#Found these really cool artist in a designboom article about Show Off in Paris. Katinka Lampe paints oil on canvas portraits, and they’re awesome. I like this one below for the hair. It looks like a vector drawing, right?
A few weeks ago I finished the Rabbit novels by John Updike. I’d started reading them summer after freshman year and I’ve had volumes 3 and 4 on my bookshelf for almost two years now.
I don’t mean to write a review, but I want to mention that Rabbit at Rest might be the best book I’ve ever read. It capstoned the series so perfectly. I was amazed at how much new and unexpected it brought to the series while staying perfectly true to the characters Updike created decades earlier. It also did a great job of depicting a changing America and one middle American’s place in it. I must admit that much of my familiarity with American history over the past few decades comes from reading Updike.
The part of the series that will always stick with me the most, though, is Janice’s frustration over seeing Rabbit change from the young hero, destined for great things, to just another mediocre commoner. Each step of Rabbit’s degradation resulted from his merely making the easiest choice he could, and the reader see where that road inevitably ends: mediocrity.
Since finishing Rabbit I’ve read The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, The Road, and now I’m on The Kite Runner. I could seriously, seriously use an uplifting read if anyone has any recommendations.
Yesterday around 11am I got an email at work from a ticket company that a surprise show featuring Foals and Wolf Parade was happening that night at Neumo’s. I had just heard Foals for the first time last weekend on the KEXP live show podcast and I pretty much dug them. And I definitely like Wolf Parade. Apparently all the scene kids in Seattle knew who was playing tonight but it was a surprise to me.
Chloé was kind enough to be dragged to the show with me. She claims the hellish hipster depths of Capitol Hill are not for her, but she did fine. The show absolutely rocked. Foals was even better than I expected. They might be 18 years old. It’s weirding me out that musicians I see at shows are often younger than me. Foals really got the crowd into it; there were definitely lots of people there just to see them.
Seattlites seriously impressed me with their rocking out, also. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a crowd so completely into a show, or so completely drunk. Everyone was jumping around and rocking out, and those are my favorite kinds of shows.
I have set myself a goal of making Silverlight and the DLR the premier method of scripting the web. I love JavaScript, but I love Python more and I like the freedom to choose languages and paradigms most of all.
So I started this afternoon since I bugged out of work early for a doctor’s appointment. I only have a Mac at home, and although I virtualize Vista on my machine I want to do all of this development in OS X since most of the leet haxors I know use OS X.
I was expecting some hassle here for sure. I downloaded and compiled mono, which was a bit of a pain but I basically followed this post. I recommend you just download the dmg instead (more on that later). Then I got the SDK, which is packaged as a separate release until SL 2 is RTW. Turns out starting an app is as simple as this:
> script/sl [ruby|python|jscript] <application_name>
> script/server /b
And a a sample page of your control pops up in your browser, served by the .NET app Chiron. The XAP is generated on the fly. If you’re developing alongside a backend framework like django then just plan to serve your XAP and scripts off of a separate port and everything is easy.
Basically I’m way impressed that this is so easy; the only hiccup I had was that Chiron would mysteriously 500 while trying to generate the XAP. The first thing I tried in order to debug it was switching to the packaged binary of mono instead of the built from trunk version, and it started working immediately. Not a big problem. So stay tuned while I try to develop some traditional webapp building blocks in dynamic languages + Silverlight.
[on an unrelated note, I just noticed that this site looks like ass on IE. sorry about that, I'll fix it as soon as I have time. I just got Vista running at home a few days ago.]
Simple dish with Mediterranean leanings. The dill really made the dish, in my opinion.
Found the recipe on epicurious.
How many times have you been in a conversation that ended up on a somewhat technical or scientific topic and then had half the participants turn their heads in disgust. “I’m a humanities major, I don’t want to hear about that.” Why do they do this?
Can you imagine if a friend started talking about the election and I said, “I’m a programmer, I have no interest in politics.”? I basically can’t imagine a topic that I would be so averse to that I would immediately tune out of a conversation about. I even enjoy Folahan’s drunken rants on hermeneutics and Joyce and Nabokov. I would never, ever want to talk to someone who would lower themselves by turning away a conversation on one of these topics. So why do so many people, even those allegedly given a liberal education at Stanford University, shun topics of a scientific nature so vigorously?
Actually I don’t really care about the answer to that question. I just want them to stop it.
I used to work on a product called PicLens; it’s a real snazzy Firefox plugin that provides a 3D wall-ish view of photo albums online (and more). I think they’ve solved a tough problem about Firefox plugins: authorizing the install. Check out the site, click Download, and watch the animation on top. I think even someone who didn’t know what a Firefox extension is at all could install it.
