ELM's First Birthday

Pumpkin Patch on Friday

Party on Saturday/Sunday


Como Zoo Trip on Monday

Please Vote in November

It's our only hope.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

- from After Pat's Birthday by Kevin Tillman

Radiohead, a Saving Grace

Purchased Thom Yorke's new album, The Eraser, as a musical backdrop to thesis proposal writing (iTunes Music Store was tempting me for weeks). In high school, I was a huge Radiohead fan (e.g., Pablo Honey, The Bends). OK Computer came out my sophomore year of college but I didn't really start listening to it until graduate school. Now, I'm much more into the sound they introduced in OK Computer and perfected on Kid A and Amnesiac than those rock precursors. Like the last 3 minutes of Paranoid Android, Idioteque, Like Spinning Plates, Kid A, I Might Be Wrong, Packt like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box, create a cacophany of sounds that somehow work together to form a wonderful, haunting, ambient melody. Motion Picture Soundtrack is, I think, one of the saddest songs ever written.

PS Not a huge fan of Hail to the Theif, but hey, they can't all be the White Album.

Thesis Proposal: Status Update

In rewriting the primary "thesis" of my thesis proposal for the, ahem, third time this week, I believe I've finally struck upon something that may stick and, in the process, coined a new term.

phetadata (phe.TA.da.ta, alternate pronunciation: phay.ta.day.ta) n. The digital metadata that is generated by our everyday, physical interactions with the world. [Blend of physical and metadata.]

Thesis Proposal: Status Update

I've completed one page of goodness, two pages of mediocrity and two half-done pages of crap. Reminder: writing is an iterative process.

Hiking Mt. Dickerman (Fall Colors)

[Photo credits go to Danyel Fisher, fellow hiker and confidant]

This Life

You want the truth on this? I think he was somebody who desperately wanted to be popular and, because of that desperation, he wasn't.

-Paul, a high school friend of Jon Ronson

This American Life
6/23, Episode 314

The Office, Season 3

[weeping] Jim is gone. I miss him so much. I cry myself to sleep, oh Jim.

FALSE.

-Dwight Schrute

Google's "Add a Tab" Disappeared

I use Google Personalized homepage to keep track of some of my most read RSS feeds. They added a "tabs" feature a few weeks ago. However, now the "Add a tab" link has disappeared.

Before:
After:
Update 9/22/2006 @ 10:22AM: Aha. It turns out that Google instituted a max tab limit of 6. Someone found a hack around this limit however.

Where'd The Whiz Kids Go?

In fact, right now a UW student with a bachelor's degree in computer science can expect to make $75,000 in his or her first year. Top students are also being routinely lured with $20,000 signing bonuses — something not seen since the late 1990s. (link)

Web 2.0 (that I find useful)

• Wikispaces : free wiki hosting
• Backpack : free file, image, calendaring, todo list hosting (pages can be marked private)
  
• Farecast : airline fare predictor
  
• Zillow : real estate pricing predictor
  
• Digg : social bookmarking/linking site
  
• Google Calendar : online calendaring
• Del.icio.us : social bookmarking
  

Hiking Mount Washington, New Hampshire

Hiking Up Mount Washington








Hiking Down Mount Washington

More Free Icons

I use the Tango Icon Project in my work. I also ran across the famfamfam icon set called silk, which is a collection of 700+ free 16x16 icons.

Cognition in the Wild

"... name calling is a way of asserting one's own identity" -Edwin Hutchins

My copy of Cognition in the Wild arrived in the mail yesterday (thanks Amazon). I was struck, first, by its strange proportions. I have the paperback version and its height dimension seems abnormally long--almost textbooky. I've only read until page 17 (and skipped the introduction) but have been impressed so far. I didn't expect the narrative to be so novel-like, particulary with the suspense driven opening. The academic speak has been fairly limited to asides/digressions. At this point, Hutchins is still detailing his first impressions of the Navy as an institution and social organization, which is where I found the quote above.

Hiking Mount Pilchuck

Natural Tendency of Writing

The following strikes me as profoundly true:

It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. - Ira Glass (host/producer of This American Life)

(link)

Waterborne Spinner Dolphins

To accompany a previous post and to highlight the beautiful aqua-green water of Hawaii.

Gates Apparently on Circumcision Promotion Tour

Google News aggregation makes for some interesting combinations of headlines. I saw this one last night and couldn't help but take a screenshot. The primary headline, "Circumcision promoted," actually has no accompanying graphic. The Bill Gates shot, shown just to the right of the "Circumcision promoted" text, is actually related to the third headline link: "AIDS Funding: Gates Steps Up as Rich Countries Step Back." However, given the proximity/layout of the Gates graphics and the Circumcision headline, it's easy to interpret that they are related.

Airborne Spinner Dolphin

Victoria, BC (Vancouver Island)