Aku Aku

burners take over small town

I ran across this article in my "Burning Man" filter at news.google.com. It's actually a pretty good article, but seeing a BM-style party through the eyes of a small town reporter is a bit funny.

Burning Man Storms Montauk
Partyers take over Montauk Yacht Club for wild weekend

[...]

When Mr. Brown returned to work the following evening, he was told he had just missed the “naked swim” at the yacht club’s indoor pool; later that night, he was too busy bartending to watch as the guests burned a 12-foot-tall wooden alien on the field “somewhere between the tennis courts and the villas,” he said.

    According to Mr. Brown, none of the staff that had been hired for the weekend had any idea what they were in for. “We were pretty much shocked,” he said, “. . . by everything they did.”

I like that the Burners, despite apparently being truly shocking to the local residents, in the end made a great impression.

“It was really a fun event,” said Ms. Bryan. “The group was a delight to work with, and very appreciative of the staff and the facility. They cleaned up after themselves, and left the place as nice as it was when they arrived. The locals were more misbehaved,” she noted, “than any of the guests.”

That's the Burners I know and love, this article made me proud of my community.

Brandy in Pyrotechnics

treo_032207_004.jpg

vindication!

From /. today:

Slobs Found To Be More Productive Than Neatniks

"Are you a slob? Do you pile papers on top of folders on top of game boxes? Here's the thing that those anal neat people can't even conceive of: you're more productive than they are. That's the conclusion of "A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder," by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, a new book that argues neatness is overrated, costs money, wastes time and quashes creativity."

automatic terminals in os x with ruby

When working on my Ruby on Rails projects, I always like to open 7 windows on my OS X desktop. My IDE (currently Idea with the Ruby Plugin), my firefox web browser, and five terminal windows. One for command line interface, two for tailing the test and development logs, and two for running mongrel and a selenium server. I use two monitors, and I like to set the five terminal windows in certain places on the desktop. I quickly grew tired of opening each terminal window and placing it, resizing it, cd-ing to the right directory and running the right command, especially since it was all the same each time except for the project directory.

The OS X Terminal.app allows you to save a terminal window to a .term file. This is an XML file that contains all of the window configuration options including commands to run when opened. You can open a saved .term file by double clicking on its icon or running open mysavedwindow.term from the command line and it restores everything.

So I wrote two ruby scripts. One takes a .term file and outputs a ruby hash of window settings, the other takes a list of these hashes and opens each window represented by them. When I run the second script I also give it the name of my project and the windows are opened for that project.

The two files are parse_term.rb and terminals.rb. To use them, first manually place your terminal windows as you'd like them to come up each time. Then save each one to a .term file. Run the .term files through the parse_term.rb utility (ruby parse_term.rb saved.term). Collect the output from this and stick it in the appropriate place in the terminals.rb script.

Now edit the terminals.rb script further. Add in the :command strings so each has what you want to run when that window is open. Change the project_path directory to match your system. Run this script, passing a project name as a parameter.

This was a quick hack to meet my needs, but if you're the kind of person who likes to open multiple terminal windows when working, you'll probably be able to customize this to your needs easily.

Currently I run this from an already open terminal window, but I'd like to be able to run it from Quicksilver (perhaps using command-space period <project name> tab terms enter). Anyone know how to set that up? My AppleScript and Quicksilver skills are weak.

Obama?

I don't know how I feel about this guy. I'd like to be as excited about him as other people seem to be, but I don't really get what he's about other than being so new to the game he's probably not corrupted yet. On the way to Tahoe this weekend I re-listened to his speech at the 2004 DNC. His and Al Sharpton's were my favorite of that convention (you used to be able to download both from Apple's iMusicStore for free, btw ..grab them if you haven't heard them). He's an excellent speaker, but I still don't have any idea why he would be an excellent president.

I plan on sitting down to do some research eventually, but anyone else have an opinion on him?

QotD: Musical Horoscope

What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)
Inspired by Stephanie.  

Party_shuffle

QotD: Wise Words

What's one of your favorite quotes? 
Submitted by Georgie-boy. 

I've been collecting these in Notational Velocity, here's what I've got (yeah, screw one, ok, well I guess my favorite one here is "Reality is not only stranger than we imagine,but stranger than we can imagine"):

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted. - Ortega y Gasset

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If the most interesting stuff happens at the borders, then make lots of borders - Mike Love (Future Commons)

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" with or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil; - that takes religion."
- Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg
 
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In other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvements of tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices and errors of today.

- Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who responded to an 1847 proposal to regulate the design of bridges

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Sitting in front of your computer and using a web browser --- calling that surfing is like balancing a shared checkbook and saying you’re f*cking - Rudy Rucker

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Super profundo on the early eve of your day. - Louis, reoccuring dream character in Waking Life

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five relaxed people are a hall of a lot more likely to run into trouble than two nervous people. - ninjalicious

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democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance - H.L. Mencken  (1880 - 1956) was a twentieth century journalist, satirist and social critic, a cynic and a freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore" and the "American Nietzsche".

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Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. - Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (from danah)

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"I'm always most attracted to the project that feels most like I'm totally wasting my time and just having fun. " - Rudy Rucker

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Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
-William Ernest Henley

"The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the
plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the
user's hand. That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates
outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace."

- William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties

"as above, so below"
- Emerald Tablet of Hermes, one of the most ancient and revered foundational documents of the Western Mystery schools
(reality is fractal)

The reason that biologist Ernst Haeckel could say "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in only three words was that he had these powerful words with highly specific meanings at his disposal.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein

1.) "Reality is not only stranger than we imagine,but stranger than we can imagine" - J.B.S.Haldan

2.) "Your theory is crazy, but not crazy enough to be true" - Neils Bohr

3.) "When an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible he is very probably correct,when he says something is impossible he is very probably wrong"- Arthur C.Clarke

4.) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

5.) "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horatio" - Shakespeare

"dead is the natural state of the human being. everything else is cleverness." -dreww on #geo

Sunset

Testing creating a post on my Treo using the Vox Palm OS application. I guess you can only attach one photo? Anyhow, I love sunsets ...and Pina Coladas

Sunset

marcus' barfday show at hazmat

Went to see two bands and two movies at hazmat in Oakland. This was the third night of my brother's annual barfday punk festivites, and a fundraiser for Libertatia. Photos courtesy of Cheesebikini.

Tesla in the grass

Two videos of Tesla in Golden Gate Park. She's learned how to crawl now. Well, I call it more of a 'scootch' than a crawl really. But it gets her places. That's the second video. The first one is mostly of her interacting with grass.  A time honored Golden Gate Park tradition.