i frequently suffer from insomnia. this usually involves me lying in bed for hours staring at the ceiling waiting to fall asleep while my mind jumps from subject to subject. a game i like to play sometimes when i’m lying there is to try to backtrack along my stream of consciousness. i try to remember what the last topic i was thinking about was, then i try to think what i was thinking before that lead me to that, then what i was thinking before that lead me to that point. on and on until i can’t remember how i got started on a certain subject. it’s hard at first but if you do it on a regular basis i’ve found that you can usually improve how far back you can remember.
<p>if you do it regularly, i can pretty much guarantee that you’ll gain new insights into how your mind and, in particular, your subconscious works. my theory is that doing this kind of exercise on a regular basis will even change how your mind functions, possibly giving you more control over how you focus and giving you more of an ability to think creatively.</p>
<p>this can also be fun in a group setting. if you’re sitting around with a few friends having a drink and conversation and the conversation hits a lull, pick out the last topic you were discussing and try to work back from there to figure out how you got onto that topic. you’ll probably get much farther than with the solo exercise. also figure out who it was in the group who initiated each topic change. try drawing a diagram of the conversation. maybe you’ll notice interesting things about the group dynamic and individual personalities; eg, perhaps a certain member of the group has a tendency to change the topic much more often than other people.</p>
<p>well, that’s the kind of thing that i think about when i can’t sleep…</p>
everytime lani comes up to visit, she leaves behind a couple of the complimentary magazines from the Delta Shuttle. usually, the tech magazines are bland Wired wannabes with fluff stories about upcoming technologies and rising dotcoms.
<p>after lani leaves, they tend to last until my next cleaning pass over the apartment when, if they’re lucky, they get a quick once-over just to make sure there isn’t actually anything of interest to me before heading into the garbage.</p>
<p>tonight i’m cleaning a little and decide to flip through the copy of <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/">Technology Review</a>. there’s an <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/tr100_0602.asp">article</a> on the top 100 young innovators (this article was, of course, depressing lani because it made her realize that at 22 years old she hadn’t yet won a nobel prize ;)</p>
<p>amongst the likes of Shawn Fanning (napster) and John Carmack (doom, quake, etc) i was quite pleasantly surprised to see <a href="http://goatee.net/">Joe Reagle</a>. Joe is a friend of <a href="http://www.miromi.org/">mimi</a>’s and goatee.net is on my regular reading list. seeing a (somewhat) familiar face in a magazine when you aren’t expecting it is kind of weird. i knew that he does all kinds of cool stuff but i never realized he was a celebrity.</p>
<p>so congratulations, Joe!</p>
after drinking a lot this weekend and generally staying out late a few times too many last week, i decided i should re-hydrate myself and flush out some toxins. so over the course of the day, i drank a few gallons of water.
<p>felt good but i was pretty much running to the toilet every half hour all day. it’s hard to get programming stuff done when you can’t really concentrate on something for more than about 20 minutes before your bladder distracts you.</p>
last night, lani and i got in a van with Daphne, Blair, and Angela (Angela is doing production work on a movie and was given a van for the duration of the filming so she can pick up the crew and equipment). we drove around manhattan for a while listening to nirvana and screaming obscenities at the crazy taxi drivers. then we went out to williamsburg looking for dinner. we’d planned to go to the brooklyn brewery’s restaurant/taproom but they were closed by the time we got there. so instead we went to some other ale house nearby where i had a Weihenstephaner hefe-weisse and a grilled portobello sandwich.
<p>then we wandered down to Daphne and Blair’s to watch Iron Chef while we digested our food.</p>
<p>around 2am, we headed off to Luxx again. some of Daphne’s friends who have a hip-hop duo called Moreplay were performing. stylistically they were pretty similar to Avenue D: electro beats and sexually oriented rhymes. Daphne joined them for one of their songs. pretty good show.</p>
jP eventually did ride the wet pink pony. lani has photographic evidence.
<p>lani’s in town for the coming week, staying with me while she attends a biophysics lecture at princeton.</p>
<p>jP came down for the weekend to visit me, lani, daphne, blair, keith, and a few other bates types. on friday night we all went to see yet another Avenue D show out in williamsburg. they just keep getting better. even had a hardcore song this time.</p>
<p>the rest of the weekend we spent drinking, eating (<em>lots</em>), and hanging out.</p>
dhs.org appears to be having some trouble. they’re a free service that provides simple domain name functionality. for the last couple years, i’ve been using them to point thraxil.dhs.org at this site. my main rationale for using dhs.org instead of going the ‘proper’ route and registering thraxil.(com|net|org) has been simplicity. i’ve never really bought into the whole mindset that you need a good domain to be cool. the system is a beaurocratic nightmare with the main players abusing their customers every chance they get. stories about squatters selling domains for millions of dollars just made me laugh. i’ve never had any great desire to subject myself to that kind of abuse.
<p>dhs.org seems to be having problems lately though. you may have noticed that this site was inaccessible for the last couple days. it should be fixed now and thraxil.dhs.org should exist for at least the near future. however, the future is not looking so good for dhs.org. at the very least, it’s unstable enough to have me worried.</p>
<p>so i bit the bullet and registered thraxil.com, thraxil.net, and thraxil.org. i grabbed all three because i couldn’t make up my mind at it was pretty cheap. it could take a day or two for <span class="caps">DNS</span> to propagate fully and for any/all of them to work.</p>
<p>once they stabilize, you’ll want to change your bookmarks and links to point to one of the new domains (for the time being, all of them will point to the same place. in the future, i might decide to different things with different ones though).</p>
<p>in other words, in the next couple days, thraxil.dhs.org will be deprecated.</p>
a coworker of mine drove up to maine last weekend. as a favor, he brought me back a case and a half of shipyard export ale, which pretty much can’t be found outside new england but is one of my favorite beers in the world.
my friend julintip left today. moved back to ohio to go to law school (well, first she plans on spending the summer lounging on the beach in thailand. envy.) one less person for me to hang out with.
<p>her boyfriend, adam, who’s a CS professor at columbia has a research position at los alamos and was driving out there for the summer today so they packed up her stuff, mailed a bunch of it home and packed as much as they could into a rental car and drove off into the sunset together.</p>
<p>[geeky conversation in the elevator:<br />
julintip:
adam:
anders:
adam:
anders:
(ain’t i witty?)
<p>as something of a consolation for my loss of a drinking buddy, i got to inherit the stuff she couldn’t fit in the car and would’ve gotten thrown out otherwise. did pretty good. got: an air conditioner (god knows i need it), a TV/VCR combo, a table, and a complete set of glassware.</p>