This journal is actually updated pretty frequently, but most of it is only visible to people I know. Do I know you? Please poke me!

You should come study algorithms! I mean, if you're at UW. And you are in algorithms. And, uh, plan to study. Okay, maybe you specifically shouldn't.

( Oh, you know who you are. )

Update: To answer the first question received, no, you don't have to bring clues. Enthusiasm, determination, morale, and quiet desperation are all acceptable. Noisy desperation might be pushing it.

A few people have asked about the dentist who is coping with my broken tooth (*shakes fist at burger place*). If you're not in or near Seattle it's probably not of interest.

( dentist )

teyli turned me on to ChoreBuster!

So you aren't disappointed, I'll say up front, they haven't actually found a way to reduce one's chore load magically via the Internet. It's actually a chore tracking and scheduling tool. You enter people (in my case, me), chores (difficulty and desired frequency and so on), and *pop*, a balanced schedule comes out. (This could be used for almost any scheduling task, not just chores, but that's their target.) The underlying geekery is worth some analysis, too.

( Why that's useful, what they do right, what they do wrong )

Anyway, it's free to use, with a very small cost ($2+) to enable certain features. Worth playing with if you (a) care about the chores part or (b) are into HCI, AI planning, or task scheduling.

Waiting for my next prospective student interview to show up and ask me questions about UW. What a terrible day it is for that. So I'll use the pause as an excuse for the following PSA:

If you have content on LJ that you care about – several years of intermittent posts, discussions in threads with friends, and so on – it's a good idea to take backups occasionally. (This is true of any content you care about, anywhere, but especially here.)

The way that I have found to do this that suits me best is LJ Book, which creates a big ol' PDF you can keep on your own storage media, and lets you define what components you back up (music? mood? userpic?). Other options exist, about which I know nothing firsthand: one, two, three, four on casual search.

i hunted you a wumpus



but it eated me

UW's Graduate Funding Info Service has a blog. It's on Blogspot, so I made a feed:

uwgfis

Which you can befriend, if that is in any way relevant to you.

If you've known me for more than 15 minutes, you know I have a Thing about the "supplements" industry. I don't intend to subject you to that rant at this time, however. Apparently no-one has dropped a hat.

Instead I wanted to point out this web page. The interface is frustrating, but if you type something like "melatonin" into the drug or supplement search box, you get not only some useful info, but a list of uses that a substance has been put to, along with a grade:

A Strong scientific evidence for this use
B Good scientific evidence for this use
C Unclear scientific evidence for this use
D Fair scientific evidence against this use (it may not work)
F Strong scientific evidence against this use (it likely does not work)

So a C usually means there's not much research – but if there is research, you can find out. You can also look into "off-label" uses of FDA-approved drugs.

The undergraduate AI class I'm TA-ing is having a movie night. (In a week! Yipe!)

Apparently, last time we showed AI, and nobody came. I'm not that surprised; it's recent enough that I would guess everyone's seen it who wants to, and it's not a good enough movie to see twice. (Or even once. Urgh.)

So... what should we show? It has to be AI-themed. I, Robot? I enjoyed it, but I don't know if anyone else did. I think everyone's seen The Matrix too many times, probably. Should we go back to one of the classics, something these horribly young kiddos wouldn't have seen? I sort of think 2001 is just too hard to wrap your head around. TRON? The Day the Earth Stood Still? Blade Runner? Maybe the Ghost in the Shell movie isn't too inaccessible? T2? Something listed here?

Hep'! Especially those of you who are young peoples! Suggestions, thoughts? What would you go see on a Monday night?

Update: Holy crap. The Matrix came out eight and a half years ago.

A rant on web design:

A lot of designers treat their sites as, essentially, artwork—their artwork, with emphasis on the possessive. They get to choose how it's supposed to look, how you're supposed to navigate through it, and what you're supposed to use it for. They're fully entitled to change colors and fonts and font sizes. And they get annoyed when people mess with their precious art. This is the attitude that causes people to do things like try to find ways to block your browsers' preference settings on layout and font, or to use to make it look like they intended it to.

I think the following comment (found in an article about Gmail blocking browsers with Greasemonkey installed) sums up this attitude quite well:

Personally I dont think greasemonkey is right anyway [...] from googles point of view, youre basically hacking their site and making it do things it wasn't intended to do. I wouldn't want people messing with my sites either. (sic)

All right, web designers, listen closely: this attitude is wrong.

Web pages, in the main, aren't artwork. They serve a purpose other than being visually appealing/moving/whatever. They exist to provide information or a capability or a service. Expedia isn't there for me to admire; it's there for me to make plane tickets from. And my ability to adjust that experience makes the web page more able to provide functionality to me as a client, not less.

Print media are pretty much fixed. When you're doing a layout for a newspaper, it's going to go to print the way it is, and it will either work or it won't. It makes sense to think hard about the visual presentation, and do the best you can to make it appealing and accessible to the largest number of people. But if you could have a newspaper that automatically adjusted itself to use a larger font for the 10% of people with weak eyes, would you tell those people "Your preferences are wrong, I'm sure it's better with the smaller font?" Would you deliberately adjust the layout on an ad to put the text at the bottom, knowing your target audience was looking for it at the top? Well... maybe you would, I dunno. But you shouldn't. And that's exactly what you're doing when you try to set your web page in stone.

I've just quit using Expedia, which I like, for one reason only: they've changed their web layout to pin down the placement of some tabs, and now critical links end up behind those tabs when a larger font is used. Okay, the tabs now stay where the designer thought they looked best. But trying to access my most recent itinerary brought me quite literally to tears of frustration—I ended up grubbing through page source, just trying to figure out how to get to my damn flight. And that's stupid.

Yes, it can go too far. You can change a site so much that it's offering services you don't want to provide (such as using your gmail account as an external hard drive). But if a user wants to add a more intuitive way of deleting a message, let them. You should be thrilled that they like your site enough to try to individualize it. And you should look very closely at how many people agree that certain changes are worth making.

Browser preferences, bookmarklets, and tools like Greasemonkey offer the web designer an unparalleled opportunity to give their consumers exactly what they want, at no additional cost. All you have to do is not deliberately screw it up. It's not hard; it's what the web is designed for, after all.

End rant.

Update: Several neat positions open, not just QA.
Update 2: Geek jobs. Not joobs. I don't know what that meant either.

So it looks like txgreengoddess' company is hiring additional geeks. It's a (well-funded) new company, a spinoff from a think-tank in that region—that's all I know. More importantly, she highly recommends it as a workplace. Looks like an interesting variety of jobs available - go look!

Also, Seattle is my new favorite place to encourage awesome people to move to. Uh... no. Seattle is my new favorite place to which to encourage awesome people to move. Gah! That sentence is fired.

Anyone interested, or know someone who's looking? Please spread the word to awesome people.

Texas voting is tomorrow, 7am to 7pm.

Some links:

• WHERE: What precinct you're registered in, and where your polling station is. Requires cookies.
  
  
• E-VOTING: What kind of ballot you can cast depends on what county you're in. Consider using a paper ballot if you can.
  
  
• INFO: The ever-popular League of Women Voters information for your area. (Here's the PDF file for Austin.) Includes short explanations of bonds, as well as candidates for offices.
  
  
• INFO: Project Vote Smart has deeper information, like voting records. Specifically useful:
  • Info about congressional candidates
    
  • Info about gubernatorial candidates
    
  • Info about other Texas candidates
  
  
• INFO: And finally, some links to a bunch more information sites where you can find out more about candidates and issues.

Please spread the word to anyone you think may be interested, especially students:

Call for Student Abstracts: Workshop for Women in Machine Learning

Abstracts are due August 15; registration by September 15; event is October 4th. The workshop is free. Co-located with the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, in San Diego, California, October 4, 2006.

( details )

I gather this is a classic paper in management literature: a discussion of how rewards and punishments for a person's actions often aren't actually aligned with desired behavior. Nothing too surprising, actually, which is acknowledged in the afterword; the contribution seems to be bringing the topic up. It's an interesting and thought-provoking read, with examples. Especially useful if you are, god help you, an authority figure of any sort:

On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B (updated version) – Steven Kerr

So apparently, the city of Austin is using a pulverizer to turn glass recyclables into non-sharp fragments—around the size of pea gravel—which they will give you for use in landscaping. It's cheaper than pea gravel (because it's free), environmentally responsible, and very pretty.

I learned about this from nyogtha and ilana_gefen, who were kind enough to let me come admire their landscaping. It sparkles in the sun, just a little—more when it rains, they tell me. The colors are all mixed together, and it's much nicer than the usual xeriscaping gravel. I walked around on it barefoot for a while, and they're right about it having no sharp edges; it's about as comfortable as small gravel ever is.

The program is described at this city page, and the text of the relevant bit is ( behind cut. )

I'd love to see this succeed. Pass the word on! It's not just Austin, so check your local recycler or city web pages.

Ganked entire from the ever-clever ishaa, it's:
http://www.catchpenny.org/patho.html

Featuring!

6 features common to pathological theories
4 more such features
7 guidelines for dealing with anomalous phenomena
4 steps of proper scientific methodology
3 forms of outright scientific dishonesty with regard to observation
6 basic motives for scientific fraud
25 fallacies that lead us to believe weird things

Undeadline (n-ddln) n.

1. Initially appears identical to a deadline, but when you think it must have passed, staggers back up and wanders around some more, feasting on the brains of the living.

Undeadlines can return arbitrarily many times to torment the living, and can usually only be destroyed by a sufficiently powerful deliverable, although even this does not guarantee safety from sequels.

They can appear spontaneously anywhere deadlines naturally occur, but are particularly attracted to government contractors and work environments which do not have a clear-cut deliverables process in place.

I just spent 40 minutes choosing emoticons. I do not need another full-time obsession. I hope you all like my emoticons and journal style, because it ain't changing.

Next trick: work out how to make entries friends-only without having to do anything.

Hm. Live Journal. Hmmm.