encoded notions

For the longest time I’ve kept a list of quotes in some form or another, and I think I’m safe in saying that a majority of us carry with us a collection of quotes that we think of when times are good or bad. When we need inspiration, we look to the adages of the great thinkers of the past. When we need a laugh, we look to one-liners from some of the great comedians. Quotes are like icing for the cake of life.

As of about a year and a half ago, I had started keeping my quotes online as a subfolder of this blog. At some point, they reached a critical mass and it prompted me to write a perl application to manage and categorize them better, and that when Quoth was born.

Quoth was a bit bulky and sharp at the corners, but it did its job quite well. I had even keyed it to allow for multiple contributors, but only those for whom I specifically created accounts. This program worked for a long while, until I had a glimpse of WikiQuote. I thought, “Wow! They are browsable in both categories and by author!” and so I made a grave mistake and converted Quoth over into a MediaWiki-driven site. Stupid, R.B.!

About a month after I did this conversion I realized my folly, but by then it was too late and the damage was done. It wasn’t until I got deeply involved in PHP programming that I found my quote salvation. Though PHP may have an extremely large collection of functions in the default namespace to start, it does make web application programming look very clean (I learned this while hacking WordPress). With this newfound cleanliness of code I found in PHP, I set out to rewrite Quoth in a more elegant and concise manner, cutting through the crufty code and letting it do its job well.

Initially, only I and a few manually-added others could contribute quotes to the new-and-improved PHP-driven Quoth. This would all change when I learned of the coolness that is del.icio.us. Del.icio.us had tags! I had always struggled with how to categorize and organize my quotes—fighting with my hierarchies. Del.icio.us’s taggable structure of N-dimensional organization was perfect. Within a few days I retrofitted Quoth to use tags (and partially mimicked del.icio.us’s interface until I find a better way to present the data) and I felt freer without the feeling that I was pushing jello into ice-cube trays anymore.

A few months later (i.e. a few days ago), I got around to enabling automatic account-creation (like del.icio.us) and I’m going to let it grow. Anyone can join! With time, I hope to implement more features, as I have outlined on the about section of Quoth.

Go ahead, give Quoth a try.

Tonight, RIT’s CAB had Dane Cook perform a standup comedy routine in the Field House.

I laughed so much I think I almost hurt myself. I can’t say anything really to describe the event, other than just posting keywords from the different segments:

In the face… What?… Uppercut… Celine Dion… Bryan… Rollercoaster… Tire… In the rain… Cashews.

His new CD will be out sometime in March!

Tim Bray thinks that handwriting, as a fine art, is seeing its last days. I would have to agree with him.

Regarding the formal teaching of the physical skill of writing, the typical progression in my grade school began in kindergarten. There we practiced drawing block letters on small sheets of paper with large line seperation (and the dotted mid-lines). It took time to train the dominant hand to have the fine motor control necessary to bring the lines smoothly to meet other lines, to draw curves, to stay within the guidelines of the paper.

As we progressed upwards in grade level, the dotted mid-lines disappeared, and the inter-line spacing shrank. The handwriting gods had declared that we reduce our enormous letters into a more confined space, further refining our guiding finger motions with pencils. Just as we had mastered the art of drawing block letters, or printing as it soon came to be called, our teachers threw us a literal curve ball and taught us about this mysterious beast known as cursive. A singsongy swing of the pencil could reproduce pictures which resembled the block letters we could identify with, but these new forms had so much more pizzazz than their more uptight brethren.

The classrooms had references hung from the walls showing the different strokes that would generate the cursive letters—to remind us in case we forgot how to draw these wonderful forms. Of course, once we had learned this new way to write our thoughts and answers on paper, we were strongly discouraged from printing our letters, though sometimes I could feel the need to use something a bit less artsy.

Cursive handwriting needs room to flow; confined to the bounds of a line with spacing too small, it looks cramped and the lines cross over each other obscuring the data. Taking history notes in cursive was a pain, and it often left my hand feeling tired. Somewhere towards the end of middle school and the start of high school, the teachers stopped caring. I suppose they figured that if you really wanted to use it, you’d continue to use it. In my experience it would seem that the great cursive experiment has finally started to falter, because I did not know many people who continued to use it on a regular basis.

Tim hints that it may have something to do with the rather rapid rise in computer usage over more recent years. Hell, the WorldWideWeb only entered the global arena in 1992. I only started using any form of Internet connection in 1998. If I had ever seen a utility to handwriting, it was quickly swamped by a torrent of print characters. If you’ve ever seen cursive script characters on a computer screen before, you know what I mean when I say they look “out of place”. They clash with the sharp edges and perpendicular lines of the visual display of a computer screen. In addition, the characters themselves flow together to create words, whereas with print characters they are atomic and only placed near each other to form words (with perhaps a bit of kerning). Cursive characters are a very analog form of writing, and they seem to have been lost amid the vast amounts of digital information that I started connecting with from a relatively early age.

It used to be that a person’s style of handwriting was unique, and it could tell you a bit about the writer. But now that it seems printing and electronic textual communication outranks the stylistic elegance of handwriting, we must rely more on what we say in our text rather than the form our words take. Content versus form. Message versus medium.

I suppose our written voices will need to make up for what was lost with the death of handwriting.

It seems that some rather bad winter weather has hit the Northeast. I happen to know because the sky has been having awfully bad dandruff problems again.

So I stayed in this weekend (but really, how is that different than any other weekend?), and got little to nothing done, unless you count the sealing-off of the dining room glass doors with plastic wrap. I got a little freaked out when I came downstairs on Saturday morning to discover that there was frost building up inside the house along the window frame. Frelling frost!

Nick—the driver this quarter—doesn’t have to worry too much about brushing off his car, because it seems that it was windy enough to entice much of the snow to drift, as is evidenced by the buildup of snow against our front door.

I like the snow, so long as I don’t have to drive in it.

Pulling an all-nighter to finish Quantum Mechanics homework really makes you think about the physiology of thought. Allow me to detail the process of not sleeping:

Preface: You check the clock and realize that you will not be finishing your work anytime soon.

Postponement: After you pass through the region where all you want to do is sleep, your body quickly adapts by going into a cruise-mode. You have diminished thought capability and frequent yawning, because your body is kinda postponing your sleep cycle for what it still assumes will be a short while.

Chemical warfare: Around this time you are fighting a losing battle, as you once again start to feel sleepy. It is hard to resist giving up in your work and crashing hard. To get over this hump, one typically requires the assistance of stimulants—-such as caffeine.

The long tail: Caffeine product of choice in hand, you are now equipped to coast into the region of non-sleep that feels much like any typical part of the day (except everyone else is sleeping). This is when you can actually do the work you intended to do, since your brain has just about given up trying to force you to go to bed. Though you tend to think a little slower, and make illogical conclusions more frequently, this is a fairly interesting mode to work in.

Whiplash: When you start to closely approach your standard wake-up time, that’s when the strange aches and pains set in. You feel as if you’ve just fallen down a short flight of stairs and there is strange “pressure” coming from behind your eyes. The frequency of yawning greatly increases and your balance is a bit off. The ability to focus on the task at hand is lost. This is the point where your body is now telling itself to go to sleep. Now you have a case of The Alamo with you locked in a standoff against your body for the rest of the day. And when you go home at the end of the day, you will lose the fight.

Resolution: When you wake up from your stupid decision to not sleep you will draw some conclusions. You will examine all the good and bad it did to and for you and many of you will make a resolution to never pull and all-nighter again. I just want to tell all of those people something.

You are lying.

Tonight, while doing my quantum mechanics problem set I found that I had to integrate for arbitrary z-values. If I hadn’t just done about 6 of those manually with specified z-values, I wouldn’t have seen the pattern. A few lines of math and a limit or two and I found its value to be z factorial. This is just a special case of the gamma function, and I had just solved it starting in its integral form.

That was so neat.

I’ve grown to love the concept of a dynamic categorization system like the tagging capable with both del.icio.us and Flickr, so it would be only natural to do this with Wordpress, right?

After looking online for a suitable plugin to perform this task, I decided to write one myself—without hacking the core files. This proved to be a rather touchy subject to handle properly, but I ultimately prevailed. Until a more natural mechanism is built into the Wordpress core, I think my plugin, WP-Tags, shall suffice.

Download WP-Tags v0.1.

ToDo

• Edit the feed’s dc:subject fields without hacking the wp-atom.php and wp-rss2.php files directly (preferably with filters).

[Edit: This was only tested on v1.5-alpha-3 of wordpress.] — 13 Feb 2004

Another year gone. Another year closer to something else.

We’re so concerned about what happens next. Where will we live? What will we do? Will we be successful? How long will it take? Who will we talk to? Who will we live with? What will we eat? Will, will, will.

What about now?

Where are we living? What are we doing? Are we successful? Who do we talk to? Who do we live with? What do we eat? Now, here, this place, this time.

This is what matters.

Where we are going is also important, but perhaps not as important as where we are right now. Position over direction. If you live for the moment, then you surrender your goals. If you live for the future, then you surrender contentment. A balance is required, and preferably one with leaves you with less worry and more fun.

Another year gone. Another year closer to Something Else.

When the year rolls over, does anything happen? Millions of computers register the change, but does Nature care what year it is by some human convention? Your watch reads a different time, but does your mind feel any different? 2004 vs. 2005. A difference of one.

History books work on collapsing timelines. Condensing events. Smoothing over the details and figuring out what was important; what were the trends? The importance of an event relies upon its outcome: plans and goals mean nothing if they result in no net effect. The events of 2004 will probably be summed up in a few lines of text in some textbook in the near future. Millions of individual decisions are made, and from that collective motion humanity gains a direction.

2004: Collapse, condense, extract, done, move on.

Next please.