30.09.04
killer hamster
this just in from 'the register': killer hamster ices owner
An autopsy proved that the victim had suffered an acute reaction to protein contained in the homicidal hamster's saliva.
will your religion last?
and what's with the girl? is she supposed to make me think about procreation in an effort to keep the race clean? she does look slightly jewish.
update: uploaded the picture, see for yourself!
Fri, 1 Oct 2004 17:49
Incredible!
- Ady
Sat, 2 Oct 2004 02:11
yeah, and there's also all these vinyard posters around cambridge, selling the church as something hip and happening. including their youngster branch 'the river', which explains:
"In the Bible, Jesus turned ordinary people into history makers with exciting lives. In the movie, The Matrix, we see Neo undergo this sort of transformation when he takes the red pill. He is transported from a directionless life of working in a cubicle to being a super-powerful hero who's life has purpose. The only difference is the life we discover in Jesus isn't a reality that's more even harsh, it's better and more joyful than we could have ever imagined."
god!
- guy
28.09.04
two types of 26-year-olds
from a nice article, entitled what the bubble got right. not a must read, but this quote is very true:
There is a huge standard deviation among 26 year olds. Some are fit only for entry level jobs, but others are ready to rule the world if they can find someone to handle the paperwork for them.
room-mating
i would not be surprised if one day i'll find the love of my life looking for a roommate. if i won't have to get married before that, being a nice jewish boy and all.
Wed, 29 Sep 2004 08:35
i agree completely. in both interviewing candidates and being interviewed by candidates i've always felt the mutual checking-out going on. and when i interviewed candidates with my former ape roommate it was amazing to learn what they were attracted to--the most bland and boring girl would come through and once she left they'd say how hot she was.
- cynthia
Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:25
er, i'm not sure he referred to her level of intellectual stimulation when he made that comment.
- guy
Wed, 29 Sep 2004 19:47
ha--true, but i mean bland and boring physically as well as intellectually--but then again, what i find bland and boring physically is generally what dopey guys traditionally find hot.
- cynthia
75% of the spam
Fuck the media for giving our mothers, sisters, and daughter eating disorders. Fuck the media for making men insecure about their car, penis, house, hair.
What's 75% of your spam mail in your inbox. That's right.
The other 25% is for medication that we need after living the life they give us.
someone is on his way to checking out. someone is on his way to the most scary and interesting year of his life.
at least i'm not insecure about my car.
Tue, 28 Sep 2004 22:24
sounds like someone was a bit late to catch "fight club"
- Udi
Wed, 29 Sep 2004 12:26
it's never too late to catch 'fight club'
- guy
apparently i'm out there
got a mysterious voicemail message in my office today:
hi, this message is for guy hoffman. um, guy, this is *name*deleted*. i'm a writer with the boston globe, and i would like to talk to you, i think you might be able to help me with a story that i'm writing based on, um, something that i've read online. so if you get a second and you can call my cellphone, it's *number*deleted*. thanks so much. bye.
how did journalism even exist before the web, is what i'd like to know.
yes, i did call her back, and no, i won't tell you what this is about yet.
Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:55
wow! how did she find you, via your blog?
- cynthia
Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:19
not via my blog, although she read that, too. but via my web-presence.
- guy
27.09.04
n.a.d.d
what's going on on my desktop:
- a video stream of a lecture in AI that i missed
- the soundtrack from 'garden state' playing at 50% volume in the background
- my email, to which i'm replying when i get a new message
- IM, active
- the problem set for last week's AI class
- the problem set's solution
- my blog file, in which i'm writing now
zoz points out that i have n.a.d.d
Folks, this isn't multi-tasking. This is advanced case of Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. I am unable to function at my desktop unless I've got, at least, five things going on at the same time. If your count came close, you're probably afflicted, as well. Most excellent.
let me know if this is an interesting article, because i haven't read it all.
had to return to tend to all the things going on on my desktop.
bread
you gotta be wondering about a nation that has bread so wrong.
it costs $3 for a pound, tastes like sugar, is soft like a marshmellow and molds within 2.5 days.
the only two other basic foods that are as malfunctioning here are coffee and milk.
i just switched to soymilk, because it tastes more like milk than milk. they actually try to make soymilk taste like milk, whereas they seem to try to make milk taste like stale water.
plus it's not very nice to drink some animal's mother's milk who is impregnated all the time just for that with no chance to see her young.
actually i'm being unfair, there are many basic foods that are as malfunctioning as bread around here.
26.09.04
good question
tony pierce posts 20 good questions for president bush's debate, questions he assembled from dailykos comments.
like
⑪ During the 2000 debates, you stated that you believed our troops should not be used for "nation building." Could you explain what our troops are now doing in Iraq and how that differs from nation building?
another commenter notes that the right question to ask bush is not whether he would support a constitutional ban on abortion, but whether if his daughter came home pregnant from a party (and she has been known to party to oblivion) if he would support an abortion then.
not that he wouldn't weasel his way out of it, like all politicians do.
but just because conservatives have a tendency to change their views when it comes to their own lives. as this commenter notes, like dick cheney on gay rights (he has a gay daughter) or nancy reagan on stem cell research (her husband, well, you know).
probably the single thing that always infuriates me about conservatives is their attitude that if it's not their problem it's not a problem they should care about.
new column: the empire aims far
new column is up, entitled 'the empire aims far'.
25.09.04
review: garden state
no spoilers.
random thought #2 - the track from the thievery corporation reminded of of the one time that i was let in past all the lines of people waiting, and across the red ropes into a thievery concert, and had me get a close look at the vodka-by-the-liter drinking mafiosos of new york's unattainable high society.
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 14:06
i feel the same way about sad/depressing movies, and songs, for the same reasons--makes you feel less alone. to the right person, a very sad movie/song can actually be uplifting.
- cynthia
more somerville rats
Mon, 27 Sep 2004 13:28
you saw it, but did you smell it? i unfortunately smell about one a month. ugh.
- cynthia
how about the eat less pizza and exercise diet?
someone told me that ¼ of americans are on a low-carb diet.
i don't know if that's true, but judging by the cereal-box and fast-food restaurant index, it might well be. if kellogs come out with a low-carb cereal and even burger king have a low-carb menu, everyone wants low carb (not to mention low-carb beer).
on the other hand, my instincts tell me that if burger king and budweiser are supporting something, i should probably steer clear away from it.
but really, i commend anyone who has the discipline to be on any diet. chapeau.
for me, in the past, only the eat the fuck less pizza and chocolate and exercise daily diet really worked out.
'but it's scientifically proven!' you say.
which reminds me of the old joke, in which this guy hits on a gal, and tells her that his watch can read her mind. and now it tells him that she has no underwear on. 'wrong' says the lady. to which the man counters 'damn, it's an hour fast'
at the rate that diet science moves, i'm always on the scientifically proven diet. my watch is only a few months off.
24.09.04
is boston the fucking lamest city i ever lived in?
yes, it is.
where else can i go out to meet someone at a bar on a friday night at 1am, just to be told that they're closing. and i love how they turn the lights up superbright to drive everyone out, and you have a bunch of people standing outside, not tired, still chatting with nowhere else to go.
oh, and public transportation is already closed, of course...now you can get a cab for $10/mile.
Sat, 25 Sep 2004 19:30
be thankful you have someone to meet at 1am. if your biggest problem is the time bars close, you've got it pretty good.
- cynthia
Sun, 26 Sep 2004 01:29
amen to that.
- Udi
Sun, 6 Feb 2005 10:16
ahhhhh so it soooooooo boring there??? should i open a BAR next to your home?
i will do millions of dollars no?
if everything is empty or closed, and i stay open and everyone will be there.... ha great idea
- hoffman
the stupidity of airport security
it's almost as if, whenever we wanted to send an email, we would have to fill out a form saying that we are not sending spam, and that our attachments are safe, and that we are aware that our email can be read, then we would have to click through 4 pages of disclaimers, and finally we would have to move all our executables from the desktop to another folder.
only then could we send the email.
the economics of airport wheels
remember when airport luggage cars were free?
it was also when almost nobody had those funky wheeled suitcases. the expense of putting wheels underneath your luggage was covered by the airport.
then they decided to charge a rental fee for those carts. and suddenly people didn't really need them anymore. oh it's just a short walk, and a little exercise wouldn't kill you.
who ever paid for those carts? who pays for them now? i've never seen one in usage at the airports where they cost money.
but people really like wheeling their luggage, and they don't like carrying it. it's not worth $5, but it's definitely worth something. so then the market opened for those wheely bags, and gradually - everyone got them.
so now instead of having a certain amount of luggage wheels when you need them, everyone buys their own set of wheels.
and now we're back to almost where we started, except the economy has shifted. there's still wheels underneath every suitcase, they just have been privatized, in true republican spirit. to each his own wheels. take responsibility for your life and money.
instead of everyone paying another $1 in airport taxes for everyone's wheels, we all pay another $20 when we buy the suitcase and then we have our own wheels.
i'm sure there's a better way to say all this, but i can't think of it.
chicago was fun
so chicago was fun after all. i expected the worst, another boring american city, another boring hilton. giving a talk, attending a conference with nasa geeks. missing class, parties, dinners, indiana jones.
and then i ended up really enjoying the city. as far as american cities go, it's a fun place to hang out.
which comes to show, as so often, that no matter how good or bad something is -- the time we spend worrying about it is always time lost in vain.
22.09.04
dust eyes
don't ask me yet where this is from, but it's too good to keep from you:
Although robots defuse or in the laboratory personally with pipettes jonglieren today long dwellings dust eyes, bombs, the way to the philanthropic art nature is far.
Thu, 23 Sep 2004 11:33
sounds like spam poetry to me
- cynthia
Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:44
it's a google translation of something that's yet unpublished...
- guy
20.09.04
firefox 1.0 out
another important one for fans of blogs (that means you) is that firefox 1.0 has 'live bookmarks' that are basically bookmarks to all the recent entries of your fav blog. pages that have an rss feed <link>ed on them get a cute icon to add the feed to their live bookmarks.
i even changed my code to make it work with that feature.
for solidarity with my main browser for the last 2 years or so, i even changed my motd to promote the fox.
changed old motd
"behind every failure is enthusiasm, perseverence, the
spirit of adventure, the courage of men. and these qualities
are also those that lead to success"
-- antoine dumas
a buzz on mars
that oddity called life has teleported me to the chicago hilton, to a nasa conference, where i'm scouring among people in white button-down shirts and black ties, and where sessions start at oh-eight-hundred hours.
outside lures chicago with its deep-pan pizzas and marquee lights and elevated trains and ornate facades, bustling like a über-stylish mini-new york city in the midwest.
so far the coolest thing i've heard about is nasa looking seriously - and by that i mean seriously - into insects for ideas on how to built navigation systems for miniature aerial rovers that scout out regions of interest on mars and its moons.
16.09.04
dem somerville rats sure are big
this is what stood in my way on the sidewalk of my street today:
am i living in the jungle now?
btw for those of you who - like me - have never seen a raccoon before, it's about the size of a medium dog (smaller than a lab, but fatter), and it looks at you in this strange way, standing calmly on the sidewalk, noticing that you're a foreigner and enjoying the fact that you have no clue if this is a dangerously biting animal or a cute cuddly pet.
it then moves slowly aside, never taking its gaze off your eyes.
we both moved very cautiously.
Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:34
ha--one night a few months ago there was a terrifying-sounding fight between a racoon and a possum in our back yard ... the screams were so terrifying i went out there the next day expecting to find a bloody carcass, but there was nothing.
- cynthia
film, nostalgia, boston, religion
raiders: the adaptation in boston
some kids did a shot-by-shot remake of raider of the lost arc.
now that might seem like a smart idea when you're 11 years old. but 6 years later, when the film is finally shot, seeing all of your puberty in 90 minutes might not be the greatest of thrills.
a cult in the making, there's a one-off screening at the coolidge on monday.
will i go? no.
because instead of cheering for indiana jones who looks 11 in one shot and 17 in the next, i have to be in chicago dipping carrots in low-fat sauce with some nasa geeks.
god doesn't like me this week.
or maybe he's just angry at me for my new theory, which can be summed up as 'if god wanted me to be religious, he would have made me religious.'
mit.edu by yours truly
my design for the mit homepage is up today.
update: severeal mit bright minds asked me what it was and correctly guessed that it's a model t engine. here's the original scan.
update: my 13 hours of fame are over. stupid of me to not have taken a screenshot. this is the best i can do.
update: the nice people of the mit homepage sent me a screenshot.
Thu, 16 Sep 2004 11:21
very cool!
- cynthia
Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:52
nice design, in a-cool-deconstructivist-i-was-trained-in-new-york kind of way. even more, it doesn't make me think of carrots...
- jodi
Fri, 17 Sep 2004 03:58
Remove the link no one reads the update untill time is spent inside the link seaarching for model t engine
- skeptic
Fri, 17 Sep 2004 07:39
yes sir!
for a skeptic, i never cease to be amazed on how quickly you draw conclusions from one single person to a universal generalization.
- guy
15.09.04
unlearning me
it's not news to me that it takes time to get used to my sense of humor. what i didn't know was how quickly you can unlearn it.
paula just came back from a summer in california, admittedly a notoriously humorless place (see: hollywood comedies). within the single hour of our first conversation, i had to clarify no less than twice that i was kidding.
maybe it's also because she was dating hotties this summer, another notoriously humorless sector.
Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:04
hey! I liked that movie.
- udi
Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:19
i'm sorry to hear that. did you think it was humorous?
- guy
Thu, 16 Sep 2004 09:09
actually, at last night's dinner, i learned that someone else thought that that movie was great. taste varies widely i guess.
- guy
Thu, 16 Sep 2004 11:06
Last night, after hearing warm recommendations from some ivy-league intellectuals, I watched the 2001 Ben Stiller movie "Zoolander". It made another movie Stiller made with Owen Wilson that I saw - Starsky&Hutch - seem like a highbrow art film. Taste does vary widely.
- Udi
robots: flesh-eating and water-walking
maybe i'm just too close, but it seems to me that robots are going to turn out to be the big tech boom of this decade.
two more robot stories:
CMU (with some MIT help) made a robot that walks on water
and a british robot lives off the carcasses of flies, which it attracts with the use of human feces.
journalism, cite, nostalgia, america, israel
happy new year
on the occasion of the jewish new year, haaretz came out with a special issue today about israelis and the world, entitled made in israel - israelis without borders.
i was supposed to write a piece for that, but ended up not having the time (the story of my life?)
anyway, seems like there are some interesting articles there, and starting to read one of yuval ben-ami's pieces (haaretz's correspondent in boston), i came across this quote, citing a daughter of an israeli couple that moved to new haven. she has never lived in israel, but misses 'home'.
in a short quote she manages to both explain what's weird about living in the u.s, how israeli she is, and how not israeli she really is.
the things i like most when i visit in israel, are the simple things. like when i tell them 'my name is yael', they say 'ah, cool, yael', and when i say 'i am moroccan', people get a little scared.
- scared?
no, i'm kidding, you know, moroccan, knives, gotta be careful. i'm just kidding. in israel they get what 'moroccan' means. when i tell people here 'my name is yael', a whole saga starts of me trying to teach them my name. and when i tell them 'i am moroccan', they say 'ah, how interesting. where's morocco?'
may your new year be blessed with great love and small moments of happiness.
14.09.04
fast car
one of my favorite snipplets of lyrics in the whole wide world
city lights lay out before us
and your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulder
and I had a feeling that I belonged
and I had a feeling I could be someone
the new 줏?
now, everyone with a jewish or a korean mother and some knowledge about the other kind knows that there is a deep cultural relationship between these two types. oversimplifying, it's a heritage of guilt, mixed messages and passive-aggressiveness.
Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:01
I'm sure I heard this theory about a year ago. I forgot from who.
- Udi
Wed, 22 Sep 2004 21:02
Interesting I had a similar discussion about how the indians are the new jews... for reasons to long to cite here.
- Ady
Mon, 1 Nov 2004 19:34
-
13.09.04
voice mail
but you probably knew that, if only based on their advertisement spin, that's always so hip and cool and 'now' and motion blurred and pastel blue on a white background.
Tue, 14 Sep 2004 00:41
There's another explanation, based on greed rather then incompetence. The cellular service providers (rather then the phone manufacturers) have much to gain from the older interface, since it significantly lengthen the time you're on the phone with your voice mail server.
Since the service providers decide which phones to support and market......
- skeptic
Tue, 14 Sep 2004 01:16
i thought about this, but seriously doubt that that's the incentive, at least in the US, and certainly not for the landlines.
checking your voicemail accounts for an insignificant amount of your calls.
- guy
new column: when napster took cornell
12.09.04
non-add people
seriously, i'm amazed by people who don't have an attention disorder. turns out i don't know too many people like that.
i could watch them for hours -- er, if i could sit still for hours, that is. the way they just sit and write a document for two hours without getting up, without checking email, without fixing a sandwhich.
the way they get a new gadget in the mail, and don't open it for days, when they find the time for it.
i should probably go back to do what i really need to do.
the 'shut the fuck up' feature
Try structuring your Instant Messages to contain everything youd like to say (within reason) within each message. To put it simply, dont answer in 5 messages what you could have answered in 1.
Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:46
that's never happened to me on yahoo, is it a better system?
- cynthia
Sun, 12 Sep 2004 19:41
i'm guessing it is. in general, yahoo have great programmers, and their systems are usually very stable, if not always feature-rich.
i have had yahoo lose parts of my conversation without telling me about it - that's even more confusing.
- guy
10.09.04
new (old?) column: where fish drive
totally forgot but last tuesday, as every week, my column came up, entitled 'where fish drive. it was an absentee look at 'ars electronica'.
cross-eyed signs of lovesickness
saw a cross-eyed girl on the subway and fell in love with her. i thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world.
i can't tell by looking at a picture if i think a woman is beautiful, it's a message i'm getting from deep inside me when i am in her presence. i look at her, and this something or someone in my stomach tells me that she's beautiful. all i do is listen and obey.
when i am attracted to a woman, the image that rises in my mind is not of me having wild sex with her, it's me waking up next to her on a sunday morning and touching her face with the back of my hand.
and then having wild sex with her.
09.09.04
overheard subway conversation
- i keep wanting his mom to come into starbucks, so that i can tell her that i'd be the best daughter in law she can imagine. maybe then she'll tell him to call me.
08.09.04
a.s. neill in jerusalem
so i let the crowd walk alone up the street to the theater, and i just turned back.
Wed, 8 Sep 2004 12:29
that's beautiful.
- cynthia
Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:00
It is lovely abd I nearly believe it and of cource was very curious who is this "women".....I never heard about
- tatiana
07.09.04
first 10 digit prime number
saw an ad near mit. it was basically just a big banner saying
'{ FIRST 10 DIGIT PRIME IN CONSECUTIVE DIGITS OF E }.COM'
weird, but they got the audience right.
is seems to be an ad campaign leading to jobs at the google lab.
Tue, 7 Sep 2004 13:58
how did you figure that out?
- udi
Tue, 7 Sep 2004 16:04
i didn't. that's what the collective hive-mind called the internet seems to think. and it makes sense.
- guy
Tue, 7 Sep 2004 19:38
I noted that in his excitement, the poster on fogcreek couldn't spell "mysterious..."
- jodi
and number two is
02.09.04
kiwifruit
just in case you didn't know,
One serving of two medium-sized kiwifruit offers:
- Far more nutrition than an apple, with fewer calories and more dietary fiber, vitamin A precursors, vitamin C, calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus and iron.
- More than twice as much vitamin C as an orange.
- More dietary fiber and vitamin C than a peach or a serving of strawberries.
- Measurable amounts of other nutrients, including vitamin B6, niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin A precursors, calcium, iron, phosphorus, magnesium, copper and pantothenic acid.
assembly line
helped someone move today, and at some point i encouraged my fellow movers (there were four of us) to switch to assembly line style: one person will unload the truck, one will get it to the door, one from the ground to second floor and the last from the second to the third floor.
Thu, 2 Sep 2004 21:08
I don't know if you noticed, but we ended up doing just that when we moved your stuff a few weekends ago. I didn't think of all those reasons, but it still felt like the better thing to do.
- Udi
Thu, 2 Sep 2004 21:13
yeah of course i noticed, it's what gave me the idea today.
- guy
Thu, 2 Sep 2004 21:14
and i only thought about the reasons on my way back, trying to figure out why it worked so well.
- guy
Fri, 3 Sep 2004 08:25
so who was stuck with the task of taking everything upstairs?
- cynthia
Sun, 5 Sep 2004 19:32
I agree it worked better. Although it did seem that taking the stuff up the stairs was a more difficult task than getting it off the truck.
- oren
new imacs
not exactly breaking news anymore, but the new imacs are pretty sweet. just had to explain to another person why macs are the right choice, and i'm getting a little tired of it.
what i find amazing about the new imac campaign is that apple is marketing it almost as a large-size ipod. i guess they try to appeal to the huge ipod crowd that doesn't use macs, which is smart (who would have thought that a once mac accessory would some day become a mac incentive). but it's definitely weird when you think of a computer as being sold as an oversized music player.
01.09.04
josh kinberg arrested
josh kinberg, who i wrote about a few weeks ago has been arrested for his project, on which he has been really working hard for a long time now.
wired claims that
Joshua Kinberg, the 25-year-old creator of Bikes Against Bush, was arrested on charges of criminal mischief and criminal possession of graffiti instruments, according to Sgt. Mary Christine Doherty of the New York City Police Department.
'criminal possession of graffiti instruments'?
you can get updates on his arrest and how to help him on his site. there's even a long video of his arrest. in which he's wearing our program's t-shirt.
months, months.
funny liberal shout from the rnc, as a response to their 'four more years' slogan: 'four more months'
airline movies: memento-miracle and spartan
thing was the airplane entertainment system kept crashing, so every 5 or 10 minutes you had to re-choose the movie and the crew only sort of knew where the movie stopped when the system went down.
the difficult way home
coming back this time was not easy. stepping off from a near-12-hour journey nursing an annoying cold, the first thing i notice are the usual american cultural icons that make me shake my head in disbelief:
Thu, 2 Sep 2004 11:25
i feel similarly every time i come home from a visit with my friends in nyc. not so much the cultural issues of course, just the longing. it's more of a mental space than a physical one.
what are your objections to "COMMUTER RAIL THIS WAY"?
- cynthia
Thu, 2 Sep 2004 19:55
just the all caps. what's wrong with "Commuter Rail this way"? so much more gentle.
- guy
Fri, 3 Sep 2004 08:22
ha--true. i think it's the frustration of workers who deal with the public showing through...after being asked enough times where the commuter rail is, even their signs start shouting...
- cynthia
Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:24
at least I read something about the wedding! And about you! I still appretiate the internet - it provides me some insights about your in - head and sharing some of your thoughts - that I miss so much - love Ima
- ima
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content here by guy hoffman .. as seen times since march 2004
