4:26p urban haute bourgeoisie on hulu.
Dizzyingly good internet news: you can watch Metropolitan in its entirety for the price of two advertisements online. Before or after re-watching, you might read this interview with Whit Stillman about it and prospects for new movies [ifc].
4:22p Grr
I don't know how this happens but it's like there is a black hole somewhere in our house. First we lost a 15ft long lighted garland to the land of who knows where and now some of our wedding gifts seem to be missing. I am at a loss.
9:37a
The past few days, we've been having odd weather for August - temperatures in the 50's and 60's, lots of rain, overcast skies.. my body is all confused at the sudden change in temperature, and I've been doing things I'd be doing in November. Like, drinking tea during the day, playing video games in the evening, eating more, etc.
It's supposed to be sunny again tomorrow, just when I've become accustomed to autumn weather. Today is a good day for tea.. I feel it in my bones. It's also a good day for Madonna.
Then again, is there ever a day that is NOT good for Madonna?
When you're me, every day is a good day for Madonna.
12:01a Say it with sign!
After practice tonight, Kat walked home with me and ended up telling me about the ASL signs she learned from her friend who is an interpreter. After reviewing them with her, I decided we needed a video because...HELLO! Everyone needs to know how to say "strongly disagree" and "balls!" in ASL. Duh. Also, I thought my brother would like it. We forgot to include "fail" in the video which is a shame because it's a funny sign to know, but here's a good set for you to enjoy.
So I payed $0.99 for a song, and I need to pay ANOTHER $0.99 to turn it into a 30 second snippet for an iPhone ring tone. No fucking thank you. I bought the fucking song one time, I dont need to buy it again to take 30 seconds of it for my phone.
2:42p charles oakley
so, i'm 34 today and i don't feel that different. it's a beautiful day outside. if you woke me from a coma then walked me outside telling me it was august in new york city i wouldn't believe you because it's not nearly as hot or humid as it should be. for some reason i love new york summers, it must be nostalgia, the days are brutal, they make you feel alive and the nights are amazing.
let's reflect on the past year. the good: -i got incrementally better at improv, and was lucky enough to be a part of the raw harold which changed the way i look at improv in general. -i discovered roller derby and learned to love playing it, being lucky enough to join the best men's roller derby team in the country. through that i've met some really amazing peeps. -i'm in the best shape i've been since before moving to seattle, back to the weight of my early twenties with a better fat/muscle ratio. -i feel like i've grown more as a person and am more calm and collected even though i've still got work to do. -i've embraced being alone, and my attitude about dating seems to have relaxed, the need element is gone there in my interpersonal relationships more than it's ever been. -i've learned so much more about photography (especially lighting) and have shot thousands of pictures. -i've got a wide ranging group of friends and have cultivated some new friendships that are important to me in the past year. -i've cut down on the drinking substantially. only recently have i started doing it on a regular basis. -i moved to brooklyn, closer to manhattan, and i love the neighborhood and convenience. -i've learned to appreciate soccer more even if it's through a video game. -i've read quite a few good books. -i'm learning to eat healthier.
the bad: -i'm still smoking. it's incredibly hard to kick, and i tend to get down on myself when i think about it. -i don't use my time as productively as i should, i don't make lists or rigorously schedule. -i'm broke, paying way too much in credit card interest, and might need to get a second jobby job. -i don't write anymore, even neglecting the live journal, which was something that even though the content is generally trivial helps me organize my thoughts.
some things i'd like to accomplish in the next year: -write every day, including the morning pages. -maybe complete a book idea i've had banging around my head. -figure out which of my pictures i'd like to put in a portfolio, then put one up online, along with maybe printing out business cards for a fledgling photography business. -go through the book "the success principles" and actually making a sustained effort to embrace and use some of the methods found inside. -organize my time, make goals, follow through. -eat more fruits and vegetables -drink less alcohol -meditate regularly -stretch daily -learn to screen print -get even better at improv -skate regularly to improve my roller derby skills. -hang out with friends more. -put a significant dent in my debt.
quite a handful, but i think i might be able to do some of it. i'm not getting any younger, and i need to realize how precious life is.
the one thing i'm not getting back is my hair, check out this never before seen pic of me courtesy of mousie:
no plans tonight. i'm horrible at trying to do things for my birthday. besides, peeps got their own lives, and today is wednesday. i'm torn, part of me wants to be social but i might just go home and play video games.
I took the train from the airport into the city (the JetBlue 9 am Seattle flight is near-ideal, timing-wise) and got to see a bit of Ellen's fancy office before going back to Brooklyn for pizza. After venturing out for coffee and breakfast, I spent most of the next day at the apartment doing some work, dodging a freak thunderstorm, and listening to CNN's commentators going on and on about the "mist" smog in Beijing. Once the rain stopped it was time to begin the journey to Liberty State park by way of Gimme! Coffee (actually good!) by way of a water taxi.
Aside from confusion about the location of Pier 11, the trip to All Points West was disorientingly smooth. We got through the gates just in time to catch the end of C.S.S., which gave us ample opportunity to situate ourselves for Girl Talk near some of the worst smelling marijuana of all time. Among the more phenomenal parts of the show were: hot cops using modified leaf blowers to shower the crowd with toilet paper, frenzied bouncing beach toys, giant plastic bags filled with air, local celebrity dancers, and a finale that had Greg Gillis crowdsurfing on an inflatable mattress. That last feat, with the energetic bouncing, nearly put Wayne Coyne's hamster ball walk to shame.
As soon as that show ended, people started running across the grounds for Radiohead. We took a few minutes to pick up some awful food (my first pick, a garbage-bound ill-conceived "burrito"). Radiohead, with their giant light curtains, visual effects, and very long, newish setlist were, of course, amazing. We took the boat back and watched some Olympic Opening Ceremony mind blowing fakery until we fell asleep.
The next day involved a late brunch and another series of trips across the water, this time with longer, more annoyingly crowded lines (the first ameliorated with plastic cups of beer) all around which caused us to miss the first part of Animal Collective. The parts we saw, though, were deafeningly great. Rather than seeing other things, we decided to gradually fortify our position during Kings of Leon to for optimal viewing / getting crushed to see Radiohead. Mostly successful, we also witnessed a few people passing out scarily. I had wondered whether I really needed two and a half more hours of Radiohead so soon, but then they dug out more stuff from the back catalog and I immediately saw the error of my self-questioning. We did eventually move further back, where we encountered a raver who was more interested in her glo-yo than the show on stage and weathered youths who thought that it was a karaoke experience (I mean, maybe you get to hear Thom Yorke singing "Fake Plastic Trees" once every five years. Why cover it with your own awful voice?).
We went through the whole thing again on Sunday to see Amadou et Mariam, who, aside from being blind and good, were sporting a really shiny gold guitar, a sequined dress, and killer sunglasses. Even some of the early-arriving Jack Johnson fans seemed to be won over. The rain reappeared and we sat under a tent listening to Rodriguo y Gabriela and contemplating the rest of our agenda. There were plenty of worthwhile acts on the bill, but not worthwhile enough to merit a day in the rain; so we got wet walking back to the boat and took a cab into SoHo where the cold, damp, weather made shopping for autumn seem reasonable. I picked up a sweater from Uniqlo and a light jacket, but resisted the temptation to wear them for the sake of warmth. While all of the boat travel lent the proceedings a certain sense of adventure and allowed us excellent views of Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls, we kept having flashbacks to being at sea for the rest of the day. The weekend ended playing (and winning) a new-to-me at Black Mountain, which is among the most ideal wine bars I have ever encountered, with friends.
All in all, the weekend was fun, the weather cooperated by not being miserably humid, and the festival didn't really feel like a festival -- in part because we treated it it more like two days of Radiohead with some really good opening bands and a bunch of boat rides. Radiohead is playing near Seattle on Wednesday, and while I don't envy the terrible traffic-clogged drive, I can definitely see how their appeal justifies the trek.
The importance of distributed systems is growing as computing devices become ubiquitous and bandwidth becomes plentiful. Concurrency and distribution pose algorithmic and implementation challenges in developing reliable distributed systems, making the field an excellent testbed for evaluating programming language and verification paradigms. Recently, several specialized domain-specific languages and extensions of memory-unsafe languages have been proposed to aid distributed system development. In this paper we propose an alternative to these approaches, arguing that modern, higher-order, strongly typed, memory safe languages provide an excellent vehicle for developing and debugging distributed systems.
We present Opis, a functional-reactive approach for developing distributed systems in Objective Caml. In Opis, a protocol description consists of a reactive function (called event function) describing the behavior of a distributed system node. The event functions in Opis are built from pure functions as building blocks, composed using the Arrow combinators. This facilitates reasoning about event functions both informally and using interactive provers. For example, this approach leads to simple termination arguments. Given a protocol description, a developer can use higher-order library functions of Opis to 1) deploy the distributed system, 2) run the distributed system in a network simulator with full-replay capabilities, 3) apply explicit-state model checking to the distributed system and detect any undesirable behaviors, and 4) do performance analysis on the system. We describe the design and implementation of Opis, and present our experience in using Opis to develop peer-to-peer overlay protocols including the Chord distributed hash table and the Cyclon random gossip protocol. We have found that using Opis results in high programmer productivity and leads to concise and easily composable protocol descriptions. Moreover, Opis tools were effective in helping identify and eliminate correctness and performance problems during distributed system development.
reminiscent of thoughts I've been having about a language based on the reactor pattern.
9:57a ebb version 0.3
This release includes a rather large refactoring of the internals. In particular, the core of Ebb was extracted and expanded into a separate C library called libebb.
New features in Ebb 0.3 are
support for chunked requests (transparent)
support for chunked responses (set the header "Transfer-Encoding: chunked")
support for HTTPS. Use by supplying two extra parameters to the options hash
update 0.3.1 fix small bug with chunked responses update 0.3.2 add hack to work with Merb (who doesn't send Content-Length headers even though she should).
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