June 20th, 2010
That’s not exactly the case… I did wake up in a camper at my inlaws’ house this morning, packed up to head to the center of upstate NY for work (presentation / demo tomorrow). That’s right, I woke up, inscribed a book of pirate adventures for my father-in-law, then drove the dogs to the kennel in Saratoga Springs and Kristin to the airport so she could visit a friend in Baltimore.
While I drove to Rome, I thought about my father, listening to an old Canned Heat album, one of his favorite bands back in the day, and a perfect companion on those country roads and the Thruway. Upon arrival at my aged hotel room, I sat down and wrote out as much as I could quickly remember about his timeline — where he lived and traveled at various points, some of his key moments, trauma, tragedies, moments of joy and terror.
Looking at the few pages I have jotted down, I realize I need to dig deeper into my memory for more about his life, and I also need to turn to his old workmates and friends, my mom, brother, sister, uncles, aunts, anyone who might remember more and help me fill in the details. Yes, another project — a bio of perhaps novella length that gives him a proper place in all our memories.
Because in the end, that’s all we have is what we leave in others.
And why not; he never got a proper eulogy…
So the day was actually quite fatherful, though only because I worked at it. This project should be fun.
Tags: bio, dad, writing
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June 19th, 2010
On this 5-week road trip (post to follow), I’ve been inspired to research and write an extended essay on how water has greatly shaped how our earth and culture and selves have developed. Devastating, powerful, life-giving, heck even holy rituals such as baptisms often take place in water.
What interests me is researching whether where, how, and with what power water flows has played as strong a role in shaping how things have developed as guns, germs, and steel, as argued by Jared Diamond in his now classic study.
I’ve begun to outline some thoughts on my nascent wiki at inverspace.com, which will eventually migrate over to this site. What I’d really like to play with is mapping the earth’s watersheds. If you know of any sites that provide this already, please mail me. Here is the start of an interesting site out of Carleton that provides a tutorial on exploring your watersheds (sorry, only applies to those in the continental U.S.).
And to think, all of this from a simple walk in the woods, where I pondered the direction of a stream’s unexpected transit under a canopy of verdant maples. I expected the flow to move toward the murky pond in the middle of a farm field downhill from the stream, but it flows away from the field before ending up in a nearby lake.
I dunno; the pursuit of this ambitious endeavor might mean going after a history, geography, or geology degree next. I mean, linguistics can’t be the end of the academic road, can it? That would be tragic.
Tags: essay, water
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June 1st, 2010
You’ve probably noticed I’ve migrated much of my old trollcode.com blog over to here. The idea is to get back into blogging, but instead of using code that I rolled myself, I’m moving to a more standard blog engine.
Standardizing has its pros and cons; on the downside, there’s loss of control (I wanted that icon RIGHT THERE!), but on the upside, there’s interoperability, ease of installation and maintenance, and tons of existing plug-ins and themes. Finally, since my job has me extending the capabilities of wikis, it’s not long before I get to extend some of Wordpress’ capabilities for some form of pay. Kind of a win-win right to the bank. Well, at least a small piggy bank…
So, I’m back to blogging (though I maintain that wikis are where long-term digital online thoughts should reside) because I think it’ll be fun to revisit a diary-type system online. I get so many ideas in a day, I figure I should share some of the better ones. Or at least the ones that you might draw some use from.
So I’m back into the fold of using someone else’s code to get my point across. This is why it doesn’t belong on trollcode anymore, which is where I want to keep my more experimental programming projects. This howlingmime site is all about me as a performative (and sometimes constative) person, including my online sel{f,ves}, juggling, storytelling, game mastering, strumming, beating, and telling like it is (for now).
Thanks for reading.
Email me with responses; I’ve shut off comments, since this is my space. Set up your own if you want to post ephemera that end up sticking to the web for a long time…
Note: speaking of sticking, it seems my import from xanga (where I’d mirrored trollcode) to this site caused some strange behavior with categories. Ignore tehm for now. I’m more into tags anyway.
Tags: rationale, site
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September 10th, 2009
an awesome word on its own and an even more awesome role playing system developed by scott murray. tonight i participated in the start of a campaign that is playtesting the system. it works amazingly well. i won’t capsize any pintos on this, but let’s just say there are solid mechanics to handle any sort of skill check imaginable, and the depth of storytelling possible over im is amazing. i’ve wanted to run a game over im for some time now, and i think i see now how best to do it. i’ve been playing a game over skype with some old friends, and it’s worked out pretty well, but their use of the battlemat and the dm’s non-going-around-the-table makes it hard to “be there” compared to the other players. but this everyone’s-in-over-im structure puts everyone on the same ground, and allows scott to share information with individuals over one-on-one im sessions.
so, one word to describe the system: brilliant! there are a number of things i’ve thought of before that are in there, but many that i’ve never even considered. i’m so looking forward to the next session, and seeing where the story takes us.
sigil being a more role playing focused system and scott being a more anarchist cartographer (sigil’s term for a dm), we haven’t yet experienced combat, but i imagine it will be equally intense and flexible. spellcasting is well planned out, but there too i’ve not seen it in practice, so this is something you’ll just have to check in with me on in another two weeks, when we pick up the action in this tower of magic.
a fitting near end to a gruelling week in rl…
Tags: role playing, sigil
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June 9th, 2009
the heat in the day has started to wither a few of the plants in the garden, so i’ve taken to spending more time in the evenings taking care of them. they seem to like the sound of the guitar under the full moon.
pulled 6 roma tomatoes off the vine today. many more to come in the coming weeks. great seeimg them redden — been watching them for weeks now, salivating, waiting for the dinner bell to do the bell thing and ring.
also the second eggplant has started to develop on the eggplant plant. can’t wait to try it, though i suppose i ought to. and cucumbers are coming soon, the first few measuring 3-4 inches today.
more squash to come, and zucchinis still so impressive they put my assumptions to shame. carrots and beets not to much more down the road.
couldn’t be happier on this front. they’ve made great pan, grill, and salad fodder. last time i had a garden anything like this was in 9th grade way back in maryland. we’d turned an old dog run into a garden, and grew beans off the side of the house. impressive! not sure why we didn’t continue the practice overseas. maybe we were explicitly forbidden from turning the backyard into a garden. there’s always rented garden space! i will keep this in mind in case we end up unable to garden in our immediate vicinity when we make it back over. kristin, please remind me of this in case i forget.
back inside, staying up late working on proposals (got the work ethic of a beast of burden). maybe that’s why i’m such an ass sometimes! good to sometimes have a movie on that you’ve seen a thousand times in these moments of solitude. thanks, real genius! not necessarily the most carefully put-together film, but a cult classic for nerds the world over. moles and trolls, moles and trolls, work, work, work, work, work!
back to it, i guess.
Tags: garden, proposals
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May 28th, 2009
submitted an abstract for some document classification work i’ve been doing lately. feels good to even sign up to write a 4-page paper about what i’ve been up to. it’s one thing to write a project report, another thing still to make i sound all academic. i s’pose this will occupy art of the weekend.
but not the whole thing. we’ve got plans to have a picnic, go see some plays, and hit a few museums. tomorrow, we’ll start with museums and a coffee shop or two to get in some work on our personal projects. so good to be out of school and able to focus on, frankly, more important things.
pulled down some data today at work and did some slicing and dicing. feels good to pull out the ginsu code ninja skills. i’ll need ‘em if i’m going to test out my summarization system on the duc04 dataset and find time to participate in the plagiarism detection competition…
also started gathering a few stories for a collection i’m calling against the grain of truth. these will be stories insired by recent events in my life, but with chilling consequences. consider a work of catharsis. also started bringing together some poems for a collection i’m calling the limits of observation, in which i’m railing against the hubris of man to think we have the answers with our so-called science.
anyhoo, looking forward to productive times this summer! time to exit stage left…
Tags: abstract, collections, programming
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May 27th, 2009
aided by some old nirvana blasting in my headphones, i submitted an abstract, entitled “Low-Cost, Semantic Models of Sentence Salience for Document Summarization” this evening to the doceng conference. i might change the name, but for now, that’s the title. i’ve basically taken my thesis and condensed it down to 4 pages. still needs more condensing, but it’s coming along. maybe i should use my summarizer to summarize it!
i have another paper i’d like to submit, tentatively called “Classifying the Sensitivity of Proprietary Documents Using Ensemble Models” that i need to get to either later tonight or pretty early tomorrow, as the deadline is midnight central european time. let’s see how it goes.
ah, that time zone. miss it sometimes. so many influential people live in that zone — and so many cultures that it seems have found a way to town together in some loose union bound by a single currency.
in the meantime, just trying to eat out of the garden back in the good ole u s of a! another squash tonight; half of our food lately has come from our own li’l piece o’ earth, raised up from seed in 4′x4′ raised beds. now there’s something that’s not abstract, and that we all can truly enjoy!
Tags: abstract, garden
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May 26th, 2009
this is something i’ve been thinking a bit about, since once day (maybe within a year), i’ll likely move a few more thousand miles away from just about everyone i know.
i’ve been gaming for a few months with old friends from maryland, and we’ve had some good success with skype as a teleconference system. this lets the dm talk with the two of us who are in geographically disparate locations (almost) as if we’re in the room. the trick is that in order for us to be heard, we sometimes have to raise our voices and interrupt the in-person action. it’s not ideal, but it’s definitely workable.
i wonder if we’ll be able to game much once i’m further afield, say in europe. ’cause once i’m there, that’ll be the best way to get in touch with me. i’d like to keep gaming with folks here in austin, but i wonder if they’d be as willing to put up with having a computer present as a mediator with a
i’d be willing to get up early in the morning (2am central european time for an 8pm central start time) to make it happen. we’ll have to see if this is possible once this is the case.
what else can be done over great distances? i’d love to be able to play music in real-time with friends back east and in other parts of the country. still waiting for someone to develop the enabling technology. hackers out there, are you listening? think skype with instruments. or rock band for real, not the five-button plastic instruments. i don’t quite have the skill or interest to devote multiple years to developing this kind of ware, but i’m sure someone is. i’d pay for it.
anyhoo, we do so much over great distances… even immersive tabletop gaming is very possible.
next step: videoconferencing to be able to see the battle mat!
Tags: distance, role playing
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May 25th, 2009
i mean, really served.
you’ve put more on the line than i’ve ever been able to.
and much more than most.
thanks.
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May 24th, 2009
we’ve been so much more spontaneous these past few weeks.
just this week, we rapidly turned around a request to got to adult spelling bee, then went out to dinner and dropped by another friend’s place to play a board game and stop-and-chat. had a great time, and didn’t get home until after 2am — on a weeknight! at least it’s not a school night anymore. i have my life back!
last night, had friends over, grilled out, and ran them through the next chapter in the sci-fi role playing world i’ve been running. had friends over for dinner tonight somewhat on-the-fly and hung out past midnight. inviting a friend over for brunch tomorrow. huzzah! so, those out there — let’s get together soon and hang out!
not having the burden of school over my head has even helped my posture and digestive health. not to mention the fact that i’m sleeping better…
it’s gonna be a great year.
patriotism prep for tomorrow: john cougar mellencamp. i played along on the mandolin…
Tags: getting out, role playing
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