Tag: reflections

I recently found out that Simon and Schuster (and some other publishers) have been publishing books under an MTV imprint. In a way that is slightly reminiscent of Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, MTV has given their project the obvious name: MTV Books. That is to say, Music … Television … Books.

Of course, MTV Books is hardly constrained to traditional book media and been proactive in releasing MTV Books eBooks (including the intriguingly titled Oh My Goth! and Life as a Poser). Additionally, they have published an MTV Photobooth — a Music Television photography book.

While they’ve published Sing Like the Stars! (quite a few of their titles are exclamations), a paperback accompanied by an audio CD, they do not seem to have published an audio book. I am looking forward to the day when they do so and finish the process of coming full circle.

Here’s an association or riddle game that Mika and I created last night that I found interesting.

• Give a player a list of three random, dissimilar objects (e.g., pancakes, manhole covers, and condominiums). Tell them that you are thinking of some quality or feature shared by all three and ask them to tell you what it might be.
• After letting them think for some time, or even after supplying answers, tell the player that you lied and that you didn’t have an answer in mind. In fact, the goal of the game is to come up with any and all associations.

Most people I’ve talked feel that the problem becomes easier after one realizes that there isn’t a correct answer. Of course, the strategy that the second stage invites (thinking of anything without the idea that the answer might be right or wrong) is exactly what the player should have been doing from the beginning. Why don’t we? In what situations might we be more creative problem solvers if we pretended that there isn’t a correct answer?

I think it wold be a good idea if companies did not typeset their bicycles in ways that remind people of falling.

With that said, the red and white theme is a particularly nice touch in this case.

Our ice cream was out of the freezer a bit too long and got soft. When I went to extract it from its container, the ease with which I could scoop it led me to spoon out two or three times what I might normally have served myself.

It’s interesting to consider that perhaps my thinness is due at least in part to my laziness and frugality in obtaining food.

Overheard on my flight back from San Francisco last week… over the PA system:

Once again, we are keeping our PAs to an absolute minimum on this flight.

Perhaps not an absolute minimum.

With the new Charlie Card coming out, it seemed like it was about time to obtain an RFID blocking wallet. I liked the idea of buying a nice off-the-shelf wallet but the only pre-made RFID-proof wallet I’ve found is made of leather. I’d like to buy a vegan wallet.

Here is the Venn diagram describing my problem:

If you know a wallet for those of us in the purple zone, leave a comment or let me know. Otherwise, I suppose I’m going to have to make my own.

A banker at my hippy bank had never heard of Google. I had to spell the name out and explain it to her!

I’ve never imagined one could feel so happy about their choice of financial institution.

Mountain View is quite far from San Francisco International Airport so my shuttle to to UDS-MTV was expensive, but worth it. In any case, I’ll be reimbursed for the ride by Mark Shuttleworth.

I wasn’t the only one to notice the striking similarly between the abnormal cow born recently in China and the unofficial mascot of one of my favorite free software projects. Thanks for the link Mika!

See for yourself:

True, it’s neither a goat nor particularly large, but it seems we can’t far away. A very auspicious sign for free software!

If you live in the bay area and you are still willing to talk to me after that pun, please get in contact with me.

While it’s been a while since I’ve been in San Francisco, I’ve got a flight out Saturday for the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View. I will have some time — especially next weekend — to hang out.

Once, a friend of mine was cleaning a small tube and asked me to pass him a pipe cleaner.

Immediately and simultaneously, I both realized that I had never questioned the name of my favorite craft supply and understood the answer to the question completely.

Moments like this are like tiny tastes of enlightenment.

Maybe I’m just uncultured but when I first heard the name of the Myopia Hunt Club, my thoughts leaned more toward my vice president than a golf club.

Apparently, I wasn’t too far off etymologically.

I went to two talks yesterday about PLoS ONE, an exciting new project by the Public Library of Science. I’m thrilled to see PLoS moving in this direction.

During his talk, Chris Surridge mentioned that the the publishing platform/CMS that PLoS ONE is using is based on Fedora. I mentioned that Fedora, last I checked, wasn’t exactly a CMS, a fact that he acknowledged but responded to by saying that I would need to talk to their tech team for details.

Today I found out that neither ideological affinity nor geographic proximity to Red Hat kept the University of Virginia from choosing the wrong name for their Institutional Repository (IR) software. But at least yesterday’s confusion is put to rest.

Also, Surridge had a slide with this quote and challenged the audience to come up with the utterer:

The most valuable commodity I know of is information.

I did a quick "I’m feeling lucky" search and was thrilled to see that I came up with this page informing me that I, "do not have rights to view the article" containing the answer but that the information could be mine for a cool GBP £13.00 (plus a handling charge of GBP £1.50 and VAT where applicable).

The phrase, it turns out, belongs to Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider character in the 1987 film Wall Street.

Finally, and least importantly, I object to this image:

Yesterday was Columbus Day. It is a national holiday but is less consistently celebrated, for a variety of reasons, than any other state holiday in the United States. MIT took Columbus Day (and the day after!) off while my class at Harvard went ahead as scheduled.

I saw Luis this weekend but he had to run off on Sunday because Columbia University, of all places, apparently does not celebrate Columbus day.

On Wednesday, I walked into a tree branch. In what is apparently not an unusual turn of events, I ended up with a corneal abrasion (i.e., a laceration on my eyeball). It has hurt my ability to do work because it hurts intensely when I try to, well, look at things.

My friend asked me what kind of tree it was. Interestingly, while my eyes (or my right eye at the very least) was open when I ran into the tree, I don’t recall getting a good look at it.