thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Text message me, don't call

I'm not checking voicemail messages here, so please send a text message if you want to reach me. Email is best.

CHI rollcall redux

Alrighty, we know that Abe, Ping, and Riad will be at CHI. Who else and what nifty things will we do in Montreal? A friend graciously provided a list of good veggie restaurants (and James, you're not invited).

I'm presenting on Monday at ~5:30 in the voice input session. Come find me, if you're a fan of ASR and confidence shading.

Rosie Thomas at Club Cafe

Rosie Thomas played Club Cafe last weekend with surprising cheer, despite having all of her equipment stolen two days prior. "We were robbed. They stole everything: our instruments, my pretty dresses, even my socks and underwear." Yet in a voice an octave above her singing range peppered with intermittent chuckles, she described the generosity of strangers who provided replacement instruments.

With the exception of a slightly buzzing guitar pickup, their replacement equipment fared extremely well, though Rosie missed some instruments. "This song had a string part. It would've been great. So would having underwear."

And she dedicated a song to the robbers, but emphasized that she's not always this nice. "Really, I'm not much of a saint. If I saw them, I'd kick their asses. I hope their Easter sucks."

Openers the Winterpills played catchy rock, particularly Honey in the Chemicals and Pills for Sara.

We followed the show with nineties dancing at the Shadowlounge and the Restive show at Spice Cafe, where the band played a ton of good, funky songs whose titles I don't know yet. My favorite (and only because I know the name of the cover) was the highly danceable Hoochie Coochie Man

Stress is boring

Every semester there are usually a couple of weeks where I'm really feeling crunched, and this week is one of them. However, I've decided that being stressed about all of the work I need to do is really tedious, especially since I've noticed it pervading my conversations with people I care about. So, I've decided not to be stressed anymore. I'll get all of the work done and not be annoying to be around. Cheers!

Oh, and if I even start to recite any part of my to-do list in your presence, feel free to glare or throw something.

"Mind as disposition to heed"

I have to read an article that's full of sentences like "'Mind' is a noun similar to nouns like faith, hope, charity, role, and culture. 'Mind' is not the name of a person, place, or thing, but rather, is a dispositional term that denotes a propensity to act in a certain manner or style."

My reading strategy thus far has consisted of propping the pages up behind my laptop while I add people to my friendster network.

Metapost

Most likely this will continue to be a tuna fish sandwich blog until mid-May. For those of you not familiar with the expression, it means that posts will be of the banal and myopic "I like tuna fish sandwiches. Do you?" variety, rather than containing any thought-provoking substance.

Apparently, though, there are earnest tuna fish sandwich blogs, too.

This weekend I did some stuff and some things

• Bouldering with Josh, Jen, and Wendy (the muscles under my scapula are sore!)
• Saw the superb (and forgivably schmaltzy) movie Joyeux Noel, about the temporary WWI truce started by a German tenor, some bagpipers, and a cat named Felix (no, Nestor!)
• Ian's "primes and squares" party, themed around numerology and one CS student's desire for nerdy guys (squares) to mingle with hot women (primes). Josh's facility in dressing square was downright frightening.
  
• GSA reception at the Regina Miller gallery with the MFA exhibit (favorites were "Materiality" and the suitcases filled with newsprint money)
• Lindy at Edgewood with Dr. Zoot
• Requisite time in the sun and studying at Coffee Tree
  

Ah, geaux on

So, remember that beignet research? I'll be going to Jazz Fest in New Orleans the first week of May to interview people about their Hurricane Katrina experiences. No deets here (don't want to influence the study), but drop me a line if you're interested in the details.

Going to the fest? Come find me. I'll be the one with contraband mp3 recorder and IRB consent forms stashed in my pockets. Also, I've been assured by the peeps on the nojazz chat boards that there will be Lindy in a couple of tents and that I'll adore zydeco dancing.

Wikipedia talk page: fried dough

Looking up the history of the beignet (I swear this is research-related), I found the following note: "It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Fried dough. (Discuss)"

And wow, that's quite the talk page. People take their fried dough seriously.

Talking, writing, CHI rollcall

It's all about efficiency here, folks. You get your daily blather in tidy digest form, oh, about once a week. So, I will continue to stall on the Ecuador photo front and instead offer other stories.

April is the month of talks. I gave one this morning about last summer's research; it went over well. Giving another talk on database tomfoolery on Wednesday, and yet another about our Hurricane Katrina study next week. And then a repeat of today's talk at CHI at the end of the month. And on the written word front, we submitted a CSCW paper a couple of weeks ago and my TOCHI article was just published.

Are you coming to CHI?

Seasonal peep torture

Have you mangled a sugar-coated bunny today? I love stories like this. (Thanks, mom.)

Everybody's already googling each other

And today it's packaged in Google Romance: "We brought only the latest psychographic and search algorithms to bear on the problem of hooking up our users."

"When you do a Soulmate Search, your deeply personal and potentially life-altering search results are produced solely by computer algorithm, without human intervention of any kind.

Note: depending on your personality, you may or may not find this reassuring."