I went for a long hike sometime last fall, and took a bunch of photos but never bothered posting them. Well, here they are in all of their glory.
Monthly Archive for February, 2005
Wow. At about 3:00 this afternoon, I had an idea for a dynamic html pdf viewer that you could use to annotate pdfs and share those annotations online. Well, I got curious enough that I started hacking on it. And surprisingly, 12 hours, 1 pot of chili, 1 viewing of “Breaking Away”, and several snacks later I actually have a working demo.
What is that? I created a dynamic HTML pdf viewer in a matter of hours? How the &$*@ did that happen? That is not a normal amount of time for that kind of endeavor. Is this just way easier than I thought, or did I just get obscenely lucky?
I don’t know. Either way, I have hooked it up to my online library, so you can now view my cached PDFs within my cool PDF viewer. Check out, for example Brandt, 2000, and where it says “Saved version: PDF | View”, click on “View” and then drag the
image with your mouse to scroll.
Anyway, it’s pretty cool. It works just like Google maps, loading new bits of PDF as you need them. It doesn’t do the annotations yet, but it’s just a proof of concept, so it doesn’t have to. And I haven’t tested it in anything except Firefox, so I can’t vouch for other browsers (and certainly not IE). Also, if you try it on one of the other files in the library, you should heed two warnings: 1) some of the PDFs cannot be parsed. Ghostscript fails for some reason which is unknown to me. And 2) if you open up a file no one else has looked at (which is most of them), it will take a while to render (10 secs to a minute). After you wait for it the first time, it will load quickly for everyone. Faster than waiting for Acrobat to load, that’s for sure.
I am just dumbfounded that it actually works.
I spent today hacking on one of my “research” projects. It’s a simple cellular automata game for children that we are going to try and use to understand more about how a shared tabletop display affects problem solving. So far the project has been pretty easy on my brain–it’s “mere implementation” after all–but it has been pretty fun to have something so concrete to work on.
And there was a pretty neat development today. Today I created the Variable Hunger Rabbit Shaker (pronounced “WHORES”). What you do, is you shake the WHORES over the table, and rabbits come out. You can also adjust a little dial on the WHORES to have it shake out profoundly hungry rabbits or perfectly sated ones. Then, you add some foxes into the mix and mayhem ensues. It’s that fun place where physical and virtual meet.
Adjusting the Variable Hunger Dial™
It’s pretty fun to shake lots of hungry rabbits onto the grass and watch them devour it. Then you turn on WarpSpeed and watch the foxes eviscerate the rabbits. Hopefully the kids will find it fun, and more importantly, hopefully it will spur them to try to think about what is happening and why.
Shaking hungry rabbits into the bloodbath
Grad school is sweet.
I had a wonderful weekend. Niamh came out to visit late late Wednesday night, and stayed all the way until Sunday morning. She had kind of a miserable drive home, and I’ve been pretty busy since she left, but it was so nice to see her. It was long enough that when she left, I didn’t feel like she had just arrived, but it was certainly short enough that I really really wanted her to stay.
On Thursday, I had lots of classes, and I sent Niamh on a torturous search for parking. She had to put up with arriving in Bloomington to me stressing out about my presentation, failing to do basic preparations for her arrival, and not being able to actually spend the day with her, which is awful of me. But by the time we got to 5:00, we had both seen such emotional extremes that we pretty much didn’t care any more, and we had a lovely dinner at Bombay House. We had a delicious lamb saag, and some naan. Yum. We went home and watched some trailers and movies and stuff. It was nice.
Friday, I got up early and did a flurry of hacking on EcoLand, in preparation of my meeting with Yvonne. Through some stroke of kindness from the debugging gods I actually got a bunch of new features into a demoable state, which was nice. I went home to find Ni still asleep, all flushed and groggy. That was nice too.
We made preparations, and Friday night we had another fresh pizza party, which went really well. The dough turned out just right–really light and fluffy, and tasty. Niamh met most of my friends here, and we played some fun games.
Saturday, we went to the InfoFest and found out that I didn’t actually need to present at all. So we had some pizza and went off to catch a matinee of Finding Neverland before my meeting at 4:30. Great movie–sad, but great. I miss seeing movies with Niamh. Saturday night, we cooked the leftover pizza shells, and watched a movie with Josh and Will. And Sunday morning, Ni shipped out.
Probably all of that sounds relatively mundane, and I guess it was. But it was that perfect mix of casual dining and errands that is utterly and completely my favorite thing about dating Niamh. Honestly, if I could have an hour every week to walk around Target and flirt with Niamh while she picks out greeting cards, I would be a happy man.
I just had a good scare. I have been working on a video on Experience Prototyping for my prototyping course tomorrow, and I have to continually save it back to tape because I have nowhere to save the 4GB iMovie file. Unfortunately, it turns out the digital VCR I used to save the final version of my movie a few hours ago doesn’t work. It looks suspiciously like it is recording (blinking red circle, etc) but darned if the movie didn’t show up on the tape.
Of course, I didn’t realize this until I had long since left the public terminal that housed my iMovie file. Oops.
So, after changing my pants, I came back to the library to see if my iMovie file was still here, and lo and behold it was! So I didn’t have to recut the whole thing in fast forward. That’s nice.
And as a result, I had time to compress it and put it on the web. So for a limited time, I give you Experience Prototyping. It’s designed to have me explain things as it plays, so it might not make a ton of sense, but maybe some of you want to see the kind of thing we do in HCI design school.
Also, please don’t redistribute this too much. I don’t own the rights to any of the songs used in the video, so I will just leave it up for a few days so those of you who care can see it.
Some terrible photos of my exciting life:
Design Club tries to design its own logo. That looks like stick figure death on the white board, but it’s not.
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The nosebleeds at Yogi’s. Niel’s band was on, so we all went out to see. There was also obscenely cheap alcohol, which certainly sets the tone.
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Percival Potts. Rock over London. Rock on Chicago.
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Jim and his wife, and I think Muzo’s wife at Apurva’s “Night of Spice”. It’s funny how when Apurva throws a party at our house, more people come than if we throw a party on our own. We are lepers.
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People dig in to what turned out to be not particularly spicy spice. Apparently, Apurva doesn’t really believe we can handle it.
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Josh presents his exhaustive knowledge of sleep psychology in design club. We were planning for today’s experience prototype which actually went pretty well. We use a bunch of creative techniques to approximate the waking experience, and ended up with a reasonable test bed for prototyping. Too bad we didn’t have any prototypes to test.
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Niel’s band “Percival Potts” again. Tiffanie, Elan and I went out to see this show on Saturday, and it was fantastic. Lots of dancing in three great sets.
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Tif and I then proceeded to take a lot of pictures of the fish tank. A lot of pictures.
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After a while, I realized I would rather have photos of us making asses of ourselves with our digital cameras than of the fish themselves. This is basically what we did for fifteen minutes.
And in more exciting news, NIAMH IS COMING TO VISIT IN TWO DAYS! Holy crap. It’s going to be sweet.
Note: I wanted to get this down before I went to bed, but it is not edited at all. I apologize for the shoddy language.
I have been quite agnostic for quite some time. I have yet to see any evidence that god has any sort of material presence in our world.
At the same time, I know that our sensory machinery appears to be cobbled together for some very specific purposes. For this reason, I doubt that our this machinery is plugged in to the universe in a particularly omnipotent way. On top of that, having spent some time around computers, I fully understand how it might be that our universe could be embedded in, and functionally insulated from, some greater universe. These together are enough for me to leave open the possibility of a Creator.
These are my beliefs, but I question them quite often, especially when faced with insistent individuals with beliefs that “work for them” but seem impossible. Religious folks fall into this category.
So I have been thinking quite a bit about the question: “How real are religious fictions?” The scientist in me immediately points out that fictions are not real at all, they are completely made up
While I was in the Voices of Freedom Gospel Choir at UConn, I met for the first time people whose faith truly was an instrument in their lives. Every week people told stories of how they exercised their faith for good in the world. They stopped and helped someone, or their prayers were answered. And I began to ask the question: “If Jesus is exerting a force on these peoples’ lives, how could he not exist?”
The scientific response is that this is simply mass delusion. And certainly, that’s a lens you can look through. But is it truly delusional if it works in practice in their lives?
Part of the problem is that Jesus the man died a long time ago, and stopped materially influencing the world upon his death. But I recently started imagining his cones of influence. If you can imagine it, he had local effects when he was alive, and those effects had their own sets of effects, which spread throughout the world. Over the course of thousands of years, these effects form a cone of influence.
And of course you can imagine the cone that goes in the opposite direction: the forces that directly influenced his life were each influenced by sets of forces, that grow ever broader in scope as you go backwards in time from his birth.
So in the end, we have these two cones end to end, with Jesus in the middle. All of us have cones like this… one defining what influences us and one defining what we influence. I would argue, however, that both of Jesus’s are extraordinarily large. It’s obvious to see that the cone of things he influences is quite large, but I would also wager that he himself had quite a broad set of influences.
Of course, I need to substantiate this. And I’ll do so by suggesting that they way one gets a big cone of influence feeding into them is by truly taking into account as many aspects of the human struggle as possible. You are a human, and things can really only influence you in a human way, so in a sense you are limited to human influences. In the end, my only argument for Jesus’ having two big cones is that his teachings have been very widely applied, and have met fairly wide success, and this suggests that their roots are also fairly deep.
Every day we tap into shared cultural beliefs. I believe that buildings labeled “Kroger” will sell me food because it has worked well. This belief, however, is only mildly useful. By tapping into Jesus’ cones of influence, believers connect to a massive dataset that resonates with Jesus’ teachings. And this is the sense in which Jesus is real. The man is gone, but the “spirit” of the man is this cone which is very real.
And here I mean “spirit” as in the spirit of the law, not the letter. It is this spirit that exerts a force on peoples’ lives. You could say it’s all in someone’s head, but it’s really not. It is in these giant cones, individuals just tap them.
In indian households, families often set up small “temples”, often in the Kitchen. These contain sculptures of family gods and goddesses, and is a place for ritual. How do these and other “holy” relics fit into this picture? These are objects which serve as lenses that project the image of a spirit onto someone’s mind. Much like a photograph of Niamh project’s her spirit onto my mind’s eye, these relics truly conjure spirits into material reality in their viewer’s head. This occurs through an agreement between person and relic, but it is nonetheless very real.
So that’s my best explanation right now of what might be real about religion. No doubt both atheists and the religious faithful disagree with many points, but I think these are some interesting thoughts.
Bill Gates is a smart guy, but I’m sorry, this is just nonsense:
SPIEGEL: The particular charm of Linux is that it is an adaptable system that users can shape themselves.
Gates: If everything runs under the same platform, however, you can better concentrate resources and more quickly repair errors. For instance, in a hospital where different systems are used, a single problem in one section cause the other systems to crash. Thus, from a security standpoint it is always better to focus on one system.
A) You didn’t address the question, B) If you run Linux, there are fewer post-setup errors to fix, C) In a homogeneous network, a problem in one section is a problem for the whole network, by definition, and D) even if it is harder to fix errors, on a heterogeneous network it is unlikely you’ll have the same problem on different platforms at the same time. So you have fewer machines to patch any given day.
This is a good example of where toeing the company line makes you look stupid.
If lesbians and gay men can’t marry because it would violate the historical definition of marriage, maybe we should return to “coverture“. Then if I married a woman I would legally own her, and all of her property. After all, that’s how it used to be done. Women retaining a legal identity after marriage? It’s an abomination!
Thanks to Judge Doris Ling-Cohen for the suggestion.
After a fairly productive week, I spent last night and today in bed downloading music. I’ve come across a lot of crap, but as always a few gems shine on through:
Fiona Apple – Extraordinary Machine
I’ve been a fan of Fiona Apple for a long time. I’m generally a fan of women vocalists who put some weight behind their voices and let their speaking voice trickle in. As a man, that combination just commands my attention. This track is off what would be her newest album if it had been released in 2003 when it was completed, but it wasn’t released so all we have are a couple of leaked tracks. Produced by Jon Brion, famed sountrack composer and pop god, it is an unforced, plodding, yet highly compelling anthem more apt for Broadway than MTV. “Be kind to me, or treat me mean. I’ll make the most of it; I’m an extraordinary machine.”
Fleming and John – Ugly Girl
This song took me through three stages. On first listen, it sounded like just another example of the throwback pop that litters the rock world these days. On second listen, I started listing to the lead singer’s voice, and really enjoying it. She sings just outside of her range, but backs away just enough that the tiny bit of cracking mixes in with her properly pitched head voice. The result is actually quite pleasing. On third listen, however, I start listening to the words and realize that the song is really a fairly hideous sentiment. It’s vain and spiteful despite the easy style. Nasty, but I suppose honest on some level, and still worth listening to.
The Gossip – Sweet Baby
A lot of the music I’ve been tossing away has fallen out of my favor because they wring every bit of space out of their tracks until they are unlistenable. But The Gossip combines a great, aggressive, bluesy vocalist with a band that is just good enough to get out of her way.