Random stuff

Simpsons:
Lisa: I hate going to the zoo. I feel so sorry for the animals.
...
Homer: In the wild, they would never experience boredom, obesity, loss of purpose... you know, the American dream.

New Yorker:
"We have to do something about satellite television to keep society free from this horny jerk-off situation."

For those of you using Google Reader, I wrote a Greasemonkey script that lets you open the current item in a new tab.

On the weekend-yuppie-meter, a score of 7

Friday night, dinner at Nam, which had the typical almost-too-much decor of Tribeca, but suprisingly good vegetables in curry and banana bread with ice cream (but bad soup, according to C).

Saturday, went to dia:Beacon. (Tip: buy the discount package from Metro-North machines using the Getaways button in the upper right corner.) Favorites included On Kawara, Agnes Martin, and Fred Sandback. A very cool space. (Good reviews at from the floor and findarticles.)

Along the way had an interesting discussion with Sarah, who works in publishing, about why Google Print might be evil. She explained that they have to buy the right to song titles to put into textbooks, so who are we to even tangentially repurpose and possibly profit from whole pages of books? Compelling, but this really just suggests that this permission crap has gotten out of hand.

Today, unlimited mimosas and coffee at Basso Est, shoe shopping at Jackrabbit Sports, and plate-hanger-buying at Home Depot.

I also started running with my iPod. Running with shuffle and using the free case it comes with is actually pretty workable. So much music at my fingertips... Still hunting for good podcasts. I did get a scary error message from my iPod about not being able to write to the disk, but some people on the Internet attribute it to problems with USB port, which given the weird messages I get about USB 2.0 seems like a possible issue.

Exegesis is up to 27 links on del.icio.us and few mentions in blogs. A plug on kottke helped a bunch. (Thanks!) By the way, two new hidden features: 1) searching for a word that does not occur (e.g. "fags") will highlight verses linked by any pages that match the word and 2) usng the left and right arrow keys in the search box will jump to next and previous search matches.

Exegesis

So, my big Bible art project launched today at Turbulence. It's funny, I started out with some ambitious ideas but then I realized the amount of data was large enough (and that animation was a beastly enough thing to code and seems to annoy people anyway), that I had my hands full getting something simple done, even with several months to work on it. I think I was also pretty spoiled using such a fast computer. I had to use it on Linux and hear about the Mac users before realizing I was accidentally doing some needless O(n^2) operations in the GUI thread. I'm hoping they'll let me sneak in some cleanups, at least. I think it's still possible to get interesting stuff out of it, and my beta testers called it "neat" and "cute," so I've got that going for me, which is nice. And at least one unbiased person had nice things to say. Still, it definitely feels clunky and frustrating, depending on what you try to do with it.

I'm sure there's more to tell about the long process to getting here, but I'm a little incoherent after staying up till 2 and then catching the 8 am Jet Blue to Mountain View (although, I must say, Jet Blue is pretty nice - if only they had mp3's like Song! rip, Song. also, budget rental finally has economy cars. yay gas prices)

What a day

After a fun Halloween at Glo, I decided to shirk my upcoming art project deadline to get a much-needed haircut. I heard these could be gotten cheaply in Chinatown, but I failed to realize that this might involve surrendering my fate to someone who didn't speak English. My new hair is, uh, interesting.

Also, I bought an iPod (after trying out the clunky iriver at best buy). It's very pretty! I'm slowly filling it with music, podcasts, and subway maps. My laptop appears to have a 2.0 controller but 1.1 ports, or else something else is amiss. Now will I start buying music at iTunes? That's the big question.

which news pun is more popular?

plame game ~34,600 results
quag mier (and then some) ~946 results

What's that song?

I heart the Internet.

Weatherman trailer
Jarhead trailer
Bravia ad
Shopgirl trailer

Good & Bad

Good: seeing the Daily Show in person (Jon is short!), indie music podcast, franz ferdinand remixes

Bad: enamel loss, idiotic arguments (try lessig instead), and Nov 1 deadlines

The new ipod still don't have cases to run with, which leaves me free to remain undecided.