The On Air with Ryan Seacrest logo is very interesting. I sat down to watch television for the first time in months (I watched for about 20 minutes straight … not bad huh?) and was immediately struck by the logo’s colors, font, and how the thing represents the base of a microphone that reporters use. On top of that, the logo makes for a fun flash animation with which to interact on the official website. Obviously, the show’s audience is teens and young adults who are hip enough to use technology like text-messaging, and who have the disposable income to burn on things like … text messaging. While the logo does do a good job of conveying the show’s young content, I couldn’t help but feel like it had been done before - on MTV. All MTV’s graphical work has that same hip, line-art feel to it. Unfortunately, I unconsciously associate that visual style with mindless (and to my shame, occassionally entertaining) “reality” shows where everyone is beautiful and insists on whining. So much for music television. Either way, regardless of the MTV content (or lack thereof) that the logo hearkens back to, I think the graphic artist responsible for establishing the show’s “identity” created something eye-catching, vibrant, and memorable.
I heard an interesting piece of news on NPR today. Entitled, “FDA Seeks Suicide Warning on Drug Labels,” the report outlined how some antidepressants have been linked to causing suicidal thoughts and tendencies. These drugs include Zoloft, Paxil, and other antidepressants. To paraphrase a soundbite from a doctor interviewed during the piece, “… people seek a magic pill to solve these depression problems … they don’t realize that the whole person needs to be considered and treated.” It is true, doctors are expected to give out prescriptions like candy. People expect a pill for everything and thus can’t deal with the doctor saying “I don’t have a drug for that.” Furthermore, prescription drug companies put enormous pressure on doctors to sell their drug. Warnings on drugs will not do one thing to change these narrow-sighted panacea and profit driven practices by patients, doctors, and drug companies, but they are a baby step in the correct direction. Most shocking to me was the statistic that the report concluded with: 11 million prescriptions for anti-depressants are written per year, for teenagers alone. In a nation of 292 million people, this is simply unacceptable. When is this pill-popping insanity going to end?
In unrelated but equally important news, John and I played DDR at the arcade today. His skills on doubles are unbelievable. Furthermore, I bought a hat for $6.99 - a steal - marked down from $21! I love this hat. However, I really owe Steve a huge apology for completely stealing his style. Sorry man, you have full priority on NC gear at home, as you were the first to own. It looks like my very first concert could be a Switchfoot concert. I think this is appropriate.
If you are a teen, please take some time to watch this. The following quote about said show may be helpful:
nils: what’s it about?
alex: how every aspect of teenage lifestyle is bought and sold by large corporations for a share of the immense buying power that we wield
As I went on to say, do not get me wrong, I am not some rabid MTV hater. However, moderately unbiased knowledge is still power. Furthermore, one can never know too much about the pill. See? TV watching is not all bad.
I’m not convinced by the Java concept of abstraction. The analogy goes as follows: a Java class is like a car, you do not need to know all of the intricate workings of the fuel injection, suspension, and steering in order to make the car work. Thus, you only need to know the gas, brake, and basic signaling mechanisms in order to make the car work as intended. I disagree. Abstraction stifles flexibility and usability in the real world and creativity and innovation in the programming world.
Let’s say your car’s fuel line ices up in the winter. With your basic knowledge of the user interface (the interior controls of the car), you have little or no ability to make a diagnosis. However, if you knew more about the car, you would recognize the chugging sound, realize there is ice (and possibly water) in the line, and that you need to add a de-icer. Knowledge of the car increased the usefulness - instead of being stranded on a roadside, you could add some de-icer from your trunk and continue on your way (assuming everything went right). Similarily, in the initial years of programming progress would have been impaired (much as our poor user by the side of the road) if everyone had simply learned the interface of programming. In order to make changes and improve the technology, programmers understood the architecture all the way down to machine code. This allowed them to not only to push the current technology of the time to the limits, but to perceive new and better ways to do the old things. Computing is not currently at a limit, simply at the threshold of the current methods (processing dies and methods are approaching physical limits). The more people we have ascending the ladder of abstraction, the less innovation and more “boxed in” our innovations become. True, twenty years plus of experience may have produced the x86 chip structure - but why stop there? Why accept that architecture as the most basic - as a ladder of abstraction not worth descending - and ultimately stagnate?
Some would say the point of abstraction is for beginners, that the concept is only so the novice can learn things and implement them quickly. I agree that abstraction has its time and its place, I myself use it quite regularly when revising the backend of this site in PHP. I do not understand how the eregreplace command works in PHP. However, if I were a large site administrator and I was stuck by the metaphorical side of the road with a hanging server, I might research and discover that the “Perl-compatible” syntax pregreplace is faster. Understanding how the original eregreplace command worked in the first place and therefore being aware of the alternatives would have saved time and money from the beginning. The information of _why things work is invaluable.
People are declared “experts” in a language far too quickly. Mastering syntax, efficient logical structure, and robust design is, I believe, only the beginning (and a claim I would not make on any language - including English). If abstraction were given less emphasis and the value of a lower-level understanding reinforced more, innovations would be given a more friendly environment to enter into.
Tomorrow is Java abstraction, for loops, while loops, logical flow, and encapsulation. Tomorrow is a section test and a study time. Tomorrow I play pool. Tomorrow I eat. Tomorrow is a new day (and really, its today).
I had gotten yogurt in order to make it through the long lecture of mathematics that lay ahead. After consuming the strawberry goodness, I really had nothing left to occupy my time. So, I began chewing on the black plastic Dixie spoon. Unfortunately, with spooning side down, I managed to lodge the sides of the device between the two rows of teeth on the top of my mouth. Let me diagram:
Now, in my infinite lack of wisdom, I pushed the spoon further into my mouth in order to get it unstuck. This, unfortunately, took all the energy that I used to un-wedge things and forced the tip of the spoon into the roof of my mouth. Bleeding ensued. It still feels exactly like I have a sore throat, either from the constant river of blood down the back of my throat or because I am missing part of the roof of my mouth. Must have been the Ides of March.
Got up at 5am. Walked. Worked out. Showered. Walked back. Made it for 8:15 class. Happiness ensued, bike will be used next time. The nice thing about going so early is you finally wake up when your workout is just about done - like writing a paper in your sleep! Which I highly recommend.
Max and I are creating a plan to make the North Campus mission a success.
In a random act of server-updating initiated by the powers that be (over whom I have no control) tumbledry experienced some unscheduled downtime. My most sincere apologies. I will redouble my “UpTime Monitoring” (which consists of visiting the site and making sure it loads; pretty scientific eh?) efforts. The database that tracks all you visitors got corrupted by some process unknown to me. Thankfully, I had a backup copy from right after the 2000% hit increase incident from about a month ago. Zeus be praised! (Note to self: research before referencing pagan gods). (Second note to self: burn some old notes). (Final note: | Re: rambling | Message Body: stop).
Right, sorry. I am proud to say tumble is now part of k10k.net’s ondisplay exhibition. I leave it up to you to find this on the site, because k10k is something very worth exploring.
Girl. She’s in my Shakespeare class. Yes, she’s the one that is “so good looking I want to slam my face into a door.” What to do? CSS does not seem to help interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, (and obviously so) the ability to set up a dynamic website has no bearing on one’s ability to meet women - if anything, it’s a liability, not an asset. I need a musigeekathletfriend. Then there’s the young woman in Java …
For some reason, I’m attracted to dark eye makeup. And iridescent lip gloss. Mmm. Not necessarily together.
Some people make you feel like a million bucks. Others make you feel like some old dollar bill that has been torn up into little pieces, thrown into the street, rolled in mud, and then carefully pieced back together and dried off just so it could be soaked in gasoline and burned up.
I found a piece of Trident gum on the ground. It was fully wrapped and looked pretty clean. I’m really craving gum so I am trying to decide if I should chew it or not. Thoughts would be appreciated. Currently, I am leaning towards chewing it. Gum is gum, I doubt it has been poisoned. Although, there is a small chance it has been poisoned. In this case, death could result.
These coming days: schedule ortho/endo visits, Java, Shakespeare, Calc III, schedule appointment for summer class scheduling, and perhaps the original secret mission will be taken up to North campus and Dowling (and no, I’m not kidding).
From the Matt’s Got Funny Links department comes a man who counter-scammed a scammer. Great read. Scammer gets scammed.
Furthermore, I would really like to buy The Elements of Typographic Style - typography is such a fascinating field. Which brings us to the Operina font, inspired by “a 16th-century lettering model of the scribe Ludovico degli Arrighi.” It is, in a word, beautiful. Moving on to random humor would be Tamanimals. I don’t get it - but it is so very much fun. Back to the theme of typography and we get this link. It is font-based animations with music; quite mesmerizing. I would recommend visiting the Garamond page (Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice”), the Century Gothic page (Jose Feliciano), and the Book Antiqua page (Beatles). Tell me what you think.
Typography to photography. I’ve been looking into making a pinholecamera. Plus, I am about to finish off this Oatmeal round, one of the requirements for creating a camera. Apparently, the easiest thing to do is to use a simple Polaroid backend. With pinholes, the camera has to be loaded and the film developed in a dark room. Using the Polaroid backs would help avoid messy development, but then I wouldn’t have negatives. Obviously, I still have plenty of learning to do. Why the sudden interest? I was, of course, inspired by someone. That would be Heather Champ.
A fun example of form highliting; shockingly more useful than you would expect.
I grew up with Webmonkey, it is sad to see it go. It had such character.
Informative article attempting to outline how much information the world contains. It puts a lifetime of human memories at 200 megabytes. Bad variable names and the people that use them. I guess our JAVA teacher was right.
I seem to have caught the Myst bug once again. I have read all three books (The Book of Atrus, The Book of Ti’Ana, and The Book of D’Ni) but I have not yet played the game. I am considering getting the “realMyst” game, which commemorates the original by recreating the old game in an immersive (rather than selective) 3D environment. Of course, buying and/or playing this game will come someday when I have time to spare. I am not completely sure when this lovely day will occur, but when it comes I will enjoy it to the fullest.
Apart from all the links, I rediscovered the Steinway in BEC and have fallen back in love with playing pianos that sound good. The difference between the Gracement HunkOPiano and that Steinway can be likened to the contrast between the deepest, blackest, darkest night of the soul (Hunk) and the brightest, sunniest, warmest, loveliest day that ever gently grazed your life (Stein). Honestly.
Finally, the chats between Matt and I frequently descend into pointless bouts of key-mashing. During these times, we exchange meaningless strings of text usually with the intention of expressing extreme enthusiasm for the current topic of discussion. Lately, we have noticed that when we throw caution to the wind and blindly wreak havoc on the keys, certain “words” tend to appear with a startling frequency. Stemming from the mindless finger-thrashing on my end is the French sounding “ibuce” (pronounced eye-boo-chay). Furthermore, the equally impressive “lask” is a direct result of Matt’s frenzied typing. We can only conclude that the apparently random typing we are taking part in is, in fact, not random at all. We are governed by our sub-conscious more than we realize.
My Day in Music:
George Winston - The Velveteen Rabbit - Alone
George Winston - The Velveteen Rabbit - Loneliness
Cake - Never There
Ani DiFrance - This Bouquet
The Beatles - Yesterday
George Winston - Loretta and Desiree’s Bouquet
The Strokes - Someday
Paul van Dyk - Nothing But You
Dishwalla - Until I wake Up
The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun
In the meantime, I am trying to browse through this massive spreadsheet at dithered.com and determine how to improve tumbledry’s little stylesheet switching-choke that some users have noticed. QuickMail seems to be rather stubborn when it comes to switching in some browsers. This is somehow related to the inline frame that it uses, but I can not explain why it occurs on some versions of Internet Explorer and not on others. Perhaps a formal study should be conducted? Most of the reason for the problem is most likely attributable to IE being the worst browser ever created. Who knows, maybe I’ll find the answer to life’s persistent questions within the grid of yes’s, no’s, and question marks.
But coding and its philosophical ramifications aside, today was a good day. For posterity I would like to record that. The math test was the most intense test I have taken in college yet, and I dind’t even look up to see the InstantBlizzard that began during the exam. Although it only lasted about 30 minutes, it was beautiful to see heavy thick white flakes int he air again. I finally played some basketball with the guys, pickup is probably the greatest invention in the history of sports. Oh, my parents got back from Texas today as well; it sounds like their trip wasn’t bad, with the exception of a rather disturbing abundance of dried stuff on their sheets. This is not something I would like to brainstorm a cause for. My ramblings about my personal life may make you ask why I do this. Why write? Well, I believe in the value of keeping a “historical record.” This inspires me to voice my semi-daily thoughts about my life. I’ll be able to look back and say “that’s what the spring of my freshman year in college was like” or “that’s how I felt at the ice palace” and on.
There are a couple of things to expect in the next four (4!) weeks from your friends at tumbledry. I plan to add old updates back to 1999. It’s fun to see how my writing style has evolved (devolved?) from it’s former rough edges and corners. I’d like to think my “hand” has loosened up a bit, although I still have many edges to round, faces to sculpt, and bowls to throw before I consider my writing to be at the level I want it to be at. Writing. Photography. Music. Audio. Weights. People. I have chosen the things I want to be a part of my life, and going back to them is like wrapping myself in a warm blanket of trust and hope. Find the parts of your life and you will never be lost.
Old updates aren’t all that is coming to this space soon; I will not so proudly be displaying a very old picture of me, a gallery of ancient pictures of me and Matt, a gallery of some art I created for one of my web projects called “Dilated Studios,” and screenshots from all of the 9 (11 maybe, I have lost track) of this website in its past incarnations. Au contraire, we are not stopping there. I have a very special treat for all of you. Oh yes, a very unique collaboration between me and Matt is forthcoming, a song which he wrote and I recorded a while back. Kept hidden in the dusty recesses on our old computer, and passed via sneaker-net (along with many bits and bytes of the past) onto this new machine, it will soon meet a new audience.
As a hint to what it is: “I’ll keep you in the loop.”
We were taking a physics group quiz and I got to talking to Brad next to me. Turns out he got up Wednesday morning and had been up since. If the quiz had been on Wednesday, this might not have been a big deal, but it was late Friday afternoon. A man that had been up for 48 hours straight corrected my error during the quiz. That’s not as bad as the time I lost two out of three to a drunk person in Connect 4.
I’m not stupid, honestly.
As for sleep, I have been sleeping really soundly lately. Have you ever slept so soundly that regardless of the time you woke up, you felt rested? I think Thursday night to Friday morning was the most productive sleeping I have done in a long time. Let us call it High Density Sleeping. I got the most bang for sleep investment.
Friday morning was beautiful, the snow clung to everything and I thought of the Canon hanging out at home, film loaded, too far away to be useful. What a shame I did not get any pictures. Being March, the snow comes and goes in spurts and starts.
Let’s get this Spring Show on the road.
I am going to be doing some studying this weekend.
I figured out that Wednesday consisted of just under 8 hours of class. However, the final class I had on Wednesday, I only have once a month. My ride there, unfortunately, was not able to drive, so they just gave me the keys to the car. As I did not having enough cash on my person to simulaneously pay them for gas and pay for parking, my sister graciously drove me over to the class and picked me up. This month, we will be visiting orthodontists and oral surgeons, and it looks like it will be very interesting. The final doctor to present during class on Wednesday was hilarious. He is a maxillofacial surgeon (which includes oral surgery - he became a surgeon and got a PhD in Biochemistry at the same time) … anyways he opened with a slide of a guy with a dinner fork stuck in his face. The man, an inmate at a local prison, said he was simply minding his own business at dinner and somebody came up from behind him and jabbed a fork into his face. Yeah right. The first picture was straight at the front of the man’s face, and you could see the fork with the tongs buried about an inch into his the tissue right below his eye. The side x-ray was the funniest: there was just a skull and then perfect profile of a fork buried in the cloudy soft tissue. Apparently, the operation to remove the fork went pretty smoothly. After that, we saw more typical things, like facial reconstruction. The incisions around the eyes were particularly interesting: in order to screw the titanium surgerical grade screws into the bone, surgeons make incisions around the eye socket (so as to avoid scars), and sometimes actually remove the eyeball to get at things. Very cool. Jaw surgery was particularly interesting; the upper jaw bone was actually sawed in half and then re-set (using those screws again) to a new position. Particularly stunning was the way in which the soft palette can simply be cut, peeled back to expose the bone, and still heal back to normal usually within a week or two. What interesting stuff.
Yes, the women in the program are still ridiculously good looking - even one of the dentists I observed with pointed this out, and she’s a married mom.
My parents are in Texas, Katy is going to Arizona this weekend - everyone is all over the country this month! I think I will stay right around here, learn some stuff, and take a spring break at the end of this month.
I reclaimed my room for next year, I have been trying to help a couple people with deciding whether they want singles or quads, roomates or none, on campus or off. Getting in the habit of living in one place is a good thing, but one tends to wonder if there is something better. As for me, I am happy where I am right now.
After hearing this, I wrote a little ditty on guitar. My picking is slowly getting faster, but mashing my fingers into funny shapes is a still a little aggravating right now. New form of entertainment: drumming the fingers that have guitar calluses on stuff and listening to the great percussive effect.
