By anders pearson 01 Aug 2002
lani is in dexter visiting me on vacation. i feel kind of bad because there really isn’t much of anything to do here. took her on a short tour of town: “there’s the abandoned shoe factory… and there’s a tractor driving through town… and those are some trees… “
<p>on saturday we’re supposed to go to a friend’s wedding in wiscasset. i have no idea what we’ll do until then.</p> By anders pearson 24 Jul 2002
to save some money, my sister recently decided that she should get a roommate to share her house with her. yesterday, her new roommate moved in. she brought with her a very large dog. well, actually, it’s only half dog. Misty is half collie and half wolf. i must say that she is an absolutely gorgeous dog and probably one of the most friendly and laid back dogs i’ve ever met. she’s enormous but with really soft fluffy fur and the most intense eyes i’ve ever seen on an animal.
By anders pearson 22 Jul 2002
went to the pearson family reunion on saturday in deep river, connecticut. quick summary: lots of swedes, potato salad and beer. deep river has a big fife and drum muster every year that we managed to catch. there must be a thousand fife and drum corps in new england and they were all there. it was truly amazing how long it went on; band after marching band. i was most impressed by the one that was truly a ‘fife and drum’ corps: just two people, a fife player and a drummer.
<p>back in dexter now. i’ll be hanging out at my parents’ and my sister’s house for the next two weeks. my friend cj is up with his drums and i’ve got my guitar so we expect to make a bit of noise. around august 3rd, lani will be coming up and we’ll be heading to our friend Jesse’s wedding.</p> By anders pearson 19 Jul 2002
probably by now, many of you have heard that Forgent Networks is claiming a patent on some of the compression techniques used in the JPEG image format and actively trying to get licensing fees from anyone who uses jpeg compression in their software. the patent was filed 16 years ago and they’ve waited until now to assert their ownership. of course now jpegs are so widely used that there’s no way the technology can really be eliminated or replaced without causing a lot of harm. so any companies that distribute software that handles jpegs are stuck either paying licensing fees or getting sued. open source developers are, of course, even more screwed. when Unisys pulled a similar stunt with a patent on the LZW compression used in gifs a few years ago, there were similar problems. many powerful open source image libraries such as perl’s GD library had to remove support for gifs.
<p>obviously, i’m not very happy about this whole situation. i wrote the following post on the <a href="http://www.webdesign-l.com/">webdesign-l</a> list:</p>
<p><blockquote></p>
<p>i’d really love to see someone with high paid lawyers attack the<br />foundations of software patents. patent law specifically forbids<br /> patenting mathematical processes and techniques. companies are somehow<br /> getting away with patenting computer algorithms. anyone who’s studied<br /> computer science and is familiar with things like the lambda calculus<br /> knows that any computer algorithm can be represented as a mathematical<br /> process.</p>
<p>in my <em>introductory</em> linear algebra class, we went over a basic lossy<br />compression algorithm similar to what jpeg uses. the idea is that an<br /> N x M matrix can be decomposed into two smaller matrices (eg, an N x 1<br /> and a 1 x M matrix) that, when multiplied together produce<br /> approximately the original matrix. if your original matrix is actually<br /> a bitmap where each element in the matrix represents a pixel, what you<br /> end up with is basic jpeg compression. for a small image (say 10<br /> pixels by 10 pixels), you can do the whole process by hand on a<br /> blackboard. the compression technique that the patent covers is a<br /> little more complex than that but is still essentially <strong>math</strong> which<br /> you shouldn’t be able to patent.</p>
<p>i’m not holding my breath for anyone to actually put this argument<br />forth in court though. any of the companies with enough money to<br /> challenge the foundations of software patents realizes that they<br /> benefit too greatly from them. microsoft, <span class=”caps”>IBM</span>, lucent, etc. all<br /> maintain huge portfolios of software patents, many over really trivial<br /> algorithms. between them they just make agreements: you can use my<br /> patents in your products if i can use your patents in my products. but<br /> they have patents on enough basic algorithms that they can effectively<br /> lock out any smaller competitors that they want to (or use the threat<br /> of patent lawsuits as leverage for takeover bids, etc).</p>
<p>software patents are the single greatest threat to open source<br />software development. particularly the stupid, simple patents and the<br /> patents like this one that pop up 16 years after the fact when the<br /> algorithms are already in too widespread use to replace.</p>
<p></blockquote></p>
<p><a href="http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/">eric meyer</a> then gave me a little hope by replying with link to a story about how<br /><p>in general though, i expect this same kind of situation to happen over and over again, causing serious harm to the advancement of computer science and software development for as long as software patents are legal.</p> By anders pearson 18 Jul 2002
walking by a construction site on 110th st today, i noticed a small (but very official looking) sign at about waist level that said:
TEMPORARY
SIAMESE
interesting.
i also picked up a copy of Amélie on DVD today. joy.
By anders pearson 16 Jul 2002
i was walking back from lunch today down amsterdam ave. with some coworkers. a light turns green and this black jetta peels out, does a wide U-turn into oncoming traffic and skids sideways into a parking space on the opposite side of the street, right next to where we were walking. the kind of move you’d see done by a stunt driver in an action movie. another guy is standing next to the spot, waiting on the sidewalk for the guy who was parking the car. he sees us watching, shrugs and says “it’s a rental”.
By anders pearson 15 Jul 2002
thraxil.dhs.org is gone. i warned you all weeks ago. please, if you link to this site, change the link to point to http://thraxil.org/.
<p>thank you.</p> By anders pearson 11 Jul 2002
read about this on ars technica.
<p>Universal Music has apparently smartened up a little and come out with the first (potentially) viable business model for selling music online. they took their catalogue of older, hard to find albums and put them online. for a fairly low rate, you can get unlimited access to download mp3s. i haven’t actually plopped down the money yet, but it looks intriguing.</p>
<p>i’ve always used napster and the various p2p networks to find music that i just can’t find for sale in stores on CD, and to check out new bands without having to actually spend money only to find that they suck.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.emusic.com/">emusic</a> seems to have come pretty far to meet my desire to find older, hard to find stuff. the prices are low enough (as long as you have a broadband connection) to be appetizing. download speeds are rumored to be pretty good. the ars technica article mentions that the mp3s are only 128kb/s, which isn’t ideal, but is as good as 80% of the crap you find on napster anyway. having somthing of a guarantee that the albums were ripped well is probably worth the cost of the subscription alone. all the other attempts at selling music online have been pretty lame; either they insist on using some copy protected format that prevents you from burning backups or mixes (and usually don’t have a linux player for) or the prices are too high and the selection too small.</p>
<p>the only thing holding me back from signing up now is that i’d still prefer a system where the record companies were just out of the equation entirely. if artists owned their own work and all got together and set up a similar system to sell their music online, that would be ideal. </p>
<p>so i’m considering signing up. whatever i do, i’ll be watching closely to see if it succeeds.</p> By anders pearson 08 Jul 2002
our friends Debbie and Daphne from Avenue D were invited to perform at july 4th festival in, of all places, Charlotte, North Carolina. Debbie, a couple Charlotte locals that they knew who live in nyc now and a couple other new yorkers got in a van earlier last week for a little trip to the south. daphne and lani had to work till wednesday so Daphne and i took a bus down to DC wednesday night where we met up with lani and daphne’s friend Marin and drove down to Charlotte from there in a borrowed Pulsar.
<p>i think that driving many hours across several states just to see Avenue D play makes us all officially groupies now.</p>
<p>since we left DC at about 11 pm after all working all day, we knew it was going to be a long night. at about 5am, somewhere south of Chapel Hill, and still a few hours from Charlotte, we gave in and got a motel room for a couple hours of sleep. when we got up we continued on and met up with everyone who’d come down earlier. </p>
<p>the whole trip was kind of a redneck safari. the group consisted of: debbie and daphne (from miami but living in nyc), marin (from miami but going to school in austin and living in DC for the summer), me (from maine but living in nyc), lani (from washington state but living in DC), rick and grant (both living in nyc and i’m not sure where they’re from), lauren (from georgia but living in nyc), travis, derek, and autumn (charlotte locals who all live in nyc now). travis and derek basically acted as our tourguides, showing us around the city and introducing us to the cool people they knew there.</p>
<p>on the fourth, the <a href="http://www.fatcitydeli.com/">Fat City Deli</a> had their “family fun picnic” which was a combination music festival (with two stages) and 9 hour long party with food and booze. it’s a pretty cool place; lots of nice graffiti and alternative subculture type people hanging around. you get the feeling that it’s one of the places in charlotte where the few cool people in the city hang out on a regular basis. Avenue D performed at about 6pm on the outside stage. the fact that it was called the “<em>family</em> fun picnic” amused me to no end. Avenue D is <em>not</em> what comes to mind when i think of “family” entertainment. they make 2 live crew sound like someone you’d see at disneyworld. nevertheless, they played, they kicked ass, they shocked and impressed the locals, and, miraculously, the didn’t get arrested for being the most obscene act that the bible belt’s seen in quite a while.</p>
<p>there were more local bands throughout the night. most of them were fairly mediocre punk and garage rock types. a couple really stood out though. Snagglepus sounds kind of like a cross between the B-52s, the Cramps, and Babes in Toyland; fun and loud with some horns and sax. the last band of the night was Babyshaker. everyone was pretty tired by then but they still rocked. they’re pretty straightforward heavy garage rock. sort of reminded me of Kyuss or Queens of the Stone Age. nothing fancy, just solid rythms, loud guitars and catchy melodies.</p>
<p>between the bands, the cool people, and the cheap beer (<span class="caps">PBR</span> for $1.50), it was one of the better parties i’ve been to in a while.</p>
<p>on friday, those of us where were capable of waking up at noon did so and went to the Original House of Pancakes for breakfast. then we did a bit of shopping and drove out to Automn’s parents’ house which is about an hour outside the city and (most importantly) situated on a lake. i didn’t have a bathing suit with me (actually i don’t even own a single pair of shorts) so i sat in the shade and read for a few hours while everyone else went swimming.</p>
<p>when it started getting dark, we headed back to charlotte and went out to see a sketch comedy troupe which derek and travis were performing with. in new york, travis frequently does a drag queen act as “Pearl”, a janis joplin impersonater. we saw him perform it once in new york at one of Avenue D’s early shows. he really is amazing. he’s got the voice and the personality down pat. the comedy show featured Pearl, a talking baby, the song “fuck the goat” and a bunch of other sketches.</p>
<p>after the comedy show we went to a diner called Athens that was about the only thing open by then. <voice type=“comic book guy”>sketchiest. diner. ever.</voice>. seriously, the place was scary. lani and i shared a seafood platter that i’d rather not discuss in too much depth. let’s just say that it included a whole deep-fried horseshoe crab.</p>
<p>then, because all the bars were closed by that point, we went to a house party. the house was owned by a bunch of musicians (including some of the members of snagglepus and babyshaker i think), some of whom have a hip-hop side project called “the McClintock G’s”. they were excited about Avenue D being in town and wanted to get them to do some cameos on a few tracks for them. luckily they had a whole studio set up in one of the rooms of the house. for hours everyone just hung out in the studio drinking. they set down some beats and just set it to record everything. different people would go up to the mic every few minutes and freestyle until they got tired and someone else would take over. some of the funniest stuff i’ve ever heard. </p>
<p>on saturday lani, marin, and i got in the car and started driving north to DC. everyone else was going to take the van back up to nyc later that day. we managed to stop off in Chapel Hill for a break and had dinner with anthony (and said hi to the llama). </p>
<p>on sunday lani and i walked around her neighborhood and meridian park for a bit before she dropped me off at the bus station. greyhound that day was seriously a clusterfuck. everyone and their brother was traveling that day. to make matters worse, apparently there had been a bomb threat earlier that day and all service had been halted for a few hours. the station was full of people who had been trapped there for hours, all semblance of lines and order had vanished, staff were running around trying to get things organized, everyone was pissed off and tired, and they didn’t have enough buses or drivers to take care of the load. it took me about 2 hours just to get on a bus only to discover that they didn’t have a driver for that bus so we sat in the parking lot for another hour before they moved us to a different bus and we finally left. even the drive up to new york was slow. lots of holiday traffic and accidents. at least i was in no real hurry and i had my diskman and some books to keep me occupied.</p> By anders pearson 28 Jun 2002
i frequently suffer from insomnia. this usually involves me lying in bed for hours staring at the ceiling waiting to fall asleep while my mind jumps from subject to subject. a game i like to play sometimes when i’m lying there is to try to backtrack along my stream of consciousness. i try to remember what the last topic i was thinking about was, then i try to think what i was thinking before that lead me to that, then what i was thinking before that lead me to that point. on and on until i can’t remember how i got started on a certain subject. it’s hard at first but if you do it on a regular basis i’ve found that you can usually improve how far back you can remember.
<p>if you do it regularly, i can pretty much guarantee that you’ll gain new insights into how your mind and, in particular, your subconscious works. my theory is that doing this kind of exercise on a regular basis will even change how your mind functions, possibly giving you more control over how you focus and giving you more of an ability to think creatively.</p>
<p>this can also be fun in a group setting. if you’re sitting around with a few friends having a drink and conversation and the conversation hits a lull, pick out the last topic you were discussing and try to work back from there to figure out how you got onto that topic. you’ll probably get much farther than with the solo exercise. also figure out who it was in the group who initiated each topic change. try drawing a diagram of the conversation. maybe you’ll notice interesting things about the group dynamic and individual personalities; eg, perhaps a certain member of the group has a tendency to change the topic much more often than other people.</p>
<p>well, that’s the kind of thing that i think about when i can’t sleep…</p>