retineo  contemplatio  deludo

Dave's House of Web

"not this one, another this"


"But how one is to have fun, if a manager goes on the cookie, whose nerves are situated brightly, extraterrestial fans absolutely autographs to want and overeager TV Fritzen muscle-shows off in trunks to the page to place?"

I used to be a graduate student at Northeastern University in the College of Computer Science, until I got my degree and departed the Ivory Tower for the more prosaic joys of the Real World. Now I work at AT&T Labs Dash Research, which isn't Lucent Technologies, even though it's in New Jersey, and i was in the same building with all those famous people who invented things like unix and the coiled telephone handset cable. I have a home page there, but it's pretty anemic, and i don't even want to talk about the picture. I also used to be a member of the CCS systems group; now I just make it sound like I was Mister Big Powerful Systems Administrator and everybody treated me with the respect and fear usually reserved for major tribal deities, but nobody believes me. Go figure. In my copious free time (save for that i've been spending acquiring pointless inline imagery for this page) i've been working (sporadically) on JHM. Most of this time has been spent constructing really pointless little toys on my character, but i imagine i might do something useful there eventually, like maybe a nice t-shirt or something. JHM is a text-based virtual reality (ok, ok, a MUD) where we're exploring, well, virtual issues in cooperative programming, object-oriented design, and networked systems. I spend an awful lot of time at lambdaMOO, but I'd really rather not talk about that.

Work from Smoke

I've been said to be

but you'd never in a million years get me to admit it. Not without proof. Really good proof. Really good proof and a million dollars. Then maybe. And even then, the acronyms weren't my idea, and you can't prove they were.

I've also done some work with the Diagram Understanding Group here, attempting to build intelligent authoring tools, especially for use in biology and genetics. If you can help me find information on gene diagrams, or if you have suggestions or information (really, about anything at all. i'm not picky), send me mail or something. Or don't, that's ok too.

So it goes.

There's a really amazingly cool 'zine at Yale, called Nadine. They haven't really published anything lately, and I don't know if the authors really want me putting up pointers to their stuff, but they did something that mentioned MOOs, so i figure they deserve whatever they get. Moreover, Julian Dibbel worked on Nadine. And he wrote a long article about LambdaMOO that made the front page of the Village Voice. Small world, isn't it? Plus, Julian's really cool, and i take back all those awful things i said about him.

I'm very interested programming language design, especially in Scheme and dynamic languages, like Dylan. (It's a shame about the syntax and the fact that Apple seems determined to kill its best technologies in the cradle, but there you are). The Gwydion project at CMU is doing some nifty stuff with Dylan and programming environments, or at least they claim to be. I'll believe it when I see it. The Dylan language was developed at Apple Cambridge, which is (or rather, was -- i don't live in boston anymore and anyway the group has fallen victim to corporate cluelessness, sigh) right up the street from me.

I've no idea what Hemochromatosis is, but boy, it sure sounds serious, doesn't it?

I used to live in Mankato. It's a pretty exciting place, especially if you like the Two-Egg Combos they have at Perkins. Johnny used to live there too, which is about the best thing about the place.

Users here at CCS are beginning to discover the web. Some of their works show great promise, stretching the very boundaries of the technology of this youthful medium. Others, such as Jim Mokwa's, are clearly the products of a truly diseased imagination. Still others speak for themselves.

I've been trying to help emma get a job.

Heyyyyyyyyyy, nice suit.

I took the VALS personality test. The results were that i was "fulfilled" and an "actualizer". According to reliable market data, this indicates that I am a Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Conde Nast Traveller reader who lives in Beverly Hills, listens to classical music, and eats a lot of egg substitutes. And i own an in-ground swimming pool. This on the same day that the woman who gave me my badge holder at the conference i was attending told me i was "very organized." i later forgot the badge at a vendor booth. i can't remember the name of the vendor, and i stressed about the loss of the badge for hours. On the other hand, my MBTI type is apparently INXP. Personally, i think Listen Like Thieves was really overrated, and they've certainly done nothing interesting since, so i'm beginning to wonder about the veracity of these things. In spite of all of those nasty things the personality tests say about me, however, people keep walking up to me on the street and saying the nicest things about me. I usually say the nicest things in reply.

Back when i lived in boston, i thought wmbr was the best radio station in the whole world. now i live in new jersey, and i think wfmu is the best radio station in the whole world. maybe i'm just fickle. they're both online, i guess, so maybe you can decide for yourself.

Current read: Thomas Frank, One Market Under God (i'm an utterly predictable baffler fanboy, aren't i?)

If machine translation ever really takes off, i think it'll be pretty much the end of civilization as we know it.

"Space-potato" does not lie on the edge of Universe.

Erik Ostrom's home page is much cooler than mine. This is mostly because Erik Ostrom is much cooler than me. NrrdGrrl is much cooler than me, too, but she thinks i'm an weirdo. I guess she's probably right.

NrrdGrrl also used to have a link to norm's comix, but when she changed her web page, she got rid of it. he sent me mail once, to yell at me for claiming he was eating up all of nrrdgrrl's food. it isn't strictly true that i ever claimed that. i claimed he stopped eating up all of her food. anyway, he's about the only famous person who's sent me mail. Well, ok, him and rose. But that's all. i don't really hobnob with celebrities.

Recent CD purchases (i hate hate):

and rez, which is nice, but don't think i'll be even touching it until i put another hundred hours or so into final fantasy x.

He wants to help, but is not needed.

I know thigpen, and i owe him money.

free mumia.

For best results, resize your browser window to the width of this line:


For some gratuitous text of no relevance, you can finger me.

dave@ccs.neu.edu

boing  boing