Evan's LiveJournal

28

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:34:42 GMT

muir woods, olympic national park, hot springs

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:22:37 GMT

I visited Muir woods again recently (the third time? the fourth time?). I somehow got a new appreciation for their idea of preserving wilderness this time. I guess historically public land has been preserved but always in a human-sculpted form as a nice park with plants and pathways and grasses, while the people who founded this reserve knew a hundred years ago that plain old wilderness was something that will become increasingly rare.

Despite growing up in Washington, I never (after childhood) went out to the western half, which is completely dominated by an enormous park. There's even a rain forest (as defined by volume of rain) on the western side. Meena and I went out there last week on a vacation.

The highlight was probably the olympic hot springs. It's a short hike (2.4 flat miles, some of it along a decaying abandoned road) but long enough to filter out casual visitors. We had this beautiful pool to ourselves.

My other bit of vacation trivia is that there is in a rain shadow behind the mountains along the north coast. Sequim, despite being in overcast western Washington, claims they get 299 days of sun a year.

Every time I visit the northwest I find myself missing the air, weather, and greenery again. California and particularly San Francisco sure is nice but I'm not sure it's the right kind of nice for me.

break-in

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:54:38 GMT

Someone broke into our place a few weeks ago. It seems they used a screwdriver to pop the front door and our apartment door; we've not been good about using the deadbolt, especially in this sort of circumstance where Matt left home mid-day and knew I was returning in the afternoon.

My life philosophy has "own nothing worth stealing" as a sort of unintentional side-effect but that mostly means I mooch off of my roommate. I lost nothing while he lost a laptop, mac mini, projector. The worst was that they stole Meena's camera and laptop, since she's (a) a poor college student and (b) had no backups of her eight years of photographs. (It seems some of them are scattered across various online services so it's not as bad as it first seemed.)

The whole thing hasn't upset me as much as I would've expected. It seems, with a few weeks of reflection, that I think of crime as a sort of natural consequence of mixing vastly different incomes in such a small place, and San Francisco has that worse than any other place I've lived (my street = million dollar houses; 3 blocks away = tons of homeless). I guess I have a sort of sad resignation about it and I'm mostly glad nobody was hurt.

Boston

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:35:28 GMT

I'll be in Boston tomorrow through Sunday. Any places or people you recommend?

motivation

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:05:01 GMT

Dear internet,

What keeps you going? What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?

Genuinely curious,
Evan.

what else is there?

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:41:49 GMT

What Else Is There?, Röyksopp featuring Karin from The Knife. (As Dan said: awesome video, not as sure about the song. But that woman has a rad voice.)

tessasaurus

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:39:45 GMT

Tessa's awesome homemade Halloween costume.

all quiet

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:30:37 GMT

I haven't written a real post in months. I apologize. I like to think of the LiveJournal friendship relationship as a real exchange, my secrets for yours, and I haven't been holding up my end of the bargain. Looking back, four months ago I posted "I have a lot on my mind and not a lot of time to type it" and today I am still holding that same thought: that most things worth saying take more than a few sentences/minutes to communicate. The modern world (or maybe the internet -- the two are sort of confused in my mind) are whatever word means the opposite of conducive to prolonged concentration, and I hate how even I would have began to skim this post now if I were reading it and I hate even more to contribute to this vast superficial static.

Instead I have fragments of posts collected on my laptop that are meaningful to me and maybe properly enigmatic for "constructing an online personna" but actually kind of annoying otherwise. One excuse for stopping there is that I'm just not much of a writer. In elementary school I refused to write the assigned journals because I had nothing to say. I started with LiveJournal as a toy to program on and somehow we eventually absorbed each other -- the idea that continual internet bloodletting led to my "rich internal life" seems equally plausible to me as the idea that you just grow up a bit in your 20s.

My other excuse is that there really isn't anything going on. When I was a teenager (a teenager! I started here a teenager and I'm now twenty seven years old) the fear of self-revealment online was a teenager's fear of being too earnest: Are you sure you want to be telling me all this, I quoted. Now the embarrassment refracts into a twenty-year-old's fear of exposure of being inoffensive and bland. In truth, I am a computer programmer and this year I've got more video games played under my belt than books read. Here's a piece of one of those aforementioned unpublished posts:

Everything is mundane. At work I push quietly forward on The Project* and at home I push quietly forward on the projects. There are a week's frustrations and then a week's victories and in two weeks they are forgotten.

Would we be friends if we met at a party? Sure if you want to talk about computers or music but that's not quite where I'd imagined I'd be.

* That's Google Chrome, now that it can be named.

portland

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:50:18 GMT

Dear LJ, I'm sorry I haven't posted anything of substance in a while. I have a lot on my mind and not a lot of time to type it.

I'm gonna be in Portland this weekend for a wedding. Anyone around there interested in hanging out on Sunday? I seem to have lost my phone, but email works.

some minor happenings

Wed, 21 May 2008 18:23:31 GMT

My DSL has been out at my house since Wednesday. It's probably been better for my social life.

On Wednesday I went home from work "early" to join a bunch of friends in the park, and slacklined for the the first time this year.

On Thursday I biked 44 miles to work. I'm not at all the marathon biking sort -- the ride was probably somewhere around 20x longer than any other bike ride I've done -- but I thought it would be something fun to try once. So many of my friends doubted I could do it! The best parts were going through the city as part of a large pack (maybe 42 people initially; I joined up with a larger group); going through a park full of eucalyptus; and the parts where the wildflowers were thick enough to smell. The worst parts were forgetting to bring my bike gloves, especially since this bike has rough handlebars; Thursday being the hottest day yet of the year; and in general the second half, which was through the relatively boring, treeless, and flat south bay.

On Saturday some friends roasted a whole pig. If I had any pictures of it they'd likely gross you out. It was delicious.

On Sunday I observed the mayhem that is bay to breakers. Now I am sunburned.

On other days not mentioned I worked. A lot. Somehow I managed to pull a 12-hour day yesterday.

doonesbury

Fri, 09 May 2008 06:55:14 GMT

Today on the bus home, talking to a friend: somehow Doonesbury comes up, I mention I know it from reading the books of it that were scattered around the house when I was little, and my interlocutor stops: Whoa, he says, I now know way more about what sort of person you are and what sort of place you come from than you were probably intending to reveal.

best roommate ever

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:58:01 GMT

Matt got a spare ticket so I could come along to the new Errol Morris film playing at the international film festival. I have such a brain crush on Morris.

vehicle overload

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:34:44 GMT

We now have five vehicles at our apartment: two bikes, two motorcycles (both Matt's(!)), one car. I observed that it was sad alongside the fact that we're a block from a Muni stop. Matt replied: "That's a testament to the quality of the Muni."

I'd much rather be out in this nice weather on a bike than slaving away at the keyboard right now!

stomach "flu"

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:49:58 GMT

I was sick again over the past few days, confined to home over the weekend. It was a stomach thing; seems likely it came with me from south America. I found I've gotten a different attitude towards sickness from exposure to a friend who has a lifelong disease with no known cure, only varying effectiveness approaches towards controlling symptoms. Despite this, he does more with his life in between the times he's feeling bad than I do with my relatively healthy one. I like thinking that willpower has more influence on what you get out of life than circumstances. (One of my favorite LJs is a woman who juggles so many simultaneous full-time activities I'd swear it was faked if I didn't know better.) These days, when I'm sick, I look at it like this: this sucks now, but eventually it will be over and forgettable. I just need to sit still for a few days while my body figures it out. And like when I was in school, during that downtime I plan all the more useful things I'd be doing if I were well.

home again

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:35:48 GMT

When I got back from my half year in Japan (1.5 years ago, now) I drafted a monster LiveJournal post detailing everything I thought about there and here. I kept revising it, trying to distill it into core points: like, how different is it, really? and would I consider living there for the rest of my life?

I never quite figured it out, and that post is now lost to wherever my files go when I'm not looking. I expect maybe that's also where my thoughts on Buenos Aires will also go.

In any case, I'm home again after a week's vacation, ready to resume my relatively monotonous and moderate programmer's life.

exploitation/exploration

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:03:00 GMT

The other day I went to a friend's apartment in a neighborhood of SF I'd never been to before. He'd bought a big ladder from a hardware store so he could get onto the top of his building, because there we could see a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate. Erinn always chides me for never leaving my own neighborhood, but even here I've yet to go to the restaurant a block from my home. One way of looking at it is that I simply lack the taste for adventure, or that with so many opportunities I'm overwhelmed with the choice. Another way of looking at it is that I have millions of ideas, boxes of tea, stacks of books I have yet to topple. In machine learning ("AI") you call this the exploitation/exploration tradeoff: how confident are you that the optimum is near where you are already versus a yet-to-be-discovered new peak. Me, I make a point of adjusting for my own bias towards conservatism, not because I'm unhappy with where I am but because the only way to know you're in a local maximum is to try something unknown.

new nine inch nails album

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 03:21:37 GMT

New Nine Inch Nails album, all instrumental, released online for $5 with CDs to follow. The actual download site is toast. But they also put the first quarter of it up for free on bittorrent. So far I'm reminded of the instrumental interludes from his other albums, with a bit more drone to it. First two tracks are mostly piano.

Their take on the distribution method is interesting, too: they have five different purchase options ranging from free to $300. The $5 one gets you the full album digitally. Each level beyond that on the price scale buys you more physical goods: first CDs (so antiquated!) and a book, then multiple formats of the audio, all the way up to personally autographed LPs. "When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied." It appears the entire album (?) is CC licensed, too.

This is the note included with the album. I love its straightforward honesty.

This torrent is an official upload from Nine Inch Nails.

We're very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV. Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label, we've decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. It's licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

We've also made a 40 page PDF book to accompany the album. If you'd like to download it for free, visit http://ghosts.nin.com/main/pdf

Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV. Undoubtedly you'll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you're interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5. You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.

We genuinely appreciate your support, and hope you enjoy the new music. Thanks for listening.

http://ghosts.nin.com

two bits of livejournal news

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 03:19:44 GMT

Four "LiveJournal advisory board" members have been chosen. Two are IRL friends and one is... Lawrence Lessig! It remains to be seen what this group of people will actually be responsible for, though.

The New York Times published an article on Putin, then had it translated to Russian and posted it on "The Times’s Russian-language blog on the site, www.livejournal.ru, which is Russia’s most popular blogging platform" [link, Russian]. They then translated some of the comments back to English.

donorcycle

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:46:25 GMT

Today as Matt zipped into his motorcycle gear for his commute to work, he told me: a coworker of his used to be an EMT, and as an EMT they called motorcycles "donorcycles", due to the quantity of fresh organ donors found from motorcycle accidents.

That is awesome and kinda horrifying.

good music and story

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:35:00 GMT

A plug for two recent posts by snej, both of which I've really liked:

A new mix CD: "Shiver 2"; his mixes are always awesome, and this one so far is perfect for this rainy day.
Short story: "The Ice Bar".

buenos aires

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:19:25 GMT

New plan for spring break: not New York, but Buenos Aires. I've been wanting to visit since I read about eightoclock's adventures there, and another friend of mine is currently living there, so why not. We've got tickets so there's no turning back. If you have any recommendations about neighborhoods, places, or people, please fill me in.

Embarrassingly, I have pretty much no knowledge of Spanish. I had been planning around the new year to take a class (a community college just opened a couple blocks from my place) but by the time I went to sign up the classes were full.

the darknet strikes

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:20:17 GMT

Wikileaks (link goes to the Wikipedia article about the site) is a Wikipedia clone for anonymously publishing leaked documents. They're in the news now for getting injuncted offline for publishing documents relating to a court case about money laundering in the Cayman islands.

Unfortunately, legal systems are by their nature slow and archaic; when the law meets tech issues it always calls to mind the Charles Stross neologism "legislatosaurus". What the ruling has actually done is force one domain name registrar to nuke a domain name, but there are mirrors in countries around the world, including with alternate domain names and encrypted connections. Here's a fast link, for example. From browsing around the site, it seems much of this was motivated by working around the filtering of the internet done in China by the Chinese government, but these workarounds work just as well for the rest of us.

One Wikileaks document claims, in a confusing sentence:

In the second half of last year Wikileaks exposed over $4,500,000,000's worth of money laundering including by the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi (see [...] which became the Guardian's front page story in September 2007 and swung the Kenyan vote by 10% leading into the December 2007 election and [...] reported in the Nairobi paper The Standard and now the subject of a High Court Case in Kenya).

That certainly sounds exciting, whatever it's saying! As a member of society, though, I can't say I'm completely positive on mechanisms that are above the law, even if they are for seemingly-noble causes like whistleblowing. But as a technologist I can assert that it's nearly impossible to stop this sort of thing (especially in a world where blatant piracy is apparently is still going and hosted in a US-friendly country). It makes me a little sad that Wikileaks isn't relying on any real technological solutions -- for example, there's no way for me to verify these mirrors contain the same information that was taken offline -- but in practice I expect the darknet will work out to be a combination of many unreliable technically weak solutions and a few reliable technically strong ones (like via Tor, maybe, at gaddbiwdftapglkq.onion).

new york room

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 21:30:21 GMT

Meena wants to go to New York for her spring break (next month) to visit some old friends. Where should we stay? Do any New Yorkers have tips or hotels or neighborhoods they'd recommend?

voting, 2

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:08:22 GMT

I'm truly touched so many of y'all took the time to comment on not voting, even if it was just to say you thought less of me. Since what I wrote was truthful, I sorta figure I haven't done our relationship any real harm that wouldn't have come out eventually anyway -- like if I secretly was a bigot, wouldn't you rather know now rather than later? -- but I also maybe wonder whether having that sort of thing come out in the context of a normal friendship would mean you'd know me better than to think I'm the sort to follow a fashion or that I haven't thought about it at length. So maybe I am worse off, to have given you that impression.

I wrote that I'm not interested in arguing, and I do mean that I'm not interested in convincing you to change your beliefs or in the validity of mine. But I do hate feeling misunderstood! I wrote three pages of a response but after thinking about it decided it wasn't worth posting. I'd enjoy talking with you in person about it sometime, though.

rainydayz remixes

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 19:51:07 GMT

This is good: "an 8-track collection featuring remixes of Radiohead's historic seventh album, In Rainbows. The songs are available in a zip file below and feature verses courtesy of Too $hort, MC Zumbi of Zion I, Chali2na of Jurassic 5, and Del the Funky Homosapien."

I never really got the Grey Album because I never listened to the Beatles. And in any case, I like the production on this better.