November 2004 Archives

While perusing Fark.com and procrastinating doing my lifting, I came across this amusing video of some enterprising Yalies successfully pulling a prank at a Harvard-Yale football game. An article in the Yale Daily News provides some additional background.

Inter-school rivalries are a bit silly in my book, although I admit to having a couple of “Yale sucks!” t-shirts stuffed away in my drawers. (Apparently, their derogatory slogan for us is “Princeton doesn’t matter,” underscoring their perception that the Princeton-Yale rivalry is a mere afterthought.)

Anyway, I tip my hat, humbled by their chutzpah.

I have been studying up on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in support of another blog-based project that I have got bubbling on the back burner (re-purposing a classic public domain work, using the MT engine in what I hope is a unique and useful manner). Not fully understanding RSS feeds, I had chosen to remain blissfully ignorant, hoping that the default RSS templates in Movable Type 3.x were “good enough.”

Unfortunately, for those who actually browse blogs via RSS, these default templates have one major annoyance and one minor one. The limitation that the default feeds load only an excerpt of each post, rather than the entire post is apparently a major pain. The second, minor annoyance is that the default feeds do not include comments; I was on the fence about whether to include these.

First I downloaded an RSS reader so that I could see what my three feeds (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom) actually look like. Shrook is a free and popular (with good reason) RSS reader for Mac OS X. I then took bits and pieces of understanding from Learning Movable Type’s article on “Simple RSS Customizations” and “Full Posts + Comments RSS Template for Movable Type” by etc. (with the lion’s share of the code from the latter).

Since there does not yet seem to be a standard for RSS feed “best practices,” I just decided to be a total copycat. So my…

• RSS 1.0 feed (http://www.notmike.com/index.rdf) - has just the last 20 entry excerpts
• RSS 2.0 feed (http://www.notmike.com/index.xml) - has the last 20 full entries with full comments
• Atom feed (http://www.notmike.com/atom.xml) - has just the last 20 full entries

I have not had a full belly in a very long time. It feels good. My fifteen-hundred-calorie-per-day diet does not, in any way, provide the opportunity for the sensation of sated, bloated fullness.

There is not too much guilt to follow my evening of relative gluttony, as this was an isolated event, and tomorrow it is back to the old diet. These last ten pounds around my midsection are proving to be rather troublesome. I will lose them, though. My official reentry back into “the game” will be a catered singles semi-formal on December 10. It is my strong desire to reach my goal weight (180 pounds) by then.

Back to my sated belly…as I mentioned in the comments to my last post, I accepted a Thanksgiving invitation from a co-worker. It is always better to spend holidays with friends or loved ones.

Because there were three vegetarians and one vegan in attendance, we had a nice variety of scrumptious non-traditional fare in addition to the turkey, stuffing, and so forth. They did not serve tofurkey, unfortunately, but did have seasoned fried tofu “fillets” topped with a tangy vegetable relish. Underscoring the “omni” in “omnivore,” I sampled a bit of everything. Delicious.

My plans for Thanksgiving fell through, so I have decided to stick to my diet this year, mainly because I will not have someone to take the leftovers off of my hands.

So…since I’m not going to use them, I thought that I would share the recipes with you (via FoodNetwork.com), just in case one or more of you was still looking for ideas. After two years of excessive effort and cooking all day, I was going to try Rachael Ray’s “Thanksgiving in 60.” Now I doubt that I could completely make this meal in sixty minutes like Rachael (after all she’s a goddess in both physical appearance and culinary prowess), but I loved the apple theme she used throughout. How does this sound: Herb Roasted Turkey Breast with Pan Gravy, Green Beans with Apple Cider, Pumpkin Soup with Chili Cran-Apple Relish, Apple and Onion Stuffin’ Muffins, and Autumn Potato Gratin. Yum. Maybe I will cook these recipes after all.

Now if you already have a turkey, and it’s the full bird, I highly recommend brining. Now submerging a turkey in iced saltwater for 12 hours may seem scary, but it created the most tender, flavorful turkey meat that I have ever eaten. Alton Brown was the inspiration for this one. Both years that I tried it, I used this brine recipe, but this year Alton used a honey brine recipe. Interesting. I may give that one a go (next year).

Fourth time’s a charm (well, it was the third support person I dealt with over the past few weeks). I am exceedingly grateful to Abdul Hakeem, who successfully copied my entire Movable Type installation from Bloghosts’ servers over to my spacious new digs at TotalChoice Hosting. Bloghosts never responded to my support request when I was having trouble with the transfer, but everything worked out in the end.

I expect the usual headaches as my domain name server changes take effect, so the URL you see above may not be notmike.com for a few days.

Now that I don’t have to migrate my blog manually, I can use that time to work on another blog-related plan that I had for one of my subdomains (and all of that extra storage and bandwidth), but more on that later.

Update: From my end, surfing at home via Comcast Hi-Priced Internet, the DNS propagation took less than 15 minutes. That seems way too good to be true, but if everyone else is getting to this page via notmike.com, RegisterFly.com rocks as a domain registrar.

Moving on to less controversial topics…

A co-worker lent me a somewhat obscure live-action Japanese movie that he had borrowed from our university’s language lab, and I finally got a chance to watch it Sunday. Battle Royale (2000) by director Kini Fukasaku is an extremely dark, unsettling film with a laughable premise, but a serious, brutally violent tone throughout. I highly recommend it if you can find it (maybe via P2P client).

In a corrupt, imploding dystopian Japan, adults choose to quell student rebellion by making an example of one class of high school students each year. They ship these students off to a deserted island, fit them with electronic explosive dog collars, give each one a duffel bag with random bladed and projectile weapons, then set them loose. Only one student will be allowed off of the island, the required death of all of the rest of their classmates is the only caveat. If more than one student remains after three days, all of the collars explode.

The movie has its flaws (limited characterization, repetitive at times), and the excessively brutal violence is sickening and tragic, but it ends up being a surprisingly moving and provocative tale of desperate survival, friendship, betrayal, cruelty, and resistance.

I was so incensed by a blog posting by LiL, I wrote a 2,100 word entry myself. So go read her posting, then come back here and read mine. What inspired her post was a New York Times article about the abortion provision tacked on to the latest Congressional spending bill.

Do you ever have one of those nights where you have no desire to sleep, or read, or exercise, or surf the web, or watch television, or catch up on projects, or send e-mails to friends, or even write a substantive blog entry?

Instead you just sit in chair with a blank expression on your face, listening to Mozart’s Requiem over, and over, and over, and over again, with a myriad variations of the same thoughts drifting and rolling around your consciousness.

Oh, you’ve never had a night like that? OK, then.

Tonight was session number eight of my eight-week “Web Development with HTML” class. I hope my students feel like they got their $75 worth. Obviously, I had no expectations that they would be web developers extraordinaires after just 12 hours of instruction. However, if they walked away from this class with some idea about web standards, separating structured content from presentation, accessibility issues, or even how Firefox is a much better browser than IE; I can declare this to have been a successful venture.

Because blogging has become such a large part of my life (even though it may have at times added certain complications to my life), I felt that devoting a third of my last class to a demonstration of Movable Type was a worthwhile exercise. The point I tried to make was that they need not have mastered everything that I taught in order to publish on the web. One can blog without any knowledge of HTML; however, even with just a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, one can create a visually engaging blog site.

The adult school invited me back to teach the same class next February, and I accepted. I figured that since I already spent so much unpaid time doing prep work for the fall session, I might as well reuse those materials in the spring.

So now that I have this small victory behind me, it is time for me to take a day for myself, temporarily forget about the huge queue of projects looming over my head, get out of the apartment, and do something wild and crazy….

Another link from Japan. This time it’s How to fold a shirt. I suppose that I am easily impressed sometimes, but….

Next up (for you らんま 1/2 fans), we have Anything Goes Martial Arts Laundry Folding.

This evening I attended the first installment of a promising lecture series skillfully organized by my friend and cubicle neighbor. The cross-disciplinary series “aims to explore interrelations of new media, technology, and traditional forms and practices of arts and humanities.”

The featured speakers were Brooklyn-based mixed-media artists, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. In one of their pieces that they demonstrated for the intrigued audience, the McCoys had re-shot the famous kiss between William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, then built a self-contained, projection-ready, suitcase-housed computer “appliance” that restructured a database of the shot frames with a custom algorithm, altering the display of the narrative by suspending, reversing, stuttering, and repeating the frames in a perpetual loop.

I have to admit that I was jealous—not as much by their work (which was captivating)—but by the collaborative aspect of their marriage. They have been creating conceptual art together for more than a decade, each adding his or her respective strengths to the mix.

Plus, admiring his wife (respectfully, bien sûr), I was totally envious of Kevin McCoy—an articulate “girl geek” with an artistic bent is incredibly sexy; now where can I find myself one of those?

The PressAnyKey Dictionary of Names is an amusing distraction, but is, of course, no more reliable than a personality description based on astrological signs. Their database of names is rather vast; I was surprised to find most of my uncommonly named friends (not all of the entries are flattering, though). Below is mine. I couldn’t really find anything in the description that was untrue, but the statements are general enough to apply to anyone.

 Michael

Your name of Michael gives you a clever mind, good business judgment, a sense of responsibility, and an appreciation of the finer things of life. You are serious-minded and not inclined to make light of things even in little ways, and in your younger years you had more mature interests than others your age. Home and family mean a great deal to you and it is natural that you should desire the security of a peaceful, settled home environment where you can enjoy the companionship of family and friends. Whatever you set out to accomplish you do your very best to complete in accordance with what you consider to be right. In the home you assume your responsibilities capably, having the self-confidence to form your own opinions and make your own decisions. Others can rely on you; once you have given your word you will do your utmost to fulfil a responsibility. However, there is a tendency to be a little too independent in your thinking and it is difficult for you to accept the help of others when you should. Due to your strong sense of responsibility, you could experience worry and mental turmoil through assuming more responsibility than you should. Friction could arise through others feeling that you were interfering with their rights and privileges, even though you are only trying to help. 

Well, I finally got around to posting the gallery of photos that I took during a visit to the Princeton Writers Block Garden on October 31, whittling it down to 47 photos.

I was going to provide more detailed captions, but figured that it was senseless to reproduce the information that one can find at the main Princeton Writers Block Garden site. Be sure to check out the Auction Results page for descriptions of the follies and the price that they went for at auction (links removed).

I have devoted three posts to this exhibition because it is my way of applauding the significant achievement of these visionary artists. They temporarily turned a vacant lot, which will now become residential housing, into an inspirational public space that not only brought together the university and community (“town and gown”), but also facilitated collaboration among representatives from a broad swath of academic disciplines, including creative writing, architecture, visual arts, history, and even physics. Brilliant.

Update 5/4/06: I removed the links to the PWBG site because it went away. It’s always a shame when another website just disappears like snow in spring.

…where do they all come from. So first we read about the Boyfriend’s Arm Pillow, then there was the remotely controlled robotic Hug pillow, and now modern ingenuity has blessed us with the urethane foam Girlfriend’s Lap Pillow.

This invention seems a little creepy to me (yes, she, I mean it, has panties and an anatomical similarity to Barbie). I think, though, that it is just a little bit too close to this (link not safe for work). Is the real thing that hard to find? Oh wait, yeah…I guess it is.

BTW, while Googling the above NSFW link, I came across this hilarious, but also potentially NSFW link—Real Hamster:The World’s Finest Love Hamster. I do not think I want to know whether it’s just a parody.

Somewhat bored with my workout, I have decided to mix things up a bit for weeks twenty and twenty-one. Although I still have about ten pounds to lose around my midsection, I am going to put the fat loss on hold for a short while and attempt the “Two-Week Blitz for Bigger Triceps and Biceps” chapter from the Darden book (below).

The two-week blitz is very similar to the normal Bowflex workout, except for a few key factors—a slightly larger calorie intake, more sleep, creatine loading, and more intense upper-body exercises that focus on negative, rather than positive resistance. Creatine Monohydate is one of those rare dietary supplements that actually has more than a placebo effect on muscular size and strength. Creatine does impede fat loss, though, so it should not be part of any program where losing weight is the primary goal. Caffeine, which I already avoided for the past few months because of its diuretic properties, is really verboten here because it cancels out some of the effects of the creatine. (God, I miss coffee!) After the two-week blitz, I will return to my normal program.

Even before I begin these two weeks, I am already starting to see definition in my triceps for the first time in my life. Here’s hoping I see the “measurable increases in the circumference of [my] upper arms” as claimed in this chapter. Too bad winter is a time for bulky clothing.

Confusion. Disappointment. Frustration. Dejection. Fury. Resignation.

I jumped in my car tonight, headed for the grocery store; the solitary purpose of this nocturnal mission was to return with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in a vain attempt to cancel out a small amount of the negativity from the past few weeks. It has been more than 130 days since I have sought solace at the end of a spoon. Such fulfillment is ephemeral, and the deleterious effect of sixteen hundred calories is anything but ephemeral; however, for fifteen or so blissful minutes…

Heading for the freezer section, I urgently strode toward the long-avoided frozen confection aisle. Reaching my goal, hands pressed against the glass doors, I stared intently at the rows of refrigerated shelving. A powerful wave of negative emotion washed over me; SuperFresh’s paltry selection did not include the flavor I desired. Чёрт возьми! I just stood there for five minutes, while irrational, uncharacteristic rage unexpectedly bubbled up from the repressed depths of my soul. Finally I decided that if I couldn’t have the flavor I wanted, it just wasn’t worth it; I left the store, having purchased just two items—a carton of one-percent milk and a loaf of whole wheat bread.

Driving home, my lungs exploded with an ear-splitting, throat-wrenching scream, and my right foot slammed down on the accelerator. Soon realizing that driving forty-five miles per hour above the speed limit was probably not the wisest course of action, I quickly released my foot and released a venomous litany of decidedly non-Christian epithets.

I arrived home and poured myself a drink—it’s not quite Ben & Jerry’s, and there was not enough left in the bottle to get myself drunk, but at least I calmed down enough to write a blog entry.

I’m not willing right now to recount any of the true sources of my frustration, but I can describe one contributing factor. My migration from the now defunct Bloghosts over to my new host, TotalChoice Hosting, has not been going well. There is some misconfiguration on the Bloghosts servers that is preventing the automated cPanel site transfer. Requests for assistance from Bloghosts and/or Jace Herring have gone unanswered (and will mostly likely continue as such). Our last resort, copying the cPanel-generated backup file over to TCH’s servers so that one of their support personnel could reattempt the migration proved unfruitful. I am now probably faced with the undesirable task of recreating my account piece by piece. Bleah.

In Flanders Fields
by Lt. Col. John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

On this November the 11th, I render an awestruck and thankful salute to our nation’s veterans, past and present. My own deployment to Bosnia was a cakewalk compared to what these brave men and women have been willing to sacrifice repeatedly. I encourage you to give a veteran a hug or a pat on the back today.

Putting together a photo gallery from my visit to the Princeton Writers Block Garden is taking longer than anticipated because one of the organizers had asked me for a CD burned with all of my shots, so I have been color-correcting and cropping over six dozen photos.

Here are three more of my favorite pics as a teaser.

Um…left of center?!? Whiskey…tango…foxtrot?

I took the Political Compass survey that has been spreading virally throughout the blogosphere (via Watermark). This six-page survey tries to place you on a four-quadrant grid whose axes range from Left to Right and Libertarian to Authoritarian. According to the results, I am apparently chillin’ in the same quadrant as Gandhi. Gandhi?

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -0.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.59

This is probably not the most scientific of surveys. In fact, this alternative political compass survey writer called its accuracy into question. Hmmm, seventy-five questions? Maybe some other night. This one only has ten questions (too few to accurately measure anything), but let’s see…

Okay, that’s it. I give up. Next thing you know, I’ll be voting Democratic. Oh, wait…merde.

Well, at least I am still strongly opposed to the Kyoto Protocol and believe that Ronald Reagan has been the greatest president during my lifetime.

If you are a Bloghosts customer, and have not visited Bloghosts.com in the past few days, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have less than two months to find a new home for your site.

I was disappointed when I found this out thanks to LiL because I have been quite satisfied with Bloghosts’ service during the four short months I have been with them.

It looks like I will get a chance to test out how well Sebastian Delmont’s TypeMover plug-in works. Being the paranoid sort, I have also been making manual ftp backups of all my blog-related files every evening since I got the news.

I have already compiled a list of potential hosts (mostly culled from BlogExplosion’s directory); unfortunately, they are all a trade-off between price, blog-centric support (specifically Movable Type), cPanel availability, and perceived longevity.

I had meant to blog about this right after I got back from Pennsylvania, but forgot about it until I was cleaning out my glove compartment. While I had noticed the latest trend in vehicular adornment on just a few cars in New Jersey, when I was driving around western PA, I was hard-pressed to find a car without some variation of the little magnetic ribbons. In case you haven’t seen them (yeah, right), the ribbons are yellow or red, white, and blue (or a combination of the two), and sport catchy slogans like “Freedom isn’t free,” “Support our troops,” “God bless America,” and so on. My mother was kind enough to give me one of her extras (below), but I think that I will pass on placing it upon the posterior of my Neon.

It’s not that I am unpatriotic, or that I don’t support our troops (which I do, of course); however, I’m just so cynical about crass commercialism. When my mom gave me the ribbon, she had insisted that a portion of the profits from the sale of the ribbons was going to support our troops. Being such a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be (must be all that time around academics), I was forced to dispel her fantasy.

So, that’s it. Nothing profound. Just a rambling rant. Enough with the tacky magnets already.

So now what do I do with this silly little ribbon? Anybody want it?

This car, which I photographed in the parking lot outside of my workplace today, is just too funny. (License plate blurred to protect the innocent.) Hi-res version (156 KB)

It’s time for a total 80s flashback. A song recently came up via Shuffle Songs on my iPod that I had not heard in ages by a group that I have not really listened to much since high school, but the lyrics (especially the first verse) really paralleled some thoughts that have been swimming around inside my head lately.

Somebody by Depeche Mode

I want somebody to share
Share the rest of my life
Share my innermost thoughts
Know my intimate details
Someone who’ll stand by my side
And give me support
And in return
She’ll get my support
She will listen to me
When I want to speak
About the world we live in
And life in general
Though my views may be wrong
They may even be perverted
She’ll hear me out
And won’t easily be converted
To my way of thinking
In fact she’ll often disagree
But at the end of it all
She will understand me
Aaaahhhhh….

I want somebody who cares
For me passionately
With every thought and
With every breath
Someone who’ll help me see things
In a different light
All the things I detest
I will almost like
I don’t want to be tied
To anyone’s strings
I’m carefully trying to steer clear of
Those things
But when I’m asleep
I want somebody
Who will put their arms around me
And kiss me tenderly
Though things like this
Make me sick
In a case like this
I’ll get away with it
Aaaahhhhh….

There is a bit of a sad cloud hanging over some parts of the blogosphere now that this long, drawn out, and expensive (over $4 billion) election is behind us. As a contrast (and as a means of procrastinating getting my work done), I thought that I would post some humor links.

This blog-related cartoon was rather cute. (via Busy Mom)

If you haven’t seen the anti-Kerry ad by Airplane! director David Zucker, it really is worth viewing. I personally found the whole “flip flop” criticism to be contrived and tiresome, but one can appreciate a creative work even if one does not agree with the sentiment behind it. At the time of this posting, only the RealPlayer version worked.

Although they get repetitive after awhile, the Happy Tree Friends are an amusing distraction if you happen to like ultra violent gross-out humor with furry cartoon animals.

This post gravitates toward the “mundane” part of my site description.

Today I threw away twenty-six pairs of underwear. This, of course, would only make sense to those following my weight loss progress. Losing weight is expensive.

Time to do the prep-work for my adult ed class, just three more weeks. I hope my students are actually learning something.

Disenfranchisement was a common topic of conversation today at my workplace, first with three friends who are foreign nationals, and then with group of six college students. Two of the six (H. from New York and C. from California) had followed the proper procedure to request an absentee ballot before the deadline; however, neither received a ballot. They lamented that a number of their friends were in the same boat. C. had just come from the local polling place, where he tried to get a provisional ballot, but they would not give it to him because he was registered in California.

Six people is hardly a representative sample, yet disenfranchisement of one-third of these students is scary. Frankly, any percentage above zero percent is unacceptable.

While I would not be so quick to ascribe this to a nefarious ploy by the Bush administration to prevent college students from voting, this demonstrates an infuriating level of bureaucratic incompetence.

I feel their pain. During the 1992 election, I was living in New Jersey, but registered in Pennsylvania. This was to be my first presidential election, and I mailed my absentee ballot to Somerset County, PA. A few weeks later, I found my ballot in my mailbox with “Return to Sender” stamped across it. Apparently, the post office had sent my ballot to Somerset County, NJ, instead of Somerset County, PA. Dammit.

Well, I just cast my vote in the 2004 Presidential Election, using one of the brand-new electronic voting machines. Living in a small suburban town means that my polling place was less than a half-mile up the road, and I only had to wait behind two other people.

As for the voting machines, themselves, these ones were burgundy and black, with a red curtain. I was expecting a touch screen, or something similar, and when I stepped through the curtain, was surprised to find a big paper ballot in front of me with the candidates names on them just like the mechanical lever machines.

Green LED “Xs” shine through the translucent paper. You can feel a membrane button through the drawing of the button on the paper, and when you depress it, a green “X” moves over from the office title column to the block with the chosen candidate’s name.

Below the paper ballot, on the right, is a glowing red “CAST VOTE” button; when you press that, an electronic trill signifies that your vote was recorded (hopefully).

No “I voted today” sticker for me, though. You’d think that all of the polling locations would have them to give out. Oh well…

BTW, to make things easier on yourself, do not forget to bring some form of identification. First-time voters who registered by mail after December 9, 2003, must show identification according to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Proof of identification varies from state to state. Check your state rules to see what qualifies as identification or to see if they have any additional requirements regarding identification to vote.

[Update:] The Ocean County Clerk’s Office posted a photo gallery of the new voting machines.

[Update 2:] Chuck invites others to blog first person narratives about their voting experiences. Stop by his page and add to the list of accounts. (via LiL)

As promised, as of November 1 and my fiftieth post, this blog is no longer anonymous. I will still not post my last name on this site to prevent those who Google my full name from stumbling by here. Instead, I will link to my personal site (www.muzsai.com). There’s not much there to see right now, but I hope to expand that site a bit and also use it as a repository for gallery images.

Below are two pics of yours truly. As you can see, I’m still not ready to cast off all of my masks. I love to Photoshop myself into movie posters—kind of Fark.com meets Walter Mitty.

Now that this blog’s traffic has ballooned to over a hundred unique visitors per day, now is as good of a time as any to reintroduce myself.

I am a single, heterosexual 32-year–old blogger living in Kingston, NJ. As an alum of Princeton University, the Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Training Center Europe, and the Army Intelligence Center; I suppose that I could describe myself as well-educated.

Even though I am registered as a Republican, my politics are moderate and open-minded, and I feel that the less the government tries to parentally protect people from themselves, the better.

Although I believe in God and attend church once in a while, I do have a problem with denominational religion, and how it often focuses on dogma, rather than doctrine—and judgment, rather than service.

I’m a great cook, which partly explains my recent weight problem; I still have a bit of a gut, but I’m finally starting to see muscle definition in my upper torso (vive le Bowflex).

My current favorite iPod playlist includes Bond, a few mixes of Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Enigma, Angel Romero, Nightwish, Metallica’s The Unforgiven, some Vivaldi, some Celtic music, Let Go by Frou Frou, Rockell, and some Japanese techno.

You can find more biographical information in this post: Who is not Mike?.

Every word that I write on this blog, I post as a private citizen, not as an employee of Princeton University or any other company which employs my services. I am solely responsible for what you read on this site.