Category: Leonard Richardson

February 12, 2005 /

So I lied. I still don’t trust that my funny-filter is better than yours, but I do think it’s better than Dog Bites Dog’s funny-filter (if not, alas, its funny-generator). It also occurred to me that a DBD weblog has a function other than filtering: I think it’s a good thing to archive and save the best bits for future humans, who won’t understand their context, because the links have rotted. But still.

Relatedly, like most postadolescent males, I have harbored in my gut the desire to start a satirical news publication. Since by far the best part of any such rag is the headlines, though, that’s all I ever bothered to produce. For the last few months, whenever I’ve felt particularly savage about something in popular culture, I’d come up with a headline and archive it. That wasn’t often enough to be a viable source of content on its own. Combined with somebody else’s generated headlines, though, it might be!

It is for these combined purposes that I’ve set up Dog Bites, a weblog in the vein of Spam As Folk Art. It should have new content every day or two, or more often if DBD is on a hot streak and I’m feeling hateful. I hope you like it! (And hey, my SAFA co-maintainers, let me know if you want in on some of this action.)

Little epiphany

February 7, 2005 /

It occurs to me that I finally have a use for that old iMac on which I installed Yellow Dog Linux over a year ago: the Ultra Gleeper.

Also, check out this hilarious graph from Leonard’s official Gleeper paper, on methods of obtaining new links to recommend:

Method Link quality Limitations
Stumbling upon incoming links while following outgoing

links

 Pretty good Depends on serendipity
Google Web API (link: queries) Not good: ordered by

PageRank instead of recentness

 1000 queries/user/day
Technorati web API (Cosmos query) Excellent 500 queries/user/day, frequently down
del.icio.us screen scraping Excellent I tried this and Joshua Schachter got mad at me

December 8, 2004 /

Leonard says that it was in fact Zappa, and offers further quotage:

“In every language, the first word after ‘Mama!’ that every kid learns to say is ‘Mine!’ A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say ‘Mine!’ when you grow up, has — to put it mildly — a fatal design flaw.”

Maria notes that in fact it’s usually more like “no,” then “mine,” then “mama.” I think that only makes the quote more interesting, as does the fact that it relates not at all to free culture, and very well to the MPAA/RIAA model of purchasing and licensing. To quote Leonard himself, “‘own’ ‘it’ ‘on’ ‘DVD!'”

More on this later.

Update 12.09.2004 1615 hrs: Maria wishes me to state that though she has studied development, she is not in fact a developmental psychology student, and that I have never stated any facts about her or quoted her accurately, and also that I should be dragged out in the street and shot.

See? I did it again!

October 14, 2004 /

Maria and I went to San Francisco last weekend, and it was pretty great. We left very early Saturday morning and got back very late Monday night, and although we unfortunately missed hanging out with Kris, we did get to play games and bum around with Leonard and Sumana a lot.

It was like every few hours we gained a new and spectacular privilege: aside from Leonard’s food, to which I’ll get in a moment, we discovered the mafia geese of Fairyland; we gained admittance to the residence of Kevin (more on this soon too); we got a quick-but-personal tour of Berkeley; we spent big wads of money at Games of Berkeley; and we played arcade games both vintage and new. Hell, Maria attended the national American Academy of Pediatrics conference practically by accident, and I got to have one of the first looks at Leonard’s newest awesome secret project (so awesome, he got banned from the API of at least one site!). It was that kind of weekend.

Now, Leonard’s food. It should be sufficient to say that Leonard’s fondue made me–the guy who hates cheese–like fondue, but I’m going to say more. We also got to eat his first-ever attempt at home fries, which were unfairly perfect, and his first-ever attempt at pie ice cream, which was also pretty freaking great. Leonard’s food is world peace. Leonard’s food is the answer.

As for Kevin’s house: when Ian and I were younger, we had on our 386 Magnavox computer a program called Floorplan Plus. Because we were dorks–huge dorks, the budding dorks of legend–we spent hours on that thing, designing about a million floor plans so that both of us could completely fail to go into architecture.

My houses were silly, but I always tried to make them sensible. Ian, on the other hand, was constantly reinventing a place he called Jamhouse. You can pretty much imagine what it was like: the perfect residence, as envisioned by a ten-year-old boy. And Kevin’s house is that house, but with a better sound system and more art. It is my future house’s role model.

I need to say something about Sumana too, because she was a major part of the weekend and I’ve barely mentioned her. We stopped for lunch in Berkeley at De La Paz; it was warm and we’d already walked a lot, and Maria (who is hypoglycemic) was getting kind of dizzy. Sumana got up, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but first snuck over to the bar to have the lone waiter express-deliver a Coke to replenish her blood sugar. That is the kind of friend Sumana is.

Before February of this year I’d never been west of Minnesota, and now I’ve been to California three times in eight months. Two-thirds of that is due entirely to Leonard and Sumana, whose hospitality and thoughtfulness are boundless and unfailing.

October 8, 2004 /

I wouldn’t mind seeing I Heart Huckabees, which people seem to like. I like Jason Schwarzman (everybody likes Jason Schwarzman), and I liked David O. Russell’s Three Kings, and I like high-concept movies. Usually.

What gets me, though, is that all the critics go “existential detectives! Quantum mechanics! It’s WACKY!” and nobody mentions Dirk Gently. I’m not going to get huffy about this, because art is theft, but hasn’t anybody read those books? They’re not as well known as the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, but they were still bestsellers. Apparently about six dorks on movie forums are the only ones who’ve picked up on it.

Yeah, that puts me in real good company. As I wrote to Leonard yesterday, I’m never certain that I have any taste.

October 7, 2004 /

I bet you were wondering whether, early this Saturday morning, Maria and I were going to fly out to San Francisco and visit Leonard and Sumana and Kris.

Well, GUESS WHAT!

Update 10.08.2004 0022 hrs: Possibly I am lying about Kris.

That accursed picture

September 27, 2004 /

First Leonard called me out on it, then Maria called me out on it, then Leonard sent me a text-only debunking, then tonight Jon of all people sent me the definitive Snopes proof. Yes, I would have noticed the weird TV shadow and the odd intersection of the panel and the teletype if I’d been looking for it, but I wasn’t, OKAY? OKAY! I TAKE IT BACK! I’M SORRY! I QUIT!

I don’t actually quit.

If you monitor human-human interaction, you do it on your own time, understand?

September 24, 2004 /

I’ve been thinking about my performance evaluations class (which I’m failing, but still find interesting, except for the math), Leonard’s comment on bad metrics and the concept of keystroke counters and loggers (thanks to spam). There’s a quote in the textbook for the aforementioned class, “that which is monitored improves,” attributed to “Source Unknown.” So I can’t call out the person who said it for being wrong, which it is.

Here’s a handy set of heuristics for deciding when to monitor. For you! It would be better drawn as a flowchart or tree, but I’m lazy.

Good Things To Monitor

  • Efficiency of system-system interaction, based on system output

  • Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the system, based on user-satisfaction output

Bad Things To Monitor

  • Quality of human-system interaction, with the goal of improving the human
  • Quality of human-system interaction, based on system output

Incidentally, this also covers the basis of the problem I have with standardized testing. Or the lecture-test educational system as a whole, in fact.

Update 09.25.2004 1054 hrs: Leonard has pointed out to me that I somehow copied the wrong Crummy hyperlink. It’s fixed.

September 23, 2004 /

Leonard has pointed out that that picture‘s caption is incredibly fake when you think about it for a second, as I failed to do. The concept of “home computer” in 1954 would have been equivalent to “home aircraft carrier” today; there was no concept of the use for one, much less a market, and it’s not like whatever device actually is pictured there would have had any home applications itself.

I still want to know why there’s a steering wheel and a teletype, though. Maybe it’s for trying to drive a vehicle without a windshield. Or… or a very complicated bank vault.

July 26, 2004 /
  • Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
  • Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
  • Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
  • Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
  • Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
  • Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
  • Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
  • Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
  • Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
  • I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as

    The Greatest

    SKETCHBOOK

    Ever In The History Of Time

    which basically means I win.

I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.