Monthly Archives: April 2006

The little problem I had with this site a while back prompted me to make some MATLAB tools to parse Apache web server log files. They were very useful then, but I never got back to them.

This morning, I took another look at the logs, specifically the 700-or-so queries from the last nine months. My name shows up a lot, as does MATLAB. No surprises yet. There’s a lot of “Mather Sex” !?! The New York Times‘ David Brooks is slightly more popular here, though; I guess a lot of people want to read what he says for free.

Here are some of the other interesting search terms:

• “Are Sikhs Hindu?” — It depends on who you ask.
• Camoflauge and “wedding announcement”
• Exploration of British North America
• Churchill Hotel Ecru — Lots of people want to know about the paint we used on our walls.
• how much airlines spending money on advertising in india???
• names of furniture stores in dehli india
• stereotypes of people in new orleans after huricane katrina
• you dropped the bomb on me
• “while policies of assimilation tried to keep them static” — Uh oh! Somebody got busted plagiarizing! I can’t believe I wrote that line…
• Minnesotan accents
• Nirmala’s wedding with Home Minister
• Pakistani Englad cricket series 2005 pictures
• Top 10 most beatiful faces in bollywood in the last century
• begging and its social impact on the begger
• can doxycycline cause diziness — Mefloquine certainly can! And night paralysis, too.
• crazy train images from india
• funny hindi celebrity answering machine
• how to tie a rajastani turban
• i am having difficulty booking online with deccan airways — Bummer!
• i can’t load my velvet fine art paper in my epson 2200 printer — Total bummer! Hint, use the thick paper lever and load from the back.
• i golfed across mongolia
• jack-up platform helipad scrap
• mather’s image processing system
• pictures of pepsi(oye bubbly with shahrukh khan) — Everyone sing along with the anthropomorphic chapatti: “Oye bubbly! Accha bubbly! Be my lover bubbly!”
• postmodern perspective of Huricane Katrina
• the article about hopitality [sic] in Thailand — You know . . . the one.
• what is the reason for dryness in rajasthan — Hint, it’s a desert.

Maps: religion by county (sort of via) and by language. (via)

Culture blogs: Space and Culture blog: “a cross-disciplinary journal of cultural studies that fosters the publication of reflections on a wide range of socio-spatial arenas.” And TheBoxTank blog: “A collaborative focused on retail and urbanism.” And BLDGBLOG: “architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures” And Pruned: “On landscape architecture and related fields”

So I’m a few years late: PDN @ 20

Will the real Nancy Drew please stand up? “Girl Power! Laurie Long” at the San Jose Museum of Art

Smart reporting on photography: The View from the Edge of the Universe

Grass: The American Lawn. “North America now has more than 32 million acres of lawn under cultivation, occupying more land than any single crop, including wheat, corn, or tobacco. Americans spend $750 million a year on grass seed alone and more than $25 billion on do-it-yourself lawn and garden care, making the lawn and landscape industry a booming sector of the economy. These statistics attest to the North American obsession with the lawn. As Michael Pollan noted: ‘Like the interstate highway system,’ like fast food chains, like telephone, television and cable, “the lawn has served to unify the American landscape.”

Suburbia and Ethnoburbia: Revising The Suburbs: “A new wave of scholars challenges common assumptions about sprawl and urban growth.” And Suburbia’s not so bad: “You can love the burbs or leave them, but they can’t be ignored, as this show cleverly makes clear.” And Ethnoburb versus Chinatown: Two Types of Urban Ethnic Communities in Los Angeles

Kaboom: “You seriously wanted to build nuclear bombs in college?” – AH. CONELRAD: All Things Atomic | The Golden Age of Homeland Security

1918: Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Red Sox

Self-segregation? Redefining Property Values: By Design, Status Seekers and Tree-Huggers Don’t Have to Commune

Americans love conspiracy theories, frequently involving the government and/or aliens.

Susan Clancy has a new book: Abducted : How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens. Apparently, it’s just as inflamatory as her prior book about false memories in sexual abuse victims. (She says these alien memories are just as false as most repressed memories “found” in therapy sessions.) I remember her scholars’ convocation lecture at Grinnell being rather confrontational, though I found it fascinating.

Science is not so open-minded as it seems, she says, and is bowing out of repressed memory research.

You can watch Prof. Clancy talk about her book.

“These people were surprisingly normal and sane.”

“A lot of us, perhaps most of us, are looking for explanations for things that have happened to us in our lives and [account] for psychological distress or anomylous experiences. So what normally happens…Like, no one goes to bed and wakes up screaming, ‘Holy god, I’ve been abducted by aliens!’ It doesn’t happen that way. What happens is that people have some experiences or symptoms they’re trying to understand it, and they wonder, ‘I wonder, could this be aliens.’”

“Being abducted is a culturally available way to explain experiences you’ve had. . . . We know what aliens look like, and we know what they can do to us.” Most of us know more about alien abductions than we do about mental illness and psychological trauma.

About 10% of abductees have developed vivid memories. Almost all have undergone hypnosis or regression therapy involving suggestable states where false (but very powerful) memories are easily created.

The experiences were terrifying and awful, but they are transformative, cathartic, spiritual (almost religious) events, too. It’s just a new kind of belief system.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

(Thanks to Alex Barnett.)

Lately I’ve been thinking I need a secretary. Having somebody create digests of my e-mail, book planes/hotels/cars, call the oil burner repairman, drop off film at the lab, etc. — something like the remote assistant I wrote about a while ago. (In fact, paying other people to do all sorts of things for us in India — do the laundry, carry the bags, drive the car, and on and one — was eventually wonderfully convenient but initially extemely discomforting to someone raised by Calvinists.)

Alas, we live in a self-service world. So I’m just going to have to do all of that stuff myself. Fortunately, Merlin Mann has created 43Folders, a blog that (a) feeds the American/Calvinist belief in perfect (or at least “perfectable”) productivity and (b) promises to help me meet all those various demands on my time.

Keeping up with the ideas and actions contained in e-mail is my Achilles heel. Are we all overconnected and overcommitted? Or do we only feel that way because we have a fractured, “always on” mindset made worse by poor e-mail habits? To borrow Mann’s rephrasing of productivity guru David Allen, is our “cognitive dissonance epic?” Maybe . . . Probably . . .

At any rate, I’m trying a number of little experiments to feel better about having more demands on me at work (which really is a good thing). Let’s start with e-mail. First, empty my inbox (get to the zero message, as our friends at Toyota might say). Then, clean up the rather small backlog of mostly unimportant messages. Finally, update my processes to become an “e-mail ninja.”

The idea is simple:

• spend time on tasks where it can do the most good (and that isn’t checking e-mail);
• convert e-mails into actions or reference materials quickly;
• get the processed mail out of sight and mind by deleting or filing it;
• check e-mail no more than once every 1-2 hours;
• use rules to automatically move “noncritical” messages to the appropriate place;
• set aside small chunks of time (5-20 minutes) to delete, archive, and answer as much important mail as possible;
• schedule time to read and/or clean up noncritical messages (from mailing lists, blogs, and other sources) at most 2-3 times per week;
• write small, pithy e-mails that are easy for others to read and process.

Man, what a day!

First the racoon. Jess also saw the capture from her office, which also overlooks the parking garage. Lately townie people have started making out there before heading home from work. “Stray racoons and stray couples,” she commented. Circle of life, really.

Then a few hours of honest-to-goodness work before walking to Natick Center to watch the marathon.

Patriots Day is my favorite holiday; it’s the most wonderful time of the year. It heralds the end of a long, drunken, New England winter and the beginning of spring. The trees are fresh with bloom along the quiet streets of Natick. Over in Concord, Colonial reenactors fight British reenactors after the Lexington reenactors predictably rollover to let history take its course. Runners descend upon Mass Bay — the land of my Puritan progenitors — for 26.2 miles of penance, and I go to glory in all of it: cheering fans, swishing hair, agony, and the yearly promise of (with a little extra practice) eternal vigor and youth.

As usual, a half dozen or so of my coworkers also made the 1.5-mile pilgramage there. We yakked alot until the wheelchair racers arrived, before the elite women came zooming through, while waiting for the elite men, and in the spaces between. The men start 30 minutes later than the women and chase them from Hopkinton to Boston; millenia of history repeating itself in the microcosm of cozy, subdued, suburban Natick. (No percussion bands or promises of “Free Beer” for laggards or “Whitley Rocks So Hard!” signs as in Newton’s Heartbreak Hill carnival atmosphere.) We cheered extra hard as the Hoyts passed (65-year-old father running and pushing his son with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair) heading generally downhill on their way to their 25th finish (in 3:45).

Then back to the café at the office to watch . . . the Red Sox game? It was tied in the eighth until I showed up when the Mariners retook the lead. The attempted mutiny to switch to the women’s finish left unspoken but short-lived ill-will between the die-hard Sox fans and most everyone else. The first two Red Sox batters struck out looking in the bottom of the ninth before Youkilis reached first and Loretta homered to bring him home and win the game on the next at bat. Jubilation and then a hasty departure.

The café man changed the channel to . . . CNN? Quickly remedied, we listened to a perpetually drunken-sounding Bob Lobel say that Robert Cheruiyot was too far out (Hereford Street) to beat the 2:07:15 course record. At 2:07:14, I cheered. The remaining Sox fans looked at the crazy man in the back. As more Americans crossed the line, I talked to the husband (and fellow coworker) of a former coworker (and current fashionista B-school student).

Okay. Back to my office, where I was immediately highjacked and dragged back outside to eat ice cream and generally revel in the intermittent sun that took off the early spring chill.

3:00. Finally. Let’s get through a day’s worth of e-mail at least. Success!

The Natick police were in front of my building this morning when I arrived. No cops in the back where I usually park. So I walked through the building to the front, where a small group of construction workers and cafe staff watched along as the animal control officer cornered and lassoed a rather large raccoon.

I think the raccoon was high on meth.