Pavel's Blog

It was only late last April that I previously laundered all of my actively worn T-shirts, but like clockwork, every nine months or so, the necessity comes back around on the guitar. So it was that, for the past week, I've been running over a dozen loads through the machines and, more tediously, folding, folding, folding. I'm pretty pleased, though: after starting the laundry loads Sunday night, I managed to finish up all of the folding on Friday night, while watching the DVDs of Brideshead Revisited that we checked out of the local library. Nothing like a long, slow-moving English drama to move the process along nicely.

The count this time was 259, roughly evenly split between the whites/greys/neutrals (122) and the other colors, including black (137). Well, that was the count before Kathleen made me sit down and go through all of the piles to make sure that they were all shirts I still enjoyed wearing. She was right, as usual: we ended up finding 13 shirts (about 5%) that were either ugly, boring, inexplicable, or some combination of the three. (Why, for example, did I have a "train with the insane" shirt from 24-hour Nautilus, even though I've never been there?)

So, really, I now have "only" 246 shirts in active rotation, so I guess I'll be right back where I started last Sunday, loading shirts into the washing machine, in only about eight months from today. Sigh. Just in time for Halloween, I guess...

Posted by Pavel at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)

Imagine a drafting-table-sized computer monitor that is touch-sensitive and allows more than one finger to be used at a time (kind of like having more than one mouse, but easy to use because they're your fingers). Imagine all of the cool, intuitive user-interaction styles you could support.

Now stop imagining it and see the future now. This video, copied from the Multi-Touch Interaction Research website at NYU (which is currently being hammered with traffic, making it hard to get the video from there directly) shows a wide variety of very slick demos using such an interaction surface. I think my favorite is the virtual Lava Lamp that lets you play around with the floating lava blobs...

(Thanks to the AppleGeeks blog for pointing this out.)

Posted by Pavel at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Melissa and Lynn objected to my not including Veronica Mars in my recent list of TV shows I love. I was trying to narrow my lists to things that people might find surprising or intriguing; that's why I didn't include any of the TV shows we're actually watching right now. That list would include Veronica Mars, Alias, Lost, West Wing, Commander in Chief, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville, and 24. That's the things we watch together. By myself, I also watch what Kathleen calls "guy stuff" (Mythbusters, New Yankee Workshop, This Old House, and The Woodwright's Shop) along with the occasional episode of Powerpuff Girls that I haven't already seen. Thank god for TiVo.

So, see? I am cool enough to know to watch Veronica Mars. Sheesh... :-)

Posted by Pavel at 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Since I run my blog from a private site, as opposed to a big aggregator like Live Journal, and since I don't have that many regular readers (not least because I don't post particularly regularly), it's not surprising that I've never been "tagged" before. Tagging is kind of the blogging equivalent of a chain letter or other pyramid scheme: somebody posts on an unusual topic, or addresses some set of (typically inocuous) personal questions and then names a set of other bloggers who are thereby "tagged" to do the same. Unlike chain letters, tagging doesn't appear to involve dire consequences for those who refuse the call, and unlike pyramid schemes, nobody's getting rich at the top of the pile.

Anyhow, to my knowledge, I've never been tagged before, so it was kind of fun to have Lilly tag me on a recent posting. Far be it from me to refuse my first-ever tag, so here are my lists of four:

Four jobs I've had:
1. Playing a male Elizabethan actor who only gets to play female roles from Shakespeare (at the Southern California Rennaissance Faire)
2. Organizing the international newspaper collection at a major university library
3. Teaching mathematical logic and reasoning at a summer school for gifted 12- to 15-year-olds
4. Co-founding an Internet company that was later sold to Microsoft

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Shakespeare in Love
2. The Matrix (but only the first one)
3. Harold and Maude
4. 'Breaker' Morant

Four places I've lived:
1. Bloomington, Indiana
2. McLean, Virginia
3. Berkeley, California
4. Yellow Springs, Ohio

Four TV shows I love:
1. Strange Luck (sadly cut short)
2. Babylon 5 (not counting the fifth season)
3. Firefly (tragically cut short or not?)
4. Sports Night (Lilly was right, Sorkin is/was the god of dialog)

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Lake Champlain, Vermont
2. České Budějovice, Czechoslavakia (so-called at the time)
3. Tolsta Chaolais, Isle of Lewis, Scotland
4. Thoraígh Island, Donegal, Ireland

Four of my favorite dishes:
1. "Stuff on rice", especially Saag Lamb
2. Northern Gold Cashews & Raisins Granola, with milk
3. San Jose scramble, at Hobee's
4. Chocolate-covered dried cherries, from Peet's

Four sites I visit daily:
I subscribe to over 40 RSS feeds inside my mail client, mostly so I don't need to visit sites daily, but these survive:
1. AlterSlash (much more usable feed from SlashDot)
2. OED
3. Wikipedia
4. Windows Live (for my "only skimming" RSS feeds)

Four places I'd rather be right now:
1. In my garage woodshop
2. At home, watching a movie with Kathleen, with a cat on each of our laps
3. In Second Life
4. At a table in the coffeeshop upstairs from Bloomsbury Books, in Ashland, Oregon

Four bloggers I'm tagging:
1. Hans (because he didn't know what I meant by "tagging" when I mentioned it at lunch)
2. Derrick (because his "favorite dish" answers should make great reading)
3. Lynn (because she's one of the few other bloggers I know who reads my blog)
4. Melissa (to force her into finally starting a blog!)

Posted by Pavel at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)