I started playing with the API and as a first cut thought it would be neat to use the “get_similar” function.  So for each artist, you can get the top N similar artists.  Now where can I get a list of artists I like?  Well, I could type ‘em in, but that sucks.  So I wrote a small program which:

1. Opens the database on my iPod (or a directory of mp3 files)
2. Finds each artist by either reading the iPod db or looking at the id3 tags in all of the files
3. For each artist, add a node to a graph where the area of the node is proportional to the number of songs that artist has on the iPod (or in the music folder)
4. For each artist, finds the top 50 similar artists
5. For all of the similar artists that are in my collection of artists, add a graph edge between the two nodes
6. Plot the graph

What can I say, I’ve been working on a fair amount of graph-theory at work recently.  So after processing my iPod, I came up with the following graph of my current music (click to embiggen):

Okay, that’s pretty cool.  Almost completely illegible, but cool.  FWIW, the graph has 15 connected components, unfortunately, 13 of them are “singles” (not connected to anything), with one pair (Louis Armstrong paired with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington).  Fortunately, the graphing tool I use (igraph), has built in tools for doing community analysis (using the leading eigenvector method), i.e., we can automatically find tightly coupled subgraphs.  A few examples from the 25 or so communities:

which arguably correspond to “Indie,”  “Classic Rock,”  “Jam Bands,”  “Guitar Gods,” and “Alternative.”  If I processed my complete music database, I suspect we would wind up with several other communities, e.g., Blues.  But since Robert Johnson is the only blues I’ve got on there right now… he’s in a class by himself.

I suppose it goes w/o saying, that my musical tastes aren’t everyone’s and that if you don’t like my musical tastes, you can keep it to yourself or go DIAF

So, what’s next?  I was talking with M from my office and we’ve come up with another interesting project for the Echo Nest API.  This one a) uses the audio analysis functions, and b) if we do it right might cause someone to send us a cease and desist.  So, win all the way around.

No real observation here, certainly nothing that’s statistically significant (let’s see you construct a double blind study of a man’s activities when his wife is a thousand miles away).  Just amusing myself really.  Next up… the amazing idiocy of George Bush photos captioned with “Miss me yet?”  But right now, it’s Ghetto Pop Life… go ahead, I’ll wait while you cue it up.

into:

into:

and then:

So, Tuesday, I’m lying in bed doped up on acetaminophen, acid blockers, caffeine, ibuprofen, and tamaflu, feeling better than I had in quite some time.  I was wishing there was a Phish album playing, but was too lazy to go put one on.  Instead, I laid (diagonal ) in my bed and daydreamed about Bill’s in-place, parallel sorting problem.  I think I’ve got the solution and it seems to hold even now when I’m not so dippy.

I love my dogs.  I love my dogs.  Om mani padme hum.  I love my dogs.

When I got the machine home, I spent about a minute trying to decide if I would keep a partition with Windows on it.  But then I remembered that I don’t play video games, so I didn’t really need Vista.  I’ve installed Fedora 11 and moved all my files.

Kill me now.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

When I planted the garden, I put in a couple of banana pepper plants.  I seem to recall that my thinking was along the lines of, “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll plant some banana peppers – I love ‘em.”  Great in abstract, but I don’t actually have any recipes that call for banana peppers.  I only seem to eat them pickled.

Well, I couldn’t let them rot, so yesterday I went out and picked, not a peck, but maybe a half gallon (0.25 peck) of peppers and spent part of the afternoon pickling them.  I’ve got two pints of whole peppers and four pints of sliced.  We’ll see how they taste in a few weeks.

Before and after:

I opened the envelop, and sure enough, it was a two page letter saying that the Triangle Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic is now an official non-profit and it included a lovely pamphlet with information on our responsibilities as such.

Also nice – our status is retroactive to the end of *last* year.  So all of the donations that we’ve received are officially tax deductible.  As are any future donations if anyone wants to donate

Go TWRC!

One thing that I have noticed in working with the others on the non-profit is that learning styles and communication styles seem to be closely related.  You can divide learning styles (among other ways) into verbal vs visual learners.  Verbal learners prefer to hear things explained to them.  whereas visual learners prefer things to be written down.  Based on some of our recent experiences, I think that this plays into communication styles.  And it’s communication styles which are (occasionally) biting us.

We’ve got two people (including me) who have a strong visual preference – we like email for communication.  We have one person who exhibits a strong verbal preference (prefers the phone or in-person communication) and one who has no strong preference either way.  On a couple of recent occasions, we’ve had some missed communication.  Our verbal communicator will say something or mention a project or deadline and expect that the rest of us have kept up.  Our email/visual communicators don’t catch these verbal references and do the same thing with respect to email.

I was talking to our verbal communicator (by phone, of course! – she called me after I emailed her) about this and mentioned that I don’t ever catch the details when she’s talking.  At the last board meeting, she had mentioned a project and I *assumed* that if there were deadlines, they would be sent out in email.  In fact, I don’t ever consider anything to be real until I see it written down.  It’s just how I think.  People might *talk* about a lot of things, but until I see them commit some details to something written (email, memo, etc.), I don’t think they mean it.  After I described this to our verbal communicator, she confessed that she often never reads the details of the email that our visual communicators send.  In other words, in the same way that I don’t give enough consideration to non-visual communication, she doesn’t give enough consideration to non-verbal communication.

All in all, this isn’t the worst problem that a group of people can have.  I think the most important thing is to recognize these differences and to know that if you want to be certain that your message is received, you have to consider the expected medium for your audience.  (shock!)

The best part for me has been that we’ve gotten a good amount of produce with a fairly minimal amount of work.  I planted densely, but in raised beds.  I haven’t weeded and the whole thing looks like an overgrown mess, but it produces quite a bit:

or How I Spent My Sunday.

For reasons best left unspecified, I found myself in need of a new exterior door – a replacement for the one that keeps my utility room from being a part of the outdoors.  Last weekend, I went out to the local home improvement store and after spending two hours, I realized that I couldn’t simply replace the door, but instead, had to replace the entire door, prehung in its frame.

So, I bought the door-in-frame, hauled it out to my car only to realize that I had forgotten a certain problem of logistics.  While a door slab will fit in my hatchback, a whole door in its frame, most certainly will not.  So, I haul the frame back into the Lowes and ask if they can hold it for me.  Nope.  Well, not currently.  If I *returned* the frame and then re-purchased it, *then* they could hold it.  Fine.  Done.

Fast-forward to yesterday.  I borrow a neighbor’s truck (noon) and make the 10+ mile drive back out to the Lowes.  Pick up the door, drive back, unload and return the truck (1pm).  I start removing the old door, pulling out the frame and leaving it as a rough cutout (2:30pm).  Took a break to avoid completely dehydrating and got back to work (3pm).  At this point, I realized that because of the thickness of the logs (or in the utility room, the log siding), the last door had actually been installed 2″ out of the rough and was actually sitting on the porch.  Unfortunately, that means that there was actually extra header between the frame and the rough since the porch sits an inch lower than the subfloor.  To fix that, I nailed down some extra board so the door would sit on the subfloor and be flush with the interior walls.  Next step – find my caulk.  Oops – none in the house.  Run up to the nearest hardware store, about 8 miles, and buy some caulk (4:00pm).

Caulked the rough and set the door up.  Unfortunately, the door installation instructions were a little opaque and I couldn’t figure out where to go next.  Everytime I opened the door or even stopped holding it, the door would start falling.  Google to the rescue!  Following the online instructions, I shimmed the door into place, leveled it and got everything nailed into place (5pm).  Grab the old deadbolt and doorknob and installed them (5:30pm) and, with K’s help, cleaned up – 5:50pm.

All in all, a perfectly terrible way to spend a Sunday.  And I still need to finish insulating the door, staining it and putting the moulding back together.  Whee!

Today, I bought a replacement drive.  When I got home, I wanted to record the diffs from last night to today (quite a few since I uncompressed a lot of that gig’s worth of files).  As I started that up, I received a lot of notices about the *backup* disk failing.  I tried fixing it, but no luck.  Found a new backup disk.  Re-backed up 30 gigabytes worth of data.  Verified that and installed the new drive.  Things worked pretty well.  I installed Fedora 11 for the second time in two weeks, restored all my personal files and now I’m updating the system.

I’m just glad I verified the backup prior to doing this – it would have been annoying to have installed the OS only to find that I needed to revert back to the old drive to make a new backup.  :-/

I got back from Des Moines last month and the next day had a board meeting for the non-profit I work with.  As treasurer, I went to review the financial situation based on the projections we finally received.  Sure enough, the detailed projections were in line with the back-of-a-napkin ones that I had presented earlier, i.e., dire.  The only real solution was to close a significant portion of our operations, which we did.  Unfortunately, that was also the part of operations that K cares most about.

So for the past three weeks, I’ve been working with some other folks, including another board member who resigned after closing operations, to form a new non-profit.  It’s been a little hush-hush, but we did go public today.  We’ve sent out a press release, have a web site, are doing the twitter thing, and even have a facebook page.  Yes, the last two make me feel dirty, but what the hell.

My part’s been largely working the administrative angles with K.  I’m the Board Secretary, so I’ve filed the incorporation paperwork and will be sending off the IRS Form 1023 this weekend in order to get our official tax-exempt status.  We got word yesterday that we were incorporated on July 7th!  (BTW, it’s very cool that information goes online at the NC Secretary of State faster than it goes out in snail mail.)

My colleagues are working with their friends on the branding, etc.  Hopefully we’ll be announcing a coming out party soon.

So, you see, I wasn’t really hangin’ with Galt – I’ve just been working on things I couldn’t be public about until now

I never felt that I knew Dick very well.  Of course, growing up, we didn’t call him that.  We always called him Grandpa S.  We saw him once every few years, but with a thousand miles between Baton Rouge and Des Moines, I suppose that wasn’t too surprising.  While it came 20 years later than I would have liked, I have appreciated being here today and at the visitation yesterday, hearing everyone’s impressions of the man that my grandfather was.

As generous as you have all been, I would like to share a few stories of my own.  They define how I remember Richard S.

• About ten years ago, shortly after I finished graduate school, grandpa drove down from Iowa for the graduation ceremony.  While he was there, he hung several paintings that we had left sitting around the house for a few months; fixed an armoire with stripped screws using toothpicks and wood glue (a trick I’ve used ever since); and started talking with K and me about coming back down to build in some book cases (an offer that we regret not taking him up on).  I’ve also seen work he’s done for others… a cross at his church, a display cabinet at his retirement home, a … well, I’m sure many of you have your own examples.  From this I see Richard as a skilled man generous with his time.
• One of those examples of his sharing his talents is when he came down to Baton Rouge and helped my father convert the attic into a bedroom for my brother, Geoff, and me.  When it came time to build the nooks for the beds, my father did the practical thing and measured the mattresses to figure out the proper length of the bed nooks.  Grandpa came along and added an extra six inches.  Later, he told us proudly that he did that so that as we grew to be as talk as he was, we would appreciate the space for our feet to hang off the bed.  Now, I might be 5’10 on days when I feel like lying.  Over the past, nearly, 40 years, my feet have never hung off of a bed… unless, of course, my head is in the middle of it.  That I wasn’t going to reach 6’4″ was obvious at the time he was building the room; but yet, it struck me as beautifully optimistic.  An optimism worthy of my grandfather.
• Another time, the family was visiting Des Moines.  I don’t remember where, exactly, we were, perhaps either Irma’s or Norma’s house and we were making “lefse…”  thin, Norweigan potato pancakes that you spread butter and sugar on, roll up and eat.  My mother had been teaching me and Geoff how to cook and so Dick was telling us how the lefse were made.  Now, if you didn’t know (and I can’t imagine that you didn’t), Richard had a *terrible* sense of humor.  There were puns and shaggy dog stories, all of which I’ll spare you.  So as grandpa had talked us through making the lefse dough he tells us that you cook the lefse in an iron pan and that the iron pan is *very* important.  Well, we were a couple of inquisitive, scientifically minded children.  Geoff and I were learning to cook and I could imagine of a few reasons why an iron pan might be needed.  So someone asked, ‘why an iron pan?’  His face lit up.  In hindsight, you could see it.  He gave us the setup and we took the bait.  Grinning broadly he said, “because Norwegians can’t say Aluminumunumum.”  If anyone has other examples of Dick’s humor, please don’t tell me.  Although in fairness, that might also be why grandpa’s lefse didn’t have cinamoniumum.
• I’ve covered his skills in woodworking, his generosity in sharing those skills, his optimism and his terrible sense of humor.  In my mind, the last thing that defined my grandfather was his love of God.  You could see this in his relationship to his church and his trips to the holy land.  It was for that reason that K and I asked him to officiate at our wedding.  As the groom, I honestly don’t remember that much about homily, although some time in the 3rd hour, it did occur to me that it might have been a bit long .

In all seriousness, I believe that having grandpa officiate at our wedding was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.  It made the ceremony that much more special to both K and me.

As I said earlier, I’ve never felt that I knew my grandfather as well as I would have liked; but I feel privileged to have known him as well as I did.

So, that’s roughly what I’m thinking.  I’ll have to re-read it tomorrow to see if I still want to say it.

I never did know my grandfather that well.  Of my five grandparents, he was the one whom we visited least while growing up.  There’s also the difficulty of understanding someone 50+ years older than you.  And his general Norwegian disposition, a silent doer, made it difficult to know what was in his head. I suspect you got to know my grandfather more by working with him than talking to him.

By the time I was in my twenties, my family started to have more contact with my grandfather.  He drove down to NC for my graduation ceremony.  We talked some about having him down again to help build some bookshelves.  (One of the things I know about him is that he was an excellent wood worker.  He’s built all sorts of furniture, and I think even the cross that hangs in his church.)  That was 11 years ago, and one of the last times I saw him before his stroke: a tall strong man in his early 70s.  The last time I saw him, was three years ago on his 80th birthday.  He was still mentally aware, and remained that way through this week.  We still don’t have any details on his funeral.  I’m hoping we get them soon enough to make plans to travel to Iowa.

Sorry for the rough stream of conciousness post.  My head’s not all here.

• May 16: An inauspicious start to a vacation.  Neither K nor I were particularly in the mood for heading out of town.  We were seriously contemplating not going next year and possibly even forgoing the plane fare this year and bailing.  I had been putting in too many hours working on a project for work, and K was have some difficult times with her rehab.  That said, we dropped of the dogs and headed out to RDU.  Unfortunately, the Delta/Northwest merger meant that instead of taking RDU->MSP->BZN flights, we were taking RDU->ATL->MSP->BZN (yes, 3 flights) and upon checking in, it seemed that we were going to be delayed in getting to Atlanta   Well, that worked out okay.  We got into ATL at 5:30 and our MSP flight left at 6:35.  Oh wait, no – it, too, was late and left at 8:00pm.  That meant that in spite of the assurances of several Delta and Northwest agents, we landed at MSP at 9:30 – the same time the BZN flight left.  Well, it turns out that we weren’t the only ones in that situation (‘and if you ever find yourself in that situation, there’s only one thing you can do: sing a few bars of “Alice’s Restaurant”‘).  Delta left 17 of us stranded in MSP, while their computers showed that they were only stranding 3.  Delta proposed routing many of us to Salt Lake City (SLC?) where we could catch a flight to BZN in the morning.  Of course, unless we were flying first class, we would have to eat the costs of staying in SLC.  One woman vociferously complained (though it later turned out that she had already been booked for a morning flight to SLC).  When we arrived at SLC, they had hotel and meal vouchers waiting for us (score!).  So a night at a very gracious Comfort Suites capped the day.  FWIW, on the IT front, the Delta/NW merger has been pathetic – at every point where a user interacts with their computers, they have a front-end which redirects you to the appropriate computer system: Delta or Northwest.  It’s no wonder they can’t figure out that they stranded 17 people, they can’t even make good sense of their different flight numbers!
• May 17: Relatively uneventful.  We grabbed the shuttle to the airport.  SLC is apparently one of the few airports now invading your privacy by looking at your privates through millimeter radar.  They redirected our line through the system where they had you enter the scanner.  They proceeded to use the Twister spinners to dictate how you place your hands above your head while performing a pelvic thrust for the sensors, then getting annoyed when you didn’t understand the first time that you should pretend to be flashing teenage school girls in order to get the posture correct.  Once it was done, they had to fondle your pocket regions.  No, that’s not a euphemism.  The wavelength of the radar is apparently too short to penetrate the pockets on (men’s?) pants and they then have a pissy highschool educated TSA weenie with delusions of grandeur frisk your pockets.  FWIW, I’m equally pissed at myself that I went through the damn thing.  I should have insisted on a pat-down.  If someone is going to violate my person, I want to get a good look at ‘em while they are doing it.  Having the person sit in an anonymous room getting their jollies just isn’t cool.  So, once we got through the faux-security checkpoint, we ran into the woman who complained in MSP (and got us free lodging)!  We made it to BZN – though our luggage didn’t, rented a RAV4 and went to our hotel.  The luggage showed up around 5pm.  Lucky for Delta, otherwise, they could have had it delivered to our final destination, Cooke City – 3 hours away.
• May 18: bought supplies and headed into Yellowstone.  We didn’t see much on the drive in and we didn’t go out to the park in the evening: too tired.  The beds were great (pillowtop mattresses) and the kitchen was very nice.  I wasn’t too sure about having a TV in the room, but having a phone that we could use after hours was nice.
• May 19: First real day in the Park.  We did get a late start in the morning, but the viewing was great.  We saw a wolf on the northern ridge above the Lamar valley.  People were saying that he was a part of the same group that killed several coyote pups in the valley the night before.  We saw a grizzly bear, a coyote, a bald eagle and a golden eagle (on a old kill).  That evening we went out again, we saw two grizzly and lots of bison with their young calves, also a very nice scenic view, complete with DRAMATIC LIGHTING.  (* all of the images in this series are original jpegs without the color correction, etc. that will be applied later)

I still don’t know if I’ll try to go to the reunion or not, but either way, I’ve thought more about high school this past week than I have in a decade.  If I hadn’t thrown out the year books (I think), I might go through them and see what all I’m forgetting.

I began planting late winter/early spring crops back in February and they’re starting to come into harvest.  The picture below is from a week ago and the plants have since grown significantly larger.  Last week we did an arugula [1] and basil pesto, this week it’s been a salad and probably spinach quiche [2].  I think that by the time everything starts to bolt, it’ll be warm enough for summer vegetables.

Let’s see, clockwise from the bottom right, the boxes are growing: 1) spinach, arugula and leeks; 2) kale, lettuce and a mesclun mix (not to be confused with mescaline – that’s a completely different plant ); 3) broccoli, beets and fennel; and 4) peas, carrots and turnips.  Yeah, I went a bit overboard.  I figure that we’ve got about a month for harvest, the kale/lettuce/mesclun will wrap up first.  Last will be the broccoli/fennel/beets plus the leeks which won’t finish developing until late summer.

Footnotes:

[1] It seems like every liberal type I know who has planted a garden is growing arugula.  FWIW, I suspect there are two reasons for this: 1) it’s awesome, and 2) it’s a big FU to the republicans who thought that “arugula eater” was an insult.  If it makes you happier, call it rocket – the southern corruption of roquette.

[2] Yeah, don’t give me that “real men” b.s.  We’re talking about a meal with a pie crust, cheese, cream and 3 or 4 eggs.  It’s a heart attack waiting to happen, which as near as I can tell is what makes it something a “real man” would eat

April 1, 2009

Dear Employees of XXX,

We have been tasked by XXX’s management to identify appropriate solutions for XXX’s computing needs.  As you may know, Microsoft will be terminating it’s support for Windows XP.  With complaints about Windows rising, and the looming lack of support for XP, we began considering a company-wide migration to Linux.  However, Linux is based on the Unix (Posix) standard which is almost 40 years old.  For that reason, we have settled on the latest operating system from the same inventors: Plan 9 from Bell Labs.  http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/

Plan 9 is the latest in research operating systems and should be a great fit with the work we perform at XXX.  That said, Plan 9 may not support all hardware that we own.  In order to ensure a painless transition, we ask that all employees review the Plan 9 “Supported PC Hardware” page at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Supported_PC_hardware/index.html

Fortunately, Plan 9 has a large supported software base.  Common software such as Python, GCC and TeX are fully supported in Plan 9.  Other POSIX programs can be compiled through the use of APE
(http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/ape.html).  Common desktop tasks such as word processing and web browsing can be accomplished through the pre-installed OpenOffice (a MS Office clone) and one of the Plan 9 web-browsers (Mothra, Abaco or Charon), respectively.  Unfortunately, Mathworks, has not yet seen fit to port Matlab to Plan 9.  We are confident that by using APE, we will be able to port Octave as an
acceptable alternative.  This transition will have the added benefit of drastically reducing our licensing costs.

We anticipate that this transition will benefit XXX greatly in the long run and that you will grow to love the Plan 9 experience.  We look forward to working with you over the next twelve months and anticipate
completing the migration by the next April Fool’s Day, April 1st 2010.

Insincerely,
Chris and Mark

We did have at least one person think we were serious and a couple of people that we had going until they finished the email.  All in all, not too bad for a half hour’s work last night.