Journal entries for May, 2005

I just discovered MIT's OpenCourseWare, which appears to be a repository of the course materials for most or all of MIT's courses, available for free and without registration on the web. I went straight to the Computer Science section and immediately found two courses on Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2002, Spring 2003). They actually appear to be the same course, but taught by two different teachers, and the materials seem pretty different. It will probably be interesting to go through both of them.

This website might be a godsend, since I tend to be pretty good at learning things on my own. Of course it's very helpful to have a knowledgeable professor to explain it and to ask questions of, but I can certainly pick up most of it from the course material alone. It's like it was made specifically for people like me — too lazy do do well enough in school to get into MIT, but willing to do a little extra work to learn some of the stuff anyway :)

Update: Actually, I hadn't seen the XTutor section for each course, which seems to be a full set of recorded audio lectures by the professors, along with matching lecture slides, full transcripts, and lecture handouts. There are also weekly online interactive homework problems. In other words, that's pretty damn close to what I would get by taking the course in person. Now I'm even more excited.

OK, maybe not so marauding, but I seem to have acquired a zit on the very edge of my eyelid. I didn't know you could do that. I'm quite proud of myself. And I couldn't deny you the joy of witnessing such a fine display pimplery. It's like this zit was playing chicken with his friends in a classic 50s movie, and he was the one who ended up in the classic scene with two wheels of the car hanging off of a cliff. Except in those movies, usually once the characters slip off of the car, it falls crashing into the crevasse. Or, in this case, MY EYE.

Anyway, here's the picture. Warning, it is an extreme closeup of my eye (come on, like you're not gonna look).

When you call someone on the phone, after identifying yourself, do you go right on talking, or do you stop and give them a second to process that and acknowledge you? Lately I've been doing the latter, since I know I tend to talk fast, and when you first pick up the phone you usually aren't concentrating and giving it your full attention and ready to process things. But when I say "Hey, it's Dan," and then pause, people always seem to go, "...Hi," as if they were expecting me to keep talking and are surprised they're expected to respond before I actually communicate anything. So I'm puzzled and I wonder what other people do.

Natalia and I just had a discussion about the pros and cons of vegetarianism. I was in the kitchen looking for food and she suggested I have a rib sandwich and I reminded her that I'm a vegetarian now. She explained why she thinks that it's a bad idea: "At school we're learning about the food chain. You know how the sun gives energy to the grass, and then the grass gets eaten by an insect or something, and then the insect gets eaten by a snake, and then humans eat the snake to get energy? If you don't eat meat then you don't get the energy." I replied, "Well, why not skip the snake and the insect and go straight to, well not the grass but things like vegetables? That way you still get the energy and the snake doesn't have to die." She said, "Oh yeah! So I guess I do want to be a vegetarian when I grow up" (my mom won't let her become one at this age since she is still growing and good nutrition is crucial).

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This article filled me with revulsion. It's complaining about Tom Cruise's "foolish" antics of late regarding his relationship with Katie Holmes. People seem to believe it's just a PR stunt. I don't know or care about that, but I hate how it is written with the assumption that there is a "right" way to act when you're famous, and if you do otherwise you are stupid and don't know what you're doing.

"Stay away from that Scientology stuff. How does talking about Brooke Shields drive people to the movie theater?" says Ronn Torossian, CEO of 5WPR, who has repped Lil' Kim and Ja Rule. Why does every word Cruise utters have to be carefully crafted to win him the most possible popularity per unit time?

"I don't think anyone is going to coach him," says publicist Lizzie Grubman. "He's clearly not taking p.r. advice from [his sister, Lee Anne DeVette, whom he recently hired as his publicist]. He's taking p.r. advice from himself."

And the audience gasped. Behaving as yourself, and not the carefully crafted image your publicist puts together for you? Someone stop this man before his deviant "independent thought" spreads through Hollywood like a devastating plague.

I was reading a blog entry describing a cool website that analyzes your NetFlix rental statistics, and I decided to finally subscribe to NetFlix as I've been considering for months. I clicked the link to NetFlix in the blog entry and started filling out the subscription forms.

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I finally posted about Meg and Amy's visit, but I back-dated it to help keep things chronologically consistent. I figured I'd mention it here though since it appears pretty far down the page and will probably be missed if you're not looking for it.

I remember reading about the creations of Theo Jansen years ago, but Jason Kottke's recent post about Jansen reminded me just how cool the guy is. He's a Dutch artist who has been building 'beach animals' for about 14 years now. He makes huge walking skeletons out of plastic yellow tubes, with big sail-like spines to catch the wind, which they use as a source of power. They have valves and pneumatic "muscles" that they use to move their 11-segment limbs. As this Wired article says, "Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm."

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After our unfulfilling experience with early admission on Saturday, we didn't bother getting up early on Sunday. We slept in and woke up around 11am and leisurely got dressed and headed to the park a little after noon. The weather report said it was supposed to rain, so the park was much emptier than the day before.

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Hehe, unlike Ft. Lauderdale, at the Ohio airport the wireless access costs $8 for 24 hours (though of course it's more like $8 for however long you're actually going to be at the airport). I didn't remember how long I had to wait for Bryan and Cat, but I thought it was about 2 hours, so I figured it was worth $4/hour to be entertained. But seconds after I clicked the submit button on my payment, my cell phone rang and Bryan announced they had just landed. I quickly checked my email and shut down the computer to go meet them. $8 for 45 seconds or so... Not as good a deal as I had thought :)

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I'm currently enjoying the free wireless internet access available in the Ft. Lauderdale airport on my way up to Cedar Point in Cleveland, OH to ride insanely fast roller coasters with Cat and Bryan. On the plane today I was pondering filmmaking, and considering experimenting with it. I have the equipment and software needed and know how to do basic editing. When I started considering what I might make, I realized a big difference between filmmaking and photography that's probably obvious to everyone else; filmmaking is often fictional, where you create a story and have the actors interpretit. In contrast, photography (or at least, the kind that I tend to engage in) tends to be nonfiction; finding pretty things and capturing them. I might pose the person I'm shooting with, but the photo is still meant to be a photo of the person, not a character. One of the few times I actually came up with a concept and asked people to act it out was the My Arms, Your Hearse shoot. And those are some of the few photos of mine that I actually really like.

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The week with Meg and Amy was awesome. I didn't get to write about it until a while later, because I immediately left for the Cedar Point trip, so details are kind of sketchy in my memory now, but I wanted to get something down about it.

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We had sushi for lunch today, and I discovered that apparently, Philadelphia Rolls do have meat. I thought it was just avocado and cream cheese, but apparently it has tuna as well. Damn nondescriptive names! This left me with a dilemma. It's not hard to poke out the tuna and eat the rest, but I couldn't decide whether or not I wanted to.

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Last week, I decided to try vegetarianism again, and to take it seriously this time. Ironically, it's not having Andrés and Amy here that swayed me, but rather the Simpsons (I try to base all my life-altering decisions on cartoons. It makes things interesting). Lisa became a singer and Homer was her manager, but his ways were brusque. She asked him to stop beating people up to get things done for her, and he chided, "Oh, you eat sausages, but you don't like seeing them made." To which Lisa replied, "I don't eat sausages!"

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This article on Web Browser Forensics (Part 1, Part 2) describes some of the tools and methods we use when investigating a suspected intrusion. I thought some of you might find it interesting/creepy to see how much information can be retrieved from the digital wake your web browser creates as you browse. Some of it is kind of technical, but if you're not interested in the details you can skim through part 1 and look at the screenshots of the various tools and get the gist of what's possible. Example: a cached Hotmail page.

The information described in the article is retrieved from the web browser's cache and history files. Internet Explorer ostensibly lets the user erase their cache and history, but it's interesting to note that the Content.IE5/index.dat and History.IE5/index.dat files — which contain the listing of visited URLs — are not erased when this occurs. In other words, IE will delete the cached content itself but preserves the list of URLs a user has visited. These files are locked by the operating system on startup, so they can't even be deleted manually under normal conditions. To remove them, you have to reboot your computer into command prompt mode and delete them from there. This "feature" has proved useful to us but not as beneficial for the users we've investigated.

Man, I've been getting behind in documenting my life. Spending too much time living it. OK, so Liz came to visit a few weeks ago, and it was an awesome week. Andres, Liz and I went to El Yunque and hiked down to the waterfall, although Liz didn't dare to jump down the first waterfall. Ah well, it was really scary my first time as well. On the way down, we stopped and ate awesome Puerto Rican food as is tradition, and then, exhausted and sated, drove down the mountain with the windows down and Sigur Rós enveloping us.

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Suddenly, it turns out Meg is coming down for the week as well. She called last night and asked if there was room in the house for one more. Minutes later, she had a plane ticket to come down tomorrow at almost exactly the same time that Amy arrives. Man, this week is going to be great. It'll sure be frustrating having to be stuck at work every day though. I'm trying to decide whether I should ask if I can come in an hour or two early so that I can leave early too. That'd free up more of the day when everyone is up and about, but it would mean I'd need to go to bed earlier too (or just drink lots of coffee for the week). I'll probably just do that.

Andrés and I made a midnight run to Walgreens to pick up a prescription my parents had dropped off earlier for my mom. On the way out of the parking lot, some guy in an SUV waves his hands and flags me down. Suspicious, I stop and roll down my window (inconspicuously shifting into first). He tells me he's got a magnetic oil plug for my car and asks if I want to buy it. I say no thanks. He explains that he's go an Evo as well, but it's in the shop getting painted. I nod my approval and drive off.

A minute later, I pull up to a stoplight where a cop has pulled someone over. I joke to Andrés that it'd be funny if I got pulled over, since my renewed license is supposed to be available tomorrow. A knock at the window. The cop asks me to pull in front of his car.

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Hal Bergman lives in LA and updages his PhotoBlog daily. He's incredibly talented — it's another one of those sites that makes me wistful to see, because every photo makes me yearn for the ability to produce such work.

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It's wonderful to lose yourself in Sigur Rós as the convoluted mountain road of El Yunque unwinds itself under your tires.

Someone with lots of time and a crippling obsession for Zelda created HySpace. Get Old Man's sage insight on a life spent living in fire-lit caves. Read Fish Man's thoughts about life in the sea (sadly, he doesn't say "qveeee!"). Be sure to check out Lord Jabun's profile. And I can tell you right now that no, you probably won't find this funny unless you too have an unhealthy obsession with Zelda. But if you spent your childhood fighting LikeLikes and Digdoggers and being mad about how Error's name doesn't make any sense, you might enjoy it. :)

Some kids at MIT are having a Time Traveller Convention this evening. Their intention was for it to become so widely publicized that it would be remembered far into the future, so that if time travel is ever invented, people can travel back in time and attend.

They've specified exact coordinates for the event in latitude, longitude, and time. However, a few things worry me. First of all, they don't specify altitude (i.e. distance from the center of the Earth). Warping in just 50 feet off in either direction could be unpleasant. Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that the Earth is travelling at 30 km/sec around the Sun. Being just a few seconds off in your calculations would place you in the bitter cold of space. Even if you do match the speed of the Earth, you need to consider its rotation, and warp in with the right amount of lateral velocity. At the equator, the surface of the Earth revolves at 1670 km/hr. Warping in without matching that speed would send you flying into a wall at around Mach 1.4.

One last concern, as pointed out by a Slashdotter:

Seeing the location depicted so accurately, I have only one fear...

Telefrags.

The things one finds while browsing WikiPedia at random. I came across the programming language called COW (WikiPedia entry), which is written in a language that cows can understand. Since the only word that cows know is 'moo', all commands in COW are variants of the word 'moo', with differing capitalization.

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Yet another Saturday spent at work. I can't complain, because I do it by choice to earn days off for vacations etc, but it still gets tiring. Since tomorrow is Mother's Day, Luis suggested that I work half a day today and half a day tomorrow, so that Deoscoidy could take a few hours off tomorrow to spend time with his family. We ended up not doing that, but the idea is an intriguing one that sounds like it would make a nice regular schedule — one weekend, you work Saturday and Sunday for 5 hours each, and the next weekend, you get one day off (say Friday). That way every other week you get a three-day weekend, and the weekends that you work aren't TOTALLY consumed by work, so it is still kind of like a free day. Of course, there's also the possibility of just working one full weekend shift one week and getting a day off the next. Each has their pros and cons. I guess the ideal setup would be to be able to pick between the two each week depending on your plans for the weekend. Hmm, I might have to run that idea past Luis sometime...

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I've been growing closer to Chelsea lately, mostly since I've stopped ignoring her existence altogether. It's really nice how she is always at the door waiting for me to get home from work now. One more little nice thing about working day shift.

Last night I had a dream where my subconscious apparently took that growing closeness to an extreme. In my dream, I realized I could communicate with her at a basic level. I sat down and asked her, out of curiosity, if she could catch me a mouse. She got up and started to walk off, apparently to do it. I stopped her and said that's OK, I don't actually want her to. She lied back down, but then started singing a song about mice.

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When I walk down the hallway to the bathroom at work, some of the tiles in the false ceiling pop up and sometimes vibrate noisily as I walk past. I assume it has something to do with a vacuum created by the air conditioning system, and a pressure differential caused by my approach. But I can't help imagining it's an upside-down version of those creepy little things (apparently called Snatter Goblins) that rotate the paving stones when Sarah draws lipstick arrows on them in Labyrinth. And I don't like it.

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So today is 05/05/05. That's pretty cool, but Jeff pointed out the much cooler date coming up in just over a year, on July 6, 2006. I think that calls for a Party Of Evil. Jeff suggests taking the whole week off and going somewhere evil, like the tundra. He proposes Iceland. I've been wanting to go there anyway. Jeff further suggests having a metal fest on the tundra. That seems more ambitious than an Evil Party. But why not set our sights high? Such a date has not occurred in 1000 years. Jeff also wants bands with lots of severed animal appendages on spikes. I don't know about that. Maybe we can get them to use soy-based severed animal appendage replacements. Or severed vegetable appendages. Green is supposed to be the most evil color, right? I dunno, we'll have to work that part out. But it's settled. Evil Metal Fest on the Iceland tundra on 6/6/06. Start booking your plane tickets.

Edit: Of course, given recent archaeological developments, the metal fest may have to happen a few months sooner than we thought.