Belated All Hallow's Eve

(Thank's Jen for sending this around, it brightened my day immeasurably!)

"Sunday Bloody Sunday" by George Bush

Rock song originally performed by U2 remixed Dubya-style. It first appeared as the lead track for U2's 1983 album War. http://onegoodmove.org http://thepartyparty.com/ This is seriously hilarious. and catchy. disturbing really.

if you can't stand the heat...

ok, so the summer time has dragged me away from frivolous computer tasks...
AND, my laptop died a most ignoble death hours after printing off my last paper of the spring semester.

i mis my iBook.
i would desperately love to get a new intel macBook. but... money is a deciding factor, and it decides that i dont get one!

i would however, like to get a sandblaster. so i can more easily prep bikes.
thats right. bicycles.
for painting.
see, Jana let me ride her 3 speed cruiser a few months ago, and i fell in love with it. it was like i was 7 again!
so i researched the hell out of it, and figured i couldnt get a bike that i would like for less than $500. so i thought id build one.
i havve all the parts, and i still plan on doing this, but i lucked into a great cruiser at an auction for $80. and then i bought 4 or 5 more bikes for $5. and picked up a few more here and there... and... now im rebuilding bikes for friends!

almost done classes. which is great.
two 20 pagers to write up on Aristotle. and then im FREE!

uhm... oh yes. i just acquired a position at Russell Books! they asked me if i would like a job this week when i was casually browsing for a book. jordan and andrea are super fantastic and i know im going to llove it there.

and im planning up for a short cruising trip to Hornby island in August! that should be fun. a chance to go sailing on my bigger boat again, and just relax with vuirtually no cares at all!

but for now, i must go back to work so i can afford all these little niceties!

motivation: 0.

omg i have no desire to write this damned, damned, dirty phil of mind paper!

good days, bad days, you know i've had my share...

today is going to kick serious ass. 
i had minor freak out the other day, but i was able to settle down and realize that it comes from a fear of being incapable of depending upon others. i try not to anyway, but at times, it is impossible and unreasonable to do it all oneself. it is in these specific cases that I need to be very clear in my communication to others that i am depending upon them, not to perform some menial thing, but to ensure that my world doesnt crumble down in flaming ruin...

im soon off to breakfast with the A-Team (dan and Colin) and jenny might come join us. and the day will be filled with caffeinated paper writing and hopeful ruminations of the fertile minds of the drained undergraduate cadre.

That all days were like this. 

No Possible World

Well, I officially backed out of my crewing position in the Fireball world championships this coming May. This is a tremendously difficult decision for me to make. But I am quite certain that my wrist will not withstand two weeks of intense competition. My Doctor agrees with me. This does give me an opportunity to finish my degree requirements this summer, but that is minimal compensation to say the least.

So much writing left to do for this semester. Best get back to it. 

*I* am in a superposition!!

sitting in phil of physics... talking about EPR and im bored out of my skull. 

its all bizarre, and in a very uninteresting way.

Sunny Sunday Study Session

Breakfast, and Aristotle. does it get any closer to The Good?
At least qua form, no. (Met 9.9!)

updates throughout the day, as the fancy hits me.

Sleep is a weakness that will be measured against our soul upon death.

Well, my presentation on Chalmers "Consciousness and its place in nature" didn't suck too hard. especialyl considering i was late, and slept from 7:30am until 8:37am today, and from 4:30am until 8:30am yesterday.

The miracle of a coherent outline. Filling in the blanks on my pedantic traipse across chalmers paper netted me over 3500 words without breaking a sweat. I have yet to do a full account of his epiphenominalist account.

Definately need to to do up a summary quick sheet for friday though.
yup, i get to present again on friday. yay me.

Now to a detailed examination of Stewarts paper on Metapphor a la Black and davidson. or maybe some piers Anthony. for an hour. just an hour. yeah. thats it.

Arabic this week was FREAKING AMAZING. vocab and grammar are way cool.
I desperately need some tutalage on english grammar - it will make learning a new language more accessible. Mostly i just want to know what the hell a masucline indefinate acquisitive noun is, and why it should be different mid-sentence from any other placement.

global warming or what?

its snowing outside.
some people think this is normal for march. but this is Victoria. it doesnt snow in victoria. much less in march.

Semantics class with Fiona - davidsonian and neo-davidsonian, as well as thematic roles.
interesting stuff.

For my own part, two questions come to mind.
1.) (last first) why doestn jackendoff (and or later authors who are working with thematic roles) enforce spatial locality strictly. it seems that the subtle ambiguity surrounding "recipient" might be consistently describable in terms of location, given that we define the existence of any particular agent by our capacity to define the spatial location for that agent at such-and-such a time. Problems of materialism/idealism arrise, but, they tend to arise regardless.

2.) it seems (going from the prof and what is supposedly written in the text) that many semanticists prefer davidsonian over neo-davidsonian structures. I have a feeling this is because it is "easier" in the linguistic sense, for a native speaker to allow the "language" do the metaphorical extensions of the argument/adverb application to the statement. however, this seems the lazy way out. Perhaps i dont understand what is actualyl happening, but i would think that a neo-davidsonian system should be prefered.
It would be fun to attempt to implement something like an n-D comparator/inquisitor function in prolog or Lisp or scheme (scheme maybe?) though the relational stuff seems to lend itself to a more OO implementation... food for thought at least.

YEah, thats right. I missed class this morning. again.
how worried am i? not at all. because people with mustaches make me miss class. thats right. i said it.

and im not even rick james...

early morning musing

I am going to try mucking about with LaTex again. i used it back in 96 - at the time, i thought that html derivatives (xml anyone?) would take over the sgml layout system. it hasn't happened like that, maybe because academia is very insular. but having to produce very very large papers for school now, Word is showing off its suck.
Pagemaker etc, are all well and good, but are overkill. I just want simple layout sytem that manages citations, and looks delicious when printed.

I really dont want to go to class today. i dont know how im going to learn anything more than i would just doing my readings on my own.

random inspiration

Had a thought whilst scanning through some other sites.

i dont need to have all the blog functionality i want within the same framework. i just need a meta-framework that makes it SEEM seamless. (seamless seeming is what philosophy of perception is best at anyway.)

I have done this bofre with a few other architectures i've setup. at the time i thought they were horrible kludges. but now that i reconsider it... i think its just a matter of abstracting functionality. the integration framework is like a 2nd order system that wraps the 1st order functional representations. as long as the wrapper system carries the L&F along with it... then all should be happy happy. 

also, del.icio.us seems moderately useful. but i still like my original plan.  

Composition test

These are two modern pieces that I like. I don't think that philosophy of aesthetics has much of a grip on reality, so I wont attempt to defend my choices. It should sufffice to say that they are related to pleasant memories.

Saw this at the SFMOMA:


Saw this in The Thomas Crown Affair:

This posting was made with ecto. I have tried MarsEdit and Bleezer and a few others so far. No, none of them do everything I want in the way I want. Marsedit is nicely minimalist. ecto would be ideal if blogger used movableType...
I would ideally like:

• a sidebox with my recent itunes junk. i am attemtping to get RecentTunes to do this but it doesnt like working over ssh easily. i may have to resort to kungTunes
• a sidebox with my to-Do stuff listed, preferably with a simple interface for editing, othewise i wont use it.
• a sidebox with some random stuff, recent books or food or whatever (I am setting up 43Things to try and manage this, but it seems a bit convoluted for my needs.)
• photo gallery that acts like a gallery. i prefer a gallery to a photoblog, also, none of the photblogging tools seem to work with os x and blogger. (picasa i can use via VirtualPC, but what a kludge!)

Morning mutterings

Being a perfectionist is a bit of a struggle at times. When i find something that is intriguing, I typically dive in and want to mster it, underrstand it completely. Over the years i have become a "lazy Perfectionist" - i want things to work, bu they must work perfectly. I am constantly dissapointed, especially when it comes to technical things: "why did they do it that way?" is a common muttering in my monologue. 
This goes now for this whole blogger thing. I want things to work and look just so. But they don't. 
For instance, i would like to have a few scripted folders or tools or whatever that would let me edit links in a sidebox here. or simply post recently played itunes songs... but sofar nothing seems to fit the requisitely elegant model i have in mind. which makes me worry that i may get it in mind to build what i want. but this is a bit more than i care to invest at the moment. 

Breakfast of pancakes, italian sausage, and coffee. Postal service, Franz Ferdinand and David Gray to set the sunday morning mood.

chemical induced insomnia

well, so far, I am rather satisfied with blogger. The dashboard widget is simple but effective. I am trying out Ecto. It is quite complete.

Currently listening to:
Hornblower During the Crisis (Disk 2 of 3) from the album "Hornblower During the Crisis" by C.S. Forester

To do:

• automate link additions, a la interconnected.org maybe?
  
• modify the side bars.
  
• modify the template.

The march of the widgets

This is just a test to see how freakin' cool Mac OS X makes my life. I have always bought in to functionality as necessary (Aristotle is, after all, The Man) but my lifelong exposure to The Apple Way has spoiled me in many ways. I prefer things to just work. Much like a pencil, I want my tools to be uncomplicated, suited to the purpose and aesthetically minimalist. 

For this reason, I am happy to be trying out Blogger. This posting comes from a dashboard widget, and it seems quite inubtrusive to my general digital life. Hopefully, I will be able to incorporate more (useful) data output into my life.