This is surely one of those "you know you've been a programmer too long when..." moments, but I thought I'd share.

Early this morning I was having some run-of-the-mill dream. I can't remember what it was exactly, but I believe that it somehow involved performance art and Italian restaurants. Without warning, I suddenly had a shocking realization -- or rather, I had the feeling of a shocking realization. I don't think there was any substance to it. In any event, the shock was so great that it propelled me completely out of the dream and I woke up.

But just before I woke up, a line of glowing text flashed across the dreamscape that explained everything. It was an error message, the name of an exception. It seems this particular dream had triggered some deeply-buried bug in the codebase; the bug caused an exception that propagated right up to the top level. I'm glad it didn't cause the program to halt, and I guess I ought not dream about performance art and Italian restaurants in the future.

The saddest part, however, came a few seconds after waking up, when I realized what a shame it was that I didn't get a look at the stack trace. Think of what we might have learned about cognition and consciousness through that stack trace! Mind you, think of what we can learn from the fact that there even was a stack trace. In the end, I suspect that we are mostly learning something about me from all this, and it's not something pretty.

We went to see a showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen yesterday. At one point, as a Nazi soldier lands on the hood of a car, Nath elbowed me in the ribs and whispered something. I didn't hear, so she said she'd tell me later.

It turns out that she had heard the Wilhelm, a minor but intriguing element of the world of George Lucas. A couple of weeks ago we heard an excellent radio documentary on this subject. In some old western film, a guy shot by an arrow lets out a high-pitched scream. That scream has been reused in dozens, if not hundreds of Hollywood movies since then. It's called the Wilhelm, after the unfortunate impaled character. The Wilhelm appears in just about every Lucas movie, and many other movies too. It's a matter of pride for a sound effects person to subtly slip the Wilhelm into a movie's sound, and then claim that it can't be removed. Spotting the Wilhelm is a much-deserved matter of pride. So go listen to it and be ready to spot it in the future.

I'm never really sure if the readers of thingo (all zero of you) are having a maximally pleasant viewing experience. I try to respond to requests, mostly for the selfish reason that it helps me learn to design better web sites. So I'll pause here for another sanity check.

I'm happy with the appearance of the site on recent releases of Mozilla and IE. But Netscape 4.7x on Linux gives me problems:

Netscape 4.76	Mozilla 0.7

Now, I think I know why the behaviour on the left is happening. What I want to know is whether anybody else has this problem. Has it curbed your intake of thingo? If so, I can work on fixing it. I can fix it permanently, at the cost of making the text of some earlier entries REALLY BIG. This might be the best solution.

Any other problems? Let me know. Chris, I still have no idea why Junkbuster rejects thingo. If anyone knows why this might be happening, I'd love to hear about it.

The big news in the US these days concerns Robert Hanssen, a long time agent at the FBI who was recently arrested for selling US secrets to the KGB and its successor, the SVR. I find this whole story very amusing (and a little disturbing). Here are some random thoughts on the case.

• Hanssen is planning to plead "not guilty". But he was caught making a blind drop in a Virginia park in the middle of the night. What, exactly, is he planning to say in his defense? "Well your honour, I was walking my dog at 3:00am, fifty miles from home, when the dog suddenly ran off and in the confusion I dropped the package of documents I was carrying. Can I go now?"


• In letters attributed to Hanssen, he says that since the age of fourteen, he knew he wanted to be a double agent. Apparently they don't screen for this at the FBI. They probably didn't notice that "double agent" was listed as a career goal on his resume.


• Whenever a case like this surfaces, everyone breathes a sigh of relief, as if we've finally caught the last US double agent. Whew! National security is finally rock solid. Come on. Spies are like cockroaches. If you see one, you know there are thousands more hiding in the pantry. And the spies that get caught are the bad ones.

As I left the house to go to dinner yesterday, a light powder had begun to fall, one that couldn't make up its mind whether it wanted to be snow or mist. By the time we left the restaurant, the powder had turned into the heavy stuff, and wet snow was falling steadily. By this morning, the city had received about six inches of snow, up to nine inches in some areas.

I declare today a snow day. The radio didn't make any announcement about the offices of Thingo Inc. being closed, so I hereby offer my notice. When one's total time commitments amount to about two hours of meetings a week, it's easy to improvise one's schedule from day to day. The university didn't close (universities never close), but fat chance if you'll see me around there today. Nope, I'm going to stay home, look after my sniffle (in spite of which I'm chiffle), drink hot chocolate, and light a nice crackling fire. Scratch that last part -- I don't have a fireplace.

Okay, to be honest, I'm going to get work done. I'm going to write reviews for a bunch of papers and then get back to my research. To be even more honest, the snow hasn't affected my schedule at all -- I was already planning to stay home and review papers. But I still think that the presence of snow changes the attitude of the day. It goes from being just another day working at home to a day secluded in a winter hideaway, comfortably ensconced, the heavy snow muffling the pace and anxieties of the outside world. For a few more hours, anyway -- the weather service says the snow will turn to boring old rain by midday.

Last weekend, Nath and I played Boggle Deluxe (which differs from Boggle in that the board is 5x5 and three letter words are not allowed). In one round, I achieved a stunning 64 points. I wanted to gloat about it here immediately, but held back because I felt it wasn't a very nice thing to do.

Well, we played again yesterday. Happily, Nath managed to equal my feat, also achieving 64 points in a single round. Now that we have both reached this milestone, I consider it acceptable to report it here. So, for your edification, I present the word lists that got us those scores. Remember: these are not from the same board!

My words	Nath's words
story site stain stating rotating rotary stand wear siding rang tang stang sting stings sitting pitting pits rating ratings star stare starry	patter patters matter matters mattress gape smatter smatters ramp mars rams sand wars ware wand rasp grasp grasped

Now, in looking more closely at these rounds, I can detect two, er, irregularities. In my list, 'stang' is not a word. Dang. That means that I only got 62 points and Nath is the supreme champion! Or is she? In adding up her score, I only come up with 59 points, not 64. How quickly my crown is reclaimed! From this analysis, we have learned two things: I can't spell, and Nath can't add. O, how the faculties are taxed when one is in the heat of Boggle!

The urinal in the men's room of the local teahouse is out of order once again. Ordinarily this is not the sort of thing worthy of commentary, though in an establishment dedicated to the consumption of tea, one should not underestimate the importance of a functioning urinal.

The reason I mention this problem is to call attention to the means by which it was communicated to restroom users. A simple "out of order" sign would probably be out of place in a teahouse. Instead, we are alerted via the following haiku cycle:

1.
channel-locks and wrench
we reach the limits of skill
you can pee no more

2.
I have not behaved
properly today, once touched
I lose all control

3.
what was once broken
can always falter again
don't hurry towards fate

4.
you would like to stand
it is your right as a man
today you must sit

This confluence of Eastern philosophy and Western plumbing technology resonates strongly with, and add a whole new depth to, the phrase "a suffusion of yellow". How appropriate that the I-Ching calculator that yields that phrase is described in a book called The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Wow -- if I'm not careful, I'm going to break out into a Connections episode here.

I'm currently reading James Michener's The Source, which my brother sent me recently. It's a massive historical novel, set in Isreal over a period of roughly twelve thousand years. It's also a very long book, over a thousand pages. Yet despite the length the average pace, i.e., the total duration of the narrative divided by the number of pages, is pretty darn high.

This observation got me thinking about narrative pace in general, and how it stacks up in other stories. First, I tried to think about stories with an even greater pace. The first one that came to mind was Asimov's Foundation series. But despite the grand scale of that story, the whole thing unfolds over a mere thousand years, and it takes a bunch of books (the exact number depends on how you count, but it's more than five and less than twelve). Surely we can do better than that.

Well, Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos is a rather slim book that incorporates over a million years' worth of narrative. To be fair, there's a discrete jump of one million years near the end, but we can still say that this book scores rather well.

But that's just child's play. Science fiction brings us arbitrarily large scope. Consider Poul Anderson's "In Memoriam", a short story that starts with the dying gasp of the last human and continues on to the collapse of the sun billions of years later. In the extreme, we might turn to Greg Egan's remarkable Diaspora, where so much time passes as our adventurers hop from universe to universe that it's really impossible to measure.

The other end of the spectrum is pretty interesting too. I'll mention One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn, a fairly long book that takes place over a single day. I suppose the most plodding example would be the Mike Figgis movie Timecode, which happens in real time. Most plays can't even offer this level of slowness. Does anyone want to challenge me with Lola Rennt? I believe it's also in real time but it tells the same story several times. I think the only way to improve on this record would be to watch Timecode in super slo-mo.

I would say that I have seen a fair number of classical music performances in my time. Obviously, it's not always easy to differentiate the musicianship from the quality of the composition. Nevertheless, I can recall great shows (one by Andrew Burashko, one by some woman who played Beethoven's mighty Hammerklavier) and some less great shows (a taxing violin piece entitled ...and dark time flowed by her like a river...).

I recently saw a performance that is lodged comfortably with the top of the "great" camp. Lang Lang is an eighteen year old pianist from China. He has apparently made quite a stunning debut in the American classical music scene. The amusing anecdote is that he filled in for another musician one night in Chicago and gave a killer performance. After the show, he was invited to a reception in a small recital space. He offered to play informally, and jokingly someone suggested he play the Goldberg Variations. Lang Lang sat down and calmly played the whole thing from memory with no preparation. This is no small feat.

But Lang Lang is far from a player piano, merely hitting the right note at the right time. As one reporter says, "there was not the slightest hint of empty virtuosity". His performance was a profound act of interpretation. One needed only to watch him on stage, moving to the music and being moved by it, swaying and bobbing, bowing, alternately grimacing and smiling serenely. He looked as if the music were being set down before him for the first time, and that in playing the piece he was discovering just how beautiful music could be. And his range, his careful shaping of the sound. The notes. The notes were snowflakes alighting on my nose. The notes were bees invading a peaceful day. The notes were sinister dancing pygmy clowns, merrily juggling my internal organs. The notes were many things at different times, and each one knew its place in the grand design.

And only just eighteen. We can happily look forward to many more years of masterful piano playing from this guy. In the immediate future, if he comes by your town, go check out the show.

An older woman got on the bus today a few stops before I got off. She was wearing a black hooded parka that covered most of her body and head, the hood keeping her face in shadow. She was carrying a black purse and a folded up brown paper shopping bag. The woman sat down, unfolded the bag, and with one hand calmly held it up in front of her face. She was left with only a few slivers of airspace between the hood and the bag.

After a stop or two, this amount of isolation clearly wasn't enough, for the woman put down the shopping bag, opened her purse, and pulled out a pair of black gloves. She put on the gloves, then resumed her state of withdrawl. I got off the bus shortly after this point.

There wasn't anything written on the bag that I could see. And the bag was clearly old and worn, presumably from having been used for this purpose so many times in the past.

This sort of thing amazes me. I cannot begin to comprehend this behaviour, its purpose, or its significance. And yet, her life is not a work of performance art; she must have an internal logic, a mindset, a collection of beliefs that prescribe and explain these actions, make them real and even second nature. She knows why she must do as she does. And here's the real brainbender: what do I do that seems to others devoid of sense and reason, yet comes as a perfectly well-formed theorem in my worldview? How could I know? What do you do? We all wear the black parka of inscrutability from time to time. Just don't cover your eyes -- you could disappear into that world if you're not careful.

I knew when I started writing log entries that I had to avoid the trap of writing about nothing but movies. I love movies. I watch them and re-watch them. I talk about them often and quote from them more often. Indeed, some previous entries have already focused on specific movies. On the whole, I think I've been keeping myself in check. I guess that means I can indulge in some more movie talk.

I hereby offer my full, unconditional endorsement of the Coen Brothers' most recent film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? You may have heard (possibly from me) about this movie's many sources of inspiration: The Odyssey, the movie Sullivan's Travels, and so on. That's all irrelevant. The fact is that this may be the brothers' best film yet. It may well surpass even Fargo, which I believe is one of the greatest movies ever made. I'm certainly biased by availability here. Ask me again in a year and I will offer a more balanced opinion of the two movies.

If the sound were turned off, you could enjoy the stunning colours and scenery. If the picture were turned off, you could enjoy the incredible music, or alternatively the dialog. If everything were turned off, you could sit in the dark theatre and talk to your neighbour about how good The Hudsucker Proxy was, though this is a somewhat less satisfying experience.

The Coens keep getting better; let's hope for many more movies from them.

After a couple of busy days, I'm back. You'll probably see a little more from me here for a while.

I was working on a paper for a conference this summer. This is the first paper I've written since launching the thingo log, and as such is an important test of the log's value to me. You may recall that in my very first entry, I complained about my writing skills becoming atrophied and I expressed the hope that working on this log might allow me to come out of the corner fighting, in an expositive sense.

Well, life's not a controlled experiment, so of course it's hard to say whether the log has helped. I still found the first hurdle, that of committing something, anything, to paper to be agonizing. I have yet to grasp a fundamental lesson of writing: it's a process of endless refinement. One must lay a foundation that is less than perfect, less than strong, less than mud. Only then can the rough shape of a zeroeth draft inform the polished structure that is to come. Expecting so much as readability on the first try leads to many hours staring at a blank page (or an endless column of tildes in my case).

On the other hand, once I started writing, words, sentences and sections came smoothly and effortlessly. I wrote essentially all the text that appears in the final paper in about three hours (it's a short paper full of pictures). I made very few changes to the text after that point. So perhaps I have indeed sharpened my mental quill, refined my ability to deploy it quickly. Remember: true sharpness comes without effort. Before you can use that keyboard in battle, you must learn to hold it in stillness.

It's likely that these short entries can't prepare me for a longer, more organized task like a paper. Since the beginning, I've been planning to use this site for occasional essays as well as frequent log entries. Perhaps this most recent experience will firm my resolve and you'll see such an essay soon.

A couple of years ago, we reached an important milestone in my immediate family, where every member was at least a semi-regular user of email.

The other day, I got an email from my father congratulating me on thingo. I had told my brother about it, and I gather that he reads this occasionally. Then, I was talking on the phone with my mother, telling her what was new in my life. She already knew, because she had read the relevant entry in the log. I guess my dad wanted in on the action, so he took a peek (dad: may I remind you to check out the logic puzzles at latinsquares.com). Thus has every member of my immediate family now experienced thingo. Now they're all presumably poised for me to structure my next word usement. Gosh -- pretty soon I guess they'll all start dressing in leather and urinating on each other for pleasure, just like me. Hi, guys.

Is it wrong to complain about handicapped people? One might argue that their lives are hard enough. However, I think I'll make a special exception for this person.

There's a woman who rides the same bus that I do once in a while. She must have trouble walking, because she rides around in an electric scooter. Not a wheelchair, but one of those larger three-wheeled vehicles with handlebars. As with any wheelchair-bound bus rider, she takes up three seats by bringing her wheels onto the bus. This doesn't bother me at all. The problem is that this woman parks her scooter on the bus, then gets off the scooter and moves to a seat. No, let me be more accurate. This woman is rather obese, so she moves to two seats. No, that's not right either; she has a rather expansive posture, so her elbow and leg take up most of a third seat. The net result? A single passenger on the bus who regularly consumes six seats. At my best, I'm unable to cover that much area. I'd have to lie across the tops of three rows of seats. Or carry a refrigerator with me. Or my seeing-eye horse. I try to be considerate on the bus by rounding my broad shoulders and stacking my bags on my lap. I guess others see the bus as their private taxi service.

You are no doubt aware of the idiotic trend in the naming of corporations, resulting in constructions like "Lucent" and "Agilent". Consulting firms get paid big money to devise these names and test market them -- if you haven't read it, Salon published an excellent article about this bizarre industry back in 1999.

Well, at the start of the year Andersen Consulting proved it was playing with the big boys when it changed its name to "Accenture". You know, Accenture: an ACCENt on the fuTURE. There's even a little greater-than symbol over the t, a musical accent.

I guess "Fuccent" didn't roll off the tongue quite as readily.