By
anders pearson
04 Jul 2000
most years for the fourth of july, i go out to the little town of West Athens, Maine to celebrate. it’s way out in the middle of nowhere; main street just got paved a few years ago. most of the houses are constructed of plywood and tar paper; rusty old automobile chassis on the lawns with plants growing out of them.
for unknown reasons, this location was chosen to host the most bizarre fourth of july celebration in existance. every year, all the aging hippies and bikers in the state converge for a parade and a play. the parade consists mostly of old beater cars that they’ve managed to get running for a few hours spray painted bright colors with lots of drunk stoned people riding on top of them and hanging out the windows and trunk. then there are all the bikers and a few perrenial floats from the various pro-marijuana organizations in the state (NORML, Maine Vocals, etc) and a bunch of people just walking down the street with them.
the parade ends in the local gravel pit where there is a huge brightly painted stage (local artist wally warren is responsible for set construction). after awards are handed out for the most creative floats, the play starts. it’s always about 110 degrees out with no shade and no where to sit. there is no sound system (it’s a gravel pit for god’s sake), so you can barely hear what’s going on onstage. nevertheless, the play is why people come to west athens. it’s totally unprofessional, incoherent and none of them can really act, but it’s brilliant and hilariously irreverent political satire at its finest. it usually features cheese doodles prominently. what more could you ask for.
it’s about the weirdest way possible to experience independence day in the US, but for me, it’s tradition. alas, i’m stuck in NYC this summer so i guess i’ll have to find something else to do. fourth of july usually flags and stuff burning or exploding, right? so i figure i should go burn a flag tonight to get in the holiday spirit…
By
anders pearson
04 Jul 2000
may thanks to tuck for recommending the kidney thieves to me. nice industrial rock a la nin/filter/garbage with female vocals and the occasional hint of portishead. the vocalist sounds a little bit like alanis morissette on a few tracks but don’t let that scare you away.
lately at work i’ve also been listening to the Organizer Public Radio shoutcast feed from degentech. industrial, ebm, and goth at a crystal clear 128bps. they play a lot of stuff that even i haven’t heard before. i’ve gotten in the habit of keeping a pad of paper and a pen next to me at work and making a note of any bands i hear that i really like so i can look for them later. the list is starting to get fairly long.
By
anders pearson
03 Jul 2000
an excerpt from last night’s dream:
he walked up the stairs and out out of Tony’s salad and soup kitchen straight into 8 tentacles of a giant poisonous squid.
*** blinding pain and darkness ***
“you know what poisonous squid are for?” asked the large dirty man through his haze of pain. “they’re for cracking open tough shellfish and getting at the juicy meat inside. you just let them hold on and give a few
corrosive licks and pretty soon, the shell just melts away…”
he lapses back into unconscious agony, the smell of his chromosomes burning.
By
anders pearson
02 Jul 2000
spent the day wandering around with mimi and her friend frank. her friend’s band was giving a free sidewalk concert down in east village so we went down and watched them for a while. they sounded pretty good but seemed really shy, almost like they were trying to hide from the audience. i never did catch what the band’s name was.
then we wandered a bit more and eventually went to watch some movie called Burlesk King which was about filipino gogo boys. i’m still not quite sure what to make of it. it was really corny. whenever something really sad happened in the movie and it would get all dramatic, this cheesy music would come on and the audience would just crack up. so i’m still not sure if it was intended to be funny in a corny sort of way or if it was just so bad that it was funny.
By
anders pearson
01 Jul 2000
a while back on a webdesign mailing list i’m on, someone put forth the theory that because webdesign often combines creative/artistic work with programming, webdesigners and coders might tend more towards certain ends of the Myers-Briggs personality spectrum. to test this hypothesis, i set up a simple poll script and invited the listees to take the kiersey test and then enter their type. the list has about 800 subscribers. i’ve gotten 142 responses so far. the kiersey test website lists their statistics; here are the results i got, including a column showing my results normalized against the kiersey ones (thanks to Dave Nicholls for the statistics know how on that part):
| type | number | percentage | normalized* | |
|---|
| ENFJ | 4 | 2.8169014084507 % | 0.369672100846549 | |
| ENFP | 11 | 7.74647887323944 % | 0.912423895552348 | |
| ENTJ | 4 | 2.8169014084507 % | 0.861437739587371 | |
| ENTP | 9 | 6.33802816901408 % | 2.85496764370004 | |
| ESFJ | 5 | 3.52112676056338 % | 0.297392462885421 | |
| ESFP | 1 | 0.704225352112676 % | 0.14857074939086 | |
| ESTJ | 5 | 3.52112676056338 % | 0.330622231038815 | |
| ESTP | 2 | 1.40845070422535 % | 0.525541307546773 | |
| INFJ | 13 | 9.15492957746479 % | 1.20143432775128 | |
| INFP | 31 | 21.830985915493 % | 3.17310841794956 | |
| INTJ | 21 | 14.7887323943662 % | 2.66463646745337 | |
| INTP | 15 | 10.5633802816901 % | 3.30105633802817 | |
| ISFJ | 5 | 3.52112676056338 % | 0.366784037558685 | |
| ISFP | 4 | 2.8169014084507 % | 0.926612305411416 | |
| ISTJ | 5 | 3.52112676056338 % | 0.338895742113896 | |
| ISTP | 7 | 4.92957746478873 % | 2.24071702944942 | |
out of 142 total
i don’t know nearly enough about statistics to interpret this data properly but it certainly looks like webdesigners tend heavily towards the IN group with 3 times the normal levels of INTP (architect), INFP (healer), and INTJs (mastermind), along with the ENTPs (inventor). the profession also seems to be surprisingly lacking in ESFP (performer), ENFJ (teacher), ESFJ (provider), ESTJ (supervisor), ISFJ (protector), and ISTJ (inspector) types.
probably not a large enough sample size to really draw any conclusions, but an interesting experiment nonetheless.
By
anders pearson
01 Jul 2000
today is my cat rufus’ 20th birthday. every time i go home to visit my parents i’m genuinely amazed that he’s still alive and walking around.
By
anders pearson
30 Jun 2000
i’ve archived my /tmp/random entries as sort of a diary of my trials and tribulations in trying to fix my box and reconfigure stuff.
By
anders pearson
30 Jun 2000
well, here we are with the new version of /dev/random. i never could get MySQL or PostgreSQL to talk to perl with the DBI interface (at least when run as a CGI). instead i just went old skool and have this all running off a couple unix dbm files. not the most scalable solution but should be fine until we start getting massive traffic or something.
i’ll be sending seeders their new passwords as soon as i add them to the database.
