sunday, february 29, 2004
“technology” is stuff that isn’t quite grokked yet
mister boyfriend and i (mostly mister boyfriend) constructed a new ‘puter for my dad. well, it is officially my dad’s, but i will be using it sometimes (read: it is dad’s in name only). anyway, it isn’t really new; it is mister boyfriend’s old one with a few new parts. its name is zwerge and it runs gentoo.
why “zwerge”? see a poem i wrote a long time ago. i have decided (somewhat arbitrarily) that all true names and titles are contained within that poem.
i would take a picture of the computer, but my little camera is malfunctioning. when i turn it on, the lens cover buzzes and the screen displays “e18”. apparently, that is a common problem with these canon powershot a60s. blah.
now, there are seven computers in this room.
- my imac
- my borked ibook
- little sister’s ibook
- mister boyfriend’s linux pc
- dad’s linux pc
- dad’s girlfriend’s windows pc
- dad’s girlfriend’s borked windows laptop
there are four computers not in this room.
- mister boyfriend’s linux laptop
- older sister’s ibook
- mom’s imac
- mom’s windows laptop
lots and lots of ‘puters.
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wednesday, february 25, 2004
los angeles at night
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tuesday, february 24, 2004
“whatever floats your boat” indeed
yes, jeweled platypus is grey for grey tuesday.
also, you can download the grey album from here: grey.jeweledplatypus.org.
update 2/24/04: well, i used too much bandwidth, and i can’t host it anymore. see the grey tuesday site for tons of other places to get it.
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saturday, february 21, 2004
a young male one i guess
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friday, february 20, 2004
stuff
friday night, i went to leonard lin’s stupid unix tricks thing. somehow, it was neat just to be listening to a “real” blog person. yeah. the tutorial was mostly review for me, but i learned a few new things:
- apple cinema display screens are nice. very nice.
- people coming from usc ip addresses get auto-logged-into o’reilly’s safari bookshelf. yay!
- i need to learn more about permissions and regular expressions.
- i should switch from tcsh to bash. but i already knew that.
i’m messing around with wordpress for another site. it’s a lot easier than blosxom - things that i usually install numerous plugins for are already there: comments, multi-user support, timezone changing, different syndication formats, etc. it’s more suited to actual blogging than blosxom is, really. but for a devotion-inspiring, idiosyncratic, eccentric, text-based, interesting blogging experience, blosxom is still my best friend.
“my code’s too ingenious to rewrite. i just can’t describe it. it’s just too nice. my code, it’s just…too great. it’s magical.” - mister boyfriend
march 8th, i start taking a couple classes after school at the local community college. just to make up high school credits, really: a generic computer class and psychology 101. yay.
i’m reading quicksilver, by neal stephenson. i like it. a bit heavier than usual for carrying around in my backpack, but it’s worth it.
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there can be only one catch: kudzu!
i adore this crazy chaplain dude:
These were the great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. Yet they never seemed nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners. He was pinched perspiringly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to accept solutions of problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was never without misery, and never without hope.
p. 278, catch-22, by joseph heller
reminds me of somebody…
in case you’re curious: definitions of ontology and epistemology.
now, you too can develop your very own ontology!
interesting how google considers a bunch of blogs related to this “epistemological nightmare” thing. you cannot escape the semweb!
images borrowed from hypermedia and the semantic web and w3c semantic web activity.
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thursday, february 19, 2004
there was a second part but i didn’t like it
octavia butler gave a talk today at usc. she’s on tour for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publishing of kindred. it’s also black history month and the african-american studies department wanted to give her this lifetime achievement award that looked like a glass salad bowl, sitting on an unattached piece of wood. i hope she finds some appropriate use for it; most award-items seem so physically useless.
my tenth grade teacher assigned us kindred as summer reading. i liked it. i read dawn on my own, but i thought it was somewhat silly.
the talk was about her beginnings as a writer, her inspiration for writing the book, and her views on writing in general. pretty much the same idea as the amy tan talk i went to last spring, but quite a bit more interesting. it might have something to do with the fact that i like octavia butler’s books a lot better.
i didn’t take notes, so i don’t remember many specific things she said. she read a couple of verses from parable of the sower that were intentionally political. they were about liars and fools and stuff.
my journalism teacher said something interesting today: the majority of the united states worships the same christian forces, but sunday is the most segregated day of the week.
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a black bracelet and my old ibook
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wednesday, february 18, 2004
all hail my acute sense of typography
kusc (classical 91.5 fm in southern california) is having a pledge drive. they’re a nonprofit organization, and i need community service hours for school.
so my mom and i answered phones tonight, for four hours. it was a little weird and a little dull, but mostly harmless. they had free food - chocolate cake and potato salad.
the other phone-answerers were nice old nerds. there were about 20 of us. we raised $65,000 or so. that’s maybe 500 calls.
one was curious about whether high-schoolers really still listened to classical music. well…occasionally, i do. i don’t know about any others.
the best part was the cardboard box of promotional cds sent to the station. we volunteers got to rifle through it and pick one or two to keep. i just liked the covers - a funk symphony played by some czech orchestra, the “interior of christ” with indian-inspired harp and voice, and all that gnarly home-made cover art.
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friday, february 13, 2004
changes, experiments, and trailing commas
well, the delicious links experiment didn’t work too well.
for one thing, i have too many links every day, and they overpower the real weblog. i have a low-threshold linklog and a high-threshold weblog. combining them is bad. and when it isn’t, there’s the medium-threshold cherries.
second, out of delicious context, the links aren’t worth as much. the “…and x others” is rather important - a lot of my links’ meaning is in what other users think of them. by looking at the “others” of several links, i can get an idea of who has common interests. i often refine my link descriptions and categories when i see somebody has a better idea of them than i do.
third, my little sister just said “[groan]! you have too many words [on your blog], wordo!”. by not including those delicious posts, i will significantly lower the words-to-pictures ratio, so i must. she knows better than i do about many things.
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tuesday, february 10, 2004
delicious & blosxom
i wish i was at etech. but there is high school, and sitting bored all day somehow trumps everything cool in the world. and now, for something completely different.
i’ve been using delicious for approximately four and a half months. i was in #joiito when tangra and _joshua were discussing it, before it existed. wheee.
at the moment, i have 500+ bookmarks in 60+ categories. each category has 5-25 bookmarks in it. each bookmark is in 1-3 categories. some of the bookmarks have short comments or quotes.
i want to include them in here. i don’t want them to replace “cherries” - it serves its own purpose, separate from delicious. sometimes they overlap, but cherry-links are more idiosyncratic…more significant…ok, so there’s no real criteria.
yeaaah, i don’t really like the idea of posting a link-dump as a post every day. i actively maintain my bookmarks (especially the categories); they’re usually in flux, but the blog posts would remain static.
i’m trying it anyway.
i’m using brett o’ connor’s nifty deloxom script.
update 2/12/04: there’s a follow-up post.
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tuesday, february 03, 2004
on and on and on
kyle (aka mister boyfriend) and i went to lacma on sunday. i wanted to see the nano exhibit. i saw it. does children’s art have to be so dumb? oh well. the tar pits were good for an afternoon’s amusement in fourth grade and just get better with time.
i also found five dollars on the ground outside and bought three postcards. yay for kandinsky.
i consume. art, lots of books, lots of movies, hundreds of web pages every day, parts of the paper newspaper, school. i guess i recycle music, though.
infoglutton britta. yeah yeah.
this need to consume the web, eat it all up, read read read…
i output a little, here. a post every few days. i have a link-log, a wiki.
i don’t know what i am really getting out of all this. mostly entertainment, i guess.
i should produce more, though.
i need to devote an hour every day to just thinking, just creating.
i should take up music again.
i really should.
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monday, february 02, 2004
the market is flashing a strong “buy” signal
let’s examine another large ad!
the guy’s sign says “buy”. the copy tells us that the market is saying “buy”.
it also says “the market is flashing a…signal”. so, the brokers are flashing us? the ticker-tape is transmitting words? what kinds of signals can be flashed, anyway? morse code?
it’s not just any signal. it’s a “buy” signal. like the one the guy has in his hand. oh, that’s not a signal. it’s a sign. it’s a “buy” sign. i guess he must be the whole market. funny, he looks like some stock-photo businessperson. they don’t even pretend like he wrote it on the card.
also, what’s with the fast-moving people behind him? is that implying he (and his “buy” signal) are being left behind? eeep! good thing the ad isn’t animated, or he might flash us.
i don’t even remember what company this was advertising for.
