May 20, 2012 10:43 PM
This was intentional, right? This doesn't happen by accident, and yet...
Exhibit A:
This is, without a doubt, the best thing on the internet.
IMO, things like that are what the internet is all about.
So last night it was nice out so I took Carter to the dog park. He was actually very good with the other dogs, not too many dominance attempts and very little growling (only when one dog would not leave him alone!). It rained two days ago, and there was a huge puddle in the park, which had been churned up into a watery mud pit. Of course, all the dogs were going crazy rolling around in it and running through it at top speed splashing water everywhere.
Carter took a peek, waded in very carefully, then wandered off. I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, okay, he just wanted to get his feet wet. Well, a little while later, he wades in again, takes a couple licks of the water . . . and lays down. Argh! It was actually pretty cute. I know he loves water so I figured he'd probably end up in there sooner or later. I counted myself lucky that he didn't roll in it at least.
They have kiddie pools at the park that people usually fill up with water from the hose to let their dogs lay in, and I don't mind when Carter does that because he usually gets out cleaner than he was when he got in. However, after wallowing in the mud, he needed a bath. Really he's been needing a bath for a while so this was a good excuse. I wiped off his feet when I got him in the car, then when we got home kept him on the leash and took him straight into the bathroom. Amazingly, I had little trouble getting him into the tub. The lesson learned is that if I keep him in his harness and leash, he can't really resist following me very well.
So I get him in the tub, get all his gear taken off, and start the shower running. He's being pretty good, so I start rinsing all the mud off of him (hard to do because the mud is mostly UNDER him). I try to get him to lay down so I can get more water on his belly. Okay, he mostly lays down. I let go of him to scoop up some water, and VOOSH! He's making a run for it!!! I make a frantic grab for him and manage to snag his back legs. Meanwhile he's gotten the shower curtain open and is scrabbling around on the floor with his wet and muddy front paws. Unfortunately I couldn't get any traction either because I was all wet and standing barefoot in the shower, and he managed to wriggle out and escape into the main part of the bathroom . . . where he immediately shook, spraying muddy water all over the floor, the walls, the counter, and the toilet.
Ben (who was downstairs working out) told me later that he thought by all the yelling I was doing ("No! Carter no!! Get back here! Bad dog!") that he'd gotten out of the bathroom entirely and was spreading mud all over the upstairs, but luckily I had shut and locked the bathroom door when I put him in there. In any case there followed a very slippery chase around the bathroom (amazing how much chasing is required in such a small space), where he managed to get muddy water all over everything he hadn't already covered, and I finally cornered him next to the tub and was able to lift his front feet in and then force his back feet back in. Phew!
He made a couple more escape attempts but I managed to stop him from getting his front paws out of the tub again, and he eventually submitted to being thoroughly washed. I think I got a pretty good workout. :P
For a dog that loves water and swimming, you'd think he would take a bath with dignity. Sigh. But I have to say, when he gets out of the tub and is clean and toweled off, it's totally adorable to see him zoom around the house trying to air dry himself.
My telling of this story totally doesn't do justice to his mad dash for freedom and the slip-and-slide chase that followed though. What a dog.
If you want to use Skype with Bluetooth headsets on recent versions of Ubuntu Jaunty with an AMD64 architecture, this article might be of interest. If those words didn't make any sense, this article is definitely skippable.
When using Skype with a Bluetooth headset, I was getting error messages of the following form:
ALSA lib ../../../src/pcm/pcm.c:2165:(snd_pcm_open_conf) Cannot open shared library /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_bluetooth.so
Since Skype only exists in 32-bit mode currently, you can only run it in AMD64 using the linux32 command. However, this requires 32-bit versions of all the libraries that Skype would need, including bluez-alsa if you want to use a Bluetooth headset. Ubuntu currently attempts to handle this with their ia32-libs package but the current version of this package is missing its bluez-alsa libraries (as indicated in the error message). This is the bug that has been reported here.
I have a horrible hack to fix this problem, mostly because I can't find where ia32-libs development takes place nor the Ubuntu development process. I downloaded the 32-bit version of bluez-alsa and used alien -t to convert it into a tar.gz file. I then extracted its contents and made an extremely simple Makefile with this content:
install:
cp ./usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_ctl_bluetooth.so /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/
cp ./usr/lib/alsa-lib/libasound_module_pcm_bluetooth.so /usr/lib32/alsa-lib/
Next, I created a Debian package with checkinstall which you can find here. To my knowledge, these files are missing in Ubuntu Karmic too, so this might help those users as well.
Takeaway message: If you want to try my hack, download my new package (which I admitedly haven't been able to test on any other machines, so any feedback is welcome) and use your favorite package installer (the graphical one is probably the easiest) to install it.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince: and yet 'tis nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; 'tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep: and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up; there is no other reason to be given why you han't gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship: yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you don't this very moment drop down into hell.
--Jonathan Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
Business as usual this month, which is to say that not much is getting done. Sometime this month, I'll have to prepare my talks and code release for the NAACL conference, which is at the beginning of June in Boulder, Colorado. Other than that, I'm doing some exploratory research, but I don't know what will come of it. The class I'm TAing is over; I think I did ok, but will do better at organizing (making sure the assignment handouts are consistent &c) next time.
flpsed is absolutely great. It is a simple pdf editor. It is technically for postscript files but it opens up pdf files as well. You have to save em as ps but you can always use ps2pdf to convert back. <br /><br />If you have a pdf form, it is a simple interface for filling in the form. Easy peezy japanesey. Give it a try. Linux only.<br /><br />sudo apt-get install flpsed<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/22180845-4222450024499172999?l=eschreiber.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div></content>
Your amusement for today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8019766.stm
Say you have a table foo with column value and you want to delete the row with the maximum value. You would think this would work:<br /><br />DELETE FROM foo WHERE value = (SELECT max(value) FROM foo);<br /><br />But they don't support this. You would have to copy the max value to another table and then join on that table or other such nonsense. The WHERE clause of a DELETE statement may not contain reference to the table you are deleting from. This also is so with UPDATE. Postgres has no such limitation and so that is where I shall be.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/22180845-1765858785862630774?l=eschreiber.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div></content>
This morning, I was woken up at 6:40am by Lenovo customer service. I had a similar experience in the past with Dell customer service. Now, I know these companies outsource to India in order to save money on technical support. Presumably, the people in India are still qualified for the job. (Presumably being the operative word.) Why can't these people figure out time zones? I mean, India is a number of time zones away from any American time zone but seriously, just count and figure out when an appropriate time to call is. Hint: Don't call anyone for business purposes before 9am.<div class="blogger-post-footer"><img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/22180845-6419091279600883356?l=eschreiber.blogspot.com' alt='' /></div></content>
Whenever they are not fighting, they pass much of their time in the chase, and still more in idleness, giving themselves up to sleep and to feasting, the bravest and the most warlike doing nothing, and surrendering the management of the household, of the home, and of the land, to the women, the old men, and all the weakest members of the family. They themselves lie buried in sloth, a strange combination in their nature that the same men should be so fond of idleness, so averse to peace.
--Tacitus, "Germania"
Yeah, so I haven't gotten much done this past month. Which I suppose makes it just like last month. If (to misquote Dr. Spooner) I have not tasted the whole worm, still I think I have permitted several clammy inches to pass my lips. Hopefully it lacks the hooked head of a tapeworm, and will be easy to eradicate upon my return to more familiar surroundings.
Despite having done little, a fair amount has happened to to me, so I needn't leave this space empty. In the academic world, my ACL short paper is accepted, so I'll be presenting twice. And more importantly, I never need to rewrite it again. I'm also almost done with COLING reviews, my last set for this year (unless I get picked for EMNLP, then it's here we go again). And finally, I've been elected as faculty-graduate liason, the top graduate position of Brown CS. It's an honor, and also a load of paperwork; most of the potential nominees simply refused to be considered (for more or less valid reasons). With luck, Cincinnatus will not let the farm lie completely fallow during his term of office...
I've had time for a little more travel, notably a trip into France with friends to see an exhibit about Leonardo da Vinci. There was a tour, which went on for ages, and was in really awful French-accented German. I can tell it was awful because I could understand almost all of it. (Real German is still pretty much unintelligible-- today I misheard a Berlin soccer team's slogan, "arm aber sexy" (poor but sexy) as "arm aber setz dich" (poor but sit down) and had to wonder if even English words were beyond my comprehension when spoken by Germans!) We also saw Metz, which has a very nice Gothic cathedral unmarred by any Baroque interior designers. The exterior has some exceptional gargoyles, shaped like all kinds of beasts real and mythical. It has the Church and Synagogue statues as well, and Wikipedia claims it has a Judensau, which, however, I did not see. Ironic since some of the stained glass windows are Chagall.
For completeness' sake, I will mention that a few days ago I pinched a nerve between two of my ribs, which was unbearably painful and kept me up the whole night. When I got to a doctor the next morning, he basically just pressed on a rib and gave me some ibuprofen, which solved the whole thing neatly enough. Trivial, really, except that ow.
Finally, I am forced to remember that I turn 25 on Sunday. What a depressing notion! Let's draw this to a close before it gets maudlin...
I seem to have completed the education game.
so, this week i stuck my new Swopper chair in the office. yes, i know, it's crazy. combine this with...
keeping with my resolution to update this at least every month, here's the latest from providence. things are busily quiet...
despite the hassles involved in getting there, I saw a really good concert tonight, Billy Idol of all people. while i didn't actually think about this during tonight, i did at the last concert i went to before this, Converge at the living room, and i thought about how i've been going to shows for a good number of years now and have seen a bunch of good (and bad) stuff. And so i began to think of the best shows (and worst as well) that i've ever been to, and how listing these would be such a typical livejournal entry that i might as well put it in. (saving all those ticket stubs over the years really helped come up with some of these that i'd forgotten about.) so without further ado,
top five concerts ever attended:
1. Rush - 2004 - Great Woods: 3 hours of heaven in an outdoor venue in a downpour. Heard 2112 live. 10 minute drum solos. This was definitely the greatest show i've ever been to, no question.
2. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - 2003? - Orpheum: Nick Cave rules, and they never tour that much, so this chance to see them probably represented my one and only. And thank god i went, because it was so much fun. first of all, i got to sit on a balcony with a seat. for this kind of show, a seat with a good view is definetely key. And the band was completely awesome...i've been a cave fan forever, and this was icing on the cake.
3. Fugazi - 2002 - Massart: before this show, fugazi last played boston 13 years ago. this was probably before i even got into ian's other bands, minor threat and government issue. sure it was in a gigantic hot as balls gym with shitty acoustics. It was also like 5 bucks, and goddammit, it was fucking fugazi.
4. Dropkick Murphys - 2001-5 - Avalon: I'll lump all of these shows together...for five years now i've gone to the annual dropkick murphys st patrick's day shows... and while the crowd has gotten worse and worse every year, the shows are still a ton of fun. playing "pipebomb on lansdowne" while performing ON lansdowne street... fun times
5. Metallica - 2000? - Great Woods: yeah it was the reload tour. yeah they're greedy bastards who are complete sellouts now. well, they were at the time of this show still the heaviest live band on the planet. this was also before they got that gorilla to play bass. played the thing that should not be, which is definitely not a concert staple, but one of my favorites. played about, oh, 4 new songs, the rest were pre-Load.
Honorable mentions: I couldn't pick one particular show, but in my years in boston especially, i saw Converge, Isis, and Cave in more times than i can remember, and almost every single one of those shows were euphoria. also: the dwarves, anal cunt, andrew w.k.,sick of it all, bane, the suicide file,type o negative, american nightmare, flogging molly, and billy idol definitely was cool too. and i grew up on Tree shows, which will always have a special place in my memory.
5 worst shows
1. Fuel - 2004 - hampton beach: crappy venue, fake casino, crappy band.
2. Biohazard/clutch - 2002 - jarrad's place: i went to see candiria, who played for like 20 minutes. clutch is alright, but the sound sucks here, and it wasn't enjoyable
3. Piebald - 2003 avalon - opened for cave in, i didn't get there late enough to miss this crap.
4. P. Funk - 2001? - lupos: i wasn't really a P. Funk fan at the time, and this was like 3 hours long filled with tons of lame white people dancing. super lame dreadlocks galore too. being underage, spent the entire time trying to bum drinks with my friend ritchie.
5. Godsmack, bunch of other bands - 1998 - still under my parents reign, i had to leave this show before the main acts even got to play, so i saw a bunch of crappy openers. Also, the perfect example of why a smoking ban is needed in clubs. I almost died i think.
5 shows i wish i could see/have seen:
1. U2
2. Rolling Stones
3. Led Zeppelin
4. AC/DC
5. Iron Maiden