wingolog

This morning was real strange. I woke up feeling like all of my friends had left me. Rain pattering on the terrace, an illuminated grey dome. I put on Silver Jews during the teeth brush and hurried down to a café, to breakfast in the white noise of humanity.

recent weeks

My sister visited with her boytoy, and I went north with some oddballs to play in rivers.

Also: I have discovered Collserola, an at-times astonishing natural space just over the hills. Who knew? I suspect this will be a summer of bicycle.

work

Endless bugs. I've been unexpectedly assiduous.

hack

Since FOSDEM my mind has been captivated by a problem similar to that of the SSAX parser, and have just now finished the first draft of a paper. After some comments come in I'll post it on the interweb for the single digits to download.

tunes

A friend of mine informed me that at the FNAC, one can listen to any album in the store, just swiping barcodes. This has led to too many purchases, among them only one guilty pleasure (Jimmy Eat World). The best of what I bought has been Cat Power's Moon Pix, but The Evens' second disc might displace it with more listening.

readings

Old school: Horace's Ars Poetica is still fresh after 2000 years, like biting into a raw carrot.

Today I was reading the Sidereal Message, also fresh after centuries. Galileo is audacious but rational, not getting lost in philosophy. He worked in an interesting context, having to constantly sell himself to the local oligarchy. Before pointing his telescope to the heavens, he had already written to various governments advertising its potential military applications.

In university I did work on an advanced mammography system, in which one took a high-powered X-ray source and filtered out a small part of the beam. The idea was that the filtered beam would be monochromatic, leading to higher resolution, and less need for compression, which I understand is quite painful. When the source was looking like it would work, my advisor remarked, "This will make a great gun!"

I never finished that source.

On a brighter note, I have been delighted with MediaLens. The cogitations are particularly human.