Selfish Crab

I have made the executive decision that I need to use the word “fuck” and other swear words more often in my writing.  Here is an example:

Fuck law school and its infinite store of disappointments, regrets, and melancholy.

Yes, I know three of those words are synonyms. However, (1) fuck you, and (2) not unlike ice cream, sadness comes in many flavors, and in law school, you just get to try them all.   In fact, it is a veritable world tour of the 7 land masses of misery.   If sadness was a sugared confection, law school is a golden fucking ticket, tucked away behind a chocolate bar, granting you access to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate I-have-chosen-a-career-of-shit Factory.   Did I mention I recently joined my college reunion committee?  I plan on setting up a Reunion Day lecture event, entitled “Hi Would You Like to Be More Pathetic: 5 Reasons You Should Leave a Career Actually Creating Something Useful: an Engineering to Law Primer”.  Tickets are on pre-order via a custom sundial registration form coming to you soon.

# 2008 Nov 20    {law school}    #

Video: Trailer for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which is slaking both the sudden thirst for vampire stories and the longstanding appetite for prequels.

See also, Trailer for Star Trek (prequel + director of Lost).

# 2008 Nov 19    {Links}    #

Photo:  now-Dodge Gymnasium at Columbia University circa 1908 (via kottke). The semi-circle room, second-level running track, the distinct cross-hatch rail design, the stone columns (now covered with cushions), it’s all there, and is now over 100 years old apparently.  The students pictured are playing a brand new game called “basketball” (invented 1891).

See also: Flag Rush in 1910, a tradition wherein sophomores stake a flag and defend it from an onslaught of freshmen.  Taken in front of Hamilton Hall.

# 2008 Nov 16    {Columbia}    #

1. Alcohol.   Driving automobiles.
2. Sleeping pills.  Operating heavy machinery.
3. Chatting with parents.  Partitioning your hard drive for dual-boot.

Because sometimes you misread the small white-on-blue text labels and select the wrong partition to reformat as NTFS and you wind up blowing away your entire laptop.

# 2008 Nov 10    {nerd}    #

1. Until the 1960s, Brooklyn, NY produced 20% of the nation’s beer.  [source]
2. The city of Shabim, Yemen is an ancient city laden with towering buildings made of mud (mud!!), up to 5 to 11 stories high.  Thankfully, rain comes infrequently.  [source]
3. In designing its interrogation program after 9/11 (criticized by many as torture), the CIA turned to its own internal experts, who had studied Cold War-era interrogation methods designed to elicit false confessions (good for propaganda).  [source]
4. President-elect Obama’s new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is the brother of Ari Emanuel, the basis for super-agent Ari Gold on Entourage.  [source]

# 2008 Nov 6    {Links}    2

Video:  Synchronized Presidential Debating.   Incredibly eloquent statement on the waste of time that the presidential debates have become for the American people.

Video: John McCain and Barack Obama Dance-off.  Entirely plausible visual effects and body movements.   You’d think Senator Obama would have the edge here…

Update: Video: You Can Vote How You Like.  Exuberant children singing and dancing about our choices.

Video: Vote on November 4th so pleads a plethora of celebrities. I think I have 4 readers left, so this should satisfy the requisite number of forwards.

# 2008 Oct 30    {Links}    #

On Tuesday, 36 deliverymen  won a $4.6 million judgment in back pay and damages against the owners of Saigon Grill for violations of federal and NY labor law.   The workers had been on strike since March 2007.

I’m torn on this one.   Sure it seems like the lowly wage-earner is getting their justice after toiling in an unrewarding job under harsh conditions.  On the other hand, Saigon Grill is not exactly owned by a distant franchise.  The owner, Simon Nget, was a Cambodian refugee who graduated from high school, and scrapped together enough tips and wages to open his own shop in 1991. Working his ass off, he opened Saigon Grill in 1996, expanded to the east side in 1999, moved the first location to Amsterdam in 2001, and moved the second location to University Place in 2006.  If this isn’t the American Dream come true (albeit in the form of delivering L14 with shrimp to all), I do not know what is.

Examining the facts, the deliverymen’s situation does not appear truly horrendous.  The deliverymen made $1.50/hr in direct wages.  That’s a pittance, but only just barely under the legal limit of $2.13/hr for tipped restaurant workers (source).  Meanwhile, the deliverymen were pulling in tip income, totaling in some cases, as much as $3,500 to $4,000 monthly! (source, p16)  Remember, this is under-the-table un-taxed cash income.

Additional reading:

• New York Magazine: The Deliveryman’s Uprising (Aug 2007)
• The American Lawyer: Davis Polk Hands Big Tip to Saigon Grill Deliveryman (Oct 2008)
• Judge’s decision:  Yu Ke et al v. Saigon Grill Memorandum and Order (Oct 2008)

# 2008 Oct 24    {Life, law school}    2

Stop the fucking presses– narwhals are real???

# 2008 Oct 21    {Life}    #

If you’re looking for a place to catch-up on the debates, NYTimes is hosting video of all presidential and vice-presidential debates, with a slick interface for viewing transcripts, segments separated by topic and speaker, search for every time they said “Joe the plumber”.   No permalinks though.

Also, dear readers, I know many of you are displaced citizens of these united States, so go vote absentee.

Update:  a video compilation of all four debates, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

# 2008 Oct 16    {Links}    1

Maybe I slept through this class in Databases in which we went over full-text searching, but I have no idea how to implement any searching outside of quicksort. This area of computer science is a total blackhole for me. Can one of you recommend a way to implement full-text search on a table containing movies (columns are titles, directors) with InnoDB? Am I creating a scrappy movies MyISAM table and dynamically updating it to match my movies InnoDB table? Someone please help; at my last job, I was mostly in charge of fancy CSS and JavaScript and one-off projects that were dead on launch day (see, Project FaceLink)

# 2008 Oct 15    {Life}    1

1. One of the most prestigious restaurants in New York from the 1960s to 1990s was Lutèce, located on the East Side.   It closed in 2004, citing a drop in business after 9/11 and a failed changing of the guard when legendary French chef André Soltzner stepped down after 34 years of near-nonstop service.  Soltzner, in a recent interview with NY Magazine (now loudly celebrating its 40th anniversary) recalls:
   

   I was sort of a slave to my restaurant. And my wife too. I don’t say it was right. Today, I maybe say it was wrong. Years ago, in Paris, we had no money. But when we were more comfortable, maybe twenty years later, I said, “Simone, you know, you’ve paid your dues and everything, I buy you whatever you wish.” I was thinking to buy her a ring or a necklace or something like that. “Whatever you wish, tell me.” She looked at me and said, “Take me to a movie.” For twenty years, I hadn’t taken her to a movie. I woke up. I said, “Oh my God, what did I do to my wife?”

2. I hope this feature would enable me to share all the useless knowledge I learn during all my online wanderings. We’ll see if it sticks.

# 2008 Oct 15    {Life}    #

For those of us that enjoyed the episode from This American Life explaining the sub-prime mortgage problem, This American Life has a follow-up this week: Another Frightening Show About the Economy (free download til end of week), wherein they discuss developments from the past months, thereby including the commercial paper market, “breaking the buck”, credit default swaps, and the bailout plan.

The TAF content is an oasis in a burning desert of shitty partisan journalism out there.  Contrast TAF with a recent 60 Minutes episode on nearly the same subject.  (They even interview some of the same people, such as Professor Michael Greenberger, former director at Commodities Futures Trading commission.)   Yet the fact-to-analysis ratio is incredibly low.   I’m bored of reading articles that explain little and only deride the  “greed” on Wall Street.

# 2008 Oct 8    {Life}    3

This is more for me, than for you.   Subversion does not compile flawlessly on bluehost, because it seems they are using a 64-bit OS.

$ uname -a
Linux [...] 2.6.26-3_5.BHsmp #1 SMP Fri Aug 29 12:43:21 MDT 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Here’s what worked for me, after consulting numerous sources:

1. mkdir ~/src
   cd ~/src
   wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
   wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz
   tar -xzvf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz
   tar -xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz
   cd subversion-1.4.6
2. cd apr
   ./configure ––enable-shared ––prefix=$HOME/system
   make && make install
3. cd ../apr-util
   ./configure ––enable-shared ––prefix=$HOME/system \
   ––with-expat=builtin ––with-apr=$HOME/system \
   ––without-berkeley-db
   make && make install
4. cd ../neon
   EXTRA_CFLAGS=”-L/usr/lib64 -fPIC”
   CFLAGS=”-L/usr/lib64 -fPIC”
   ./configure ––prefix=$HOME/system ––enable-shared
   make && make install

   The 64-bit flag fixes these errors
   src/subversion-1.5.2/neon/src/.libs/libneon.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
   
   /usr/lib/libexpat.so: could not read symbols: File in wrong format
   

5. cd ..
   ./configure -––prefix=$HOME/system ––without-apxs ––with-expat=builtin
   make && make install

   –without-apxs fixes this error: “cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/local/apache/modules/mod_dav_svn.so’: Permission denied “

See also:

1. bluehost forums: “svn repository on bluehost”
2. Justball.com: Setting up Subverison on Bluehost
3. Joemaller.com: How to install Subversion on a shared host

# 2008 Oct 7    {nerd}    #

Query.    Teddy Grahams: nutritious, or not?    Because I am eating a multitude at this very hour, and I fear they are trojan ursa of polyunsaturated fats.

# 2008 Oct 6    {Life}    #

NYTimes: Singer/songwriter Suzanne Vega’s ruminations on her song Tom’s Diner.  The original MP3 codec developers in Germany debugged the early versions of the MP3 algorithm using “Tom’s Diner”, relying on the song’s warm acoustic tones to test the limits of the audio compression algorithm.

When I was at Barnard College in Manhattan, I used to go to Tom’s Restaurant for coffee, and after I graduated I also ate there before going to work. It was then a cheap, greasy place on 112th and Broadway, and it still is, in spite of its celebrity.

* * *

So Mr. Brandenberg gets a copy of the song, and puts it through the newly created MP3. But instead of the “warm human voice” there are monstrous distortions, as though the Exorcist has somehow gotten into the system, shadowing every phrase. They spend months refining it, running “Tom’s Diner through the system over and over again with modifications, until it comes through clearly. “He wound up listening to the song thousands of times,” the article, written by Hilmar Schmundt, continued, “and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.”

# 2008 Sep 29    {Columbia, Links}    #

Rainy weekends = programming fun.   I have channeled my happiness with the last two years of my life into an easy-to-remember website:  DoNotGoToLaw School.org.   Enjoy.

# 2008 Sep 29    {law school, nerd}    #

Some films perhaps you were not aware, or dare I say it, had forgotten that, starred the late Paul Newman:   Slapshot (1976, cult classic hockey movie),  Pixar’s Cars (2006, doc hudson), Road to Perdition (2003, greatest cast ever for a comic book movie?).

# 2008 Sep 27    {Life}    #

How many nights that drift to four AM, spent chasing digressive distractions, must be enjoyed before one realizes the source of one’s nocturnal meanderings lies in a fundamental dissatisfaction with the day’s deeds.  That is to say, one lingers, sleepless, because of a hope that some act will be accomplished– or knowledge, learned; or expression, sung– that will slake a heart’s craving for… happiness???

The solution must be an avowal, a promise to pursue daily at least a shard of one’s dreams, some small slice of satisfaction.   My apparition of a day job is not cutting it anymore.  Expect more photographs.  More programming.  Yes we can.

# 2008 Sep 24    {Life, law school}    #