| a poem |
[Aug. 27th, 2009|09:54 am] |
the flowers
the breeze
the trees
the hum
the hummingbird
seeks
the tasty plum |
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| wedding chateau |
[Jul. 21st, 2009|04:18 pm] |
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She's telling me a story that she's making up as she is looking through a picture book. It's the kind of book inside of which you put pictures or photos. This picture book consists of photos of people from her life from when she was about 1 and 2 years old. As she's telling the story she gets to a photo of Nina and Marc; friends who live in Brooklyn. It's a picture from their wedding in France (he's French). She incorporates this photo into the story by describing the wedding as being held at "Shatoh Barwah". She also describes and elaborate banquet consisting of pastries, notably croissants. I ask where she got the name from. She says she just made it up. I asked if she knew what the words meant and she says they are made up words. I tell her "Chateau" is kind of like a large cottage or country house or a small castle in France and perfectly appropriate place to have a wedding. She responds with "Look at me with French words! I rock!" |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 31st, 2009|02:37 pm] |
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My original Ipod is dead (It was 30 gig Ipod photo). In looking to replace it, I've decided that I want an Ipod Touch. I don't want an Iphone. Do any of you have experiences with them? Like them? love them? meh? |
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| wimax tracking 6 |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|06:34 pm] |
Location: Near the back of the Bagdad waiting in line for BSG screening.
SE 37th and Clay
Pretty good signal (10 bars).
Download Speed: 6853 kbps (856.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 497 kbps (62.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
A shame it's not like this in other parts of inner southeast Portland. They say it will get better. |
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| wimax tracking 5 |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|07:47 am] |
downtown portland on Max train (Pioneer Mall stop)
Download Speed: 3572 kbps (446.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 411 kbps (51.4 KB/sec transfer rate) |
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| wimax tracking 4 |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|07:33 am] |
ON Bus 14 at SE 20th and Hawthorne
Download Speed: 6806 kbps (850.8 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 502 kbps (62.8 KB/sec transfer rate) |
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| wimax tracking 3 |
[Mar. 18th, 2009|03:33 pm] |
location: SW Barnes at HW 217.
Download Speed: 3661 kbps (457.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 516 kbps (64.5 KB/sec transfer rate) |
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| wimax tracking 2 |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|01:19 pm] |
Location: SW 3rd and Pine (Stumptown)
BW: 1742 kbps down 101 kbps up
interestingly my signal varies from 2 bars 7 (out 10 total). Haven't figured the trick to getting access to stats from the dongle yet. |
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| wimax tracking 1 |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|01:17 pm] |
Location: Bus 15 heading west near SE Morrison and 20th.
BW: 4200 kbps down/375 up |
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| race (xposted to fb) |
[Feb. 20th, 2009|04:10 am] |
Living in Portland I am not often exposed to deliberate acts of racism or hatred. I can say that I am not often exposed to subtle attacks thuogh they are relatively more frequent. What is frequent yet largely difficult to detect are acts of racism concealed so deeply that even the person behaving in this manner remains unawares. As far as they are concerned they may either believe they are not racist or just know how that its not acceptable to behave that way. The former category tend to be largely ignorant of the minority experience for better or for worse.
I think Portland suffers from this type of racism. It goes largely undiscussed and when people do bring it up it make people, Portlanders in general defensive. I think I even get defensive at time. [The sun is now rising here over the DCA airport here in Washington and the sky is that beautiful rosy dawn color] This is a discussion that needs to happen. Especially now given the kinds of crap I've seen on networked news media. Things like "Is racism dead."
That sort of question is complete bullshit and that is so not the discussion we need to have. I don't know what the conversation should look like but I think it needs to start with creating a space for minorities to speak frankly. I don't see this happening much and the fault belongs to all. It's my fault as a minority to not speak out about these things. Its the fault of minorities for ignoring their voice in this issue. It's the majority culture's fault for either not creating the space in cooperation with minorities or when they do for not letting us take the space ourselves by speaking for us (however well intentioned it may be) . It's the media's fault. It's the fault of the vacuum in cultural leadership. We are all to blame.
What made me think about this is my interaction with a store employee here in DCA. I'm waiting for my flight back home to Portland. I was buying some souvenirs in the gift shop.The clerk (whose race I will omit) spoke abruptly to me using unusual language ("I'm listening...") with deliberate lack of eye contact. He took obvious pains to have no physical contact with me in the handling of items bought. I was reminded of how I might behave when I am taking out my garbage. This contrasted greatly to his behaviour with other patrons. I'm obviously Latino. The other patrons where white and black. Its rare that I experience deliberate racism. But it still happens. |
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| brain leakage |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|10:01 am] |
Some thoughts I need to capture
There's a general perception that as the older we get our perception of the passage of time changes. For me and I think most people, the older I've gotten the quicker that time seems flow. In talking with K about this earlier today I proposed that as we get older our brains hold more and more data, more and more information such as memories, experiences, feelings, etc. As we wind through our day to day moments we have to process and integrate our perceptions into our existing knowledge store. I posit that because older folks have a greater amount of "stuff" stored in their heads, our perception of time seems slower because it takes longer to perform the work of integrating our day-to-day and moment-to-moment perceptions.
K brought up the fact that as we get older we tend to have more responsibilities. She also mentioned that we as adults also have a greater ability to pay focused attention to some task or process (such as sitting and reading a book for an hour). I am sure there are other similar aspects of age that would play into the processing issue.
I want to know if we can measure in some objective way how much data is stored in our heads?
Can we create some kind of test or experiment to measure the volume of data stored in the brain?
There are lots of different ways to approach this I imagine. So far I come up with:
a very general knowledge test: IE. See how much people know, This seems far to subjective.
a very generic knowledge extraction test; IE, keep pulling out any data until the "bowl" is empty and compare across age groups.
Interestingly, the metaphors that underly my understanding of the brain drive some of these tests. I know the metaphors are incomplete or wrong. It's interesting to see the concepts of a "container" that holds some volume of data. Obviously its much more complicated than this. I suspect that really I need to expand the metaphor to include the idea of how our minds process the data. I mean this in terms of what Steven Pinker has referred to as "learning engines" in some of his work. I suppose I can approach this in another ways then. I can try to see if I can measure some aspect of the processing capabilities I mentioned as being affected by having more data stored in our heads .
For instance, some kind of series of tests with different age groups where subjects are given tasks to perform and then are asked questions about the task and their perception of the flow of time.
Ok. I need to go back to work.
Anyways, this is the kind of crap that is always going on in the back of my brain. This one just seemed interesting enough to me to note out here. |
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| fireworks |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|07:48 am] |
while we are eating dinner someone is setting off fireworks in the neighborhood
"It's nobody farting, it's [only] fireworks." |
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| the little one on the debates... |
[Oct. 3rd, 2008|07:15 am] |
Scene: In the TV room. She has her table setup with a workbook to keep her busy while the VP debates are on.
I wish everyone would just talk about Halloween. |
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| it's been this kind of a week. |
[Oct. 3rd, 2008|07:13 am] |
"Hi my name is office [$unusual_american_male_name]. I have stopped your for failing to stop adequately before a right turn."
The ticket says: "Failure to obey traffic control device". $242.00
:( |
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| from various sources |
[Oct. 2nd, 2008|02:25 pm] |
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
The cvs tag command is based on a timestamp.It assigns the symbolic name to the version of the file or directory that is closest to and older than the timestamp; it does not look at the work directory. |
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| sd |
[Sep. 29th, 2008|01:30 pm] |
A little punchy from toorcon (www.toorcon.org). In typical con style, not a lot of sleep was had but a lot of fun was. This trip was however made even more fun by the fact that I got to hang out with my brother (younger than me by 6 years) and a friend who has known me longer than anyone. Excellent quality time was had.
more on the conference later. I just become aware of how bad the markets are and need to grok that a little more clearly. |
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| gadget |
[Jul. 24th, 2008|06:58 am] |
I am patiently awaiting the arrival of my Nokia N82.
Is it a phone? Is it a camera?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N82
Since I'm constantly accused by my friends of being a geeky tech gearhead, I figured I'd give in. It's a Symbian based S60 phone so there are a lot of apps for it out there to give it functionality beyond that of a normal cell phone (even the iphone). Among these, I have the ability to SSH, skype, do Assisted GPS mapping, watch youtube and lots of other things.
Moreover, this phone has a 5 megapixel camera (Zeiss lens and xenon flash). A quick review of flickr for images made with the camara are impressive for a phone-camera. Agps can geo-tag the images. Video capture is impressive and the microsd slot can hold it all. I got mine in the tasteful little black version from buy.com since they were having a decent sale price on it.
The only things missing are 3g and qwerty. The newly released E71 adds those features but loses the quality of the camera. The E71 was very compelling, but I don't have the same issues with qwerty keyboards as others do and well we'll see how long I hold out until I need faster speeds. I banking on making do with using WLAN connections with the N82 for things that need speed.
now to deal with symbian security issues. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 12th, 2008|02:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
cell phone died.
I am so bummed. I mean I did not like it much any way. It was a lowly razr v3. I'm currently on t-mobile and willing to move. I dont' really want an Iphone. They seem pretty cool but the hype kills it for me. I thinking pretty hard about Nokia N82 and then someday upgrading to a N96.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N82
So, do you have recommendations?
Ideally, I'm looking for:
wifi
bluetooth
camera better than 3 megapixels and preferably with a decent lens (zeiss)
calendaring, etc, sim capable.
I'd like the option of using it on tmobile or att networks
capable or roaming outside the us
kind of annoyed and frustrated at the moment |
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uncomfortable