Perusing the classifieds in the Eugene Weekly today, I ran across this. Amongst the "drinking and herb-friendly fifty year-old WM ISO SWF" and "preop transsexual looking to meet others"-type ads was this little flower. Poor little Lee, he missed the West Wing! Perusing the classifieds in the Eugene Weekly today, I ran across this. Amongst the "drinking and herb-friendly fifty year-old WM ISO SWF" and "preop transsexual looking to meet others"-type ads was this little flower. Poor little Lee, he missed the West Wing! Jason Kottke, following my lead, talks today about the PowerPoint article in the New Yorker. He points out a similar article in USA today. My favorite quote from that article:
It does help lay out thoughts in a coherent manner," he adds, "but it breeds a dependency the likes of which I've only seen in heroin users and Starbucks coffee drinkers. Has anyone seen Microsoft salespeople hanging around school yards yet?
Funny he should bring that up. Microsoft proudly notes that PowerPoint is increasingly being found in K-12 schools. "Students are using PowerPoint for show-and-tell," says a PR document.
Like thousands of other Americans, I was suckered into seeing Pearl Harbor this Memorial Day weekend. (Don't worry, no spoilers here - the movie is predictable enough to be its own spoiler anyway.) Lesson learned: the promise of outstanding computer effects isn't substantial when those effects are hung on a limp plot. Granted, there was a handful of beautiful scenes, but the rest of the cinematography was sterile, lacking detail and interest. Kate Beckinsale, who I adored in Cold Comfort Farm and The Last Days of Disco, couldn't even infuse her mediocre lines with any emotion. A hoky romance, trivial portrayal of race relations, and not enough attention to the more worthwhile characters (like Ewen Bremner's "Red") made this an overall failure. I debated with my uncle whether there were enough of us walking out of the theater to stage a coup and demand our money back. Instead I think I'll move to Ireland.
"PowerPoint is a software you impose on people" - from Ian Parker's brilliant article on the ubiquitous monster in this week's New Yorker. (Sorry kiddies - article isn't available online - but since this week's focus is all things digital, you should run right out and pick one up anyway.) Not only has the program assisted the masses in organizing their presentations into neat bulleted chunks, Parker and others find that more and more it's altering the way people think. And not in a good way. Begone pronouns and phrases more than seven words long! The name "AutoContent Wizard" for the templates (with scarily meeting-ese prewritten content) was originally a joke - "a rare example of a product named in outright mockery of its target customers."
My experiences with PowerPoint are mixed - since it doesn't support animated gifs easily (a blessing in most circumstances), I've used Director instead for my thesis presentations lately (which were all about animated banner ads). Director is a pain - you have to deal with a lot of overhead yourself, and the finished product is generally indistinguishable from that which would've come from Microsoft.
One beautiful, mold-bending slide show I saw recently was by Geoffrey Hiller, who incorporated his stunning photographs into the background of each screen. Yeah, yeah, you say, that's been done before. But some gestalt mixture of emotive photos, subtle (not blue!) background colors, and nice navigation buttons really struck me. Unfortunately, much of the text was too small to read, but it made for a visually compelling talk.
Moira's toolbar of wonder. You know, what I really need is a Dictionary.com search field right next to my Google toolbar in IE. While you're at it, you could add one for Amazon, too - since it's a legitimate reference guide.
I visit Google, Dictionary.com, and Amazon about 20 times per day (combined), so quick access would save me about a minute daily (that comes from an exaggeration of Fitts' Law.
Did you know that deinococcus radiodurans can withstand unusually high levels of gamma rays? Hannah taught me this at her thesis defense today. Way to go Hannah! Did you know that Google, everybody's favorite search engine figured out that I meant "deinococcus radiodurans" when I typed in "deicoccus radiodenens" - and that Yahoo!, MSN, and Altavista didn't? Way to go, Google!
Not wanting to shirk my civic duty two years in a row (after getting excused from jury duty last year), I went to the Lane County Courthouse this morning to report for jury duty. I was all revved up - prepared for a patriotic adventure. Maybe I'd even be a foreperson. I'd get to be the one to say that we found in favor of the plaintiff, just like on Ally McBeal or The Practice or a John Grisham novel. Just as long as the trial was speedy, I wouldn't gripe too much. Sat on folding chairs with a hundred other people in the basement of the courthouse. There appeared to be one other student-age person there; most people fit the working-class middle-age demographic.
The morning started with a rousing video about how we're all taking part in a "cornerstone of democracy," and how Thomas Jefferson considered trial by jury a crucial part of our new country. Screenshots of "Th. Jefferson"'s signature and the words "trial by jury" in faded calligraphy. Then we learned about Martha (don't really remember her name), who thought she was just too busy to serve jury duty. Poor, misguided Martha. But then, when she learned that she had to serve, she looked around to see how the courts serve us today. Screenshots of Martha looking thoughful, overlaid with images of a courthouse, overlaid with a shot of a flag waving in the breeze. Cue the patriotic background music. I learned so much from Martha's story.
We were divided into panels named after the seven dwarfs (yours truly was in "sleepy") and awaited going upstairs, where the final jury selection for a handful of trials would happen.
A half-hour later the woman in charge let us know that all of the jury trials for the day had been cancelled for various reasons (mostly plea bargains). We were all dismissed. Feeling only a small sense of being slighted out of my chance to set the innocent free, incarcerate the guilty, and be as cool as Martha, I walked out the door with my fellow compatriots. Went to the Beanery and bought a mexican soy mocha.
Stunning font alert: Amazone BT (free at High Fonts) with its swoops and curlicues outshines the boring standard cursive scripts like Coronet and Signet Roundhand. Can't get enough of Amazone's uppercase O. Those of you receiving graduation announcements from me will be seeing much more from this up-and-comer.
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Yes! I realize this post is 5+ years old, but I went looking for Amazone BT today after discovering it via VistaPrint's available design fonts. I found it with lots of extended characters for $25, but I also found a slimmer free version here:
http://www.newfonts.net/index.php?pa=show_font&id=10
Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note to say I love it too. : ) (It's going in my wedding invitations/announcements/favors/etc.)
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http://www.newfonts.net/index.php?pa=show_font&id=10
Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note to say I love it too. : ) (It's going in my wedding invitations/announcements/favors/etc.)
Oh, and my friend Jacob said I could distribute his fabulous thesis. If you want a copy of an excellent novel in five stories, email me.
"If you're not willing to be nice to someone constantly, then you should kill him" - Mike Tyson in Black and White, a film in which the majority of the lines were ad-lib.
From my mother, who's usually a kind soul: "We are all fashionable in our minds, Moira, but it's too bad we can't be in real life." Ouch.
And from Kristel: "I borrowed your news porn, Moira, since it was just sitting there." Actually, I think she said "Neosporin," but it makes a better story the other way.
Ooh ooh ooh - XML-RPC.
Here are Kristel's thoughts on my animal/vegetable/mineral debate from yesterday:
In my opinion, a tulip definitely fits the vegetable category since it is
vegetation after all. That is the point of the category and I have always
included things like trees in it. And I guess you could claim that it has
minerals in it. But so do animals and digitals.
Yeah, all my digitals is minerals.
Checklist for the Willamette Valley Folk Festival:
- sunscreen. check.
- program guide. check
- book. check
- dinero. check
- camera. check
There will be boogieing. Oh yes, there will be boogieing.
Sick of the putrid magenta background this site used to have, I overhauled the design today. Isn't it groovy? Now, we can all get past the fact that a tulip isn't a mineral, can't we? I noticed in the process that "animal, vegetable, mineral" isn't all-inclusive, as many would have you think. Flowers aren't veggies, and granted, they're not minerals, but they're sorta earthy. So, you can see how I made the connection. Now no more on that.
Another blogger used the phrase "go me" in her post the other day. This was the first occurrance of the phrase written down I'd seen, and I have to say I like it.
We are all feeling very special right now. Go have a cookie.
Self-healing plastics in Wired this month. So, if you drop your cell phone, mini pores in the material release a goo that fills and solidifies in the wound, much as skin does. Which do you think will come first: we turn machines into humans, or humans into machines (a la Joy or Kurzweil, or even just the wearables community)? More and more we see biological standards being applied to concepts (i.e. memes) or inanimate objects (like artificial neural networks, genetic programming). As biology and digital terms merge in the common lexicon, it seems that this human/computer synthesis is becoming publically accepted. Part of it is that we just like finding cool analogies for technical concepts (like, oh, daemons, zombie processes, divide and conquer, viruses, bugs), but it also seems to signal an acceptance of the integration of humans and computers. PDAs are socially de rigueur, and with the push to make them smaller and lighter, would the public really turn down a technology that could make your PDA display on your retina? Not that I'm against this (how's that for riding the fence?), but it's just something to think hard about.
This scared me just a little. Surfing some random site (actually, a Blogger blog of note), and they appeared to know my name. Now, being the web savvy chick that I am, I know that actually, my buddy Amazon.com knows my name, and Amazon sent the info to the page. But if I weren't the web savvy chick that I am, I would've been freaked out. Plus, the explanation Amazon gives (which if you click on "how do we know your name" and then hunt around you might find) is less than satisfactory. Insert rant about revealing too much information online here. Root beer tapper at shockwave.com is just way too diverting. Now, where's hard hat mac?
Shoes as symbols. Why are there tennis shoes hanging from power lines all over the west university neighborhood? Some say it's a gang sign or graduation ritual. (Maybe both? How many gang members graduate?) On a related note, Tyson told me yesterday about a graduation ritual for marching band geeks at his high school - after playing the closing chord, everyone would march barefoot off the field, leaving their shoes arrayed in the final formation.
McSweeny's today was poignant, especially considering the opposite birthday experience I had last week, with friends and family all over. Remind me to change the link tomorrow, since McS doesn't seem to archive the current article until the next day.
Addendum: Bonus points go to Bryce for actually reminding me to update the link.
Well, I got the memo.
Recipie for a fabulous afternoon:
Shuffle two parts Guster, one part Counting Crows (This Desert Life - less brooding than August), Groove Juice Special, and the So I Married an Axe Murderer soundtrack. Drown out the neighbors' hip hop. Add one Dreyers Whole Fruit Bar (tangerine) and a blissful kitty (Hazel - Winter's too bitchy) sprawling on my supine torso. Crank the temperature to eighty, and have great reading material.
That material would be my friend Jacob's senior thesis, a novel in five stories. I don't know Jacob that well; we lived in the same dorms for two years, and he's close to my other dorm friends. But I see him around the honors college occasionally, as I did yesterday, where he was at that triumphant stage of turning two copies of the finished thesis on 25% rag-content bond paper in the requisite manila envelopes with title page affixed with a single piece of scotch tape. One day soon that'll be me. Jacob emailed me his stories, and they're exquisite. Heavy on the Palahniuk (another UO grad), but I think Jacob was probably already heavy on the Palahniuk long before Chuck started writing. Hints of Eggers. Brilliant one liners. The thesis reminded me that their are jewels among your friends and acquaintances. Talented people destined for greatness. Seek them out.
Some of my favorite exerpts:
"My current ulcer, which I call Ramone, sputters and twitches inside me."
"The future's never looked this not bad."
"Following the world from Gilgamesh to the Carthaginians to the Scots beating the crap out of the Scots to Hitler in Poland to Russians in Afghanistan to Americans just about everywhere, you've come to realize that chess really is a bad metaphor for life, because in chess, ther are actually pieces other than pawns"
"Wherever Danny Nixon walked, Jesus followed. This wasn't like a religious ecstasy sort of thing. This was like a stalking sort of thing."
As you can see, I'm a bit prolific today (can you be a 'bit' prolific?). Making up for yesterday when I was wrassling with javascript. Night, kiddies.
Realization: I've reached the point in my academic career where my mini stapler is no longer big enough.
In an email about the CIS department programming contest I'm participating in next week:
"In response to a couple of requests, ML will be added to the available programming languages (Java, C, C++)."
Whoa there, cowboy.
Finally, after hours of toiling (and I mean hours!), I'm unveiling the groovy new photos section. I must not be a very devout computer scientist, because I've decided to give up on making the photo section's javascript work properly in Netscape. Too much caffeine and w3c specs and I get cranky.
But on to happier topics. Yesterday was my birthday. My mom, who used to wake me up and play "Yer Birthday" from the Beatles' white album every year, called me up and sang it over the phone a little off key, but well-intentioned. And she brought me some lilly of the valley. Had a barbecue with friends (heh - like that second plug for the photos section?), and generally frolicked.
My new goal is not to be awake at my computer when Dictionary.com sends the email with tomorrow's word of the day (at midnight). Failed tonight.
It's a sad day in Mudville. Linda left for Sweden a few hours ago. I don't think Winter knows yet. Poor kitty.
Furthermore, Papaya has made me hyperaware of scents, sounds, and tactile sensations. A sample of my experience walking down the street to Sundance just now:
<location>entering the alley that runs to the store
<smell>spicy burning oil from the Indian Restaurant
<sound>the "na na na" part from Ani's Buildings and Bridges coming through the screen door of the house on the alley behind the restaurant
<more sound>crunching gravel beneath my sandals
<location>half way down the alley, almost to the store
<smell>sweet and foul, from the dumpsters
<sound>frenetic jazz piano from a latin jazz cd the guy recycling boxes behing the store was playing, and only the piano frequency carried into the alley
<location>on my way back from Sundance, approaching the restaurant again
<sound>another Ani song, this time with a woman singing along live
<touch>warmth from the boxes of food I'm holding
<location>exiting the alley, near the vet
<touch>the wind lifting up the bottom of my shirt
<sound>a dalmation barked once at me as I neared his home
<location>my front yard and walkway
<sound>crunching grass and those spiky brown pods
< more sound>crunching gravel in the walkway
Two complementary movies on service/servitude I recommend (and happened to rent last night, not noticing the connection): A Single Girl and The Scent of Green Papaya. Both featured subtly beautiful women forced to work for others. However, the juxtaposition of how the women accept their positions was striking: the maid in contemporary Paris yells at her smarmy coworker and talks about abortion with her boyfriend, while the domestic in 1950's Saigon won't even raise her eyes to the family she serves. Yet both manage to be happy.
So it's a beautiful Saturday morning, replete with sun, birds, the whole bit, and my cat is doing laps. This is her usual routine, although today I admit she's doing it with added brio. She starts at the back door, looks around a bit, and then hurtles as fast as her six inch legs can carry her toward the back room (which, ironically, is on the front side of the house) where the catbox is. Then she'll nonchalantly saunter out into my room, look around a bit more, and repeat the process in reverse order. Today my other back door is open, too, so she runs the backyard steeplechase ocasionally, as well. Right now she's refueling on the best generic cat food Safeway has to offer, but the second heat will be starting soon.
More on the ephemeral intelligence of weblog/journal entries. An odd semi-related thought I had last night: wonder if anyone has ever had a URL tattooed on their body?
As I cleaned my room today in preparation for the fiesta tomorrow, I ran across my old journal. I'm amazed at how delusional I was at 16. And back then I thought I knew everything, just as I think I know everything now. I really should listen to my parents more.
At least at 21 I wasn't too bad. Sample entry: "Picked up an IKEA catalogue at Mary Beth's. Better living through the purchase of many mass-produced comsumerite shrines made to give your home that yoga-esque simple look - that look that says you don't actually make messes; you just sip tea and read Gibran on your white sofa (with accent color shag pillows) all day."
I am enjoying some celebratory Brie right now.
Jess and I both passed our thesis defenses. (We're smart women. Take notice.) Lessons learned: animated banners are bad. Nuclear waste is bad. Thesis advisors aren't all that bad, especially when they bring you chocolate molded like a computer afterward. Life is good.
Mmmm . . . lentil potato soup from the soup guy on kincaid.
Things to do other than panic on the day of your thesis defense:
- Bake copious amounts of banana bread
Watch Junkyard Wars and decide that British bikers are actually smarter than you
Clean the catbox. Well, okay, make plans to clean the catbox tomorrow.
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