Today was my first day at the new dojo; after three weeks without training I was excited to get back into things. It's a bit of a trip to get there--about one and a half hours by bike and light rail, but it was well worth it. I hope to make it out there three times a week.
A few things were different--stretching followed different patterns, white/black belts only, and a second bow for entering the mat, in a different direction... I haven't figured out that one yet. However, the rest of the class went smoothly, and was a great experience. Everyone was very welcoming and friendly, worked hard, and there was very good energy. At the end I was asked to lead stretches, which was somewhat unexpected, because I had never seen these exercises before! I managed to make it through the whole series, but it was definitely an exciting experience.
I'm home, in a way. The last few weeks have slid past faster than I could keep a grip on them, and the academic ski-jump that was finals week left me temporarily in free fall. There were some hard goodbyes to say.
Yet, stepping off the plane from the midwest, I feel unusually grounded. Things here are engaging and immediate. I'm working at the same software company as a lot of NRST alumns, fooling around with VMWare, and generally being an IT ninja. There are interesting challenges to explore, tinker with, and hopefully resolve, and that makes me happy. There will be LAN parties, summer frisbee, and Aikido to look forward to. It reminds me of irimi, in a way.
The Competetive Enterprise Institute has produced an amazing pair of television ads espousing the wonders of carbon dioxide. The most hysterical bit is the tagline at the end: "Carbon dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life." To concentrate and preserve more of that precious life, I recommend that the members of CEI hold their breath, and keep holding.
Such nonsensical messages shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; CEI is largely funded by an industry with a vested interest in the continued production of "life". The Clean Air Trust identified Shell, GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler as contributers to CEI. ExxonMobil, for example, gave $405,000 to CEI in 2002, the largest contribution in the list of "Public information and policy research" donations by the company.
Today was a great day in Psych. We were discussing the formation of phobias (specifically, classical-conditioning models of phobia response creation), and went over some common phobias like:
To recap the events of the past few weeks:
Aphyr.com suffered a brief span of amnesia due to faulty ram, which has since been replaced. Everything seems to be working great now. In the meantime, I've started working at Sys/Net, which is much more fun than tech support. It's chaotic, unsupervised, and way the heck too much fun. Running around with cable testers, patching in ports and messing around with DNS is my kind of job. d=('_`)=b
I've written an Atom 1.0 feed for Ragnar. Other changes include a more organized system for passing metadata, improved image thumbnail layout, better cross-platform support, and new graphics. The administration interface still needs a lot of work, though.
This paper explores an interesting technique for measuring the angles of light rays at each point on a CCD, by using arrays of small lenses. There's a decrease in the resolution of the image, but the data captured can be recomputed to generate photographs focused at varying depths in software. This also means that photographs can be taken with larger depth of field without changing the aperture. I'd really love to have a camera that could do that...
In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay on the pitfalls of English prose, describing what he considered to be the common mistakes made in modern writing. Politics and the English Language identified dead metaphors, over-used phrases, and vague diction as habits to be eliminated from writing, for they tire the reader, confuse the meaning, and destroy the specifics of one's intended message. Whether purposeful or accidental, such errors have not yet been eliminated from the English language: 60 years later we still make the same mistakes, albeit in slightly different forms. While most writers keep their prose admirably clear of such obstructions, passive, vacuous, and needlessly complex sentences cloak the modern world of bureaucracy and politics in a haze of pretentiously irrelevant verbosity.
Take the first of Orwell's charges: the dying metaphor. Some of his examples of have now faded from use, like "ring the charges on" or "take up the cudgels for." After all, few people fight with cudgels nowadays. However, some of these phrases remain in circulation. "Toe the line" has become embedded in our vocabulary to the extent that it fails to arouse any trace of visual imagery. One has only to examine any political statement to encounter these tired phrases being trotted out once again for display. We speak of "cutting off ties" with other nations, or refer to America as "a shining beacon" of democracy, and no one thinks anew. The problem of dying metaphors hasn't gone away, but merely shifted to a new collection of unimaginative analogies.
Why the Lucky Stiff (author of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby) has written a slick web frontend to the IRB Ruby shell, allowing anyone to try out the Ruby language from their browser. There's also a handy tutorial available.
Okay, this is officially the coolest peripheral ever.
So I'm back at work again, but my job has changed. No longer am I the stealthy IT ninja, whose responsibility it is to replace components the day before they they break, anticipate obscure printer errors that could bring ruin to the marketing department, repair desktops while their users are out for a cup of coffee, and arrive silently in an employee's cube before they hang up the phone. I'm still messing about with the network monitoring system (especially the TAP gateway, which fails silently half the time), but my official job is now within the realm of support. Working against time on a laptop with a failing hard drive, I'm writing a support web site with the Ruby on Rails framework which will interface with our customer relations management service.
Let me tell you this: Ruby. Is. Amazing.