Sturgeon's Law

my Dr. MacArthur program is already obsolete. there is a great quote in Tim O'Reilly's article Watching the "Alpha Geeks, "Inventions need to make sense in the world where you finish a project, not the world in which you start the project." Well, my project has become obsolete in a mere two weeks: the administration changed the format of graduation. and no thanks to me; not a soul knew about my project because i did it over spring break. oh well, i suppose that i need to just realize that 90% of everything is crap. i hope i can eventually make something that falls into that higher 10%.

noise noise noise

"the hardest part about writing a novel," simons says, "is the first draft. before the first draft all you have is the idea of a novel." that's how i feel about this blog. i've barely had time to complete the normal tasks of life and that leaves little time to write. so many things have been happening but until i start a first draft i only have the idea of a blog.

t just read Watching Alpha Geeks by Tim O'Reilly where he talks about a "young FreeNet developer" who piped IRC through Festival so he could listen to it while coding. that grabbed my interest to see if t could do it on Mac OS X.

Festival and Speech Tools compiled without much problem. i had an issue trying to figure out how to actually get the speech to output from the audio because OS X doesn't have /dev/audio (Festival's default). i finally realized that i could just set the output to mplayer.

i compiled ircII and did my first run through irc. using the information at irchelp.org.

now i just have to write a perl script that will feed the output of what people say to Festival.

well for everyone who doesn't care about these sort of things i should have more interesting posts soon. for everyone who wants more information i plan on making a tutorial on the whole process. it's really straight-forward if you have any experience compiling any software.

for a special graduate

i found out this week that the graduation process for my school has been modified. here is the way it use to work: thousands of people crowded into grace community church to watch as their favorite student marched down the aisle and received his diploma. next, the crowd looked on and the student had his picture taken with the president of the college and proudly moved his tassel to the left side of his cap.

however, that won't be the case this year.

the new format works this way: after a group baccalaureate in the main auditorium each of the majors will be splitting up into smaller classrooms where the head of each department will deliver the diplomas in a small-group setting.

the supposed reasons i've heard for this change are varied. they range from the idea the administration is answering requests for a "more intimate" graduation process to the suggestion that this is the containment of an un-containable applause that is inevitably produced at graduations. whatever the case, the topic has sent a ripple of discussion about the nature of a meaningful or purposeful graduation.

we were discussing it on friday and mark told us that dr. suzuki had suggested that maybe next year we have an "online graduation." Shortly after, someone suggested that you could just upload your picture and have a website that would compose a picture of yourself with Dr. MacArthur.

i've been studying perl lately and i've been itching for a project to work on. so... here is a prototype. simply type in your name, upload your picture, and it's like you're really there!

i just found out that you can read the transcripts of the oral arguments brought before the supreme court. i find this absolutely fascinating; we have access to listen in to some of the most insightful and intelligent legal minds. i just finished reading the oral arguments from the case van orden v. perry where the supreme court discussed the constitutionality of a monument on state property depicting moses holding the ten commandments.

i found it interesting how clearly the petitioner, mr. chemerinsky, stated his objection to the ten commandments. the issue was not with the behavioral portions that reflect the current laws such as 'do not kill', 'do not steal' etc., but with the fact that the ten commandments claim an exclusive mono-theism: "...if you look at these commandments, it's that God has claimed that he is the only God, prohibiting idolatry, prohibiting graven images, prohibiting taking the name of the Lord and God in vain. (p.5 l.16-20)"

maybe this clear understanding and rejection of the ten commandments shouldn't surprise me. i suppose it does surprise me because 1) i feel that many christians i know haven't stopped to examine the meaning and implications of the first of these commonly quoted commandments and 2) this man who does understand their implications rejects the consequences of them.

the discovery of these direct transcripts was a welcome relief from hearing the filtered sound bytes about the case long after it was over.

i tried sharing these ideas at school today. mostly people's eyes glazed over in boredom. i think as soon as you start talking about reading transcripts from the supreme court people automatically assume that it will be confusing and boring. if you're actually still reading this you should see for yourself.

random

tonight i'd like to recommend two things:

1) ken burns 10-disc documentary on jazz. you can get it on netflix or amazon.com

2) geek tool. a great little app to show the outpu shell scripts, etc on your desktop. you can find a bunch of helpful ways to use it over at macosxhints.com

the armpit of america

the film garden state is a mental measuring stick. it grates my soul to here the pseudo intellectuals talk about its beauties. if they were honest and admitted they were talking about natalie portman than maybe we would go from there. but instead they try to make it into some coming-of-age landmark film.

it's like studying the female nude. "it's artistic" they say. they try to deny that there is any sexual underpinnings at all. why do you think it's been the male artists subject of choice for the last 2 centuries?

up next: an epistemological love story starring Keira Knightley!

i'm sitting in my persuasion class. we are doing commercial advertisement speeches. basically i'm paying $50 to be forced to sit in an hour and half of commercials. worse, they are being performed by my classmates. nike shox. nokia cell phone. season tickets. i don't blame them for doing it. i'm giving a speech on an apple ipod. we all have to do it to pass the class and therefore to get our degrees. i just don't get the point. we are barraged with about infinity ads a minute, the last thing we need is one more venue for advertising.

despite the exercise, i have to hand it to bradley. he has a way of making even this bane exercise interesting. if you ever have the chance to listen to him tell a story, you should take it.

but the guy who tried to sell us a mandolin? he was about as excited as a coroner showing you his caskets.