One of my classmates is from England. He was talking the other day about how, incredibly often, people here ask him if they celebrate the 4th of July in England.
Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s day of independence. It commemorates the date of a battle. More importantly, it’s just a minor regional holiday in Mexico. It’s nothing like our 4th of July. And Mexicans don’t make a big deal out of it! It’s arguably celebrated primarily in the United States.
Another foreign student at school mentioned that her home country (I think it’s Portugal) celebrates Thanksgiving. That’s really pretty strange?
The other day my camera was in its “AF Hunt” mode, where it couldn’t seem to lock on focus. It’d focus past where it should be, and then turn around and focus back the other way, and just keep going. When you use the flash, it’s worse, because it’ll do a strobe flash to try to aid in focus, but it doesn’t help at all.
After a couple times of doing this, I finally got it focused, and just slid the switch on the lens from “AF” to “M,” disengaging automatic focus. It’d hold the focus that way, so it wouldn’t have to focus every time. (I was stationary, photographing something stationary, so there was no need to refocus every time.)
And then I put the camera down and bumped the lens, so the focus was off. So I just turned the focusing ring. And for the rest of the night, I left the camera in manual focus mode. I’ve found that I can do it just as quickly as the camera can focus the lens, and that’s when it works right: I don’t spin the focus back and forth ten times in a vain attempt to focus something.
Leaving it in manual focus also speeds up the shot: you press the shutter and it takes the picture instantly. There’s no waiting as it focuses.
So almost accidentally, I’ve become a fan of manual focus. Sometimes I’m lazy and want the camera to do it for me, but more often than not, I’m finding that I’d just as soon do it myself.
This weekend was the Youth Democrats of America conference in Manchester, NH. I’d toyed for months with renting a fast telephoto for the event. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t—most of the speakers I wanted to capture weren’t even there.
Bill Clinton was the first speaker. He delivered an amazing speech, but also kicked off what would rapidly become an irritating trend—unabashed praise of Hillary. Right before Hillary was the state chair of something (Youth Democrats?), who explained that he was prohibited from endorsing a candidate. So his speech began, “Effective Monday, I resign from my post. I’m going to join the Hillary campaign.” It seemed pretty inappropriate.
Clinton, though, was a great speaker, and it’s understandable that he’d back Hillary. He talked about how excited the debates last week made him—the Democrats weren’t debating whether global warming was a myth, or whether health care was broken. They were debating the best way to fix it. I wish I had a better recall of the exact figures, but he mentioned that the US pays something like $700 billion a year more than any other nation on healthcare. He said that if we were to close our eyes, pick a country, and copy their health care system, we’d end up saving a lot of money. So he complained about the people that whine about “socialized medicine”—even if we went with a truly Socialist plan, it would save us money. But no one proposed that we become Socialists anyway.
The next morning we had a series of luncheon speakers. Most of them were pretty bad. The first one stood up there before it started pleading with us to hurry up. Like, probably every 90 seconds he’d make an announcement, alternating between asking us to get food and asking us to get food quickly and reminding us that there were two separate lines. And he’d add in “funny” comments like, “If the person in front of you is taking too long, shove them,” which really didn’t do anything but grate on our nerves. And then we had a series of speakers that no one knew that really weren’t that good. One of them I think was taking some serious drugs or something. He started of by talking about going “back to the future,” and all sorts of other things, and never really tied any of them together. And there was this joke that none of us even understood about Bush getting off an airplane carrying two pigs, but he started it off by pretending it was an actual news story. We were talking about it afterwards, and basically all admitted that we had either laughed because everyone else was and we didn’t want to seem like we got it, or, for a few people, they laughed just out of sympathy because he’d taken so long setting up for it and yet it came out making no sense.
They served this big elaborate lunch, but only had coffee and water. So a few of us go find a vending machine. And I guess Elizabeth Edwards was just standing outside waiting until she was called as the next speaker, so they were able to just go talk to her. “And she talked back!” they said with some surprise. They came back and told us, so a few more of us went to see her, but she was going in right as we were coming out. So instead we went to find the vending machine. After checking a bunch of likely places, I asked at the front desk. “They’re on every odd floor—so 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11,” she told me. (One might assume that the lobby is an odd floor, but it’s called “Lobby,” followed by “Mezzanine” above, and then 3. So we took the elevator up to the third floor, bought a can of Dr [sic] Pepper for $1, and went back, by which time Elizabeth Edwards was speaking.
She delivered a really good speech about Edwards. I was very impressed, and when she turned it over to questions, the first question summed it up well: “Why aren’t you running for office?” The question drew a lot of applause. She’d make an amazing First Lady, because she really knows her stuff! And then a woman asked, “My partner and I have been together for 30 years. When I say that we want to be married, how would your husband—and how would you—answer us?” (Edwards has stood out as the Democrat most opposed to same-sex marriage.)
Her answer again drew applause, when she started off with, “Well, those are two separate questions.” Her answer was actually even more impressive, as she began talking about how it’s an “evolving issue” and that she hopes John’s stance would change with time. (Now you see why people wanted her to run?)
Someone else asked for her opinion on some obscure personal attack on a politician. Her answer was basically that she thinks it’s very important that the American people grill candidates with questions, but that sometimes people don’t respect people’s personal lives. She gave the example of people obsessed with Romney’s Mormonism, and then, “And some people criticized John for continuing in spite of my illness… I think that’s inappropriate.” (Again, applause.)
The rest of that day was going to be some sort of canvassing event that none of us wanted to go to. So we instead took the time to tour the local campaign headquarters of the candidates. We were given some really vague directions, and people kept expecting me to know all the backroads around Manchester. One direction involved turning at a prison, which somehow got misinterpreted. We pulled into a prison parking lot, and everyone was walking in. I pointed this out, but they insisted that his headquarters were inside. “No, there is no way that Obama has set up his headquarters inside a prison,” I argued. Someone else suggested, “Well, as long as we’re here, let’s just go inside and check.” I finally persuaded them that it would be incredibly embarrassing to walk into a prison and ask if Obama’s headquarters were there. (Actually, it would probably get interpreted as some sort of racist joke, as opposed to sheer idiocy?)
So we continued down the road, and not a half mile later, we were at the Obama headquarters. It was actually in the middle of nowhere, but the place was huge:
That just shows a small part of the office. It was substantially larger. Hillary’s offices weren’t as nice inside, though they were in a very plush office complex. But she wins points for largest IT infrastructure:
N.B. that this server closet just powers this one little branch of Hillary’s many campaign offices.
At both places, the staff was more than happy to take a few minutes to show us around and talk about why they were supporting their candidate. I was really struck that all these volunteers seemed so professional.
And then we went to the Kucinich headquarters. I didn’t take any pictures inside, because it was a small place and would have been awkward. In hindsight, I really, really wish I had.
It was above this big restaurant, though, with an obvious political history. Inside we found a couple surprised volunteers. “We were in the middle of something,” one of them said, as the other jokingly added, “Inauguration planning.” “But we can talk to you for a couple minutes.” We thought it was pretty strange. One of them moved and a lighter fell out of his pocket. They both seemed pretty… mellow… as they talked to us, and were really all of the place in topics. They actually raised some good points, but the whole thing was really pretty creepy and left me liking Kucinich even less. (The quizzes I’ve taken say he’s my best match, but there’s more than just his stance on the issues that matters. If I were running for President, for example, and saw a UFO one night at home, I might think, “Gee, I’d probably look pretty crazy if I brought that up” and not mention it.) They ended up talking to us at length. At one point someone else came in, seemed surprised anyone was there, and went through these tiny little doors into some sort of oversized closet in the back room. It was amusingly creepy.
After we left, we started talking about how weird the whole thing had been. Someone asked, “Was I the only one that thought it smelled like weed?” Someone else agreed, and then we discussed them dropping a lighter, and how vague the “Oh, we were doing something, but I guess we can talk to you” thing was. And the sketchy back room.
This is not how you should be running a campaign? At all?
We ended up being pretty unimpressed with the YDA Conference, though. We had a good time and got lots done, but some of the best parts were when we skipped the official parts of it and did stuff on our own. We were initially told there’d be “Presidential speakers,” which we naively took to mean that the candidates would be there. Bill Clinton was the big one, followed by Elizabeth Edwards. Kucinich was supposed to be there but canceled. (Don’t worry, plenty of jokes about him, UFOs, and green leafy substances consumed in the back room of campaign offices have already been made to explain his absence.) Obama was never scheduled to come, it turns out, and his “speaker” was his half sister. We were going to go, but it was actually a “party” in the back room of some pub that was very overcrowded. So we left. We ended up not even sticking around today, after seeing the only interesting event of the day (Kucinich) had been canceled.
I found a script that does that sort of Markov chains mentioned. I use it in PHP.
I needed a large body of text, though. Just using someone’s blog posts, for example, just results in a lot of repetitiveness. It’s no good. For bonus points, I wanted a large body of text that sounded kind of strange no matter how it was read.
So I found the Bible. It’s doubly good because the wording is pretty archaic, so you’re use to having to carefully analyze it to divine some meaning. While a guy on a forum saying he recently spent an evening with a grain of salt comes across as nonsense, in the context of the Bible you might try to read into it. This is perfect for this script!
Here’s the page. A lot of it’s sheer nonsense, but some of it’s incredibly good. In lieu of actual verse numbers, the script picks up on the numbers and very consistently plugs in two numbers in front of text.
Some recent highlights:
22 7 And David said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the land to bury with the passengers those that remain upon the face of the earth, and upon every high mountain…
The zombies are coming? To kill the living?
5 11 Woe unto them! for their day is come, the time that David was escaped from Keilah; and he forbare to go forth. 23 14 And he went through the corn fields on the sabbath days. 4 32 And they were offended in him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and
This is one of those ones that almost tells a ‘coherent’ story about David escaping from Keilah, running through cornfields even on the Sabbath, which offended people. But Jesus stooped down to begin scripture. I’m fairly certain that no such verse appears in the Bible, though.
22 3 And David prepared iron in abundance for God had made them rejoice with great joy
That’s not much of a party….
Of course, sometimes it seems to get in a sort of loop… Anyone who’s read the Bible will recall that it, at various times, launches into really lengthy lists of people’s names and the relations between them. So I cringe whenever it begins doing that, because sometimes it just doesn’t stop. Here’s a good illustration of that:
are honest, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
29 2 And he placed forces in all the coasts thereof, from two years old was Jehoash when he began to reign, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem.
My biblical history isn’t so hot, but I’m fairly certain that rulers had to be at least three to begin their reign.
15 6 In the morning sow thy seed, and in the water
o_O
40 4 And the glory of their strength in the tabernacles of Ham
16 59 For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will stand upon my watch, and set me in dark places, as they that must give account, that they may lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel, and have no child, and her husband were dead, she bowed herself and travailed; for her pains came upon her.
Say what?
33 25 Wherefore say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins.
Is that an actual verse? It sounds like it may have been the equivalent of a your-mom insult from the biblical era?
Anyway, go see for yourself. Just don’t expect every verse to be good.
Watch him as he goes! It was the usual “wasting time on Wikipedia” path — I started reading about nuclear fission, and then read about Los Alamos, and then read about the supercomputers, one of which ran Plan 9, so I read about Plan 9, and then its GUI, and then the guy who wrote the GUI. And there was an allusion to someone else, Mark V. Shaney. So I read about him.
In a nutshell, it was a script a few of the Plan 9 guys wrote that would process a lengthy body of text and do some statistical analysis, and use that to spit out writing. It was AI, in a sort, but “schizophrenic” is the best way I’ve seen it described. You read it and it’s one of those things where, for a minute, it makes sense, but then it radically shifts topics or draws some sort of completely irrelevant conclusion. Kind of like a lot of people on the Internet, actually.
They had some fun with textbooks. Here‘s an example, in which the code was fed a basic arithmetic textbook:
Why do we count things in groups of five. When people learned how to count many things, they matched them against their fingers. First they counted out enough things to match the fingers of both hands. Then they put these things aside in one quart. A giant-size bottle that will hold four quarts is a three-digit number….
It starts of making good sense, but suddenly they go from counting on your fingers to putting “these things” in a quart, and is pretty incomprehensible from there.
Here’s another really funny one. You read it, and can kind of comprehend it. But the first reply summarizes it well: it suddenly shifts from constipation to understanding the 19th century, with no logical shift. I think that commenter may have been aware of what was going on. The second guy accurately nails what’s going on.
Finnegan’s Wake? This one cracks me up a lot. But you read this, and doesn’t it exactly sum up what’s wrong with Internet forums? The people just seem totally bonkers, and like they’re ranting but not really sure what they’re ranting about. He manages to talk about being good in bed and using the latest version of BSD in the same sentence. The reply is hilarious, because it’s exactly what you’d think if you didn’t know what was going on: that the “guy” posting was on some serious drugs.
This one, though, is my all-time favorite. It starts off as some religious rant, but clearly not a coherent one. But the fifth paragraph is the best paragraph ever written:
When I meet someone on a professional basis, I want them to shave their
arms. While at a conference a few weeks back, I spent an interesting
evening with a grain of salt. I wouldn’t take them seriously!
I’m fairly certain there are AI ‘bots’ out there that do this same thing, maybe in more coherent forms. I want to acquire one. Badly. I’ve always been interested in the ‘bounds’ of nonsense—when something kind of makes sense, you work with it. We “understand” people shaving their arms in professional settings, and we can visualize someone spending an evening with a grain of salt, and I surely wouldn’t take them seriously afterwards. But we’re making ‘sense’ out of sheer nonsense generated by a computer. How far will it go before we think, “This is complete nonsense.”
Am I the only one that has to put up with terrible interfaces all day, every day?
The work order system for submitting requests to facilities management (Datastream) has a number of irritating flaws:
It only works in IE… I just happened to be in Windows right now, so it didn’t require anything other than switching browsers.
It requires pop-ups. SP2, by default, doesn’t allow them. It’s simple enough to allow them, but it’s a nuisance.
The link isn’t at all easy to find from the main Bentley site.
You need to log into this specific URL that specifies what building you’re in. The problem is that this information is tied to your username anyway, so you really don’t need to specify it in the URL. Except that, apparently, you do.
You log in with your student ID. Our student IDs begin with an @, and are then an eight-digit number. I never got the @ sign, but you can’t log in with it. It’d take a one-line script to strip the @ out if provided.
It’s some obnoxious Javascript/Flash interface that requires double-clicking on page elements. There is no reason this can’t be done with HTML forms? Which would also allow the interface to be used outside of IE.
You can view tickets, past and present, for anyone in your building. I suppose it’s not exactly confidential information, but why do you let me see that the guy on the first floor has to have someone come spray for ants?
In all seriousness, I could write the code to do this in a day, by myself?
And then our library has this interface to schedule meeting rooms. We have about 20 rooms. It’s terrible. It seems to connect to about 20 IPs when loading, which gives me strong reason to believe that every page load goes out and connects to every room. (Haven’t they ever heard of caching?!) There are always 2 or 3 rooms that don’t load, and often the tables load all funky. And it takes about 30 seconds to load. The problem is that it auto-refreshes every minute or so. So you’ll finally get the room to finish loading, and as soon as you lay eyes on an open room and go to click on it, the page refreshes and starts the whole process all over again.
And even when it does work, if you try to click on a certain date, instead of you showing you the room schedule for that day, it takes you to a little page with a picture of one of the rooms. How this isn’t a bug I don’t quite understand.
Again, this is a Programming 101 assignment. Any of us on here could write something that would work better in a spare afternoon.
But then I started thinking… That’s maybe 5 web interfaces I use, 2 of which are unbearable. That’s 40% garbage. That’s a pretty bad statistic?
I graduate in May. Here are some jobs that I’d like:
Doing soundtracks for movies. Not composing music, just spotting ideal music for songs. I have a whole playlist of songs that are crying out to be part of the soundtrack to a movie. I even resisted the urge to put every Moby song I own into the list. Also, Radiohead’s “Motion Picture Soundtrack” isn’t on the list.
Sports photographer. I’d like to go a Sox game some time, and I love taking pictures of things. So I’d basically be getting paid to do something I’d do anyway. And they’d provide me with the equipment. (I hope… Good lenses don’t come cheap.) Maybe just a photojournalist. I already have the press pass. 😉
Corporate CEO. It’s unclear where to submit my resume for this position. Maybe they’ll come to me when I get my degree?
Doing the soundtrack for Guitar Hero IV or whatever. I already have a list of songs that would be good.
President of the United States. No one’s political ideology is as closely aligned with my own as mine. I
President of my college. $750K/year. I’ve never even seen ours. I’d do it for half the pay and be twice as visible. And I’d fix the things that need fixing.
Police chief on-campus. We’re not solving an awful lot of crimes.
We’ve spent weeks preparing for a group presentation in one of my classes. And tonight it all came down to the wire. We were all really nervous, and frankly, I thought we did pretty badly. But the professor’s a down-to-earth guy, so after class one of my members mentioned, “We did so bad!” or something to that effect. And he glanced around to make sure the other groups that went weren’t around, and told us, “I can honestly tell you that your group’s presentation made my night.” And that made my night.
And then when I was upgrading Apache I screwed up and deleted the vhost configuration files. And it’s one of those things I never understood… I tried recreating them but they never behaved in a way that made any sense at all. I’d load them and get errors that made no sense, or the server would just act in strange ways. I finally got it to the point where the blogs worked, even though nothing else did, so I left it. While there are nice GUI tools for Apache, they’re not much good on a headless server. (And no sane person runs X remotely on a server, since it’s a needless waste of CPU and running VNC would make it even worse.)
I just spent some time reading up on vhost configuration, and just got it right… I had the syntax all wrong the first time along, to the point that I’m surprised the server was coming up at all. I think I’m actually going to put together a static page on how to properly set up vhosts, because in my searches for help I found a lot of people with similar problems.
Tonight I interviewed a sergeant with the campus police department. He’s starting a community policing division, and some of what he had to say was neat. When he first started doing it years ago, his supervisors thought he was slacking off. He’d spend hours in the residence halls, chatting with students. At first, he told me, students were suspicious. Why were the police asking them about the football game? What were the police really there for? Soon, they got to realize that there was no hidden motive. His job was to patrol the campus and keep a presence in the dorms, and, as long as he was doing that, he figured he might as well make sure people knew his name and that people knew he wasn’t out to get them.
After a while, his supervisors realized that the officer that seemed to waste his shifts chatting with students was one of their top officers. He was solving crimes no one else could, until soon there really weren’t many crimes for him to solve. The crime in the buildings he patrolled dropped sharply. And the reason, he told me, is pretty simple: people knew he was there all the time, so they thought twice about doing anything stupid. And when people observed someone else doing something that affected them, they felt comfortable reporting it to him, whereas they might not want to call the police ordinarily.
But this reminds me a lot of the “Broken Windows Theory.” For those not familiar, some researchers somewhere watched an abandoned building for a while. Nothing much happened. One day, the researchers smashed out one of the windows, and kept watch. In a matter of days, people smashed in all the other windows. The reason put forward is that, when people see things in disrepair or decay, they don’t see as much of a problem with making the problem worse. As a very minute example, consider a trashcan in the bathroom. Would you ever throw your paper towel on the floor? If you’re the least bit civilized, no, it’d never cross your mind. But what if the trashcan was overflowing? You could probably fit your paper towel in. But you just throw it on the floor, partially because you have no choice and partially because you’re dismayed at the level of disrepair. And extrapolate that feeling to the people who would go around committing more egregious acts. I think it’s the exact same thought process.
At work, I probably drove the maintenance people nuts. I considered it a complete disaster if a light in the bathroom was out for more than a day, for example. There were nine bulbs in each bathroom, but a single flickering bulb is all it takes to make the bathroom seem like a run-down place. Pretty soon, I’d tell my coworkers, we’d have graffiti and people breaking the mirrors. We never did find out if I was right, because we never let the chance present itself. (I won’t lie: OCD was another factor that I insisted that burned-out bulbs be replaced ASAP.)
Sometimes we’d be insanely busy. And it felt like the building would be nice and clean for hours and hours, and all of a sudden, the floors were a mess. People would drop crumbs, and, as long as there were crumbs on the floor, why bother picking up the napkin you dropped? And when the people at the next table saw napkins on the floor, why should they bother picking up the plate they dropped? And when the kids a few tables down finished their soda and knocked the bottle over, why not leave it on the floor?
As Malcolm Gladwell would say, there’s a tipping point. Things would be nice and clean for hours on end, until all of a sudden there’s a subconscious signal that it’s no longer necessary to be tidy. And I’m not sure how many of my coworkers understood it on a scientific level, but I think most them intuitively got it. Even though we were really busy, we’d try to find an employee who could spare 15 minutes to go around and pick up. Not only did this have the positive effect of solving the “broken windows” problem, but I think it even went the other way: they saw that, not only were the windows not broken, but we were actively addressing the issue. And every once in a while, you’d get someone who would pick up the trash under their table when you got near them. You’d basically reversed the problem.
Our toilet in our dorm room was getting really gross. In addition to the predictable filth, the top of the toilet had become really dusty, and there were probably about five cardboard rolls from finished-off rolls of toilet paper. The other day, I couldn’t take it any more, so I cleaned the toilet bowl and the seat. I didn’t really have the energy to do the whole thing, so only half the toilet got cleaned. There was still considerable room for improvement, but you were no longer afraid to use it.
Today, our toilet is sparkling clean. I don’t know who did it. I never asked anyone to, and I didn’t do it. But I take partial credit. I think I sent a subconscious signal by cleaning half the toilet. All of a sudden, the other part of the toilet was thrown into contrast, and the message was sent that we don’t like our things to be filthy. Someone else picked up on that, and finished the job. And I think the toilet’s going to stay clean for a while.
And now that I’ve talked about sending subconscious messages with my toilet, I think it’s time I acknowledged that I’m up way too late and went to bed.
