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Did Blood Platelets for the Red Cross today.

PROTIP! 274 Tremont St isn't just the Red Cross site in Boston - it's also the address of the parking garage they'll give you a 100% validation ticket for.

Also bought some new boots. (Wolverine)

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Don't count the days, make the days count.

Maybe trite but absolutely true. Days can have a fractal quality.

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Between a rise in all kinds of respiratory illness spurred in part by low vaccination rates and the rise of sports betting, I'm beginning to suspect that we are a nation that loves unnecessary gambles. The dark flipside to the MLKjr holiday, the obverse of amplifying the positive message aspect of equality and justice, is the reminder for the potential for horrible violence in American society, amplified by the nearly unfettered availability of guns.

Right now at that stage where fewer people can come right out and say what they think about races, at least not in polite society (or maybe they've come round to some idea of equality albeit with tremendous caveats), and they think we've reached a land of the USA living up to its goals of individual opportunity and justice, and so any further work to make that happen is just "reverse racism", and that really, following MLK Jr's vision is stopping all this anti-racism work 'cause didn't he want us all to be "colorblind" anyway?

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I usually hear it as "It must certainly be so!" but yeah...

On my devblog, the zen of palm, a browser-based palmos emulator, and the handspring. Interesting learning the Palm UI was mocked up in hypercard. Made this with Superniece Cora this morning... turns out her Llamas-in-games comes more from Barbie rather than Jeff Minter...

corallamas1

PUNCH AND JUDY TO THEIR AUDIENCE

Our puppets strings are hard to see,
So we perceive ourselves as free,
Convinced that no mere objects could
Behave in terms of bad and good.

To you, we mannequins seem less
than live, because our consciousness
is that of dummies, made to sit
on laps of gods and mouth their wit;

Are you, our transcendental gods,
likewise dangled from your rods,
and need, to show spontaneous charm,
some higher god's inserted arm?

We seem to form a nested set,
With each the next one's marionette,
Who, if you asked him, would insist,
that he's the last ventriloquist.

(via Marvin Minsky's "The Society of Mind") I posted this link to the Consolation of Philosophy webcomic two years ago, and then reposted it last year. Maybe I will start a January 16th tradition... "There's so much stuff that matters, but so little of it matters to my well-being!"

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I feel like "Don't Get It Twisted" is a more LGBTQ-friendly way of saying "Get It Straight" I posted this link to the Consolation of Philosophy webcomic a year ago. Man, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal really gets me. Like, REALLY gets me... ""There's so much stuff that matters, but so little of it matters to my well-being!"

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The bad UI that scared the bajeebers out of Hawaii

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Trying to remember you is like carrying water in my hands a long distance

What an image! I love metaphors that reveal further parallels as you think about it more.

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[during lull in conversation] maybe people who say the earth is flat are thinking of maps

"There's so much stuff that matters, but so little of it matters to my well-being! You know what the real answer to Camus' 'Question of Suicide' is? Because I don't feel like it!"
"You're like the Raft of the Medusa, but piloted by Pippi Longstocking."
"Wheeee!"

The whole thing resonated for me deeply. (Not completely; like I think there is at least some meaning between life and non-life...) Admittedly I had to look up "Raft of the Medusa".

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On my devblog, some thoughts on game design

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything

Oh man, at first I thought this quote was "a love poem about everything", which is a concept I like even more.

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Looking to make up some band music (but not looking to spend hundreds of dollars) I've been wrestling with the interface of both "MuseScore 2" and "NoteFlight", both very similar programs with startlingly frustrating UI. Why do they make it so hard to enter new notes and/or select existing notes to edit? Didn't Music Construction Set have this figured out in like 1984? For reals.

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--My Super-Niece at the New England Aquarium (still from footage for my 'One Second Everyday' We had a team building event Monday, at Brooklyn Boulders in Somerville. Time lapse of an easy(ish) ascent...

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http://www.city-data.com/top2/c467.html - 13 of the top 20 windiest US cities are in Massachusetts - and Somerville is 21. Is it weird that Cambridge and Somerville are 20 and 21 but Arlington isn't on the list at all? Thoughts I've been having lately:

My mom and I were corresponding about an old vacation video I had recently unearthed, and when I talked about my discomfort at being such a graceless, attention-seeking adolescent, my mom wrote:

I so wish you could be more understanding of your adolescent self. That's the real key....you were an adolescent and your actions then belong to that stage of development. You've grown into maturity with so so many positive attributes that were somehow cooked together from those years. Plus, you've carried into adulthood a lot of the creativity and risk taking that many adults leave behind.

I've been thinking a lot about my "creativity and risk taking". In most ways, I'm not much of a risk taker, because I live in this weird fear of being held account to some authority, sometime, somewhere, some voice that will point out "YOU CHOSE POORLY AND NOW THINGS ARE BAD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD". So, I don't proactively choose much. And I don't judge much, or at least not casually, because then I'd be responsible for an opinion that could turn out to be wrong. I guess to the extent I seem like a risk taker, it's in not really caring if I got put into certain categories by other people... I've always had more interesting things to worry about than if I was a dork, that battle was probably already fought and lost. (Or won.)

There's that (often misattributed) quote by Marianne Williamson "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." that I've been mulling around. The thing is, on an abstract, intellectual level, I know some things are impossible. You can take the series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 +.... for as long as you want, even forever, and you will never ever get to 3. The AI research Marvin Minsky mathematically proved (citation needed, couldn't find a good reference) that a type of neural network some other folks were working on would never, ever be able to differentiate certain types of visual patterns.

So how important is the impossibility of things to real life? Should I try to just label it a meaningless, abstract theoretical? Do I use the concept as too much of an excuse to continue my life's pattern of being a local optimizer, preferring to build in small steps rather than make grand sweeping changes?

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relevant cartoon from http://tumblr.tastefullyoffensive.com/post/73422091488

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On Valencia Street, I look out the window at the hipsters on their fixed-speed bikes. The tight clothes, the tiny hats -- their major struggle as a generation seems to be reducing drag. As if success in life requires being ever ready to slip through a narrow opening.

Cool quote, though I'm a little mixed on hipsters as a term these days.

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http://kottke.org/14/01/the-sum-of-all-positive-integers Good lord. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + .... ends up equalling -(1/12). If you ever wanted to make a philosophical argument that math doesn't describe our world, start here. Does anyone in the world use my RSS feed?

I should either ditch it or upgrade it so it has my "of the moment" stuff too.

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Went out into the Wintry Mix for a new Couch to 5K Day 1, this time with Galloway's "Easy 5K" app that tweaks the tempo on my own music to give me a good target pace.

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Live and learn, die and forget it all.

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Enter a small room. Doors close. When doors open, you're in a different place. Elevators are the next best thing to wormholes

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'I check my Privilege.' 'Roll high!' 'Ew...1.' 'You start arguing that being punk rock in school was like being a minority.' #TwitterDnD

Last December Amber and I took a weekend mini-break to Western Mass, the centerpiece of which was a daytrip to MASS MoCA. This contemporary art museum is about as far west as you can be and still be in Mass.

For more information you can check out this Artsy.net page about Sol Lewitt as well.

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Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.

--It's tough to think of a new heart doodle for the Love Blender every month, but Amber suggested a snow globe (after a snowflake, which didn't work out so well. And after a snowbank which would have been really tough to make heart-ish.) She also pointed out the snow bits in the thing shouldn't have an outline.

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Deluxe Town Diner has a lovely train station companion in Newton Centre; only place I know to get, say, tall order of pancakes and a sloe gin fizz...

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Truth is, everybody is gonna hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

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New Blender of Love Digest is here!

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Bad game for the Pats, congrats Jets. Ah well a time to "practice equanimity in success and failure" - which sounds LOSER TALK- and it is - but not untrue.
--for the MIT Mystery Hunt I am playing Frank, the rabbit guy from "Donnie Darko". It's a long story.

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I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there.

So for pretty much the whole weekend I'm going to be remind myself of how smart I'm not at the MIT Mystery Hunt. Updates will be precanned, but watch me look to twitter as my lifeline to the outside world.

Go Team Left as an Exercise for the Reader!

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Literary Bit of the Moment

"Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Yassar student. For a price, she'll come over and discuss any subject - Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I'm driving at?"
"Not exactly."
"I mean my wife is great, don't get me wrong. But she won't discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn't know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who's mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I'm willing to pay for it. I don't want an involvement - I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I'm a happily married man."

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Via FoSO, brilliant art hoax "Entropa": http://tinyurl.com/7c9bv2

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(weird... twitter just auto tinyurl'd me)

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Just let your love flow, like a mountain stream... ...cold, unreachable, and full of jagged rocks.

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How many A's in KHAAAAAAAAN? http://www.flickr.com/photos/squidnews/3200285750/

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SouperSalad has a "add a bowl of soup for the price of the day's projected high temp"- do they have a plan for of it goes negative?

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MIT Mystery Hunt: Team lead Sarah can scan through a list of 28 categories and recite the 6 that hadn't been matched. Do I belong here?

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For ten years I know that an anagram for my full name is "Risk Oral Linkage" Maybe this will come in handy during the Hunt? Just on the verge of ordering tickets to Japan. Very exciting! I need to start up on my Pimsleur...

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Business Quote of the Moment

The process isn't about not getting fired.

Steve is our "scrummaster", who helps the team guide itself through the 30-day-cycle ("sprint") process of software development known as "scrum". (It's not "process heavy" as far as these things go, but does have certain events, the daily standup meeting, the end of cycle review and "planning poker" meeting for the next sprint.) Sometimes Steve will emphasize the importance of keeping up to your part of the Scrum contract over making other people in the company happy.

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Letter Excerpt of the Moment

She hugs you in the doorway and when you say to her, 'If you move just six inches closer, I'm going to kiss you,' she moves closer, and you kiss her and the whole world is nice.

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Headline of the Moment
NY Times: New Bacteria Strain Is Striking Gay Men:

A new, highly drug-resistant strain of the “flesh-eating” MRSA bacteria is being spread among gay men in San Francisco and Boston, researchers reported on Monday.

Oy. Just the echo effect is enough to make my heart drop.

I find cleaning house to be a maddening production of "Short Attention Span Theater". I'll just grab this pile of books-- but where to put them?... oh look, there's some dirty dishes... better bring those to the kitchen, ooh, kitchen, the garbage needs to go out... huh, I should take care of the trash can in the front room... besides, and oh look, there are some shoes I can wear to take out the trash... hmm, that dvd stack is pretty precarious, better move that over and... hey, what was I going to do with this pile of books here again?

I guess that's where strategies such as "only touch anything once" and "start at one end and systematically proceed to the other" come from, as a way of fighting that "tangential" method of decluttering.

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Ladywear Mystery of the Moment

--Photo above the "sleepwear and intimates" at the Target near my mom's. What are these? Are they just for prettifying bare feet? Are they meant to be worn with some kind of shoe?

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Anecdote of the Moment

(German contralto) Ernestine Schumann-Heink was an unashamed gourmand. Enrico Caruso, another lover of good food in quantity, entered the restaurant at which she was dining. Seeing her about to begin on a vast steak, he said, "Stina, surely you are not going to eat that alone?" "No, no, not alone," replied the lady, "mit potatoes."

I also like her response when she was crashing her way through the orchestra pit, and the conductor hissed at her to go sideways: "Mein Gott! I haff no sideways." So this is Texas...I think it may well be the first time I've been west of the Mississippi, except maybe in an airport en route to Mexico.

At the airport I saw a few cowboy hats. It got me wondering, and I mean this sincerly; how does a guy wearing a hat decide to wear a dark hat or a light hat? Do they pick one shade and stick with it? Does a dark hat reflect an inner dangerous streak?

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Kid Games of the Moment

OICURMT!


O I C U 8 1 2


A B C D goldfish
L M N O goldfish!
O S A R...S M P N?


F U M?
    S, E F M.
F U X?
    S, E F X
O K L F M N X

I learned these when I was a kid...I admit that now the goldfish thing doesn't make a lot of sense.

UPDATE: In today's comments Catherine described what this other site calls the Cockney Alphabet...

You know, a weekend without enough lazing about the house on my own just doesn't feel like much of a weekend.

A while back in trying to understand Mo a little better I read "The Introvert Advantage" and although I feel I'm kind of bipolar on the Introvert/Extrovert scale, I definately grokked what the book was saying about the introvert's need to "recharge my batteries" by being alone for a bit. For me that usually involves just unwinding and catching up on websites.

Also, I am so longing for big stretches of freetime to tackle some projects. Going through my CD colllection and making mp3 rips, moving my websites to new server space, revamping my online database program...

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Video of the Moment
Funny, funny video of a man blowing up a raft.

Animation of the Moment
My cold, cold drive to work this morning would have been so much more tolerable if it was in this Mazda autobot. Admittedly, merely a computer animation (and in a car that doesn't seem to have much in the way of passenger seating) but still a bit hypnotic to watch.

The page it comes from has some random backstory about it: "The TRANSFORMERS® RX-8, is a TRANSFORMERS ALTERNATORS vehicle that combines the spark from an AUTOBOT solider with 100% pure MAZDA ZOOM-ZOOM." ("Transformers Alternators". Maybe they could throw in a few more electronic part names, like if there's a rebellion maybe they'll be the "Transformer Alternator Resistor" and if you're talking about a robot that can do, like, a LOT, it would be a "Transformer Alternator Resistor Capacitor"....) Good to know that the protection of the planet is in such good hands, but if this the team up with Mazda and the Autobots to avoid Cosmic Rust, I wonder what would happen if McDonald-Douglas starting building robot bodies for the Decepticons?

Watch the skies.

(Heh...what if, like, 747s were Transformers? For some reason I imagine them as being these really big, dumb lumbering guys...)

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Pseudo-Intellectual Ramble of the Moment
I've been e-mailing with a friend (about Mensa) when I started namedropping the "theory of multiple intelligences"...she asked what it was and I wrote the following...maybe someone out there will find it interesting.

It's a kind of self-evident idea: most people know that you can be smart at one thing (like taking standardized tests ;-) and dumb at other things, but we still tend to measure smarts on one scale and call that "intelligence". The theory of multiple intelligences just says that there are different ways of being smart, emotional and what not...

Actually I just realized I've been using the term loosely... A google search came up with
http://www.thomasarmstrong.com/multiple_intelligences.htm
which lists 8 specific ones:
Linguistic intelligence ("word smart"):
Logical-mathematical intelligence ("number/reasoning smart")
Spatial intelligence ("picture smart")
Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence ("body smart")
Musical intelligence ("music smart")
Interpersonal intelligence ("people smart")
Intrapersonal intelligence ("self smart")
Naturalist intelligence ("nature smart")

At one point back in school, when I was still using the term loosely, I thought there should be a similar concept for art and literature. It was in an early black literature class, and I was noticing the circles some of the academics were running in to justify studying some of these novels that really weren't "very good"; schlocky and corny, knockoffs of the white novels written at the same time. But they were worth reading, because of who wrote them and when they were written. I realized a "theory of multiple intelligences" would do well to analyze what makes a given work worthwhile.

And what I thought is it doesn't have to preclude pointing to some things as "great works", it doesn't have to be some egalitarian equality of all books; even a dimestore trashy romance is "good" at provoking a certain response in its audience, via titillation and/or something emotional; it just is more likely to be bad on the other fronts. A book by your eight-year-old is unlikely to be a breakthrough work of genius, but it will mean so much to you because of who wrote it. Things that are great, that inarguably deserve a prominent place in "the canon", on the other hand, are much more likely to be effective on a bunch of these hypothetical levels, and that's why we consider them great.

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Link of the Moment
Mars Vs. Earth Probes ("As you are well aware, Earth is currently the underdog in the solar system division in the Expensive Hardware Lob. For every piece of hardware that returns useful information from the Lobbee's planet, the Lobber scores a point. For every piece of hardware sucessfully thwarted by the Lobbee, they score a point.") -- so far Mars is ahead, 20 to 16. (Though if you just count the good ol' USA, our record is 10 to 5. Dang Russkies!)

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News of the Moment
if the northeast cold snap does cause blackouts...man, that will be very, very bad. What a nightmare....I keep thinking back to this old Barney Miller episode where there was this guy who was kind of a prototype for the Y2K folks who came later, except his deal was converting all his paper money to gold in preperation for the coming ice age...if changes in climate patterns are making this kind of North Pole blast more likely...ugh! Quote of the Moment

Those who do not understand history should not be permitted to make it.

Very appropriate of our current time I think.

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Fruit of the Moment
Yikes! Bananas Split, maybe within a decade?

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Link of the Moment
Adweek on the best 20 ad campaigns of the past 20 years. I don't know why I love this stuff so much. Heh... Bartles & Jaymes, "We thank you for your support." Hadn't thought of that for a looong time, but it was pretty great.

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News of the Moment
Space Shuttle launches with the first Israeli astronaut. (Can Mel Brook's vision of "Jews in Space" from History of the World be far away?) Anyway, security was extra tight for this one...what a big target, in more than one sense of the word. Sick Sad World of the Moment
When the capitalistic message we try to bring the world goes a little bit awry...it's the handheld video game "Laden Vs. USA", with real pictures from September 11.
On the one hand, it's appalling to make a terrorist incident where thousands died into a game. On the other hand, you have to admire the chutzpah. And really, is that much worse than the flash games like this or the "Come Mr. Taliban, Hand Over Bin Laden / Daylight Come and We Drop Da Bomb" flash video?

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Quote of the Moment

What comes out of your mouth is more important than what goes into it.

Incident of the Moment
Our neutered boy cat has started humping our spayed girl cat. Man, I know we should necessarily judge cats by our standards of conduct, but sheesh. That's just icky.

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Joke of the Moment

Scenario: A bishop (B) and a rabbi (R) are sharing a train compartment. After a short while, the two men of the cloth start relating some of their past life experiences...

(General conversation...)

B: So tell me, rabbi, have you ever actually tasted ham?

R: Well yes, in fact. Once when I was very young and daring, I tried it. But only the once...

(short pause)

R: So tell me bishop, have you ever ... enjoyed the comforts of a young woman?

B: Well, ahem, yes... before I took my vows, mind you, when I was not so old and not so wise...

(another short pause)

R: Zo, it's better than ham, hmm?

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Defunct Link of the Moment
A while back I was cruising Domain Surfer (the best way to see what domains are free or taken... another addition for that hypothetical best ever links list). I must've been checking out the namespace near my own alienbill.com when I found alienbob.com. At the time, the site had nothing but a block of some odd animation of Bill Gates morphing into a devil. I wrote the site and asked what the story was... the owner said once for some Model-UN type experiment set on modeling the politics and economy of a colony on Mars he decided to simulate a dictatorship based on Alien Bob. Alas, the domain is no more, and Alien Bill now stands alone.