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senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter

i dream of you and all the things you say

Sunday, 03APR2005:

david woke me up with a phone call around noon (after we lost an hour due to the 'spring forward' for daylight savings time) to give me the details for the sledding activity planned for today. met up with april, emilie, robert, carine, ulu, maxine and david at the old rez and then headed across federal road to check out the ridges for primo sledding spots.

the first hill attempted was nice and steep but also came a bit rough and rocky. we all got a chance to try out the jumps and get some decent airtime, but when maxine smacked herself hard on the back, we decided to move to smoother climes. along the way, i stopped to uncork the thermos that i brought back from china and served up some hot chocolate to get warm.

we backtracked to a more windswept slope that was longer but less steep, trading speed for the chance to get more extended slides. it was such a smooth ride that i was able to use my digital camera to shoot an action video of one of my trips down. unfortunately, the batteries froze out before being able to capture david's death-defying leap over an icy precipice.

to close off the sledding session, i challenged april to a race. she kicked me silly, going a good 15 metres past my previous record where i had narrowly missed a power pole. other than maxine's sore back and my slight elbow strain, we managed to survive the ordeal without any major injuries, unlike our previous outing when we had to take greg to the hospital.

we walked back to town to carine's place where she served us chai and we watched a celebrity world poker tour match. after seeing jack black get knocked out by aisha, we headed our separate ways. i slunk home to veg out on the offline poker game while working on the track selection for my latest mix. i kept sipping hot chocolate from the thermos until i finished the whole jug - it was still hot even 8 hours later !!

also finished reading 'hanging out with the dream king', a book of interviews of 'sandman' creators and other neil gaiman collaborators. the most noteworthy comment from today's reading was gene wolfe on the value of speculative fiction:

"I think that the kind of things that 
we talk about ... - fantasy very much so, 
science fiction, and even horror - the 
message that we're sending is the reverse 
of the message sent by what is called 
'realistic fiction'.  (I happen to think 
that realistic fiction is not, in fact, 
realistic, but that's a side issue).  
And what we are saying is that it doesn't 
have to be like this: things can be 
different.  Our society can be changed. 
... We can do something else if we don't 
like what we're gettin'.  I think a lot 
of the purpose of fiction ought to be to 
tell people that."
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when tomorrow gets here, where will yesterday be

Monday, 04APR2005:

didn't do much exciting today, so rather than wracking my brain trying to find something to write about, i spent the time setting up the archive structure for earlier posts so that this page doesn't take so long to load up.

still working on the tracklisting for the latest mix, but i think i have a title - 'AUr(or)al exposures' - i started with 'aural', but since i'm in the arctic, i might as well make it exotic, and the AU == or == gold match came to me in a flash :)

  • today's soundtrack: 'do ya feel lucky', a mix with a gambling theme that i'll post to aotm later this week
  • interesting link of the day: how traditional recycling efforts fail to acknowledge the 'big picture' associated with waste management and our induced 'addiction' to garbage
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it just feels good, like poetry

Tuesday, 05APR2005:

went up to l'école trois soleils for the monthly 'first draft' writers group meeting this evening. in attendance were carolyn, stephen, gillien, jurate and me. we did a roundtable to relay any writing-related news - carolyn got an extended magazine piece published; gillian has a couple of filmed scripts under her belt and is working on a couple more; jurate is now in the process of editing the novel that she wrote last november; stephen is trying to figure out how to write more like king than koontz; me, i'm writing this blog :) we spent the rest of the time assisting carolyn with version 5 of her 'heavy' poem.

finalized the tracklisting for 'aur(or)al exposures' and now burning copies for all the intended recipients. spent some time working on the liner notes as well, so hopefully it will be a nice little package. i'll post this mix along with the gambling one at aotm on friday (using the weekend to trawl for mix traders).

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it's only you that can find me

Wednesday, 06APR2005:

broomball chronicle:

team white: denis, mark, danny, martha, greg, jacques
team black: carine, alastair, julian, rob, gavin, me

a bleak day to be dressed in black. well, the game wasn't a disaster by any means as both teams played fairly well. team white had an extra sub at the start but after they went ahead 2-nil, they tossed the sub our way so that we played 6 on 5 for a bit. however, when greg arrived to even up the team numbers, team white started to smoke.

here are the tallies: greg (4), jacques (2), mark (2), danny (2), martha (1), denis (1). notice the pattern ? even freshman danny was able to get a couple pots (including one deflected in by yours truly). denis still had the best goal tho, lifting a hail mary ball high over the forward-playing gavin to bounce cleanly into the center of the net.

without team black's excellent defensive play, the score would have been much higher. rob, the other freshman, not at all cowed after this shellacking, asked to be added to the email list. chief arm-twister denis will keep playing for a couple more games before turning over the reins and abandoning us for the south. however, we also learned that carine would be leaving us after this season so we'll have to add her to this year's hall of fame as well.

  • IP idiocy link of the day: a new york court has clawed archival recordings back out from the public domain using the doctrine of perpetual common law copyright
    • Waldbaum said the ruling frustrates the 
efforts of the music restoration industry 
to ensure that classical performances are 
preserved for posterity.

"We are talking about things in the public 
domain that have no commercial value," 
Waldbaum said. "We are not talking about 
the Beatles. We are not talking about Maria 
Callas. We are talking about things that are 
basically lost in time."
  • for something a bit cooler, check out the International Mixtape Project (thanks to sue for the heads up !)
    • They represent a strange collision of the 
cerebral and the emotional, because they 
most directly satisfy the need, not of the 
seeker, but of the sender. They are the 
mixer’s art, while the mixer’s medium is 
the art of others. It seems that for many, 
putting together a mixtape, is much more 
rewarding than receiving one. 

Making a mix can be masochistic. There is 
some pleasure to be derived from struggling 
miserably to make something perfect by 
smashing together chunks of music swiped 
from complete albums, creating something 
that both sounds right to you and strikes a 
chord with its recipient.
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past mistakes that make us shaky

Thursday, 07APR2005:

i've been sitting on a discussion from edge.org for awhile and finally got a chance to read thru it all.

Richard Foreman, a noted playwright, asks whether we are becoming pancake people, that is, in a P2P and friendstered setting, are we beginning to live more thru that collective intermediated and ephemeral bit bucket world rather than developing our own inner monologues. He also wonders if computers will ever be able to be programmed to make the 'mistakes' that humans make in the arts and sciences, and whether a computer would ever be able to recognize any of those mistakes as potential opportunities for new insights and procedures.

Douglas Rushkoff responds to the first part by comparing the present to the Renaissance. While the first Renaissance elevated the individual's perspective, today's world restores the power of the collective and the measure of any individual is no longer determined by what they know, but by how well they can jig from the information networks. "We give up the illusion of our power as deriving from some notion of individual collecting data, and find out that having access to data through our network-enabled communities gives us an entirely more living flow of information that is appropriate to the ever changing circumstances surrounding us."

Roger Schank, another knowledge guru, deals with the second part by emphasizing that "mistakes come from complex goals not trivially achieved. We learn from the mistakes we make when the goal we have failed at satisfying is important to us and we choose to spend some time thinking about what to do better next time." so, rather than focusing on programming 'mistakes', smart computers will be designed to have goals and be able to learn from the experiences of failing to meet those goals. mistakes would just occur naturally in the process :)

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'cause the dancefloor is calling

Friday, 08APR2005:

went over to molly's after work to drop off 2 mixes that i had promised her (Aur(or)al Exposures and Faith). she was hosting a musical jam, and i was sorely tempted to stay but since i was already kind of dressed up for an '80's retro party, i decided that i shouldn't let those efforts go to waste.

went over to bernice's where a sizeable crowd of partiers were celebrating her 30th birthday. malcolm and olivia had been invited and i just kind of swung in on their coattails. also hung out with chris, celina, sarah and wade, and after a few sips of the spiked punch, i hijacked the boombox in the strobe-lit dance room to d.j. a set from the stack of '80's music on-hand.

someone decided it would be a kewl idea to try to get into the legion at a quarter to midnight. so, we piled into 3-4 taxis and unloaded ourselves at the gates of doom. standing outside smoking were lori, sue and sara, so we stopped to chat. big mistake. we ended up standing in line outside in the cold for a good 15-20 minutes until the bar staff finished counting heads and let a few of us trickle in.

at first, we were restricted to the quiet lounge, but after waiting there for a bit, we were allowed to pass out onto the main arena. unlucky chris had wandered across the line of contention earlier to hit the loo and when he boldly attempted to walk in the other direction, the bouncer hauled his butt back over.

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a new sound coming in as an old one disappears

Saturday, 09APR2005:

the poker tourney scheduled for this afternoon was cancelled due to good weather outside. i had the option of joining a soccer team in net for a tournament up at the high school but decided instead to work on burning a few mixes for the 3-for-3 trades that i had arranged with FLWB and dice.

while browsing on aotm yesterday, i ran across the idea of tracking all of the mixes traded and with who. so, i made up my own tracking spreadsheet and realized that i've distributed over a 100 mixes since the spring of 2001. recipients have been co-workers, family members and aotm'ers from missouri, michigan, virginia, australia, georgia (2), west virginia, texas, ottawa, florida and california.

left my computer burning while i climbed up the hill to the frob to attend a supper for malcolm to celebrate the completion of his rotation with us and his move down the hall to a different office. i managed to devour a plate of ribs without getting messed up, and then lisa goes and spills a glass of water on me when we get up to leave. it's a good thing i was wearing black or i might have been pissed.

followed cyndi and rose a few steps to the storehouse where we hooked up with joe, dennis, damien and silaqi. watched the fancy light show over the dance floor for a bit, then played air hockey against rose before heading home for a reasonably early nite.

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