Parker Writesand stuff

I got a really really absurdly late start today. This is something I really need to work on. I have a lot of trouble getting up when I don’t have to.

I went to the library, which was good. I did some wikipedia surfing and watched a couple of TED talks, which was also good. Then I clocked in some hours on some web development. goodgood. I sent a few emails, but I ought to have sent more. I still sometimes have a lot of trouble diving in and cooking up brief emails.

After the library closed ~8, I was largely unproductive. Until my friends Cole and Eleni got in around midnight. Me and Cole recorded episode one of a new video blog. More on that soon.

Overall: Got a good amount of stuff done today.

I am disappointed with my level of activity last quarter. I made the grade, but overall I did less independent learning and less activism, and I created fewer things.

I want to get this quarter started off right. So this week, I am going to pay particularly close attention to what I do with my time.

And I’m going to blog about it.

I’m sitting in my dorm at Dartmouth. My east coast journey has come to an end. Overall, it was a huge success, and even exceeded my expectations. I met up with a lot of cool free culture people and overall just spent lots of time in the company of good friends.

Thank you to:

• *Spencer for letting me crash at Harvard
• *The Berkman Center for Hosting the awesome Gender and Tech mini-conference
• *Sam for letting me crash at Boston College
• *The Free Software Foundation for hosting LibrePlanet
• *Mako and Mika for hosting nightly get-togethers at The Acetarium during LibrePlanet, and for letting me crash Sunday night
• *HelloSilo people, including Seth, Tim, Rachel, Alex, and others, as well as Asheesh for hanging out with me and for being thought-provoking and hilarious.
• *Barry, for letting me crash and showing me a good time in NYC.
• *Free Culture @ NYU, especially Parker and Wesley, for letting me crash your meeting and hang out.
• *Elizabeth Stark for letting me crash your class at Yale.
• *Yale Information Society Project for letting me crash your fellows meeting.
• *The Purple Crayon at Yale for letting me play with you and for putting up with my horrible horrible improvised song
• *Adi Mark and Swati, and all the other awesome people that I met and hung out with at Yale. You guys are intelligent and funny and awesome.

I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed. Let me know and I’ll add you. The success of this trip has been a product of many many deliciously excellent parts which would not have been possible without the generosity and hospitality of so many friends.

(photo credit: thomashawk on flickr)

Over the next 1.5 weeks, i’m going to be backpacking around the east coast. I’ll be going to a couple conferences, meeting with some friends, checking out a couple museums, and walking a lot of city streets.

I have a google doc with my itinerary (mostly short notes now, will flesh out more later). If I’ll be in the same place as you and you want to meet up, give me a call or shoot me an email.

I’m going to be microblogging my adventures, as well as (macro?)blogging most days. I microblog on identica, and my identica feed gets cross-posted to my twitter account.

So follow along, won’t you?

Some time last week, I found myself forced to use an obnoxious scanner that emailed individual scans to me as PDFs. I had to re-enter my email address on the impossible touch-screen keyboard for each page, and when I was done I had 7 emails in my inbox.

I needed to re-assemble these 1-page PDFs into a 7-page one. A quick google search led me to this page. But I’ll spare you the unnecessary list of non-solutions (as well as the hentai Site Traffic Strip-O-Meter). The real gem on that page is this linux command:

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf

simply “cd” into the dir with all the pdfs that you want to string together, replace in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf with the names of your pdf images, and voila! out.pdf is your new SuperPDF. The Eurasia of PDFs.

(This is the first time that I’ve posted a nerdy linuxey howto. This may or may not become a trend. But don’t get scared–the main focus of this blog will continue to be my crappy creations and stupid ideas.)

Relationships look funny on Facebook by esagor, on Flick

I’ve developed the habit of compulsively opening new tabs in firefox and going to facebook.com when i’m bored or looking for a break. It’s gotten pretty bad. When I’m bored in real life, i actually say to myself, in my head “ctrl+t, facebook.” Literally.

This is a crutch that I lean on when I have a particularly painfully large amount of work (read: schoolwork) that needs to get done. When I’m pulling a most-of-the-nighter to write a paper of finish a lab assignment I keep track of up-to-the-minute updates to my friends’ status’ (and the albums they are being tagged in, the notes they are commenting on, the videos they are uploading, etc etc). When I’m actually having fun or doing something interesting, I’m blissfully unaware of the fact that Jane-who-I-met-once-at-this-party-several-years-ago-but-still-stalk-on-facebook is “no longer listed as single” (I’m not bitter) (Jane isn’t a real person) (really, she’s not) (don’t make fun of me).

This habit of alt-tabbing to give myself a brief break and release some stress is probably a habit that should be kicked altogether, but for now I’m going to focus on replacing it with something more productive: feed-reading. I’ll skim some headlines, read a few short blog posts, and catch up on webcomics. I’ll also follow my friend feeds on twitter and identica.

Wait, isn’t that just like looking at your news feed on facebook?

Well, kind of. Except that my identica and twitter feeds are full of thoughts and news from some more interesting people (lots of big players in the Free Culture movement). It’s more newsworthy, or at least more interesting and valuable to me. Jane isn’t on twitter telling me about how happy she is with her stupid boyfriend (not bitter) (she doesn’t even exist) (I don’t want to talk about it).

is full of stuff right now. Daily updates on hold until further notice.

Give me a hug if you see me. I probably need it.

Adi wrote about how he should take more photos because snow is beautiful. I agree.

I wanted to talk about something that I’ve been noticing a lot recently that I’ve wanted to photograph. I suspect that between the lack of light and my poor photography skills, I would probably fail to capture what I see. Perhaps a written description is better.

When I’m walking by the green late at night, I’m always struck by the way that the light from the street lamps hits the trees. The lamps aren’t very tall, so the light comes at the trees somewhat horizontally. The trees and the little mounds of snow around their bases are illuminated against the blackness of the rest of the green. They’re like perfectly isolated subjects in a photograph. The untouched, clean color and Seussical form of the snow makes a nice contrast with the harsher angles and dirtier colors of the trees. With the cool, still, sterile air and the focused, isolated lighting, I feel like I’m in a museum looking at a winter diorama with a single snowy tree. Someone must have stolen the wax cave man.

There’s something about horizontal lighting. I noticed this a couple years ago while I was riding a train in northern Italy. The sun was low in the sky. We were traveling through countryside. It was flat and grassy. But it was beautiful. I couldn’t stop staring at the grass. There was just so much dimension. So much contrast. Maybe it also had to do with the oranges in the light of the setting sun.

I sometimes wonder how much more beautiful these small things would be if I weren’t red-green colorblind.