Funny

I would never do this.

Home

Blogging on my parents' new wireless network (courtesy moi). After a week at home, the one thing I miss most about work is Diet Coke. Luckily, I had some today. Home's been very fun. And warm! Basketball, the beach, parties. It's feels odd to have people you see exactly once a year. Everyone (i.e. Josh and Charles) has a blog! Driving is kind of fun if you do it infrequently enough. Cranium is awesome! (Spelling questions are best answered sober, though.) Apples to Apples is mysterious, but easily won with the "Driving off a cliff" card. Firefly is addictive.

As an aside (as if this all weren't!), this Dilbert really captures how I felt when I first moved to Boston. (Good find, Richard):


Leaving now to watch more Jeopardy (boy has my trivia brain atrophied) and erase comment spam.

Yes, I've been delinquent

So much has been going on, I've had no time to write about it. Working backwards, more or less. Ben Franklin documentary on History Channel, Ben as a playa. Bronx Zoo at night - tigers and sea lions and camels eating, reptiles sleeping, baby capuchin monkeys breastfeeding, reindeer locking horns. Fun, if pricey. A better deal if you get in during the day - it's almost the same price. Also, the entrance closest to the subway is closed at night. Oops. Before that, Scrabble. Good find: 2 letter and 3 letter words with definitions! Google holiday party - too much booze - why did they have to have it on a Thursday? Incredibles and Kinsey (really liked Kinsey, sad how little religious conservatives have progressed in accepting human nature). Finished Oryx and Crake (Catherine thinks it's faux-deep, but I enjoyed it. Anyone want to discuss the ending?) Still hunting for decent Indian food in this city. Fun Thanksgiving at Catherine's (precarious hike in the rain at night, arcane card games, suburbia, Trading Spaces, good food). New sweater, new duvet cover, new couch. The Game. The only thing sadder than Yale on the field was Harvard charging for tailgates(!).

More debate text analysis

I was reading old stuff in Bloglines, and ran across Cameron's toys for looking at the debate transcripts.

Purple proportional map!

Thanks to a pointer from danah: purple proportional map.

Still catching up after Chicago...

I had a fun trip to CSCW in Chicago, especially since I snuck in some time to go on an awesome architecture tour and see jazz.

My talk apparently went well (thanks danah!) although a mid-talk crash led me to forget to show off the topic clustering and similarity coloring that constituted the text analytics. We also got some good questions about the possibility of shared read wear and user profiling.

I'm still sorting through my notes on what I saw and reading through papers. There wasn't anything that really blew me out of the water, although the session on backchannels was interesting and exhausting (I like the idea of augmented classrooms), Barry Wellman was entertaining, and the brief discussion of IDiag was intriguing. The idea of Wikilens was also interesting, and the sessions on software develoment, cultural issues in face-to-face collaboration, and organizational issues rang true. Cliff explained how e2 was supposed to work to me (and gave me some explanations of Slashdot's moderation system). He also pointed me to Susan Herring's work comparing e2 to wikipedia.

Some interesting ways of organizing things: McGrath on ROI, Quentin Jones on wireless. Good explanations of acquiring common ground in different environments. Cool demo of CoWord.

Frankly, commiseration over the election really impeded discussions about collaboration. Larry Lessig, in an awesome-if-generic closing plenary fused the two with his mention of opt-in communities, but didn't really offer any solutions. He did repeatedly mention the book republic.com. Maybe I should read it.

Can't stop thinking about the stupid election

We've seen the proprtional maps and the purple maps, but where are the purple proprtional maps?

Did Kerry really win?

An embarassing day to be an American

It's a sad, sad day when a country can re-elect a fear-exploiting, liberty-squelching, fact-ignoring, world-angering President like Bush. I mean, seriously, if you want to live in a religious state, go start one in the Middle East. And I sure don't feel safer.

(As an aside, how absurd is it that people have to wait hours to vote? That's equivalent to disenfranchising whole portions of the population. Internet voting is so clearly the wave of the future...)

Visual design and the campaigns

Every time I see footage of rallies, I'm shocked that Bush (and, to a lesser extent, Kerry) can use such ugly, almost farcical fonts for their signs. They project power in a 1984, Starship Troopers kind of way. I was trying to see if anybody was analyzing this on the web, but didn't have much luck. The best I could do was a blog about social design which had a recent post about a Times article comparing the two campaigns' logos and a post about this amusing painting. I also found the Design Observer blog, which has some interesting stuff.

On hold

I've been waiting on hold with Time Warner Cable to ask a billing question for over fifteen minutes. Pretty lame. Stupid regulated monopolies. All to remove a charge for TV Guide which I didn't ask for in the first place. And then the person keeps me on the line to try to sell me on their phone service. Yeah, fat chance. (All that said, their DVR is pretty slick, if a little buggy and feature-limited compared to Tivo.)

Politics on my mind

I put up a new Annotated Debate, and I also just had dinner with Will, who's pro-Bush. This, plus some other things, has me wondering about politics.

I still wonder if it's possible to create a place for reasoned, evidence-based, point-by-point political discussion online. Something like REALM (results here - I wish I could maintain this better!). Perhaps not. Nobody seems to change their mind or act on the basis of reason, anyway. Then again, maybe voters are just stupid or incompatible.

Or maybe part of the problem is that, unlike ketchup or soda, voters don't have enough choice. Spoiled by segmentation and the long tail, we demand Diet Kerry or Caffeine Free Bush With Lime. On Leno the other night, the audience clapped loudly at the suggestion they deserved more choices. Leno egged them on, noting both candidates were rich white Yalies, while Chris Matthews noted (rightly, I'd think) that the candidates offer the starkest political choice than in recent memory.

Bad weekend for wallet, good weekend for tummy

Catherine got a Zagat, which led to us hitting up Meskerem, Mexicana Mama, and Cho Dang Gol. All three had tasty vegetarian options.

I also finally bought a bookcase and rocks glasses and the REM Album. Also found a promising place to buy curtains, West Elm. It's very exciting to only have 3 boxes left to unpack.

An experiment

I wrote a little hack that matches Fact Checks up against the body of the past two debates. Anyone think this is good? Bad? Any other places to draw from? (Other than blogs, which would be cool, but a lot of work. ;-)

• Bush-Kerry Part I
  
• Cheney-Edwards
  

Television...villain that thou art

Just when I was patting myself on the back for avoiding getting sucked into The Apprentice this season, I've found a new addiction.

Also on television, the debate. I feel like Kerry made some good points, but should learn to repeat them. Did he miss the fact that George Bush seems to dupe America in large part by repeating falsehoods ad nauseum? (Not that Kerry is innocent, either.) In order to understand conservatives better, I will try to read more conservative blogs. You should, too. (Sadly, I missed the real action.)

I also need to read up on North Korea, since I had no idea what they were talking about.

How do you shop?

So I'm on the hunt for window curtains and a bookcase (and a lamp and a couch and...). Because my window is weirdly long and I'm anti-tacky and pro-hip, those is proving surprisingly difficult. So far, Ikea is the leading contender, but their curtains might be too small. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of bookcases, none of which have really set off sparks. But, as I've been looking around online, I've been keeping lots of tabs open and praying my computer doesn't crash. Of course, since I have all these tabs, I can't restart and install the latest Windows patch. Does anybody else keep lots of tabs and windows open while shopping? I also end up emailing half the links to Catherine. Surely there's a better way?

Speaking of online shopping, Hold Everything has a moderately snazzy online catalog. Crate and Barrel and cb2 also have surprisingly hip stuff.

Today I found out...

That the K numbering of Mozart compositions comes from Köchel, which sounds a bit like my name. Apparently, he was a writer, composer, botanist and publisher.

Speaking of classical music, I went to the Chamber Music Society opening night last night thanks to Evan. Although I liked the Wagner piece the best, the dance to Renard the Fox was bizarre and entertaining.

Random thoughts

- REM tickets are on sale, but I have nobody to go with!
- Apparently, in old apartments, switching the boiler for winter makes brown water briefly come out of the taps.
- All Verizon cell phones seem to suck in some way.
- Extra-wide shower curtains are surprisingly difficult to track down.
- I still need to get Richard to fix Gallery and MT-blacklist.

As promised

I had the Welsh Rarebit at the very-hip Schiller's. It was good, although not quite what I expected. Maybe the gooey Mory's rarebit is more uncommon than I thought.

Google Local to the Rescue

I've been hunting for place other than Mory's that serve Welsh Rarebit for some while now, especially since Catherine and I tried to cook it ourselves and had the whole thing end in disaster. Enter Google Local. A simple search finds plenty of possibilities. I'll try one soon and report back.

Almost no longer homeless

Woo hoo! I signed a lease Tuesday. My life feels like it's been on hold for two months, but I finally start moving in tomorrow. I will soon be a proud Chelsea walkup studio dweller. Along the way, I've learned various valuable lessons like: bank checks can be cheaper than cashier's checks, movers may be slower than they claim, it's worth waiting for a good apartment, and sometimes the subway floods and makes the trip from Park Slope 2 hours long.

Mm...coinstar

I got $120 from Coinstar today! Goodbye, bag o' change!

Undercover marketing is scary!

I caught the tail end of a story on 60 Minutes about undercover marketing. It was creepy and reminiscent of Pattern Recognition. I wonder if people will every pay bloggers to hype something up?

California is fun

One of the neat things about the Mountain View office is that I can do my laundry for free. Unfortunately, there are not enough laundry machines. So I'm up rather late but uninterested in being productive. Hence, a blog entry! I had quite an exciting weekend. On Saturday, I drove to Santa Cruz and went running on Seacliff Beach. Finding beaches to run on is actually rather tough...the long stretches of sand sounded appealing, but it turns out that there was a lot of dodging of tide, people, and kelp involved. Nothing has quite matched running at Myrtle Beach. On Sunday, I went bike riding across the Golden Gate Bridge. Here's a tip: get a Bay City Guide from any of the vendors at Fisherman's Wharf and then use the $5 off coupon plus the price-match guarantee to get a $20 rental from Blazing Saddles. We also saved a bit by parking farther out and taking a street car. In any case, I can see why people like California. And happy post-birthday Vince!

Computer term etymologies

I was trying to figure out the etymology of i18n today, and I ran across this handy page of computer term etymologies (and computer company names). However, it didn't really explain how i18n came about. Eventually I found this detailed discussion, and along the way found a RFC about the origin of foo. Ah, etymology.

I know this was on Slashdot...

...but I feel compelled to log every interesting textual analysis of Slashdot.

Working

Well, I've had my first few days at Google, and it's every bit as fun and exciting as hoped. And they feed us a lot. But there's a lot to learn. I haven't really had time to go out and do New Yorky things, but I was excited to find a NYSC open till 11 near my hotel. It's sort of strange that 24-hour gyms are common in the otherwise non-24-hour San Diego, but not in the very-much-always-open New York.

Speaking of hotels, I'm fairly annoyed with hotels.com. I had deliberately chosen them thinking I would have more flexibility than with Hotwire. But in the fine print they mention no "early checkouts." This has the rather peculiar result that once you check in on a reservation, you're bound for the duration, even though you have up to the time of the reservation to cancel with some penalty. This might possibly make sense if they cut some deal based on the duration of the stay, but they usually lay out the pricing as the sum of the prices of the individual days stayed (there are some duration discounts). Very stupid. I might as well have booked 7 individual reservations. Their customer support was quite rude. I do not recommend them.

I'm in the middle of reading The Wisdom of Crowds, which is a much more reasoned approach to the idea of emergent intelligence than other things I've read. Before that, I was in the middle of Six Degrees before I had to return it to the library, and it was actually very complementary to Wisdom. I think Six Degrees does a good job emphasizing the science, compared to Linked, although the explanation of percolation is kind of poor and the story of his rivalry with Barbasi comes off akwardly.

Alive!

Egad. Between server hackery and momentous life events, it's been a long time since I've written anything! But I'm alive again, having had in the interim far more adventures (the Cape, Maine (pictures TK), the 4th, Barth's The End of the Road, Spiderman 2....) than I will ever manage to recount. I am also, for anybody who doesn't know, momentarily unemployed. I've left IBM to work at Google in New York, which was a really, really hard decision, since I really loved the people and the work at CUE. But, working at Google seems like it will be a fun adventure. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Speaking of search, I ran across this. My dream of clustering Slashdot is finally coming true! ;-)

Slackin' off

Is the weekend over already? I did go canoeing (difficult when windy!), see Eternal Sunshine (beautiful!), start reading Jennifer Government (totally captivating, and my second advertising-driven dystopia book after reading Pattern Recognition), eat Indian food, and see Jordi and Horn and Rox, but somehow it still felt lazy and unproductive. Thought about renting a bike or seeing the Sox, but didn't.

Ow

I'm still recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out Friday. Ow ow ow. I look like a chipmunk. In other news, I finally saw The Graduate. It was much weirder than I had expected.

Stuff I've been up to

I've had two good meals lately which have left me wondering why I haven't done a better job of restaurant scavenging before. The mushroom tower at The Asgard was tasty, if too spicy. And Audubon Circle is close by and has $4 beer, great atmosphere, and good veggie burgers.

Also exciting was a trip to see Swan Lake at the Wang Center. Ballet turned out to be much more entertaining than I remember from seeing Nutcracker years ago.

Hmm

The Stanford Prison Experiment actually has an interesting slide show walking you through what happened, which seems to be slightly more subtle than the way the magazines have been referencing it....

Pictures!

I installed Gallery (with Richard's help). Voila!. These pictures join the ones from Fernanda, Scott, and Yuri. ;-)

Back from Vienna!

I got back Sunday, and it looks like it's going to be a few days before I get my life in order. I have some pictures from my snazzy new camera, but I can't really share them till I find some good online album software.... In the meantime, suffice it to say that Vienna was awesome. And, oh yeah, some of the things at the conference were neat. ;-) I spent a lot of time eating and museuming and drinking and went to a castle. Oxford was gorgeous, too, although it left me missing Yale a lot.

Off to Vienna

I wanted to stop and work at the field hospital and fall in love with the local beauty, but also be home in a week so I could do so many other things, fifty life-directions all seemed equally appealing and possible — shark wrangler! Whatever happened to training to be a goddamned shark wrangler?

Just in time for my trip to Vienna for CHI (thanks IBM!) (with a sidetrip to see Madhan at Oxford that made the plane tickets cheaper!), I have finished reading You Shall Know Our Velocity, which, despite some parts where it drags, is a really incredible book, especially with the twist which is apparently only present in the paperback version. It's one of those books that really makes you take stock of things.

Also thematically appropriate (insofar as Germany is near Austria), I saw Goodbye, Lenin tonight. It gets a little absurd, but is sweet in the end.

And also just in time, my Pentax S4 arrived. Hopefully I'll have some good pictures to share when I return.

As an aside, sadly (ironically?) I never got to post my thoughts on BloggerCon, though some of them appear in the replies here.

Mm, restaurants

It's not quite Green Line Menus, but this little list is handy for finding restaurants in Cambridge. Somehow it's just easier to use than Boston.com, Citysearch, or Opentable. I just went to the Cambridge Brewing Company yesterday, and though it's not as good as Beer Works, it is nicely close to work.

Back from DC

Had an awesome time visiting Mike in DC. Saw cherry blossoms, went to the Spy Museum (highlights included an explanation of lock picking, a video about Aldrich Ames, an Aston-Martin, eyeglasses with cyanide in them, miniature recording devices and guns and knives, stuff about pigeons carrying cameras and the tunnel under the Berlin Wall and the enigma and ways of blowing up trains and disguises and modern-day Trojan horses and...) and to the outlet malls at Leesburg and went out in Arlington. Now I'm quite sleepy, though. Note to self: don't make plans involving getting to BWI early in the morning. Also played lots of Dreamcast Tetris and made use of Mike's nice cell data service from Verizon.

Also had dinner before I left at Chez Henri, which was the only place we could find with vegetarian French food. It's weird that it's so hard to find vegetarian French food, since the few times I've had it, it's been awesome.

The Swan

is awful. I mean, the girls were normal looking, and they made them ugly. And then they tell one person in each episode that they're pretty, but not pretty enough. The whole thing is twisted. And the message was clear: nobody will think you're pretty unless you let (male) surgeons and trainers remake your body. Maybe the FCC could fine Fox for this nonsense instead? This account of the discussion boards is pretty interesting (as are the boards themselves), but reading the blogs on Technorati was equally fascinating. I'm surprised that any people actually find the show acceptable.

Lisa

took pictures! Hopefully she will visit us again, since I have yet to see her adequately intoxicated.

An apple a day

probably would not have kept my wisdom teeth from needing to be removed, which is apparently the case. I went to the dentist today, and at least I have no cavities. I also confess that I really like my dentist, Dr. Keohan. I just picked the closest preferred provider to the office, so it's kind of surprising that it worked out. And I was kind of sketched out the first time I went, since it's just this tiny little old school storefront, but everybody there (all three of them) is very nice and relaxed and funny and there's a fish tank and the radio playing. Much more pleasant than Harvard Vanguard, which cost me money, anyway. Go figure.

Donald

The Trump is quite funny on SNL. If it, say, happens to be sitting on your TiVo, watch it! Also, The Economist has an interesting take on the show:

Slugging it out, say, in the jungles of Borneo for a $1m prize, a more typical reality-TV formula, is unlikely to illuminate the real lives of most American middle managers. The drama that Mr Trump offers cuts closer to the bone.... the show is the second-most popular series on television among 18-49-year-olds with incomes over $100,000, lagging only “The West Wing”...

O.C. soundtrack (at last!)

Bought the new O.C. soundtrack at the recently-enlarged Newbury Comics. A fun listen, and it includes a link to a web site with video of the scenes containing each song. While wandering the net, I also ran across fashion from the O.C..

Mmm

Lisa's in town so Andrea tooks us to Peking Tom. I highly recommend the banana rolls and green tea ice cream dessert.

Social networking platforms?

Thanks to Mike, saw a talk at the Berkman center about SocialPhysics by John Clippinger. (Also had a yummy free lunch!) His idea of instantiating communities with a template of behaviors called a "culture" is pretty intriguing, and the paper he links to about the economic and biological aspects of trust is interesting.

Mmm, smart art

Martin let me tag along to a panel at Art Interactive coinciding with their exhibit called eVolution. Sadly, one of the pieces wasn't working and another one wasn't on, so I'll have to go back later. The two I did get to see were pretty interesting, and the talks were thought-provoking if somewhat repetitive of things I've heard before. It occured to me that both reality television and art with artificial life in it are both fascinating because the creator establishes a set of rules and then sets the thing free to produce unpredictable results. At best, he can control the presentation of what happens. The guy from Art Interactive thought that the key was that both appeal to our desire to play God and be voyeurs, but Christiane thought that evolving art was really appealing because it was interactive (although so is some reality television, I'd argue) and that reality television was fundamentally different because what we were watching were people instead of simple rule followers. Still, you have to wonder, if reality television has led to the decline of the sitcom and hour-long drama, will evolving art supplant deterministic art?

Ah

This blog is now protected by MT-Blacklist! Stupid comment spam. Many thanks to Jay Allen, though. I was rather impressed by how the people with drug-related spam flocked to the drug-related entries, though. Those spam people sure are smart. I wonder if the new Moveable Type authentication system will work out.

Feedpaper

What a smart idea! You can easily imagine feedpaper taking on the character of those Amazon recommended reading lists. Now if only this were integrated into Bloglines, I might find myself forced to switch ;-).

Fun trip to New York

Apart from dragging my bag around most of lower Manhattan, an awesome extended weekend. Will's Aero bed was very comfy. I saw Erik in 131, which was really fun. Zanza Bar was also pretty cool, and Carl introduced me to Olive Tree. People in New York seem to be busier than people in other cities. It's very weird. Writing this reminds me that I never wrote about my trp to the Bay Area - among other things, I ate brunch at Stacks with Vince and Albert. Hmm, I should get a digital camera one of these days.

Obviously it's been a big web surfing night for me

Smoots explained!

Although the choice is now obvious...

...this candidate comparer comparison is pretty interesting.

Speaking of travel...

These lists are kind of fun. I could use a good beachy vacation. Mmm. Running on sand.

Where I've Been

This is kind of fun...a map of where I've been I've been to (good find, Albert)....

make your own

If you need a cheat sheet, try this. I'm still not sure I got all of my road trip correct. ;-)

Stuff I've been consuming

Saw City of God this weekend...quite a movie. A little depressing, but very well told, not unlike Mystic River, although City of God has much more style. I'm very curious to know more about the true story...someone was telling me that tourists actually tour the slums in Rio. Also saw Casablanca at the Brattle...much better than I remembered, I think I must been half-asleep when I saw it last.

I've also been eating at new places, like East Coast Grill (the vegetable entree was actually really interesting!) and Joshua Tree (pretty average) and Bomboa (snazzy atmosphere). Also went to Bertucci's and Peach Farm again. Last night, hit Pour House (much nicer than the last time I went, now has a tap!) and LIR (a little too loud and grown-up-frat-partyish).

Still on the prowl for a new album to buy. In the meantime, Jonathan pointed out the gray album.

How to find long-lost people?

So, I'm trying to track down this long-lost (for various complicated reasons) cousin of mine, Tina Thakar, who I know married a Michael Vaulter and settled down in San Francisco before we really lost track of her. I noticed that she was on classmates.com and laid down $40, but the email address they have must no longer be valid. There isn't anything promising in any of the online phone books. Anybody know of other ways of tracking people down? (Then again, maybe she doesn't want to be found...)

Hehe

And you thought your job was boring?

Back again

So, just as I was about to write a blog entry describing how Feedster came through with Janet Jackson pictures way before the big engines could catch up with it, coupled with a rant about how a network whose leading shows are rife with violence and allusions to sex and even purport to present "reality" had turned out to be just as hypocritically and capriciously Puritanical and superstitious as the next American, I found out our server had been hacked. Grr. I think I would rather have a car stolen than have my data messed with. It's just disruptive and scary. Anyway, things are back to normal (yay Richard!).

Since then, not too much has happened. I finally saw 28 Days Later (scary!) and watched Miracle (fun, simple!) with Wes (happy birthday wes!). I also made Valentine's Day reservations with the help of Open Table. What a cool service. It'd be nice if they linked straight to menus, though, since it took a while to figure out which restaurants (many of them!) didn't have vegetarian options, especially on their prix fixe menus.

I'm now on Orkut. Come find me. It's already proven quite valuable. I found out that Anna has been signed for many more episodes on O.C. and I found a really interesting list of collaboratively filtered web surfing experiments.

Back!

I'm back home from Lotusphere, and it's time to put my life back in order and catch up on sleep (I'm particularly sad about the hours lost before realizing Zone Labs was secretly keeping me from copying files to the server's Windows share). Donuts got mentioned in a blog and another blog and then in Ed Brill's blog, which is neat. People liked the demo, and the conference as a whole was impressive...I met lots of interesting Lotus people and enthusiastic customers. If I had watched the opening session from the main hall, I could have said I'd seen Patrick Stewart, but oh well.

The trip's trappings were less stellar...Universal Studios Florida was pretty cheesy; Song was nothing special; the hotel (Disney's Dolphin "Resort") was shockingly expensive considering the crying baby next door, the missing cue ball on the pool table, the $2 cans of soda, the missing remote control, the erroneous mini bar billing, the 2 mile road "running trail," the dim flourescent lighting...the only good thing was Ethernet in the rooms, and even that ran out of bandwidth. Adding insult to injury, it was the coldest Florida's gotten in some time while we were there (though it was quite funny to see people wearing scarves and gloves in 40 degree weather). I also had forgotten how vegetarian-unfriendly Florida was.

But it was warm enough to go running outside (the one day I managed to wake up early enough!) and there were a few fun places near the hotel to grab drinks. Overall, very fun, but it's good to be back.

Yeah, yeah

So I've been neglecting my blog. It happens to everybody, right? Not entirely sure why. Part of it is probably hanging out with Catherine (we saw Urinetown (cute, catchy music, weird ending) on Saturday and then went to Finale (half hour wait and a little pricey, but worth it...mmm) and last weekend we saw Big Fish (sweet, entertaining) and ate hot pot). I've also been busy getting a demo ready for Lotusphere (although I think last week would really have been the ideal time to be in Florida). Hmm, what else have I been up to? Friday, Abe and I played laser tag, which was fun, although the high schoolers demolished me. I'm also still working on my Warcraft skills. In any case, I'm off to the grocery store now.