Blog is back.
(Was it ever really gone or are these just brief pauses?)
(Also what’s a year?)
I find myself more and more with things I should be complaining about, criticizing, and hopefully through speaking, improving. So let me see what I can do here.
I do not want to be a political person.
That said, the last few weeks, maybe months have been absorbing. Hillary disappeared, and with her my heart left the race. I needed to stop listening to NPR because I couldn’t feel the race anymore.
With her gone, my plans to vote also evaporated. I am not much of a voter. My vote is worth almost nothing. And more: I think there are more important and meaningful things someone can do than vote. Taking an hour of my time once a year to do something that is supposedly a right (though given the people on the street, and on the tv, and those who tell me how much this matters – it sounds less like a right and more like a forced action, which if I do not perform I should be excommunicated and then cut open with a thousand knives) in my opinion does not make an active or engaged citizen. Join a club.
But then even with my still incomplete thoughts on actually motivated and truly respectable citizens and the mindless voting sheep, I have decided to vote.
Mostly to appease Rob Simmons. He has been working so hard to convince people to vote that I believe I owe it to him, to do something that really was not very difficult for me, and really doesn’t help him at all even though he wants me to do so very much.
This is a decision I have come to accept, even though it goes against my voting for a candidate who I do not truly believe in. The old man is a politician, but I couldn’t vote for him because his alaskan wingwoman is just too crazy and shouldn’t be allowed to run any country, even though he was on my ballot three times. So my vote goes to a man who has assembled the most solid graphic design team I have ever seen. The vote really goes to Gotham, as much as it does to anyone.
As for the rest of my poster sized ballot, I tried to find information about the candidates on the internet. This approach mostly failed. So I did the best I could with what I knew. For the amendments & resolutions, I read each, and went with my snap judgment. I am rarely in North Tonawanda anymore anyway.
The best thing about all of this. Is after today, it is over, and I can go back to living as apolitically as I can, and if all goes well, by 2012 I won’t be in the country anyway.
Web web Web web web web web web Charlotte’s Web web web web web web webby web web web we. we. web. web. web… web web web web web web. spiderweb spiderweb. world wide web world wide web web world wide web web web web web.
Blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog blog, blog, blog blog blog blog blog LOG (whale) log log blog blog blog blog BLOG blog blog blog blog blog blog blog. blog.
weblog.
oh. i get it.
I have decided that I do not write enough about my work on my blog. This is a semi-complicated issue, because as with most work, other people also hold stake in it, and it is good to keep certain things close to the chest – even in research there is competition! However, these are just excuses I make for being lazy, and with all good problems once the conditions and limitations are defined there are good solutions.
So, starting next Friday, I will begin posting once a week on topics at least related to Computer Science, Design, User Experience, Privacy, Human Computer Interaction generally, or at least something some what science-related and interesting, and occasionally,
So … look forward to that! (up first a Microsoft Report on the future of HCI)
A light humorous post because I am behind in my writings on very stern and serious topics that must not be laughed at. Much of my site(s) traffic these days comes from search engines and sometimes people say funny things in search engines. Collected below are the strange ways people have come upon me in 2007 (all of these are printed as is from the search engine, spelling mistakes, grammatical adventures, and ridiculousness as authored).
First off some strange searches that got people to various parts of patrickgage.com (some of these ending up here I seriously question):
Other common searches involved icelandic weddings, which I am now seemingly an expert on, people looking to steal license plates, and an awful lot of people wanting to not get rejected to CMU.
But much funnier this year were searches that came into Reading to the Rain including:
And also a number of questions that people ask that bring them to a site full of book reviews:
Also, big hits this year were “naked pictures” of just about every author on the site due to Heather’s posting of Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart. Furthermore every combination you can think of of “naked pictures” and “rain” also came up, leading me to believe there is a huge market for pictures of naked people in downpours that really seriously needs to be explored.
Saw No Country For Old Men, today, at the Waterfront. I enjoyed it a lot, it wasn’t over pretty, or over dramatic, or at all sympathetic. It was also very strict to the novel, including the organization of the scenes and nearly all the dialogue. The only real difference was that bits of the novel were cut, though these were mostly unnecessary. Also, it was funny and no one was laughing, I think that likely takes a second viewing.
As for the content, Llewellyn Moss, you found a bag of money (which should have been twelve across-twenty deep, but was only six across and of unknown depth) and just did not realize what this would mean for your life. But then, what I am sure would have been most shattering, had you realized, is that you were not the main character of your own movie.
I offer you only a few thoughts as my evening tonight is filled with privacy homework and a statistics project. Only two more days of school and then I can escape to Buffalo for a bit of relaxation and reading before concluding the semester.
Thus this is very short as I am about to return to writing summaries of court cases related to privacy (which there are an awful lot of). But before I go, I leave you with this question:
Let us say I send an email to you. Now before you have read the email it exists, somewhere, on some server, in storage. However you have not yet received it so you could also say it is in transmission. Yet, there are two laws that apply here, one to stored communications, one to communications in transmission.
So is the email stored or in transmission?
I believe the answer is Heisenbergian.
For today.
(image by Living The American Dream via flickr)
Winter is a good time to clean your house plants of dust that may have accumulated on the leaves.
This is what we learn from Miss Living The American Dream. Winter, which we seem to have entered is the time for removing the dust of the year off the leaves of our houseplants. Is houseplants one word or two? Are houseplants flora that reside in one’s home or factories for the creation of residences? Have you ever felt more alive yesterday than you do right now?
Relevancy is being determined by the social or by the machine; I can only be a servant to the choices of either machination. And as forces are driving me in directions diluted less by space than by xxxx, abstraction is all you can recieve today. That and a blown out photo of the future of distraction.
Though to be honest–which is said when one is normally a liar, and is trying to separate this lie from the more mundane lies across the career of a liar–the whole point is clearly drawn in the title.
Today I announced that I am officially a candidate for the Graduate Student Association Presidency, at Carnegie Mellon. GSA does have a website which can be accessed here though it is presently down, which is fine since it is really bad (and thus one of the first things that needs to get fixed).
But then an announcement is nothing.
This week Google announced Android, “a Linux-based mobile software stack,” read: phone software that is open and anyone can build stuff for. Now if this is the GooglePhone that everyone has been hoping for to come dominate the cell phone market (and kill the iPhone) I think it is a failure, but if this is some long-term plan to make cellphones better devices for software developers maybe it will work.
Sure they have said they will have a development kit for programmers to hack at out within the week, but people say it is unlikely we will see any phones that will run this until late next year.
I think the most interesting thing we can learn from this is if a truly “open” platform can really take over a market. Everyone admits that cell phones suck, that is the reason the iPhone is doing well, the market was full of products so repulsively bad that anything looks comparitively amazing, but this is a real chance for open source to fight and secure a lot of ground (faster than in the OS world anyway).
And while some say that Google will teach Apple the lesson they should have learned from Microsoft about being too closed (aren’t they already opening up…) I am currently much more inclined to agree with those who think Google is suddenly in the vaporware business (even though i am not a powazek fan these days after the whole jpg thing). I am even about ready to think this is a giant mistake and the market doesn’t want tons of open software on their phone, “they want a phone that just works,” and Google and its 33 friends can go startup a poorly run deli
Maybe I have just been reading too much 37signals but it seems like this small team, get it done mentality is even more powerful than a giant company and likely more powerful than a completely collaborative environment. Or maybe I just refuse to admit that the author is dead.
In a month I will hopefully be at the helm of a reasonably large student populous (approximately 4500 graduate students) and there are a number of projects I would like to get done. Politics at this level is largely a mangement and organization task and I think it is important I have more actual progress than announcements. I am excited.
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