sunday, june 25, 2006
This is not tagging
All around my house, there are small yellowish stickers with transliterated words on them. This is the legacy of my little sister’s sudden and fleeting interest in learning Japanese a couple years ago.
Seeing “kagami” several times a day has taught me the Japanese word for mirror. It has been added to the list of Japanese words I know from Nethack (food ration, helmet, arrow, several kinds of swords, etc).
Curtain.
Shower.
Glass. Yes, it’s on a cabinet. The actual “cabinet” sticker (shokkidana) is on a different cabinet.
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monday, june 19, 2006
I like spam sometimes
Like what, you may ask?
Computer additions? Yeah, I have some friends who sneak off to Central Stores every once in a while and buy more parts, parts they don’t even need, and then these things pile up in odd places. You find dead video cards, old hard drives, floppy disks, and who knows what else in the corners of their rooms and in TV cabinets. Definitely a bad habit. Ruining their health.
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saturday, june 17, 2006
Should have been more
Things I wrote from September to June:
- Nine mini-essays on aspects of global food sustainability.
- A long essay on prefaces in 19th century American works about the Middle East.
- The outline of an essay about Sufism, American transcendentalism, and Arab-American literature.
- An introduction to a collection of emails between me and people I’ve never met in person. I angled it as “teen girl talks to older men”, which was true but irrelevant and amusing.
- A personal essay about fruit.
- Three short essays on Latin American modernist writers.
- Four art gallery reviews.
- An essay about an obscure part of Glendale.
- Eight or nine poems.
- A report on hookworms.
- A linguistic analysis of Max’s attitudes toward Valley Girl and Surfer dialects. Disputed, naturally.
- Several “explications” of passages from Paradise Lost.
- Part of a long personal essay about my high school experience.
- A few thousand emails as the voice of del.icio.us support.
Compare to the beginning of the year.
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monday, june 05, 2006
The roof of the nuclear lab
Max and I, taken by his cellphone. My shoulder did get sunburned, but not too badly.
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thursday, june 01, 2006
Weird computery stuff and things
I like the UNIX issue of the Bell System Technical Journal: published in 1978, about 400 pages long, checked out from the Davidson Library 13 times (mostly in 1985-1986), bright green, and modern/relevant to a degree that surprised me. There used to be links to some of the articles in this bibliography, but they’re broken now and I don’t think the articles are online anywhere else. I had hoped that this was one of the issues my grandpa worked on, but he stopped being the journal’s associate editor in 1972 or so.
From the preface:
Because computer science is still in an early stage of development, no well-formulated theoretical structure exists around which problems can be defined and results organized. “Elegance” is of prime importance, but is not easily defined or described. Reliability and maintainability are important, but they also are neither precisely defined nor easily measured.
The epigraph on the foreword: “Intelligence…is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. — Bergson”
The best article is “Statistical Text Processing”, about using UNIX for linguistic analysis and spell-checking. I like to think that computers are just built for words.
The list of contributors includes one woman, Helen D. Rovegno, but Google doesn’t say anything about her.
On the inside back cover:
This issue of the Bell System Technical Journal was composed, including all tabular and displayed material and final page makeup, using the document preparation software described on pages 2115-2135. It was phototypeset using the
troffprogram, which was written by the late Joseph F. Ossanna, Jr.
