Published on Thursday October 31, 2002 .
Well, I'm not out partying the night away tonight -- I'm a lot exhausted after today's sprint midterm composition, and I find parties more stressful than relaxing -- but I was at a party on Saturday, and I wore a costume! Check it out, I was A Guy with Short Hair:
Heh, as much as that qualifies as a Halloween costume all by itself, I actually had a costume in addition to that. I was Oz, from Buffy:
Of course, as Mark pointed out, I kind of dropped the ball, as I had an opportunity for an even more meta costume that I overlooked. If I'd really been on top of things, I could have worn the same Halloween costume as Oz wore in Fear, Itself: A name tag that said "Hello, my name is: God." That episode had a lot of good moments, not the least of which was the "Actual size" punchline at the end.
(And on the synchronicity side of things, when I was getting my haircut, Lonnie said "Y'know, it's funny -- I have another client named Ben who had all of his hair cut off just last Saturday." Funny how that works.)
Published on Thursday October 31, 2002 .
Just like the night before, last night when I should have been working on my Linguistics midterm, I was instead procrastinating like crazy. Here were the three most interesting things I read last night, amongst innumerable others.
- Unspooled, a sadly nostalgic article about the death of the cassette tape, with a moderate focus on the art of the mix tape.
- On, Off, or Asleep? an article about the interface of power buttons.
- Dan Shafer on Baseball in response to Dave Winer on Baseball. I thought both of these posts were insightful, and I may have something to say of my own on this subject by the time it's baseball season again.
As it turns out, I was so effective at procrastinating last night, that by the time I fell asleep, I'd only written an outline for two of the three questions, which left me with about 4 hours to write 3000 some odd words of prose today before the midterm was due. It came out well enough, considering the rush.
However, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't listen to my favorite blood pumping music when I'm rushed and stressed out of my mind. Though the music succeeded in getting my adrenaline flowing, when I listen to it in the future, it will just increase my stress levels in memory of this morning, which probably isn't what I want some of my favorite music to do.
Published on Thursday October 31, 2002 .
Whew, today's midterm was a killer. I only had 75 minutes to do a test that I think would have taken me about two hours to do well. Needless to say, I felt a little rushed. And on top of it being too long, I just wasn't entirely sure what kind of answers they wanted on a lot of the questions. The problem was I just had too much to say about any given thing they asked, so I wasn't really sure how to reasonably constrain it to what they were looking for.
I've got the feeling that I'll get the test back and for most of the things I got wrong, I'll say "Damnit, I knew that, but didn't think that's what they wanted." If it'd been an interactive test (like an interview), I know I would have been able to show that I knew what I was doing.
Bah, grumble. I'll just have to wait and see.
In other news, tonight finds me working on my Ling 106 midterm. Here's a Lakoff quote about the topic of one of our three midterm questions from yesterday in lecture:
"Doing a metaphorical analysis of the etymologies of 150 or so words would make a great dissertation, but it would also take some real intellectual courage. Indo-European etymology is a nasty field. It's a cutthroat business. You'd be attacked by pretty much everyone."
-- George Lakoff
Published on Wednesday October 30, 2002 .
I've got a midterm tomorrow morning, so obviously I had some reading to do tonight. Here's the list:
And that's in addition to all the time I spent playing with Linkstew's random taglines.
I also played around with the idea of making a new sidebar item that's just a list of articles I've read recently, without any commentary. I don't typically like posting links, because I always end up feeling like I should say something more about them. Since any post requires a title, I always feel like a puny little link would be dwarfed by the other interface elements on the page. So that might happen, but obviously not tonight. I've got "studying" to do.
Published on Tuesday October 29, 2002 .
I was updating the random quotes that display below the title of the page earlier, when I came across one that I I didn't recognize. It said, "There will be a seventy five cent refund for this portion of the internet." I thought that was pretty funny, so I laughed, and then I started to wonder where I got the inspiration for that line.
Y'see, very few of those quotes are things that I actually came up with on my own. Most of them are either direct quotes from a song or something similar, a variation on a quote, or some random quote from conversation. Very rarely is it something I actually came up with on my own. The thing is, I can't account for "There will be a seventy five cent refund for this portion of the internet." as being any of the first three, and I don't think I'm original enough to have come up with that on my own.
Usually I annotate things that I might not remember the source of (quotes from tv or movies, for example), but this one isn't annotated. A google search only turns up Linkstew for either the direct quote or any reasonable variation (things like "there will be a" + "refund for this portion", among others), and I can't for the life of me remember where else it might have come from.
So, anyone recognize where I might've gotten the framework of that quote from?
Oh, and if you're ever bored, you can make a game out of trying to identify where my random quotes came from. Some day I plan to annotate them with explanations, but for now, I obviously don't even have explanations for all of them.
Published on Wednesday October 23, 2002 .
Instead of one single item, I'll make you a deal and give you 7 short items instead. Consider it one for each day I haven't blogged in the last week.
- Metroid Prime comes out in a little less than a month, and Nintendo just posted the commercial. It's a pretty nice commercial (much better than that awful Super Mario Sunshine commercial), and it got me even more excited about the game. Hopefully it gets some non-Nintendo folks to check out the Gamecube.
- Check out the video of Verbal, the single of Amon Tobin's new album Out From Out Where.
- If you're wondering, I didn't go see Stallman speak -- Instead, I went and listened to Lakoff talk about causality and the mind for 80 minutes.
- Just like Kevin got a new Wells Fargo Platinum Visa card a few weeks ago, I got my new Bank of America Visa Platinum Check Card today. Unlike Kevin, though, this is actually exciting for me. Not only does this increase the amount I can spend at once from $500 to $1200, but since my card number changed, it also means I'll finally be able to use Paypal.
- I'm happy to see the World Series tied 2-2. On the one hand, I want the Giants to win it all because of that Disney thing with the Angels, and because duh, it's San Francisco. On the other hand, I want the Angels to win it all because I like the AL better, and I like seeing underdogs do well, and because all the news about the Giants seems to be Bonds Bonds Bonds. Really, I want to see it go to Game 7 again.
- As for that First Circle concert I went to a couple of weeks back, it was pretty good. First Circle didn't come on until after 12:30, but they played until 2. And between First Circle and the two other bands that played, we got around 4 hours of music for a mere $6. I highly recommend checking out concerts at Blake's, and I think I'll have to try to get back there a few more times before I'm done here.
- Oh, and finally, check out the Perl IAQ - Infrequently Asked Questions. It's pretty amusing. I especially like the answer for "How do I convert a string to a number?"
Published on Thursday October 17, 2002 .
Bah, Richard Stallman is speaking in Soda on Tuesday at 4pm, but thanks to my new attendance policy, I find myself in a bit of a quandry. I could go to part of my 3:30 class, I suppose, but I'd only be able to stay for about 10 minutes if I wanted to get any kind of seat for Stallman. And I know for a fact that Lakoff doesn't take well to people leaving his lectures early.
So I could go see Stallman speak and break my streak, or I could continue with the perfect attendance. The real problem is, if I break my streak, I know I'll start missing many many more classes, and that's just no good.
I suppose the answer's obvious, but it still bums me out that I'm going to miss seeing Stallman speak again.
Published on Wednesday October 16, 2002 .
Yeah, so I've got regular assignments due on Thursdays, which explains why these quotes keep getting passed off as content on Wednesdays. Sorry.
"I'm 28 now, and hopefully I'm still... Shoot! Never announce your age to the class."
-- My CS 160 Professor
Published on Sunday October 13, 2002 .
One of my goals this semester is to make it to every single class. That might not sound that unreasonable, considering that elementary schools regularly give out "perfect attendance awards" -- hell, I might even have gotten one way back in the day -- I don't really remember...
But when you remember that I'm the guy that went to one half of a CS 170 lecture before deciding not to go for the rest of the semester, you'll hopefully understand why this goal is so "out there."
I just finished week 7 (out of 15) of my last semester at Berkeley, and so far so good. Admittedly, I had to leave one class early one time, and I was late to two other lectures -- but I've been to every lecture so far in some capacity.
Hell, even if I skipped the rest of the semester, I'm pretty sure that 7 weeks of perfect attendance is more classes than I went to in some entire semesters.
I think this might be a sign of a big change my undergraduate career.
