The Broken Fourth Wall

07/18: A date to remember

2008-07-18T08:59:00.004-05:00

Mark the 18th of July as an important date on your calendar. I certainly have. Let it be remembered as the day that you finally update your feeds and subscribe to my blog over at LiveJournal. (Posted on both LiveJournal and Blogger)

Goodbye, Blogger

2008-06-28T22:45:00.001-05:00

Having used Blogger for a while, I've come to hate its interface. Therefore, I'm going to use LiveJournal for a while. My new blog address is kurtmckee.livejournal.com. Remember to subscribe to my new Livejournal feed!

Python's time module

2008-06-12T18:21:00.004-05:00

So I've been working like a fiend to import all of my comments from around the internet. It has been a herculean effort because almost everything has to be done manually. One comment here, another there, and no uniform way to extract those comments.

Two sites, however, made comment retrieval easy: Xanga and Slashdot. Both offer fine lists of my old comments. I first scraped Xanga for all of my old comments, but stumbled when converting the dates and times of my comments into a usable format: while Xanga outputs dates and times in the form 1/1/2006 1:22 AM, I need output in the form 2006-01-01 01:22:00 for import into the comment-tracking software I'm writing.

I hacked together some trivial regular expressions and had a solution in about ten minutes. However, I then wondered if there was software that could convert the dates and times for me. Surprise, it's already included in Python! Python's time module includes a function called 'strptime' that does all of the heavy interpretation and standardization of the formats. With that in mind, it'll be no trouble converting Slashdot's comments' dates and times (like Sunday January 01 2006, @01:22AM)!

The moral of the story is, do a little searching before writing your own software; somebody else may have already written a solution for you.

Of molds and such

2008-06-09T21:34:00.004-05:00

Once again it's summer in Evanston, and the humidity is wreaking havoc on my perishables. Today I discovered that a uncut pineapple, a pomelo, and a loaf of bread were consumed by mold. Last summer I suffered greatly due to the humidity, including expedited milk expirations, and the loss of potatoes and carrots.

Carrots don't mold, my mother informed me.

That has not been my experience. So, can anyone out there recommend a good dehumidifier?

Hadouken!

2008-05-23T22:52:00.010-05:00

Okay, SO, I'm totally throwing myself a party in my honor, and to add pride to pretentiousness, I want everyone to check out the invitation and mark whether you're coming or not so I know how much to pat myself on the back for a party well-thrown.

My birthday party on April 26th went over extremely well. The people meshed well and we had a wonderful time. It all started with Aaron and Allan arriving shortly after 7:00a. We ate at Chipotle, picked up a volleyball, and wandered around campus before heading to the beach.

Desolation

Bow and arrow (Tokuda)

Library (Tokuda)

Laughter (Tokuda)

At the beach, we played foxtail, flew a kite, and when enough people arrived, we played volleyball for a couple of hours. That was a good time, and an inside joke from that time is the source from which the title of this entry originated.

Flight (Tokuda)

As evening came, it was decided that we should go check out the big pile of dirt that was arbitrarily located at the south end of the beach. More fun ensued (primarily for the guys, but we eventually convinced the girls to join us).

Jump

Geronimo (Tsang)

Doubletake (Tsang)

Lemmings (Tsang)

With help (Tsang)

Hug (Tsang)

Some of my crew left, and we headed to Andrea's apartment for pizza. Unfortunately, we experienced a significant delay getting from the first floor to the third floor.

~~Videos forthcoming, but Youtube is throwing errors right now~~

Update - There will be no videos for a while; my cell phone is no longer generating videos with playable audio. I mean, there's audio, but no free software nor service supports the audio codec, called QCELP. Thanks for NOTHING, software patents.

Until there are videos, I'll just explain that the elevator was incorrectly rated up to 2,000 pounds, and it ground to a halt just before reaching the third floor. We were rescued after about 45 minutes.

Saved (Tsang)

Eventually we got out of the elevator; the firemen took down our names and told us not to collectively weigh more than 2000 pounds ever again, although we're certain that 10 people, each weighing less than 200 pounds, shouldn't have caused the elevator to stall.

Pizza was awesome, Lock was awesome, and then we went to Prairie Moon. This birthday party was exactly the experience I needed. Thanks everyone!

A group shot of the remnant prior to Prairie Moon:

Huddle (Tokuda)

"Bow and arrow", "Library", "Laughter", "Flight", and "Huddle" are copyright 2008 Allan Tokuda. Used with permission.

"Geronimo", "Doubletake", "Lemmings", "With Help", "Hug", and "Saved" are copyright 2008 Andrea Tsang. Used with permission.

Going for broke

2008-05-18T14:47:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, while at Sheil, Tim called out Kurt! and flashed some kind of hand gesture at me.

Tim: There, see? I just put a curse on you.
Me: Oh, hexes are the worst. Can you...is that something I can just wash out?
Tim: No, you're stuck with it.
Me: Shoot, and I got the Black Spot last week, too.
Tim: You know I'm from Salem, where all the witches were? Yeah, from Salem. You could go there and get some potions and stuff to lift the curse. It'll cost you, though.
Me: So, you haven't really given me a curse, but a financial burden.
Tim: That's the curse.

F-Spot problems

2008-05-11T01:54:00.003-05:00

I know I've been promising to upload photos and videos from my birthday, but I've been running into a roadblock that I don't have any good way to deal with. Consequently, I've had no incentive to organize and select the best photos to upload.

For over a year I've been running an old version of F-Spot -- version 0.4.0 -- because I've not had access to the internet in order to get updates. I now have internet access, and have updated F-Spot to version 0.4.2. In the intervening time, however, F-Spot has changed significantly: where previously it stored my photos' timestamps in Universal Coordinated Time (previously called Greenwich Mean Time) and interpreted the actual date and time by subtracting hours from the time, I'm now finding that the new version of F-Spot believes that the timestamps are now in local time. As a result, all of my photos' timestamps are wrong by five and six hours.

Needless to say, I'm flipping out, and my stress is exacerbated by the fact that F-Spot has had timestamp problems for several years. Of course, my solution right now is to make sure that I force my new photos' timestamps forward by five hours. If it's going to be wrong, I want it to be consistently wrong, so that it can be fixed consistently in the future.

Sigh.

Possibly-related bug reports: 340899, 340903, 332025

Stay strong!

2008-04-28T21:55:00.004-05:00

The other day a mother came into the toy store with her young son, Nicolas. Her son was very well-behaved, and played quietly at the train table when she asked him to. My boss commented how pleasant the boy was, and she informed us that he had been having an awful day, and that this was the first time he had been content.

When it came time to leave, however, her son threw a fit and began disagreeing with everything his mother said. It was an amusing psychological response.

Come on, it's time to go to Mandy's house.
I don't want to go to Mandy's house!
But she's having a birthday party, and you'll get to have ice cream!
I don't want to have ice cream!
And you'll see all of your friends there!
I don't want to see all of my friends there!

And so on. She put him in his stroller and I held the door open for them, encouraging poor Nicolas as he continued crying and carrying on.

Stay strong, Nicolas!
I don't want to stay strong! he wailed.

Theftable

2008-04-23T19:35:00.002-05:00

Discussing with Allan the possibility of him bringing his small desktop computer.

Allan: I don't know if I should bring it...it's kind of...
Me: Theftable?
Allan: "THEFTABLE". Good use of bad English.

Cherokee 0.6.0 and Django

2008-03-30T23:21:00.010-05:00

In this post, I'll detail how to set up Cherokee with Django using FastCGI.

I'll be working under the following assumptions:

Python, Django, and flup are properly installed on your system (I'm currently running Python 2.5.1, Django 0.96.1, and flup 1.0)
You don't have root, and/or want to run Cherokee only in a development environment

So then, let's begin!

Installing Cherokee

In a terminal, change to the directory to which you downloaded Cherokee 0.6.0, and run these commands to install Cherokee in ~/apps:

    $ tar -xzf cherokee-0.6.0.tar.gz
    $ cd cherokee-0.6.0/
    $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/apps
    $ make
    $ make install
    $ mkdir ~/apps/var/log
    $ mkdir ~/apps/var/run

We made those two directories at the end so that Cherokee can write to access and error logs, and start and stop Cherokee from our web browser.

Starting a Django project

We'll need a Django project to work with. Let's create one in ~/project.

    $ cd ~
    $ django-admin.py startproject project

Couldn't be simpler. Of course, if you already have a Django project, take note of its path (and especially the path leading up to the project; in our case we need to remember the path of our home directory: /home/user).

Configuring Cherokee

Alright, time to try out the new Cherokee admin console!

    $ ~/apps/sbin/cherokee-admin

Now open a web browser and go to http://localhost:9090/. You'll see something like this:

Let's first customize the settings in the "General" page:

Port: 8080 (must be above 1023, since we don't have root)
Port TLS: 8443 (in case we set up HTTPS later)

Click "Submit". Note that this does not save our changes to Cherokee's configuration file! This merely saves our changes temporarily. You must click "Apply" to permanently save your changes.

Next, open the "Virtual Servers" page:

Cherokee requires that the "default" virtual server (or "vserver") always exist as a fall back, but it is possible to create other virtual servers. Thus, you could create a second vserver, bound to a particular domain (like "beta.kurtmckee.org"), that functions under a completely separate set of rules. We won't explore that here, but I recommend exploring it further. For now, let's focus on customizing the "default" vserver. First click on its name in the "Virtual Server List".

You'll be presented with six different sections, starting with "Basics". Let's skip directly to "Behavior":

You see that there are a number of rules already defined for us. By default, Cherokee is configured to run PHP applications like Wordpress or Gallery, but we want a comprehensive Django-based solution! Be sure to study the default rules before continuing, as these rules are very informative, and you'll surely want to customize things later (perhaps by running other software alongside your Django project). For instance, you should notice the "Priority" column -- the larger the number, the sooner the rule is applied.

OK, so go ahead and delete every rule except the first (the '/' directory rule, priority 1). Then, click on the '/' link (it's very small). You'll be presented with this screen:

Change the "Handler" to "FastCGI", and you'll be presented with this screen:

Make absolutely sure to uncheck "Check file"! I have yet to figure out why, but if this is left checked, the variables that your Django application will see will be seriously b0rked up. You should also check "Error handler", which will prevent Cherokee from intercepting the pretty Django debug output and replacing it with terse HTTP error codes. Next, enter the following for the "Host" and "Interpreter":

Host: 127.0.0.1:8070 (or whatever port you want, but remember that port)
Interpreter: django-admin.py runfcgi host=localhost port=8070 --pythonpath=/home/user

There are two things to note here. Number one, if you set the "Interpreter", Cherokee will be able to automatically start the Django FastCGI server if it's not already running. This is a Good Thing (TM). Second, remember how I told you to keep note of the path to your Django project? You need to change the "pythonpath" argument to the "Interpreter". Since we created the Django project in /home/user/project/, we entered /home/user. Change the argument
accordingly, and then click "Add".

After clicking add, you will see a new line which will allow you to set environment variables for the "Host" and "Interpreter" you just entered. Enter these values:

Variable: DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
Value: project.settings

Click "Add" at the end of the line. Then, click "Submit Query". You'll see something similar to this screen:

Now click "Apply", which will save our changes to the Cherokee configuration file. You will be taken back to the Cherokee admin welcome screen, which will inform you that the server is not running. Click "Launch" and cross your fingers, because we're about to test our setup! Assuming you see the following screen, then Cherokee is now listening on localhost, port 8080.

So let's visit our new Django project, which is running at http://localhost:8080/! If everything goes well, you should be presented with the following screen:

Congratulations, you've got a functioning Django FastCGI server connected to your brand-new Cherokee installation. There's just one last thing, which I'll leave as a screenshot-less exercise for the reader: when you enable Django's built-in administration, you'll find that things aren't working so well. That will be because Django is requesting media from a (surprise) /media URL. Cherokee is in turn passing this /media URL right back to Django, which doesn't help us at all. You'll need to add a second rule to the "default" vserver with a higher priority than the '/' directory rule. Here's the relevant information:

Entry: /media
Type: Directory (already selected)
Handler: List & Send (already selected)
Priority: 100 (or 2, or anything greater than the '/' directory rule's priority)

You'll click "Submit Query" and then edit your new rule, changing the "Document Root" to the Django admin media directory on your filesystem (in my case, that directory is located at /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/.

Prince of Peace

2008-03-11T01:01:00.001-05:00

Prince of Peace

At the 2005 Crusade men's retreat

Announcing Tricycle

2008-03-09T20:28:00.007-05:00

When Mat Honan's website Barack Obama is your new bicycle launched, it spawned a number of copycat and parody websites. I thought, "Hey, there might be people who don't have the ability to write their own software, but would enjoy having their own is-your-new-bicycle site." Thus, I wrote Tricycle.

Tricycle is a simple way for anyone to host their own "is your new bicycle" site. Just download and copy index.php into your directory. Modify the settings and you'll be all set.

Tricycle is licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3, so it is 100% free software. Check it out!

Update - Check out Tricycle in action over at Dave Woods is your new bicycle!

Unit testing

2008-02-23T23:50:00.003-06:00

I just committed basic unit testing support to Renquist, implemented using Python's unittest framework. The results were quite pleasing. Now I can quickly run multiple automated tests to ensure correct behavior and avoid regressions! Huzzah!

For my first two tests I decided to try using a blank file as both a Feed and as a List. The blank Feed test uncovered a bug I hadn't considered, while the blank List test made me fix a problem I had already tagged as a failure point in the comments of the source code. Both bugs are fixed now, but there's surely still a lot of code that isn't being touched by these tests. But how can I identify those untested lines of code?

The first thing I thought after writing those two test cases was, There should be a way to visually identify the untested code. After looking through the Python documentation, the first thing I found was the "trace" module, which can output every single line that gets run. It would take almost no work at all to generate a very simple HTML file, highlighting tested code (or untested code).

Before I write that software, though, I'm going to search a little online. I can't imagine that someone else hasn't had that idea, too.

Here's to automated testing!

Authorship and extensibility

2008-02-20T00:08:00.002-06:00

Feed items can now have authors associated with them in the database using a one-to-many authors-to-items relationship. Renquist by default will only use a one-to-one relationship, however (which means that there will be one author entry for each item entry). At first I struggled with the idea that there would be significant data duplication; I'm the only one writing on this blog, so why store ten identical "Kurt" authors given ten feed items? Wouldn't it make more sense to store that information only once?

Yes, but then I considered the case of comment feeds. I know already that there have been three Davids who have posted on my site. One uses "Dave", another "David", and the third showed up once and called himself "David (a different one)". There could easily be a collision of names, and it would be foolish to think that just because someone says that he's "David" that he's the same "David" who posted three other comments. Make sense?

Therefore I'm choosing to leave it up to someone else (through an as-yet-unrealized plugin framework) to decide how best to minimize duplication. Maybe the plugin could merely minimize duplication by name; easy, but perhaps not ideal in all circumstances. Maybe the plugin could minimize duplication using more advanced means (those three Davids might be writing in three separate languages, for instance). There are at least two other methods that jump to mind, but it's easy to see the potential for a smart plugin.

In the meantime, however, Renquist will store author information despite likely data duplication.

Renquist and distutils

2008-02-14T00:44:00.004-06:00

There have been some big goings-ons with Renquist! I have more or less gotten the code in a somewhat usable state, and have removed some more hard-coded elements. In addition, I've worked on adding code so that Python's distutils can package up the software automatically. Now Renquist can be installed as a true library!

Don't expect code anytime soon, however. Since my name is going on the software, there's no chance that I'm going to be letting it out the gate without some serious vetting, and that means unit testing (via Python's unittest). Also, I haven't yet hooked up author and enclosure code.

And finally, there's no documentation, which is just unacceptable for a library. I haven't yet settled on what software to use. pydoctor looks nice, but there are no official releases to download. Epydoc does have releases available for download, though...I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

There's all of the big news right now. Fun fact: I'm currently building Renquist as version 0.0.0 alpha. When it's releasable, it'll probably be called version 0. Exciting!

Capturing comments

2008-02-13T01:00:00.000-06:00

I stopped using coComment for a long while, and that turned out to be a mistake: I stopped commenting on others' content altogether! I'm back on coComment, and I'm loving it. If you visit my user page, you'll see that I'm actively commenting in many places.

One of the biggest problems I have with commenting is that my comment (that is, my copyrighted content) is no longer under my control. coComment gives me the ability to capture my words and store them away safely. However, it doesn't go far enough (and can't). In particular, I want to have a little signature at the bottom of my comments that points back to my own site, to the original comment, together with a GPG signature.

So, for example, I might go to Andy's blog and leave a comment that says Maintain your blog!. Before submitting the comment to his blog, it would receive a unique identifier from my blog, get cryptographically signed, and then get submitted to his blog.

I've also considered that some sites might not like a link at the bottom of the comment; that's why it's unlikely that the little signature at the bottom of the comment would be a direct link to my site. I've also considered making the entire thing a block of text that search engines would treat as a single entity, so that the signature could be searched for easily. Perhaps it would be along the lines of kurtmckee.org-comment-4238.

I do wish that blog systems supported cryptographic signatures in a smart way. OpenPGP and GPG can help establish identity because they intrinsically depend on a web of trust. Building such tools directly into blog systems seems like a good way to help people interact with trust. I could be wrong, but those have been some of my recent thoughts about commenting.

Call me

2008-02-13T00:58:00.000-06:00

I finally figured out what the proper settings are for my audio card, so Audacity is now able to record the audio coming from my cell phone, which means that you all need to start calling me and leaving hilarious messages for me to record and store away for the cold nights. Tell me a joke. Drunk dial me. Forget who you're talking to and end the message with Love you! and then burst out in embarrassed giggling and hang up.

That, or do something that I haven't heard before.

Password policies

2008-02-08T11:01:00.000-06:00

I've finally gone through and updated almost all of my passwords on the various services that I use. Having crafted devilishly unwieldy passwords for this year, it is infuriating to run across services that won't allow me to use my strong passwords. Digg and coComment are the biggest well-known offenders; Digg forbids any special characters, and coComment arbitrarily accepts certain special characters but not others. I emailed coComment about their policy, and received this in reply:

You may use only [sic] following symbols in addition to letters and digits:
$ @ - # % & ? . - _
It is a matter of security.

Security? Have they not escaped their input properly? Are they afraid of SQL injection attacks? At least they're aware of their limitations. When I changed my SourceForge password their system claimed that the change failed, while it in fact changed the password just fine.

But I can't end this post without giving special props to my Northwestern University IT people.

The Northwestern University password policy is the most onerous I've ever had to comply with. In particular, passwords must be between six and eight characters, and passwords expire every three months, and I've suffered under their foolishness for years. My passwords start at 10 characters!

Anyway, that's 31 services down, and only a few more to go. Hooray!

Cloverfield (2008)

2008-02-03T11:17:00.000-06:00

I first heard about Cloverfield over at Empty Bookshelf Reviews. Nate's review of Cloverfield convinced me to see the movie as soon as possible (and had that not been enough, my friend Dan weighed in on Cloverfield soon after). So here's my brief review:

Do not fail to see Cloverfield in theaters.

I'm not going to discuss the plot, and I recommend avoiding any trailers, because the movie was shot from the point of view of one of the characters, who is carrying a camcorder. As such, several plot devices become available. One is that the audience is not given any foreshadowing or special knowledge -- we see what the characters see. You don't get to see shadows on the wall just behind the oblivious protagonists, nor evil creepers approaching while someone sleeps, nor does the camera pan to give you a glimpse of what's on the other side of a wall. Other movies do that; this one doesn't. For that reason, I think it would be appropriate to go into the movie with as little information as possible.

As one of the few movies I've been excited about enough to see in theaters, Cloverfield was just as exciting as I could have hoped, and more. Go see this movie.

Box o' legos

2008-01-30T23:39:00.000-06:00

Transcription:

So...I've come into some legos recently...a WHOLE LOT of legos, ALRIGHT! It's like Uncle Scrooge's money bin. Let me just pull back to kind of show you what we're dealing with here. We're kind of dealing with a big boxful of legos.

Now don't think that just because there's a lot of pieces in here that there're also a lot of sets, because that is not the case. As an example, take a look at this guy. I have found a lot of leg pieces in this box. What I have not found is a corresponding number of torsos and heads, which has been just a little bit disappointing. I have, however, found a lot of pieces that are new and exciting to me -- I haven't seen them before -- such as this guy, which I can only describe as some form of fiber optic witchcraftery...

I work at a toy store, and for their grand opening they asked Lego "Would you guys send some freebies so we can give them out to the kids when we open". And Lego said "Oh yeah yeah! I think we've got some freebies..." But they sent this box instead, which doesn't do us any good because it's a bunch of individual pieces that don't sum up to any complete set. So it languished in our basement for a long time and was recently rediscovered, at which point the owners said "Kurt. Would you like some legos?"

And I said "Uh, yeah?"

And that's the true story of how I've come to be in possession of a big boxful of individual legos that don't sum up to any complete set.

Stale data

2008-01-25T13:12:00.000-06:00

I hate, I just hate, to be reminded that my data is not in fact under my control. It's happened twice in the past two weeks.

First, I had a video show up in my feeds in December. As it's almost two-and-a-half hours long, I've been waiting for that magic opportunity to watch it uninterrupted. Lo-and-behold, however, the feed item disappeared last week! It turns out that Google Reader doesn't allow you to mark an item as "unread" after 30 days. It must be too old to be of interest. Thus, Invisible Ballots - A Temptation for Electronic Vote Fraud has disappeared to obscurity. Thanks, Google Reader!

Second, I had accumulated a good number of saved voice messages that struck me as funny enough to keep. Surprise! If you don't listen to them for about a week, Sprint automatically deletes them. My favorite quote from K. Dubs is now gone forever.

Thanks, Sprint!

Revisiting "uninteresting" statistics

2008-01-19T22:56:00.000-06:00

As I noted in December, I've been keeping track of the feed items that I find interesting in Google Reader. My method has been to "star" the items, which is a statistic that Google Reader keeps track of. Here is the summary in the Trends view: From your 128 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 461 items, starred 292 items... The summary continues, but these few numbers give me what I want.

Only 63% of the content I look at is interesting to me. Almost 40% of the content is a waste of my time.

Wow. I thought that this might be the case. Unfortunately I cannot easily measure how much of my time was wasted, because this metric cannot speak to the ease or difficulty with which I glossed over the uninteresting content. It's easy to skip Penny Arcade's news and Megatokyo's rants. It's far more difficult to determine whether I want to read a blog entry without actually reading it.

Now to start pruning my feed list...

Why she sat by herself

2008-01-16T13:18:00.000-06:00

For several weeks after meeting her, I would occasionally see her in the dining hall. I would have brief one- to two-minute exchanges with her on my way out in order to avoid appearing aggressive. She, always alone, would smile and laugh at my jokes and inanity.

One Sunday in the winter quarter of 2007, I ate with a large group of Foster House guys; about 20 of us occupied two tables along the west wall. I, at the south table and facing south, saw her brisk past me. Resolving to say hello, I finished my meal and cleared my tray. I then walked back and saw that she had taken the table immediately north of the Foster House tables and was facing north. As I approached, I also saw that there was a tray across from her and wondered with anticipation what kind of friend she was finally eating with.

I saw down next to the tray and said Hi! How are you? As she replied, I became distracted by a flurry of whispering at the table behind her, and as she finished speaking I saw a dozen sets of Foster House eyes turn and stare at the two of us. The guys then turned back to their table, grinning stupidly. My first thought was That's right, stare! I know this girl! The reality of the situation became apparent moments later, as the owner of the tray returned.

He was musclebound, with tattoos and piercings. He sat down in front of the tray and queried me, Hi. How do you know [my girlfriend]. She giggled and announced This is my boyfriend! I fumbled my way through a brief introduction, ended my conversation with her, and headed out.

Back at Foster House, the guys laughed that they had seen him with her, and that they couldn't wait for him to return to the table. I just wanted to turn my chair around to face the table and watch the whole thing! crowed my CA.

At dinner that evening, I saw her again by herself and sat down across from her.

You know how, in the movies, there's the guy who likes some girl, and he keeps hanging around her, but she's not interested, but he keeps pursuing her, and then one fateful evening he's talking with her and her boyfriend walks up, there's an awkward introduction, the boyfriend casually dismisses the guy, and the boyfriend and the girl head off, leaving the guy behind to mope? If this were that situation, I would know how to deal with it. I have a lot of experience with those situations, because I've watched lots of movies. This isn't that situation, though. I'm not romantically interested in you.

She replied, I know. If you were, you would have asked for my phone number by now. But you haven't. It's refreshing.

Great. But I still feel really embarrassed about lunch today. To tell you the truth, I've been really curious why you always sit by yourself, but I figured it would be too bizarre to just come right out and ask right after meeting you.

She replied, I live in Kemper, so nobody I live with is on the meal plan. Plus, most of my friends live off-campus or go to school in Chicago.

Well. That was easy enough.

2007: A year in review

2008-01-01T13:36:00.000-06:00

Los osos del fuego

I also refer to this as "The summer of Spanish". I blasted through my second year of Spanish at Northwestern in one summer, and as Rifka Cook said, it was like we were family. The class just meshed together, both in and out of the classroom, in a way that made my summer wonderful. We all played football, frisbee, and croquet often. We also ate together, visited Northwestern's Dearborn Observatory, explored the campus, and even went swimming! It was an amazing summer for me. ¡Vivan los osos!

My first roommate

It's funny: I never had a roommate while living in the dorms, but the very same moment I moved into an apartment, I contracted my first roommate. It was nice to have someone around, and our interactions evolved very quickly and have influenced my speech patterns even to this day. However, given the size of my apartment and the friction between our personalities, I can only describe that time as a crucible. What it forged was my distrust of that roommate. Also, the experience confirmed what I've been saying since 2003: I doubt that I would make a good roommate for anyone, and that there is a person who would be a good roommate for me.

Communication patterns

I've had a cell phone for roughly six months, and it has been wonderful. I can now call people for free after 7:00p! Given the frequency and duration of my calls, I pay about $1 per hour of conversation, which suits me just fine. I thoroughly enjoy having two- and three-hour conversations with family and friends without having to worry about my phone bill.

Meanwhile, my computer has not been connected to the internet for the same length of time. I don't get to blog as often as I'd like to, and having three years of history offline is disappointing, but it has been a productive time for me. Additionally, limited exposure to the internet, and to my feeds in particular, has changed some of my usage patterns. For example, I need a way to filter my feeds.

The mother of invention

Wouldn't it be useful to have a feed reader with a spam filter? I've seen no feed reader with this capability, so I've started to write one. What I've written so far is an unreleased library named Renquist. It still needs work, so I'll keep coding.

Answering a big question

2005 and 2006 were easily the best and worst years of my life to date (and that is not to say "respectively"; the four combinations of the cross product of the two couples are true, too). The first half of 2007 was troublesome, but I want to thank Aaron for being there for me. Thanks for giving of your time, Aaron.

My parents were absolutely right to push me far away from home, but only recently did my mom reveal their reasoning. She said I was afraid that if you stayed in Oklahoma, you would breeze through college, get married, have a kid or two, and at age 30 you would suddenly wonder "Who am I?". Well played, Mom.

I'm pleased to say that I've been plunged into what I can only call a mid-mid-life crisis which it seems no single year can span. Luckily, I'm about seven years ahead of the game, so I've got some time in which to answer the question thoroughly.

Lessons in parenting

I work at a toy store now. I am constantly taken aback by the parents who come into the store. Typically, the parents are disinterested in, and disengaged from, their unruly and undisciplined children. They'll spend $500 on a stroller so their four-year-old doesn't have to walk while nursing a pacifier (!), but they refuse to spend any time instructing the child. Witness, for instance, the mother whose child spit on her face when she said not to climb inside one of our display cabinets. She said Lovely to no one in particular and continued shopping.

Oh yes, and in addition to learning how not to raise a child, I can wrap presents now!

Looking forward

I expect to graduate with a math degree in 2008. What I'll do next, I don't know. I keep thinking I should leave the country, and often I think that teaching English in Japan would be a good thing, although more recently South Korea has entered my mind as well. Maybe I have a desire merely to visit the rest of the world. Time will tell.

God is in the details

I guarantee I've forgotten something, but if I think of anything of note, I'll update as necessary.

In closing

In 2007 I enjoyed a great summer, became more involved at Sheil, and had a taste of financial independence. I also endured much, like a stressful holiday work environment as I learned the ropes, injuries (thanks a lot for barefoot football, Terence -- I still can't bend my big toe), and of course, being unable to go to Chipotle all the time as I begin budgeting like an adult.

However, 2007 is done and over with. 2008 ftw!

Thank you all for reading this through. Good year to you.

How I met her

2007-12-24T20:13:00.000-06:00

I saw her often in the dining hall, and always in the same manner. She would come in with her thick black-and-bleached hair, her striking face, and her unique clothes, and would choose a table at which to sit alone and read a book while eating.

Throughout the fall quarter of 2006 I wondered why this girl always sat by herself. As an extrovert, I could not understand her seclusion: even when a crowded dining hall forced her to share a table, her body language clearly detached her from the others...and then she would be off, off to her next unknown adventure, and likely alone.

Then, one day in the winter quarter of 2007, I saw her once again. I was facing south, and she walked past my table to sit two tables north of (and thus behind) me. Seated across from Sars, I commented that I always wondered why she sat by herself. He, facing her table, informed me that she was in one of his classes. While doing so, his eyes tracked her movement behind me, and as she passed several feet away back by our table, he turned bodily towards her, throwing subtlety to the wind. Turning to me, he continued speaking.

I'm trying to make eye contact with her so, like, when she sees me in class she'll be like "Oh yeah, I've seen that guy." Then, like, it won't be like awkward when I sit on the same row as her. Then I'll like, like decrease the number of seats between us like each class until I'm like sitting next to her and then I'll be like "Hey. My name is Sars. Like the virus."

As she returned to her table, dessert in hand, I told him that that was the stupidest thing I'd heard in my life. You just walk up and say "Hey, my name is Kurt. What's your name?" Sars argued back that you can't just walk up to a person and introduce yourself: you have to plan the first encounter to decrease the awkwardness. He then hopped up for some cookies as K. Dubs came to the table. I excused myself and walked to her table directly.

Hi! My name is Kurt McKee. I see you in the dining hall all the time, and I've always wondered what your name is.

"Uninteresting" statistics

2007-12-21T10:11:00.000-06:00

For a long while I've wondered just how much of my time is wasted sifting through uninteresting feed items. Although Google Reader provides almost no way to measure such things, their "Trends" view does list how many items were aggregated in the past 30 days, together with how many items I've "starred".

Thus, for every item I now read, I also star anything that I find interesting. Starting in January I'll have some idea just how many of my feed items are uninteresting.

Half of a decade of birthdays

2007-12-05T10:58:00.000-06:00

Hey, thanks! But, how did you know it was my birthday? You don't use Facebook or anything.
Pierce

You need to join Facebook so we can communicate as a group. How else are we going to collaborate? <I respond> Oh, I forgot about email.
Terence

I removed my wall and put up my phone number. When my birthday rolled around, nobody called. Nobody emailed. A few people sent Facebook messages saying Where the hell is your wall?
Allan

Have you ever seen "The Boondocks"? In one of the first season's episodes, Huey conducts an experiment: two weeks of watching nothing but black television. That is, television programs whose cast is predominantly black. During the experiment he becomes increasingly slothful and forgetful.

Facebook, it seems, has similar effects.

Back in my heyday, my friends remembered my birthday well ahead of time and threw a massive surprise 18th birthday party for me and Eric (we were born exactly one month apart). It started early in the morning, when two of our best girl friends showed up at my house (where Eric had spent the night). We woke up to them singing "Happy Birthday", and I doubt that they'll forget the first words out of my confused and groggy mouth: What the heck?! We were kidnapped and taken, blindfolded, to Golden Corral where a large group of our friends had driven up to an hour to have breakfast with us.

In the afternoon we were taken to a dance studio for swing dancing lessons, and with even more of our friends in attendance. In the evening we were taken to a large party with even more friends and family, where we were given hand-painted T-shirts which we have to this day. It was wonderful.

Then I joined Facebook and "friended" (I hate that verb) between 200 and 300 people. Like Allan, I disabled my wall. When my birthday came around, I got about seven Facebook messages from people I hadn't cared to talk with in several years, along with a Where is your wall? You're missing out on having your wall plastered with birthday wishes. Sorry, Chris, I don't agree. If having dozens of people take less than one minute out of their lives to follow a link and type what amounts to less content than most IMs I receive is supposed to be some kind of pinnacle of birthday experiences, then I don't agree.

I'm not depressed about any of this, mind you. But I'll always remember my 16-hour birthday party, surrounded by my closest friends. And I'll always hate that, in one half of a decade, people have changed the measure of a birthday from the amount of pleasurable quality time spent with good friends, to the masturbatory number of Facebook messages you receive.

Defective

2007-11-30T21:36:00.000-06:00

I bought a garlic press so I could crush the ever-lovin' daylights out of limes for limeade with that "fresh from the tree" taste. Unfortunately, I snapped the metal of the garlic press. Stupid flimsy inferior metals. There ought to be a law.
The other day a woman came into the store with her 18-month-old child. After purchasing some toys and unsuccessfully attempting to leave the store several times, she turned to me. Would you tell us to leave?

I stared at her, stunned. However, she didn't wait for a response, but immediately whirled towards her child. Okay, this man told us we need to leave! C'mon, sweetie! This man said we have to go, so say goodbye!

My anger immediately and tirelessly burned against this woman. Stupid incompetent mother. There ought to be a law.

Licensing Renquist

2007-11-30T21:34:00.001-06:00

I've long thought that the GNU GPL was the software license that best reflected my ideologies about software, and with the release of the GNU GPL version 3, I've decided that it's important to man up and commit to the new version. I'm taking it a step further, however: Renquist will be licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

The reason I'm choosing the Affero version is that it prohibits someone from using Renquist as a backend for a web service without making the source code available. Under the regular GPL licenses, web services do not technically distribute any software to people, so there is no need to provide source code. Thus, someone could take Renquist, significantly improve it, and create a web service without ever having to release the source code of the changes. This is unacceptable; everyone should benefit from any improvements to the code. Choosing the GNU AGPLv3 helps ensure that any and all improvements will be made available to the public so that everyone benefits.

And that's the way it should be.

Life with GnuCash

2007-11-27T20:46:00.001-06:00

Using GnuCash has been a real joy over the past two weeks. I'm now very comfortable with my money because I know to the penny where the money comes from and goes to. Plus, exact bookkeeping will let me more carefully budget how I want to spend what money isn't being spent on bare necessities.

In addition to easy reconciliation and budgeting, however, I'm seeing areas where I need to improve my habits when buying. In particular, I'm seeing discrepancies on my receipts that should have been caught while I was standing at the register. For instance, Chipotle charged me for two drinks instead of one last week. And Burger King charged me an anomalous $0.44 more than the total on the register receipt when they ran my card.

Two weeks is clearly not a baseline, so I look forward to seeing trends emerge in the coming months. In the meantime, I'll work on changing my routines at the register so Jewel's self checkout machine can't short me a dollar and penny in change ever again.

Feed lists

2007-11-27T20:44:00.002-06:00

As I've had time, I've continued to work on Renquist, and have added some support for feed lists. Thus, rather than subscribing to a particular feed, a person can subscribe to a list of feeds. For instance, maybe my friend John is always finding new webcomics. I can just subscribe to his feed list and I'll automatically start seeing the new comics, too, as he adds them.

The next step may be to cook up a template so I can output feed lists in OPML format.

My everlasting solvation

2007-11-19T23:42:00.000-06:00

Aaron and Allan came to town for Erica's (Aaron's girlfriend) dance concert on Saturday, and Allan spent the night at my place. While here, he taught me how to solve the Rubik's Cube, which took all of about 45 minutes. I've known for a while that it was solvable using simple algorithms, but it is still satisfying to see it come together at the end.

Although there are many algorithms out there, he taught me a comparably short set of rules. Easily memorized and very straightforward, the rules allowed me to solve the puzzle in about five minutes a short while ago. Unfortunately, I apparently can't play with the cube for very long, as the motions have unexpectedly caused my forearms to flare up with pain.

Allan, my hat is off to you. Thanks for the knowledge hookup (and the complimentary cube!).

Identity and cryptography

2007-11-19T23:28:00.000-06:00

The other day I received an anonymous comment on my blog. I deleted the comment, since the content wasn't particularly useful. Besides, the person didn't leave their name! But immediately after the deletion I had second thoughts. Frankly, I've never been able to establish a commentator's identity online, even though I feel like I can if they leave a name. Just because someone claims to be Larry doesn't mean that they are!

I'm a proponent of both anonymous access and anonymous participation, together with a culture of accountability (and systems in place to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high). Optimally, people choose to use their true identity (or, at least, a consistent online identity) because that's the cultural norm. You see this culture on Facebook, with people using their real names. It similarly exists on Gmail, as people generally use a derivation of their real name (or preferred online identity) in order to form their email address. (This culture does not exist on MySpace, where the cultural norm for names is ~~~InOcAnHaSaGeD69~~~.)

Name, email address, or URL alone is not enough, however.

Shortly after thinking on this, I stumbled on a blog that caught my eye: the author signs all of his comments using PGP! I've no link now, but his commenting system parsed out the PGP signature lines and presented a link at the bottom of the comment to a page with the original comment and signature. Readers can then verify the signature.

This struck me as a wonderful solution, because it unobtrusively builds on the web of trust that PGP encourages, nay, requires. And the re-use of a proven and decentralized technology usually appeals to me. Therefore, I expect to have a similar system implemented for my own website software one day. In the meantime, I strongly encourage you to approach me, Kurt McKee, or your nearest Google-authorized search provider for further information about PGP and its powerful open source alternative, GPG.

Bullet points

2007-11-07T22:27:00.000-06:00

Although I've often thought it would be good to use GnuCash to keep track of my finances, I've never taken the time to actually use the thing. That changes now. My bank offers transaction information in several downloadable formats that GnuCash supports, so I'll be able to quickly and easily keep track of most of my cash flow.
I uninstalled X-Moto completely because not only did I get Aaron addicted, but the latest version (now with over 100 all-new maps!) threatened to completely consume my time.
Speaking of Aaron, he helped me out with some photo organization that I've needed to get done. That appears to have been a catalyst, because I've been on a roll, having organized backwards through time to the beginning of 2004. The big stumbling block for 2004 has been the choir tour to Chicago, photos of which number in the several hundreds (to Frederick, Stephan, and David: expect phone calls from me soon).

Quantifying stuff and things

2007-10-26T23:08:00.000-05:00

I like the idea of keeping track of seemingly useless things, because the statistics gleaned from such data always seem interesting.

As an example, one of my friends recently called me and informed me that he was missing some money. You see, he's been keeping track of his finances using double-entry bookkeeping (which means that he sees not just where the money went to, but where it came from). He had been tracking cash that had been going into, and coming from, his wallet, but had not kept careful record of every little transaction (all the little things that we don't think about, like parking meters and vending machines). Looking back over the past several months he discovered that there was a severe discrepancy.

I'm missing almost $700!

If we rule out theft and loss -- both of which seem improbable given the data -- that's a lot of money to spend in small amounts. But that is, of course, entirely possible, and it makes you think. In my case, I wonder what the statistics are for my various categories of purchases. For instance, how much money have I sunk into Chipotle's guacamole (which costs me about 12 minutes of work at my current salary)?

When you have statistics, you can make reasoned economic decisions. As an example, I recently checked my statistics in X-Moto. Since March, I've played for 66 hours. Much of that time has been spent trying to beat several of the most difficult maps. In particular, I've played the map "Up and Down" 1624 times in a total of 11 hours (and I still haven't beaten the stupid thing!).

Thanks to these statistics, I've made an economic decision not to spend my time playing X-Moto anymore. Where will my next five- and ten-minute time-waster come from? I haven't the foggiest, but I doubt it will have such wonderful statistics attached. ...Although I know I spent 44 hours on the phone last month...

A good man

2007-10-24T20:15:00.000-05:00

I remember the night of my high school graduation fondly; there were tons of funny things that happened, but I've long forgotten many of the smaller coincidences and friendly exchanges. Two things I strongly remember, however: the romantic revelations of the evening.

First and foremost (and still one of my favorites to date) was the conversation between myself and one of my graduating friends' fathers. He walked up deliberately, greeted me, and we shook hands. However, he didn't let go of my hand, but looked me straight in the eye, and said, You know, I think you only like me for my daughter. I looked him straight back and evenly replied, Well that's not true at all. I also like your tie.

Later, at the graduation after-party, he approached me again and suggested that, if I should pursue his daughter, he would be quite pleased about that. He further noted that interest has been shown by his daughter. I thanked him for his confidence in me, but declined the opportunity to pursue my friend as I was not romantically interested in her.

At another point at the after-party I was pulled aside by one of my beautiful friends (and she, a model!). She confided that she had had a crush on me for most of the school year. What a pride booster! I have no idea what I said in reply, but I have confidence that I told her that I was flattered, but that I was not romantically interested in her.

A couple of years later I met up with the father's daughter; she was engaged to a young man she met at college. During our conversation she informed me that, when she and her father were discussing the engagement, he had commented that the young man is okay, but he's no Kurt McKee. Another vote of confidence, albeit an awful thing to say in that context!

Throughout my college years I have felt that I have fallen from people's highest opinions and my reputation has declined. (The last time anyone has offered a daughter to me was 2005, but that one doesn't count.) Luckily, along came my friend Eric by way of his blog: Going through a day knowing that at any moment the secrets of your heart could be "laid bare" really made me think twice about the true state of my heart and mind. Spurred on primarily by that, I'm working to make decisions that I'll be able to respect. Of course, making decisions that I think are right and good does not make me a good man. Already, however, I respect myself more, which is a good step for me.

Renquist

2007-10-24T15:25:00.001-05:00

I have been having a blast working on my feed software idea. I've been trying to apply good programming practices throughout, and although I have very little functional code, I do have some architectural code in place.

As an example, I've got some code in place for using the Decorator Pattern. Basically, a plugin can define new functionality and data structures that can be wrapped around feed items. Thus, while regular feed items contain information like "This article was posted on October 20th, 2007 by Kurt", a decorator might add additional information: "...and is currently unread". It looks like this will be mostly transparent to all of the other code (as it should be!), because later today I'm expecting to tinker with implementing the Factory Pattern. The Factory Pattern lets all of the rest of the code be ignorant of the existence of any decorators; the rest of the code just asks for a feed article, and any decorators will be automatically attached.

When I actually sat down to code for the first time, I came up with a name for the project: Renquist. You see, I had "True Lies" (1994) on in the background, and Arnold Schwarzenegger had just introduced himself to Tia Carrere as Renquist. Harry Renquist. I figured, Hey, if he can dance the tango with Tia Carrere and then blow up some stuff and shoot a bunch of people in the ensuing chase, Harry "Renquist" can do anything. And I'd like this software to be just as capable.

Growing as a person

2007-10-14T23:21:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you've noticed that I've started listing the books that I'm currently reading on the sidebar of my site? I've begun to take full advantage of the Evanston Public Library, which has an extensive collection of interesting books. I'm enjoying reading again, and of course I have the hope of increasing my reading speed simultaneously.

In addition to significantly stepping up my reading, I'm currently enjoying watching Futurama in Spanish. I've watched many of the episodes so often that I can watch the show in Spanish, expectant of the meaning because of my familiarity with the English dialogue.

It's a fantastic time for me; even my passive television-watching time is spent well!

The unfortunate downside is that, every time I watch that classic first-season episode, A Fishful of Dollars, I desperately crave anchovy pizza. Thus, I had to enjoy myself a four-cheese pizza with self-applied anchovies on Friday night. Sweet!

Unable to sleep

2007-10-09T22:51:00.001-05:00

I've been reading a "For Dummies" book about design patterns, which are tried-and-true ways to solve software development problems. Unfortunately, it has triggered a sleepless state that I haven't experienced in a long time, in which I'm unable to quiet my mind because I'm thinking about software development. It's 3:30a now, and sleep is far from my mind.

For the longest time I used a desktop application called Liferea to manage and read my feeds. Not bad, but it had some shortcomings: it was slow, it was buggy, and the developer was making changes that didn't sit well with me. I switched to the web-based Google Reader and have been relatively happy, but there are long-standing limitations with Google Reader. For instance, I can't read my friend Tiffany's feed because Reader doesn't support authenticated feeds (i.e. feeds that require a username and password). Further, it's impossible to do interesting things with Reader. As an example, I'd like to have a Bayesian filter that I can train to separate interesting posts from uninteresting posts; perhaps I like Miguel de Icaza's posts about software, but would rather ignore his political posts.

So what can I do to improve the situation? I could switch from Google Reader to another service, but I still won't have extensibility. I could switch to web-based software that I run myself, such as FoFRedux, but extensibility could very well come at a high price: I don't think FoFRedux is in active development, and my changes will be almost useless when I upgrade to the next version (whenever that may come out). Or, perhaps I could take a lesson from Phillip van Hoof, who used design patterns to create TinyMail (the design of which has impressed me for almost a year now).

Now you're all caught up with what's been going through my mind: I've ideas for writing my own web-based feed reader. Maybe the idea will pass and nothing will come to fruition...but maybe I'll have a pleasant project that I can learn from and enjoy and share with others. Either way, it's 3:50a, and I need to get back to lying in bed.

Faster'n fast

2007-09-25T21:18:00.000-05:00

Wow, classes haven't even started and already there's been an intruder in a girl's room. I guess Northwestern needs to lock more doors to prevent this kind of thing from every happening again.

A resident of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority woke up about 4 a.m. Monday [September 24, 2007] to find an intruder inside her third-floor room. [...] The incident came as the university has been working to institute new security measures for all of its on-campus housing. On Sept. 10, members of fraternities and sororities were notified that all doors in Greek houses would be locked, and that secondary doors would be alarmed in the future.

The only thing that's going to hinder intruders effectively is student awareness. You can't solve a social issue with technical measures, and Alan Cubbage (the vice-president of Northwestern university relations) knows it.

Cubbage said that students can help prevent similar incidents by using common sense, such as locking their doors at night and not letting strangers into their residence halls.

(Security is) a joint effort, he said. Students have to be engaged and involved in it.

I am glad that nothing untoward happened to the girl.

Comic duplication

2007-09-22T11:22:00.000-05:00

Is anybody else noticing that Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del comics sometimes share very strong similarities? Check it out:

Tiger Woods game faces
8/31 Pendulous And Vile
8/31 The Game Face

Halo 3 tie-in ads
9/14 Alien Genocide Is Thirsty Work
9/14 Marketing Blitz

I like to see originality in my feeds, guys. I'm not going to sit around trying to figure out which comic was published first, or whether there was an external third-party source for the ideas. I just want to see comics that don't look like copies of each other.

Hecho en China

2007-09-17T15:13:00.000-05:00

People are irrational. You can see this in the way people judge the terrorist threat level: 9-11 created fear in hearts of men, and we've responded by misgauging relative safety. 3,000 people died in 9-11, but 40,000 people have died in automobile accidents in the United States every year since. Commonplace death just isn't scary.

Recently, the makers of Thomas the Train toys issued a high-profile recall due to the discovery of lead in the paint on very specific models. At the toy store where I work, many customers have come in looking for toys that were not made in China. Some have even wanted toys only made in America. Tough luck for them, because some 90% of American toys are produced in China!

Their irrationality presents itself when they ask for our opinion: should they throw out all of their China-made toys? Their kids' safety is at stake! The answer is of course "no", but we have to do a little song and dance for every customer, noting that many of our manufacturers have issued press releases that their toys are safe, nodding sympathetically to their unfounded concerns, and making non-legally-binding suggestions that the customer probably likely has almost nothing to fear from other toys made in China and of course I'll show you the press releases that we've printed off.

So please, keep things in perspective.

Northwestern and OpenID

2007-09-13T18:02:00.000-05:00

Background

Just over a year ago I discovered a vulnerability in Northwestern University's centralized authentication system. It would have allowed an attacker to steal a person's username and password, if the attacker could get the victim to authenticate using a specially-crafted URL. I probed and saw other details about the system that raised my hackles.

Idea

Thinking back on the authentication system's design, I have realized that Northwestern could easily push forward into the 21st century by implementing the system using OpenID. All Northwestern users would then be able to authenticate anywhere on the internet (that is, anywhere that supports OpenID) using a Northwestern URL such as http://id.northwestern.edu/kurtmckee.

About OpenID

OpenID is an authentication system that doesn't require me to give a site my username and password in order to log in. Let's see how this works in practice. For this example, http://id.northwestern.edu/kurtmckee is my OpenID URL, the OpenID service is called IDea, and I'm wanting to authenticate at a brand new Northwestern service called Hostel.

I visit Hostel and tell the site that my OpenID URL is http://id.northwestern.edu/kurtmckee. This is the only information that I provide to Hostel in order to log in!

Hostel redirects me to id.northwestern.edu/kurtmckee and includes information that lets IDea know how to tell Hostel whether I've authenticated at IDea or not.

I give IDea my username and password. If my username and password are correct, IDea redirects me back to Hostel and informs Hostel that I logged in correctly. Hostel then treats me as a logged in user.

About Northwestern University

Northwestern is a Big 10 school with thousands of users. Although OpenID does not deal with identity, Northwestern is in the unique position to link authentication with identity. Further, it has the ability to give its users the immediate benefit of an OpenID URL that can be used all over the internet.

I hope Northwestern takes the ball and runs with it; this would be an incredible step towards giving its users true value.

A new job

2007-09-13T17:50:00.000-05:00

I've been working at a toy store recently: it's a family-owned business, and the store is very close to where I live. Retail is significantly different from computer work, and although I have the potential to be making more elsewhere, right now I'm pulling down toy store employee money.

It has been difficult on me because the Northwestern University library hours and the hours during which I work have almost completely prohibited me from accessing the internet. Being unable to check my email, read my feeds, or blog has been frustrating. School will start soon, however, at which point the university library will have extended hours.

One of the things I've learned from this job is that, when I say "No" to my future kids, it will mean "no". The parents who come into the store are laughably inept at getting their kids to obey. Most parents don't even try. We had a mom come into the store with her 14-month-old; the child was running around pulling merchandise off of the shelves and knocking things down, so another employee politely but firmly told the mother that we have toys out for children to play with, but the merchandise on the shelves is for purchasing. The mother told the child Do you want to go see the toys on the table? Do you want to go play with the toys on the table?

Receiving no response from the child, the mother promptly gave up, turned to the employee, and started asking questions about (and walking towards) toys on the other side of the store, leaving the child unsupervised and obviously doing what was expressly disallowed.

Later, I noted that the child's left foot was bare. Alarmed, I informed the mother that the child had lost her sock and shoe. The mother replied Oh, no, she didn't have those on when she came in. I was trying to put them on before we left the house, but she didn't want to put on the left sock and shoe, so I just loaded her up in the stroller. My immediate thought was Ah, well that makes sense. 14-month-old knows best, don't worry about putting on your socks and shoes, go ahead, touch the cornballer...

Another time we had a mother and her 3-year-old daughter come in. The child kept running around the store, finding something, and bringing it to her mother. She would announce Mommy, I want this! to which the mother would reply, We're here for a gift for Susie, sweetheart. The child would immediately throw the product on the floor and announce I can't carry this anymore, it's too heavy!

The mother never corrected the child's passive-aggressive rebellion.

The point is, I'm glad to be exposed to this now so I can remember what to avoid in the future.

I'm not content with my current salary, as I'm accustomed to making anywhere from three to six dollars more per hour. I'm also concerned about my ability to thrive in a retail environment; I simply have no experience in this area, and I experience a lot of stress when a large number of children are running around and being unruly. Finally, having a job at Northwestern would provide several financial incentives (such as a decreased tuition), academic opportunities (such as a more forgiving environment when I need to duck out for classes) as well as social advantages (a full hour for lunch, and I would be on-campus to spend that time with friends).

Whether or not I could get a job at Northwestern remains to be seen, but I need to get this figured out quickly; the holiday season hasn't started yet, and I know it will multiply my stress a hundred fold.

Filler

2007-08-22T13:33:00.000-05:00

5: Job applications that I handed in yesterday
3: Drinking glasses Sars has shattered so far
1: Plates that my grandmother hand-painted that I've damaged so far
OK, I don't know if it's the three burgers I ate, or the story you just told, but I have to go throw up now. -- Sars

Online services

2007-08-11T20:40:00.000-05:00

Since I still don't have internet access, I've gone ahead and started really using Flickr and YouTube. That's right, I'm uploading videos to YouTube. Obviously I've disabled comments on both sites; Flickr's got a fairly good community, but YouTube is a cesspool. I also maintain a tumblelog at Tumblr.com. You can find links to all of these services on my site, and I'll duplicate them here:

Photos @ Flickr
Videos @ YouTube
Goodies @ Tumblr

Also, remember that I've been posting a new poll every Monday. Right now the poll is "Best marketing evar?"

Cell phone videos

2007-08-01T16:48:00.000-05:00

Dear Lazyweb,

My cell phone takes videos in a completely useless format. Unfortunately, I only know how to refer to it by file extension: .3g2. GStreamer doesn't support it. MPlayer can play the video, but fails to properly decode the audio.

I've been searching for so long that my eyes literally hurt (read: proprietary, likely-patented formats are causing me physical pain). Does anyone know what codecs I'm missing in Ubuntu Feisty for GStreamer? Or for MPlayer? I'm frankly out of ideas.

Love,
Kurt

Random...

2007-07-31T17:01:00.000-05:00

...and out of context.

LaRae and me!
34: Number of hours I was on the phone last month
I just hopped over a couple of leaves, and I'm feeling pretty good. -- Sars
You sound like a member of the KKK. -- Professor Castro

A header mockup

2007-07-25T21:07:00.000-05:00

I've been looking at various websites' designs and working to come up with a design that I can call my own. It's slow going, but I've got something that I like just a little bit. Here's a preview of the header:

It kind of reminds me of Half Life, which is cool, but I'm not sure I have the ability to resolve such a very dark design to a light body design (that is, black-on-white). I do know that I want my design to be a single-column design (or at least ere towards one column, like shawnblanc.net and Daring Fireball). I'll continue to post iterations and other mockups as I'm able.

Suggestions?

Learning Dvorak

2007-07-23T12:13:00.000-05:00

I'm finally committing myself to learning the Dvorak keyboard layout. I used gtypist to estimate my WPM using the standard keyboard layout (QWERTY); I'm consistently in the 85 WPM range.

Right now I've only learned the home row on the Dvorak layout. For QWERTY keyboards, the home row is "ASDFG HJKL;", but for Dvorak the layout is "AOEUI DHTNS". My typing speed is just a little above 20 WPM, but it continues to increase each day. I'm probably going to start on the second lesson today.

It's amazing what having the right tool for the job can do!

It's all Spanish to me

2007-07-20T20:28:00.000-05:00

At Jaimee's Harry Potter party:

Christine: There's not a Roman numeral for '25', right?
Me: Right.
Christine: But there is one for '100'.
Me: Yep. 'C'.
Christine: Nice! Spanish.
Me: Uh...yes. It's also the Roman numeral for '100'.
Christine: How did I get into Northwestern?!

My Spanish crew

2007-07-17T21:06:00.000-05:00

I am really excited at how well my Spanish class has developed into something very much like a family, to quote my dear professor Rifka. I've played football, frisbee, and croquet in Deering field, played pool at the Norris Game Room, gone swimming on the 24th story of an apartment building, gone to Sheil's cheap lunch, taken people to some of my favorite places on campus (rooftops and gardens and subbasements, oh my!), gone to the Dearborn observatory, and had some fantastic conversations and interactions throughout. Of course, it's only through playing football that I've gotten injured at all: I rolled my big toe, which developed heavy bruising, and I also injured a finger.

Tomorrow (July 18th, one of those birthday dates that I still remember) we're going to head to Grant Park to see The Decemberists play; I had not heard of them, so I'll be in it for the ride. I'll take photos and likely some videos too, and probably I'll not upload them in a timely manner for your personal enjoyment.

Address booking

2007-07-10T14:40:00.001-05:00

Having met new people in my Spanish class, I'm finding myself rehashing my stance on Facebook again. It's amazing how often college students stop dead in their tracks when they hear that someone doesn't have an account on Facebook, or doesn't use the site in the same way they do.

As I've said before: I don't use Facebook because I don't like the idea of a centralized server maintaining my relationships to people. I do, however, have an account so that people can find me in a medium that they're comfortable with.

What I really want is decentralized address book software. It could have a web-based frontend. Other servers could ping mine to let mine know that there are updates to my friends' contact information. It could run an LDAP server so my email software can auto-complete email addresses. I could synchronize my Palm Pilot with it. It could integrate with an OpenID server, or a Jabber server for chat, or an Asterisk server for VoIP calls. I could run a finger server for old skool grins and giggles. It could build an OPML blogroll of my friends' websites so feed readers could automatically subscribe when my friends create new websites or change accounts. I could maybe even start something with my friends. Best of all, the whole thing would require very little input from me, as my friends using the same software (or perhaps a service that runs the software for them) would only have to update their own information, which could then be aggregated to everyone else automatically.

(I am aware that I would have to input, say, my friends' websites initially. However, elroy.com/befriend is a lot less information to input than Elroy's name, address, phone number, etc. I also realize that I could be very wrong about how long setup and maintenance times might take.)

Regardless, that's not how things work, and it might not ever work that way. I may have 500 friends and one new phone number, but I have to notify all 500 of them, and they have to manually update everything. What an incredible waste of energy. What an uninteresting waste of time.

Am I going to start using Facebook? No. I maintain my own website, and there are feeds available so that people can easily aggregate the content to someplace they're comfortable and familiar with. Facebook does not offer me any significant value.

Update: It appears that something very similar to what I envision has already been developed. Unfortunately, it's still not decentralized, but it's a start. The service is called Plaxo.

Watermarked images

2007-07-09T12:08:00.000-05:00

Remember how I said that I've been working to properly organize my data prior to a full backup? One of the things I ran into over the weekend was a batch of over 500 photos that needed...modification.

In early 2006 I attended an event that was photographed by a professional photographer. At the photographer's website there were small photo thumbnails which, when clicked, would lead you to larger photos that contained watermarks in three locations. I used curl to download everything en masse with the intention of writing a script to automatically apply the unmodified areas of the thumbnails over the watermarked areas of the larger photos.

This weekend I took the time to write the script, and it worked like a charm. I even made sure to transfer the original Exif metadata to the modified images.

If anybody has a similar need, let me know and I'll provide you with the shell script I wrote. It's fairly straightforward, and only relies on ImageMagick and jhead.

The dresser cometh

2007-07-08T17:13:00.000-05:00

I got a new dresser yesterday; I ran into Matt, a guy who lived in CCS, a residential college next door to Foster House. I hadn't seen him in about five years, so when I saw him moving out, all I could say was Wait, you live here?.

He glanced up in surprise when he realized I was talking to him, so I continued: Are you looking to get rid of a dresser?. Turns out he was, so I am now the proud owner of the dresser that he gave me for free.

Backups

2007-07-06T15:05:00.000-05:00

My Palm Pilot died the other day; I lost all of my online account information and passwords, and all of my friends' contact information and other information (although there are some birthdays and phone numbers that will forever be imprinted in my memory). Needless to say, I was quite disappointed. Please email me your contact information! I'm looking for current addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, email addresses, and anything else that you're willing to share.

The upshot is that I've learned the value of proper backups. To that end, I'm working to complete the Herculean task of organizing all of the photos, videos, audio files, and documents that are scattered across hundreds of directories, many times in duplicate or triplicate. Once that's done, I'll be burning all of it to disc.

Remember to email me your contact information!

My weekend

2007-07-02T16:48:00.000-05:00

In Spanish:

Tenía un mal fin de semana. Mi amigo stupido vinó a visitarme el viernes pasado. Yo no estaba en mi residencia por la noche, pero en la mañana Sars me llamó. Se le ocurrió un accidente...

Mi amigo vomitó por la noche. Vomitó en frente de mi edificio, en la ventana dentro de mi edificio, en mi cama, en mi suelo, y en mi pared. También, la puerta de mi armario es roto.

Por eso, él es muerto. Le maté. Baka.

What I think I just wrote:

I had a bad weekend. My stupid friend came to visit me last Friday. I wasn't at my apartment that night, but in the morning Sars called me. There was an accident...

My friend vomited throughout the night. He threw up in front of my building, on the window inside of my building, in my bed, on the floor, and on my wall. Also, my closet door is broken.

Thus, he's now dead. I killed him. Baka.

Note: Baka is Japanese for "idiot".

I'm against torture

2007-06-29T15:46:00.000-05:00

The last time I was at the Catholic church on-campus, there was a woman who was asking the congregation to sign an anti-torture petition that would be sent to congressmen and other officials. She approached me and asked if I would like to sign the petition, and I said that anti-torture a good thing to petition against. But first, could she please tell me what the petition actually says?

It says that you're against torture in all its forms, and that the United States must stop torturing people.

Well, sure. Does it go on to specifically denounce any particular forms of torture, or give a definition of what the signers believe torture to be?

No, but...torture is torture.

On that note I informed her that I would not be signing the petition, which she took to mean that I wanted her to convince me that the petition wasn't a waste of my time and ink.

The problem here is that "torture" is being fundamentally redefined in the American legal system. If the position of the petition is merely Torture is wrong in all its forms, then all the men in power have to do is redefine the legal definition of torture (which is in fact what has already been done). Since no definition of torture was provided in the petition, it is bankrupt of meaning and power.

Food

2007-06-28T21:13:00.000-05:00

Sars and I went shopping for the fourth or fifth time today. This time I made a significantly longer list and planned around some recipes. In particular, we've got all the ingredients we need for potato salad, chicken salad sandwiches, pumpkin bread, and cereal.

Actually, that last one isn't really a recipe.

We bought so much stuff that we couldn't carry it all, so we walked the cart right on down to the apartment, up the elevator, and into our apartment. I only have a video of the cart in the apartment, since I consistently botch the saving of my videos. My cell phone puts "Cancel" on the right, which is where I'm accustomed to finding affirmative actions (being a Gnome user). Too bad, too: the video of the two of us crammed into the elevator with a shopping cart would have been priceless.

And yes, I returned the cart.

Polling

2007-06-27T20:22:00.000-05:00

I'm trying out Blogger Draft's new polling module. The current poll is "Which do you associate with me more?", and will hopefully illuminate which catchphrase people most associate with me. Stop on by and cast your vote!

Polling in blog software has never particularly appealed to me, primarily because it doesn't seem that people usually participate. Plus, the polls I have seen aren't very compelling, and invariably the answers are irrelevant. For instance: "Heroes: A great show? Or the greatest show?". This would then be followed by unrelated options, such as

Yes
No
I don't like television
Post more often instead of wasting time creating polls!

Will I discover that I enjoy posting polls? Will I delude myself into thinking that mine will be witty and clever? Find out (and vote) next week when I solicit your opinion!

Cell phone videos!

2007-06-26T19:55:00.000-05:00

I now have a way to move videos from my cell phone to my computer: mass storage mode! I simply plug in the USB cable and activate the mode, and the camera acts like a USB flash drive! Brilliant!

Now if only there was a video organizer on par with my photo organizer, F-Spot. Right now I'm forced to manually copy and name the videos like a chump.

Angst

2007-06-25T15:57:00.000-05:00

My Spanish professor has insisted that everyone have a webpage, but since I don't cotton to running multiple sites, I just linked to here. That stunt came up during a break in Friday's class, and I explained that I've been running a blog since aught four (thus trumping Empty Bookshelf Reviews and their hoity-toity subtitle).

The guy seated next to me finally asked:

Him: Livejournal?
Me: What kind of ship do you think I'm running here? Livejournal is for fanfic: "Will Mac and Harm kiss? Find out in my 3-paragraph short-form JAG fanfic!" No. I don't play the Livejournal game, and not Xanga either. Xanga is for
Him: Angst.
Me: angsty teens, exactly.

It was with delicious...sigh...irony, then, that Friday's blog entry in Spanish was filled with angst. Nonetheless, I hope to continue last week's hot streak; excepting Friday's entry, I haven't felt so inspired since summer 2004!

P.S. @K. Dubs: My judo grip on the English language fails me above. Is there anything similar to an ellipsis to indicate that a speaker has been cut off mid-sentence? I dislike the formatting above.

Spanish Friday

2007-06-22T16:55:00.000-05:00

In Spanish:

Yo la ví hoy. Ella estuvo conduciendo su coche. Yo la amo, y mi corazón está ~~rompiendo~~ roto.

What I think I just wrote:

I saw her today. She was driving her car. I love her, and my heart is broken.

True story

2007-06-21T20:32:00.000-05:00

So while waiting for Sars to get in the other night, I tried to pry the top off of a bottle. Unfortunately, the bottle broke in my hands and I cut up the back of my finger pretty good. It was my index finger, and for a day or two there, bending it would cause the wound to reopen. This was inopportune, as I've been working on establishing my 'tude, and 'tude just can't be properly established without finger snapping.

Things are getting back to normal, though, and finger snapping has resumed. I think people are really starting to respect.

My first cell phone

2007-06-20T18:03:00.000-05:00

Mommy, wow! I'm a big kid now!

I just picked up my first cell phone ever. Let me be the first to say this: I hate... HATE...American telecommunications companies. I don't particularly need a cell phone, and I had wanted to wait until cell phone plans could meet my criteria: I want to be able to call from anywhere, to anywhere, at anytime, for any amount of time, for a set monthly fee. However, I realized that, when forced to choose between shelling out for a land line or a cell phone plan, I might as well go mobile.

I harassed Mr. Alex the Lead Sales guy at the Sprint store, asking him question after question. Although I had done my research, he still had some insights that proved helpful, and was very generous to me (assuming it's not merely company policy to act like 10% discounts in addition to chopping $50 off the cost of a listed-as-$80-even-when-buying-into-a-2-year-contract phone is something the sales rep is doing out of the kindness of their heart). At the very worst, I left the store skillfully conned, but nonetheless feeling very much the smart consumer.

There was a distinct sense of pride when I walked out the door with a cell phone in my pocket. Now all I have to do is figure out if (and how) to get Linux to talk with it, and I will have a convenient camera with me at all times. I think this thing may also do video! Huzzah!

Cooking

2007-06-19T19:46:00.000-05:00

I'm still trying to move in; today and yesterday I spent quite a bit of time cooking, as well as setting up my desk and computer. Tomorrow I expect to cook the last of the raw meat. Probably over the weekend I'll make some pumpkin bread, too.

I've moved!

2007-06-18T12:56:00.000-05:00

I've successfully moved into a studio apartment; Sars is living with me for about month, and we're already having a blast. I've also started my Spanish courses for the summer, and it looks like it's going to be both demanding and fun. I'm looking forward to having internet access in the studio, but living without it will hopefully increase my productivity (assuming I don't have any serious assignments that require access to a computer).

I need to check my email and print off some things before heading back and fixing some lunch.