place holder

By emile 21 Mar 2001

http://www.crushlink.com angers me in an old testament sort of way. i’ll elaborate in the comments, to avoid clogging the main page.

my pants are vibrating

By anders pearson 20 Mar 2001

i occasionally like to indulge in rants on user interfaces and the future of technology. my thoughts basically boil down to the observation that 99% of interfaces to modern technology (especially computers) suck. technology should be transparent. it should work for us and not the other way around. if a device or program doesn’t save me time or work in the long run, i don’t want to use it.

as a demonstration of my thoughts on how technology should behave, i’ve posted a description of how i set up email forwarding to my cellphone. i’m pretty happy with the system i’ve got set up as it does what i want it to automatically, without any intervention or effort on my part.

the ol hometown

By anders pearson 18 Mar 2001

stompyblog doesn’t provide links to individual posts (most annoying) forcing me to quote the march 12th entry rather than just linking directly to it:

MAINE ? A Parkman man will be sentenced today for trying to murder his son, an admitted zoophile, or person who has a sexual attraction to animals.

Frank Buble, 71, pleaded guilty last December in Piscataquis County Superior Court to attempted murder and elevated aggravated assault. He is accused of trying to kill his 44-year-old son, Phillip Buble, by striking him several times with a crowbar on Sept. 13, 1999.

The elder Buble reportedly attacked his son, intending to kill him, because of the son?s attraction to a dog, among other reasons.

In the September assault, the younger Buble received a broken arm and several lacerations and required medical treatment at Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft.

In anticipation of today?s sentencing, Phillip Buble submitted a written request to the court asking that his ?significant other,? a short-legged, mixed-breed dog named Lady, be allowed in the courtroom for the sentencing.

The request was denied.

In his written request addressed to Justice Andrew Mead, presiding this week in Piscataquis County Superior Court, Buble stated that he would be exercising his right to speak at the sentencing.

?I?d like my significant other to attend by my side if possible as she was present in the house during the attack, though not an eyewitness to it, thank goodness,? Buble wrote.

?I?ve been informed your personal permission is needed given that my wife is not human, being a dog of about 36 pounds weight and very well behaved,? he added.

The letter carried Buble?s signature and a hand-drawn paw print. Typed below Buble?s written signature were the words ?Phillip and Lady Buble.?

Justice Mead denied the request Tuesday, noting that no animals are permitted in the courthouse unless it is a guide dog in the company of a visually impaired person.

source: Bangor Daily News

this is quite amusing. i used to live in parkman. that’s about all i have to say about that. and people ask me why i left maine to move to manhattan….

brain cancer

By anders pearson 15 Mar 2001

today i finally broke down and bought a cellphone. Ericsson T28 World. my coworker got one today as well and when he showed me the phone and the plans that they had, i decided that i had been left behind for long enough.

my metric for the ideal cellphone has always been that i want a phone that is small enough to accidentily swallow. well, consumer technology doesn’t seem to be quite there yet, but we’re getting closer. i can fit the entire thing in my mouth. not sure if that voids my warranty or not though.

interestingly, i hadn’t really done much research on calling plans until my coworker got the same phone but it really looks like you can get a comparable, if not better deal with a cellphone than with a regular wired phone. especially if you make lots of long distance calls. the fact that you can get your email forwarded to your cellphone is pretty sweet too. and the funky brain cancer is just icing on the cake.

the day job

By anders pearson 08 Mar 2001

thought i’d give you all a little glimpse into what i do at my day job. Pierrot Lunaire is a project i’ve been working on for Columbia’s music department that recently went semi-live. in order to make any sense of it, you’ll need a little background. pay attention cause this is tricky; i get confused myself.

Albert Giraud wrote a series of 50 poems in french about a character called “Pierrot Lunaire”. they’re not too bad; pleasantly dark in places. the famous atonal composer Arnold Schörnberg selected 21 of them, had them translated to german and set them to “music” (Sprechstimme and chamber ensemble). the site currently contains the following material: Giraud’s 50 poems in french, english translations of those, german translations of all poems, english translations of the german translations that Schörnberg used for his 21, scans of three different print editions of the poems (1894 french edition plus 1895 and 1911 german editions), and audio of the 21 “Schörnberg” poems being recited in french and german. there’s a lot more on the way too including audio and video of the pieces actually being performed and lots of miscellaneous information about the poems.

the main focus of the site currently is the “poem interface” which is intended to allow students or scholars to easily compare and contrast multiple poems and the multiple translations of the poems. there are two panels that each contain a poem. at the top of each is a bar allowing you to choose which version of the poem to display in that panel (french, english translation of the french, german, and english translation of the german). at the bottom of each poem are a couple icons with the optional additional media for that poem/version (print editions, audio, and video which is currently inactive). below those are pulldown menus allowing you to select which poem to display based from either the original 50 or the 21 “Schörnberg” (be careful, they’re not ordered the same).

the site should pretty much work with NN4+ and IE4+ with javascript and css enabled. if it works on any other browser, i’m pretty impressed. the design is temporary until we get one of our real graphic designers to put something together for it. my real contribution to this besides the mad javascript kung-fu, was the XML/XSL backend that allowed us to go through N-thousand different iterations of the navigation trying to settle on one that would make the professor happy without going insane recoding all 171 poems over each time.

anyway, let me know what you think.

make money. now.

By jp 07 Mar 2001

I think one piece of software the net is sorely lacking, and though rather useless would probably download like hotcakes and be incredibly popular, would be a cross-platform universal chat client. it pisses me off to have to use MSN messenger to chat with my japanese friends, ICQ to anyone who’s computer savvy, and AIM to chat to my ninny brother who refuses to switch. I don’t even bother with my Yahoo IM friends.

one client that could maintain a contact list across all services and send and recieve from the appropriate servers based on contacts would be a nice little thing to have, for those of us to cheap to have long distance (which gets a little pricey going to the other side of the globe).

so if any of you programming enabled folks out there want a quick million, write it, distriubute it, sell it, get rich and send me a holiday card.