Escaped Thoughts

Lost Cities came today, much to my enjoyment (even though Laura promptly creamed me, despite her never having played before). It's a fantastic two-player game, with the right combination of simple rules and gameplay, but interesting strategy and variation. It's nice to find a good game that doesn't require getting a bunch of people's schedules to mesh in order to enjoy it; a big thanks to Josh for introducing me to it while I was visiting.

Speaking of lost things, I apparently haven't posted here in over seven months. I hadn't realized it had been quite that long (although now that I think about it, it's possible that one or two people may have mentioned the lack of posts...). But I thought about posting fairly regularly over these silent months, and I've always been told that it's the thought that counts, so no harm done.

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We learned today that when one steams purple cauliflower, the water in the lower pan ends up a vibrant blue-green color, which is somewhat disconcerting. Interestingly, the water that condenses around the edges of the upper pan is a more understandable purple.

If anyone can offer an explanation of this phenomenon, I'd love to hear it. It doesn't have to be an accurate explanation, or even more than passingly associated with reality. (Although perhaps I should be inventing my own explanation; after all, I have a Master's Degree... in Science!)

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Laura and I went to watch part of a nearby collegiate ballroom dance competition, and were pleased to discover that we haven't lost that most important attribute: petty cattiness. Who cares if our style is getting sloppy as long as we can watch other people with sloppy style and verbally rip them apart? Given that, I suspect we'd have no problem jumping back into the competitive circuit. (In fairness to us, these were people dancing several levels above where we ever danced, so their style really should have been much better.)

But in all seriousness, it was a lot of fun. There were a few couples that were very good and were a lot of fun to watch, and we caught some of the fun events (the ubiquitous reverse-lead Cha-Cha being one of them), which are great to watch and reminded us of some of the fun parts of competitions. And hopefully watching and doing a bit of dancing during the general dances will finally goad us into finding some new lessons so we start dancing regularly again. It would just be for fun though; watching the comp was entertaining, but we don't really want to get back into that circuit.

But if we did, we could totally kick some of their butts.

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Today I met Hixie and chatted with him about web standards for an hour or so, then got a book signed by Woz. Not too shabby for the space of a few hours.

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Hornsby's hard cider isn't nearly as good as Woodchuck. Sadly, the I haven't been able to find the latter around here.

Pictures from our visit to the butterfly migration in Santa Cruz are coming, but I haven't had a chance to sift through them yet. Stay tuned!

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In any given hand, Laura is not allowed to score more points than Stuart.

I hope that settles that question. Now that it appears on the internet (with the word “official”, no less!), it must be true.

That is all.

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This was just too good not to mention:

What might cause us to go to EDA-Level Red:

you may wonder? I'm glad you asked. And as for why, well, there are apparently plenty of reasons.

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There are essentially 4 steps to steaming vegetables:

1. Put some water in the bottom half of a steamer.
2. Put some vegetables in the top half of a steamer.
3. Cover the steamer.
4. Put the steamer on a burner.

If you are going to forget just one of these steps, I highly recommend that it not be step 1.

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Over the weekend I finally finished a project I started several weeks ago: putting my pictures and collected bits and pieces from my trip to France together into an album/scrapbook. “Wow,” you may be saying to yourself, “hasn't it been three years since you went to France?” Yes... only these weren't pictures from our honeymoon. These are from my class trip to France in middle school.

So... yeah. Better really, really late than never, right? And it was a lot of fun to look back and remember those bits and pieces of the trip that I captured (although it's too bad I didn't keep a journal as I'm sure lots of good stuff has been lost to antiquity). I am happy to report though that my photography has improved significantly in the last 10 years.

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Buzz has some great interviewing tips that everyone new to interviewing should definitely read.

Having been doing some interviewing myself recently (some of the same interviews, in fact), all I would add is to go a bit further and break talking out into its own item. (My opinions, not my employer's, void where prohibited, etc.)

Talk, talk, talk: If you are given a problem-solving problem, the interviewer wants to see you solving the problem. Silence and/or muttering as you try to work through it won't give the interviewers any insight into what and how you think, which means it's only marginally useful if you get the right answer, and worthless if you don't. Plus, many interviewers will give hints to keep things moving and give you a chance to get to other interesting parts of the question—if you are silently going down the wrong path, you are on your own. Worried about saying something that's wrong as you think out loud? Don't worry about that too much. If you realize your mistake while talking it through, and correct yourself, all the better.

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So through some random link-following I read some of a highly amusing site run by someone trying warn people of the dangers posed by the aliens experimenting on us, and explaining how you can defend yourself (the answer, of course, being the next generation in tin-foil hats—just as stupid looking, but now with 10 times the mind-control-stopping effectiveness). What struck me most is that we apparently know that among other things aliens can:

• Control gravity
• Pass through solid objects
• Perform surgical procedures

And yet “aliens have not been able to remove a thought screen helmet secured with tape or string.” Clearly these aliens need some help managing their invasion, if they haven't managed to figure out how to apply their powers and tools to the daunting task of cutting through tape. But since they can read my thoughts from 100 miles away, I'm sure they are on their way over right now to discuss a lucrative consulting contract.

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Quick, how many GB of data can you burn onto a 4.7 GB DVD?

Just as with hard-drives, it continues to boggle my mind that this isn't illegal.

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Je viens de lire avec Laura plusiers livres pour enfants, et un de ces livres s'agit d'un renard qui (entre plusiers autres aventures) parlait avec un corbeau. Tout d'un coup, les première lignes d'une des fables d'Aesop, en forme de poème, sont arrivés dans ma tête. Je l'avais apris par cœur il y a plusieurs annés, probablement en collège. Je m'en souvenais de seulement sept ou huit lignes, et j'avais l'intention de demander si quelqu'un pourrait me fournir le poème entière—parce que j'ai cherché “mettre corbeau sur un arbre perché” au lieu de “maître corbeu sur un arbre perché”, et j'ai rien trouvé; c'est ça la difficulté avec ce qu'on apprend par cœur oralement.

Et la voilà, pour les curieux:

Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché,
Tenait en son bec un fromage.
Maître renard par l'odeur alléché,
Lui tint à peu près ce langage:
«Hé! Bonjour Monsieur du Corbeau.
Que vous êtes joli! Que vous me semblez beau!
Sans mentir, si votre ramage
Se rapporte à votre plumage,
Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ces bois.»
A ces mots le corbeau ne se sent pas de joie;
Et pour montrer sa belle voix,
Il ouvrir un large bec, laisse tomber sa proie.
Le renard s'en saisit, et dit: «Mon bon monsieur,
Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aut dépens de celui qui l'écoute.
Cette leçon vaut bien un formage, sans doute.»
Le corbeau, honteux et confus,
Jura, mais un peu tard, qu'on ne l'y prendrait plus.

(Ça fait plusieurs annés que j'ai presque point écrit en français, alors ça ne m'étonnerait pas si il y a pas mal de fautes.)

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Normally I have a hard time getting out of the shower in the mornings. I'm generally still partially asleep, and the hot water is relaxing and comfortable, so it just seems best to stay there.

Not so much when the shower is all cold because the hot water is mysteriously just air instead. Next time the hot water pressure is noticeably low when I go to bed at 1:30, I'm going to call someone at home and raise hell rather than just shrug and go to sleep.

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Normally I don't post these viral “What ________ are you?” quizzes, but this one was fun enough to take (although the ordering of the answers really needs to be randomized to make it less predictable) that I'll make an exception. But only because it's part of my evil plan, of course.

What Type of Villain are You?

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It wasn't supposed to rain today, and I still haven't bought fenders. So now I'm very wet again. This weekend, I'm definitely getting fenders. Really.

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So in early December, when I ordered Laura‘s laptop, it went from Shanghai to Anchorage to Indianapolis to my door in Cupertino in about 36 hours. That wasn't even any kind of rush shipping. I was highly impressed.

So far, my iSight has been in transit from Sacramento for almost 2 full days. It spent 20 hours in a sort facility. 20! And now, 12 hours after leaving San Jose on a delivery vehicle, it still hasn't managed to find me yet. I'll tell you, Cupertino's not that big, and our receiving department really isn't that hard to find.

Apparently I need to order more of my stuff directly from warehouses in Shanghai, where they don't ship things by strapping them to a narcoleptic snail with no sense of direction.

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Sometimes it's great to just decide to embrace a heavy(ish) rain by deciding to not care that you'll get completely soaked and bike home anyway. And in that respect, it was... what I failed to consider, though, was the dirt aspect that comes with not having any fenders. I don't think my coat and backpack were very amused.

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Rather than try to give a full (and boring) account of my vacation, which would never get done anyway, I'll simply share some random vacation thoughts:

• Winter vacation is surprisingly short out here in the Real World™.
• Crossword puzzles are dangerously addictive.
• Working for a sexy, well-known company is totally the way to go when it comes time to attend a (pseudo) high-school reunion.
• Yes, Hero is still that good the second time.
• No matter how many times I read almost nothing on vacations, I'm still convinced it's important to take two or three books with me.
• Presents are very, very exciting when you are three and a half.
• The iTalk may be more expensive than writing reminders to myself on paper, but it's way more fun and a lot harder to lose.
• Pfeffernüsse is quite tasty.
• Friends don't let friends visit Powell's with a credit card.
• There's a reason that samba baterias generally play outside.
• Snow is much prettier on forested hills as I drive by than it was piled on the sidewalk and by the side of the road as I slogged to class.

All in all, a very successful holiday.

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Here's a little tip for any of you who might someday become police officers and need to direct traffic around an accident in an intersection at night without the benefit of those glowing orange cone things: a really good way not to do it is to shine your very bright flashlight right in the eyes of the car you are trying to direct then make hand gestures with your other hand behind the flashlight. If for some reason you do decide to use that method though, a good way to round it off is to yell angrily at the driver for having the audacity to not know what the hell you are trying to get them to do.

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This optical illusion, if it can be called that, is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. Stare at the center, don't move your eyes, and don't blink. It's like magic! Even the name—motion induced blindness—is cool.

Bonus points if you can get all three dots to vanish—I've done it once, so I know it's possible.

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Have I ever mentioned that I have a sister-in-law? She's super annoying.

;)

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Today is 04/04/04. I just thought that was cool.

Now back to your regularly scheduled weblog.

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I've been thinking a lot about writing as I work on my master's thesis (notice that I say that I've been thinking a lot about writing, not that I've been doing a lot of writing). Anyway, I've been thinking about why I've been having trouble writing, and I had an interesting thought.

People always say that the best way to get over writer's block is to just write stuff down without worrying about it, then to go back and make it good later. Unfortunately, I find that as hard as writing good stuff in the first place, if not harder—I almost always plan every sentence and paragraph in my head before I start writing it—and I think I may know why: I write a lot of code. It's what I did for classes, what I do at work, what I do for my master's research, and not infrequently what I do with my free time. And what's the number one rule of writing code? Don't write any code until you know exactly what you are doing. No one ever says, "Write a lot of free-form code, then go back and try to make it into a good algorithm later"—that's a quick road to buggy, broken code.

So now I have two plausible theories. Theory one: I've written so much code that I've absorbed the doctrine deep into my psyche. Theory two (and this is my favored theory): That's simply the way I've always tended to think and approach problems, which is why I've always found writing papers painful, and writing code relatively easy. Either way, I now have something besides my laziness to share the blame for my slower-than-I'd-like progress.

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Suddenly, the appeal of cell-phones with embedded digital cameras is much clearer to me. There are moments in your life when you would never expect to need a camera, but you'd suddenly do almost anything to have one: Today I was running errands, and the car next to me had a dog leaning out the window. Wearing goggles.

I'd love to know why someone thought to put goggles on a dog, or why the dog didn't seem to mind. But most of all, I'd love to have had a camera

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My blog is currently the number 2 Google result for the search phrase "stress-induced coma". How cool is that?

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In the shade, with a stiff breeze, it's ok outside. Sadly, there's little shade, and even less breeze.

Ah, Cleveland, with its hot humid summers and cold dry winters. Give me the moderate temperatures of my homeland (incessant rain and all) any day.

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According to Fannie Farmer, when whipping cream you must "be careful to whip just until soft peaks form: cream that is beaten too long will begin to turn to butter, often quite suddenly."

If only I had thought to consult it before I had a bowl full of butter.

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It's neat how two cool natural phenomena can occasionally combine to become even cooler. Today, while walking home from work, a thunder storm had rolled in enough to cover all of the sky overhead, but not enough to block the western horizon. So all the buildings around me were lit up a bright orange-red by the setting sun, against a backdrop of steel clouds lit by continuous flashes of lightning. Quite the view.

On a related note, I'm intrigued by the fact that I can see lightning that looks like it's above and all around me, but not hear thunder until several seconds later, as if it's far off.

What can I say... I'm a sucker for thunder storms.

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Thunder is a totally different beast out here than it was at home. In Oregon, thunder is a low rumbling. A big thunder storm means the rumbling is louder. Here, thunder sounds like angry gods warming up by snapping huge trees in half, then moving on to breaking handfuls of trees at a time, then doing more of the same, but with a microphone and an amp set to 11.

The idea of thunder as the sounds made by gods makes a whole lot more sense to me now than it did in Oregon.

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I realized today while I was driving down Cedar, with the towers directly ahead off in the distance, that even after 4 years here I still haven't experienced the big-city part of Cleveland except for occasionally driving through/past. I don't really think anything of it when I see the towers, even though I grew up in a city with no skyline.

The question is, am I blasé because of TV/movies, which shove skylines at us whenever possible, or am a still a country bumpkin who doesn't really believe in the big buildings except as painted scenery?

I think it's the second; big land features impress me, but I don't think anything when I see a big building. I think the scale of really tall buildings is one of those things that hasn't actually sunk in yet.

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This line, from Noises Off..., speaks for itself: "Nothing could prepare us for the horror of Cleveland."

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So I've suddenly started saying "in the before time" an inordinate amount. I'm trying to figure out where I picked it up, and except for being almost positive that it's nothing recent, and a vague idea that it features in some popular sci-fi book or movie, I haven't a clue. Google isn't really any help.

Plausible theories, anyone?

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Whenever I'm walking alone and I see someone approaching on a relatively clear sidewalk, and I know them well enough to say hi but not more than that, there are always a few awkward seconds. I don't want to make eye contact right away, because I'm still too far away to say hello, but that leaves me trying to avoid eye contact until I'm closer, without looking like I'm avoiding eye contact. Even worse is when they happen to see me at the same time I see them, and make eye contact, because then I have to pretend we didn't make eye contact while avoiding eye contact.

I hate that.

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There are times that I'm really, really glad I didn't leave just a few minutes later. Getting inside very shortly before a sudden torrential downpour mixed with pea-sized hail is very high on my list of such times.

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What qualifies something as a "sense"?

I'm not going to be so weird and philosophical as last time, don't worry. I was just thinking about picking up on emotions, the way it feels, and the language we use to describe it. Sure, we pick up on little clues through all of our normal senses that let us know how people are feeling, but that's not how we really think about it. When someone is really happy, or really angry, we say that it's palpable. We say tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife. When it's spring, we say love is in the air. We don't actually think, "Certain ways they are speaking and acting and looking tell me that they are angry/happy/whatever, so now I know that." We "feel" it at an unconscious level

So no matter how we may get the clues that give us perceptions of people's emotions, we have this whole system in our brains that automatically interprets that information, and feeds it into our conscious through a channel that's totally separate from our other senses. So to some extent, I think it's fair to call it another sense. And I, for one, think that's pretty cool.

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Despite the fact that it's in the 30's (and was in the 70's a few days ago), it's actually a beautiful day. Blue sky overhead, the falling snowflakes glittering in the bright sunshine...

It took me most of my walk to campus to realize how strange that is.

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I've discovered a fantastic way to make my head hurt: trying to think about what vision is. I was pondering the question of whether or not people see the same colors as other people, and then I started to wonder what that question even means. Where and what in my brain is vision (or any other sense) exactly?

I can imagine a neural net hooked up to a wavelength detector, which would allow color identification: neuron x fired, so the sensor is seeing blue. That would be trivial, and presuably that's more or less what my brain does. But that's not what happens from my perspective. I see blue. What the heck does that mean?

This leads to another mind-bender: When a neural net has been trained to, say, approximate a function, how does it perceive the function?

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