Journal entries for December, 2005

Yesterday they delivered the new furniture for my room, and it finally feels like a living space again. What's more, it finally feels like my living space (sorry Andrés for evicting you). Soon after I got home from work around 7am, the Rooms To Go truck showed up bearing wonderfulness.

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Usually I try to avoid posts that are simple links to other sites, but looking at Cute Overload is such a mood improver that I can't deny anyone the opportunity. It's basically just a blog where they post pictures of cute things, but really it's more like a perpetually flowing font of happiness. I literally find it difficult to avoid giggling when looking at this site. And by most reports, I'm quite heterosexual.

Here are some of my favorite entries. If you can really look at these dispassionately, without a single high-pitched sound escaping your lips, you're dead inside.

• Delicious!
• Rule of Cuteness #9
• Whatevs
• Homework
• Rule of Cuteness #8
• C is for Cookie
• Staring Contest

Heehee :)

Today I had restless sleep, and that often seems to lead to interesting dreams. Or perhaps it's just the waking up at odd hours that lets me remember them. I'd be kind of concerned to discover that these kinds of things are going on in my unconscious mind every night and I'm just not aware of them. Although it'd explain a lot.

This time I dreamt that I was wandering around some kind of university or apartment complex somewhere in the US, and I realized I was close to the apartment where Tony and his girlfriend lived (My awake self doesn't recognize who his girlfriend was, though apparently in the dream I was friends with her).

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Bah, the comment spammers seem to have discovered my site. I've gotten about 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. In frustration I wrote up a quick captcha feature for my comment submission form (Captchas are those images with the distorted text that you type in to prove you're a human), but now I'm not sure if I should use it. That puts the burden and inconvenience of preventing spam on the users, rather than on me, and that's not fair. Maybe I should just keep deleting them manually. Of course, 702 of the 891 comments on the site were left by users with BinRock accounts, so I guess I could just require captchas from anonymous users. That might be a good compromise.

Version 1.0 of the Ruby-based web development framework, Ruby On Rails, was released last week, which prompted me to revisit it. I'm very happy — they seem to have eliminated most of the complaints I had with it (mostly things like instability and inefficiency), and it now appears to be a perfectly usable development platform. Last time I tried it, back around version 0.12.1, it had some issues like deadlocking with 100% CPU usage when it encountered a syntax error in your code, and doing redundant things like saving all your objects in the database with every page load even if they weren't changed. Both of those are fixed now, along with pretty much all the other more minor gripes I had with it, so I think I'm ready to embrace it on BinRock.

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I read about myheritage.com, a site that uses facial recognition software to tell you what celebrities you resemble. I tried uploading a few photos of myself, and here's the results.

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I constantly find myself slipping into the comfortable, habitual attitude of reducing strangers to caricatures. When I scoff at someone on the road who drifts out of their lane and into mine, and then minutes later I find myself doing it myself. I have to keep reminding myself that it is my tendency to forget about people's humanity and treat them as if there were nothing more to them than the tiny part that I can currently see.

This is explained very effectively, and at the same time humorously, in The Monkeysphere. I found myself thinking, "Yes, exactly!" with each sentence I read. I think you will enjoy it as well.

When I got out of work on Saturday morning, I headed out to CompUSA in Carolina to try and find some computer parts. The drive turned out to be longer than I remembered, and when I finally got to the store I realized that I was already at least half of the way to El Yunque. So when I couldn't find any of the parts I was looking for, I said what the hell, and continued on to El Yunque to take pictures.

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I've gotten really into the abominably-named Frou Frou, which I discovered on the Garden State soundtrack. I was interested in hearing more of their music, and it was suggested to me that I check out the solo albums put out by the singer, Imogen Heap. Now that's a name I can feel good about telling people I listen to.

So I found the album on Amazon and got ready to order, only to realize that the CD is copy protected.

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The Pope is about to abolish the doctrine of Limbo. Before his death, Pope John Paul II summoned an international commission of theologians to come up with a "more coherent and illuminating" doctrine in tune with the modern age. The commission is going to recommend that the concept of Limbo be replaced by the more "compassionate" doctrine that all children who die do so "in the hope of eternal salvation".

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I realized today that my photography has been exhibiting a definite trend towards more experimentation — first long-exposure night photography, followed by the opposite, high-speed photography, then astrophotography, camera tossing, the Holga, and stitching panoramas. I'm about to start experimenting with infrared photography, and eventually I still really want to get a large format view camera.

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I went to see Rent last night. It was another Life Aquatic-like experience — I knew it was based on the Broadway play of the same name, but I had no idea what the play was about, and hadn't heard any reviews one way or the other. And just like Life Aquatic, I was surprised by how much I liked it. It didn't quite capture my attention with obsessive delight as Life Aquatic did, but I did leave the theater convinced that I'd buy the DVD when it came out, and today I went to Borders and bought the soundtrack.

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The pictures I took at the Botanical Gardens with Andrés and Amy were among the files that were lost when my external hard drive was stolen during a party at The Compound. I've still got the web-sized versions here on BinRock, of course, but those are no good for printing. I've always mourned the loss of those photos; even moreso now that I have a nice photo printer. But then yesterday I realized — those were scanned from film. The original negatives and prints should still be around somewhere; most likely in one of the many boxes I shipped down here when I moved back to PR.

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On the first of every month, BinRock's web server logs are automatically analyzed and I get a report. My favorite part of that monthly report is always the list of search terms that brought people to my site. For the last year or so, I've been making a monthly friends-only post on BinRock listing the most amusing of these search terms for the previous month. The only reason they aren't publically accessible is because I fear it would only serve to further convince google that my site is a good place to find pictures of naked frat boys. So for those of you who don't have accounts on BinRock, I've gone ahead and cross-posted all of those entries to LiveJournal. You can see them all here.