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What's with the muttonchops?

danelope strikes back, taking vengeance for both Danelope Week and Ken Goldstein of the Week Week.

Dan also notes that he hopes to instantiate a weekly beering of the pale and nerdly, a goal I can heartily get behind. I especially endorse the goal as a means to develop further diabolical plots and nefarious schemes devoted to the appreciation and appropriation of online identity.

It should be noted that while we waited anxiously for it, Dan made no embarassing social gaffes whatsoever. His drinking skills are clearly much improved, or perhaps it’s the more-precious nature of beer.

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Posted on by mwhybark

Two Bells and Three Men

I just returned from a beer-up at the Two Bells with Messrs. Harpel and Elope.

We had a pleasant evening in which I learned that “no one cares about my sandwich,” notwithstanding the fact of my munching Crab Louie whilst my compadres consumed burgerfleisch. Kaycee Nicole was likened to A Rape in Cyberspace.

Tom regaled us with tales of his interesting, absent father, the key image of which is said progenitor presenting the preadolescent Tom with a bag of gold coins, and Dan reminded me of one of the reasons to avoid drinking gallons of instant ice tea.

On the way home, we noticed that half of the Sit-and-Spin is now the interesting-looking Hideaway, filled to the brim with the bicycle courier contingent. We actually walked Dan nearly all the way to the top of the Hill, and I was flabberghasted at the variety and quantity of activity in the streets we passed. My neighborhood is a hive of activity.

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Tubbing.

Manny’s very nice site design has been swiped. Today, word comes that swiper became winner: image swapping is set to follow, and Manuel has used a word that includes only the two syllables ‘tub’ and ‘girl’ to describe the images he intends to use.

Me? I’m selling the tickets and the popcorn. When’s the show start?

(Confidential to the Manster: swipee may very well be able to follow referers, in which case your prank may be in danger of exposure.)

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The seduction of the fold

The New York Times – Science – Cones, Curves, Shells, Towers: He Made Paper Jump to Life:

In contrast to traditional origami, where all folds are straight, Dr. Huffman developed structures based around curved folds, many calling to mind seedpods and seashells. It is as if paper has been imbued with life.

Curved folds have occasionally whispered into my ear of their charms, structural or otherwise. One wonders if Dr. Huffman left web traces amid the paperscraps.

Clearly, he did. Someone at SGI took note (very cool pictures of Huffman at work), and the ACM has a memorial page.

UCSC maintains a ghostly faculty listing as well as an archived news item on the professor’s passing.

Interestingly, a page hosted at Rice takes a look at Huffman’s role in developing early compression algorithms, something that, at least to my analgebraic mind, appears directly related to the paperfolding activity explored in the NYT piece.

Oh, for the plans of these structures!

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No Credit

poupou:

If you examine popular media images of women using IT, which I did with some reservation during the final semester of my graduate studies, you will find an overrepresentation of relaxed-pose, sitting on the floor, gazing dreamily into the monitor, giggling, languidly stroking a single key on the laptop bullshit.

The pleased and amused me no end, and reminded me of one of the reasons I enjoy poupou’s friendship so very much. Bring it!

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Ralph and B

Nader or Cobb, wonders Editor B. He is on his way to the Green convention. Appears he deems Ralph undesirable, for reasons of the man’s poor tactical sense.

Ed. Beta threatens to blog the convention. I’m thinking, from up in my tower of dark terror, I will direct a warming beam of sun-lamp-like vigilance in his direction. Fellow perspicatores are invited. B. has a fine track record and if history serves as a guide he will be videotaping every gol-darned secont.

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No Metro for Palm?

Stops – The Bus Schedule Database for Palm OS Handhelds may be a useful stopgap for the apparent lack of a Seattle-based resource publishing Metro schedules in a palm-readable format.

C’mon, Metro! You already do a great job with getting the data online. Give us some RSS or Atom or something that can get into an AvantGo channel, at least!

Grumble.

Jonh appears to have already written a scraper, but it’s a personal tool and oriented to PDF.

QuickTrip may also be a bit less daunting to set up and use than Stops, I think.

Still, what I really need, I suppose, is a table-viewing application for my decrepit old Vx.

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SIFF '04 RIP

I pointed this out a few times early in the festival run, but I want to prompt Seattle-area readers or ex-locals to stroll through the amusing doings the various Tableteers got up to over at the Siffblog.

I still need to fix an IE display bug which centers everything, but on the whole I think the experiment worked out well. I think it would be interesting to see Tablet implement something like this as a regular part of their main site design.

A very interesting aspect of getting the blog, um, rolling for them was the relative lack of internet-oriented thinking my friends there have. I asked if they knew what the base traffic of the main site was. This proved to be data that had not ever been sought previously. While I think most of the folks on the Siffblog had a vague idea what a blog was, I don’t believe that they had ever committed their own time to either reading or writing one on a regular basis.

As it happens, yesterday was the one-month anniversary of the blog, and I’m pleased with how it worked out. Never a high traffic site, it still enabled direct, personal writing about the experience of the festival per se.

A few other folks were blogging SIFF as well. Since SIFF draws a dedicated core of pass-holders who can be quite competitive about numbers of films seen, I think next year it would be a really great idea to set up a collaborative blog for passholders as well, possibly scraping film listings from the main SIFF site and allowing the pass holders to riff on that material.

Spatula vs. SIFF runs through June 9, and is (oddly) an audio blog. Being constitutionally averse to multimedia, the content will remain obscure to me for the nonce. But don’t let me stop you!

Artdish did some blog-form previewing, but steers clear of lengthy personal reactions, alas.

Eric at Of Charm and Strange wrote up Sky Blue, Buddy, Open Water, The Five Obstructions, Doppelganger, Touch of Pink, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, and Torremolinos ’73. He may have reviewd more, but it’s time for me to move on.

MoviePie has a nice listing, with about 64 films reviewed – just eyeballing, I’d say that they rate films more or less as I did, although I have quibbles with a perfect score for Hero, which I predictably view as imperialist running dog propaganda, if beautiful (that’s a mild joke there folks, and yes I do hope to write about it).

Cinecultist weighed in every now and then with dispatches from one Seattle Maggie, and last but not least, Mena and Me, at a not-long-for this-world radio.weblogs.com URL, took the time to drop some lines on SIFF as well.

In other news, I just shipped a review of SIFF Golden Space Needle Best Film winner Facing Windows – look for it in this Wednesday’s Stranger. More than that I dassen’t say. I did take the opportunity to interview director Ferzan Ozpetek when he was in town. It was my first-ever interview with a non-native English speaker. It included the services of a translator. I think it went well enough, but of course, I can imagine how to improve the experience next time. I don’t have an assignment to use the material yet and thus will keep mum about what we discussed.