may contain traces of puns

consider yourselves warned

Q: What do you call a robot that makes fun of itself?
A: Self-deprecating

Q: What do you call a robot that celebrates the new year by throwing itself down a flight of stairs?
A: Self-depreciating

micah

"With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on High?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly before your God?
Micah 5:8

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
Isaiah 58:6-9

the purpose

of riches

So He brought His people out with joy,
His chosen ones with singing,
He gave them the lands of the nations,
and they took possession of the wealth of the peoples,
that they might keep his statutes and observe His laws.
Praise the Lord!
Psalm 105:43-45

Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who bought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the the house of slavery.
Deuteronomy 8:11-15

four euros

worth of excitement

I met someone yesterday who was very excited about four euros, excited enough to start kissing random strangers.

Are four euros really that exciting? Sure thing. Four euros is a croissant, a coffee and a then a pain au chocolat because you've still got the munchies. It could also be a sandwich for lunch, three rides on the tram or two big coins that you can stick over your eyes and pretend are monocles!

So next time you look in your wallet and all you see is four euros (or six canadian dollars), just remember: you've got a pocketful of excitment.

dieter rams

ten principles that define good design:

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.

french turkeys

not so large, it seems

So this morning, I went turkey hunting. Not turkey hunting in the usualy sense of the work hunting. Instead of creeping about on foot, I took my bike. Rather than moving steathily from copse to copse, I wore a bright orange fleece sweather as I moved from boucherie to boucherie. Actually, I only found two, so it didn't actually take that long.

Anyhow, the French tend to only order turkeys around the french holidays. Strange, but anyways, it makes it difficult to find turkeys for Canadian thanksgiving. Eventually (read: at the second boucherie) I was told that they might be able to get turkeys, but that they wouldn't me any larger than 4 kg. 4 kg!! That's 9 pounds! A capon turkey, if you will. When I asked for a 10-15 kg turkey, the dude laughed and said they didn't exist. grrrr.....

Sigh...

France: where everything is smaller.

(p.s. boucherie = meat shop. Think European Meats in Kensington)

stupid and mean

dangerous combination

As part of our introduction to seismology course, we will be giving informal seminars on famous historical earthquakes (San Francisco 1906, Sumantra, etc...), or the seismology of a particular region, all in an effort to give us some background on the subject.

Yesterday, at the beginning of class, three brave souls volunteered to give to inaugural presentation. However, by the end of the class, two of them remembered that they didn't have internet and at the thought of doing research at an internet cafe, their bravery failed them, and so the prof decided to ask for volunteers who had internet access.

Those of you who know me (which is probably everyone who reads this) will know that paying careful attention to everything that goes on in class is not my forte. When I heard that a volunteer with internet was required, I assumed it was because my classmates were having trouble downloading the course materials. So fools leap in and all that, and I stuck my hand up and told everyone that they could come by my room with a USB key and I would happily give them the files. I suspect the prof was a bit puzzled by my response, since it had nothing to do with what he was actually asking, but he wasn't about to let an internet-enabled volunteer slip through his hands.

And so, it dawned on me that I had just volunteered, not to download files for people, but to give a presentation. Dumb.

But this is not the end of the story. Don't worry, it's not time to stop procrastinating, not yet. After the true import of my actions had sunk in, I realized that Prof. Campillo was staring fixedly at me, and saying that he needed one more volunteer. If I was being offered the chance to choose who I would work with, I wasn't about to let it slip through my fingers. Ignoring the fact that he wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to the proceedings, I said "George!", and this was apparently funny, since everyone laughed. Mean.

Watch out world, not only am I stupid, I'm mean. Who needs enemies with a friend like me?

percolatr

slow-drip photographic goodness

If you keep an eye on my flickr page, you'll know that I tend to add a whole bunch of pictures all at once. I don't really like doing that, because it means that you get overwhelmed with tons of pictures at irregular intervals and don't have the time to fully appreciate the splendour and beauty of each one. (Q: is dave full of himself?)

Anyways, I thought it would be nice to set up a queue of pictures and write a program to upload them once a day. At first I thought I'd write a huge program that would store pictures in a queue and let me give them tags and names and descriptions, and then I'd write all the code that talks to flickr, and so on. However, all those things have been written by other people, so my motivation to write them from scratch was approximately nil.

Then I realized that the only thing I really wanted was the queue. If I could somehow get the computer to pull one picture from a queue each morning and put it in my way, then I could just upload it myself. This, it turns out is much easier...

I added two albums to iPhoto: "flickr queue" and "flickr". Then I wrote a script that grabs the first image from the "flickr queue" albums, copies it to the desktop, does some processing to prep it for flickr and then moves the image from the "flickr queue" album to "flickr". Then I told launchd to run the script every morning and I'm all set. Everyday there will be one picture sitting on my desktop screaming to be uploaded!

Here's the script, if you're interested:

tell application "iPhoto"
 set queue to the album named "flickr queue"
 -- (count photos in queue) is equal to 1
 if (count photos in queue) is greater than 0 then
  set photo_of_the_day to the first photo in queue
  set path_of_the_day to the image path of photo_of_the_day as POSIX file as alias
  tell application "Finder" to set fresh_copy to duplicate path_of_the_day to the desktop
 else
  return
 end if
 
 add photo_of_the_day to the album named "flickr"
 remove photo_of_the_day from the album named "flickr queue"
 
 tell application "Image Events"
  launch
  set image_of_the_day to open (fresh_copy as string)
  scale image_of_the_day to size 1200
  match image_of_the_day to destination profile "sRGB Profile"
  save image_of_the_day
 end tell
 
 
end tell

amphibuity

the quality of being amphibious

I have a new theory of amphibuity: things spelled with 'ph' are amphibious.

For instance, phrogs, as we all know are amphibious, so that's one point to my theory right off the bat.

Now I know what you're thinking: Phones. Phones are spelled with 'ph', but are they amphibious? Well, the latest research says yes...

I was sticking my feet in a cold mountain stream today and decided that I would put my mobile phone in my shoe to keep it from falling out of my pocket and into said cold mountain stream. You see, I too did not think that phones were amphibious. But I underestimated the amphibuity of my phone and it took a dive right out of the shoe and into the stream. I retrieved it, dissasembled it and let it dry for about 5 hours. and then...DUM DUM DUM!!...it worked as if nothing had happened. Ergo, phones are amphibious and my new theory is going to revolutionize zoology the world over.

The only bummer is that for about five hours I was convincing myself that I would have get a new phone but now that my old one works....no new phone for david :( NOKIA!!! I'll get those quality finnish engineers one of these days...

ooohh! shiny

new subway trains

The TTC is displaying mock-ups of the new trains. Those of you who aren't in Italy should definitely go and have a look. And, perhaps, take some pictures for me ;)

insurance

co-op style

Gambling is a Bad Thing, so when someone described insureance as gambling I started to think and decided that there are two ways to look at insurance.

Insurance as a gamble: you buy insurance because something might go wrong and instead of maybe paying a large sum, you pay–for sure–a smaller sum. Essentially, you're gambling that something will go wrong.

Insurance as Capitalist-Communist Mashup: Given that calamity generally doesn't strike everyone at the same time, we all chip in a fixed amount of money on a regular basis. When problems occur, we dip into the kitty. Sometimes we're helping others and sometimes we're being helped.

If we look at it this way, insurance clearly isn't gambling. However, two questions remain: How do the insurers look at it? and How would a different point of view affect insurance policies?

I won't pretend to answer the first question, since anything I say will probably be too simplistic. Moving on to the second question, here's an idea for a new kind of insurance business: co-operative insurance.

In co-op insurance, the premium is not fixed. Every month, the total cost of claims approved is divided among the policy holders. If no claims are approved, no one pays more than the basic administration fee. In a month with a higher number of claims, everyone's premiums jump up.

The idea here is that the cost would be lower because the insurer is not being paid to take a risk. The uncertainty is spread across all the co-op policy holders, not concentrated in one insurance firm.

This is simply the germ of the idea. It would be interesting to flesh it out a little to see what it might look like in more detail. It would also be interesting to contrast it with Lloyds of London's insurance market.

At any rate, it's an idea that moves insurance away from gambling, and may even result in reduced costs.

severe

potential

as in "Have you heard the debut release from Mimico Molly? It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's got severe potential!"

Has anyone noticed that I like making up random phrases? aaahhh.....

"I deeply considered this

to find an explanation"

Our class received an email today for a professor who expressed his deepest admiration for us as well as his chagrined disappointment with our preformance in the final exam. After writing that he would bump the marks by about 20%, he concluded by saying...

The final grades will reflect my unchanged esteem towards you.

---

Choice quote from (every single) lecture: "I remember to you..."

letter and numbers

information

Literacy and numeracy are generally considered to be fundamental skills. They are both general skills applicable in a million ways and places. Much of the early years of our education is devoted (or, was devoted–who knows what they're teaching kids now :) ) to learning to understand and manipulate letter and numbers.

Once we have learned how to handle data, we move on to learning to deal with information. Often, this is taught in a much more specific way than we are taught our letters and numbers. Instead of learning to deal with all kinds of information seperately, in english, biology, math and music class, might it not be better if we learned the basics of information handling in a general way and then applied it to each situation?

---

Just for the record, this idea is half-baked. For starters, I don't even know what I mean by "the basics of information handling". Essentially, I've got a suspicion that things would be clearer if we were explict about the methods we use to write and interpret whatever information we are dealing with.

Functor!

the executionator!

(to the tune of Trogdor, the Burninator)

Functor was a function,
i mean, he was a object-function
uhhh, he was just an object

uh

but he was still
FUNCTOOAAARR!!!!

(with apologies to all non-geeks and homestarrunner.com)

mi prendo

in giro

literally "you take me for a tour", but means "you're pulling my leg".

The other day, I got all worried because I saw a sign announcing that all regional and interregional trains on the Milano-Genova line were going to be cancelled for a year! This is bad, b/c it essentially means that I wouldn't be able to spend evenings in Milano...

So after a week or two of worry, I finally figured out that my leg was, in fact, being pulled. sigh.... at least the 00h27 train still runs!

francis schaeffer

says:

But when I am a creature in the presence of God, and see that the last relationship is with an infinite God, and these human relationships are among equals, I can take from human relationship what God meant it to provide, without putting the whole structure under an intolerable burden. More than this, when I acknowledge that none of us are perfect in this life, I can enjoy that which is beautiful in a relationship, without expecting it to be perfect.

the one advantage to having insomnia, is that you have more time to read books...

augustine

says

"And I answered unto all these things which stand about the door of my flesh, "Ye have told me concerning my God, that ye are not He; tell me something about Him." And with a loud voice they exclaimed, "He made us." My questioning was my observing of them; and their beauty was their reply?

veiled glory

veiled beauty

I think I understand why brides wear veils.

A friend of mine showed me a passage from a book that talked about how women are beautiful because they are the image of God's beauty. I had forgotten that man and women are the image of God and I realized that I had never really considered God to be beautiful.

Sometimes girls are too beautiful to look at. It almost hurts to see them. I've always relegated that to the "strange guy-girl phenomenon" pile, but now it makes complete sense—the glory of God is shining through them. Moses saw a glimpse of God's glory and had to wear a veil. The beauty of a woman is the image of God's glory and beauty.

The Bible is very clear that marriage is a symbol of our relationship to Christ. The whole idea of submission is an image of our submission to God—it is one way husbands reveal Christ to their wives. What my friend found liberating and I find stunning in its simplicity and truth is that wives reveal the glory of God to their husbands by being beautiful.

We cannot see God's face on our own. It is only when we turn to Him that we see His face (2 Corithians 3:12-18). Wedings are symbols of that: the bride is veiled, just as God's glory was veiled. Once the bride and groom are married, the veil is removed and the groom can see his bride as she is.

I always knew that marriage is a beautiful symbol of our relationship with Christ, but I only saw half the story. The husband and wife are simultaneously showing and being shown Christ. At the same time, they both see Christ in and and show Him to each other.

The crazy beauty of this just makes me want to praise God! How does He think this stuff up?

distractions

are good for you, apparently

This morning, I spent a thousand dollars. Canadian dollars, though, so it's not that much. You would expect that in making that important decision, I would have spend hours poring over the pros and cons to make sure I was making a good call.

However, that's not my style. I checked out the prices. I checked out all the details. I heard what a few people thought about it. And then I got into a long discussion about software engineering, posted some pictures and watched the Olympics. Was I irresponsible? Ought I to have spent more time studying and deliberating?

Well, according to this guy: no, I shouldn't have. His research suggests that the best way to make a complicated decision is to get all the relevant info, and then distract yourself. As you distract your conscious self, your (way more betterer) unconscious mind gets to work and you'll make better decision.

I know what you're thinking: Dave that's just an excuse to be your usual lazy self. And? What if it is? The best excuses are the ones that are actually good reasons for doing something. I wasn't being lazy, I was using state-of-the-art multicriteria optimization techniques ;)

parking

parking
Originally uploaded by his daveness.

I love this picture, if I may say so myself :)

expression

between creation and translation

Let's start with the Oxford English Dictionary:

Creation: the action or process of bringing something into existance
Translation: the conversion of something from one form or medium to another

Expression: the process of making known one's thoughts or feelings

They are similar because they all generate something in a particular medium or context. They all have the same result. They are different because they start in different places.

Creation starts with nothing and adds something totally new. Translation starts with a source and adds nothing to it.

Expression lies in between. The process of "making known". It is translation because an expression simply points to something that previously existed. It looks like creation, because before the expression, that which is expressed was unknown.

Translation takes something visible and makes it comprehensible. Creation has nothing and makes something. Expression takes something unkown and makes it knowable.

Maybe the Author should say that software engineering is the process of expressing human desires as computer actions. The Author is right to say that translation is a powerful word, though it exists only as an aid to expression.

A software engineer doesn't translate someone's desires into computer actions, he helps people express themselves with computers.

Authors writes in their own language. Their work is later translated to other languages. The software engineer helps his clients to write directly in a language they do not know. What makes the job challening is that language affects how you think and the client must be able to express themselves as natives in a language they do not speak.

Expression: simultaneous creation and translation.

raw & managed

tasks

It occured to me, that there are two different types of tasks that we engage in. We perform a managed task in a context that was created by someone else. Computer programs, for example. We don't actually do anything, we just give instructions. The context may do what we ask, it may do more than we ask, it may disregard our instructions, it may crash randomly. In a managed context, we are users, we are merely using a tool.

When we perform a raw task, we do something. Think of paddling a canoe or slicing vegetables. We do not tell the paddle to make the canoe move; we don't instruct the knife to cut the peppers. When we perform a raw task, we are responsible for making sure that nothing goes wrong. In a managed task, the 'manager' can prevent us from doing stupid things. When you're cutting veggies, it's up to you to avoid your fingers.

It's not just about computer programs and boats, though. Large organizations (NGOs, governments, corporations) are set up as managed context. The people in charge don't actually do anything, they give instructions to the context, the organization. In theory, organizations have adequate checks and balances to operate as a managed context. A lot of havoc is wreaked when people step out of the managed context -- they can do a lot of damage.

wireless

mouse

I bought one

I think this makes me officially a geek.

engineering

poetry

My TA said that reading my homework was like reading pure poetry. This is quite possible the weirdest comment I've ever received on any homework, ever. My english teachers never said that when I was *trying* to write poetry.

At any rate, I decided to answer a question on my next assignment in haiku. I have reproduced it below for your reading pleasure:

Acceleration
that causes severe damage
is one point one g.

Mind you, my first attempt had the wrong answer, so the lines came out a bit different:

Acceleration
causing total collapse is
one point seven g.

free

books

Right here. These are most (if not all) of John Piper's books. He's a great pastor and theologan, so I recommend reading his stuff.

Did I mention that they were free?

thoughts on

training people

I wrote an email to a friend with some advice for training people. I thought I'd copy-paste it here. The training had to do with sound boards at our church, but I think the ideas are pretty generic. Ok....here goes:

The biggest thing to remember is that there is a limit to how much information (or knowledge) people can absorb and retain in one sitting. Sadly, that limit seems to be lower on Sunday afternoons than any other time :)

Now, the good news is that I believe that it's possible to monkey with the retention limit (ooooh....retention limit...I just made up a new term!!) by the way you present the material. Essentially, you learn more, quickly from a good teacher and you learn less material (slowly and not very well) from a bad teacher.

So now, instead of trying to make a "good" training session, you've just got to make a training session that helps people retain the information you present. This may not seem too relevant, but I like to replace vague words (like "good") with words that will give you a better idea of what to do.

Ok! So how do you train people so that they don't forget everything the minute they walk out the door. My suggestion is that you start with 'Why' and then move to 'How'. Start generally, then move on to details.

Think of it this way: you're giving them a whole lot of little pieces of paper. One says how to adjust the gain, three of four of them say how to adjust the e/q, one talks about phantom power, etc... Make sure you give them a shelving unit to put all the stuff on before you start throwing little pieces of paper at them!

I find that if I understand the overview, all the little pieces fall into place without much effort.

Now, you can apply the shelving unit/paper slips metaphor on several different levels. (Isn't this exciting!) What's a meta for if you can't use it creatively? (sorry...bad pun..couldn't resist :) )

Level 1 (let's call it alpha-prime, just for kicks): This is the 'Why' level. The shelving unit is your objectives: making the speakers audible, the musicians able to lead the worship, etc... Then whenever you teach some little thing, you can point out how it achieves one of these goals (or even make your trainees guess!). This gives some structure to the info and structure makes things easier to remember.

Level 2 (this one's called gamma-double-prime): This is the 'How' level. Start with the most basic explanation of how it works. Sound comes in the microphones, through the sound board and out to the speakers. This not only gives some structure to what you're saying, but it also allows you to focus on one part. You can ignore the microphones and focus on the board. And then, with the board, you start with a shelving unit and then focus on filling one shelf at a time.

Now the problem with this way of training is that it requires some serious thought beforehand. You've got to organize everything you want to teach. All I can say about this a) don't underestimate the amount of time this will take and b) don't underestimate how much it will be worth! It's a great discipline and you'll probably find yourself gaining new insights just by sitting down and organizing what you already know.

My final suggestion is to get your trainees behind the board as soon as possible. Once you've figured out how you'll break down the material, ask the question "What is the minimum needed before they can sit down and start doing things on their own?" If you're anything like me, your breakdown of the material won't be perfect and letting the trainees loose allows them to customize the shelving units and ask questions about the bits you'll inevitable forget.

My final encouragement is not to worry too much. Even if you don't give the greatest, bestest training ever, they'll start to put all the information away. If worst comes to worst, the ducks that fall in the middle of the pond without a lifejacket still learn to swim :)

one does not suppose

that unrefrigerated bread will last for a month

which is another way of saying that if you leave a loaf of bread in your cupboard and then spend a month on a totally different continent, said loaf is really not supposed to be edible when you return. It should be hard, stale and totally covered in mould. That's what ordinary dead stuff does: it rots.

So apparently, this bread is totally loaded with preservatives. It was still soft, only a little bit stale, didn't smell funny and tasted totally normal. Despite the fact that I finished the remaining eight slices, I don't think I'll ever buy that brand again. Frankenbread? No frank you!

Now earlier I alluded to being on a different continent than the bread while *wasn't* rotting. One of us was in Canada, while the other was in Italy. Now it only makes sense for the evil, preservative-laden frankenbread to be from Canada, right? North America is a stronghold of newfangled unhealthy stuff and Italy is a pure as extra virgin olive oil.

Except not. When I buy preservative-laden bread in Canada, it goes mouldy after a week. And Italy, once the home of emperors and fresh olive oil, is foisting frankenbread on it's unsuspecting shoppers. Sigh....I'm so disillusioned

And also, frankenbread is a cool word.