oooh – text arc is this gorgeous program that does cool things with text and visualization. it’s very similar to ben fry‘s work with valences, all of which are just so intriguing as visualizations of textual data. now, if only someone would take visualization of text to a new level and play with the structure of the glyphs, i’d be ecstatic.
Yearly Archives: 2002
an angel out there…
i’m sitting at home for the first night in well over a week (well, last nite when i passed out doesn’t count). given, i’m working, but i’m still sitting at home. and becky brought over her mammoth CD player so i can actually put in more than one CD at a time and listen to them on quality speakers (although i do adore my boombox). but anyways..
when my car was broken into, i lost all of my CDs… well, all of my goa CDs. i was back to listening to Bad Religion and the like. which was fine, except that i really wanted to be listening to goa. and i bemoaned this fact out in public and this angel of angels who i’ve never met wrote me and said that he probably had a lot of what i lost and if i’d send him a reel of CDs, he’d replace my stolen items… so i sent him a list.
and blessed be, he not only sent me most of the CDs i lost, but some extra ones that he’s determined are essential for my collection. so here i am, sitting in my bedroom, listening to the CDs that i thought were a goner and learning what else needs to be purchased from psyshop since i’m a geek for owning my own CDs… (i swear that receiving copies of what are ‘essentials’ is the best way to promote me to spend an obscene amount of money on CDs, even if the silly music industry thinks the contrary.)
oh, i’m so ecstatic. mmm… currently listening to shpongle – my absolute favorite for the late-night calm happiness…
something to work towards..
it’s been a *long* times since i’ve gone dancing! particularly given that i was going once a week for a while. in fact, i woke up this morning and had a hard time walking since i’ve been sitting for so many weeks. but i have a new goal. enough of my shit needs to be done so that i can go to the upcoming synthetic sadhus party.
why? raja ram. very simple. woah amazing. i’m super psyched to hear that it’s going to be at a venue that has an outdoor space, although i don’t know about this all-ages thing… i’ve gotten very particular lately… i can’t stand to see all of the kids in such bad wrecked stages. i end up feeling like a mother!
SecureId: a working demo
so, i’ve spent the last 1.5 weeks slaving away at building a working demo of SecureId. it feels like i’m back at Brown – 6000 lines of code in under two weeks. damn. poorly commented, utterly hacked and in need of a desperate cleanup, but it’s the best i could do with such little time.
but i have to admit that i’m kinda proud of myself… who would’ve thought that i could put all of that together so darn fast? wow.
unfortunately, i also have to move on to a million different things asap. eek. so much to do, so little time. i’m so angry with myself for letting everything slip. ::sigh::
oh what fun!
i remember long hours of sitting by the campfire telling mental puzzles…. my favorite:
a man is driving down a road. something on the radio startles him. he drives off the road and kills himself. what happened? (a slight version of #16)
semi-colons are not acceptable
Ok… one should not think in semi-colons or Iterators, case statements or if/else clauses. Those should be reserved for .java files only, not mental processes or verbal communication. I did a demo. At the end of each statement/sentences, i found myself with a mental picture of a semi-colon. When i couldn’t continue, i couldn’t find the semi-colon and i would have to race through my “non-compiling” brain to figure out where the damn thing had gone. There were parentheses and too many were unmatched reaking major havoc on my mental state. I have been coding way too much lately.
blogging again…
i miss blogging.. so i’m going to come back.. this time, under a convenient new format…
fellow privacy troublemakers
A few days ago, a friend of mine (David Nguyen) asked me if i wanted to help with a proposal for a workshop for CSCW 2002, alongside Carlos Jensen and Scott Lederer. The topic: privacy in digital environments, intended to empower users through awareness and control. Of course, i jumped at the opportunity and in a matter of days, we produced this workshop proposal.
privacy continues to be problematic
Every day, i’m reminded that privacy is becoming less and less a part of my reality. What’s sad to me is not that i lack ultimate privacy, but that i’m quickly losing the privacy that i’ve gained through modern life, back to a state that is so invasive that we might as well have zero freedom. Below are random articles on privacy that i want to keep track of, because they are a reminder.
inQtel – the CIA’s VC firm.. They are paying off different startups to turn around and make spyware of sorts…
Rosen’s article on privacy (which is quite similar to the talk that i went to this week on the same topic). It’s quite nice to hear that someone is coherent about these issues, even if they make me paranoid.
[cypherpunk login for nytimes: c1ph3rpunk/c1ph3rpunk]
Nothing to Yahoo Over New E-Rules – lack of privacy on Yahoo, again.
Online Companies Draw Fire For Removing ‘Offensive’ Postings – Yahoo deleting “terrorist” messages. Too bad that all of my V-Day posts got removed too. But, i guess we are a terrorist organization, because we fund folks like RAWA and talk about pornographic words.
FDA doesn’t regulate implantable chips. Yes, they regulate everything else that goes in my body based on their moral high ground, but not chips.
good conversations & drug propoganda
what a gorgeous day – although it seems as though the bugs have emerged as well.. i sat in the courtyard today discussing lab politics with one of my oldest friends here and it’s sooo depressing to learn how much the lab consistently screws people over. yuck yuck and yuck. this was particularly painful because i spent the earlier part of the day mentally remembering why there is no way in hell that i want to be here in the future. i watched as my advisor told others how their project would look and that just made me feel gross gross and gross. this is really just not the way that research is supposed to work. ::sigh:: so i just felt disgusting coming out of that conversation in every way possible.
i keep having those mental conversations about the value of education, the power plays that happen here, etc. interesting mental games…
regardless, i also got to think about the institution of marriage, how to reform it and the politics of drugs… she gave me the most fantabulous link about how colombia’s super bowl handled anti-drug advertisements – sooo hysterical!
this is so entertaining in light of The Onion‘s latest drug-related article.
::sigh:: i have to admit that i’m quite cranky with the gov’t & drug issues these days… just like i’m always thrilled when the government is hypocritical. Drugs & the Internet is one of their latest publications, intended to crack down on online available drug information. my favorite is how they are upset that reformers are gathering online to “promote” drugs (what about when we are engaging in freedom of speech to question the government’s legitimation of alcohol/tobacco but not marijuana, a far less harmful drug [1][2][3]). and, even on the front page, they are concerned about the availability of information on harmful effects of MDMA, GHB and LSD. since when is it a bad thing to release the causes for concern? oh, right, because the people saying the problems are generally against government dictation of how to treat one’s body… plus, the gov’t is generally after raving folks, because of the promotion of mind-expansion with drugs. i think it’s a bit terrifying to realize that even my digital discontent (this page) with this approach could put me at risk. freedom of speech has failed; we are living in China, just no one knows it.