i haven’t been posting much lately because i’ve been rather busy. had finals week, then my Columbia graduation and moving my stuff to my new apartment (with omar).
from there, tuck, jp, and i went down to deleware for shu and liz’s wedding. it rocked. the three of us were “thugs”; our job was to stand around in suits and dark sunglasses and intimidate people (plus handle any bodies that may need to be disposed of). nice ceremony on the beach. the weather cooperated. no fatalities. jp showed tuck and i how to eat crab.
now i’m hanging out at bates with kamden, lani, and assorted other miscreants that i haven’t seen in a while waiting to graduate from here too. got kam and lani to watch eraserhead with me the other night for their first time. mwahaha..
saw Shrek the other day. it was funny. saw Pearl Harbor today. it sucked. i was going to give it one star for killing ben affleck, but then it turned out he wasn’t dead so i can only give it half a star. sorry if i just ruined the surprise for anyone. you weren’t missing anything.
i’ll be back in nyc on june 6th to start my “new” job.
until then i have some serious slacking off to do.
cool. apparently there’s a professor at columbia who studies evil:
… Dr. Michael Stone of Columbia University also showed slides of nearly three dozen killers and others whom he considers evil.
A woman who burned one of her three daughters alive and starved another to death was ``at the extreme edge of evil … one of the most clearly evil persons’‘ of more than 400 whose biographies he has read, Stone said. …
actor Robert Blake appears to be under investigation for the murder of his wife.
normally i’d give him the benefit of the doubt. but anyone who’s seen Lost Highway knows that Blake is the creepiest human being in the world. is this the face of an innocent man?
Q: what do you get when you mix together the following?
one Z-80 microprocessor (state of the art… in 1976. 3.7MHz. 8 registers. 2K of RAM)
about 20 bucks worth of misc. electronic parts
2 antennae
a few hundred hours of time that really ought to be spent on more important things, but…
4 engineering students with just enough knowledge to be dangerous
a love of obscure musical instruments
and a unhealthy desire to produce lots of loud, fucked up noises that will annoy the hell out of anyone in a ten block radius.
A: you get XinT, the world’s first microprocessor controlled digital theremin. designed and built from scratch by yours truly and 3 other depraved (and now slightly more deaf than before) engineers.
for the bargain-basement price of $10,000 USD, the XinT team will even custom build one for you.
i always thought it was silly that most schools use students’ social security numbers as keys for all their databases. i know that at columbia at least, you have to give your SSN to register for or drop classes, pay your tuition, get financial aid, get a transcript, and just about everything else that you might want to do. it always bothered me. what disturbed me even more was that no one else ever seemed at all bothered by it. “what’s the big deal? it’s just a number.” is the unspoken logic.
well, here’s one reason you might want to think twice before handing over your SSN to the next person who asks for it.
what’s really bad though is how common that the SSN is used for identification. it was never intended for that. early versions of SSN cards explicitly stated on back that they were “not to be used for identification purposes.” the desire for a unique id for every person in the country is understandable from the standpoint of the organizations that need to track large numbers of users but there have got to be better ways. there is just no reason that SSN’s should be considered adequate for identification. they’re no longer safe; literally hundreds of organizations from the government to credit card companies to schools know any given person’s SSN. it’s relatively easy to find out someone’s SSN (dumpster diving, anyone?). yet it’s still treated like some kind of secret key.
also, from a privacy standpoint, unique identification numbers for citizens are a somewhat frightening concept. it creeps me out anyway.
heather spotted and fixed a little bug in my markov code that was probably responsible for some of its tendency to get stuck in little loops. nice evidence that open-source is good for everyone involved. thanks heather.
(and, because i pay attention to my HTTP_REFERER’s, i know why she was going through markov’s internals with a fine-tooth comb. but i’ll let her keep it a secret until she’s ready to share. ;)
little redesign. this time, i have completely removed thraxil’s reliance on <table> tags for layout. it’s all CSS now. still a little buggy since i don’t have IE around to test with, but that should all be cleaned up pretty soon.
i’m almost entirely done with my undergraduate education now. pretty much all i have left is one homework assignment, one term paper, and one final. for the last month or so i haven’t really had time to catch my breath with all the projects i was working on for my classes. a few weeks ago i was suffering from a particularly bad bout of insomnia and found myself up really late too tired to really do any work but knowing that i wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a few more hours. about then, i realized that i had almost no fiction at all on my bookshelf here at school. i had about two novels, neither of which i felt like reading for the 20th time or so right at the moment, amongst 30 or so computer, math, and electronics textbooks (which aren’t terribly appealing bedtime reading either).
so i went online and ordered a bunch of paperbacks. i grabbed a couple collections of HP Lovecraft stories (tuck had recently reminded me how intricate and immersive his writing is), willian s. burroughs’ Junky (because i hadn’t read it yet), Blood Sugar by nicole blackman (because she rocks), and the Pit Dragon trilogy (Dragon’s Blood, Heart’s Blood, and A Sending of Dragons) by jane yolen.
the pit dragon trilogy is worth an extra mention. they’re children’s books. or “young adult” level i guess would be more accurate. i read them for the first time when i was in 4th grade or so and absolutely loved them. re-reading them now, i’m happy to see that they really are just good books.
over the course of my book-buying binge, i realized how infrequently i’d been able to actually read for pleasure over the last few years. when you’re in school and having to read hundreds of pages of dense engineering textbooks every week, the last thing you want to do with your spare time is read more. so now i’m really looking forward to my soon to be “graduated” state. the first thing i’m going to do is start reading everything that i missed out on in the last few years.
