Linkstew

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.

I've got a midterm tomorrow morning, so obviously I had some reading to do tonight. Here's the list:

• Inside the PowerPC 970
• Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate
• Two Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance reviews
• Portrait of a Blogger
• Carbon vs. Cocoa revisited
• TCPA and Palladium Technical Analysis
• Spam meets blogs
• And the usual blogs.

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.

I had a CS 172 midterm today, which obviously meant that I had some heavy duty procrastination to do last night.

In particular, I replaced Metacookie with an RSS feed both here on Linkstew and over on In Passing. I admit I probably should have given metacookie users a chance to transition, but I suck I was so excited by RSS that I accidentally deleted all of the metacookie code without saving a backup before I realized what I'd done, and once I was gone I decided it wasn't worth the time to re-implement a dead technology. Metacookie was fun while it lasted, but I agree with Kevin, and I think RSS is a much more viable and flexible solution anyway.

So that brings us to RSS. What is it, what's it do for you, how do you use it, etc, etc? Kevin already answered most of those questions, but in short, in combination with an RSS browser of some form, it lets you subscribe to sites that you want to keep track of, and it not only tells you which sites are updated, but it also lets you skim the headlines of the sites that you're watching and keep track of particular articles that you've read. When you feed Linkstew's RSS to your RSS browser, your client will grab the titles, first paragraphs, and number of comments of the 13 most recent entries.

And credit where credit is due, Kevin let me borrow his RSS generation code which made my life much easier, and made it of a reasonable size to tackle as a procrastination project.

So over on the left, there's a link to Linkstew's RSS Feed -- just grab that link and feed it to your RSS browser of choice. On the Mac side, NetNewsWire Lite is a very elegant Mac OS X RSS browser that also happens to be free. On the Windows side, uh... I don't use Windows, so I haven't used any of these, so I can't exactly assess what a good free implementation is... Kevin suggested Trillian Pro (the swiss-army-IM-client for Windows) and NewzCrawler, but unfortunately, neither of those are free.

I've got a couple of questions about my RSS implementation for y'all, though:

• Should I use that ugly orange XML button like Kevin has? I totally thought it was something he made up, until I ran into it on another site today.
• Right now I include the comment count under each entry. The purpose of this was to make the reader mark an entry as unread when the comments increase. With NetNewsWire, though, this behavior is a little inconsistent, and I have no idea how other clients work. And I could see this behavior being really annoying... So, good? Bad? Should I make a feed without comment counts?
• 13? The right number, or too arbitrary?

As for today's midterm, I didn't really feel prepared, but that's just the status quo for me. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Yesterday when I stopped in Noah's, I saw this article about five A's players living in a shared house on the front page of the Chronicle. I liked the idea of five baseball players making plenty of money and yet still living together and playing video games enough that I bothered to dig up the article online so I could read it. It made me stop and say, "Hey, look, maybe they're just some ordinary guys, just like me."

Actually, that was a rather timely article, given the sparse attendance at the Coliseum in the first two games of the division series. It's the sort of human interest piece that might just succeed in boosting attendance at tomorrow's game 5.

And now that I have something to identify with, I want them to win even more tomorrow. Pity they kinda got rocked by the Twins today...

And now that I think about it more, if the A's, the Angels, and the Giants all win their division series, California's practically begging for an earthquake.

State Dependent Learning is a pretty well studied phenomena. But in addition to the effects of chemical states and moods described on the linked page, evidence has also been found that a person who studies in the same environment in which he or she is tested will perform better.

So here I am studying for this final and thinking about State Dependent Learning (which has nothing to do with network protocols, I assure you). I'm wired on caffeine right now, but that's not a problem, because I'll be equally wired on caffeine while I'm taking the test. Hell, I'll probably be consuming caffeine while taking the test. I figure I'm not going to be able to take the test in my bedroom, so I'm not going to be able to do anything about the location factor.

But what I'm really pondering is Music. Of course I've been listening to music while studying, but I certainly won't be able to listen to music while taking my final. Instead, when I'm taking tests, I always have some song or another that I hum to myself. Obviously, to be maximally effective, it should be a song I listened to a lot while studying.

So let's see what I've been listening to today:

• Amon Tobin - Bricolage
• Amon Tobin - Permutation
• Amon Tobin - Supermodified
• Lamb - Lamb
• Moby - Play
• Moby - Play: The B-Sides
• Moby - 18
• Radiohead - OK Computer
• Radiohead - The Bends
• Radiohead - Kid A
• Radiohead - Amnesiac

Most of these are conducive to my studying because they either have no lyrics or I can easily ignore the lyrics. In contrast, I cannot study to TMBG no matter how much I love them, simply because I get distracted by unignorable lyrics.

Heck, the song I had stuck in my head during Monday's final was Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box off of Amnesiac, so I should be in good shape to focus on a song I've been studying to during the final tomorrow.

Assuming, of course, I actually study instead of writing about studying.

I know there have been studies of the effect of music on learning, but I don't have time to look them up right now and see if they thought to investigate state dependent learning effects as part of those experiments. Did they test the performance of the subjects with and without music? Did they poll the subjects to see if they were thought about the music they studied to while they were being tested? These would all be interesting questions to know the answers to, and seem extremely important to any study of the effects of music on learning.

I'm such a horrible student. I've got a final in 23 hours, and I haven't even looked to see if there are any practice finals available on the course website. Instead, I'm sitting here thinking about what I'd rather be doing:

1. Go snowboarding. Of course, this is only reinforced by my friend emailing me this morning to let me know that 2002-2003 Kirkwood season passes are already available. Gah, it's so far away!
2. Read more of the book I started last night.
3. Go jetskiing. On the bright side, I'll get to go jetskiing in July and I don't even have to pay for it.
4. Finish up Jedi Outcast, which I've been playing for almost two months now.
5. Figure out what's wrong with Linkstew.

::sigh:: I suppose I'll start studying now. Well, after I go to three hours of meetings this afternoon. And as much as I want to watch the Enterprise season finale tonight, I'll be a good boy and leave it on my TiVo until tomorrow.

Because what better time to start reading a random book because I want to than 36 hours before a final that I have not yet begun to study for?

Yesterday my first homework assignment of the semester was due in my Linguistics class, but things certainly could have gone smoother.

Though I met with a group of classmates on Sunday afternoon to discuss the assignment, and knew what I was going to write, I didn't actually start typing up my responses until it was so late Monday evening that it was very nearly Tuesday.

All along I knew there was a 5 page limit on how long our submissions could be, but I honestly didn't think there'd be a problem. I merrily tapped out my responses, and by the time I finished around 6:30 am (What can I say, I'm easily distracted! At 4 am, for example, I decided I wanted some new playlists for my iPod and spent an hour playing with that...), I had about 4.9 pages.

"Perfect," I thought.

However, I was a little tired to proof-read my submission, and because the assignment was due at 11 am sharp, I decided to print a copy and go to bed, and proof-read and print again if I had time in the morning.

But when I grabbed the printed pages from the printer, something looked funny. I looked closer, and realized that it was single spaced.

I'd written 5 pages single spaced for an assignment with a length limit of 5 pages double spaced.

You do the math.

I never write papers in Word. Normally I use a LaTeX template that I've developed over the years to write papers with. That template defines all of my fonts and spacing and I just have to fill in the paragraphs and TeX does the rest for me. But for some reason, when I started this assignment, I thought using Word would be a good idea. It never occurred to me that Word was a WYSIWYG editor beyond the part where I was using it to visually determine how many pages I'd written. The last time I used a WYSYWYG editor to write a paper, I was in High School.

So it was still 6:30 am, and I was still too tired to care, so I tossed the single spaced copy in my backpback just in case and went to bed. I woke up at 9 am, and spent the next hour and a half doing my damndest, and the best I could manage was 5 pages at 1.5 space with an 11 point font.

I decided that that would have to do, printed again, and headed off to class. I walked into the lecture hall and up to the podium where the assignments were being stacked, and saw that Professor Lakoff was looking at the top paper on the stack. In fact, it looked like he was reading it. I hesitated about dropping my paper onto the pile, and he sensed my presence and looked up at me.

I quickly lowered my eyes and dropped my paper onto the pile and took a seat near the back.

I hesitated not because I was worried about Lakoff reading what I'd written, but because the print on my assignment was so much denser than that paper that was on the top of the stack. If I'd dropped my paper in front of his nose, the contrast in the density of the text would have been immediately obvious. He would have to be blind not to notice that my paper wasn't double spaced and that my font was smaller.

Today, Baseball owners voted to get rid of two teams, though nothing was said about which teams would go beyond speculation that Montreal, Florida, and Minnesota were likely candidates to get axed.

In response to this announcement, AP Sports Writer Jim Litke wrote this piece suggesting what should be done to make major league baseball properly profitable and exciting. I'd have a difficult time recognizing this proposal as baseball, but I think in the long run, it'd work out. Ah well, it's not like it'll ever happen, and fans probably wouldn't go for it. Anyway.

Yeah, this makes three sports posts in a row, I know. When I'm procrastinating, I read sports news. So sue me.

This "class" thing is something I've often heard about, and occasionally even checked out for myself. I'd say that in a typical semester, I make it to about half of my classes total. So I'm a month into my seventh semester at Berkeley, and how am I doing?

Well, so far I've attended every lecture of Folklore, which is unheard of for me. I'm pretty sure that after the first month, I'd have missed at least two lectures of a normal class. I'm going to try to buck the record here and make it to every lecture for the rest of the semester.

Then there's the middle ground with CS 188, where I was at the first three lectures, then I missed two, made it to one (but slept through it), and then missed the last two, so that puts me at more or less my standard 50%. As far as the discussions go, I went to one and a half out of four, and don't really plan to go back. I might stop by tomorrow night just to confirm that decision, but it's not a good idea to tell me something is "optional."

And then there's CS 170. I went to class on the first day, but I don't think I stayed for more than half the lecture before leaving and not going back. As I told a friend after the TMBG concert, "I'd say I'd see you in 170 tomorrow, but I'd be lying." In the worst case, my attendance record for the class will be doubled come the midterm next Thursday, but I'm considering going to this Thursday's lecture. Considering, mind you. I've got to balance out my Folklore attendance some how. ;-)

I had my first classes today, and one of them was Anthro 160, "Forms of Folklore." And after just one lecture, I'm really looking forward to it. I feel an itching at the back of my brain telling me that this is something that I'm going to enjoy, and I haven't seen anything to disprove that yet.

I've heard three things about this class: Good professor, interesting material, bad bad evil term project. And yes, the project is a little insidious, but it doesn't seem that bad...

The project? Collect (at least) 40 pieces of folklore from friends and family and whoever you can find, and gather information about where the informant learned that lore, and what the informant (and others) thinks it means, and so on. Each item is a separate entity, and is supposed to be prepared individually. Analysis of one piece is not supposed to cross-reference the analysis of another piece. Basically, the project is collect 40 pieces of folklore, and then write 40 short reports about all that folklore. And for seven of those pieces, find a printed parallel of that piece of folklore, and examine the parallels and differences. And yes, there's a shear bulk of work to do there, but I think it will be interesting.

If I could get my ducks in a row and didn't have a project to finish for work, Fray Day would be the perfect place for me to start this project. But that's probably not going to happen. My folklore archive isn't due until December 7th, though, so I've got all kinds of time... so I say now.

For the curious, one of the most integral characteristics of folklore is apparently multiple realization. That is, different versions of the story are known all over the place. If someone says "The way I heard it...", you're dealing with folklore.

And in case you can't tell, I'm feeling very drawn in already, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. I'm vaguely thinking about what a blog version of a folklore archive would be like, but I guess I should wait and see how my folklore archive itself turns out. Well, it would be kind of like In Passing, only more focused and with more detail and analysis and categorization.

Sheesh, I thought I had stuff to write here. It's fleeing as I try to put my finger on it. I have an application essay to write, and an essay for english (yes, another one), and math homework I could do, and EE homework I could do, but I that that I had things to say here, and now I can't think of them.