scrap pad

3 videos yelling together

spotlight hate continues

One of the things I want from Spotlight is that it rank documents I created higher than, say, pages of the mysql manual, or random pdf books. And factor date last opened into the ranking. I also want it to cache my fucking queries; I think I only ask it about five different things.

hate hate hate

hats

screencasting apps

thing I am obsessed with today

pronounciation

I don't mess around saying 'steven, um, stefen' these days; I say 'steven dobyns' and am done with it. also, I say 'cayche', 'eethernet', and 'bur-DOCK.'

commenting on people

about yana

lean back

find powerbook battery status via cli

how to find out, from the command line, the battery status of a laptop running mac os x: use 'pmset' (power management setting cli util):

[1:38pm bec@persimmon:~] % pmset -g batt
Currenty drawing from 'AC Power'
 -InternalBattery-0     89%; charging; 0:39 remaining 
[1:38pm bec@persimmon:~] % pmset -g batt
Currenty drawing from 'Battery Power'
 -InternalBattery-0     89%; discharging; 2:11 remaining

resizing with js

google's master plan

composite primary key

db normalization

recommendation crazy

I have been caught in a flood of recommendations recently.

movies my aunt janet recommended to me:

• Caught
• The Narrow Margin
• T-Man (or T-Men?)
• Raw Deal (1940s)
• Phantom Lady
• The Big Clock
• The Man on the Eiffel Tower
• I Wake Up Screaming
• This Gun For Hire

I get the feeling that she was just listing every film noir she remembered. This is the kind of list I will wait for backup on. This Gun For Hire I had heard about before, so it's now on my queue.

anton recommends (in general I think):

• Jan Švankmajer (director), Faust and Conspirators of Pleasure (two of his movies)
• Andrei Tarkovsky (director), Stalker and Solaris (two of his movies)
• MI-5 (brit tv show, seasons 1 and 2)
• The Avengers (with Diana Rigg, 1965-1967)

I kind of split this in half and put Faust and Solaris on my queue. Everything else is waiting until my list of things to see is a little shorter.

I'm putting a hold on all recommedations until further notice. If you've recommeded anything cultural to me in the past six months, you are on especial hold: I just can't keep up. Now it's my turn to make a few unexplained recommedations (though, to be fair, I'm really really curious about Solaris right now, because talking about the shooting style piqued my interest). I'm not doing links here, go out and find them your goddamn selves. I'd send you home with just some half-legible notes in your little notebook, if I could.

• Firefly (tv show)
• Some Like it Hot (movie)
• Double Indemnity (movie)
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (movie)
• Lockpick Pornography (book)
• Starship Troopers (book)
• Tomatoes, by Stephen Dobyns (poem)
• The Kossoy Sisters (specifically, their album Bowling Green, it's music)

I know this person

really cool to read about the father of a childhood friend in the NYTimes. He was always doing something... designing hang gliders, experimenting with new oar shapes, building a house. now it's violins. New Approaches to Instrument Design - String Theory - New York Times.

somehow in my head people on the internet and in the newspaper are bigger celebrities than actors. also, being on myspace makes a person less of a celebrity in my head.

watching dr who

Amateur

3.5" drive enclosure

sleep cycle alteration

non-caffine awakeness pills. ugh, I hate the cycle that caffiene allows people, it's almost an expectation these days. this makes me nervous. via slashdot.

sleeping/notsleeping pills could become as much an expectation as birth control pills? freaks me out. not that I disagree with birth control pills; but like with sleep, I don't want to fuck with the way my body does things. and why should work/lovers/society orchestrate my dopamine/hormone/whatever levels? (side note about positive consequences, and how they're "positive" because they fit with society's needs, and how they're "positive" also sometimes outside of all that, but how society erases the weight of other choices anyway. society loves being anthropomorphized.)

facts about foods

flickr camera finder

lyrics

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow
I hope it bleeds all day long
Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises
We're pretty sure they're all wrong
I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn't over
And I hope you blink before I do
Yeah I hope I never get sober
And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can't find one good thing to say

um, ouch. No Children, by the Mountain Goats

wordpress plugin

the story on animal products used in sugar refining

honey pecan pie

corn syrup

Why use a high fructose corn syrup? ...

• retain moisture and/or prevent drying out
• control crystallization
• produce an osmotic pressure that is higher than for sucrose or medium invert sugar and thereby help control microbiological growth or help in penetration of cell membranes.
• provide a ready yeast-fermentable substrate
• blend easily with sweeteners, acids, and flavorings
• provide a controllable substrate for browning and Maillard reaction.
• impart a degree of sweetness that is essentially the same as in invert liquid sugar
• high sweetness
• low viscosity
• reduced tendency toward characterization
• costs less than liquid sucrose or corn syrup blends

lots of big words! mostly unnecessary.

turnaround

Lineform

zip codes

donut robot!

museum exhibit: bikes

web apps... taking over...

yet another variation on the project (life) management/notes to self web 2.0 app thing. you know where to stikkit (sorry). one of those things with so much 'usefulness' that it's un-integrateable: I'd have to change habits to use these things (see also: basecamp, del.icio.us). ceo is Rael Dornfest, whose name I think I remember from bloxsom?

Seashore

a mac blog

bamboo for everything

bed bug life cycle

hating the word:

pretty color scheme

I really like the fall colors on this site (63xc.com--The Offroad Fixed Gear Site):

p.s. note to self: no more reading about fixies! stop, now.

bike movies

from a conversation:

I don't think it should be a problem to be perceived visually in a way that you *do* identify with.

- but one of our cultural problems is that our visual identity is so closely tied to our percieved identity

other people percieving you as being in the wrong category is problematic, because it's an issue with their methods of categorization rather than your need (or lack of it) to match your presentation to your self-perception.

(it turned out to be a much-quoted conversation; kb quoted it for a school project on narrative. she came out with significantly more "um"s.)

kb recommends

anton recommends

a lot about fixed gear bikes

more regularly updated bike porn

"lugs"

recording skype calls

"how not to get hit by cars"

Bicycle Safety: How to Not Get Hit by Cars. I'm on top of this already, but: there are diagrams!

revision: I didn't really read this, just looked at the pictures. after some discussion with kb, I found out that it's ridiculous. possibly some of the strategies could be partially integrated into a general bicycle safety stragegy, but they shouldn't be blindly obeyed.

(fuzzy peach?) knit nudes

see also: family, dude. the artist, Anna Maltz does a lot with knitting.

secret giant nerds

self portrait

today I drew this picture of myself:

a lot of times I want to draw an impassive stick figure and title it things like "this is me saying the word cretin" or "this is me listening to the server buzz." it's not amusing enough to torture other people with, but my personal standards of amusement are lower.

biggest portable phone, ever.

pics of hot local singles! updated daily!

calculator

Particletree

wanted from CD Baby

The Django Book

poptech notes relinked

fools never differ

"new" operator in javascript

timer

Haiku

cd cover art dimensions

train speculation

Is it a new train every time it runs through the station? On each execution of each route? Is yesterday's 10:40 the same train as today's? Is there only one train that makes multiple trips? Is it a different train every time different cars are put together? Or is the train just the engine? Did I take only one train this weekend, or two, because I took one down and another back? When I take the train again, will I take the same train a) because it is Amtrak, b) because I might take the same 10:40 train, c) because it is the same route, or d) there will be different cars, so it will be a different train? (expansion on an email ramble that got all stuck in my head)

also, sac-<sf train info: take the train from sac to richmond ($16, but it fluctuates. takes 1 hour, 40 minutes.), then the bart from richmond into downtown SF (to 16th & mission is $3.85. takes 45 minutes.). OR: train from sac to emeryville ($16), amtrak bus from emeryville to downtown SF ($5). the greyhound goes from downtown sac to downtown SF (mission and 1st) for $32 round-trip, or $18 each way, which seems to be a constant price. amtrak has more leg room and trains are more fun. amtrak does not necessarily not smell less like piss, though. sit on the west side to see the bay, and the C&H sugar refinery (left side going north; right side going south).

failure and hypocrisy

... I think it's worthwhile again to note the distinction between hypocrisy and akrasia, or simple moral weakness. This is an important distinction, albeit one made more difficult by the fact that "hypocrite" has entered the English language in a way that akrates has not. That word tends to get translated as "incontinent, lacking self-control," but it's literal meaning has more to do with powerlessness. Those of us who are not all-powerful sometimes fail. Such failure does not always, or even usually, entail the insincerity that is the hallmark of hypocrisy. It also does not involve the duplicity of hypocrisy—the notion that standards exist for thee but not for me.

from slacktivist: All you need is. a blog post about a guy's favorite part of the bible. bible-schmible, but I occasionally appreciate bits of other texts about philosophy and/or myth, so why not this.

comic

Transmit 3

or something

anyone want to answer my drupal question?

the Mac OS X Color Picker

question

why do DSL modems need to "train"? (be connected and turned on for a longish period of time--ours says 10 days). the only clue the sticker gives is that it has something to do with speed.

training: "A process where two modems try to establish a connection over the telephone (voice frequency) line." from this Paradyne master glossary (pdf). Paradyne is a company, and the master glossary has isp things in it. so: training handshakes with the isp, and optimizes the frequency data is sent at; being able to send data at lower frequencies means that you can send data at a faster rate. "fast retrain" refers to an ability that some modems have to adjust to use more of the bandwidth (take over voice frequencies) when the phone is on the hook, and ignore (attenuate!) those same frequencies when the phone is in use. from this DSL sourcebook, also put out by Paradyne. this doesn't explain why it might take 10 days to optimize.

(this question came up because we just got a Zoom ADSL modem at work.)

being interesting

"how to be interesting": this is fucking pretentious. Not that I don't aggree that it's really important to observe, process, and engage with the world: I think that people being fully engaged with their world is one of the most important things. But it's narrow minded and blindly privileged to suggest that the best way to engage is to take digital pictures, blog, and podcast. It's also dangerous to think that "interestingness" is, as it's portrayed, a superficial goal, intimately connected with being a creative professional, and you choose to "become interesting" for the admiration of others (or the blog readership, or career boost).

blogging can be a great way of processing information, but it is by no means the only way. taking photographs isn't the only way to look more closely at the world. creative professionals are not the people who most need to know that they way they percieve and process the world is valid. I think it's really important for people to analyze their experiences themselves, rather than using other filters—companies/advertisers, tv, magazines, music, newspapers—to define how they think about things. but what's the good of blogging it if you don't talk about it with your mother? why take a photograph of something when you could point it out to whoever you're walking with? how will you podcast your discussion with your grandmother if your only internet access is at the library?

uh, and, that wasn't the intended audience at all, was it. I guess the insecure bloggers who might take this to mind without taking the underlying idea (engagement) to heart are all set up for this list. also: do shit because you're interested in it, not because you want to be interesting. holy shit, that is obvious. and beyond that, it's radical and Important to be engaged. but the internet as the absolute engagement? as the panacea?

I need to go buy raisins.

Flatland

word I could not remember

hypo- thesis

Introducing JSON

Content Templates (Contemplate) | drupal.org

word

gooseberries

forum topic about apples

internet word

always wanted to grow up to be a bus driver

dolphin with legs

internet dream

wordpress wish list

• bulk tagging interface
• captcha for comments (exists, wish it was already installed)
• speedyness

pinhole camera

my dad keeps reminding me that:

road sign fonts

in this context: "imitation" != bad (at a glance they look fine), "free" ~= free for noncommercial use.

• imitations of both the new (Clearview) and older (FHWA Highway Gothic Series B/C/D/E/E(M)/F) highway sign fonts: Roadgeek Fonts (free)
• Minnesota Department of Natural Resources recreation symbol font (linked on Roadgeek Fonts page) (free)
• There are currently two fonts floating about on highway signs: FHWA Highway Gothic (series) and the recently (2004) approved Clearview. more about Clearview.
• imitations of UK road sign fonts (free)
• another US look-alike is Expressway, aka "Blue Highway" by Larabie fonts. too tightly kerned (but that's adjustable). one face is free.

adjective

presidential speeches

casio ex-z750

point and shoot digital camera search

Leica C-Lux 1, in black: so pretty! also, $500. I am really frustrated with my camera's performance under low lighting that I've started thinking about my Christmas list. found this great comment thread on point and shoot digital cameras at 37signals, and I'm inclined to listen about the Fujifilm FinePix F30. I've been daydreaming about a digital SLR, but IRL I know I'd hate lugging it around.

the lecia is also sold under the panasonic lumix brand. exact same camera, less expensive and different body. aparently it has a full manual mode! super-unusual in a point-and-shoot.

comic about lesbian sex

Jeopardy says watermelon is a gourd

filling my media rda

christmas present

where do I go to vote?

the Sacramento County polling place lookup gives me a picture of where I'll go to vote.

accessible tables

<table>
    <caption></caption>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th></th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <th>(row label)</th>
            <td></td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

text sizing of some websites

random sites on my semi-regular reading list:

nytimes

sets body text size as keyword small, everything else in %.

themorningnews

sets body text as 12px. not resizeable in IE.

zefrank.com/theshow

sets body text as 9pt. not resizeable in IE.

using firefox blinds me to text-size problems, I can resize anything.

37signals' Campfire

standalone trackback

nonprofit research collection

quick online photo editor

links: myspace for community organizing

• Myspace--Tentative Best Practices
• putting a submission form on a myspace page
• hyping myspace and youtube for community organizing
• from the conference call today: "they have to do 45 minutes of educational before they go to myspace" -- I'd like to make a myspace profile that was an educational space...

nonprofit web 2.0 public relations

community planning for public health