dude

I have watched The Big Lebowski twice in the past week and, incidentally, the stress from the semester has faded. So, now I am putting together a proposal for my summer research.

another round of quickies

This past weekend I:

* saw Fog of War at RagTag.
* played ulimate frisbee for the first time since July.
* saw The Legend of Suriyothai.
* ate some barbeque.

I recommend Fog of War if you, like me, feel like you have neglected learning history. Robert McNamara reminds me of my grandfather, who I wish I got to see more often. I recommend The Legend of Suriyothai if you want to see a movie intended to be a history lesson for Thai children.

In case you don’t know what all of this means… let me spell it out… my family was out of town so I did some things I don’t normally do.

a few quickies

* I just saw Spirited Away… I have never watched anime before but I thought it was excellent.
* I just saw Seabiscuit… mediocre. It was especially awkward in the beginning and it was over I felt the awkwardness was not worthwhile.
* I just read The Pragmatic Programmer… would likely be a good book for a first time programmer to read but did not do much for me. But it never hurts to be reminded of good practices.
* I am taking a course on information retrieval this semester.

beef jerky

I made beef jerky last night… I was inspired by Undaunted Courage by Steven Ambrose and jerky I ate while touring Joshua Tree National Park several months ago. I highly recommend the book and the park.

The preparation process was a long but the jerky is pretty good. I don’t think I will cook it very often.

word death

Some words are just really cool. I really like the word booyah!. I don’t think it is used often enough amongst my co-workers. I plan on changing this so that booyah knowledge does not die forever.

The best part of the word booyah is that you can say it while you are writing code or playing ultimate frisbee.

For example:

* If you just finished debugging some really sick code you could shout “Booyah”! And your cube neighbors would know that you just kicked some ass.

* Imagine that you just made a really good catch… you could turn to your defender and shout “Booyah, I just caught the frisbee!”. Then everyone on the field would know that you mean business.

odd ducks deep linking my content

I have done a little access log surfing and discovered that someone is deep linking (not sure if this is the correct term) to a graphic I made (of which I am quite proud) for the 2001 showme state games ultimate frisbee tourney.

I did a google translation and it appears to be about feeling oppressed (my guess is a discussion amongst french teens)… but if anyone could explain how the photo relates to the text I would love to hear the explanation.

content management systems etc.

For the last week I have been evaluating bids for a content management systems that will be deployed across campus. The plan is for the central IT shop to act as a content management ASP (similar to atomz).

My first impression is that most of these systems are designed for deployment to a single location. Or possibly that is just the most common deployment scenario.

Gosh that was really boring… in other news… I twisted my ankle this weekend at Summer Soaker 3. It was my first ultimate frisbee tournament in about two years and I played well and had fun. Because of the sprain I have been mooching rides off of everyone since I can’t ride my bike. Oooohhh and guess what else… last night I played in the sandbox with my son. I buried his toes in slightly wet sand and then he made them peek out. We also made smoothies (yum) and ate popcorn.

I am also reading Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort (the origin of zipf’s law) by G. Zipf. I have seen it cited in many places and figured it was time to read this classic. I really love when the fields of sociology, economics, biology and computer science come together (sorry requires IE). If you want to read it for yourself I suggest your local library because $250 is the best price I found on the web.

linkspam

I usually like to keep posts topically coherent but this one is not…

* “more on social capital”:http://www.isuma.net/v02n01/putnam/putnam_e.shtml

* “spam detection algorithm summary/history”:http://www.pacificavc.com/blog/2003/02/10.html#a78 (via “jon”:http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/05/12.html#a686 via “michael”:http://aldoblog.com/blog/2003-05-04)

* just for steve: “what I hate about programming languages”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/05/12/languagephilosophy.html

alternate news source

“the memory hole”:http://www.thememoryhole.org/ is a great source for alternative views on world events. I do think they are a bit “sensationalist”:http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/stripped-iraqis.htm but they do point out lots of “silliness”:http://www.thememoryhole.org/ “in”:http://www.thememoryhole.org/media/evening-standard-crowd.htm the “press”:http://www.thememoryhole.org/media/msnbc-iaea-report.htm.

more parking lot drama

AJ’s is at “it”:http://www.khakipants.org/archives/2003/03/parking_lot_drama.html again.

Looks like I have beaten “the competition”:http://ccmad.blogspot.com/ to this choice story (I am going to reach the top of “blogdex”:http://blogdex.media.mit.edu with this scoop)!