Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/06/06/gallery-opening-illuminopart/
Thursday I attended an art opening at a gallery called 20 GOTO 10. I learned of the show as I learn of many parties these days–through a friend on Facebook. Most such parties I learn of through one particular friend and it lends me to wonder if she spends her time searching for events on Facebook. (I tried this recently, but the interface is poor.) My working hypothesis is that she networks with a lot of the hipster Web 2.0 crowd and she thereby gets invited to events posted to Facebook. She probably gets more invites than your average Internet groupie because she is a “total babe” but whatever the deal she has lately been responsible for a fair proportion of my going-out / nightlife in San Francisco.
Anyway, yesterday I hit a gallery opening after work because the art in question was technological in nature and because art openings are a good way to score free snacks and wine. I showed up at the start time of 7PM because I didn’t want to romp around so late and because I figured it would be less crowded and possibly more delicious at the early end of the evening.
They needed more time to finish setting up. (In San Francisco everything happens late–it is a cultural thing.) I waited on the sidewalk with a middle-aged Asian man named Mike. He had a scruffy goatee with several meandering strands of beard, many of them white. He said he had recently moved from Bayview which has bad air that irritated his skin and bad neighbors, to the Mission, which suits him better in many ways. The hallmark of a true San Franciscan, he at one point mentioned his cultivation of avocados in Bayview. He said he is an educational technologist. One thing he did was design a widget for the old 8-bit Nintendo that slotted in between the system and the cartridge, and would show you and let you fiddle with the various registers and whatnot so that a curious kid could explore how fiddling with these things affected playing the game. I thought that sounded like an awesome fun thing that would help open the understanding of technology as something we can control to the people for which such appreciation is most important. He seemed proud, but explained that the project never really got anywhere.
There was plenty more time to wait and I think Mike really needed to talk because he continued through stories of himself–geek friends inviting themselves over to his workshop to use his lathe, for example. He said now that he had divested his life of such things as the workshop that he didn’t get visitors so often. He did not tell this story as an appeal to pity but as a simple matter of fact.
“It should be, ‘Hey Mike, I’ll bring a pizza over tonight and then maybe I can use your lathe.'”
“No, they never brought food.”
“Well,” I offered, “geeks do tend to lack in social graces.”
Another story he told was of his efforts to touch up a mural. He strategized things out in Photoshop then, frustrated that the muralist was busy, he went and fixed things himself. “Because I had to look at it every day.” He said that his efforts had been recognized as an excellent job, and that this had softened the attitudes of his neighbors towards him.
He asked if I knew of ephemeral art. I know of Mandelas made of sand and then cast into the wind. He said a large one had been assembled outside of the De Young Museum and while it lasted he took his own steps to preserve the thing — a series of photographs stitched together into a very large image. He wanted to build a tilt-shift lens, and I was pleased that I could ask a question along the lines of “it somehow shifts the lens to get a consistent focus across the depth of field?”
The show opened, and Mike took an SLR digital camera from his bag. It sported a home-made fish-eye lens and he explained that this took round pictures which he wanted. Lenses on the market distorted such optics back to a rectilinear format, which is not what he wanted. He seemed dubious of his ability, however, to fashion a tilt-shift lens.
A crowd of us entered the tiny gallery — fascinating paintings of various repeated geometrical shapes that were set into motion with changing colored lights. Fascinating and wonderful. I squeezed carefully to the back and grabbed a plastic cup of wine and a handful of what I suspect are actually gourmet dog treats. I squeezed my way back through the gallery, really digging the art work, especially two of the more complex works that did a lot of subtle color mixing within layers of geometric shapes — one was quartets of circles within ever larger quartets of circles, and another was circles within faces of stacked cubes.
I finished my nosh and since space was so tight I stowed the empty plastic wine cup in my bag, made my way out the door, where a line of people had formed, and headed home.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/06/01/horned-toads-and-light-years/
Yesterday I was listening to a public radio story on The California Report. I gritted my teeth as the announcer thrice referred to horned toads as lizards. I like to think that public radio folk are reasonably bright and that they proof-read stories, and so when a friend called, I asked, “Are amphibians lizards?” Well, amphibians aren’t lizards, but then horned toads are actually misnamed short-horned lizards.
This afternoon I read the following from the June 6 issue of “The Week” with glee:
“By lucky chance, astronomers were peering at a galaxy 88 million light-years away when they witnessed the initial blast of a star exploding into a supernova–the first time that rare stellar event has been seen as it happened.”
Though, for all I know, perhaps astronomers have figured out how to observe things without being limited by light-speed, and we’ll be able to watch the supernova explode again 88 million years from now.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/30/howto-google-search-site-parameter-as_sitesearch/
I was trying to hack up a little search box to access the local Google search appliance. I know you can search with a query like “foo site:example.com/docs” but I wanted to pass site: in as a form parameter. Here is an example of how to do that:
<form action="http://googleplex.example.com/search">
<input type="text" name="q" />
<input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="example.com/docs" />
</form>
So, where you might use site: in the search field, you use as_sitesearch as a hidden search parameter. I figured this out by squinting at the Google Advanced Search page.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/29/mountain-view-burrito-baby/
The first time we endured layoffs at Tellme the ops team went out for burritos on the company dime. Out of a sense of mourning, my colleague ordered their largest burrito. It was the size of a baby. This was on a Friday in Mountain View.
Joe claimed to have polished off his burrito in two days.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/26/china-birth-cotrol/
There was another aftershock in Sichuan today. More people dead and homeless. A big part of the original tragedy is that kids were at school, and many of the schools collapsed, and there are a lot of grieving parents, and questions as to whether schools were built properly.
Now, a little reminder of how different it is to be a subject of China’s government compared to what I take for granted:
“According to a new regulation issued by the Chengdu Population and Family Planning Commission, families like Wang Xuegui’s that lost their children or had children disabled in the earthquake are permitted to give birth again.”
I recall a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where they do what must inevitably happen on a long-running hit TV series: have a bunch of women giving birth at once under stressful circumstances. Worf finds himself assisting a woman in labor, and following instructions, he asserts, in a confident, commanding tone, “you may now give birth!”
“You may now start over at having a family.” That is some hard re-building.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/26/dont-reinvent-penis/
O’Reilly has some fun and insightful reading on the whole Microsoft-Yahoo! drama. The idea is that instead of chasing the competition because you have “penis envy” and spending your time and energy re-inventing what someone else already kicks ass at, you should figure out what awesome new things need to be built, and go do that instead. Yahoo! shouldn’t waste its time on search when what it is really good at is building a great media portal and user experience. Similarly, Microsoft should probably focus on building better network-enabled user software.
“So, my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn’t.”
I kind of figure that building search is a waste of Yahoo!’s energy, and that if Microsoft wants to ditch their own failed effort and give Yahoo! a chunk of cash for its also-ran technology, well then hooray for Yahoo!
I was also reading about Sugar, which I have gotten to play with on the OLPC XO-1. It is somewhat frustrating to deal with because I really really really like having access to the file / folder metaphor for tracking my work. I do like the “history” interface to “activities” via the Journal, and the built-in collaboration, although I have not had a chance to actually “collaborate” with any one, seems like a really big win–the sort of thing that has a lot of potential not only for education but in the office environment that we adults use as well. It is too bad that collaboration via shared applications is such an under-developed idea. That strikes me as the sort of thing that ought to be within Microsoft’s grasp to run with, and a nice answer to the Google “spreadsheet in a web browser” mentality.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/16/heart-rending-report-from-china/
NPR happened to have a couple of reporters in Sichuan when the earthquake hit. The other day I heard this story on NPR. It is a story of one family bringing in an excavator to try and recover people from the rubble. It is very touching and emotionally difficult to listen to. The reporter’s voice is choked up and failing at the end of the twelve minute piece, which concludes with a great deal of heartfelt wailing and people setting off firecrackers for the dead. The government is estimating 50,000 dead. Horrible horrible news. you can read the contents of the NPR story on the reporters’ blog.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/15/gay-marriage-legal/
From the L.A. Times:
SAN FRANCISCO — — The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory.
Awesome!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/15/do-you-see-a-sign/
As seen on Judah:
Do you see a sign “Leave your
junk here”? No you don’t see
a sign “Leave your junk here.”
Do you know why? Because this
corner is not a junk yard. Try
putting your crap in a garbage
can.
There is a certain practice in San Francisco of people disposing of unwanted stuff by leaving it on the curb. Alas, for stuff that nobody wants, that means crap piling up on sidewalks. Someone expressed their disapproval in the form of an homage to Quentin Tarantino.
I couldn’t agree more.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/15/lines/
I had started with the lines of a womans face, and how her hair flows in a way that conveys motion, then played with the idea of scan lines. Food for thought, anyway.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/14/canon-i250-hardy-heron/
The Ubuntu upgrade broke printing. Among other things, it removed my canoni250.ppd file. I struggled with it to no avail. Then I went back and pasted the commands in from last time and now it all works.
Yay.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2008/05/12/bread-machine-recipe-cinnamon-rolls/
I found this recipe on the Internet somewhere, halved it, and recently adapted it to weight measures. Makes about one dozen cinnamon rolls, and can easily be doubled.
Combine:
135g water (2/3 C)
1 egg
1/2 stick butter (set aside the other half stick for later)
315g flour (2 1/4 C)
35g sugar (3 tbsp)
7g salt (1/2 tsp)
4g yeast (1 tsp)
Run on “dough” setting (90 minutes)
Flour work surface and hands, remove dough ball, and knead out and flatten the dough into a rectangle. (If you are doubling this recipe, flatten half the dough at a time.)
Pretend you’re making a pizza, and top the dough to taste. I use:
1/2 stick butter (slice into pats and spread like pepperonis on a pizza)
a handful or two of brown sugar
a sprinkling of cinnamon
a dash of cardamom
raisins!
Roll the prepared dough into a “jelly roll” and slice that thing into cinnamon rolls of desired size: I tend to get 12-15 pieces. Lay these out on a cookie tray, cover, and let rise for about 45 minutes.
Preheat oven to 375F. Bake cinnamon rolls 10-20 minutes. Make sure they taste good, then share them with someone you love, or someone you would like to love.
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