Tiny Story #1
Dating

Start here. You totally don’t know me. Shed away all those conceived pretensions; like flicking off curly cue lizard skins found roasting in an Arizona mesa. 108F. Everyday. Yes, I am the happiest man alive. I live in the shadows of Miller. Not Paris, but NYC.

Empty the cortex. Reboot, re-wire, it’s a big ball of mush. It will take you to the end of the earth, to pass the universe and scramble you, the first time she walks into the room. 69 words. What is the big deal, you’ll be dead some day.

Yep, I have to say it LOUD. You’re dealing with a mass of constantly swirling progesterone, testosterone (yep, she loaded on that one too, surprise!), throw in some oxytocin (that oxytocin, not oxycontin, sorry), phases of an August moon and 50Khz vibrations (that’s how rats find each other; and you 2 is my bet) and you can ready to enter the nyc dating scene. fun? No, it shall be sad. Sad, yes, oh so sad too. Dating life 101, NYC style.

It’s not worth it kids. Fuck the “it’s better to love then to never have loved at all”, crap. That’s like saying a sharp stick in the eye beats getting hit in the head with a hammer. I know, I’ve been there. I’m telling you. Don’t do it. You’ve been warned. Get a dog. You will be much happier. 9/10 guys seem to agree with me on this one.

So I devoured in a mad frenzy this weekend a New York Times Sunday Magazine article digesting over 30 years of male and female sexuality research by the worlds leading experts. They have fucking 30 years worth of data!

What did I learn?
Well, take it for what it’s worth: Women are in a constant state of sexual frenzy, ready to leap on any standing male that has at least a drop of red blood still curing through his veins, while men are as dumb as a box of burnt hair and that’s even saying a lot for burnt hair. They have 30 years of research to back up their claims. I could have told them that in 60 seconds. If this is all true why isn’t that brunette that caught your eye on the A train stalking you down a dimly lit alley? You looked at her a second time and she gave you that New York girl WFT, don’t even look at me again mother fucker_ cold stare. Ok, that’s not really her talking. It’s thousands of years of evolutionary biology that has taken it’s toll on her psyche. Not much you can do about it. Maybe things are better in an alternative universe. It all has to do with the prevailing social order repressing her limitless sexuality, she has to be totally shut down sexually or else Pandora’s box would open. That’s all there is to it. (It’s in the bible, believe brothers & sisters, just believe) Options?

I guess you have to move to France. I heard things are way better there. NYC is a tough nut to crack. It’s that Puritan thing.

I’m back blogging. The crew is saying, Ed less talk, just GO!  And what a great piece to start with.  Loving it!

The New York Times’ $50 Million Paywall Crumbles With Simple Code ExploitAfter spending such a hefty sum, Times executives might be a little more than peeved that a simple Javascript exploit has been found that can smash right through the paywall.

via The New York Times’ $50 Million Paywall Crumbles With Simple Code Exploit | Media | AlterNet.

Such a great story. I love it!

Derrick Wiggins, 44, began his daily tweeting at 5:41 Wednesday morning, and it wasn’t about the quality of his French roast coffee or his favorite “American Idol” contestant.

It was to let his roughly 3,800 followers know that he had woken up safely in the New York City Rescue Mission, a drop-in shelter on Lafayette Street, and eaten breakfast there.

His next message, at 6:03 a.m., outlined his immediate plans: “It is going to be a cold day my plans are to minimize the amount of exposure to the cold by making use of the subway.”

Mr. Wiggins’s Twitter handle is @awitness2011, and the profile on his Twitter page explains that he is “tweeting from a prepaid cell phone.” It identifies him as “A native New Yorker and a Giants fan. Homeless.”

A Life on the Streets, Captured on Twitter – NYTimes.com.

I have been FASCINATED with ants forever. They are 40,000 years ahead of us.

The fate of most ant larvae—that is, whether an individual insect grows up to be a worker or a queen—depends largely on the quality and the amount of food they receive from the other ants in the colony. But in a few rare species, an ant’s future social “caste’’ rests solely within its genes.

All ant species establish colonies ruled by a queen, sometimes several queens, who are the only members of the colony who can mate and reproduce.  For most ants, the destiny of the queens’ offspring usually is determined by food, possibly with some input from genes. But in a few “minority’’ ant groups—ant scientists have discovered only five species so far—genetic composition alone is the deciding factor.

Ants: Clues to Human Development – US News and World Report.

When I feel a meltdown coming on, I think of creative ways to do
myself in. I picture a solitary walk into the churning surf on some
nearby New England coast. A beach still in hibernation, ready to
bounce and shimmer in July’s blistering haze, but for now I am the only
soul on the sands. Rainbow umbrellas, creamy coconut scented lotions
and sexy bikinis are still 6 months away.

The frigid winter months seem like the best of times to check out to
me. A chilly jump into the surf, discarded winter clothes leaving a
trail for friends to try to interpret. Did he take off his shoes
first? Where are his socks? Why did he leave his coat here, but his shirt
there? It all seems so confusing.

I know once I reach the shore, I’ll be chilled to the bone, my mind
will slow down to one thought, followed by another, slower and slower
as the outcome becomes crystal clear. My first steps into the surf
shock me back to life, but no turning back now.

As I take the first and final plunge, I feel a sense of peace. All the
life’s lived, experiences taken, friends never to see again, pass as a
movie through tightly clenched eyes. As I sink into the waves, there
is peace. Total and utter peace. And then I go down, meeting up at last
with the ocean population. Becoming one with the place where I was
born. Where we all were born. In the cold, deep blue sea. And then
I drift away with the new moon tides.

This is a classic programmers problem. That pesky Daylight Savings time!

A report out of Australia notes that the Alarm Clock application Apple ships on the iPhone and iPod touch began waking users up an hour early in the southern region of the continent — New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria, and Tasmania — because a bug caused the software not to fall back an hour when changes to daylight savings time kicked in one Sunday ago.

AppleInsider | Apple says iOS software update to fix pesky alarm clock bug.

This is worth checking out. The early days, most have been wild.

Douglas Engelbart, A research center for augmenting human intellect (1968)

From Wikipedia: The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart’s December 9, 1968, demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) at the Convention Center in San Francisco, in which a number of experimental technologies that have since become commonplace were presented. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, hypertext and a collaborative real-time editor.

The IxD Library » Blog Archive » The Mother of All Demos – A collection of materials related to Interaction Design.

Looks cool. I’m sure you’ll be a Bar Guru if you practice, practice! But a $1000? That’s a lot of brews.

BarMax: Harvard lawyers teamed with top iPhone developers to produce BarMax, the only complete bar exam prep course (2 months of lectures, Calendar and Task List to Keep You Organized, Unlimited Personal Attention/Support from BarMax, Essay, MBE, Performance Test, and Flash Cards) available for purchase in the iPhone App Store. Plus it is the only course with 1,371 REAL previous MBE questions, and over 100 REAL previous essay exams.

BarMax

via BarMax.

Wow, some way cool visualization by way of FourSquare interpertation. Where the hipsters are.

In these maps, activity on the Foursquare network is aggregated onto a grid of ‘walkable’ cells (each one 400×400 meters in size) represented by dots. The size of each dot corresponds to the level of activity in that cell. By this process we can see social centers emerge in each city.

via Archipelago | URBAGRAM.

Wow, some way cool (Geek Out!) visualizations here:

This is another one of my rare technical posts, as opposed to news of which countries I’ve been visiting.

If you’re in computer science, you’ve probably seen an animation of sorting algorithms, maybe heard a rendition, or seen a visual representation. I have, somewhat by accident, discovered a different way to visualise a sorting algorithm: plot points for memory accesses, with address on the X axis and time (counted by accesses) on the Y axis, and different colours for reads and writes. It produces some rather pretty pictures. Note that these are not to scale relative to each other – the Y axis has been compressed to fit the entire sort into a fixed height.

via Entropy always increases: Visualising sorting algorithms.