Everybody (or: I’m a proud big brother)

My sister will kill me if she finds out I posted this on the Internet but I just had to share. I’m so proud of her.

11 Everybody

She’s performing an arrangement of Ingrid Michaelson’s “Everybody” with her school’s jazz choir.

The long dark tea-time of the soul

It looks like I’ve been too busy living life to stop and blog about it. I think this is an overall not-too-bad thing – it’s nice to have something resembling “a life”. But I remain filled with ideas, and I find that the best way to let these ideas grow and develop is to force myself to put them up for the whole Internet to see.

So: I intend to make several posts in the next few days, as it looks like I’ll have lots of free time. Apologies to the month of May: it’s not your fault you got no Blandfill posts.

A tiny little snippet: I am in the tropical and rainy town of Hilo, Hawaii. Today is King Kamehameha day: a celebration of the unification of the Hawaiian islands, a day off of work for state employees including those of the University of Hawaii, and a chance for childhood Tom to chuckle at an obscure anime reference. I like it here, even when I don’t have much to do on account of being transportation-less. Life is lived more slowly, I keep my windows wide open 24/7, there are real people. There’s an elegant simplicity to things, despite the fact that this community doesn’t have all that much money (in comparison to developed tourist centers on the other islands). Most of all, I like how this place is the polar opposite of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dear readers: unless I am whisked away on some sort of adventure in the near future, I shall make more posts soon. Until then, listen to some Dio.

GChat

Someone in the room mentioned that we should create a GChat bot that would let us all talk together without the hassle of creating a chat room each time. Having used xmpppy before, I went and did it.

The result:

(Charles changed my GNOME theme to pink some weeks ago.)

Tom then wanted me to write a post about how I did it, so here it is. Without going into a description of the library itself, it works as follows: when it gets a message from one of us, it prepends the appropriate initial and sends the message to the rest of us.

I guess I can go a little more into the details of the library (especially because the documentation is pretty annoying). (There still isn’t really that much to say.) You run some commands in the library to create a connection and log in, then register a function with the connection object to handle incoming messages. I suppose I can add more description if anyone wants. Code.

So that I can get all the tags:
http://acme.com/jef/singing_science/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM0ib4GxLPw

Long overdue

Hello readers; I realize that it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve posted, since exciting things like meteor showers, drastic concentration changes, and creepy conversations online with strangers aren’t things that happen to me. But the rest of the Blandfill has been good to me and hasn’t heckled me for not posting, as I have done to them many times. So here’s my update.

Will Ramsey bit me today at the hockey game. It was refreshing and terrifying. (more…)

Stars

This one’s for Rachel. Thanks for taking care of our wet music.

As Tom mentioned below, we went, along with a bunch of other people, to see the stars. (Nominally the meteors, but there weren’t very many of them.) I’ve got a little tripod, so I took some long-exposure (15 seconds, so not really that long) shots of the sky.

Cassiopeia over the horizon.

Orion.

Big Dipper.

This is the PLEIADES.

And now for something completely different.

This is awesome. Someone should do this for a CS50 final project.