A treatise that views all social interaction as a negotiation, and applies the ‘principled negotiation’ strategy to everyday life. Also includes some interesting stuff about personality and understanding nonverbal social cues. An interesting read for someone who, like me, tries to find an algorithm for everything.

While it hews pretty closely to the ‘manic pixie’ storyline, it is good to see Breathed continue his books for kids, after ‘A Wish for Wings that Work’. Sad, funny, and good art.

Perhaps it is just because season 4 was so awesome, or maybe because I’ve built it up more than it deserves, but these movies seem more scatter shot and almost desperate than Season 4. Mostly, I blame the longer format, which, due to contractual reasons, is oddly sliced into 22 minute acts. So, while I enjoyed this “movie” a lot, it didn’t have the narrative consistency of a single episode. For comparison, say, Godfellas (3.12), in which Bender had to tackle similar issues of reality and destiny, was presented in a similar parallel structure that worked as a whole.

Interesting stuff; I had to get some after reading about it in Collapse. It was good, but very sour with a note of lye that hit the back of my nostrils after a few bites. Also, it is a bit pricey. Buffala yogurt is better overall, and will remain preferred lunchtime dairy snack.

Bought a Chunky Monkey MilkShake with my lunch frozen burrito today. Had more calories than the burrito, but it tasted better. I probably won’t make a habit of it, however I will likely try the other two flavors sometime before they are pulled from the market for poor sales.

While at CVPR 2006, I noticed that a lot of people wanted to tackle big Vision problems – things like getting a whole scene out of a single image, or constructing object finders out of sketches. Marr had 18 citations, so I finally got around to reading the whole thing – not just skipping over the parts that seemed out of date or just plain wrong. And a lot of it is wrong, with other books like Forsyth and hoary Horn providing a better technical idea of what how the field is shaping and how to put the basic ideas to use. However, Marr is a good introduction to ideas about how research in vision, and other such fields, should be done, if not in any usable form today. Next, I’ll read Aliomonos’ old thing. If I was in Biology, I get the feeling this would be reading Darwin after reading Gould, or whoever the hot one is now.

An excellently made and thoroughly depressing flick that suffers from Spielberg’s interesting recent tick of having multiple endings. On top of that, I had to deal with Spielberg’s squeamishness about nudity, which only made the love scenes more out of place. While I enjoyed the movie as a whole, its end, especially the final shot, seemed unearned. The movie was better when it was about people and their attempts to bring order from chaos through the application of more chaos. Its constant reminders and symbols of home and family felt forced, especially when intercut with the technically and thematically more successful action sequences.

For breakfast this morning, I poached a couple of eggs (from TJ’s) and toasted a whole wheat english muffin, put some of the spread on the muffin, and added some Niman ranch ham to make a tasty breakfast sandwich. I had tried the spread plain on a muffin a few days earlier, and it was just too much. However, it was pretty good on the mcmuffin.

I showed FF Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ for movie night last Thursday. The discussion afterward was pretty good. I always like how a flick can take you inside a person’s head. The Conversation offered a good counterpoint to ‘Rear Window.’ I suppose I’ll have to see ‘Repulsion’ and ‘Blow Up,’ and a bunch of other related movies, too. So, it goes. (Afterward, we decided to show ‘Fanny and Alexander’ next Thursday.)

When I left my powerbook on the edge of my desk and returned to find the adapter prong bent beyond repair, my first destination was the apple online store, which carries replacement power adapters for $80. However, I checked OWC, who carries a replacement adapter for only $35. The adapter is old school – a white variant of a similar adapter that came with my 2001 Dell. The led is on the converter, not the ring, and it doesn’t have the classy apple styling, but it does the job, and at less than half the price, so I can’t complain.