Precision at the cost of accuracy. How many times do we give answers that are precise but inaccurate? Where do you want to go to dinner? I don't know. How about Aoki? Okay. It's possible that of all restaurants, you didn't really want to go to Aoki, but because the lure of precision is so strong you agree that yes, Aoki is where you want to go to dinner.
I'm writing this from my Dell... the abandoned PC on my desk ever since my PowerBook arrived. My PowerBook however has gone back into the shop due to the dreaded white spot problem. It's been gone a while now, and only today do I think, "Hey, I can just use my old PC instead." I've been reading and going out instead. Smell like smoke now in fact due to just coming back from the Capitol Club. Do you know how some people always show up late? It's really annoying.
It's performance review time at work again. Another 13 pages of self-reflective prose that wavers between super-critical to super-congratulatory. While I publicly complain about this process, I secretly love it. It's like going to the psychologist and being asked all the right questions.
K had eye surgery last week. She's currently experiencing the joys of being able to read a book at any distance that it is held from her eyes. I wish I could enjoy my eyes as much.
We also got a new bed. A present for K's birthday. It barely fits into our bedroom, and watching it get assembled by the bed-assembler guys made me realize that we'll probably have to ditch it if we ever move. If we ever move? Are we going to stay here for the rest of our lives?
I'm thinking about different ways to create indexes of content. There's the table of contents, for instance--a listing of topics that have been written in order for a particular purpose. Doesn't quite fit the weblog format though. A taxonomy makes more sense... contents arranged by topic. There's also a glossary--a listing of phrases and keywords in alphabetical order with annotations about where they were mentioned in the text. Then there are footnotes--given a particular page, where can I find more about the topics mentioned in these pages? Bibliographies and appendixes. Then there's the web-like "most mentioned topics," "most popular topics," "similar topics," and "recently viewed topics." So many ways to organize content. I will have something to show you in about 2 weeks, I think. It's a clever hybrid of Movable Type, MTMacros, mySQL, Mason, and mod_perl. The 5 Ms. With things like RDF, synonyms, parent/child relationships, and bottom-up categorization thrown in for fun. I think people will really dig it.
I've also built my first XHTML 1.0 Strict site in my life. Was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Am also taking a Java class at the University of Washington. Still working on a few other side projects that I can't talk about yet too. Will be speaking in a panel at SXSW Interactive called "Replacing Billboard, Bestseller Lists and Editors with Robots" with Cameron Marlow, Paul Bausch, and Brian Whitman (creator of the cool Eigenradio amongst other things). It's going to be so cool. We're going to prepare some cool stats just for the occasion.
And this has been an exercise of providing an overload of precise data while ignoring the accuracy of the state that it is emerging from. An exercise in telling you more than you need to know at the cost of telling you how things really are.
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