Posted on by lhl

Hmmm, Warcraft 3 is looking pretty good. Not that I’d ever have the time to play it, but still. I remember playing Warcraft quite a bit back in high school. Nothing like playing games on the Drafting LAN (hey, less worthless than the 6 pillars of character. I’m glad I got out of there before they start pulling that shit). Hey Mr. Altieri, where ever you are.

On that note, I’m going to call it a night. No more Internet for me. I’ve been staring at a screen all week. Gonna kick back on the ol’ bean bag, do some reading, and listen to the Nick Drake box set that came in from CDNow the other day.

gene simmons and terry gross battle to the death

Posted on by lhl

Ha! This is not to be missed. I’ve made a mirror here of Monday’s Fresh Air interview with Gene Simmons from dan’s berkeley site.

Here’s an excerpt from a partial transcript for you to check out before you decide (and you will) to download the 25MB bad boy.

TG : I’d like to think the personality you presented on our

show today is a persona that you’ve affected as a

member of Kiss, but that you’re not nearly as obnoxious

when you’re at home or with friends

GS : Fair enough, and I’d like to think that the boring lady

who’s talking to me now is a lot sexier and more

interesting than the one’s who’s doing NPR, studious

and reserved.

This interview isn’t on Fresh Air online because according to FA, “Simmons declined to give permission for this Web site to offer audio of his interview, or sell tapes or transcripts of it.”

Oh, here’s a mefi thread on this 2 days ago. New to me. That’s my logo.

Midnight Screenings

Posted on by lhl

Nice, Landmark’s doing midnight screenings at the Nuart and Rialto. Here’s some I’ll probably want to catch:

  • Nuart: “Monty Python and the Meaning of Life” Friday, February 22
  • Nuart: “The City of Lost Children” Friday, March 1
  • Nuart: “The Dark Crystal” Friday, March 15
  • Rialto: “Saturday Night Fever” (Original “R” cut) Saturday, March 23
  • Rialto: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Saturday, March 30
  • Nuart: “The Princess Bride” Friday, April 5
  • Nuart: “Clue” Friday, April 12
  • Nuart: “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” Friday, April 19
  • Rialto: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” Saturday, April 20
Posted on by lhl

This morning, the discussion of faceted classifications on peterme caught my eye. This discussion led to a mention of Berkeley’s Flamenco project and a Digital Library Seminar on the project next Monday.

The abstract sounds interesting:

We have developed an innovative search interface that allows non-expert users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. The design goal was to offer users a “browsing the shelves” experience seamlessly integrated with focused search. Key to achieving our goal is the explicit exposure of hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that is intuitive and inviting to users. After several iterations of design and testing, the usability results on an image collection are strikingly positive. We believe our approach marks a major step forward in search user interfaces and can serve as a model for web-based collections of up to 100,000 items.

Research done by:

Jennifer English, Marti Hearst, Rashmi Sinha, Kirsten Swearingen, Ping Yee

While obviously I won’t be making it to this seminar, the Flamenco site has links to pdfs and powerpoints of publications and talks that I’ll certainly need to look forward to when I get a chance to do some catch-up reading.

UCB looks like they have some interesting Digital Library stuff going on (http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/). Martin, you might want to bring this up w/ Deb and the gang and see if they’re aware of what is being done or have been in contact.

Posted on by lhl

This little tidbit might be of interest: ArsDigita Shut Down.

More talk at OpenACS and at Greenspun.com and FuckedCompany (yum, catty).

Not surprising following (and far preceding, one might say) the whole Philip G Bruhaha and the massive changes surrounding and leading up to that.

Hmmm, it might be a good idea to grab a local copy of the asj while one can, although Red Hat has apparently purchased all aD’s assets (/.’d of course). I wonder if they’ll switch the Java ACS back onto the GPL instead of the ArsDigita Public License. (ACS-Tcl development has been going on at Ybos since aD had abandoned it – YES looks interesting).

For $220 aduni will send you a copy of the 80GB of lectures, problemsets and all their other stuff (it’s under the Open Content License).