Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

10 May 2003

I had heard about it, but just saw "Cog", the new Honda commercial. If you have not seen it, you must. As you watch, keep in mind the following: there was no trick photography, no cuts, and the final film wasn't edited except to add a voiceover at the end. This is one impressive feat of engineering, here. Merely designing and building a car pretty much pales in comparison.

"We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler." --Paul Graham

Posted 12:12 AM [+]

09 May 2003

I guess that ultimately my bank issues right now are that I'm not used to something taking on the order of two days longer to do electronically than it would by hand. After last month's overdraft fiasco, I made sure that this time I waited after depositing my paycheck before giving a check to Brown; and additionally, I knew that the exchanges were between the same two banks (Citizens and Sovereign), so there would be no "but Fleet has fancier computers" shenanigans. And yet, I still got socked with an overdraft fee. This time I got the guy at Sovereign to admit that even after a check clears, and the money is in fact actually sitting in my account, as such, they still put a hold on it for a few days. (He wouldn't admit last time that that's what it was---if he had I sure as hell wouldn't have reasoned like I did and it sure as hell wouldn't have happened again.) I'd consider just pulling out of Sovereign entirely---they've also been annoying me with the random monthly service fees on my "Totally Free Checking(tm)" account---but I'm going to be moving in a couple months anyway, so it hardly seems worth it.

Ok, so don't even ask how I got to this site, but this picture is on the main green at Brown. (The urinal was brought in just for the photograph.)

"As anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to to stake out a piece of ground that no one wants." --Paul Graham

Posted 11:20 AM [+]

08 May 2003

Paul Graham is so quotable. His new essay, Hackers and Painters is again good---some stuff I disagree with, but very well written.

You know how hard it is to get into a project? And how it's even harder to get back into a project after you've set it aside for a month or two? Thus it was with my PhD thesis. But Tuesday afternoon, I made my way over the hump, and I'm moving again. Hopefully I can be ready to defend in a month and a half.

(Oh, and the concert last night went really well. I got assigned a solo just two days before the concert, but I was in excellent voice and it went off great. :)

"Computer science is a grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia." --Paul Graham

Posted 11:42 AM [+]

06 May 2003

From this article: "Coalition forces have no orders to protect universities. They have orders to protect places of interest.... Iraqis need to protect their own cities." --US Central Command

Thanks, guys.

"Gordon's is only good for serious mixing/jello, and even then only because it's cheap. As a matter of fact, the only good thing about Gordon's is that it's cheap. And at least 80 proof. Two. Two good things." --Eva Shillace

Posted 10:08 PM [+]