adam.oliner.net

Confrontations are often turn-based, where each person ups the ante until the other backs down. Sometimes, however, one party decides to escalate the situation clear into the realm of insanity. Such was the case the other night, when another driver decided to run my father off the road. By this point my dad had done nothing more that look at this man (who we will call Mr. Crazy) as he passed him on the highway; Mr. Crazy responded first with wild gesticulations and then by following my father until he began to get off the exit ramp. It was at that point that the not-so-gentleman intentionally hit my dad’s car.

I’m proud of what my dad did next, and I like to think I would have done the same. To summarize: “Aw, hell no.” My dad began following Mr. Crazy, while simultaneously calling the police. He led my father on a winding tour of backroads, trying to lose him. With each turn my father updated the officers on Mr. Crazy’s location until the flashing lights became visible and converged on him like the closing hand of God. Four black and whites and an undercover car responded to the call. Mr. Crazy decided, against all logic and reason, to abandon his car and flee on foot into the backyards of Framingham suburbia. It is with no amount of shock that I report the man was quickly tackled and subdued. My father identified the man as the driver who hit him. Mr. Crazy was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and (shock!) driving while intoxicated.

On a positive note, congratulations to Ben Liblit on winning the ACM PhD Dissertation Award. Ben is a former student of my advisor, Alex Aiken. Slashdot carried the story a few days ago. I’ve been using his tools and hacking around in his code as part of my own work, which makes me feel special by extension. Leeched glory! (Ben suggests that I “try to pull off the same trick.” I’ll do my best, man.)

Here’s a link if you’d like to visualize where your tax dollars are going.

My time is otherwise occupied by finding a place to live in Albuquerque this summer, finding a dog-friendly place to live near Stanford next fall, finding a brilliant research topic, and reading scientific papers like it’s my job. Which, to some degree, it is.

This weekend I’ll be backpacking on The Lost Coast, a stretch of untouched coastline in Northern California. It should be cold, windy, rainy, and absolutely gorgeous. Don’t even act like you think I won’t take pictures. That’s just crazy.

Before my PSA, let me thank all those of you who offered their canid-related counsel on my previous post. My hypothetical pooch and I are grateful.

Last night, the intrepid Dave Balint placed upon me a weighty burden: to save the boobies.

“If there’s anyway it you could work it into your site, it would be great if you could post a link to my Avon Breast Cancer Fundraising endeavor.”

Despite the name of the Boston event, I am reasonably confident that the Walk’s purpose is set against breast cancer, rather that for it as the name might suggest. Dave is the one on the left in the boat, snarling like a wild beast. The others I can only conclude are his ninja bodyguards of the Hoodie Clan. I don’t know why they are in a boat but I can assure you that cancer is displeased.

I know many of you are still in Boston, and I encourage you to support Dave by donating, volunteering, or beating up cancer if you should happen upon it in a side alley on a dusky eve. Those of you not in Boston should donate, because it is both a socially acceptable way to show your support for breasts (pun intended), and a great opportunity to get silly names to appear on Dave’s Fundraising Honor Roll. Seize it.

I haven’t posted in a while, so I’ll have to enact the shotgun approach to blogging: killing all of my readers with a shotgun. Hang on, my editor is telling me that, in fact, the shotgun approach means shooting off lots of smaller updates in lieu of a single, cohesive entry. Pity, that. I was both locked and loaded.

I met John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, in an elevator. For those of you in the biz (whatever that means) you should be familiar with the term “elevator speech.” It means a short pitch that shouldn’t last any longer than the short time you may suddenly find yourself sharing in an elevator with Mr. Important. I always thought about it as a metaphor, but there I was with Mr. Chambers. I’m not looking for a job, venture capital, nor really… anything. So I didn’t make a pitch, but I introduced myself and joked, “Quick, what’s my elevator speech? Hit [the button for] 5! I need more time!” John and his entourage got a real kick out of this, apparently, because they continued laughing until I left the elevator. Jacob, who witnessed the exchange, suggests that I had primed him to listen to whatever I may have wanted to pitch. Which, unfortunately, was nothing.

Jane has been helping me get my recommended monthly allowance of culture, inviting me for group voyages to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the local opera to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. The museum had an exhibit of 18th century artists from Kyoto. I have long been fascinated by Japanese culture, an intrigue that was only strengthened by my trip to Japan last summer and my persistent consumption of anime. It was wonderful to see the artists’ renditions of a China they knew only from the descriptions and drawings of exiled Chinese monks who had fled to the isolationist Japan. I was also very proud of myself for being able to point out in the artwork temples that I had visited while in Kyoto. The opera was enjoyable but plot-wise ridiculous, which might be a tautology. Nearly everyone is dead or miserable at the end, which might also be a redundant comment.

My trips to Greece and England are planned, meaning I have plane tickets. I spend the last week of April at a conference on the Isle of Rhodes in Greece and then fly back through London to spend a week at Oxford with Yong-Hwa, who goes to the opera with the kind of frequency that I watch anime. While we’re on the subject of conferences, I had a paper rejected recently, which is always disheartening. One of the reviewers (who are “blind” and therefore cannot see the author names) pronounced that the analysis we used was reminiscent of work Larry Rudolph had been doing for 20 years, and that he would be surprised if it hadn’t been applied to this problem before. Larry was a coauthor. It hadn’t been done before. I got a kick out of that, as did Larry. We are reworking the paper for submission to a conference in Australia (ICS 06)! One door closes, one opens, and all that.

I’ve been investigating the possibility of getting a dog. I wouldn’t be able to do that unless I moved into a pet-friendly apartment in the fall. As a first-time dog owner, I probably won’t be getting a troublesome breed like an Akita or Husky. A Labrador or Golden would be most appropriate. But, man, if I can find a Siberian Husky with the mannerisms of a Lab (or, far less likely, a Lab with the appearance of a Siberian Husky), I would be all over that like a fat kid on a cupcake. There are a number of issues I need to consider, including what to do with the dog when I go on trips, how I can afford it, whether I can bring it to the office, and so on. Will I really be OK with dog hair on my stuff? What about allergies? Would it prevent me from finding affordable housing? Am I fine with picking up its poop for the next… decade?

I’m sure half of you have success stories owning pets and the other half have tales of horror. So, what do you think? What advice would you give a guy who’s considering canine companionship?

Sometimes I feel like a Pokemon trainer of academia. It’s as though I’m trying to catch ‘em all. I’ve got (or am working on) MIT, Stanford, IBM, Google, LLNL, Sandia, IEEE publications, ACM publications, book chapter, fellowships, two BSs, an MEng, and a PhD. I just need Dorkizard and I can take on Team Nerd in the tournament. My next conference trip is IPDPS in Rhodes Island, Greece. It looks like I’ll be making a stopover in England on the way home to visit Yong-Hwa at Oxford. She is truly a Pokemon Master.

This past weekend included Peter’s Australia Day party, during which time I ate copious amounts of guacamole, smoked salmon, and fairy bread. I know what you’re thinking: “Adam, you promised to fix your photo galleries and still haven’t done it. What gives?” Right after that, you’re thinking, “What the deuce is fairy bread?” It’s a popular dish in Australia, you uncultured buffoon. Now, bring me my brandy and sprinkles.

Before that, I spent a weekend at Sierra near Lake Tahoe, learning to snowboard. From what I now know of snowboarding, and from what Colin has told me about abusive homosexual relationships, I would say that snowboarding is a bit like an abusive homosexual relationship. You take a severe beating, convince yourself that its worth it and that you are happy, and at the end of the day your ass is killing you. There will be nonpornographic photos of the snowboarding and gorgeous Tahoe scenery posted as soon as I keep my word and fix the galleries. I hope this little metaphor didn’t offend anyone. Except Colin, obviously. I think it’s safe to say his panties will be considerably bunched.

I’ll leave you with today’s political gem. As you are aware, Hamas recently won in landslide Palestinian elections. These well-known supporters of terrorism were elected democratically, so you’d think the Bush administration would be thrilled. After all, bringing democracy to the Middle East was the reason for invading Iraq, right? Well, no, it was WMDs. Remember when Saddam was an imminent threat? Neither does the administration. Suddenly, they went from “we must fight for peace” to “fighting for peace makes no sense”:

“You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.” - Condoleezza Rice, January 30th, 2006.

“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.” - George W. Bush, June 18, 2002.

The Daily WTF supplies programmers and system administrators with an amusing glimpse at the worst of their field. For me, it was a remote thing, another world in which incompetent people wrote distressingly stupid code. In the last few days, I seem to have stumbled into that world; a stranger in a stupid land.

You may have already noticed that some of my website photo galleries appear nuked. Emtpy. Here’s how a stupid person made that happen by being incompetent perhaps months previous: Gallery is the software that runs the galleries (whatever its faults, the name is appropriate). Each album is stored as a text file. Precisely, it’s a serialized php object. Whenever someone makes a change or a comment on the album, Gallery reads in the serialized object, adds the new data, and writes it back out to that file. Now, imagine the hard drive is full. A non-retarded coder would check that there was space on the volume before writing the file back out. Instead, Gallery writes until it runs out of space, then leaves the truncated file on disk. This truncated file cannot be read back in because it is corrupted, and appears to you and me as the empty galleries. Luckily, in their infinite wisdom, the authors of this software also write a backup copy of this serialized album data. They do this immediately after writing any changes to the primary file. Do you see where this is going? Gallery starts writing the primary, fails, and leaves the broken file on disk, then overwrites the backup file, also leaving it truncated and useless. Brilliant. I am trying to hack the serialized files directly; perhaps I can resurrect my Japan pictures, which apparently had thousands of hits before dying unceremoniously.

Then, of course, there’s the gem pictured on the right. After upgrading Mac OS X and restarting, I was presented with that dialogue. I believe it to be a window display bug rather than an actual blank prompt, but the point is I both did not know what the problem was, nor did I have any choice but to fix it. I could click on the question mark, yes, but such measures are a sign of weakness. Whatever I fixed, fixed it was.

On it went: The Bank of America website specifically recommended using Safari, but in practice did not function properly until I used Firefox, which they do not support. The Play It Again Sports website listed an address that did not map to a single location. This echoed similar problems Joel suffered, in which Google was provided incorrect longitude/latitude coordinates and sent him on a wild goose chase.

Then I caught a glimpse of the news on TV while lifting, and I remembered something. In fact, I remembered everything: Bush, Iraq, WMDs, Intelligent Design, Rick Santorum, unchecked genocide in the Sudan, tension over Iran driven by a collision of religious mythology and nuclear technology, Bin Laden threatening the US with impunity provided to him by the impotence of our President, thousands upon tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians and American troops while the media obsesses over a single white woman, pro-lifers being simultaneously pro-death penalty, and a thousand other insanities that have surrounded me my entire life. I wasn’t a stranger in a stupid land. It was my land. There were just a few moments there where I had managed to insulate myself, to pretend that reason and kindess prevailed, to not be saddened by a world that is only just becoming my responsibility.

There is so much talk of solutions. Politicians proclaim that they will create peace in the middle east. Bush insists that he will defeat terrorism. Nearly a hundred million people stood behind him, most with not the slightest idea what that meant or how it would be accomplished. The news has never, in my memory, done a serious analysis of the motivations of terrorists. Jealous of our freedom? That might be the most stupid thing of all. Because everyone talks about fixing things, but all they see, all they know, is a blank dialogue box with a button. “Fix.” It’s about time people started asking questions. We’ve gone too far without clicking on the question mark.