11/13/99 5:10:40 PM
dagnabit! why didn't anyone tell me thatgreenspun was having free web dev courses at caltech? At least I reserved for tomorrow. wee fun. ;-)

looking through the slides right now. this is amusing

11/13/99 2:49:37 PM
Here's a site w/ the paintings online.

11/13/99 2:47:14 PM
hah. they're showing "america's most wanted painting". "The U.S. painting, based on a sampling of 1,001 adults nationwide, shows two deer and a hippopotamus in a mountain lake on a partly cloudy day with people relaxing near the shore. A small image of George Washington in period costume was included because people like pictures of famous people almost as much as those of ordinary people."

11/11/99 3:42:18 AM
i was talking to my cousin about how china's "communism" really isn't, and low and behold, a relevant threads found browsing through the first topic on /. I also think it is spot on that when molecular nanotechnology becomes viable, the open source (communist) approach could be the way to go.

11/10/99 2:14:01 AM
i've found recently that i haven't been able to stay up as long as i used to. perhaps also has to do with the fact that i've been feeling under the weather for the past month and a half.

11/10/99 2:06:33 AM
if i had more time i would read more blogs regularly.

11/9/99 11:27:25 PM
how neatly my new digital camera readings tie in with my ee321 class. i'm also re-reading some of Charles Poynton's old stuff. I remember reading that huge thread between him and Timo when it was all going down about a year and a half ago. (too lazy to dig up the deja link).

sigh. i remember when i had spare time earlier in the semester...

last note. last night i went to a talk by victoria vesna. I wouldn't say that it was useless, but it was definitely a bit long. I liked the issues that her bodiesinc explored, but (and this really relates to her agent extensions) the bodies really didn't do or represent anything. What's the point if you can't use the bodies (if it's just the concept, i'd say that goes back to the early 90s and can be traced back to the 70s!). The agents are a worthwhile topic for discussion, but her exploration is not that new, especially if there's nothing that is actually functioning—her explanation of collecting documents/information and tracing interactions was especially vague and vexing—one can hardly say the contents of one's hard drive is a fair approximation or representation of one's self. Furthermore, partial representation and distribution of self the self goes back centuries (learning all about it from my phil262 class and on my tangent searches on eb), and is made explicit in lots of sf literature (True Names comes to mind right off the top of my head -- that was written in what, 1980?). What sort of bothered me was the collective (audience and speaker) attitude that these concepts were somehow way beyond tech companies, or computer scientists in academia. sorry to spoil the party, but these heady concepts aren't that original, and implementation is the hard part—the details and actual implemenation does matter. i'm ranting again... perhaps unfairly. i will get back to slaving on my projects now and save the rest of my vitriol for another day.

tiny footnote: i also failed to see how it creating an agent and letting it sit there and interact w/ other agents would be a useful proxy for personal interaction / participation in a community. sure it would give you a presence, but the agents' interaction doesn't really give you what you would normally get from a community experience, does it? i could see it's use for other things (presence being one thing, checking up on its status giving a summary of interactions, etc). of course, it's all a moot point without proper modelling of an agent and the proper infrastructure for it to interact in.

11/8/99 4:14:00 AM
It's been a week w/o a peep. been busy and sick and lethargic all around. got my coolpix 950 thursday, so i've been taking some photos. i actually have a backlog of commentary and links, but i'm so behind in my other crap that it's probably gonna go on the back burner.