Sunday Lament

Since grade school, I have suffered from a perpetual dislike of Sundays. Like so many students before me, the thought of Sunday evokes a certain anxiety which can only be attributed to the dread of school. As a 20th grader (not counting kindgarten or preschool), I feel apt to assert that it is not Sunday's fault. I am certain, now more than ever, that I dislike Sundays only because of the impending Monday. Which leads me to conclude that a Sunday without a Monday is not so bad.

Fakes Words in Your Dictionary

Originally in the New Yorker (the following stolen from boingboing):

This piece from last August's New Yorker documents the fascinating hunt for the fake word inserted into the New Oxford American Dictionary. These fake words are inserted by dictionary editors as a kind of watermark to catch competitors who copy their dictionaries wholesale. The process of figuring out which of the words in the NOAD was the fake was quite involved, with six candidates sent around to a panel of distinguished language-scholars who had a vigorous debate about whether each word was a fake

I believe that phone companies used to do something like this with their phone indexes. They would insert fake names and business (complete with phone numbers and addresses) to catch unsuspecting plagirists who would just copy the book wholesale.

Mind Blowing

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

Give it a try -- it really worked for me (both perceiving the green dot and the disappearance of all the pink dots).

Gloria Mark, Mary Czerwinski, Eric Horvitz, Linda Stone

Gloria Mark and other HCI researchers are written up in this New York Times article. I received my Master's degree from UCI where Gloria Mark is a professor (her office was adjacent to my advisor's).

The article, titled Meet the Life Hackers, begins with highlighting Mark's research with Victor Gonzalez on how human's "multitask" in the workplace.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/magazine/16guru.html

Pumpkin Carving Party

I made the Scooby one (not yet complete).

Apple in New Yorker

"Tidal" was uneven. Apple was nineteen when she recorded it and had a teen-ager's sense of drama, which sees the world ending whenever a relationship does; she did not yet know that "invade your demeanor" is a phrase that God never intended anyone to say out loud.

-Sasha Frere-Jones in the 10/10/05 New Yorker on Fiona Apple's new album

The Sky Really is Falling

An article written about security in IT cites Ed Lazowska, a faculty member in my department at UW, and begins:

Ed Lazowska, cochairman of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, says that there is a looming security crisis, and the government, vendors and CIOs aren’t doing enough to stop it.

http://www.cio.com/archive/100105/qa_lazowska.html

How Dare You Compare Me To Cheney

Like Vice President Dick Cheney, who led the search for a vice presidential nominee before choosing himself, Miers headed the team searching for O'Connor's replacement and ended up choosing herself.

Ack. There's something fundamentally suspicious about heading a search committee that ends up choosing you. Also note to self, attempt not to follow in Cheney's footsteps in anyway such that comparisons like these could be made.

CSE Rainbow

Taken on my camera phone (SMT 5600 SmartPhone) from the top floor of the UW CSE building.