opening up

slush

work, talent

I feel more empowered by the thought that, for my ambitions, work and talent are interchangeable, than by the knowledge that I am capable of acquiring any talent.

a new tag: weeklies

As I said earlier, I’ll be declaring weekly a topic that I’ll spend that week focusing on, hopefully culminating in something human-readable, not simply obtuse.
The posts defining the coming week’s focus will be tagged weeklies1.
Yes, until I put in a good interface to the tags, you’ll need to type out http://aresnick.mit.edu/blog/tags/weeklies. [↩]

“at least it has an ending”

From Cory Doctorow’s talk at GoogleNYC, talking about his book, Little Brother:

“[...] who discover, after a terrorist attack on the Bay Area, that destroys the Bay Bridge, that in fact that as bad and terrifying a terrorist attack is, it at least has an ending. Whereas the police response to a terrorist attack has [...]

renewed intentions

to write regularly.

overheard in w20, third floor

In response to a question “on subject” but “off-topic” (that is, it wasn’t directly related to the problem set being discussed):

G No guys, let’s not go there. This is one of the only classes I’m getting an ‘A’ in, I’m not going to fuck it up.

and, i’m back

Sorry for the delay.

overheard in W20-3*, “the coffehouse”

Grades take on undue precedence:

G: You told me a few specific things [I could improve about my paper], but like, I wasn’t sure if like, if those things would make the difference between a ‘B’ and an ‘A’.

sysadmin: “beautiliful” retired, “quotes” hired

So, I’m retiring the beautiliful page for lack of use. firstnamebasis will still function. As a token replacement, I’m linking to a growing Google Notebook of quotations I collect1 on my reading page. Quotation, source, and citation, slowly refined. Feel free to suggest quotations for contribution.
And yes, eventually I’ll have them [...]

boring: updated OPML file

Updated OPML/feed file; read everything I do. Still behind on updating the rest of that page.

overheard in w20-3* (“the coffeehouse”)

G: I can’t even calculate the probability of like a roll of the die. I’m just praying I didn’t fail.

follow-up: online, language learning tools

Looks like this market is doing just fine; MyHappyPlanet is actually solving the problem (i.e. opportunity) which I noted a few days ago.

concern shows itself in strange ways at mit

If you fall asleep in a computer cluster, other students, acting in good faith, will wake you up, concerned that you didn’t mean to fall asleep and might instead be falling behind on your work.
Endearing, but freaking weird.

idea: web-enabled foreign language instruction

Update (03.12.08): Looks like this market is doing just fine; MyHappyPlanet is actually solving the problem.
So, a recent story in the New York Times brought to mind an old idea of mine seeded by a friend’s description of a matchup service in Germany dedicated to setting up meetings between English-speakers seeking to learn German [...]

off-topic: fixing annoying side-scroll behavior in Firefox with ThinkPad Trackpoint

So, that little red nub on Thinkpads? It’s part of the so-called “Trackpoint” system. And on my Thinkpad, running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, when I attempted to scroll with it (using the middle mouse button), if I deviated to the left or right while in Firefox, Firefox would attempt to go Back or [...]

overheard in marina ballroom e, etech ‘08

B: I’m not as efficient as I used to be, and it’s killing me.

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