Linkstew

By the way, here's the intro graf I sent out when I started at A9.com more than a month ago now. It seems like a pretty reasonable "who I am these days" graf, so here we go:

"Oh boy, this is the part where I have to write an introduction that somehow makes me seem both incredibly interesting to know and work with, but not show offy either. Here goes: Benjy like the mouse, not like the dog. Went to Berkeley, majored in Cog Sci (the "other" CS). I worked at NexTag.com after graduation, and now I'm happily here. My hobbies include snowboarding, music in languages I don't speak, and looking for parking in San Francisco. I look forward to working with y'all, and if there are any scrabble fiends out there we should get a game going at lunch sometime.

And as Jim and Alex discovered yesterday, you probably won't want to be in the room if I'm playing table tennis."

And if you haven't checked out A9.com yet, you totally should.

I read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland this weekend, and in it, the narrator distills his roommates and co-workers into what their seven dream Jeopardy! categories would be. And I thought to myself "Man, what a great way of describing someone."

The question isn't just asking what you like, but rather, it's asking what you know better than anything else -- what you grok. It's not asking who you want to be, but rather, who you are. It's not something that most questions really get to.

So, if my life were a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:

• They Might Be Giants.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld Universe.
• Stupid UNIX tricks.
• Stupid perl tricks.
• The Macintosh Way.
• The writings of Kurt Vonnegut.
• 'Bop' as a prefix, infix, and suffix.

If your life were a game of Jeopardy!, what would your seven dream categories be?

My Evil Twin has proven to be a worthy nemesis, as he and I, for the seventh semester in a row, share a class together. This time, it's CS 188.

I wonder if he's noticed this yet?

And no, I still haven't talked to him. Nor do I have plans to. What would I say?

"Stop following me taking my classes you adjective noun!"?

Oh, wait, I've got it! on the last day of class next semester (assuming he doesn't spoil the streak), I can say "So, we meet again, for the first time, for the last time!"

And that'll be that.

Ach! My evil twin is back in Berkeley! I saw him today while walking home from work, and I watched him intently as we walked towards each other, and then we passed without a word.

This morning, I again woke up with the desire to get my hair cut. And before I had a chance to lose my motivation to actually get my hair cut, I called and made an appointment. And at the appointed time, I got my hair cut.

It'd been a year since my last cut, so it'd gotten pretty long. Here are Before and After pictures. Since I was just getting a trim, and since it'll just grow out again anyway, I wasn't overly concerned with the quality, or even the style of the cut. I just wanted it shorter, and that's what I got.

I started growing my hair out long about seven years ago, I guess. I can't remember for sure. I know that it was at least a little bit long when I had my yearbook picture taken in my freshman year of high school, because I'd been wearing a hat, and the combination of hat hair and half long hair and pimples made for a really goofy shot.

I got a hair cut last june, and before that, I'm not really sure when it was. My hair is really long now, and I really want and need a hair cut. But I don't want the same old thing... And yet, I don't want to change it too radically.

What the heck would I look like with short hair? How exactly would I get it cut? I'd have to make choices about my hair! What a hassle! Which tells you why I let it grow long in the first place, and why I haven't gotten around to chopping it all off.

Which really leaves me very few options. I guess I'll just get it cut so that it's just long enough to still tie back -- that way, I can have the illusion that it's long if I want it, and yet, it'll be shorter and different at the same time. From there, I can get used to the shorter hair, and maybe go shorter still.

Unless you have any better ideas about what I should do with my hair, in which case, you should let me know.

Well, he doesn't look much like me, and he doesn't talk like me (He talks about esperanto, I'm taking Japanese) or dress like me or anything, but I think I've got an evil twin. You see, There's this guy who I've had in at least one of my classes every semester since I got to Berkeley. He lived in the same dorm as I did, was in Math 1B with me, CS61A with me, CS61B with me, psych 2 with me, Math 54 with me, Math 55 with me, EE42 with me, CogSci 1 with me, and now he's in Philosophy with me and CogSci 100 with me. I've never actually been in the same section as him, but many many times, he's had the same TA for a different section. This semester, he has the same Philosophy TA as I do and the same CogSci TA as I do, and he did his CogSci Term Paper on the same topic as I did. More than that coincides, though, because the pattern of classes I've taken isn't at all normal. The pattern of classes described above is one of a studen who was once intending to be a computer science major who is now a cognitive science major.

I don't know his reasons. I've never talked to him. It's not like I can talk to him, because then he'd know that I was following him. Or that he was following me. Or... Well, you see, if I talked to him, then I'd find out that it's just a bizarre coincidence of a large magnitude and I won't get to think up new conspiracy theories during those dull moments in class.

I've been told that a lot of what I write is just ranting or griping or kvetching about this or that. In fact, I've been compared to Malcolm, of Malcolm In The Middle. For those who don't know, Malcolm's job is to gripe about his life. Okay, so I gripe a lot. Sorry.

It's just that the things that I'm most likely to talk about are the things that get bristle my hair and make me want to kick the bike that idiot left chained to the stairs with the handlebars sticking halfway into the stairs. God, I can't believe he did that. I almost tripped on them and tumbled to my doom when I was taking my laundry downstairs. There was another person who parked a bike on the more trafficked side of the stairs, but someone put a note on that bike seat saying "this is not an appropriate spot to park your bike." This other bike that was is on the less trafficked side of the stairs, however, has been there for months. Gah, bastard!

Everyone in my Japanese class now thinks I'm incredibly resourceful, which I may or may not be. However, I find it funny that the few things I did today led them to that conclusion. You see ,I walked in, grabbed three outdated postings off the wall, flipped them over, drew props on them for my Skit today. I then pulled a staple out of one of them and used it to staple my assignment together. Then, when I spilled my Dr. Pepper, I pulled out my towel (Okay, so it's a washclothe... but size isn't what's important. It's how I use it) out of my bag and wiped up the mess. And that led them to believe that I'm resourceful. Well, off to the train station for a funfilled day and a half in Bakersfield/Wofford Heights.

Behind the Stew is the site I made for the Behind the Curtain Project. Basically, it's pictures of all the things I did on Sunday, September 17th. It's too bad that was a really boring day. Some of the pictures came out cool though. Check it out if you're bored and have bandwidth to waste.

At about four of noon, there was Another Web Page. By Four of Two, I created a second Web Page, which I dubbed LinkStew, to capitalize on the Blog trend. However, this caused some confusion, because I couldn't figure out how to split my content up. By quitting time, I realized that LinkStew should actually be a subset of YAWP, and so that's what I'm heading for.

However, at the moment, YAWP still has all of my old content, and the engine that will drive both sites is on hold while I finish a project for work. So in the mean time, I've decided to put almost all of my content on linkstew, which might make for some very long posts on the front page. Sorry.

Well, I made my first web page... Gosh, it's been awhile. It was the fall of my Sophomore year... of HIGH SCHOOL. That would have been... Fall of 1996, I guess. From there, I made several pages... They were narrow and were just random things... Nothing notable, really.

But then all that changed in March of 1998 when I made Another Web Page. This one was to hold anything and everything. It went through it's cycles, and after two years, I believe that most of the lifespan of that page is up.

In March of 2000, I started LinkStew. It was to spin off several large pieces of my last web page, leaving that page for the big ideas and this page for the small thoughts.

That didn't work out so well, and in August 2000, I finally figured out what I wanted to do with the two pages. LinkStew would be a subset of my web page. LinkStew would just be the links and my thoughts on them. The first page would be everything. That hasn't been implemented yet, so for now everything is going on LinkStew.