I've been compared to Buckaroo Banzai, but better at neurosurgery, physics, music, and racing cars.
They're making a comic book based on me. To do justice to the subject, top scientists under my direction are cloning Leonardo da Vinci from skin cells caught under the paint of the Mona Lisa.
The painting itself is being destroyed for the greater good.
I could crush you all like ants! When they say "summit", they mean it.
via SimplyTweet
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mule
San Francisco
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iPad
Unsurprising to most, I was foolish enough to buy an iPad. After some unpleasantness this morning, I ended up picking up one later in the day. I grabbed the dock and case, because I find it terribly annoying to prop up my iPhone to watch videos.
I also set it up with a wireless keyboard for grins. I have a desktop computer, an iPhone, and a Macbook Pro I am using with less and less frequency. I am entertaining the notion of getting rid of the laptop altogether, and using the iPad when I need a portable with more typing throughput than an iPhone.
Obviously, it would require the ability to edit code, etc., and I'd love a web-based IDE, but failing that, I think ssh would do in a pinch. I could pack all of this gear in my bag and not weigh it down half as much as the MBP, which doesn't fit in my preferred daily carry bag (or "murse") anyway. One thing I am finding a little tough to deal with is the lack of a mouse. The whole notion of reaching out and using the touch screen is not yet intuitive and reminds me of the gorilla arm warnings from the jargon file. And, because one has to do these things occasionally, here's a shot of my home office workspace. The resolution is low because the iPhone takes grainy pictures with relatively low inside lighting, so I scaled it down to avoid looking completely bletcherous. However, if you are sharp-eyed, yes, that's a scientific calculator (HP-35s) on my desk, right next to a computer with Mathematica, SAGE, and Calculator.app. No, I can't really explain it either.
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Influential Books
It seems like the meme du jour (at least, a meme to which I am particularly susceptible) is to list ten books that have had an influence on your life. What I'm finding interesting about this list is that most of the books are not directly influential. Rather, they've had a second-order impact on my thought or action, whether adversarial or more subtle. I guess it's because I (along with most people) react more to that which we find wrong or which offends us in some way. Most people have done ten, but I'm going to be lazy and stick to six. It's Saturday, it's beautiful out, and I have work to do.
These aren't the most influential books, necessarily, just the ones that come to the top of my mind when I think on the topic. If I were more exhaustive, I'd decide which books to select from Zola, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Hume, Goethe, and Spinoza. I'd also have to add a few books that have been influential on my professional life.
1. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, recommended by a friend.
It's not so much that this book convinced me of its premise, which has been used several times as a literary device, probably most notably in Neal Stephenson's books The Big U, Zodiac, and Snow Crash. It's a convenient explanation for some aspects of godly interaction, especially in the Hellenic and pre-Hellenic ages.
But anyway, whether I buy into it or not, Jaynes spent a lot of time discussing consciousness. It was really the first book I read where a large part of the melange of philosophy and cognitive philology floating around in my head aligned and gelled into a related whole.
It's junky and not especially well-written, and eases by some technical points in favor of accessibility, but this book put me on the course of a black hat for a short period of time. Previously, I was happy with Usenet (and rn!), email, FTP, and the occasional gopher site on a Z-19 terminal, but it became a bigger issue of what I could find and where after reading this. I won't go into the subsequent details (mainly because it's embarrassingly banal and my name's on this post) but again, this is where "the Internet" really clicked for me beyond the top layer of the OSI protocol stack.
I read this in my teenage years, not long after #4 on this list. Probably the biggest push from reading this book was not just a general understanding of basic capitalism, but the associated reading that led me to Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. That theory itself has changed the way I evaluate work and management.
It wasn't that my father is or was a proponent of objectivism in general or Rand in particular, but he felt that the book was an important part of stretching one's mind and laying part of the foundation for later philosophical criticism. He first offered me Atlas Shrugged when I was twelve, thinking the more mechanical aspect of the plotline would appeal to me, but I found this book much more accessible.
This pretty much set the tone for a bad-ass, and any time I needed to exercise the F***-it Bone, I often think, WWLOAD? Whether pushing on through illness, wandering into places where one shouldn't, or even changing the way I travel internationally (I am always asked for directions by other tourists, who are often impressed with how well I speak English), Lawrence is as good a role model as any. Yes, yes, he did some vile stuff, but even his death inspired the creation of motorcycle helmets.
That's not in this book, by the way.
I judge all speculative literature against this book. It's extremely detailed and the depth of assumption makes it as credible as possible. It's obvious (as has been done by Herbert's son and others) that one could create a large number of books covering the millennia between our time and this fictional future, just fleshing out some throwaway incidents or statements for which most authors would kill. Side references to battles, enmities, government, and religion that are never explained but are consistent throughout the books and give me an opportunity to use one of my favorite words when describing literature: verisimilitude.
If I ever write a fictional book, I'll use Dune as a guide.
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Books
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Seattle has a real domestic terminal
I'm flying up to visit my parents for the first time in a few years and the construction that has covered every wall of seatac since the nineties has finished in the interim. It's no longer a matter of killing time with the scary chair massage team or the smoky bar on the corner of the c concourse.
It was a very clear day and there were some great views of the cascades and crater lake, although you just get bad photos of them.
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Migrating content from Drupal (v4.7) to Posterous
I figured it was time to suffer through another blog migration and moved everything over to Posterous. This probably wasn't important at all, since I don't think I have the pre-2001 entries around anywhere, and the ones since then are pretty much narcissistic omphaloskepsis. But, it gave me an opportunity to prune out many of the semi-offensive posts and migrate to an easier posting platform. I haven't been updating mainly because I'm lazy. Twitter is really the top of my level of effort right now.
Posterous doesn't expose the same sort of migration assistant that it does for Tumblr and friends. Since the email interface does not appear to give control over the post dates, I had to use the API.
The first part of the problem involved pulling the data from Drupal. I un-published the posts I was embarrassed by, or posts that were just pointless to migrate. Then I pulled it all out of the db with 'echo "select node.title, created, body from node, node_revisions where node.nid = node_revisions.nid and status = 1"| mysql -u [username] -p[password] [database] > posterous_migration.txt'
I pulled the header row off (there's probably a flag to avoid emitting it in the first place, but I'm lazy.) and wrote a quick Ruby script to post the content to Posterous with the proper dates.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/http'
url=URI.parse(url)
r = File.open("posterous_migration.txt").readlines()
r.each {|line|
title = line.split(/\t/)[0]
raw_date = line.split(/\t/)[1]
body = line.split(/\t/)[2].chomp
new_body = body.gsub("\"", "\\\\\"")
new_body = body.gsub("\\n", "<br>")
new_date = Time.at(Integer(raw_date)).ctime
params = {"body" => "#{new_body}", 'autopost' => '0', 'date' => "#{new_date}", 'title' => "#{title}"}
req = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
req.basic_auth 'scoobydoo@example.com', 'password'
req.set_form_data(params)
res = Net::HTTP.new(url.host, url.port).start {|http| http.request(req) }
case res
when Net::HTTPSuccess, Net::HTTPRedirection
# OK
else
res.error!
end
}
And that was pretty much that. I had some missing images due to using relative paths while originally composing them in Drupal, but that was easily resolved. I also have some funky formatting, probably due to my nasty gsubs that I had there for an early attempt at passing all the information to curl.
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LinkedIn for employment fraud
It's pretty common to get LinkedIn requests from people you don't know. I think people see a possible connection that might be useful and figure,"What the heck, on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
I used to accept every request. Eventually, I realized I didn't know that many people in Spain, and started un-linking them, but only halfheartedly. There are still a few connections that are to people I don't know, but it's no big deal. I received a request today from a person with an Indian name. I've known enough people from India to know that they sometimes have multiple names, not all of which they use at work. Sometimes they know foreigners (er, to them) are stupid, and they go by their initials. It's all a matter of staying ahead of the mispronunciation of their given names. So it was possible I knew this person. I thought I forgot them or knew them by another name. The surname was very common, so I clicked on their profile page to see how I would know them. This is what I found.
Apparently, this person works for me! Not only does she work for me, she participated in most major areas of the largest project we undertook during her time here.
The specifics are...specific enough that I know they came from someone else's background. At first, I thought that perhaps she worked for an ADM partner who collaborated with us. But that lasted about five seconds because said ADM had a male to female ratio of about 20:1. Women stand out in that crowd. All I can figure from this is that this person is building a fake professional persona. It's pretty well-known in the ATG circle who's building what, and all of these tasks would ring very true to a casual observer. Seeing my profile linked to hers would further legitimize it. What she didn't know is that we're not a 400-person development team, where a single senior developer might go unnoticed. We're a small enough group that we could all gather around my monitor to laugh at how she did the work of our entire development and release engineering team. I do admit we're large enough that some people had to shift around so everyone had a chance to read the small print. It was good for a chuckle at the end of a long week. Points for clever.Comments [0]
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