Happy Whatever!

Christianity celebrates Easter today, Judaism continues Passover, Islam observes Muharram (the first month of the Hirji calendar), and everyone else sleeps in just because they can.
Me, I ate some Peeps, spent some time observing the intersection of Creation and humankind's creations and tended an ailing FM transmitter. I can't say too much about my faith or your faith or that other guy's faith. However, when walking down a row of alternating buildings and fields at four in the morning, two feet in solitude pounding the worn pavement and its dewy coat still falling from the sky... Well, I can't help thinking of greater things, but that's just me, the stupid hippie. It's hard to share "religion" because each such experience is personal, and that which is beautiful, transcendent meaning to one person will often be just another drab night to another. In each case, the context is a frame of reference limited to the head of the observer, and is not easily shared because there is only so much common ground to be found. But this is a bit of my sacred, and that is all I will say.

There will be some content here. Someday. Perhaps even someday soon, it's hard to say. I have photos on the way, and I think I might set up a little shrine to an old cereal called "Hidden Treasures". I found a lead to an old box, and I think I might run with it from there...

In the meantime, you can discuss Peeps and Hidden Treasures by following a handy link to the impromptu discussion forums. I've reconfigured the boards to make it easier to just show up and post, so feel free to spread your thoughts. Also, in a fit of boredom last week, I cleaned up the avatars a bit. Now with doughnuts, power tools, and other fun stuff, much of it courtesy of Hide Itoh's Pixture Studios. Maybe this is a sign that my major for next month should be Graphic Design instead of March's... Mechanical Engineering, I think. Something like that. College is strange that way.

The interesting thing about evaluating surface integrals for parametrized functions of three variables is that you don't actually need the function that defines the curvature of the surface--just two directional derivatives of the same. Instead of just integrating for a volume, you instead determine arc length--in two directions at once! This is interesting because you can determine the area of linear surfaces of complex shape using a polar coordinate system without having to parameterize the surface's incidental angle of inclination, without having to derive the κ-curvature seperately, and without having to stuff a complex surface equation into the boundaries of a definite integral. The down side is that this can be a bit counter-intuitive, because you're just taking volume times arc length, and appears to neophytes like myself that the result should just be the volume of a distortion of the initial function. In the end, you just have to trust the equations and hope you don't screw them up too badly.

...some random thoughts on Calculus III. I had some random thoughts on why I hate harpsichords in chamber music, but I forgot to write them down before I stopped caring. That's a greek kappa up there, by the way; if all you see is a funky-looking box, your browser isn't set up for internationalization. Silly Yank. I hadn't realized how many different character sets had been rigged for i18n in the UTF-8 standard, though... it's boring stuff, I suppose, but UTF-8 could eventually enable anyone anyware to use the same computer, regardless of where they're from or what language they speak. This is more useful than is sounds, and much more important to the future of this small world than you might think. It is at the same time another very trivial fact, of little use to most people right now than for odd things, like enabling me to show off a κ to you, properly define the area ℝ³ in a math equation, or throw out a ♧ or ☾ from the "dingbat" encoding sheet. Like I said, trivial. No idea why someone snuck the Lucky Charms shapes into the standard... but there they are. You can check to see how i18n-ready your browser is with a quick proof sheet here (or a slightly longer proof sheet here) or check out an edited mirror of the official UTF-8 encoding charts.

i18n is fun. If I weren't going after an engineering degree, I would probably have been a linguist. Or maybe a poet. ...no, I think I'll leave the poetry to contemporary poet Joan(s). Yeah.

Note to self: it's called a nabla...

Updating is hard from my room, on account of the odd network setup (in geek: passive FTP behind a 56k pipe shared with NAT is very, very slow; I'm doing this with vim over ssh), which is why I haven't updated in a while. I can already see the readership base dwindling from two to one... heh heh.
Anyway, not much to report. I had hoped to have more pictures by now, but it turns out that "next-day film processing" has become a meaningless term. So that will have to wait. If you really need something to stare at, you can always check out the first ever Segway HT, or buy it for a mere US$117,400. Supposedly most of the proceeds will go to charity or something like that. I was too busy staring at all of the naughts in the bid history table to pay too much attention to that.
Who does say that a comedy sketch has to have an end, anyway?

In the name of all that is holy, let the spastic weekends like the one now past cease to be forever!

There, my frustrations are vented.

Words of hard-wrought wisdom for today: if anyone you know is a design type--no matter whether your acquaintance is an architect, interior designer, graphic designer, artist, a city or regional planner, or whatever--give him or her a hug the next time you meet. Chances are that that person has put up with a lot of crap to get where he or she is today, likely more crap than lowly engineers like myself will ever encounter. "But, Rob, there is such a glut of designers in our shallow, yuppie-driven service economy," you may say. "How hard could it be to become a designer?" It's much harder to go into design than you know, my friend. It's much harder to go into design than I know. And the preponderance of designers is not a result of easy rites of passage, but a factor in the difficulty of that torture.
So please, hug a designer today. Hug one long and hard, because designers are people too, with feelings; feelings that are easily worn by the intensity of their work. Hug a designer, because... because.

Thank you.

Hey, it's seven minutes to midnight on a Saturday night, and here I am in a computer lab. Whee. I hate doing this, to be honest. Right now it's a toss-up between sleeping in the Sanborn lounge, playing music all night at the radio station, or possibly seeing sights that force me to burn my eyes out. That's all I'm going to say about that. I promise.
Anyway, hi. To all of my college friends in places other than Iowa: I hope your spring break goes well. For the record, mine doesn't begin until a week from today, so blast it all. Maybe it's just as well; while the 50mph winds today (!) were making it a bit chilly out, I understand it's even colder back in Rapid. I've taken the stance that until you have to say "negative" before the temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit, not Centigrade), it really isn't that cold out.
To the point, however, in Rapid, it really is that cold. I'll just stay in Iowa and walk sideways for now.

A news post, seeing as how I'm away from das Silphenboxen: Scotland has decided to execute a radical shift in its drug policy. It seems the legislature is going with rehab and harm reduction and ending Scotland's role in the war on drugs. This isn't just more noise, either--according to the article, immediate plans are in the works to loosen restrictions on cannabis, followed by funding of treatment centers and information campaigns. I'd heard talk about experiments like this in London over international news channels, as some police districts were seeking approval to establish random zones in which drug laws would be unenforced, but outside of perhaps The Netherlands, nothing on even this scale has ever been done. Very interesting.

Oh, there is one media item: Rejected. (6.8mb, Windows Media Video format, about ten minutes in length.) This is good; this might be unsafe for work. Nominated for an Oscar in 2000, and very amusing.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Bill Janklow (left). He's the present governor of South Dakota, and he just announced his intention to run for the House of Representatives. He has a bit of a sordid history with the Native American population in South Dakota (though careful about that source; it's probably a bit biased), and though his administrations have done some good, he himself has done quite a bit of harm... even if the rape charges are unsubstantiated, there is his habit of representing South Dakota as a state full of stupid rednecks in the regional press. And we're not. Mostly. But Janklow manages to keep appearing in the right press releases, and so his publicity ratings remain lodged in the political ceiling. Expect him to sweep both the caucus and the race in November that follows. C-SPAN will never be the same...

Rumors that Letterman would be replaced with Howard Stern? All right...

When I was doing the half-awake typing session Sunday night, I apparently typed up an excerpt from Farewell to Manzanar about war, peace, and chum. I'm going to wander off to bed, but I will leave you with that.

Yes, these are the days, my friends, and these are the days, my friends. But these days of 888 cents and 106 coins of change...
Below: a fragmented essay I typed up late last night, after finishing some homework. I present it as is, because I'm too unsure about where I was going with it to attempt any changes.

One of my roommate's favorite pasttimes is going to parties, drinking a fair amount of vodka and beer, coming back to the dorm, calling (and waking) up one of his old friends from his hometown, and forcing her to stay up late and listen to him drunkenly mumble about life. I hope I'm not developing a similar penchance for sleep-deprived ravings in this space...
Anyhow, it's two in the morning, and I just finished writing a paper about nothing for my English class... in the dark. My roommates were going to bed, so I grabbed my PDA, portable keyboard, and assignment packet and headed for the Sanborn Hall den. The screen on my PDA is tiny, though, and my eyes were (and are) tiny, so I wound up turning off the lights and BSing my way though a paper analyzing Jonathan Schell's mastery of basic literary techniques to the blue-green glow of the Visor. Whenever I needed to cite something, I just switched the Geek Box over to a program that displays a screen of solid pixels and used the thing as a flashlight.
I bought the thing because I needed some degree of mobile computing and couldn't afford a laptop. Now, when it looks like I'm going to be buying a new computer very soon, my choice will be for a desktop model because I don't need a laptop anymore. One tiny $300 (now worth half that, natch) contraption does everything a $3,000 mobile computer would, and some things it couldn't. Technology is neat like that, you know? Like that, and like the way Andre Torrez, computer programmer and son of a barber, can be mentioned on a minor cable network for a personal side project. Go Andre!
After KQ, I forgot for a short while a major revelation I had as I drove Anne back to her dorm just after the event, just as I somehow temporarily blanked the name of Alan Kiung, the hip-hop DJ I mentioned. The revelation was this: running around and being crazy in the Friley basement was the most fun I've had in Iowa. To be perfectly honest (just this once), I'm really just not all that happy here. It's not because of the quality of the education I'm receiving, or the odd living conditions, or even the damned wind. I'm just not enjoying myself a great deal. Of course, the great dilemma comes just upstream in the flow of revelations: first, it's probably my fault, and second, I'm not sure I'm supposed to be happy. After all, I'm not paying $14,000 a year to have a good time; I'm paying $14,000 a year to receive a decent education. I have used this argument to poke fun at my university in the past, and it of course works both ways. But where does it leave me? Unhappy, slowly balding, and sitting in a dark room at two in the morning staring at a $300 address book? To claim that I'm misunderstood would be to imply that I understand myself in a way that most other people don't. Not only is this laughable, but it's not true. My glass is half-empty, after all, and the other half is just as clear.

Blah, blah, whine, whine, blah. And then I passed out.
Anyway, media and linkage. First off, Nightline may be on the verge of termination. A number of former Nightline staff and crew are working on CNN's News Night now, so it should be no surprise that that show did a piece on the subject last Friday. It's really an insightful piece, and takes a good look at the state of journalism today. I've acquired and cropped a transcript, and it is available here. Transcript is ©2002 Cable News Network, and all that, but check it out anyway if you care one way or another about news.
The "how much caffeine would kill you" meme has come and passed, but completely missed was a nice little crib sheet about caffeine's chemical properties. Fun fact! Caffeine induces an overdose state after the consumption of about 250mg in a relatively short period. This is equal to two or three cups of coffee, two and a half caffiene-imbued no-doze pills, or five to eight cans of cola. A caffeine overdose comes with at least five of the following symptoms: restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushed face, diuresis, gastrointestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, rambling flow of thought and speech, tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia, periods of inexhaustibility, and/or psychomotor agitation. Note that in general, you don't get to pick which five.
Finally, Philip Glass! I've done some checking, and after some consultation and a referral from Tyler, I've come to the conclusion that Einstein on the Beach is an incredible piece of music. Several recordings have been cut from it; I've posted the lyrics to part of it as a text file. (That first link has more information and audio clips, by the way.) Just astonishing...

Hi. I haven't slept in about thirty-six hours, but it's not so bad. One of the hip-hop DJs at the station said his personal record was something like ninety hours, set during a laid-over flight from Seattle to Japan. I suppose my situation isn't so bad, but I haven't stayed up past four in at least seven months, and I'm a bit disconcerted right now. Focusing on the screen and typing is a major effort... Anne Greenwood strongly recommended that I get some sleep. Perhaps I will. First, though, I want to get some fragmented memories down on "paper":

1. Seven drunk girls in the main stairwell, and one more standing dazed in a men's hall near the stairwell the next morning.
2. Meeting Hannah, and discovering her to be the most impossibly upbeat and cheerful girl I've ever met. "I'm really eleven years old," she explained, holding a lighter to the ends of a bead bracelet with the words "I (HEART) JEBUS" arranged on one side. For at least six hours, she was the sole source of the station's energy as we all stumbled blindly through a dark, snowy night of trivia and ringing phones.
3. Shar, Jerry, and some of the old KURE staff coming back and... heh heh. They had a lot of fun.
4. Scavenger hunts. Giant sombreros, clowns, an army of fridges, "Grungy Ernie five-inches", cheese balls. One of the items to find was a sorority girl. Some of the sorority girls weren't so happy about being yanked off of the street and "found".
5. A sled race. Ninety minutes to find cardboard, build a sled, and race it. Every team brought out a sled, even the team that was still a bit drunk. They finished almost last, but with a little cheering, they finished, smiling like crazy.
6. The Moton Challenge: play the station's music director in a video game, namely the Dreamcast's NBA 2k2. One kid managed to get to overtime before being slaughtered.
7. Dodging a $6 parking fee thanks to four to six inches of snow, then spending a half-hour out in the snow with Carl and The Bathing Ape watching teams pile white stuff. Later, a pop quiz with the "flirtiest" member of each team.
8. Petes, my beat-up, '86 Buick Somerset must be some strange kind of god-beast. Its underpowered, four-cylinder engine tore through some fat snow drifts as big four-wheel drive trucks and SUVs slid all over the place. One red Ford extended-cab truck came screaming through a stop sign and around a curve near my residence hall with front wheels heading straight down the middle of the road and back wheels pointed at an obscene angle to the curb. I am unsure if this was an intentional display.
9. Orson Welles did a voice on Transformers: The Movie?
10. Listening to the station manager and treasurer spin some great trance and breaks, then yielding to some incredible variety music by a former music director.
11. Blatant sexual innuendo.

There is more, but I'm thoroughly zonked right now, and am rapidly losing concentration. Good night, all.

Usagi usagi.

Just took a calculus test, and I think I did all right. I finished a little early, at any rate, so I was able to come to the English building before the crowds descended on central campus. In their place were dozens of young robins, chirping contentedly as they hopped over the frozen dirt in search of food. Despite the cold and the impending snow storm, there they were, hopping along with immeasurable bliss. I've never understood how anyone can feel down and stay there when nature is so full of hope...
Anyway, T minus six hours and counting to Kaleidoquiz. I probably should have clarified that I'm not participating in the quiz, but helping organize and run it; answering phones, tracking the teams' progress on the web site for the online director, and so forth. I also have two traveling questions to finish making up and assembling by tonight... so I'm busy, I suppose, as I have been. But it's a nice day outside, though cold, and people around campus are generally upbeat because today is Friday, so the burden is one of pleasure.
Whoops, time to go to class...