Out of Cheese

Team RadiKS posted another FoBiK writeup. This one’s really good, since they wrote most of it as they were playing. It gives you a great idea of what goes through our minds as we’re in the middle of a Game.

I actually thought of doing something similar for FoBiK — I was going to put a copy of Radio on my PowerBook and blog the Game live. The catch, of course, is that other teams could use it to catch up to us. Perhaps I’ll try to set something up for the next Game that time-delays my posts. We’ll see.

If you think that modern art is simply too weird for you to appreciate it, take a look at Styrogami. Styrogami might be more interesting in a general sense than artistically beautiful, but either way, there’s something intrinsically pleasing about the concept of taking a generic styrofoam cup and turning it into something visually appealing.

The Boston Globe has an article about the man behind the art form. He apparently started it all while bored in a meeting at work many years ago….

Neil Gaiman is having computer problems. Here’s a quote from today’s entry in his journal:

The computer saga. So far, today has brought a computer-generated e-mail from Dell letting me know that their artificial intelligence unit has scanned my problem report (the computer is completely dead) and it suspects that I may be having keyboard problems. It offers several solutions to a sticky or problematic keyboard and hopes that I am now happy. If that doesn’t solve my problems I should reply again. I’ve replied again.

Several of you have suggested I switch to a Mac. Although, on reflection, many of the Macs I have known in my life have demonstrated a capacity to go wrong in strange and interesting ways that PCs are still struggling for.

Personally I am much more inclined to switch to a pen and paper. I would no longer be emailable, people would have to write me actual letters. I wouldn’t even post this journal for you to read any longer. Instead, people would come round to your house in the morning and recite it to you, with appropriate and meaningful gestures, and to the delight of your neighbours.

The New York Times mentions that absentee ballots in Minnesota that are returned with votes for Paul Wellstone won’t count as votes for whomever is named to replace him…but those same ballots will count if they contain votes for Norm Coleman.

Something seems very wrong about that. You’ll have potentially thousands of ballots which will be filled out by voters believing their vote will be counted, when in fact it won’t be…but it only won’t be counted if they voted for a specific person. I can’t imagine how that’s legal. At the same time, you can’t legitimately assume that every vote for Wellstone is a vote for his replacement. And there’s simply not enough time to reprint absentee ballots and mail the new copies out to every voter. So I’m not sure what a good solution is, but failing to count certain ballots unless they’re votes for Norm Coleman can’t be the best option.

Congratulations to the Anaheim Angels, who beat the San Francisco Giants tonight to win Game 7 of a terrific World Series. I didn’t know who to root for in the Series — the Angels, who had gone so long without once winning a world championship, or the Giants, with Barry Bonds and Dusty Baker so deserving of a win. In the end, it was a hard-fought battle, and the Giants came oh-so-close to winning before the Angels rallied late in Game 6.

Of course, the most important thing about the Series was that the Yankees didn’t take part. Without them in the running, I didn’t really have anyone to root against.

A week after FoBiK, the writeups are starting to appear online. The best I’ve seen so far is from Stephanie of Team Pandamonium. Meanwhile, I just posted our pictures from Team Mystic Fish. Enjoy!

Paul Wellstone died today, under circumstances eerily reminiscent of the death of Mel Carnahan just before the 2000 elections. Though my views are probably closer to Carnahan’s than to Wellstone’s, Wellstone’s passing is harder to accept. I had a lot of respect for him — his staunch liberalism in the face of an America political spectrum in which anything left of the center is grounds for attack ads felt refreshing and honest. To quote Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News: “You didn’t have to agree with [Wellstone's] stands all the time — no one could — to honor his commitment to justice in a society that has all but abandoned the very notion.”

Of course, it’s hardly possible to start mourning Wellstone’s death without recognizing what it could mean for the American political landscape. Wellstone’s opponent this fall is Norm Coleman, a former Democrat whom I also respect. As moderate as Coleman may be, however, if he defeats Wellstone’s replacement in ten days, chances are that both houses of Congress and the White House will be Republican. The consequences of that result are frightening — two or more spots on the Supreme Court are likely to open up in the next two years, and they’d both be filled with conservatives. At the same time, it’d be much easier for conservative legislation to be pushed through Congress. I can only hope that moderate Republicans — Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee and others — will have enough strength to block the conservative agenda that mainstream America doesn’t want.

I’m watching Ali Ozer’s “Cocoa API Techniques” from this year’s WWDC. It’s interesting to notice how many of the techniques he mentions — strategies for using immutable objects, appropriate conditions for subclassing, the requirement that object equality be symmetric (and maintain its full equivalence relation), etc. — are true for Java as well. In fact, I’m cross-referencing his slides with sections in Joshua Bloch’s absolutely fantastic Effective Java. Ozer and Bloch are talking about two different languages, but the concepts are almost exactly the same.

mpt points to an interesting interview of Marissa Mayer, who I know from my time as a section leader and TA at Stanford. The interview’s about user experience issues at Google, and it really shows that Google understands how UI should work on the Internet — that a simple interface is easy to understand and use, and that the annoyance of flashy ads makes them less likely to be clicked on than ads which are relevant to the information the user is interested in. I wonder how long it’ll be before other companies follow Google’s lead in UI design.

The MacHack call for papers went out today. I have a number of ideas, but I’ll probably wait at least a few weeks before I sit down and figure out what I’m going to propose to write.