| Films at the Gate |
[Sep. 11th, 2006|10:45 am] |
Join me for free kung for movies in Chinatown! Chinatown has been in a slump recently due to the crappy construction around the Big Dig. Interested citizens are putting together events to encourage the revitalization of Chinatown through events such as this one, Films at the Gate. They are going to set up a big screen and projector in an empty lot next to the Chinatown park at the Gate and show movies this week! I plan to go to a bunch of them. Check them out!
Let me know if you are interested in going. We'll make a group trip of it.
http://www.filmsatthegate.org/Home.html |
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| Thought Exercise: Build Your Own Religion |
[Aug. 31st, 2006|10:00 am] |
I was inspired by this program on NPR that suggested religion be examined like an organism that grows and evolves against other religious organisms. What if religion was instead a technology?
If you could build your own religion, what would it look like?
Would it have a god, multiple gods, or spiritualism?
What would be the objective of the religion?
What would be the spiritual toolset of the religion?
What would the religion say about our places in the universe?
What would the responsibilities of the practitioners be?
What mechanisms would it have to evolve and adapt? |
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| August Moon Festival |
[Jul. 31st, 2006|12:01 pm] |
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The August Moon Festival is this upcoming Sunday in Chinatown. Lion dances, martial arts demonstrations, music, food, etc. Let me know if you want to form a posse. |
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| Going a little crazy |
[Jul. 31st, 2006|11:59 am] |
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On the way to work today I decided I need a fish for my desk. I'm researching Betas today. I think I'll name him "Knuckles." |
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| The Pleasure of Robot Tanks |
[Jul. 30th, 2006|10:31 pm] |
I recently took a break from reading the latest book in the ponderous fantasy epic of Song of Ice and Fire by George Martin. The series was fun at first, but the latest book seems to be suffering from the same kind of bloat that the last couple Harry Potter books experienced. Having found success, the editor of the series has apperently given the author freedom to write as much as he likes, and that causes the book to bloat uncrontrollably since there is no external constraint suck as "tell your story in 500 pages or less."
In its place I've picked up some light science fiction reading in the form of David Weber's "Bolo!" You may know David Weber from the Honor Harrington series. The short of it is he is an accomplished militery SF writer. In the Bolo books he writes about artificially intelligent tanks the size of city blocks covered with fusion guns, nuclear weapons, and many other kinds of fantastic science fiction weapons. The stories, there is usually a human character and the Bolo itself, narrating things like "It has been 0.0047 seconds since I have awakened from Semi-Autonomus Standby mode. I allocate 1.0035 seconds to perform system diagnostics and am pleased to find that all of my primary and secondary systems are functioning within specified parameters. I activate my dorsal sensor pods and within 0.223 seconds have a accurate survey of the depot. I sense 3 enemy heavy tanks approaching from the north. I cycle up my fusion core to 80% power and begin deployment."
The funny thing about these books is that the tanks are really enjoyable to read. They have been likened to giant, duralloy lancelots of the future, and I can't help but appreciate the fun of these stories. The best way to express the appeal of the tanks is that they are plucky, being clever and fighting hard to honor their regiments and protect their human masters from the atomic death belched forth from the invading aliens. :-)
Check it out of you're looking for some light reading. |
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| My Dungeon Adventure |
[Jun. 27th, 2006|12:41 am] |
I escaped from the Dungeon of Nak3dmolerat!I killed Scirocco the leprechaun, Locriansax the rat, Mechanacor the troll and Technoluddite the zombie. I looted the Dagger of Dead Like Me, the Armour of Fighting, the Sword of Wing Chun Kung Fu, a Figurine of Martian Bob, the Wand of Racing, the Amulet of Japanese, the Dagger of Teaching, the Armour of Sushi, the Armour of Ramen and 96 gold pieces. Score: 171 Explore the Dungeon of Nak3dmolerat and try to beat this score, or enter your username to generate and explore your own dungeon... |
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| Waterfire |
[Jun. 21st, 2006|05:02 pm] |
If you haven't been, you should go. They've got gondolas, fiery braziers on the water, and live music piped through speakers built right into the walls of the canal!
http://www.waterfire.org/
How about a road trip July 15? Who's in? |
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| New Blogging Project on Blogspot |
[Jun. 15th, 2006|12:11 am] |
Cripes! It's been such a long time since I've logged in that my password was just a fuzzy memory that I had to pull out of my back pocket and blow the lint off of and smooth out before I could get in!
Things have not only been busy, but there's this scary Big Brother firewall at work that monitors all web traffic and I'm a little paranoid about making posts during the day. In the evenings, I'm running around so much I often forget to catch up with friends on LJ. *waves*
In alternate blogging news, I've started a new blog project. I intend to learn enough about Tai Chi Sword to publish *something* I'm not sure what yet by the end of the summer. I'm calling it "100 days of swordsmanship." I want to keep it independent of my LJ, so I started a blogger account for it. You can check it out here. I would really appreciate your comments on it and any help promoting it so people can come give me information I can use.
http://100dayswordsman.blogspot.com/ |
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| Poisoned Myself |
[May. 30th, 2006|11:46 am] |
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There was this peach on my desk that I forgot over the weekend. It was starting to look wrinkly and sad, so I ate it. It was very tart, but I kinda liked it. I think I am now slightly poisoned. |
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| Brown illegals look like Ahnold |
[May. 8th, 2006|11:41 pm] |
My friend Ennis wrote this fun article in a public blog recently about Arnold Schwarzenegger.
http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/003348.html
What if amnesty and harsher punishments are both wrong? America rewards ingenuity and often that ingenuity is illegal. In the 19th century we got our technological might by global patent breaking and industrial espionage. In the 20th century we created industry after industry by breaking the grip of old technologies. Trains, steel, telephones, mainframes and mail all fell to technology's progress. Better perhaps to treat immigration as a game: sure, some peopel fill out paperwork and others jump the border. Those who jump the border spend their stay in the the US playing cat and mouse with INS. In the end, paperwork, hiding from the law, they're all just hurdles. Those who can maked it, do. Those who can't, well, maybe it's better in some survival of the fittest sense that they stay in their own countries where the pace of things is a little slower. |
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| The squealing is a good sound... |
[May. 8th, 2006|11:16 pm] |
I've really got to get my summer tires on. I tried a couple times at the beginning of April, but it kept raining on the Saturdays I was trying to do it, and then when I tried to do it last weekend, I discovered that the tires in my basement are my race tires, and that my summer tires are in my mom's basement. Dang.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) scirocco went to Solo School this past weekend and I missed out. I heard someone scraped their nose in a dip on the offset course, and I'm glad I wasn't there to hear that. I'd've been driving like a granny out of fear that I'd hit the damn dip too.
At least I can practice a little line visualization when I'm doing my regular city driving. For those of you who are interested, the common thinking that the best line is outside-inside-outside is wrong. Well, I should say misleading. If you are practicing your racing line on the street, try this instead. Look at the exit of the turn ahead. Don't think about the entry. Just imagine the "gate" at the end of the turn, and picture where you want your car to be when you cross that gate that will give you the earliest chance to accellerate to the next turn and the best angle to get there. It's like pool. In pool making the shot is important, but having a great leave setting you up for the next shot is more important. It's not about this turn, but about being in the right place for the next one when you exit this turn.
I've gotten to the point where I can sail into a turn without applying much brake and just carry my speed through. (Easier than in sounds given how much safety buffer we have between the speed limit and actual dangerous driving speeds) The hard part is resisting the urge to gas your way out of the turn when you've set up your exit... it's very easy to end up right on another car's bumper on exit. |
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| The Strength of Weak Ties |
[Apr. 18th, 2006|11:52 am] |
In the book Linked, the author writes about an influential paper by mark Granovetter that imagines social networks as a loosely connected web of complete graphs. The complete graphs are groups of friends or coworkers where everyone in the group knows everyone else. The members of each graph have links to other graphs of complete networks where they are not one of the members who knows everyone else.
The essay advances to say that when trying to access new resources such as when looking for a new job or a date, it's the connections we have into other social groups that have the highest likelyhood of delivering. People in the same close group are exposed to the same information and likely have similar access to the same resources. A higher percentage of people report getting new jobs through acquaintences rather than friends, for example.
Test this! Go to someone outside of your Friends List and inner circle and ask them for something. Anything. Say, "can you help me find a martial arts school that teaches Bagua," or "know anyone into tantric sex," or "could you help me find a good video card cheap so I can play Dungeons and Dragons online." Report the results! |
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| Calendar This! |
[Apr. 16th, 2006|07:09 pm] |
A few people have been tossing around their ideas of good internet calendars. Ob3y by amandae, Myspace, Outlook, etc. The other day I saw that Google is releasing it's own free calendar system. You can find it at http://calendar.google.com (naturally) and it's really nice. It supports shareable events, reminders, and has a really smooth DHTML interface that is much like Gmail. In fact, if you have a Gmail address already, you can just log in to Google Calendar without making a new account!
The Google compels amandae, wavemaster, and technoluddite to join the scheduling revolution! |
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| Shocking But True |
[Apr. 5th, 2006|05:41 pm] |
I have Google set to my home page at work, and for today's word of the day it has this:
Word of the Day
cum: with; along with; combined with. |
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| Where Anime Fiends Belong |
[Apr. 3rd, 2006|05:46 pm] |
I found a flyer in Toscaninni's for Otaku Night at All Asia on April 4th. The card read "Where Anime Fiends Belong." Assuming they're not going to get all the enthusiasts into the bar and then light it on fire, I'm going to check it out Tuesday. Let me know if you'd like to come too. Hanging out with b33r is enough reason to go, but adding some new anime titles to the "have seen" list is worthy too.
Otaku Night
Otaku Night on MySpace |
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| Lunchtime is Spamtime |
[Mar. 30th, 2006|12:06 pm] |
Every day at noon my mailbox fills up with emails about great new ways to refinance my mortgage and pleas for help getting millions of dollars out of frozen overseas accounts.
While I feel there's some kind of perverse efficiency to batching all their spam messages together, I wish that efficiency would be put toward removing my address from their mailing lists after a certain period of inactivity. Come on, people! Let's get with the program and give up already on the unresponsive email addresses! Maybe it would make people hate spam less. |
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| Burn like a good bonfire - In Whatever You Do |
[Mar. 28th, 2006|10:52 am] |
The time is long overdue for us
As cleaving all of our souls
We all get so complicated in our lives
When walking just walk, when sitting just sit when being just be
Above all don't stray from your chosen path |
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| Personal DNA? |
[Mar. 27th, 2006|11:06 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Lamb: Fear of Fours | ] |
Personal DNA says I'm an Attentive Creator.
I don't know about it's evaluation about me. I tend to think of myself as very cereberal, even mechanical, but this report says I'm very visual and emotional. I do frequently feel in conflict with myself over the art and function of things, I wonder if this test knows something I should be meditating on more? |
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| Tempura Explosion |
[Mar. 26th, 2006|10:05 pm] |
One cannot help it: once you start dipping things into tempura mix like hot dogs and the aforementioned hot dogs, everything else starts to look dippable.
( Read more... ) |
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