End-of-year cleaning: podcast subscriptions

It's the end of the calendar year so I'm upping my recurring donations to charities and artists. And suddenly... my hard drive is full? This seems ridiculous because I haven't done anything data-intensive in months.

A short investigation later...

A truly incredible 119G of memory stores unlistened-to podcasts. In a year of actively subscribing and donating to things, this 2020 garbage fire of using my attention and privilege to do better, it is time to unsubscribe from some stuff.

Podcasts from which I'm unsubscribing, sometimes hundreds of episodes behind:

• David Tennant Does a Podcast With...
  David Tennant interviews various guests and makes them say like two sentences and an anecdote for every separate fact he extracted from a whirlwind tour of their Wikipedia/IMDB page. This just never held my attention enough for me to listen to the episodes.
• Dissect
  This is a really fantastic music analysis podcast but it requires a lot of attention and the host's voice and production values just didn't ever push it to the top of my queue, so it has languished for several years. Alas, pruned! I'm still subscribed to three other music analysis podcasts so if some truly incredible song comes along I will hear about it, even in my digital monkish seclusion.
• Jordan, Jesse, GO!
  The original podcast. An extremely good way to feel not-lonely and not-isolated when in grad school abroad, but in the years since it has not held my attention. At one point the hosts themselves called out that they are a stereotype of "two white guys discussing their childhood video games with no particular agenda" and over time I've developed more varied and diverse podcast interests. (Sometimes their guests promoted the guests' podcasts, which I subscribed to and found more interesting.) And I guess I no longer feel America-sick, since I live back here now.
• Social Distance
  The pandemical podcast from The Atlantic. In March was comforting to have a daily podcast of people also worrying and sharing information, then they exhausted the low-hanging fruit of topics and became less interesting and less relevant, then I had enough mental space to do my own research and reading and I haven't listened in several months. (I still read some related columns but they are much faster to get through than the podcast.)
• This American Life
  I found other things more interesting and haven't listened --- there are more than 8G of these episodes alone. I have since heard some spot-on parodies of the tone and style that were so perfect that subsequent listening to the actual show is dimmed in comparison.

Several others are on my watchlist --- doing inventory reminded me of my interest in the podcasts, but I hadn't listened in a long time. If I don't listen to them by the end of December, I'm also going to unsubscribe and delete all those files.

This is what happens when I've already KonMari-ed my excess clothes, books, furniture, childhood memorabilia, shoes, electronics and cables, and piles of miscellaneous cruft. My documents are in organized folders, my photos are sorted, my finances are in order. If I were any more responsible it would ooze out my pores and be even more repellent than my already-achieved levels of disgusting competence. \end{humblebrag}

This post's theme word is autotelic (adj), "having purpose, motivation, or meaning of itself; not driven by external factors." Autotelic cleaning and organizing gets its own chapter in my autobiography, but blogging just gets an incomplete sentence fragment footnote... if I get around to it.

Tomatoes

Many thanks to the nameless supermarket designers and employees whose choices in lighting, display baskets, and arrangements of tomatoes resulted in this delightful spread.

Anyone for some sphere-packing practice?

The addition of other vegetables for variety in color and visual texture serves to emphasize the red, rounded, Platonically-ideal tomatoes.

This post's theme word is bleb, "a bubble," or "a small blister or swelling." If your rash of blebs resembles this pile of tomatoes, seek immediate medical attention.

Banal tourist photos

There's a reason many tourist photos come out so identically: there is simply one point from which the view is spectacular, serene, well-framed, with interesting visual aspects and a clear focus.

This is that view at the parks in front of the imperial palace. There's a cute little decorative pond with a tiny house (shrine? temple? landscapers' hut?) on an island in the center.

Then there's the Wes Anderson version: centered, dramatic, low on emotion but high on organizational satisfaction. Just some temple grounds I wandered through.

And of course the dramatic-sunlit corner of a roof.

Then the photos which look utterly unremarkable, but are quite memorable for the context and the memory that accompanies. Of course these are only interesting for the photographer. Thus, in the center of the city, when I turned and saw a single view with trees lushly carpeting the hill in the distance, I took a photo: because just outside the frame, there was a bustling cityscape. But this one view stood out as exceptional.

Of course this exceptional contrast is not evident in the picture, which only shows a boring roof and some trees.

This is the essence of tourist photography: interesting for the rememberer, and extremely mundane and poorly-executed scrolling for everyone else. Feel free to click over to that other tab that's making noise, now, I won't be offended.

Here's another roof, silhouetted against the sky.

Here are some prayer lanterns, next to a bamboo with wishes tied to its branches. This is what happens when I try to frame the photo to have a lot of interesting visual detail, without wasting space on the framing details.

This is The Photo. I'm standing in a place where thousands of people stand every year to take this exact photo. The photo looks calm, but only because the funnels for tourists corral them outside the frame of this exact viewpoint. The reflection is nice, too.

What this photo doesn't show is that it was in the high 90s F, with something like 90% humidity, and thus punishingly unpleasant weather. Serenity and peaceful contemplation were much further from my thoughts than shade and maybe icy beverages.

But it's a tourist photo, so you can't see that! It just looks peaceful. Look, how peaceful.


This post's theme word is animadversion, "the act of criticizing," or "an unfavorable comment." Widespread animadversion for vacation photo slideshows somehow does not stop their continued production.

Old Year's resolutions

Welcome to the last month of 2010. New Year's resolutions are common; I'd like to execute an uncommon plan. For December. This is a plan with an immediate deadline. Over the long course of a year, New Year's resolutions can become fuzzy and get lost. Things build up, to-do lists lengthen.

I propose to shorten them. To zero. By the end of December, I want to finish my to-do lists, either by achieving the items or by declaring them forfeit in to-do-bankruptcy. Wrap up projects I've been delaying. Write (or delete) the 90 draft blog posts hanging around. (Ha! Pity yourselves, readers.) Answer long-lingering emails. Mend clothing. Finish the semester.

Let's do it, people.

This post's theme word is doggo, "still and quiet" (adverb).
This post written like Cory Doctorow.

Git r done

This month feels like an aggregation of small and irksome tasks -- emails to act upon, articles to read, travel to arrange, deeds to follow-up, essays to write. I keep making ε-progress on the small tasks, context-switching too rapidly to accomplish something meaningful, juggling these many things while also trying to make large progress on my large task (research!). It takes a lot of brain space to keep so many things loaded in my RAM.

In the spirit of Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero, my rallying cry for the remainder of the month is thus: git r done! I aim to finish these tasks and clear all the irritation out of my mental cache.


This post's theme comic is from SMBC:

Pictures on Ubuntu, update

I've been playing around with Picasa. It's missing some features I really liked about iPhoto.

1. I can't import my albums from iPhoto. This fact is still incredibly irksome, and will continue to be so for as long as it persists.
   
2. I can't make folders of albums. This means that if I have more than 20 albums, they clutter up my sidebar and I have to scroll through the entire list to find the one I want.
3. There's no way to scroll through ALL the pictures in full-screen mode; photos are sorted by year, then month, then day. And full-screen mode will only allow for scrolling through a single day's pictures -- then to jump to the next day, I have to exit full-screen mode, pick the next day, and re-enter full-screen mode. Yuck.
4. Although Picasa is set to recognize .avi files, it doesn't.
   

The struggle continues. On the positive side, Picasa is not terribly slow. And lets me see my photos. That's nice. Standards lowering... lowering...


This post's theme word: moue, "pout or grimace."

Managing pictures on Ubuntu

I have amassed 30,000+ pictures since I got my first digital camera six years ago. For the past few years, I have been using iPhoto to organize these. (It is now very slow, since it tries to preload thumbnails of every picture on startup, or something similarly unreasonable.)

I like four features of iPhoto:

1. Photo files are stored in directories by YEAR/MONTH/DAY . This makes sense.
2. I can use albums to group together photos of the same event taken on different days.
3. If the camera date was set wrong, I can change the metadata on the photos.
4. My entire library is in iPhoto and organized in a way I understand.
   

I am trying to find a similar way to manage photos on Ubuntu. I have so far been unsuccessful. F-spot satisfies (1) but there doesn't seem to be a clean, working way to grab the albums from iPhoto. (Manually re-creating the albums for thirty thousand photos is not an option; I haven't found a hack that works yet, either.) Also, I can't figure out how to change the metadata with F-spot, or with any other Ubuntu software, for that matter.

I have heard good things about Picasa (Google's answer to organizing photos) but also bad things (it's slow; too many bells and whistles).

Suggestions? I've been making myself cozy on Ubuntu, but this is really irking me.

[Update, two hours later: I installed Picasa to try it out. After an XKCD-like series of events, something -- possible a hidden preference file? bug reports online are unclear -- is quite borked about my entire setup. Also, Google now gives me search returns in French and Portugese, but not English. Now everything I try fails, not just with Picasa but also basic OS functionality. Aaaiiieee! But there are no sharks. Yet.]

This post's theme word: nidicolous, "nesting."

Bookshelf

Last week I cleaned up my room and reorganized my bookshelf. I love order and tidiness.
This post's theme word: cadastral, "Of or relating to a map or survey showing property lines, boundaries, etc."

Vacation highlights

Vacation is a few days over, and I've been back to work. My last post of the year will be how my brain works: all the referential highlights, with none of the downtime buffer between. I love my family. Today, the last day of 2008, is one second longer than a normal day! (It has a leap second added.) So go enjoy your extra second of new year's eve party!

My vacation, montage-style:

Exchanging the lock on a bag of M&Ms, since it was too narrow for both of us to fit our hands in at once.

A simulated depth-first search with some interesting vertices. Kingsly.

Death by chocolate. Semi-literally. So much chocolate, ice cream, candy, and souffle that I felt a little sick. More than once.

"In order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion."

"Mennonite ankle porn" and learning Japanese from anime. "Take anything you want! Leave me my life!" あぶない！にんじゃです。Thereafter, nearly everything was declared あぶない.

Delighted by ducklings.

"Safari action adventure Lila"

Pandora (which I've now set up to work from Canada). Listen to this song, it's amazing.

It's so hard to find a really snootily-educated man these days.

"E., Mom's worried about something in particular. But I'm just worried. About curtains, about the bed, about gravity..." (Note: his room has increased gravity. For training purposes.)

A stray lawn dart killed my only bunny. Twice.

While giving a back massage, E.: "It's like your shoulders are reinforced!"

This island.

Benjamin Button? Not as good as watching Atonement for the third time in 24 hours.

All I want for Christmas...

All I want for Christmas is:

• to finish my MSc thesis;
• an Xbox 360;*
• a green Xbox controller, if it exists;
  
• socks; and
  
• Wegmans purple-top triple-fruit jam.
  

Prices just finished adjusting to the $1 CAN = $1 US conversion rate, but it's now more like $1 CAN = $0.73 US. Thus, things are now cheaper in Canada, even with slightly higher prices. Witness the Xbox: $300 in both countries, but $300 CAN = $230 US; maybe I should just buy one here. This is also the case with the computer I'm coveting, but I don't need it and can't justify its purchase. Quine is still alive and well.

Come to think of it, I can't really justify my desire for an Xbox, either. It would be fun. Back to work, now!

* This is somewhat expensive, and I don't really expect to get it as a gift.


This post's theme game: geometry wars.

Leaves

Fall is my favorite season. I like the textures:... and the colors:
... and my new camera.


This post's theme word: serein, "Fine rain falling from an apparently cloudless sky, typically observed after sunset." Not today -- the rain was heavy and the clouds, visible.

Another weekend bites the dust

I spent another Sunday on grading. Then swim practice. Laundry was aborted because of rain. In the hour or so of consciousness I have left, I shall write letters and tidy up my mental space in preparation for the week.
While grading, I took a break to photograph this lovely tree outside my apartment. Still playing with the different modes of my camera. Above, everything black-and-white except the tree; it is very dramatic. Below, I color-sampled other things and (in-camera) changed the leaves to those colors.

First, a red-covered magazine from the side of my bed:
Then, one of my green shirts reverses autumn:My purple bedspread makes a landscape reminiscent of Dr. Seuss:
This post's theme quote comes from "The Nerd Handbook" (via MetaFilter). I don't agree with everything in the essay, but this rings true:

[The nerd] sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable.

A new year, a new project

Celebrations of the turnover from December to January ring a bit false. But today? Today is a new year that I can celebrate. It is the beginning of a new school year, which means something. Not just a changing of the calendar, but a new schedule, a new course to teach, new seminars to attend, new knowledge to absorb. The same thesis project to work on, but with new energy. Everything just seems new and shiny. The weather is perfect. The day of massive insect die-out (freeze, demonic mosquitoes!) is nigh.

Thus I begin a new project: Project Simplify.

Motivated by a sense of crowding generated by my own possessions, here begins a massive reduction of the things that I own, manage, and live with. They take up physical and mental space. I have to carry them, clean them, sort them, file them, index them, and keep track of where they are. Losing things drives me crazy, but I don't mind culling the herd. It will free up space, mental cycles, and time. (As an added bonus, my infrequent "what to wear?" deliberations will be made even scarcer.)

So my new year's resolution is to streamline everything. Clothing not worn in the past year (excluding, perhaps, special occasion clothing like formalwear and my corset/hoopskirt outfit) shall be sold or donated. Books I don't plan on rereading or using as reference material shall be sold or donated. Crates of old papers I'm saving as records shall be digitized, shredded and recycled. My goal is to be able to transport all of my living accoutrements, by myself, in a few trips. (Large pieces of furniture excepted.)

Abetting the completion of this project, today I am (once again) without internet at home. So posts here on the Lila Prime project will be dearer (only what my guilty conscience permits me to eke out here in my office), but Project Simplify shall benefit from that displaced time.

Today I went through a box of papers, and sold a book online. A good beginning.


This post's theme word: pleonexia, "excessive/insatiable covetousness."

Social peanut butter

Other people are mysteries. I cannot understand them.

A. and I discovered that we both use the following scheme to model other people's behavior:

Assume other people are thinking, behaving, and decision-making just like you are.

After all, your only known model of the inner workings of a mind is your own. This may be a terrible approximation, depending on the person you are trying to simulate.

When this model breaks down, I default to viewing other people as enigmas. (For example: inexplicable-to-me behavior at airport security checkpoints, odd supermarket-traversing paths, abuse of sidewalk-usage protocols.) This default case is invoked quite frequently, as I am a compulsive, acute observer of others' behavior.

What does this mean to everyone out there who is not me?

By being silent and awkward around you, I am actually demonstrating my respect for you as a unique person (in my own odd way). I'm quite outgoing around people I already know, those who have put in the long months/years to get to know me to the point that I'm comfortable around them. I'm also social around those with whom I share an instant recognition of common background. (College roommates are examples of the former; conference nerds, the latter.)

What does this mean for me?

The accumulated effect of this strange policy is that it takes me a long time to warm up to you, and once you're my friend, you're stuck. It will take a long time for me to forget you. This is why I've been sending postcards and letters to my dispersed, graduated friends around the world: I move in social slow-motion. Like walking through peanut butter. Even after eight months here, I'm still not adjusted; my mental self-image has trailing emotional tentacles stretched back to college, and no firm roots yet taken in Toronto (mmm, mixed metaphors). (At least, I don't feel adjusted; what does adjustment consist of, but feeling adjusted? Objective self-assessment is difficult if not impossible.) This is all amenable to posting online, somehow -- I don't know how -- if I don't understand myself, how can I ever understand others?

I sometimes spend entire days here working quietly by myself. At the end of the day I realize that I haven't had a single face-to-face conversation (of more than a few words) with another person all day. I wonder: how will I make friends if I'm no good at socializing? Then my other obsessive thoughts crowd this out, and I have no worry left over for the friends I don't have yet.


This post's theme word: paroemiology, "the collecting and studying of proverbs."

Diagnosis

Although I'm still the same, just having a diagnosis makes things better, somehow. Makes me seem more reasonable. There are other people out there like me, I am not alone. And as Steve Eley says here, now I can work with my known quirks, rather than trying to suppress them. Not that I was doing a good job of suppression anyway, since then suppressing them became an obsessive-compulsive focus... oh, recursion.

The diagnosis was accompanied by the observation that I have "incredible willpower" to function daily at the level that I do. Hooray!


This post's theme passive verb: to be neaped. That is, to be stranded aground by a neap tide (of course!).

Recent reading rundown

I don't have a lot of free time for reading, or for context-switching between leisure reading and work, but I also love to read. So once every one or two weeks, I sit down and read an entire book, just for fun. In the spirit of C, here are some books I've read in the past few months. (I read many of these as ebooks, delivered to my inbox as part of Tor's promotion for their upcoming site.)

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Children's fiction, but with under- and over-tones for plenty of enjoyment by adults. Delightful parallel universes collide, in a poorly-defined way. Children open and close windows between them. Heavy religious (and inquisatorial) themes, although the reveal (in book 2, a high point for me) was not at all what I expected based on the hints dropped earlier in the book.


Shike by Robert Shea

I love all things Japanese, so this Japan-themed semi-samurai novel tickled my fancy. It had a lot of good scheming, politics, battles and tactics. But it dragged on for several hundred pages more than I could really enjoy. Was it at all realistic to have all of the main characters survive nearly to 100 years of age? It's convenient for storytelling; they get to live through several different political regimes, shaping them subtly and altering power structures over time. But it was long. Just too long.


Old Man's War by John Scalzi

This book was a delight -- technology, personalities, military scheming and tactics and crazy alien encounters. It reminded me of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game in its tone and subject matter. Excellent! (At the bookstore where I made a spaceship, I discovered that there are more books in this series. Yay! They were sold out -- unsurprisingly -- but I added them to the queue.)



The Android's Dream by John Scalzi

Yes, the title is a reference to Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But that is the full extent of the allusion. Unlike Dick's dark, depressive, gritty novel, this one is bright, shiny, comedically clever. There are no androids. There are sheep, a lot of them. (Unfortunately, most are dead.) It begins with interplanetary diplomacy ruined by farting, and escalates in a nearly Terry-Pratchett-like way from there...


American Gods by Neil Gaiman

This book is amazing. It has joined my list of books I can read repeatedly, without boredom. This brings the list up to five. What else can I say? The gods live among us as people, but retaining their mythical powers. As long as their believers believe, they are powerful; otherwise, they fade. Or some mechanic like that. It's a meta-mythology encompassing everything. I am addicted to anything meta; this book is fantastic.


Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

Modern, epic space confusion. The stars and moon vanish. Time is dilated. We attempt to terraform and settle Mars. The universe hurtles towards its cold, collapsing end. Doomsday cults abound, flourish, collapse themselves before doomsday comes. Humans are, perhaps, being kept like zoo animals by some much more powerful aliens? ... with a satisfying conclusion.




Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson

Cool premise of a typical medieval-era world. A little of an alchemical tinge, but also magic and fantasy. A favored upper class enforces the dictates of an omniscient, omnipotent dictator in oppressing a slave class. The slaves rise! -- of course. This book was very enjoyable, and I was glad to discover that it has several sequels. So many puzzles were solved, so many (ominous) questions remain unanswered...



Gray by Jon Armstrong.

A short, cute novel. It was under 300 pages long, though, and it never really fleshed out any ideas in that space. The readers shared with the protagonist a certain scattered perception of events. I found this frustrating, right up until the end. It felt like the protagonist was willfully unobservant in order to prevent the author from describing things which might give away important clues to the readers.


This post's theme ability: reading. Close runners-up: flying, seeing in black-and-white, telling the future, traveing between parallel universes, and crazy ninja fighting tactics.

The feeling of places

Places I have recently (sometimes disconcertingly) felt comfortable:

my house
my office
the theory lab
the doctor's office
the hospital
inside an MRI machine

Places I have recently felt uncomfortable:

meeting with my advisor
walking on crowded sidewalks
phone conversations with bureaucratic agencies
the hallway outside my office
any social situation with someone I've known for less than a year
my front porch
the grocery store


This post's theme people: random strangers who stop on the sidewalk to help the sad girl on crutches. They are rarer than I would ever have believed, but incredibly kind when they do occur in nature.

RSS feeds

My OCD has recently been ratcheting up in intensity, resulting in a cleaner-than-usual room, kitchen, and inbox. But how to deal with the ever-lengthening list of news sources, web comics, and blogs that I must check daily? Lucky for me, other nerds got here before me and developed RSS feeds. Now all of my daily web content is automatically plucked from the internet and aggregated in one place, much more quickly and efficiently than even my most frequent checking could accomplish.

Thank you, Google reader. Of course, thanks to Google (blogspot), this blog can be subject to the same process, if anyone out there is reading it at all.


This post's theme word: tatterdemalion, "tattered; worn to shreds; bedraggled; in deplorable condition." A good descriptor of how my own mind and its needs make me feel sometimes.

Nesting

A week ago, I moved into my new, permanent, livable apartment. A huge thanks to my parents for driving my stuff here (thus clearing out their garage) and helping to move, paint, and furnish my room. For the first time in four months, I am not living out of a suitcase. Hooray! Now that I have my “Lila nest” – all my books, puzzles, clothes, electronics – I feel much more… well, human. Much more Lila.

To help you understand my relief at moving, I’ve prepared a little compare/contrast for you:

Before, I was living with smokers, drug dealers, and squatters in a 15-(plus squatters) person house in a neighborhood overrun by fraternities. There were loud parties at my house, or at least audible from it, every week on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights. The house was filthy, and no amount of personal effort could counteract the grime-tending apathy of my housemates. On the corner of the block was a Christian Science church, and two blocks away was the Bata Shoe Museum. Not at all my style.

Now, I am living with grad students in a four-person house in a residential area with families and small kids. It’s quiet, even on Halloween with the street full of trick-or-treaters (and one adult chaperone playing the bagpipe – an inexplicable but uplifting thing to pass on the way home). The house is reasonably clean, within the tolerances of my OCD tendencies. On the corner of the block is a bakery (delicious). I am two blocks from a street of electronics stores. Also nearby are Chinatown, Kensington Market, and the Toronto Public Library’s science fiction/fantasy collection. Much more Lila.


This post's theme song: "Making a Home" from "March of the Falsettos."