My sister recently got back from a missionary trip to the Dominican Republic. Before she left, I gave her my old Nikon 6006. She really put it to good use, taking 20 rolls of slides. I scanned her selection of favorites.
In other news, I get to write perl all day for my job. Then I go home and read about nicer languages and wish I was smart enough to apply them at work. Sigh.
Every time I think I've gotten too ridiculous for Dr. Abed Solomon, he replies. I wonder how far I can go.
I recently started a discussion with a Togolese about helping him retrieve USD$15million from a bank account so he and I can become rich. It has been interesting so far.
I got an exciting email a couple of days ago. Somebody smart (you probably know the name) is working on the spam problem, and asked me about trust metrics. I'll post more as soon as it's clear the person wants this info public.
Paul Graham's www.ArcHub.org says:
When you design a new language, you have to write programs in it to know whether it's any good. We decided to use Arc to write a new, free, programmable, spamproof Web-based email service.
I wonder if the two are related!
The USGS's Volcano Watch page is fascinating. From the most recent issue:
When lava meets the sea, large steam plumes (dubbed "laze" for lava haze) are created as the more than 1100°C (2012 °F) lava boils and vaporizes seawater. A portion of this steam recondenses and rains out of the plume as acidic precipitation that has been enriched with seawater salt, and contains tiny glass fragments generated by the intense physical interaction of hot lava and cool seawater. The pH of the plume precipitation is between 1 and 2, or between that of battery acid and pure lemon juice.
Acid mist suffused with glass fragments. Sounds like fun!
I really liked Signs. It was fun to see it in a crowded theater, where everyone gasped and jumped and laughed together.
I miss most of you. You know who you are.
I'm visiting my sister in Virginia this week. She has some cool stuff; she just dug out a 1923 American Type Founders Specimen Book and Catalog. It has all the classics; Gothic, Goudy, Hobo, Caslon, Bodoni, Copperplate Gothic, so many more. They're beautiful.
I helped make a movie over the weekend. It was a lot of fun. We had a script, did various takes, shot out of sequence, had tripods, and used editing to tie it all together. It makes me want to pick up a nice DV camera. The Canon XL1S looks sweet. A little pricey, though.
Some of the inspiration came from watching Citizen Kane for the first time last weekend. I watched it twice; once straight through, and once with Roger Ebert's commentary. Ebert gave some nice insights into the tricks Welles and his DP used to get some of the amazing shots. It made me want to try them myself.
I took some photos.
A coworker pointed out lomography to me. It's a cute idea. Exteremely cheap plastic Russian cameras with their defects (vignetting, light leaks, unreliability) played as lifestyle decisions.
Paul Graham posted a new article. It has elements from many of his other articles and notes. It shows a little bit more of the planned syntax for Arc. Cool.
You can cycle windows in MacOS X Mozilla by repeatedly pressing Apple-1. This is frustratingly close to Apple-Q, which closes all windows and quits. Yeah, I know Tab is next to Q too, but I've never hit Alt-Q when I meant to hit Alt-Tab. I've hit Apple-Q twice in 48 hours already.
I'm really anxious to try to build a real, useful web-based application on CLISP or CMUCL. Maybe I'll try SBCL.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!
