| doonesbury |
[May. 8th, 2008|11:47 pm] |
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Today on the bus home, talking to a friend: somehow Doonesbury comes up, I mention I know it from reading the books of it that were scattered around the house when I was little, and my interlocutor stops: Whoa, he says, I now know way more about what sort of person you are and what sort of place you come from than you were probably intending to reveal. |
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| best roommate ever |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|11:32 am] |
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Matt got a spare ticket so I could come along to the new Errol Morris film playing at the international film festival. I have such a brain crush on Morris. |
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| vehicle overload |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|11:29 am] |
We now have five vehicles at our apartment: two bikes, two motorcycles (both Matt's(!)), one car. I observed that it was sad alongside the fact that we're a block from a Muni stop. Matt replied: "That's a testament to the quality of the Muni."
I'd much rather be out in this nice weather on a bike than slaving away at the keyboard right now! |
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| stomach "flu" |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|08:30 am] |
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I was sick again over the past few days, confined to home over the weekend. It was a stomach thing; seems likely it came with me from south America. I found I've gotten a different attitude towards sickness from exposure to a friend who has a lifelong disease with no known cure, only varying effectiveness approaches towards controlling symptoms. Despite this, he does more with his life in between the times he's feeling bad than I do with my relatively healthy one. I like thinking that willpower has more influence on what you get out of life than circumstances. (One of my favorite LJs is a woman who juggles so many simultaneous full-time activities I'd swear it was faked if I didn't know better.) These days, when I'm sick, I look at it like this: this sucks now, but eventually it will be over and forgettable. I just need to sit still for a few days while my body figures it out. And like when I was in school, during that downtime I plan all the more useful things I'd be doing if I were well. |
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| home again |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|09:20 pm] |
When I got back from my half year in Japan (1.5 years ago, now) I drafted a monster LiveJournal post detailing everything I thought about there and here. I kept revising it, trying to distill it into core points: like, how different is it, really? and would I consider living there for the rest of my life?
I never quite figured it out, and that post is now lost to wherever my files go when I'm not looking. I expect maybe that's also where my thoughts on Buenos Aires will also go.
In any case, I'm home again after a week's vacation, ready to resume my relatively monotonous and moderate programmer's life. |
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| exploitation/exploration |
[Mar. 6th, 2008|07:46 pm] |
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The other day I went to a friend's apartment in a neighborhood of SF I'd never been to before. He'd bought a big ladder from a hardware store so he could get onto the top of his building, because there we could see a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate. Erinn always chides me for never leaving my own neighborhood, but even here I've yet to go to the restaurant a block from my home. One way of looking at it is that I simply lack the taste for adventure, or that with so many opportunities I'm overwhelmed with the choice. Another way of looking at it is that I have millions of ideas, boxes of tea, stacks of books I have yet to topple. In machine learning ("AI") you call this the exploitation/exploration tradeoff: how confident are you that the optimum is near where you are already versus a yet-to-be-discovered new peak. Me, I make a point of adjusting for my own bias towards conservatism, not because I'm unhappy with where I am but because the only way to know you're in a local maximum is to try something unknown. |
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| new nine inch nails album |
[Mar. 2nd, 2008|07:19 pm] |
New Nine Inch Nails album, all instrumental, released online for $5 with CDs to follow. The actual download site is toast. But they also put the first quarter of it up for free on bittorrent. So far I'm reminded of the instrumental interludes from his other albums, with a bit more drone to it. First two tracks are mostly piano.
Their take on the distribution method is interesting, too: they have five different purchase options ranging from free to $300. The $5 one gets you the full album digitally. Each level beyond that on the price scale buys you more physical goods: first CDs (so antiquated!) and a book, then multiple formats of the audio, all the way up to personally autographed LPs. "When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied." It appears the entire album (?) is CC licensed, too.
( Read more... ) |
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| donorcycle |
[Feb. 29th, 2008|10:45 am] |
Today as Matt zipped into his motorcycle gear for his commute to work, he told me: a coworker of his used to be an EMT, and as an EMT they called motorcycles "donorcycles", due to the quantity of fresh organ donors found from motorcycle accidents.
That is awesome and kinda horrifying. |
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| good music and story |
[Feb. 24th, 2008|11:34 am] |
A plug for two recent posts by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) snej, both of which I've really liked: |
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