In the Chicago Endeca office, we Work At Home every Monday. Which is great, because it’s ugly out and I don’t want to put on suitable clothes when it’s ugly out. I’ll go into the office in the afternoon, when the blood sugar settles and you need to force yourself to be somewhere doing something.
The above photo is a reflection of the sunset reflecting off of buildings in the Loop. That’s just a fancy way of saying I took a picture of my neighbor’s window. I haven’t seen anything good yet, and I don’t plan to. Making smalltalk in the elevator is tough enough without knowing little secrets.
In the op-ed pages today, we’re talking about whether or not Barack Obama wears an American flag pin. I’m going to write a list of things I don’t care about. This immense apathy prevents me from watching TV. It’s not because I’m virtuous. I’m not. I watched seven hours of football in a row last month. With the sound off, of course. I don’t care what the commentators say. It’s always the same. The ads stay the same. The evening news stays irrelevant and lacks context.
In the event pages, the Magnetic Fields will play six shows here in one weekend next month. I don’t know whether to go early or late (they play two a night). You should come with me and sing along.
I immersed myself in amateur photography today. I’m an amateur. I took some photos. I played with them for a few seconds in iPhoto. I posted them to the intertubes.
This week at work I listened to an NPR interview with Thom Yorke. He spoke British and the DJ played a few tracks that Thom likes. Mr Yorke thinks electronic music is great but it can make you lazy. My camera combined with iPhoto works the same way. I actually take photos now. I didn’t for the first twenty-four and a half years of my life. But I’m lazy. There’s a button in iPhoto called ‘Enhance.’ You click it and it makes the picture better. It must amp up the color and the contrast. Somebody more dedicated than I am figured it out.
What if all software had an ‘Enhance’ button? You write an e-mail, click ‘Enhance’, and watch it morph into something you would have said if only you were wittier. I might write something like that. A real-world ‘Enhance’ button would put Viagra out of business. I’m on it.
I can see now how people spend hours on cropping and organizing. Addictions only make sense once you’ve given them a try.
I took all the photos on our balcony standing in my sandals. It was twenty-something degrees and sunny, not bad. I have special balcony sandals. They’re not good for anything else but walking two feet, standing, and looking. I grill in them. The next time I buy a pair of shoes I’ll ask how they go with meat.
I’ve tried to start a serious web presence four times in my life. I’ve made another dozen half-hearted attempts. I always kill them in the end. Or leave them to rot.
Writing for an audience makes me tentative and pompous.
So this time, screw it. I’ve written two python scripts recently. One sends a random Chuck Norris fact using whatever SMTP server you specify. The other scrapes the Craigslist apartment listing page(s) of the city of your choice. You check out the public Subversion repository. Do whatever you want with the scripts. They took a few hours, but didn’t involve anything tricky. Good ol’ Craig writes some pretty scrapable HTML. The Chuck Norris facts dude annoys me slightly, but I won’t say anything just to stay safe.
In the real world, actually doing something instead of talking is subversive. So there. I wrote some scripts. Now I’m shipping them.
I am proud of one snippet of code:
def sfilter (f, g):
for x in g:
if f( x ):
yield x
raise StopIteration
def smap (f, g):
for x in g:
yield f( x )
raise StopIteration
They’re like map and filter, except lazy. No one had ever thought of that. You would never have found these functions unless you read this post.
