$disanpoter

public secrets

i found a post today that i never got around to finishing entitled "public secrets and other unspoken constants." The body of that post held only this:

so the meeting i had yesterday with MF (president of the nyc alum chapter) went quite well, though having left early, i wasn't able to speak with her again after the book group.

notes for this post

    * but i need every drop
    * programs co-chair opportunity
    * book group discussion
    * "them"
    * the interactive story about things left unsaid

the first bullet point referred to an exchange with CD in which he said something about there possibly not being enough coffee left for a full cup and i exclaimed with spontaneous sincerity "but i need every drop!" why do i remember something that incidental? seriously.

the second bullet was about misgivings in relation to a possible position on the board of the nyc alum association, and as betsy got to hear about over the weekend, they've only become more justified - to the point where i really can't be bothered. i feel like i'm expected to jump through hoops to gain entrance into a club and i'm just not interested in that. it reminds me of a situation i heard a colleague describing a while ago in which he had to with-hold information in order to get information the should have simply been available to his whole group, a game he was completely capable of playing, but found ridiculous. after having me come up to the UES for coffee then have a phone interview with another board member for what is technically an elected position, i heard nothing for months. when i casually brought up the fall transition at the last book club meeting i got evasive answers. then, weeks later i got an email asking me to sum up my suggestions and observations. when i sent back a quick query as to when the annual meeting was, i got no response. whether i come off as someone who want to take to much control, whether it's just flightiness on the part of the president or whether its some personality mismatch, i don't know -  whatever the game is that's going on on the other side, i'm just not interested in playing anymore. i have too many other projects i want to get back to.

i do wonder what the public secrets was about. i know on one level it referred to my own assumption that i'm a fairly easy person to read whether i actually talk about what i'm thinking or not. this however is not really worth a post, so i'm left tonight scratching my head over what other instance of public secrets unrelated to my own had me thinking about such dynamics. what i do know is that the latter half of the title was an inverted reference to 'variables' and that bewilders me. 

sustainability

in this post: facebook interests, website for starpower program, french sociology book, housing works orientation, run in with the office hall monitor, possibility of sustainable relationships, possibility of sustainable activities, architecture and support beams, g-tech, kai and the winos, hallelujah ...

[so i'm adopting this new blog form, mostly to help me remember my thoughts as i come back to this throughout the day. my posts have diminished on this temp assignment, and that's not good, since a significant part of its purpose is the delayed value of me rediscovering my own thoughts months later. the downside is y'all might actually have to look to my blog to see the actual contents of the post. :{ ...not to assume that you necessarily want to or anything like that]

so...starting with hallelujah...A.Ho and I got a drink at the Bourgeois Pig last night since Tuesday are half off bottles all night, and while we were there a particularly stunning rendition of Cohen's "Hallelujah" came up on the playlist, which reminded me how much i like the song and especially the part "i heard there was a secret chord that david played and it pleased the lord but you don't really care for music, do ya? it goes like this, the fourth the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah..." to begin with there's the overtone of isolation - not any generalized sense of isolation, but the particular isolation of being one among many. it's the implicit significance of the aside "but you don't really care for music, do ya:" here the singer is considering the possibility of an essential truth that could reconnect the lone person with the divine and it's irrelevant to share because the very vehicle one requires to share it cannot be accessed by the person the singer is trying to connect with. then on top of that there's the allusion in 'the baffled king composing' to our capacity to create thing greater - even more human - than ourselves, and the doubly poignant aspect that very often we can experience being profoundly touched, we can create that which touches us profoundly without having access to the why or the how it manages to do so. there's so much hope in that for being human. i guess that's what i love about the song, it's this poignant bundle of the yearning and the hope and the weakness and the tragedy of human experience. [i'll rewrite this so it's not as fumbling, i promise]

curious L goes to school!

so i've pasted a VERY rough draft of my personal statement for my application below. if any of your are
a. feeling altruistic
b. in need of procrastination
c. motivated by a perverse desire to laugh at me

and would like to give me some feedback on the general ideas or efficacy of it. that would be much much much appreciated.

foundlings

i've been going through random archive CDs of of mine, hoping to find some of the papers i wrote in college - specifically the one's i wrote in the class of the professor from whom i just requested a recommendation. i haven't found those yet, but i have found various bits and pieces of poems and stories i wrote and despite the melo-drama that surrounded my life in those months, they're actually not that atrocious. I can even see in them what i trying to do in them. so, if your curious (or altruistically willing to offer feedback (or maliciously eager to laugh at my expense))...there will be a list of links, growing here below, to old writings of mine. the password, is my real first name, no caps.

[i mean, i could just copy and paste the text in, but that would go against my philosophies regarding setting content up to facilitate better information management...can't have that, now, can we?]

loss less

it's been a week. being strapped for cash, i've radically broadened the scope of my job search. i applied to two temp agencies, which beyond needing money i'm hoping to hear back from, because i wouldn't mind temping for a while. i feel a need to 'look around' and not commit that wouldn't be accommodated by a full time job. after my interview with oxford, where my own hesitancy was a major detractor from any impression of competence i might have hoped to give off, i've concluded i need to have a more solid grasp of my own skills before i try to convince anyone else of them. to that end i've returned to small building projects, with the added task of actually documenting what i attempt to do. Thus i'm setting up a job tracking database this afternoon and mapping out the framework of it in a word document as well. outside of that, life as been a hodge-podge.

i saw a film over the weekend that inspired me to what to make some small stunning dv project with my camera. i even preliminarily roped derek into it. st pattie's day was uneventful in a petulant way. chancey, arnie, arnie's friends eddie and ellen and i went out for chinese food spent far more than we (at least chancey and i) intended. not good when you don't have a job. i'll be living off the take-home for the rest of the week. arnie's behavior towards me has once more devolved to an indiscriminate "it's not always about you" to anything i effort i make to join a conversation. this is especially frustrating, when my interest is in fact in regards to what someone else has said about their life, and has left me generally un-inclined to give him the time of day. others have suggested that these comments may reflect his displeasure that events of the evening, and of evenings in general are very infrequently about him. i just see him consumed by an effort to reinterpret all that transpires in a way that shines favorably on his own hopes and struggling with reality's resistance to be thus interpreted.

returning to this film - if you haven't seen it Notes on a Scandal is an exceptional, well-crafted film, with solid performances by even its less notable cast-members, stunning cinematography, and if not always subtle, still rewardingly complex psychological exploration.

also, this week, I read this enjoyable collections of longer short-stories: Sonechka: A Novella and Stories. Ulitskaya has a strong narrative voice. Her stories are laced with the muted humor of ordinary existence and move a multi-generational cast of characters through privilege and hardship with ease. Her exposition of the impact of political situations has left me both deeply intrigued by a people who have weathered so many dramatic changes in a lifetime and bemused by the relative simplicity of the american worldview.

finally, i have begun the "there is no sex in this book" story and am happy to be in a sustained mood to write this week. hopefully it will hold. if any of you would like to read/ offer feedback of the non-effusive kind, please drop me a line. i've also returned to some of the Hadley work with pleasing results.

an in my personal life, i am missing you all, with the exception of course, of those who i've today. my romantic life has some good prospects but nothing solid yet, which i'm okay with.

oh, and i've applied to teach english in japan. i have designs to leave the country for a while. i think it would be good for me, no?

and then, there's grad school...

Programmer's Desktop

It was a bit nippy at 70 degrees (not so much for the temperature as for the impossible to locate (apparently/incidentally neither unlocatable nor unplaceable are real words) draft in my apartment this afternoon so I put on a duraflame log. It yielded much comfortable warmth before collapsing forward suddenly into a heap of flaming ash at the front edge of my hearth, causing wave upon wave of smoke to escape the draw of the chimney and permeate my livitchen / kichingroom with a visibly grey haze. Fortunately, I'd been diligent earlier about spritzing the Caush [?] whenever he tried to climb the screen so neither of the kittens were nearby. So that was a bit of an event.

Meanwhile, I've been returning to the thoughts i was working out at Random House regarding more flexible information architectures [this space left intentionally to represent the long winded extrapolation on exactly what needs such architectures would respond to]...gotta run...

we don't like mearagrrl, do we?

if you don't get it, go here and here.

mearagrrl is way to popular. nevermind that she's been an adult for far longer than me and by more years than the mere difference in our ages would indicate. she had too many friends. so many in fact, that i may have to post here multiple times a day just to get her to pay attention to me!!

actually. we love mearagrrl. mearagrrl in fact rocks this rock-based planet on its axis. and we just want to say we feel fortunate, even grateful, to be among the many friends that mearagrrl considers her own.

we also think karacelia rocks, or would if she sent us updates on her livejournal every once in a blue moon.

thoughts on 'paper'

okay. so here's the promised brainstorming session. i'm having a hard time focusing today, or figuring out what to focus on today - one of the two. so, be forewarned, what follows will be messy, which will irritate me, but which is absolutely necessary if i am going to get back on track. i feel stupid today. it happens sometimes. it's one of the scariest recurring experiences in my life, which i suppose, is a reflection on how privileged my life actually is. fortunately, i have chancey here at the cafe with me to remind me that it's all in my mind, that the feeling of hopeless stupidity and cognitive vacuity will pass, that i must simply work through it.

for myself, i know that this sense of aimlessness and lack of purpose occurs when i am faced with a dearth of  workable content and a surplus of airy possibilities.  it tends to paralyze me, leave me grasping for something anything to work on, and yet every grasped strand whispers of wasted effort and its own uselessness. no project seems the right one to be working on; the perfect project looms like Avalon, an unreachable presence swaddled in mist. a swelling pressure to create content in order to create structure pushes against my mind, swallowing and obliterating the thoughts that could free me from it. it's unbearable. but the only way to get past it is to work through it. so with this preface to remind me in the future of the state of my mind (or my emotions, perhaps) today, so that i may forgive myself, in part, for the lack of inspiration and the poverty of the style to come, i begin...

i need to reflect upon what it is that interests me in technology. I know it has to do with information. there are conditions in the net at large that frustrate me: the reduplication of information, the reliance on explicit information creation, the lack of congruence between technologies aimed at flexible information storage  and those aimed at integrating multiple information sources.  I am frustrated by the scope of technologies developed to assist  the consumer in managing real world objects. I am frustrated by the segmentation of ideas, the half-way accomplishments that are, i know, wonderful and ground-breaking and necessary, but which fall short of this insistent intuition within me that the world could be, should be more seamless.

to this end, i have thoughts on the possibility of technology changing the implementation and possible even the form of government. to this end, i imagine systems that conceive of databases and program object code that together constitute the objects manipulated by the system or the users. to this end i dream of scripts and machines that gather information automatically.

we have this brilliant method called AJAX, that allows new content to be pulled into an existing page without having to refresh latent content, but on the server end of those browser calls there still must be pages built to provide or receive the content. there must still be people or feeds or process built to create the content.

we have wikis, which allow free-form content creation and the efficient creation of certain connections via simple inline symbols (:: {{}} etc). 30 boxes employs a similar concept in the onebox entry, providing regex patterns to denote hyperlinks, maplinks, users, and tags. but they are all independent and they all must be explicitly added.

why haven't we creating structural character sets? why do we still have CR/LF to designate newline, but no character designating a link, an object type? why is the closest we come middle-ware that creates more complex character strings to integrate with other platforms and standards or visual interfaces that mask what's going on. why aren't we creating a language of structure for people to work with?

that was what i was trying to explore in my Essential Forms Model. i was trying to capture the Platonic Ideals of information. What forms it took, how relationships existed and changed. What the essential traits were of hierarchies, how one could create dynamic stability in data systems. How iterated structures differed from recursive structures, how one could create a system that provided controlled flexibility without necessitating information creators to constantly define or redefine the objects they work with.

more later.

a tyranny of lines

we have been duped by time. it has asserted in our minds the dominance of the sequential, the consequential, the linear. We write in lines, our speech doesn't double back on itself and our thoughts too, hamstrung by the means we have at our disposal to express them, we experience as linear. But our world is not linear. It is not cartesian; it is fully multi-dimensional, and it is frustrating to me that is a source of frustration for me that it requires such a steely grasp on our minds simply to begin to perceive it in the way it really is and to be able to contemplate that our own experiences of it are beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps all that is a load of crap I can't hope to substantiate. it seems to me that we already know that we do not think linearly, yet, we so often perceive our thought processes as such. We may perceive branches in the the thought process that takes us to a given conclusion but we don't see them occurring sequentially – or at least, if one begins with the observation that languages develop words of distinction for variations that are immediately relevant to the speakers of the language, then we certainly failed to develop sounder methods for expressing correspondence and synchronicity among events.

What's my point. I don't know what my point is. My point is linearity of expression is limiting us. My point is we would not be alive if our brains processed things linearly and we should try to tap that ability for our conscious minds as well as our autonomic systems. My point is if we try can we develop non-linear forms of communication. Can we have computers that are not strings of 0s and 1s or are we imprisoned not only in time but its aftereffect, that no matter how fast a neuron travels, it still is traveling in time across space, that no matter how sophisticated our object oriented programming languages and visual programming languages grow, they still must descend into a realm of tyrannical linearity before fulfilling their tasks.

I want to know. 

Cooliris

Notes on experience using Cooliris link preview feature.