moonlee.org

My sister-in-law passed this transcript of a David Foster Wallace speech on to me, which I found very much worth reading. I would have liked to have heard this in person.

[Truth] is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

Full transcript after the jump.

(continued...)

Saw this linked from Tikirobot via Paul: Auto Tune the News #2. “For the second time, pundits and news anchors urgently break into song to deliver the news.” Pretty inspired.

Well, the Chicago real estate market may have fallen off a cliff, but there are still some buyers out there, we being one of them. Yesterday we put in an offer on a house in the Arcadia Terrace neighborhood (a bit north of our current digs in Lincoln Square), and after a few counter-offers, we’ve settled on a price that the sellers have verbally accepted. Zoe and I are excited to own our very own Chicago bungalow!

Back in last September, I purchased one of the early netbooks, the Acer Aspire One. I cracked it open to upgrade the ram to 1.5GB and was generally enthusiastic about the hardware and the form factor. It was a neat little machine. But really, the Linpus Lite OS installed on the thing had to go. I tried various flavors of Linux, including Ubuntu and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. But nothing seemed to really feel or work quite right.

So it was with some interest that I began reading about various success stories of people installing Mac OS X on Netbooks (aka hackintoshes). From all reports, the Dell Mini 9 and MSI Wind were the most hardware compatible, with my Netbook, the Acer Aspire One having some core issues. But I figured I had nothing to lose by trying it out.

So, using iDeneb’s installer, along with some small tweaks, I had it going in about an hour. It’s a good install, but there are currently 3 notable problems: first, there are no working drivers for the Atheros wireless card, so I’m going to have to switch it out for a Broadcom 1390 (found one on ebay for 5 bucks) to get the wireless working. Second, the computer won’t sleep, at all. Lastly, while the SDHC card reader on the machine can be coaxed into reading SD (apparently, I haven’t tried it yet), the experimental driver does not support SDHC. yet.

So, after I swap the wifi out, apart from the sleep issue, it will be pretty near 100% functional. Not bad for a small cheap little Mac!

A nice little writeup on the install is here.

Well, my fledgling Yiquan class has ballooned to the record size of 3 whole people, with the addition of a couple this week, who seem to have appreciated the taste of Yiquan they received and are looking to return again next week. Both are Chicago police officers, one who has practiced Eskrima (a Filipino art) for about 30 years and I believe teaches as well. Things are definitely starting to get a bit interesting here…

For the past 11 years or so, I’ve had a roll of black and white Kodak Tri-X film that I’ve kept in my desk drawer that I had shot in 1997-1998. From place to place, I’ve faithfully just taken it with me, resolving to get it developed someday but never really motivating to do so. By that point, of course, I had totally forgotten what images were on it, or even if any images were on it at all. I’m sure we all have dinosaur film canisters lying around like that (well at least those of us over a certain age heh).

Anyway, last week, curiosity got the better of me and I decided that the time had come. I tried to find a place in Chicago that still developed black and white film and there were 2 places, but neither very convenient to my location. So I sent it out to Dwaynes Photo in Kansas, and they did a pretty competent job for $5 bucks and about a week turn around time.

When the negatives arrived, I was pretty excited with anticipation. What could possibly be on the film? It turns out some pretty good stuff: old pictures of Zoe and family, old friends I hadn’t seen in over a decade, and my 2 cats that I also hadn’t seen in just about as long.

And I have to say, there’s just something so wonderfully rich about the tones and grain in black and white film (especially Tri-X) that I haven’t obtained with digital. It’s almost enough to make me want to shoot film again…

While walking down Western Ave. after dinner last night, I spotted this familiar image on an advertisement gracing a bus shelter outside the restaurant.

It was a pretty odd moment of cognitive dissonance, I’m definitely not used to having something I coded have this kind of exposure. Aside from being novel though, it’s nice to know as a programmer that your code is actually being used for some benefit.

I suppose that’s generally true for any endeavor…

So, being the owner of an Xbox 360 console, I finally decided to upgrade to the new “Xbox Experience” a few days ago, mainly to try out the integrated Netflix streaming movie capability in the new dashboard. So far I’ve been super impressed with the picture quality (the movie I was watching was available in HD), however less than impressed with the service overall on my cable connection. Pretty regularly the picture would freeze and the player would refill the buffer, which would take about a minute or so. I eventually had to just give up on the movie.

I have a feeling these hiccups were mainly because I was attempting to watch a movie at 8pm on a Saturday night, and their streaming servers simply couldn’t keep up. Looks really promising though, if they get a handle on the bandwidth thing. I’m going to try again on a weeknight to see if I get better results…

For those who haven’t heard of it:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

ted.com has many of the talks available for free and they’re really worth checking out – I’ve listened to 3 or 4 on topics ranging from neuroscience to spaghetti sauce, and they’ve all been quite good.

So the temperature here in Chicago this morning is a balmy -11 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 with wind chill). I’d never heard of this in other places, but apparently here in the great north midwest, kids can get the day off from school for a “Cold Day” just like they would for a “Snow Day”. I think it’s on account of the fact that if you stand outside for more than five minutes today, any exposed skin would instantly turn blue and fall off. So makes sense.