Josh Burdick (stowaway)

vaguely productive...

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:56:06 GMT

As in, I found the little notebook which is my to-do list. Owww! Also am removing a fair amount of dust from my desk; evidently this is why dusting is a Good Thing (tm).

Also, the cooling weather is making me randomly cheerful.

Also found: the e-mail address of Chris Stone, one of the really good fiddlers who was at Skye, and listened to
<a href="http://www.myspace.com/chrisjstone">him and/or the so-called String Contingent</a>.

busyness, and sillyness

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 04:02:12 GMT

I'm stressing about vacation time. Consequently, I'm attempting to get a fair amount done. On the third hand, I'm looking forward to E+A week.

In the meantime, here's some documentation from the JDK, v. 1.3 documentation for String.replace()
(so it's been around a bit)

Examples:

 "mesquite in your cellar".replace('e', 'o')
         returns "mosquito in your collar"
 "the war of baronets".replace('r', 'y')
         returns "the way of bayonets"
 "sparring with a purple porpoise".replace('p', 't')
         returns "starring with a turtle tortoise"
 "JonL".replace('q', 'x') returns "JonL" (no change)
 
-- http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/api/java/lang/String.html

more gigs; GOOG-411 loses and wins

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:30:38 GMT

Played for a wedding ceilidh in Pittsburgh. It went reasonably well, although it was a somewhat annoying amount of being in a car. Also, though some were enthused, at some level, it's hard to compete with "Stayin' Alive", which as I may have mentioned, I have fond memories of dancing to, while backstage and costumed, in a high school production of Comedy of Errors.

Also, played some for a wedding dance (yay!) Some parts, especially La Bastringue and the waltzes, went well, although the waltzes may have been on the tricky side. The English went reasonably well. The contra... rmph. Kind of an exercise in faking it. I should have agitated more strongly for either easier tunes, or tunes that I know better. I then got to dance, to some really good music. There was also some fairly not-technically-perfect-but-enthusiastic Scottish dancing.

Since I'd disappeared from work on Friday, I went in today, and did a bit. I was thinking of going to a party at which my fiddle might be useful, but then changed my mind, when I contemplated the state of some of my Java code, and the floor of my room... At any rate, said decision left me in Center City with forty minutes to kill.

I thought I'd try one of those banana-strawberry smoothies which several bandmembers had recommended. To try to locate a Starbuck's, I tried GOOG-411. When I said "17th and Market", it thought it was "Market and I-76". I like the sound that they use for "don't understand"; but it might also help if it recognized "user starts laughing" as "go back." GOOG-411 score: -1.

Shortly thereafter, an apparently Korean guy noticed my violin and said "instrument?" "Yes, violin." He then went on to ask where he could get a "small reed". Trying GOOG-411 again, I got Eighth Street Music, which I knew, and didn't seem ideal, but seemed like it might at least refer him to somewhere useful. It successfully texted me the address, which seemed safer than trying to say it. I explained, approximately, that I'm bad with maps, and he'd have to manage that part on his own.

He bowed; I didn't have the presence of mind to bow back. GOOG-411 score: 2.

Maybe the variation between the price / Mb of cell phone voice vs. data or text messages is a cell phone company plot to speed up the development of voice recognition software...

dept. of less-serious CS

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:53:33 GMT

via Shtetl-optimized: SLOGN, a new conference for hard-core theoretical computer science.

And Conor McBride, in Epilogue, the Epigram developers' blog, revives the lost art of the transparency, with social commentary, in Winging It. (The artwork is funny, even if, like me, you don't get all the type theory.)

And now, as I've been saying, I'm going to sleep like a baby zombie...

programming, and contra

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:29:00 GMT

I'm going on various vacations over the summer, so there are some things I'm trying to finish up. One of them is a model with log-likelihood, which in this case I'm maximizing with a function maximizer. (Fortunately, I am using some libraries, and I guess I probably should for this, as well.) Except it was only answering powers of two. Either this was a da Vinci-Code-esque breakthrough discovery, or a bug, and yes, it was a bug in the maximizer. It does mean I learned about (and implemented) the Golden Section search method, though. It's cute, and I wouldn't have heard of it, had I not been implementing this myself.

So my code is not as obviously wrong. Another programmer, at the contra, suggested this was in fact a bad thing, since if it were obviously wrong, I'd know not to trust it... At any rate, the Syncopaths were great.

preparation

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:49:45 GMT

7:45 am: wake up, with charley in calf.
7:46 am: eat banana, which is in backpack next to me.
7:47 am: document on LiveJournal.

This would be a tale of excellent preparation and organization, except that in that case, I would have eaten the banana last night.

I will be rained upon soon, but am not minding this fact yet.

reunion stats

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 05:00:18 GMT

Frisbee golf, I basically didn't rock on at, but was fun. Roundsinging was quite fun.

Capture-the-flag with super soakers didn't seem like it worked so well, game mechanics-wise. However, it was fun, and got my metabolism going, and it was warm enough that the water generally felt good.

Liquid nitrogen ice cream was fun to watch being made, and of course tasted great. Sudden half-hour apparent birds-of-feather forum on type theory was fun, although I didn't always feel clueful.

But mostly, many random unplanned interesting conversations were good.

best things about my presentation today

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:50:16 GMT

(Some of these I claim credit for, but most are not really my doing.)

- It was about 3-D simulation of molecules, which was something we hadn't covered much in any seminars, as far as I know.

- This meant plenty of opportunity for pictures. I successfully avoided the presentation of the form "reading from PowerPoint, while following each word with the laser pointer." Which I admit I've sometimes done.

- The GCB laser pointer performed excellently. The "Torch" function (which is just a flashlight) worked well when I needed to look up something from the paper.

- My previous class ended early. This meant I had an extra half hour beforehand to look over things. And yes, I know, the half-hour beforehand is not the ideal time to do so.

- The little IR presentation clicker was in fine form, going to "next slide" and "previous slide" smoothly.

- It also has "shut off display" functionality, which I tested. About midway through the talk, when I extravagantly reached behind my back and pressed a random button on it. I swear this was accidental.

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:08:43 GMT

Sigh. Break is almost over.

The New Years' festivities were great. I kind of regretted not being in the Civ game, but I don't necessarily have the attention span for that sort of thing. The moving of the exercise machine, though, was really impressive to watch; almost like living the sofa in the stairwell situation.

I did a bit of cleaning, but now I'm doing a bit of actual work. Which really feels much better. I suppose you can't decide which pages / things to swap out if none of the processes are running...

In the distant future (like, the fall), I'll be a "class musician" at Not-Ramblewood 2009. With some of my favorite musicians! I'm looking forward to it.

Project Excavate Floor

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 03:24:45 GMT

is annoying, but proceeds. It being half-done leaves me feeling unsettled, along with some half-done things at work, which hopefully will be resolved before Hogmanay festivities start.

On the plus side, I ran across my copy of The Real Book, and hacked through some tunes, which was fun. Playing piano for GCD open band today was also a bit of a challenge, but basically fun.

(Now we see if LJ's "restore from saved draft" feature clobbers this again... --ed.)

tales of yore

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:53:23 GMT

First: when my dad was in something like first grade, for Halloween he made a pirate costume. It was really good and detailed, and he was sent around the school to show it off.

The next year, he and his mom completely forgot about it. He asked her what to make, in a panic. She suggested the mask from the back of a Wheaties box. At the time, there would sometimes be such things on the box. So she suggested the Viking mask from the back of a Wheaties box. My dad said, "what about the rest of the costume?" She said, "Oh, well, they dressed pretty much the same back then."

Which is what he told his teacher when she asked him where the rest of his costume was :)

Second, gleaned from sifting through various old jotted stuff, trying to get them into some sort of order. nullsurface , on a contra caller at NEFFA getting distracted and reduced to saying "partner partner partner partner partner partner": "Yeah, that was really off the heazy."

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:19:16 GMT

I'm impressed at the Republicans' spin, that after mostly Democrats supported the bailout bill, the fact that so many Republicans voted against it was entirely because Pelosi annoyed them, by dissing a president with pretty low approval ratings.

I've heard of spin, but this is like ultracentrifuge speeds...

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:48:50 GMT

This tune is sweet.

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:53:13 GMT

from

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5837337

in reference to Bush at times saying something similar to the fundamentals of the economy are sound:

"President Bush has used the same language many times but his press secretary would not repeat the line Wednesday in the face of historic financial turbulence."

Man, being a press secretary must be a depressing job...

overheard on my exam

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 03:07:00 GMT

Specifically a Bio exam I took last year.

"
Q: Some animal viruses also have polycistronic mRNAs...

A:
IRES
which may, or may not, stand for
'intra-RNA expression sequence' ...
(written in red ink: 'internal ribosome entry site'
"
That would be "not."

In other news, it's weird hearing of a different large financial institution I've never thought about being (bought / taken over by the government / watched with a cynical eye) every Monday; it seems like the work week and weekend have become inverted for some people.

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:08:42 GMT

Apparently, greedoid is legit mathematical jargon. I'll have to be more careful before calling someone a greedoid.

Also entertaining was the guy in front of me in line at the grocery store, with an entire shopping cart of Mountain Dew. Only Mountain Dew. I'm sure it's good stuff, but I wasn't sure what to make of this.

biology-related

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:02:31 GMT

The prep class for the difficult Bio class next semester continues to be interesting. I didn't get all of the problems, but for at least one, when I saw the answer, it totally made sense, and was an easier problem than I'd been expecting. After a bunch of problems about membrane potentials and ions being in equilibrium, or not, one of the TAs recalled the saying: "A cell in equilibrium is a dead cell."

Today involved, as well as said class, helping Will move, and some other errands, such that at the moment, I'm just sort of at some sort of resting point, not really able to focus on anything. No doubt it will pass, especially given some larger quantity of sleep.

Heh, having been thinking about fuel cells some, and just having heard a bunch about membrane transport, I'm amused by this fuel cell idea.

In the department of stationary addiction, I now have four lovely new shades of dry-erase marker, and a list of things to do in one of them.

vehicles, and politics (short but slightly ranty)

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 14:40:01 GMT

I haven't seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?" But I'm less inclined to think of it as a vast conspiracy than I was before. For vehicles, carrying both fuel and oxidant around (as batteries do) is a serious cost, and conventional motors (and hypothetical future fuel cells) are a lot lighter by using oxygen from the air, and spitting out carbon dioxide etc. Also, plug-in cars tend to rely on lots of power being used over the grid, which isn't all that efficient. (Although fleets of oil tankers isn't the most efficient thing ever either.)

So I think hybrids are going to do better than pure-electric cars, but am more willing to believe that the EV2 wasn't quite ready for prime time.

But that was then, and this is now, Priuses are selling out and there are hybrid Civics. It would be nice to see US automakers catching up, and I think Obama's idea of supporting such research makes sense.

John McCain may have a multifaceted approach to the energy issue, but the only part he seems to really care deeply about, the part that he seems to think should happen no matter what, is increased oil exploration. Amid assorted yammering about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. I think he's mostly distressed that, when Obama actually took McCain's challenge to visit Iraq and Europe, US servicepeople, and many people where he visited, really didn't seem to think he was all that bad.

wedding

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:34:56 GMT

The wedding went pretty well. Most people didn't hear my Authentically Unscripted Remarks, but some did. I was mostly happy with how the music went. The Monster Mash went better than I expected.

I'm sorry to have missed the gaming, but I was starting to feel anxious about getting back to theoretically doing things, and couldn't easily change my reservation, and wasn't feeling like doing another red-eye train trip, as it were. Those things are more manageable when the expected number of seats per person is more like two, but as it was, I had to actually approximately sit in the seat, and attempt to doze that way, which I haven't really gotten the hang of. The downside of trains (which are a good thing, IMHO) being popular, I guess...

stuff

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:13:40 GMT

Good news! Gas will be $2/gallon for the next 30 years. Or at any rate, that's what the EPA is calculating.

In other news, I enjoyed watching Persepolis. I don't think I'll be entering the ICFP programming contest, opting instead to do the dishes, and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 04:47:05 GMT

I just saw The Prestige. I was somewhat depressed by it at times, but thought it was really good, and quite worth watching.

Sun, 25 May 2008 14:32:30 GMT

from http://paddyleague.blogspot.com/: an altercation on a bus in Crete

(eta: fixed link)

miscellany

Mon, 19 May 2008 02:38:33 GMT

Now that I've lost both my driver's license and monthly trailpass, and the change compartment has worn out, I'm thinking it's time to get a new wallet.

Accomplished a few things, such as laundry, some rehearsing, and getting a few dishes done. Also did, maybe, an hour of coding on a project I'm supposed to be working on. (Mostly writing test-cases in NetBeans. The assumption that every class needs exactly one test per class, and each test consists of checking that method's output on exactly one input, seems like a starting point, but sort of oversimplified. Not to mention that checking the output on one input seems pretty minimal. Of course, I'm sure the code given is sample code, that they're expecting you'll add more test cases for. Still, VLSI tools for checking function equality seem a lot more developed...)

Plus a fair amount of nostalgic wandering various Haskell pages, for which I indirectly blame q10, not that much arm-twisting was necessary.

In an attack of contrariiety (sp?), I downloaded a MINIX live CD. Yes, it puts the "mini" in MINIX, but darn does it boot up fast. And reading the system requirements (ideally, you need 16 MB RAM, but 8 MB will suffice) makes even lightweight Linux distros look a little over-complex. Granted, the capabilities and driver support are less.

Am still wasting far too much time wandering the design space of small laptops on Ebay. Given that screen and hard disk are the major power drains, if you replace the hard disk with, say, a flash RAM card in an IDE adapter, then the main remaining power cost is screen. And every inch of diagonal space is going to be something like a squared amount more screen real estate, and power required. 12" is pretty adequate for my purposes, but would 10" really suffice, even assuming I frequently had a large external monitor to connect to? Ah, the earth-shaking decisions.

Many gigs coming up, in the short term. This weekend has involved a good deal of playing, some of which I felt somewhat off for. I think a lot of this is because of tiredness, and the fact that my bow drastically needs rehairing, two strings are coming unwound, etc. I did have one spell of using the whole bow, though, which I hadn't really been planning on doing, which was good. Also made a conscious effort to play <i>Jack's Health</i> not just over-the-top drivingly somewhat angrily, which is my default, but somewhat more sweetly, and liked the result. Sometimes conscious experiments work.

Been eating a lot of asparagus. With tofu cooked in olive oil, which is sort of bland, but pretty darn simple, on the plus side.

non-scampering

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 00:17:07 GMT

I am missing a contra dance which I would otherwise like to go to, because my back is acting up. This is almost certainly related to my lack of sleep, which is definitely related to the number of things I need to get done, which I've let pile up.

So, I'm liveblogging from Greylock 301, mostly because I've never liveblogged anything. Mostly this involves me occasionally working, and people reading, or occasionally putting pieces of string, tied to a coathanger, in their ears, and banging the coathanger. It's quite a sound...

for Bayesians...

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:35:15 GMT

I've been trying out
Hal Daume III's Hierarchical Bayes Compiler. It does sampling, for a variety of distributions. And, it compiles stuff to C. Plus, it's written in Haskell, which tends to be a plus with me. It doesn't seem to do EM yet, though, as far as I can tell.

I was going to rave about how it is the greatest thing since primitive peoples first sliced bread, held it over a fire, and called the result "toast". But I haven't successfully written many models yet, so I can't say that. If I can do that, though, it looks promising.

In other news, the gig on Friday went pretty well. I'll be playing for dancing at NEFFA, with the other demo team musicians ("Windsor Knot"). I mean, along with playing in the hallway...