Thesis proposal nightmare #1

Invoking Dream either by reading or talking about him (as I was doing recently) tends to cause screwy dreams. This pattern continues...

It is April 4th -- 10 days before my real thesis proposal. I've done one practice talk which indicated that more practice talks were in order, yet somehow I'm giving the proposal anyway. Weirder still, I'm giving the proposal in my parent's family room on an old television instead of with a projector. Only four people have shown up -- two faculty and two students. Nobody in my area. It is only when my advisor Eugene shows up that I realize that not only is the rest of my committee not present at the proposal (one of the attending faculty members assures me is not a problem). I then realize that I've somehow scheduled my thesis proposal during a major conference which my thesis committee members (including Eugene) are attending.

Wake up.

Error: Too many errors

Count the errors. There are at least three:
Error 1: Saying there was an error, then saying there wasn't.
Error 2: Saying there was an error, then saying there wasn't when there really was -- it really didn't rip the DVD.
Error 3: Title says "Error while burning" but it was ripping, not burning.

Is this a bad joke? While trying to rip a DVD, I got this message from Brasero. This is dailywtf material but I haven't been able to find any previous postings on it. While ripping the DVD, the output file grew, but apparently, Brasero deleted it at the end. Also, there are no messages from the kernel about a DVD read error, so we appear to be hallucinating problems.

Steal this idea: Musical intersections

Listening to you,
I get the music.
Gazing at you,
I get the heat.
Following you,
I climb the mountains.
I get excitement at your feet.
-- The Who, "We're Not Gonna Take It"

There are a couple times when two or more people want to listen to some form of streaming music (road/train trip, shared office space, etc.). Streaming radio sites like Pandora should have the option of combining multiple peoples' musical taste and come up with music that both people would like. Being able to generate a road trip playlist for portable music players would be nice too, though there are the obvious copyright issues.

I imagine coming up with good shared playlists is trickier than just taking the intersection of the songs/musical features. Ultimately, it would depend on the model of listeners tastes. Of course, in many cases, these intersections can be small (my freshman year college roommate and I both liked Stevie Wonder but had little else in common musically).

Year of the Jetpack

Dear

Sincerely,
The Future (2008)

P.S.

Open Access (almost)

The journal Computational Linguistics has opted to join the movement of journals switching to the open access model, where academic articles are viewable in full for free without any membership fees. The idea is that publicly funded research should be available to the public. Anyway, now the punchline. Try to download the full article about this (outside of an academic setting) and you'll find that you can't without a membership account for MIT Press (of course, this is exactly the model we're moving away from, hence why this is only slightly ironic, I think).

Going somewhere?

Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: Monorail!
-- The Simpsons, Marge vs. The Monorail

I think this post pinpoints some of the problems with our transportation infrastructure very nicely. Short of the unnecessary Simpsons quote, I don't really have much to add except that I hope this article reaches a wide audience.

Dancing Deer writes back (again)

Those of you following this blog may remember my letter to Dancing Deer (see here and here). The story now has a new ending which is both surprising and happy. The president of Dancing Deer, Trish Karter, has added her two cents on the matter (read her comment here). I think she makes reasonable points in her comments and I very much appreciate hearing from her. Additionally, I'm glad that I was wrong about this whole issue -- it turns out that they ran a study with the intent of determining ways of minimizing petrol in their packaging -- and I would like to apologize to Dancing Deer for any negative press (though I assure them that readers of this blog are few and far between). In any event, I think more than enough digital ink has been spilled over what started as a minor discussion at a weekly tea and we can hopefully lay the issue to rest now.