Paul's Pretentious Pablum

More stuff.

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 04:59:20 GMT

Quick thoughts before bed (yet another in my continuing installments of blog posts that are worthless).

WorldMark by Wyndham has a sales pitch that they make to you. The sales pitch is kind of a scam, since you can get what they offer from a 3rd party reseller for half the price apparently.

It is, however, kind of an ingenious business model, though, most likely, unsustainable.

I think many software companies fail to continue to deliver the new hotness once they come out of start up mode because business people are usually in charge of major decision making, and business people, in my short experience in the industry, are pretty bad at understanding what the new hotness is or how to capitalize on it. This probably bears a larger post at some point, but basically I think my experience with business people is that the best ones are able to take a set of general tools and dig deep and understand how to apply those tools in a specific industry to make a business succesful. However, most business people I've encountered (buisness people here are like, the CxO's, the people with the MBA's, you know?) only think they're succesful at doing this but don't learn enough about the specifics of the field their competing in to make good decisions or to be able to really understand the implications of the major decisions they're making. I've seen this in 3 pretty wildly different niches in the software industry now. And I've seen aspects of it in my experience with academia, too. I'm sure if I went to business school there would probably be a whole course on how not to fall into this trap or something. If there's not, there should be. It's pretty irksome.

Ice cream is delicious. Particularly any ice cream involving chocolate and peanut butter.

I suck at scrabble. It makes me sad. I wish I were better.

I really, really miss Italy. I may consider starting the podcast back up.

I still feel like I'm having a hard time making any progress, but I have done the first tiniest bit of introductory reading for my thesis, and that makes me excited. *crosses fingers*

I really, really like Bebel Gilberto.

I really, really like Emacs.

I'm getting pretty excited for oscon.

My wife is the most awesome person ~~on earth~~ ever.

Caleb the other day asked me, in a very sad, sad voice: "Daddy, can I hold you?" I said, "Sure what's wrong? How are you feeling?" He said, "I'm just... feeling... a little married right now." It was pretty cute.

I'm going to bed now.

Life.

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:05:38 GMT

Life has sucked recently, motivation wise. This is probably for a variety of reasons. I've had this paper that I wrote my first semester back in school that I'm pretty sure (as mentioned previously) is publishable. I had some exchanges with a guy who published on the field like.... 30 years ago. Not really much has been done with it since. The paper I sent him was one I wrote for class, and wasn't particularly polished, and so he wasn't convinced that I'd done something new, so I told him (like a year ago) that I'd take a month or two and read up on some articles he suggested I look at, re-write, and give him a better version of my code. It's literally only like a weeks worth of work at most to get this paper out the door. But. I have been unable to muster the ability to take those... maybe 15-20 hours... and spread them out over the last two months, even though I've been getting up early and working on it before work.

This means that, as of tomorrow, I'm throwing in the towel on the paper for now. I'm shelving it again, even though I've got lots of cool ideas about it. It has spawned what I think are 3 interesting open source project-ish things.

Starting on Tuesday, thesis research must begin in earnest. Honestly, though, I'm feeling less than enthused about my degree right now. I really just wanna be done. I wanna buy a house. I wanna just work my job and not feel time pressure to complete projects all the time.

Work has also been alternatingly frustrating and rewarding over the last few weeks. Similar motivation problems have plagued me there, and it's just not fun when not much gets done after a few weeks' worth of staring at the same 3 problems.

Anyway, sorry for the downtrodden, depressed vibe. I'm fully convinced that at work things are about to turn a really good corner, and who knows, maybe I'll get really quick at reading for my thesis and be able to burn through the next month of reading really quickly and return to the paper before the end of summer.

A quick jaunt through yesterday.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:22:18 GMT

Yesterday, rather than getting ready to release some (incredibly minor) open source projects that I've been working on lately in a long and drawn out tangent from the real project that I was supposed to get done during the month of May, I played some video games. And I went for a run. And, I fixed our car.

Yes, you read that last part right. While Melissa was wrapped up in a fit of domesticity, making me a much needed new pair of pajama pants from scratch, I took our little chubberoo to the library, where we checked out (among 12 children's books) a car repair guide for the Subaru Legacy 2000-2006 models. The guide is written by the "Haynes" company, and for the problem we had (a clanky noise in our door which rattles all around, caused by the door lock cylinder falling inside the door) was nearly completely useless. It gave a basic ordering for how to pull the door apart and told me which part I'd need. For the lock repair it says this (paraphrased): "Unhook the lock cylinder. Unscrew bolt. Installation is reverse of removal." It turns out there are several moving parts and a couple of (hard to get at and not easy to understand without a picture, and obscured from view inside the door) rod connections which are necessary to understand. Anyway, I ended up getting the whole thing fixed after an hour and a half, making me feel proud of myself. If anybody ever needs to get inside the door of a 2002 subaru legacy sedan to repair the lock mechanism, I feel secure in saying I can help you figure out how to do it, and I have the necessary door trim panel removal tool.

After that, at about 7:30, we went to help Anna's sister move in to a new apartment up in Orem, by the old Word Perfect plant. That is a sad place up there, I think. There's tons of buildings, including one we saw labeled "Building W" which I assume means that there were indeed buildings A-V before it. When they killed that company it must have died hard. I think the thing that's saddest to me is that the company was so big it could afford to build and people all those buildings at some point. But now they all stand slighlty dilapidated, housing startups. It's sort of a testament to how insecure the software industry can be: You can be a giant one minute, and be put out of business the next (metaphorically-- I mean it didn't take just one minute to put Word Perfect out of business, I'm sure).

Anyway, that was Saturday.

Some thoughts. (aka, a long, windy, rambling post about unrelated things).

Tue, 27 May 2008 04:51:52 GMT

Point 1. I've been watching the NBA post-season. The Jazz were in the running, and almost forced the Lakers to a game 7, which would have been sweet. But, instead, they lost to the Lakers in game 6. I don't really like the Lakers much. The only guy that I think is a real standup, non-goon on their team is Derek Fisher. Last year, the Jazz lost to the San Antonio Spurs in the semi-finals. Which makes them, of course, non-favored by local folk. The thing is, watching San Antonio play the Lakers this year, I've realized that I actually respect three or four players on their team, guys like Manu Ginobli, Tony Parker, and Tim Duncan. However, I think there are a few players on their team which are goons, who get a significant amount of playing time. A team with goons (where goon = somebody who plays dirty basketball and kind of shames their teammates by the way they conduct themselves on the court) and lots of standup guys makes me hesitate. I want to cheer for the Spurs. I want them to win. But I also don't want to cheer for them because I think some of the quality, solid players they have should be ashamed to play with some of the dirtier players on the team... They shouldn't be cheered for because they rely on the goons to do the dirty work, even though they could probably win without the goons doing the dirty fouling. It's an emotionally interesting thing.

Point 2. I signed up for eMusic.com today. Not sure if I can give it a hearty endorsement for most people. A guy I home teach and with whom I have been trading CDs back and forth for a while (he's a filmmaker and gets into cool music, which is sweet) has mentioned it a few times and I checked it out and they had a promotion where for your first month you could get 80 songs for $10. I figured I'd try it out. They've mostly only got smaller "independent" labels on the site. There's more than 80 tracks worth of stuff I'd like to download, so I'll probably spend a couple of months' worth of allowance at it, but we'll see. The first few selections that I've downloaded are by Zuco 103, Robin Eubanks, Chris Potter and Bebel Gilberto. Thing is, I could probably burn up most of my 80 tracks downloading Zuco 103's back catalog and Chris Potter and some other jazz musicians, and that's before I even start exploring the bands I'm actually kind of interested in sampling, like Múm or what have you. So, it seems like this should be a rousingly good thing for eMusic, but I haven't listened to the selections on the ol' squeezebox yet. They say they do 192 kbps, VBR encoding with Lame, which should be pretty good. I'm just not sure if it'll be good enough to fool my ears or if I'll have spent a lot of money which I should have just spent on CDs. At least this way some artists are getting more money, right?

3. I've been watching some TV lately. I watched all of Firefly this last couple of weeks. It was good. Really good. I've got the movie here and I think I'll probably end up watching it tomorrow. One of the things that I like about it is that it really seems like the actors and the writers through themselves into the act of making a creative work, which is nice. When people put it all out on the line, I think things work well.

I also started watching the first season of 30 Rock. I was not too impressed with the first few episodes, honestly. I felt like they just weren't well written, the jokes were pretty cliché and predictable, and that it just didn't really have much of a chance. But after watching a few more episodes, I started really liking it. Which is funny, because it was unexpected. After the first couple of episodes I was thinking, "No wonder SNL isn't that funny anymore." But now I'm thinking, "Maybe SNL has been funnier than I assumed the last few years." I haven't really watched any SNL for like 10 years except for whatever skits occasionally hit the intrawebs, but those haven't ever really seemed that good to me. Oh well. 30 Rock is mildly amusing enough to distract me during an evening bike ride, anyway.

4. I really, really like emacs. Have I mentioned that? I also really, really like javascript. :) I've been using Steve Yegge's excellent js2-mode. It's sweet. I installed Rhino and have written an inferior js shell for use with js2-mode and a small unit-testing javascript system (where small = ridiculously small), which I hope to use to mega-streamline my non-browser-based javascript development.

I'm using this stuff to do my kinship reduction rule generation system, v2. At first I was going to do it in pyhton, because I thought it would be much easier to get a cross platform GUI working in python then it would be in perl (can you imagine trying to explain to old, nearly retired anthropology professors -- the kind that would still be interested in this area-- how to install CPAN modules to get their computer to run your software correctly? The thought made me shiver...) So, I spent a while sitting and spinning on the thought of trying to do this in python. I got constantly distracted and bored by it, and then the other day I realized, "Hey! The best system independent UI setup in the world is right at your fingertips: Just use the web!" Sourceforge provides web hosting for projects, and I don't think I can conceive of that going away any time in the near future, barring some kind of singularity, so this would be a really great way to make the project publicly available in an easy-for-everyone-to-consume format. No downloading, no anything. So, I've just been getting the emacs comint-based mode setup, and then today starting to get some of the basic stuff written for the helper functions for the algorithm. Then, I just need to code up the algorithm and then wire it into a web page and voila! instant kinship reduction rules for the whole world! :)

5. I've thought about using Steve Yegge's javascript parser written in elisp to then compile javascript into elisp byte-code. That is a project for much later, and I'm nearly positive he's already thought about it which means he'll probably get to it long before I ever read enough compiler literature to begin, but wouldn't it be sweet? You most likely could byte-compile any language into elisp byte-code if you were clever enough (which I'm not) meaning you could open up emacs extension to a whole host of new folks who might be turned off by lisp-y-ness.

Well, there's my huge, rambly post. I hope you found something in it which you liked.

To RSS or not to RSS.

Thu, 22 May 2008 20:47:57 GMT

So, for the last week or two, my RSS feeds have been down. I've been using a convoluted process to read them: Newspipe fetches them, on a cronjob once an hour, and e-mails them to a gmail account I've set aside for rss feeds. Then Gnus fetches the gmail account via IMAP. This is better than the process which once was fetchmail grabbing them from the gmail and then using procmail or something else to dump them into something readable by gnus. I set this up because (allegedly) the gnus rss support sucks.

So, 2 weeks ago our local family server died. That was also jury-rigged to do DNS/dhcp for our local network, so that, under a previous uber-ghetto network topology, we could get to our home server via the same dns name as the outside world. When all of that went away, my rss feeds stopped working. As part of a work task this week, I made a change to my local setup that kicked the rss feeds back into gear.

The thing is, the 2 weeks without rss feeds were intensely good. Like really good. Like I got a lot more done, I wasn't so scatterbrained throughout the day, etc. And I was at peace with it, mostly, though there was still this little nagging feeling in the back of my brain that I might actually be missing out on things. I'm really considering dumping them.

But if I did, I'd miss little gems like this..

Quick update.

Mon, 19 May 2008 05:46:09 GMT

Almost finished with the ol' system update to ubuntu, including the latest openssl stuff. I upgraded our photo gallery so it's on gallery2, now. Not sure if we like it. can't get the themes to work properly, etc.

Caleb stayed home from most of church today because of his runny nose, which means I stayed home, too.

I think I may have got a line on some motivation for my project, which means the thesis work could start in the next couple of weeks *crosses fingers*.

Server upgrade.

Sun, 18 May 2008 06:30:23 GMT

In the middle of moving from an old debian install to ubuntu. This is my first ubuntu experience. So far it's nice.

Magnetics word to the wise: I think this (long overdue) move was finally motivated by the fact that while re-arranging our living room I moved our server around, quite near the large-magnet speakers. Keep those hard drives away from the magnets, friends. They're not kind to your files.

Updates galore.

Mon, 12 May 2008 04:56:32 GMT

I have been unable to work up any kind of momentum to return to the two or three academic projects that I have outstanding like Hogwallop, or my Brother Brigham paper. Summer laziness has hit hard. So, Friday night I started soldering the ol' Rockmite in earnest, while Melissa was finishing up a book for her class. I'm about a third of the way done with the Rockmite. Maybe a quarter. I got a little (read very) obsessive compulsive about lead contamination due to the solder (solder is often made of a high percentage of lead, despite what this wikipedia page says). This means that I laid down cardboard over top of the kitchen table I was soldering on, used disposable rubber gloves and treated them as contaminated during and afterwards. This proceeded to freak Melissa out. I think one of the main sources of this freak out was that I don't want Caleb to have some kind of lead poisoning problem and end up learning disabled or something because of a dumb hobby. Afterwards, I googled "soldering kitchen table" and found this article in which somebody repeatedly emphasizes that soldering can only cause lead problems if you actually ingest the solder. That made me feel much better. Isn't it great what a random internet site can do for you, even though I have no idea who "ranger/- Warren" is or if he knows whereof he speaks?

On Saturday, I went for my second 8+ mile run in two weeks. Last week I went for my first run longer than 3 miles ever. It was relatively intense, and I had to stop after 4 miles and then start again a 20-ish minutes later. This last week, though we took a couple of breaks while waiting for red lights and such, I ran the whole time without any large walking stretches. 8.27 miles in 1 hour and 26 minutes. It felt great. Hopefully I'll be able to continue to do the occasional long run.

A quick post before bed.

Fri, 02 May 2008 05:49:40 GMT

This week we released a feature at work on which I've worked my tail off. Sourceforge just became an OpenId relying party. Essentially what that means, dear friends and family, is that you can take your livejournal account and use it to log into the website I work on. Or your Blogger account, or your AIM account, or your... You probably have a lot of openid's and didn't know it yet.

We did it using some code that is part of an open source project, but the open source project didn't really fully implement the whole thing, so I got to dig into the nitty gritty encryption parts of the protocol and stuff. It was pretty fun, and we did the whole thing in under a month. Which was awesome for our team, since we've been kind of stagnant for a loooong time. So, that was an excellent good thing.

The rest of this week has essentially been spent playing Mario Kart Wii and recovering from the ol' windy city where I went for a big work meetup last week. It was quite windy and rainy, actually. I haven't gotten the project which I intended to this week (revamping Hogwallop so it's in python and more readable) but I got some work done on that tonight, though I skipped out on doing the dishes to do it (sorry, sweets!).

Anyway, I'm feeling pretty good. Work is going well. School is good. I got an A in my phonology class, though I did sort of whine to the professor about grades right before the semester ended, but an A is an A, whining or no whining, I suppose, and I did also work my tail off on my final phonology paper. (Neapolitan consonant gemination FTW!!!). And on that note I'm off to bed.

We got a Wii.

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:59:03 GMT

Well, the family connections paid off this week, and we were able to obtain a Wii. A good use of my christmas money, even though I didn't quite make it last the whole year this year.

I like the fact that when we play, everybody kinda gets involved, at least, that's the case with the couple of games that came with it, Wii Play and

Wii Sports. I know there are other "hard core gamer" type games that are available for it, but I'm not sure those would go over well with Caleb and/or Melissa, so I may wait to try'em out/rent'em etc.

The only thing I wish is that it were slightly more hackable, i.e. if Nintendo would open up the platform a bit more. I'd _love_ to hack up some WiiWare, but I don't think they'll make that available ever, which is kinda sad. Think of the cool things that would flourish if they did!

Car accidents, again.

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:44:00 GMT

Got hit from behind today, while driving home from taking Melissa to school. Kinda sad. The guy fed a fake name and no license to the cops so he got arrested when they figured out he was lying to them and he had a bench warrant out for his arrest. I felt bad because when I rear ended somebody the other people didn't want to call the cops (maybe they had bench warrants out, too?) and so I didn't get a ticket.

I finally fixed a bug that I've been working on in some library code we're trying to use after like a week of banging my head against a wall. It was like the absolute most annoying problem of all. The rest of my team at work has been writing code on top of the bug I've been working on, assuming it'll get fixed, and I think it finally has gotten fixed, which is nice. It was crypto code (more in the near future, hopefully, on the nature of the code), though incredibly lightweight, but being php and all, it's kind of a pain with the ol' arbitrary precision integers. Anyway, it's nice to have that done and over with. The rest of today has kind of been a decompress day, with the accident providing a bit of stress in the morning, and the bug fix finally getting pushed out to the team around 4:00pm my time.

The semester is about to end. It's kind of going out with... a fizzle. My class has gotten really easy over the last couple of weeks, probably because the professor is trying to keep up with his grading and doesn't think he can read our rough drafts before we finish, though it's entirely possible he can, since I'm pretty sure several people in the class gave him crap drafts.

I'm really starting to feel engaged at work again, which is a nice feeling. I feel like we're finally making some real progress, and we're doing decent, fun stuff. So it's nice. Really nice. I have to travel a ton in the next few months for work, which is less than nice, but at least it'll feel like productive time while travelling, unlike the last trip which I took for work, which was nearly a complete waste of time and money.

I've been finishing off Angel, though I've got one season left, and I have to say... In some ways it's really cheesy, but in other ways I really like it. I think it's kind of nice to have a "show to watch" as it were, but watching shows that have already completed their runs is both good and bad, since you can watch the whole thing without having to wait for "next week's episode" but then when the show is over, you're done. There's nothing left. No anticipation about whether or not there's going to be another season. No nothing. It's kind of a let-down.

Okay, that's the end of this entirely too-long update/ramble. I bid you good night.

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 01:46:35 GMT

Just had a classic Paul Huff moment.

I'm taking Phonology this semester. It's my only class. You'd think that would mean that I'd be able to spend all kinds of time on it and just do really well at it.

You'd be wrong.

Phonology, it turns out, is really dumb. At least, the parts of it that we're studying now are incredibly poorly thought out. We're studying generative phonology right now, which apparently has been, at least in some circles, superceded by optimality theory, for which I really am holding my breath. The guys that came up with the stuff we're reading right now make all these assumptions about the way that phonological processes must work in the brain that are basically completely unfounded. And then they base their whole life's work around those principles. It's kinda scary.

It's also intensely unmotivating. That's why it took me approximately six gazillion hours to get up the gumption to spend the 6ish hours that I spent all-told over the last couple of days on my weekly homework assignment that was due today at 4:00pm. In addition to tons of reading, we're essentially asked to write a short 4+ page paper each week. Which, honestly, under normal operating conditions for a linguistics class would even be kinda cool. The option to write a short paper on an aspect of the class, I mean. In this case, it's intensely unmotivating because you know that even the teacher doesn't believe the arguments that you're making in your 4 page paper, but you have to make them, because that's the way generative phonology works.

So, I spend all this time writing my paper, stay up late last night, get up this morning and spend a couple of more hours on it. I go to class today, and ask the professor about a couple of nitpicky, but semi-important details in the way that I wrote things out in the paper. Then I go home. As I walk in the door, I think to myself, "I'm going to e-mail that paper to the professor right now."

Do I actually e-mail the professor my paper? No. I spend all this time working on this paper that I then proceed to not turn in. I remember this at 6:30pm, while finishing the dishes and send an hurried e-mail to the professor with my paper attached. I have a timestamp on the paper showing that I haven't touched it since 9:45am this morning. Do I think the professor will actually accept my paper? I have no idea, but I'm leaning towards no, because I think he's one of those "show no mercy to the student" types. Which is fine. I can accept that. It's just kind of annoying to have put forth all this effort to do my tiny lame paper and then forget to actually turn it in.

It is, of course, all my fault. And there's the Paul Huff moment: doing a bunch of work to get something half-decent, and then, quite absent-mindedly, not caring enough to go the rest of the way.

Alas.

4 quick notes.

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 05:37:54 GMT

1. Melissa found a random old Border's gift card left over from last Christmas that had $36.00 on it. I went and bought Stoa by Nik Bärtsch's Ronin. Let me remind you that I was thinking about buying this album a long time ago. Let me hereby publicly prostrate myself in front of Jeremy Tilton and say that I'm sorry I ever doubted his musical tastes or suggestions. This album is freaking awesome.

2. I haven't forgotten about the contest winners. Josh, I'll need to consult with you online sometime, Caren, I'll need your address, and Ben and I have been in constant consultation. I also owe another contest or two in the next little bit here. As soon as I crawl out under work and school stuff I'll be hitting the contest scene pretty hard.

3. I'm semi-excited about my final project for my class. More to come.

4. To everybody who's asked: My Amazon wish list can be found here. It's prioritized, though sort of half-heartedly, so pretty much anything on there would be neat-o for Christmas. Books and CDs are great used, so if you're short on cash, or you want extra bang for your christmas buck for me, I'd love to have two used books for the price of one new one, or CDs or whatever else :) Other things that would be nice as Christmas presents include:

Nice looking articles of clothing

Morse code/Ham Radio apparatuses

Fancy hot chocolate

Chocolate cookbooks (don't know which ones are good, so I haven't added any to the list)

Subscriptions to Make, Cook's illustrated or QST (which would just be membership in the ARRL).

Board games (Apples to Apples, Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne expansions besides "Cathedrals and Inns")

Other fun digital widgets (Arduino stuff, Chumby-like stuff), though nnone of those are necessarily things that I want, they might be cool.)

And anything else you think might be cool.

Contest Winners!

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 05:57:48 GMT

Okay, folks.

Here are the winners:

jsweed, carenbobaren and my brother-in-law Ben, get handi-crafted goodness from me.

Even though half the people who entered said they wouldn't do their own contest, I decided to enter them anyway. They can feel free to do a good turn to Pay It Forward, or they can just simply abstain from paying it forward. I'm cool with that.

Stay tuned in the next week or so for my digital handi-craft contest.

A mixed bag of a day.

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:49:58 GMT

Well, Contest #1 is well under-way with a record 9 entrants. Remember, you've got until tomorrow night at midnight to leave a comment on that post if you'd like to be entered in the non-digitial handicraft contest. The digital handicraft contest will follow shortly thereafter.

So, today, was a mixed bag of a day, as my title suggests. I've actually got some decent momentum at work lately, making some decent sized changes throughout the course of my days at work, which feels nice. Better than it has for a while. Certain circumstances over the last week or so have caused me to realize just how cool it is that I get to work from home doing something that I like reasonably well. Working from home really is a _big_ benefit. I certainly hope it is the wave of the future, because even just this last year at home watching Caleb grow up has been truly amazing. I can't imagine what it would be like to miss out on all his shenanigans and the little bits of him growing up. I think it would be awful.

However, today was one of those days where I wanted to be coding on a million different side projects rather than what I'm assigned to do at work. I think it'd be fun to try and write an app for Google's new cell phone system, so I was thinking about that, and investigating the possibilities. I've always thought it would be fun to write a game (and may still do so for the second part of the contest), so I have been looking into game frameworks for python, my language du jour. I've always thought it would be fun to write a guitar tuner, so I've been reading about audio processing this evening.

On the surface, I would say that days like today push me towards academia, with the freedom to be at home more than a traditional job, but also to be able to pick whatever the heck I want to research into on a particular day. However, that thought is wrong: I have 2-3 open, half-baked academic projects sitting, waiting to be programmed on/worked on/written up and that's on top of the project for school which is mildly amusing that I should be working on. Was I dreaming of any of those things today? No.

I was thinking about Morse code speaking cell phones and tuning my guitar with my laptop.

Maybe there's no place for me. Or, maybe I should just pull my head out of the clouds and get to work.

Contests 'n such.

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 06:43:40 GMT

I won this contest and this contest. So this means I get two handicrafts. Which will be totally awesome.

This is how these contests work. It's like a meme. Win a contest, make your own contest. So, I have to have two contests on my blog now, for things hand crafted by me. I've decided to do two different contests. The first one, this one, will be one in which I make a traditional handicraft. Enter by by leaving a comment. You have, let's say, until Tuesday night at midnight to enter.

The second contest will be a digital handicraft. I will write you a little program of some sort. That one will start after the first one ends. You can enter both or neither or just one. You can win both or neither or just one. Winners will be selected randomly.

So, comment away. Have fun. Thank you, and I'll see you in a little bit.

Facebook and twitter update at the same time.

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 22:41:59 GMT

I finally went ahead and installed twit.el this weekend. I did it because I figure I ought to be twittering my status updates. So, I wrote the following wrapper script around my facebook.el and

twit.el so I can update them both at the same time.


(defun set-status (status-message)

  (interactive "sStatus message: ")

  (let* ((split-message (split-string status-message))

	 (whole-message (mapconcat 'identity (cons

					      (capitalize (car split-message))

					      (cdr split-message)) " ")))

    (facebook-users-set-status status-message)

    (twit-post-function twit-update-url whole-message)

    ))

I'd love to write some crappy NLP in elisp to see if I can get it to parse out a "Paul is..." from a twitter update some time, but I doubt that will ever happen. But it would be fun. So, I just upper-case the first letter of the facebook status since that should make a decent twitter post anyway.

I'm a beginning twitterer, but I was surprised that simply https-ifying the url didn't quite work, which was sad, because it's sending my password over the net plaintext. Oh well, that's what a throwaway password's for anyway, right? I was able to make it so I don't have to put in my username and password to twit.el everytime by doing this:


(require 'twit)

(setq twit-base-url "http://username:password@twitter.com")

(setq twit-update-url (concat twit-base-url "/statuses/update.xml"))

Man, those cats who wrote the url package in emacs sure did their homework :)

(p.s. extra spacing in the elisp because I can't figure out how to get around lj-update's fill stuff at the end. Anybody know how to fix that?)

Rants addressed to people who will never read my blog, but should.

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 05:53:47 GMT

Dear creators of Bionic Woman,

Your show's okay. I like it okay. The whole Jake 2.0 angle isn't being played up too much, and that show was kind of a knock-off of your original anyway. However, the "Bionic Noises" have _got_ to go. We, the viewers, can tell when the Bionic Woman is using her bionic powers. We can figure it out. We don't need a ridiculous outside-of-the-narrative-frame audible cue everytime it happens. Or ever. Just tell the sound guy to get rid of it.

Ever yours,

Paul Huff

Dear maintainers of Livejournal,

Nobody likes those hover-over-popup-previews. At least, nobody with sense does. Even if they've got a clever name that somebody in marketing somewhere came up with like "Snap". They're over intrusive, you can't hover over them without totally distracting yourself from what you're reading, and they're, quite simply, ugly. Not only should you not have turned them on by default for everybody, you shouldn't have ever coded up that feature in the first place. If your focus groups told you that people liked them, then think New Coke before making a similar change in the future.

Your humble servant,

Paul Huff

Dear J.K. Rowling,

If you wanted Dumbledore to be gay, you should have said so in your books. (Heaven knows they were long enough that no editor ever looked at them anyway, so it's obvious the so-called editors didn't keep it out.) Now that you've finished writing the books, you don't really have much of a say anymore. See Eco's The Limits of Interpretation for more on this topic. Basically, you can't re-write the book unless you actually re-write the book.

Your ever-devoted reader,

Paul Huff

The Surreal Old McDonald.

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 05:47:10 GMT

So, lately Caleb and I have been doing a little ditty I like to call, "The Surreal Old McDonald."*. It's not surreal as in involving lame, old-school B-list celebrities but surreal as in surrealism. Like the art movement.

Let me tell you how it goes: I start singing, "Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o. And on that farm he had a ___" and I wait. This is the part where Caleb chimes in. When we first started singing our little chantey together, at this point Caleb would always say, "duck." No matter how many times we'd sung the song with his participation substituting animals in, he loved to put the duck in there. He was, apparently, enamored with Old McDonald's ducks. So the song went a little something like this:

Me (singing): Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o. And on that farm he had a....
Caleb: Guh [Caleb's word for duck]
Me (singing): Ee-i-ee-i-o.
Me (not singing): What does a duck say?
Caleb: Gah Gah Gah! [Caleb's word for quack quack quack]
Me (singing): With a quack quack here, and a quack quack there, ....

You get the idea. Pretty standard stuff. Eventually we convinced him to start substituting in cow, or doggy, or whatever. Not too shabby, I thought. Our son is participating in singing!

Lately, however, Caleb's true artistic genius has come out. Tired of that old standby the duck, or even its slightly more edgy successor, the cow, Caleb has begun a bold new Old McDonald movement. This is an example of how the song now goes:

Me (singing): Old McDonald had a farm, ee-i-ee-i-o. And on that farm he had a....
Caleb: Ba ba dra ba. [Not Caleb's word for anything.]
Me (singing): Ee-i-ee-i-o.
Me (not singing): What does a "Ba ba dra ba" say?
Caleb (exhaling quickly, with his lips pressed together tightly): Ffff.
Me (singing): With a ffff ffff here, and a ffff ffff there, ....

Other examples of animals of whom Caleb thinks Old McDonald is an expert caretaker include: Ssssss (which sometimes says "ffff" also, but often says a shortened version of it's own name, just an "ss"), ghra, also likes to make some of those fricative noises, apparently, and the loveable and incredibly huggable, (guttural h, here) hah, which is a big fan of making another guttural noise as it's primary means of intra-species communication.

How many animal names does Caleb know, you ask? More than 5. How many animal noises does Caleb know, you ask? More than 10. (Pandas say, "Bamboo, please." Bet you didn't know that, now, did you?) However, Caleb doesn't choose any of these, because, well, folks, that would be, well, too realistic for such an artiste.

*(I only have called it "The Surreal Old McDonald" in my head up until now, but I've been doing that for a few days now....)

Another PZ4 moment.

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 06:21:48 GMT

Tonight, Melissa (mhuff) and I got to go on an honest to goodness date. To the movies! By ourselves! Late at night! With no child in tow! It was a blessed event brought to us by Melissa's mom and dad, with whom we're staying this weekend for car fixin' and various other reasons.

The movie we saw is called The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising. It's based on a book called

The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. I kind of wanted to see this movie because I loved the books so much. I was quite disheartened because it departed so much from the story in the books, even the general feeling of the movie was different than the books. Quotes on the wikipedia page linked to above say that the writer, director and actors didn't really pay too much attention to the books. Which is lame and stupid of them.

Several things which I didn't like: they added in 10 overly cliched and oddly complicating elements to the plot which dragged the story down. They failed to write well enough to sustain some of the themes they added into the story (namely the teacher-student sort of relationship they tried to ham up between Merriman and Will). It felt like there was almost an attempt to stay true to the magical elements of the original book, which were nice because they were incredibly low-key, and un-PZ4-like. The book is much less like Fantastic Four the movie and much more like, say, the first X-Men movie. Fantastic Four has the people's powers be the concentration. The first X-Men movie treats the powers as a tool in telling a story, and the powers seem to be slightly more... natural? Less comic-booky? In the end, the magic felt lame and over-wrought, which is always the danger in a movie like this. They added random fist-fights, a component that I don't remember at all in the original story. They made the story much more a piece of young adult literature than it was originally, I think. It's been a while since I read the book, but now I want to go back and read it again.

Anyway, bottom line, don't go see this movie hoping to find something similar to the book, except essentially in name only. If you do, you'll be disappointed.

It was, however, an excellent date. I love Melissa! She's hot!

Music (the postlude.)

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 16:50:38 GMT

While I was up in the middle of the night for a couple of hours for no apparent reason, a piece of music started playing on repeat through my mind. This happens to me a lot, not just at 3:00 a.m., and I'm not entirely sure why, but I'll have a couple of bars of a nice piece of music, or jazz recording, or some other pop song go through my head repeatedly. The game always becomes, "What is this two bar (or, sometimes, as little as two chord) phrase from?" Sometimes it takes me a day or two to figure it out, sometimes a lot less. Totally random.

The nice part was that at 3:00 a.m. last night my brain started playing a nice little phrase that I couldn't place for a little bit. I thought about it, and thought about it and suddenly it dawned on me: it was a phrase of music that I'd heard for the first time on Friday night, as I played it with Jeremy and Chris Hough who it turns out is a really nice (as a person) and good (as a musician) guitarist in Salt Lake. It was a song that I'd never played before (which seems to be my musical performance theme of the summer), and it was nice.

It was a pleasant 3:00 a.m. surprise.

Music.

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 04:46:29 GMT

I get to play again with Jeremy tomorrow night, for the first time in like... years. This is going to be the first time that I play with a real bass player in years, too. Like 2 years, at least. It makes me nervous. Mostly because I want Jeremy to like my playing.

At some point, Jeremy got better than me. It's kind of funny, because for a while I think I was as good or better than him, mostly our freshman year. Then our first year back after our missions, I think we were about on the same level. Then, something happened. Maybe I started spending too much time in front of the computer, or just spent my time on other things, while Jeremy spent his time on his bass. Maybe that's the case... I just don't remember him practicing too much. Maybe it happened one of those summers he went down to Vegas to work, and came back at the end of the summer. At any rate, at some point he got better than me, and started playing with other drummers, and ever since then, I've really wanted him to like my playing, but my playing has essentially gotten worse since then. :) Due to lots of factors, but mostly lack of playing and practicing.

It's hard to practice drums, consistently, when it's not your livelihood. Setting up and taking down the drums is costly, time-wise (only 5-10 minutes, but still... it's more than just picking up a guitar or a trumpet and wailing away, you know?). And, honestly, who wants to hear somebody, a neighbor, practicing the drums all by themselves? I know I would hate it if our neighbors suddenly took up drumming... Anyway, all that aside, I get to play tomorrow. Playing alone should be treat enough, but I want to play well. I want to make beautiful music. I like that feeling.

A PZ4 moment.

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 05:10:48 GMT

Please excuse my PZ4-ness.

It's season/series premiere week on NBC. I've never liked CBS (old people shows, when I was growing up, anyway), and ABC, while they've done Alias (only really liked the first season or so) and Grey's Anatomy (liked it kind of a lot) of late, haven't particularly caught my interest. NBC always has great concepts, many of which often fail to take off. Which stinks.

Watched the Heroes second season premiere online today. It was... okay. Not perfect, not great, but not bad. I found myself wondering today why the show had taken such an extra comic-book turn instead of being more gritty and less flashy. I think that was the sort of feeling I originally really liked about the show: it was about superpowers, yes, but not so much superpowers as about the interesting interplay between the characters. Now, thinking back across all of last season's arc and this season's premiere, I'm thinking maybe it might be getting too lost in comic book land.

I was not impressed with the last 15 minutes of Bionic Woman tonight, which was all I caught. Nano-technology invading the body? Again? Jake 2.0 did that (and did it in a more interesting way), and probably lots of other things did. Seemed like they were trying too hard during the last 15 minutes, anyway. Perhaps I was just too colored by the negative review in the New York Times Maybe I'll see if I can catch it on the website tomorrow.

I did like Life, which is a detective show (apparently I like detective stuff lately. Kinda weird.) and about a detective who gets sentenced to life in prison, is exonerated, and then goes back to work as part of his settlement. Cool premise, pretty well scripted. Slightly weird and cheesy/silly in parts, but not too bad to totally turn me off... I think I'll give Bionic Woman one more shot, watch heroes for the rest of the season, and try and watch the whole first season of Life. I just hope they're all on the website, because I can't commit to watching TV when they come on...

That is all...

Scouts, campouts and other things that go bump in the night.

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 04:44:30 GMT

Got back from a camporee earlier today. What is a camporee you ask? According to wikipedia, "[a] camporee is a gathering of Scouting units for a period of camping and common activities." That period of camping is one Friday night, in my vast scouting experience.

The eleven year-old scouts are good. I like them. There at a place where things that are relatively dorky and annoying to the rest of us are still fresh and new. They're at an age where they still mostly respect adults, but they have their own thinking to do, which keeps things interesting.

Some thoughts about scouts based on the campout: I never realized this before but there is a distinct, quite pungent smell which accompanies all scouting expeditions everywhere, worldwide and gets stuck in vehicles which scouts ride in. That smell is, to be blunt, the smell of farts. Not particularly nice-smelling farts, either. Nasty ones. I smelled it today in the van on the way home and suddenly realized what this smell is that I'd been smelling since I was eleven. The perma-fart. The scouting perma-fart. Yuck. (The smell is currently stuck in my nostrils. Nasty.)

Last night, one of the life-long scoutmaster types gave a little talking-to to the scouts. He talked about how the purpose of scouts was to help boys to have good role models and help them learn good skills and have good, constructive lives. He compared this with some boys that he works at a the local juvie, who's lives, he said, were essentially stuck in the eternal cyclic loop of crime sort of lifestyle. They didn't good guidance.

This made me feel, somewhat unexpectedly, a bit sappy and nostalgic and positive towards scouts. Today, I watched the other scoutmaster that was with the 11 year-olds tend and hang out with and watch over a group of 3 latino kids from our area. These are boys that this man would rarely, if ever, interact with if it weren't for their mutual association with scouting. He treated them kindly, and gently and helped them learn to do things, like how to cook for one another, how to put up a tent, and how to tie knots (listed in order of everyday relevance :) ), and re-taught them how to do them if they forgot and was just kind and generous and benevolent towards them. "This is a place," I thought, "where scouting does good: it brings together people that otherwise wouldn't be able to rely on each other." It was pretty heart-warming and made me at least appreciate how scouting could help people out.

But then, of course, there's the whole smell thing...

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:07:42 GMT

So, this semester is shaping up to be one in which I'll be able to pick up all the loose ends from research I've done over the past couple of semesters and maybe get things ready to submit for publication. That'd be good, but what I've done a. isn't terribly impressive, b. isn't terribly noteworthy and c. isn't terribly long, so I'm wondering how publication worthy any of these couple of papers will be. We shall see, we shall see.
My class is quite lightweight, which makes it slightly easier to skate by while watching Caleb, and working.

Work, by the way, has also been incredibly light-weight lately, and though the uppers are ever promising new work, I'm not entirely sure we're going to see a lot of it anytime soon. I have my own projects to keep moving on, but I have a hard time self-motivating sometimes, and since stats, the place where most of my own projects are, was down for a day this past week and 1. nobody told me, and 2. nobody noticed, it seems like it's probably not the highest priority for everybody else either. This means that it's up to me to motivate myself. Being on call 2 weeks out of 3 isn't the best for sustaining momentum either, since it means that technically I'm not supposed to do any "project work" which is the kind of work that stats work would be. Ah, motivation, that ephemeral beast which pulls us along some of the time and leaves us high and dry other parts of the time. (ephemeral is apparently my word of the day since this is like the 4th time I've used it today. Does that happen to anybody else? I don't mean it to be pretentious, but then I end up disgusting myself with my own pretentiousness when I use the same big word several times in a day.).

Other things going on? Scouts. There's a camp-out this weekend. Last I checked, I wasn't quite in charge enough to be in charge of finding people to drive, but we needed like 3 more cars to drive up with us to some remote part of the Utah mountains. Hopefully it should be good, but I've got my worries. Mostly, I think it'll just be a big, semi-poorly planned time sink. Here's hoping. May the 11 year-olds not try and prank me.