mason: September 2008 Archives

One day Soshi was walking on the bank of a river with a friend. "How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!" exclaimed Soshi. His friend spake to him thus: "You are not a fish; how do you know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?" "You are not myself," returned Soshi; "how do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?"

I ran the half-marathon in San Francisco this past summer. It was amazing. Afterwards I wanted pictures to remember it by--specifically, pictures that had me in them to remember my experience. Before the race, MarathonFoto informed me that "you and your family will not have to worry about trying to capture your special race moments" because they would take pictures. Great! They neglected to mention those pictures would cost $40 each to download.

I liked the pictures, but that heads-up they gave before the race was slimy. I wondered, "how can I make a better, cheaper service for finding photos of myself (and put these guys out of business :P)?" The result is bibfind.com: a crowd-sourced photo tagging system that uses the bib numbers worn by runners to identify them in photos.

I read The Elements of Style by Strunk and White to get better at writing. The biggest section is on common misuses of words and expressions in English. I thought the section was valuable, but more than I'd be able to keep in my head while writing. To solve that problem, I made a script that analyzes some given text and then annotates each potential misuse with a link to Strunk's guidance.