Art and design
People who love "Law and Order"
…would like to see an artistic representation of some of their favorite characters.
Law and Order: Artistic Intent
Rumour is that Jim Dedman has bought a Mac
Rumour is that Jim has a Mac. I have encouraged him to blog an entry about his new finer computing apparatus.
As a former iMac owner I remember the thrill of bringing the big box home, the smell, the hypermatte covering, viva Apple.
The Past...
The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.
What is the opposite of recursion?
Recursion is a programming technique, or a mathematical technique, or a set logic technique.
When a {function} (or {procedure}) calls itself. Such a function is called "recursive". If the call is via one or more other functions then this group of functions are called "mutually recursive". If a function will always call itself, however it is called, then it will never terminate. Usually however, it first performs some test on its arguments to check for a "base case" - a condition under which it can return a value without calling itself. The {canonical} example of a recursive function is {factorial}: factorial 0 = 1 factorial n = n * factorial (n-1) So when a function calls itself it can be said to recursing.
American Aesthetics, European Splendour
My father and I have had a number of discussions about architecture in Europe versus architecture in the Empire. Here in the Empire our office buildings are downright ugly – even the buildings where the honchos are, the buildings are pretty blase. Yet the same corporation’s building in another country - especially Europe is usually quite impressive.
Take for example the Silicon Valley’s office parks or buildings (Intel, Nortel, NVidia, Juniper, Yahoo, AMD). The Ciscoland campus is basically a putty and teal series of boxes: buildings A-O, Buildings 1-22. The standout building, the one with the circular drive and 1 more floor than all the rest with the flagpoles is the executive building.
Urban Ruins
Urban ruins are fascinating to look upon – and remind me of the creepy video game series “Silent Hill”.
Finished Eat Shoots & Leaves
I finished Lynn Truss’s (that apostrophe there was discussed in the text - apparently that’s the correct way of doing it these days) book today (Buy Here). It’s a book about punctuation for pedantic people who know they’re being pedantic.
This book reminds me a lot of Anne Fadiman’s book Ex Libris (Buy Here).
I decided that I would like to keep a better handle on all the books I read in a given year so I decided I would start a Book Journal. I bought the journal at Mountain View’s East / West bookstore and proceeded to go to town.
If you want to sell me something, a recipe
Greek Myth Cool glyphs - none better than cuneiform or Greek A quest against the gods An existential dilemma Pseudo (or actual) Latin chanting background music (? la Orff’s Carmina Burana) Great scenery and backgrounds Mysterious Oracles who say mysterious stuff Extra bonus: Get great voice talent like SF icon and host of City Arts & Lectures, Linda Hunt, to do the role of the wizened narrator.
In short, God of War
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This game is, may I lapse in to gamer, T3H r00lz!!!111!!!.
You play Kratos - a very wan man in search of vengeance - seeking the death of Ares.
Hurry up, Macauly!
Big Mac, God sculpted your face so that you could play Michael Score of Flock of Seagulls in the movie version of 1984 musical history.
Blogging offline, from Wis-kahn-sin
Well, as mentioned previously I’ve begun my sojourn to the Old World. This morning my awesome girlfriend took me to SFO at 0430. We got to the airport fairly quickly and check-in was uneventful. The only real bummer was that I realized that I had left my excellent Christmas present from Elle, a great coat, in the backseat of the car and that it was too late to do anything about getting it back. So, I’m a bit worried about the weather and my attire but I’ve heard rumors about a fashion industry being centered in Rome, so I’m sure I’ll find some way to go.
Where, oh where are the poets like this?
“The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” – Edward Gibbon
Programmers and domestic goddesses
#!/usr/local/bin/perl print "aww\n" I wrote a suite of Perl programs to generate all the quilt blocks of a certain type: sixteen “half-square triangle” patches arranged into a square with 90-degree rotational symmetry, and printed out the result
I was even more delighted when the quilter and I got married. She made the program output into a real quilt and gave it to me as a wedding present. There are pictures here.
Cuteness
Austin: A good town for modern architecture
When we were still living in Mountain View, I would often watch Dwell magazine on TV on the Fine Living channel. I was consistently surprised by how many modern homes were being built in Austin and the surrounding area.
It’s funny where modern design pops up, while I wasn’t surprised to hear about the Annie House conversion in South Austin, the other day Lauren and I had a run-in with modern design quite by accident.
We had gone to La Feria on South Lamar for dinner and afterwards drove through a neighborhood that I had never visited before. Ok, in truth, I thought that the road would go through and be a shortcut back home, which it was not.
Visiting Ginny’s Little Longhorn
Ladies and gentlemen, let us discuss a truth.
There are times in life, when a person needs a beer after work.
It’s not my usual practice to drink very much. Sure the occasional glass of wine with pasta, or a ‘rita on the rocks with a fine mexican meal, or a Negra modelo with queso, but alcohol, on the whole, doesn’t find a daily involvement in my life. Although, by the previous sentence, if I ate a diet of “fine mexican meals”, pasta, or queso exclusively, it might just, but I digress.
With Lauren working until later in the evening, and me having too many hours to kill until she got home, the prospects for the early evening were go home (crickets) and surf websites or write code ( something I’d done enough of yesterday, thankyouverymuch ), watch DVDs, and I’d missed my yoga class.
Word So Totally Sucks
Yesterday, after a walk around Town Lake, we stopped by Austin Java for a bit of lunch. While I was waiting for my salad and Lauren for her egg burritos, I noticed the Austin-typical amount of people there with books and laptops, no doubt hard at work on materials for their classes.
The guy next to me was working on something in Word. As I watched him fiddle with margins and tab stops, go clicky-click to mutate some words from regular text to bold I realized, again, just how incredibly painful it is to have presentation (bold, left margin of 12, or 30 picas) defined in the same place where you define content ( “When in the course of human events….
Mysteries of the humour universe
I’ve been in the closet about this for too many years. I was afraid that stating the following would put me into a repressed minority. I feared I would be laughed at by the intelligentsia, I feared that I would be a type of “free-thinker” iconoclast that is vilified by the conservative part of American life.
I suppose I was merely afraid. But I will be afraid no more. Let me say what I’ve known in my heart for oh-so-long.
Doonesbury is simply not funny.
Scott Walker: My SXSW 2007 legacy
On March 13th my world became a little bit weirder and a little bit richer as I watched Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. It tells the story of an American boy named Noel BrelEngel, who heads to Los Angeles and joins a trio called The Walker Brothers. The Walkers have minor success in the early Sunset strip scene, but then head to Jolly Old England where their success is of a much larger and much more lucrative variety.
There they seem to tap into a post-war ennui psychology that ties the bourgeois-making-tea-staring- out-the-tenement-development that defined Britain. Listening to the music you hear the heavy reverb, the Phil Spector influence overwhelming the headphones.
Commentary by Ticketmaster
Note: First blog post from new MacBook Pro :-D
I still receive email updates for Bay Area acts. It helps me find out if said acts might be heading to Austin soon. There was this winner in the latest update.
Hilary Duff Sleep Train Pavilion
The ancient arts: Geometry
Often attributed to Kepler is a statement of the nature of the following. I don’t seem to have a copy of the Mysterium Cosmographicum handy, so I’ll parrot what I found at goldennumber.net:
“Geometry has two great treasures: one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.” –Johannes Kepler
I’ve always been a fan of Kepler since I was in Holland and studied 16th century science. As Sagan said, he was the last of the mathematical astrologer or the first astronomer.
Letterpress: The joy of three dimensional reading
Letterpress: 1a. The process of printing from a raised inked surface.
source
I’ve watched it now three times and I find a great peace in the slow narration and accentation. Makes me want to visit the northeast again.
It reminded me of Jessie Ferguson’s installation hosted by Make magazine.
On the Internet, things that are lost are occasionally regain’d
When I was a young fellow living in The Castilian dorm in the late 90’s, I would occasionally visit the TV lounge on my floor early in the morning and study there. Being a bit of an odd bird in that I would rather “sleep less and get up early” versus “stay up late” this would mean that the lounge was empty ( save the odd beer can and cheetos wrapper before the morning cleaning staff came through ).
The cable provider in Austin at that time carried Classic Arts Showcase which follows a roughly MTV-like format where a clip is introduced by a title-card in the lower left describing the music and the visual, and then the art plays.
Halloween Costumes
My girlfriend Lauren, as Re-L Mayer:
Anime
Costume
Yours truly as Ergo Proxy:
Anime
Costume
My Christmas Present
On Christmas Day I opened this:
And I knew the place immediately, Roma, urbs aeterna
It reminded me of the day that I with Big Nerd Ranch staffers had the opportunity to tour Rome. It specifically reminded me of the small tunnels that connect the streets through buildings, something like…
My friends speaking in secret codes
Lauren: The Language of Flowers
Mice: The Language of Fans
Getting that we’re about to be back into the Texas summer and our swing venue
Use your public library! Access SF Public Library without login
As someone who recently liquidated about 9 boxes of books, the majority of which I read only once but lugged around for 10 years, let me recommend that you RENT your books through a service that’s kinda like Netflix, but for books: the public library!
Since I moved, every time I have the urge to buy a book (physical or Kindle) that I think I will read only once, I instead go to sfpl.org and see if the book can be rented. It’s a great way to be slightly more careful with your money and conserve living space.
Granted, there are times you want to have an artifact.
Preview Markdown as rendered HTML from Vim
Or, “Dont’ make me use your ‘rich editor’”
At work we’re using a wiki engine whose power user syntax has been disabled. While it’s been disabled for good reasons, it still bothers me much.
What one is left with is the rich text box which works great for dumping in cut-from-Word documents or which people who don’t want to type quickly and don’t mind mousing to turn on bold etc. As a person who wants to type fast and format as he thinks it, not being able to write markup as I write in wiki data is sad, sad sad.
Tragedy
I have never seen a film that captures dramatic tragedy better than Chan-wook Park’s Boksuneun naui geot or, to us non-Hangul speakers, Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. This film has all the epic tragedy of something by Sophocles or Shakespeare; and it has all the concomitant blood and tears. I grit my teeth throughout, except for the moments where I was taking sharp in-breaths in the “a-ha” moments as threads collapsed together in a symphonic story-path.
Simply put, a poor factory worker arranges to sell a kidney and give 5million won to shady organ harvesters so as to acquire a kidney suitable for his ailing sister.