scrap pad

PayPal

building blocks

sketchbook

chinese pantry staples

helvetica

writing docs

weekly video

image styling

camera

media access

nothing-but-the-best: genius and praise.

blog post on physics' "Cult of Genius" at Cosmic Variance. via uncertain principles. I was pretty disillusioned about people calling me "smart" in highschool, especially after leaving the MSSM because of low grades.

also, this article on praise at ny magazine.

democratic presidential candidates

It freaks me out that the Democratic party starts off the pres. campaign by fighting amongst themselves. Wouldn't open discussion and working towards some sort of consensus be the best way to come up with a good-for-the-nation candidate, rather than tearing eachother down? The race for the primaries isn't constructive at all. ugh.

so this New Yorker article proposes Al Gore and his possible Lincoln-like strategy: let the others factionalize, he'll keep clean. And step forward if he's needed. sounds like a "duh" now. via kottke.

two lists from McSweeney's

• adding the letter "g"
• "hi, I'm a mac" commercials, repurposed

molding plastic

admirer

joey of asofterworld on being a secret admirer:

The internet is full of people to secretly admire. …

What ever happened to secret admirers? Are they just stalkers now? If you notice someone, if you pay too much attention, that's weird.

phrase

computer scientist

cc MP3 Player for websites

Vikings spoke Icelandic.

avalanche on the highway to Tahoe

Code Igniter

charcoal

MapGuide

how it used to be

women as web leaders

I really, really appreciate Anil Dash's response (The Old Boys Club is for Losers) to the women at web conferences kerfluffle that Kottke set off the other day. He responds to John Gruber's (daringfireball) "women aren't interested" bit too.

You’ll note that nowhere in that list do you find gender, race, creed, or any other such parameter. Those things are completely unimportant to me when organizing a conference. (Or, really, when I’m doing almost anything.)

(Eric Meyer) Why is it only affluent white men who think that society will work if we pretend that divisions just don't exist?

why caffeine helps headaches

headache + caffeine study at the New Scientist (oct 2001).

Tension headaches are characterised by dilated blood vessels around the skull. Caffeine constricts blood vessels. "It is that vasoconstrictive effect that probably explains its effects," says Diamond.

drupal unpleasantness

word usage hate

I hate when survey results are reported and respondants are cited as "admitting" that they [do some behavior]. It casts the behavior as bad while at the same time it implying that respondants all practice it&emdash;whether they "admit" it or not.

present in many news articles about surveys, but spurred by this bbc article on how information addiction is worse for you than marijana. also obnoxious: taking obvious claims and hyping them 'till they're beyond ridiculous.

php scraps

software: GeekTool

word: "bricked"

spamusement

ArcMap gripe

custom gradient fills in ArcMac 9.2

so you can fill shapes with any color gradient you want.

1. open the "style manager" from tools -> styles -> style manager...
2. in the left pane, expand a folder (probably want to choose the c:\documents and settings\username\... one)
3. create a "color ramp"
   1. click on the "Color Ramps" folder in the left pane
   2. right click in the right pane, choose new -> algorithmic color ramp...
   3. fiddle to create a gradient, hit ok
   4. name the gradient.
4. click on "fill symbols" in the right pane.
5. right click in the left pane, choose new -> fill symbol...
6. from the "type" dropdown in the top center of the window, choose "gradient fill symbol"
7. dig around in the "color ramp" dropdown to find your gradient. they're not labeled, or ordered (apparently).
8. bring the "intervals" number up a bit: more "intervals" = smoother gradient. I do 25.
9. fiddle. edit the outline color if you want. hit ok.
10. name the "fill symbol". close the style manager.
11. to use the new gradient fill symbol, double click on a rectangular color swatch in the "layers" pane. choose the thing you named. it will be in any pane where you select "fill symbols" like that.

ESRI's help article on Creating fill symbols in ArcMap 9.2.

wrapping handlebar tape

how to wrap handlebar tape. I wrapped starting at the bottom of the bars, going from the inside to outside because I ride on the bottom of my bars and tend to put my weight twisting outwards.

wrap inside to outside

self-tightening when you ride on the bottom of drop bars, rotating hands outwards

wrap outside to inside

self-tightening when you ride with your hands on the top of the bars, pulling back

also, I put a pic on amazon.

film fest

bike tires

skinny bicycle tires

netflix friends

calculated fields in ArcMap

newline in vbscript

TAM on tv, soon

color picker option

Excel

career

childbirth

Solaris

I love the shape of the backwards (uh, Cyrillic) 'R' in this title from Solaris:

(Solaris, part two)

Solaris, by the way, is a Russian science fiction movie made in 1972; it is really really beautiful, and I'm angry that I missed the last 15 minutes of because the disc was scratched. It uses a lot of ambient noise, long shots, and that thundery noise you make by shaking a big sheet of metal. It's weird, and not terribly realistic, but it's not cheesy either.

interactive genetalia

online bike stores

bike tires

handlebar tape

what I want is the same stuff I had before (ugh, change): thin white vinyl non-sticky tape with a criss-cross pattern. unfortunately, it was just random lying around the bike kitchen stuff, and nobody actually sells it anymore. so, the options:

• this actually might be the same stuff: eBay: Benotto Handlebar Tape NOS White. Most Benotto tape is vibrantly colored, smooth, and translucent, but they had some solid colored "waffle" tape; I suspect mine was that sort of Benotto. ($7)
• new old stock Olmo handlebar tape - red. this is approximately the same stuff, but in a more appropriate color for my bike. ($13)
• Fizik handlebar tape - the modern stuff. red. slightly padded (as opposed to completely unpadded) and pretty flash. it might be more comfortable for longer rides. ($20 at the local bike shop)
• cork. lots of colors, supposedly really comfy. ($15 I think)

I enjoy obsessing about ridiculous tiny junk; maybe I get too caught up in it.

word: peloton

both sides of the coin?

cell phone

I want this phone, but for Sprint (because that's what my dad has): Nokia 1100. I used it this summer and it is tiny, light, has killer battery life, and good predictive text input.

another option is the Samsung SPH-M610. It has a really sharp screen, a 2.0 megapixel camera, and is matte black, thin, and un-ornamented. The menu screen is accebtably ok-looking, too.

also, the Samsung A900, which comes with a usb cable. it has too many buttons on the outside, but it's not silver, and it connects to my computer! and I could set my old number muncher sounds as a ring tone. (I could do that on other phones too, I guess.) the menu is ugly and the phone is chunky (who am I to talk about chunky cell phones?)

(My old cell phone is mostly still in good shape, except its battery slips out sometimes.)

building wiki content

snow chains

sacramento webcam

valentine of web 2.0 companies

gadget blog

british food

ms vista design flaw

Multimap API

backup

LED lightbulbs, and entitlement (I've got it too)

backing up an office full of windows

VISTA Health Benefits

paternalistic

cell phone typing

giant ships

on indie music and money

home remedies

"sous vide" cooking at home

professor anne pringle

I'm listening to an NPR story on a woman who's researching an invasive mushroom species in California, the "death cap" mushroom. She says:

It's a challenge to study something that's so different from you because, you know, a fungus is not a human, it's not an animal, and it doesn't act the same way, so you really have to think hard and challenge your assumptions about everything that it's doing.

Her collegue says, "Fungi are really cool." (On the Trail of the Death Cap Mushroom at npr.org)

food deserts

kvass

East Germany movie

social networking for bikes

more where that came from

oh man I am way too much on the bad similes/metaphors these days:

outer space is relevant like novels are relevant: noone is eating them, but they sure look delicious!

the idyllic bubbles aren't gender-free zones (gender is hot), but are spaces where gender is redefined/more free; my idyllic Earth still has air on it (air is awesome) but it's cleaner, fresher air.

interacting without gender would be like everyone wearing hazmat suits, all the time.

Drupal question

I asked this on the CTC VISTA Project Drupal wiki page.

Can anyone tell me about Drupal's "file access" features? It seems like it just points to files at "drupalinstall/system/files/filename" and controls access there, but the files are still available at "drupalinstall/files/filename" without access controls. Am I missing something? Do I have to put something in the .htaccess file to restrict access to the "files" directory?

drastically different character shape in italic vs. regular

nice new font in windows vista

Anil Dash mentions Segoe UI, based on (or, a copy of) Frutiger.

Also, wasn't there excitement earlier this year about a bunch of Windows fonts that were new for Vista? (Segoe wasn't among them at that point) Ah, yes: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, and Corbel.

space exploration like cathedral building

ie, by the rich, for the rich, to make certain people more rich, and offhandedly lend a bit of "progress" to the general population, which they will have to pay for by letting the rich walk all over them, but justified as a natural and important pursuit of the human mind. oh, wait, the article doesn't say any of that.

eminently quotable speech on the "Real reasons" of space exploration. via kb, who calls bullshit but agrees anyway. quotes (incl. quotes of quotes):

When you do things for Real Reasons instead of Acceptable Reasons, you have a chance to obtain Real Success. And so we have a conundrum. The cultural ethos in America today requires us to have Acceptable Reasons for what we do. We must have reasons that pass analytical muster, that offer a favorable cost/benefit ratio that can be logically defended. We tend to dismiss out of hand reasons that are emotional, or are value-driven in ways that we can't capture on a spreadsheet. But, Acceptable Reasons alone don't take us where we really want to go.

In my view, the space business more than most other endeavors suffers from the fact that the most important, the best, and the most basic reasons for doing it are Real Reasons and not Acceptable Reasons.

"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing," by the character Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde's play "Lady Windermere's Fan."

the JFK quote about space that I love more than anything in the world, because it evokes exactly the things I'm talking about here tonight, was the one he gave from this lectern at Rice University in September of 1962, when he said "We choose to go to the moon, and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

endangering children

superbowl commercials

superbowl commercials on youtube. there are 51! (I suspect some are duplicates, but didn't bother confirm). nothing spectacular, but a few are ok:

• Kevin Federline for Nationwide. KF is gross, but he ends up in fast food, which is ok.
• eTrade bank robbery. everything just happened so fast!
• Toyota Tundra. It drives over a see-saw! and they say the word "tranny" in an entirely-too-reverent tone.
• Doritos spicy/cheesy/crunchy/bold. contest winner. cost $12.79 to make. slate says, "...bad news for highly paid advertising professionals. Get ready for a whole lot of sub-$15 ads," which is dumb because not only did the kids who made it not have to pay people/rent things/etc, but doritos paid to hold the contest. while I'm all for the idea of people making media just with resources available to normal people, it's really inaccurate to say the ad cost $12.79 to make. It's like saying brownies don't cost anything to make, because there is already brownie mix in the pantry and eggs in the fridge.

yellow

current unfortunate obsession

Darby Ram

movie to look forward to

tracked changes in word docs

pretty

trash can mouse trap

femperialism

"femperialism" - a discussion of "how feminist language and institutions have been used to further the aims of American imperialism". great radio discussion, especially before the first break. direct mp3 link. via brownfemipower.

also, it's good to hear someone say that non-Muslim/western women can speak with Muslim women for the rights of Muslim women, and in general that the liberal reliance on "authentic" voices can become a way of validating our unwillingness to incorporate other viewpoints. It's not the *job* of oppressed people to "educate" others about oppression; it's the job of people on the outside to listen, probe, rethink their/our own actions and beliefs, and then find a way to add their/our voices in a non-oppressive and constructive way.

brownfemipower also linked this cleverly named article: "The Missionary Position." I am reading it, but slowly.

dates and times in python

tagging and laziness

I am too lazy to tag blog posts. instead of tagging I make sure certain words appear in posts, or I say the same thing in different ways in the same post, so I can find stuff by searching. that's why I title some things "phrase" or "christmas present," why I make sure to have both "bike" and "bicycle" in bike-related posts, and why I add "mac os x" whenever I mention software for mac os x. etc. eventually I want to do some sort of statistical tagging, probably involving word frequency and clustering.

which reminds me, why didn't I link kottke's post on "tag frequency and popularity acceleration" (re: his tagging of his own blog) when I first read it? I'd like to do stuff like that, except without having to actually tag anything.

also in the course of this thought: I've made 1300 posts to this blog over the past 487 days; that's an average of 3/day if I take out 60 days of traveling this summer (2.7/day if I don't). that is more than enough content to start playing with (if only I weren't lazy).

html forms, css

haich

"I hate Macs" at The Guardian

on dildos and sodomy in Texas

11 minute clip of The Dildo Diaries (youtube). via meyer. from the very end:

... and they reinstated heterosexual sodomy in the penal code. Warren's at the front mike and he and Talmadge Heffman are high-fiving and slapping eachother on the back—a big double victory—and some of the guys in the press box called over the sargent at arms and said, "Sargent, we want you to go over and repremand both those men because under provisions of the amendments just passed by Representative Chisam it is now illegal for a prick to touch an asshole in this state."

sorry for spoiling the punchline.

cheesy but interesting.

David Sedaris on Letterman

on what goes on in programmers' heads

"every single day they come out with a total exploit"

question

story by joey comeau

doesn't answer my Al + steel question

online survey tools for nonprofits

skip lists

bike racks

comment I left

I commented on Eli's posting on being queer and what it means about who you sleep with. (update: the comment discussion has continuted in an awesome way)

[from another commenter]I am one of those hopeless romantics that thinks, if you've got no problem with the dynamic or your partner's identity, and she or he feels the same, then why does it matter? who cares whether the relationship itself is gay, straight, or whatever?

I've found it really really difficult to have a relationship without identity. As a woman who is attracted to both men and women, but who is not at all interested in being a guy's girlfriend, I've found it really difficult to have a regular (> 3 weeks, non-long-distance) relationship with men because the relationships always fall into that girlfriend-boyfriend pattern, even when I am explicit about that dynamic being a dealbreaker. It's not about being romantic, or even the chemistry between me and a guy; it's just that when someone else percieves only part of my identity, it's like being whittled down to fit that round hole [square peg, round hole]. The same mismatch often happens around lesbians; I'm not a lesbian, neither am I straight. (I'm a dyke-identified bisexual, or a queer woman, or something).

Identity is how we place ourselves in society; how can we have social relationships without identity? The I'm-ok-you're-ok thing is great in theory, but gender (in whatever form) is so important; interacting without gender would be like everyone wearing hazmat suits, all the time. A workable model for some things (having a "business lunch," talking on the phone, handling chemicals) but really not how anyone actually works. So when our identity is not what society dictates/expects, hashing it out is kind of necessary. So I think what makes us queer is that reworking of our identity. Even if our identity superficially fits with a societal norm, there's a path and a process behind it that we are constantly aware of (ball of string in the labyrinth). The gender or sexuality that the world expects of us is a starting point and not a final answer.

revision: ourselves/we/us/our should be more like myself/I/me/mine.

update: 2nd comment.

I am enjoying these responses as much as the original post... esp. your touching on heterophobia; it's something I noticed in myself a while ago but was never quite able to articulate.

I meant to convey something about gender not being optional; As part of a gendered society, we do operate in gendered ways. Whether or not they're traditional gendered ways, whether or not we "want" gender, and whether or not we are working to change ideas of gender.

About it not being possible to "create an idyllic bubble of protection outside of those forces": the idyllic bubbles aren't gender-free zones (gender is hot), but are spaces where gender is redefined/more free; my idyllic Earth still has air on it (air is awesome) but it's cleaner, fresher air.

california ski report

web thinking cards

what will she do next?

burning multi-session dvds on mac os x

BurnAgain DVD, burns multi-session dvds easily. I'll try it next time I need to burn a dvd (tonight). Apple's Disk Utility can burn multi-session disks, but you have to burn from an image, and I don't have the disk space to make images of everything I burn. I tried Disco today and it's ugly (unreadable text, clashes with everythine else) and awkward (didn't ask me to name the cd I burned, I was unsure of what preferences would be applied to the disc I was burning). also, what is with the black? did I mention how ugly it is?

the article that pointed me to BurnAgain DVD also mentions Monolingual, an app that deletes unused language files (oss/free), Xslimmer, an app for intel macs that deletes the ppc part of universal binaries (crippleware), and Burn, an os x disk burner that unfortunately doesn't yet support multi-session burning (oss/free).

update: BurnAgain DVD didn't recognize DVDs in my drive as writable media. so that's useless.

to do in sac

slide rule watches

unicycles

bizarre unicycles. unicycles are weird to begin with, but that page details the tall, short, multi-wheeled, etc. recumbant unicycle!

unicycles are usually fixed gear, but several on that page are not: the 1.5 wheeled unicycle and the one-directional unicycle. there are multi-gear unicycles on that page, but you have to stop and change gears manually. not on that page is the "guni," geared unicycle, with gearing inside the hub, which you can (with some skill) change gears while in motion (by toeing/ankling a button on the fork, I think?). there are only two gears, a 1:1 ratio (normal uni) and 1.5:1. (gleaned from this forum discussion of shifting on geared unicycle hubs) thanks for the distraction, ben.

graphing & data analysis software

phrase

so high-level it's funny

2006 movies

twitchy dancing

flights

After April I will have flown 10 times in 12 months. I have never flown this much before. I'll have paid for 4 of the 10 flights.

schedule: sac->washington on april 3, arriving 7pm est. washington->florida on april 6, leaving 9:30pm est. florida->sac on april 10. whirlwind. I am fantasizing about bringing my bike, but that's ridiculous.

cory doctorow interview

reasonable