evan coonrod org

The news

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:41:08 -0700

I just read an interesting article from The Guardian:

Lou Gehrig killed by baseball not Lou Gehrig’s disease, study finds

Well, that’s pretty interesting, right? Let’s read together:

Lou Gehrig killed by baseball not Lou Gehrig’s disease, study finds

Fascinating! The headline really grabs you, doesn’t it? There was a study, and it had a surprising but definite finding.

Player who gave his name to a type of motor neurone disease more probably died due to brain trauma

The byline. “more probably” - great, ok, I mean they probably looked at his medical records and since medical science wasn’t so advanced in the 40s they just can’t be 100% sure, but obviously the study makes a pretty good case that Lou Gehrig wasn’t killed by Motor Neuron Disease, or they would’ve used a different headline.

Gehrig, who built a heroic reputation for playing on despite injuries - he played 2,130 games over 14 years - is not named in the study.

Oh.

I was a big fan of The Audience Is Listening, so I was excited...

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:13:29 -0700

I was a big fan of The Audience Is Listening, so I was excited when I saw that Cut Chemist’s new album is available for streaming in its entirety online.

Weather forced us to rearrange our wedding day a little. By the...

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 16:01:00 -0700

Weather forced us to rearrange our wedding day a little. By the time we were ready to leave the church, our guests had all left for the reception. Fortunately, a few holdouts meant the bubbles did not go to waste.

Wedding behind-the-scenes

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:20:17 -0700

Wedding behind-the-scenes

Illegally Parked Parking Enforcement

Wed, 26 May 2010 23:47:31 -0700

Illegally Parked Parking Enforcement

lenticular graffiti

Wed, 12 May 2010 19:44:22 -0700

lenticular graffiti:

this is really cool. More pics here

Video

Tue, 04 May 2010 00:09:42 -0700

iPad Couch Pouch

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:41:00 -0700

I always slide my laptop under the couch when I’m not using it, but I didn’t want to do that with my iPad since it’s basically a big sheet of glass. I didn’t really have a great place where it could be handy but wouldn’t be at risk of falling off a shelf or something, so Leslie made a little pouch that buttons on to the side of the couch:

Sort of the exact opposite of the Sprocket Pocket.

Couch pouch on Flickr

Video

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:22:50 -0700

We have received your feedback regarding Wolfram|Alpha.

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:47:00 -0700

Thank you for your comment. We have investigated the issue but have determined that we cannot implement your suggestion at this time.

Thank you for helping us improve Wolfram|Alpha.

Best wishes,

The Wolfram|Alpha Team
www.wolframalpha.com

Name:
Input: gold the size of a human brain
Occupation:
Organization:
Message: should tell me the dollar value of a gold nugget the size of a human brain

Short documentary about the history of pirate radio in London.

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 18:49:12 -0700

Short documentary about the history of pirate radio in London.

Switch back to the old Facebook layout

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 11:05:00 -0800

I got an invitation to become a fan of a page on Facebook called “Switch back to the old Facebook layout”. At first I thought it was just another “We liked the old layout better” group but it’s actually more evil than that.

Following the directions here isn’t going to do anything but annoy your friends. The happy user comments are fake (just an image!), the wall is disabled so real people can’t post. I thought maybe clicking where it says to click would do something, but it doesn’t look like it. The javascript is hard to read but I think it just reloads the same content.

So why is this so nefarious?

Because someone’s now got 80,000+ fans! View that as a list of 80,000+ gullible people to send spam to. And since there’s no spam filter on Facebook, this is a pretty valuable list.

Who would fall for this, you ask? The same people who just google for “Facebook Login” and then plug their credentials into the first result.

Gingerbread House party

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 19:35:00 -0800

Every year Leslie’s microbiology lab has a Gingerbread House competition. This is the seventh year overall and the third year Leslie and I attended. Instead of gingerbread, which takes a long time to bake, we use graham crackers for planks. Everything must be edible and this year we had a new rule, only provided candy was allowed.

Expectations were high going into the contest, with Leslie and I taking the prize for two years running. While some teams are happy to make a house- and I’ve seen some amazing houses- some teams get a little crazier.

This year we went meta and made a Gingerbread House Competition. Here are some pictures of our entry, along with some of the other entries.

Click through for captions

We won for “Most Creative”!

Video

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:55:00 -0800

We went to New York!

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:13:00 -0700

Leslie and I went to New York! It was amazing. It was an amazing, whirlwind three-day trip and we saw so much amazing stuff!

Highlights:

A taping of The Colbert Report (you can watch “our” episode here)
A book signing with Alton Brown for his new book, “Good Eats: The Early Years”
Shrek: The Musical
All the typical touristy New York stuff- Times Square, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza, Central Park, Hudson River Cruise, The Guggenheim, The Natural History Museum, Hayden Planetarium, FAO Schwarz, the 5th Ave Apple Store, etc.

Here are my pictures, or in convenient slideshow form:

Twilio Contest

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:27:00 -0700

So sometime earlier this year I found a service called Twilio that I thought was pretty cool. They offer a service that basically makes it really easy for web app developers to offer telephone based features. Not mobile features, like iPhone apps- actual honest-to-goodness POTS features. Hit a URL, and your phone rings. Answer it, and it will speak to you in a soft robot voice. Dial a number, and Twilio makes a request to a web service.

Naturally, I spent the morning coding up a really simple demo app. It didn’t do much, but I was impressed by the simplicity and power of the API. Then, I wrote a program to prank call Lane.

A couple weeks later, I read that Twilio was running a weekly contest over the summer. Each week has a new theme, and the coolest app each week wins a netbook. I subscribed to the blog, eager for a theme which inspired a cool idea.

Last week’s theme was Amazon Web Services, which is a concept close to my heart. We use AWS heavily for the app I work on at Palo Alto Software, Email Center Pro, and ECP is all about communication, so it seemed like a natural fit.

I pitched my idea to my manager, and he liked it, so I spent most of the day Friday writing the code for Voice Alerts. It shouldn’t even have taken that long, but there were a few nagging issues I just couldn’t get past. Our ECP API is quite robust, so it was actually pretty easy to add a simple option to output TwiML, the special code that tells Twilio what to say.

I decided just explaining what the feature did wouldn’t be interesting enough, so I resolved to make a video. I grabbed my camera equipment and went in to the office to do some filming. I edited the video down and uploaded it to Youtube on Sunday, just a few hours ahead of the deadline. Normally Jason does our ECP videos, but I think I did alright:

I did some Twitter snooping and found some really interesting competition. I really didn’t think I had much of a chance at winning the competition, but I was happy just to have made an entry. The winner was supposed to have been announced Monday morning, but instead @twilio announced on Twitter that there were SO many entries, they hadn’t picked a winner yet. Tuesday rolled around and still no winner announced. Finally, Tuesday night the blog updated.

I was one of TWO winners! So I’ve got a brand new netbook coming any day now, which is pretty cool. We’ll be launching my new award-winning feature later this week, and I have a feeling I’ll be doing more with Twilio in the future.

Hey BTW

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I got engaged, just FYI

I went to Disney World!

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

And here are my pics:

The Same Old Thing: A gallery review

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:49:00 -0700

In the history of Art, few mediums have been as inextricably linked to a single artist as with the readymade with Marcel Duchamp. While others have tried- and certainly many have- few have met any measure of success. Indeed, Duchamp’s work so scandalized the art world that few were ever even exhibited, and most discarded as rubbish. Perhaps his most famous work, “Fountain”, was denied entry to the unjuried exhibition. A replica of the long-since destroyed piece, one of 8 commissioned by the artist himself shortly before his death, sold at Sotheby’s in 1999 for $1.7 million, and in 2004 was named “The most influential artwork of the 20th century” by a panel of 500 artists. When Duchamp abandoned the medium in the 1920s, no artist was foolish enough to take it up. When the art world finally caught up in the 1960s, few were able to achieve the level of legitimacy that Duchamp brought.

I thought it notable, then, when I saw a new public exhibition of one artist’s readymades in Eugene this past week. I discovered this artist’s work while biking home from work, far from the city’s many downtown galleries, though I have since been informed that several of his compositions are displayed on their walls. While I can’t say that this anonymous artist will be the next Duchamp, he is certainly worthy of note.

Same, Untitled, 2009, spraypaint on wood, 408” x 18” x 18”. Oakway Street, Eugene, Oregon.

While Duchamp sought to elevate the mundane, to celebrate the unseen beauty in the nondescript; Same takes a somewhat different approach. His artwork is not here to celebrate the nondescript, he wishes to highlight the trees in the forest, to alert us to unseen dangers in our midst.

The human brain evolved to recognize changes. When primitive man walked through a field, it would do him no good to notice the same grass he’d seen every day. Noticing the places where the grass had changed- trampled into a trail, perhaps by dinner, perhaps by a potential rival for the top spot on the food chain- this is a trait which served him well in his quest to survive.

Same, Untitled, 2009, spraypaint on steel pipe, 56” x 4” x 4”. Oakway Street, Eugene, Oregon.

Same, here making a brilliant use of vertical space, recognizes that our modern predators do not leave trails in the grass. One utility pole is an imposing object. Tangible, intimidating. There are thousands, though, and with thousands of utility poles in a city, they become mundane, invisible. We see so many each day that, paradoxically, we never even notice them.

Same has used his spraycan to call attention to individual poles, and in doing so, he calls attention to the larger forest delivering electricity, cable television, and the internet to sedate the masses. This is our modern predator, slinking through the skies in narrow black cables. This is what we must learn to respect if we are to survive the next hundred thousand years.

Same, Untitled, 2009, spraypaint on wiring enclosure, 16” x 14” x 30”. Oakway Street, Eugene, Oregon.

This wiring enclosure was designed by a team of engineers specifically to be non-descript, to be invisible, so as to not lower property values. Same calls attention to it, his moniker identifying not only himself but also the state of the thing: Sameness. We ignore these plastic parasites, allowing them to invade our yards in exchange for the sweet nectar of telecommunications. We believe the relationship is symbiotic, but in reality they take away more than they give us.

Same, Untitled, 2009, spraypaint on cement and steel, 42” x 42”. Oakway Street, Eugene, Oregon.

Same’s work approaches the medium with fresh eyes and offers a new perspective on the readymade. He manages to make us question ourselves as much as when Duchamp signed a urinal in 1917, although in a different way. Rather than asking ourselves, “What is art”, we must ask ourselves whether our society is heading down the right path. Do we wish to continue to take refuge in our homes and offices, our lives playing out in ones and zeros on flickering phosphors?

A word to the technical merits of Same’s pieces. Yes, the medium is not for everyone. I’m sure many people will just ignore these pieces, passing by them without a second thought. In a way, that’s part of the message. Just as Same has selected seemingly-arbitrary utility poles and panels out of thousands, it is the rare person who will truly be able to appreciate the artistic intent behind his work. The composition is superb, and the monochromatic palette is yet another glimpse into the deep sophistication which is barely evident in such a technically simplistic work. The selection of a single color once again presents the theme of a single object to typify an easily ignored quantity. One imagines the artist at Home Depot, comparing dozens of Krylon caps, before stuffing the perfect under his oversized sweatshirt.

Humanity survived its adolescence by picking out subtle hints in its environment: a broken twig, a bent leaf. Slight differences in a sea of sameness that signaled food, or shelter, or danger. Same endeavors to bring this awareness to humanity as it exists today, snapping twigs with a can of paint. There are no easy answers to the questions he asks. Each person must answer for him or herself. For Same, it’s enough to broach the subject.

Same’s work is currently on display on the east side of Oakway Road between Cal Young and Coburg in Eugene, Oregon until someone sandblasts it off.

My bug tracker doesn’t look like this for long, just...

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:39:20 -0700

My bug tracker doesn’t look like this for long, just thought I’d record it for posterity