Staticfree Blog

New photos in structure/:

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New photos in silly/:

Some of your friends are already this fucked. An interesting look on the music industry from a financial point of view. How much money does an average band make? I don't quite know the accuracy of the numbers, but looking them over they seem to make sense.

In the shower, I was pondering relationships. As happens too frequently, I started pondering them in terms of other things, and this case - in terms of internet protocols. Yeah, I swear I'm not addicted to computers.

One night stands

This one's simple: UDP. It's an unreliable protocol where no permanent connection is established. You aren't even guaranteed a reply at all.

Relationship (significant other)

TCP/IP. You go through a bit of a dance to establish a connection (lots of hand shaking) and once you do, you've got a reliable connection. Even over long distances and through harsh networks you can have a reliable connection, although they're more apt to disconnect that way. When you're done with the connection, you say a few magic words and it's over; the port you reserved for it is then freed.

Polyamory

Multicasting. It's not widely supported, but some use it on a daily basis. Some think it's the future, while others think it has too much overhead. Some will try it out and realize that it's not for them, while others get very into it and often get swept away by it.

Flirting

nmap ;-)

New photos in Xmas2003/:

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PuTTY for SymbianOS (the operating system of my cellphone). PuTTY is my favorite SSH client when I can't get the real thing. Having it live on my cellphone means that I can have an ssh client...in my pants. (Arguably, I've had such for awhile, but the program is for my Palm and is remarkably slow). I recall drooling about the idea a few years back and hearing various people saying, "bah. what's the point?" The point? Does there need to be a point? It's SSH in my pants! [From MobileWhack]

This was accidentally posted before I finished it. Apologies to those who were horribly confused.

foreach my  ( @lives ){
    live( \@lives,  );
}
live();

I don't really like this very much - it seems so vain - but some people keep asking for gift lists. It's a bit late, I suppose, but here's a list of stuff that I like. Part of it is automagically updated from my Palm's list of media that I need to research, so it's still rather current.

Gifts are so hard, I just don't generally desire many things that aren't very expensive. I spend most my money on computer equipment and eating at fancy restaurants; both things that are hard to give as gifts. I suppose recently, media is the best bet for little things that I like, but that's such an impersonal sort of thing. Everyone should just give me a day of hanging out with them for the holidays - I think I'd like that a lot.

It's about time. I finally made it to one of Dave Weiner's Berkman Thursday weblog meetings. I ended up showing up a bit late, as I couldn't get a fix on exactly how to get to where I wanted to on Mass. ave. (don't pretend to be in a car, walk on the other side of the street).

Before I went, I listened to one of the recordings to get a feel of what was going on. I anticipated a meeting overrun by a large collection of pale, scrawny geek guys, but it turned out to be a refreshingly eclectic group. I arrived, hovered a bit, and eventually landed at the table, fitting in by pulling out my laptop.

I find that an increasingly popular phenomenon: a group of people existing in meatspace proximity, yet simultaneously conversing and residing in a virtual space as well. In this case, everyone was chatting in IRC while Dave talked about how keen public aggregators of common content are (and how easy it is to find this common content if people continuously send you links to it). It allowed silly conversation to go on, while also having a more serious discussion. Both would feed on each other: the IRC channel providing links and flames based on the conversation IRL. All we need to do now is remove the keyboard, screen and shove as much of the tech into an implant. Let this sort of discussion/metadiscussion happen every day.

All in all, I met a bunch of interesting people who don't mind chatting about the social problems of crpytography over a very tasty indian dinner. I'll be going back if I can manage to plan it into my week (things always come up on thursdays) and see if I can drag a friend or two along with me.

I really must stop this habit of posting blog entries before I go off to work: my computer keeps yelling at me to get going. "Yeah yeah, µ, I'm on my way."

New photos in LOTR/:

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In reading the Creative Commons RSS feed, I came across another feed for archive.org, which is very keen. There's a ton of free (free as in beer, free as in legal, free as in speech) music there and some of it's even good.

A particularly nifty compilation there called One Minute Massacre Volume 1 was put together by a bunch of electronic music artists, each contributing a 1-2 minute segment that is supposed to blend with the previous segment. Some of the artists succeed remarkably well. Check it out, the only cost is a 141MB download.

New photos in Boston/:

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In thinking of how news propagates through an information network, Dyfrgi and I came up with the (perhaps not original, but new to us) idea of distributed, pluggable RSS filter modules. Somewhat like what Localfeeds is, except with optional control lines. I like to think of them in the way that Galan thinks of LADSPA plugins: a network of connected modules with separate control lines.

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Hello dear readers. I've recently set up my cellcam such that it'll upload straight to my photo gallery and post an entry to my blog. I've so far heard one negative comment on this and one neutral one. What do you think?

The options I've considered are:

1. Leave it as-is, posting a set of 320x240 occasionally.
2. Smaller thumbnails, leave as-is.
3. Post one image from a set as a "teaser" and put all inline in the comments page.
4. Post a link to the comments page (and/or the images) in the "summary".
5. ...

Please leave me your compliments, suggestions, flames, etc. I want to be able to share these things with people, but I don't want to annoy my audience in such a way that they get up and leave. Tell me, dear readers, what you want to see.

New photos in structure/:

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A flash-based web meme, the snowman creator! I'm mainly noting this here as their gallery seems to have died and I was quite proud of my fractal snowman. I was going to iterate it a bit further, but then I realized that I'm drawing a bloody snowman fractal. And life goes on.

New photos in people/:

New photos in people/:

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(04:42:34) Brigitte: internet needs a peaceful quiet...

The Internet has become a sort of home for me. It's the one place (if you could even call it such) where I find my self returning to each day and falling asleep in. Like a good home, it's comforting to me in many regards - being able to communicate in various ways with my friends and lovers as though they were there. It's missing many things, but one particular one I've been wanting recently - quiet.

The real world is a subtractive environment: you have to actively do less in order to communicate less. You have to make the conscious decision to lay still to not communicate body language. Even then, the pattern and rate of your breathing, the state of your eyes, your facial expression, all say great deals about yourself.

Online, communication is additive. If you want to express yourself, there's a wall up that you squeeze your expression through. You must actively place words, actively create a web page, actively interact with your computer in order to communicate information. The only passive information in the electronic world is your chat status, your avatar. That, though, is ultimately controlled by you, so it is effectively additive.

Why note this distinction between additive and subtractive communication?

Silence.

In an additive world, silence is the norm. If there's nothing happening, then simply nothing is being directly communicated. There's no passive facial expression to show how someone is inside. You can't tell if someone is there and sharing the silence with you, or off playing a video game at top volume. In all the silence, there is no guaranteed lack of activity. You cannot share a silent moment with someone online for there is no silence.

Why is this important? Why does one need to have pure, unadulterated silence? It's a remarkably personal thing. We, as humans, pride ourselves on our accomplishments, on our creations, on our successes. But silence is the opposite of that. There is no activity there. A silence is a moment of reflection: a 4am lay-on-the-couch-and-ponder-the-universe silence. It's a time people can share together, intimate and isolated.

There is no easy way to give the Internet this capability. As noted, it's additive. You would have to literally see all that was happening and hear all that way playing on someone's computer to truly share such an intimate moment like this. Perhaps some things should simply be left to the reality and not recreated in an abstraction.

Grouphug.us came across my radar recently. It's a site where people can post anonymous confessions. As a minister, I feel it my duty to hear some confessions every once in awhile. It's more than that, though: it's intriguing. You get to hear what people feel is bad in their life, what they deem to be wrong. Things vary from having wild, drunken sex with relatives behind their SO's back to confessing that they aren't honest and true to their friends.

I don't know how much is truthful, but it doesn't really matter. Like The Dead Letter Office, it's a small, penetrating look at a portion of a random someone's life that is often hidden. Or what they want people to think about it anyhow.

I have a morbid fascination with these sites which I'm sure many people would deem unhealthy. I think quite the opposite: I can reflect on them and see how I stand against a random set of individuals. I can look at their seemingly unsolvable problems and I can ask myself how I'd handle it. I can look at myself and say, "I'd never do that; I'm better than that" and ask myself if that's really true. It's a strange sort of thing that I like to call "my daily hate", for without the bad, the good loses all its contrast and definition.

MozCC is a nifty plugin for Mozilla-based browsers that lets you view, at a glance, the Creative Commons copyright information embedded in the page. It puts little icons in the lower-right corner of the status bar that show what you're required to do if sharing the work. See this post which has a bunch of other nifty CC toys, including a CC validator.

This robotic vehicle is totally awesome. It has 4 carefully-controlled wheels per side which can rotate more than 90° as well as move forward and backward, raise and lower. It can drive normally, sideways, spin in place, walk(!), and other keen things. If only there was enough monetary interest to build a full-scale model of it. Now that I'd pay to see.

I just received my first Christmas gift in the mail the other day, straight from CD Baby. In the package came a keen sampler of other CD Baby artists (an mp3 CD with a good 90-something songs). One of the songs caught my ear so far, Come to Me by Bethany Yarrow.

Good female vocalists always catch my fancy, especially when accompanied by intriguing backup instruments. There were some particularly amazing samples of a live set where Ari did accompaniment vocals to some ambient electronica by Antarktika; I wish I had been there. On that note, Ari will be performing around Boston. She's having a regular show every Monday of December, so I think I'm going to try and make those. See her site for more details.

I just put together a Nokia image upload server so that I can upload photos straight to my server from my cell. You can see the photos I've uploaded so far in my gallery. I'm pondering a good way to make an RSS feed out of uploads, while consolidating common events into single posts. I'll see what I can find/write tomorrow, when I'm not in dire need of sleep.

Every time I hear someone mentioning "balancing a checkbook" I realize that it's one of the many tedium tasks that I've managed to escape ever having to do. Technology has revolutionized my life in ways I don't even realize at times. Here are a few things which I've never had to do that my parents did, due to technology or modernization.

I have never:

Balanced a checkbook

Online banking and electronic bill payments pretty much got rid of this. I've written perhaps 10-15 checks in my life and they were mostly for rent and payment to friends. I'm still not entirely sure what it means, though I've got some notions and am glad I won't need to do it any time soon.

Gotten cut while shaving

The ads have some merit: never get cut again. Well, I haven't yet. Electric razors don't really cut, nor do the three-bladed ones; that's all I've ever used.

Sent taxes via postal mail

I've filed all my taxes electronically. This is definitely a good thing as it reduces the amount of people in the system considerably.

Used a typewriter for work

They're still used for filling out forms on occasion, which I've only ever done electronically (most of my College applications had magical type-in PDFs).

Sent a fax

OK, this is just a silly thing that I'm glad I never had to do. I've only heard bad things about fax machines, yet somehow a faxed signature is legally-binding. I don't get it.

Used a print encyclopedia

This is a bit of a lie, way back in my childhood, I would occasionally look through the one we had for fun. But I've never used a print encyclopedia for any real work.

What have your parents (or that generation) had to do that technology has saved you from?

I just upgraded this blog's RSS feed from RSS 0.91 to RSS 1.0. I'm hoping this means smoother syndication, as all the entries are now timestamped. I just implemented an RSS story count limiter, so only 5 stories should exist on the RSS feed. Sorry 'bout the aggregator spammage if any occurs; this should be the last time.

Additionally, I updated the code over at my blog such that it avoids a number of bugs in Internet Explorer 6. Of course, it's uglier now if you're using IE6. If you don't like how it looks, note that I'm using standards-compliant code and that you can simply get a better browser. It's also been improved a bit to work better with Lynx, screenreaders, and other non-graphical browsers.

I think I've determined one of the main problems with laws in the United States these days: there're too many superfluous laws. Take for example §61-1-6 of West Virginia Code: "It shall be unlawful for any person to have in his possession or to display any red or black flag, [ctd.]" What is the reason for this? Why is it there? And if it's superfluous, why should it remain? Or how about §61-10-25: "Engaging in work, labor or business, etc., on Sunday - - Prohibited." That's a bit arcane and is highly abused in these modern times. Why should it be permitted to exist still as actual law?

In the same way that both parties in a trial get defendants, in the same way that you free() your malloc()s, in the same way that republicans and democrats constantly battle, you need to balance out the dichotomy. Politicians spend their days creating new jobs and modifying old ones that come up, but what about the cruft? I believe that if you were to have someone who was paid to remove laws like this (mind you, through the same amount of debate that brought it into being in the first place) we'd have the potential for a more successful government.

Not to say that it would happen, but if you could decimate the set of extraneous laws, I've a feeling more people would actually bother to read the laws and realize what they are and aren't entitled to do. As they are, they're dauntingly numerous: a good few hundred laws that could probably be thinned down to effectively 2/3 to 1/2 as many. With fewer laws, the set of laws as a whole would be more manageable.

Paralleling laws to source code (which in a way they are: the code of conduct and organization of a complex system), programmers will often optimize or even rewrite entire sections of code in order to make the system work better holistically. Let's not just remove old, useless laws, let's consolidate! When programming, if you end up copying and pasting the same bit of code more than 2 times, you should probably turn it into a subroutine. The same should apply for laws: let the chapters parallel subroutines and tie them together better. The legal language is certainly robust enough to handle it and I'm sure lawyers would love it too.

I've mentioned this idea to others before and the main cause of concern they brought up was that the laws are there and not harming anyone, why not just leave well-enough alone? Well, the same reason a programmer will remove un-used subroutines from a program: there's no point in leaving it there and it only adds to the bloat. I say, hire someone to act as that programmer and clean up the mess. After all, it's only our laws we're talking here; it's not like they matter in our daily lives at all.

I'm presently sitting in the Trident Cafe with Allyson connected via the free wireless connection here. Allyson didn't bring a computer, so we have to share µ's net connection. I also forgot my cellphone at home, so I can't go online with my Palm. What do I do? I set up a ppp connection over bluetooth from my palm to my laptop and do NAT to get it online. I've a caching DNS server running on µ that serves anything that connects to it via NAT.

Internet gateway → Trident ISP --802.11a→ Airport --802.11b→ µ --PPP over bluetooth→ Palm

And the best part is that it's all wireless and it works. I ♥ wireless.

I moved my blog to a new engine, Blosxom. As much as I loved all the XML of my engine, it got quite out of hand dealing with a single large unicode XML document. Editing it in Emacs would periodically cause Emacs to not want to save it at all. I figured I'd have better success finding someone who has already done most of the dirty work for me, so I don't have to re-invent the blog-shaped wheel.

Blosxom is nice as it's very simple: each .txt file is a blog post; the first line is the title, the rest is the body. Categories are created by making sub directories (the one downside to this is that something can't be in multiple categories easily).

It'll take a bit to make everything work smoothly. I've so far put all the posts into categories (check out /blog/tech/bots/ for example) and set up the comment system. I've yet to move old comments to the new engine, but will as soon as I write a conversion program.

I don't tend to post news here, but this is just awesome. Massachusetts will be providing equal legal protections in civil-unions for gay/lesbian couples as well as straight ones. This is a wonderful, glorious step in the right direction. Congratulations to all who have been fighting for these rights, it's about time the government catches up with the people it represents.

Update: macabre_grrl notes that it's not over yet.

I wonder how much E someone was taking to come up with this twisted combination: digital watch + lighter + LED bling. Impressive. Grab that, show your Jesus-pimpin' pride with your "magnetic flashing rave cross", and make absolutely sure they know you're a candy raver by putting a flashing LED pacifier around your neck. Geeze, and I thought the electroluminescent wire that I wore to a club once was tacky.

A local Rochester church has decided to make their way into the information age by putting up an entirely different type of steeple. I'm sure the Minister appreciates that his audience gets full cell reception during his sermons, ready to interrupt his dramatic pauses with ill-timed electronic hails.

Well, like an RIT construction project gone terribly wrong, Winter hit Rochester like a sack of bricks. Starting with 45mph winds and topping it all off with horizontal, vertical, diagonal and other snow, a near blizzard started and then vanished in a few hours. All that remains are tattered trees and a suspicious cold, white residue on top of most things exposed to the outdoors.

I grabbed some photos here and there, even grabbing a shot of the finals-week coffee shop drum circle.

Java's is a good coffee shop. Not a clean, well-lit place - but a more homey, humanistic type of atmosphere. Where poets, signing and missing words into mics, while flocks of sleep-deprived students poke the plastic keys of their laptops, away in their own worlds. Where an all-nighter is curled up in a dark corner on a couch, stealing a few hours where they can.

FOAF is a keen system for creating distributed social networks. Think of it as a distributed Friendster, where social connections are tied together by URLs and email addresses.

How do you play? It's simple! Go over to the FOAF-o-matic, fill out the form, and put the generated code on your web page. Once it's online, hop by the FOAF Explorer and see who else is available. A more complete getting started guide is also available.

My FOAF file is available if you want to poke it for some reason. I'll be adding more friends as more people start using it. So... use it! There's a bunch of nifty things you can do once you put one together. This is one of those "critical mass" toys that isn't so useful if only small number of people use it. Unlike Friendster, though, it's not nearly as viral as it should be. Tell you friends!

steve@warehaus:~% grep -ce '^feed' ~/.rawdog/config
38

Yes, 38 RSS feeds. I'm starting to feel a slight tingle in a certain corner of my brain, like the buzzing of 1,000 humming birds somewhere very far away. You know they're there, doing their timeless dives into the center of a buttercup; you can see it in your minds eye, buzzing like that little region of my mind. Thirty eight feeds, 21,600 words, news of the world and the metaworld.

So much signal, but with so much more noise.

Now if someone could only invent a way to turn these feeds into food. I'm at Java's still and all the restaurants that Compusfood has have already closed. I guess that leaves vending machines, ordering out for pizza, or taking the 30 minute hike over to Subway.

Awhile ago, I got a Linuxfund MBNA credit card. Ryan had been reminding me that I should start building credit and that his Linuxfund card got the chicks in grocery store checkout lines. Well, got smiles from the chicks anyhow. So I applied for one and some time later, got both a magical sliver of plastic in the mail and a cute little stuffed Tux.

Today in the mail I got another stuffed Tux. You can see him sitting on top of the little penguin bath toys Care got me recently. I'm not sure why they sent it, but I don't mind having another cuddly cute thing in my possession. You can never have too many cuddly cute things.

I also got a new 3800mAh battery for mu, as I've always been paranoid about the main battery giving out after awhile. This also means that I can go on bus rides and not worry about trying to minimize power consumption: 12h of actual battery life isn't too shabby.

I also improved my vocoder network a bit to use my joystick (USB Gravis Gamepad) as a keyboard. The network now uses the buttons on the joystick for notes and the voice will "sing" those notes. Hear µ "sing" my rendition of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Two black men and a little black book
came knocking on my door.
They wanted to sell me their ways and ideals
and to read me some o' their lore.

I was quite sad that I was running late and couldn't stay to talk to the Jehovah's Witnesses who came by this morning. I've never really had a good opportunity to talk religion with a fanatic besides my mom, and she doesn't really count (Flower child → found Jesus → rediscovered her hippie ways).

Unrelatedly, I think a religion based on the wisdom of fortune cookies would be pretty nifty. When posed with a moral dilemma, one would go to the Holy Chinese Restaurant and take an offering from the fortune cookies. "My teenage son is not talking to me, and calls me a 'controlling bitch'. Oh scrumptious Fortune Cookie, what should I do?" "Love is hard work; and hard work sometimes hurts!" "I see now. Thank you, Fortune Cookie."

Even those without a Holy Chinese Restaurant nearby could participate thanks to the wonders of technology. I think it could work.

Awhile ago, I found this site on some memeblog: The Church of Virus. It's an interesting site that talks about organized religions as memes for spreading ideals. I'm a firm believer in this and this site tries to play upon that, being a meme in itself. I believe the site says it best:

Goal

Virus was originally created to compete with the traditional (irrational) religions in the human ideosphere with the idea that it would introduce and propagate memes which would ensure the survival and evolution of our species. The main advantage conferred upon adherents is Virus provides a conceptual framework for leading a truly meaningful life and attaining immortality without resorting to mystical delusions. (source)

I got myself a vocoder. Well, a vocoder plugin. With it, I can sound like a robot.

You've probably heard a vocoder, but not heard of a vocoder. They're quite popular in electronic music, used heavily by bands like Kraftwerk and Freezepop. It's a audio filter that takes two sources, the carrier and the formant. The formant is the human voice source and the carrier is commonly a simple waveform, say an 80Hz sawtooth wave. Parts of the formant is filtered out and replaced by the carrier, weaving the natural and the generated sound sources into one synthetic-sounding voice that retains most of the voice's pronunciation.

I put together a little network in Galan that had both "analog" and simple wave carriers. I put a cross-fader between the two carriers so they could be changed or combined. I found with an equal balance of an 80Hz sawtooth carrier and a 350Hz "analog" triangle-wave carrier produced a pretty decent robotic voice.

I used the vocoder on my red-robot costume for Halloween. Unfortunately, my laptop speakers weren't loud enough to drown out my voice and so I just sounded incomprehensible with it. I'll have to get some battery-powered speakers and a USB joystick to manually control the carrier frequencies for next time.

I think I'm starting to feel the pulse. The Internet is a vast web of information exchange. It's far too large, even if one could manage to monitor everything, to really get a high-level overview of all the new data that's added to the web. Almost.

On that web there are many nodes that will digest and summarize the information flowing around/through them. There are also nodes that look for patterns, and extract meaning: a news site that is regularly updated, a blogger's site which has interesting links and ideas posted on it. Let's call each of these nodes "neurons". These neurons act as sensors for their environment: a blogger who complains about the weather, a news station that reports on a local crime. If they could be monitored, say via a standard protocol, one get a high-level view of the union of all the neurons monitored.

These neurons are not isolated. In fact, most of them will monitor other neurons, other information feeds, other events and generate output based on their observations. These information feeds, connecting neuron to neuron, could be paralleled with the brain's inter-neuron connective structures: "dendrites". Dendrites function by passing signals from neuron to neuron, creating a network of information flow.

What's the point of this metaphor? Well, it's nowhere near the density of a human brain, but each person on the web functions as a neuron. Information flows through the Internet, regulated and filtered by each of these neurons. I've started adding RSS feeds to a centralized aggregator. I have this insatiable urge to keep adding more feeds, to become more tied in, and monitor more neurons. With what goal? Well, to find the Nodal Points, as another blogger called them. The interesting things being passed around; the things that "matter" to the Internet as a collective.

One type of these nodal points are the ever-popular memes. I often consider memes to be information viruses, but now I'm starting to think of them more as signals that happen to pass particularly well from neuron to neuron.

One such example of this is the site, Friendster. I was very amused to learn of its existence one day, chat about it on IRC that evening, be IM'd by two friends from RIT (within an hour of each other) the next day, and then participating in it, passing it on, the day after that.

The last step is to create a technical system for automatically digesting the feeds and sorting out the most relevant bits of information. Think of it as a Google page-ranking system for "real-time" data feeds. The more automated the system becomes, the larger it can scale and the more dendrites can form between the neurons.

What results from this ever-interlinking collective network of minds? That's a question on par with "What is the meaning of life?". The more I ponder the significance of the Internet the more I hope that the answer to both questions is the same.

"Somebody had to put all this Confusion here!"

I had found it before, but here is a Discordian Coloring book. It's remarkably well-illustrated, for such an eccentric thing. I only wish someone would publish it on cheap paper so I could discretely leave them in Dr.'s offices around the country. The thought of a little kid scribbling over an apple with ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΙ inscribed in it is just.. awesome. "Mommy, what's she doing to him?"

After poking away at a network client written in pure malloc'd C, I was remound of the most excellent and geeky song, "Write in C". (there seem to be some revised versions of it out there, mentioning Java instead of ).

In remembering that song, I recalled that I hadn't heard anyone sing it besides myself, acapella. I thought it's bound to exist in a recorded fashion somewhere out there in the vast and glorious Interweb. Well, look no further junior rangers! There's a whole flock of geeky songs in an old album by called Spammer's Paradise. You must check it out. MIDI + [bad] singing + awesome lyrics == geeky like nothing you've heard before.

I have a new home. Well, I've had it for awhile, but I'm actually living in it recently. Thanks to the nocturnal habits of my new cuddly friend, Brigitte, I've been spending more nights than I care to admit hanging out on the various couches of Java's.

In fact, with Brigitte comes another group of people to add to my collection: goth/metal John, Shelley, and Leighton. All are permanent residents of Java's and tend to be clad in black and metal pricklies. More often than not, a subset of them will be hanging out in Java's either hiding behind a glowing lap-warmer or curled up in a ball in a corner, rejuvenating.

I've shyly been flirting with MovableType as a possible replacement for my hand-coded blog engine. As much as I like the concepts behind my engine, there are aspects of the implementation that I don't have finished or don't desire to finish. Parsing user comments for HTML, for one, is something I'd rather not have to code. In addition, the constant re-parsing of the XML is slow (yes, I'll change it so it generates static pages soon enough) and prone to corruption with a malicious text editor.

My younger sibling, David, already has his blog up using the MT engine I installed. It's a good piece of software, but unfortunately not open source. I may leave philosophy behind on this one though, as it's still free to use (for non-commercial use) and modify, just not free to distribute modifications. The bling may overcome the licensing.

You know computers are running too much of your life when you accidentally sleep-in and skip class due to a programming error. You also know that you program too much when you can diagnose that error, fix it, check it into CVS, and then can fall back asleep. Finally, you know you're a 'net junkie when you are amused by that chain of events and then blog it, knowing the blog will be syndicated to at least 3 other websites.

Oh, and you can get the updated versions of the code here: classalarm. Other necessities for it can be found here: scripts.

I was just given a link to Tugboat - music done by my friend Jesse from middleschool. He and I would often hang out, making fun of the computer network admin and generally being geeky boys. *reminisce* Check out Tugboat, it's videogameish music done Right™. He even goes as far as to make sure the polyphony was done in the way classic system would do it. Awesome.

"Molten milk chocolate mixed with cream is like a liquid cuddle for your belly." -Steve *drooling at the thought*

Mink and Kris visited me over the weekend. They drove out from Boston sharing the joyous task of conducting Kris's boatSUV on the Route Ninety Sea. We had a most excellent time hanging out while Rob and Ryan worked on and drank their beer, cuddled, toured RIT and other such randomy things. I miss being in Boston and I miss them both; why must I be plagued with the torment of distance? So far I've had one (1) relationship (besides this summer) where distance was not a major impediment. Even then, transportation was a bit of a pain without a car. Some day, some glorious day...

On an unrelated note, I am now Vice President of RIT's SME club. Andrew has also been appointed the President. That means that the top two positions of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers are lead by ones other than Manufacturing Engineers. I'm not even technically an engineer either. I believe there's one ME student in the entire club, but I could be wrong.

Whatever the silly terminology makes itself out to being, I'm now co-leading what's solely become a robotics club (technically, SME does other things. I should probably find out what those are soon, I imagine). Together with MDRC, we will be trying to bring more robotics projects to RIT.

One of the most important aspects of robotics in a school environment is that it requires the help of many types of people to produce a final product. Hardware designers, hardware producers, software designers, software implementers, debuggers, web designers, graphic artists - a vast array of people can work together on one [hopefully] kick-ass tangible goal. This is why I like robotics: bringing together a heterogeneous group of people to make one nifty device. Well, that and the fact that I really enjoy automation in all its various forms. Especially 300lb forms that attempt to drive by themselves.

Now I must return to the homework I've been attempting to do all weekend (how can you sit down in front of a book writing in Japanese, «Mt. Everest is a bit larger than Mt. Fuji.» and other such variations for a few hours when there are two attractive females visiting you for a weekend? It's just unpossible). My partner in AI today greeted at lab me with a yellow Course Withdrawl form. He told me he was going to pull out and will be continuing to help with the project, but that's a good gauge of how frustrating the class is. Hopefully I can find time to sort out all the "fuzzy assignments" he keeps handing out; they're often about as vague as recycled technologies we explore.

My weekend consisted of the following chain of people and events:

Friday: home → RTS Bus → Greyhound → Worcester → Mink.

Saturday: Mink → breakfast with her friends → hang out with her suitemates → Commuter Rail → Lisa → Kris → Eat, Drink, Man, Woman.

Sunday: Kris → Harvard Square → Tashari & Pete → One Arrow St. Crepes → Newbury St. → Allyson & friends → Trident Cafe → Delerium concert at Axis → dad's appt.

Monday: Dad → Greyhound → RTS Bus → home → bike to RIT for classes → Rob → home where Ryan and Rob tried their homebrewed beer for the first time.

And this is why I have trouble getting homework done on the weekends.

Cellphone Update: I got the replacement in the mail friday in a convenient box that had a return postage sticker in it. The only thing they didn't provide was the packing tape to reseal the box (whoever made the origional Palm Pilot did that). The new phone has the latest firmware and everything appears to be happy so far.

I started writing this in a comment on Smileloki's RSI post, but figured it'd be more useful here. Awhile ago, I got a wrist brace to help with my aching wrists and hands. It's been good so far, but isn't a "magic bullet" to cure a RSI.

In CS4 a few years ago, I got a severe RSI from pounding out code and chatting constantly. I looked around for RSI solutions and besides correct posture and a good desk setup, many expensive keyboards were suggested. Considering their $200-400 price range, I looked for a cheaper solution.

I decided take the plunge and switch to Dvorak (and more importantly, learn to type properly - fingers on the home-row, minimal moving of fingers, using pinkies and such.). That helped a great deal as I both slowed down during the re-learning process and ended up with a better typing style overall afterward.

Dvorak alone is not a super improvement over Qwerty - I prefer it, as I overall move my hands substantially less (watch someone typing in the two layouts; it's sorta nifty as typing on Dvorak almost looks like fake typing.), but the process of relearning to type was the most important. You can attempt to relearn to type in Qwerty, but I always find that I fall into old habits too quickly.

Of course, it takes a great deal of patience to relearn to type; ultimately, though, it is worth it. I found the best way to do this was by taking notes in class with a laptop/palmtop which is mapped to Dvorak. I tried to practice typing in Dvorak by chatting in AIM and on IRC, but that proved to be insanely frustrating: I couldn't keep up with the flow of conversation and ended up "reverting" to Qwerty to actually speak. Coding or writing papers in Dvorak is a decent alternative to notes, but deadlines make it look rather unappealing after awhile.

If you do make the switch, don't be discouraged. You will start off slow, but will also regain speed within a month or so. I now type a good 80WPM or so in Dvorak without much issue (I'm not sure if that's better than my Qwerty speed, but it probably is).

One last concern which is always brought up: compatibility. Yes, I can still type in Qwerty. When I was starting off, it took awhile to switch between the two. I had a "shaky finger" as my brain tried to decide which to use, but I've gotten to switching now. I can easily start typing on a Qwerty keyboard, but it'll take me a good 30 minutes to get back into the rhythm of Qwerty (I've heard of people who don't even have this time, and I'm guessing they actually use Qwerty on a semi-regular basis). I tend to find that most people's computers can easily be switched to Dvorak with minimal effort or problems on their part (OS X, GNU/Linux, ). My most recent frustration in that front has been with the modern Sun Blades which have magical new USB keyboards that are entirely unlike all their successors.

Ultimately, if you can spend about 1 month of time typing a bit slower (and 1-2 weeks being frustrated at your typing speed) in order to help prevent any RSI, Dvorak is a great choice.

How do I make my computer Dvorak?

So, how do you do it? It's easy!

Windows

Start → Settings → Control Panel → keyboard → Language → add → "Dvorak"

You should be able to switch it with the little icon in the tray.

Mac OS X

System Preferences → International → Dvorak

GNU/Linux with X 4.* (or anything running X 4.*)

setxkbmap dvorak

I also recommend the -option ctrl:nocaps -option compose:menu options. The former will turn your "caps lock" key into a spare "ctrl" key (no more bumping caps lock aND ACCIDENTALLY SHOUTING) and the latter will map that "menu" button to be a "compose" key.

To switch, I've a two scripts that run the setxkbmap with either the above option or setxkbmap pc104 (which is often the default). The one that switches to Qwerty is called aoeu and the one to Dvorak, asdf (that idea blatantly stolen from Tetron). You switch by rolling your left hand on the home row in a terminal.

2004-04-11 update: setxkbmap -option 'ctrl:nocaps' -option 'compose:menu' -option 'altwin:super_win' -option 'grp_led:caps' -option 'grp:shift_toggle' 'dvorak,us' This is wonderful. I hijacked the capslock LED to indicate Dvorak vs. Qwerty (the LED is on when it's Qwerty) and pressing both shift keys at the same time causes it to toggle layouts. No more hunting for a terminal to type "asdf" anymore :-) This is due to the fact that you can have up to 4 loaded layouts at once in XFree86 >= 4.3.

I stumbled across the info here: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/rules/xfree86.lst and /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/README.config .

Ahoy me mateys! I write this 'ere letter from a ship headin' from the coast o' Rarchestarr to Bawston. She's an old craft, but is quite speedy on the concrete seas. I be in Bawston fur th' weekend, seein' me mateys an' hearin the fine sounds of Delerium. Send me some word if ye be wantin' to meet up Satarday ur Sunday. Me ol' "sell-fone"'ll be right as rain so ye can give me a hollar on that there work o' witchcraft. I can't promise much, though, as me mateys may very well be takin' up all me time.

Aye, me lads and lassies: 'case ye hadn't heard th' word, today be Talk Like a Pirate Day. Save th' day me mateys, this be the best day of the yearrrr.

Yarrr. Mark me words, ye scurvy scallywags. They say lassies arn't ta be on a ship. Aye, it's not th' lassies but their chilluns who're ta be left at port. Thar be one such chillun 'board this 'ere vessel an' 'e be squeelin' like a gull o'er a fresh catch. I'm of mind ta toss th' lily-livered rascal in the brig an' see 'ow 'e likes th' looks of th' bars.

Here be me attempt at a unicode pirate smiley: ṗ-1

Every once in awhile, while in the shower or some other such monotonous task, I get ideas that I think just have to be written down. My first instinct is to draw up a HTML document on the idea, trying to organize and formalize it. One of the reasons for this is - well - I want to pass it on and see what others think.

I wrote up two such ideas recently: a way of transporting an inexpensive object (say, a borrowed book, a burned CD, or such) across a network of people. People are constantly moving; why not try and harness some of that movement for a collective good?

The other (which actually has market potential) is a slight tweak to a used book store. This used book redistribution network favours the movement of the book - the more the book moves on through the network, the more money the people involved in its transport get. If it were implemented well and if it caught on it'd be nifty. Of course, to be effective the users have to grok it (one of the main issues people have mentioned so far; it's very confusing). Maybe someday when I have money to burn and time to waste on projects like this, I'll put it together. Until then, I'll continue posting wacky ideas I have in hopes that anyone cares.

Cellphone update: Well, as I feared, the replacement phone didn't actually come in the mail. I called on Tuesday to confirm that they sent the order out, and I learned that they didn't even have a record of the order in their system. After 45 minutes on the phone with a nice customer service rep., I got a confirmed order and was told that it'd probably arrive by Monday. Most of the conversation was trying to figure out how I could possibly get a phone that I could borrow for the weekend, so I'd be able to twiddle plans while in Boston.

A fun quote from that conversation:

Me: "So, are there any T-Mobile stores that can get me a temporary phone until the new one arrives?"

..pause..

Rep: "Is New York large?"

Me: "Pardon?"

Rep: "Is New York rather large?"

Me: "Uh, Yeah. It's about 6 hours from here to New York City"

It turned out there were no places in the "loaner program" near me and that I'd have to go on an 8 hour bus ride and weekend in Boston with no cell/Internet connection (horror of horrors!). So, I asked him if it'd just be possible to buy a phone (with Bluetooth) and return it within their 14-day "no obligation" trial period and he said that would work.

I stopped by the local T-Mobile shop in the nearby mall and got a Sony Ericsson T68i (it was the cheapest they had with Bluetooth and I figured I'd try a new phone for kicks). So far, it's been working great on both my Palm and my laptop. I still can't get over how light the phone is - it feels like one of those empty "dummy demo models" they have at cheap electronics stores. I'm not so fond of it though - not enough features - and look forward to toting around a Nokia 3650 again.

Combine GeoURL with RSS aggregation and what do you get? Localized RSS feeds. Localfeeds is an aggregate which finds all the feeds in 50 miles of a given city and displays summaries on the site. *Waves to the Rochester blog world!* It'll be interesting watching city-level events be blogged in one spot. I've certainly gotten a kick out of watching the spread of memes through the various sites I read in my aggregated feed.

My next step is to get a better system for posting posts. Right now, as I wrote my blog engine myself, the post system is written in Perl and requires me to ssh into my main computer to write entries. This isn't bad really, as I can use emacs to compose nice HTML, but It'd be rather handy to have some XML RPC methods which I can post with, and the accompanying clients on my various wireless devices. I've pondered looking into switching over to MovableType, but I don't really have the time to write a conversion engine or any such things. Just ponderings for future ways to waste time.

On an unrelated note, some day I - and my army of kitten-seeking red robots - will create a meme that will take over the world. Just thought I'd give fair warning.

This has got to be the cutest ring-tailed lemur I've ever seen. I want one! In addition, people really need to get up and dance more. [from Boing Boing]

Oh, and regarding my cellphone which fatally crashed? The replacement (which, I might add, I said OK to them charging me $15 for next-day air) still has not arrived. Hopefully today will be my lucky day, but we shall see. Even if it does, I'm a bit paranoid that it will have the old firmware. Version 2.54 of the firmware came on the broken one and according to various messages boards, is quite buggy for other people too. Fluffy just got a one from T-Mobile and it came with version 2.54, so I'm a bit skeptical that they even have any with a newer version in stock.

My cellphone crashes while booting and there is no hard reset pin.

I love technology.

Bored in class, I decided to follow Ryan's lead and add a LOC record to staticfree.info's DNS entry. I also added a cute little GeoURL ICBM meta tag to staticfree.info's main page. Ryan likes the DNS entry better, but I think both have their place. The meta tag can be used for someone's about page or their blog, for example, while the DNS one wouldn't suffice. Of course, knowing where a physical server is can be quite handy as well, but for entirely different reasons.

All in all, you can do some pretty nifty lookups with GeoURL and get a map using the LOC data.

I'm back in Rochester, back at school. I've already gone to all my classes and they've been good. I've had two of the professors before (Carithers and Dalal), and I liked their teaching style. This time around I'll put more effort into their classes, so that should be good. The other two seem interesting enough (although my AI prof is both dry and unintelligible) and should provide for good classes.

3 out of my 4 classes are in building 70 - the new CS/IT/SE building - and I take notes on µ in HTML in them. Therefore, I'm generally online in those classes. I love technology.

I've been switching between various wireless devices recently, from my phone to my palm to my laptop. As such, I've been shuffling my online habits to accommodate that: using IMAP more frequently (on µ and my palm), I set up an email address solely for my phone (not entirely sure what I'll do with it), and started using Rawdog to read all my various blogs/sites.

Also on the software front, I added theming capabilities to my schedule system. I put together a nice "white and teal" theme that's actually readable on my palm. (the blacker theme is too black). I'll eventually switch all over to iCalendar. Maybe. I like certain features of the current calendar/schedule system as-is.

Oh, and now that I'm back at RIT I'm rediscovering how much I missed my crazy friends here. Julie, for example, is Very Cool™. Hopefully I'll meet a bunch of other random-crazy-cool people, as there's bound to be at least a few at a school mostly populated by CS/IT and photo majors.

Heading back to Rochester; heading home. Well, one of my homes anyway. I always ponder the concept of home as I have a few (various places in Newton and Rochester), one (the Interweb) or none. I like to think they're all homes of sorts, in their own rights. They all house people I care about, things I care about, and things I've created. Strange how one is but an abstract layer on top of the other two, yet that layer is itself a home. Would it perhaps be a metahome then? All I know is that, provided a cozy spot to sit, a beverage dispenser of some sort, and either WiFi or cellular reception, I can feel quite at home.

The summer's over already and classes are starting in a few days. My dad will be driving my self, my stuff and my new bike out tonight. The trip is a good 6-7 hours so sadly, I'll be missing Rochester.Amber as she leaves Saturday morning.I'll just have to join Kate sometime in the future and visit Amber's new apartment. :-)

It's so mechanical, packing. Consolidating a summer's worth of activities, saying goodbye, moving on again, and leaving behind only memories. I won't miss my dad's apartment (especially not the nasty bugs that occasionally visit it), just the people around it. Oh, how I wish someone'd create a transporter already! Or maybe just a high-speed train straight from BOS to ROC. Even cheap airfare between the two would be plenty! Until then I can only shuttle between cities toting µ, some tech and some clothes. I'll miss Bostony folks so much.

On the note of leaving, I may be coming back. It's still in the air, but I'll probably be back in Newton come winter quarter. FTRD seems to be open to the idea of me working there for another co-op session, I don't mind the extra money, and it'll then fill all my co-op requirements (assuming Pennie ever gets my two bloody credits submitted). All in all, too many people want me around Cambridge/Newton then for me to really be able to stay at RIT then. I just hope classes can coincide appropriately.

Oh, and apparently I can type around 88WPM (77WPM accounting for typos) in Dvorak on µ. I need to find a better tester though. Preferably one that isn't written in java. I'd pro'ly be a bit faster if it was using emacs, as I'm particularly keen on emacs' "undo" and "delete the previous word" bindings.

Sorry to those viewing the RSS feed that I've spammed. I decided it was silly to abbreviate my posts to only the first paragraph, so I got rid of that. I also forcibly escaped the HTML in the posts instead of wrapping it in a CDATA to try and make it more universal across RSS parsers. I'll eventually redo the entire thing as an RSS-encoded RDF, but that'll be when I have free time.

My weekend was joyously spent with Krazy Kris (With a 'k' like "kookie"), Miss Mink and a brief flirtation with a graveyard. After a pleasant evening with Kris, Saturday morning rolled around and so did my dad in our old Volvo. I, having finally re-acquired a learner's permit (this is #3) the day before (taking 2 hours in line. Just my luck as the day before that, the line was 7 minutes long and I was shooed away for not having "proof of residence") joined him on a pleasant Saturday spin around the graveyard.

I can't think of a better place to learn to drive than a large, beautiful graveyard. Except perhaps in the real world, but one tries to avoid that when first starting off. It was full of tricky turns, haunting hills, and ominous obstacles. Of course, it also accurately simulates not-quite-an-hour-rush-hour traffic at a wavering 15 miles per hour or below. I ended up driving for 1.5h which makes the total time I've driven a car in my life around 2 hours. Huzzah! Progress!

After my brief tour of the homes of the deceased, I trundled into Haaavad Square where I met up with Laurie and company. I hung out until I had to run off to a train for Worcester to visit Miss Mink.

Mink and I stayed up late playing on computers and then woke early for King Richard's Faire! The faire was more fun than I thought, but not as amazing as it had worked itself up to being. The various games were too spendy ($3.00 for 10 arrows to shoot into a arrow-pocked bale of hay), the food was of course up there in price (more annoyingly, it had an annoying "ticket" system where all real money transactions were traded for 50¢ tickets), and all merchandice was amazingly spendy. Then again, if you want to go spend a bunch of money on that sort of thing, this place is certainly the right place!

Of course, in light of all the spendyness, I gave in and actually got myself a new carrying case for my Palm. It's not as hardcore as Mink's skull pouch, but it was gotten from the same place; there's bound to be a little hardcore spilled over into it.

We returned to torment her suite-mates with random music which we were remarkably capable of singing along to. *Insert mental video clip of Mink and Xavier singing and bouncing with laptops on laps, joyously to Neutral Milk Hotel - Song Against Sex here*.

I ran off to home, to dinner, to Kris (sadly sans Star Trek), to work and thusly the summer routine will end. It's been an amazing summer and I wish it could last longer.

I opened the summer with a song lyric, and I think I'll close it with one too:

"We're here and now, but will we ever be again
'Cause I have found
All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade
Away again" - Fuel - Shimmer

I've not posted here in a bit, as both I am lazy and µ was in the shop for 1.5 weeks. (I wanted to post a bunch of photos, which were on µ). Some recent events in photos: Adam had a party, b1o spun a session on a hill near a cell tower, my brother came back from Japan, and Tashari re-bleached my hair. All in all, I've been having a great time and enjoying my summer.

My laptop, µ, got lucky. Its warranty ran out the day after I discovered its CD-RW/DVD drive was broken. In addition, its power adapter (like so many other Lifebooks) had also broken. When the CD-RW/DVD drive broke, I was nearly certain that my warranty was already expired, but I figured - hey - they might at least be able to give me a repair estimate. I was very lucky to call tech support and discover that I was still under warranty, as those repairs would have probably cost $400 otherwise. I brought µ down to a local Fujitsu repair shop, Tech Fusion, and they seemed to be pretty good about repairs.

I've recently discovered that one of my favorite bands, Delerium, will be on tour starting 2003-09-03. I'm going to try and convince someone in Rochester that they really need to go to Toronto ("I don't want to go to Toronto!") come the 18^th. There's always room for another road-trip to Canada.

In addition, Guster will be playing at the U of R on the 20^th, and hopefully Amethystmoon will come out for that. Unlikely due to her recent lack of car, but I can still hope.

I also recently set up a variety of calendar-related systems on my computers. I discovered the nifty iCalendar/vCalendar (I'm still not sure of the difference between the two) formats which allow for easy sharing of calendar data. I set up PHP iCalendar over on Warehaus which will eventually house my Palm's datebook and class schedule information. I just need to write a SIS→iCalendar converter and find a Palm Datebook → iCalendar converter, as I'd rather not like to write the latter. Ultimately, it's pretty nifty when coupled with something like Mozilla's calendar plug-in.

Now that I've put about 4 entries-worth in one jumbo-sized entry, I'll be posting more frequently from now on. I hope.

I've been writing a few little poems in my random bouts of inspiration before I go to sleep. Usually I just use them for my away messages, but I figured I'd share them here too. Dreaming of Dreaming and She Dreams. Yes, you are correct: the theme you might be noticing here is purely coincidental.

My party was good. Yada yada yada yada yada. I had an amazing time, saw a few of people I'd thought I lost to time, and - save one important one and a few others - had all my closest friends with me at one time.

On an unrelated note, I've decided that my summer goal to "play with Bluetooth" still had not been fully satiated. Therefore, I decided that I was fed up with Cingular's inability to give me all the cell-phone features (Voicemail has never worked in Boston. Well, it works as people can leave messages, but the system does not notify me in any way) I purchased and have hopped over to T-Mobile. The main inspiration for the jump is because T-Mobile is offering an unlimited Internet plan (via GPRS) for $20 extra/mo. Having portable, always-on wireless Internet access that I can use (via Bluetooth) on my palm and my laptop, as well as a decent cell-phone package is worth the $60/mo. IMO. Which, sadly, is only about $10/mo. more than my Cingular service.

On usability: Bluetooth, with my shiny new camera-phone and Palm, is very nifty. The Palm has a handy little software upgrade that provides a wizard to set up a phone-control and GPRS-connection-sharing link. Palm did an amazing job putting together their phone-palm integration, as I can practically leave my phone in my pocket (with the headset on) and do all that i need to do with it: go online, dial numbers (from my palm's address book). In addition, I can actually send contacts between the two devices over Bluetooth - a feat of standardization that I never thought would be seen in my lifetime. I'll play with getting a link set up to my laptop soon, which should be good: wireless 'net (though a bit slow) anywhere I go that doesn't already have WiFi. I love the information age.

The party starts at 18:00-19:00 and there will be dinnery food served. I've attempted to put together a menu of cheap tasty things that veggies and carnivores can both like, but feel free to post suggestions as a reply to this. So far, the menu is:

• Pizza - pepperoni and plain. Maybe something chickeny or garlicy if I'm feeling daring
• Chips/salsa/etc.
• Spanakopita - one of my favorite snacky foods
• hummus, pita, tabbouleh, etc.
• focaccia - if anyone wants to help make some
• other suggestions?

SmileLoki and I went on an adventure, spur of the moment, because we could, and because it was there. True, in the grand scale of all adventures, this was a walk in the park, but as far as a certain scrawny computer geek was concerned, it was quite a trip.

MacWorld has been in NYC for the past few whiles in the Javitz Convention Center. Many vendors come, as well as the Holy Apple itself, and followers come to pay tribute to the benevolent ruler of their computers. Shown gleaming and proud on whirling pedestals of plastic ice, the latest and greatest are displayed, posing pornographically with their covers off and innards showing. Inside and out, they are seen to be beautiful; thin grates, teasingly glowing icons, and just enough ports to remind you that it's actually a computer.

Why, as two hard-core Linux users, would we go to an Apple festival? One might guess that it's a familial thing: with the recent advent of OS X and its intimate relation with Linux's sister, BSD. In a sense, similar to going to an art show where your friend is presented and seeing what they've done, seeing where they've gone in life, and seeing what their peers have done. There's also the novelty factor: so much new, shiny technology - the pinnacle of modern computer design by many's standards - all concentrated in a hands-on showcase. Finally, the other novelty - I simply hadn't done it before.

Waking early in the morning to catch a ride with Aelsha and Spinfire (friends from the vast network of the Interweb), SmileLoki and I traveled to the closest train stop that the drivers wanted to travel to. There was a train in the station heading to NYC when we got there, so we ran in - not noticing it was making local stops. On the train, we talked and read our respective books.

Arriving at Grand Central Station some 30-40 minutes later, we found the shuttle that took us within a few blocks of the convention center. SmileLoki lead the way through the trip, as she has a compass for a sense of direction, and a spacial memory like a map. We got there much earlier than I anticipated: a good 11:30 or so.

After watching a registration clerk fight with her workstation to spit out a badge (the system had inconveniently forgotten anything I submitted but my name, despite the fact that the web forms didn't allow for such a submission to even occur in the first place. Isn't technology grand?), we wandered towards the showroom. Pausing first to feed my external-brainpack some data from a little winking beacon (cute design. Prior to that, I wondered how long it would take to see such a device in existence.), we entered the showroom and instantly flocked to the pretty new G5 on display.

All I can say about the G5 is: my, what a large heat sink; boy, it sure goes fast.

We wandered the booths, poking at ideas, products, and toys. Bling-blings were presented of all shine and sheen, glossy and glowing, dancing and playing the guitar. From a rather normal (read: it didn't look like a showcase) Apple-schlockmeister, I grabbed a shirt which said, in big, white-on-black letters:

C:/DOS
C:/DOS/RUN
RUN/DOS/RUN

All summers I try to acquire at least a few new t-shirts to add to my collection. One can never have enough shirts with witty sayings or pseudo-religious icons.

After a trip to the food court to feed our bodies and briefly play on the open WiFi, we saw a few more booths and headed out. On the way out, the poor registration clerk said hi and bye, as she and we vanished off into the city.

We made our way to times square and basked in the sky spittle and radiant heat from cars trudging through the flocks of pedestrians. The city is beautiful in its ugliness: a fast-paced writhing network of verbally. tactilely and electronically-linked cells, shuffling through their individualities and lives; hiding from the world in their respective mobile steel exoskeletons.

I grabbed some cheap DVDs from one of the large, blinking stores in the square and we waited for SmileLoki's friend to return her call. He did, but wasn't going to show up. So we left for Chinatown to feed and head home.

There are many buses that go from Boston <-> New York City. The only difference between these buses is sketchiness and price. Normally, I'd take Greyhound or some other commercial entity that advertises on silly things like television and such. In the hopes of leaving as small a financial scar as possible, though, we decided to take the Fung Wah bus. Unfortunately for us, the Fung Wah bus didn't want us to succeed. We were hoping to catch the 18:00 bus back to Boston, but Fung Wah was sold out until 21:00. One other person in line with us seemed quite frustrated, and mentioned another bus which did the same route down the street.

We followed the man to a mostly Chinese sign with the name Travel Pack on it, seemingly advertising the route we wanted, but severely lacking any explicit place to take the offer up. After a bit of hunting around, we came across a Chinese woman sitting in front of a random 'lectroschlock store with a similar sign, verbally advertising, "Boston? $10 dollar!". We waited with her per her instruction, acquired some beverages and mystery-meat dumplings, and after a good 30 minutes trundled down the street to where the bus was supposed to pick up.

It didn't. Instead, we just got tickets at that street corner and followed another Chinese man to another street - one that looked a bit more fruitful in the bus department. We waited with a crowd. It grew as the bus continued to be elsewhere, and we waited more. Eventually a mostly unlabeled bus approached filled with people. Some other Chinese men armed with cell phones waved people into the bus, filling it up. We made our way to the front of the crowd, but only to be told it was full. Another bus came, unloaded, and left. The third (third is a charm) bus came, empty, and with room for us. It is on that bus that I write this now.

We arrived in Boston fairly late and met with my father near the Boylston T stop. He drove SmileLoki home and "home" I went. Ah, the Internet - my home.

...tell us the lesson that we will learn. The upcoming weekend shall be crazy, fun and full of many things, people and places. So far, I plan to do the following in rough succession and flanked with brief periods of sleeping:

1. Friday: Take the Spinfire & Aelscha bus or the Fung Wah bus to NYC for the MacWorld Expo with SmileLoki
2. Friday: Partake of a BFF at Miraba's house
3. Saturday: FFF followed by Rocky Horror in the evening
4. Sunday: MIT Flea

With any luck, I'll remain alive through the barrage of activity and acquire many people along the ride. We shall see.

The party will not be held at a certain Kris's apartment, but instead at the infamous Pink Stucco. All other details shall be the same, except that it will be a combination party for Frommy and myself. In addition, some alcohol will be provided, as is common at Pink Stucco. If you are looking for a ride there, contact me and I can [attempt to] put you in touch with someone who could give you a ride. Another good option is the mailing list that Frommy is putting together, so contact me or him if you'd like to be on it.

Finally, anyone needing a place to crash for the evening after the party should also contact me, and I'll see if I can arrange something. There're a few people who live in the Newton area that'll be going, and some are willing to put people up.

After many hours of deliberation (ok, minutes), it's been decided: the Big Summer Party™ shall be held on the evening of Saturday July 26th, 2003. The stated reason for the party is that it's my birthday party (well, a 9-day late birthday party), but the real reason is that I both like tasty cake and people. Eating and hanging out with, respectively (or concurrently? I won't say).

Details

When

The evening of Saturday July 26th, 2003. If for some reason you can't make it then - sorry. The summer is generally packed, and trying to find time for this party was tight. There's the slightest possibility that, if enough people want it, it could be moved a day prior or subsequent, but I'd like to avoid those days for a number of reasons.

Where

The party is tentatively going to be held lo, not at my dad's tiny appt. but at the appt. of a certain Kris. Until I know more details about that location's availability, I'll leave it at that. There's MBTA transportation to that location via bus from Harvard, so transportation shouldn't be an issue for most people. someone, somewhere. To find out where, see posts from the future.

Why

My 22^nd birthday! And because I love throwing parties.

What

A fun party in the summer with as many people as I can reasonably muster. Mealtime food will be served in both vegetarian and carnivorous flavours. If you require vegan food items though, please post a comment here. Alcohol will be permitted if you BYOB: people I know are generally insane enough not to need alcohol added into the equation.

Who

Everyone! If you can read this, and know me in person, you're invited. If you can read this and don't know me in person, RSVP and you're invited. Ideally, I'd appreciate it if everyone who'll be coming (excluding anyone who's told me already) please send me some communication or post a comment here to let me know you'll be there.

How

Magic.

I hate printers; I want one (as seen on my favorite geekporn site). I always thought it'd be cool to have a printer that worked somewhat like a hand-scanner, but in reverse. And, unlike a hand-scanner, people don't really care about quality as much as they care about the ease-of-use. I can't wait to see this little bugger on the market: as it can print onto any surface, including scrap paper; I might actually succumb to using paper for communication again.

I've a dilemma: I want to have a big party with many people. This means that it will have to be held at a time that's inconvenient for at least one person, at least according to most probabilities. In order to minimize the number of people it's inconvenient for, I'm holding a public vote right here for your editorial entertainment. To use, please make sure to use my comment system, not livejournals and leave a vote for each day (listed below) that is convenient for you. All times are assumed to be evening (18:00-whenever). Please pass this on to anyone who might know me (and therefore be invited to the party).

1. July 5^th
2. July 6^th
3. July 11^th
4. July 12^th
5. July 13^th
6. July 18^th
7. July 19^th
8. July 20^th
9. July 25^th
10. July 26^th
11. July 27^th

You can vote by leaving a comment with either the bullet numbers or the dates, by IMing me, or by throwing a brick through our open window with your vote wrapped around it; I really don't care. Remember: If you don't vote, you can't bitch that you can't make it.

the confused upsidedown pirate goes: "ɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹɹə"

It's been about 7 years since I've gotten a pair of rollerblades. I specifically "forgot" to bring my old pair from Rochester so that I would have a strong incentive not to ever use them again and instead purchase a new pair. I got a new pair today, as Blades in Harvard Square happen to have an older model in my size (size 13 men's. Quite a rarity that they had them). They're Rollerblade® Aero, black with big wheels. All in all, they're decent skates, though I'm sure a more obsessed 'blader would object to the brand.

The old ones were classics: Rollerblade®-brand blades that were undoubtedly one of the first models made (they have "Patent Pending" printed on their sides). They still roll and are quite sturdy, though could use new wheels, bearings, laces and bolts. Oh, and they're about as comfy as strapping steel-armored gophers to your feet. They, like shoulder pads, are thankfully now mostly-deceased spawns of the mid 90's.

I believe I shall attempt at rollerblading to the T tomorrow, and then from the T to work. With any luck, I can shave a good 15 minutes of walking off. We'll see how unwieldy they end up being.

For some strange reason, I find it incredibly odd that the Blue Line goes out to Revere Beach. Even odder is the fact that I've lived in the Boston area for about a decade and I didn't realize this until just now. It's always been there, about an hour and a half away...and I never noticed.

Rachel and I went to the aformentioned beach last Sunday. We were a bit worried that it'd rain, but luck was with us and the grey clouds gave way to sunshine and a cool breeze. Toss in a trip to the famous Kelly's for dinner, and it was a quite pleasant, unique excursion. I'll definitely have to venture out there more as the summer progresses. Maybe I'll even start to like fish & chips :-)

On an entirely unrelated note, Bluetooth is nifty. My new toy has built-in bluetooth, so I went ahead and got my laptop a little box so they could talk to amongst themselves. I made sure to get one that supported the headset protocol, so (someday) I may be able to wirelessly connect something like this headset to my laptop. It'd be nifty giving it voice commands all day. Now, all I need is to combine that with normal stereo headphones and I'm all set. Or, perhaps, I could just wire my computer straight into my brain: ears can be damaged by abusive concerts, but microphones can be replaced.

If you've gotten this far, you should probably know that my birthday is coming up soon. By soon, I mean by someone else's qualification of the word entirely: July 17. This means I'll have a party sometime then. So far, the date is tentatively Saturday, July 19^th. With any luck, I'll be able to drag as many people from as many recesses of the country as I can to the party, including the old Tigernet crew and maybe even some Rochester crew. I fully intend to literally go through my Palm's address book and look through all my contacts: see who's still alive and around Boston. Leave a comment here if you are interested/not interested, or you can directly contact me about coming. I'll mention more as the time comes around.

I thought I would know
if four walls could hold me.
I wanted to see
if fire would burn me.

-Mogwai - O I Sleep

Last night I hung out with Susannah, which was fun. We played on our laptops: I poking the Interweb and she installing OS X. We also put together a tasty dinner, noted below. I definitely agree with her: OS X's installer is poorly designed. If you want to do anything else but the standard install onto one partition, you have to know substantially more than you'd expect or "call your systems administrator". That's one thing I love about most open source software: they never say "call your systems administrator" as they tend to assume that you are the systems administrator.

Cole once made this recipe for my family, and I had always wanted to try my hand at it. It's very tasty and so simple I wonder why I'm even bothering to consider it a recipe.

Spicy Marinated Tempeh

Ingredients

• 1 package of soy tempeh (I used Lightlife's organic soy tempeh)
• ¾ cup - 1 cup soy sauce
• 2-3 tbsp. minced garlic (to taste)
• 1-2 tbsp. chili powder (to taste)

Procedure

1. Make the marinade (soy sauce, garlic, chili powder) in a deep bowl.
2. Dice the tempeh and place in marinade for 10-15 minutes. Make sure to occasionally spoon some marinade over the tempeh or stir so the tempeh gets throughly flavoured.
3. Saute with a bit of vegetable oil until golden brown
4. Serve over rice [non-exclusive 'or'] vegetables, optionally using any remaining marinade to season
5. Serves 2 people

I should start posting more things I cook here; mainly to inspire myself to cook more often. I really love cooking: it's like compiling for your food! *goes off to poke at fire*

Two things I've [re]learned recently: snuggling/cuddling rules and Cambridge can be pretty wacky, if you know where to look. In addition, the Internet is a great catalyst for people meeting each other; particularly people of like minds.

Consider this: if the Internet makes it easier for an individual to find their peers in the world, then if applied to everyone, everyone will find it easier to find their peers. Through that, people of like mind/interest will more easily find each other and thus what appear to be insanely weird connections will have formed. It's like Google: you end up getting what you want, even if you're not sure what you're looking for.

I'm starting to research Jabber for work. Jabber is very cool. It's not only an IM system, but it's also a really good platform for routing XML messages. It can therefore be used for all sorts of nifty things, including RPC and generic message systems. Now the only thing left to do is write some nifty apps for it. I think i'll implement Geekhaüs's information-age instant-message-sending doorbell with it; that'd be super-keen.

I'm very fond of soda (not "pop", as Midwesterners, southerners, or Canadians might call it. It's "soda" or "carbonated beverage" in my book). I'm particularly fond of Coke®, ginger beer (the stuff that burns as it goes down), root beer, birch beer, and (the focus of this post) grape soda|grape or orange soda. The last two behave in a rather unusual fashion though: unlike the other flavours, their quality of taste is inversely proportionate to the apparent quality of the beverage.

The primary characteristics I look for in a soda are:

1. carbonation
2. sweetness
3. caffeine content
4. flavour

I've found the best beverages are a good balance of the first three, with each drink defined by the fourth trait. Too much of any one trait can ruin a beverage and overpower any of the other traits. It's refreshing, though, to occasionally focus on one characteristic when selecting a beverage: in the case of Mountain Dew (or the tastier Code Red), the focus is on the third trait. The same applies with Red Bull, although other chemicals are used to function in conjunction with the caffeine to enhance the "energy" nature of the beverage.

In the case of orange or grape soda, the best drinks come when the first is fairly medium, the second is maximized, and there's a good selection on the fourth. If a grape soda is not sweet enough, it ends up becoming much too tart. Too much carbonation overpowers the flavour, and too little makes it taste too much like slightly-fermented grape juice.

The problem arises in these two traits: companies that produce more "expensive" beverages try and deviate from the established "fairly sweet with medium carbonation" paradigm that tends to turn out the best. The data are summarized below (with caffeine left out as none had any):

Note: "corp" means "corporate", "store" means the given beverage is a store brand.

• Polar grape (corp): medium carbonation, mild sweetness: too tart, not very good
• Wegman's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a very "hard candy" flavour
• Shaw's grape (store): medium carbonation, strong sweetness: a bit more tart than Wegman's
• Bread & Circus grape(expensive store): mild carbonation, strong sweetness: light grape flavour, much too tart
• Shasta grape (cheap corp): mild/medium carbonation medium/strong sweetness: a good grape flavour, but a bit light on the other two traits

From the data, you can see that the best grape sodas tend to be the "store" or "cheap corp" sodas. One could hypothesize that the cheaper or more generic the grape soda brand, the better overall it becomes. Thus, the actual beverage quality is inversely-proportional to the "cost" or apparent quality of the beverage. This is a rather counter-intuitive phenomenon that is not often found in other beverage categories.

This was tested with orange soda as well, with the results being that cheap store brands were far better than Coke or Pepsi's answer to the orange soda demand. (especially the Minute Maid brand version).

The question arises: why? I postulate that it's a result of the more expensive brands trying to make the drink seem less "candy"-like and more like their more popular beverages. That, unfortunately, is against the nature of these two flavours. Overall, though, it's not that big a deal as the better sodas end up being cheaper and can therefore be bought in much greater bulk: ready for any long coding sessions.

In trying to make my new toy go on my laptop, I ended up breaking PCMCIA stuff. This primarily meant that all the photos that I've taken were stuck on my camera and I couldn't unlazilly put them up. Well, they're up now. Here's some from NoHo and from James's Party.

I went to Haven (err, Manray) last night with James, Katie, Kris, & company. When I got home (thanks to a ride from Kris), I poked my laptop, did some webby stuff, and managed to fall asleep on the couch in front of it. Perhaps that's what staying out late each night, followed by waking up at 07:30 does to me. Nah :-)

Rocky horror is tonight. "I've seen..." "...this movie way too many fucking times." I honestly wonder how many it's been. I generally keep the stubs, but didn't for a particualrly intense period of time when I was going every week. I imagine well over 50.. but how much over?

I often forget how much I like Kula Shaker until I hear them again after a period of non-listening. There're many other bands like that: Guster, U2 (from the 80's), The Cranberries, Nirvana... I often forget about them when mentioning bands I really like, but they've some of my favorite songs to sing along with. I ♥ music.

It's been a fun few days of seeing people, partying and seeing more people. James had his annual cookout early, as he's running off to hike the Appalachian Trail soon. It's always good to see friends/acquaintances that I haven't in a long while. It's so easy to stay in touch these days, yet so easy to lose touch.

As often happens with parties, I met a bunch of nifty new people and got to know a few others a bit better. *waves at paper crystals and metoikos* This summer should prove to be interesting in the sole fact that there're more people I know who will be around in some manner.

I have never before seen a full-spectrum radio jammer, but apparently such a device is employed in various tunnels on the way to Logan Airport. No matter what radio station you're listening to when you go into the tunnel, you end up hearing the transit authority's pre-recorded messages. I'm still debating whether or not it's a good thing.

There are people whose job it is to wear loud, heavy equipment and blow tree junk around. I can't really tell where they're blowing it, but it appears to at least be a pile. This is what we need robots for - so these people can find slightly more meaningful jobs. Which would you rather see as a job title: "Tree Shit Blower" or "Robot Maintenance Crew"?

Before you ask, yes: I am a part of their plan for domination. You should join too, lest you be left to Zion. err, the boring robot-less world. You know you wanna.

I got a job. Thanks to my old MIT Media Lab friend, Pascal, I now have a consulting job at France Telecom for summer work. Not only will I be doing fun R&D work, but it'll count for co-op at RIT as well. It looks like a fun place to work and has some cool people there. It should be muchy fun. Oh, as I'm sure you're curious: the office is not in France, but in Cambridge thankfully.

To celebrate my new job, I decided to get a new toy. I've ben aching for a new PDA for awhile, so I picked up a Palm Tungsten T from Best Buy on my way back from the office. It's got a nice screen and Bluetooth, so it should be fun to play with this summer. Hopefully I can get some more Bluetooth toys and get a nice personal network of gadgets going. It'll be ... interesting ... getting it going in Linux, if at all.

I have been waiting for this for so long - assuming this is true, researchers have created a tree that grows fruit that bears meat. Like, animal flesh. But without the animal. This is exactly what the world needs right now as we don't have replicators yet. Plant one of these suckers next to your tomato plant next to your lettuce next to your pickle plant (heh, maybe by 2005 we'll have engineered salt directly into the cucumbers), grab a bun and some cheese and you're set! Oooh, next up - a cheese plant...

I've been hanging out at UMass with Amethystmoon, Tashari and crew for the past few days. It's so good to be able to hang out in Amherst, as it always feels as though my best friends are here. Plus - it's just fun to play with Sarah C.'s (Tashari's housemate) cats :-)

Amethystmoon made Tashari, Tetron, and me breakfast the other day; today, Sarah C. made Amethystmoon and me breakfast. Friends who enjoy cooking rule. Especially when they enjoy cooking with someone else - Amethystmoon and I made some very tasty cookies the yesterday for one of her parties. These are the reasons I keep escaping from my dad's appt. - I need people, especially those with whom I can relate.

Amethystmoon's party on Saturday was awesome. It reminded me of my weekly "Friday night gatherings" that took place senior year of highschool, except with the addition of a bit of alcohol. There were lots of people, all geeky in some manner, both outgoing and somber. Everyone having a good time, playing on computers, video games, card games, or just chatting. Most parties hosted by Tashari or Amethystmoon are this way, which is good. We as a collective need to make sure these kinds of parties are held over the summer, so people don't lose touch.

Earlier that Saturday, Freya and I met up in Northampton and picked up the pottery we painted before. It was good to see her before she ran off to France (...lucky people who can make it to Europe *grumbleJulie,b1o,Freyagrumble*). Her tea kettle turned out nicely, and my mug turned out OK, though a bit rough around the edges. Some day I'll learn to paint better; someday I'll learn how to draw a straight line without a ruler :-)

Singing in the shower this morning made me come up with a little tune. I decided to try my hand at capturing it in some manner. I considered singing it for a brief moment, but decided that'd be rather ineffective without accompaniment. Lacking any MIDI equipment, I tried SoundTracker. Considering this is the first piece of music I've written - well, ever (ok, so I lied. I'd write tiny little tunes when I was younger, but never really went this far with them) - as well as my first time ever using SoundTracker, I'd consider my venture successful. You can listen to the results in either SoundTracker (xm) or OGG Vorbis. (if you can't play either format, try getting WinAmp 2.9 and playing the OGG Vorbis version) Tell me what you think :-)

Update: I put together another one: chip box 2. Again, leave a comment saying what you think.

Updated update: Mental note: never ever compose music by listening only through tinny laptop speakers. this is what it was supposed to sound like.

Home's in a bag
strapped to my side
goin' with me
for a ride.

9 hours of bus from 11:00, I'm back in Newton at my dad's apartment. The ride is so tedious and cramped, as I carry all my luggage on-board (I don't trust the breakables in my backpack to remain intact while bouncing around in the luggage compartment). Tedious in monotony and lack of a comfortable place to lay my head. I think I'm going to have to go "grandma style" and bring myself a pillow next time. The only good of the trip is that my laptop has oodles o' batteries, and I was able to watch a good 4-5 episodes of TNG. Mmmm, Riker is so bad-ass.

America the beautiful,
except for that part of town
you can't afford to ignore.
Pledge allegiance with your eyes closed,
your fingers crossed
and one foot out the door.

-Kate and Meredith

Someday I will see them in person. Them and so many other talented artists. For that, though, I need a job. Come on, job... come to daddy. You know you wanna.

The skyline was beautiful on fire.
All twisted metal stretching upward,
everything washed in a thin orange haze.
I said, "kiss me, you're beautiful.
These are truly the last days."
You grabbed my hand
and we fell into it,
like a daydream of a fever.

-Godspeed you Black Emperor! - Dead Flag Blues

I like watching the highways pass by from the bus. Seeing the cars leave trails of mist going by. The world is so high-res, so intricate; the subtleties of it all make it beautiful. There's so much beauty in the world, one only needs to look to see it. Or, perhaps the common case: one needs to have temporarily lost the beauty in order to truly see what splendor you've had all along.

Despite the Genesee River being the 2^nd most polluted river in the United States, it can actually be quite pretty. John and I went rollerblading through the park that runs along the river. We had some fun, saw a nifty fire-fighting training center, got some exercise, and took some photos. It's good to get out on nice days.

On that note, I spent most of today outside. It was a beautiful sunny day in Rochester - quite an unusual event - so I made sure to not miss out on such a transient opportunity. My arms are a bit red and the back of my neck has that warm-glowing feeling, but I should be fine. It's been a very long time since I've had skin peel from sun exposure. I've also determined that, despite the wonderful outdoor WiFi coverage at RIT, my laptop's screen was not designed to be able to see in the sun. So, I decided to try something different.

Unicycling is hard. Well I should say, attempting it certainly was. I made a bit of progress in the 2 or so hours I played with Danner's unicycle, but didn't succeed in going anywhere on it. There's a sort of zen you need to achieve: a trust in the unicycle, as you put all your weight on it and let your feet only balance you. I did not achieve said zen, though perhaps shall try again in the future. It seems to be a strangely popular mode of transport at RIT, so I'm sure I can steal some on occasion in order to learn. ->acquire_skill('unicycle riding'); If only it were that easy.

The robot competition went well. After many-an-hour of last-minute tweaking, building and designing, we got our robot mostly working. I was able to get manual-override going nicely, so I could drive the robot around with a USB joystick. The automatic mode doesn't entirely function correctly - it seems to be a bit confused as to how to actually drive the robot. With some luck and testing, we should be able to fix that soon, though. There're some photos online for your photonic, pictoral pleasure.

It's that time again: robot crunch time. We worked on our robot until 1:00 last night and ended the night by getting the treads on and aligned. We strapped on (using electrical tape, of course) some 30Amp 12v batteries, a high-current relay and a "Emergency Off" switch on on a long cord and started driving it around outside. We took photos and videos. The thing's a beast and is definitely prepared to crush all hu-mans.

Today, Andrew and I need to make the robot's brain's go. It's got all its brunt, but without brains, it's just a killer robot that makes a ton of noise. With brains, it's a smart killer robot that makes a ton of noise. Smart noise. We've gotten USB part #1 going - the GPS. Next up is the motor controller controller. We need to make one PWM generator for each motor controller that we use, then write some simple code to interact with them. Once we get the USB chip's programming done we're essentially home-free.

On a more chocolaty note, I've forgotten how much I love hot, malted chocolate. Thankfully, I've a rather full container of it on my shelf in Geekhaüs's cupboard. Ah, I miss Geekhaüs - I went to bed before ¾ of its inhabitants at a wholesome 04:00. Now if only Rochester had a job or two lined up for me, it'd be perfect. Well, almost perfect: I still need to get a car so I can visit some friendly .ma.us friends (especially those at remote .edu's).

The weekend/monday/tuesday ruled. I managed to escape, find laughter and song, drink and eat the foods of our Goddess, and enjoy happiness if for only a little fleeting while. I have hope for things to remain well and I only imagine them getting better with time - a red wine from 1999 aging with warm spiciness, and a mild aftertaste.

And yes, the cork will survive this one intact. That's what patience is for.

In the on-going collection of hobbies I'm accumulating, I've now added lojbanic filking. Well, it's not really filking, but more translating the lyrics to lojban (in which case the grammar often gets so different from the original, that it's practically filk). It's quite challenging, though. doi daiz. took a good few hours, and each verse of this took at least 15 minutes:

Mirah - Monument

Aren't you gonna come along?
aren't you gonna fight?
aren't you gonna hold your
hands up to the light?

xu do ba klama gau mi
xu do ba damba
xu do lafti
le do xance fa'a le gusni

If you feel an emptiness,
if you want to hide,
think about the blood that pumping
keeping you alive.

ganai ganse lo kunti
je djica mipstu
gi pensi le ciblu
tepi'o leka jmive

That's not even close to the end of the song. On a more productive note, it's helping me get better at lojban grammar / vocabulary.

Time to sleep; the next few days are going to be insane. I fear I'll need to rejuvinate my caffeine habit to remain sane. We shall see.

I've gotten un-lazy - quite an amazing accomplishment if you know me. Well, I should say, un-lazy enough to finally get around to finishing up my driving lessons. The place I'm taking them at, Cam's Auto School takes the brute-force way of getting the required classroom hours. They generally have 15 numbered classes total, a good 2-4 classes in a given day, and let you pick when you take them. This is well and good, but it leads to a sort of over-dosing on them. I've been taking as many as I can wake up for for the last few days and I'm starting to feel a bit like Gir getting high on the power conduit that emitted stupidity. I can't take the high-school mentality students and teachers; I don't need to be babied and told to watch Yet Another Pathetic Attempt To Get Kids Interested In Seatbelt Safety™ videos. I need to get out.

So I am. Hopefully getting out of this lonely apartment and seeing actual people will make me a bit more sane. I realized all too late that, "woah, you have an über-long vacation which you're pretty much free to do whatever you want". Or maybe I simply didn't know what I wanted to do until too late. Whatever the case, I'm doing something about it now before obligations kick in.

I have a job interview the 30^th that should turn out interesting. I'm a bit worried that I'm getting into waters a bit over my head, but we shall see. I felt the same way about my last job as well when I first heard about it, and in the end, I prevailed.

The 3^rd and 4^th of May hold the competition for our SME Robot Construction Rover. I will hopefully be heading out to Rochester late the 30^th or the 1^st so I can help with last-minute construction and coding. If you're in the Rochester area or at RIT, make sure to stop by the ice rink, as that's where the competition is held. There is no admission fee and you can see all sorts of nifty robots and gadgets.

Those who know me, should be asking "my goodness! Steve has something planned out nearly a week in advance!" To which I reply "That's not a question, but thank you for your concern. I assure you, I truly have no idea what I'll be doing past the aforementioned plans, so you shouldn't worry. I'm not --MUST CRUSH ALL HUMANS -- a robot." "*gasp!*" "And by the way, I have some nifty dressing rooms I'd like you to check out..."

Thanks to the help of a certain magical friend and with some coding on my part, I now have an RSS feed available. There's already a Livejournal syndication user for it, so you can just click here to add it if you desire.

I just did a bit of hacking and got my blog engine to spit out the whole shebang. So, If you're interested in reading all the way back to March, 2002, it's there.

On an unrelated note, I've started writing poetry again. I think 6-7 months is a big enough break. Hopefully it'll help me write better and perhaps more openly here (perhaps even more interestingly!). Some of the latest (I lied: the only latest):

• April Rising
• Black Skies, Black Water
• Following Sweetness

An an even less related note: never ever let your / partition fill up entirely. I've discovered this a few times so far in working with Linux, but this time was particularly painful. Both Gaim and Mozilla decided they should overwrite their config files, despite having no free space to do so. So, as they overwrote, they also erased. Strangely only some parts of Mozilla's config file was corrupt/erased. I'm not so sure I know what happened there.

Singing computers rule.

So much so that I decided the lojban text-to-speech that I'm working on needed to be able to sing. Well, it turns out that festival 1.4.3 has a cute little .scm file that lets you create XML files marked up with musical notes and durations for singing. With a little bit of poking around, I was able to convince our lojban voice to want to sing. With a little more poking around and about an hour trying to translate, I put together: "Daisy" (as in the song HAL9000 sings when Dave kills him in 2001).

Continuing the same theme, I was pointed out this project (which I had tried first, but which failed miserably): Flinger. Some of the examples are amusing, not in their badness, but in their resemblance to the pop music's tendency to use vocal distortions on actual singers.

Also, if you've never heard them before, a geek or two put together this impressive 386dx singing computer. They even have a hard-core music video!

Last weekend was excellent; last weekend was insane. Friday I went to Anime Boston, getting there around noon. I went straight to the registration line, as I had missed the pre-reg by one day. After waiting in line for 30 minutes, I began to notice that the line wrapped all the way around the mezzanine and then some.

Two hours, 10 games of Tux Racer, 5 Jolly Ranchers, $40, and spurious small talk later, I got through the registration line. I watched some anime and eventually met up with Tashari and Pete. We ate and eventually made our way over to Harvard Square where we met up with James for Manray. Manray was fun, filled with scantily-clad men and women dancing to loud, good music. I eventually trundled home.

Saturday, I made it back to Anime Boston in time to see the Chibi Project live and met up with Tashari and Pete again. I attended a few panels on various video games, in hopes to learn more about them. Learned that I still don't play video games (really?) and that many gamers are stinky (in other words: I learned nothing new). I eventually gave up on panels, and wandered off in search of humans.

I encountered Fluffy who was hanging out with some nifty-looking people. There I met Freya, who has turned out to be very cool. We talked a bit and eventually joined up with Tashari and Pete again. Quite hungry from a long day of animeing, the 4 of us went out for dinner at Thai Basal on Newbury St.. As the con had pretty much died down, Tashari and Pete headed home. Fluffy, Lucky, Freya and I all decided to go to Rocky Horror that night, so we had oodles of time to kill. Lucky was at the masquerade, Fluffy went home, so Freya and I ran off to a quiet room to watch videos on my laptop.

Which brought us to Rocky Horror, which was the usual silliness. There was a particularly silly 4-20 opening and the cast did a gender swap (female chars were played with male actors, etc.). All in all, there was an adequate amount of hot women (and at least one fairly cute guy) so all was well. We finally went home thanks to a ride from Fluffy. Thus ended my insane weekend.

I've just discovered a fun new game. I call it, Unicon. The goal is to come up with cute little pictures (icons of sorts, or a unicon) using unicode characters. "but there are so many characters!" ... yes, so many to work with! This is sorta like ascii art, except the focus is more microscopic: the characters themselves. An example:

A roasting potato

The real trick is to use the combination characters and other nifty unicode characters to your advantage. You put down a normal character, then follow it by one or more of the combination marks. You can do this fairly easily with a little bit of HTML knowledge:

• Take this template, save it to your hard drive
• Look at the charts mentioned above, pick a character you like and note the number below it. You can put that character into an HTML file by writing &#xNNNN; where you replace NNNN with the number below the character.

You can make all sorts of nifty things. The code for the one above is: o̫̾

I've discovered that, unfortionatly, mozilla doesn't do combining characters correctly. This is disappointing, as that leaves few remaining options, as IE most certainly won't do it correctly. XTerm does, though ☺

As any computer geek knows, having a good keyboard is very important. Understandably, as most tend to have their hands poking away at it for at least a few hours a day - I can't think of many other things where you can say the same. Now, as I've been using my laptop as my main computer, I've been poking away at a reduced-size keyboard for a while. This is well and good, but my hands are not as content with it as I. So I've been hunting for the Perfect™ keyboard, and I think I may have found it.

The IBM USB Trackpoint Keyboard seems to have all the features I want in a keyboard (except perhaps a numpad). The most important ones being:

Full-sized

I have big hands, so I like having a keyboard that actually fits them. I'm always surprised that I can deal with my laptop's keyboard, as it's reduced in size.

TrackPoint (nipple)

I hate mice. They're very bad for ergonomics: in normal use, one is constantly moving their hand away from the keyboard to the mouse and back again. Well, that's not entirely true: I just hate mice for every-day tasks like clicking a link on a web page and such; they're great for doing 3D modeling, graphics work, other things where you have one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard. Trackpoints on the other hand, are great as their small size and easy access makes switching between them and keyboard negligible. Just don't try and do oekaki with one.

Feel

I've grown to like the feel on my big, black IBM TrackPoint II keyboard. It's got a key feel that lets you know you're pressing a key. "*press* CLICK *release*" This is due to the buckling spring mechanism in each key (sorry for all the Japanese sites. I can't seem to find any equivalents in English). Unfortunately, it looks like the USB one I'm looking at doesn't have that same mechanical feel. There's nothing quite like a keyboard that weighs so much it could be easily used as a bludgeon, and is so well-constructed it would also withstand being used suchly.

Color

Black is just cool. Other colors are good as well, just so long as it's not beige. Who decided generic stuff had to be beige anyhow?

So, ultimately this is the perfect keyboard except for the key mechanism. The IBM Trackpoint II would be excellent, but they're hard to find (I believe they're discontinued) as well as slightly large for the laptop world and most importantly, PS/2 not USB.

Well, the decision has been made. I am forgoing possibly unnecessary treatment, and instead will be getting CT scans every 3 months. The options were as follows:

1. Monitoring (CT scans periodicly)
2. Radiation
3. Chemo

I thought it over for a while and decided that it'd probably be best to simply get periodic scans. If anything comes up, it can be dealt with then. So, I chose:

1. Monitoring (CT scans periodicly)
2. Radiation
3. Chemo

Hopefully that was the right choice; I think it'll be just fine. The only problem with it is that every 3 months (to start with) I'll have to make my way over to Boston (or perhaps Rochester) to have a CT scan done. This scanning is reccomended to go on for 4-8 years, depending on how paranoid I want to be about it. I guess I'll get to enjoy the various contrast agents quite thoroughly.

I have given up the color black and other such dark colors. From now on, I will dress in all-white, with perhaps a hint of black and other colors here and there. I have been impure long enough; now I shall take back the light.

"Home" is shifting again and this time I don't think I like where it's going.

8 hours there, 8 hours back and a few days in the middle. I (this is what gets me, I dislike the place, but I like the company; I miss my friends there, but want to physically be here.) miss Rochester. I've recently rediscovered how many friends (or at least people who can stand my company) I have there, which disappointingly overshadows my few friends still left in the Boston area. Perhaps I should simply do what I did in Rochester - hang out at a coffee shop until cool people fall into my lap (so to speak. I wouldn't mind at all if it literally happened, though).

As Care and I'm sure many others have been longing for: we need teleporters. That way little French bistros could welcome my patronage for lunch, followed by tasty Italian food for dinner - in Italy - and other such pleasantries. Europe would be a lot more fun if it were one decomposition and recomposition of your molecules away.

And "home" shifts. Heading back to Newton, I packed up with no intention of immediate return this time. I took half my bed (the squishy, foldable half that fits into a suitcase), my summery clothes, exchanged boots for shoes, and generally left as much of the Winter as I could in Rochester. It belongs there, living there most of the year. Goodbyes were thrown at many friends who I wouldn't see for awhile ("fall" seems so easy to say, but is still so distant) and at acquaintances who didn't even know I had only been there for the weekend. I hope not too much changes while I'm gone, or if it does, it at least doesn't forget about me in the process. [insert greatest fear here: being forgotten] This will be a true test of long-distance friendship maintenance. If they can perform surgery on someone via robotic arms, I should have confidence this could work.

Is this "home"? I'm still not sure where my home is. "Home is where the server is" they say (well, perhaps only I say that). If that's true, that would put home in the living-room of Geekhaüs. Instead, I'm living in the living-room of my dad's apt. wondering what to do with my time. The place I walk back to from the T doesn't feel like home, but will at least pretend to be it for a good while. I think I'll just do as I did before: slap a "home" sticker on the internet and consider it my cozy place to hide. It's close enough.

There is nothing cooler than drinking berry-flavoured barium sulfate suspension (almost 1L of it!) on an empty stomache, getting put on a bed and then in a nifty machine with lasers, a voice that talked, and even a blinky light for good measure. Oh, then being injected with an iodide that made me feel my circulatory system (it felt warm as it pumped through). At least it was brief and it didn't make me feel sick for very long.

So, hopefully in a few days i'll get some word back from my doctor to see if the cancer has spread anywhere, and if so, how much radiation treatment would be needed. It's been mostly ruled out that chemo therapy will not be necessary (hurrah).

I just returned from the hospital (this seem so familiar now) having had a tumor removed. I'm now well and will be taking some time off from school to recover; perhaps the entire quarter. Moreover, time off to potentially have any cancer that might be there eradicated, irradiated, and generally removed. I don't yet know if there's even any cancer, though - so much to find out still.

The operation went well. It was scheduled for 13:30, but ended up starting at 16:30 or so. As usual, I opted for general anesthetic (that's where they knock you entirely out and you don't remember anything). After the installment of an IV tube and the subsequent injection of some fun narcotics, I woke at 19:30 or so minus one tumor and in throbbing, successful pain.

This was my first hospitalization at !Children's Hospital (Brigham and Women's). All the nurses seem quite competent and friendly, so that was good. So far, except for numerous delays here and there, I'm quite pleased with their service.

The biggest frustration with this so far is that I don't know if there's been any spread yet. I won't know until about a week from now, which will put me well into RIT's second week (out of 10 weeks, that's pretty far-in). Most likely, I'll be taking this quarter off and seeing if I can find work around Boston to pass the time.

I'll probably also spend some quality time mastering my Japanese, learning more lojban, and possibly learning some linguistics. I've been meaning to for some time now, so now would be a great opportunity for such. RIT sadly does not offer any linguistics courses, so I'm stuck on the solo-route for that. Some of the people in the lojban IRC channel I've been lurking on seem to have some good knowledge / resources that I should be able to leach off of, so that will be helpful. All in all, I'm sure I'll find something good to learn while I'm not at school. After all, the famous Mark Twain said, "Don't let school interfere with your eduction".

I've finally gotten a copy of an x-ray of my back. You can see the shiny metal rods that were put in way back in '97. The operation that was done is called a spinal fusion and was remarkably painless at the time. Yes, those hooks go onto my vertebrae. Also yes, it does occasionally still hurt (bloody thing). At least it performs its job: keeps my back straight; I can't slouch at all anymore (makes it hard to be a true slacker).

This summer will be good. It will be good. Photos will be taken at all events. So far, the following is planned (Amber and myself anyhow):

• Camping Trip to Maine/NH
• Photo trip to falmouth beach with a tree swing
• Boston photo trip
• P-town, far beach
• Canada / niagra falls
• NYC
• Wellfleet Drive-in
• High-falls, Rochester, NY
• Main St. Hyannis
• Downtown Crossing
• Cambridge, MA

Sometime in the not-too-far future, we must do a road trip 'cross country. Hm, so many plans... so little summer. Maybe we should take a year off and just do photo shoots while taking up part-time jobs. I want to travel, just to go, and have been there.

I got frustrated with the lack of a Lojban text to speech voice for Festival last night, so I put one together. It took a bit of research, but I've grown to like Festival's engine. It's all lisp with a C++ core. As Lojban has an entirely phonetic textual representation, it was easy to hack together a phoneme mapping an existing diphone collection for Lojban. (in other words, I didn't have to record myself speaking to make it go).

In stopping by the Lojban IRC channel, I found out that someone has recorded some diphones for Lojban (albeit with a French accent). Best yet, the recordings are indexed by phoneme-pair. With a bit of work (listening to 1186 wav files and labeling where the key parts of the waveform are) we can have a Lojban text-to-speech that's got its own voice! Of course, I don't have this much time to spend on such, but who knows. Maybe my 16h of bus riding will prove to be productive.

Well, I've finally put together an avi of an old project I started 4-5 years ago. The output is viewable here (high quality or low quality). It's fairly short, about 40 seconds, but took quite awhile to render (a few days). Of course, this is on one 900MHz machine and in Wine, so performance is not to be expected. Also check out one of the stills I put together a few days ago.

In reading through the lastest Wired, I came across an übergeeky product. It reminds me of a very toned down version of my childhood fantasies of my ultimate throne room. Aww yeah. I'm now re-rendering the animation that still went with, as I've finally got the disk space to store all hundreds of TGA files. It should be available as an mpeg someday soon.

I've also been playing around with Apache::Gallery for my photo collection. I had to tweak the code a little bit and the templates a lot, but I think I'm quite fond of the results. The dynamic resizing is really handy. If I ever get around to it, I'll hack it so that it will respect Exif orientation tags.

Way back in elementary school, in what must have been chorus, I learned one of my favorite songs. It's a simple, beautiful song: goodnight in many different languages. I've finally found it, it's called Dreams of Harmony by Joanne Hammil. Here is an encoded version of the lyrics:

Good night, bonne nuit, お休みなさい,
buenas noches, lala salama, 晚安,
Спокойной ночи, Gute Nacht, לילת טוב.

Where ever you rest your head tonight
we are all one family, let's hold tight
and fill the world with dreams of harmony tonight.

Except for the Swahili (which I can't find any encodings for) the above should be correct in the language's native characters. Mouse-over to see the phonetic pronunciation.

Title credits to A. Katsaris.

Primecard has finally paid me! As soon as I manage to get my final pay check deposited, I'll officially be non-broke for at least a good 45 minutes until I start writing checks for people I borrowed money from. It will be a good 45 minutes though, that's for sure.

I've been spending a bit of time organizing stuff. I've mostly gone through my SME RC and photos directories. I've finally put all my scripts into CVS so I can keep all my systems (µ, xxv, warehaüs[well, that's not entirely mine], and spot) up to date. Best yet, I've actually done some code cleanups so that there's no more site-specific paths in the source. Lastly, I spent a few hours poking at some scripts to clean up the music on bfg. I also categorized a bunch of directories; we now have a yé-yé category (at least it's not yet another artist put in "rock"). All in all, things are running much more smoothly.

Stuff with Amethystmoon and myself is odd. I think I'm beginning to understand what good friendship really is and precisely how frustrating relationships can become when 400 miles are placed in the middle of them.

Someone definitely needs to invent sky-hooks.

Yes, oui si да はい, true 1. ja, .i go'i!

RSI frightened me into getting a wrist brace. With many hours of sitting on comfy couches with bad typing posture in front of my laptop at my dad's apartment, my left hand started to go slightly numb. For someone whose livelyhood and thus life depends on his hands, this is very freaky. I am wearing it as much as I can and will continue trying it out for the next month or so. Hopefully it'll help, but I'm skeptical. I should probably start looking towards other prevention techniques besides the heavily advertised ergonomic keyboards and keyboard-alternation (which I effectively do. workstation at home, laptop at *).

Oh, as for the text at the start of this post, I was boredly thinking of all the different languages I know how to say "yes" in and managed to come up with an english-sounding sentence from them all. If you can't figure out the language, peek at the source - it should give you some clues. See if you can "decode" the "hidden" message!

Back in Rochester again. I'm glad i came back a day early - i need it to unpack, unload and fall into the routine again. Oh, and do some homework (bugger).

On a related note, I finally finished reading all the archives of Megatokyo. I now see what all the fuss is about - it's an enthralling story. I'm quite amused how certain characters remind of Anime Club peoples. (Largo reminds me heavily of Scojew, for instance). Unfortunatly though, as with any time i do this, i'm now frustrated to having made it to real-time. The story is slow enough, let alone being delayed by days instead of mouse clicks.

Ryan and Cassie are presently here. Melissa will pro'ly end up here tonight, Mariah should be arriving tomorrow, and hopefully Care will be able to come by before long. It's going to be a fun time in the Geekhaüs.

Care and I baked chocolate cakes. We even made one for Cole that was vegan. This all makes me quite pleased, mostly because chocolate cakes are tasty and we were able to make them together. On a related note, plain Silk is quite a edible thing. Forget the vanilla flavour, plain is just dandy. On a related note, marinated and cooked tempeh is a quite tasty vegan food. I fully intend to acquire some of it as well as other Rochester-rare grocries like Ken's Steakhouse Redwine Vinegar and Olive Oil salad dressing, Five Brother's Five Cheeses Pasta Sauce, and Malted Milk. Why are these so rare in Rochester? I wish i knew.

Well, I've been leaving this post in my text editor too long - new years has come and past, leaving only photos and memories. It was a fun party and so many random people came: BermanNate&Paul (and their respective female accompanyment), James Northrup (who i hadn't seen since senior year HS), and even Boulat. Pink Stucco knows how to throw good parties.