November 29, 2003
birthday (belated)
Turned 26 yesterday. This year I:
And next year I hope to:
Geegaw one year, two years, three years, four years ago.
November 26, 2003
proce55ing
Inspired by Jim's foray into processing (which isn't a programming language so much as it is an IDE and a set of simplified helper functions for Java), I wrote a small toy app, Stars. Don't get your hopes up - the game itself is not cool, it just draws little stars. The cool thing is that it was a hell of a lot easier to use than the Java SDK. Screenshot:
I think the easiest way to learn Processing is to keep the reference open in one window and read the source code to the sample apps in the other. Mouse 1D is the simplest sample app I could find. Also, I'm attaching below what Hello World looks like. You could copy and paste the below code into a new Processing window. Then use the Sketch->Add File to load Bodoni.vlw.gz from the "fonts" subdirectory of your Processing installation, into your data folder. Finally, use the Sketch->Run command to run.
void setup()
{
BFont f = loadFont("Bodoni.vlw.gz");
textFont(f, 18);
}
void loop()
{
text("Hello World", 5, 95);
delay(1000000);
}
November 25, 2003
Anniversary (belated)
For our eighth anniversary, A. and I got gold rings and drove out to the coast, out of cell phone and internet range. Then I made my first Flash animation (click photo to view):
And we took photographs and stuff. I'm really getting into drawing on photos:
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November 21, 2003
my favorite neighbors-to-be
A few weblogs I read that I know are written in or near New York. (If you know of other good ones, post them to the diablog?)Laboratorium
Proleptic
Satan's Laundromat
Cheesedip
Synthetic Zero
Oblivio
David Chess
Plurp
Texting
Metascene (maybe?)
Language Hat
Ftrain
Lemonyellow
November 20, 2003
New York
I keep getting these mass-mailings from some guy who claims to be the exiled Emperor of China. His emails are numbered and I started getting them around #116, so he's been doing them a long time. And I got an invitation to go to lunch with Nancy Pelosi and Baghdad Jim next Friday -- the catch is the suggested donation, $1000.I told my boss today. A. and I are moving to New York. I'll be leaving Seattle at the very beginning of April. I don't have a job lined up or anything, so if you have any leads, let me know.
I'm really, really, really tired.
. . . .
Feeling better; even the narrow-mindedness of Xeni Jardin, the boingboing.net blogger who thinks that the reason the Los Angeles County asked tech vendors not to refer to master/slave hard drives was because of the BDSM connotations doesn't bother me. It doesn't. "Oooh la la, slavery is when my girlfriend makes me lick the linoleum." Nope, doesn't bother me.
November 18, 2003
hard drive failure
In the middle of the night, I hear the drive on my old laptop spin up, seeking something and finding nothing but bad sectors. A tirade of loud, irregular clicks pours out of it.Drag myself out of bed and stand over the machine. Flip it over and hold it in my left hand, remembering how I used to hold a rat in that hand, spreadeagled on its back, with my four outer fingers pinioning its four feet and my other hand readying the syringe.
With my right hand I unplug the power source, slide out the battery. The drive spins down and is still.
Laptop, \\kangkung, you were once my prize possession, and now I lie awake in the middle of a storm, with your rattle drowning out the rattle of the rain, and wait impatiently for you to die.
bush in 30 seconds
What software do you need to create a 30 second anti-Bush ad, edit the music, etc.? The PBS special on political advertising recommended "threatening music" and I was envisioning having Penderecki's "Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima" playing in the background. . . .
November 17, 2003
political affective disorder
Eva Sutton (scroll). That's the career trajectory I want. And her work is good, too.This article made me dizzy. Bush planning to bring back the draft in 2005? Please, please, please, could the major media pick up this story.
Considering talking with A. about selling our car and giving the proceeds to MoveOn.org. The DNC has sold us out. OK, back to coding.
November 15, 2003
Introducing the Duke of Turing
Me: "Can we get away with this number just being random, or does it need to be cryptographically random?"Researcher: "I don't know. I'll send an email to The Cryptographer and ask."
a few days later
Me: "It looks like there's no OS support for symmetric keys."
Researcher: "Well, just use two asymmetric keys instead."
Me: "I'm not sure if you can really do that. . . . "
Researcher: "OK. Let me go and call The Cryptographer."
Last night, with all the researchers out partying ("partying" is how I would describe the state of being neither in the office nor logged on an IM server), I took matters into my own hands and wrote The Cryptographer myself. A reply came back instantly. I wrote back a couple hours later. Instantly, a reply. Wrote back this (Saturday) morning. Voila! appears an email with the answer.
I'm so impressed. Is The Cryptographer man or machine? Maybe a little of both. . . .
November 14, 2003
sushi is tasty to wear
I wanted to get Yukino one of these wasaaabi T-shirts which are the definition of cute. Who am I kidding? I wanted one for myself. Alas, Temporarily unavailable! "But they were available last night," I find myself pleading with the deity of Cuteness. It's obviously a ploy to get us to buy their second cutest shirt, raw power (drawings of happily smiling sushi) t-shirt in fear of it going out of stock too.Well, I don't know. I have mixed feelings about actually wearing sushi.
9:53pm. Depressingly, I just finished coding for the night. On the bright side, I did break for dinner with A. On the depressing side, Win98 doesn't appear to have support for even the laughably pathetic DES encryption. On the bright side, I just finished coding for the night!
November 12, 2003
0wn3d!!
Some external company did a full reverse engineering of the spam filter that ships in Microsoft Outlook 2003. Expect a sharp increase in the number of messages that make it through the Outlook filter now.
November 11, 2003
vaporbacks
Top two as yet unpublished science fiction books that I can't wait to read: Air by Geoff Ryman (Dec 2003), and Untitled #2 Sequel Novel by Tony Daniel (date unknown).Unpublished DVDs I want to watch: Last Chance (1999 - sank without a trace), American Dad (pilot Fall 2004), and La Strada (1954 - it's just a matter of time).
Unpublished books of poetry: Trouble in Mind by Lucie Brock-Broido (Jan 2004).
. . . .
Some new stuff in Slate today. I'm interested in the organic farmer's journal -- the weeklong diary format reminding me oddly of a zine -- there is also a review of collected Marianne Moore by Stephen Burt.
a funny story
Tracked down a crash in some new code I was writing today . . . Turned out the bug was caused by including header files written by two different researchers. Both guys were using statically sized arrays, and they had chosen the same name for the numeric constant they used to #define the size.
The name of the constant was NUM_COLLISIONS.
November 10, 2003
nearing the halfway mark
Every weekday morning I have the same fantasy, which is to sleep in, buy a latté, walk down to the Pike Place Market and get a croissant at Le Panier, walk down First Avenue to the Elliott Bay Bookstore, read for a few hours, do yoga, maybe write something, then come home and cook dinner! In other words, be a college student again (since homework never took very long to do -- nor did class take very long to cut). I am so solitary and lazy. But the solitary and lazy parts of myself are my favorite parts.
On the other hand, my boss said that my design doc was the best he'd seen in years. Of course it is. It has to be absolutely air-tight. (It isn't yet.) "Do less harm than good" has been my motto for the past few months. But after talking to A. tonight, I'm realizing I can't just play defense. I need to come up with a scenario I believe in and actively propound it.
Poets to watch desultorily: Juliana Spahr
Juliana Spahr has two good poems in the latest issue of the Baffler, titled "December 2, 2002" and "December 3, 2002". I can't find them online but here is a poem that's essentially the same (and I assume, part of the same song cycle): November 30, 2002. Still, I worry that a voice that tries to sound all-inclusive, prophetic and grandiose might have worked in the 19th century, but in the 21st century just bears a tinge of condescending buffoonery. I think someone else said this when comparing early Allen Grossman vs. Jorie Graham. Addressing the reader as "beloveds" doesn't sit well with me. I had thought women were immune from the Dave Eggers Christ-figure complex. Nevertheless, the poems are pretty good.
November 7, 2003
a bunch of random things to play catch-up
You wouldn't think that a 50 hour week would be very hard to manage, but add in a two hour commute and a sprinkling of working from home, and I barely have time to keep the Dean site updated, ha ha. On the bright side, I watched the last 15 minutes of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" while doing the dishes and it was hilarious. Also read two v. good short stories - Geoff Ryman's "Fan" and Dostoyevsky's "A Nasty Anecdote." Watched 10 minutes of the Family Guy episode "A Fish Out of Water" on my **new laptop**. Then wasted the hours from 11:30pm-1am exploring tribe.net, which is like Friendster except good. The Friendster people don't understand why fakesters are so key to their success, whereas in tribe.net they have "tribes" which fill a similar role and are actively being promoted.My birthday is in three weeks, an if you know of the whereaboutes of a used Dell Inspiron 600m QuickSnap cover in bamboo (a tempting color resembling tensegrity green) I would be once again in your debt.
Thought in the shower: I want to read V. and War and Peace in a couple months when things "ease up," ha ha.
They're doing that weird pseudo-layoff thing to more of my ex-coworkers, making me pretty glad that I switched divisions this June. . . .
November 4, 2003
treading water
Ray of Bellona Times has a charming entry on the Atkins Diet: how it inflicts maximum environmental damage to achieve minimum body fat.Let me not forget to mention one quick and socially responsible way to drop a couple pounds: organ donation.
Was going to write something titled the "Viagra Monologues" but Google informed me that several people have already taken the idea and run with it.
I hope you voted today. . . I expect to vote on this day in the year 2010.
November 3, 2003
no oil for the octopus, nothing to pour
Poets to watch: Elisabeth Murawski. Well, one poet.This morning it seemed like one of the books on my floor was coated in shrink-wrap. "But I'm sure I read it . . . didn't I?" I thought. Optical illusion. I guess it was a sign or a metaphor.
I'm tired, everyone's tired. The schedule of work items came out today and it has half of us doing six-sevenths of the work, can that possibly be right? You know which half I'm in, don't you?
I hugged a baby yesterday, A.'s in the shower wiping off my congratulatory kisses, and yet it feels like I haven't seen anyone for days. Maybe it's that I don't want to see anyone for days. Maybe it's time for an octopus encounter.
The jars of octopus --
brief dreams
under the summer moon.-- Basho
November 2, 2003
a neurotic mood
Happy belated birthday, Toadex! (This year I got him this.)This morning we were about to leave for brunch at Cafe Campagne when I started to worry about the presentability of my absolute dressiest outfit, a black shirt with ruched sleeves (I got it because I thought it made my arms look like the squiddies from the Matrix) and a pair of 3% spandex velvet jeans I got a couple weeks ago from the Slave Factory for under $20. I'm too cheap and too lazy to go to the dry-cleaners, so almost all my clothes have been machine-washed to practically rags and never pressed, so I felt like I looked like hell. The article on Elsa Schiaparelli in this month's New Yorker, explaining how such a "homely" woman could look "almost lovely" in photographs, theorized "nerve gives off its own radiance." Alas I am a nerveless coward.
Then again, it might be that not having cut your hair since August (and I had short hair then) counts as nerve. I was feeling bad about that too, and then Nari said she really liked my "haircut" and then I felt better. I guess mullets are in.
Adbusters, adbusters. Opt out of the game; try to look ugly or at least rewrite what it means to be 'pretty.' I hate getting male attention anyway.
November 1, 2003
wrack and roll
OK, here's the books I would put in Jim's hypothetical backpack if I knew I could return to civilization eventually, but would need something to cheer me up while I roughed it in the wilderness for a while:
Note: These books were selected in 5 minutes, partly on the basis of weight. . . . The reason Anne Carson is not represented is that I couldn't pick any one of her books without it making me miss the rest of her books all the more. The Anne Carson Omnibus would have replaced the Jeeves Omnibus in a heartbeat.