October 2005

Chicken suits on Lost and The West Wing.
Mentions of Grand Guignol on both robotwisdom and The West Wing.
Ice cream in my hand and on The West Wing within 10 minutes.

If I were a tinfoil hat wearer I’d say that TWW were trying to send me a message over the past three days.

Naaaaaaaaaah.

Well, maybe.

I guess I’m making up for lost time.

The Lincoln Memorial is by far my favorite place in Washington, D.C.

I can’t not cry when I turn to the right and read Lincoln’s great words, his second inaugural address. This bit, among others, always slays me:

The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

The Civil War is raging, and the war must be won or the United States of America will not ever be the same, and the President broaches no prediction? What act of humility and realism was this? Sure, there was no live coverage from C-SPAN, but the words would be in the paper. What a different time that was. My wish is for a return to such statesmanship.

This wonderful set of posts deflates “Web 2.0 Hype™”, reinforces the awesomeness of those folks (like EVDB) who are working to remake the web to actually use these wonderful syndication tools and browser technologies to the fullest extent: Part I, Part II.

Backstory: I’ve actually met both Andy Baio (briefly) and Brian Dear (less briefly, we had lunch once. Smart fellow and a nice guy.) and have read them for a while. I think both Upcoming and EVDB are kickass tech.

And if you hadn’t noticed, this post was for geeks.

I’m a big fan of Halloween.

In 1991 or so I won a costume college (I was either first or second place out of maybe 2 dozen or so health science students at CHRV College of Health Sciences).

The other day I posted the “guts cake,” which I submit as evidence of liking Halloween.

Funny enough, I’m not a big fan of scary movies. I don’t really care for horror movies unless MST3K is making fun of them. I did like Shaun of the Dead, but in general, not so much.

I’m rambling.

The image above is a bad colorization of a scan from a college yearbook. The yearbook is from 1991, the colorization was me doing PhotoShop for a class at UCLA Extension in 1995. It’s not great colorization. These days I’m much better.

Hmm.

Today was not so great. Plenty busy all around, feeling choked by work.

Let me say that Leah rocks my socks off. She’s on the verge of being the best project manager I ever worked with ever. And I’ve worked with some great ones. Also terrible ones. Terrible ones.

Okay, enough rambling.

The nicknames that never were (for me), from 2000. From the crew that hung out on AOL chatting trivia and whatnot.

ArtViedersehn
ArtMum
ArtFess
ArtNaturale
ArtSafety
ArtTip
ArtDuck
ArtJovi
ArtPhile
ArtDeco
ArtHowl
ArtLunar

Cleaning out the hard drive, from March, 2000:

*EMPLOYEE PROPRIETARY INFORMATION AND INVENTIONS AGREEMENT *

Bidland.com, Inc.
3990 Ruffin Road
San Diego, CA 92123

The following confirms an agreement between bidland.com, Inc., a Delaware corporation (the “Company”) and *Name (referred to in this agreement as “I” or “me”). I understand that this agreement is a material part of the consideration for my employment with the Company:

1. Proprietary Information. I understand that the Company possesses and will possess Proprietary Information which is important to its business. For purposes of this Agreement, “Proprietary Information” is information that was or will be developed, created, or discovered by or on behalf of the Company, or which became or will become known by, or was or is conveyed to the Company, which has commercial value in the Company’s business. “Proprietary Information” includes, without limitation, information (whether conveyed orally or in writing) about algorithms, application programming interfaces, protocols, trade secrets, computer software, designs, technology, ideas, know-how, products, services, processes, data, techniques, improvements, inventions (whether patentable or not), works of authorship, business and product development plans, the salaries and terms of compensation of other employees, customer lists and other information concerning the Company’s actual or anticipated business, research or development, or which is received in confidence by or for the Company from any other person. I understand that my employment creates a relationship of confidence and trust between me and the Company with respect to Proprietary Information.

I don’t remember anything from bidland’s technology other than that they had their own in-house templating language and that every transaction with the (Oracle) database was handled in stored procedures that the DBA wrote.

Bidland has not existed for several years.

In Zappa news… Zappa Chess Engine

Zappa is not named for the great Frank Zappa, or at least not directly. Frank rather quixotically named his daughter “Moon Unit”, and Mike Myers used this in Austin Powers 2: there is a scene where Dr. Evil talks about how he has divided his moon base into “Moon Unit Alpha” and “Moon Unit Zappa”. I had just finished reading a book by Bruce Pandolfini, “Chess Openings: Traps and Zaps”, and I thought that Zappa had a nice sound to it. I have never actually listened to a single song of Frank, although I am quite fond of several of his quotes.

via robotwisdom

Yeah, no posts in a while eh? Latest bit of interestingness is the cake I made for Alex’s birthday:

White cake, raspberry filling, and powdered sugar icing.

The ribs are made from white chocolate.

Sculpted by Joe.

It was a lot of work, but very fun.

More later this week.