[Toshi]

ooh, and btw www.toshiclark.com now resolves properly. x 2 . i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do with it yet. probably make a new template for betterhtmlexport and rehash some of the better content from tjclark.ath.cx

 

[Barbaton]

Hey Toshi, do you think I should get one of these:

 

[Toshi]

Hey Toshi, do you think I should get one of these:

http://www.twoevils.org/images/photos/funny/baka-shirt.jpg

heh. please uninline large pic tho, thad. it's screwing with the text wrapping. that shirt's japanese is totally pidgin btw. "baka" shouldn't be in katakana, but should be 破家, 馬鹿, or 莫迦. on the other hand, i don't see those kanji enough to immediately recognize them, so the impact would be lost at least on japanese semi-literates like me i suppose.

 

[WTGPhoben]

ooh, and btw www.toshiclark.com now resolves properly. x 2 . i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do with it yet. probably make a new template for betterhtmlexport and rehash some of the better content from tjclark.ath.cx

if you're cheap (like me), you just forward it for free to your ath.cx (phoben.com >> phoben.ath.cx)

 

[Toshi]

boo. down with mere forwarding

other thoughts from today:

i saw the national acrobats of taiwan today. they played at benaroya hall, typically the venue for the seattle symphony. $10 rush tix for students...

anyway, they were AMAZINGLY good. a few of the acts just blew my mind.

the most spectacular: a guy did a series of handstands on a chair. the thing was that this chair was on a stack of about 10 (no joke) other chairs, of which the bottom chair rested its four legs on four wine bottles which rested itself on a platform. the guy was easily 2/3 of the way to the ceiling at the pinnacle of the stunt (he kept on building the stack one by one from the top, with the chairs being handed to him by assistants with a long pole and hook deal. wow. his act alone had the audience both mesmerized and fearing for his life, and garnered a standing ovation.

i didn't find any pictures in a quick googling that capture the act, but this video is decent. you need quicktime 6+ to view it. the video is here

 

[Toshi]

random pic from today, snapped along with the first few images in the gallery walking from my parking spot to benaroya hall:

 

[narlus]

that building looks kinda like the one used on Wilco's cover of _yankee hotel foxtrot_

 

[Barbaton]

toshi, you might be interested in this if you haven't seen it yet:

new PGP key server at pgp.com

 

[Toshi]

toshi, you might be interested in this if you haven't seen it yet:

new PGP key server at pgp.com

sweet. somehow they already had my old key in there, as i got a verification email a few weeks ago at my long-neglected hotmail address which isn't on my current key. i just put my current, valid key up there even tho it has been on my website forever.

 

[Toshi]

hey guys,

what would cause my site to not show up in google when searching on my name? it used to be #1 in the results (duh) but now is nowhere to be found...

 

[Toshi]

also, contribute to this thread: http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?t=108022 (on where you live)

 

[Barbaton]

hey guys,

what would cause my site to not show up in google when searching on my name? it used to be #1 in the results (duh) but now is nowhere to be found...

have you changed hostname, etc so that external links to it don't work anymore? are fewer people linking to your site than before? doesn't google rank by how much the page is linked to by others, the whole "humans confer authority bit?"

 

[Toshi]

google does rank on that. it must be a side effect of their new anti-blog-spam algorithm, since my site dropped from being #1 to being way down on page 15 (or so i hear, i haven't bothered to dig that much) . this sucks since i got quite a few hits from people googling on my name.

 

[Barbaton]

I thought this was kind of funny:


http://www.cubeowner.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=9096&st=0

 

[Toshi]

mmmm i am using a very lovely 1.8 GHz DP G5 here. 20" cinema display, 1680 x 1050 px.

 

[Toshi]

my ipod's headphone jack took another turn for the worse today, and now the sound fades in and out with every step. i had to carry it in my hand to alleviate this after fiddling around with pulling the headphone plug just a tiny bit out but not too much etc. etc. . so in maybe two months i'll probably either be sporting a shuffle or a rio flash player-that-works-with-itunes...

 

[WTGPhoben]

my ipod's headphone jack took another turn for the worse today, and now the sound fades in and out with every step. i had to carry it in my hand to alleviate this after fiddling around with pulling the headphone plug just a tiny bit out but not too much etc. etc. . so in maybe two months i'll probably either be sporting a shuffle or a rio flash player-that-works-with-itunes...

why wouldn't you buy another iPod?

 

[Barbaton]

why wouldn't you buy another iPod?

he won't write you back until he's done taking apart dead people.

 

[narlus]

sounds like he

1) doesn't need the capacity

and/or

2) wants a flash-based player for those rough sex episodes when the iPods's hard drive might be damaged.

 

[Toshi]

ahha #2 is the key. i'm going for the trifecta , sandwich on the bedside table...

 

[narlus]

if you were canadian, doggy style would let you watch hockey too. neaky:

 

[Toshi]

original: http://toshiclark.com/images/events and concerts/finch's 20th - may 6, 2003/Pages/6.html

manga:

black:

more here: http://toshiclark.com/images/miscellaneous/transformation - january 21, 2005/

http://www.ridemonkey.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1416406#post1416406 <--- has link to transform site

 

[Toshi]

and an ipod shuffle review: http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,2533,a=143007,00.asp

It's also highly competent as a music player. It has dead-flat frequency response, less harmonic distortion, and most notably, better bass response than its bigger siblings. The older iPods, especially the Mini, have been rightfully criticized for being somewhat deficient in bass, and although the bigger players have flat frequency response, they have trouble sustaining big bass notes. Not so the shuffle; it drives its earbuds well and hard without resorting to artificial bass boost. Though most digital audio players have moved past the Apple players' audio quality (by virtue of learning from Apple's mistakes and being fresher designs), the shuffle does them one better.

We did our usual critical listening through the supplied earbuds, our Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones, and studio monitors. The shuffle had no sonic flaws that we could detect.

(i'm killing time, waiting for traffic to die down before going out for a bit)

 

[narlus]

wow, you can't skip to the next song??? that's a drag! i guess you either need to be sure you like what you load on the thing, or choose really short songs.

edit - after reading further, you can skip to the next song. you just can't "navigate" to the next song, ie i guess since there is no screen, you can't see what's coming next.

 

[Toshi]

google does rank on that. it must be a side effect of their new anti-blog-spam algorithm, since my site dropped from being #1 to being way down on page 15 (or so i hear, i haven't bothered to dig that much) . this sucks since i got quite a few hits from people googling on my name.

no google hits to my site since wednesday . i usually get a few per day. nooooo

anyway i've changed robots.txt to allow the googlecrawler to index /images/ on both http://toshiclark.com and http://tjclark.ath.cx . this way i'll have more "legit" links, thousands more in fact, which should outweigh the ones that currently show up, which are all from message boards basically, and all of which are deprecated under the new antispam algorithm as a result. <-- this in response to wiki and blog spammers, who would put their site's link everywhere indiscriminately -- sorta like me eh -- to increase its pagerank artificially.

hmm. looking at the links from ridemonkey maybe this is not the case: the anti-blog-spam feature requires the software houses (like vBulletin) to change their software to have a rel="nofollow" attribute in user-created links, and ridemonkey's vB isn't doing that yet. go figure.

 

[Toshi]

mmm sushi

in a bike related corollary of today's sushi outing i managed to REALLY tweak my shoulder putting on my rain coat. usually when my shoulder has come out it has been due to hitting something, whether the water, a tree, a pick when playing basketball, but this time it was due to the coat + my muscles straining against it. it hurt. . pics were at 1/60, f/1.4, iso 200 except for the sushi shot, which was in brighter light and thus iso 100 at the same settings iirc.

 

[Toshi]

 

[Quadari]

Sweet. How much are you going for?

 

[Toshi]

Sweet. How much are you going for?

well, www.humanforsale.com says i should ask about $2.4 million...

 

[Toshi]

http://cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/1984macintro.mov

watch it! features a young steve jobs and the first macintosh unveiling... makes me get all misty eyed. almost.

 

[Toshi]

narlus, you recommended this book, no? anyway, i put aside thomas pynchon's "gravity's rainbow" today after 50something pages. just too weird for me. reading david foster wallace's "infinite jest" was quite enough of the genre for me.

 

[Toshi]

wow. i found my old rants page (first through archive.org and then by looking at my own backups), which i had thought to be lost. it was like my blog (xanga in this case), only before blogs were cool. not that they are now.

but anyways:

May 3, 2001

Why must AM107 midterms be so hard? Although I don't feel as violated after the one this morning as after the first one earlier this semester, I'm definitely not feeling enthused about it either.

April 20, 2001

Happy 4/20 Day, everyone!

What do I have to rant about lately? Life has been assailing me from all fronts: musically, conductors all assume that their rehearsal (for an unpaid gig, invariably) is more important than anything else I may have going on; professors try to make sure that I have as much going on as possible (and when they fail, we have TFs like Adriana, who issue "clarifications" of problem sets in the middle of the night that make your once-perfect solution completely and utterly wrong); and a summer internship with a company that has announced a hiring freeze after its stock crashed. I think next semester/year I'm going to take easier classes, but deep down inside of me I know I won't, since I seem to enjoy the pain, or at least the thought that through the pain I'm learning something important. At least I'll stop playing for musicals and anything unpaid (besides HRO, but possibly including HRO as well).

Now that I reread these last few sentences, I realize how I really am not certain that I'm learning anything important here. Although I'm sure that all that I absorb will be of at least marginal applicability no matter which field I end up in, I wonder how much of this really matters. Perhaps this is just my fatigue speaking, or maybe these are just annually recurring springtime pseudo-deep thoughts, but I'm just not sure.

March 7, 2001

Broken ribs are no fun. I have found this out the hard way, after pulling an especially stupid bike stunt (upping to bashguard on a rail, a very slippery and wet rail) which ended up with me holding my side, gasping for air. Why can't I just swap out my hindsight and foresight? Oh well, no lifting for a while, in any case.

As for another, more mundane rant, I've been sleeping very little, as usual. Now it's 3:21 am, in fact, and the CS124 Programming Assignment 1 writeup is still not done. <shudder> Time to sleep.

February 25, 2001

Lately I have surprisingly little over which to rant; problem sets are daunting but manageable, cycling is cold yet invigorating, and trumpet playing is intimidating yet rewarding. And the use of yet brings pleasure on its own, as it frees one from being more creative in the use of English. But this is hardly a rant.

On second thought, I do have a rant: why are Magura crossover lines so easy to break? Just one swift kick and suddenly you have hydraulic fluid everywhere. Then again, Hayes does not have the most durable brakes either, as my scarred full-face will attest to.

February 16, 2001

12 hours of sleep over 3 nights does not make for a coherent me. I'd like to thank Adriana for writing such a hard problem set for 107, and Prof. Mitzenmacher for contributing his share of agony as well.

January 24, 2001

There are few things more pleasant in life than being woken up at 7am by the sound of snow plows scraping along the ground. Just to name some offhand: playing a New Year's gig a week after having my wisdom teeth pulled; landing on my head and giving myself a concussion in Kamikaze practice at Mammoth; getting slapped upside the head... the list goes on. Do I make myself clear?

Actually, the experience of the snow plows, and later that morning, the sound of a man fruitlessly attempting to keep his stoop clear of snow for what seemed like hours on end, wasn't that bad. The ensuing depression that hit later that day, thanks to exhaustion and finals, was the kicker. Oh well, both the storm and finals are long gone.

January 17, 2001

I have always loathed practicing in Quincy House's F Entryway practice room, but I could never quite figure out why. The piano always seemed flat, and the room had some odd quality about it that would make me play sharp no matter how relaxed I tried to stay while playing. So tonight, January 17, I ventured down to the room, with key and Powerbook in hand, and did some testing. The results: the piano is 26 cents flat, and that's just around tuning A (A4); it is progressively flatter as you ascend, and slightly less flat as you descend, thanks to the wonders of equal temperment. The real kicker is that the flourescent lights, which I had identified with my not-quite-perfect pitch as a sharp Bb, turned out to be a really flat B natural instead - 40 cents flat, to be precise. With these two pitch influences tugging at my ear, it is no wonder that I have trouble staying on pitch in that room.

Winter Break 2000-2001

For winter break, I decided to fly home. There's nothing odd about flying home, I thought. What I didn't count on was a series of miscues and cancelled flights that would turn what should have been a painless jaunt from Boston to Seattle into a frustrating 24 hour journey. After snowfall caused Boston's air traffic controllers to cancel my original flight, the ticketing agent had the idea to shuttle me out to L.A. on a standby flight. On its own, this idea seemed as if it would work, so I gamely accepted. The gods of travel evidently were not appeased by one cancelled flight in a day, however, leading to an hour's delay before the plane lurched out of the gate at Logan.

This hour turned out to be exactly the interval between the projected arrival in LA, and the departure of the last flight to Seattle that night. So, in an experience somewhat reminscent of sleeping in a parked car, only with Christmas music blaring throughout the night, I got to sleep at gate 75 of Los Angeles International. Sleeping in the terminal would not be overly disagreeable, were it not for two things: the unending stream of music, and a very hardnosed female security guard that felt it was her duty to kick me out from the gate, at 4 am.

Some things are just too fun for words.

 

[Quadari]

wow. i found my old rants page

Ah yes...AM107. 'Twas an interesting class....

I did like the fact that it didn't have a real final, though.

But as you complained about, some of those problem sets were a little crazy.

 

[Barbaton]

Ah yes...AM107. 'Twas an interesting class....

I did like the fact that it didn't have a real final, though.

But as you complained about, some of those problem sets were a little crazy.

who taught it when you guys took it?

 

[Quadari]

who taught it when you guys took it?

Prof. Leslie Valient.

 

[Barbaton]

Prof. Leslie Valient.

Aah. Nice guy, not always the most intelligible. Not sure what a class would be like but i have an idea.

 

[Quadari]

Aah. Nice guy, not always the most intelligible. Not sure what a class would be like but i have an idea.

Yeah...I had the same impression. He seemed like a nice guy, but he mumbled a lot and even when I could understand the words he was saying I didn't really understand what he was saying. It basically seemed that he had very very minimal control over the class. It was basically run by the three TFs. They rotated writing and grading the problem sets and it was very predictable that one TF hade very hard problem sets, one medium, and one easy.

There were no exams in the class, just two midterms, which was nice.

 

[Toshi]

this skiing season sucks unbelievably:

crystal mt: closed
mt baker: closed
stevens pass: closed
white pass: closed
snoqualmie: closed
mt hood: closed

whistler is the only place remotely nearby that's open, and i'm certainly not going to drive 4.5+ hours for 47" of old snow.

 

[Quadari]

this skiing season sucks unbelievably:

crystal mt: closed
mt baker: closed
stevens pass: closed
white pass: closed
snoqualmie: closed
mt hood: closed

whistler is the only place remotely nearby that's open, and i'm certainly not going to drive 4.5+ hours for 47" of old snow.

We've got great skiing out east!

 

[Toshi]

hmph. this may be the one year where the weak-sauce eastern mountains actually have better snow. <sniffs haughtily>