You win some, you lose some.
Friday 03.24.06
Friday 03.17.06
About a package I was s'posed to get today, UPS online tracking now says
Your package is in the UPS system and has a rescheduled delivery date of 03/20/2006.Cool. Nice to know it isn't delayed or late or anything, just rescheduled.
Thursday 03.16.06
Amr Mohsen's trial concluded yesterday. The jury found Amr guilty of attempted witness tampering, guilty of soliciting arson, and not guilty of soliciting murder. More info in the court documents. Sentencing is set for July 14.
update: sentencing continued to September 15.
Wednesday 03.15.06
Tuesday 03.14.06
From Robert Fripp's online diary, an encounter at a Mexican restaurant:
The mariachi trio came to our table, and invited a request. I asked: if you knew you were going to die in 10 minutes, what would you play?
Monday 03.13.06
Raleigh Collins (née Roland Shook), a climbing buddy of mine, committed suicide last night. He jumped off the top of one of his favorite climbs (Leave it to Beaver, 5.12a) in Joshua Tree National Park.
Raleigh was the most adept climber I've ever climbed much with. I learned a lot from him: climbing technique, how to develop bolted routes, how to tie a cool knot I've never seen anywhere else, and more. He and I had a bunch of inside jokes that I can't share with him any more.
Why did Raleigh end it all? It's my understanding that he got in trouble with the law and was facing potentially serious consequences. I hadn't seen him in a while, I can't speak about his state of mind of late.
Hearing about Raleigh's death made me reflect on his life--the good points and the bad points (in his case, both strong at times). He was a kind of Jekyll/Hyde character, with the latter often coming to the fore when alcohol was involved. If you only knew his bad side, you didn't know the whole man; ditto if you only knew his good side.
It takes time for a death to fully register with me. I'm at a loss to describe the range of emotions I'm feeling now; let it suffice to say I'm sad and shook up.
Sunday 03.12.06
Went climbing with Ralphie today; neither of us wanted to be the wuss who said it's too cold. Air temperature was about 38°F and rock temperature probably lower. Fingers still grip in these conditions, but it's unnerving to pull hard when no sensation is coming from your fingertips except cold.
Ralphie's a fine climbing partner: doesn't mind if it's cold or hot or windy or whatever, climbs hard, and is always in a fun mood.
I've been asked to play music at Ralph + Sonja's wedding this November. That's forced me to get more serious about practicing. Did you know that the piece we know as "Here Comes the Bride" is from Wagner's Lohengrin? It adapts OK for marimba.
When I was about 13, I wanted to write a computer program to play chess. I was naïve, I thought computers were supposed to be blindingly fast, and that a program could consider every move, every countermove, every countermove to that, looking, say, 10 moves into the future (to a depth of 10 ply, as I later learned it's called in game programming jargon). Chess programs do consider moves and countermoves--but machines still aren't fast enough to evaluate every move to 10 ply (and let's not talk about how much slower machines were when I was 13). Programs have to limit their search both in breadth and depth.
I never wrote a chess program, but I followed the progress of computer chess with interest. I was captivated watching the games in the Deep Blue : Kasparov match live over the Internet in 1997--the first time a program won a match against the world's strongest player.
A few years ago, while taking a break from work, I again got interested in the idea of writing a game playing program--but not to play chess, for a bunch of reasons (not the least of which was that chess had already been programmed extensively). I wanted to try my hand at writing a program for a game that needed some new ideas beyond the techniques that had been developed for chess programs.
I also liked the idea of programming a game that, by its nature, was harder to analyze than chess. Computer Go, for example, is nowhere near as advanced as computer chess. Go masters can still beat any program on the planet. But Go never really grabbed me, so I started thinking about programming Hex instead.
Hex is a board game, independently devised by several people in the mid 20th century (and thus doesn't have the rich history that Go does). But as is the case with Go, Hex strategy depends on pattern recognition in a way that chess doesn't, making Hex harder to program than chess. Hex programs still can't beat the best players (on, say, a 12x12 or larger board; like Go, Hex can be played on boards of various sizes).
Hex has a small but devoted following. I had played (online) for a while a few years ago, but I stopped when most of the players I knew migrated to a web site that supported playing at a much slower pace--games played over the course of days rather than minutes. I've just recently gotten back into playing again.
Hex has perhaps the simplest rules of any board game, but its strategy is complex. If you can appreciate how the patterns in the Mandelbrot Set arise from simple rules, then you can imagine what I like about Hex.
I also like that it's played by a small community, for many of the same reasons why I like living in a small town.
And who knows, a particular Hex tactic may be the only thing anyone ever remembers me for a hundred years from now.
I never did write a Hex program. I studied the existing Hex programs and I racked my brain, but I didn't come up with an approach that hadn't been tried before.
Sunday 03.05.06
A neighbor boy (12 or so years old) and a few of his friends walked over today while I was doing some work outside and chatted with me for a while. Our conversation was fairly straightforward until the boy asked me about someone else, at which point the discussion became complicated and laden with subtext:
| boy: | Do you know <person X>? |
| Tommy: | I know him. (I know a lot more about him than I want to say.) |
| boy: | Do you like him? (boy doesn't like <person X> and is looking for confirmation of his feelings) |
| Tommy: | I'd rather not say anything bad about someone. But I don't hang out with him. (I am obliquely admitting that I don't like him) |
| boy: | Is he gay? |
| Tommy: | I don't think so. (I know for sure that he isn't, but I don't want to let on that I have even spent enough time with <person X> to be sure. Meanwhile, I'm wondering where the fuck this question came from, why it matters, whether the boy knows I am gay, whether he cares, and so on. All the while I'm careful not to show anything with my facial expression.) |
Now, understand that this is in our first conversation; a friend of his has just introduced us.
Why didn't I say much about <person X>? Many reasons. For one, I live in a small town where gossip is rampant, and I wanted the boy to have the experience of seeing someone not gossip for a change.
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