Alice Lee's Journal

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Kitchen Phone
On order, coming slowly from Germany.

Wall mounted; should fit in well with the rest of the kitchen. All hail eBay.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: "The Great Destroyer," Nine Inch Nails

Save A Tree & Such
Get off the credit card offer mailing lists (note: the only fields required are name and address) or call 1-888-5OPT-OUT

Pay the DMA a buck to get off junk mail lists.

It's a little frustrating that Green Dimes offers what appears to be nothing more than resending your info to the DMA, but charges a premium for it. Maybe I am missing something and they do something useful. NAI has a handy cookie opt-out form if you do not use other cookie management tools. And there's a link to opt out of double click in particular.

Phone calls: there's the Do Not Call registry. Reminder: Congress wrote themselves an exemption. If you wish to avoid robocalls each November ("Yes, I voted five hours ago and have had 17 calls since! Stop it!") there is a very simple tactic. Don't fill in your phone number on your driver's license form. It is not required and that's the data source for most campaigns.

Military recruiting phone calls: High schools are now obligated to turn over information about students (name, address, phone number) to make it easier to recruit. Some families report weekly calls and high pressure tactics. Parents (and students over 18) can opt out by asking their schools not to send contact information to recruiters.

What else am I missing?

[Edit: Wow. Sorry. Looks like I accidentally flipped to rich text mode, then back to HTML like God intended, and that went... poorly.]

Spot the Martian
There are some very pretty images from Mars.

Life is Too Short
to debug someone else's perl code

Current Mood: exhausted
Current Music: "Alarm Call," Bjork

Dear Authors of Eclipse,
Thank you. My early experiences with IDEs were... unpleasant. Vince's fear that Pascal Genie was a DoD weapons project was far off the mark, but I do grant that Genie did induce violence. And I've logged a few hours documenting half-baked IDEs. I've seen the sausage in the making. I have few hopes.

Today when I pasted a for loop with an index i into a different for loop, also with an index i, Eclipse very politely let me know perhaps this was not going to end well.

There's a good half an hour of teeth gnashing avoided. It is so nice to have tools that Don't Suck.

Sometimes little things count a lot. From 0 to i. And j.

(Anyone reading this who isn't friended? Lemme know.)

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: "The Biggest One," They Might Be Giants

My New Hero
Check out this interview with Steve Boyett, better known as djsteveboy of podrunner fame.

He also answers email. Quickly. I am now satisfied that his podcasts are legal, ethical, and non-fattening. He's done some tremendously cool to make things work in this crazy area where there is no case law.

Also, from his website:

dj steveboy @ Flavasauce, San Francisco
I'll be spinning my first SF gig at Flavasauce @ Wish Bar on Friday May 11. This looks like a great night! Wish Bar, 1539 Folsom St., San Francisco, CA. Hope to see some of y'all there!

ooOooh.

Current Mood: impressed

Signs of Sanity
The Senate Intelligence Committee is doing much better now than the meeting I sat in on last year. Basically: no, you cannot have more domestic surveillance tools until yinz show you're not messing up what you already have. Step away from the cookie jar.

Senator Wyden seems like one of the good guys.

Current Music: "Black Steel," Tricky

emacs pinky
gotta love the shooting pains up to my left elbow.

i'm 53% done with my current pass through the xml files i need to parse. i would be very happy if my current pass is also my last pass. well. where "happy" means "less miserable."

(heh, sometimes music lines up to whatever i'm posting about all too well.)

Current Mood: working
Current Music: "Get It Right The First Time," Billy Joel

Shooting Spree
32 students & faculty are reported dead at VA Tech today.

Note the article contains things like "a woman who answered the phone..." as a source. It sounds like the reporter just randomly dialed numbers to get quotations. That's pretty nauseating behavior. You have a bunch of people under lock down, in fear for their lives, aware they probably know several people who were killed and injured. Maybe they're trying to reassure loved ones that they're ok. Maybe they're trying to get information as cell phones and websites are intermittently available. Gee, I know, let's call 'em up at random and see who will talk! How ambitious do you have to be to put aside any sense of humanity and make those calls?

I thought Sand Brothers was slimy but their folks can't hold a candle to journalists. Huh, Sand Brothers doesn't show up in Google for anything but historical stuff. Did they go under?

Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: "Seven Nation Army," The White Stripes

Week's Links
It is so completely April. I am behind on everything and dooooomed. I have no idea how I am going to get through this coming week let alone the full month. If this month were a hill, I'd get off and walk my bike. If this month were a river, I'd head to shore and carry my kayak overland. If this month were next December, I'd be lucky to have so little stress heading in to quals. :-( Aiigh.

Closing out tabs in Firefox to cut down on visual / mental clutter. Look, stuff:

Joshua Bell v. rush hour, which is actually entitled "Pearls Before Breakfast," is interesting on many different levels. If you have five minutes go read this. Really.
Henry Blodget writes about ISPs selling click stream data.
WaPo piece touches on the mess created by the specially designated nationals list of people with whom it is illegal to do business.
Kerr's Four Models of Fourth Amendment Protections.
Professor Solove is an author on the concurring opinions blog (mostly privacy law issues, some econ, a smattering of general interest).
The University of Washington has a great collection on Internet analysis.
Sample Java code for parsing XML and the Document Builder class.
Nice examples for SED.
The few FTC actions for violating privacy policies.
A few interesting bookcases: modular & curved, which has the advantage of many configurations. Then there's a corner piece, which might look really interesting depending on the paint colors behind it. It's hard to beat glow in the dark paint.

Time for another short-term to do list.

Current Mood: overwhelmed
Current Music: "Kicker of Elves," Guided by Voices

Simple Joys Have a Simple Voice
Last night we had key lime pie for dinner (one of the perqs of being a grown up) and then my husband got his Atari set up. It was about 1 am and we had a lot more to do but we took a short break. We played Pong first. Had to. Then Yar's Revenge and Space Invaders and Hangman and a bunch of other stuff and CENTIPEDE. Whoo!

It was funny how much I remembered. I never had an Atari, but my friend Jennifer did. (She had all the toys. Later in life I realized this had to do with her family being really screwed up but at the time it was unmitigated goodness. For me, at least.) Pong sounds just like I remembered. I knew there had to be a two-player version of Space Invaders because as soon as it came on the screen I knew there was a missing ship, and the exact shade of orange, and that it is easy to forget which one you control after you swap sides on the screen. In 50 years when we are all in nursing homes drooling on ourselves, all they will have to do is play the sound for when the aliens are moving really fast and just about to land. All the geeks will perk right up. You can hear it in your head right now, right?

The joy sticks are designed to create RSIs in under ten minutes. In some ways this is good because it means I will not spend research time playing centipede. I will not spend research time playing centipede. I will not spend research time playing centipede.

Anyway: the Atari is now disassembled again. The house is full of sawdust. Progress tastes gritty.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: "Jane Says," Jane's Addiction

Things I'll Want to Find Again
Pertenent Art has a collection of privacy-related videos and cartoons.

Current Music: "Dance On My Own," Robert Plant

Data!
Shiny happy data.
Pretty data.
So soft.
Pet the data.
We like the happy data.

I could actually get a quarter of this paper done tomorrow. It's only a year late.

And now, I sleep.

Current Mood: ebullient
Current Music: "Speed Freak (Moby Remix)," Orbital

The Right Tool for the Job Redux
I am taking the markers to my next exam. I am astonished at how much color coding things helps me to keep it all straight.

The code that kept me up until 5 am does not work. I replaced it wholesale with a new approach that did work. I have a little more to go from that to actual results, but now it is just cranking through it: there are no mysteries left. I have done most parts of this before and actually have a good grasp of what I am doing from here forward. Yay.

Debugging is always so mixed for me. Yay! + Duh! = can I have those hours (days) of my life back now, please?

Current Music: "Normal (Helston Flora Remix By Afx)," Baby Ford

The Right Tool for the Job
I wrote some code that had some crashing bugs. So I fixed the bugs. And then there were new ones. So I fixed those. And now... now I am down to logic errors. Once again this is the sort of thing where anyone reading here would look, laugh, fix it and be done. But me? I am gnashing my teeth.

It's a few if loops in a while loop, really, how hard can this possibly be. A few arrays. Nothing hard. And yet, my output from my test file is really not right. So I figure it's time to trace it all down by hand, look at what's going on, yadda yadda yadda. And I just rebel a little each time. Such a pain to have to think it all through and see what's wrong now.

...so I broke out the Crayola markers I bought for my husband a few years ago. 45 colors!
Here we go.

Current Music: "Ready or Not, Here I Come," School House Rock

Flashbacks
Once upon a time in 5th grade I learned two neat things: how to create a loop in BASIC, and the sequence to make the Apple ][ beep. Unfortunately I learned control-G but did not recall control-C. This resulted in two things: a teacher powering off the Apple ][, and losing my computer privileges for a few weeks.

Apparently EMACS gets grumpy when you query-replace yourself past the maximum buffer size. Grumpy and vocal.

The happy ending in 5th grade: having nothing better to do, I discovered the wonders of reading the documentation. The happy ending tonight: sed. Not happy enough, alas, but at least moving forward.

Math is Hard, Let's Go LitSearching
So I'd like to know how much of my word count I've blown on the Abstract / Intro / Related Word sections. But since I am writing my quals paper in TeX, that is not quite as easy as it might be. I could just run my old friend wc on the .tex file, but that reports markup too. Not to worry, there's a shell script in the CTAN collection that is designed just for this problem.

The shell script reports back *more* words than wc.
Shyeah.

Not that it matters at this juncture. I know I am way past the quantity of material that will make the final cut. That's fine. Once I have results it will be easier to see which parts are actually relevant. Meanwhile, at least I have something to show for the past few weeks of my life. Some days I think the only thing worse than writing is not writing.

I am back to the point where I crawl through haze into waking each morning and panic at how behind I am. April came early. It's basically fine, though. I am still finding time to eat, sleep, and occasionally even exercise. That is the difference between April and May.

If anyone is interested in privacy policy literature, or insomniac, I can hook you up with pdf via email.

Current Music: "Slinky Wizard-Hit And Run," Slinky Wizard

Spring!
It's skirt day. I thought it would be and dressed accordingly. Yay for better weather.

I am sitting outside in one of the new mini-parks on campus. (My favorite got torn down for a new building and I am very very very bitter. Not only was in the middle of a stand of trees, there was a power outlet to go with the wifi coverage.) Trees, chirping birds, spring flowers. The construction guys must have DVE on: the Clark's Cigarette is pouring forth over the sound of trucks backing up and drills hammering down. The train whistle reminds me just how close we are to the tracks.

Alums don't believe me when I say the school is better, the students are happier, &c. So I offer a new example: they've found a lower-odor fertilizer. The cut is still resplendent in brown, but it is more a visual than olfactory assault. Come to Carnevil if you don't believe me. :-)

In other news, I am watching a project (not mine) go right off the rails due to the bitter political fighting that academia is known for. This sort of thing doesn't happen within my department so it is a bit of a surprise for me. Yes, I know: I am spoiled. Wonderfully so. At least for once the stakes are not low. Yet that also makes the backstabby machinations all the more disappointing: the outcomes matter, this is not just about scrambling for resources.

Pouring the weekend into work was a good move. I can see the path through today and tomorrow, and if I just keep working all the time I might survive Wednesday's morning meeting without massive trauma. Maybe. I suspect the next month will remain very busy, with a spike into frantic in early May. Just in time for the last snow of the year.

Current Music: "Ice Cream Man," Van Halen

Paid by the Word
The good news: by word count, I am about 10% done with my qualifier paper. The bad news: I am just working on the background and related work sections, and I feel like I am only about half way done (and they were "due" over a week ago, but it's all the soft expectations of internal deadlines.) These preliminary sections really cannot take up this much space, seeing as I will also want to discuss things little things like hypotheses, methodology, and results. My current plan is to just write and worry about word count later. No doubt I will add a few things as well as cut a lot over the course of the next year. Uh. More like nine months. Tick tock.

Random collection of links from the past week:

20 questions for Presidential candidates is a fun read. While it is moot, seeing as he dropped out, number 17 is my personal favorite.

A study in Texas finds about a fifth of people have been stalked in the past two years. I expect the study was skewed toward college participants, but even still: the bar for what constitutes stalking is high. So why aren't students more concerned about privacy issues?

As predicted, the FCC is stalling on NN for another year.

Current Music: "Uncle John's Band," Grateful Dead

Faster, faster
I am sick. Again. I think I managed to be not sick about a week and a half out of the past two months. I started coughing a few days ago and I figure I have at least half a week more to go. On the bright side, my hands have healed from when I went sidewalk surfing and the bruises on my knees are more manageable.

I am not able to submit a paper at the end of this month and that's really a shame. For one thing I'd like to be done with it. For another it was my best shot at getting it published. Here's hoping I am not disappointing faculty too much, but I am worried that all of the "I don't see how I could get this done" comments I made along the way might not have been believed.

Work is piling up. My weekend to do list keeps growing even though there is no way I can get to all of this, yet they are still things I really need to get done this weekend. Um. My inbox is approaching 2000 messages. Um. And everything is taking longer than it should, in part because I can't think straight. For example, one of my to do list items is "Email (person) Re: duh." Unfortunately I have no idea what this means. Generic male first name, could be one of three people, and "duh" doesn't exactly narrow it down. Spiffy. I am now to the point of a zillion small tasks that are nibbling me to death, plus several large tasks that are only good for something when I manage to complete them. Every time I get something done I realize more things exploded and need attention somewhere else.

Plus, you know. Other stuff. Serpents and dragons, lions and tigers and bears.

But posting to LJ is a great use of time...
Kill me.

Current Mood: resigned
Current Music: "The Hounds of Winter," Sting