(Not Very) Current events
From Tractatus
Old Stuff
I started playing with www.pandora.com today. I am thinking of creating links to it from my Music page. --Iain 20:21, 2 January 2006 (EST)
New Toy! I needed it to get local latitudes without doing painful searches on a geocoder later. --Iain 01:10, 28 December 2005 (EST)
http://www.questionablecontent.net/ is now the official web comic of Tractat.us --Iain 00:54, 23 December 2005 (EST)
I upgraded the site to mediawiki-1.5.3. Also, started to play with Google Maps. So cool! Pretty soon I'll have a script, and an XML format to allow me to make maps, and overlays as embedded objects.
--Iain 00:28, 22 December 2005 (EST)
I should really add some sort of internal blogging software. Saw this interesting commentary by A.O. Scott on child-appropriate films. --Iain 18:33, 15 Dec 2005 (EST)
The big news in Iain-land is that I will no longer be working in IBM RACF Level 2! Starting on the 15th i will instead be working in IBM SAN FS development for z/OS. Tht means I'll be writing the z/OS portion of a distributed file system. It is not that far of a move in spatial terms, since my office will be in the same building, but not remaining in stasis in an increasingly mind numbing job is an incredible relief.
I am really excited about it :) I should have done this years ago. There is far too little change in my life as a general rule. I think I will have to change a few more things while I am at it.
--Iain 23:17, 8 Aug 2005 (EDT)
Phew. I finally added support for formatting bridge hands. It looks like this: Bridge:Mollo. I need to adjust the bidding stuff a little. But, fortunately I finally scrapped the buggy old way I used to format all the Bridge stuff, and replaced it with a new buggy way. The main advantage is that the new way is in my cvs repository, and includes automatic installation/testing in the Makefile. That means I can fix my mistakes :) If the page does not format nicely in your browser, please leave a comment!
--Iain 00:02, 25 Jul 2005 (EDT)
Site goes live! Send me an email with your preferred username and I will create an id for you. --Iain 22:33, 5 Jun 2005 (EDT)
OK, one more day on the resume thing. Good news is that I uploaded my quotes files, and started to XMLify the file. I also put in a few new entries. (Click on Recent Changes if you are interested).
Really do send me an email. I need to populate my contacts list :) --Iain 01:04, 3 Jun 2005 (EDT)
My target uptime on the site going live is next Monday (6/6). I am reading email sent to iain@tractat.us, so send me some email to let me know you care :) My next priorities are preparing a resume (should be up tomorrow), and starting to clean up the site. --Iain 23:16, 1 Jun 2005 (EDT)
I put out some movie recommendations under Movies/Iain Recommends. Check them out. If you have not seen them, I recommend them :) --Iain 01:52, 30 May 2005 (EDT)
OK, the big current events news is that I taught myself XML/XSLT/PHP this week, so that I could start formatting Bridge bidding on the wiki. It looks ok at this point(Bridge, check back in a few weeks and it will no doubt look awesome. Next up, I need to finish preparing my quotes file(I have missed it these past 5 years), and my resume. Phew! --Iain 23:16, 29 May 2005 (EDT)
No uptime yet on email. I have started writing an extension for wikimedia to let me easily display Bridge conventions. Today I am sick, so I made a few additions. --Iain 17:58, 24 May 2005 (EDT)
Added RSS support. Now the NewYorkTimes rss can be read. I also confirmed that MediaWiki support for RSS works: New Pages Recent Changes. Enjoy! --Iain 11:12, 20 May 2005 (EDT)
I decided yesterday that the only way to make this page not boring was to remind myeself at all times that I am the audience, and so, the emphasis should be on recording things I find interesting, such as the articles in the NYT today which posited that female orgasm was a vestigal side effect of embyonic development, or the article which hypothesized that Type 1 diabetes was a survival mechanism uring the last ice age. Neat. Reminds me of Malaria. --Iain 22:24, 16 May 2005 (EDT)
A slightly odd day. I slept in, then went to and ate a fantastic marvelous sandwich at Babycakes. It was Chicken-Chipotle on fresh bread, with lettuce, tomato, and cheddar. Perfect. I washed it down with a Saturday edition of the New York Times, and a Red Eye. Go have one.
I finally got around to creating an account on the Internet Go Server. So, if you want to play a game of Go against me, look for keddie on IGS. I played a pair of games. One against someone who was terrible, and even though I mad some large mistakes, I won handily. The next player I played seemed just about the right level. Just a little bit better than me. Well, quite a bit better, but not so good that there was no hope at all.
--Iain 02:22, 15 May 2005 (EDT)
Smallville
What a charming series. I am just about done with the first season.... three more seasons to go. I am amazed by how the rules of the Smallville universe are even more ridiculous than Buffy's. I am inspired to create a Smallville Lexicon
--Iain 16:51, 4 February 2006 (EST)
Locations
I improved the display of the markers in the Locations not sure where I want to go with it next. I think adding thumbnail images.
--Iain 01:26, 5 February 2006 (EST)
Spam
Sigh. Some jerk paintball thing has started to edit some of the talk pages on the site. For the moment, I am taking no action, but please if you look at 'recent changes' and see an IP address has made an edit to the page, don't just go to the page. (It should be safe, but I am paranoid). Click on 'diff' and see what the differences are. If they look bogus, then ignore the change. :)
--Iain 01:58, 11 February 2006 (EST)
Malicious Posts.
For now, I have disabled anonymous edits for talk pages. Grr. Annoying. --Iain 17:24, 11 February 2006 (EST)
Optical Illusions
http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html
Sick :(
I have this nasty cold, so in between catching a few hours of sleep, I am watching the first season of "Lost"
. I really like it. It reminds me a lot of A Maze of Death(Phillip K. Dick)
, there are numerous not very subtle references to, well, lots of things. I suppose it is a little like fotune telling... if you just sprinkle a few facts about the mind will free-associate them into a pattern. But, the story of Maze of Death, in which 12 travelers have arrived on a mysterious planet, with no escape and must stuggle against each other against a shfting background. Why have they been brought together? Is this planet known to them? Why are their desires fulfilled? It is classic Phillip K. Dick, and one of my favorite books. Many of these elements appear in the fable/fantasy portion of "Lost". I can only hope that they take the last ten pages from PKD. :)
--Iain 01:12, 24 February 2006 (EST)
Cargo Cult
Odd rant, cute idea: American Cargo Cult. I like the notion of trying to sum up a myopic world view by using the powerful image of a Cargo cult
. It is just a shame that this example is not better :)
Started editing page again.
Phew. I have not touched this page in a long time. How sad.
--Iain 22:06, 30 June 2006 (EDT)
Herodotus vindicated.
http://www.livius.org/he-hg/herodotus/hist06.htm
Neat Visualizations of wikipedia.
I was looking for Software visualization tools, and I came across this interesting tool out of IBM research:
http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/index.htm
Click on Results for a nice breakdown on what is going on in each image. Neat!
Home Mainframe.
Envy, be silent and attend.
http://mainframe.typepad.com/blog/
Local Gym Event.
Oddly this is the gym I have a membership in(It is the closest gym to my apartment):
Frankly, since my last gym had some strange rules as well... this did not amaze me.
I notice that one of the effects of the 'judgement free zone' seems to be that no one tells people who are risking injury that they are risking injury. Wait. Am I judging?
Nice page of epigrams.
http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/suslick/laws.html
Proof of Alien Spacecraft on Mars
http://web.mac.com/bdunford/iWeb/Riding_with_Robots/Home/D00D363F-31A1-4A8B-90A2-8DF9E25654FD.html
NYTs article on exercise while injured.
Lotus Notes and the NSA.
Caveat: I did not check to see if this was actually true. But, I really like the sound of it so...
http://cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
Alcibiades
Alcibiades(c. 450 BC–404 BC)
Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the first blow to prevent the attack being made. And we cannot fix the exact point at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must not be content with retaining but must scheme to extend it, for, if we cease to rule others, we are in danger of being ruled ourselves.
Alcibiades' Oration before the Sicilian expedition as recorded by Thucydides, (VI, 18])[d]; Thucydides disclaims verbal accuracy.
See Wikipedia.
Reading the Wikipedia entry on Alcibades, I could not help but think of parallels between the Sicialian expedition and our foray into Iraq. Not directly parallel at all, but, hard not to have it in mind.
Rogovoy report
Listening to the Round Table this morning, I head Seth Rogovoy give his list of the ten best performances in the area. http://rogovoy.com/journal.html
I really need to go see Shakespeare & Company performances. Also, Micheal Wex sounded like a (somewhat unexpected) riot.
Champagne Bubbles
Heard an interesting story on NPR about how the pleasent bubble formation in champagne is due to cellulose fibers being left on the glass. That nice steady stream of small bubbles coming from one point... guess what is at that point? If the hollow inside the fibers were larger, then the bubbles would be much larger, and the beverage would go flat. Smaller, and the bubbles would not disengage. Apparently cellulose fibers are the Goldilocks of bubbly: Just right.
Messinian Salinity Crisis.
I got here from reading about long rivers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis
Very interesting.