Pie Palace

Okay, I’ve promised myself that I’m going to work on my thesis, and that I’m not going to dip into Green Party politics any more than absolutely necessary. Some kind soul decided that I need to know that Catherine Johannson worked at a Liberal Party event during the last Manitoba election. According to my tipster, her hubby is Shane Sadorski. According to Google, Shane is an employee of the Manitoba Liberals.

I’m not sure if I agree with Catherine Johannson’s position on Green issues (her blog is pretty sparse in terms of policy). All I know about her is that she has been endorsed by someone who comes across as a wee bit scary.

But the allegation of being involved in another party? Who cares? She was working at an event, probably to help her husband. Whenever I get a chance to go to another party’s event, I do. Partly for the free food, and partly to see how they do things. Unless something a little more damning comes up, this isn’t something that I really care about in terms of voting. I’m much more likely not to vote for her because of the endorsement I mentioned above.

From this moment on: No more Green Party stuff until my thesis is done. Period.

According to a study out of Columbia University, in the long run, people regret not having fun, more than doing the right thing (Which means I should really stop working on my thesis and go do something stupid). Link

Here’s the current progress for my thesis.

Pages: 84.
Words: 20686 (54% of total)
Deleted words: 17357 (46% of total)
Days until the first revision is due: 15.
Estimated number of pages left: 40.

I have less text deleted, as compared to last time, but my advisor hasn’t given me too much advice recently.

It’s now officially panic time. In order to finish my thesis in time to hit Burning Man, I have roughly 2.5 weeks to (a) write a couple of chapters, (b) write enough code to prove my theories, and (c) evaluate the freshly written code to demonstrate that my that my “proof” is founded on reality.

It seems unlikely that I will be making many more Green Party related posts before the convention. Same goes for MiniPosts.

For anyone who is interested (and likes lines and graphs), here is the unoptimized state machine representing SMTP. Clicking on the highlight will give present you with the huge and yummy SVG file. These things are remarkably useful for debugging.

While doing some writing for my thesis, I ran into the history of the word “queue.” Which is kind of (sort of) interesting:

Word History: When the British stand in queues (as they have been doing at least since 1837, when this meaning of the word is first recorded in English), they may not realize they form a tail. The French word queue from which the English word is borrowed is a descendant of Latin coda, meaning “tail.” French queue appeared in 1748 in English, referring to a plait of hair hanging down the back of the neck. By 1802 wearing a queue was a regulation in the British army, but by the mid-19th century queues had disappeared along with cocked hats. Latin coda is also the source of Italian coda, which was adopted into English as a musical term (like so many other English musical terms that come from Italian). A coda is thus literally the “tail end” of a movement or composition¹.

Of course, the word I was looking for was cue, so this didn’t really help with anything.

Return to your daily business.

1. From Dictionary.com‘s definition of queue.
   (back)

I woke up this morning certain that I owned a new Mac laptop. I dreamt that I had bought one. The dream was boring/realistic enough that I didn’t think to question it until about half way through breakfast.

I guess that what happens when you spend 11 hours a day in front of a computer working on a never-ending thesis.

Every time I make a revision to my thesis and chop some text out, I stick it into a LaTeX comment. After two cycles of revision with my advisor, I currently have 559 uncommented lines and 894 commented lines. That’s 5340 words of text that are usable, and 7033 words of text that will only ever be seen by me.

That hurts.

Everyone knows that writing a thesis broadens the mind. All those hours of procrastinating add up, and the best procrastination is procrastination with a point.

My past week of procrastinating has centered around the newest addition to my commuting quiver¹ a Land Yachtz Pinner longboard. The thing is amazing. It’s fast, responsive, and easy to ride. It isn’t exactly like snowboarding, but it’s close enough that it makes an ordinary commute feel like a slow, easy cruise on a ski hill. It’s left me trying to figure out the most downhill route between chez moi and my lab at Carleton.

Instead of working on my thesis for the past hour, I’ve been digging into “longboarding culture”. I’ve discovered that:

• Ottawa will feature its own downhill longboard slalom contest on Canada Day.
  
• there’s a secret longboarding hockey league. Longboard hockey is played on longboards, with hockey sticks and an empty beer can, preferably in the basements of abandoned buildings.
  
• longboard manufacturers are looking to become more environmentally friendly. What the hell? That’s great, but completely unexpected. I know that Arbor Skateboards has an environmental policy, but I didn’t know that the other, larger, nonCanadian manufactureres were angling that way as well.
  
• longboarding, like every other great innovation to come out of North America is strongly anchored in the Left Coast.
  
• the next Tony Hawk skating game will feature a series of longboarding scenarios. (For those who don’t know: the Tony Hawk line of console games are flagship skateboarding video games)

Welcome to AM posting #1. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about what I’ve been reading without sounding like a Grade 4 book report, and have failed miserably. Miss Strong, should you read this, I expect nothing less than a B+, as that is what you gave me when I was a lad fresh off the boat.

I’m posting at such a late hour because I’ve been up reading Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job, it warrents three sleepless hours (but probably doesn’t warrent putting me three hours behind on my thesis). It’s rehash of the “guy becomes Death” plot, but it’s well written and fun. I’m only about 60 pages from finishing and it hasn’t quite fallen into any cliche I’ve seen so far. It’s mostly realistic, other than the supernatural happenings part, and set in modern day San Francisco.

On the science fiction front, I’ve polished off Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, Richard Morgan’s Woken Furies (or Wanking Furries as My Lovely calls it), and Verner Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky.

Of the three, Vinge comes out on top, with an imaginative plot and interesting characters. He follows two human fleets, trapped decades from home in hiding from an alien race that is stumbling through an industrial revolution. The greatest failing of the book seems to be fairly common to sci. fi. writers: he assumes all alien cultures will be identical to ours, just with more legs.

Woken Furies is also a lot of fun. It feels more like film noir than sci. fi, but that isn’t a failing. The story is set in a world where people’s personalities are stored in a little chunk of hardware in the back of their head. Should their body perish (which occurs often in this book), they can have their personality “decanted” into another body. This book, the third featuring protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, mostly features violence, revenge, violence, revenge, and a possible change in the power structure of Morgan’s universe (and some violence and revenge).

Speaker for the Dead was good, but didn’t hold my attention. Probably because the author’s doting introduction reveals the “ohmigosh!Ican’tbelievetheplottwist” ending on page vi. Card states that his purpose in writing the book is to talk about family, and the effects that family has on characters; which is admirable, as science fiction doesn’t usually plumb those depths. He then goes on to introduce a super-duper protagonist who can conveniently see into the head of every other character and completely understand their emotions and needs. Which makes for a fairly boring story, as we just have to wait for the unstoppable Ender to talk to the right people and the entire plot falls into place. Although Card doesn’t make Vinge’s mistake of creating aliens identical to our society, Ender’s superpower does get a little annoying after a while.

And on the subject of fiction, or at least insufficient evidence, I’ve also been reading 1421. The book is ideal for anyone who enjoyed In Search Of. If you’ve seen in search of, you’ll remember it: it was a memorably bland documentary series featuring Leonard Nimoy narrating the stories behind famous “mysteries”, such as the fate of the Marie Celeste, how those crazy Mayans managed to build cities when they clearly weren’t white, etc. 1421 is similar in that it strings together a few marginally related scraps of evidence, and tries to make a point. In this case, the point is that Chinese ships sailed around the world in 1421.

I don’t contest the possibility that Chinese ships could have sailed around the world in 1421, I’m just a tad skeptical of the rather shakey evidence. Evidence that mostly seems to rely on one or two genetic comparisons of North American natives and Asians, and a few hand-me-down maps left over from Europe’s pre-colonial days.

1421 is worth skimming for fun. But I don’t think I’d sit through the entire thing unless Leonard Nimoy was reading it, to a cheesy Moog soundtrack.