i bet the texture is great

The fully loaded chair from Alexander Reh (via stylecrave)



It looks like the shells are fixed in place, but it would be cool if they could freely move in a frame, like a pinscreen.

designer of things lovely

sara paculdo

this is a chair that can be shipped flat.

App store purchases

How can you get information about what apps you have and what you've spent on them?

• Look at the files in the "Mobile Applications" folder.

• Print from the Apps view in iTunes (use the Song listing option to get the most information).

• Use Spentonapps (I'm sure you're very enthusiastic about giving them your email and password so they can comb through your email account.)

• Look at your purchase history via iTunes 20 purchases at a time.

• Do some tedious email-mining.

Naturally, I choose the most tedious method.

I searched my gmail for iTunes receipt messages and applied a label to them. I don't usually store my email locally, so I set up gmail and apple's mail client to IMAP sync only one of my gmail labels (it would take way too long to download all messages). I figured out how to do this thanks to a comment by Matt at StackExchange:

if you have a lot of email, turn on the "Advanced IMAP Controls" Labs feature, then, under "Manage Labels", turn off IMAP access for all the folders except the one you want to download.

Thanks Matt! Once I had searched for the iTunes receipt messages, I applied a label to them and downloaded only those messages.

Next, I selected all the messages and saved them as plain text in a file called "receiptPlainText.txt". Then, some nasty bash:

cat receiptPlainText.txt | grep -v "Order Total:" | grep -B1 -A1 "Report a Problem" >purchasesOnly.txt

b=`cat purchasesOnly.txt | grep -v "Report a Problem"| sed 's/^Free/\$0.00/' | sed 's/, v[^,]*//' | tr -d ","`

echo $b | tr -d "*" | sed 's/ -- /\*/g' | tr "*" "\n" | grep "Seller"| sed 's/ Seller:/HBPH/' | sed 's/ \$\([0-9\.]\{4\}\)/, \1/g' | sed 's/HBPH/,/g' | sed 's/^/\"/' | sed 's/$/\"/' | sed 's/, /\", \"/g' >appPurchases.csv

The breakdown:

grep -v "Order Total:"

• remove prices that are totals

grep -B1 -A1 "Report a Problem"

• identify regions of text that are individual purchases

b=`

• remove newlines by saving the text as a variable

grep -v "Report a Problem"|

• remove unneeded line

sed 's/^Free/\$0.00/'

• make line structures comparable

sed 's/, v[^,]*//'

• remove version info

tr -d ","`

• remove commas

tr -d "*"

• remove any asterisks in app names

sed 's/ -- /\*/g'

• put a marker between records

tr "*" "\n"

• replace marker with newline

grep "Seller"

• remove records that aren't apps (all apps have sellers)

sed 's/ Seller:/HBPH/'

• replace Seller with marker for comma insertion

sed 's/ \$\([0-9\.]\{4\}\)/, \1/g'

• insert comma before price; remove $

sed 's/HBPH/,/g'

• replace marker with comma

sed 's/^/\"/' | sed 's/$/\"/' | sed 's/, /\", \"/g'

• put quotes around each field

As a side note, people get huffy about using cat before a command that can simply take a file name as an argument (the "Useless Use of Cat" award). However, I find it useful when I'm working on commands in a modular way. If I need to move the first grep statement around, I don't need to move the file name too.

I analyzed my data, and wow, I've bought a lot of apps. I couldn't bear to leave the left axis on, sorry.

It would be nice to have the date purchased too.

Law school:predatory lending ?=science training:pyramid scheme?

The New York Times profiles some unemployed, debt-encumbered lawyers and discusses how law schools report the status of their graduates in a misleading way. These reports promote the perception that going to law school is a good investment.

Catchy quote:

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm...Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.” - law school professor William Henderson of Indiana University

The article reminds me of several recent articles pointing out the crummy conditions for people with science PhDs and how there too the interests of the educating institutions are at odds with those of the applicants and trainees. In the case of science, this is the result of how our academic science research and training is organized: a structure not infrequently called a pyramid scheme.

A faculty person who leads a lab is high on the pyramid, and the majority of the work is done by trainees (postdocs and graduate students) who are lower on the pyramid and mostly want to eventually lead their own lab. This structure was better suited to the expansive early days of civilian science (mid-1900s to 1970ish), because the the whole pyramid was growing, and trainees were relatively more likely to be able to move up the pyramid. When academic research expansion slowed, there were fewer new jobs created. For existing labs to continue, they needed a steady supply of trainees, but there was less demand for those people after they were trained.

What is the outcome? Between 1973 and 1996, the percent of scientists NOT working in permanent, full-time positions rose from 7% to 21%. This measurement was made among scientists who earned their PhDs 9-10 years previously, the assumption being they should no longer be in short-term training positions like a postdoctoral fellow positions.

(This statistic is based on figure 3.12 "Fraction of US life-science PhDs not holding permanent full-time jobs in science or engineering, 1973, 1985, and 1995" in Trends in the Early Careers of Life Scientists. National Research Council (US) Committee on Dimensions, Causes, and Implications of Recent Trends in the Careers of Life Scientists.

Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1998.)

While this seems like an unsustainable system, at least PhD scientists usually don't accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars in graduate school debt . Faint praise indeed.

Good girl dinette

I ate at Good girl dinette tonight with KC and MM. Yummy Vietnamese food, simple and delicious. House-made sodas, very good spring rolls, good mushroom sandwich. Crummy but friendly service.

The market for used iPhones

This beanplot shows the distribution of prices for which used 32GB 3GS iPhones were sold on eBay. A beanplot shows "a density trace, which is mirrored to form a polygon shape." Overlaid is "a one-dimensional scatter plot show[ing] all the individual measurements." When two phones were sold for the same price, the line is twice as wide, and so on.

Here's the R code that produced the plot

price_and_shipping=read.table("iphoneListingsPricesOnly.txt")
allprices= price_and_shipping
$V1+ price_and_shipping$V2
allprices=sort(allprices)
outlierCount=round(length(allprices)*.05,0)
prices=allprices[(outlierCount+1):(length(allprices)-outlierCount)]
library(beanplot)
png(filename = "priceDistribution.png")
beanplot(prices,method="stack",axes=TRUE,what=c(0,1,0,1),log="",main="Beanplot distribution of prices")
dev.off()

code formatting kludged together from output from Pretty R at inside-R.org -- i had to hack at it to get it to work on blogspot, and that made it uglier than it should be. normally they make (as per the name) pretty stuff.

Assessing prices on eBay

I recently listed my old iPhone for sale on eBay. I wanted to know how much phones were going for. But I didn't just want to peruse the prices; I wanted to plot them and analyze them. Here are the steps I took. They are ugly, but they worked on my system, which is Mac OS X Leopard, Firefox 3, and the Table2Clipboard extension (which you don't really need). I'm interested to hear about better ways to do this.

Do an eBay search.

• search text: iphone 3gs 32
• Preferences: Completed listings
• Preferences: Used
• show 200 results

Copy results to a local file

• create dedicated directory like /Users/exampleUser/ebaySoldPrice
• copy results tables only:

• select a word in the first listing
• from the right click menu, choose table2clipboard/select table
• scroll to end of page,
• shift click in last item to extend selection to include all items,
• right click and choose View selection source
• it takes a while for this window to populate
• Copy, paste and save text as "ebay_search_results.txt"

Clean up the results

• Open a terminal window and type the following commands (you may have to fix line breaks if you copy this text)



• cd /Users/exampleUser/ebaySoldPrice/





• cat ebay_search_results.txt  | sed 's/~//g' | 
  sed 's/<table class="li" r="/~/g' |
   tr  "~" "n" | sed 's/ shipping.*$//' |
    sed 's/([0-9]*).*class="vip">/1~/' |
    grep Sold   | sed 's/<[^$]*$/~/'  | 
  sed 's/Free shipping/$0/' |  sed 's/<[^$]*$/~/' |
   sed 's/<.*$/~na/' | tr "~" "t" 
  >ebay_search_results_cleaned.txt

here's how that breaks down:

• sed s'/\~//g'

                  ### remove any tildes in ad title
  

• tr  "~" "\n"

                  ### replace tildes with newline
  

• sed 's/<table class="li" r="/~/g'

                  ### replace table starts with tildes
  

• sed 's/ shipping.*$//'

                  ### get rid of text after shipping
  

• sed 's/\([0-9]*\).*class\=\"vip\"\>/\1\~/' |

                  ### keep the initial row number, deletes everything else until the title
  

• grep Sold

                  ### limit to items that sold
  

• sed 's/\<[^$]*\$/~/'  |

                  ### delete text between title and price
  

• sed 's/Free shipping/\$0/'

                  ### give free a numerical value
  

• sed 's/\<[^$]*\$/~/'  |

                  ### delete text between price and shipping price
  

• sed 's/<.*$/~na/'

                  ### if price doesn't have a dollar amount, delete text and give it an NA value
  

• tr "~" "\t"

                  ### replace tildes with tabs
  

• >ebay_search_results_cleaned.txt

                  ### direct the output into a file
  

Viet Noodle Restaurant in Atwater Village

photo by seanbonner

I love the spare aesthetic of this restaurant. I ate here today. The service was abysmally slow, but friendly. I had the vegetable soup, which was delicious. MM had the Beef Pho, which he said was fine, but was annoyed that he hadn't remembered it was nothing special.

Rose bowl post-parade float viewing

photos 1,3 and 4 by modmodworld

The day after the parade, I went to see the floats. It hadn't been on my LA bucket list, but it was urged, so I went. The float I liked most reminded me of the pottery design Star Glow (left), and thematically of two other patterns I like a lot: Salem Free Form Hop Scotch Pink and Jack Straw's Constellation (3rd and 4th from left). The photos are by Flickr user modmodworld who has a tremendous collection of photos of mid century dinnerware.

I’m willing to bet she’d pass on you too.

While looking at the sidelinehotties website for the DVR macro blog entry, I came across this exchange of comments, which has to be the final word for nearly every guy who critiques the appearance of women in media.

Comment: Really, this is the best Mexico has? Her face is dog fence, she has fake boobs (probably more) and she is way over the hill. Pass.

Response: Ok, so she’s not the hottest, I agree. But I’m willing to bet she’d pass on you too.

Skip the TV sports filler with DVR macros

WSJ

In my recent visit to see my family, my dad mentioned a WSJ analysis of US televised football showing that only 6% of the telecast is actual football plays. The details are here.

I'm waiting for macros for DVRs that you can use to see a subset of a recording. For a football game, a fan might note down the times during which the game is played, and write a macro that directs a dvr to show only those portions of the game. Another fan might have something similar, plus selected replays. And someone with an attachment to the sideline reporter of the day might post their macro to the sidelinehotties (not even kidding) website.

Once the broadcasters figure out a way to make it profitable, hopefully they would tag the different content, in which case you could use a general "show plays only" macro. As my sister noted, you'd also want to be able to pause the macro and, for example, listen to the commentators' analysis of a referee call.

Los Balcones Del Peru

photo by Barbara Hansen for the LA Weekly

I went to Los Balcones Del Peru for the first time last night. Apparently it was remodeled in August; all I can say is that it's lovely. It's a large open space with simple aestetics. We sat in a corner booth, which was too big for four. We actually had trouble hearing each other, and mostly talked in twos. The restaurant itself didn't seem that loud though.

The food was wonderful. The sauces in particular were wonderfully flavored without being particularly hot. I didn't take close notes while I was there, so I've augmented my memory with the descriptions from this LA Weekly article. For appetizers, we had the tiradito (a sea bass carpaccio with a delicious sauce, reportedly made from the Peruvian yellow chile (ají amarillo)) and a quinoa salad with asparagus, a maracuya (passion fruit) vinaigrette and a poached egg. I love quinoa but find it dry; they were generous with the sauce, and it was great.

For entrees, I had the shrimp chowder. The LA Weekly article reports "Chupe de camarones (shrimp chowder) is red with panca chile and gets substance from rice, choclo (giant Peruvian corn) and a poached egg. This dish is from Arequipa in the south." I didn't see and egg, but the corn was delicious. I mostly forewent the rice. We all tasted nearly everything on the table. The seafood chowder was widely endorsed.

Michelada

Photo by "Tatters:)"

Yum. Michelada is a Mexican beer cocktail. I've only had it in bars, so I can't vouch for the ingredients of the ones I had. Here's the recipe I'll try when I make this at home:

Mango Michelada
1 drink

1/2 cup mango, peeled, pitted and pureed*
2 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice
1 (12-ounce) chilled Mexican beer
1 lime
Coarse salt
Fresh mango for garnish
Hot sauce (optional)

Combine mango puree, lime juice and beer. Rub a lime wedge around the rim of a tall glass and then press the rim into coarse salt, coating the rim. Fill glass 2/3 full with ice and then add mango mixture. Add in a few drops of hot sauce if desired.

*1 mango yields approximately 1/2 cup mango puree

Serenity gate

I think this makes me an official fan-girl. But I've been one at heart for a long while.

Our neighbor's dog crashed through the baby gate we were using to keep the dogs from leaving the porch. I wanted a cheap replacement, so I spent $10 on some pre-cut plywood and a couple pieces of hardwood trim to serve as a handle and keep the plywood from bowing too much. And I couldn't just let a canvas like that stay blank. I had some glossy black outdoor paint and silver spray paint on hand, so I made a stencil. Here's the gate under construction:



And here's the gate in place. There may be a sliding mechanism coming, but don't hold your breath.

iphone cases made by 3D printing

I came across a few lovely iPhone case designs today on the Shapeways website. Shapeways is a company that will 3D print a design you upload to them and, optionally, sell the product.

Los Angeles Opera's 'Rigoletto'

I got to be a last minute sub for some very nice tickets to Rigoletto at the LA Opera tonight. M and I had a great time. I was transported, absorbed.

Sarah Coburn was impressive as Gilda. I was floored by her control. But my favorite aspect of the production was the lighting and set design. Although it appears that the set was designed in 1997 for the production, then in San Francisco, I had never seem them before, and I loved them. The lighting was fantastic, and they had some nice effects that required precise positioning of actors, which was executed without apparent awkwardness. The simulated water-reflection effects were also nice.

photo from www.losangelesopera.com

Involuntary corporate transparency

A great term for wikileaks' upcoming release of internal corporate documents.

--
Mobile

CBS: watch us, ad block no one

Sometimes when I watch Hawaii Five-O by streaming it from the CBS website, I lose the show in the middle of the program. It usually happens between two commercials. I get this message:

The video you have requested is either unavailable or is being blocked by an ad blocker installed in your browser.

I went through my ad-blocker on two separate occasions to prevent it from blocking ads from the CBS domain. Apparently, it's not enough to allow ads from CBS; I have to accept ads from everyone. If I have to choose, I'll hold on to a tool that blocks the annoying, flashing, talking ads. Hawaii Five-O isn't that good. I'm not sure what would be.

I'm not the only hater.

Bing map wins (in Grand Rapids)

Maps from Google (left) and Bing.

I'm in the habit of using everything google, but that will pass with maps like this.

The difference in proportion, indicated by the less elongated blocks in the Google map, is also surprising.

Moving with dogs: the preview

I urge you to read this phenomenally funny story about moving with (neurotic) dogs by Allie at hyperboleandahalf. I expect I'll be torturing my own dog in a similar manner soon.