The Magnetic Fields

Posted on by boj Posted in Music

Some fun facts about my latest musical acquisition I by the Magnetic Fileds:

– there are some kick ass songs on this album. Some songs fall flat, but are supported by a number of good ditties.
– there are string instruments hacked into the music which makes it more fun
– some songs are quite sad, but appropriately so
– lyrics are interesting
– the music borrows from a number of musical genres. The fun is figuring out which. So far I’ve discerned proto goth, waltz, lounge among others.
– I’ve had the album for a week now and I am still not sick of it

And the swallows have sharpened their beaks *

Posted on by boj Posted in Higher Education

It is the beginning of November and the point in the semester where light panic is starting to settle in at the bottom of my stomach. I have the following deadlines:

SYSC 5207
Nov 15th – Assignment #2
Nov 15th – Presentation (15 min)
Nov 22nd – Project part I
Dec 9th – Exam
Dec 17th – Project part II

SCI 5174
Nov 25th – Presentation (20 min)
Nov 25th – Assignment #3
Dec 6th – Exam

Oh yea, and I have to be able to run my software in production on November 13th for work. So I will be a bit nutty for the next 7 weeks. Then I will have a nice holiday and sign up for another two classes in Winter. I guess the nuttiness is more or less constant.

*”Straight to you”, NickCave and the Bad Seeds

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint

Posted on by boj Posted in Higher Education

I have been annoyed by PowerPoint for a while now which made me pretty interested in reading Edward R. Tufte’s self-publication “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”. This paper basically slams PP for oversimplifying and distorting information. There was a joke e-mail going around the Internet few months back about someone who took this paper and summarised it in a PP presentation.

If there ever was a collective of bad presenters then grad students take the cake. It is fair to say that I have sat through a multitude of incomprehensible presentations. In a sense PowerPoint helps you discern what people are talking about. However, I often don’t want to read the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time. This is especially true if the presenter is mumbling. My worst pet peeve about PP, however, is when I pull out slides from a presentation a month later (or even later the same day) and try to figure out what the presenter meant to say.

This paper was ‘preaching to converted’ as far as I go. There are a lot of very good points in this paper. Examination of NASA presentations on which the decision to not worry about Columbia shuttle was based is interesting. There is a funny mock PP presentation of the Gettysburg Address. However, for some points Tufte went a bit far. I don’t really follow the connection between PP style and authority in the Roman Empire, but whatever. To add to complaints I don’t like his solution to the problem of presenting the information in other ways. While handing out printed charts in a meeting at work is a good method, doing the same in class is not convenient or socially acceptable. Not to mention handouts that you will not be keeping for further reference are even more annoying than bad PP presentations.

Overall I enjoyed reading this paper and I might check out some of Tufte’s other work, however, it did not knock my socks off.

Lazy Weekend

Posted on by boj Posted in General2 Comments

I decided this to be a good opportunity to post some more of the photos from the New York trip. I could have talked about my homework, but that has no consequence to anyone but me. Chris wanted me to talk about the spambot attack he just fought off (go Chris!), but I will let him talk about it. So here go the slides:


This is the view from our Hotel room over the Central Park. It is the sister picture to the one I posted with the original NYC post.

Here is a more central picture of the Central Park:

We went to the Cloisters which is a pretty nifty museum type-thing on the northern edge of Manhattan.


You have to walk through a pretty nice park to get to the Museum. This sign is funny because it stands on top of the flight of stairs going down. This is apparently so confusing that they had to add a little paper sign on top to confirm that you should go down (rather than up) to reach the Cloisters.

The Museum is constructed from pieces of crumbling monasteries brought over from Europe.


I really like this garden and will try to steal some ideas for my front yard next year. I quite like the volume as well as the inconspicuous addition of the red flowers to the lower right corner.


This garden is the actual useful garden with food, medical plants and other household uses plants (clothes dyes…). It has a really nice view towards New Jersey:

Apparently one of the benefactors bought the land in New Jersey so the view from the museum is always uninterrupted.


Unfortunately he didn’t buy the waterways, so you still get some sense that you are in NYC.

Little bridies having a bath:

We also visited some gardens in the Central Park (unfortunately we didn’t have the time to go on a garden tour they offer). This garden is inspired by Shakespeare’s plays:

At the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts we checked out modern art and arms and armour section. Here is Chris and some frightfull warriors:

Movie review – Team America

Posted on by boj Posted in Film

We went to see “Team America” with Paul and his roommate. The movie wasn’t bad, finger-licking funny even. If you like South Park, you’ll like it. The puppets were cool and the premise was hilarious but the script stunk. The script, if you can call it that, was relying on spoofs and hackneyed movie stereotypes. It might have been funny except for the fact that it has been done (better too) to death before. Spoofs genre should have been returned to Junior High Schools everywhere, like, two years ago.
Overall it is a fun movie. I’ve heard too many good reviews of it to not have expectations and expectations have ruined many a passable movie to me before.

Late Bloomers

Posted on by boj Posted in Gardening2 Comments

Late Bloomers

I was quite disappointed this spring when almost none of my half a dozen or so iris clumps bloomed. It turned out that one of the clumps had worms when I bought it and it infected everyone else. I used biological weapon referred to as nematodes – tiny things that feast on iris borers that attacked my plant. It looked like the thing worked because I have a nice iris blooming in the fall. Yay!