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taking over

By anders pearson 25 Mar 2003

lani and i had the <a href=”http://backstage.musicchoice.com/channels/electronica.asp”>electronica</a> digital music cable channel on for background music last night and what did we hear but our own <a href=”http://www.avenued.com/“>Avenue D</a>’s “Do i look like a slut?”

i guess their recent european, west coast, and florida tours are paying off. the Music Choice channels are, as far as i know, nationwide. i don’t listen to the electronica channel that much but the metal channel has always been pretty good at playing bands just before they start getting big and get played on MTV or Much Music.

the amount of press Ave D has been getting is pretty astounding (though deserved) for a band that doesn’t even have an album out yet. i’ve heard from others that their songs are staples in some of the cooler clubs in London and a worldwide fanbase is developing.

i think that when their album finally comes out, it will be exciting times.

cohabitation

By anders pearson 25 Mar 2003

somehow, without any major mishaps, lani and i made it from DC to manhattan with a truck full of her belongings this weekend and now she lives with me.

some of the major accomplishments:

  • didn't hit any pedestrians, vehicles or stationary objects substantial enough to leave a scratch or dent on the truck.
  • managed to locate, stop at, and register to win a vespa at 8 Target stores within easy reach of the highway.
  • never really got lost despite doing a lot of off-highway driving around maryland and new jersey looking for Targets.
  • gerard miraculously found and secured a parking spot for us right in front of the apartment
  • managed to unload the truck in about half an hour
  • lani managed to wake me up at 7am so we could drive the truck to the drop-off point in new jersey by 8am.
  • survived morning rush-hour traffic in manhattan and got through the lincoln tunnel without incident
  • were slightly late returning the truck but didn't get charged any late fees

now, we just have to get lani’s stuff unpacked.

this whole cohabitation thing will be new for me. i’ve only had experience with long distance relationships. even as far back as high school, i’ve never dated someone who lived in the same <em>town</em> as me, let alone the same apartment.

new puter

By anders pearson 17 Mar 2003

my friend prasanth has been doing his rotations for medical school for the last year and will be doing them for another year or so. about a year ago, he foolishly went out and bought a custom made dual 1GHz pentium machine without thinking that he would be travelling to a different city every 6 weeks for a long time to come and having a big desktop machine wouldn’t be very convenient. unsurprisingly, it’s remained in storage almost since he bought it.

so this weekend i bought it off him for cheap. this works pretty well for both of us. by the time he would get to use the machine it would be way obsolete so instead he got to convert it to a bit of cash that he can put towards a laptop which will travel better. my old computer is a 400MHz celeron that i bought in 1999. i run linux and don’t really play video games so i don’t feel a strong need to have the fastest machine on the planet. still, 400MHz is feeling slower and slower every day as everyone else around me upgrades (although realistically, with all the performance improvements that have been made to the linux kernel, my 400MHz machine has actually been getting faster and more responsive since i bought it). moving up to a dual 1GHz machine is a pretty significant improvement for me.

so <a href=”http://www.gentoo.org/“>gentoo</a> is installed on it and kde is compiling while i’m at work.

jury nullification

By anders pearson 03 Mar 2003

a coworker of mine was just on a jury for a drug possession case. he expressed some regret that they convicted despite his feelings that drug possession should not be illegal.

<p>for years, my dad has been ranting about the concept of &#8216;Jury Nullification&#8217;. the short version of which is that juries don&#8217;t have to convict someone of breaking a law that they feel is unjust even if the facts of the case clearly indicate guilt. if juries consistently nullify convictions under certain laws, those laws don&#8217;t tend to last long (the Fugitive Slave Act and Prohibition were ended in large part because of jury nullification). in times past, juries used to be explicitly informed of this concept before they were asked to try a case. during the vietnam war however, things changed and they stopped informing juries about jury nullification. </p>

<p>so when i spoke with my coworker about this concept, i was a little surprised to hear that they had been explicitly told that their duty as jurors was to decide based on the facts alone and that they could not take their own politics into account (probably something worded similarly to <a href="http://www.bostonbar.org/dd/patjuryinst/CRPJ0LX5.HTM">this</a>).</p>

<p>a google search for &#8220;jury nullification&#8221; will turn up dozens of pages discussing the idea. what i&#8217;m looking for is something more official. i want to know where to find the actual legal precedents behind jury nullification (as far as i can tell, it is considered &#8216;Common Law&#8217;, ie, it was common practice when the Constitution was drafted but was not explicitly put into it) and what the current state of jury nullification is. if, as everything i can find seems to indicate, jury nullification is still allowed, how can courts justify purposely misleading jurors by telling them that they have to convict based on evidence alone? </p>

<p>the closest i&#8217;ve come yet seems to be this article wherein a judge <a href="http://www.levellers.org/jrp/orig/jrp.juryrevolt.htm">warns  other judges and prosecutors</a> about the impending dangers of <a href="http://nowscape.com/fija/fija_us.htm">fully informed jurors</a>. he&#8217;s clearly against jury nullification, but provides the best legal background i&#8217;ve seen yet that establishes it as a right of jurors. eg, he mentions <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=254&invol=135"> <span class="caps">HORNING</span> v. <span class="caps">DISTRICT</span> OF <span class="caps">COLUMBIA</span> , 254 U.S. 135 (1920)</a> in which an instance of jury nullification is upheld: &#8220;&#8230;but the jury were allowed the technical right, if it can be called so, to decide against the law and the facts&#8230;&#8221;</p>

<p>anyway, i&#8217;m not a lawyer. that&#8217;s why i will be very grateful if someone can get me a reference to the actual legal status of jury nullification (preferably as interpreted by an actual lawyer and not someone with an agenda one way or the other).</p>

voicemail

By anders pearson 24 Feb 2003

this morning my cellphone rang. i was at work and the number came up as ‘withheld’ so i sent it straight to voicemail. 5 minutes later i checked it and found a message from some woman in what sounded to me like swedish or some other scandinavian language. i played it for <a href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“>peter</a>, who is our resident expert on scandinavian languages (i think he speaks swedish, icelandic, and danish). he was mystified. he said that the cadence was norwegian and he thought he recognized a couple icelandic words, but otherwise couldn’t figure out what language it was.

unfortunately i deleted the message. it would have been fun to digitize it and put it online.

in other news, this morning i woke up one minute before my alarm was set to go off. sweet.

i love the smell of napalm in the morning

By anders pearson 12 Feb 2003

i must be getting old.

last night i went to see napalm death, strapping young lad, nile, dark tranquility, and berserker. the headlining band was Nile. who is Nile? i’ve been listening to death metal since high school and i’d never heard of them before yesterday. and there they were with top billing above Napalm Death, one of the most influential bands in the genre. apparently Nile is currently popular with the kiddies…

the other really strange thing about the show was the venue: BB King’s Blues Lounge. not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to see a metal show.

met up with angela before the show and we went to the BB King grill which is in the same building as the lounge so i could get a quick bite to eat before things started. about half an hour before the show was scheduled to start, the first band, Berserker, went on. we were in the restaurant part and we oould hear them pretty clearly through the walls. it was then that we realized that the staff pretty much had no idea what they were in for. when the band started playing, a couple of the waitresses disappeared off to the lounge to see what was going on. the came back in looking absolutely mortified. it was quite amusing.

we wandered back into the lounge with just enough time to grab a beer before Strapping Young Lad started playing. SYL was the main draw of the show for me. their set was unfortunately somewhat disappointing. they only got to play for about half an hour and the club’s sound still wasn’t well setup. it was about 20 decibels quieter than SYL deserves (and needs) and tinny sounding. even with the poor sound, the band was still fantastic. Devin is a pretty goofy guy (“water, water, it’s good for your heart, the more you drink the more you… have in your system”) which makes for an odd contrast with the sheer crushing heaviness of their music. Gene Hoglin, the drummer, is positively inhuman.

after SYL played, angela and i each ran off to our respective bathrooms. as i was coming out of the narrow hallway leading to the bathrooms, someone says 'excuse me' and slides past me and into the women's bathroom. i had to stop and blink a couple times. it was Juliya, the host of Uranium the metal show on Much Music, one of the few tv shows that i actually watch on a regular basis. 5 minutes later angela comes out of the bathroom. i'm about to say something to the effect of "do you realize who was just in the bathroom with you?" when angela beats me to it. apparently she had a long conversation with her while they were both applying hair spray at the sink.

after our little celebrity encounter, Dark Tranquility went on. like Nile, i’d never heard of them before that night. they were pretty good though. sort of at the goth end of the death metal spectrum. growly vocals and heavy guitars but mixed in with keyboards and occasional clean vocals. i’m really a sucker for that style of music so i’ll probably pick up one of their albums.

the Napalm came on and showed everyone how it's done. holy crap. the first two songs were a little muddy sounding but then the band really tightened up and they got the last kinks out of the PA. most napalm fans have been disappointed with their last couple albums. thankfully, they played almost all old material with just two or three songs off their new album. napalm's first album, Scum, is an absolute masterpiece of extreme music and single-handedly invented the grindcore genre. but it was recorded for almost no money and production wise was pretty terrible sounding. so i was thrilled when they played about half of that album live (the whole album was only 28 minutes so playing half of it wasn't that big a chunk of time) because i got to finally hear the songs with decent quality sound. the other highlights of their set were "Suffer the Children", "From enslavement to obliteration", and their cover of "Nazi punks, fuck off".

after Napalm was Nile. by now my curiousity was killing me. who the hell thought they could be billed above Napalm Death? being the headlining act implies that you're better than the opening bands. being presented as better than Napalm builds up some pretty high expectations. sadly, Nile fell far short of those expectations. they were pretty generic, cookie-cutter death metal. they played pretty well but not exceptionally so. angela walked out after 5 minutes of their set. i lasted another 20 minutes but i was getting tired by then and after seeing napalm play, Nile were just bringing me down.

RSS

By anders pearson 08 Feb 2003

ok. thraxil finally has an <a href=”/rss”>RSS feed</a>. i’m not sure exactly what to do with images; for now i’m just leaving them out. anyway, enjoy.

horrors

By anders pearson 04 Feb 2003

last night i watched Resident Evil and American Psycho 2.

RE was fun and cheesy. basically a direct ripoff of Aliens but with zombies instead of aliens. it had the strong female lead character surrounded by well trained and equipped soldiers trapped in an enclosed space with some relatively difficult to kill nasties. almost every character from Aliens had an equivalent. there was even a final showdown with one particularly nasty and powerful enemy. strikes against it: 1) complete and total lack of originality 2) uninspired dialog 3) no bishop. what it had going for it: 1) good soundtrack 2) milla jovovich 3) i actually got a kick out of how much it looked like a video game.

American Psycho 2 was just bad. i didn’t expect it to be any good but i was still disappointed. it had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. who’s stupid idea was it to follow up a fantastically good movie with complete crap?

touchstream

By anders pearson 31 Jan 2003

just to make sure it was firmly established that she is the coolest girlfriend in the world, lani got me the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/ST_product.html”>Touchstream keyboard</a> that i had been yearning for.

the touchstream is a unique device. it is a combination of keyboard and mouse in one unit using something similar to a trackpad for the entire thing. there are no keys. the surface is totally flat and it uses a microprocessor to figure out where your fingers touch the surface and maps those to keypresses or mouse events.

there were basically three things that make it an attractive device: 1) it requires essentially no force to hit a key (since nothing is being depressed) which makes it very easy on your wrists. with practice, it is also potentially faster to type on than regular keyboards because your fingers don’t have to move as much. 2) you can use the mouse without moving your hands away from the keyboard; your keyboard and your mouse are always right below your fingers, you don’t lose any time switching between them. and 3) it also supports gestures. the onboard processor detects certain motions and converts them to multi-key sequences like Control-x or Alt-backspace.

i’ve only been using it for a few nights now and not that heavily (the docs recommend not using it more than an hour or two a day for the first few weeks because apparently, when you are learning to use a new interface device, you tend to tense up and that can lead to RSI). my impression so far has been largely positive.

first, the learning curve for being able to type on it is just as steep as you would imagine. without tactile feedback, you basically have to learn to touch type all over again. on a regular keyboard, i can probably type a nice moderate 40 words a minute without looking at the keyboard or making too many mistakes. after playing with the touchstream for a few days now, i could probably get about 30 wpm but with about a 30% error rate. i have to slow down considerably to eliminate mistakes. if you have any imperfections in your typing technique, the touchstream basically amplifies them into mistakes. eg, using the touchstream has made me notice that i have a bad habit of hitting the ‘c’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than my middle finger. similarly, i reach for the ‘p’ key with the ring finger of my left hand rather than using my pinky like i should. on a regular keyboard, i’m probably just barely hitting those keys. the touchstream is less forgiving and those and a dozen other bad habits i’ve learned to compensate for over the years just don’t fly. you also have to be really good about keeping your hands in the proper position hovering over the home row, just like typing instructors keep telling us is necessary for fast typing. all in all, using the touchstream is like having the ultimate fascist typing instructor scrutinizing your every keystroke and not letting you get away with anything. it’s slowing me down right now, but i can feel that if i keep at it, it will improve my typing overall.

for as much time as i spend on the computer, i’ve been pretty lucky with RSI. the only thing that really bothers me is using the mouse for long periods of time. because using a mouse hurts, i’ve gravitated away from GUIs and instead rely more on text and console applications. the bash commandline, emacs, ion, and mozilla/phoenix’s type ahead find are my bread and butter. once you get efficient with keyboard driven interfaces though, you start to become painfully aware of how inefficient most mouse driven interfaces are, especially the overhead of switching from mouse to keyboard and back all the time. the most appealing aspect of the touchstream to me when i was just drooling over pictures was that it would basically eliminate that overhead and make it possible for me to actually use the few mouse driven applications i need to deal with as efficiently as the key driven apps i’ve been spoiled on.

i was mistaken though. yes, having the keyboard and mouse both right there and having no overhead switching between mousing and typing has made a lot of applications easier and faster to use. but the killer feature of the touchstream turns out to be the <a href=”http://www.fingerworks.com/touchstream_gesture_guide.html”>gestures</a>. unfortunately, they are awful hard to describe. the multifinger gestures start with the shift key. since drift can be a big problem on a keyboard without tactile feedback, stretching your pinky out all the time to hit the shift key is not such a good idea. instead, on the touchstream, you can just drop all four fingertips of one hand on the home row and that acts as a shift. control and alt are similarly easy. dragging the four fingertips of your right hand up or down will scroll up or down like using a mousewheel. there are also very intuitive gestures for back and forward in web browsers, cut/paste, and most of the common emacs commands. my favorite though is probably the cursor control. if you slide two left hand fingertips around, it will move the cursor around through text like it was a mouse pointer and you were using a trackpad. it doesn’t sound very impressive but it only takes about 3 seconds of actually playing with it before you can’t understand how you ever used the inverted T arrow key pad before; having to hit different keys to make the cursor go in different directions seems downright primitive.

overall it has pretty much lived up to all my expectations. the only negative things i can think of to say about it are that it isn’t wireless so i can’t sit on my couch and use it with the projector, and it isn’t customizable or programmable; you change between a few different preconfigured modes (windows, linux, mac, photoshop, emacs modes, etc.) but you can’t enable or disable specific gestures or define your own new gestures.

the device even gets good marks for durable construction. there are no moving parts so hopefully nothing to wear out. if you spill your drink on it, you can just spray some windex on it and wipe it clean.