This Friday is the last day to vote for SXSW panels, so if you haven’t yet, go check out the panel picker (and check out my presentation submission, too)! SXSW provided people with badges, so I figured I’d use one (see above). Yep, I think that’s about it.

I don’t like the semi-rimless because it makes me look old, and the totally rimless one makes me look evil because the transitions effect in them never goes away (they’re always kinda tinted). I wanted some thicker frames this time around but the plastic ones I tried on didn’t feel too great. So I ended up getting a pair of metal full frame glasses that are sorta dark green and have this weird temple design.

The lady at the eye place was really cool and helped me try on a bunch of frames. Many of them looked kind of girly or totally bad for my face. The lady definitely knew what was up with what worked and what didn’t. Unfortunately, the frames that I really liked cost a lot and weren’t included in my vision plan. I dunno if this was her ulterior motive or if she was just picking from all the stuff equally. She probably has some kind of incentive to pick more expensive frames; but she did suggest only the ones that I agreed looked good.

Anyway, it went between two good frames but the green ones won in the end. If I can’t get a green DS or a green Wii, at least I can get green glasses. They should be ready in a few weeks. I’ll just pick them up right when school starts since I’ll be out of town for a while in the next few weeks.

As a bonus, here are some funky frames I found that didn’t make the cut (but I didn’t bother taking pictures of the actual frames I ordered, whoops!):

A few weeks ago, I saw that SXSW Interactive was accepting applications for panel ideas. I’ve been playing a lot with analyzing social networks and network structure in and out of my coursework at the University of Michigan, so I wrote a panel proposal for a walkthrough of network theory and how it’s relevant and useful to companies and products that have some kind of social component.

My general motivation for proposing this is that I’m sure that a lot of companies have some really interesting network data about their users that isn’t being put to good use. Sure, a company like Microsoft or Yahoo will have their own research labs (this paper from Yahoo Research about the evolution of social networks is totally awesome), but smaller companies will most likely lack the resources and skills to do interesting network analysis. Hopefully my presentation will serve as a good starting point for people with access to rich network data to produce some really interesting data and maybe even share it. This kind of data is usually difficult to get access to, so it’s kind of a shame if the data exists and isn’t being used.

Anyway, check out my official submission here. It’d be cool if I could get some supporters to vote and comment on the thing, but I guess that might become kind of spammy as well. I also checked out a bunch of the proposals on the SXSW Panel Picker. Here’s a few I think look interesting:

Ruby Sinreich, Understanding Social Networks, Beyond the Graph - This one seems probably the most similar to mine, so it makes sense that it looks really interesting to me. It looks like rather than focusing on theory, this panel will be more practical in nature.

Mussie Shore, Bustin’ Social out of the Network - This one looks neat mainly because the speaker founded a mobile software company that was acquired by Google and now works on OpenSocial. Plus there’s a ton of positive comments already (wonder if he’s got his possee on this).

ian nieves, Discovery: The Future of Friend Search - Searching people is a problem that I’ve always had an interest in. Using network centrality measure makes sense to rank which people come up in a search. I’m interested in seeing what kind of algorithm this guy is using for friend search.

Russ Unger, Friendship is Dead - I just love the idea of this panel. The fact that people aren’t really people anymore; they’re just items to collect in Facebook. Kind of like Pokemon.

I haven’t gotten through all the panels but I’m hoping to skim through all the sections I might find interesting. Hopefully my idea will be interesting enough to be selected. Remember, sign up for a SXSW account, check out the Panel Picker, and vote for stuff (including me)!

Today I reached a sort of achievement (personal, not xbox live style) by doing the 10 reps of push-ups and side plank without collapsing or “dropping my hips” as my trainer likes to say. Although she asked even though I didn’t. Oh well. At least I know I accomplished this task.

Also, the lunges are freakin’ hard. I wonder if I’m doing them correctly. They make the leg that I step back with feel like they’re going to explode around the 9th or so rep. Lunges are probably the only exercise that hasn’t gotten easier since starting Wii Fit. I wonder why…

After Life (also called “Wonderful Life” in Japanese) is a film about what happens when you die. I’ve been wanting to watch this movie recently because a few people close to me have passed away in the last year. I was originally introduced to this film a few years ago in Japanese class by a classmate who was a philosophy grad student. After Life has a somewhat positive view on the afterlife, so I thought it’d be nice to watch.

The film’s afterlife is actually really similar to the world as we know it. Seasons change, electricity goes out and people get cold when it snows. The difference is that new visitors to the afterlife have a week to choose their most precious (大切な!) memory to immortalize in film form. Apparently they’ll watch their memory and then go on to yet another afterlife where they keep only that memory with them.

The idea is both liberating and excruciating at the same time. You can forget all the bad things that happened in life and cling onto one great memory. But you also have to leave all of your life’s work and focus on the one most important moment of your life.

The film works in sort of a pseudo-documentary/narrative mode where the dead counselors help the newly departed choose their memories. What follows is a candid look at the lives of 10 or so people. Some won’t stop talking about their womanizing ways while others think it would be cool to choose Splash Mountain. Apparently a lot of high school girls pick Splash Mountain.

In the midst of all this, there’s also a plotline concerning the relationship between two of the counselors. It turns out the counselors are dead, too. They’re all people who weren’t able to choose a memory. There’s a love story of sorts going on between them which kind of begs the question: why doesn’t everyone just choose to stay in the limbo afterlife instead of making a movie memory? They could literally live forever. Maybe people living in the limbo eventually fall out of love or get bored and decide to end it? I could imagine a number of Hamlet-style soliloquies proposing “to choose or not to choose?”

One of the recently dead, a young punk, starts messing with the counselors. He asks if he can use a dream as his memory, or even just make stuff up. He’s sort of the voice of reason in the movie. He asks the questions that I’d ask and prys much more than the other deceased. While watching I realized that the actor was also Morita in Honey & Clover, another Japanese movie I recently watched. Apparently he’s also in Casshern!

After all of the dead people choose their memories, the counselors get to work making their memories into mini-movies. After Life works because of its absolute earnestness. It really seems like a true documentary where these people are choosing their ultimate fates. They seem completely genuine when they’re describing the happiest moments of their lives and genuinely happy to see those moments recreated on set with actors portraying them. It probably helps that the director did a lot of actual documentaries before working on this movie.

After Life is a great movie because it successfully suspends disbelief. For the 118 minutes of the film, I’m convinced that when you die, you make a movie about your life, watch it, and relive that memory forever. That alone is wonderful, given our uncertainty of the afterlife while we’re still living.

So yeah, that’s what I have to say about After Life. It’s quirky, funny, thoughtful and genuine. I really dig it.

While on my drive back from the grocery store today, windshield down and blasting some “Of Montreal,” I overheard some sweet tunes coming from a truck during a red light. Instead of yelling at the driver for the name of the tune (he might not have known anyway), I turned off my radio, fired up this app, Shazam, and held it out the window for a few seconds. The app came back at me with the song title, artist, and other junk:

And here’s a link to buy the song (if I ever wanted to…)!

Pretty cool.

Then I hatched an ingenious plan to open a window and have the bat fly out of it! It worked!

I really have no idea how the bat got in, since the only windows open were the ones with screens. Maybe the bat squeezed through one? Or maybe it was a lame assassination attempt? We may never know the truth!

I went to see The Dark Knight in IMAX last night. It was pretty good. I mean, as far as movies go it was probably one of the best I’ve seen in years. But there was so much hype leading up to it that the movie was kind of wasted. My co-workers were really psyched about the movie. So listening to them continuously talk up the movie had its effect on me, I guess. If I had come in with no expectations, the movie would’ve been incredible. It still was, and it met the hype, but sometimes I feel the best way to go into a movie is with no expectations at all.

When I went to see Wall-e a few weeks ago (or maybe it was just last week), I had no idea what the movie was about. Okay, so I knew it had a robot in it. And that was about it. I ended up enjoying it a lot! I think we, as viewers, should just let the damn story tell itself. No spoilers, no trailers, maybe just a title.

Knowing as little as possible about a movie going into it probably gives the best chance for me to enjoy it.

When I woke up in the morning, not only was the site still throwing errors, it was also affecting my other websites as well. MapsKrieg, Notecentric, Basugasubakuhatsu, etc. So I figured I should find out what is going on. I sent a support request to MediaTemple, my host, in case it might’ve been something on their end. It took a while for them to reply, but they eventually just told me it was something taking up all the memory and that I should try to optimize the site. Not too helpful. But I don’t really expect MediaTemple to provide this kind of support anyway. And it turned out it wasn’t their fault.

Upon closer inspection, the site was really behaving weird. I could tell by the logs that the site was actually rendering things, but it always took about 189 seconds. This was odd. I’ve had experiences before where the rendering took less than a second but the page still took more than 3 seconds to load. But 189 seconds! That was a bit too much.

I had suspected it was something to do with the mongrel cluster that I had set the site up to run on. Basically, I followed the script that MediaTemple provided and I still don’t have a great understanding of how mongrel cluster works. That’s definitely bad.

I tried stripping the view of everything but the content for layout. I got rid of before_filters and tried running the site on the mongrel clusters as well as the webrick server on port 3000. The same thing happened. It took way too long for the site to load. Thinking it might be easier to test on my local machine, I got the site and database from svn and mysql and, strangely, it worked fine on my PC.

Now things were slowly fitting together. I was reminded of a post that someone made on Anime Nano about how their feed wasn’t being aggregated into the site. Apparently their feed was unreachable from my server. I had previously chalked this up to weirdness on their server, but I wondered if it wasn’t a problem on my server. The thing about each pageload taking almost exactly 189 seconds pointed to a timeout issue. Then I realized there was a piece of code in Anime Nano that I hadn’t written. It was a plugin for Text Link Ads that I used for some ads on the bottom of the site. That plugin was grabbing a feed of ads and parsing it to show links automatically on the site.

If their site was unreachable, it’s possible that Anime Nano was just waiting on grabbing that snippet of code and timing out. And that’s exactly what happened. I commented out the text for the ads and the site immediately started working again. I’ll have to look into how I can prevent this from happening again before reinstating the ads.

So what did I learn from this whole experience? You should probably understand how code works before randomly integrating it into your site (I added that code a long, long time ago and forgot about it). Also, relying on a third party to provide some information before loading your site is just plain stupid. I can’t believe how badly thought out I had made the organization of the site.

So I’ve been playing Wii Fit for a while. One of the really neat things about the program (it’s not really a game, right?) is that it automagically graphs your progress as you lose weight. It’s pretty nice getting positive feedback when you put hard work into something. I think this is one of the very well thought-out features of Wii Fit.

Anyway, I was looking at my weight going down and figured I’d do some rudimentary linear regression on it. I’m pretty much just eyeballing it because I don’t want to throw stuff into R or Matlab. It seems as though I’ll reach a threshold (away from Obesity) around the end of August. Though I’m basing this on a linear fit. It’s possible that the actual plot will end up looking more like a power law since it’s easier to lose weight when you’re way overweight. The point is, I’m losing weight and it’s nice to try and see when I might reach my goals.

I also think it’s worth noting that Wii Fit seems to overestimate my weight. Because when I use my bathroom scale my weight is always lower than what Wii Fit says. I guess I could adjust the “weight of clothing” but since I always pick the same thing I don’t want to mess with the consistency.

Now, if Nintendo had programmed some regression in automatically, I’d have to give it a 10/10 for science! But for now I’m pretty happy with just the graph functionality. It’s fun seeing large local fluctuations with a general downward trend. Now, if I can only keep this graph from turning into a parabola like with my DDR Diet…