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Today was an absolutely beautiful day. Clear blue skies, mid-70's temperature, low smog, completely perfect. So, like any other sane human being, I decided to take a walk. Specifically, I hiked up to the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park, which is a nice little place a few miles north of campus. On the way there, I was really struck by life in California. Here I was, walking along on one of the most beautiful days of the year, and I didn't see more than a half-dozen other pedestrians on the two-and-a-half mile walk up to the park. Of course, I saw several hundred cars, trucks, and SUVs. I saw people driving from their homes on Mills down the street to Vons and back again. It's so weird here — on the one hand, a lot of people seem to be "fitness freaks" and very concerned with "wellness", but on the other hand there's this overbearing car culture...

So, I picked up a copy of Andrew Bird's new album Noble Beast today. Yes, I know that today is January 18th and it's not released until January 20th. That's why this post isn't going to be published for two days.

Anyhow, the album is excellent. Everything you know and love from Bird's previous releases is here, but more polished. Some things that I thought particularly stood out:

• The instrumental beginning of Effigy. And the double-stopping soloing in the middle. Really, the whole song.
• Unfolding Fans. Makes me think of Brian Wilson, but in a more minor key

Yeah, I know, this isn't much of a review. Well, I'm not much of a reviewer. So I'll give you my bottom line -- go buy the album now.

Well, break's over. I'm back at Mudd. Hopefully, I'll keep updating as the semester goes on.

Ciao.

So, I'm currently in San Clemente for a couple of days before going back to Claremont. As usual, the trip cross-country was fun. Lots of hours in a tin can. Anyhow, something amusing happened at T.F. Green when I was leaving. TSA got confused by my backpack in the X-Ray machine (understandable, since it's got a zillion wires and such in it). So they start going through it and they find that I brought a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The guy then ignores the rest of my bag, pulls out the book, and runs it through the X-Ray while running swabs from it through the chemical analyzer. I'm not sure whether it's worse that

• they thought they'd find anything on a chemical scan/X-Ray of a book
• they were more concerned with a book than with the tangle of wires in my bag
• they were interested in a book in the first place

Isn't travel fun?

I just had a fun day. For some value of fun, at least. I spent most of the day fighting with CMSs for the Narrows Center for the Arts, which is considering moving away from their antiquated website that some guy hacked together for them. I mean, not that tables-based layouts aren't still cool and all. Oh wait, they're not. So I was playing with Joomla and Drupal to see if I could cobble together something slightly less ugly. I ended up spending most of the day withing with Drupal, the Drupal Content Construction Kit, and Contemplate. Joomla's admin interface got on my nerves too quickly. Anyhow, it takes a lot of clicks, but it seems possible to put together pretty much anything in Drupal, which is nice. Of course, I'm not sure that I want to invest the kind of time that it would take to make a decent theme/stylesheet for the Narrows. Especially not with the semester started. But I demoed a quick and dirty version to them, so hopefully their eyes are opened a bit. Of course, I didn't spend any time on the theme at all. So the odds are just as good that they'll ignore the content and focus on the mediocre presentation and just not pay any attention at all. Such is life, I suppose. You can see a screenshot of one of the pages at right.

After that, my folks decided that we should all go out to dinner. Fine with me. We went to a place called Mesa 21 in Fall River, which replaced a nice Italian restaurant called Il Piatto Semplice. Well, Mesa 21 did not live up to its predecessor. They decided to add a bar, which dominates the room in a terrible faux-stone design. They also installed a giant-screen TV behind the bar which shows loud ESPN. Basically, they turned one of the only nice non-Portuguese restaurants in the city into a loud sports bar with mediocre food and no atmosphere to speak of. *sigh*.

So then I get back and guess what I have in my inbox! A nice e-mail from Google informing me that while I have a nice shiny resume, they "do not have a position that is a strong match with [my] qualifications". I know, it was a reach to think that I could get one of the Google internships, but it's still a little depressing to get a rejection before the application deadline even hits. One less thing to look forward to, I guess.

That's it for me for now. I may or may not decide to post something else in the next couple of days. If not, well, I'll post again when I'm back in California. Ciao.

There are a few tips online as to how to use Twitter and QuickSilver together, but they're lame. Particularly because they send your Twitter password over a nice non-https connection. And because I don't like to have to choose between getting prompted to grant access to my Twitter password every time I post from QuickSilver and granting all AppleScripts free access to my Twitter password. So I decided to leverage Twitterific's AppleScript support and write the following quick AppleScript:

using terms from application "Quicksilver"
    on process text t
        tell application "Twitterrific" to post update t
    end process text
end using terms from

Just drop it in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions and restart QuickSilver. Voilà!

Hello valiant readers. It's that time again. I've grown bored of what I had and moved on to something new. In this case, I've decided to migrate to WordPress, and to make it my primary website instead of being hidden away on a subdomain. I'm going to attempt to mix a "traditional" static-content website with a sort of blog idea. Roguelazer.com now includes (lambda x blog), and more. We'll see how that works. Anyhow, I've imported everything from Blogger, so we should be good to go

If you're keeping count, this makes my fifth weblog, although that's counting things from well before the terms "weblog" or "blog" had been introduced. And that's not counting the (many) old implementations of Roguelazer.com, most of which had some sort of a news feed that I treated like a blog.

Anyhow, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the new site.

Roguelazer.com is currently undergoing renovations due to its move from OnSmart to DreamHost. Owing to extreme business elsewhere, I am not sure when this site will be back up. Until then, you might want to read my blog on blogspot.

Here's the rules, as I've seen them on the Internet:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

And my result is,

"But this concept of nature is confirmed by experience and must inevitably be presupposed if there is to be possible experience, which is coherent knowledge of the objects of sense in accordance with universal laws."

Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. I may have been writing a philosophy paper last night...

A few minutes ago, I was reading an article from my hometown's newspaper, the Fall River Herald News. It was an article indicating that half of the schools in Fall River have been classified as "needs improvement" by the state. I'm not here to talk to you about the article so much; it was hardly good news, but nothing new for Fall River. Instead, I'd like to talk about the comments. You see, I was reading this article online, and the online edition of the Herald has a comments field. Here are two of the posted comments, reproduced for analysis' sake:

duclos

city gets what it pays for--- city gives the least amount of money to education in the state-and the money they do have they misuse

1972

Thanks duclos, I knew that was the problem with our schools. We have to start paying our teachers more in order to get them to teach! I figure $80,000 to $90,000 a year might get us off the failure list.

I think that this represents an interesting divide in the perception of schools, and one which I've seen a lot, at least anecdotally. So I thought I'd do some research.