Lily Allen / Reading Lots / iPod in the Bathroom

Ezra and Sal introduced my to Lily Allen last week. Holy cow she’s rad. Edgy lyrics, variety of instruments, clever syncopated rhythms, multiple (slightly predictable) harmonies. Maybe Gwen Stefani meets a (white British) Missy Elliot. That’s not quite right. But she’s rad. If you’re looking for two good tracks to start with, I recommend: Littlest Things and Alfie. Apparently she’s all the rage in the UK, but I can’t even buy her full album on iTunes. What gives?

Apparently she is catching some flak for being a rich girl fronting like she’s from the hood. Whatever.

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So far I’ve read a lot during break:

1. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Jonathon Safran-Foer – uncannily similar in tone and structure to his previous book (multi-generational, quirky/poignant/sad), which is an interesting choice and I’m not totally sure what to make of it.
2. Half-asleep in Frog Pajamas: Tom Robbins – this dude is a straight-up wack job. a bit preachy and pretentious at times, but funny if not taken too seriously.
3. The Blind Side: Michael Lewis – story of a) how the Left Tackle became such a highly valued position — the second most highly paid position after quarter back, and b) how an inner city kid from memphis goes from the most ghetto of ghettos to the rich ‘burbs living with rich white folks to one of top recruits in the country, at, yes, left tackle.
4. Bonfire of the Vanities: mostly funny, with a bit of sad and disturbing mixed in, portrayal of NYC’s i-banker “Master of the Universe” mentality.
5. Just started “Sick Puppy” by Carl Hiaasen

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this has to be a joke. really. please? god forbid you sit on the toilet without your iPod.

PHP Captcha for FutureMe

 In the continuing attempt to make myself useful during my long winter break from school, I wrote a php CAPTCHA implementation for FutureMe. There are a bunch out there, but I just didn’t think any of them were easy ennough to implement and/or stylish enough to deserve to be on FutureMe. It’s also a little startling how many of the implementations use a hidden input field to pass through the key in the form. That’s about 1.2% more secure that having no CAPTCHA at all. It’s maybe even less secure because it’s just so tempting to break.

My implementation uses the built-in php session object to store the captcha value (I know – I should use mysql…but we’re not looking at > 1 server in the near future). I also limited the possible characters significantly to try and cut down on ambiguity. And I dynamically shift the placement of the letters on the image with a certain window. I would have liked to introduce some element of rotation as well, but was too lazy to figure out how to do it w/ the PHP imageobject.

Anyways, I think it’s pretty slick if I do say so myself. If you’re interested in it, lemme know.

Hello world!

OK. With a good deal of ambivalence I am starting to write a blog for 2007 I guess. Am I really worthy? (Probably not). Is this silly self-indulgence? (Absolutely). Do periods go after or before closing parentheses? (I can’t really say for sure, but I should know that given all the education that I’ve been privy to.)

WordPress is pretty slick though.