A few weeks ago, I brought Iris to her preschool, and we were alarmed to see that a fire crew was there. It turned out they were just putting out a small fire in the nearby woods. Someone must have dropped a cigarette there or something. I walked Iris into the school, and we talked about the fire for a while. I mentioned to her that I thought it was caused by a cigarette thrown from somebody’s car. But Iris had another theory. She said: “I think a bad birdy did it.”
Iris has a pair of pants that have little embossed hearts attached to the botom of the legs. After several washings, the hearts started the crack a bit. So, one day, she takes a look at the pants, and says to us, “my heart is broken!”
There must be a law of blogging that says you will inevitably get tired of the look and feel of your blog. I’ve succumbed to this law, and the result is I’ve installed the Silver Light 0.1 WordPress theme. Have a look at the new oranchak.com — dig the less gaudy and more simplified layout.
My online Data Mining course has a web-based forum that students can use to post questions. The course instructor asked how everybody was doing on the first homework assignment. I replied, and in my reply, I asked the instructor if I was on the right track for one of the homework problems. The subject of the reply was quite surprising:
Man, that’s cold!
Wow. Harsh. I know that these instructors are very stressed graduate students; but this can’t be good for bumping up the enrollment numbers.
Sadly, the source of the subject wasn’t as dramatic as true malice, because the subjects are simply generated from the first parts of the responses. Here is the real reason the subject was so insulting:
Oh. Not REALLY fighting words.
Technology is the culprit. One day it will enslave us all! (Wait… I think this has already happened…)
Back in 1993, during freshman year of college, my friend Brian McEntire introduced me to the “demoscene“, which is, at its best, a group of extremely highly skilled (and often very young) computer sound/video programmers who specialize in creating dazzling presentations that run in real-time on computers. Demoscene folks spend a lot of time trying to out-program each other, showing off what kind of amazing audio and visual effects they can do with computer hardware. Demos at the time were amazing to watch. When I watch the older demos now, 14 years later, they seem very quaint and primitive.
Second Reality, a demo by Future Crew, one of the most famous demo groups back in the 1990s. This was cutting-edge realtime PC sound and graphics back then.
Some of the best demos have come out of the Assembly demoparty, an annual Finnish gathering of demoscene enthusiasts which features a demo competition. Many people enter their productions into the competition, and the winning entries are usually very high quality. The recent Assembly demoparty was held in August 2007, and I was amazed by the creative and dream-like stylistic quality of the winning demo, LifeForce, by Andromeda Software Development, a Greek demogroup.
Screenshots from LifeForce by Andromedia Software Development. Click for a larger view.
To see this production in glorious motion, download the high-quality 246MB AVI movie file via this link. It is a much better experience than watching the embedded lower-quality YouTube version below.
The pure skill and creative talent needed to generate these real-time productions (the animations are NOT pre-rendered), combined with the fact that the best demo groups consist mostly of teenagers and very young adults simply doing this stuff for fun in their free time, continue to amaze me.
Well, this error I recently experienced in Eclipse was amusing:
“An internal error occurred while showing an internal error.” Eclipse’s way of saying, “Senator, I do not recollect those events.”
Real life analogy: Barb at BKA once told us about a former coworker of hers who accidentally cut off his finger on some industrial equipment at the WestVaco paper mill in Covington, Virginia. A manager wanted to know what happened, so the coworker went to the machine and demonstrated the chain of events. And lost another finger.
My eighteen months of frustrating COBRA insurance coverage is coming to an end, and I recently received a letter explaining the expiration of my coverage. Their choice of salutation is interesting:
Did they just call me a penis?? Ah well. I’ve called them much worse things over these past eighteen months.
The audio from the GECCO 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, and Steven Jones is now available here. Also, my little project got a brief mention in this article in New Scientist (a few paragraphs from the end). I was stoked!
Here’s another way to look at the huge set of photos from our London trip: The PictoBrowser!
(unfortunately, it is a bit limited; it’s only showing about 250 photos from the 600+ photo set. but maybe that’s a good thing. who wants to see 600+ photos???)
