Does anyone want to go with me to the Bright Eyes concert on the 13th?
Monthly Archive for October, 2005
Read a provocative essay earlier today about Web 2.0. Excerpt:
Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can’t imagine anything more frightening.
When did the Republicans become the Big Brother Party? Who would have thought the GOP would make the dems look like Libertarians?
After yesterday’s list of activities (adjectives) I have to add Mad Scientist’s Ball (depressing). I probably should’ve known that going out when I was already feeling pretty useless was a bad idea. I went for a run before I left in order to up my confidence level, but it didn’t really work. I continued to feel useless and dull, and I feel a little bad for being so moody. I feel like I was no fun for my friends, and I didn’t really meet anyone new. Well, I chatted with a chemical engineer from Perdue about long distance relationships, since she was living two hours away from her fiancee. And I met this math Ph.D. from Turkey, but that conversation was pretty one-sided.
So pretty much, the party sucked for me. Maybe it was because I wasn’t drinking. That’s a depressing thought in and of itself. As the party was starting to loose wind, I was compelled to have a number of jello shots, which resulted in…
…absolutely nothing. Not even a buzz. I think my mood needed a much higher dosage than that to have any kind of medicinal effect. But I am pretty resistant to the “alcohol as medicine” philosophy, so I’m not particularly interested in trying the proper prescription.
Needless to say, I ditched, and I rode my bike home about 8 miles, stopping on the way at Kroger. Or should I say “Kroger’s”. Browsing the isles at 2am was nice. It was quiet and calm and soothing. While I resist medicating myself with alcohol, I gladly medicate myself with food. And the house has been lacking lately. I bought the calming staples: cereal and milk, ice cream, Ovaltine, pretzels, frozen pizzas and some iced tea mix. Pick-me-ups. I also got some cold chicken tenders from the deli case. Sell-by date: 10/30. Purchase date: 10/30, at 2am. Bought in the nick of time.
I sat on the bench outside, celophane-wrapped firewood to my left, kiddie-seat shopping carts to my right, eating my chicken. I wished I had my camera, but I didn’t bring it. It was a sad scene.
And now it is late afternoon. I had a lovely sleep-in, but I am still feeling a little sad. This is almost entirely due to my lack of productivity, so that’s probably what I should be addressing. But y’all got a blog entry instead.
That said, I am having another eventful weekend. Yesterday I had Yoga (excellent), an NKS colloquium (pretty bad), crepes (tasty), opera (sleepy) and then today driveway hockey (fun), and right now I am an hour late for the Mad Scientist Ball.
Does an active social calendar make up for the fact that I am not really getting any work done?
“Hello small piece of apple that fell off my apple and onto my shirt and I am going to eat you now.”
Google clearly read my weblog entries from this week becuase they decided to give $350,000 to OSU and Portland State University for their open source initiatives.
Also, the article reminds me that Google did do that whole summer of code thing, which was really rad and led to some great open source software.
Nonetheless, there’s talking the talk and there’s paying the pay and then there’s walking the walk. And Google is still a big beautiful ball of secrets and closed source software. An open-source funding, closed-source company.
Don’t get me wrong–I think it’s fantastic, I would just rather be a part of the open source world than not. Then again, it’s not like I have a job offer from Google on the table. I think I could learn a lot from working there, and I’m sure I would have a great time.
OSU should use the money to build a giant Nutch server farm. That would be great.
As mentioned yesterday, they may not be fully bought in to the idea of free culture, but damn, they do intriguing stuff.
Google Base is supposedly a soon to be released system that allows people to hand create databases on Google’s servers and make them easily searchable. Google probably likes this idea because A) they have greater access to this information than their competitors and B) they can theoretically provide better results with structured information than unstructured text.
Users like it because their stuff is easily searchable, and (supposedly) really fast to access, given Google is the current infrastructure king.
I am intrigued by it because I think adding a little more generic structure to information will allow much more powerful interfaces. Right now computers don’t actually “know” anything about your data. They only know how to do things with it. They can pull data out of an opaque bitstream, put it into an opaque datastructure, and send it to some opaque drivers. This makes it really hard for you to ask the computer to do weird things, like spell check an instant message. The conversations look like this:
You: type type type
Computer: puts words on the screen
You: hit enter
Computer: sends message
You: type type type
You “Hey computer, you know how to spell check text. Can you spell check this message?”
Computer: ??
If computers understood that, yeah, instant messages are text, and this thing called “spell checking” can be done on any kind of text, no matter where it is, then they could react a little more helpfully in that situation.
Google base is a step in that direction.
That said, despite Google’s supposed “don’t be evil” thing, it seems a little bit sketchy. RSS, for example, is a technology that lets people control their own information but makes it more easily searchable and usable by other people. Google base on the other hand trades control for usefulness. A company that cares more about freedom might have architected this thing differently, in a more decentralized way.
Google, however, seems to be primarily motivated by making great stuff, not by freedom. So that’s not what they did. That’s their right, but it makes me even less comfortable with them.
On a completely different note, The Arcade Fire is awesome. I’ve been listening to them for a while now–last spring I read about them on Pitchfork Media and downloaded a couple MP3s to listen to on my shitty laptop speakers. They also came well recommended from Jackie. They were a staple on our trip to Chicago. Then more recently when I got my iPod I downloaded most of Funeral, though still just crappy MP3s. That, along with the Radiohead, the Badly Drawn Boy, Modest Mouse, and the various other singles I’ve been listening go (Feist, DeVotchka, Queens of the Stone Age) have been the bread and butter of my iPod. But yesterday I finally bought Funeral at TD’s, and the pure CD audio is like music to my ears.
In fact, it is music to my ears.
Tiffanie blogged about the nasty weather yesterday, and how it is intolerable. Josh also seems to be missing the Calfornia sun right about now. But I have to say: it’s too bad you guys think this is winter. Winter in the midwest SUCKS. It’s more like a prolonged rainy November. There are very few people in the world who enjoy cold drizzly gray days. They are out there, but they are few and far between.
And I am not one of them.
I love the winter. I love those days when you wake up and the air is crisp and still, and you put on a warm coat and a scarf and hat, and you walk out into the deep, dry snow. Your cheeks get rosy because of the cool air, but there is no harsh wind ripping at your exposed skin. There are no sopping wet clothes draining your body of heat. The sun is shining down, warming your face and lighting up the snow that’s caking every tree branch. The birds are chiping, children are building snowmen and sledding in the woods. The snowplow rumbles by for the third time since the snow began late last night, clearing those last bits of snow off the road for the commuters.
That is winter to me. This, what we experience here, is just shitty weather.