Things That Fell Out of My Head

Re-re-visiting

triple_entendre — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 06:21:44 GMT

Lost track of my password for a while there. I'll always miss LJ, but I'm thinking about starting up an actual self-hosted blog.

Revisiting LJ

triple_entendre — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 23:12:13 GMT

If I were to do some long-form writing again, what kinds of things would you be curious to read?

Flipside 2015: The Flood

triple_entendre — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 03:12:25 GMT

I attended this year's Flipside.

I had a great time!

I was one of the people stranded there by floodwaters for an extra day. The community handled the whole thing very well, and we were uncomfortable, but safe.

Who do I know in CA?

triple_entendre — Sun, 31 May 2015 19:49:03 GMT

California/East Bay Area, I am in you!

I'll be in the area for a couple of weeks.

Who do I know that still lives around here?

Things!

triple_entendre — Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:15:14 GMT

and stuff!

Flipside 2014!

triple_entendre — Wed, 21 May 2014 17:37:52 GMT

I'll be at Flipside!

from now until Thursday I have SO many things to do before I am free to go

Not Alike

triple_entendre — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 08:11:31 GMT

I keep wanting to "Like" things on here. I feel terrible about this!

I miss you, LJ.

today's office

triple_entendre — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:49:17 GMT

today's office: a ceiling-mounted papasan egg-chair, outdoors, being entertained by no less than a half-dozen housemates and their friends who are dancing and singing along with the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack

triple_entendre — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:58:52 GMT

some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll misquote jwz."

cleaning house

triple_entendre — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:33:24 GMT

Today I cleared out obsolete entries from my address book. There were some very, very dusty old things in there.

contraditions

triple_entendre — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 02:02:34 GMT

Just spotted this eggcorn/accidental word of the day:

contraditions

I'll define it as 'things that society demands we do about something which actually make it worse'.

tip of the metacognitive tongue

triple_entendre — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 08:34:15 GMT

Just noticed that if there's a word I can't quite recall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_of_the_tongue), it actually helps if I reason about it out loud. I talked aloud, in a disinterested voice, about the particular concept as if explaining it to someone. After about a paragraph of this, the word became silently(!) available.¹

I noticed that I had a slight resistance to initiating the exercise of speaking out loud to prod the memory/clear the block/etc. I mean, I believed intellectually it would work, but not emotionally. The "stuck" circuit wanted to succeed "by itself", so to speak. (I guess that's a "wait, wait, don't tell me".)

I think whatever subsystem of my brain that was handling this request wanted that tiny "reward" of dopamine that you get when a mental effort succeeds. My talking-out-loud workaround gave me the word *without* any such reward. Or indeed any sense at all of where it came from.

Trip

[1] now that I think back on it, it may even have been a picture of the word. Or more specifically, the mental state that I might have shortly after seeing a picture of the word.

Horsing around

triple_entendre — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 01:14:44 GMT

I just agreed to do some more Gallup poll things.

It's interesting to observe how difficult it can be for me to answer what I consider poorly-formed questions. And that I consider nearly all questions to be poorly-formed when the asker cannot add any additional context to the text of the question they are asking, because they are (quite understandably) reading the question from a list and are probably specifically trained to avoid "helping" the questionee parse the question, since this would bias the results depending on who does the asking.

I kind of wanted some help with "household", though. Is my household one person (me), or is it the 17 adults that I share common living space with? If there are kids in the house, but they aren't my responsibility, does that count? I decided to go with the IRS sort of definition and said that my household is just me, one person.

Do I feel that The Economy is getting better or worse? Okay, I can translate this by adding either "...for me as an individual taking into consideration only my own direct benefit" or "for residents of the United States of America considered as a whole", but in neither case does this really help me answer. What does the asker think The Economy is? What if I think it's something completely different, and thus give an *answer* that is meaningless to the asker? I suppose that really they just want a gut response of feeling based on the trigger words in the question. I feel like I'm being too flippant if I give that sort of answer, though. I want to *really* answer things, and in everyday life this means tackling deconstruction of the question more than it does the answer. The *question* is where the real content to be uncovered exists. (In everyday life, when a person brings you a question, they are usually bringing you their answer, which you can help them discover by mutual refining of the question.)

And now it has a little friend

triple_entendre — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 08:11:38 GMT

Yup, so I managed to get one of the HP Pre³ 4G phones at a *really* decent price. These were built to work cooperatively with the TouchPads. These phones work great, there just aren't and won't ever be very many of them. It's an unlocked AT&T-branded GSM phone, but I'll probably use it mostly for PDA features, games, and VOIP. I plan to get a pay-as-you-go SIM from AT&T, for the rare times I'm not in Wifi range.

triple_entendre — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 07:10:41 GMT

the delicious ironing, it burns my tongue

pitchers of cats

triple_entendre — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:41:21 GMT

Hello Internets,

I got these pitchers of cats just for you.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091117112956/http://fineartamerica.com/featured/cat-in-pitcher-larry-keahey.html
[expired link] http://www.puppy-trainingtips.com/wp-content/uploads/kitten%20pitchers.jpg
[expired link] http://www.baseballjournal.com/images/action/2010/kyledrabek-0830.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20151110035959/http://s9.thisnext.com/media/250x250/529F1590.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20151110035706/https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2d/8f/2f/2d8f2fdeacd0eceee446ef6c1bbac872.jpg

I did get an HP TouchPad in the fire sale

triple_entendre — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:52:20 GMT

I got one of the $150 32GB units, the soft protective case, and a couple of the Touchstone wireless charging cradles. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it, but so far, I like it a lot.

UPDATE: And now it has a little friend

HP WebOS TouchPad

triple_entendre — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:55:02 GMT

As soon as I have room in the budget, this will be my next toy. TouchPad by the Numbers

Earnest Hemming

triple_entendre — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 16:19:35 GMT

"Decades later, in response to a Freedom of Information petition, the F.B.I. released its Hemingway file. It revealed that beginning in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover had placed Ernest under surveillance because he was suspicious of Ernest’s activities in Cuba. Over the following years, agents filed reports on him and tapped his phones. The surveillance continued all through his confinement at St. Mary’s Hospital. It is likely that the phone outside his room was tapped after all.

In the years since, I have tried to reconcile Ernest’s fear of the F.B.I., which I regretfully misjudged, with the reality of the F.B.I. file. I now believe he truly sensed the surveillance, and that it substantially contributed to his anguish and his suicide."[1]

An interesting question: how would you help a friend who was paranoid *and* right about it?

Unsurprisingly[2], I have an answer to offer for my hypothetical question.

For the purposes of this answer, let us assume that the person is not in immediate physical danger.

When I want to help someone, I play to my strengths. I harmonize, in the Aikido sense. If I am offering support or advice to someone who is delusional in some way, I restate in a neutral voice what they are telling me, to confirm I am hearing them correctly (active listening). Then, if doing more than listening seems appropriate, I try to help them reason through what their response should be. I do not attack the person or try to impose my own perceptions on them (unless perhaps they explicitly ask me to, in which case they are probably already making progress working it out for themselves). At most, I might share with them my philosophy that we should maintain a healthy skepticism of all inputs, even those from our own senses, and that this skepticism should be grounded in an understanding of how those senses operate (they have specific, known limitations, and that's okay).

In other words, if an insane idea or perception is driving someone crazy, help them make a sane response to it. Don't fight them; help them find their own strength.

-- Trip

Notes
1. sadly, I am not certain if there's a way to link to a NYT article that won't eventually break from NYT's own foolishness: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html?pagewanted=all
2. because the ability to answer hypothetical questions is one of my most bothersome superpowers...

Lovely pictures

triple_entendre — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:10:59 GMT

There are some really amazing shots in these sets. Apparently they are done using judicious application of long exposures with light painting and HDR.

http://scotthaefner.com/photos/favorites/

This needs to happen

triple_entendre — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 13:49:16 GMT

Industrial, function art reminiscent of Burning Man.

http://inhabitat.com/2010/09/27/giants-carry-the-weight-of-the-energy-grid-on-their-shoulders/

Perhaps some of you I saw there were doing the same

triple_entendre — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 20:58:45 GMT

I had the sort of epic dreaming last night where, although I don't remember most of it, it was multiple different movie-length experiences, and I have the feeling that I have lived out some more of my lifetime. The idea that some serious time has passed, more than just one night, at least in the perspective of the person who I am.

disambiguating algorithms

triple_entendre — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:14:38 GMT

For my fellow database geeks:

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

I still love you.

triple_entendre — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:11:06 GMT

(One of my favorite mental exercises is adaptively recognizing situations where, despite ambiguity, the same answer, response, or plan of action pertains, so you can just blunder onward without actually clarifying or getting into specifics.)

pocketses

triple_entendre — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:26:17 GMT

what *hasn't* it got in them?

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/04/scottevests-carry-on-coat-houses-all-of-your-portable-electroni/

want!