Dave Kellam

I was taking a look at Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music (via Freeman or Eve) and the geek in me shone through bright and clear. First off, it’s a good way to learn about different types of electronic music and genres, if you don’t know much about it (like me, so for all I know it may be a bad example). Then the geek part says, “Man, those are some good examples of network graphs”. Computer science rules my brain.

Yeah, I like network graphs. And I like interface design and looking at how people actually interact with computers. I just don’t see myself as a particularly stellar coder. I can do it, but I just don’t envision myself creating anything that’s mathematically innovative — which seems to be the typical outlook (at least at Queen’s anyway). Let other people code, I’ll tweak it and make it work for me. I mess around with html, php, css, and some other letters for this site on a regular basis, but I’ve never really seen that as writing code. It may very well be. There’s a weird kind of elitism playing against scripting and markup languages, something like literary journal novels versus scifi or trash romance.

David Crosby got busted for gun posession and pot:

The veteran rocker had checked out of the hotel after the Manhattan show, but left behind a piece of luggage, police said. A hotel worker found the luggage Friday and went through it looking for identification and discovered the marijuana, gun and knives and called authorities, police said.

He left his gun, knives and marijauna bag at the hotel? It’s one of those bags you normally want to keep good track of. It’s also just funny that he had a guns, knives and marijuana bag.

“Yo Leon. Toss me the knife, gun, pot bag.” It sounds funny in my head.

An article on Walter Cronkite. Two excerpts:

— Jimmy Carter was the smartest president Cronkite met, and the only one who bothered to actually read the lengthy bills passed by Congress. “He knew so much about everything and was not timid about telling you about it.”

— Our arrogant stand in nearly all our diplomatic approaches to the rest of the world with this administration has been such as to deeply embarrass the United States,” declared Cronkite. His sarcasm was quietly withering.

Nowadays, most people seem to remember Jimmy Carter as the bumbling idiot who builds houses.

I got an interesting email from the administrators of my website:

To: dave@eightface.com
Subject: Warning about your e-mail account.
From: administration@eightface.com

Dear user of e-mail server “Eightface.com”,

We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may
contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe,
please, follow the instructions.

Please, read the attach for further details.

For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is “47518”.

Kind regards,
The Eightface.com team

Apparently, my administrators have taken time out of their busy day administering my site to inform may that some clever monkey may be sending me viruses.

I’ve spent most of the last day or two plugging away at my presentation for the final project. I have Go-Moku on the brain, it is oozing out. That is all.

We just finished up issue number 25 at golden words. Wow, it’s hard to believe that it’s been a year. Thanks to everyone who was a part of it this time around. Still have transitition issue next week, but the management of content creation is now out of my control.

I was feeling the need to make something in photoshop tonight, and was trying to avoid doing work on my CISC499 presentation, so I made some new wallpaper. I present you with two wonderful versions: glorious 1280×960 and magnificent 1024×768. Enjoy.

I made the image with a bunch of brushes and fonts from misprintedtype.com. Check it.

From an article about open-source software in government — China on open source software:

Countries such as China have concerns about the closed nature of a proprietary product such as Windows, and the national security risk this creates. They want greater transparency, and at the same time believe that embracing open source will spur local software development.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think China complaining about the “closed” nature of something is pretty funny.

Ohio woman gives birth to six babies in one minute:

“The speed at which the babies came out was overwhelming. It was like a popcorn popper,” the baby’s grinning father, Keith Hanselman, told reporters.

He’s also quoted as saying, “Crunchy, a little boney though,” after dipping one of the babies in melted butter and trying it out.