Tuesday, September 30, 2003

• time travelin’ Back in the Bay Area. I’m like a ghost sifting through memories trapped in amber. I figure that I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, but maybe that won’t be for very long. But trust is a prerequisite for love, so that’s clearly not going to happen. Having too much time on my hands is a good way for me to get into trouble. After seven years, the sting is starting to wear off, but it still stings. The less you have, the more you worry you’ll lose it.

Saturday, September 27, 2003

• i swear i’m not crazy Any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination. I seem to have made a habit of picking myself up out of blast craters. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and try to move on. Despite everything, there really are things that are worse than being alone. (Plus another quote from Charles Bukowski.)

  Thursday, September 25, 2003

• insomnia One of the symptoms of major depressive disorder. Despite the fact that things are going OK, I still can’t seem to pick myself off from the ground.

• maybe god doesn’t like you Homer Simpson sympathizes with God and understands why the Flood had to happen. (tags: simpsons, fight-club)
• i don’t buy it The only reason to not write standards-compliant code is sheer laziness. Everything can be rewritten given enough effort.
• ass monkey disease Seasonal affective disorder kicks my ass all the time.
• genius and insanity Ordered chaos. Deliberate, orchestrated disorder. A quote from Charles Bukowski that backs me up. At least that’s what I tell myself. I may very well be a super genius, or a nascent schizophrenic.

• the matrix has you Using tables for layout is eeeeviiillll. It’s time to break out of the Matrix, and learn CSS. (Cool. I know CSS.) Wishing that IMDb had an API like Google and Amazon.

  Wednesday, September 24, 2003

• i think there’s something wrong with me Any moment of triumph crumbles quickly into despair. This may very well kill me some day.

  Tuesday, September 23, 2003

• galileo and the last day of summer The Galileo space probe meets its end in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The last day of summer always leaves me cold.

Monday, September 22, 2003

• adventures in print serving Using CUPS to print to the Canon i850 through a print server.

  Sunday, September 21, 2003

• “underworld” and neverwhere And Harry Potter, now that you mention it. It always seems that supernatural worlds have portals in the London Underground, doesn’t it?

  Saturday, September 20, 2003

• amazon_buybox The code for getting Amazon.com on a Blosxom weblog.

• buying stuff Shopping. Getting immersed in wi-fi. Screwing around with Bluetooth. Getting Amazon.com on Blosxom.

  Friday, September 19, 2003

• blogging • a retrospective Rebecca Blood is one of the original A-listers on the blogosphere, back before Blogger even existed, and you pretty much had to roll your own blog engine. Going backwards in time on the blogosphere always ends up causing me to go far and wide as well, though, and I find myself in very strange corners of the web.

  Thursday, September 18, 2003

• the simpsons go to africa My favorite quote from the Simpsons’ episode ”Simpson Safari”

  Wednesday, September 17, 2003

• the xhtml 2 debate XHTML 2 is deliberately breaking backwards-compatibility and the Web screams. I don’t know why people are so addicted to backwards-compatibility. If you use open-source and open-specs, then there’s nothing to worry about. Some clever hackers will implement the new stuff, and you can move on. Or you go without, and adhere to the old specs, and compile the old source. I mean, there are systems still running Linux 2.2 out there after all.

  Tuesday, September 16, 2003

• r kelly has a way with words R Kelly sympathizes with Osama bin Laden.

• chrono_nav “Link to previous article” and “link to next article” for Blosxom.

  Monday, September 15, 2003

• outkast “hey ya” Shake it like a Polaroid picture!

  Sunday, September 14, 2003

• 27 • third time pays for all Reminiscing on a night spent getting blasted out of my mind.

• gorillaz “m1 a1” A song that makes me think about zombie attacks. (I’m thinking of “28 Days Later”, “Resident Evil”, “Shaun of the Dead”, “Silent Hill”, or “Omega Man”)
• retrograde consolidation revisited What I’m trying to say with retrograde consolidation: instead of using new software on new hardware, let’s use old software on new hardware. Examples: SGMLXML, UNIX, etc.
• scattered thoughts Some random perlisms. William Gibson on blogging hiatus. XSLT tips and tricks. Arguments for and against XML.

• itunes_playlist A kludgy way to incorporate my playlist into Blosxom.

  Saturday, September 13, 2003

• 27 • part II After 25, it’s all down-hill. Still don’t know where I’m going to end up, though. The event horizon known as the big 3-0 looms ahead. And sometimes I get the feeling that all the important decisions have already been made. It’s just a matter of riding it all out.

• 27 • part I Drunk blogging to “Piggy” by Nine Inch Nails on eternal repeat. One of these days, I hope to get through life better than just barely.

  Friday, September 12, 2003

• blessings in disguise So-called intellectual property is no hindrance to the Internet. It’s very Taoist in a way. Whatever does not yield to the Internet, the Internet merely routes around. Hence, instead of a myriad of proprietary rich media technologies, we’ve got open standards such as CSS and XHTML.

The RIAA pursues a losing strategy. As they say, those who cannot innovate, litigate. While the iTunes Music Store ain’t exactly a clean break from the old model of music distribution, the fact that you can (for the most part) buy just singles (and not just the crappy singles that the music companies allow to be released) is in itself an innovation.

Tuesday, September 9, 2003

• the tower of babble The Babelfish Game: take a phrase in English, convert it through multiple languages, then change it back to English, and see what you get. (See the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the original reference to the mythological Babelfish.) Natural selection in action? A demonstration on how false vacuum can decay into true vacuum?
• more about retrograde consolidation On the other hand, plain text is* more expensive to *process than, let’s say, binary code. But thanks to Moore’s Law, it ain’t a problem. My phone is over 100x more powerful than the first computer I ever owned. In this day, interpreted languages (more fashionably known as dynamically typed languages) are back in the fore. Thanks to advances in bandwidth, in particular, wireless bandwidth, non-lossy audio compression is becoming a reasonable format to download songs in. But the reliance on plain text has the additional side effect of increased openness: it’s much easier to reverse engineer a plain text spec than it is to try to disassemble opcodes.

• retrograde consolidation A follow-up to my elliptical comments on mass amateurisation(sic). The original browser wars had the indirect effect of pushing back the envelope. While we have rich media such as Flash, what most of us end up publishing is essentially plain text. (OK, it’s technically HTML, and it’s usually Unicode and not ASCII, but you get the picture.) But plain text will always win in terms of portability and in terms of compactness. Which makes me think of other technology that has gone backwards a bit: MIDI ringtones, NASA’s renewed interest in Apollo space capsules.

  Sunday, September 7, 2003

• star raiders Reminiscing about an Atari 400 game.

• mp3s and spam Wanted: mp3s. Not wanted: spam.
• lists and positioning Neat things you can do with unordered lists and CSS.
• the man in the high castle What if the Axis won?

• elliptical comments on mass amateurisation We’ve got cheap hardware and free software. All we need is wi-fi everywhere, and we’re on our way to ubiquitous computing. Microsoft is missing the boat. Apple is the wave of the future. Democracy is all about “Worse is Better,” and not “The Right Thing™”.

  Saturday, September 6, 2003

• stackable ipods We should be able to daisy chain iPods and create a RAID array. Or at least have Logical Volume Management.

• for fuck’s sake by robert lasner A book about pursuing women. My life is exactly like this book, except I don’t have any of the sex.

  Friday, September 5, 2003

• processing Is the relationship between Processing and Java the exact relationship between Logo and Lisp?

  Thursday, September 4, 2003

• september September and the end of summer. Taking a moment to look ahead.

• google is god reprised Google is omnipresent, and rapidly becoming omniscient. And nothing will be the same.

  Wednesday, September 3, 2003

• sick in the head Moments of triumph only remind me of how lonely I am. Great.

• a7 “piece of heaven (central seven remix)” This song makes me think of Robotech.

  Tuesday, September 2, 2003

• brain excrement Random thoughts. Thinking of sci-fi, and not movies or music.

  Monday, September 1, 2003

• targeted advertising Amazon.com is leveraging your personal preferences in order to sell you stuff. And now they’re trying to sell me a bra. Is this just a script gone awry, or do they really think my gynecomastia is getting out of control? (And somehow I start referencing “Fight Club” again.)

• movie watch “Gigli”, “Excess Baggage”.
• end stage soul disease Playing with categories in Blosxom.