thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Google archive as personality detector. Here are the last several items I've searched for in Google:

• the weakest link (for the photo in my last post)
• jude cristodal (he's got a new album coming out in october)
• acm chi (professional organization for computer-human interaction)
• pad thai recipies
• eugene public library
• shag pillows (hmmm . . . don't remember that one)
• roll your own blackout (a self-imposed blackout movement to protest Bush's obscene energy policies)
• trademark character in HTML
• toasts (trying to figure out how to spell one or something)
• pink martini (song titles and such)
• chuck palahniuk (the author of Fight Club who just visited UO)
• fuzzy logic (CIS term)
• yumm sauce (proprietary blend of nutritional yeast, garlic, almonds, etc. from Cafe Yumm)
• push stars (a kickin' band I just saw live)
• king of the road song (to find out the artist. Roger Miller, FYI)

Don't we all feel a little closer to Moira, now?

I turned on The Weakest Link last night and saw that the host was showing cleavage. Is this a television first? Has there ever even been a female game show host, let alone one in a posh low-cut top? Barker's Beauties and Vanna White obviously don't count. All the pictures of Anne on the NCB and BBC websites show her in the "Hitler's Mother" top (shown), so maybe she's trying to add a little mystery to her image. More power to you, sister!

My neighbors are launching preemptive, flatulent firecrackers.

  Did I mention I posted the photos from the KLCC garden tour?

Highly recommended: the sony spressa cd burner. After much ado with my friend Sean, we discovered that my old burner (a BCE something - so generic it didn't even have a real name) was, indeed, incompetent. In the process of testing the old burner and installing the new one, I learned how the IDE bus works and what it means to be master and slave. I've long since overcome my fear of messing up my computer via software (schmah - I can't really hurt anything). I'm quickly becoming more daunting in my under-the-cover forays, as well.

pb at onfocus is starting a photographic version of exploding dog. You, you brilliant child, submit a caption, and he'll put a photo with it. Example: He marched around endlessly hoping to make a substantial contribution to analytical geometry. (Brad noticed it first.)

Hazel and I are learning French. I was going to say that in French, but I'm not that far yet. I can say "Good day. My name is Moira. Two baguettes, please."

Comparing client-side scripts, the instructor of my SQL course said you could think of ActiveX (which has access to much of the client's computer) as a kind of poison applet.

Shower is an excellent movie.

"We tend to form loving relationships with people perceived as similar in attractiveness to ourselves (matching hypothesis). We also tend to perceive our partner, in a biased way, as a little more attractive than ourselves." From Perception of Physical Attractiveness Throughout Loving Relationships. (Link via brainsluice.)

7-Eleven has a link for "careers" on their homepage.

According to an article in the Eugene Weekly, New York advertisers only agreed to post the ten-story poster of UO quarterback Joey Harrington in downtown NYC because they thought it was going to be Joey Heatherton, the 60s sex kitten.

Amazing story on NPR this morning about starlings, and their uncanny mimicking of real-world sounds. Meredith West, a professor at Indiana University, played clips of a starling imitating her porch screen door and whistling dixie. She also said that the bird loves to watch basketball and chirp "defense, defense, defense!"

Here's a mayonaise rant for you. Sample:

My God in Heaven, Mayonnaise is in fact proof of the existence of Satan, for only a foul demon could possibly have concieved of this poultice from hell, this dressing of despair, this fecund white and yellow putrescent slime...this salad dressing that nobody ever puts on their salad.

Things you can do with your CueCat now that it's worthless^*:

1. Extract the innards and you have a fabulous jello mould.


2. Plant them surreptitiously in your yard to surprise guests. Garden gnomes beware!


3. Redecorate in a Queen of Sheba motif


4. Award them to idiotic venture capitalists and entrepeneurs who come up with ideas as stupid as the CueCat (as David Coursey at ZDNet suggests). Maybe we could have the annual CueCat Awards™.

*Not that the cue cat ever had any kind of worth. (ZDNET article thanks to Doc Searls.)

However, we are not amused by the animated banner at the top of the spell-checker window. (While I'm using the royal "we," I think the revulsion is widespread.) Clearly not Evan's doing - the company that hosts the service, Spellchecker.net charges $50 for every 10,000 uses to remove the banner. Even a simple static banner would be preferable - right now I'd rather have tpyos than watch the dancing credit card a microsecond longer. Unlike the thousands of companies that have realized the inefficacy and annoyance factor of animated banners (link goes to my thesis findings on the topic if you're interested), SpellChecker.net hasn't figured that one out just yet. Catch up, guys!

Blogger heard my pleas! Now you too can have spanking-clean prose thanks to its new spell-checker. Love how the first word the checker questioned in this post was "Blogger."

Chris and Luke, two ken doll high school seniors, actually conned First USA (the credit card company) into sponsoring their college education. I'm amazed and delighted. Good work, boys! (From Bradlands.)

Squirrels are cavorting in the backyard. There's a hammock, with ropes worn soft from age, under a shady tree. Fresh strawberries for the picking as soon as the sprinkler finishes. The coast fork of the Willamette river idles by. I love visiting my parents' home.

From Annie at out of order, on seeing John Cusack in a hallway:

And then he looked at me and smiled, which turned me into a goofy seventh-grader all over again. He is tall and handsome and evenly complexioned in real life.

But now he knows I exist, which means it's only a matter of time before he wants to go out for tea.

The University of Oregon has officially graduated me, along with a few hundred of my friends. (Like my use of the transitive verb there?) Spent the weekend flitting from social engagement to social engagement, blithely in denial that we'll all be parting soon.

Word of the day:

naff - Unstylish, clichéd, or outmoded. Chiefly British slang. Definition from your favorite and mine, Dictionary.com. Used today on brainsluice.

I guess computer science majors don't think much about ironing (as was apparent at the graduation ceremony last year):

Subject: Ok, this is the Final word for commencement!
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 13:55:08 -0700
From: Cheri Smith
To: Recipient List Suppressed:;



A suggestion was made that if you're planning to wear a cap & gown, you might want to look it over before putting it on. They tend to come out of the bags quite wrinkled, so you might give consideration to pressing them ahead of time. Just a thought. :)

Word of the day:

google - To use an Internet search engine such as google.com to look for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend. From Word Spy (which I found via Kottke.)

They've found me out.

Went to hear Chuck Palahniuk talk last night. He's promoting his latest book, Choke, which my two friends had already purchased and finished in a span of a few hours. Chuck likened his writing process to a two-mile Japanese fishing net, in which he snagged anecdotes (often embarrasing) from his friends and strangers and put them in his novels. "I don't want to take credit for them," he said, "but I don't mind getting paid for them."

When he was young and without a lot of money, he couldn't understand why contestants on The Price is Right would choose a trip to Paris over a long-lasting couch set. At least the couch would be there next week. But eventually he learned that experience is every bit (if not more) important than possessions, a good lesson for those of us who are graduating and setting off on new adventures soon.

But you're probably wondering what the accompanying picture has to do with anything. While getting his book signed, my friend Jacob told Chuck about his thesis which was heavily influenced by the author's edgy cadence and voice. Searching for some way to pass the creative torch on to a promising author, Chuck handed Jacob the daisy Chuck had had in his breast pocket all evening. Jacob got a but quivery, and my friend Annie and I looked on with maternal pride. Jacob, Annie, and I commenced to watch Fight Club on video.

The New Yorker's summer fiction issue is out. A snippet from my favorite story so far:

"If you blunder again," my grandfather said, when we arrived at the location, "I will stop the car and you will get out with a foot in the backside. It will be my foot. It will be your backside. Is this a thing you understand?"

And I would want my cat smacking my monitor why?

A beautiful article on The New Ten Commandments in the UK Guardian includes passages like:

Look after the environment There's a worrying generation gap between mother earth and her children. If looking after the environment meant racing around in rubber dinghies and chaining ourselves to trees, we'd all be doing it (for rubber and chains, see under sexual orientation). Instead, what we should really be doing is sorting our rubbish into 17 different types. This is a very dangerous thing to encourage the British to do. Anything that can be sorted and classified can also be spotted and be turned into a hobby. Once the British start collecting and spotting rubbish, nothing will ever be thrown away. Instead, it will be swapped in the playground or labelled and displayed lovingly in heritage centres.

(link from extenuating circumstances).

Not to add to the incestuization of the weblog world, I'm going to refer to another thing on Bryce's site. He mentions that only 20% of visitors to his site are from the uoregon.edu domain (people on the UO campus). Why don't I announce stats like this on my page? I don't want to scare off all of those hot guys who think they're secretly reading my page without my noticing. Of course, any guys I'd consider hot would have already looked at the source code and seen that I'm using a commercial counter, so they know I'm keeping tabs on them. I'm too lazy to even grep the server files - at least that would be covert. Now that I've spilled the beans, hot guys, please keep visiting me.

The word of the day was going to be estivation, since Mighty Girl just used it, but I hit esc while typing and lost my entry. You'll just have to look the word up yourself.

The new word of the day is, instead:

onus - a difficult or disagreeable responsibility or necessity; a burden or obligation. From Dictionary.com, and used quite wordsmithily by Simon Taylor in a response to David Coursey's pro-Smart Tags article.

You, my brilliant reader, probably know all about Smart Tags and have an opinion. Thus, I'm not going to supply you with mine. If you are of the impressionale sort, you could read Mossberg's or Guglielmo's articles on the topics (thanks to DaveNet).

Wonder where the word of the day went? Well, it's right here:

spammenot - Something added to an email address in order to prevent spammers from harvesting emails from sites. Usually a word or phrase in all caps inserted into a normal email address (i.e. dude AT hotmail DOT com). From the frabjous Pseudodictionary.

I love my erstwhile Swedish roommate (the erstwhile goes with roommate - she's still Swedish). She sends me emails with lines like "take care and let me know how you are doing and what kind of planes you have for the future!!!"

Bryce had me type something in his blog for him last night while he busy doing something else. It felt unnerving - like I had snuck under someone's bed, pulled out their diary, chose a matching-color pen, and forged an entry doing an ingenious job of imitating their handwriting. Just wrong.

Noah Grey does the same title switching as me. (View source on our pages to see the array of possible titles.) Some of our title ideas are nearly identical - don't know if that means we're unimaginative or just both brilliant.

Why are license agreements so frequently printed in ALL CAPS? Is it to encourage us not to really read them, or perhaps to TRUMPET THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COMPANY AND REMIND YOU, THE USER HERETOFORE MENTIONED, THAT YOU ARE MINISCULE IN COMPARISON AND SHOULD JUST SUBMIT TO THEIR GLOBAL DOMINATION? LimeWire, which I'm showing here, isn't the best example (they're a pretty small group), but can we think of some others, perhaps?

A rental video's merit is inversely proportional to the number of exclamation points in its description.

Saw this amidst my job search on monster. Don't think I could afford to work for them.

Even if you're not into all of the AI hype, you should still see the movie's beautifully designed flash site.

The brilliant Anthony Lane (of The New Yorker) refers to Hugh Grant's detestable, Bridget-chasing Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones's Diary as "a slithy tove who just wants to gimble in her wabe."

Three semi-related events have happened in the last couple of days, when taken alone are nice enough, but when combined, harmonize so serendipitously that I get al warm and fuzzy about being in computer science. First, I finished reading "In the Beginning was the Command Line," by Neal Stephenson, available online thanks to those whizkids at The Cyberpunk Project (and thanks to Tiller for the hint). Stephenson, with his usual cognoscenti lexicon (from which I gleamed words like cruft, saturnine, and eldritch) describes the origins of the various OSes and makes a great case for Linux and BeOs. Plus, he referred to Lisp as "the only computer language that is beautiful." Next, I heard Linus Torvalds talk on NPR, about which I already wrote. Finally, I watched Antitrust last night. Ryan Phillipe fights off the evil Tim Robbins (who does a mean Bill Gates) and saves the world from corporate domination. A good chuckle, especially when one of the Microsoft-esque company's employees walks around in a Java t-shirt (a Sun product, one of MS's biggest rivals), and all of the hotshot programmers code in Java (again, not something that is likely promoted in Redmond). Plus, the cool-looking code that ran through the title sequence was just HTML - would've been a lot scarier looking in C or Perl or something equally arcane. All in all, makes me happy to be one of the digerati. I'm in on the joke.

I was in the middle of a blog about several interesting tech events lately when Hazel, being her usual clumsy self, knocked her water dish off of the windowsill where she sits. Right into the air vents in the back of my monitor. Several seconds passed, in which I looked at the screen and thought, "ooh, the pretty colors" before having the sense to turn it off. Tried to take the cover off to no avail, wiped the water that dribbled out the bottom, fretted for awhile, and then took a nap. Turned it on a couple of hours later, to see that everything had a bright purple sheen. Considered who I could talk into buying me a flat-screen. Fiddled with the RGB levels, hoping to come up with a usable compromise, when it suddenly turned bright yellow and then went back to normal. Hazel and I are back on speaking terms.

Word of the day:

cruft - layer upon layer of superfluous code added to an existing product to make it compatible with new hardware. Think Windows 98. Related to legacy code - code written by an earlier programer that the current programmers don't understand and are too afraid to remove. See "How to write unmaintainable code". (More about cruft, including its origins at Harvard, from dictionary.com.)

Word of the day:

bowdlerize - edit by omitting or modifying parts considered indelicate; "bowdlerize a novel." From Thomas Bowdler, who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818. (from WordNet, which, by the way, makes an excellent dictionary for my PDA)

Terry Gross interviewed the soft-spoken Linus Torvalds on NPR today. The creator of Linux explained, quite nicely, why the open source movement works, and why he's a happy man today.

Craving thoughtfully drawn stick figures with amusing captions? Never fear, exploding dog has them for you. Sam, the artist, takes title suggestions via email and then draws green-monster-and-red-robot-laden pictures. Some of his early stuff is profound. I recommend "that's like dancing to architecture" and "someday i will join you."

Things I wish Blogger supported (part one in a series of, well, maybe many): double-spacing between sentences and spell check. I doubt I'm the only Type A out there that craves two tidy little spaces between my sentences - a legion of fourth-grade teachers is right now eyeballing students' book reports for that little grammatical botchery. Blogger nicely turns my carriage returns into cute little <br>'s, so could it also detect my double spaces and stick in my &nbsp;'s automatically, too? I would love it forever and ever, especially if it had a little spell-checker button, as well. Blogger, darling, I love you as you are, but maybe we could work on a few aspects of our relationship?

Two blogging gems for you: Mighty Girl waxes smut-etic on the marriage potential of Webvan (note: this isn't a permalink - look for the 6.1.2001 entry) and The Daily Brad is back up after a much-too-long hiatus!

Word of the day/week/moment: Both for my own memorization and for the benefit of you, my readers, I'm introducing the WOTD feature. Now you, too, can have a stellar vocabulary. No more grasping for multisyllabic words - my goal is to get you to say, "they have a word for that?!" Non-english, geekspeak, and nonsense will definitely make appearances. So, we'll have a special double-issue to kick things off:

caryatid: A supporting column sculptured in the form of a draped female figure (dictionary.com)

mathom: A useless object, like those found in museums. (from The Lord of the Rings trilogy).