Journal entries for April, 2005

Well, I think Liz's family received a warm welcome back to the island. Check-in time for their hotel was 3pm. Their flight got in at 6pm, so they headed to the hotel then, and the room wasn't ready. Finally around 8:45pm, as I was getting off work, they were finally let into their room. The hotel offered them a free meal at the restaurant in compensation, and they invited me to dinner. During the meal, the power went out several times, finally going out and staying out. I pulled out the three mini-flashlights I keep in my bookbag (take that, Jing-Ta, it is useful to keep everything with me after all), handed them out, and we went in search of stairs to climb the 14 floors to their room. We couldn't find them, so Liz and I headed off and her parents continued searching for a way up to their room. They called Liz later to let her know they had gotten up to the room, but the power was still off and there was no water either. I offered repeatedly to let them stay with us, but they refused. They did, however, accept two bottles of water to use for brushing teeth, and Liz took a shower here before I took her back. I hope the rest of their vacation can live up to the high standard set for it on the first day.

You know those roads that are marked with an unrealistically low speed limit, and everyone sort of ignores? Like the section of Hwy. 76 that passes through Clemson, which is marked 35mph but is basically a highway deserving of something like 55mph. Or Kennedy Expressway in PR, marked 45mph but is a long, straight road with no exits or on-ramps. I usually drive 65mph on Kennedy and it feels completely comfortable.

Tonight on the way home from dropping Liz off at her hotel in San Juan, I was making my way back on Kennedy at 2:30am. The only other car on the road was a cop car with lights blazing, as they always are here. Naturally, I matched his speed, but the lights were pretty much blinding me, so I nudged forward until I was just in front of him. He then got on the loudspeaker and said, "You're going faster than 40, you know."

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Liz arrives today, and will be visiting for a week. Andrés arrives tomorrow, and he will be here for two and a half weeks. I've accumulated four vacation days from working weekend shifts over the last month or two, so I'm taking Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday off. That means today is effectively my Friday, which is awesome.

After Liz regrettably leaves, Andrés and I are going to see if we can make a weekend trip to St. Thomas to visit Rose. A few weeks after that, I'm going to Cedar Point with Bryan and Cat. Around then, Michelle and Andrea get down here for the summer, and they'll be here for 4 months. So for the next few months, at least, my solitude seems to be in a temporary reprieve.

Liz's plane gets in around 6pm, so the plan is to call her when I get off work at 8. Just have to make it until then and I'm home free.

Today I went out for my lunch break and planned to get the car washed. However, halfway to San Patricio it started raining heavily, which very effectively turned the excursion into wasted time. Very clever, to keep it bright and sunny here in San Juan, so I would be fooled into heading out and using up my lunch break for nothing.

While making my way around San Patricio, I drove through a huge puddle, which sent torrential sheets of water cascading away from my car, absolutely soaking a guy who was walking on the sidewalk with an umbrella. I felt bad, but couldn't help finding it hilarious too.

As I've become wiser to the ways of the world, the two puzzling sections of one of my favorite songs finally fell into place.

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Weird Al is a musical genius. I know he's mostly known for his parodies, but if you listen to some of his originals, like ‘The Night Santa Went Crazy,’ ‘Since You've Been Gone,’ ‘You Don't Love Me Anymore,’ or his magnum opus, ‘Albuquerque,’ you can't help but stand in awe of the man's masterful ability to craft a song that makes you laugh while actually being very enjoyable musically.

A few months ago I read this essay written by Orson Scott Card on his thoughts about gay marriage. It was such a disappointment to discover that a writer I like so much holds such an intolerant, narrow-minded opinion.

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Interestingly enough, being stuck down here all alone has actually helped increase the number of friends I consider close. In Clemson, I kind of focused all my social energies on the select few friends that occupy the "Govies & more" group on my buddy list, to the exclusion of most of my other existing friendships.

Being down here and unable to spend every minute of every day hanging out with Meg et al. has forced me out of the comfortable hiding hole into which habit had driven me, and caused me to broaden my net and reestablish contact with all the friends I had fallen out of contact with, or that I'd never really gotten to know well.

While my life is still very lacking in physical interaction, socially I've actually improved, and I'm now good friends with a much larger group of people than the small circle I was limiting myself to before. I hate having to grudgingly admit that something you'd cursed and despised has actually been beneficial to you.

And so BinRock acquires yet another useless feature. I've added revision tracking; now when I edit a post, it remembers the changes, and you can now view the changes made between any two revisions of an entry. Of course, it's pretty uninteresting for now because there is only one revision available for all the posts made until now.

So the question is, what good is this? I don't know. Nobody cares about seeing what mistakes I've corrected. It's another of those features I add just because I like the idea of it, and want to see if I can do it, regardless of its usefulness. The next improvement should be a little more worthwhile though. I'm going to fix all the form processing scripts so that if you don't enter all the required fields, it will save your input and warn you nicely, rather than yelling at you for your stupidity and throwing away what you typed just to add insult to injury.

I made a half-hearted attempt to go fly the helicopter today. I woke up at 10am, so I had plenty of time, but Harold doesn't get out there until 1pm so I didn't want to leave just yet and wait around. So I did some other stuff, worked on binrock, etc, and then when noon came around I didn't feel like leaving. Finally around 3:30 I showered and loaded the helicopter in the car and set out. It was starting to look dark, but I figured if I didn't get to fly the helicopter, I could at least drive around and take pictures or something. But then as I passed Dorado it started raining, which basically rules out both options, so I turned around and headed back. The rain was dastardly enough to wait until just after I passed the last exit before the second tollbooth to start falling, so I had to drive helplessly towards my second wasted 70¢ like cattle to a slaughterhouse. ...A slaughterhouse that charges you 70¢ and lets you go free, I guess.

So anyway, I paid $1.40 to go for a scenic drive in traffic. All in all a good day.

I've always hated talking on the phone, mostly because telephonic conversation seems to consist mostly of accidentally talking over each other and having to stop and say "sorry, what?" To me this seems like a flaw inherent to the design of the telephone; you can't see the other person, so you have no indication when they are about to start talking. Online chatting lacks this feedback as well, but the software enforces serialization and cleanly puts the messages one after the other. Talking on the phone is sort of like chatting with a program that prints the messages as soon as you type them, even if the other person sent something at exactly the same time. That kind of conversation would have exactly the same problems. So with such a critical design flaw, I just don't understand how the telephone has gotten so popular. It seems like it should have been a flash in the pan invention that quickly fizzled, like the pogo ball.

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Wow. Apparently for the past month or so my mom has been going through my photo gallery and downloading the photos she liked best, and compiling a coffee table book with them. She just got them in yesterday, and showed me when I got home from work. It was a really pleasant surprise. I feel a bit awkward having a book of my photos though, especially since she ordered a few extras so I could give them to friends. Hehe, offering someone a book of your photography feels so egotistical. Kind of like handing them a promo headshot of yourself as a christmas present or something. Fortunately, I have the excuse that my mom made it, so I don't have to take responsibility for it and can just enjoy having it. :)

SeaCode is a startup whose plan is to buy a $10 million cruise ship, park it three miles off the coast of California (just barely in international waters), and fill it with software developers hired in places like India. By registering them as "seamen," they fall under international law, and US laws like having to pay payroll taxes and requiring immigration visas don't apply. They will work 8-10 hour shifts, 24 hours a day. "Try to get American software engineers to work at night," says Cook. (heh.)

I realize that legally, there's nothing to be done to stop this kind of thing. But I just don't understand how such obvious attempts to skirt the law can be accepted idly. I kind of miss the days when mob justice took care of things when the law couldn't.

(Poetic justice now dictates that my end will one day come at the hands of a frantic mob in a style fit for The Onion's horoscopes.)

Working during the day means there is no longer a 12 hour communication delay between my boss and I, and so I'm kept more busy. However, it's not really all bad, because Luis tends to be quite happy with the work that I do, and so being given more projects means I get to receive more frequent praise for doing them well. So it ends up being sort of nice being able to get things done so quickly and get straight to the acknowledgement of my efforts :) Like a carrot on a stick. I am a simple being.

Hehe. I'm playing Rachel's — Systems/Layers at work. My coworker Fernando tried to be diplomatic: "It sounds like the soundtrack for a movie or something, how the mood changes gradually."

My boss was less so: "Bullshit! It sounds like the music my grandmother played when my grandfather died. I'll be right back, I'm going to go puke."

We just replaced the shower curtain in the hall bathroom with a shower door, and I like it much better. But I've encounted a fundamental flaw in its design.

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Apparently the Banco Popular website has spontaneously evolved consciousness, like SkyNet, but the poor thing is lost and scared in a big new world. I dunno why it thinks I'm the one to ask, but I'm flattered.

I read the other day about how Nine Inch Nails is giving away a multitrack audio file of their latest single online. It's in Apple GarageBand format, so anyone with a Mac can open it up and do whatever they want with it.

...Drag the file over to your hard disk and double click it. Hit the space bar. Listen. Change the tempo. Add new loops. Chop up the vocals. Turn me into a woman. Replay the guitar. Anything you'd like.

...I've now heard a country version of the track as well as an abstract Latin interpretation (thanks, Leo). There are some copyright issues involved, so read the notice that pops up. Giving this away is an experiment. I'm interested to see what comes of it, what issues are raised and what the results are.

--Trent Reznor

I think that's cool as hell, and I wish more bands would do that. Of course, with all the fear that record companies have these days about MP3s, I can imagine how they cringe at the thought of giving away a multitrack recording.

Bah, I managed to stay up until 11pm last night, but I'm still up at 5am and can't get back to sleep. I hate the feeling of impending doom, knowing that if I can't get back to sleep I'm going to be falling asleep towards the end of work, yet there's nothing I can do about it. The more you want to go to sleep, the harder it is. Oh well, I guess I should have known it wouldn't be that easy.

In the past few years, LEDs have become more efficient and thus gradually transformed from indicators to illuminators. It’s nice that flashlights and stoplights and taillights can be made with low-power-consumption LEDs, but it seems like the change is universal and there is now no such thing as low power LEDs anymore. Last night was the first time in a long time that I went to sleep in the dark, which allowed me to discover that the amber LED on the front of my computer is bright enough to illuminate the room.

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(Sung to the tune of Perfect Circle's 'A Stranger')

Nice things about working during the day:

• Sleeping in the dark (so nice! I should do this more often)
• Finally get to use my $75 Oakleys (what a stupid purchase, especially for someone who worked at night)
• Seeing other humans/Not feeling like I'm on the set of 28 Days
• Free mallorcas each morning (Ugh that would be bad long term)

Downsides:

• No longer have daytime hours free to do things like renew driver's license
• Daytime environment at work a little less laid back
• Can't just leave headlights on all the time, since I actually experience daytime driving now
• Other people in my bathroom stall!
• Traffic, I have not missed you.

Every morning as I drive down the long gradual hill behind my house on the way home from work, there is a huge flock of pigeons congregated at the bottom of the hill pecking at food.

(There's usually more than that). As I approach, they inevitably wait until the last possible minute before scattering in a flurry of feathers that envelopes the car.

For weeks, I've pondered the phenomenon.

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With my 25th birthday and everything, I've been feeling a bit of remorse about the uncontrollably swift passage of time. I know I'm not old yet, but I'm older than I want to be. Sort of a quarter-life crisis, as it were. But George Carlin says, "Life is a series of dogs." And I'm still on my first. It feels like Chelsea has been with me all my life, and that's almost true.

And sure, she's getting a bit old, but the fact is, if my first dog is still alive and well, I don't have anything to complain about.

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Some bands or albums are inextricably linked to places, and usually cars, in my memory. Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction is driving in the Bonneville with Andrés and Bryan. NOFX - Punk In Drublic is hanging out with Bryan and Andrés when we were living in Estancias (particularly, all of us harmonizing along with Linoleum in the Bonneville while leaving the neighborhood). Goldfinger is driving around in PR in the Camry when I was in high school (particularly, passing by that no-name pizza place on Esmeralda). Snake River Conspiracy is driving around in Clemson in the Camry (particularly, looking for parking in the Calhoun Courts parking lot). Hole is pulling into the CVS parking lot in Ohio with Cat. OSI is walking along the waterway between my host family's house and the subway station in Japan. Cafe Tacuba is riding the subway in Japan on my way to class. The Cranberries is driving to El Yunque in Papi's Lexus with Andrés, Meg, and Amy last Christmas. Godspeed, Rachel's, and Thornley all bring to mind working at Xapiens, but we'll have to let them settle a while to see if they will become distilled down to a singular image like the rest.

Am I the only one who has such specific memories associated with music?

Today Natalia woke me up to come give me a hug goodbye as she left for school, and it was the best thing ever.

Today after work I stopped by the panadería for breakfast. I wasn't sure if I should order a sandwich or just get oatmeal, because sandwiches take a while to make. But I figured I wasn't in any hurry, so why not. Seconds after I ordered the sandwich, a cameraman and a reporter for Telemundo walked in the door and told everyone to get pretty because she was going to interview everyone about some current events thing. Crap. I would have felt ridiculous cancelling the order just because of that, so I just hunched into the corner with my back to her and hoped she'd get the hint. After that it was just a matter of a race between the sandwich guy and the other interviewees.

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Luis told me today that he's moving me back to the daytime shift starting next Monday. I'll be working 10am-8pm. It's weird, it's like this fundamental shift in my life. Everything I know will change again. And I'm not sure I like it. Sadly enough, I think I actually prefer the shift I have now. Right now, if I need to go to a store or get some work done on my car or whatever during the day, I can. When you're working during the day, you can't get anything done.

There's pros and cons, of course. Now it won't be a challenge to wake up early enough to go flying on Saturdays, so I can start doing that again. And hopefully I'll no longer be quite so familiar with the feeling of desperately trying to stave off sleep, which was what initially started my long descent into regular Starbucks patronage. It will be nice to have evenings free; now I can go to movies more often. It'll also be nice when friends come to visit, because friends statistically hang out much more often during the evenings than early mornings. I guess we'll see how it goes.

There's some 14-year-old girl named Katie who lives in Pompano Beach, FL and really really wants to know what my favortie band is. And apparently she thinks my tastes change often, because she asks me again every few months. I'm seldom here, so often she just gets my away message, but this doesn't deter her. Really, her persistence is touching. I'm glad knowledge of my current musical taste is so desperately desired.

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In a fit of nostalgia, I was watching old home videos and rediscovered one Andrés and I recorded around 1997 of ourselves playing music. We were tasked with watching Natalia, who was about 2 years old at the time. So she was walking around the room, apparently diaperless, and occasionally yelling out her babytalk backup vocals. However, our playing was interrupted by this event (5mb Xvid video). Babies are so lovably not in control of their body parts.

Yeah, so she's going to hate me. We mentioned the existence of this video to her a few months ago on our trip to DisneyWorld, and her embarassment was obvious; she demanded I destroy the tape. I tried to console her by explaining that we all have our embarassing moments; Andy ate poop, for example. She was not mollified. Oh well, hopefully by the time she is old enough to use the internet, this will have been posted so long ago that I can say, "it was a different time then!" as I shakily fend off her attacks with my cane.

I finally got around to implementing the feature in the photo gallery software where you can click the left half of a photo to go to the one before it, or the right half to go to the one after. If you have JavaScript enabled, it should also underline the corresponding links above and below the photo to give you a bit more visual feedback about the new behavior.

Also, if you don't feel like moving your hands to the mouse, there are now two ways to navigate with the keyboard. Details inside.

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Prof. Naomi S. Baron will soon publish an article titled See You Online: Gender Issues in College Student Use of Instant Messaging. A highlight:

For example, women tend to use more affective markers (e.g., “I know how you feel”), more diminutives (e.g., “little bitty insect”), more hedge words (e.g., perhaps, sort of), more politeness markers (e.g., “I hate to bother you”), and more tag questions (e.g., “We’re leaving at 8:00 pm, aren’t we?”) than do men. Men, on the other hand, are likely to use more referential language (e.g., “The stock market took a nosedive today”), more profanity, and fewer first person pronouns than are women.

The description of female writing style sounds very familiar to me. I don’t say “little bitty insect” (thank god), but the “affective markers,” hedge words, excessive use of first person pronouns, and relative politeness are right on the money. Maybe that explains why twice now I've had online gay friends profess their interest in me.

My old roommate Todd will be joining us on BinRock soon. I've only seen a few of his photos, but they were really good, so it'll be great to have him on here. BinRock seems to be becoming a little photography community all on its own. I didn't plan it that way, but I'm happy that's the direction it seems to be going. I wonder if it'd be worth modifying the photo gallery software to function more as a community photo gallery with multiple interacting users, à la deviantArt, rather than a series of disparate galleries that all happen to look alike because they share a common backbone. Perhaps people prefer to keep their sites "belonging" to themselves. I can see how deviantArt users wouldn't really call their DA member page "their" website, and I imagine BinRock's users might not want to give that up for the community metaphor. Besides, if someone wants to be a member of a photo sharing community, there's already sites like DA and Flickr with much larger communities. There's no need to duplicate them. Still, I like the idea of having more interaction and a community feeling. Perhaps there's some middle ground.

So today I ordered pizza (Domino's 3 pizzas for $5.55 each, mmm, way too much pizza). Since you have to have an electronic key to get to my office, standard practice is for the pizza guy to call when he arrives so we can go out and get the pizza. This guy apparently didnt know to do that, though. When I got a call on my cell phone, I assumed it'd be the pizza guy. But instead it was some woman who said (in Spanish), "Daniel? Are you expecting a pizza? The guy is out here and he's about to leave." Until this point, I figured it was the guard at the front desk calling. However, she continued in a surprised tone, "Are you here at atrium? What floor are you on? I ran all around the building looking for you but didn't find you. Anyway, you'd better get out here, the guy's about to leave. You owe me a slice of pizza."

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Man, why is it that reading pretty much any page on MathWorld leads to an immediate feeling of inadequacy and stupidity? It's like someone going way overboard with one of those jokes where they make up technical-sounding words to ridicule the concept of jargon. Except it's all real:

In many cases, the Hausdorff dimension correctly describes the correction term for a resonator with fractal perimeter in Lorentz's conjecture. However, in general, the proper dimension to use turns out to be the Minkowski-Bouligand dimension (Schroeder 1991).

I tend to feel I'm relatively well educated, but reading things on that website makes me feel like an six-year-old stumbling across his older brother's Calculus textbook. I felt the same way watching A Beautiful Mind. I'm so in awe of mathematicians. I can't imagine being conversant in all of those terms and knowing what to do with them. But I'd like to be.

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I've been trying to think of some cool project I can build with my Lego Mindstorms set. JP Brown's site details some cool Mindstorms robots he's made, such as CubeSolver, which solves Rubik's Cubes, Aegis, an auto-tracking squirrel-hunting cannon, and K9, a camera-enabled robotic dog that plays fetch.

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