HA! I found the bug! My parentheses were just a touch two thetic, and not quite parenious enough.
06:03:47 PM,
Wednesday 13 December 2000
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Other kinds of pop tarts may claim to be faintly healthy in some way--incorporating fruit, and all. But there's not really any way brown sugar and cinnamon pop tarts can even pretend to be terribly nourishing.
12:31:00 PM,
Wednesday 13 December 2000
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Sleep or Linux Users' Group, sleep or Linux Users' Group. Linux Users' Group... the meeting's going to be about multi-head Linux, which is too cool to pass up. And coffee will help me survive. (If I ever have three monitors on a computer, I need to remember to name it Cerberus).
08:06:38 PM,
Tuesday 12 December 2000
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Electric guitar gets run over by a car on the freeway. This is a crime against the state. This is the meaning of life.
02:45:12 PM,
Friday 8 December 2000
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Stupid Election Reform Suggestion Of The Day: a state law requiring that the margin of error be determined for every voting method used in the state (i.e. what percent of the ballots can be expected to be counted incorrectly), and requiring that, if the votes for the two leading candidates should differ by less than that margin of error, neither shall be considered to have won the election.
11:55:33 AM,
Tuesday 28 November 2000
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(Well... if you've used X Windows and studied Greek.)
02:24:47 PM,
Monday 27 November 2000
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(I should note that that is, of course, inspired by Mr. Fahey's coinage of the "x privative"... if you've used X Windows, you'll understand.)
02:23:55 PM,
Monday 27 November 2000
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e privative: the "e-" prepended onto various common words, to indicate that they have been transformed into websites and deprived of any real worth.
02:22:45 PM,
Monday 27 November 2000
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The good news is, I'm getting my Thinkpad back online. The bad news is, my new computer still hasn't managed to arrive, and the alpha is still crashing... hopefully they'll deliver the one tommorow, and the other will be fixed by changing OSes, but I have my doubts.
11:21:59 PM,
Saturday 25 November 2000
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SQL has a data type named BLOB. I think that's pretty damned cool. They say it stands for Binary Large Object, but I think we can all tell which name came first.
02:42:21 PM,
Monday 20 November 2000
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"That is what we all thought. We had reckoned without naked mole rats."
--Richard Dawkins, explaining, in an endnote to the 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene, that no, as it turns out, the insects aren't the only ones to have evolved sterile workers.
05:30:54 PM,
Friday 17 November 2000
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Ooh! And the circus is back! They've started counting absentee votes, so there's something to watch today.
12:19:12 PM,
Friday 17 November 2000
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A clearly stated, well reasoned, thorough article on a scientific topic that's traditionally been the subject of a fair bit of political controversy, and this from a news source that's traditionally quite conservative. I'm quite pleased, even if the matter it discusses is a bit worrying.
12:02:37 PM,
Friday 17 November 2000
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My manta ray's all right...
03:30:39 PM,
Thursday 16 November 2000
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Election scenario of the day: the other advanced nations, deciding that our election irregularities are a cause for concern, but mostly just pissed off about us having acted like the world's policemen for so many years, decide that a U.N. intervention is called for, and thus invade America.
12:03:55 PM,
Thursday 16 November 2000
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That was fun. I'm still trying to decide which one I prefer; this one is I think more elegant and concise, but this one has that beautifully ironic suggestion to use more general keywords.
08:39:34 PM,
Tuesday 14 November 2000
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From fortune - "A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee into theorems". - A similar statement is true of programmers.
04:58:00 PM,
Monday 13 November 2000
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Fun electoral college scenario of the day: Gore fails to win Florida (and thus fails to gain a majority), but several Republican electors defect to Nader, which they can safely do in the knowledge that, with no electoral college majority, the election will be decided by the Republican-dominated congress.
01:28:54 PM,
Monday 13 November 2000
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Proposed: property ownership allows owners to periodically charge rent, extracting a certain amount of money from its natural flow. This removes information from the economy, hindering its ability to react in a natural way. Trying to respond to market forces when you have to pay the rent is like kicking dead whales down the beach. Resolving this would be one step towards towards engineering a better version of capitalism.
05:23:35 PM,
Wednesday 8 November 2000
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Why didn't I pay more attention when they were trying to teach me trigonometry? They told me it might even be useful, but what did I say? "Oh no, I'll never need to survey anything." Never occurred to me that doing anything cool looking with motion on a computer involves using trig. Anyhow, at least I'm generally math-geeky enough that I can re-learn what I've forgotten... and probably enjoy it, really, after some initial griping.
03:24:16 PM,
Friday 3 November 2000
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News flash!
In a great personal victory, I have finally managed to get an 'Authoritarian' score on the Libertarians' "World's Smallest Political Quiz". I think the deciding factor, the change that finally pulled me out of that ugly little "left-liberal" box, was my decision that, though I oppose all military service on principle, I can still support a draft as an application of the principle that all citizens should be required to do their civic duty. Closed borders and state control of television broadcasting, of course, were easy ones. So far, my only deviations from an entirely authoritarian party line are my opposition to the drug war and to regulations on sex between consenting adults.
If you'd like to try the quiz, go to www.lp.org, the Libertarian Party website ("The Libertarian Party: we were convincing ourselves we had a chance before the Greens even existed!"). Points will be awarded to: (1) Any anarchist who manages to get scored as a fascist by the quiz using only honest answers, and (2) Anyone who can offer me a good reason to change my two two remaining Libertarian positions.
03:40:48 AM,
Friday 3 November 2000
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Programming FAQ #5
Q: How late are you coming in tommorow?
A: Very late.
12:07:33 AM,
Thursday 2 November 2000
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Programming FAQ #4
Q: How many monitors are you using?
A: Two.
11:40:47 PM,
Wednesday 1 November 2000
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Programming FAQ #3
Q: What are you listening to?
A: Fast, loud, simple music. At the moment, Dr. Octagon.
11:39:59 PM,
Wednesday 1 November 2000
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Programming FAQ #2
Q: Where are the chocolate covered coffee beans?
A: The chocolate covered coffee beans are on the vi quick reference card.
11:39:12 PM,
Wednesday 1 November 2000
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Programming FAQ #1
Q: What are you drinking?
A: Right now, water. I have recently finished the Surge. I have not yet started on the second Red Bull.
11:38:03 PM,
Wednesday 1 November 2000
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Okay, I can understand how they would decide not to make ActionScript case sensitive... I don't quite agree with it, but it's not a language for hackers, and that's the sort of thing that could help to avoid confusion. But to do that, and then establish principles for how to capitalize different things, when the different capitalizations won't actually distinguish them... that seems foolish.
06:42:14 PM,
Tuesday 31 October 2000
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This is actually the result of a well established rule: medications recommended by the school nurse are never compatible with being in class. I still remember Patrick's non-drowsy cold-medicine horror story all too vividly.
02:06:31 PM,
Tuesday 31 October 2000
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Santa is my motor.
Hear my motor purr.
05:25:05 PM,
Monday 30 October 2000
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A fish before dyeing?
06:11:34 PM,
Friday 27 October 2000
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Noooooooo future, nooooo future, noooo future for yooooooou! Noooooo future, nooooo future, noooooo future for meeeeeee!
06:43:46 PM,
Thursday 26 October 2000
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Grape Nuts O's are stupid. What good are Grape Nuts if they aren't infinitely dense?
12:56:51 PM,
Tuesday 24 October 2000
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It's good to challenge one's self, especially if one is someone else.
12:20:02 PM,
Tuesday 24 October 2000
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Okay, who exactly decided that it would be a good idea to design the scripting language of Macromedia Flash to use degrees in the functions to set the rotation of objects, but radians in all the trig functions in the math library? Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
07:04:03 PM,
Monday 23 October 2000
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And now I've got two computers connected through that same connection.
02:02:16 AM,
Monday 23 October 2000
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Whee! I've got a cable modem connection! And it's nice and spiffy and fast!
02:00:09 AM,
Monday 23 October 2000
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