| up yours, Maine |
[Nov. 4th, 2009|09:35 am] |
Same-sex marriage lost in Maine 47-53%. Angry profanity-laden rant behind the cut:
( Angry, profanity-laden rant )
Hmm, not as profanity-laden as I had thought. Still, I'm mad.
On the good news front, Washington's domestic partnerships vote is looking good (they vote by mail so it takes a few days to get final numbers), and Annise Parker (an open lesbian) is in a runoff for Houston mayor. But Maine really stings. |
|
|
| election day! |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|08:36 am] |
Not much in Austin is that interesting (but go vote if you haven't already, blah blah blah) - there are a handful of races throughout the country, but the big ones for me are in Maine and Washington.
In Maine, same-sex marriage is being put to a vote (after the legislature passed it and governor signed it, it was put on the ballot by a "people's veto"), and in Washington state the same thing is happening with domestic partnerships. Nate Silver thinks keeping same-sex marriage is favored by a little bit in Maine, but the truth is that same-sex marriage has never won when put up to a vote (although domestic partnerships have never lost when put to a vote...interesting, no?) so a victory in Maine would be huuuuge. Really hoping to turn Maine dark green on the marriage map (and turn Washington, um, slightly darker green!) - here's hoping! |
|
|
| depressing articles about football |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|11:13 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | links | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  bored | ] |
One in GQ, and one by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. Basically, it looks like many linemen in the NFL suffer from Chronic traumatic encephalopathy which has symptoms similar to Alzheimer's.
It sounds like the NFL is being very reluctant to investigate or make changes to the game to minimize the risks. Sure, players know the risks of getting injured, but it sounds like people don't realize the risk for CTE and that it seems to be so widespread, and it can ruin your life after you leave the NFL. Head injuries are nothing to mess around with. |
|
|
| life update |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|01:24 pm] |
We finally got our roof replaced (and got a gutter on the back of our house to boot), and are almost done with getting the insurance settlement and paying the roofers and whatnot. I'm looking forward to putting this behind us. How often do roofs get damaged like this, anyway? The damage happened in March and we're still not quite done...
I've been getting back into origami lately - found a really cheap source of paper and ordered a bunch that should arrive today. My sorta-goal is to make all five Platonic solids - so far I've made a (bad) tetrahedron, a decent octahedron and a pretty cool cube. Anything with equilateral triangles = hard.
We cooked something out of the Joy of Cooking last night! Some kinda chicken dish with garlic and lime and potatoes. It turned out pretty well.
Planning on volunteering with the Community Tax Center in the new year. It's been a while (too long!) since I've done any volunteering, so it'll be good to get back into it.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on a LiveJournal client for the Palm Pre/Pixi. It works decently for me, but when I gave it to a few people to test it freezes. (luckily, you can just kill it so it doesn't mess up the whole phone) I'm at a bit of a loss as to why this is happening and it's pretty disheartening, so I haven't worked on it in a few weeks. |
|
|
| Golden Rules of Travel |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|10:01 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | travel | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  happy | ] |
Grandma's Golden Rule of Travel: Always go to the bathroom whenever one is available.
Grandpa's Golden Rule of Travel: Don't back up more than you have to. (this is more of a driving rule)
I am proud to present
My Golden Rule of Travel: Always pack boxers and sleep pants, no matter what the temperature is outside.
This rule has served me well :-) |
|
|
| All's well that ends well |
[Oct. 15th, 2009|10:39 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | happy | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | The Magnetic Fields - "Zombie Boy" | ] |
So last Thursday I was a little irritated with our roofing company and called the guy asking a) when the gutters would be done and b) what we needed to do for insurance. And I was annoyed because he never called me back.
But, lo and behold, Monday the gutter guy called me and we set something up, and last night I got an email from our insurance implying that it had all been taken care of. (so we get the depreciation extra money or whatever) Still would have preferred if he had actually, you know, communicated with me directly, but I'm not going to complain too much... |
|
|
| developing for the Palm Pre |
[Oct. 9th, 2009|10:18 am] |
This week Palm announced how you'll be able to publish apps for the Pre, Pixi, etc. There seem to be three options that I'd consider:
- Join the Palm Developer Program (PDP) for $99/year and pay $50/app to get it in the App Catalog on the phone (paid or free)
- Join PDP for $99/year and distribute it on the web (paid or free)
- Release it open source and distribute it on the web (no need to join PDP in this case)
Basically, if I wanted to sell apps, I'd have to choose options 1 or 2, which are a bit more expensive than I'd like for a hobbyist project. I've been working on a LiveJournal client under the assumption that I'd be selling it for $2.99 or so - I haven't seen any other clients and I put a fair bit of work into parsing posts and comments, etc.
But I think I'll probably just release it on the web open source and put up a Donate button or something. Costs me nothing and it will let more people use it. |
|
|
| Rice pictures |
[Oct. 1st, 2009|10:20 am] |
I visited Rice for some recruiting this week, and tried to document all the things that have changed since I graduated. The result is here:
This has been, for various reasons, a crazy few weeks. I'm hoping things have settled down a bit now.
One of the things I've been doing is competing in the Google Code Jam, an online programming contest. The structure is interesting - each problem has a small set and a large set of data to solve. The small set you can usually get by doing a straightforward program/algorithm (although not always!), and you have 4 minutes to download and submit your solution. If it's incorrect you get notified right away and you can try again on a different data set. The large set is much, well, larger, and you usually have to do something pretty clever to solve it. You get 8 minutes to download and submit it, but you only get one shot and you don't know whether you succeeded or not until the contest is over.
The first round was the qualification round (you had to get one small set and one large set to advance) and after that was Round 1A. There were also rounds 1B and 1C, you could compete in any/all of them, and the top 1000 from each round advanced to round 2. I did well enough to advance, so I started doing more practice rounds from previous years with varying levels of success. This culminated in trying round 2 from last year the day before the contest and getting 0 points. I was kinda frustrated at this but it sorta worked out well because I was resigned to probably not advancing. In the actual round 2 I got 2 small sets and 1 large set, which I considered respectable - it put me in 1078/3000 people, but only the top 500 advance (and get a T-shirt :-) ). So I'll probably do it again next year but without a lot of practice or something I'm not sure I'd ever see the ways to do most of these; Google publishes a contest analysis of each round after the fact, and those round 2 problems are doozies.
The upside is that it made me want to jump back in to my other programming projects, so hopefully I'll get to do that soon! |
|
|
| at-work-early links |
[Sep. 22nd, 2009|08:37 am] |
A Bush speechwriter wrote a tell-all kinda book - an interesting excerpt:For a commencement address at Furman University in spring 2008, Ed Gillespie wanted to insert a few lines condemning gay marriage. Bush called the speech too "condemnatory" and said, "I'm not going to tell some gay kid in the audience that he can't get married." (Of course, Bush ran his 2004 campaign telling that kid just that.) Should I be happy that Bush wasn't really against gay marriage or mad that he pushed a constitutional amendment to ban it anyway? (answer: mad, I think)
LOST University is in session....only a few more months until new episodes come out!
Science links:
A team at NYU has developed a device that can identify materials by scanning them, kinda like a tricorder from Star Trek. It fires a laser through the object and studies the scattering of the light. Awesome!
Unsurprisingly, people you're friends with on Facebook tend to have the same views (religious, political) as you. More surprisingly, two students at MIT have used this data to predict which people are gay (who didn't declare it on Facebook). The data-loving part of me says "neato!", the squeamish-about-outing-people part of me says "kinda scary!"
Chronic Radiation Is Beneficial to Human Beings (maybe) |
|
|
| reviews of stuff I generally like |
[Sep. 17th, 2009|09:52 am] |
After spending another month with my Palm Pre since my last review, I thought I'd take a minute and reevaluate. I'm still happy with it in general...
Battery Life: This has gotten a bit better since my first review - I still charge it every night, but just taking to the office and browsing a little with it during the day still leaves me with plenty of juice. Even traveling with it and playing games for a while on the way back from Niagara Falls I was able to use it most of the time.
WebOS: One big annoyance is that, when the phone is in landscape mode (which is better for reading web pages, etc.), you don't get the notifications on the bottom, and the keyboard is obviously in the wrong place. This leads to a lot of switching back and forth between landscape and portrait mode, or just giving up and leaving it in portrait mode.
Apps: There are now 50 apps on the store, and supposedly paid apps will be available next week. Here's hoping!
Last night we watched Spirited Away which was really pretty amazing. It struck the same "magical environment" tone for me that Coraline did. Here's a good review of it with a few clips to get a good taste of it. The director's newest film is Ponyo, now showing at the Alamo Drafthouse Village.
This week (busy week!) we also picked up Scribblenauts, a new game for the Nintendo DS whose tagline is "Write Anything, Solve Everything". The basic idea is that you have a series of puzzles to solve, and you can write any object (no trademarks or profanities) and it will appear, which you can then use to help you. It's a pretty cool idea and the dictionary of words it recognizes is huge. (according to someone who extracted it, it's over 22000 words!)
There are two types of levels - puzzle ones, where the goal is to do something specific (like collect the flowers and give them to the florist, or help the birthday boy break open his piñata) and action ones, where the goal is to get to the starite and overcome whatever obstacles are in the way. The puzzle levels are a lot of fun - they aren't too difficult but you master the level if you beat it three times in a row using none of the same objects. The action levels are an exercise in frustration, because the control scheme is fairly terrible. You tap on objects to manipulate them, but you also tap to move Maxwell (your character) to a spot on the screen. We've already died many times because of mistaps and there sure isn't any undo...
Anyway, it's a cute game and fun to play and watch. I just wish it was less frustrating! |
|
|
chipper
angry
unsure
energetic
hopeful
busy
determined
contemplative
bouncy
12 (92.3%)
tired