Saturday, June 28, 2003
105679572066977646:: 3:22 AM

Headed out to Chop Suey with Dave and caught Prince Paul, Aceyalone, and Eydea. I saw Prince Paul in Montreal when he headlined with Paul Barman. He played an amazing set that night: starting with old soul, funk, and moving on through the history of hiphop. This time Prince Paul did something similar in short form, but also added a lot of wacky skits. Eydea was cool: angstful lyrics exploring dysfunction and positing serious discussion -- all charged with personal perspective. Aceyalone displayed awesome lyrical interplay over unexpected beats. I didn't realize that those same MCs worked on project blowed; shows how much I know.

Anyway, here are pictures.

Tuesday, June 17, 2003
95755486:: 8:14 AM

Who left the sun on and made the birds so loud? This is the second day that the sun has woken me up (this time at 7:20am) by virtue of being so bright.

Thursday, June 12, 2003
95582977:: 1:52 AM

I went up to check out Paul's weekly at the nearby Irish pub tonight. It was pretty chill. I played 2nd: Peter and Sean C played after me. Both of them kicked out awesome sets -- Peter doing some fast hiphop into funky electro, and Sean C demonstrating scratch skills, beat juggling and moving it from funk, to old soul to dancehall. I was talking to Sean C afterwards to see if he was competing in the DMC regionals (next week at Chop Suey). Anyway, a little ways into talking to him, I find that he used to live down in San Antonio and Austin and that he was friends with Rev. Kathy Russell, Nick Nack, Bavu, Tee double, et al. I forgot to ask about Invurze and Michaelangelo (peeps who I used to do a weekly at the Ritz with). Anyway.

How random to meet a DJ in Seattle that I probably saw 10 times in passing in Austin. I went to the Rock n Bass website to read up on the compilation I am on... two of my songs are mentioned in the write-up. It's so strange cause you just figure all this work disappears into a void: it's wierd to run into someone who knows about it. Anyway... this post has no point other than to say how small and connected everything is... even when you can't see it.

Sunday, June 01, 2003
95176760:: 9:16 PM

A year ago I was writing assembly code and designing analog circuits to help a group of autonomous robots win the world cup in Japan. Today, I'm at home watching one clean my apartment. I got it last weekend since I really needed to vacuum (had no vacuum for 10 months!).

Overall, it's pretty cool. It's industrious, round, and cleans 'without remorse'. Here's a picture of it teaching my home economics to my CD players. Here's all the junk it collected... and finally a picture of my room afterwards.

Being an engineer, I had no choice but to experiment with it. It's clear that it has no memory of the shape of the room. Instead it relies on pretty simple local navigation rules and very loose global heuristics to maximize floor coverage. Given the observed behavior I'm guessing that it would get near-100% coverage in an empty room. With the various obstacles and complexities of my apartment, however, it probably gets 90-95% coverage, which is to say it is more thorough than me when I vacuum (not as if that's much of a standard). Anyway, it works pretty well and its fun to watch. I even had it vacuum my jetson's table as a way to test its cliff-dodging smarts.