Author Archives: zephoria

my ability to break everything

I could never switch webhosting services because no one but Glenn (Netspace) would tolerate my ability to break everything consistently (and hog huge amounts of their bandwidth with my Ani DiFranco lyrics site). And always through what seems to be a quiet, calm, non-intrusive tasks. It’s not like i’m writing scripts that are getting out of control, or anything.

Today, i needed to find a few emails from my 2002 mail archive. So, of course, the first thing i do is gunzip. Well, i’m too close to my quota so it barfed. I wanted to untar it to find out what i had destroyed in the process. Couldn’t untar in my directory so i moved it to /tmp (forgetting that i should move it to /var/tmp instead). tar -xvf and it pukes. I think it’s all corrupted, but really, it just used up all of /tmp. Oops. So, i sent a message to see what i had done wrong. Yet, apparently, my abuse of /tmp caused a bunch of processes elsewhere on the system to fail and eventually caused a httpd process to spiral out of control and hog everything else on the system.

::sigh:: What’s a girl to do?

Of course, last time, a small glitch in my .procmail crashed the entire box continuously. OOps.

My favorite was that at Brown, i used to be able to crash the main file server by printing. Of course, they sysadmins there responded by creating a printing script which basically said “if uid=’dmb’ { break; } else { print(); }”

focused on social networks

As i become more and more focused on my research on social networks, i realized that i want my primary blog to be arbitrarily focused, but have a specific site dedicated to all of the bits and pieces of what i’m researching.

Thus, here commences a danah blog on social network tools and their evolution.

Early blog entries are some of the more recent Friendster entries from my more personal blog

chaos collision

I’m starting to remember that i’m not invincible and can’t do everything even if it looks doable on paper. Somehow, i’m working around the clock on top of handling registration for the conference this week (Altered States and the Spiritual Awakening if you don’t know about it).

And i haven’t even really coped with the reality that i’m moving in under 2 weeks except to have pretty vicious anxiety nightmares. I’m so psyched to move in with my friends and i truly hope that this is my last move for years to come.

Next comes SIGGRAPH, which i haven’t even begun to cope with. Somehow, i need to get to San Diego (i think i’m roadtripping). Somehow, i need to write a presentation. Somehow, i need to come up with a video.

Egads. What do i get myself into?

apophenia

Spam sucks. Zephyr must shortly retire. In comes apophenia, thanks to worthless word of the day.

apophenia: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things; seeing patterns where none, in fact, exist

This word was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 in a Jungian context, but has regained currency due to William Gibson’s recent novel, _Pattern Recognition_.(you may remember Gibson as the author of the seminal cyberpunk tale, _Neuromancer_)

“There must always be room for conicidence, Win had maintained. When there’s not, you’re probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of consipracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he’d believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always, [Cayce] knew, took for granted was there.” William Gibson, _Pattern Recognition_

gorgeous images

An artist on a psylist that i’m on just sent out a link to new images that he created and they are utterly gorgeous. My favorites:

Perfect timing! I totally fell in love with Sidhi (on the left) and i was thinking about refreshing my art with my upcoming move. Yay for being able to support artists in my community!

government information awareness

The Computing Culture Group at the Media Lab never ceases to make me smiles. To celebrate the 4th of July, they’ve unleashed the Government Information Awareness program:

To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy to use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.

To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.

Happy Independence Day! Let freedom reign!

definition of weblog

One of my colleagues was trying to measure blogs (how many, how often, etc.) and i warned her that she had to first develop a concrete definition of a blog because i didn’t know of any. Apparently, last week, Jill Walker proposed a definition of a blog for Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Also, read Andrew O Baoill’s response. His response is particularly interesting because he argues that blogs always exist in a community context. Thus, blogs are not simply about the production of information, but the role of the reader.