$disanpoter

location irritations

following up on the dorky data-based posts, i've spent a sizable chunk of the day researching options for a static resource that can be referenced dynamically to provide location information, because really, how many local, independently established copies of city-state-country data does the world need. it's a waste of effort and resources for every sales, product, mailing system to have it's own in-house set of tables for this information when they all must comply with rules and conventions established by national organizations. it's ridiculous and i resent the fact that i live in a world that hasn't come up with a better more widely adopted solution for this. oh...incidentally, this is a rant.

M is for MHOГO

my brain is fragmented this morning. i think this is the fault of the book i've gone back to reading after a bit of a non-fiction break. i've been having trouble reading through this book because within a paragraph of starting into it, it's got me spinning off into a world of supplemental ideas. so my mind's fragmented, thinking about life as a series of statements object-action code syntax like so:

print_r $lindsay.state;
>array( 'not bored', 'fragmented')

and thinking about how best to implement specialized content in facebook platforms. it has one flaw in common with myspace that irritates me to no end: the idea that one frequently refers to one's own profile page. most of the applications i would want to create would publish stories in the newsfeed i receive not publish items on my behalf in the newsfeeds of my friends...meh. like news, friends blogs, study review (ie daily german vocab), etc. fortunately facebook has added this new 'pages' concept for businesses which could provide such a service...i'll have to explore that. i suspect the service pages won't actually permit specialized per-user content so it might not be very useful at all...

and thinking about  how i need a better pandora station, so i'm trying out intersection stations by picking two disparate artists and seeing what happens. i'm annoyed with Up Up, because it's not, actually what it purports to be. so i've put manu chao with moloko to see what craziness that stirs up.

and thinking about how i miss my friend. it's not a frequent thing, missing people...but there are some. standing in wait for the A train again at JFK saturday night, i had such an intense sensation of remembered experience it stayed with me all the way home.

it's fun thinking in layers.

the uses of un-inspired music

i went to a disappointing performance last night. i'll post some clips from it later, because the artist was a fairly solid performer. it took me a few tries to articulate what was so disappointing about: it was billed as indian fusion, but in fact, turned out to be a series a songs that were all fairly solidly located in one genre or another and merely varied from each other. the first song was heavily pop-y; the next more latin with a smattering of indian drumming interludes; the next heavily indian. so all in all, they lacked the experimentation and interplay i associate with and find intriguing about fusion.
the up-sides of this are two-fold: it's prompted a very engaging conversation on how a listener pursuing new music encounters songs and uses them as nodes in a network to explore versus the intent and merits of the original work, and it reminded me of when we saw the Chemical Brothers and the similar, though more minor, disappointment i experienced then - and in reminding me, got me pursing a well-honed Pandora station on for the south-asian inspired electronica i was hoping for.
In the ways of nodes, it split out along any number of other spokes, as well, so the back current of my brain is enjoying a bit of a frenzy of potentials to be reaped later right now: (the image of which, itself, has reminded me of the tobacco juice glaze patterns from ceramic class which distributes outward in organic tendrils of gradient tone and my excitement about using them on something this session) multiple new station creation for related sub-genres, digging up the junoon concert cd somewhere in my closet, the uses and cases of node-spoke information structures, instrument creation and experimentation...and on.
there were some cool things about the performance. I appreciated the piece where he re-tuned his guitar to imitate a sitar. that rocked. he also had a riff on "I want to be in america" from West side Story that was amusing, not to mention a well-delivered dig.
I may post some excerpts from the conversation later too, because as we all know, my friends are smarter than me and say more interesting things. :)

all forks lead to lola

I shared an amusing Eartha Kitt song with Esan and some others when it cropped up on my pandora station. He came back saying he bets i have Lola playing on repeat. This alludes to the T-shirts i wanted to make up that had !#/usr/bin/lola  and a vertical row of !# s respectively.

the comment prompted me to shoot back the retort that i hadn't yet figured out how to hack the pandora algorithm so that all forks lead to lola (that's not really possible). what's funny about this is first came the comment, then came the 'oh...hmmm...i didn't realize my awareness of the algorithm was part of how i interact with it' musing - and then a brief imagining of what kind of voodoo song ratings might actually lead to a convergence of selection pathways rather than a divergence...

as for lola...i wish. sigh.

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.

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. 

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.

Fire it up, now...

Today I've allowed myself to get sucked into the computer configuration vortex. I figured it couldn't be a total waste since i'd learn abit more about the Windows Registry (you see, it all started with the discovery a few weeks ago that i couldn't enable 'hiberbate' on my laptop because the c drive didn't have enough room (it needs over a gig. yes, doesn't it seem like only a few years ago a gig of memory was unheard of on pcs?), but i couldn't remove the files because windows doesn't let me. so i decided to organize my programs my only way - the way i used to back before windows 95).

I got most of it moved around the way I wanted then edited my Internet Explore, just to see what happens. Not only didn't it warn me my security setting were too low to be recommended when I finished. It warned me before allowing me to go to my homepage on launching. Then it warned me every time I navigated to a new page. So what did I do? I downloaded Firefox. Let that be a lesson to Microsoft. Security is great, but I don't need a jailer for putting the bodyguard on a leash.

Of course, once I'd gotten Firefox, i just had to check out the extensions available for it. Which led me back into the realm of social tagging and technology trends. Now I'm trying out two browser extension tools that do much of what del.icio.us tries to do. The only thing that's annoying about all these is things - and all of the 'exchange' apps cropping up these days - is that instead of providing a useful interface to fit in with one's preferred internet and desktop use, one that brings to the user the community generated information not only from their own service but from like services out there. In other words, one that actually eliminates the need to also look in and keep sending information to those other services as well.

I spend so much time thinking about what options are available to improve the information world space we live in and what essential elements are lacking from those tools and technologies. There are SO MANY standards out there pushing the boundaries, but for each the amount investment developers need to commit to have a sound perspective not only on how to use it and what other technologies it commonly interfaces with, but what it has to offer over the alternatives is almost to much to make them effective. i just hope i have something to contribute to the thoughts going into this new territory.

White Noise

I've hit that critical mass point again where all my thoughts and goals are piling up behind my eyes and at the outskirts of my brain like a throng of trapped and terrified creatures. the image that comes to my mind of course is that of the townsfolk locked in the burning church. it's that kind of undoing of self where the center that was meant to bind the group together in the best of ways becomes the source of their destruction instead. That's how my brain feels right now. I need to reorganize myself and my projects. I have so many ambitions - though ambitions with it's outwardly focused connotations is less the word i'd like to use than something else might be. There are so many potentials i dream of seeing fulfilled and provided for - in myself, in my life (the people, groups, and whatnot that i feel connected to), and in the world at large: or at least the world of minds represented electronically. It's not so much about me acheiving these things as these things being acheived at all. It's stressing me out...

So to start with, i'm going to more rigorously set up my space over at the disanpoter domain around projects. I'll keep this one for babbling in the hopes that one can become some kind of point of collaboration. I only wish i was smart enough and productive enough to be able to work with those minds i admire most ...

oh my good grass roots

yes. i admit it. i caved. i went on myspace today. i followed friend links back into the mire of high school acquaintances and the loose associations of children's choirs and society girls and other attributes i've never had assigned to me and it all reminds me is that i lived in that world for a while. and we all grow up to do what we do. it's just that simple.