Paul Berry's Journal

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I'm going to go to the tea shop on Alberta, get a table outside, and start counting bicyclists that go by. Maybe I'll count the next 100 bicyclists, maybe I'll stop when I get bored.

Poll #1225900 Helmet usage
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What percentage of bicyclists will be wearing helmets?

View Answers

I'll give some kind of prize to whoever gets closest.

Slightly less short notice
Tomorrow night at 6:30, a group that bears a remarkable resemblance to the Oregon Sinfonietta will be playing a short concert at Glenwood Place, a retirement home in Vancouver. We'll be playing:

Rossini - Overture to Il Signor Bruschino
Mozart - Exsultate, jubilate (Linda Appert, soparano soloist)
Schubert -Symphony No. 5 in Bb

Glenwood Place is at 5500 NE 82nd Ave in Vancouver, WA. If you need a ride there and you're willing to spend some extra time, I can give you a ride. I'll be leaving my house at 5:10 sharp to avoid traffic and to get there in time for our 6pm call. Let me know if you'd like a ride.

Short notice
If anyone wants to have dinner tonight and play a little Rock Band, let me know or come on over.

Post-ICFP thoughts
I'm still recovering from sleep deprivation, so these will be kind of scatterbrained. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do a big post-contest writeup like I did last year.

It's amazing what you can accomplish in a short span of time if you know your time is short and you're committed to getting a lot done.
It's amazing how little you give up in productivity by being thorough and disciplined.
My libido has been huge ever since the contest. What's up with that?
Last year your submission was automatically scored within seconds of submitting it. This year things work differently, and nobody's submissions have been scored yet. Which means that we still don't know for sure whether our submission will even run at all. This is a bit disappointing, but I think it's an inevitable consequence of the nature of this year's contest.
I feel like over the last year I've spent less time hanging around with j3h, jes5199, and boojum than I would have liked. It was nice to spend some high quality programming time with them again.
I really need to find a graphics environment and get comfortable programming in it. I did some SVG during the contest, but it left a bit to be desired because it was hard to make it interactive. I'm thinking the thing to do would be to learn OpenGL.
Most days of my life are so much less intense than the days of the programming contest. I wouldn't want every day to be that intense, but I could stand to have a little bit more intensity. This fits in with a recent theme in my life, which is that I spend too much time reading random web pages and chilling out with people, and not enough time doing projects.
I'm way more of an extrovert than I thought.
Apparently I'm pretty damn funny when I'm outrageously sleep deprived. Definitely my inhibitions are lower, and I'm more inclined to let my sense of humor show. I wonder if there's a way to import the good aspects of that into my regular well-rested life without having to endure the bad aspects.
Speaking of which, recovering from a huge sleep debt is not much fun. This morning while napping on the couch I had an episode of sleep paralysis, which I'd heard about but never experienced before. It was kind of perversely fascinating but mostly just scary.
I'm tired of using darcs for source control, mostly because of poor performance. I think I'm going to switch to git.

Programming contest, take two.
Remember last year when I entered the ICFP programming contest with

boojum,

jes5199, and

j3h?

Well, we're entering again this year. It starts tomorrow at noon and runs for 72 hours, until Monday at noon.

Last year, team size was unlimited, so I invited anyone with any scrap of interest to join us and see if you like it. (And

lindseykuper did, for the first several hours). Unfortunately, the rules have changed (grumble grumble), so I can't extend that invitation anymore.

But if you would like to help out, we are seeking people to:
- Notice when we are about to go nuts and encourage us to sleep, eat, drink, take walks, etc. (

anonamyst did a bang-up job of this last year).
- Bring us take-out food (or cook for us) (several people did this last year,

keystricken and

anonamyst spring to mind).
- Hang out quietly with us while we work.
- Give us backrubs (I asked for this last year, and there were no takers. Well, I can dream).

And last but most certainly not least,

keystricken has graciously offered to visit my cat Marie every now and then and keep her company. If anyone else wants to do that too, I will be extremely grateful.

Oh, our home base of operations will be Farpoint.

If last year's contest is any indicator, I will be in sporadic e-mail, LJ, and phone contact the whole time. And I'll be exhausted, and excited, and sleep-deprived, and acting like the total lunatic that I am, times eleventy-one. It should be quite a sight.

Awesome news: Marie has started hunting bugs in the house.

Non-awesome news: Stacy found another huge lump of concrete buried shallowly in the front yard.

I has kitty!
Dear Diary,

Today I went to the Humane Society and got a kitten. Her name is Marie. She is tiny and adorable. And she thinks that me typing on my laptop is the most fascinating thing ever, so this entry took me about a half hour to write.

More pictures on flickr

Dancing
This has been circulating the internets for a little while now. I think this guy might be my new hero:

Got to remember this one
This just showed up in my gmail at the top of the screen where there's usually a small ad:

Quote of the day - Anatole France - "It is human nature to think wisely and act in an absurd fashion."

Kind of sums up my life so far maybe? I don't know, maybe not.

Also, while I'm talking about things relevant to my life, this xkcd comic rocks my world.

Art Benjamin at TED
I took discrete math from this guy.

Epic work party win

Cleared front yard
Originally uploaded by stereotype441
Five more pics behind the link

Yesterday's work party was a smashing success. Amariah, Jesse, Dan, Tara, Jenn, and Kenny showed up. We did an enormous amount of weeding in the front, clearing room for rototilling and irises. Jenn trimmed the bush in front of the house (can't remember what it's called) down to a manageable size. Daniel trimmed the hedge by the driveway. Kenny cut some dead branches off the tree in back. This all would have taken me weeks, and I would have had nowhere near as much fun.

Oh, and we drank beer and blasted music across the neighborhood. Afterward we played Rock Band and had dinner at Por Que Non.

Current plan (probably overly ambitious) for the front yard: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, corn, beans, raspberries, and any other good ideas anyone manages to suggest before I start planting.

Hmm, the yard got overgrown because I couldn't find the time and energy to maintain it. So now I'm thinking of planting a huge vegetable garden. Yeah, definitely overly ambitious. I must be insane. Still, I can't wait.

Thank you all for helping!

A melody
Apparently this is what I do when I should be sleeping.

I found myself whistling this melody (or something like it) and decided that preserving it was more important than sleep.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

That took a while
I just looked at an old picture of myself with a beard and thought, "No, that isn't me. I don't look like that." I shaved the beard on March 22, so it took nearly three months for my internal body image to completely adapt. Interesting.

Short notice
Rock Band. My house. Tonight. Dinner 6ish, rocking 7:30ish. We'll probably continue till around 11:30.

A home improvement story in pictures
Today Jeff, Kenny, and I finished taking out the holly tree from my front yard. I now know why God created chainsaws.

Check out where the tree used to be:

( Read more... )

Also also: the yard is now much sunnier

and I want to turn it into a garden. I will be having a work "party" (or "work" party, if you prefer) during the day on Saturday to get that process started. Come over if you like work, or beer.

Cooking
One of my goals for my summer vacation is to get better at cooking.

freyley has been helping, and he's been doing a really good job of giving minimal guidance, forcing me to be creative, and encouraging me to think about flavors.

Here is what I made for Narnia last night, which I thought turned out pretty well:
- 3 sweet potatoes, cut into about 3/8 inch cubes. (Note: not yams. I used to think sweet potatoes and yams were the same thing. But I like sweet potatoes much better.)
- 2 red onions, cut into roughly 1-inch pieces.
- 1 bunch celery, cut slightly more finely than the potatoes.

Bake that all in a pan at 350° for about 30 minutes. (We actually used two pans initially, to keep the celery separate, because we didn't know whether it would work well with the dish or not. It worked, though).

Then pull the dish out, mix it up a little, and add the following. (Note, I didn't measure anything, so these amounts are pure off-the-cuff estimates):
- Olive oil (2 tbsp drizzled over the top)
- Salt (1-2 tsp)
- Nutritional yeast (1-2 tbsp, probably could have used more)

Bake for another 15-20 minutes.

Aww, kitty
Here is an awesome video of two guys getting not mauled by a lion:

http://www.cyberthing.net/video-play.php?id=105

WARNING! Video contains background music of irresponsibly saccharine proportions. If you are sensitive to such things, you are strongly advised to turn the volume all the way down before clicking play.

Dear Lazyweb
Ok, I've been talking about this for a while. It's finally time for me to stop serving up web pages and code repositories from a computer in my house. Anyone want to recommend a hosting service?

What I'm looking for
- Not too expensive (maybe targeting $50/month?)
- Ssh access
- Root access (I think, or maybe someone can convince me this is unnecessary)
- Ability to serve web pages
- Ability to install my own software on the server (e.g. darcs)
- Sufficient storage & bandwidth that I can use it as a remote backup (I'm thinking 50-100GB of storage, and bandwidth equivalent to a T1 line)

Earlier this evening I jumped on a trampoline for the first time in, like, 20 years. Man, it was fun.

(No, that's not me in the video)

If any of you thought I was responsible and organized, think again
When I first registered to vote when I was 18, I registered as non-partisan.

When I moved to Oregon I was certain that I switched to democrat. But I guess I didn't, because I just opened up my ballot, and it says nonpartisan.

Fuck.