Wow. That works too well.

In my news cycle this week was this article on Improving your photography through classical art. I took the time to try it out today (and by “time”, I mean “five minutes”) and applied the first colorful art piece I could think of offhand, Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to an appropriate swing photo with similar colors. I find the theme of the pieces similar.

This is the result, “A Saturday Afternoon Dancing on the Plaza of Sproul”:

Pretty cool, huh?

Class is cancelled for tomorrow, so I can sleep in, which means I can blog before bed.

SwingCal finale tonight. Small event, but three separate follows (with large amounts of dance-cred) complimented me on my leading, which makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I’ve only been serious about dancing since January, but it’s amazing what I’ve accomplished in the intervening time. A major part of that can be attributed to the last two months or so in particular, social dancing in more general, public environments, clubs and whatnot, in Seattle and here in the Bay. Practice. Adaptation. Refining. Learning. Saturday morning, after Lindy at Night, I went to LoS for a few minutes pre-laundry and danced a few. It was then that I first noticed that with well-practiced follows (Movement is what struck me at the time, but it applies more generally) my swing-outs had become actually fluid. It felt better. It felt right. And what’s more is that I wasn’t getting dizzy; usually I do after more than a couple, but when it works, I could just about go the whole song and not mind. My first swing-outs were choppy — as James made an analogy, a slowly-sampled version of what should be a continuous sine wave (signals nerds will understand this comment). I’d also get dizzy after two or three. What’s more, I was merely going through the motions. Now I actually take the lead. This from a few months work.

Classes are wrapping up. Signals courses are going into special topics — namely, the same special topic (wavelets and image compression) which I have of late become a localized expert in, for an undergrad anyway, thanks to my project. Which I also spent some time this week fully understanding; a few days ago it was “oh, this is how I think it works” and now it’s “oh, this is how the code should be written” — which is considerably better.

yawn

Sleep. Sleep is good.

…gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues

So much I could write about. I could expound on any of the following topics:

• Kurobox rebuild
• HDHomeRun
• vimperator
• Lindy at Night/Big Swing
• Pictures
• Summer plans!
• SPIHT project
• Seattle post-mortem

But the only reason I’m posting right now?

Lotsa new pictures are up on Flickr!

And I’m listening to copious amounts of The Rolling Stones. For some reason they capture my mood of late.

Just me playing with panoramic mode. More from Seattle if I can.

More 164 rantage:

So today I woke up and rewrote my crappy parser from scratch, having had a showertime epiphany about not only how to write a good one, but write one with features we’ll need for the next part of the project.

In the end, I came out with exact same linecount. So I was +0 in lines but plus several million in functionality.

We didn’t get it in just on time because our grammar-rewriter was, well, mangled. This bothered me a little somewhere deep inside. Until I had two quick beers and took another shower. Upon emerging I had an inkling about what to do. Drunken? Perhaps. But that sort of drunken clarity that makes things possible.

So I scrapped darch’s rewriter and started over. At 3 in the morning. I wrote and wrote and things started to just fall into place. A slight change of order here, a minor off-by-one hack there, one piece slyly using some nice output from another piece… and in 2.5 hours I had it up and running. Which is better than busted. And much shorter, cleaner, and compartmentalized than it previously was.

My line count for the day: -70 My contribution: Enough to make me feel like I deserve my trip to Seattle for Spring Break

Right now I’ve got so much hack energy that I can’t sleep if I wanted to. Oh, I’ll crash real soon now, but this is the first time in a while I’ve felt the rush. And it’s this that makes me think that everything’s going to be okay once I leave school and my life is somehow on track — which I was worried about earlier (eating at the dorms makes me feel old).

• Drinking a beer
• Listening to The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible album
  • This is thanks to Jyte’s observation that 8 of the top 10 Last.fm tracks are from this album
• Messing with photonzero.com
  • In such ways as my new 404 page for anywhere that doesn’t exist
  • This was inspired (and made possible in part) by BeOS’s old browser, NetPositive
  • Playing in Markdown which WP supports
  • Converting to Feedburner (thanks Karen)
  • Adding folks I read to my Blogroll
• Putting my dotfiles in SVN — which is particularly cool
• Contemplating summer work
  • Doing Google’s SoC along with taking an AC requirement sounds interesting to me now, as a possible plan
• Contemplating Monday night’s events
• Happy that I can sleep in on Mondays
• Feeling just a little down, but with the feeling that I’m going to have to put it aside and move into overdrive tomorrow

So I changed all my Flickr pictures to be under Creative Commons: Attirubution-ShareAlike, under the heading of being a good sport while retaining what I really want (which is largely attribution — the sharealike merely perpetuates the CC) — so yeah, if you care to use them, you can totally do so and it’s fully legit. This also from the fact that I’m about to break 300 views — which I know I didn’t do.

Lindy on Sproul is still lots of fun. I have ~ 2.5 gigs of swing music now, which is quite awesome. Note that this is only ~ 500 songs because I’m a nut for quality where I can get it (192+) — I’ve even gone so far as to get FLAC albums in some cases

It’s been almost overwhelmingly WARM in Berkeley — my handy internet thermometer suggests that it was 77 degrees earlier — and with a higher humidity than I get up in GV. Blah. At least b33r tastes even better now.

And apparently a troupe of LoS people are out to find a swimming hole after dancing tomorrow, which I am so in the mood for.

Running a LoS movie night (courtesy of the CSUA) in 306 Soda on Monday…. yay Swing Kids.

UU stuff on Monday too.

And I can write a simple lexer in 38 lines of Python, including comments and whitespace? Who’s the man?

And then darch and I want to write what seems to be a gstreamer-based mpd/mserv replacement in Python — which is totally doable and would be bunches of fun — mainly because it scratches a mutual itch in terms of music serving.

Looking for work, as always — considering Google SoC and research and whatnot.

Next minor project is to finally SVN my interesting homedir stuff (the theory being I can sit down at a fresh machine and go “svn co Homedirstuff” and have my shell work as it should) and possibly reinstall/fully-move-into a copy of Feisty Fawn, which I dunno why I haven’t et myself do — for some reason, my brain calls it temporary when I want it to be more permanent. Likewise, it’d be very nice to put FF extensions and configs into SVN for total cross-platform ‘lovin.

That and update my blogroll to also include blogs of people who a) are not Karen and b) are not on LJ. LJ is for legacy connections — and besides, that’s what my friendslist is for.

In short, what AREN’T I doing these days?

Today I co-hosted Lindy on Sproul! And played DJ, photographer, and danced to my heart’s content — in short, I was in full multitask mode.

I built the playlist the night before — good thing too; making selections on the fly is hard. Heck, I still was changing the order every few songs or so.

My DJ cred is rising — I did it wholly from the swing collection I’ve been building for weeks from torrents and whatnot — I ripped one of the standard CDs just in case, but ended up not using it.

However, these formed the majority of the playlist. The real cred came from putting some of my own spin in — my hits and misses that weren’t “standard” swing songs. And I had more hits than misses, so I have something of an ear for it.

The breakdown:

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You know you’ve gone a little far when you apply nerd concepts to non-nerdy things like dancing. I first crossed this line tonight posting a reply to Emily’s post on dancing…

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I’m sick. I should be getting better, but I think today/tonight I hit bottom.

Dayquil fucks you up. I went to class sooo strung out — feeling better, but loopy. I’m sticking to straight Tylenol from now on. It currently seems to be working.

Hopefully I’ll start feeling better by this evening. Cause dancing is important to me.

So I resigned from the CSUA the other day. It was about time. It’s no longer fun for me; yeah, if I want to hang out, it’s none too bad, but I don’t feel as motivated to. We have so much fresh blood that it’s sort of gone the other way. It’s not an exclusivity thing, it’s a purpose thing. I kid, but we should almost apply as a Greek organization. A very nerdy, very open and inviting Greek organization, but the days of hacks and hackers seem far away. Of course, it’s not like they’ve been near for a long while.

So this marks another shift in my priorities. Namely, something else I believe in — dancehacking. Which is the concept title of the for-fun dissertation I still want to write. I’ve been compiling a handful of notes for it; perhaps I should mindmap it and then write it out.

Which sounds terribly like applying a compiler approach to thoughts. Where the mindmap is the AST. Yay 164 for further fucking with my mind. (Though in all actuality, it’s the most fun I’ve had since 61C)

Anyway, If I want any more sleep than the 3 hours I’ve already accomplished, I’d better get to it.