Blog, Paradoxically

[sandandglass]

[amik-blog]

The problem with digital music is that for digital compressions, bits wear out over time since 1s and 0s are too rigid. The obvious solution here is to use .WAV files. The smoother wavelets in the compression helps reduce wear and tear. Playing your music at a lower volume also helps to retain quality by reducing the number of 1s that are passed through the 0s.

Linhai Zhu

[amik-blog]

It's not just a fantastic scifi show; Farscape also appeals to my musical nerdiness by scoring the climax of each season with a Requiem.

[theymerb]

You win.

[amik-blog]

Highlights of the Seattle U District Street Fair

The street outside my apartment is filled with the sounds of the U District Street Fair. I decided to go check it out, and here are the highlights of my experience

A Salmon + Cream Cheese piroshky

Yum!

Art by Justin Hillgrove

I purchased prints of the following two pieces:

And this guy ...

[amik-blog]

Crisis Averted

This morning, my phone slipped out of my pocket on the bus to work. Thanks to "Find My iPhone" and the altruism of the other bus passengers, I was able to recover it by meeting the bus on its next trip around. NO thanks to King Country Metro Lost+Found, who refused to even notify the bus driver that I was looking for my phone.

[amik-blog]

Moving to Seattle, Part I

I've been in Seattle for about 48 hours now, and I've done a lot already.

Before I get ahead of myself, allow me to provide some background: in late February, I accepted an offer for an 8-month co-op at Amazon in Seattle, beginning in May. After staying in Boston for my first two co-ops, I felt it was time to try a new location for the third (and final) internship. It didn't hit me until late April what exactly I had signed up for ...

The Trip Home

My co-op does not begin until tomorrow (May 8th) but I had to vacate my Northeastern housing by April 24th, and I couldn't move into my new Seattle apartment until May 5th. So, on April 22nd I packed up my Boston apartment, I sent my speakers, piano, computer, and lots of boxes with movers and put the rest in suitcases.

I decided to fly Southwest to Tucson — at the urging of my father — instead of the usual direct, non-stop flights I take to Phoenix. I was supposed to leave Boston at 6am EDT, connect through Chicago-Midway, and arrive in Tucson around 10:30am PDT. Everything was going well until the pilot stood up at the front of the plane with a piece of metal in his hand and explained that it was the latch to the cargo bay, which had malfunctioned. Without a functional cargo bay door, there was no way we would be taking that plane, and so everybody de-planed and amassed around the gate agents' desk. I ended up flying from Boston to Denver, Denver to Las Vegas, and Las Vegas to Tucson, arriving at 4pm PDT. On the bright side, I had my first (legal) gambling experience at the slot machines in the Las Vegas airport. I hope they put my $2 to good use.

The Vacation

Vacation is a relative term; I wasn't working or taking classes, so I suppose my 10-day stay in Tucson technically counts as a vacation. It was great to see my family, hug my dog, visit my piano teacher, eat at my favorite restaurants, go up to Mt. Lemmon, and just relax. The weather wasn't even too horrible while I was there, only reaching into the nineties in the last couple days. Alas, on May 5th it was time to pack up once more and head to Seattle.

New Beginnings

I arrived in Seattle around noon on Cinco de Mayo. My first impression, while looking out the window as the plane approached Sea-Tac, was "Wow! That's a lot of water". An hour and an $80 cab ride later, I had arrived at the Lothlorien Apartments, where I will be living for the duration of my co-op.

I dropped off my bags, got an introduction to the apartment building and the area from Lothlorien's friendly Property Manager, and then headed out for a stroll. I quickly discovered that living on University Way is going to present conveniences and challenges: namely, there are restaurants everywhere and they all look like quite good. Lucky for me, there is a gym on the second floor of my building.

That evening, I met up with my friend Adam, who is currently on co-op at Microsoft Game Studios, and we went to Brouwer's Cafe for some delicious beer and fantastic food. The next day, Adam and I went to explore downtown. We started at Pike Place Market, where we encountered The Mirror Man (pictured below),

Video here

and eventually strolled all the way over to Amazon's new campus in the South Lake Union neighborhood ... it looked like a short walk on Google Maps, but that didn't take into account the fact that it was mostly uphill.

On the way back, we took the Seattle Streetcar to Westlake Center and stopped at the nifty Starbucks

Source: Flickr

then witnessed a game of giant chess amidst an eerie forest of blue trees

before returning to Adam's car and heading back to my apartment.

Moving Forward

Tonight, we're going to see The Avengers 3D at the Seattle Cinerama. Then, Amazon's New Hire Orientation is tomorrow, and so begin the next 8 months of my life.

With my new location comes a new plan: work out regularly and eat better. With a gym right downstairs, I intend to exercise every morning before going to work. I also have a full kitchen at my disposal, so I will be planning my meals and eating in as much as possible. I'll probably have to allow myself one or two meals out per week, considering how many cool restaurants are located within 3 blocks of my apartment, but I'll be putting my kitchen to good use.

Somewhere in there I also plan to re-style my blog (this minimalist gray background is not very attractive) and post more often, so stay tuned!

[amik-blog]

We have ceased to believe that a friend's highest purpose is to summon us to the good by offering moral advice and correction. We practice, instead, the nonjudgmental friendship of unconditional acceptance and support—"therapeutic" friendship, in Robert N. Bellah's scornful term. We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side—validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we can to keep the boat steady. We're busy people; we want our friendships fun and friction-free. ... Until a few years ago, you could share your thoughts with only one friend at a time (on the phone, say), or maybe with a small group, later, in person. And when you did, you were talking to specific people, and you tailored what you said, and how you said it, to who they were—their interests, their personalities, most of all, your degree of mutual intimacy. "Reach out and touch someone" meant someone in particular, someone you were actually thinking about. It meant having a conversation. Now we're just broadcasting our stream of consciousness, live from Central Park, to all 500 of our friends at once, hoping that someone, anyone, will confirm our existence by answering back. We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud. ... The most disturbing thing about Facebook is the extent to which people are willing—are eager—to conduct their private lives in public. "hola cutie-pie! i'm in town on wednesday. lunch?" "Julie, I'm so glad we're back in touch. xoxox." "Sorry for not calling, am going through a tough time right now." Have these people forgotten how to use e-mail, or do they actually prefer to stage the emotional equivalent of a public grope? I can understand "[So-and-so] is in the Park with the rest of the City," but I am incapable of comprehending this kind of exhibitionism. Perhaps I need to surrender the idea that the value of friendship lies precisely in the space of privacy it creates: not the secrets that two people exchange so much as the unique and inviolate world they build up between them, the spider web of shared discovery they spin out, slowly and carefully, together. There's something faintly obscene about performing that intimacy in front of everyone you know, as if its real purpose were to show what a deep person you are. Are we really so hungry for validation? So desperate to prove we have friends?

William Deresiewicz, "Faux Friendship"

[amik-blog]

Formalized Denotation of Sarcasm and Rhetorical Questions

If you've been using the Internet for any reasonable amount of time, you have no doubt encountered situations where sarcasm was interpreted literally, or vice versa.

You know, something like:

A: Hey do you want to go out to lunch tomorrow? B: With you? Who wouldn't? A: Great! How's noon? B: ... that was supposed to be sarcastic. I don't like you.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way for B to denote that sarcastic rhetorical question⸮ Oh, there it is!

The Percontation Point

It turns out the percontation point, ⸮, has existed for almost 500 years but fell out of popular usage some time in the 17th century.[1] Traditionally used to specify a rhetorical question, I propose that it should also be used to denote sarcasm, perhaps as a parenthetical "(⸮)" if your teeth-gnashing happens to be in the form of a statement rather than a question.

Here are some example usages:

Wow, it was definitely necessary to write a blog post about this (⸮). You've made a meaningful contribution to Internet communications (⸮). I bet you're proud of yourself, huh⸮

Maybe that's a bit excessive. Surely none of my hundreds of few readers would respond so critically to this post.

How To Use It

This may be one of the few cases where it's easier to do something on Windows than on a Mac.

On Windows, ALT+1567 on the Numpad will yield this lovely punctuation mark.

On Mac, it's slightly trickier — press ⌘⌥T (Command+Option+t) to bring up the Character Viewer. Now click the menu button in the top left corner of the Viewer and select "Customize List...". Check the box next to "., Punctuation - All" and click "Done". Now find ⸮ near the bottom of the characters in the "., Punctuation - All" category and add it to your Favorites. Any time you would like to use it just bring up the Character Viewer, go to Favorites, and double-click.

There you have it. Use this mark wisely lest you find yourself with many fewer friends.

[amik-blog]

A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat out Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers’ top annual award, Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the nineties, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama’s caché (to wit: Pepsi-Cola’s “Choose Change” campaign, Ikea’s “Embrace Change ’09” and Southwest Airlines’ offer of “Yes You Can” tickets).

Naomi Klein, No Logo

[amik-blog]

The Inexorable Flow of Time

I just remembered the time capsule that my 4th grade class buried outside our classroom in 1999. Was it after 10 or 20 years that we were going to unearth it? Does anybody else remember? Maybe it won't even be there; the land has changed owners at least twice since it stopped being Armstrong Academy. I wonder: what would I do if I accidentally dug up somebody's time capsule? I sure hope we put a letter in there saying, "Please return to ..." I'm quite curious to find out what my 8-year-old self had to say back in 1999.

[amik-blog]

The open spectrum enemy, turned Net Neutrality enemy, became Google’s bedmate thanks to a business deal. Straight up. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. We got all of this thanks to Google’s desire for Android to take over the world. I commented earlier that they signed a deal with the devil — I wasn’t being facetious. They actually did! And they got away with it!

I've been trying to express this sentiment since ditching Android in early 2011. I'm glad that somebody else found the words for me. One point of disagreement: I dislike the OS as well. Hopefully it has changed significantly since 2.2, but it was pretty awful back then.

[amik-blog]

I want to take this cat back to Boston with me, but I would have to fight my sister for her.

[amik-blog]

Because I want my sisters to have the same opportunities that I do.

[amik-blog]

[amik-blog]

NEWT REX PLOT: It is 2020 and Congress has just amended the Constitution, allowing President Gingrich to run for a third term, unchallenged. President Gingrich is also his own vice president, the only man he trusts. During his momentous run as President, Gingrich has narrowed the executive cabinet down to the Departments of War, Crime Fightin', and Jesus. The "Soylent Green" program is both a profitable and successful way to feed the poor, who all have jobs digging graves for each other. The national debt is nonexistent, because the Federal government is a subsidiary of the largest company in the history of the world—Lockheed Exx-mart. After a brief and relatively harmless exchange of nuclear arms, China is now the 51st state. Gay marriage is against the law, but fashionable men may still brunch behind closed doors. Climate change, however, was confirmed as a national scientific fact, and it is now the official policy of the United States government to encourage the creation of new beach front property. ABBA's "Dancing Queen" is the national anthem. The book ends with President Gingrich's marriage to his fourth wife, his former intern.

Devore, John. "New Republic: Newt's Alternative Autobiography." NPR : National Public Radio.

[amik-blog]

"What distinguishes Steve Jobs is that he existed in layers from exceedingly public, second hand, apocryphal to private."

— comment on this beautiful eulogy by Steve Jobs' sister, Mona Simpson