Archive for March, 2004

Dance, Robot, Dance

Wednesday, March 31st, 2004

Here’s a jaw-dropping video (6.7 MB Windows Media Player file) of four Sony QRIO robots dancing. (These are smallish bipedal robots, remarkably anthropomorphic and apparently very highly articulated.)
(Subject line stolen from Labyrinth, link via Boing Boing)

Shirky

Wednesday, March 31st, 2004

Clay Shirky’s latest piece, titled Situated Software, is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds — basically, it’s about how the “traditional” design goals of web software (”scalability, generality, completeness”) are being gleefully disregarded in ways that produce software that’s extremely useful and successful within smallish social groups. Kinda reminds me of some [...]

Collegiate

Monday, March 29th, 2004

First day of term and zero chance of missing the rest of this week due to snow! I like my two in-person instructors, and my two online ones seem cool as well (and I’ve taken a live class from one of those).
Most common comment today: “You should be a teacher” (I heard this [...]

Memo To Self

Saturday, March 27th, 2004

Wikipedia pages on graph theory and graph visualization (complete with useful links), respectively.

Hee

Friday, March 26th, 2004

I’m such a dork.

ARGH

Friday, March 26th, 2004

Anything nice I ever said about PHP, I take it all back. I HATE WEB PROGRAMMING.

ASCII Art

Friday, March 26th, 2004

I got an email from someone whose computer I worked on last year (total revenues: $32). She asked if she could pay me to hook up a DVD player if she bought one… a job which would take less time than the round trip.
(So instead I drew a picture.)

Hide In Plain Sight

Friday, March 26th, 2004

This is thoroughly disgusting: a money compartment built into a pair of tighty-whities with pre-painted skid marks. Sort of a “poo-loined letter” effect, if you’ll forgive me…
(oh yeah, link via gizmodo)

Geekboy

Thursday, March 25th, 2004

Implementing Graphs [in Python] — way nifty. Hardcore geek territory, though.

Castaway

Wednesday, March 24th, 2004

Anybody want a 12x CD burner?

Geekboy

Wednesday, March 24th, 2004

While this will undoubtedly cause my sweetie to repeat the oft-heard phrase “just give ME the money!”, I got myself a DVD burner for my PC today, for less money than I’d expected to spend ($115). I wound up with an NEC dual-format drive (this means it writes to both DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW, a [...]

Da Pain

Wednesday, March 24th, 2004

I hereby declare today to be Goddammit Day.

I spent some time adjusting a few things on both of my bikes, slicing into two of my fingers in the process.
One of our prettier candleholders (frosted glass inside a metal frame) fell off of the bookshelf as I walked by, breaking three of its four panes of [...]

Attack Squirrels

Wednesday, March 24th, 2004

Highly entertaining story of one motorcyclist’s encounter with suburban wildlife. (Link via Sean Graethorne, who as far as I know has no website.)

Oooo, scary

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004

Cat With Hands (6.2MB Quicktime link) is a creepy little short film that I would particularly not recommend to my squeamish partner. But for the morbid among you who enjoy the original Grimm versions, have at it.
(link via Neil Gaiman)

Geekboy

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004

Here’s NASA’s press release, including links to some not-particularly-exciting pictures, of that subvocal speech recognition system I mentioned last week.

Collegiate

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004

Finally got my grades back for all my classes last term (they were supposed to be available Friday, but my trig teacher apparently didn’t enter them until last night, and that was the one class whose grade I wasn’t sure of). I got another sweep of As (17 units’ worth), bringing my GPA up [...]

Miscellany

Monday, March 22nd, 2004

Had a lovely weekend with some friends in Seattle — juggling, and French/Mexican fusion cuisine (the mango-Brie quesadilla was excellent).
I’ve added two new links to the right: Aussie Chick, as she’s known on the Joel on Software discussion board, will probably not be particularly interesting to any of you, and my Canadian friend Karen [...]

Thought Processors

Wednesday, March 17th, 2004

The propellerhead set at NASA (and I mean that in a loving way; one day, if I’m very good, I may have a job as cool as theirs) have come up with an interface that reads your mind — sort of:
“A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly [...]

Pythony Goodness

Wednesday, March 17th, 2004

Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11)
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)]
Type “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
MacPython IDE 1.0.1
>>> thisList = ["spam", "eggs", "bacon", "spam"]
>>> for i in range(len(thisList)):
…     print thisList[i]

spam
eggs
bacon
spam
…I’m liking this language. And not just because it encourages you to use “spam” and “eggs” instead of “foo” and “bar.” [...]

BOO-YA!

Wednesday, March 17th, 2004

Watch Donald Rumsfeld soil his trousers. (link via Justin)
[UPDATE] My dad theorizes:
It seems like they got away with saying one thing, then contradicting themselves, then lying about it for so long (like three years while the media never called them on it) that they’ve gotten used to just saying whatever is convenient.  I think [...]