Dan Sheridan

It's even more niche than the abelian grape joke! [1]

Q: How do you get a room full of partial evalutation experts to watch a Matt Groening animation?
A: Tell them it's the first Futurama projection

Yep, I've been reading this and I'm a sad geek ;-)

[1] What's purple and commutes?

I never really do the meme posting thing, but this one made me laugh...

Girls who are Dans who like Dans to be girls who do boys like they're Dans who do Dans like they're boys... where's this from? made by marnanel enter your name: suggestions? comments? changes?

In other news, I've now got a myspace account. Yay bandwagons!

...that's me! I passed my viva with minor corrections on Monday afternoon.

I've just found out that an acquaintance from Oxford (we shared some lectures and some friends), who for a while has been a high-profile employee of the Mozilla Foundation, also writes for the Times. Well done Gervase!

According to today's dose of spam, maniac anthologists have been out and about RA'PING a BLONDE. I've never liked anthologists, myself.

Grrr. Spamassassin taking too much memory and making my VPS swap manically so exim times out and lets through spam. Unixshell are usually lovely people but they are dragging their feet on my much-needed memory upgrade :-(

The Internet is amazing sometimes. I was looking for Marvin Minsky's often-quoted paper "Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas". This bit is particularly commonly quoted:

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

So, google for the title of the paper. Aha! Lots of hits. It turns out that there was a talk of the same name a OOPSLA last year. Filter out those results and there is very little left except the famous quotes. Try Minsky's home page? Not even listed in his publications. I was beginning to think I'd have to track down the 1967 edition of Design and Communication II (where it was originally published) which even bl.uk doesn't seem to have.

So I thought I'd give googling one last chance, and I found this link with a PDF. Not a PDF of a picture of the paper, but a new PDF of a revised version! Where does it come from? Who knows! This seems to be the only place on the Internet where it is still available.

So I'm giving it some google juice in the hope that it'll help the next person looking for this paper.

Do you remember when all the things you wanted were £10? For some reason, everything I want now seems to cost £200. The nice thing about having a job is that I can occasionally buy these things.

I bought a Gaggia Red Evolution espresso machine, and very grand it is too. Like most things, it has an optional extended warranty, which tops out at £69 for three extra years. Not bad. However, if you register online as I did, you don't get offered the for-pay extended warranty. No, instead you can get it for free by buying enough stuff (coffee, tea, etc.) from the Gaggia online shop. Quite a lot of stuff (and it's not fair trade, so I don't really want to buy it). So can I still get the for-pay extended warranty? Who knows!

Then there's the card they gave me in the shop which said "register online and get £50 of Gaggia vouchers" which haven't materialised. I need to find that card and chase that one, I think. That in itself is almost the value of an extended warranty...

Lots of things have changed since my last proper post (which was over a year ago!) and I'll be blogging about them bit by bit. One of the more interesting, for those who know both me and the chick, is that she is now on LJ too, reviewing exhibitions and theatre stuff around London. Check out ms_vasari.

Today I printed my PhD thesis. Only a year late.

At last I can start wasting my time on Livejournal again. Yay!

The Chick and I just put a deposit on a flat! It's near to Highbury & Islington tube station and it's got laminate floors in a huge living room with open plan kitchen and it's even got access to gardens. The best bit is that the agency is called Hotblack Desiato, and is the origin of the character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

And I'm posting this sat in The Brittania the (surprisingly nice) pub in Euston station, waiting for the Sleeper up to Edinburgh as we missed the last train :-(. Bluetooth is a wonderful thing.

If anybody's interested my travelogue thing of New York is finished -- you'll have to go back to the main page of my blog to see it all.

I'm in Boston for CAV because I have a paper at the BMC workshop (my talk is on Sunday... wish me luck!). I stopped off in New York on the way for the Tap festival, and while I was there I kept a diary, which I'll be slowly editing and posting here over the next few days. If I can work out how to do it in ljupdate, I'll be backdating the entries to the days they correspond to.

Looking back at my notes on New York, I think I must have been in a very grumpy mood. Certainly now, I miss the city a lot and I think I enjoyed myself more than I admitted to. The grumpyness probably had a lot to do with my upcoming presentation at the BMC workshop the following Sunday (which went unexpectedly well, by the way), although it probably had a little to do with the general attitude of the New Yorkers that I encountered: with the exception of the dancers, everyone I met was surly, difficult, and uncooperative. From people in the street to the information desk at Newark everyone just seemed to be unpleasant. Come on, people. You live in the most vibrant, exciting city in the world! Have some humanity, please!

My last day in New York, but I manage to enjoy myself at last!

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A day wandering around New York and seeing some of the sights.

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My first full day in New York, and the last day of the tap festival.

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My flight and first afternoon and evening in New York.

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Went to Chippenham for a bit of a dance. First time in several years that I haven’t been dancing out with Diversity so it was a rather nice break and meant I could go to workshops (tried to learn a Sam Sherry clog thing and was the only person wearing taps instead of clogs...). Saw Whapweasel, bought a CD, and I’m now madly in love with the keyboard player. Yum. As always, I saw lots of friends that I only see at festivals -- nice to see them, but a shame that I don’t get to see them more often. This could be another good side-effect of moving to London.

Yup, the man himself came to Edinburgh to give a talk -- two and a half hours without notes -- this afternoon. I made a few notes on things that I thought were interesting, and I thought I'd share them with you.

Overall message: it's all about people. Right-wing, non-free, copyright software serves to divide people and keep them helpless (as far as software is concerned); left-wing, free, copyleft software unites people by allowing them to work together.

RMS is anti-Coca Cola, anti-McDonalds, anti Bush, but drank Pepsi throughout the talk.

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A week in Canada for the SAT 2004 conference at which I had a poster. Lots of fun! I flew with Zoom which was surreal: budget airline values in a transatlantic jumbo. Highly recommended, though. Best part of Vancouver was obvious and I learnt a lot. Brilliant.


( Technical stuff )

So the chick got a place on the MA course at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Huzzah! Which means that in the autumn we are moving to London -- probably mid September.

I'm planning to work for the year as a monkey programmer or a sysadmin or something to support a 6-class-a-week habit at Pineapple -- any suggestions? I've been searching Jobsite but I'm not sure what I'm experienced enough to do. And of course we need somewhere to live. We're currently thinking of SE1, or maybe N1, but it's all a bit daunting at the moment.