Tag: reflections

My friend got ripped off yesterday buying Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags.

Bad Karma.

In Don’t Take My Whiskey Away From Me, Wynonie Harris sings:

Baby don’t take my whiskey ‘way from me.
Baby don’t take my whiskey ‘way from me.
You can help yourself to my last dollar,
If you touch my jug, you’re gonna hear me holler!
Don’t take my whiskey ‘way from me.

Not so long ago, I remember listening to this song and laughing at how ridiculous and the lyrics were. That was before someone started taking my whiskey away from me.

I suspect that someone drank some of my favorite Scotch while I was away on some recent travels. This made me feel like feel a little bit like hollering.

My friend had a nice stereo in an older car. When asked why he wasn’t worried about his car being broken into (or even why he often didn’t bother to lock his cars’ doors) he told me about his security system which he swore was more powerful than any car alarm: filth.

Basically, by covering the interior of his car in garbage, and by stubbornly refusing to wash the exterior, his car looked so dirty that prowlers assumed that there was no way that the car contained anything of value.

He’s clearly onto something. I suspect it might even be more than a good rationalization for not cleaning ones car.

Most irony goes unnoticed. Many people don’t really know what irony is.

I think troublemakers could use this fact to spread confusion by prefixing normal statements with, "I don’t mean to be ironic when I say this." Because irony is often non-apparent, people would spend a lot of energy and thought trying to find irony in places that it didn’t exist (or at least wasn’t intended).

I think it could also work, only slightly less well, with the classic, "no pun intended." Of course, in my case, troublemakers would say this only when there actually was no pun — intended or otherwise.

Ubuntu has gotten some flack for some controversial sexualized artwork.

For whatever comfort company brings, I saw a fun picture on Microsoft’s website for their Streets and Trips software. That man’s hand is not on the gear shifter and his attractive friend seems to really enjoy traveling.

In answer to their question: Clearly, not the right sort of traveler. I guess that’s the point.

I think many people take the United States, or the idea of being from the United States, way too seriously. I think people in the United States (and the US government in particular) are particularly bad about this.

I also find it annoying that’s it’s difficult to concisely and non-awkwardly describe the United States by name. "America" is right out; America is just tad larger (nearly too continents in fact) than the US. "The states" is too vague and "the United States" or "the United States of America" is just too long (not to mention that other countries, like Mexico, are also "the United States"). "The USA" is hard to say and it pronounced differently in most Latin languages than in English.

USA is a perfectly pronounceable acronym and I think it’s crazy that we insist on reading the letters out. I think everyone should start pronouncing "USA" and calling the country "oosah" (with the u as in in food or Ubuntu). It’s citizens would be Usaites or Usians or something similar.

I think this would give the world a concise and unambiguous name for the United States and at the same time make it harder for people to take the country seriously.

I’ve been talking recently to some folks from the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU.

The name of the institution makes me think. What sort of school is not a school of education?

With Rosetta out the door (and evidently quite popular), Canonical has quietly launched a piece of system called Launchpad.

I spent much of the Ubuntu conference in Mataró, where there was much chatter about the imminent release of launchpad, slightly amused by conversations about the mechanics of "launching Launchpad."

It centered around an interesting question that is either a matter of philosophy or engineering depending on how one looks at it:

How the hell does one launch a launchpad?

Much of my favorite literature (like George Perec, and more recently Eunoia by Christian Bök) is written within rigid limits. I was thinking about this when I was reflecting on the text messages my friend and I used to send to each others’ Seiko Messagewatches. The Messagewatch was a pager in the size and shape of a watch that enjoyed a little boom in popularity in the nineties. Here’s a picture:

Seiko saw where things were going with mobile phones and, sadly, decided not to fix a number of Y2K bugs in the Messagewatch system. The service was discontinued on December 31, 1999.

Messagewatches could receive messages — very simple and very short ones. The pagers had simple watch displays so they could only show messages if they would fit and used characters that could be displayed on screen. I remember how difficult it was trying to think of phrasings that could get a given point across while still fitting within the Messagewatch’s limitations.

Because the watch had a two-line display, words would be split automatically as they are in this following example which gives you an idea for the medium messagers were working in:

I remember receiving the message "hey there ace" on multiple occasions. It’s a less than completely ideal phrase because its impossible to display with splitting "there." Ideally, messages would also be structured with spaces in such a way that words would not be split between the lines.

Feeling nostalgic, I thought a good way to honor the memory of the Messagewatch would be with a poem about it. That said, I thought I could both play to my own artistic sensibilities (the "writing within rigid limits shtick") while appropriately memorializing the watch by writing poetry that could be displayed, without words broken between lines, on the display of a Seiko Messagewatch.

That said, there are pretty serious restrictions working in the "Seiko Messagewatch poetry" genre. The executive summary is that:

• No words can contain letters that cannot be drawn unambiguously in upper or lower case without diagonals (i.e., no M, W, X, Z, V, or K);
• No stanza can be longer than 16 characters long (including spaces);
• No single word can be over 8 characters long;
• No series of words can be such that they need to split a word over the line-gap between the 8-9th and characters;

The poem I have created tries to capture my feelings about the Seiko Messagewatch, a technology that was not without warts and limitations but that taken from us all early: the only real Y2K tragedy loss I experienced personally.

Without further ado, my Tribute to the Seiko Message Watch:

I wrote a book-length research piece on collaboration and I still can’t spell collaboration correct on a consistent basis (I misspelled it in this sentence the first time through). Part of the reason is that I always use a spell-checker. The other part is because my spell checker (GNU Aspell) is really good. No matter how much I mangle a word, Aspell almost always manages to suggest the correct replacement and it’s usually the first option. The end result is that it’s more effort to learn to spell the word correctly than it is to correct it each time.

If my spell checker was less good and I was forced to read through the entire list options or, god forbid, type in the correct spelling by hand, I would know how to spell more words. I think that the lack of improvement in a users’ spelling ability over time may be one useful metric in evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of a spell-checking software.

I think my complete stagnation in the swamp of bad-spelling is a testament to Aspell’s greatness.

Many web-based forms are just online versions of paper forms. I suspect that many of online forms are now being created automatically from their printed predecessors. The fragment of the form below, which I was asked to fill out yesterday, is one reason I think this:

Mika’s has a fish. The fish is a betta and, living in an environment steeped in technology and copyright jurisprudence, his name is Betta-Max. Since Betta’s are also called "Fighting Fish" I thought it would be funny if bought my own fish, named it Universal Pictures and put it in an adjacent container. But I haven’t done this yet and that’s not what this entry is about.

On Christmas day, I realized that I had lost Max. Luckily, I found him two days ago and he is now safely returned to the table.

I think this story is only a good one if I don’t say any more than this.

If you read this recent blog entry, you’ll realize why I’m particularly unhappy about the result of this google search:

My only comfort is that at least I dragged Debian and Ubuntu planets onto the front page with me.

I was pleased to see that my recent post on the interrobang generated a good deal of excitement for this long neglected piece of punctuation. I’ve heard that there will even be a compose key sequence for the interrobang in future version of Debian’s X! It’s inspired me to do another little report from my explorations of Unicode.

I can not claim to be an expert in math(s) and I welcome clarifications and corrections. That said, I find the mathematical symbols in Unicode to be some of the most interesting. I have found these useful in the past when I wanted to concisely express that something is very much greater than (⋙) something else.

Recently, I have been confused by the "neither less-than nor greater-than" (≸) and its companion "neither greater-than nor less-than" (≹) glyphs.

In the past, I have (naively I’m told by people who are better at math than I) eschewed Unicode entirely and used the ASCII equals (=) character every time I wanted to express this relationship. I’m told (although I have yet to meet someone who can give me an example or explain why) that the relationship between numbers need not be equal to, less than, nor greater-than in some forms of math.

I’m willing to accept that. But wouldn’t that also require a "neither greater-than nor less-than nor equal to" symbol? Wouldn’t the "neither greater-than nor less-than" symbol really be implying "neither greater-than nor less-than but possibly equal to or not equal to" which would be something different?

Another character I’m still confused by is the "strictly equivalent to" symbol (≣). I understand =, ≠, ≡, and ≢ but my complexity threshold seems to be breached when the fourth bar is introduced. I also don’t understand why there is not a "not strictly equivalent to" character.

By the definitions I use, ≸ and ≹ seem strictly equivalent to me. Would be it fair to say that ≸ ≣ ≹‽

I was pleased to see that my blog now outranks pedophiles (or ‘paedophiles’ as your locale may dictate), for google searches on my name.

This is always a good thing.

My only fear is that by writing this, my blog will now come up for people searching both the terms "mako" and "pedophilia."