Britt's Blog

The Beloit College Center for the Sciences has officially received Platinum LEED Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The building has also won a Design Excellence Honor Award in Interior Architecture from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

In addition, they have fixed the pressure problems so that the front doors no longer get stuck closed in cold weather, my office now maintains a habitable temperature more or less year ’round, my motion-detecting, ambient-light-sensing indirect overhead lighting has always worked like it should, and they say they’re going to fix my blinds so that I can open the screens fully, which will make it much easier to to operate my operable window.

W00T to the Kettle Chips factory in Beloit, also, for their gold certification. They didn’t get platinum certification, but our building does not produce delicious, delicious potato chips, so I think it’s clear who the real winners are.

My laptop is filthy. I drag it around every waking minute (it seems), I eat while I use it, and I probably don’t wash my hands enough. As a result, my computer has all kinds of grime all over it and crumbs in the keyboard. (And probably swine flu virus too.)

My “A” key got a crumb stuck under it and wasn’t working right. (My students will be happy to know that this mishap occurred after I finished entering grades for the semester—otherwise I would have been unable to give a grade higher than a B+.)

Anyway, I popped off the key to remove the obstruction (my, there’s a lot of cat hair under there, too) and as always I forgot how to correctly reassemble the little white plastic interlocking ring-lever doohickies underneath to get the key back on.

It is deeply annoying that there isn’t a good tutorial out there on how to do it, but at least this one had a (underexposed, blurry) picture that is clear enough to see how it was all supposed to go. Reattaching a key on a MacBook Pro.

I post it here in preparation for the next crumbectomy.

You know what I want, more than anything else in the world?

I want a brand new mathematically complicated toy that requires learning a new programing language and which produces unpredictable, ever-shifting, strangely compelling visual output.

It’d be great if it could be so addictive that I lose all desire to do anything other than dink around on my computer so that I alienate all my friends, stop doing my job, get fired, and end up living on the street in a cardboard box that is located near a power outlet where I can plug in my laptop.

Behold, my new creation. I call him “Octopulus.”

Here is the code that created Octopulus:

startshape star

rule CircleLine .2{
CIRCLE {hue 200 sat .7 b .5 }
CircleLine{x .1 y .1 r -10 hue -.2}
}


This version of Octopulus is variation HTR.

If you download Context Free you can thank me later for ruining your life.

Loyal “Britt’s Blog” readers, I hope you will consider taking three minutes and fourteen seconds^* out of your busy day to watch our exciting new YouTube video, straight from the Beloit College Propaganda Bureau Office of Admissions. By the end of the video, you will want to be a student at Beloit College. *wiggles fingers hypnotically* You willlllllll coommmmme to Belooooooooyyyyytttt and briinnnnggg your tuiiiiiiition…..

But, seriously, the more people watch, the higher our YouTube rank will be, and also, it actually expresses a lot of the things that are special about Beloit to me.

^* Watching time does not include download time. No warranty is expressed or implied. Offer void in Alaska and Hawaii, the freak states.

Okay, I thought “Flat Daddies” were… sketchy. But, hey, it seems to give some kind of comfort to the families, so far be it from me to criticize.

But an AI mommy or daddy that can videoconference with toddlers while Mommy or Daddy is off in harm’s way? That is a whole order of magnitude higher on the “Eek!” meter.

via Boing Boing

I’m getting something like 100-200 spam comments a day, and manually moderating posts is growing untenable. (Ask poor Dan, whose comments got lost amongst the pitches for Viagra, incest porn and escort services.)

You’ve probably seen CAPTCHA before; it’s the program that gives you an image of some supposedly non-machine-readable distorted text, which you then have to type in to prove that you are a human and not a spambot.

I heard about reCAPTCHA a while ago and thought it was pretty damned awesome, so when my spam problem escalated, I was thrilled to find out that WordPress has a plug in. (Thanks to Jason, who takes care off all my WordPress administration crap, for installing it for me.)

When you enter a comment, you will be asked to enter two words from an image that looks like this:

These words are not just randomly generated strings of characters, they are actual words from scanned documents, like out-of-copyright books and archival issues of the New York Times, words which are not readable by OCR. One of the words is “known,” so if you get it right, we know you’re not a bot. The other word is an unknown. The words you enter are sent back to the reCAPTCHA folks, and after an unknown word image has been identified as the same word by a bunch of people, they’ll know with some confidence what the word actually is. (So don’t panic if you can’t make one of the words out; you’re only required to get the “easy” one right to post your comment.)

Incredibly, brave commenter, you’re not just proving that you’re not a spambot, you’re making teh internets better for everyone by digitizing what the machines can’t.

If you find this irritating, I have enabled registration to my blog. Look over at the sidebar to the right under META for the “Register” link. If you register you can then log in and post comments without having to go through reCAPTCHA, though, if you ask me, it’s probably quicker to just type in the two words.

You can make comments below to try it out. :)

Just a quick heads-up! If you use iTunes to manage your podcasts, be alert! I just discovered that my podcast settings had all been changed to the “Default” settings, which were to “Keep the Last 3 Episodes” instead of “Keep All Unplayed Episodes.”

This presumably happened when I updated to iTunes 8, though I suppose it could have been malicious elves messing with my software settings.

It’s easy enough to change the default. Just go to the Podcasts screen and click the “Settings…” button, then in the “Settings For:” menu select “Podcast Defaults.” If what happened to you happened to me, all your podcasts are have been set to the “Default” settings, so you can change them all in one fell swoop.

In the grand scheme of things, losing a few podcasts isn’t the end of the world, and I was getting kind of behind on podcasts anyway, so it probably didn’t hurt for me to have involuntarily deleted a bunch, so I am only mildly irritated—certainly not irritated enough to track down the lost episodes.

And I’m hoping that maybe now it will actually delete played podcasts the way one would believe it would, based on the fact that it was set to “Keep all unplayed episodes,” something that worked only erratically for me in iTunes 7. (UPDATE: it seems to work much better, though the NPR Shuffle podcast simply refuses to comply.)

I have an order coming from a certain online retailer named after a South American river, and I’m tracking my packages with the delightful Delivery Status Dashboard widget. Delivery Status automatically checks up on your packages every hour, saving me the trouble of reloading the “Where’s My Stuff” page approximately every 33 seconds, as I am wont to do, so that I know exactly where all of my packages are all the time. *pant* *pant* *pant*

Unfortunately, this time both of the boxes have been showing up for a couple of days as “Carrier notified to pick up package” on the retailer website, and as “Not Found” on Delivery Status.

I am sure I need not describe to you how unsatisfying this is.

The retailer’s website says,

To speed delivery, shippers may not location-scan all of their shipments. When shipping volume is high, packages are processed in bulk, and the first time a package is scanned may be upon arrival at a regional hub near the destination, or even when the package is delivered. If you don’t see any tracking data for your shipment, and the estimated delivery date has not yet passed, please do not be concerned.

This is supposed to be a comfort to me? Cold succor indeed, in this information age.

How am I supposed to know whether my heart should race when I hear the tread of the mail carrier on the porch? Should I be on my porch straining for the sight of the yearned-for brown truck, or is my package still days away?

Surely they don’t expect me to just sit wait patiently until some day I randomly come home and find a box on my porch, do they? What kind of a way is that to live?

I’m at the end of my queue of podcasts, with just two more to share with you.

Continuing the trend of completely irrelevant introductions, I would like to say that I love comment spam. I approve all posters in order to ensure the high quality of commentary that you have come to expect from blurrypicturesofmycat, and I don’t have any kind of a spam filter, which means I have to go through and disapprove a staggering amount of comment spam.

I have to applaud the more clever random-text comment spam that actually get me to hesitate a moment before I realize they’re just a random excerpt from a novel or news article that happens to be bizarrely apropos. The comments which are nothing but a deluge of filthy, filthy descriptions of porn have a charm all their own, but my favorites are the comments that try to coax me into accepting them through pure flattery. “This is amazing sight! I thank you!!!” “You are stunnning brilliant!” “I read your blog everyday. You have excellant info!” I know, rationally, that it’s bot-generated bullshit, but it still warms me, somehow.

As such, it also pleases me to assume that all the Cyrillic comment spam is saying the same thing, but in Russian.

Getting on to the podcasts:

Radio Lab
I haven’t been listening to Radio Lab for very long, (it’s a relatively new show). They’re pretty experimental, playing around with sound, sound effects, and different ways of presenting information, but the content us usually interesting enough to sustain me through the weirder parts. Each week’s show is on a different topic, and it’s a little more unified than This American Life, and a little more fact-delivery-oriented, but some part of me keeps wanting to lump it in as the same genre. It’s the same, yet different. “Real different,” as they say in the Midwest. ;) I’ll leave it at that. :)

X Minus One
This is nothing more than the classic 50′s SF radio program, featuring dramatic productions of the work of all the great authors of the day. They’re wrapped up, irritatingly, in lots of ads for the US Navy. (I haven’t exactly figured that out yet. They’re public domain, so I guess somebody just picked ‘em up and sold advertising on them. To the gubmint. Well, I guess it makes sense for a lot of the stories, thematically.) No host, no intros, just classic science fiction radio drama Lotsa, “Now, see here!” and “Well, I’ll be…” plus suggestions that you’d be really cool if you joined the Navy.

It must be time for more podcasts!

Point of Inquiry
The Podcast of the Center for Inquiry, whose mission (from their website) is “to contribute to the public understanding and appreciation of science and reason, and their applications to human conduct.” The podcast deals with science, medicine, religion, and ethics from an atheist/rationalist/skeptical viewpoint, and in a somewhat heavy-handed manner, sometimes. Thankfully they’ve eliminated some of the commentary (which was often sophomoric and over-the-top) and stuck to what they do well, interviews by D.J. Grothe with intellectuals, mostly on their own side, but sometimes not. Plenty of food for thought.

Selected Shorts
This PRI program of short stories read by respected actors is hit or miss for me. Sometimes I’m really interested in the story, and sometimes it’s just not my taste. It’s always of very good quality, though.

Studio 360
Kurt Anderson brings us the public radio spin on art, TV, music, et cetera. Another quality PRI podcast, making it easy to get you public radio fix over the internets. Because it’s so varied, I always find something fascinating in each show.