July 2008 Archives

Back from camping - such as it was.  Addie was apparently hit by a car but shows no real signs of having suffered any damage - the driver drove off, this was reported third hand, so I can only assume that she completely caved in the front of the car as any good tank-like dog would do.  The vet said that if she wasn't bleeding profusely and walking on shattered limbs that she was probably fine, just watch for lethargy.  She's a 9 year old dog and sort of pudgy, lethargic is pretty much how you describe her on a good day.  But yes, she's fine.  However the whole process pushed me over a threshold I didn't realize I was near.

I have now been cited and fined by every level of government as near as I can tell.  The University of Washington campus has to be considered some sort of demi-city (damage to property for riding my bike where I shouldn't have), city (parking tickets), county (speeding), state (speeding again), and now the federal government for - and I'm quoting here - "Dog in a closed area".  $75.  Then again for "Dog off leash". Another $75.

That first citation really translates to "dogs where there aren't supposed to be dogs" because, apparently, dogs are forbidden in national parks.  National forests are fine, as are state parks and forests where they are also considered "restrained" if under strict voice control - It's just national parks that are a no go.  God only knows the terror and havoc they've been conditioned to unleash in parks but not forests.  But anyway, all of you fellow dog owning car camping Seattle-ites, next time I say we head for the olympic state park.

I've got two projects that I'm far too excited about for what they actually are - so much so that I've given them semi-sinister sounding names because all good projects require names.  And henchmen, but I'm still a little lacking on that front.

Project Arcturus is my scattershot random picture project - I'm going to scatter 100 disposable cameras around the city in neat little yellow boxes that say, "hey, congrats on being one of the less than 1% of folks even willing to pick up a box like this let alone look inside.  Now comes the fun, you're part of a participatory art project.  Take some pictures of you, your friends, your family, funny looking dogs, whatever, and mail them back to me in the envelope provided (don't worry, I'm covering postage) and together we'll make something cool.  Look at this website for more info and updates".  I think it'll be smashing and I hope that I'll get fewer than 5% pictures of people's junk (both literally and scatalogically).  So Arcturus is progressing nicely with a source for cheap disposable cameras, cheap remailing envelopes and potentially cheap boxes to put them in (though I'll probably have to spray paint them yellow).  Now the only problem is where to get 100 rolls of film developed somewhat cheaply.  I looked into doing it myself at home and despite the opportunity to play with caustic chemicals it's just too expensive still.

Project Aurae is much less interesting but probably more useful overall - with the iPhone SDK now out I've been working on a scrabble dictionary application for it - with "find me a bingo with these letters" functionatly and everything.  "But zack, what use is that application when your iPhone already has teh interwebs and there are free dictionaries online?" you say.  Well, yes, that is a rather huge gaping hole in my plan and part of the reason this idea is unlikely to make me massively wealthy.  Mostly it's because finding quick ways for a computer to find words that match your letters is just an interesting problem to me.

Lastly - you now have to think ever so slightly harder if you want to comment here.  As Mikey rightly pointed out the russian mafia/spammers had sucessfully migrated to the new format and my anti-spam-fu is weak.  However I read recently about reCaptcha and I like what they're doing.  It's one of those "squiggly words" tests (captchas) except what these folks do is use it to help digitize old books for the library of congress or google or whomever.  They give you two words, one of which they already know the answer to and the other their computers have had a hard time with.  If you get the one right they assume the other is also good and - tada - you've helped digitize a book.  Swanky no?  If you get a particularly hard one (I got a giant black box one time) just click the little refresh button and they'll happily send you more words.