I’ve been reading the various Newly Digital pieces with interest. The ones I’ve read so far have been uniformly great, and if you haven’t checked it out, you really owe it to yourself to do so. I’ve thought about writing my own, but well, for some reason, it seems hard for me to pin down something worth writing. Also, I’m a lazy bastard. I mean, take a look at the state of this site.

Incidentally, my original undergratudate application essay was about how BBS’s changed my world-view. In fact, the discovery of the digital experience has been an intermittently recurrent theme. Most recently, in fact, is a paper that I wrote early this morning for my CTCS 505 (Survey of Interactive Media) class. Here’s the syllabus prompt:

Technology First Encounter Essay: Recall the first time you encountered a particular media technology and analyze how you anticipated, interacted with, and utilized the technology. It will be useful to consider how your use of previous media technologies influenced how you approached the new technology, as well as how that technology eventually influenced future media technology usage. Words: 1500

Due: Tuesday, June 3^rd at beginning of class.

Here’s a very slightly modified version of the essay (cleaned up a few passages, filled out the selected bibliography). It’s still a bit of the mess (it’s been a looong time since I’ve had to write an academic paper, and it shows), but despite cheese and awkward construction, I think it touches on (and summarizes) some stuff that might be of more general interest: Some Thoughts on the World Wide Web. [20KB PDF]

Palm announces acquisition of Handspring today, which is interesting. Jeff Hawkins has this look on the Palm Homepage photo that just well, anyway. Probably more important is that he’s holding a Treo 600 in his hand. I’m pretty jazzed about it. The only thing it’s missing seems to be Bluetooth (although it does have an SDIO slot).

A 3000 kVA transformer that serves the RackShack data center exploded and caught fire Monday night (thankfully, no one was hurt). The genrators kicked in, and apparently have continued to hold up until utility power can be restored (by Friday). More details and discussion in RackShack Talk.

Just got an email about this (my server is hosted on RackShack), but I have to say that I’m impressed by how they’ve been handling things. Over the past year and a half with RS, I’ve noticed no RS-responsible network or system downtime.

Nice, another happy member of the Trojan Family.

The Photographer’s Right – A Downloadable Flyer – Your Rights When Stopped or Confronted for Photography.

20 days in spring, 2003

I finished Fast Food Nation this morning. Even though I was familiar with many of the topics discussed, taken as a whole, it was quite a read, and if you haven’t yet, I would wholeheartedly recommend it. I also found the afterword and notes sections extremely interesting.

Just got back from a midnight screening of The Animatrix. Good stuff, including some interesting pieces by the Cowboy Bebop and Aeon Flux guys. A very wide range of animation styles (digged the wild rotoscoping in the Kid’s Story). Would definitely recommend catching it in the theater if you can, apparently it will be appearing in very limited release.

Via JesseR: Bill Nye the Science Guy will be at UCLA tomorrow! 3-6PM, free and open to the public, and free food.

Picked up a 35mm f/2.0 and 50mm f/1.8 prime this morning. Hooray, handheld shooting in streetlight has just become that much easier.

Brad with a post on scaling LJ. I spoke w/ Brad one night about some of this stuff at this past SXSW (he has a sweet deal w/ F5), but it’s good to see where they’re going (see memcache info from lj_dev).

A few intersting notes. Brad mentions the uselessness of pconnects for MySQL, (yes) but goes on to blast InnoDB. From my experience, InnoDB is not only technically superior, but faster speedwise as well (some InnoDB vs MyISAM benchmarks). Also, although improvements have been made, MyISAM still has fugly row-level locking. The main real caveat is that there’s no full text search support current in InnoDB (others: slow counts due to multiversioning, auto-incrementing and table status are funky and other misc ‘stuff’).