I so want to get behind this door. Well, at least beta testing will probably only take another month or two, and it'll work on Voicestream's network, hence Cingular's network, which is what I have now. Who'd've thought I'd find a phone I want more than my 8290...

In the coming flood of 'yatta'-based memes, it will be helpful to know that 'yatta' is slang for 'yarimashita' which basically means 'I did it.'

For those interested in the more pragmatic and less random, I have a few great information display and UI links I'll be posting tonight or tomorrow, some really nifty stuff including music pattern visualization and other pattern recognition, 100% yatta-free.

Sometimes bucking the herd can be your only escape.

I'm not sure which is more amusing, that she was smart enough to escape the slaughterhouse, or that in the end she was brought down by decoy cows.

In this case, the squeaky wheel saved herself from becoming grease.

Call this number: 212-479-7990. I mean it.

(once you're on the phone, choose any option, but in this case, option #3 is the relevant one)

At long last, here's my Mardi Gras Gallery

It wouldn't have taken so long except that I took this chance to try out a new gallery model I've been thinking about. The whole layout is created dynamically, grabbing the image information out of a database. I'm planning on using this model, with more features like hide/show thumbnails and prev/next buttons and commenting functionality, for Randompixel, which means that with this gallery, randompixel is a big step closer to going live.

I'd like your feedback on what you think of the gallery design. Is it overbearing? Is it useful? I'm thinking most galleries would have smaller thumbnails, by the way.

Anyhow, enjoy the gallery. For those at work, the pics with the little exclaimation point on the corner aren't necessarily work-safe. It was, after all, Mardi Gras.

Have a great weekend all!

Just all kinds of life stuff going on just now. I'm sure it'll make for good blogging when I have... time... to... blog.

Sorry for the tease. Mardi Gras gallery will be up this evening at any rate.

I'm all for ubiquitous computeing, but some web innovations should never make the transition into the 'real world.'

Topping that list is Am I Hot Or Not: Palm Pilot Party Edition, where you and your palm-packing party-pals can rate each other anonymously and you can find out if you're hotter than the party average.

I have to think that the fatal flaw here is that the hottest person at the party is likely the one not frantically beaming their rating of every other person at the party in n*n-n many combinations.

I want the lite version: Am I a geek or not?

Last week I was sifting through IMDB and found that one of my favorite movies (albeit made for TV (err HBO)), The Worst Witch, shares a lead actress with The Craft.

Fairuza Balk, as twelve-year-old Mildred Hubble (truly the pregenitor to Harry Potter) could not be more different than her decade-later Craft character Nancy Downs, psycho goth toes-dragging-on-the-ground power bwitch.

That would make a kick-ass double-feature.

One of the speakers I heard at the Council on Foundations was Mr. Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. One of the stories he told ended with a musician's realization of the 'Beyond the Fuck It' principle, aka BTFI.

The general principle is that when you get to the 'fuck it all' stage of despair, you can come through the other end with an attitude of 'well now that I've said fuck it I can do things my way and I don't care what happens.'

Anyhow, one of the things that's been on my list for a long time is to get Fury.com into a CVS code revisioning system so I can have a real development deployment and a real production deployment and I just need to republish to update production Fury to the last stable version. the sad truth is that this hasn't happened, and so I only make changes to Fury piece by safe piece.

Until I get to BTFI, that is. When that happens you can keep viewing the site and see it work, fail, look really strange, go haywire, until my changes are incorporated and working on the live site. One thing for certain: It makes me sure to complete a feature change before I tire of it, because I'm not going to go to sleep with the site broken.

Anyhow, I'm just about there, which is a good thing for progress, but a bad thing for someone who would like to think of himself as a pragmatic programmer.

Does knowing the 'right way' and not doing it the 'right way' make me a little better than someone who's stupid through ignorance?

If I do (heaven forfend) decide I want to watch live TV, wouldn't it be nice if, as an alternative to seeing channel-by-channel listings (as every day of being a TiVo owner means not having to even know what channels you ge, much less where they are... "huh? Olympics are where?"), you could get a listing of everything currently on, sorted by the degree to which TiVo's predictive modelling thinks you'll want to see it.

Optionally grouped by start times, so you don't have to get your hopes up for the last 18 minutes of "A Philadelphia Story".

If you hold the evil marketing power of consumer taste information, you may as well wield it for good.