Open Letter to Whomever Stole My Bike

The Guy Whose Bike You Stole

Enjoy It.
Seriously, I mean it.
Some things I think you should be aware of though.

1. That thing was made by JC Penney (They made bicycles?) around the late 1970s; and has untold numbers of rust spots on it. Notice how the seat is up somewhat high on it? It isn’t because I’m tall, oh no; it’s because the nut is actually rusted on. You know, I once tried some WD-40, and it didn’t work on it either. Maybe you’ll have better luck.

2. The back brakes don’t work at all, while the front brakes squeak worse than anything else I’ve ever heard. Come to think of it, the wheels squeak just by virtue of spinning too.

3. The front reflector has a nasty habit of actually not being existent anymore, and with the strange mount that it uses? Good luck finding a replacement.

4. Notice how that front wheel wobbles a bit? Yeah, that won’t be going away.

5. The chain is far too long causing extreme pain whilst going up any incline; speaking of which…

6. Note how it displays proudly on the front that it’s a “five speed” bike?
It hasn’t been five speed since the early days of the Reagan administration.

7. The seat was not only placed far too high, but is also ripped in a rather awkward way. I hope you enjoy that especially.

8. The kickstand? Rusted over.

9. The bike “lock” on it? Yeah. The code wasn’t even resettable / was easily unlockable with a biro/pen.

You know, come to think of it, I never much cared for the color either. The shade of brown never quite suited me. In fact, I’m fairly sure that had the thing actually somehow gained sentience, that its first conscious act would be to commit suicide in the Mill Stream simply due to this fact alone.

It must be mentioned that I was planning on actually replacing it within short order, and was wondering how to properly dispose of said bicycle; luckily, you made it that much easier – no more will I actually need to consider abandoning it outside of a thrift store or behind someone’s truck in an ingenious scheme to gain insurance money.

Wow, this is actually the best theft over, no joke; now off to Craigslist to find a vintage Schwinn bike.

With Much Love,

The Guy Whose Bike You Stole

There were a couple of fun things we had, but I think Scott’s Horrible Video Game panel was one of the coolest things I got to do all con.  I recorded it on my camera, and even though it’s crappy quality, I’m gonna see if I can’t stitch together a Youtube post featuring it in the next week or so.  Standard work for a lot of the rest of the con, but even so, it was pretty fun.

It’s been fun, but it’s time for the new-old-guard to start moving on…  And time for me to actually get to work on the work that needs to be done for this semester.

P.S. djpretzel, Liontamer, and zircon were all awesome guests.  I didn’t see the others as much, but I think this years’ guests were all great and courteous guests and generally cool to hang out with!  Even though…  I kinda stayed in the ops room for half the con again.

• Finish the one outstanding lab for Physics research (Tomorrow and Monday)
• Check on stuff to be done for CS research
• Contact the first three volunteers for Genericon I’ve gotten wind of.
• Get the video game submission forms up (by Friday)
• Finish the DB Systems homework (by Monday)
• Tinker more with SemWeb class project
• Get a photo to the person who needed it for some RPI website thing
• Contact the Union Sysadmin to get the RSFA the privileges it needs to run MySQL for the library
• Check again with all previous requests for panels and volunteering that I never got a response from
• Check on postering SUNY Albany and getting over to check Union (and possibly Siena) for Genericon
• Meet with TA helping with Physics research
• Check data quality from Physics research
• Figure out about Austin flight in January, ‘hack-a-thon’ also, and anything else Jim might have gleaned that would be useful to me at ISWC.
• Actually make time to read RDFPeers and cwm papers (on the plane tomorrow?)
• Write paper due for HCI on Thursday
• Read some for History class
• Fix first draft of grad school application personal statement
• Finish application process for grad schools to the point where requests for recommendations go out (by Wednesday)
• Contact University of Toronto to find out a bit more about the application process for US students.
• Do just a tad more research to find out exactly what SemWeb/KR stuff is going on at the colleges I picked so I can tailor my personal statement.
• Find out if I can get another opinion on the personal statement for grad school applications
• Get paperwork in for Independent Study next semester
• Fix minor issues with Panel (removeslashes) and Registration (fix date) pages.
• LOW: Actually watch the rest of Lucky Star and/or Pale Cocoon
• LOW: Actually get some more purple coin stars in Galaxy

I’ve got a lot to do, but I’m doing alright I think…  At least I got my very first draft of a personal statement done for grad school applications, and the DB systems homework is nearly done (or at least functional.  Not fast.) Oh, and I just installed Leopard on my laptop.  Desktop comes when I get back to school.  Also, I purchased a 49-key keyboard (the piano kind)  

This course is an introduction to some of the major genres of Japanese animation: sci-fi/cyberpunk/mecha, apocalypse, gothic/noir, romantic comedy, and epic. We will discuss anime’s distinctive paradigms and its narrative and visual styles with attention to anime’s development and circulation in postwar Japanese culture and to its contemporary commercial and cultural globalization. Students will be required to view all the films before we discuss them in class (generally a 2-hour feature a week) and to watch one entire TV series on their own over the course of the semester. The reading load for this class is heavy and some of the readings are difficult. If you are not interested in film theory, you will not like this class. Because anime is a new field of film studies, relatively speaking, some readings are in early film theory, from a time when critics and theorists were trying to articulate what was significant about film as a new medium for art and experience. Though we are not seeing photographs animated for the first time, the advent of anime is something like a new medium and a new aesthetic. Other readings are critical analyses of particular works. We read these both for the writer’s particular insights into the film and for ideas about what it might be important to notice about anime in general or specific genres of anime or about animation. We may also read about the history of producing animation in general to help us understand the production of anime in particular. There are short writing assignments about the films during the semester and a final exam that covers the films and the readings.

That being said, everything up to now (and my quietness) has a fairly long backstory.

It started back in November of last year, when an attempt to renew pipian.com went horribly wrong (Thanks RegisterFly!) $130 and nearly two months later, I finally got it back and, by that time, had started on a new project.

This project is still somewhat secret as it’s incomplete at this time, but it’s progressing well (and some of you already know of it) and will hopefully will be marketable by the summer (crossing my fingers of course).

In the process of working on this and getting back into the groove at school (and in all the hecticness of setting up and being Chief of Operations at Genericon XX) I managed to finally (and briefly) meet Jim Hendler, who is currently in the process of moving to take a constellation chair at RPI this semester. This got me thinking.

One of the items that my ‘secret’ project needs is something of a stable geospatial framework of coordinates, cities, and hierarchies, to enable intuitive and ‘smart’ discovery of as many cities as possible, and as needed. Thus, I came up with the concept of the Semantic Web Locationary, utilizing several well-known semantic ontologies and several free/libre data sources to accurately describe many geopolitical constructs (mainly hierarchies of city->province->country->continent->Earth styles).

I figured this would both help to get my feet wet in a seriously usable semantic web context (The Geonames.org ontology is not terribly human-friendly, even if machine-friendly and more detailed than the Locationary) as well as offering a framework for my program to rest on as well as offer a static reference for other semantic applications (foaf:basedNear anyone?).

At any rate, it’s somewhat stable now, in so far as all the MAIN parts are implemented (if a bit in semantic flux at the moment), so I can move closer back to the project by overlaying one more data store over the existing Locationary (Arash Partow’s Global Airport Database, given the fact that DAML no longer has their airport script online, DAFIF is no longer available, and my project needs airport locations) and probably making that publically available as well…

More information about what I’m REALLY planning with this semantic data when the project gets closer to completion.

I promise I’ll talk more when I can actually get some sleep (i.e. Friday night maybe)

I might be able to get something useful done and earn some money for once too.

Also something cool I just learned: The venerable xscreensaver has a native Mac OS X port. Now I can have GLMatrix again! (Poor Windows doesn’t get it, and XGL doesn’t like displaying OpenGL in its windows)

Oh, I’ve been working a little on the side-project, but it’s on hold until I finish Pokemon Emerald, and still has a long way to go besides.

This week is not fun, and I’m just making it worse by playing it… *sigh*

Eventually I’ll get back to it and finishing Disgaea…