searching for the ineffable
What happened? Why am I dormant? Is it that the winter has lasted so long? Is it the gray, rainy, cold day? Is it an overwhelm of work and lectures to hear and life to live and paperwork to fill out?
Today, I can’t relate to hibernation. Today, I burn.
currently playing: the future sound of london – “papua new guinea” (accelerator, disc 1)
This little toy aggregates and displays the latest images that LiveJournal users have been posting. “They may be subject to copyright and may not be work safe,” reads the warning. LJ users seem to post images rather frequently – every time I reload the page, all of the new loads are completely different. Of course, LJ has what, over a million users? So the volume is not that surprising. Amusing, though.
While we’re at it, Ethan pointed me at Random Personal Picture Finder ™, which makes up a random string likely to be commonly used by digital cameras, and searches Google Images for it.
Halley questions the week’s seven-day length, and I for one am with her. Actually, it’s more that April (well, post-friends’-wedding last weekend really) is one continuous work stint.
You know, I like it. It’s liberating. I don’t get to ignore laundry or bills or my teaching for too long; but most tasks can be put off if they need to be – and these days there are tangible results after every encoding stint, spurring me on. This, these days right now, is when I get to actually say what I’ve been waiting so long to say about the Roland corpus. I say it by putting angle brackets around my argument. By this coming weekend, I’ll have enough encoded that we can start playing with the semantic patterns that emerge. It’s been a long time coming, but now that it’s less than a month to presentation, the work is flying, exhilarating. I feel focused, and remember once again why I love my work so much.
“I was gonna be done with this file by noon. Noon!”
“Well, you know. Noon – eight – geologically speaking, they’re practically the same moment.”
I’m doing enough work to be satisfied this weekend, even considering that April is so busy we aren’t supposed to have weekends. In-between, we’re finding out that candy apple red works well not only on bleached hair but on henna-treated as well.
No, not the recent Stephenson novel, but this free gadget for Mac OS X users. Allows you to use the keyboard to launch applications and do much more – Dan Dickinson’s tutorial is excellent for discovering most of its features. I like this app much better than LaunchBar, which isn’t bad but got to be kind of a nuisance. Quicksilver is just… slick. And with a gorgeous interface to boot.
So, the Mac OS X Trojan scare was just that. A PLOY by a virus protection software company to FURTHER its own ECONOMIC INERESTS.
Well, I never.
Halley Suitt’s tribute to her father on the second anniversary of his death makes me think of the three years gone by since I’ve lost mine. Of family, blood and chosen, of interpersonal relationships, of my sadness at how often we manage to forget what’s important.
I’m not shy about political ranting here at Words’ End, but this time I’ll leave it to the professionals. (NYTimes link, login required)
Well, it had to happen sometime.
