$disanpoter

even better than inventables

instructibles!  i found this site searching for how to polish silver without harsh and toxic chemicals. it reminds me of the wikiDIY  idea on meta wiki except that it's all orange-cream styled and makes me happy. :} that's all. just thought i'd share.

ban does best but...

it's not my underarms that need freshening up; it's my familiarity with these...

Web Technologies I need to cozy up with:

• .Net
• SOAP
• XML
• AJAX
• DOM, yes the dom. (dom da dom dom DaaaaaaOM)

Platforms, Projects, Concepts I need to fool around with more often:

• the Wikis, not to be confused with the Wookies, young master.
• Movable Type
• Proto/ mash-ups
• there's another somewhere - oh write, that storytelling scripting language

Companies I need to get familiar with:

• Coghead
• outside.in
• ThinkMap
• hmmm...one that will hire me, perhaps.

I'm feeling a bit swamped
...and my battery's running out.

i'm going to pull a classic avoidance move here and not work on any of these. instead i'm going to return to the Hadley story and get her out of that post-party breakfast she's currently in the midst of.

work here now

there's a restaurant on the upper east side called eat here now. The type-face is of a style that would be retro but for the liklihood that it's been there since the original era of the style's use. down some stairs and some-what worn down, the diner never had much appeal for me, but the typeface I can still recall instantly in my mind's eye. of course, none of this is relevant to what I actually broke open the typepad editor to write about - i just thought i ought to acknowledge the source of the phrase.

being, as i am, lacking in regular employment, i've been frequenting coffee shops and the like far more often than i ever have before. part of that comes from the still steady source of income lending me the somewhat erroneous feeling that i can afford to buy breakfast and lunch at these venues on a semi-daily basis. it's not a delusion i'll be able to convince myself of for much longer, but in the meantime, i'm enjoying it.

i'm also enjoying observing the daytime patrons of these venues. as steven johnson so aptly quiped - park slope and similar areas of brooklyn have become the chosen land for the creative and self-employeed. on any given mid-morning, the tea lounge on 7th avenue, is equally abuzz with toddler towing thirty-somethings, students of an indestinguishable age and degree level, and up-and-coming yuppies of unknown parenting-status. - speaking of toddler towing thirty-somethings. I'm fairly certain I just watched heath ledger and michelle williams stop into the cafe i'm sitting at for some coffee. i looked at him, then looked back. he played with his newborn, looked back, and went about his business. I don't consider myself much of a celeb watcher. i've rarely cared, but i happend to enjoy both of their acting talents and you know, i always appreciate the ones who walk around like normal people and do their thing, especially the clearly very bright ones. i only hope he was amused and not irritated by my quiet attempt to see whether he really was who he is.

But getting back to my point, today i've been thinking i'd like to open up a work cafe: comfort like a coffee house; productivity of an office; resources of a library. I'd call it 'Common Place.' It would have large round tables with plugs between every other seat . There would be subscription and single use prices, with advanced features for the subscribers, like lockers, server space, web-hosting, etc. There would be reservable meeting rooms and small-group tables, as well as comfortable seating around the outskirts. 

modrageous

mathmachinations is hereby declared its own category in acknowledgement of my blatant misuse of mathematical notions towards such perverse ends as interior wall painting, M&M consumption, and most recently linearization of object attributes. yup.

little did I know with I wrote that post this morning, that today would be a day of minor epiphanies. I was working on my schema structures and then my brain went like this:

• gee, there are alot of attributes for this schema system i've worked out
• this attribute really warrants an on,off, and null state; it's too bad chmod only accomodates 2 states per value
• oh...chmod is really just a series of binary characteristic represented with a series of values
• (and I already know that the mechanics of chmod is merely the geometric sequence 2^n)
• i wonder if any integer base could be used for the modularization then.
• i wonder if you could have modularized designations where each attribute had, say, 3 options.
• let's try.

2.5 hours later I concluded that the following system would allow for any depth of attribute options and number of attributes.

~Given a two-dimensional array $attributes with N rows and a maximum of X columns per row, such that for any $attribute[n] with X or fewer value options, an object may have at most one $attribute[n][x] . In other words, attribute values are mutually exclusive.

~Given exclusivity of attribute value, a sequence of numeric assignments can be established such that the summation of the attribute values of all rows is absolutely unique from the summation of any other combination of attribute values.

~Furthermoreusing X,N defined above:, this numeric sequence can be described in two parts as follows:
   1. each sequential value of x^n demarcates a distinct attribute
   2. each incremental value of x^n+ix < x^(n+1) demarcates an attribute value option
These 2 rules permit the entire array of attribute values to be weighted without the added burden of calculating the combinations or determining intermediary weightings. Conversely, despite the exponential increase in numeric values, the most iterations required to 'unpack' any combination into component parts will be N iterations. The unpacking process, based on sequential true false evaluations, requires no arbitrary or exhaustive value testing. 

Reality Sucks, Read the Onion

okay so it doesn't....but still I love the Onion. Like this headline : Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever. How can you not enjoy that?

Another think i love about the onion - it's absolutely made up of the same people who spent the mornings doing cross-word puzzles in my math classes, put out Hierarchy of the Zucchini People, and otherwise entertained and amused all of us.

Anyway. I've been interested in things this weekend. I didn't get to go to that gallery show i wanted to, but hopefully i'll be able to sometime this week. First I was looking into movable type, then i was looking into the new top-level domains they've got out there, then i was trying to figure out some organizational changes to get my stuff put a way. then i had to regroup from having to fund a variety of moving issues that have cropped up for my mother. i'll get it all back of course, but things are a little tight, and i really really need groceries.

other than that, it's just trying to finish things up, get things clean, do something - before the weekend's over. and scheming up plans to make the world run better, you know, typical me stuff. and now...a fried egg, sourdough roll dinner. yum

self cleaning utensils

they've now got touthbrush holders that sterilize your touth brush with UV rays after you use it. I think it's about time we had self cleaning travel utensils and containers...which btw reminds me that i may have to wait on the mp3 player and get a scanner instead. so i can sketch out these things...

anyway, the best way i've come up with is to have a really small container on the bottom that the scraps get pushed into and the some kind of brush/squeegy that came down from the top with a tiny amount of water to get anything left off. after that a short dose of UV could sterilize the interior. The scraps and any remaining water would be sealed off prior to extraction between plastic sheets. These could be reused by collecting them at home and reconstituting them in a plastic making machine that came with the set.

i'm not really satisfied with that yet. I feel like there ought to be a better way...like a portable dishwasher/lunchbox...

shared sources

someone should make a gateway service that patches people into to information servers. a massive directory for shared data, so that databases don't have to partially reproduce stupid shit like city and state names. we should all just be requesting that data from google or maps.us or usps.com. on principle. we waste way to much space and bandwidth on copies. copies should be used only as a germination point for a new permutation and as a resource management tool for diffusing retrieval requests. 

Applied Efficiency: Refridgerator Doorlets

Sometimes you have to open the refrigerator door all the way, and sometimes you even have to hold it open with your foot, your under-chin holding one item in place while you cinche more and more items between your side and your arm until your not at all sure you can make it to the counter (or even attempt to put something back) without dropping what inevitable turns out to be the most important and more breakable ingredient.
BUT...

B.Y.O.P.

actually, it took me about to weeks, and then a nice hot shower (well, okay not the shower, but i just had a bag full of frozen peach slices so that hot shower is definitely going to come before the rest of this), for me to remember what this was about...but i did. yes indeed.

the one washer

why don't they have a combined dish-washer/ clothes-washer? I don't have room for both. they have clothes washer with a vertical agitator. It could double as the vertical water projector of a dish-washer, couldn't it? Or they could simply have a dish stabilizer unit that attached to a fixed point on the back on the unit uneffected by the tumbling action of the front load washer. I suppose people would worry about getting food on their clothes, though...but then, most do already.