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young innovator

By anders pearson 24 Jun 2002

everytime lani comes up to visit, she leaves behind a couple of the complimentary magazines from the Delta Shuttle. usually, the tech magazines are bland Wired wannabes with fluff stories about upcoming technologies and rising dotcoms.

<p>after lani leaves, they tend to last until my next cleaning pass over the apartment when, if they&#8217;re lucky, they get a quick once-over just to make sure there isn&#8217;t actually anything of interest to me before heading into the garbage.</p>

<p>tonight i&#8217;m cleaning a little and decide to flip through the copy of <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/">Technology Review</a>. there&#8217;s an <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/tr100_0602.asp">article</a> on the top 100 young innovators (this article was, of course, depressing lani because it made her realize that at 22 years old she hadn&#8217;t yet won a nobel prize ;)</p>

<p>amongst the likes of Shawn Fanning (napster) and John Carmack (doom, quake, etc) i was quite pleasantly surprised to see <a href="http://goatee.net/">Joe Reagle</a>. Joe is a friend of <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>&#8217;s and goatee.net is on my regular reading list. seeing a (somewhat) familiar face in a magazine when you aren&#8217;t expecting it is kind of weird. i knew that he does all kinds of cool stuff but i never realized he was a celebrity.</p>

<p>so congratulations, Joe!</p>

hydration

By anders pearson 24 Jun 2002

after drinking a lot this weekend and generally staying out late a few times too many last week, i decided i should re-hydrate myself and flush out some toxins. so over the course of the day, i drank a few gallons of water.

<p>felt good but i was pretty much running to the toilet every half hour all day. it&#8217;s hard to get programming stuff done when you can&#8217;t really concentrate on something for more than about 20 minutes before your bladder distracts you.</p>

kidnapper-mobile

By anders pearson 23 Jun 2002

last night, lani and i got in a van with Daphne, Blair, and Angela (Angela is doing production work on a movie and was given a van for the duration of the filming so she can pick up the crew and equipment). we drove around manhattan for a while listening to nirvana and screaming obscenities at the crazy taxi drivers. then we went out to williamsburg looking for dinner. we’d planned to go to the brooklyn brewery’s restaurant/taproom but they were closed by the time we got there. so instead we went to some other ale house nearby where i had a Weihenstephaner hefe-weisse and a grilled portobello sandwich.

<p>then we wandered down to Daphne and Blair&#8217;s to watch Iron Chef while we digested our food.</p>

<p>around 2am, we headed off to Luxx again. some of Daphne&#8217;s friends who have a hip-hop duo called Moreplay were performing. stylistically they were pretty similar to Avenue D: electro beats and sexually oriented rhymes. Daphne joined them for one of their songs. pretty good show.</p>

"no, lani, i'm not going to ride the wet, pink pony"

By anders pearson 17 Jun 2002

jP eventually did ride the wet pink pony. lani has photographic evidence.

<p>lani&#8217;s in town for the coming week, staying with me while she attends a biophysics lecture at princeton.</p>

<p>jP came down for the weekend to visit me, lani, daphne, blair, keith, and a few other bates types. on friday night we all went to see yet another Avenue D show out in williamsburg. they just keep getting better. even had a hardcore song this time.</p>

<p>the rest of the weekend we spent drinking, eating (<em>lots</em>), and hanging out.</p>

Announcement: domains

By anders pearson 11 Jun 2002

dhs.org appears to be having some trouble. they’re a free service that provides simple domain name functionality. for the last couple years, i’ve been using them to point thraxil.dhs.org at this site. my main rationale for using dhs.org instead of going the ‘proper’ route and registering thraxil.(com|net|org) has been simplicity. i’ve never really bought into the whole mindset that you need a good domain to be cool. the system is a beaurocratic nightmare with the main players abusing their customers every chance they get. stories about squatters selling domains for millions of dollars just made me laugh. i’ve never had any great desire to subject myself to that kind of abuse.

<p>dhs.org seems to be having problems lately though. you may have noticed that this site was inaccessible for the last couple days. it should be fixed now and thraxil.dhs.org should exist for at least the near future. however, the future is not looking so good for dhs.org. at the very least, it&#8217;s unstable enough to have me worried.</p>

<p>so i bit the bullet and registered thraxil.com, thraxil.net, and thraxil.org. i grabbed all three because i couldn&#8217;t make up my mind at it was pretty cheap. it could take a day or two for <span class="caps">DNS</span> to propagate fully and for any/all of them to work.</p>

<p>once they stabilize, you&#8217;ll want to change your bookmarks and links to point to one of the new domains (for the time being, all of them will point to the same place. in the future, i might decide to different things with different ones though).</p>

<p>in other words, in the next couple days, thraxil.dhs.org will be deprecated.</p>

shipyard

By anders pearson 06 Jun 2002

a coworker of mine drove up to maine last weekend. as a favor, he brought me back a case and a half of shipyard export ale, which pretty much can’t be found outside new england but is one of my favorite beers in the world.

loot

By anders pearson 01 Jun 2002

my friend julintip left today. moved back to ohio to go to law school (well, first she plans on spending the summer lounging on the beach in thailand. envy.) one less person for me to hang out with.

<p>her boyfriend, adam, who&#8217;s a CS professor at columbia has a research position at los alamos and was driving out there for the summer today so they packed up her stuff, mailed a bunch of it home and packed as much as they could into a rental car and drove off into the sunset together.</p>

<p>[geeky conversation in the elevator:<br />

julintip:
adam:
anders:
adam:
anders:
(ain’t i witty?) 
<p>as something of a consolation for my loss of a drinking buddy, i got to inherit the stuff she couldn&#8217;t fit in the car and would&#8217;ve gotten thrown out otherwise. did pretty good. got: an air conditioner (god knows i need it), a TV/VCR combo, a table, and a complete set of glassware.</p>

everything in its right place

By anders pearson 30 May 2002

i’m probably not the only one who’s noticed that postings to the main part of this site have slowed down a bit lately.

<p>it seems to me that part of this is that people have been discovering and utilizing the diaries more and more.</p>

<p>this isn&#8217;t a bad thing, but i thought i&#8217;d try to take a moment to clarify what my original intentions were for the different sections. i loathe playing dictator so please don&#8217;t take this as a mandate; just suggestions. </p>

<p>in my eyes, the diaries are a place to post things that are probably only interesting to people who specifically care about you and are curious what you&#8217;re up to. i added the section   because i wanted somewhere to post mundane stuff without cluttering the front page.</p>

<p>anything that may be interesting to a wider audience or is likely to spark a good discussion  should go on the front page where it will get seen by more people with less effort. eg, jP&#8217;s recent <a href="node.pl?nid=3576">analog</a> post and tuck&#8217;s ongoing series on martial arts and mental states and their relationship are the kinds of things that i would envision going on the front page. </p>

<p>it&#8217;s a fuzzy distinction sometimes. the acid test i&#8217;ve been using is that something goes to the front-page if i can really give it any topical keywords other than &#8216;the uneventful life of anders&#8217;. </p>

<p>just knowing that people are using the site, posting things and reading is enough to warm my insides, so don&#8217;t feel bad if you prefer to keep stuff off in your diary. </p>

<p>i find the intricacies of how online communities like this grow and evolve and interact with the tools infinitely fascinating. so i&#8217;m curious: how does the feature-set and design of the tools that thraxil provides influence how we interact with and communicate with each other? how do you think the thraxil community has reacted to and changed with the addition of new features like diaries, bookmarks, images, keywords, or threaded comments?</p>