On friday I finally finished making corrections to my thesis, and had it bound into a nice book, pictured here. If you’re not lucky enough to have access to one of the three copies in existence, then please feel free to read it online, as a PDF: Topic segmentation in spoken dialogue.
So I’ve had this idea that I’d like to rearrange my room. I’d like to try a bunch of different layouts without actually having to move all the heavy furniture. My mum loves doing this sort of thing, and she uses special square grid paper representing the room, and little cutouts representing the bits of furniture. That’s OK, but there would be a lot of advantages to doing this sort of thing with a computer. The Sims is actually pretty good for this sort of thing - you have enough flexibility to make rooms of interesting shapes, and a large-ish selection of furniture. Then you can more-or-less fly through the room you’ve made and see how it looks.
But I think software specifically designed for it could do this better. You could use real dimensions on the walls and furniture, place items at off-90° angles, save layouts, get architecty-looking printouts, etc. I don’t think I’m about to write it, but it would be very useful.
Something a bit different: a couple of quotes I’ve had floating around with nowhere to put them. Here you go.
Or rain-skinned on a concrete fastness,
Fortress island in the flood;
You walked amongst the smashed machines,
And looked through undrugged eyes
For engines of another war,
And an attrition of the soul and the device.
With craft and plane and ship,
And gun and drone and field you played, and
Wrote an allegory of your regress
In other people’s tears and blood…
–Iain M Banks
Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs upon me. Peace frightens me; perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it is only a facade hiding the face of hell. I think, ‘What is in store for my children tomorrow?’ ‘The world will be wonderful’, they say. But from whose viewpoint? If one phone call could announce the end of everything? We need to live in a state of suspended animation like a work of art, in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside of time, detached….detached.
–La Dolce Vita
On the train this evening, I happened to stand near some young men jokingly discussing ways to hack Swiftel (my ISP). It seems that one of them used to be the database administrator for the company, and the other two were badgering him (unsuccessfully) to reveal any useful passwords, or whether he’d left himself a backdoor into the system when he left the company. The conversation drifted to the best way to launch such a hypothetical attack, from pre-paid dialup cards to internet cafés.
Discussing the overheard conversation with James C later, we agreed that we’re hearing more and more technical conversations in ‘the real world’. Is computing more popular now than five years ago? Or is this new generation of computer geeks (of whom I guess I am one) the delayed effect of an interest piqued during the internet explosion of the late nineties?
Catherine and I found a small Indian grocery store opposite Meadowbank Station this afternoon. We had a little browse around, and we found long-life instant curries. When we saw the notice in the close-up we decided they were worth a try:
I’m guessing that what’s inside is more-or-less a rebranded military “meal ready-to-eat”, Indian defence force style. Kinda cool. Also highly tasty, actually.
Tony Sloane discovered that Larry Lessig, author of Free Culture and generally Interesting Person, is going to be giving a talk in Sydney on the 29th of this month. Apple is paying! Details are here. You can register on that page, but it’s not clear whether registering does anything other than sending your email address to Apple, as “registration does not guarantee a seat”. I registered anyway. I think it’ll be pretty cool.
So, there’s some new Australian music I can heartily recommend you check out: