Vlissides

I just read on Lambda the Ultimate that John Vlissides, co-author of the well-known Design Patterns book, just passed away. I talked to John a few times when I was at IBM, and ended up co-authoring a paper with him. I remember him giving me good advice on grad. school the first time I met him; he told me how he worked insanely hard (16 hours days) as a grad. student, and how (not unsurprisingly) it turned out to be a bad idea. He also gave me a free copy of Design Patterns, which I thought was really nice of him. Anyway, he was a really good writer and a very nice guy, and I was sad to see the news of his passing.

"I'm da boss"

I just finished watching Raging Bull for the first time in a while; what an incredibly powerful film. The very last moments, where La Motta repeatedly mutters "I'm da boss" while shadowboxing, reminded me in some remote way of the ending of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Both endings take a small piece of thematic material, emblematic of the work as a whole, and fade away while repeating it more times than one would expect. When the work finally does end, the audience is left with a sublime echo that resonates more deeply as one reflects on the work as a whole. Anyway, just a random connection that popped into my head.

"I Come From Lake Titicaca, Nicaragua"

Slate has a nice review of the new Beavis and Butt-Head DVD release. It's too bad they couldn't get all the music videos, though, as they often had the most brilliant observations.

Microloans

I just saw this site Kiva, which looks really cool. It allows you to loan money to small businesses in the developing world, and get paid back if/when the business succeeds. It looks like all their businesses are funded now, but I put myself on the mailing list for when they find more.

TV on DVD

This sounds familiar. And yet again, one must ask: why no mention of The Wire, which is at least as marathon-inducing as any of these shows?

Rosen on Recording

Here's an interesting book review by Charles Rosen of Performing Music in the Age of Recording. It made me feel bad that I don't perform music nearly as much as I used to; I really need to get a piano.

Catching Up

It looks like Alex Ross is catching up on episodes of The Wire, and he comes to the same conclusion I did a few months back. Yet another confirmation of his good taste :)

Doctor Atomic reviews

I thought I'd collect links to reviews of Doctor Atomic as I find them. I'll try to update this list as I see more reviews. Maybe I'll add my own after I see it :). Alex Ross has some cool stuff up on the opera too.

• Los Angeles Times
• Bay Buzz
• SF Chronicle
• New York Times

Best-Of Compilations

When I used to watch a lot of television, I can remember seeing certain commercials for "best-of" compilations (like Ultimate '70s or Piano by Candlelight Platinum) so many times that the little song excerpts would merge in my head into a new song. Even now, I can still remember chunks of songs from some '50s love songs compilation commercial I saw in elementary school, and I cringe when I think about it. I always found it jarring when I'd here the full version of some song that I only knew through an excerpt from one of these commercials. It was almost always disappointing; my brain was so used to the commercial that the real song seemed worse than a chunk of it in the context of the commercial. Or perhaps the song had been built up too much by being associated solely with a "best-of" collection. Anyway, not sure if others have experienced this; just a random thought.

A Little School Pride

It looks like MIT came out first in the new Washington Monthly college rankings, which emphasize both academics and service to the community (also covered in The Tech). The statistics used to compute these rankings are not ideal, as acknowledged in the article, but it still seems like a good idea to me. Hopefully they'll be able to find better ways to measure service in the future and MIT will stay close to the top.

I've been meaning to write a couple of other posts; I'll hopefully get to them soon.

Saul Bass Titles

You can view stills from a bunch of titles done by Saul Bass here. I posted on Saul Bass before (but the link in that post is broken). Cool stuff.

More on Diet Coke

Here is a page that breaks down the various diet versions of Coke, vaguely related to a post of mine from a while back.

Poor Guy

Check out the White House press briefing [RealPlayer link] where Scott McClellan tries to dodge questions about Karl Rove. He's not very good at it, and it's just kind of sad to watch.

On del.icio.us

After hearing about del.icio.us for a while, I decided to get an account, and it's pretty cool. Now I can easily access links to my online bills / accounts and technical papers that I check from time to time. I've also been trying to bookmark things I think are worth reading; it's for cases where I don't feel like writing a blog post about an article or posting it on NewsDog, but I still think others may want to take a look. There are RSS feeds on all the pages, although the only one I imagine anyone else would want to track is the last one. Anyway, good stuff.

ForecastFox and Berkeley library proxy

Here's something that about 0 of you care about. I use the ForecastFox extension in Firefox to show the upcoming weather, and I also use the UC Berkeley library proxy to access certain web sites from outside school. Unfortunately, the proxy configuration script lists AccuWeather, the site ForecastFox uses, as one that needs to go through the proxy, thereby necessitating a login to the proxy server every time I want the weather forecast to show up. To fix this, I changed the script to not access AccuWeather through the proxy server; here is the altered script. Just use that link as your proxy configuration URL instead of the standard one, and you should be set.

Obligatory Stella Review

I just watched the first episode of the new Stella show on Comedy Central, and given that my blog is called Raking Leaves (Quicktime link), I figured I should comment. To put it briefly, it's funny, and still weird in that Stella way, but it just didn't have the impact that I was hoping for. Stella's lunacy just doesn't work as well over 22 minutes as it does in 2 minute sketches. And, I agree with this Dana Stevens review that this stuff might be too weird to get big ratings. But, don't get me wrong; the episode had really funny moments, and I'm definitely going to watch whenever I can. And, I know from experience that Stella gets funnier after a few viewings, so maybe I'll take another look at the first episode sometime soon.

The Wire Season 3

I just finished watching it, in spite of my current massive workload. I'd say that in the end, it didn't quite match Season 2, mostly because it was a bit too sprawling. To really appreciate Season 3, you need to remember Season 1 and some of Season 2 in a fair amount of detail. The amount of mental effort required to try to track all the plot connections detracts from the impact of the episodes. I imagine that upon a second viewing of all three seasons things would connect in a deeper way, but that's 37 hours of television, which is beyond even an addict like myself. Also, I didn't find the running theme of politics in the third season to be quite as compelling as the inside look at union workers from the second season. Nevertheless, Season 3 is definitely worth watching if you've seen and liked the first two.

Cable Choice

I heard this interview with Tim Winter, director of the Parents Television Council, yesterday on the radio. From the things I had previously heard and read about the PTC, I assumed this guy would be some sort of nut, but he was actually fairly well-spoken and reasonable. I was pleased to hear that his group wants to deal with objectionable content on cable by allowing consumers to only pay for the channels they want. This solution would also solve my problem of wanting HBO, but not wanting to pay $50 for the other 200 channels on digital cable that I'll never watch. Anyway, even though some of what he said was BS, he seemed thoughtful, which was a pleasant surprise.

New Tristan

This is funny. It's related to this earlier post.

PDF e-books

You can get free e-books in PDF format here. Normally these things are a pain to read on a computer screen, but the typesetting in the PDF helps a bit. And, on my Tablet PC it's actually pretty comfortable to read longer documents, so this site should come in handy.