ed felten is giving away 128-bit integers/circumvention devices.  get yours before they’re all gone.

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i met lane becker at sxsw– here’s a picture of us on stage at the heather gold show:

lane is in green, i (characteristically) am wearing the gray sandals. (note: this picture was taken by micki krimmel, who said i had the best quote of the show. i walked around on a cloud for the rest of the day after i read that.)

i met lane right before the show, i saw him in the audience and went up to him because he had asked an interesting question at one of the panels i was at that day and i wanted to discuss it further. i had no idea he was one of the guys behind adaptive path, which is probably a good thing, for if i had known it’s unlikely i would have had the courage to talk to him about my ideas. he could not have been nicer to me, and so i’ve been a big fan ever since.

his new company, satisfaction, had a great post today on the digg user revolt. i have been fascinated by this story (not quite as fascinated as techmeme has been, but still.) ever since i wrote my first constitution at the age of nine (it was for my third grade class, and was designed to put a check on the unbridled power of the girls), i’ve loved thinking about and designing systems that allow people to interact in order to achieve a common goal.

the general theme i’ve seen in the revolt posts is that this is the ‘end of digg’.  i’ve been thinking just the opposite– i think digg will become stronger as a result of the revolt.  the revolt was a clear illustration that there are checks and balances in the digg system: while digg-the-company has the ability to change particular policies or aspects of the voting algorithm, digg-the-community has a very clear veto-power that they can use to reject decisions that they don’t like.  i think this is hugely significant– users in editorial-driven systems like slashdot or the daily kos can write journals or diaries and complain all they like about site policies they don’t like, they don’t have any actual power to effect change.  the end result of this is that users eventually get frustrated and leave and the site stagnates.  the digg community has a much more powerful outlet for venting their frustration, and the net result of this is that digg-the-company is forced to change to match the ideals of digg-the-community.  regardless of what you think of the decision the community made, this is what democracy is all about.

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when i came across this entry in my feed reader:

Mono, Grails @ Emo’s

i immediately thought of mono and grails, and wondered what these competing application frameworks would be doing together at emo’s.  fortunately, the google search for ‘mono’ provided a number of helpful links to treatment options, so i should be getting the help i need very soon.

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THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES.  (for context, see this.)

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over the last few months, i have played quite a bit of wii tennis. sadly, i am now at a point where the game no longer provides a challenge. i have achieved the mythical 2301 rating and regularly beat sara and elisa 40-0, 40-0, 40-0. i can take a new character to ‘pro’ status in a mere 5 games.

i’ve started to have this daydream where i’m playing wii tennis against cary elwes, and the match is very competitive. the power serves are coming fast and furious and our respective frontcourt miis are volleying back and forth in the blink of an eye. i dive and miss a cross-court shot, and he wins the first game coming out of deuce.

– ‘you are amazing,’ i say.
– ‘thank you…but why are you smiling?’ he replies.
– ‘because i know something you do not…i am not left handed!’

needless to say, i need to find a new game to obsess over.  has anyone played this new GT racing game?  It comes with a steering wheel that you insert the remote into and looks very cool.

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i feel like my tone has been a little dour of late, so here are a few things that made me happy today:

• this blog now is the #9 result for the google search “random graphs”.  this kicks ass because all of the other first page results are about the mathematical concept of a ‘random graph’, and this blog does not talk about those random graphs at all, aside from the obscure pun in the subtitle.  i would like this blog to become a quiet resting place for weary graph theorists.
• i had lunch at tam’s deli and cafe today– roasted chicken sandwich with the house tea and a cream puff for dessert.  one of the most satisfying meals i have had in a long time.
• i registered dumbandpoor.com, the future home of my social network devoted to those people who, for whatever reason, opted to pass on the chance to work at google before the IPO, or turned down the opportunity to be employee #6 at microsoft.

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i was working on my online profile for one of the social networks i belong to the other day.  like many social networks, this one asks its users for a short block of text that summarizes their essence.  i had no clue how to do this (i don’t think it’s possible to summarize things that you don’t understand), so I read other people’s profiles in order to get a feel for what sort of things i should be saying about myself.

a number of the profiles i read indicated that the person writing the profile hated/didn’t care for writing the ‘about me’ portion.  no one seemed to complain about listing their favorite music or books or movies, so it seems like this distaste for talking about yourself is limited to context-free, blank-piece-of-paper situations.

i think there are two dimensions to this discomfort– internal and external.  internally, we feel like we’re far too complicated and interesting to be summed up in a few sentences.  externally, we obsess over what other people think of us, and desperately try to figure out how to express ourselves in such a way that the people we care about will like us and think of us in the way we wish to be thought of.

as i read, it occured to me that there were a few different broad patterns people used when writing their profiles, and better yet, they could be easily mapped to several of the major post-renaissance art movements.

1. baroque/mannerist:  highly stylized, offers a vision of the writer as a perfect combination of the attributes that they value most highly.
2. realist:  a portrayal of a person as they really are, usually with more emphasis on their warts than is necessary.  often written by someone with a fascinating lack of self-consciousness.
3. impressionist:  vague but pleasing.  when done effectively, allows the reader to fill in what they want to see.
4. cubist:  a sequence of short snippets or references to likes, dislikes, interests, thoughts, or emotions, the thinking being that we get a better feel for who people are by seeing a number of different dimensions in rapid succession.

i suppose it makes sense, when you think about it– as a species, we’ve only figured out a handful of ways to react when confronted with a blank space that we’re supposed to fill in with some piece of ourselves.

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i’m flying to DC right now to see some friends at family, and as I was leaving for the airport this afternoon I had this moment of overwhelming sadness.  i could have chalked it up to a number of things– saying goodbye to indy always makes me sad, both yo la tengo and guster are playing shows this weekend that i’ll be missing– but that’s not really it.

you know those times in your life when you’re somewhere and you feel something, and your memory of the experience isn’t from the point of view of your own eyes, but as a third-person, watching you from some impossibly picturesque angle, so that the viewpoint in your mind evokes the feeling?  it’s like the actual image in and of itself wasn’t enough to capture the feeling, so the emotion modifies/overwrites/remixes the visual.

i was a junior in college, in the international terminal of atlanta hartsfield, with a few hours to kill before i boarded a plane for zurich and then budapest.  if you’ve never been there, it feels like being in a cathedral of light and linoleum, with alcoves all along the sides with small groups of people worshipping london, rio, or hong kong.  giant flags hang down the central aisle in pairs of stained polyester.  it’s unbearably quiet and unbearably empty– far too big a place to be so quiet and so empty.

and then there’s me.  i’m walking down that central aisle with a backpack and a carry-on bag, so small and inconsequential, looking up and to the left at the flags as i walk past them, doing my best to figure out what countries they symbolize, trying any sort of trivial exercise to distract from how lonely i feel.  i’m about to die, and we always die alone.

the process of leaving your life behind always involves a death and a rebirth.  the death is painful in and of itself at the time, though it gets modulated somewhat over time by the quality of the life that follows.  when our rebirth is joyful, we don’t spend too much time thinking about how awful it felt to die; when it’s tragic, we long for the old life that we killed off so recklessly.  in this case– in my case– i had a wonderful rebirth, in this strange country where i didn’t know anyone and didn’t even speak the language.  and so i’ve never told anyone how sad and sorry for myself i felt at that moment, just before i got on the plane.  i’m sure people knew i was sad in my old life– happy people don’t leave their lives behind intentionally– but i wonder if we ever think about how sad dying-as-dying is for the person, even when the choice is their own.

ever since then, it seems, going to the airport is a sad thing for me.  i think commercial air travel is the most death-like experience we can have while we’re still alive– packed tight into a compact space with a bunch of people we don’t know, unable to move or speak or think over the dull roar of the engines, spending most of the time lost in our own thoughts or someone else’s.  it’s as if you can’t die when you’re on a plane, because you’re not really alive.

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i’ve had the stages of grieving on my mind lately, and so when i discovered that i couldn’t login to gmail this afternoon, i noticed some striking similarities:

1. denial: hmm, that’s odd– a server error. i’ll just login again, gmail will fix everything.
2. anger: gmail is down! can’t those twits do anything right? have they hired too many ex-microsofties or something?
3. bargaining: ok god, if you let gmail be up when i try to login this time, i promise to talk the next person i meet out of going to law school.
4. depression: gmail is down, and it’s never coming back. nothing will ever have its simple ajaxian elegance again. i’m not even sure i want to bother speaking or writing anything ever, since i know that i’ll never see those words wrapped inside of gmail’s pleasing frame. (that’s the stage i’m in right now)
5. acceptance: okay, which of my other 12 email accounts should i use instead?

in the end, it’s all about putting one foot in front of the other.

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some of my favorite “like * but for * instead of *” from around the web:

• like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs
• like the State Fair but for sewers instead of livestock
• like Pandora, but for beers instead of music (this one might have some promise)
• like thermostats, but for partying instead of temperature
• like pinnochio, but for joy instead of falsehoods
• like the microwave but for data instead of food (techcrunch: like a gold mine, but for lame analogies instead of gold)
• like a swear jar, but for torontocentrism instead of profanity
• like metafilter, but for itself instead of the web (whoa…)
• like beer goggles but for trees instead of ugly people
• like SETI@home, but for terrorists, instead of aliens
• like Ninjas, but for music instead of assassinations
• like Borges, but for designers instead of writers

update: tony’s list is excellent.

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