What Silence

UO

I'm really smitten by the University of Oregon. Not only is it well-situated in a state having the highest concentration of schools I'm interested in (CA being so much bigger, it doesn't make up for the quantitative lead), but it also has an array of programs that I'm really drawn to.

Interestingly, it's $17,445 per year for non-residents, compared to $5,610 for residents. That's an enormous delta.

Their art department has a huge selection of digital art courses (more, including a digital art MFA), with a smattering of photography and sculpture. ...I totally want to do this stuff. : )

The CS program seems relatively weak... but it's hard to say with only three pages of marketing spiel to go on... oh, wait, I found the page. Okay, so it's better than the spiel made it out to be. ; ) The focus I'm most interested in from their list is the languages one. I haven't actually seen a program like that before. (Granted, I haven't yet looked too hard.) They've also got a few projects on eye-automation, which is cool (but I probably wouldn't do well at).

They've got a strong music program, too. ...Mind you, I wouldn't dare major in music: too much work. But I dread the idea of being on a campus without a music program. It's part of the University experience, for me. A big part.

They've also got the kick-assiest linguistics homepage ever. Their focuses include descriptive linguistics, which totally appeals to me (like, big time--I wish U-Mass had that focus, but they were more theoretical), and cognition (which is a nice tie to CS). The department is about half the size I'm used to, but that suits me fine.

"Some of the most active areas of research at the University of Oregon are in the fields of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology." That suits me just fine. That's where research should be most active. ; ) Check this out:

The research in the Barkan laboratory focuses on two areas: protein-facilitated RNA catalysis, and the molecular cross-talk between the nuclear and chloroplast genomes. The two projects are synergistic, in that the chloroplast serves as a useful model system for the genetic analysis of catalytic ribonucleoproteins, and the control of catalytic plastid RNAs by nucleus-encoded proteins provides a molecular link between the nucleus and plastid. Both projects are grounded in genetic screens that identify nuclear genes that influence chloroplast gene expression.

...Doesn't that just make you want to go open a biology book?!? I wanna talk like that! : D And the clincher:

Hormones and other excreted signaling factors regulate growth, differentiation and survival of cells, and ultimately control, the development, metabolism and behavior of higher organisms. We are interested in the cellular actions of steroid and thyroid hormones. These hormones are involved in the cause or treatment of a wide range of diseases including arthritis, artheriosclerosis, diabetes, osteoporosis, and cancers.

That is exactly what I want to be studying. ...Not to mention, that Professor is cute. : )

In short, UO is about as close to a U-Mass as I've yet found... and the fact that it's in the Pacific Northwest makes it more appealing than U-Mass, anyway.

I'd love to end up here. I'm actually tempted to stop looking, I'm so satisfied with this school... (But will that stop me? Heh...)

UNC Chapel Hill

Here's another exception: UNC. I don't like the South. Frankly, I would just as well consider it another country. So the fact that I could bend my rules a little to study there must mean an exemplary program, and I think UNC qualifies. Amazingly cheap, even for out-of-staters, at something like $10k per year. Despite that, it's got an attractive campus as well as some good programs. ...At least, that's what I thought. :) Part of the reason I'm doing this is to learn more, and as I look more deeply into UNC, I'm not sure there's really a compelling reason to break the no-South rule...

They seem to have a decent art program. 11 faculty and affiliations with other local schools... the usual focuses are available. But doesn't seem to be worth writing home about.

They don't have a Biochemistry program, per se, but they do have a Chemistry department with a focus on biochem. Within that program, the emphases seem to be on protein synthesis, genetics, and disease. Meh. (I'm really interested in signal transduction and endocrinology.)

They do have what appears to be a rather large, diverse biology department... with some neat programs within it. I could be happy with that, I'm sure.

But, again, I doubt it's worth the location. :)

UNM

UNM has an "Electronic Arts" program that I would be interested in moreso than their (relatively weak) CS degree. I've met some of the professors over there in CS, and haven't been exactly overwhelmed. However, they do exist, and I think I could add a lot to the program, were I to help them out. ;)

On the other hand, UNM is fairly well-known (I'm told) for their BFA/MFA program, so I could "leverage" (shudder: I hate that word) that fact, major in Art, and just do a lot of computer work associated with it. (It seems the MFA in photography is #2 as of 2008.)

They have a really big bio department... lots of topics covered, some of them surprising for the middle of the high desert. Only 10 faculty in the Organic Chemistry realm... but that's not horrible. : )

UNM's a neat campus, and I really like the part of Albuquerque it's nestled in (Nobb Hill)... I eat there all the time. ; )

NMSU

Let's move to another exception: New Mexico State University. They're small. They barely have the curricula I'm looking for. For whatever reason, some website I was using to help my search listed them as a top-50 Computer Science school. I'm not sure I buy it... anyone here in Albuquerque who's into CS has never mentioned it to me. (Though, that said, they usually tout TVI, a community college, instead. Blech.)

The advantage to this school is, clearly, it's proximity. It's 3 hours from my house.

CS has 13 full-time faculty members, about 280 undergraduate majors, and 95 graduate students, including 25 doctoral candidates. ...That's a decent size. They're actually working on some pretty cool projects there, including graphics, music, linguistics, robot control, web programming, and programs for teaching: each of these is a focus I would consider.

I may very well end up doing graduate work here. I think I'd enjoy it...

They do have an art department, including drawing, photography, and sculpture (which are three of the four areas I would consider). 15 faculty. Since I'm not looking to major in art (more like a minor), I'm comfortable that I'm not blown away by what I've found there.

They also have a lofty-goaled biochem department with a good number of faculty and courses... another minor area to sink my teeth into.

I like it. I'm surprisingly impressed by NMSU, especially given that it's right next door.

On the downside, I've never visited, and the scant pictures I've seen of the place are decidedly unimpressive (errr... aside from the natural beauty of NM itself, but I just step outside to get that).

List of Universities

Here's the rest of the list (no particular order):

(Bolded items are websites I've researched already, followed by a five-star rating.)

If I'm correct, that's, geographically:

California - 9
Oregon - 5
Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Washington - 3
Hawai'i, New York, and New Mexico - 2
(Everything else) - 1

Naropa University

At this point, I do not believe there are any people reading this weblog (certainly not regularly), so I'm going to proceed as if this were truly a personal journal.

I've decided to "learn" about more Universities. I've long claimed I'm a "University guy", but I'm not walking that particular talk. It's time to change that. So, I'm going to post here about Universities.

I've spent the last day or two building a list of Universities I would personally consider. The criteria are HIGHLY subjective. It must not be:

in any major city, unless I would consider living there permanently. (ie: No Chicago, NYC, Boston, etc...) The point here is that I LOVE campuses. I couldn't be happy at, say, MIT.
religious... errr... except one: keep reading.
in the South. ...Except in one case that I couldn't ignore.
in a few other select states that I wouldn't feel comfortable in (ex: Dakotas, Ohio, Utah, Wyoming, etc...)
private, unless it's REALLY REALLY fantastic (CalTech, Stanford).
Ivy League. Elitist snobs. (Okay, Stanford folk are snobs, but...)
a school that gives me a bad vibe. Yup, totally subjective.
"just" a college. I'm all about Universities, not just colleges... graduate studies are what fuel me most.
small. I'm only considering enrollment of 10,000 undergrads or more. (Yes, I should have gone by grad students, but that info is harder to get.) There are a few exceptions to this.
a program without these three majors (which I'm interested in, in this order):

Computer Science (specifically allowing a focus on software engineering).
Fine Art.
Biochemistry, or the combination of Biology and Chemistry.

That said, I came up with a list of almost 40 universities. I won't list them here, now. Rather, I will talk about them one by one to the point where I'm comfortable knowing what I know about them.

THAT said, the first one I'll examine is Naropa University. It's in Boulder, CO, and it's the only "religious" university on my list. Tuition seems to run just over $20k per year including board, so it's definitely on the expensive end of the scale, but there are almost 200 faculty and only something like 400 students. :) They claim their focus is on "contemplative education", and it appears they offer (mandate?) a set of meditative practices.

This is one of the huge exceptions to my criteria, but I just thought it was so cool, I wanted to know at least a few things about it.

There are no real science programs, and the only thing they offer that would interest me personally is Visual Arts. The website was impressive. They also have a program called "Peace Studies", which is an interesting concept.

I wouldn't actually consider going here, so I don't care to know much more than this. :) I just wanted it in my repertoire so I could mention it to other people (I know a fair number of people who would find it interesting)...

He's Insane

Okay, so I just made the post about favourite albums... and then my wife bought me Year Zero, NIN's new CD.

I had mixed feelings about The Fragile when I first heard it (It's now in my top-5), and With Teeth took me a solid five forced listens before I finally fell in love with it.

Not so with Year Zero. Love at first sight.

People are calling this Reznor's Magnum Opus... I agree. Not only does the music kick ass, but he's gone one up in the way he's delivered it. Buy the CD and you'll notice a piece of paper stuck to the back reading "USBM WARNING: Consuming or spreading this material may be deemed subversive by the United States Bureau Of Morality." Of course, there is no such entity, but when you go searching for such a thing on the internet...

...Well, I won't spoil it for you. But let me say, it reminds me heavily of The Matrix, where Neo is using the web to search for Morpheus.

It doesn't stop with the Internet. Reznor has gone completely Davinci Code with this one. Open the CD and it's a solid black CD with a spot of text on the bottom reading "Year Zero". Put it in your player for a track and take it out... it's a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COVER! (Triggered, I assume, by heat.) I was blown away when I first noticed that. Look around and you'll find strange bolded letters here and there... collect them, rearrange them... well, you get the point.

He's turned it into an experience.

Not to mention, there's some kick-ass anti-establishment messages in the lyrics. Examples:

"I push the button and elected him to office, and / He pushed the button and dropped the bombs. / You push the button and a watch it on the television. / Those mother-fuckers didn't last too long."

"I've traded in my god for this one, and he spells his name with a Capitol G"

Yum.

Top-five, all-time, desert-island records

In no particular order:

Shpongle - Nothing Lasts, Nothing Is Lost
Nine Inch Nails - The Fragile
Tangerine Dream - Dream Mixes
Introspective - Gewesen
Aleksi Virta - ..Meets Tortsi At The Space Lounge

And because we all know five albums isn't enough to live on, here are the next ten runners-up.

Pat Metheny - The First Circle
Depeche Mode - Playing The Angel
Fahrenheit Project - Part Two
Fahrenheit Project - Part Five
Giles Reaves - Nothing Is Lost
The Orb - Orbus Terrarum
Beethoven - The Sixth Symphony
esem - enveloped
esem - serial human
Shpongle - Tales of the Inexpressible

To be honest, even with these fifteen, I would be wanting. Toad The Wet Sproket. Some of esem's singles. Seal. Red Hot Chili Peppers' BSSM. Engima. And a metric buttload of other electronic artists.

But these lists are about restrictions, right?

Anyway, I mention this because, despite loving all this music so much, I recognize that new music is important. Of late, I have felt like my collection is lacking something, but couldn't put my finger on it. I've realize what that is, though: something new.

[shrug]

The human condition, I suppose.

Prototype (et al) in Greasemonkey

So, using Prototype in Greasemonkey is... awkward, at best.

You see, everything you do in GM Javascript is actually stored in this weird space called "unsafeWindow". (Clearly, I don't fully understand why.)

It also seems to be impossible to intrude on the basic elements (like Element itself) that PType wishes to.

Thus, you have to be sneaky: you cause the page to load your scripts. ...And yet, for reasons incomprehensible, you still access them in unsafeWindow. Even when events fire. ...Which, by the way, seems to be the only way to do it: events firing. You can't just natively "do stuff".

Disappointing... but work-around-able.

I think we can use this to help us Monkify some of our websites. My first target is Learnerweb, which is Usable But Obnoxious as-is.

Here's a script that causes a new <p> to appear on the cspabq page when you click pretty much anywhere under the header:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Monkeys.  Greasy, greasy monkeys.
// @namespace      CSP
// @description    Testing Prototype and ilk in GM
// @include        http://www.cspabq.org*
// ==/UserScript==

var scripts = [
    'http://wiki.script.aculo.us/javascripts/prototype.js',
    'http://wiki.script.aculo.us/javascripts/effects.js',
    'http://wiki.script.aculo.us/javascripts/controls.js'
];
for (i in scripts) {
    var script = document.createElement('script');
    script.src = scripts[i];
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
}

window.addEventListener('load', function(event) {
 
    $ = unsafeWindow['window'].$;
    div = document.getElementById('content-main');
    div.addEventListener('click', function(event) {
        x = document.createElement('p');
        x.innerHTML = "It is very greasy.  You are likely to be eaten by a monkey.";
        $('content-main').appendChild(x);
    }, 'false');
 
}, 'false');

WinAMP

It is to my deepest chagrin that I admit WinAMP is too bloated for me, these days.

"If you can guess a landing spot on the moon, I suppose you can guess a cake!"

I've been using WinAmp since I was getting beat up in the high school locker room. I've been an avid follower, and was delighted when WinAMP was one of the first players to support OGG files (perhaps 85% of my collection is OGG these days).

In my anti-social nature (mentioned in the last post), I have taken to listening to music incessantly here at work. ...But my work machine is the most absolute of burger-sucking dogs, and when one works in such software as Visual dBase, Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, and--powers of the universe preserve us--Internet Explorer, one is bound to find bits leaking out of their little unprotected blocks and spilling onto the CPU, making a terrible mess and stinking of ozone.

WinAMP does not enjoy this anymore than I do. In fact, I believe it makes matters worse.

I don't like bloat. This is why I hate all Microsoft software. All of it: I haven't found a single counter-example. Everything is bloated. Hell, I would rather skip buying a CD than listen to sound examples in anything made by Real, that scum-bag sucking fat zombie mime fuckhole company. AOL is something to be approached with fallout gear and large, preferably long-range weapons.

Pardon me. Where was I?

I use XMMS at home. (On Linux.) I believe XMMS is perfect: it does what I want, it looks reasonably cool (winamp skins), it's free, and it's got a footprint on the scale of rodents. Small rodents. There is no "thinger", there is no internet-scouring script looking for album covers... even the built-in visualizations are limited to oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers. And I don't have to go through six screen to install it. (Hell, I just enable it with a package manager, dammit: I never see a single dialog box!)

"I think if I were a spaceman, I wouldn't care if people believed in me or not."

So, I merrily resolved to install XMMS here at work and be done with it. Alas, I quickly discovered that there are no win32 binaries for XMMS.

Drat.

I begin scouring for another player, but am quickly assaulted by free-download sites that cause AdBlocker to groan under the pressure. I fear looking for bloat-free players in this manner will be fruitless.

As I said, 85% of my collection is in OGG format, so I choose instead to float on over to the Vorbis site and check our their recommended players. To my dismay, almost all of them are commercial bastardizations of freeware (much like WinAMP is, though I fear winamp is one of precious few companies that aren't really stepping on me when I download the free version of their software: almost no nagging, and no crippled features that I care about.)

Then I stumble upon Zinf. I've heard of it before, I think: I've probably passed over it in linux installs. (There's that "mindshare" thing, eh?) It's smaller than WinAMP, and just barely bigger than I think it should be (it's 1.7 Meg). I install.

Okay, so it's not sexy... but not hideous. It plays my OGGs. It's got a music manager that I don't particularly care for, but I start using it anyway: we'll kick the tires.

...And that's where I currently stand.

"Maybe I'm dreaming. My eyes are open, which means maybe I'm awake, dreaming I'm asleep. Or... or more likely, maybe I'm asleep, dreaming that I'm awake, wondering if I'm dreaming..."

So, if you haven't noticed, the quotes have been from Aleksi Virta's "...meets tortsi" album. ...One of the best albums ever, mind you. I'm listening to it now. Memory footprint? 14Megs. This is more than I expect, so I check WinAMP playing the same song, and I lose my breath when I see it's taking up a massive 44Meg! ...Eeep. Okay. So, for the next few weeks (?), I will be testing this Zinf thing, and seeing how it goes, because only time will tell.

Still, I lament the fact that I'm abandoning WinAMP. It used to be one of the only programs I really trusted. [sigh]

"An anti-American eagle? It's diabolical!"

Anti-social

I haven't posted lately, it's true. It's been an anti-social couple of months, and getting more so. I'm enjoying the introspection.

I had the idea of blogging about "becoming an artist", since that seems to be my aim, of late. And then I asked myself, "Why do you want to be an artist?"

Since then, I haven't come up with a good answer. Oh... I've had some ideas, but none of them are terribly motivating. Things boil down to a few salient points:

I like programming. Even if given the chance, I would not stop.
I don't like artists, on the whole... a few good souls, sure, but that's true everywhere. By and large, artists tend to be... broken people.
I am so not into self-marketing.
The money's worse than programming (with exceptions).

That said, none of these trains of thought have deterred me from doing what I'm doing. Namely, I'm drawing. A lot. I also spend a lot of time thinking about drawing, analyzing what I see. Last, and perhaps most copiously, I seek out art, judge it, and learn from the pieces I like most.

Tying that in to programming, I actually wrote a ruby script that scrapes Deviant Art and grabs "favourites" from all of the artists on one page of your own favourites page. (Think of them as meta-faves). It uses ActiveRecord to store some db information, Hpricot and open-uri for the scraping, and it's probably 120 lines. Fun to write.

I'm actually of the mind that my favourites on DA are remarkable works of art. The process has also taught me exactly where I want to focus my efforts. This is key. It breaks down into stages, as I see it:

Draw, until I...
Get some kind of tablet.
Do "digital painting" until I...
Get a strong foundation in form.
Start rendering (3D).
Move slowly into physical sculpture.

There are a few key points, here.

First, I love digital paintings. I love the colors, I love the textures: like paint, but less chaotic. It's what I want to do... for as long as it will sustain me. Brushes intimidate me. I don't like getting messy. Digital painting is my thing.

"But."

Sculpture is what I consider the height of "personal" art. (The subtext there is that I think there are cooler versions of collaborative art, but that's for another discussion.) If had to choose one thing, that's what I would focus on. But there are a few things keeping me from jumping right in. Most importantly, I don't think I have a strong enough concept of space and form. It's also a "slow" form of art, not as immediately gratifying as drawing or painting. It's also much harder to sell, takes up more space, and is otherwise less practical. ...But someday, I'll be able to work around all those things. Certainly computer modeling gets around most of those, and perhaps I'll dabble in it in the near future. But at the moment, I'm not confident enough: I haven't modeled in.. .oh my... has it really been over a decade?!? Pardon me while I go puke for a while.

Subject lines

It occurs to me that Subject lines are totally in the wrong place, when composing a message (they're appropriate at the top of a received message).

It's not until after you write your message that you truly have an appropriate idea for your subject line.

The subject should appear right before the "SEND" button.