Bay to Breakers 2012
If you don’t know what it is, all you have to know abou Bay to Breakers is that 1) it begins at 7am on a Sunday morning and 2) it involves physical activity, two things I am notoriously very fond of. Yes, I am actually talking about a footrace that stretches for 12km across San Francisco, from a few blocks away from Embarcadero (Bay-side) all the way to the Great Highway on the Pacific coast (where breakers crash onto Ocean Beach, hence the name).
Blessed as I am with extraordinary motor skills, you may wonder why I would even consider bestowing my sunday morning on such an endeavour. These pictures will have you wonder no more: as it turns out, only a few hundred creezy mofos actually run the race (San Francisco is hilly, remember? And even more importantly,the race is on a sunday morning, remember? ON A SUNDAY. MORNING.), whereas the rest of us humans are just content with parading in THUNDERCLAPPING FUCKING AWESOME COSTUMES!
Oh yes.
And yes.
Oh, fuckyes!
And even more motherflipplin’ rollerbladin’ YES!
Then things suddenly got weird…
Until they got awesome again!
In case you were wondering, we are NOT sailors, but manly, hardcore, greasy Navy NUCLEAR ATOMIC SATANIC mechanics.
Clearly.
Californ-i-a
It’s not been a week yet. I am not sure I have even fully adjusted to the time zone shift, so take this short report for what it is: tentative. I just wanted to give some decent news to all of you who showed so much love and support in wishing me well on this little american adventure and generally update anybody who may be interested. So, here’s the juice.
I landed in San Francisco last friday (May 4th), and it was a good thing to have a couple of days to get over the jet-lag before starting my new job on the next monday. Of course in my mind I don’t get jet-lagged any more because I am such a seasoned traveller, but as it happens, reality sometimes begs to disagree. It’s not all for the bad, though: some of you, especially my Dutch family, may be aware of my appalling sleeping patterns, and if you don’t, let it be known that I tend to go to bed really late and wake up relatively early (in the style of Stephen Wolfram – http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/), but as my cyrcadian clock is still a little screwed up, I now conveniently wake up every morning at 6 – perfect to stretch out a decent morning routine and be on time at work – and by the time the sun goes down I am usually as passed out as a crackwhore. Very glamorous indeed.
Work is great! Not only this university is really terrific stuff, but I’m also blessed with incredibly skilled, work-oriented and -last but not least- nice colleagues. On day one I was given a couple of computers, all the reference material I could dream of and a neat working booth with a view on the sunny hills of Berkeley. As there was a nine months build up work prior to my arrival here, what I am working on is not really that new to me; right now, however, I am doing a rather intensive background research on the technologies I will be working with, before I actually get started on the modeling (which is, as often happens, by far the most theoretical and interesting part of this project). One may question as whether anything done in Java – yes, I know, don’t – actually qualifies as “technology” instead of “inane bullshit”, but we are not having this discussion right now.
I don’t have a house yet, but as I am looking for one Anthony is kindly hosting me in quite the location (downtown SF). I am likely to move to Berkeley in order to avoid all the commuter nonsense, but as it is looking right now, anything that is not the Golden Gate goes. I don’t have an american phone number either, and that’s mostly because I don’t yet have a credit card, which is due to arrive shortly, etc, etc. It’s all a work in progress, but I expect things to be sorted out pretty quickly. One thing that I have, though, is a Cal 1 card in which I look rightfully surprised; if you are me (which you most likely aren’t, but hey!) you have dreamed of having one of those since more or less the age of 12, so go figure (evidence attached).
San Francisco is awesome in every regard. The weather, which is knowingly as stable as the plate tectonics around here, has been downright gorgeous all along: clear sky, warm sun and no fog at all. I do not expect it to last, but so far so good! Taking advantage of such a blessed weekend, I went for a hike in Lands End Park along with Anthony and Vincent; the excellent weather made for quite the scenery.
Contrary to expectations, I have eaten amazing food so far, but that is mostly due to the good influence of Anthony and of the french crew in general. I do not expect it to last, and I know you don’t either, so let’s just leave it at that. In general, life is absolutely awesome and I am thrilled to be here. There is still some adjustment needed, of course, but overall I am one happy (albeit a little busy) motherfucker.
More will follow.
Stay awesome meanwhile.
Post-it from my mac #2
Content-based social networking: the algorithm shows you the post that are more likely to suit your interests based on their content and general tone. The idea here is that, in addition to the semantic it represents, the structure of your interaction on social networks may be used to deliver better information about your friends. In particular:
- There exist elicitors for content of a sentence in natural language, mostly based on dictionaries or ontologies; these would do until a better neural-network approach could be developed after data critic mass for training (large data sets are the key to everything) is reached.
- General tone means the “kind” of conversation people are having; categories could be found. It would be interesting to develop a full framework (a silly task to keep a socio-linguist occupied) that models the interaction patterns on social networks – e.g. conversation, fight, singleton, discussion, etc. Metrics could be the number of participants, the reaction time, length of posts, users tagged, etc. It is important to highlight how the “general tone” doesn’t have any particular connection to the semantic itself (as the “content” is dealt with separately); however, the
In addition, categories do not necessarily need to be explicit, as they can be modeled in the weights of a well-trained neural net. Also, a more formal but still partially emergent (self-adjusting) approach would be to study the n-dimensional model resulting from weighting relevant quantitative degrees of freedom of a dialogue over a large set of examples. Depicting the results in graphic form would result in patters, and hopefully categories. OkCupid has an algorithm that does something vaguely similar to what I mean. Obviously social informations should be elicited too.
Issues: needs a world-class algorithmist, would be in the interest of large content-oriented corporations such as FB or G, who are probably already well ahead on the track but can’t really do it because it would be creepy. A new network, started afresh, wouldn’t have to deal with this because young people can say profanities and be right at the same time. On the other hand, critic mass is… well, critic.
Post-it from my mac #1
Email: non va bene. Roba del secolo scorso. Non intendo dover spendere tempo inutile scrollando e cercando la mail giusta. Voglio mail tipo Facebook (per contatto, aggregate con altri feed/SMS/etc) e flessibilità tipo Wave. Distribuzione. Voglio tutta la grandezza dello schermo utlizzata, caratteri grandi e varie aree di lavoro e colori. Bisogna ottimizzare l’uso dei vari gradi di libertà della vista (colori, dimensione, poligoni, movimento, etc) per permettere all’utente di avere flussi di informazione multipli e continui sui pochi parametri fondamentali dell’applicazione (nuovi messaggi, gruppi di contatti, recenti, hot topics, recentemente acceduti). Cose così.
Trivialities
I find somehow unsatisfactory the standard formula to calculate the future value of an investment 
The reason is that I feel it somehow misses to represent the intrinsically recursive nature of compound interest (albeit being considerably more efficient to compute). After a quick research, I failed to find an explicit formulation of it. This seems appropriate to me (with some minor changes in the notation):
where 
It is also interesting to notice that it is now trivial, by piecing things together, to define a function to express the growth of the interest earned yearly, as follows:
To-Do list – Summer
☑ Go to Italy
It was pretty fun, although a little rushed: time was not on my side and I stayed for around ten days, give or take, that all my friends turned into some really great time. The same doesn’t necessarily apply to family, re-adapting to which was a little bit of a task; nonetheless, in the end it was lovely. The wombat came over too, hungry to taste the delicious alcoholic tradition Veneto boasts. Let it suffice to say that there was not a lot of it left, when he boarded the train back to Torino. Kudos to all you lovely people there.
☑ Take my family for a toss around London
Oh boy. We need footage here.
(This is gonna cost me.)
So. This here is my lovely sister in the act of entertaining her easily bored self whilst we were waiting to visit the London Museum of Anesthesia. Wicked, I know. I found out about the whole thing by absolute mistake, and it turned out to be one of the oddest experience a tourist can get in London without having to visit the police afterwards. Ah, the joys of being nerds.
So anyway, the story is that my mum and stepdad finally decided it was time to give London a chance, and just like that they rocked up over. It has been an immense pleasure to show them around the place, do all the touristy stuff and enjoy one of the most beautiful place in the world: Harrod’s.
Kidding (not): they loved London and London loved them. In fact, the day after we left riots started all over the place. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
I also had the chance to see some of my lovely brits, and they were all adorable as usual. I didn’t see Elizabeth, or as she likes to call herself “The Queen”, because she was always too pissed to go out, the twat.
☑ Find a new place in Utrecht
Next I flew back home (LGW-AMS, BA: a chavy nightmare), figuratively speaking, since I have to vacate the premises I am occupying right now by Aug 31st, when my tenement contract expires. So the aim was to find a crib in a week. Now, for those of you lucky enough to live in a straight-minded country, you should know that finding a place to rent in cities such a Utrecht, Amsterdam, Leiden or Groningen is just FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE. Not just impossible: HECKING IMPOSSIBLE. (I blame it on Simon Cowell: everybody here seems to be very into auditioning the future flatmates in an X-Factor kind of style, and the whole process is so ridiculously time-consuming and complicated that I’m not even gonna bother you with the details. Let it suffice to say that it’s so frustrating Nanni Moretti wants to make a movie about it.)
And you know what’s the most annoying thing? That every time someone brings up the topic in conversation, the FIRST answer EVERYBODY gets is: “oh it’s just so, so hard!”. And no, that’s not what she said, ’cause she is too busy hunting for a flat in Utrecht, to be making sexual innuendos.
Anyway, you get it: it’s hard, bla bla bla. Turns out: it’s not. All you need to do is walk into a real-estate agency, ask for a room to rent, pick one you like, sign the contract, get out (top tip here, folks!).
It appears, hence, that starting on September 1st I will be living in an fairly big house with the wombat, Chris, and a lot of space to spare. Invitations for the housewarming party will follow, bring your gin.
◻ Check out China
I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a week: will visit Beijing, Xi’an, Shangai. Can’t wait to find out how this one will go all tits up.
◻ Work out
oh, cock off.
Peace.
The Personality Defect test
You are the Smartass! You are rational, extroverted, brutal, and arrogant. In fact, you could very well be the anti-Christ, as you are almost the exact opposite of everything Jesus was supposed to be. While Jesus says love your enemy, you say love beating the crap out of your enemy. While Jesus raises the dead, you raise hell. While Jesus walks on water, you tend to sink. You probably consider people who are emotional and gentle to be big pussies who are obviously in lesser stature than you. You have many flaws, despite your seeming intelligence and cool-headedness. For instance, you aren’t very nice. In fact, you’re probably an asshole. And you are conceited and self-centered. Not only that, but you are very loud and vocal about all this, seeing as how you are extroverted. There is no better way to describe you than as a “smartass”, I’m afraid. Perhaps just “ass” would do, too. But that’s a little less literary and descriptive. At any rate, your main personality defect is the fact that you are self-centered, mean, uncaring, and brutally logical.
Your exact opposite isthe Emo Kid. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Capitalist Pig, the Braggart, and the Sociopath.
Rings a bell?
Douche of the week
You thought it was me, didn’t you?
So did I, actually, but then I stumbled upon this and this, and I just couldn’t fucking believe it. The nerve of some people! Now, what douche assumes the rest of the world is interested in their computing habits? Anybody? Correct, Richard Stallman does. In fact in his mind Stallman probably thinks of himself as the result of a multiple insemination performed by Jesus Christ, Alan Turing, Nelson Mandela and The Dude on Angela Merkel. Dude, get a clue. Seriously.
Now, let’s recall for a second: S-man and his hair’s full-time occupation is twatting about, ranting about how evil microsoft is and how linux is not at all a shit show in the making, but rather the cornerstone of a world-wide movement that promotes free and open software and that will give us all peace, freedom and hairy armpits for the centuries to come. Of course, his line of reasoning doesn’t really take into account minor variables such as reality, but who are we to question beardy?
So anyway:
1. I use a Lemote machine which has a free startup program and all free software. Since the processor is a variant of MIPS, Windows does not support it.
I wonder how many points he can go without mentioning windows. (And Lemote machines are netbooks. NETBOOKS. The father of free software uses a netbook. I suspect he secretly does that because he knows it’d piss Steve Jobs off, because Steve Jobs totally cares.)
2. I formerly used an OLPC. I stopped because the OLPC project made their machine act as a platform for running Windows.
Fucking pussy. You know those Windows Embedded-operated medical equipments? I wonder what would happen if they had to use one of them on him.
4. I spend most of my time editing in Emacs. I read and send mail with Emacs using M-x rmail and C-x m. I edit the pages on this site with Emacs also, although volunteer helpers install most of the changes.
How is a sentence like this still even allowed in 2011?
6. The programming languages I use are Lisp and C. They are also my favorite languages. However, since around 1992 I have been very busy with free software activism, too busy to do much programming. As a result, I have not had time to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python or Ruby. I recently did read a book about Java and found it interesting to compare with C.
Lisp and C. I love Lisp and C. We all do. But we all also have a job, unlikely S-boy.
Oh no wait, don’t tell me! You expected the gran visir of freetards to actually know something about software? Come on, really?
7. [bollocks bollocks] However, if I am visiting somewhere and the machines available nearby happen to contain non-free software, through no doing of mine, I don’t utterly refuse to touch them.
He just moans a little bit.
I will use them briefly for tasks such as browsing. This limited usage doesn’t give my assent to the software’s license so I don’t see an ethical obligation to refrain from this.
Oh no? I wonder why they are called “licenses to use” then. It’s like saying “it was only a drop” after getting busted by a policeman peeing on a public wall. It just doesn’t work like that, but I’m sure S-man’s got some thingamabobs 2-hours long speech to bore people into thinking the whole thing make total sense.
Also, this just popped in my mind, is he allowed to download data from non-free software-based servers? Isn’t that like children slavery?
Of course, I explain that they should migrate the machines to free software.
Could you imagine inviting him over your place? Such a pain in the arse.
Dude, stfu and drink your coffee, I don’t come round your house lecturing everybody on (say) bareback action even though I might think a condom-free world would be so much better and much more fun. Not to mention, less expensive. What you say? STDs? You are such a slave of the microsoft dictatorship.
But here’s my personal favourite:
For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer.
!
(I also have not net connection much of the time.)
!!
(What does he do? Seriously, with no connection and, clearly, no software, what’s left to do? Open-source squares on the desktop?)
To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me.
Wait a minute. WAIT A MINUTE.
Really?
So basically he’s surfing the internet of 1994. Betcha he’ll pop round Monochrome one of these days.
I wonder how such a lusers-proclaimed “guru” can honestly live with this. I mean, before he pops a vein trying to make us progress, he may want to check out this new thing we have going on. We call it the “world wide web”. It’s not as much of a big thing as free software is, but hey; could still kill a coupla hours.
It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.
Welcome to the freakin freetards’ funworld: a crew of cheap douches with a lot of time on their hands and a fetish for complications. What a fuckin freakshow.
