteen Ways to Save Orkut by Rebecca Blood
• Design For Community by Derek Powazek. This book is a little older at this point, but still chockful of really great ideas about online communities.

Next up: The Scale (since there is no written explanation anywhere)

First Post!

I understand when people bitch about being tired because they haven't gotten enough sleep. Life is hectic and sleep is a frequent casualty. However, if you're not sleeping because you're getting laid, you can just shut the fuck up.

Next up: Something insightful about social networking sites.

previously on sollaires.net...