Two excellent pieces of news
- Tomorrow at this time, I will be on the playa.
- I got a job.
Life is sweet. More on these topics as they develop.
Life is sweet. More on these topics as they develop.
Checklists, mental and scrawled on scraps of paper, were consolidated and the items checked off. Boxes were shut, sealed, labeled, and stacked. Gradually, the floor of my living room was revealed. Then in the span of an hour, my apartment gained some semblance of order. I'm not done yet—there are things still to be collected, pipe to be cut, some final items to pick up. But for everything, there's now a place.
The time-lapse photography of my camp setup is playing out in my mind. Having so triumphantly packed, I'm now imagining gleefully tearing it apart. Items newly purchased and items bearing evidence of past camping trips will litter my tiny patch of playa, and gradually coalesce into our home for twelve days.
I'm almost there... Tomorrow, the truck packening begins. Hopefully we'll only have to do it once this year.
I suffer from migraine headaches. I can tell within a few hours of waking up whether I'll be incapacitated with pain by the evening. And if I go to bed with a migraine, I'll wake up with an even worse migraine. They're my own damned fault—if I don't eat breakfast in a timely manner I'll get a headache. Breakfast can be substituted with a back-breaking toil in most cases. It's something to do with blood-flow, I think.
That said, a backbreaking toil is also o a cure for a migraine. So is good conversation, and often sex. All three however have an "activation energy" which is usually unattainable when I'm squinting my eyes in pain and trying to stay very, very still.
I'm suffering from a migraine headache right now. The acetaminophen in this medication is turning my liver to swiss cheese, but my brain continues to hammer its way through my left temple. I'm sending in reinforcements, PRECAUTIONS: be damned. Livers grow back, brain cells don't.
According to the helpful table included with this prescription, a migraine only affects one side of the head, whereas a tension headache can affect one or both sides of the head. The included table reveals that a migraine is in all other respects a "really bad" tension headache.
According to the Wikipedia (which is a substitute for the expertise of a healthcare professional) the word migraine has its roots in Ancient Greek: hemi+krania (half-head). That's reassuring, somehow. The ancient Greeks too, in all their brilliance, were brought to their knees by malfunctioning cranial blood-vessels. The togas made sex a more viable curative I'm sure, but they definitely didn't have Amidrine.
I think its a placebo. Wikipedia lists a whole host of migraine medications and Amidrine isn't among them. Wikipedia also lists some "traditional" cures, including acupuncture and the extracts of various plants. But the Ancient Greeks didn't have any fancy modern medication, and they managed to survive! Er, uh oh...
No, further research does not definitively tie the fall of Ancient Greece to migraine headaches. I had to make sure. This migraine may be the end of me though. I'm going to try a traditional cure of my own—alcohol. Livers grow back, brain cells don't. Here's to Ancient Greece!
If you've ever smelled playa dust, you know how I feel. Well, perhaps "smell" is the wrong word. Have you sanded the paint off a house? Your nose is definitely involved, but its not exactly an olfactory thing. Anyway, I'm getting that fullness of the sinuses that can only mean its time to return to Burningman.
I have a dream every so often: I've got about 15 minutes until my ride to Burningman leaves, and I haven't started packing. This is an evolution of that older dream where I'm about to take the final exam for a class that I stopped attending after the first week. Sometimes its a curse to have your dreams come true: I have four days to get my things together, and staring at the empty space I've cleared to stage my gear isn't exactly spurring me into action.
This is my third year on the playa. By all rights I should have this process down. And indeed, I'm counting on my prior experience in surviving Burningman to bear me through what portends to be a rushed, haphazard packing. I have what you might call a low standard of living out there. I eat out of cans and lug around my own body-weight in caked playa dust. I sleep in a tent that either retains or releases heat, whichever is least comfortable at the moment. But in the past I've only had to keep myself alive. This year I'm bringing provisions for myself and for my girlfriend Vicki, a Burningman virgin. And so, because I love her, and perhaps out of a certain degree of embarrassment, I'm taking great pains to make our camp comfortable and luxurious. I really think I'll appreciate luxury more when I can share it with someone.
I have four days. And that empty space where I'm staging my Burningman supplies isn't filling up on its own. Panic is rising in my stomach like a dust-storm.
No, that's not true. I went to Pep-Boys today and bought a 10'x20' car-port. As playa accomodations go, its suitable for a family of six. If I somehow managed to forget all my other belongings at home, I know that I would at least have a warm, insulated enclosure in which to play jai-alai.
I won't starve, and I won't freeze, and neither will Vicki. But the prospect of making this a miserable experience due to inattention to detail on my part is chilling nonetheless.
But I'm pushing that attitude firmly out of my mind as I conclude this post. In a few short days I'm going home. I'm going to be surrounded by the friends I love, sharing Burningman with the woman I love, and helping build the city I love.
And I'm going to get covered in playa dust.
The man burns in 16 days
From: "Monster Jobs"
To: eric@gradman.com
Subject: Qualified Job Opportunity
Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2004 02:38:35 -0500
Dear Eric,
Good news. Monster has matched the ideal qualifications of a client's job opportunity with your active resume in our database, and the client looks forward to hearing from you.
To view the details of this job, click the link below now.
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&jsdjobsearch.monster.com&hdcompany.monster.com&adjobsearch.monster.co.in
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Good luck!
http://www.monster.com/
(see what they came up with after the jump...)
(more...)
The frequency with which I check my email is a good indicator of how much fun I'm having. Seldom does the world muster enough distraction to compel me to ignore my email and my RSS reader. Burningman does it handily. This week, so did SIGGRAPH.
I arrived, a guest of the Guerilla Studio/Cyber-Fashion Show, completely unprepared for the forthcoming sensory and intellectual onslaught. My first impression of the event was formed in the Guerilla Studio, a hodgepodge of fully equipped computers, laser scanners, rapid prototyping machines, motion capture systems, and printers. There was a "dot-matrix" printer that used sand as its ink and and the floor as its canvas.
But I was taken by the creativity that pervaded the room. Individuals and groups were engrossed in marvelous activities: constructing futuristic garb for the cyber-fashion show; operating a printer that prints on human fingernails; tweaking 3D models for instant "incarnation" in plastic, fine-tuning a dopper-effect computer simulation. People were sitting in front of computer monitors or slaving over soldering irons, but they were operating them as paintbrushes and pianos. What's more, this art defied any convention. There were so many people in this room helping to blur the lines between sound and light, dance and inverse kinematics, physical and digital.
In reflection, I find it strange that even as a technical person I find it easiest to employ metaphors to relate to how I felt when I encountered this environment. I'd like to think that its because I related to this event as an artist, then as a techie. But then again, when the digital world is your canvas, is there any difference? It was inspiring to see the mode of art that I want to create, and to feel I had something in common with its creators. It was also incredibly humbling to discover I've been working in a relative vacuum, ignorant of so many incredible creations and tools.
I toured the Emerging Technology gallery at SIGGRAPH, and my mind was summarily blown. I was fortunate to have Athena Demos accompany me and drag me out by the hand when my attention-span hit rock bottom and I began stumbling from installation to installation, wide-eyed, staring at everything but absorbing nothing. I compare it to the feeling of arriving on the playa for the first time, confronted with a world so obviously full of possibility yet too vast to comprehend at once.
I smoked a cigarette and bought a book on Beginning OpenGL. I have since managed to render an icosahedron, though I think it looks a little lopsided.
Over the course of the convention I experimented with graphics and electronics and sound generation. I practiced my solder-fu to help fix costumes, and I even strutted down the cyber-fashion show runway wearing a vest equipped with an illuminated indication of the Homeland Security Alert Level. I passed out resumes and business cards. I donned an LED-studded costume and spun electro-luminescent meteors in the lobby. I cursed at my virtual icosahedron, many coffee-fueled late-night hours in the making, and definitely still lopsided.
Most importantly, I got to interact with some amazing, skilled, creative people. They proved that applying geekery to art is not a waste. I am inspired to create as I've never been before, and I've discovered a global community of geeks with whom to collaborate and share.
And perhaps I'll even get a job out of this. I'll try to write a more practical SIGGRAPH wrapup, one less encumbered by metaphors or my early-morning compulsion to be "eloquent."
This thread discusses the intuitive use of InverseFunctionalProperties to refer to objects expressed in RDF on the semantic web. What is an inverse functional property? It is a property (or attribute) of an object that uniquely identifies that object. A social security number is an InverseFunctionalProperty of a person that, when taken alone, uniquely identifies the person who possesses it.
It is valuable to refer to objects by inverse functional properties because it short-circuits the technical (and sociological) problem of assigning canonical URIs to objects, as is the current RDF practice. URIs are a hierarchical naming scheme based, somewhat unintuitively, on the domain name system. This scheme binds object names to an existing hierarchy, which serves a practical purpose at the moment: it combines the naming and the addressing schemes for referring to objects.
However, there's a mismatch here. DNS load balancers are an illustration of this mismatch. You request information from www.yahoo.com, but there isn't a single host called "www.yahoo.com" serving up that information. Your request is, in truth, a request for information from an abstract resource: yahoo. See this paper for a better treatment of this topic.
For InverseFunctionalProperties to serve as effective resource identifiers, there must be a distributed mechanism to associate properties with the resources themselves. Put differently, some abstraction layer must be built between the naming scheme that InverseFunctionalProperties provide, and the addressing scheme that URIs provide.
InverseFunctionalProperties exist in a flat namespace, bound only by the constraints of the ontologies that define them.
Consider a distributed hash table which provides a flat keyspace. InverseFunctionalProperties can comprisee part of that keyspace. Simply concatenate the ontology URI that describes the InverseFunctionalProperty with its value and write or read the key in the distributed hash table. The value written and read from the hashtable for such a key would be a resource URI for the InverseFunctionalProperty's inverse (optionally signed by its owner or by a third party).