Krauthammer

Nice editorial on the complexities of oil pricing.

Hard-Fi's Performance Sucked

I want google blog search to find this post and to inform as many would-be concert goers just how bad Hard-Fi is in concert. Blame for yesterday's miserable concert falls squarely on the shoulders of their lead singer. HIs voice was atrocious. He was off key, he air-balled all of the high notes, and he substituted shouting for singing for roughly half of the concert. And despite the quality of his performance, he kept lecturing the croud about how they weren't applauding enough for him. He had no idea how bad he was. It did not occur to him that shouting is no substitute for singing. It did not occur to him that not even trying to stick to the melody was a bad thing. It did not occur to him how disappointed his audience was.

If he reads this, (I doubt he could), he will deny to himself how bad his performance was.

I love their album. They opened with the second track -- Middle Eastern Holliday -- and their singer belted out the first few words, I was in shock. "WTF? Why aren't you singing it right?". I was sad because this was the song I was most looking forward to, and at the time, I thought the singer was going to improve as he warmed up. Since they opened with it, I was not going to get the chance to hear it sung right.

By their third song, I knew there would be no improvement. The rest of the concert was to suck just as much.

Pant's and I have a few thought-bites of the concert.

* It's like they weren't trying
* We just watched a bad Hard-Fi cover band
* Very karaoke
* Mad props to whoever produced their album; they made someone with little tallent sound good.
* Half the audience followed them here from Britain.
* The rest of the band did fine -- didn't matter, the vocals ruined everything.
* Learn to play the harmonica and put down that Wind Piano, you loser.

Hard Fi

Hard Fi is playing the cradle tonight.

I've been listening to their recent album, "Stars of CCTV" over and over again. It's good stuff. I think the 2nd track is my favorite, though the lyrics aren't inspiring. That's fine. It's not always about lyrics.

In contrast, the Jenny Lewis CD I just bought has plenty of good lyrics. I think I'm gonna start collecting some of the lyrics I like on this blog; I like lyrics and this blog is for me not you, so stop your complaining.

"Didn't I see you in Vegas? It wasn't pretty, but she was ... (not your wife)" -- Jenny Lewis, (echoed by the Watson Twins).

Crackin' heads

Club Sandwich

Not our friend

Putin is not our friend. Time and again, he takes anti-democratic stances. He's rolled back democratic advances in his own country; governers are no longer elected, they're appointed by the Kremlin. He's stuck his nose into the elections in the Ukrane and Belarus. Cover story on today's Post: Russia delivered to Iraq US troop movement data during the invasion. How is that the act of an ally? It's one thing to make diplomatic protestations; it's another thing entirely to subvert troops on the ground.

Putin is using his "friendship" with Bush for his advantage in crushing rebellious groups in his country; after the USSR fragmented, Russia is using all its strength to prevent further loss of territory. So in the immediate aftermath of the Beslan seige, Putin makes it look like radical Islam was involved. That way he can use Bush's anti-terrorism rhetoric to justify brutal repression. Lessons from Chechnya are then taken to Georgia.

What Putin will not do, though, is acknowledge the democratic motives that Bush has. Putin is all about his own power. Why hasn't our foreign policy shown signs of reacting?

Putin

I don't like Putin.

During Ukrane's orange revolution, he took the "fradulent elections should not be overturned" stand.

Belarus is up for sanctions before the UN over their recent presidential election. All international monitors have ruled the election was neither free nor fair. What's Putin's stand? "Congrats Lukashenko! Great job crackin' heads."

Post article

Sex Symbol

From the A.V. Club:

"But who deserves to go? Unquestionably Mr. Covais, whose talents as a singer, a dancer, and a stage presence have escaped me entirely. And here's the thing that's most disturbing about him: Thanks to Paula Abdul, he's constantly referred to now as a "sex symbol." Okay, I'm confused: When you call this kid a sex symbol, are we still talking about the sex that involves fucking and whatnot? Or is there some other kind of sex that's possibly presaged by a choirboy singing "Starry Starry Night" in an angelic voice?"

Workahol

I had lunch with TJ yesterday at Patio Loco. I'd just discovered a bug in some code I released a long time ago. A big one. One to make a lot of Croquetta players unhappy. I drifted off in the middle of conversation with TJ to think about the reaction that I'd get. My absence from the converstaion was quite noticable. At least if there are three of us at lunch, and I drift off, the other two people can continue talking by themselves. Not so if it's just me and one other person.

I've been so wrapped up in my work for the past couple of years in an attempt to graduate. I have trouble not thinking about work. It really sucks. I mean, I love my work, but I don't want it to be my life. Even now while I'm typing this blog entry, my mind keeps drifting back to work. Of course, I'm at my desk in my office and it's between the hours of 8 and 5...

Job

Woot.

So I'm sorry everyone for leaving this blog so neglected for so long. I've been workin' some long hours. About mid January, I scheduled a job interview in Seattle for a post-doc. I was out there from Monday to Wednesday of this past week. I spent the week before that preparing a talk for the job interview. I talked about the flexible gates and the grassa extensions I'd made to Croquetta. It went over really well. I got the job.

That means I'm scheduled to move out to Seattle in August '07. A while from now, yes, but I've got lots of work to do between now and then. Coleman has offered me a job here as a post-doc. I'll stay here and work in his lab for a year after I graduate. I've got my fingers crossed, but I'm hoping for August. While the post-doc with Coleman will definately be a great experience, there was no interview process -- he just offered one day -- and so there was no build up of tension and then a release. So, I guess I feel more excited about landing the position in Seattle, but still, the work I'll be doing with Coleman will be really exciting.

I'm gonna have to make up a whole slew of new nicknames to protect the innocent.

Musharraf

Musharraf agrees with the protesters. Everyone should just be a muslim. Even moderate muslims think everyone should obey Sharia. If the moderates agree, where is the argument?

Watch all western business pull out of Pakistan. Watch Pakistan regress to 6th century poverty.

CNN Story

Pseudo

Onion's Weekender

I may be out of a job soon.

Riots

From Slate

"Of course it is not Western values that are trampling freedom of expression: It is the ayatollah's own values, combined with the threat of violence. The other problem with his little joke about double standards, and with the whole supposedly mordant comparison between denying the Holocaust and portraying the prophet, is that the offended Muslims do not want a world where people are free to do both. They don't even want a world where people are not free to do either, which would at least be consistent. They want a world where you may not portray the Prophet Mohammed (even flatteringly, slaying infidels or whatnot) but you may deny the Holocaust all day long."

My $0.25

The Fed a'int doin' its job, 'cause a single copy over in the chem library now costs a quarter if you want to use cash. I had 4 pages I needed to copy. I had one dollar. I was kinda tired. I copied the page before the first page in the paper I wanted. That is, I photocopied the first page, and then without thinking rotated the book 180 degrees and copied the opposing page. The opposing page was not part of the paper I was trying to copy.

So I walked back to my office where I'd accidentally left my student ID. I returned to the chem library. I swiped my card ($0.14/copy when you use your card). "Retry." I did. "Retry." After 20 more "Retry" messages, I "borrowed" a quarter from one of the students sitting next to the copy machine.

Grrr.

The Bear

The A.V. club has an article on animal snuff for kids.

I don't know how to imbed links yet - I'll figure it out - but here's the URL

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/45020

I misread the title of the article, replacing "snuff" for "smut" - we all know where my mind is, it's not a joke, it just happened, ok?

So I opened the link thinking the first thing I would read about was Disney's "The Bear." I saw it with my grandfather when I young. It's a touching story of a man and his son, I mean a bear and his cub. I can't remember, but I think the mother is killed by a hunter at the beginning of the movie.

At one point, the father discovers a female passing through. He pushes over a tree to show how macho he is, and I think he digs a hole. When they start fucking, the cub wanders off and finds some mushrooms. He eats them, rolls over on his back and starts hallucinating. A butterfly lands on his paw and the cub is mesmerized. Fade to black. Cub wakes up with a hangover.

Chauvinism. Criminal neglegence. Sex. Drugs.

The movie should have made the list of "snuff," though, because daddy bear has a run in with a bullet-splaying hunter. The guy notched the tip of the bullet I think to rip apart on impact. Grizzly. I think daddy bear survives; the rest of the A.V. Club's movies were more grim.

American Idol

I'm so excited. I'm gonna be on American Idol! I didn't make it to Holywood, no, but they spent a lot of time interviewing me before and after my spectacular (at least I thought so) audition. I looked so good - I spent months preparing for this audition.

My best shiniest hair is in the back of my head, so I grew it out really long. I didn't want the judges to see me as some long-haired hippy, so I kept it short in the front.

I wore my american flag shirt that has 15 american flags on it, one for each of the stripes on the flag.

I flossed my teeth, which I usually dont' bother to do since the gaps between them are big enough to fit the bristles of my toothbrush.

I even lost 5 pounds over the past 6 months, brining me down to 245.

I looked great.

But Simon Cowell can suck my dick. That mother fucker wouldn't know tallent if it donkey punched him.

Optimizing Grassa

Grassa now works. We put it together in record time. At the begining of the week, it took 110 seconds to score a small game, and 80 minutes to score a large game (one that covered the whole field). I've been optimizing the code using Shark (it's real name). Shark is the most amazing program I've ever run. It's a profiler. It samples the program counter during program execution and talies how much time you spend in each function. When it's sampled for 30 seconds, it creates a heirarchical display of what functions dominate the running time. You can look at the assembly, and it'll give you Mac-specific suggestions on how to re-write your code and whatnot...

The assembly suggestions aren't nearly as useful as the structured heirarchy of function calls. The profiler behaves exactly as a profiler should. I can't imagine anything better.

I've got Grassa scoring the small game test case in 17 seconds now, and the large game in 17 1/2 minutes. This scoring function hasn't been tuned yet, but we know it models scores better than previous scoring methods and that ultimately, it will be part of Croquetta's backbone. I remain totally psyched.

Message for TJ

Pants was telling me about how she'd recently caught up with TJ's blog and was shocked (shocked!) at how much scatalogical humor TJ relied upon.

She wanted me to relay: TJ is a poopy pants.

I'm not making this up.

Flawed

A few years ago a friend of mine told me that my name was an anagram for:

An ear, very flawed.

I post this at the risk of exposing my identity.

Orals

I passed my orals yesterday. I'm so glad it's over. I don't know really what to say about the experience. I had trouble falling asleep last night; I kept reliving the exam. I'll try to post some of the specifics soon.

Lame list

Foster's was crazy packed this afternoon. I met Pants there around 1 and we stayed for a couple of hours. We talked about whether or not hollow objects were stronger than solid objects. She first asserted "Hollow objects are stronger than solid objects" which raised my eyebrows so she quickly qualified it with "for their weight." This is probably true, I'm not sure, but I'll believe it. But Pants didn't stop there. She pulled out the trump card for all scientific debates: she invoked Mr. Wizard. "That's old school Mr. Wizard right there." End of argument. Case closed. Whabam bizzach, shut that up!

Except I remembered that epsiode of Mr. Wizard. He had a kid come on and they watched a metal dowel bend under successively heavier weights. He had two dowels of the same diameter, one hollow one and one solid. The hollow one bent more under the strain. The child was suprised, I guess because "hollow" is such a cool word and why wouldn't an object described by a cool adjective be better than the object without that adjective?

I recounted that episode to her, admitting that the two bars were of unequal weight. She relented: in fact, she didn't remember whether or not there was a Mr. Wizard episode about hollow objects.

We reminisced about TV science and I was reminded about how Bill Nye used to be part of that Seattle-based sketch commedy show that was on Commedy Central back in the early 90's. I couldn't remember its name. Google helped me out: Almost Live!

I loved that show.