Apparently. Since the last entry, I've gotten married, gone on vaction (for 2 days), gone kayaking for the first time, started grad classed, and debugged a both of my software codes which actually have users.
Also, finally saw Open Range, a Western that was shot partly on my parents place. They planted a single lone tree on one of the hills, which everyone said looked kind of wierd at the time. It came out ok I guess, but it did look kind of wierd. It's strange to see a place I spent a lot of time on growing up on the big screen. Tamara was highly entertained.
Since I'm so busy with school and work, I feel that I should increase the number of distractions in my life. To this end I am looking forward to the start of the 2003 Nethack tornament. It runs the whole month of Novemeber. I think it's safe to say the Tamara and I won't get very much done in November. I've also been trying to get Halflife working in WineX again. I'm have a problem that I remember fixing once before, but I can't remember how I fixed it. Typical. I need to setup a knowlege base application of something so that I can look up all the things I've fixed and forgotten over the years.
As if playing games isn't enough, I've read a story on Kuro5hin about downloading legal music, and a collaborative filtering application that would do it. iRate is such a program, but the interface, documentation, and execution is so poor that I can't bear to use it. So, I've drafted up a little plan for a better collaborative filtering system:
Take the iRate idea, add generas and moods (I like tencho, alt rock, country, and big band. I was upbeat music from any of these genres) and the ability for users to tell the server what genre, mood, and general quality a given song is.
Keep a database of URL's, along with artist data, and allow users to find out more about or contact an artist; don't bother trying to provide album sales, just be a referal mechnism. Allow artists to add themselves to the database, and allow them to get a more detailed report than a normal user would get. Apply some sort of filter to ratings to help prevent skewing.
Write a client (XMMS plugin!), and a web interface. Allow multiple servers, and some sort of mechanism for sharing data between them. Users of the service would have to login; have a mechanism to prevent lots of different logins from the same IP or MAC...
Once a track has been added to the database, the artist may give consent to have the track distributed between peers in a bittorrent style system, except with one listening port for all tracks.
Consider XML-RPC as an interop protocol between clients and servers and servers and servers. Publish the API. Let other people build more clients, or build functionality into existing applications.
On the grammer/spelling front, when you can't bear to do something, is it "bear" like the animal, or "bare" like being naked? Or is there some other spelling all together?
