Thought for the day: If freeing all prisoners in Iraqi prisons (except for the murders; they need permission from their victims' families) is Saddam Hussein's way of saying 'thank you' to the Iraqi people who gave him a '100% vote of confidence' last week, then what does that say about the Iraqi people's own impression of their legal system?

If freeing convicted criminals is seen as a good thing, even a reward, by free Iraqi citizens, doesn't that imply that those same free citizens must have viewed those imprisonments unjust in the first place?

The difference in how the Iraqi people react to their prisons being emptied and how US citizens would feel if our prisons were emptied demonstrates a key difference between how they view their government and how we view ours. We actually think our government is doing a good job by putting criminals away, and would be horrified if they were all released.

Okay, I confess: I'm baiting some of you a little bit. It's absolutely true that a lot of Americans think that a lot of people are in jail who shouldn't be, some for marijuana drug possession, others for prostitution, others for whatever your own pet injustice is. But this only furthers my point: If you think that marijuana users should be set free, then you probably also feel that the government was wrong to put them there in the first place.

So if you feel that all prisoners should be set free, then it follows that you'd think that the government was wrong to imprison all of them in the first place. (Except for the murderers. Apparently that's the only crime Iraqi people feel is deserving of imprisonment.)

In one act of 'belevolence to the Iraqi people,' Saddam has at once confirmed the injustice of his own regime.

And another thought: What aboue people committing crimes tomorrow? Do they get caught, tried, and put into the newly emptied prisons? Or is crime no longer a crime?

Completely unrelated topics, but they're quickies:

Yesterday was cold (and I'm sure my definition of that term will slide steadily down the mercury pole as the months roll on, but after 6 weeks in the 80s, it's cold). I figured it was mid-forties since, as a California wuss, that's what I would call cold. I only knew that my tech-jacket wasn't doing a good enough job in concert with my t-shirt at keeping the chill out, and an added sweatshirt only made things okay.

I didn't realize how cold it was until I went to my car after I was done with classes to find that the beaded droplets of rain on the hood, roof, trunk, windows, and windshield weren't the happy, liquid water they appeared to be, but were now a million tiny igloo squatters.

Catching me by surprise, it also caught me without my ice scraper which was (intelligently enough (as in, not at all)) back in my apartment, where it's nice and warm.

Okay, so it's getting colder around these parts, when cars freeze during an October afternoon.

Now, on to sleep. I'm tempted to say I haven't been getting enough of it, only I sort of have been, measured in aggregate.

Deposits into the sleep bank this week:

• Sunday: 3 hours
• Monday: 4 hours
• Tuesday: 10 hours
• Wednedday: 2 hours
• Thursday: 10 hours
• Average: 5.8 hours

Okay, so just under 6 hours probably doesn't sound like 'enough sleep' but it's what I lived on all last year at Yahoo... Still, I'm pretty sure the bank charges a commission whenever I don't pay the minimum daily balance, and their overdraft fines are pretty steep.

I was talking to Andrew last night about some projects I want to do, and he asked me where I'd find the time. I've rediscovered, as I discivered while doing the Trainblog last year, that the best way in the world not to procrastinate, or to make time for things you otherwise wouldn't do, is to make a regular schedule, and incorporate that thing into that schedule. It was easy to write 600 words a day when I was at Yahoo because writing was just the thing that I did when I was on the train, part of my daily process.

So basically I have to create a new daily process. So many of the things I do on a daily or weekly basis here are on my own, with no formal time or people dependencies, which means they don't get done until there is a time dependency or person dependency. This isn't good because it leaves me feeling like I have nothing to do until I suddenly have everything to do. Heck, even sleep has regulalry been postponed until 2 or 3am, simply because I have nothing, in my head or out of it, tha tells me that I should be going to sleep before midnight (well, there's common sense, but that's just a passenger in the backseat. Sadly, it may be the same passenger who's penning this very post, so we'll just have to hope that it can nudge instinct in the shoulder and tell her that it's my turn to drive.) Of course, I have to wake up at 7 to make it to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there's a dependency that results in the short night. On the other hand, if I had a dependency to go to sleep by a certain time, but didn't have one to wake up, I'd be grand.

This weekend's a good test. I have three days with virtually no time-anchored events, but a lot of things that need to be done. I think one of the first things is to map out what a Kevin day should look like, with slots for all the things I deem important, and try living on a schedule.

I don't see how it couldn't be worth it, considering that even breaking out of my planned schedule would feel like a guilty pleasure, while regular procrastination, because there's just too much to do to know where to start, is onthe empty side.

It's all a matter of intention.

So I was up until 6:30 this morning, in the cold multimedia lab, before walking over to my office to take a nap on the couch, prepping for my 8:30 class.

My cellphone went off at 8 as I asked it to, and I opted for a 5 minute snooze before facing the next half of my 48-hour day.

Apparently reality and I have a difference of opinion as to what constitutes 5 minutes, or so I realized when I looked at my watch and saw that it was 9:55.

Pissed at being (so very) late, and having a flashback to the recurring nightmares of waking up 2.5 hours late for a 3 hour final, I got up moved my car which, after two hours of delinquancy, didn't have a ticket (small favors, I thank thee), and was grateful (for once) that Interactive Programming is a 3 hour class, and I'd be coming in just after our mid-class break.

Walking in on a presentation, I was still asked by Pamela to see her after class. I thought I was older than that. Wanh. (stomping foot)

Nevertheless, the presentation went off without a hitch, and all went well. She told me I should be working on more challenging programming projects, and I certainly could; I just have to clear my work buffer to the point where the assignment doesn't get shoehorned into the sandman's time, because sometimes he takes time when you've really got better things to do.

So some of the fonts won't work quite right, unless you have the full Lucida family on your computer, but if you're interested, here's the thing I made last night, a takeoff on the traditional hangman game.

Between the ages of 18 months and 15 years, a child learns a new word every two hours on average.

I'm in the multimedia cluster, coding a Macromedia Director implementation of Hangman... It's so cold here that it's getting hard to type.

Note to self... Check the windows, and next time bring my gloves.

You know you're in a serious class when Amazon tells you that the textbook is

"inelligible for Super Save Shipping due to its unusual size or weight, and will incur a separate shipping charge of $1.40"

on top of standard shipping fees.

It's also amusing that they also advertize a "Great Buy" when I buy this $65 book along with another $60 book on a related topic, for the combined special price of... $125! Suchadeal! Okay, stopping now...

So I made the Amazon purchase today, and four items, including the oversized textbook, are on their way to me. I gotta say, living 50 miles from an amazon distribution point makes for some lighting-fast fulfillment. I've had an order arrive less than 14 hours after I placed it.

And I shared the love. Rather than sift through email addresses and determine who might like what (not that I could break it down by item anyhow), I just decided to send it to all my 'Amazon Friends.' Not that Karen cares about The Computer Music Tutorial, or Ernie wants MacOS X for Unix Geeks, but overall I figured a lot of people might be interested in something on the list.

I just hope that my mom doesn't decide she wants to give Tenacious D a try.

Ahh the life of a grad student: Go home from campus at midnight, get to sleep at 2:15am, get up at 7:15am, get to campus again. That's what they mean by early to bed, right? Because somewhere around 1am it stops being late.

The scary part is that's more sleep than I've gotten any other night in the last week, except for Sunday, when I slept in until 11, making a deposit in the sleep bank. I think funds are getting low, but judging by how I'm alert, happy, chai in hand and early for my 8:30 class, I guess my check didn't bounce today. Or maybe I'm just overdrawn...

So it was so cold last night that I carpooled a couple of fellow students home after one of my project's group meeting. I offered Kerry a ride home and she said she'd be fine walking, but 5 minutes later she IMed me back and took me up on the offer. Seems she went outside and discovered just how cold it really was outside.

So it was about 38 degrees (err, Fahrenheit) at around 11:30 last night, clod enough to make your ears burn a bit. This is about as cold as it'll usually get during sane hours in the Bay Area. Every once in a while you'll get ice on the windshield in the morning, but that's just a message sent from a nocturnal place most of us Friscans witness evidence of, but never actually experience.

Yeah, 38 degrees. A stone's toss from freezing. Great. The funny part is go ahead and drop that stone to 32 degrees, and you'll have the average high in February here. Yep. Half the days it doesn't even get that warm! (Yes, I know I'm amusing a bunch of you who grew up with this stuff and live with it every winter. ("Snow? Falling from the sky??") But I'm not going to let the jadedness of others ruin it for me. I cherish my incredulity, however banal it may be to others.

Okay, now I've squandered my earliness, but the day already has a positive spin, and my iPod is churning up nothing but favorites this morning (all hail the 5-star smart-playlist). I hope your morning feels at least half as good as mine does.

The holiday season approacheth, and so it's almost expected when those brainiacs at Amazon launch their latest way of leveraging off of their monstrously large purchase information database and provide you with another way to get purchasing ideas from someone other than publishers.

The new feature, "Just Like You," matches your Amazon purchase history against every other Amazon customer (who hasn't explicitly opted out of the feature) and comes back with the two people whose purchase histories and product ratings most closely match your own. Amazon then dubs these people as being "Just Like You," as we really are no more individual than the media we consume(?!).

Amazon strips almost all identification information from that person, except for what country they're from (and possibly other info I just haven't kenned yet) and, of course, their intimate purchases. (How embarassing if the people Just Like You are porn addicts... Yet another reason not to leave yourself logged in to public computers. Not that I would know, despite what Amazon thinks I might enjoy.

Okay, so 20% creepy, 20% insulting, 30% voyeuristic, and 30% cool, this feature is almost like making everyone a little anonymous blogger against their will. How far will they go with this feature? Can I subscribe to my Just Like Me clones, and get emails when they purchase new things, or just put them in their basket? Does someone else get a ping when I decide to buy a textbook for my class or a DVD for my mom? Even though I don't know who they are specifically, can I send a gesture of affinistic goodwill into the world and buy my clone things off their wishlist? Can I import their wishlist into my own wholesale?

The possibilities are endless if you break out from the commerce loop. Commerce is great because buying stuff online leaves an easy paper trail without anyone having to go through the actual effort of composition, but what if it tracked your clickstream wherever you went on the web? What if, turning the tables on Google's sites like mine (which is really astonishingly good), you could find 'people who surf like I do'? Step-back, Metafilter; adios mempool. You could track your clone as they traipse across the web, everyone safely anonymized. And if my doppleganger is particularly interesting, I could share their autogenerated realtime webtravellogue with others, making an instant websurfer-celebrity, memes that might grow to the point when inevitably the Truman in question would follow the meme link and lock thousands into a recursive loop, bringing down the internet and society as we know it.

Or maybe I'll just be content knowing that someone else there likes Portishead, Unix, and Shakespeare in Love, even if the are in Denmark.

Well, not so dramatic, but I did have the opportunity to give a talk for my fellow HCI and Interaction Design classmates today (thanks for the forum, Micah and Neema!). I think it went pretty well, considering that I'm running on four hours sleep (hate the GOMS.. Really really hate the GOMS. Homeworks that can be described on half a page that take 12 hours and 38 pages of excel spreadsheets with careful measurements are so not not not fun...).

Anyhow, the talk went well, and I enjoyed sharing. Now I have to work into the wee hours on a project for Interactive Programming, not to mention the sequence models I need to have done in 34 minutes for my lab group meeting.

Ahh well, the forecast is that things should ease up around Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. Also, the nights have been getting downright chilly (around 38 degrees!) and the days are as amazingly bright as they are crisp. My family regularly spends Christmas week in Carmel each year, and this is the kind of weather we usually get, so naturally it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas around here, though probably just to me.

On another note, I see a few people are already using the Fury RSS feed, and one's even complained that I built it, and now haven't even posted in two days! Well at least this post might appease you.