2014 August❮❮prevnext❯❯

August 1, 2014

2014.08.01

(iPhone 5 macro mode isn't half bad. Although the lens isn't up to my Canon's quality, the touchscreen helps...)
The performance that Inspired the new James Brown movie. I checked out the soundtrack for the new James Brown movie on iTunes, and was kind of bummed that it was the original versions, and not remixes with a modern feel - as great as the classics are, they've been available for a while. Anyway, watch this. James Brown was the showman of the century.
At my husband's grandmother's wake my MIL took my 4 or 5 year old up to see his grandmother in the casket. Everyone was hushed, listening. He paused, looking curious. "Why is there a pillow under her head?" he demanded.
My mother in law faltered. "Ummm, so she could be comfortable," she said, trying to placate him.
He looked at her incredulously and spoke to her as if she understood nothing at all. "Grandma, she's dead. How could she be comfortable? What do you mean? You could take a chain saw and cut her up and it wouldn't matter at all." Everyone was literally speechless.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/31/news/companies/radioshack-future/index.html Say goodbye to Radio Shack, for reals. I'll miss it; sometimes for the odd bit of obsure electronics it was pretty great. (Not to mention for my first laptop in 1991, an hard drive free 1100 FD (haha someone put that 20 year old machine on the Internet via the serial port... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs4vvUoueOE )

Now I've now started grabbing little things like that from Amazon - that's the dark allure of Amazon Prime, stopping me from having to arrange trips out for things I can wait a day or two for.

It will be really hard to convince the next generations that the name "Radio Shack" was kind of a retro thing in the 80s and after, that it wasn't quite as out of date as the juxtaposition of "radios" and "shacks" would suggest.

Also, http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/ for all your old RS catalog nostaligia needs... I can almost smell the weird newsprint they used.

july 2014 new song playlist

2014.08.02
July was terrific for music, especially R+B wise... The first 4 songs here I all rated 4 stars. I was contacted by local musician Chandler Travis, and asked if I could jump in for the Chatham 4th of July parade... here were 4 songs we did (plus Iko Iko, which I'm trying to bring back to my own Honk Band) Some acoustically interesting bits-- Novelty Songs... Misc

August 3, 2014

2014.08.03
July One Second Everyday:

Highlights include Fireworks on the 3rd, Cora on the 5th, Porchfest on the 19th.

August 4, 2014

2014.08.04
"And by the way... Your ship is filthy."
"Filthy? She has no idea. If we had a blacklight, it would look like a Jackson Pollock painting."
Gamora and Peter Quill, "Guardians of the Galaxy"... pretty good flick!

We are not members of different generations, as unlike, as some people would have us believe, as Eskimos and Australian Aborigines. We are all so close to each other in time that we should think of ourselves as brothers and sisters.... Whenever my children complain about the planet to me, I say 'Shut up! I just got here myself.'
Kurt Vonnegut

We are so lonely because we don't have enough friends and relatives. Human beings are supposed to live in stable, like-minded, extended families of fifty people or more.

Your class spokesperson mourned the collapse of the institution of marriage in this country. Marriage is collapsing because our families are too small. A man cannot be a whole society to a woman, and a woman cannot be a whole society to a man. We try, but it is scarcely surprising that so many of us go to pieces.

So I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.
Kurt Vonnegut.
That's why I'm in a band! I guess that's why I stick around church, a bit, but on the outskirts. Maybe the Arlington UU is too big for me.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to maintain it.
Kurt Vonnegut.

August 5, 2014

2014.08.05
Fun, low-key-raunchy music video I found looking for the "I could eat a peach for hours" Nicholas Cage clip - but I can't find the MP3 anywhere (except for a crap island remix someone made) Any suggestions? I hate it when I can't find someone to "shut up and take my money!"

Fun Fact: Saying 'I SUMMON ENTROPY' actually creates entropy.

FOLLOWUP: A FB friend Josh pointed me to http://www.deturl.com/ a kind of metasite with links to various "grab file from streaming" services. http://convert2mp3.net/ was able to make an MP3 from the video, and then http://www.telechargerunevideo.com/ was able to grab a different youtube movie that I had previously updated but the OSX app Grappler was choking on. (Grappler wasn't able to do the Peach MP3 because "video not available on mobile").

August 6, 2014

2014.08.06
protip: refer to all your mistakes as 'artistic choices'
cash4gore.tumblr.com

Slate on adjective order. I heard about this a while back... it's one of those things that kind of freaks you out when you notice how wrong "Red Big Barn" sounds vs "Big Red Barn".
"I saw Owen, yes. He's just as melancholy, just as charming, as uncomfortable with himself, quiet, nostalgic, sharp.... and we went out and had a pleasant round of small talk, and we went home. And like a good little trouper I explained how I don't spend my time in love with people who don't love me back anymore, I'm all grown up now, adults don't do that, and now he doesn't have the burden of guilt that all that messy unrequited shit brings. I'm all grown up now, I'm 'just anyone', and I don't have grand romances anymore."

"And what did he say?"

"'Ah.' He said 'Ah.' Nothing else. I could tell he was hurt, maybe more hurt than he had been at not being in love with me. He's just as stoic as he ever was, though. Good ol' Owen. Tucked me into bed in a green room with faery prints on the walls. Made me breakfast in the morning. And then I left. I finished up with business and came home...." My voice drifted off to silence. I blinked to keep back tears and turned off the hot water. I noticed the orange juice and began drinking it in big sips.

[...]

I leaned back into his chest to wait, trying not to seem overeager. I could hear his heart beating, a soft thudding in my ears. I was reminded of a time we had gone swimming at night. Phillip had held me against him so that I was floating in the water. I had closed my eyes and listened while he hummed lullabies. I'd heard them like this, muted and deep, my ear pressed against his heart. I was soothed again, as I had been then.
Two snippets from "In The Bath", a story from Usenet's rec.arts.erotica.
The original some BDSM themes that may squick some folk, but it's well written, and these paragraphs have stuck with me.

August 7, 2014

2014.08.07
http://www.newsroom24.co.uk/the-great-british-hidden-language-a-must-see-for-all/ a guide to British undestatement
When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them.
Andy Warhol
RIP + Happy Birthday!
http://www.warriorsmovie.co.uk/gangs - I love the design work that went into the gangs of the 1979 "The Warriors"

FACTOID OF THE MOMENT: When you say the word "crisp" it moves from the back of your mouth to the front as you say it. (via)

August 8, 2014

2014.08.08
So cool, really points out how important sound design is!

August 9, 2014

2014.08.09
bouncy house! bouncy house! bouncy house!

August 10, 2014

2014.08.10
"Love a friend, love a wife, something, whatever you like, but one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence, and one must always try to know deeper, better, and more."
--Vincent van Gogh

blender of love

August 11, 2014

2014.08.11
I enjoyed this film/film audio mashup.

August 12, 2014

2014.08.12
Justin was happy, like a clam at high tide, but abruptly ending his musings he recalled that he had every reason to be happy (in his own small way) because he was a quahog and it was the highest of tides, and he squirted with delight.


http://betabeat.com/2014/08/civilians-in-abandoned-mcdonalds-seize-control-of-wandering-space-satellite/ In happier news, this is a lovely bit of real life Cyberpunk (and has NASA's tacit blessing)

August 13, 2014

2014.08.13
The internet is one huge experiment in confirmation bias.

It's almost scary how lighting can change the appearance of a face in photography.

August 14, 2014

2014.08.14
Comparisons are odious.
Old Saying.
Its interpretation in a zen-ish context is important to me; I find it rattling around in my head. Comparing, especially to a sense of how things should be, is a super common but only marginally useful activity for grownups.

hooptime!

2014.08.15
Over the past few years I've realized that I use an idiosyncratic visualization for certain kinds of time; I see the cyclic nature of the twelve months of a year and the seven days of a week in the form of a circle, both going counter-clockwise. I spent some time today generating images reflecting this view. Here's a reflection of what a week is like for me:

I guess the specific rotation and counter-clockwise direction reflects a dash of synesthesia, and also how important physical layout is to my sense of recall -- if I'm trying to do a week-based day calculation, I'll often use my hand to as an arrow to mark my place in the week, in the same way I'll still unconsciously shape an "L" with my left hand to recall which direction is which.

I'm less certain why I place the weekend down. My best guess is see that as the start and stop of a week, and is either "heavier" or "where the week meets the road" (to stretch the physical metaphor, since I view myself as moving in the fixed week-wheel rather than it moving to accommodate me.) The counter-clockwise motion then springs from that - I read left-to-right, so the Saturday-Sunday "start" to the week is in that "forward" direction, and thus drives the rest of the loop.

Years are even more strongly laid out in my mind's eye:
Here the calendar starts at the top, as one might expect, but I think that's because I view a year as progressing from school year to school year, with the loveliness of summer vacation anchoring as the base (though a separate desire to have the numeric transition be straight up tilts the thing a bit.)

Neither visual is strongly color-coded for me, but week vs weekend and the various seasons have a different ephemeral feel, here color-coded for grins.

As a side note, I used a new technology for this, p5.js -- the same processing.js I've used for years, but now as pure javascript, rather than going through some weird java-to-js convertor. Highly recommended! You can check out the working page and source code if so inclined.
It would be fair to say that the concept of a forest is simpler than the concept of a tree.
Ray Kurzweil, "How to Create a Mind"

August 16, 2014

2014.08.16
So the Silverball Museum in Asbury Park got a classic Pong (sadly the head of one of the dialsis missing) I was a little shocked to see that it has a fancy end/attract screen! Pong is shorthand for "the simplest game possible" but the physical production of it had some serious nuance, from the return angle of the pongbats to stuff like this. Honestly it's still a game that's fun to play, so well-tuned to a social night out with beers.

Probably the best JP Honk Vid yet!

If there's one thing I wouldn't want to be twice, zombies is both of them!
Mantan Moreland in "The King of the Zombies"

August 17, 2014

2014.08.17
Maybe I'd stumbled onto the secret for eternal happiness: Keep your dreams small and stupid.
Brad Warner, "Hardcore Zen"

August 18, 2014

2014.08.18
The jaded sousaphonist...

August 19, 2014

2014.08.19
RIP Don Pardo

"How was the 7-minute workout?"
"Great, except for the Triceps dip. Man did that hurt. In fact, I think Triceps are just made up to make people feel bad. Uhh, ok, you got Biceps, lets get you working on your... Triceps. Yeah. Then we'll do Quadceps and Quintceps, ok?"

Just brought a 240-count jug of Atomic Fireball candies into work. Let the dieting commence! (Seriously, a 30-calorie candy can do a good job of knocking out a craving for many hundreds of calories of something else.)

August 20, 2014

2014.08.20
"I'm going to start a bar and call it 'Pour Decisions'."
"That's almost as good as what mine's gonna be: 'Cocktails & Wifi'."
Me and Jeff F. on our company outing a few weeks ago

ALS Ice Water Challenge. I lost an Aunt to this, and it's such a terrible thing...

August 21, 2014

2014.08.21
Dead at Noon. Gillian Bennett elected to end her life rather than give into an inevitable slide into dementia. She tells her story and makes her argument elegantly on a website published after her death.

repeat until death

2014.08.22


When I posted about my timehoops, my friend Christa Terry posted her mental image of time, a kind of upward spiral:

I made a rough interactive webtoy of it, which unfortunately isn't playing well with some browsers, so I baked it as a looping GIF here.

I kind of admire how she surely used less time doodling out her view than I did with my timehoops, or my webtoy. In fact I kind of like her rendition better in general! All well, c'est la vie (et la vie et la vie)

August 23, 2014

2014.08.23

our octopus overlords

2014.08.24
A comic strip I drew today, visting with EBB + Co in Rockport. The panels came to me in a dream a few weeks back.

August 25, 2014

2014.08.25

Quotes from Christopher Thomas Knight, The Last True Hermit:
"Sitting here in jail, I don't like what I see in the society I'm about to enter. I don't think I'm going to fit in. It's too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia."
[On the human condition] "I did examine myself. Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free."
[Asked for insight he gained] "Get enough sleep."
His story of living in the harsh woods of Maine for decades, occasionally stealing and becoming a true local urban legend in the process, is astounding. Read this!

mother nature is a mother

2014.08.26

--humon on deviantart...

August 27, 2014

2014.08.27

August 28, 2014

2014.08.28
ALL IS HERESY!!!

August 29, 2014

2014.08.29
Geek time! Thinking about how I so strongly prefer libraries, where you call the code, to frameworks, where their code calls you. (More or less.)

Looking at the trouble I've had lately with frameworks, it seems like there's always some mismatch between the end result we're trying to produce, and what the framework does naturally - and the hacks to get from point A to B are UGLY. To that extent, I realize frameworks are inherently "Waterfall"-ish, because you have to have a good idea what you're coding from the very outset. Libraries tend to be more swappable, and you're less beholden to the clever Frameworks makers having pre-guessed your requirements.

Don't get me wrong; Agile always gets messy. But I think the messiness that results from keeping things simple is easier to cope with than the messiness of hacking around something complex.
Just got Verizon FIOS. So far seems pretty good! The real test will come at 10PM, when Netflix Hulu et al would go to total crap.

yousenet

2014.08.30
WARNING: this post is not very interesting to anyone except weirdly geeky stalkers of me.

Usenet used to be really central to my online life... before the web really got into gear, it was a great set of forums over myriad topics, and it was cool to have so many different forums all with the same interface, one that the poster could choose. (Especially compared to web-forums, where every forum requires a new login and uses a slightly different interface.)

Years ago I used Google groups to do some basic metering of how much I posted to Usenet. Today, cleaning out an old HD (including a snagged snapshot of my old cs.tufts.edu account home folder) I found a copy of my ".posted" file, a list of references to Usenet posts I made. I crunched some numbers and came up with the following...

Here's how much I posted per year:
1995615
1996570
19971048
1998959
19991149
2000453


Here are the groups I posted to most often. (I posted to 441 unique groups, 193 only once, and 65 only twice.)
rec.games.video.classic1167
tufts.general752
comp.sys.palmtops.pilot354
alt.fan.cecil-adams308
alt.folklore.computers267
rec.games.video.nintendo258
alt.games.wing-commander150
alt.tv.commercials139
alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot137
tufts.tuftsconnect124
alt.hackers102
rec.arts.sf.written89
rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc64
comp.sys.palmtops61
alt.peeves60


Finally, here were the threads I participated in the most:
What does Micro$oft do Well ? alt.folklore.computers 46
Tufts Lifeline Taxi tufts.general 45
Tufts on NPR tufts.general 40
Worried about IDSA killing emulation? rec.games.video.classic 23
What did Nintendo do that Atari couldn't? rec.games.video.classic 19
Defending Emulation / some ROMS. rec.games.video.classic 17
Just missing immortality, defining a life well-lived rec.arts.sf.written 17
Reorganization RFD has been submitted rec.games.video.classic 14
Just Wondering... tufts.general 13
Primary Source tufts.general 12
So quiet tufts.general 12
Landware Go Type Pro keyboard comments comp.sys.palmtops.pilot 12
whats your favorite classic system (cannot include arcade emulators) rec.games.video.classic 12
The string of lights down the hill tufts.general 11
Dont buy Palm: Retarded OS with 4K memo limit comp.sys.palmtops.pilot 11
tuftsconnect tufts.general 10
Atari VS. ??? rec.games.video.classic 10
Gameboy vs 2600: The Ultimate Classic System? rec.games.video.classic 10
It seems odd to me how few of these I remember, and odd to look things up on Google Groups, and see discussion that once meant kind of a lot to me.

Anyway, here is the raw .posted file, the full data analysis, and the node script I wrote to crunch it.

August 31, 2014

2014.08.31
More Usenet fun- my favorite .signature quotes... i had a Perl script that would pick a random one each time, and glue it onto my contact information.
Stars and People are made of the same stuff
Bill Nye the Science Guy
Now is the winter of our discontent-- and I'm makin' snowballs!
There are no "facts"-- there is only *the fact* that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.
Henry Miller, _Tropic of Capricorn_
All life is 6-to-5 against, just enough to keep you interested
Runyon
I remember two things very well, and that is that ladies are pretty and money pays the bills when you get it
B.B.King
"The time has come," the walrus said, / "To speak of manic things,
Of shots and shouts, and sealing dooms / Of commoners and kings."
Thurber
It is not true that life is one damn thing after another--
it's one damn thing over and over.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
There is no god and Murphy is his prophet
Well, we all got misery, but it passes, it always passes!
Mike Feder, New_York_Son
Insecurity knocks once in a while. Invite her in. Sit down, have coffee with her. And once you have heard Insecurity out for a while, take that sugar spoon and poke her in the eye.
Erica Bial
(My mom loves that last one)
Context is strawberries
bas-jan@seneca.demon.nl
When life gives you poop, make poop juice.
Max Canon's Red Meat
"Looking back on your life, what would you say satisfied you most?"
"...I'd say women."
Interviewer and Man Ray (sculpter, photographer, artistic genius)
And isn't sanity really just a one trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh oooh oooh, the sky is the limit!
The Tick
The question is complex and life is short
Protagoras on theism v. atheism
when you see infrared we're all luminescent
The cat is trying to open the door on the hinge side. I laugh, then realize that I make the same mistake with people, ideas, and doors, too.
New Yorker cartoon
"Life's too short to worry about it"
"I want to live like I type- fast, and with lots of mistakes"
Obscenity, by itself, is the last refuge of the vulgarian and the crutch of the inarticulate motherf**ker.
Lawrence Protagoras
"I'm going to kill everyone in this room."
"Now that's DARN rude."
The Joker visits David Letterman, The Dark Knight Returns
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--
'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'
Kurt Vonnegut
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." --Kurt Vonnegut
We're all soldiers in the war against entropy.
alt.folklore.computers
I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt.
Mark V. Shaney
No why. Just here.
John Cage, Life Magazine's "Why are we here"
But in my arms till break of day / Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful.
W.H Auden, from "Lullaby"
If I cannot be free, I'll be cheap
Joe Boswell
"I'm out to shave with Occam's Razor"
We don't know if there's a god- but there *are* women...
Woody Allen, "Deconstructing Harry"
How do we stop an elephant if it goes berserk? What do we do? Do we use
an AK-47? An M-16? An AR-15?... Frankly, would that stop an elephant?
I really doubt it. Do they have a bazooka?
US Senator Bob Smith
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was. . . an arctic wilderness.
Steve Martin
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.
W.H.Auden
When I'm clicking through the hundreds of E-mail messages that await me each morning, sometimes I imagine I'm a mighty information whale, sifting through thousands of tiny (but nutritious!) krill bits. Yum!
J. Quittner
So many women, so little nerve.
Bruce Bethke, "Headcrash"
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: This is the ideal life.
Mark Twain
The ant's a centaur in his dragon world
Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI
I think art should be in the place in our culture where religion used to be. Where magic used to be, there should be art.
Teller
We come together making chance into starlight
Jeff Buckley
We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.
20 Past Midnight
As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual.
Latka Gravas in "Taxi"
Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.
Peter Gay
[Stegosaurus] Two words: spiked tail. "Oh, so you're sneaking up
behind me to eat my delicious body? WHAM! Spikes! For you! In your head!"
Brunching Shuttlecocks
Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
David Hume
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
People are either charming or tedious.
Oscar Wilde
Sleep... Those little slices of death; O how I LOATH them!
Edgar Allen Poe
So we keep asking, over and over, / Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths-- / But is that an answer?
Henrich Heine, "Lazarus"
...the greatest bargain since Jesus bar-Miriam was was sold for thirty pieces of silver to the Romans, who, God wot, have been selling him ever since...
Avram Davidson, "The Redward Edward Papers"
i seem to be constantly reminded that everything is temporary.
the older i get, the more this bothers me.
http://dancy.franz.com/~virago/
Striving for excellence, like a moth beating itself
to death on the side of a light bulb.
Josh Space, church of josh
Without music, life would be a mistake. ...I would only believe in a God that knew how to dance.
Friedrich Nietzsche
> All positive integers are interesting! Any doubters?
No, no, no. All positive integers are boring. Proof by contradiction:
Let n be the smallest non-boring positive integer. So what? QED.
Car broke down / Wife left me.
Life is lite, / and then Hefty.
Rand Carlson
Tiger got to hunt, / Bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder,
"Why, why, why?" / Tiger got to sleep, / Bird got to land, /
Man got to tell himself he understand.
Bokonon



2014 August❮❮prevnext❯❯