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The following entries were written in the Society and Culture category:
It occurred to me that I associate certain music with the interface through which I played it. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a surprise (something akin to muscle memory), but I wonder if other people ever experience this?
I’m on my way home after spending the weekend in LA for Lauren and Michal’s wedding. Unfortunately, because I was in the wedding party, I don’t have any photos of the ceremony, and have only a few of the reception. I do have some nice ones from before the ceremony, though. This next week is going to be incredibly hectic, but I’ll try to get some of them online soon.
Before I forget completely, I wanted to mention just how awesome farm 255 is. It’s a restaurant in Athens that I went to twice while there for ISWC last week, and it’s everything a restaurant should be.
The International Semantic Web Conference is currently taking place here in Athens, Georgia, and it’s been really great so far.
Earlier this month I spent a few days in Maine visiting friends and enjoying the scenery. Unfortunately, the foliage couldn’t seem to make up its mind, and the trees were mostly either green or brown.
Turning on the television just now, four sequential stations had concurrent news coverage about the E. coli infested spinach fiasco. Maybe the DHS should bump the threat level or something.
It’s been around for a few days now, and I’ve got mixed feelings about Flickr’s new geo-tagging support. On one hand, they’ve done more for the cause of spatial photo annotations in the last few days than anyone has ever done before. On the other hand, the data still ends up being controlled by Flickr, and the simple coordinate approach to geo-tagging means that you can’t attach any other interesting data off of locations.
This most recent trip to California is coming to a close, but it’s been a great trip. I spent four days in San Diego with my parents, three siblings, two brothers-in-law, four nephews and two nieces. We had a great time visiting the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Sea World, paddle boating around and watching fireworks across Mission Bay, and attending a Luau.
It bothers me that when discussing An Inconvenient Truth, WGBH DJs refer to it as being a “Power Point presentation” instead of a “Keynote presentation”.
Kat and I got back from Maryland last night where we moved in a car-load of boxes to my new apartment. The entire round trip from Providence took us about 32 hours. The new apartment is decent — certainly workable for only nine months. I’ll be back there in a couple of weeks to finish moving in and start classes.
Matt, Simon, Katia and I went to Sunset in Boston this past weekend where we had yards of beer. After years of talking about it, I finally had a yard of Guinness.
There are very few things I wouldn’t have considered doing to be able to attend the Long Now seminar from last month with Will Wright and Brian Eno.
Photos from the barbecue in LA are now online.
I spent the weekend (with Kat) in Santa Monica where my two nieces were celebrating a birthday and a baptism.
The other night Matt kept pestering me to grab my camera and get some shots of the approaching storm. I’m sure glad he did because I got about 3 shots off from the balcony before it started pouring rain and this one captured the lightning very well.
ESWC went really well. The Scripting workshop was quite good, making me a bit sad that I missed last years’ at which I was supposed to present a paper. The conference proper was also good, but the hallway (beach) track was far superior to most of the presented talks.
Maybe the way to kick-start this weblog again is to mention that I’m at the airport. Again.
“We’ve basically traded bands for beer,” he said. It’s true; what bands were to us growing up, beer has become.
For a long time, I’ve tried to consider what the best way to present my photos on this website is. Here’s some background on what I’ve done in the past, what I’m doing now, and a solicitation for thoughts on how to move forward.
Went to a talk by Christo and Jeanne-Claude on Friday night at Wheaton where they discussed their current work, Over the River: Project for the Arkansas River
So I’m back from Japan. I have been for about a week, actually. It took a while to get caught up on sleep, though. I haven’t had time to publish all the photos yet, but I’ve put some highlights in a (Flickr) Japan Set. Expect more soon.
Last week, Kat and I spent a few days of spring break in Vermont, doing all the Vermont things we could think of. Also, I leave tomorrow for two weeks visiting Kabir in Japan.
On Saturday Ben, Kat and I went to Beer Advocate’s 3rd Annual Extreme Beer Fest. I think I agree with Ben that this year’s festival wasn’t nearly as creative as last year’s. There was a lot of similarity in the offerings, and the beer overall didn’t seem so much “extreme” as simply “strong”.
I’ve just made public a feature on this website I’ve been playing with for several months. After discussion privacy issues at ISWC with Libby and Bijan, I added support on the photo pages for marking individual photos as private. The idea here is that if you’re in a photo, you have the option of taking it offline.
With over a hundred dollars of new beer, what I really needed was a nice rack to hold it all. Of course, now that I have the rack, it looks rather empty and so I think I’ll need to pad out my supply of large-bottle beers and belgian beer glasses.
I spent the weekend with Kat visiting Tim in Albany.
Happy Squiderific Holidays!
Sad to see John Spencer go. He was a fantastic actor. The future of the West Wing doesn’t look good without him. NBC news just had a bit about his death while showing clips from Leo’s heart attack in West Wing. That seems in very bad taste to me.
Last Saturday we had a great early Thanksgiving in Providence before everyone left town to be with their families, and this week I’ve spent the actual Thanksgiving holiday with family in DC. Photos are now online.
I’m finally back from Ireland (and England) and ISWC. There are pictures online from the conference and my weekend in London.
Another month, another post from the airport. I’m off to Ireland for a week to attend ISWC, and then to London for a weekend to visit Leo. I’ll try to post updates while I’m there, and I’ll post pictures upon my return.
Discussing consumer electronics with Tim earlier today, and then consumerism and Wal-mart, finally leading to peak oil and consumption, I was startled by his reaction to the problem. Startled because despite the fact that I think about these things a lot (likely a significant portion of my life, recently), it’s all become rather muted with repetition. Tim’s reaction brought the impact of the situation flooding back to me.
Kat and I went to the New England Beer Festival yesterday and it was a lot of fun. I think that overall the Belgian and Extreme Beer Festivals had better themes, with potential for better beers, yet the quality of the New England beers was high and consistent.
Pictures from the Keene Pumpkin Festival are now online.
Matt, Kat and I spent the day at the Keene Pumpkin Festival.
I’m drooling over the announcement of Aperture. The demo videos (and quite frankly everything I’ve read about it) make Aperture look like a near-perfect post processing application for photos. It’s clear that Apple took all the serious issues photographers deal with when working in digital, and thought long and hard about how to solve them. From the stacking of rapid-fire shots, to the backup vaults, the pervasive metadata support to the beautiful user interface, Aperture looks like a winner.
Oh my god, I’m finally finished with The Baroque Cycle.
Just got back from a weekend of Sea Kayaking in Maine. It was cold, wet, and windy. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
You can now “Gift” any iTMS album or song to someone. It doesn’t look like you can do this with full iMixes yet, and iMixes are still always public, but I like where things are headed. We’re getting close to being able to send people full mix tapes via iTunes.
Just got back from spending the weekend in Albany with Tim and Gary.
If you could recommend any one book to me, what would it be? Would the answer depend on me (would it be a different answer for a different person)?
I’d like to take this opportunity to warn any of you who might have missed the premiere of ABC’s new Commander in Chief last night to avoid this show at all costs. It was offensively bad. On so very many levels.
New photos are now online from the Cnation mini-reunion at Sunset and the Housewarming at our new place in Providence.
I went to Jamba Juice yesterday (jamba jamba jamba!), and in a parking lot of thirteen spaces, there were three Priuses, plus the one I was driving in. Of course, there were four or five SUVs, but I’m just blown away at how many Priuses there are here. Even more than the dense numbers I see everywhere else. Which is very cool.
I’m back at the airport. Again. Back to LA for a week. I’ve got lots of work to do while there, and lots of other things to take care of, but I promise, I’m going to start posting more often.
All the Wheaton crew was back together this weekend, meeting in Freedom, Maine for Greg and Laura’s wedding. The weather was pretty damp and cold, but the rain mostly held off for the wedding, the reception was under a large tent nicely erected atop several birch trees, and a great bonfire warmed everyone up later on in the night.
Well, I’m off again, this time to LA. Again. I’ll be there through Sunday night, hanging with a critical mass of the samo-fools.
Thanks to Gary for the heads up, we caught Kasey Chambers at the Celebrate Brooklyn festival last night, and it was amazing. I’m so glad I made the trip, because Kasey put on an excellent show.
I’m on a train heading for Washington right now, and tomorrow morning I’ll be driving to Roanoke for an extended family gathering. I’ll be back on a train on Sunday night, and back in Providence on Monday morning.
I’m glad the shuttle is back.
The D&D game raging in my living room has just entered it’s thirteenth hour.
OK. Everyday since getting back, I’ve promised myself that I’d post an update. And sure enough, every day I’d not do it. But today is different. Today is the day that I get back into the habit of posting. I swear.
We’ve been hanging out in the French Quarter and enjoying the night-life of New Orleans. We leave tomorrow heading back to Providence, but New Orleans has been tons of fun.
We made it through Texas! Now for a few days in New Orleans. We’ve staying a couple of blocks from Bourbon Street, so this should be tons of fun. I’ll try to upload some pictures before we leave for home on Saturday.
Simon’s been doing a pretty good job at updating his weblog during our drive, and I’ve been concentrating most of my energy on the driving, so I’ll let him take care of that. But just wanted to post an update saying we’re in Nevada for the night, we’ll be in Simon’s hometown tomorrow night, and Santa Monica on Friday night.
Simon and I have started our cross-country journey.
I’m just leaving the house to head for Boston, and from there I’ll be flying to LA for the weekend. If you need me, call the cell. Otherwise, enjoy the weekend and I’ll be back on Sunday night.
The summer season is upon us, and the solstice is just a week and a half away. Just in time, I’ve discovered Anderson Valley’s Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema. It’s simply wonderful.
Well, I finally got around to seeing Naqoyqatsi last night. It’s a stunning collection of video and audio depicting our technology, culture, and violence (in many senses).
Because I’m a total sucker for these memes, a list of languages used in my music collection (via Kottke).
Another day, another meme: Total size of my music library, last CD I bought, currently playing, and five songs that mean a lot to me.
Wheaton’s Graduation was yesterday. It was great, as always, to see so many old friends and to watch the seniors graduate. So congratulations to the class of 2005. Thanks for being such amazing people, and here’s hoping you stay in touch.
Matt came down to visit this weekend, together with Simon, we found ourselves at a Wheaton party where seniors and the underclassmen that are staying for graduation are all enjoying the week before commencement and the beginning of summer.
Nikon is fucking up big time on this RAW debacle. The refuse to engage the community of their users, and it’s utterly frustrating. Engadget’s recent interview with Steve Heiner, head of Nikon’s DSLR group, had an obnoxious cut-in by Nikon public relations trying to avoid saying anything at all about the RAW issue, or Adobe’s DNG format.
We ended up visiting Shipyard in Portland, Maine, Otter Creek/Wolavers in Middlebury, Vermont, and Magic Hat in Burlington, Vermont. We also stopped at the Great Lost Bear for lunch on Wednesday. Here’s a rundown of where we went, and what we drank.
Lauren hit town yesterday, and today we’re off for a beer-tour of New England. So no posting at least until the weekend. Probably.
I’ve put up pictures from the WCCS Station Dinner at Paragon last night, with a few additional shots of the flowers that are springing up all over Providence.
Dara, Anna and Heath drove down from Bangor today, and Simon and I joined them for the Jimmy Eat World concert.
I’ve been doing terribly at updating this month. Really quite awful. So here’s a recap of the month.
Simon, Kat and I went to see the Dropkick Murphys show at Lupo’s the other night. It was a great show, and Kat helped me put my spikes up (it’s been so long!).
My Death Valley photos are now online.
I’m back from the desert.
Off to LA today for a week in Death Valley. Tons of pictures upon my return. Promise.
It would seem that my need to meticulously record things has replaced my 2004 list of beer with a new 2005 list of the books I’ve read. Here’s a list of books I’ve read since the beginning of January.
With a working computer back in my life, I’ve been cleaning up some code, and making some changes to the website.
Nate and I went up to Boston on Saturday to attend Beer Advocate’s Extreme Beer Fest.
Simon and I just got back from four hours at Lupos where we saw George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic.
In contrast to my flight yesterday, here’s a list of some of the more interesting people I’ve had to sit next to while traveling.
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m going to miss driving in LA. I still hate the driving-in-LA part, but for the past two weeks I’ve been driving a brand new Toyota Prius, and it’s an amazing thing.
Walked down to Izzy’s in the rain last night, and enjoyed the assorted 2am crowd.
The year has somehow snuck past me, and is about to become nothing more than a memory. Just as I was getting really comfortable writing 2004 — with the 4 dropped down, so that the vertical stroke becomes a descender below the baseline. It just made me happy to write it. And now I’ll have to get used to writing 2005. Bleh. Herewith, a summary of what I’ve done this year.
Photos from our Christmas Eve dinner and church service are online.
Went to Father’s last night with Lauren and had some excellent beer.
Here’s a photo of Logan from the plane while we were waiting to be de-iced.
Despite being a complete zoo, the check-in process at Logan was amazingly efficient, and I’m now waiting on my flight back to LA.
Nate and I just bought tickets for the Extreme Beer Fest at the Cyclorama in January.
Seth Godin starts a list of things “every third grader ought to start learning” in “The top 1,000 things to know”.
The silence was getting to me, so here’s a photo from Wheaton’s Luminaria.
Optimizing the image search continues. It’s much faster now than a few days ago (again), but still slow for interactive use. Here’s a screenshot, though, to tide you over.
I had intended to write a short bit about why you wouldn’t be able to browse pictures on this site by location for a long time, but two days of solid hacking on an good-enough solution using RDQL has gotten me so much closer than I would have thought possible just a few days ago.
Today is Buy Nothing Day.
And now, two days of thanksgiving.
The pictures are now available to be browsed by year and month.
I can’t believe Kasey Chambers played in Boston last week, and New York this evening, and I didn’t know about it.
It is totally snowing.
There are now 8642 photos, at least partially annotated, on this site.
The photos from the Beer Festival are online.
The Beer Festival was excellent. Joining Simon, Ben and I were Cate, Amanda and Christian. There was some confusion as to where tickets were to be purchased/picked up, but after that, things went smoothly for the most part.
And now, I’m off to Boston to attend the Belgian Beer Festival.
Today is the day that the Curse went away
I’ve been putting tons of work into the photo annotation code, and am about ready to tackle the trip photos. To test the code, I’ve been adding lots of new pictures, and going back and annotating lots of old pictures.
The Viridian Movement is now half over. And we need it now more than ever.
We ended up at the South Portland Library fall book sale, and loaded up a bag. Between the book sales at South Portland and the local Providence Library, I’ve just acquired a stack of books two feet high.
On a whim, drove to Newport yesterday and walked the Cliff Walk all the way to Rosecliff and back.
Fall color is everywhere. Herewith, photos from the last week.
I ended up watching “I, Robot” last night. What a bizarre mish-mash of culture.
New idea: audio installation with a grid of speakers controlled by cellular automata.
Eno says, “Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.”
So who knew? Richard at Father’s Office grew up in New England and used to bartend at The Great Lost Bear in Portland, Maine.
I’ve begun the long, arduous process of sorting, selecting, annotating, and publishing the roadtrip and Ireland photos.
And then of course there was the incident of the €1,700 dinner bill.
I’m reading The Clock of the Long Now, and it’s great. I’m reminded of a story from KSR’s The Years of Rice and Salt.
ComicCon is in San Diego right now, and Rich and I hung out walking around the booths.
The camera I mentioned earlier is my new Nikon D70. It’s awesome, and I’ve put up a new photo album of shots of surfers and kitesurfers at sunset in Malibu.
It’s Photo Friday again. This week’s subject is “Mother,” and I’ve got the perfect photo.
Today’s wordPhoto is “Boat.”
I just started reading Brian Eno’s A Year With Swollen Appendices and it’s wonderful. Also, WorldChanging just posted a link to a talk Brian Eno gave last November for the Long Now Foundation’s seminars on long-term thinking.
You can now search for photos on this site by place name, latitude/longitude pairs, and Wordnet terms.
Almost all the photos in the pictures section now have individual pages describing who appears in the picture, the date and location at which the picture was taken, and the camera used to take the picture.
So Simon and I drank yards together last night at Sunset. On the topic of beer, as of today I’m making my beer drinking habits (“problem”?) public for all to see. I’ve started generating graphs of total beer consumption, beer types, and locations of drinking. Also, the list of beers these graphs are generated from are available as a text file, or as a hacked-up, work in progress, RDF file.
Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for a sorrowful day.
A photograph of a door in the Garage, Cambridge, submitted to wordPhoto for “Graffiti.”
Photo Friday, a couple days late: Black and White.
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is fantastic.
I want the iTunes Music Store to become friendly to mix-tapes. Except without the tapes.
An entry for Word Photo’s “Night” topic, too late for submission, ends up on my site instead.
Photo Friday: Self-Portrait.
Four photos from the past week.
Thanks to Mike, who alerted me two hours ahead of time, I had a great time at MIT this evening at a talk by Fred Gallagher, creator of MegaTokyo.
By request here is a list of words with dense ascenders.
The most fun, however, came at t