blogwaffe

This weekend was the third annual Caltech Dance Show. Being friends with a few of the performers and dating one, I was super excited to see the show. My excitement, as it turns out, was not misplaced.

I essentially know nothing about dance: not the histories, not the theories, not the performance. But I can categorically say “that looked awesome/hot/beautiful” when I see something deserving of such a label. Every piece in the performance I saw opening night on Friday deserved more than one such accolade: from Scottish country to Belly dancing and everything in between. To pick favorites though, I have to say I personally enjoyed most the Lyrical piece performed by Kristin, Val and Birgitta (emotive! gorgeous! passionate!), the Ceroc piece performed by Michelle and the Ballroom club (stunning! incredible! awesome! stylistic! …geometrically impressive!) and the so called “Contemporary” piece by Kristin, Alexa and the Dance Troop (fascinating! clever! provoking! red!)*.

…Yes, I realize these are the very pieces in which the people I know performed. They were still my favorites. Get over it.

For the second show Saturday night, I snuck backstage to wish Michelle luck and ran into Kristin who, being one of the organizers of the event, looked like she was trying to be in a dozen places at once. In order that she need be in only eleven, I asked if there were some dumb grunt work she’d like me to do (thinking of “move that over there”). She handed me a camera and asked me to take pictures backstage: people getting ready, shots of the performances from the wings, etc. Why not? So I took a couple hundred shots (most blurry, the use of the flash onstage being a no no). A couple of the best were pictures I had taken when I swindled my way past the ushers and into the audience, so I volunteered to take more pictures during the third and final performance on Sunday afternoon. This time, exclusively from the front row.

Somehow I became the show’s official photographer.

Armed now with a tripod and a sense of duty, I took several hundred pictures before, during and after the performance from carefully chosen locations (read “someplace I could lie down”). Everyone was very appreciative, but all I did was act pleasant and push buttons. The real work is being done by the people who have to sort through and possibly touch up those hundreds of photos I took (I’m thinking Kristin and Wolfe). Not to mention the absurd amount of time Wolfe is spending video taping, editing and making DVDs of the performance. But I was up front and visible, so I got the thanks.

A little cog in a big machine, but I had a really good time doing something I’ve never done before (Dad will be proud). The best bit, though, was watching the performers (one in particular!) do their respective things.

* I name the people I know, not necessarily the prime movers.

Several months ago, I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout. On the whole, I’m quite happy about the switch. I’m still a little disjointed when going back and forth between it and QWERTY, but otherwise things are quite smooth.

I do still, however, make a few common typos; I’ll sometimes mix up the following pairs of letters: a and o, e and o, k and x, m and w, and l and s (each pair has adjacent constituents). I’ll also sometimes type characters out of order (presumably because the Dvorak “rhythm” is somewhat different than that at the QWERTY layout).

But I always made lots of typos. It seems, however, that more typos slip through my pinky’s erstwhile diligence at backspace patrol. I believe there are several factors at play here.

1. I make more typos than before. This explanation is extremely dull. Let us never speak of it again.
2. I don’t make more typos, I just catch more; I’ve become better at proofing my writing. This explanation I’ve included only for the sake of completeness. I can’t imagine I’m actually any better at proof reading now than a year ago, say.
3. I don’t yet feel the typos when typing on a Dvorak keyboard (as I do on QWERTY) and so must depend on my eyes to catch them. This would be related to my relative lack of comfort with Dvorak’s “rhythm”.
4. And finally, I treat vowels and consonants differently. Most of the single character typos I make swap two vowels. When proof reading, it seems harder for me to catch the difference between “color” and “coler” than between “color” and “colwr”. This is interesting. Two possibilities come to mind. To work backward, the second possibility is that the letters a o and e, in their respective lower case forms, look somewhat similar: round (as opposed to the letters o and w). Indeed, the consonants I swap most often also have some sort of “shape similarity”: w and m, and k and x. I don’t think this can be the whole story, though. Continuing backward, the first possibility is that I only read the consonants and that the vowels act mostly as placeholders (and as the occasional disambiguators). This possibility I called “first” because I am irrationally attached to it and proclaim it to be “likely” without any data to back me up. Since all the vowels are grouped together on the Dvorak layout, vowel swaps may be more common and (given this “likely” possibility) cause commensurate unnoticed typos. Perhaps Dr. Language person can comment on the merit of this “I don’t read vowels” possibility.

In any case, I’m not that good at typing, but I never have been. Don’t blame Dvorak.

Allen posed a problem to me many have faced before. He was on the phone with a friend of his when his call was dropped*. He called back, but so did his friend and apparently at just the right time such that each reached only the other’s voice mail rather than the other’s actual self. In comedic fashion, this dialing around in circles happened multiple times. Frustration abounded.

The solution, he believes, is the development of a universally known and agreed upon protocol for how to reestablish a broken telephone conversation (be it cellular or landlinear).

I am here to state the optimal such protocol. You are here to read it, accept it, and follow it unconditionally.

The telephone post-disconnect redialing protocol for two parties

Whoever dialled that specific call must redial the call if the connection is lost, unless otherwise explicitly agreed upon by both parties during the course of that specific call.

The question is one of who should call whom. The above is optimal (for the appropriate definition of optimal) due to the following considerations.

1. The caller should not put financial burden on the callee.
2. The callee may not know the phone number of the caller, while it is clear the caller has access to the number of the callee.
3. There is no mention of alternate Tuesdays or the color of either party’s socks.

Go forth and propagate this decree unto the masses.

* Information is passed from cell phone to cell phone by electromagnetic waves cleverly encoding digital information in a fault tolerant and secure fashion such that your voice gets through with reasonable clarity to the party on the other end of the “line” without anyone else being able to listen in. These electromagnetic waves are simply a fancy technical sounding word for “cell phone fairies”. These eager, though sometimes clumsy, creatures occasionally drop your voice as they carry it from one phone to another, hence the term.

I’ve long hated slashdot. The articles that make it to the front page are typically pretty good, but the summaries are sometimes misleading, poorly worded or written by someone who clearly had no idea what the article was actually about. Worse, and the actual source of my hate, are the comments each submission acquires.

Whenever I read the comments on an article about Quantum Information (or some other field I actually know something about), I find the number of comments which contain pertinent information to be small, and those that contain accurate information to be entirely negligible. Reading the comments of such articles is infuriating. Why people read a naive explanation of some physical principal and then assume they know all there is to know about it, I don’t understand. Why they claim this knowledge and then publicly demonstrate their ignorance is further beyond me. Extrapolating, I long ago decided that comments on all of the articles were, with high probability, similarly misinformed, so I simply stopped reading slashdot. A better solution might have been to stop reading the comments, but knowing just how terrible the comments were, I lacked the will power to stay away from them; I was the moth, they the flame.

To get my nerdy news fix, I started reading digg. The technical articles there are of a narrower scope, but it’s worth it for the comments which typically come in only two varieties: “no digg” and “I also like cheese. digg++”.

Refreshing. Useless, but refreshing. I never get sucked into reading digg comments because I know ahead of time that they contain identically no information. In particular, there’s nothing there to raise my blood pressure.

Until recently.

A few days ago, I saw an article on digg titled Prof says there’s no hacker he can’t foil. I scoped it out and saw that it was a poorly written bit of science journalism about Hoi-Kwong Lo’s most recent paper: Simulation and Implementation of Decoy State Quantum Key Distribution over 60km Telecom Fiber.

The result is a nice practical demonstration. The article, however, makes the great mistake of confusing an eavesdropper (someone attached to the medium through which you’re sending information from one place to another) and a hacker(/cracker, a person with far more tools at his or her disposal, e.g. social engineering). This error on the part of the journalist made for some really disappointing comments on digg: exactly the sort of comments I try to avoid by steering clear of slashdot. I don’t know if the digg culture is changing, if quantum information brings people out of the woodwork who should remain there, or if this was a statistical aberration. In any case, I’ll have to be more careful from now on.

spamdies

oddly enough I read an article about a month ago on how to spoof a photon. This proff needs to catch up to the times.

no digg.

malkav

Of course this protects against sniffing/mitm attacks etc.. but if a ‘hacker’ just broke into the computer connected to the network, they could probably extracted the data from the network card after it has been decoded, or even from disk if it isn’t encrypted.

FYI, the actual result doesn’t claim otherwise, but digg++.

metman

To allude that your infoilable, clearly is a act of arrogance. Silly human.

Your spelling, then, is clearly not an act of arrogance.

snowbooch

its gonna be open season on this guy

Perhaps. If the “hackers” out there demonstrate a level of reading comprehension on par with that of your own. Or if they feel like punishing a happily innocent scientist for having a ‘sensationalized to the point of misinformation’ article written about him. I admit either as a possibility.

kiwifireball

This is all well and good. It’s not a surprise that this overly “intelligent” physics geek made such an outrageous claim. I suppose he didn’t take into consideration that this system could still be “hacked” with good old social engineering.

So close. You see the problem, but miss the source. I’ll give it a ‘I thought about digging it but decided to abstain in the hopes the aggregate would know better than I do’ for potentially leading people in the right direction and allowing some future commenter to correct your misconception.

barkie

I read about quantam crypography two years ago. Old shit. No digg.

Ah… this one might be my favorite. Dumb shit. No digg.

madjack3

dugg for the comments more than the article! haha.

I also like cheese.

The short of it is: if you have tickets for the 1:15pm taping of the Price is Right on a Monday, get there before 5:30 or you probably won’t get in (see the table at the bottom of the post).

On to the long of it.

In town visiting Michelle a week and a half ago was her good friend Laura whose greatest desire while in LA was to see Bob Barker at a taping of The Price is Right. Since Laura was just in town for the weekend, going to the studio on Monday was our only option. Unfortunately, Monday is the busiest day there for two reasons: all the out of towners just in LA for the weekend have to go on Monday (they don’t tape on Friday), and there are two tapings on Monday (they don’t tape on Friday). It was going to be a long day.

The previous week, Michelle had gone to the CBS studio to pick up tickets for the 1:15pm taping on February 5th. Apparently there was no line (though there was also no one at the booth for some time), and she, as a ticket picker-uper, was allowed to park in the studio lot for free.

Monday Morning (with deserved capitalization) Greg and I awoke around 4:00am and were picked up by Michelle and Laura at 4:30 here in Pasadena. Without traffic, we made it to the studio, where there was already a sizable line, at about 5:10am. Laura and Greg got us a spot in line while Michelle and I drove around the block to The Grove‘s parking lot (a mall lot that cost us $11 with validation).

We patronized the unenthusiastic coffee/bagel shop across from the studio (location is everything) and waited in line until, at around 6:00am, we were given tickets that held our place in line. I was number 131. At that point we were allowed to leave as long as we returned by 8:00am, so we picked up the car (the lot wasn’t yet taking money that early in the morning, so we decided to move the car while we could and save a few bucks) and drove to a nearby IHOP. We parked back at the grove and went back to the studio to wait for our priority numbers, which we got at about 8:30am. I was number 98; apparently about a third of the people in front of us were there for the later, second taping.

At 9:00am they called us back into formation and started droning on about rules (no disparaging remarks about the prizes, please), taxes (you have to pay them), the line we were sitting in (never leave it or you’re not getting into the taping), and a handful of other things that were repeated ad nauseum. Eventually, we were issued our name tags (Price is Right name tags!) and seating numbers (our fourth non-ticket). I was number 99; it’s unclear why we four were all bumped up a number.

At some point (cell phones and cameras are not allowed on the studio, so I wasn’t able to keep good track of time), they started calling a dozen people from the line up at a time to be “interviewed”. Contestants on the Price is Right are not drawn randomly. They are selected from the crowd ahead of time during this interview process. You only have a few seconds to make your mark, so be creative. We finally got interviewed at around 11:30. We then got herded into… another line! and sat down to play a few hands of UNO with our neighbors.

And then the moment arrived. We finally got into the studio a bit before 1:00pm and got seats. The place was tiny. Watching the show on TV, you get the sense that there are at least a thousand people in the audience and that “coming on down” is at least a 50 yard dash. As it turns out, there’s only about two hundred and fifty people at the taping, and most everyone is within twenty feet of the stage. The display doors (which look massive on TV) are eat-me tiny and the stage itself is about the size of a foosball table. When we first came in, I remarked that Bob Barker must be a midget. Apparently, the TV industry is just plain good at clever photography.

After being prepped by the show’s announcer, the actual taping flew by; everything was extremely fast paced: “Come on down”, bidding, win, play whatever game, cut to commercial, repeat. During “commercial breaks”, Bob would talk to the crowd and take questions. This was just about the only time we actually heard his voice. The staff there get all the audience members to ooh and ahh and scream and shout advice (“higher!”, “$1300”, “the soup!”, “My spleen just exploded”, and so on) with such volume that very little of what’s going on on stage is discernible. I now have a lot of sympathy for the contestants who keep having to ask about the previous people’s bids.

Sadly, none of us was called down. Our dreams (“one dollar, Bob”) were not fulfilled. The guy behind us did get called though, so I bet we were on TV for a second or two (unfortunately, the show aired today and I was too lazy to give anyone advance warning). Despite our lack of luck, I’m glad to have gone. Price is Right, for good or for ill, is truly a piece of Americana, and it was neat to be involved.

Anyway, that’s the boring long of it. For a less mind numbing account, see Greg’s First Post! on the subject.

Below is a table of a person’s final seat number for the 1:15pm taping vs. that person’s arrival time. Somewhere not too far past seat number 150, the people all came from pre-booked large groups which are guaranteed admission (and so don’t have to wait in line).

Final Seat Number	Arrival Time
1	11:00pm
10	12:30am
15	2:00am
30	2:45am
40	3:30am
65	4:00am
100	5:10am
150	5:50am

Jeff recently lent me Monkey Business by Black Eyed Peas, and I’ve been listening to it on and off over the past few days.

It’s good. There’s several tracks that have, in the immutable words of our generation, huge, catchy hooks. “Pump It”, “Don’t Phunk with My Heart” and “My Style” among them. A couple are pretty sweet remixes of old classics including “Union” (of Sting’s “Englishman in New York”), and “Pump it” again (of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou”). And one track’s just plain fantastic: “Don’t Lie”. Though a couple lines are overly steeped in poppy vocals, the song manages to make it despite.

But the quality of the album as a whole is not what I wanted to comment on today. Rather, I’m more interested in dissecting the lyrics of one song in particular: “My Humps”, a fair to middlingly catchy song about a… shall we say ‘curvaceous’ hot girl. Allow me to reproduce a stanza of the lyrics here.

Tryna feel my hump hump,
lookin at my lump lump.
You can look but you can’t
touch it. If you touch it, I’ma
start some drama.
You don’t want no drama.
No no drama.
No no no no drama.

Consider those last two lines in particular: “No no drama. / No no no no drama.”

That’s one of the worst lyrics I have ever had the misfortune of hearing. I think I can honestly feel a little rivulet of blood pouring from my ears every time I hear that song. What was the songwriter thinking? “Uh… Something that rhymes with ‘drama’. How about ‘drama’? Yeah, that”ll do. And for the next line I’ll use… meh… ‘drama’ again. And for the forth… screw it. Slap another ‘drama’ in there, throw in a few ‘no’s for rhythm’s sake and call it good.”

Well, allow me to retort. You’re a no talent ass-clown. That’s right: no no talent. No no no no talent. And for this reason, I proclaim “My Humps” by Black Eyed Peas a work of sheer Musical Genius.

If you haven’t heard me proselytize Gmail before, count yourself lucky; I tend to spout off about it. Yes, I know that Gmail is creepy. I understand all the privacy concerns and the potential to allow Google to earn lots of money off of my correspondence. It’s just so damn convenient.

But I digress.

Gmail allows its users to construct email filters to tag messages with various labels, forward things to different address and so forth by specifying the conditions an email must meet before the filter in question is applied. One can specify that the message be From a particular source, be sent To a certain address, contain specific text and so on. Since the filters are implemented as Gmail search queries, Gmail filters may also include basic boolean logic. For instance, you can create a filter that catches emails From bob@example.com OR sally@example.org. In terms of Gmail’s search syntax, this filter would be denoted as from:(bob@example.com OR sally@example.org). Similarly, NOTs are specified with minus signs, and spaces are used for ANDs.

Gmail’s filters, then, are fairly robust. However, the interface for writing filters is very limiting. The user is presented with five text boxes: From, To, Subject, Has The Words, Doesn’t Have. And that’s all the options we get. Suppose, instead of the above, I wanted to create a filter that caught messages From bob@example.com OR To sally@example.org. I can type ‘bob@example.com’ into the From box and ‘sally@example.org’ into the To box to try to construct such a filter. But Gmail does not offer me the ability to specify the boolean operator that should be applied between the From and To conditions; it assumes AND. I’m hosed.

But only at first glance. You can actually implement a relative OR between fields. A cursory internet search yielded the following clever solution.

In the From field, enter

bob@example.com) OR to:(sally@example.org

It’s the sneaky use of parentheses that makes it all work. Another solution would be to enter the entire search query into the Has The Words field:

from:(bob@example.com) OR to:(sally@example.org)

Though more straightforward, some will argue it isn’t as clean.

Anyway, don’t let Gmail’s (in this case) crappy interface stop you from making arbitrarily complicated filters.

I renewed my vehicle registration with the California DMV sometime in October or November. The DMV was (unlike last year) quite prompt in both initiating and following through with the transfer of information and funds. I, however, proceeded to lose the registration card and sticker after they sent it to me. Now I have to pay $32 to get new copies. I could lie and tell them I never received the stuff in the first place, but lying sucks. Fine. I have an appointment at 3:10 pm Monday afternoon to straighten everything out. Despite the pain of being at the DMV, I’d rather negotiate this treacherous path in person than hope for miracles to occur behind the desk in some DMV warehouse of trained monkeys.

The bigger issue? There need be no appointments and no monkeys (trained or otherwise) involved in this situation. Here’s what I had to do. I called the DMV hotline and found out that they could do nothing for me. Nothing. So I printed out a paper copy of DMV form REG 156 and filled in the little boxes by hand. I see, too, that in the corner, this form will eventually be initialled by some poor sap. How many people have to touch this piece of paper before I get my sticker? At least I was able to print it from online rather than being forced to pick it up in person.

I should also note that part of my reason for deciding to speak to someone face to face is that the exact names of the bits I lost (the registration card and the little year sticker) are not defined anywhere on the form or the website as far as I can see. Presumably, they are explicitly named in the missive originally sent to me by the DMV. But that’s lost (indeed, I checked the “Lost” box on the form). It reminds me of inquiring of your bank the number one should call after having lost one’s credit card. “The number is on the back of the card” is not a helpful response. So, in order to determine which of several likely looking checkboxes on the form I need to check, I need to ask someone.

Incomplete information aside, there’s a big problem here. The DMV has a giant computer database of vehicles and owners (or rather, I pray to all I call holy they do; I can’t fathom doing everything with files and cabinets). Stovepipe a damn user interface on the thing and allow me to access some of it from the web. Asking for replacement stickers cannot possibly be a very difficult task, but doing it via paper and several middlemen is costly and time consuming. That and I hate it.

Somebody get these people some IT.