Monthly Archives: February 2003

News
Phew…

Well folks. after a week of being down and out of service sneaker.org is back online and hopefully fully operational. The machne that runs sneaker.or is a very old Pentium Pro 200 MHz with 64 MB RAM on it. It was running RedHat 6.2 on it and hadn’t been patched in a while, and so I’m sure it was playing host to some abusive hacker who was molesting the poor little machine while I wasn’t watching. So I decided to finally pull the rug out from under him and rebuilt the machine from scratch. And then of course getting RedHat configured to do everything it needs to do is always a non-trivial task (trivial onc eyou figure it out of course) and so the site was down for a while.

Anyhow, it’s back up and I’m still testing to see if the blogger connection is working. So this is the first real post to test that. So here is what’s been happening…

Oh, newsflash! The pictures section still has a ton of new stuff!!

New in Thought — caught in the act!*

  • Nothing new in here yet, but coming up soon… Frijdas Laws of Emotion — dissecting falling in love; Intellectual Masturbation — a chronic ailment of graduate programs; Motivation; Why George Bush annoys me?.

    New in Rants and Raves*

  • Nothing new in here either, but coming soon… Gelato; Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, Ms. Saigon and more..

    New in Eavesdropped!* on Sunday, February 2, 2003

  • R: We need to use the pumping lemma for this one.

    Me: Right now the pumpkin lemma sounds better to me.

    – While working on the Automata assignment

  • Me: “Oh, I need to water the plants”

    Ramu: “Why don’t you just get artificial ones?”

    Me: “Why don’t you just get a blow-up doll!?”

    – an unusually witty response even though I say so myself 🙂

  • “Your nipple doesn’t work.”

    “I’m not used to working without a nipple.”

    “Your nipple is broken.”

    – Dave A. when the trackpoint on the notebook wasn’t working.

  • No, I don’t want to set “munky.com” as my home page.

    – Frank L. upon accidentally going to wincvs.com instead of wincvs.org

  • The Law of Hedonic Assymetry: Pleasure is always contingent upon change and disappears with continuous satisfaction. Pain may persist under under persisting adverse conditions.

    – Nico H. Frijda, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands in his paper on The Laws of Emotion.

  • “Data from questionnaire studies (Rombouts, 1987) suggest that [falling in love] is triggered by a specific sequence of events, in which the qualities of the love-object are of minor importance. A person is ready to fall in love because of one of a number of reasons – loneliness, sexual need, dissatisfaction, or need or variety. A object then incites interest, again for one of a number of reasons, such as novelty, attractiveness, or mere proximity. Then give the person a moment of promise, a brief response from the object that suggests interest. It may be a confidence; it may be a single glance, such as a young girl may think she received from a pop star. The give the person a brief lapse of time – anywhere between half an hour or half a day, the self-report suggests – during which fantasies can develop. After that sequence, no more than a single confirmation, real or imagined is needed to precipitate falling in love.”

    – Nico H. Frijda, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands in his paper on The Laws of Emotion.

  • Satisfaction is less a matter of getting what you want than getting what you have

    – Myers and Diener in their paper on Who is Happy

  • “Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults”

    – Thomas Sasz as quoted in the paper on Who is Happy by Myers and Diener

  • “That man is never happy for the present is so true”

    – Boswell, 1776 as quoted in the article WHo is Happy by Myers and Diener.

  • “Just because someone is educated doesn’t mean that they are right.”

    – Dr. James Gross in my Seminar on Emotion class @ Stanford in reference to a particular work on EI.

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