0. Help Set the World Record for the World's Biggest Toast.
Go to a Draft Guiness-serving pub on Friday, February 27, 1998,
at 7pm Pacific Time and raise a glass of Guiness. All around
the world, people will be toasting with you.
1. Falco is dead. Probably some right-wing conspiracy.
http://www.nme.com/newsdesk/19980109131840news.html
2. John Hiatt's 17-track best-of collection titled "Have a Little Faith
in Me" comes out March 31.
3. Oscar nominations: Titanic 14, Good Will Hunting 9, L.A. Confidential
9, As Good As It Gets 7, The Full Monty 4, Boogie Nights 3.
4. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 115 points today to a record
high 8295. 10,000 by 2000?
5. "Fate and destiny play a huge part in this karmatic circle we live
in..." -- Drew Barrymore on Larry King Live, selling her new movie
Wedding Singer which opens Friday
6. "The wisdom of a fool won't set you free." -- New Order, "Bizarre
Love Triangle"
7. The LAPD responds to 150,000 burglar alarm calls per year, 98% of
which are false. -- 2/9/98 LA Times B1
8. Microsoft to buy content from Collier's to beef up Encarta.
9. The Internet is "a wide Sargasso Sea with many kelp beds that can
hang you up." -- Dennis Miller
10. Titanic is a fable of fallibility for the high-tech age.
Whether by design or by coincidence, it is the right movie at the
right time, a cultural touchstone much like "Gone with the Wind" in
1939 and "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968. -- 2/10/98 LA Times A16
11. I have never done illicit drugs, but MAN do I wish they were legal.
12. "Is it bad when you refer to all alcohol as pain-go-bye-bye juice?"
-- Patton Oswalt on Conan O' Brien
13. 30 seconds of advertising for the final episode of Seinfeld in
May will sell for $1.5 million. By comparison, 30-second spots
for Superbowl 32, which was seen by 133.4 million people, went
for $1.1 million. Last week, 28.84 million people watched Seinfeld.
There are only 8 original shows remaining including the hourlong
final episode.
14. The average person forgets 80% of what he learns each day.
15. U.S. consumers faced 2 billion credit card solicitations in 1997.
16. TLC filed for bankruptcy in 1995. Toni Braxton filed for bankruptcy
last week.
17. M&M's slogan -- "candy for MM" where MM are the Roman numerals for
2000 -- has flown over most consumers' heads.
18. 436 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated
by the U.S. supreme court -- 144 of them in Texas. Last week, Texas
executed Karla Fae Tucker, the first woman put to death since 1984
and the first woman in Texas to be put to death since 1863. I still
believe any decent system of justic should have room for mercy,
leniency, clemency... and I think the U.S. death penalty is arbitrary,
capriciously doled out, and prejudiced against the poor. Then again,
we all gotta die sometime; why not waste millions of dollars of
taxpayer money in so dying?
19. Man, Dilbert's voice on those Office Depot commercials is so wrong.
20. "Zero Effect" is a really good movie. I wish I could buy the
screenplay for it from like Amazon or something. I'm thinking of
adding a music section to
http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/local/fork-books.html
21. Suppose you had infinite bandwidth, zero latency, infinite cycles,
infinite storage, perfect software, and truly predictive models.
What would you do with it? I guess I would try to completely record
my so-called life. Everything I think, see, experience, hear, smell,
touch, sense, say, do, feel, read, write, watch, listen, eavesdrop,
believe. I want my life to be indexable, searchable, and
introspectable.
22. Picture a mural that incorporates everyone's individual "big
pictures" -- what would it look like?
23. The Getty has a room -- "Rembrandt in a Circle" -- with 8 paintings
from the various stages of his life. I look forward to seeing this
someday. I also want to see the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC
someday.
24. "5-year goal: build the biggest computer in the world.
1-year goal: one-fifth of the above." -- Seymour Cray
25. "All this subtext is making me tired." -- Dawson's Creek
26. My respiratory doctor says my condition has regressed again, and he's
doubling the dosage of my medications again. I must escape from L.A.
and I must escape soon or I *will* die. Rohit talks about disliking
this city from time to time, but I am literally allergic to it.
Sometimes it gets so bad I can't think, I can't work, I can barely
live. I don't want to see anyone and I don't want to be with anyone.
I just want to disappear and make the pain go away.
27. Currently reading: "The Vanishing American Jew" by Alan Dershowitz.
A compelling read.
28. I have actually been working on my Master's Thesis writeup of work
that was done more than 2 years ago. It will feel so good to get
this writeup out of the way. My only complaint is that writing is
such a slow process. Actually, for me, reading is a slow process
too, so maybe it's not a complaint, just an observation.
29. Make sure, whenever you edit a document for someone else, you save
the "diffs" between her document and your document, because some
people don't want the newly revised document. All they want is the
diffs so they can decide on a case-wise basis what suggestions should
stick.
30. To try to counter the effects of my medication I bought a treadmill.
Now I can really go nowhere fast.
31. Earthlink is coming to Caltech on Wednesday to talk about their
scalable email solutions. Memo to self: drink lots of caffeine on
Wednesday.
32. Nelson Minar is coming to Caltech Wednesday to Sunday to talk about
stuff. He's gonna spend all day Thursday with JoeK and Mani, except
for the half hour Mani talks with Microsoft Research, who are
visiting on Thursday. I've agreed to have lunch with Nelson Thursday
and maybe Friday. But really all I want to do right now is finish up
the Master's Thesis writeup on work I did more than 2 years ago.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
I'm half-alive, but I feel mostly dead.
-- Jewel, "You Were Meant for Me"