Journal
By the time Julia returned from her adventure, she had picked up several thousand experience points, and two rations.
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(10)
04:30:58 PM,
Saturday 17 September 2005
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Julia is home.
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(7)
02:47:23 AM,
Saturday 17 September 2005
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Which are worse: fashion designers or architects?
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(22)
02:40:14 AM,
Saturday 27 August 2005
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This is a test.
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(1)
02:21:08 PM,
Wednesday 24 August 2005
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Hey, remember how a while back I was talking about running a game of Lexicon? And how I then completely flaked out on everyone and didn’t get it started? Well, Neil is doing one now, and everyone who wanted to be in on it before is totally invited. Heck, as far as I know, everyone at all is invited. So come play Lexicon. The game started today (sorry for taking so long to post about it), but it is not too late to join in, and it won’t be too late for a while.
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09:10:11 PM, Friday 19 August 2005
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Oh my... looking at the date on that last post, it suddenly becomes apparent that I hadn't blogged in almost two weeks. Something should really be done about that.
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(4)
03:54:01 AM,
Friday 12 August 2005
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What the fuck makes people think that shit like this is okay?
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(11)
03:51:07 AM,
Friday 12 August 2005
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Grimly humorous effects of outdated Trivial Pursuit cards
Q: What country to Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, and Macedonians call home?
A: Um... Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia?
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(9)
09:12:50 PM,
Saturday 30 July 2005
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Let’s start with the differences in types of radiation. Basically, anything that moves is radiation, from visible light, to ultraviolet, to X-rays, to microwaves, to alpha particles, to neutrons, and even to flying pigeons. These different radiations do different things when they hit you, particularly the pigeons.
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02:45:27 AM, Wednesday 27 July 2005
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In American English usage, it is standard to capitalize the letters of an acronym (for example, “NASA”, or “IBM”). Many acronyms are three or four letters long, and acronyms are often used in technical contexts. Nevertheless, it is not standard to capitalize the letters of any short technical word. “Mac”, “Ruby”, “feed”, and the like can all be perfectly satisfied with no more than one capital letter each.
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09:19:58 PM, Saturday 16 July 2005
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We have the new Harry Potter book! We had been careless and did not think to preorder and we didn't think we were going to be able to get it tonight, but then on our way home just now we decided to swing by the local bookstore just in case! And it was open! And they had more copies than they had sold! And we got one! From someone who reminded us of Derek!
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(2)
03:31:13 AM,
Saturday 16 July 2005
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In honor of my fifth blogthday (or at least, the fifth anniversary of my upgrade to Bloglet 2.0), a new layout, and a new Five Years Ago link. I’ll probably continue playing with the details of this layout for a while, but I felt it was time for a change.
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10:04:02 AM, Friday 15 July 2005
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That’s all well and good, then.
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12:06:31 AM, Friday 15 July 2005
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Testing.
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(2)
12:03:41 AM,
Friday 15 July 2005
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"Many of these fields talk about important problems, certainly. But the way they talk about them is useless. For example, philosophy talks, among other things, about our obligations to one another; but you can learn more about this from a wise grandmother or E. B. White than from an academic philosopher."
Paul Graham, "Undergraduation"
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(1)
12:04:13 PM,
Thursday 14 July 2005
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Think about what this sign means for a while.
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(3)
09:54:24 PM,
Sunday 10 July 2005
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I am older.
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(19)
10:29:07 PM,
Sunday 3 July 2005
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Some interesting things on Language Log about caring less.
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(1)
07:40:22 PM,
Friday 1 July 2005
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Daily weather reports by David Lynch.
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12:08:28 PM,
Friday 1 July 2005
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This thing is cool. And by cool, I mean totally sweet.
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(1)
12:41:58 PM,
Tuesday 28 June 2005
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There’s something to be said for writing the possessive form of “it” as “it’s”, for the sake of consistency with other possessives.
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09:27:46 PM, Monday 27 June 2005
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(1)
09:24:26 PM,
Friday 24 June 2005
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We’ve been re-watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (well, not all of it, but the good bits). And I have to say: I liked him well enough the first time through, but now, with every passing episode, I hate Xander more and more. He ranges between just being sort of whiny and pathetic, and being deeply disturbed.
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12:31:38 AM, Thursday 23 June 2005
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02:29:05 AM, Thursday 16 June 2005
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Apropos of that last post, I feel I ought to note that where I work is now within walking distance of where I live again (I didn’t move—work did), so I can quite practically get through most ordinary days without ever needing my car.
In my new lifestyle, the only things that depend on a steady supply of oil are:
- All of the food I eat,
- Virtually every tool I use during the day,
- Every method I have of communicating with almost any of my friends,
- My job,
- Most of my forms of entertainment,
- and in short, my entire livelihood and way of life, and the society in which I live.
So that’s progress, right?
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08:26:14 PM, Tuesday 14 June 2005
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Jim Kunstler: "...what you see in California is a society with a tragic destiny. I was all over the Bay Area earlier in the week, from San Francisco to Silicon Valley to Berkeley and even down to Santa Cruz, and that was bad enough, But then I got down to Los Angeles on Friday and have been in a state of pathological reflex nausea ever since. Despite their lame attempts to rebuild a few pieces of the 2000-mile-long streetcar system that they gleefully destroyed in the 1950s, life here is all about cars and it will never not be about cars -- until the reality of our oil predicament falls on the hapless public like a hammer of God and the people of California die for their fucking cars in their fucking cars and over their fucking cars."
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(2)
07:51:58 PM,
Tuesday 14 June 2005
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Image048.jpg
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(1)
11:29:12 PM,
Friday 10 June 2005
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There seems to a fair bit of interest in a game of Lexicon, so I’m going to set up a Wiki for it and get us started. I’m thinking I’ll send out an email with details (location of the wiki, topic of the lexicon, final list of players, etc.) on Thursday, and we can start the game on Saturday.
Remi suggested making the turns longer than a day, so we have more time to mull things over, and so that it doesn’t start to feel like a chore. His suggestion was a week per turn, which seems too long to me (it would make the entire game last six months), but I think it would make sense to take two days per turn. Does anyone else have thoughts on this?
If anyone else wants to join the game, you should say so in the comments on this post. By my count, the current list is: Neil, Derek, Gillen, Julia, Mirabai, Remi, Tanya, Libby, Martin, and Erika. Also, if you’re not sure I have your email address, please email it to me (at gmail.com, I am moss dot collum).
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06:32:30 PM, Tuesday 7 June 2005
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EasyInstall is a CPAN-alike for Python: it automatically downloads, installs, and builds Python packages. Hell yes. We've needed something like this for ages.
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(1)
08:25:49 PM,
Monday 6 June 2005
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Fafblog: "competent intelligence and accurate prison records are both tools the enemy can use to escape justice."
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07:58:31 PM,
Monday 6 June 2005
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Lexicon is a little roleplaying game, in 26 turns, based around the construction of an encyclopedia. Inspired by Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, ideally suited for playing on a Wiki, and reminiscent of an academic, text-based version of the Baron Munchausen game, this is something I absolutely have to play.
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03:42:25 PM, Sunday 5 June 2005
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Well, I didn’t come close to finishing, but I had a lot of fun, and I think I may yet finish the app I started building. All my code is available at the railsday site, along with everyone else’s, though I never did check in my last piece of work (I’d started actually writing a controller). Definitely going to do this again next time.
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01:57:01 AM, Sunday 5 June 2005
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Okay—as of right now, I am embarking on my attempt to build a web application in 24 hours.
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12:00:04 AM, Saturday 4 June 2005
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A recent Language Log post reminded me of the brilliant line from the movie Heist, "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money."
While I was Googling it to see where it came from (unnecessarily, as I realized when I got to the bottom of the original post), I came across this delightful bit of correspondence from Roger Ebert's column "Movie Answer Man".
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06:02:17 PM,
Friday 3 June 2005
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Mark Liberman on Language Log: There is nothing in the grammar of the English language to support a prescription against starting a sentence with and or but --- nothing in the norms of speaking and nothing in the usage of the best writers over the entire history of the literary language. Like all languages, English is full of mechanisms to promote coherence by linking a sentence with its discourse context, and on any sensible evaluation, this is a Good Thing. Whoever invented the rule against sentence-intitial and and but, with its a preposterous justification in terms of an alleged defect in sentential "completeness", must have had a tin ear and a dull mind. Nevertheless, this stupid made-up rule has infected the culture so thoroughly that 60% of the AHD's (sensible and well-educated) usage panel accepts it to some degree.
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(5)
04:31:55 PM,
Friday 3 June 2005
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From 9am on Sunday June 5th to midnight on Friday June 10th, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast all of Beethoven's music.
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10:00:59 PM,
Thursday 2 June 2005
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