By
anders pearson
29 Mar 2004
every once in a while it happens.
woke up this morning and decided that enough was enough and got out the clippers. 5 minutes later and 2 years growth of hair was gone.
this is about the third time i’ve let my hair grow long and then just buzzed it all off. it really is a pretty good feeling.
it’s a simplification. when you cut your hair off, it becomes one less thing that you really need to worry about. i can take a shower right before bed now without soaking my pillow. i barely use any shampoo. i can wash my face without having to find an elastic. there is no such thing as a bad hair day. i will not be mistaken for a hippy when i forget to shave for a few days.
but there’s more to it than the practical benefits. cutting off my hair has a ritual feel to it. there is an element of cleansing and rebirth. it makes me feel like i can re-focus myself. i have symbolically eliminated the distractions from my life and now i can reevaluate my position and move forward unimpeded. why cutting an initiate’s hair is a part of so many indoctrination rituals (military, religious orders, sports teams, etc.) is no mystery.
the other main activity of the day was having a pleasant evening at julintip and mark’s. julintip cooked some fantastic thai food and we cracked open a couple bottles of good whiskey: <a href=”http://www.glenmorangie.com/default_flash.asp”>Glenmorangie</a> and a bottle of distillery reserve <a href=”http://www.jameson.ie/flash.asp”>Jameson</a>, both brought back from their recent trip to Dublin. they were both good but the Jameson was really fantastic. much smoother than the Jameson you can buy in the US.
By
anders pearson
25 Mar 2004
had yakitori, 48oz beers and saw wolfsheim last night with jP and tamara. took some dark, blurry pictures.
they sounded pretty good, especially for the part of the set where they brought out a live drummer and guitarist. played mostly stuff off the new album, but also did the required older material. "The Sparrows and the Nightingales" was probably the strongest song live. the only really annoying thing about the show was that doors opened at 8 but they didn't go on until 10:30 and most of that time was waiting in line outside the club. with a bladder full of 48oz beers, that very nearly led to accidents.
By
anders pearson
22 Mar 2004
i’m still down in austin. my flight is later this afternoon. had a fun, exciting morning today.
lani, being the crazy grad student with way too much work and not enough time for niceties like sleep had set her alarm clock for 6AM so she could finish grading some papers before class. it went off, she hit snooze, asked me “do you smell smoke?”, i said no, and we settled back in. a few minutes later, the alarm goes off again, she hits snooze and sits up saying “i really think i smell smoke”. we hear a sort of popping noise like little firecrackers going off and gets up. she walks over to the stairs and says, pretty calmly, “anders, there’s a fire downstairs”. i’m up out of bed in a second and following her down in just my underwear. i ask her where her fire extinguishers are, she says that she doesn’t think they have any.
lani lives with two roommates who both live on the first floor of the house. Mary’s room is right off the living room, with glass double-doors and a curtain seperating her from the living room and a door to the kitchen. Leslie’s room is on the other side of the kitchen. through the glass doors to Mary’s room, we can see the glow of flames right on the other side. and there’s a pretty serious amount of smoke coming out the cracks. lani runs back upstairs to find the phone, i wake up leslie and run into the kitchen. i open the door to mary’s room from there. i can see flames about 6 inches to a foot high spread out on the floor right by the glass doors; the smoke is already pretty thick. mary doesn’t appear to be in the room (i found out later that she wasn’t home). i run back into the kitchen looking for something to put the fire out with. the best i can do is to fill a frying pan with water from the sink. i make about two quick dashes from the sink into the smoke pouring what water i can on the fire which seems to be centered around a pile of magazines on the floor.
leslie appears with a tiny fire extinguisher and empties it on the fire which gets about 80% of what was remaining. i toss another frying pan of water on it and manage to get out the rest of the actual flames with the water and patting them out with the pan. i make another trip to dump some water on the ashes, but the smoke is getting really thick and lani is yelling at me to get out because smoke inhalation is what kills people. so i get out and we wait on the back porch for the fire department who show up in probably two minutes. lani had grabbed a sweatshirt and pants while she was on the phone, leslie had been sleeping in shorts and a t-shirt, but i was standing around in just my underwear when the firefighters arrived.
they quickly declared the fire out and set up some big fans to blow the smoke out of the house. leslie had managed to cut her foot on some of the glass from the door that had shattered so she was surrounded by firemen who were making sure she was alright (later, she admitted that that part of the morning hadn’t been so bad).
once things cleared out, they told us that we had done a good job and that it was a good thing we caught it in time. they think it started because there had been a bunch of papers and magazines blocking a heater grate in the floor right by the glass doors. they had caught fire and the curtain caught from there, burning up and around the door before falling down and setting more of the papers on fire. there was a big cloth and metal wardrobe full of clothes right next the the door that had been singed a bit. if the fire had gone for another minute it probably would have caught fire. if it had caught fire, it would have really gone up and frying pans of water wouldn’t have cut it.
in the end there was pretty minor property damage, the house is going to smell like smoke for a few weeks, leslie has a small cut on her foot, and i’ll probably be coughing up black stuff for a few days, but none of the people, gerbils, or the 3-legged cat living in the house were really hurt. so as far as house fires go, i’d say this one was pretty successful.
i’ll post pictures of the aftermath when i get home.
By
anders pearson
17 Mar 2004
here is the customary, incomplete, randomly ordered list of people i’ve met so far at SXSW:
and that’s basically why you go to a conference like SXSW. there were lots of cool panels and events and everything, but mostly it’s all about meeting lots of interesting people and making connections and friends.
i’ve got a badge for the film component of SXSW too but so far lani and i haven’t made it to too many movies. we saw the premier of kevin smith’s new movie “Jersey Girl.” kevin was there himself to introduce the film. he spoke for about 10 minutes before the movie and was absolutely hilarious. the movie, unfortunately, sucked. it was cheesy, predictable, cliché, and generally just not very funny. they really shouldn’t have shown the film and instead just had kevin stand up on stage and talk for 2 hours.
after Jersey Girl, we went to a special early release of <a href=”http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/hellboy/“>Hellboy</a>. Guillermo del Toro
was there to introduce the movie and told us that we were basically the first ones ever to see the whole film. he hadn’t even seen the final edit himself yet. del Toro, mike mignola, and ron perlman were there for Q+A after the movie too. Hellboy rocked. there were some minor issues with the plot and some things not really making sense, but overall it was just fantastic. apparently, one of del Toro’s future projects will be a movie based on the HP Lovecraft story ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, which i am now very excited about.
oh, i also had a very brief encounter with <a href=”http://www.wammolovesme.com/“>wammo</a>. i was walking down sixth street coming back from lunch with ethan on monday. we were talking and i wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on around me. i had my <a href=”http://www.asylumstreetspankers.com/“>spankers</a> shirt on. someone walking toward me sort of gave me a punch on the arm and said “hey!” as he passed. i immediately went into psycho new yorker mode, recoiled and instinctively checked to make sure my wallet was still there. when i turned around and looked back at who it was, i saw the long blonde hair and slowly the voice recognition part of my brain began to register and by the time we were a half block away i realized that it had just been wammo trying to be friendly and i was too stupid to figure it out until it was too late.
on the other hand, a bird shat on my head while i waited for a bus today. so i can’t say that the conference has been a 100% success.
By
anders pearson
12 Mar 2004
i came down to austin yesterday. SXSW doesn’t really start until friday night, so i’ve mostly been following lani around campus. today, we went to a bioinformatics lecture by <a href=”http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1993/roberts-autobio.html”>Richard J. Roberts</a>. the lecture was on enzyme’s or something that i didn’t really have the background to understand. still, he was a good speaker and even though i wasn’t sure what he was talking about most of the time, i managed to pay attention to the whole thing instead of getting bored and dozing off.
i did understand the first 10 minutes or so of the lecture which he spent passionately arguing for the support of the <a href=”http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/“>Public Library of Science</a> (which i’ve <a href=”http://thraxil.org/nodes/4743”>linked to before</a>) and <a href=”http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/“>PubMed</a>. he doesn’t seem to be a big fan of the scientific journal industry. he pointed out that he’s served as an editor and referee for a number of journals, and, like almost all other editors and referees, worked for free. the vast majority of the research that is published in the journals is paid for by the taxpayers, authors actually have to pay the journals fees to get their work published, and then the journals are only available to institutions that can pay the exhorbitant subscription fees, so the taxpayers can’t even access the research that they’ve paid for. something really seems to be wrong with that picture. he is now refusing to work with or publish in any journal that doesn’t deposit their articles in PubMed.
he also concluded the lecture with some interesting information about microbial life and bacteria. he pointed out that the total mass of microscopic life on earth is greater than the total mass of macroscopic life. he also mentioned that we’ve really only been able to grow about 1% of the bacteria we know about in laboratory cultures. the vast majority of microbial life just refuses to be studied. he suggested that the reason is that when scientists take bacteria and try to grow it in a petri dish, the goal is to isolate a single species to make it easy to study. the problem is that most species actually need to live in complex symbiotic relationships with other microbes, so they really just can’t be easily studied. some bacteria even behave radically differently when grown in cultures. eg, when some bacteria are grown in cultures, some of their genes just aren’t expressed. scientists only know about the genes because they can splice them into other bacteria where they <em>are</em> expressed.
By
anders pearson
10 Mar 2004
i’m leaving tomorrow for austin. lani and i will be at <a href=”http://www.sxsw.com/“>SXSW</a>. if you’re going too and want to meet up, send me email.
By
anders pearson
08 Mar 2004
just released version 1.2 of cgi_app. it now supports mod_python almost transparently, in case you want to write really fast web applications.
By
emile
06 Mar 2004
random post
<p>by markov<br />
<p>martial arts and mental representations, translation, computers and a surprisingly entertaining website too.</p>
By
anders pearson
01 Mar 2004
Trevor Smith wrote a neat little java applet to help people speed read Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe". Joe Gregario does a good job explaining what it's like to use the applet.
i thought it was a pretty cool idea, but its potential was limited by being a java applet. i immediately wanted to be able to use it to read any text file or webpage. i also wanted to be able to stop in the middle of a book, close the browser, and resume in the same spot days later.
so i wrote up a quick python app that let me do just that. feel free to grab the code. it's pretty rough around the edges and the interface is ugly (especially the fonts), but it should be pretty straightforward. the html parsing is not guaranteed to be flawless; it just extracts all text from the <body> of the webpage and displays it. so if there's weird stuff like inline javascript, that will get displayed. i haven't tested it anywhere but on my linux box, but it should run on any system with python installed. if you can or can't get it running on windows or OS X, let me know.
By
anders pearson
28 Feb 2004
today i got to go to meet <a href=”http://ted.hyperland.com/“>Ted Nelson</a>, the inventor of <a href=”http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hypertext”>hypertext</a> and visionary behind <a href=”http://xanadu.com/“>project xanadu</a>, the “<a href=”http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html”>longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing</a>.”
he was at columbia giving a workshop on <a href=”http://xanadu.com/zigzag/ZZdnld/“>ZigZag</a>, which is… well… after three hours of listening to Ted and playing with it, i’m still not sure exactly what to call it. it’s sort of an advanced data structure that Ted believes can be used to hold any kind of structure whatsoever. sort of a relational database exploded into multiple dimensions. but also a basis for a document model, or possibly a filesystem.
the man is clearly brilliant, if somewhat out there. he literally sees software design as a branch of filmmaking. much of his work is motivated by the extremely non-linear way that he thinks and his hatred of hierarchies (i never did get the chance to ask him what he thought about BeFS and <a href=”http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html”>ReiserFS</a>) and the limitations of paper (and computer representations of paper). unfortunately, he isn’t a programmer himself and he seems to have had personality conflicts with many of the programmers that he’s worked with, resulting in a long string of half-finished projects. the personality conflicts i think were because he views himself as an artist and, like Orson Wells or Frank Lloyd Wright, insists on having complete control over every single minute detail of his creations.
i don’t really have a point. while he may never get around to actually producing anything directly usable, he has some really fascinating ideas, so i think he’s worth paying attention to.