Monthly Archive for April, 2001

The Stew (phase I) is now complete

Published
by
Benjy
on Monday April 30, 2001
in Info Systems and LinkStew
. Closed

This morning I finally finished categorizing all of my old entries. Since the links to the old categories are now totally redundant, I've removed them from the page, and in their place there is a link to a list of all the new categories.

However, that list of new categories will be very much a work in progress. Some of the categories are way too broad and need to be split up, while others are too narrow. I need to analyze how The Stew is performing with this data, and adjust the data and The Stew as necessary, to make the system as useful as possible.

Where’s George?

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday April 29, 2001
in Money and Web
. Closed

My roommate just came into the possession of a five dollar bill stamped with www.wheresgeorge.com, which turns out to be a very neat page which relies on the users of the money to help track the journey of money as it's used.

Now I want to go get a stamp made so I can circulate some Where's George bills and see how far and wide they travel.

Which reminds me that a couple of weeks ago, a co-worker came up with a bill stamped asking the possessor of the bill to please return it to Benjamin (middle name but not my middle name) Stewart if they found it. I tried to get her to give it to me, but she wouldn't go for it.

Filled with creamy Nougat

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday April 29, 2001
in Art, Books, Music, Pratchett, Synchronicity and They Might Be Giants
. Closed

Another McSweeney's/Thief of Time coincidence. In "Barry Blitt's Vacation Postcards" in McSweeney's, there is a postcard filled with "Pebbles of the Red Sea", and one of those pebbles is labeled as "Filled with creamy Nougat", and another was labeled "Forged in a blast furnace called time. (The others if you're curious, were labeled "A girl", "The color of cRutney", and "Mistaken for marzipan by early spanish settlers, but these aren't relevant to the coincidence.)

And in Thief of Time, Pratchett bashes Nougat at least three times, and ends the story with the sentence "Even with Nougat, you can have a perfect moment."

We Now Know Who

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday April 29, 2001
in Art, Books, Music and They Might Be Giants
. Closed

On the front cover, McSweeny's #6 claims "We Now Know Who", and nothing else. McSweeney's is a literary journal, more or less, but #6 was an Art (and Music) volume. The idea was to provide a soundtrack for the artwork and short stories, and the result was an interesting amalgamation of words, pictures, and fingertips.

On one hand, the journal by itself has good content, for the most part. There are some dry bits, but no journal can be overflowing with perfection every quarter. According to the introduction in the beginning, the original intent was to fill this volume of the journal with nothing but art, with no words at all. This idea was abandoned quickly, and the art and music (and words) version was conceived.

And on the other hand, the enclosed CD has a lot to like on it. Most of the tracks were composed by They Might be Giants, but there were a number of other artists as well. Most of the music was composed in an attempt to match the theme (and duration) of the work it was to accompany, though some of the tracks were old TMBG songs, such as "Edith Head" or "West Virginia". And a few of the pieces of Art and Stories were composed after the song had been written, such as in the case of "Bangs" (which I found to be the most enjoyable story/song combination). All in all, it's a very likeable CD. With 44 tracks, the CD works great on random play, much like Apollo 18's fingertips.

The problem I have with the whole package, though, is the stories. I had a very hard time to trying to listen to the song for a piece while reading it. Also, though they tried to write songs that matched the length of a piece, it's an impossible goal, and most of the time the song was over long before I was done, which just made me irritable.

But, it was a very good attempt. The songs and the art went very well together. When I listened to the CD, the songs I liked best were the ones that happened to pair up with short stories. But when I read the journal while listening to the soundtrack, the best songs were the ones that accompanied the art. Amazing how significant context can be in the appreciation of something. I'd recommend trying it out... It's interesting.

And there's nothing sadder than a frog plucking a banjo.

Nothing Sadder Than a Frog Plucking a Banjo

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday April 29, 2001
in Art, Books, Music, Pratchett, Synchronicity and They Might Be Giants
. Closed

On Friday, I finally got my copy of McSweeney's #6. In brief, it's a literary (and art, I think) journal, and volume 6 also features a soundtrack, composed mostly by They Might Be Giants. As I was working like crazy on my compiler, I didn't have time to sit down and fully appreciate the whole package -- instead, I just listened to the CD as background music. I'll write more about how neat this whole package is later...

Anyway, the song that I liked the best on the whole CD was named "Frog and Banjo", by Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing, I believe), and it accompanied a story/comic named "A Very Sad Story About a Frog and a Banjo, not at all appropriate for Children", by Chris Ware. So far it's my favorite part of the package, but again, more about that later.

Last night, as I was finishing Thief of Time (Which I'll also write more about later), I came across a section about stuffed animals that started

    The next gallery was full of stuffed animals. There'd been a vogue for it, a few centuries before. These weren't the sad old hunting-trophy bears or geriatric tigers whose claws had faced a man armed with nothing more than five crossbows, twenty loaders, and a hundred beaters. Some of these animals were arranged in groups. Quite small groups, of quite small animals.

And the next paragraph began "There were frogs seated around a tiny dining table". The combination of the word sad in one paragraph and the frogs in the next paragraph put me in mind of "A Very Sad Story About a Frog and a Banjo", and I thought to myself "Gee, it's a pity one of those frogs isn't playing a banjo...

And then that paragraph that started with frogs sitting around a table ended with "There was a monkey, playing a banjo."

A Creole Pigeon?

Published
by
Benjy
on Sunday April 29, 2001
in Linguistics, Pratchett and Synchronicity
. Closed

So on Thursday morning, when I was taking a forced break from my project to read Pratchett, I found myself laughing madly out loud when Pratchett made a joke about some pigeons speaking Pidgin Pigeon. Sure, it's a lame joke, and sure, it's pretty obvious -- But there were so many layers upon layers to the joke that I couldn't object. The setting in which the pidgin pigeon was spoken was a city modeled vaguely after New Orleans, which wasn't obvious if you're just reading Thief of Time, and required a lot of background Pratchett knowledge, and that detail, all by itself, is what changed a joke about pidgin pigeon from being lame to being immensely clever.

And on Friday, when I was working like mad on my project, I took a break to attend my Linguistics lecture. And appropriately enough, the subject at that lecture was Pidgins and Creoles. Man did I find it hard to contain my laughter.

No! Anything but mental exertion!

Published
by
Benjy
on Saturday April 28, 2001
in Apartment, Banality, Busy and School: Homework
. Closed

In a vain effort to do anything but think after finishing turning in my compiler last night, I just spent four hours cleaning up my apartment. I scrubbed the kitchen and bathroom counters, cleaned off the surface of the stove, swept the floor, cleaned the sinks, and even worked at the mold on my bathroom ceiling a little, because nothing has been done about any of that in like, four or five months. I've just been too busy to think about it. But now, with my compiler turned in, all I've got left this semester is a homework assignment and four finals. Unless we decide to try to write an optimizing compiler... But at the moment, the thought sends me into a fit of mad laughter.

Did Mixtec borrow the Spanish Word for Garlic?

Published
by
Benjy
on Friday April 27, 2001
in Food, Linguistics and School: Homework
. Closed

I'm sitting here working on my Linguistics homework, and I was faced with the question of "Is it strange that Mixtec (A central american language) borrowed the spanish word for garlic?" And this page tells me more than I ever needed to know about garlic. Notably, by telling me that Garlic came from Europe, more or less, this page tells me that it's perfectly natural for Mixtec to have borrowed the Spanish word for Garlic. There's also other neat Garlic trivia, like it's mythological significance in ancient Greece...

Mixtec borrowing the spanish word for white, on the other hand, is just plain weird.

In the face of Crashing Servers, read Pratchett

Published
by
Benjy
on Thursday April 26, 2001
in Laugh, Pratchett and Programming
. Closed

My partner and I were at my office working on our compiler, until the computer science servers got "wedged" at about 1 am. I sat around for a few minutes with the vague hope that it was an intermittent problem, but... It wasn't. So I decided to head on home before starting to work off of the back up copy I had made on my office server.

So I got home and did a few things, and just as I was preparing my environment to work on my project, a 'ps' resulted in a Segmentation Fault. As did 'w' and a couple of other programs which simply don't segfault. Then my connection to the server dropped.

"This is dumb", I declared. I didn't wait long before grabbing Thief of Time out of my bag and curling up in bed to read for a few hours.

I see that the entire cs instructional network is still down (it's amazing how critical a file server can be, eh =P), along with my office server. My, that's convenient timing. I really hope they don't extend the project again. Sometimes I'm really glad I'm not a sysadmin, as not only do I get to say "This isn't my problem to fix" but I also get to say "Gee, I guess I can't do my work right now. Goodnight."

Your Project Got Extended?

Published
by
Benjy
on Tuesday April 24, 2001
in Favorites, Laugh, Linguistics, Pratchett and Programming
. Closed

There I was, sitting in the office, merrily working away on my compiler, which is due Thursday. Nearby, a co-worker and her partner were also hard at work on their own compiler. Suddenly, she shouted "Our project got extended 24 hours!"

I turned and glared at her.

She looked back confused, and whispered to her partner "Why is he looking at us like that?"

"Wait, do you mean your project got extended, or everyone's projects got extended?" I asked tentatively.

"Everyone's."

"oh. Oh, well that's different then!"

You see, I thought she meant that her project, and only her project, had been extended. Obviously I was wrong, but considering that she was sitting beside her partner, and she said "our project got extended," and I wasn't sure if she was talking to me or talking to her partner... Well, it was an honest mistake.

I kind of wish I hadn't found out tonight, though, because now I'm going to have a hard time convincing myself not to read Thief of Time tonight instead of waiting until after the project is finshed... The book is sitting beside my keyboard, calling my name. It is my motivation. And now, I have an extra day. An extra day in which I can read the book... Curses!