A Cataloged Spillage of Thought

2010-03-08T00:47:00.004-05:00

Hi there,

As you well may be able to tell, this blog is currently defunct and is no longer being updated.

I’m leaving it up here as I occasionally have to sift through it to find this article on fixing my keyboard layout in OS 10.

I keep telling myself that I’ll archive this and revive it all, but know deep inside that it’s probably not going to happen, and that I’d rather write the more intimate things things down with a pen and paper.

Thanks for swinging by, and do check out the book and the hackfest.

Edward

2007-09-04T22:17:00.001-04:00

I found this little gem through Venkat Subramaniam and company's blog on development on OS X: Nocturne is a Mac app that acts like a night vision mode that provides some super snazzy high-contrast for those times when you need it most (to save power, or in bright situations, etc.).

2007-08-25T10:13:00.000-04:00

As seen on Reddit: (SFW) pictures of people's first reactions to goatse (if you don't know, don't look. There is such thing as knowledge that should not be sought.)

2007-08-25T09:37:00.000-04:00

(As seen on Drawn!) Letterpress and its results never fail to make my mouth water: (According to Creative Techs, this documentary was made by Chuck Kraemer, and originally posted in DesignGeek. More about Firefly Press in Somerville, MA here.)

2007-08-25T09:34:00.000-04:00

(I think this was a few clicks away from a Hack A Day post.) Behold! A singing Tesla coil!

2007-08-25T08:07:00.001-04:00

I woke up a little earlier than the rest of the house this morning and had some time to trawl through my rss feeds, which yielded this little gem of a find from metacool: my dream kindergarten [as reported by Monacle].

2007-08-21T21:03:00.001-04:00

How cool is this?

2007-08-17T00:13:00.000-04:00

Settlers of Catan manifests itself on Craigslist; behold

2007-08-15T21:00:00.000-04:00

Here's a little Canadian rock from the Joel Plaskett Emergency (as heard on an old CBC Radio 3 podcast I found the other day):

2007-07-21T15:16:00.000-04:00

A pretty snazzy ad for Renault:

2007-07-21T09:34:00.000-04:00

I forget how I found it (probably through chronic checking of reddit and its programming section), but this post-mortem of a webapp called Jonkenpon by a guy named Yong Fook is well written, entertaining and informative. Also referenced is a new project by the same guy that turns out to be really snazzy: Open Source Food — think of a dedicated Flickr on food with recipes.

2007-07-15T23:21:00.000-04:00

A holophonic recording: you really need to be wearing headphones to get the full effect, but man is it worth it. How many of you turned your head at the beginning?

2007-07-09T18:29:00.000-04:00

Women in art through the ages (from drawn.ca)

2007-07-04T23:43:00.000-04:00

Keeping up with the recent videos, I present... a super cool dance to some Daft Punk:

2007-06-27T20:05:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure why but I find this hilarious, especially the third time around.

2007-06-24T20:51:00.000-04:00

(realized while listening to Sam's new badass mixcd) If someone wrote a vocoder that laid Schwarzenegger's voice over as a lyric track on RHCP's Dani California, it'd be like a humour-based immediate diuretic.

2007-06-22T11:52:00.001-04:00

Photosynth looks cool.

2007-06-13T00:39:00.000-04:00

While the Safari 3 beta might be easily exploited, I’m actually finding it entirely useable (on the Mac at least), unlike its previous incarnation. Its in-page finder is particularly snazzy, though I wish I could remap keys innately, without having to look for some plugin. I’m still keeping Firefox around for its awesome development plugins (namely Firebug), but I’ve had it with its memory and CPU hogging and random keyboard non-responsiveness.

2007-06-09T10:33:00.000-04:00

How stupid awesome is this? A lot. Massive props are sent to Connected Ventures to producing this bitchin' one-shot, one-take corporate lip-synch fest of Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger.

2007-04-08T12:50:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten has a great write up of their experiment to see what would happen if one of the finest musicians alive played some of the best music written on one of the best instruments ever fashioned in an ordinary metro. (i.e. Joshua Bell playing the L'Enfant Plaza on the Gibson Stradivarius) The result is a little disconcerting, and best summed up by the author’s analysis of W.H. Davies’s poetry:

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?

2007-04-07T16:23:00.000-04:00

This gnarly advert for Miranda July’s new book goes to show that a little creativity, a a camera, and some CSS can go a long way in terms of marketing on the cheap.

2007-03-31T18:32:00.000-04:00

Whoa, this public transport planning widget for the Northern California bay area is really cool. Anyone feel like making a simple schedule widget for the STCUM (Montréal)?

2007-03-30T20:09:00.000-04:00

Montreal is awesome and weird. Where else do municipal workers pull up to you and yell "Hey Jew!" and ask you in a genuinely inquisitive tone if rabbis can be gay?

2007-03-30T12:57:00.000-04:00

As seen at An Event Apart Boston: The Flap and Snap is where you let your face go limp, whip your head back and force as fast and hard as possible, and people take pictures. Kudos to Jason Santa Maria for the Flickr group. Example:

2007-03-30T00:59:00.000-04:00

While on the phone this morning, I realized that I think I forgot to post this presentation of mine I gave last summer on Ruby. Check it out! Even if you’re not a programmer, I’m sure you’ll get a kick out of it.

2007-03-29T00:36:00.000-04:00

Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits fame continues to rock my socks off in this presentation on juggling design and UI challenges. I wish to make stuff as cool as this guy one day.

2007-03-28T15:16:00.000-04:00

Excuse me? A fully functional paper Optimus Prime?!?!

2007-03-26T00:48:00.000-04:00

I couldn’t resist: here’s Oliver Reichenstein’s Web Design is 95% Typography

2007-03-26T00:31:00.000-04:00

I drool for good typography, so I’m awfully glad that Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton presented on why Web Typography Sucks.

2007-03-25T21:33:00.001-04:00

=== Confessions of an information junkie == WTF? Today's connection to easily obtainable and digestible information inevitably has detrimental aspects; the proliferation of information addicts being one. Being afflicted this way doesn't mean you're a scholar or a person with particularly vested interest in a subject so that you can produce something of net benefit to the community – a junkie has an endless appetite for the easily absorbed – retention and contribution are not serious concerns here. For this reason, zoning out on IRC, or any other high-traffic IM venue is another great funnel to the head, apart from the web. The destructive effects are pretty obvious: I can remember days where I would wake up at around noon, read till my stomach hurt (around 2:00pm), return to the machine, eat dinner, then go to sleep when the birds woke up. This kind of pattern lurches against everything you're supposed to do as a functional, healthy, social human being. It is BAD. If you've got this, you can at least use your addiction to try and get out of your slump by learning more about it and eventually controlling the vacuum cleaner your brain has become. If you know someone with this, push it in front of their eyes and hope for the best. == Dealing The best way for folks like us to kick our habit is to understand what's going underneath the hood (to some extent). I'm not sure what exactly triggers this behavior, but I've got a feeling that it's related to workaholism, where you're going through the motions because it feels right, without much thought as to whether you're producing anything useful. This is something beyond regular procrastination. Taking heed from an article by Sierra on the scary aspects of Twitter (a crack-like Internet service that alerts you via email, mobile text messaging, and other avenues on the status of your friends and what they're up to), the key aspects of information addiction are how learning "stuff" regardless of its immediate practicality is an “example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines.” Be aware of how your head works in this manner; when your health starts taking a beating because you're spacing out on the net, get out of your humble abode, do something productive, or just run around and be active. Go parkouring (it's fun and dangerous!). Your body and mind tend to reset themselves to a more sane state while doing this, giving you a chance to reflect on what and why you're doing. If you're a RSS hound needing that "feeling of connectedness", uninstall your client or blow away all your feeds and try living without for a week – you'll find that it doesn't make a huge difference, because you'll hear about the important stuff anyway, either through another news channel, a friend, or through directed research you're doing for something with a concrete goal and deadline (Sierra). Go call your grandparents and ask them about the last abnormal thing you spoke to your room mate or peer about; if it's inappropriate, go for it anyway – they were your age once and probably had to deal with much crazier situations than you. Doing this will satisfy your craving and let you get on with what you should really be doing. == Wrapup Be cool. Being a total nightowl whackjob that hoards information obsessively is a controllable (and eventually highly prized) attribute. You knew the solution before you started reading this, but act on it now: get out of your house. Jumpkick a tree and run through a forest as fast as you can. Call an elder and ask hard or bizarre questions that'll have an answer you're not prepared for. Godspeed, you crazy junkies. Get better. Kathy Sierra's "Is Twitter TOO good?" : http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html Also inspired by "If", by Rudyard Kipling.

2007-03-21T23:43:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of learning about the process of creation, especially when it reveals the mistakes and how they helped define the final product, so stuff like this incremental logo design process is something I'm really into. If anyone can find more like this, please comment.

2007-03-16T10:10:00.000-04:00

Facebook continues to consume all: Stéphane is apparently my friend – we go way back.

2007-03-13T01:37:00.000-04:00

In an effort to stem my recent insomnia, I thought I should shunt some thoughts out: Driving and walking around Lennoxville sometimes makes me miss all the weird things that happened on public transport. One of my more treasured memories was when I got on a bus in Vancouver (the 99 I think, towards UBC campus) about 3 years ago, and I walked to the back of the bus only to watch a small debate between two guys over the role and definition of art spontaneously almost entirely take over the bus – random strangers just started talking to each other, debating and sharing their thoughts with passion and gusto rarely seen in the brusquely apathetic and stoic public transport crowd. It was over in 10 minutes, but I remember it well, having ended my own debate with a professional photographer who eventually got into resolution requirements on digital cameras.

Something else that I’ve been thinking about is this impending thesis-that-isn’t of mine: it seems like every time I think I understand the key algorithms going on beneath the hood, I manage to pick an example to try it out on that seems to either fail horribly or make me realize that I’m missing knowledge – typically a good thing, except when you’re hoping that you’ve gathered enough material together to stew a paper together. In no ways trying to sound emo or needy, I often think about what Andrew Wiles’s reaction was when he announced to the world that he had solved Fermat’s Last Theorem, only to later find a hole that he couldn’t plug. This is a guy who had essentially dedicated his life to a problem and after a superhuman amount of concentration and frustration thought he had it in the bag, only to watch it trickle out between his fingers. Wiles managed to grind onwards anyway and fix it months after, but that feeling of desolation has still got to be soul-crushing.

2007-02-25T22:10:00.000-05:00

Truly, the world is a majestic place when friends like these are happy to see you: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=513179439&hiq=thorin

2007-02-10T17:38:00.000-05:00

Being someone who's really into watching the incremental building of things (especially when they're in high-speed video playback), Stefan G. Bucher's Daily Monster really hits the spot. Also: cartoon monsters that inspire stories the author encourages people to link back to his site about.

2007-02-07T10:30:00.000-05:00

Along with attempting to be more organized through using some demented version of the GTD Moleskine thing (I have yet to really grasp this whole Next Action/Capturing/Processing/Project thing, so I'm kind of making it up as I go along), I found this: Shovelglove: The Sledgehammer Workout Honestly speaking, I am no stranger to swinging heavy objects around for the sake of swinging heavy objects and feeling incredibly buff. However, I have yet to see someone who takes it this far and develops a full training *system*. Gill, as my personal trainer and "muscle-guy/musician" friend, could you take a look at this and tell me if I'm going to rip the crap out of my pigeonbone-like frame?

2007-02-04T21:23:00.000-05:00

Am I the only person who listens to songs in a drastically different way after having listened to it for a long while, then reading the lyrics and realizing that it's about something entirely different?

2007-01-24T14:11:00.000-05:00

CUSEC 2007 was a sweet and nutty blur; Venkat Subramaniam is without second thought *the man*. Dave Thomas (a fine speaker himself) was kind enough to take a picture of the Bishop's crew: Original Flickr post here

2007-01-24T11:23:00.001-05:00

As seen on Presentation Zen, I present to you Le Grand Content, an exercise in what seems to follow in that whole trivia gorging meme that’s been going pretty hard for the last 15 years. Or is it one of those wakeup calls to society that’s expecting that whack in the snooze button?

2007-01-14T14:21:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone who helped out move my junk yesterday! For those who couldn't make it, just think of this with more boxes.

2006-12-16T22:18:00.000-05:00

While researching for a paper on systems biology for my compilers class, I came upon Y. Lazebnik's Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? — or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis I'm a little stressed for time at the moment (said paper not completed and all), but to summarize, it's awesome and worth reading for David Papermaster's (Lazebnik's Yoda) description of the rhythm of ups and downs of scientific research fields and how the long tail of the "down" curve populates the field with floods of papers that ultimately lead to the "paradox that the more facts we learn the less we understand the process we study". Lazebnik's paper gets better. It's awesome. Read it.

2006-12-07T23:54:00.000-05:00

One of the most frequently frustrating things that happens to me is that I have these bouts of thoughts that I'd like to blog that I dream up while doing something monotonous, yet I lose track of them by the time I'm done. Tonight, while doing two hours worth of dishes (driven on by Nick Wilson’s selections on MB’s iPod), I was lucky enough to have some paper and pen nearby to jot things down on between washing and drying. A thought: people (a generalization mostly based on myself) seem to optimize their behaviour in regards to the input and output of information, as if we have some kind of processing inertia. To clarify: I spend a lot of time reading stuff. Online news, journals, articles, blogs, cereal boxes, signs, and almost anything I can see (I still remember the moment that I realized I could read; at that moment I thought that by never stopping, things would be easier). While this is partially fueled by the reading material being convenient, I’d say that I intake a lot more information than I churn out (like this blog entry). (Note that I don't actually assume all information input to come in the form of reading; it just happens to be the most evident to me.) Yet I know of some people (among myself) of accruing a drive of information output. This need not be in the form of writing (chopping firewood works too), but could be. This drive, or groove is admirable and very convenient when it happens: once you start producing, it’s easier to continue producing. I think that both could be considered work, so it’s not as simple as saying that production of a written work is more difficult simply because it requires more thought or energy, because it’s possible to read carefully and introspectively and exhaust yourself the same amount. Likewise, you could do a crappy job doing either. So I suspect that there’s some kind of inertia behind information locomotion. Possible tangents from this thought include workaholism, average email send/receive ratios and distributions over time, and theories on fun (video games are fun because they present a string of easily accomplishable tasks, etc.) and the conversion from information to knowledge and the distinction between those two. PS – Blogger: great job on the update; I'm liking how the improvements are subtle.

2006-11-02T22:24:00.000-05:00

As part of today's Subversion and Ruby tutorial I had people working on writing scripts to auto-generate emo-poetry using Ruby: Auto-Emo at Google's code hosting service Alternatively, take a look at the balloon: http://balloon.hobix.com/auto-emo

2006-10-01T15:34:00.000-04:00

While reading up on things bioinformatic for my thesis, I came upon a haiku project. I am not surprised that this is from UBC. A sampler:

DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER DISASTER fruit fly punnett squares tic-tac-toeing genotypes gives birth to Mothras ~Scheherazade

2006-10-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

Does anyone else use option-[ and option-] on their macs for proper double and single quotes, or is it just me?

2006-09-25T19:56:00.000-04:00

One day I'd like to be as cool and sincere as John Hodgman.

2006-09-08T16:48:00.000-04:00

These Amazon reviews are sheer genius: Looking For--Best of David Hasslhoff

2006-09-01T13:51:00.000-04:00

From Aldous Huxley's “The Art of Seeing”, 1943: “Avoid, if possible, being bored yourself or boring others. But if you can't help being bored or being boring, learn the art of seeing for your own benefit, and teach it to your victims for theirs.” (page 28)

2006-08-29T01:49:00.000-04:00

Two little lines added to my ~/.bash_profile have brightened up my day:


# Add colour and always report human-readable file sizes
alias ls='ls -hGF'

# Always run top, sorting by cpu-usage (descending)
alias top='top -u'

If anyone has a better colour-scheme, please pass it on.

2006-08-28T14:09:00.000-04:00

From Kathy Sierra's marketing & sensuality: unboxing.com (I kept and lugged my Macbook box from Vancouver because it was so nice.) My summer in Vancouver is complete: work at the GSC on visualizing the mapping of a specific cancer's genome continues. Dr. Nelly Khouzam's algorithms class mattered significantly as I was dealing with millions of rows in a Postgres database and I could really feel where speed tweaks had to happen. The end result was going from an 8-hour process to a 5 minute process. It felt good. Ruby is a fine language to use and teach (thanks go out to my students who braved my classes for the last 4 weeks). The current plan is to head to write a bachelor's dissertation on Hidden Markov Models with a genomics slant, and head to UBC for a masters in Bioinformatics in a year.

2006-08-07T13:20:00.000-04:00

1 … 2 … 3 … … … Belugacam

2006-07-29T14:21:00.000-04:00

Update on the Google subversion server: It continues to suck the big one. It takes about an hour to upload 33MB.

2006-07-29T05:40:00.000-04:00

Camilo and I are trying out Google's new SourceForge replacement, with mixed results. The actual interface and issue tracker are very slick and intuitive. However, the subversion backend is *incredibly* slow. I'm betting that someone didn't expect the subversion repositories to be under such duress that they didn't throw more hardware at the problem, but the end result is me spending like 30 minutes _checking_out_ a small Rails project. This is crazy. I'm hoping this'll be fixed in the next few days, because I'm itching to start putting it through its real paces.

2006-07-22T23:05:00.000-04:00

While reading a Slashdot review of an XML book:

XML: You killled my father! HTML: No, XML....I am your father! XML: That's impossible! HTML: Grep your code...you know it to be true. XML: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

2006-07-22T03:05:00.000-04:00

Recommended intake:

DNTO talks art, suffering, and inner peace with Weezer's Rivers Cuomo This week, in honour of graduates everywhere, Sook-Yin Lee chats with Harvard's most famous grad of 2006 - Rivers Cuomo of Weezer. Rivers talks about writing some of Weezer's biggest hits, suffering for art, and how he's started to make peace with himself. Download DNTO talks art, suffering, and inner peace with Weezer's Rivers Cuomo [mp3 file: runs 00:31:30]

Crossing borders: Explore functional programming with Haskell

2006-07-17T15:05:00.000-04:00

For those interested, check out the top banner pic at CUSEC's site. That's me between Chad Fowler and Adrian Marcoux. Go Bishop's!

2006-07-16T01:41:00.000-04:00

Curious what my desk setup looks like at work? Take a look at this.

2006-07-16T01:24:00.000-04:00

Something that's bugged me about OS X's Terminal is its default key shortcuts: the home and end keys don't do what I expect, and holding ctrl+arrow keys don't skip around words (which is really useful once you get in the hang of it). Even "cmd" from Windows has these key behaviors. The fix: Check out /etc/inputrc and /etc/profile to make changes system-wide (of course, you can make this specfic to only your user account by using ~/.inputrc and ~/.bash_profile). This is my /etc/inputrc:

# Be 8 bit clean.
set input-meta on
set output-meta on
set convert-meta off

# allow the use of the Home/End keys
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line

# allow the use of the Delete/Insert keys
"\e[3~": delete-char
"\e[2~": quoted-insert

# mappings for "page up" and "page down" to step to the beginning/end 
# of the history
"\e[5~": beginning-of-history
"\e[6~": end-of-history

# alternate mappings for "page up" and "page down" to search the history
# "\e[5~": history-search-backward
# "\e[6~": history-search-forward

# this lets you hit tab to auto-complete a file or 
# directory name ignoring case
set completion-ignore-case On

# these allow you to use ctrl+left/right arrow keys
# to jump the cursor over words
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word

and this is the relevant line in /etc/profile

export INPUTRC=/etc/inputrc

2006-07-16T01:23:00.000-04:00

(Disclaimer: I've been putting off the writing of these posts for a while, but I've been keeping track of topics I wanted to cover, so here they come...) Quicksilver is a really good interface idea/implementation. Coming from a Linux/command shell mentality, Quicksilver is like having a better "locate" that doesn't just hunt for stuff, but makes a learned guess at what you want to do with the thing, and it sorts the guessed actions by what you've done most often. So typing in ctrl+space (what I've set as the command that brings up Quicksilver) then "fi" will show me a list of most common stuff that it thinks you want to do/run. Hit "enter" and it'll run Firefox (in this case, the first returned item). But that's just the tip of the iceberg; I use it for uploading stuff to Flickr by selecting and copying pictures from anywhere I can see them (usually from the Finder or in iPhoto), calling up Quicksilver, pasting, and typing in "fl" to bring the "Upload to Flickr" item to be the ready action. It's awesome, and should really have a screencap to demonstrate how nifty it is at throwing pics at Flickr. (See the Flickr plugin-specific documentation here for more.)

2006-07-16T00:57:00.000-04:00

Maki's Pizza: West 39th and Dunbar, Vancouver Fri Jul 7 19:41:28 PDT 2006 I figure that the form of the blog allows for a way to send the same relatively impersonal news update without leaving the reader jilted, so I might as well exercise it. Life for the past month has been surprising and save for getting gently hit by a spacey SUV driver and winding up in the hospital due to the worst reflux-inspired heartburn known to man, things have been pretty awesome: (Roughly chronological) * I've a summer job working at the Michael Smith Genomics Institute doing mostly Ruby and Rails-based stuff. Things are currently being planned out in regards to what my summer project will be, but it looks like I'll be building a web-interface to a large (we're talking petabytes here) database that'll be used in mapping genes linked to lymphatic cancer. Jon Ben, Keltie, and Anand have been kind enough to let me sleep on their couch. Thanks guys. * Early on in starting my summer job, I lucked out and ended up with a brand new 20" iMac on my desk. Getting used to it, I decided to pour the greater portion of my summer cash into a 2GHz Macbook with 2GB of RAM. It's really nice and very snappy, but it gets hot enough that I usually end up putting a clipboard or something underneath it when it's on my lap. I don't really care though, given that it's on a desk 98% of the time. In regards to why I switched from Gentoo/Ubuntu, I agree with most of the thoughts laid out here * I lucked out and met up with my friend Rob White from elementary at a bus stop next to work. Walking back to home, we saw a bus throw blue sparks. It was cool.

2006-06-26T20:22:00.000-04:00

This happened a little while ago, but a few friends of mine finished the summer Internet Programming and came up with an unofficial survey for where we'd like wireless access and how much we'd pay for it. Take a look.

Flock 0.7

2006-06-15T12:05:00.000-04:00

This is a Flock 0.7 test.

2006-05-31T09:25:00.000-04:00

I think there's something wrong with the air in my apartment. Usually, I only get this scratchy, suffocating feeling in the mornings, after I wake up, but last night it was too much to the point where MB and I had to get up and head back to her place. Anyone know of a DIY test I can do to see what I'm breathing, and where it comes from? Some side notes:

my apartment is pretty small (like < 300 sq. feet of space plus a *small* bathroom)
I have an air duct+fan in my bathroom that is probably clogged with 30 years of cack (I think I'll take a look at this now)
My fridge makes this really bizarre gurgling sound when I gently pull on the door, creating what I think is a pressure difference somewhere, forcing air into where there's water (which... shouldn't be anywhere in the fridge)

2006-05-25T12:20:00.000-04:00

"I want to say Cyndi Lauper, but it's Leo Laporte" -Me while in the Limocar bus to Lennoxville Wed May 24 11:27:42 EDT 2006

2006-05-18T11:38:00.000-04:00

Developing essentials on MB's Mac:

Developer Tools (or fink-ed set of the gnu tools)
Subversion
Textmate
Postgres
Ruby & Rails
Firefox

2006-05-17T20:10:00.000-04:00

Anyone know what happened to Rick Swan (the guy who used to write Swan Song in Inquest magazine)?

2006-05-09T18:15:00.000-04:00

Using InDesign makes me feel like I'm signing my credit card slip at the grocery store with a baseball bat: it takes forever and using it makes me look stupid.

2006-05-09T17:17:00.000-04:00

Work is progressing slowly. I am amazed that my childhood wasn't videotaped with time-lapse techniques, given my glacial pace.

2006-05-02T21:06:00.000-04:00

Thanks Kathy! For the incoming readers from Kathy's blog, there's not much to see here apart from my personal mumblings and exclamations. So I'm going to direct you to links of much greater awesomeness: - Mary Beth keeps me alive and echoes her efforts here - Skrud won the coolest geek award at Concordia this year. I go to Bishop's, so I'm not jealous. He does however write meaningful posts, which does make me a little jealous. - Harley is now a grad student in Bioinformatics. - Jon Ben discusses board games and astrophysics - Keltie talks about the life and times of a med student at UVic - Nick (nicknamed "Evil" because he really isn't) shows what it's like to be a hardcore unicyclist (yeah! Go muni!) well versed in Anglosaxon. - I mirror my friend Simon's Infinite Courage webzine (sadly no longer updated). I highly recommend the Rhino Assault Saga and Hetero Buff World. - Devin sometimes talks about Canadian politics and biking into hard things at night while blind. - Benjibopper writes short stories.

2006-04-18T00:56:00.000-04:00

OH CRAP! Listen to this awesome mashup, and let Futurama ring around 4:30 in! http://www.theothernight.co.uk/theothernight_1.mp3

2006-04-18T00:24:00.000-04:00

So after an awesome trip to Boston and MIT (and its fantastic swapfest), we found a new hard drive for MB's melancholy iBook. Tonight we installed it and sunk back into our flaming geek lifestyle of sitting in the same room, enjoying the high-speed wireless, IM-ing and calling out Chuck Norris facts (MB got a new CN dashboard widget, so I've got to script up something fast). But the shining moment of tonight was when I made MB laugh in the same room as me, only to get "lol" MSN-ed to me. Oh boy. Nous sommes tres geek, la la.

2006-04-14T01:50:00.000-04:00

Trying to break out into this nutty world of financial independence, I just found out that Canada Revenue has this really snazzy guide to how to feed Canada's tax system. My favourite image so far has got to be Paul the spaced-out 17-year-old recent labour force addition. You tell 'em, Paul!

2006-04-08T16:46:00.000-04:00

[Edward realizes that there's already a del.icio.us javascript linkroll generator that works nicely and uses it.]

2006-04-08T15:39:00.000-04:00

I like trees. So ectonoha is really cool. I also like icons. So this and this are also really nifty. [I should really write a script to slurp my del.icio.us posts of the day and dump them here.]

2006-04-08T01:41:00.000-04:00

My brazenly intelligent little brother has a blog here. I watched a girl fall asleep (completely KO-ed) in a lab exam today. I would have taken a picture had I not been so set on calculating 50-something uncertainties (it would have also been a little too creepy). I thought about my near constant state of sleep deprivation that I slogged through during cegep. Emacs no longer fits me. It doesn't feel right. It was fun to try, but the complexity of it all got to me. At one point I wanted to change the amount of spaces the auto-indentation function used, and found myself trying to understand an entire indentation engine language. I just want to use 4 spaces! So now I use Kate. If I was cool enough, I would have stuck it out with Emacs or Vim, but I just wanted an editor that remembered sessions, had a file explorer on the side, used a decent syntax colouring scheme for C/C++ and Ruby, and indented things in what I perceive to be a simple manner. I also like editors that let me hold down ctrl+ or to skip around words. Having text insertion cursors stay where they are even when I scroll the window away from them (I couldn't figure out a way to do this in Emacs) is also something I like. I'm not sure why though. What I did learn from Emacs is how sexy incremental searching is. I used it with Firefox and "less" as well as Archie before, but Emacs did it in an almost intuitive way (hahaha... I said "Emacs" and "intuitive"...). I wish Kate did this with ctrl+r or something. (Has anyone used ctrl+r in bash? Isn't it cool?!) Skrud is so much cooler than me because he's on Typo; something I'm thinking of moving to once it plays well with Rails 1.1. Good news seems to be approaching. Future project: I want my website to be as cool as Christian Montoya's

2006-03-11T02:19:00.000-05:00

Emacs would be so much cooler if instead of having games built in, it had modes for ruby, subversion, and ECB as part of the base install. A soft word wrapping feature that doesn't break syntax highlighting and incremental searching would also be really nice. (I'm really surprised this isn't here already.)

2006-03-10T01:25:00.000-05:00

From today's networks class I've gleaned two magical responses:

"For legacy/traditional reasons": whenever you don't really know why something is the way it is, this is right more often than misleading.
"Databases": unsure of how your data/algorithmic model could be applied in the real world? It's probably used in a database, in some special situation. Somewhere. Sometime.

I don't intend to be mocking the class here. I just find it astounding at how these two responses can be nigh-universally applied. Awesome. In other news: - Tufte's books on data visualization techniques are really cool. Especially his essay on the cognitive style of Powerpoint (and how it blows). - After emerging/installing emacs-cvs with gtk2 support enabled, I think I might start using emacs more.

2006-02-17T16:29:00.000-05:00

I *must* get started on this idea I've had kicking around for a while now: Based on Kathy Sierra's post and Skrud's reply, I want to get started on a web-based frontend to Alexandria so that people can see what you've got kicking around. I think it would be cool to introduce some kind of a borrowing system as well.

2006-02-05T12:05:00.000-05:00

I'm terribly behind on blogging. In future posts: - CUSEC 2006 - My hatings on C - Old English and its awesomeness In this post: - J9 sports a really smooth diskless install that totally works. It's beyond comprehendable levels of niftiness. Laptop users who can boot off the network can boot a fully working version of Linux by plugging in a network cable and booting. It's slick. Great job Chutz, Scott and Tom. - The LELLUG released its first podcast. I don't know where it is right now, but I'll post a link when I do.

2006-01-04T14:31:00.000-05:00

MmmYeah! Chapters.ca shipped both Ruby on Rails and Programming Ruby yesterday, and Canada Post delivered them today! Go major metropolitan center living!

2006-01-04T02:03:00.000-05:00

Mike Sample has created a set of Bishop's Magic cards that I find quite awesome: http://www.shutterbook.com/albums/bluemike807/45157 In other news, I've finished another book by Douglas Coupland: "Girlfriend in a Coma". Although it's an easy read and the overall feel to be enjoyable (especially due to all the Vancouver/West Coast references that make me feel cool), I felt the ending (i.e. the last few pages) to be a letdown in comparison with the feeling of the rest of the book. "Microserfs" remains to be my personal favorite in the Coupland line.

2005-12-20T23:48:00.000-05:00

I've managed to dump like 6 hours of my holidays on fixing my cursed wireless situation at home. As previously mentioned an umpteen amount of times, I have a habit of unknowingly purchasing the crappiest wireless routers known to man. Someone on a forum alluded to a version of firmware that I was at one point using as an abortion. I think that's putting it delicately. The best I've managed is to get 128-bit wep working, which is frustrating, given that both my card and router supposedly support wpa2 (aes). In other news, I've been making my way through this muli-gig compilation of Aliens, Predator, Terminator, Aliens vs. Predator, and Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator. The situations are interesting, but the one where Robocop is the origin of Skynet's self-awareness is fairly screwed up, but still amusing.

2005-12-02T20:45:00.000-05:00

I tried to give a motorist the middle finger today, but I found out that wearing mittens impedes the delivery of the obscenity. It just looked like I was saying "hi", which really wasn't my true intention. Lesson learned: take off your mittens before you flip someone the bird, or you just friendly.

2005-11-24T09:28:00.000-05:00

Yay! Now I only have to check *ONE* site every 5 seconds to fuel my geek-news addiction: http://slashdigg.com Being prompted by Arthur's recent success, I've managed to get OS 10.4.1 working almost perfectly on my Frankenstein-like Vaio. The only that needs work is the Atheros wireless card and my Fn keys to adjust sound and volume. Woo hoo!

2005-11-10T16:54:00.000-05:00

I learned by chance earlier this year that one of my Computer Science professors, Dimitri Vouliouris, is an incredibly talented photographer, but I keep forgetting to post links to his online galleries. Behold: http://flickr.com/photos/dimitri/ http://www.altphotos.com/Gallery.aspx?&a=MemberGallery&memberid=3950

My grandmother, Gabriel García Márquez and myself

2005-11-10T13:07:00.000-05:00

Gabriel García Márquez
Originally uploaded by Edward OG.

I finally found the scanned photo!

See the Flickr commments for context.

2005-11-04T21:18:00.000-05:00

So in lieu of someone warning me not to faceplant the asphalt while unicycling, I proceeded to put on a backpack, throw off my balance, and faceplant in front of some random strangers (correction: MB knows them and thinks they're bad people - Ed.). I am fortunate to have only scrubbed my hands and gotten frustrated. I think having proper pads would be a good investment. Companies I want to work for right now are Silverorange and Design Continuum. I think I'd really like to get into Industrial Design -- Computer Science is really not what I want to end up doing. Or maybe technical writing. begin naïveté> I know that I want to get into something involving structured creativity where quality and functionality (more usabilty, really) are the highest priorities. I think the most important aspect of a dream job would be an environment of passionate individuals who give a shit about what they're doing, and not treat it as the space between 9am-5pm that generates income. /end naïveté> I'm going to experiment with Ruby on Rails this weekend.

2005-11-03T22:14:00.000-05:00

I found out that due to course selection screwups in my first semester, I may be doomed to 4 years at Bishop's instead of my hopeful 3.5. Curses. At least it gives me a chance to suck up any failures of difficult classes coming up. An excerpt from Cohen's Intro. to Computer Theory (midterm is tomorrow):

We have already wasted enough thought on the various degrees of nothingness to qualify as medieval ecclesiastics; the desire for more precision would require psycho-active medication.

2005-10-21T23:28:00.000-04:00

I was looking for a radio station to listen to tonight and ended up at Last.fm, powered by Audioscrobbler. In the words of audioscrobbler.net, "The Audioscrobbler system is a database that tracks listening habits and does wonderful things with statistics", which is to say that it can do a pretty good job of guessing what kind of music you like, and its accuracy improves the more it's used. Last.fm has done a great job of hooking into the recent wave of social networking-based web services that are storming the net by tapping into audioscrobbler's service, while working as a regular radio station by having music labels feed them tracks and cash to run the network. Check it out: Last.fm

2005-10-14T21:45:00.000-04:00

I'm hoping that I'm not jumping the gun, but my hard drive seems to have been revived after I took it out and gave it a few good raps to free any stuck heads (I remember hearing such advice a while back while sifting through hardware repair stuff). The backup begins...

2005-10-09T14:11:00.000-04:00

My Sony laptop finally gave up the ghost as I heard the hard drive crunch itself into oblivion today. While on one hand I am bummed out knowing that I'm not going to have a computer for a while, I am also relieved. To me this particular laptop represents almost 3 years of emotional trauma - everything that I've seen go wrong with a computer has, but to this specific machine. It's been a constant source of unreliability and frustration, and I haven't done something mean to it because of how much the cursed thing cost in the first place. I'm pretty certain that I could restore it to operational status by replacing the hard drive, but I think it would just be prolonging the pain. I'm certain that something else will bust in the short term future, and I don't want to be stuck counting the days until certain failure. I think I'll be taking a break from owning a computer for the next while. I've got a backup machine, but I'm hesitant to use it knowing that it'll be just like before, but slower. Maybe there's someone at the swapfest who wants this semi-broken laptop more than I.

2005-09-27T18:40:00.000-04:00

The Dylan hackers have won the ICFP this year. Their insightful writeup is here.

2005-09-26T23:23:00.000-04:00

In between my deluge of recent Mathematics homework in its form of 4 courses, I read these quotes.

2005-09-19T14:34:00.000-04:00

Yeahhh!!! Thanks for coming out to the CS party everyone! (Sorry if I beaned anyone too bad with those apples.) Take a look at Dimitri's fantastic shots here (and TURN UP YOUR SOUND!): http://www.shutterbook.com/albums/dimitri

2005-08-04T08:08:00.000-04:00

This has to be the coolest 404 page I have ever seen. Play Zork in a 404 page? Yeahh!!

2005-08-03T07:50:00.000-04:00

I haven't written in a while, mostly because I've done too much since last writing to really communicate properly. Summary: Travelled around Prague. Keywords: Glen, Marquis de Sade cafe, beer, Joe the Irishman, Captain Planet, and those Australian girls who led Alain and I to the train (upon which we didn't have tickets for a while). We also saw "Against Me" in an underground club, which turned out to be a fantastic show. I bought a book on St. Ignatius of Loyola. Travelled around Munich. Keywords: Deutsche Museum, old computers, flocks of swans, incredible urban parks. I confused two German people to speak English to each other, then asked why they weren't speaking German. They realized what they had just done, and were surpised themselves. KDE in the cafes. Assembly 05. Lots of computers. Lots of women (for a lan party). Demo scene. Met Steven Chiang (EA), and Richary Huddy (ATI), and a developer for Remedy who wished to stay incognito. Best game I've seen in a while: Shadowgrounds (currently being developed by Frozenbyte). Incredible demos. Sleeping on concrete, stadium chairs and eating pizza hut and Hesburger (McD equiv.) for 4 days and 3 nights. Stories of Boozembly. In other news, my bike seat exploded off its post while I was riding to work. I totally did not expect it.

2005-07-14T16:07:00.000-04:00

Librarian Farts in Library: People Snicker Sarah Chan and other clients of Samhurst Library in Greenwood, Ontario found themselves unable to stop themselves from chuckling and snickering under their breaths following unexpected flatulence emitted by head librarian Sheila Farmeadow. "Like dragging then dropping a big wooden desk on linoleum" was the description offered by a relatively unknown and otherwise unimportant professor from the community who happened to be sitting in a cubicle in the proximity of what he described as an "event horizon". A Librarian Union representative called the matter "unremarkable", and noted that "it's not that funny, it's a natural human activity". This reporter turned around and promptly let loose a fiery air biscuit causing their tie to flutter in the wind. The representative was not available for future comments due to a lack of a functioning respiratory system.

2005-07-14T15:59:00.000-04:00

Local DDR dancer immolation Randy "Bending" Holzenberg caused a recent fire in Powerfinger Arcade in Vancouver last Tuesday by accomplishing 43 perfect games of the most recent version of Dance Dance Revolution. Powerfinger regular Dave "Supershorts" Bannen comments: "I remember watching this guy for like, 3 hours straight - I couldn't believe it. This guy looked like someone took a 127 pound nerd's body, injected a baseball player's dosage of steroids all into his torso and legs, and gave him the flair of Ricky Martin, circa a few years ago, when he was hot shit - excuse the terrible pun. "So I'm watching this guy fly along, I turn my head to stare at a rare arcade-going chick, and when I look back at Mr. "I dance robotically so fast, I should be on fire", he was actually on fire. I feel really bad for him, he had a really good high-score record going here, but I don't think he'll ever break his previous record. Also, it looks like he toasted the machine. Bummer. Arcade officials were not available to comment, but a note was left on the still-smoking remains of the machine, asking customers not to mimic Holzenberg's "disco-inferno" ways, and to play safe and not do drugs. Mr. Holzenberg is in serious condition in the intensive burns ward in Vancouver hospital. His family asks that any letters of support be kept respectful. Holzenberg's sweat band will be eBayed shortly.

2005-07-14T15:45:00.000-04:00

14 year old girl suffers IM-related injuries Sally Biscuitweaver of Moosejaw, Alberta suffered severe internal injuries after an extreme ROFL during a chat session with a friend last Sunday afternoon. "Dude, I'm never describing my bowel movements with that much lucidity ever again" said a friend of Ms. Biscuitweaver. Local parental action groups are lobbying against the usage of such acronyms during online instant messaging and written-chat-related activites, citing them as being the root of computer-related injuries most affecting teens today. "For someone who reads real slow like me, it's very important that I'm not surprised by an explosion of feelings, or else I might not be able to handle it so well" says Corina Dewaty, co-author of "Emoticons: Friend or Explosive Foe?", and local parent. An anonymous Moosejaw school librarian condemns the negative hype surrounding the incident: "Are you kidding me? The kid was probably reading Meme Pool or Fark while on speed. Anyone who LOLs that hard has got to be on something." Ms. Biscuitweaver is in stable condition at a local hospital and will be undergoing MSN ActiveTherapy during her therapy.

2005-07-08T19:40:00.000-04:00

I've just uploaded a whole bunch of pictures to Flickr. They're not organized, except for the Airsoft set It's messy. I'm sorry. Enjoy.