Posts with mood optimistic (9)
linkytown
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2010-03-30 13:31:00
Tags: links
Words: 155
Merton (who I mentioned last time) is back! Here's the original chatroulette piano improv thing, and here's a followup.
Why you need to be excited about SpyParty - a game under development that's kinda like a Turing test. But it's way more fun than that makes it sound :-)
Cool data amazon could gather about books read on the Kindle - the privacy side of me is not so happy, but the happy-about-lots-of-cool-data side of me is overjoyed.
Don't forget to send back your census form - apparently the response rate in Central Texas is lower than it was in 2000, which means they'll have to send more people out to do interviews, which means it costs us more money.
Attitudes on homosexuality vs. prostitution over time - fewer people say homosexuality is "never acceptable" over time, but for prostitution the rates are about the same. Also, only 4% of Swedes say homosexuality is "never acceptable" vs. 35% of Americans.
NY same-sex marriage bill defeated, life goes on
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2009-12-02 14:38:00
Tags: essay gay politics
Words: 244
The New York same-sex marriage bill, which passed the state assembly 88-51, was defeated in the state senate 38-24, which isn't even close. (Anyone who knows anything about NY politics: why is the state senate so against it while the state assembly is so for it? It seems weird to me.)
Between this and the Maine defeat, as @fivethirtyeight tweeted: "But boy, its been a rough couple of months for progressives." Indeed.
Perhaps it's time to change our strategy - it seems like the votes just aren't there in most places for same-sex marriage. Looking at the same-sex marriage map (which I apologize for linking every time I write about this stuff, but it's a good way to see at a glance where we are, and can't a guy self-promote a bit?) same-sex marriage is legal in 4 states (and will be in 5 when New Hampshire's law takes effect in January) and civil unions are available in 5 more, plus DC. I think we should focus on picking off more states where there are no civil unions and trying to push civil unions there - they have fairly broad support, and from a practical perspective there's not much difference, especially since no same-sex marriages are being recognized at the federal level anyway. Maybe Maryland, or Illinois, or Rhode Island, or (heck) New York?
Getting actual rights for gay couples in other states is a lot more important to me than getting their unions called "marriage".
one christmas down, one to go!
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2007-12-28 10:57:00
Tags: pictures links
Words: 66
Here are pictures from the first Christmas. (not the first Christmas ever, mind you...)
From Daring Fireball, why 6 megapixels is the sweet spot for compact digital cameras and anything more than that just creates noise.
Why Starbucks actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses - that's kinda cool!
Why having a new programming language created every week for the last 50 years isn't necessarily a good thing.
house-hunting: part 2 of 5000
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2007-11-20 11:01:00
Tags: house
Words: 136
So we've been emailing back and forth with our buying agent (thanks onefishclappin!) and she sent us a list of houses to look over. Observations:
- It looks like our price range is indeed reasonable.
- The locations of the houses are clustered in a few places: near 183 north of where it hits mopac, east of mopac south of 183, and a few out on 360 (too far away) and near parmer (too far north for my liking but possibly doable)
- It's kinda hard to get a good feel from a house from a bunch of words and a few pictures.
There are some promising candidates on the list but overall it's good to know that we can afford a house near where we want to live. I suppose we'll start touring houses next week or so.
Microresolutions
Mood: optimistic
Music: Radiohead - "OK Computer" album
Posted on 2007-01-08 09:37:00
Tags: music dodgeball microresolution
Words: 274
Like most people, I would often make New Year's Resolutions and promptly forget/ignore them come, say, January 15. But in an age of microgames (WarioWare series of games) and microtransactions (Xbox Live Marketplace, Wii Virtual Console), why not microresolutions? On Friday, I made a microresolution that I would work out at least twice over the weekend (stipulating that dodgeball Saturday morning counted), and I ended up going to the gym Sunday to fulfill the microresolution. Success! Next up: I had a few bad headaches this weekend and I bet they're from caffeine withdrawal. Microresolution: no caffeine (tea/chocolate excluded) from today until Wednesday (inclusive). We'll see how this one goes.
Speaking of dodgeball, djedi came to watch my game on Saturday. We lost both rounds, but I did "win" our only game for our team. It came down to me and a girl on the other team, and I threw maybe five balls at her before I finally (barely) hit her. She was good at dodging! I felt a little bad because she's a girl (and I was throwing the ball fairly hard, which was helpful because when I missed it would bounce off the wall and come back to me), but one of the consequences of feminism is that I'm not supposed to feel bad about stuff like that, right?
I spent a Best Buy gift card this weekend and, on a whim, I bought the Radiohead "OK Computer" album without hearing any songs on it, although it's ridiculously critically acclaimed. Listening to it now for the first time - my microreaction is that I like it. :-)
Why doesn't the LJ spell checker recognize "dodgeball"?
that's my life in a nutshell...
Mood: optimistic
Posted on 2005-10-14 14:35:00
Tags: todolist robolab charlottesweb
Words: 300
Another busy week here - did my first robolab on Wednesday and shadowed interviews at UT on Thursday. Robolab went pretty well - this year I'm working with older kids, which is good, and there are fewer with them (around 6), which is also good. Also, I have some experience, which is good. All sorts of goodness going on there.
The interviews went fine yesterday - doing 8 of them in a day is pretty grueling, though...and I wasn't even doing the talking! I was just observing, and I do feel that I have some idea of how to do it now. When I'll get to do it at Rice is an open question, however.
Go Astros! You can register to be in a lottery for World Series tickets if you hurry - closes at 5 PM (CST) today. Contrary to what I heard, there is no obligation to buy tickets if you win the lottery, so I'm going to sign up right now!
The last Charlotte's Web show is this Sunday, and it's already sold out from what I hear. I'm glad it went so well, and I'm going to miss it (especially the people I've gotten to hang out with), but it will be nice to have my weekends back. I heard that there will in fact be a video, though, so wonderjess and Carrie will get to see it, as well as any of y'all who are interested. :-)
Worked on my todo list app some more - now the notes are saved and you can have newlines in them. I bought a copy of "Getting Things Done" today, so I may improve the todo list with suggestions from there. Or I might get fancy and let you drag and drop entries to reorder them. We'll see :-)
Hope everyone's having a good Friday!
busy week, fun weekend
Mood: optimistic
Music: Wicked - "Dancing Through Life"
Posted on 2005-08-22 14:11:00
Tags: projecteuler charlottesweb worldofwarcraft
Words: 299
Howdy!
The weekend was good - played a bit of World of Warcraft. I got it working on Windows and Linux (some sort of memory issue - doesn't seem to be isolated to one stick or one slot, but only using two (and maybe keeping it under 1GB?) works great), which was nice.
I'm really getting into World of Warcraft, which is unsurprising because I often throw myself into new things. Having Skype working to chat with people while playing is way cool, too - much more efficient than typing all the time.
I have Charlotte's Web rehearsals M-F this week and next week, so I'm steeling myself for that. Luckily the rehearsals are 6:30-9:30, so I get out at a reasonable time (although I have to eat dinner quickish to make it there), and they work us pretty well so I feel like we're accomplishing something. I'm supposed to be off-book tonight for the first time, and I think I can (mostly) do it.
My other latest thing is Project Euler - it's a bunch of math programming challenges. It's fun because it's a lot less frustrating than the Python Challenge, but there's still definitely some depth to it (and I'm using Python to do them :-) )
A random thought I had at some point - say I remember part of a song, but I don't know what it's called or whatever (this happens to me a lot!). Is there some way for me to hum what I remember, then take that sound file and do some sort of correlation with a bunch of known songs and return the best match? I don't know much (really anything) about signal processing, but it seems like humming it in a different key would make things difficult, as well as faster/slower than the original tune. Just thinking...
weekend update!
Mood: optimistic
Music: Brian Jacobs - "Untie Me"
Posted on 2005-04-25 09:04:00
Words: 307
I had a good weekend! It was mostly relaxing, which is good because the month of May is going to be crazy, what with the weddings and such. Friday night we had dinner with onefishclappin and krikwennavd before heading up to couples game night. It was fun, but we ended up only playing one game. Lots of chatting, which was nice. And talking about summer musical stuff reminded me that I need to learn my music for my audition next weekend!
Saturday was relaxing - we spent some time taking care of things around the apartment in the afternoon. Well, and then David played Dragon Warrior and I spent two hours putting album art for all of my music on my iPod. Which sounds a little crazy, but now it's done and I'll never have to do it again (which reminds me - need to backup the iTunes databases!) After running some errands, we headed over to destroyerj's and grilled steaks (well, he grilled steaks :-) ). After dinner, we played (and eventually passed) Lego Star Wars, which is a surprisingly fun and cute game - you're Lego characters in a Lego Star Wars world! It's something you have to experience to understand, I bet. Also, playing the little Lego Yoda is fun - when he's normally walking he walks slowly with a cane, but when he brings out his light saber he jumps around and does flips and all that just by walking!
Sunday was a relaxing day - went to church, more taking care of stuff (almost ready to submit my TiVo HME challenge entry) and played some Metroid 2, and got the Screw Attack just before bed, which was very exciting! We were giddy :-)
Hmm, I guess that's it for my weekend. If you like Set, you'll like the Set Daily Puzzle - I did today's in a minute and 20 seconds!
wow, I really can't think of one! oh well...
Mood: optimistic
Music: Evita - "Requiem for Evita"
Posted on 2005-04-01 09:24:00
Tags: robolab challenge
Words: 242
So I managed to get to bed at a semi-reasonable time last night, and I feel pretty good so far today. Driving to Houston should be fun. Unfortunately, we can't listen to wildrice13's iPod Mini because my Prius doesn't have a tape player! Oh well...
Gmail announced (and I don't think it's an April Fools thing...) that they're raising their storage from 1Gb to 2GB, which might seal the deal for me. I love Gmail. Also, they have a cute April Fools thing where they're raising your available storage continuously. Check it out!
Robolab went well last night - accomplished two more tasks. And I'm gonna be the "commander", deciding what tasks to tackle and what to give up on during th ecompetition. So I need to memorize the point values and time it takes to do them :-)
Work's going decently, although still a long way to go. Although our stock is not so happy today. Sorry!
Evita is good music. Never seen the musical (although I did like the Simpsons version!), but David liked it, and we should see it together at some point.
Wildflowers along the highways and on campus really cheer me up, more than they should, I think. They're just so colorful and full of life. Anyway, it's nice pick-me-up to see them every morning :-)
Hopefully this weekend will be fun. And I'll get some good pictures.
I'm like totally out of thoughts. So, have a good weekend, all!
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