Dubiously Salubrious

Disperse/Coalesce

2009-11-07T03:11:00.000-08:00

Plusses

2009-11-04T07:49:00.001-08:00

Click on it to add your own plus/cross

Typing is Still Fun

2009-09-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

Conway's Life

2009-08-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

This is without a doubt the silliest Conway's Life app I've ever made. There's not really much point to this, except maybe being amused at my sad blocky font.

Berries and Threes

2009-06-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

Lots of good things come in triads: laws of planetary motion and robotics, Musketeers, Dog Nights... Three's a nice number, not too big and not too small.

So you can see how I would consider it significant that I interacted with three types of berries this weekend:
Berry #1: Strawberries. Encountered at a festival while climbing on a dragon head.
Berry #2: Cherries. Mixed in with a little foie gras; delicious!
Berry #3: Random blue berries. Photographed in a parking lot while passing by.

Norwegian Wood

2009-06-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

I returned a fantastic batch of books to the library a few days ago, among them China Mieville's Iron Council and this one by Haruki Murakami.

As I'm becoming to expect from Murakami, the book was deceptively complex and lovely in its subtlety. His writing is so simple, so declarative and yet so powerful. How does he do that?

What allows Murakami's novels to retain their power even across language barriers? Are there sentiments that transcend language?
Language is so imprecise, mapping thoughts to words seems imperfect, and mapping from one language onto another mind-bogglingly impossible. And yet somehow I can feel so deeply moved by words that the author never conceived of, never thought of when he put these emotions and actions to paper.
I like thinking about that.

After a gorgeous passage describing watching Hatsumi in a taxi ("I watched her all the way to Shibuya, and wondered, without ever finding an answer, what this emotional reverberation that I was feeling could be."):

"It finally hit me some dozen or so years later...the image of Hatsumi flashed into my mind, and in that moment I understood what that tremor of the heart had been. It was a kind of childhood longing that had always remained -- and would forever remain -- unfulfilled. I had forgotten the existence of such innocent, all-but-seared-in longing; forgotten for years to remember that such feelings had ever existed inside nme. What Hatsumi had stirred in me was a part of my very self that had long lain dormant. And when the realization struck me, it aroused such sorrow I almost burst into tears. She had been an absolutely special woman. Someone should have done something -- anything -- to save her."

Typing is fun

2009-04-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

Boring preliminary version. Planning on putting in simple animations, words-per-minute tracking, a ui that doesn't suck, etc. etc.

Expanding Nodules

2009-03-30T20:06:00.001-07:00

Click to see the pretty orbs.