With a bit of Mustard..

Random grab-bag of things:( Read more... )

wq

This year, I expect I'll again spend the 25th by sleeping in late, getting lunch at a Chinese restaurant (or maybe Japanese if any sushi places are open), and then working for half the day. If anyone wants to join in on any of that (haha), let me know.

New Year's eve and/or day will probably be spent at home with the cats, some champagne, and later some tea and migraine medication for the headache the alcohol will give me. Maybe some indian food and/or fondue too... Hmm.

This is pretty freaky - a mutated bipedal dog.

Yay, almost was run over this morning on the way to work - was pretty spaced out and wandered out right in front of a fast-moving car (that tested its breaks). I think I was daydreaming. Also, apparently houseguest GooglePgh is moving out and getting its own place. Huh.

Today: Stumbled across Indo-European Ablaut, which is one of the most fascinating things in the world. I'm skeptical about the ability to recreate ancient languages based on quirks of modern ones, but even though it's slightly sketchy, we don't have a better means. Particularly interesting is that features like this point at a theoretical reason why and how we (or at least I) are tempted to irregularise words with vowel shifts, and how people often come to agreement about such conjugations when they're not explicitly used in modern society. It's a kind of 「linguistic primality」, which is itself an amusing idea.

One of the few things more interesting than the early-middle stages of when a thought-framework begins to form to approach a new problem domain is setting aside enough of oneself to watch that happen (somewhat less interesting is taking it meta one more level). The base-level moment of insight and then the working out the basic new framework and its implications are sweet, but monitoring the shifts in mental gears while wondering about the nature of insight, problems, and frameworks is delicious. (new programming languages, a video game of sufficient complexity (this is why games like Civ, RPGs, and the like tend to be more engaging than other game types - the more complex the better), carpentry, etc).

As is traditional for this time of year, I ponder happiness, but then conclude that I'm treading Freud's ground too much and stop partway through and mark the section as private. Yay.
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Political disenheartenment:( Read more... )

I have not seen another person for many hours, here in my office. This is probably because of a combination of the elevator being quirky (not wanting to go up to floors 6-9) and the holidays. I've some things I really want to get done for work today, but I'm tempted to head to a coffeeshop to do them (maybe the Beehive or T'd'O - I need to have more landscapes in my life than home, office, Té Café, and random long hikes outside)

On the upside, it looks like Té Café may start having tea tastings events (maybe once a month), which are equally awesome in most of the same ways as wine tastings (not having those is one of the few downsides of having most alcohol in PA go through state liquor stores).

It is absolutely adorable how many websites go to great effort to try to prevent people from downloading music they're sending to them in full.

ssh does SOCKS proxies, which is great if you're at a coffeeshop and don't want your web traffic going untunnelled over their network. ( Read more... )

I think I've said that before. Recently, I discovered 3proxy, a fairly popular zero-configuration (no futzing with config files) http, ftp, and socks proxy. This is useful for slightly different network challenges, e.g. you're on a private network where you can't directly address the outside world but you have a shell account on a box that can (or alternatively if you want to dodge location-aware network service offerings and have a box in or outside of the relevant countries *cough* BBC *cough*). ( Read more... )

This is simple enough that it merits the term K-Rad (although given all the years it's been since I used it, I wonder if those darned metric-weenies have gotten around to redefining the K there as being 1000 instead of 1024 like it should be).

A systems geek is a lot like Felix the Cat - with a well-stocked bag of tricks.

It's impressive watching animals use tools, particularly animals one does not expect to use tools. (If anyone's visiting after the link is long dead, this is a BBCNews Science blurb about octopi digging out coconut shells and walking(!) awkwardly off with them to use them as homes - it's neat that this made the front page on their site)

Balkan Beat Box - very good music (anyone who likes Firewater or Klezmer music would probably dig it).

Been thinking a bit more about the deficiency of FoxNews as a news organisation, after having seen bits of some other channels. ( Read more... )

Thinking again about 470 and the WV/PA/OH borders there, it might be interesting to visit Wheeling someday. This area of the country has an interesting set of small towns... (not as interesting as Arkham and surrounding towns in Mass's Miskatonic River-Valley, but few places are)

This was another lonely weekend, with some mild amusements:( Read more... )

Gamewise:( Read more... )

Obama is a great speaker, but I remain annoyed at how philosophically juvenile almost all good political speeches have been throughout history, including his. When I hear him talking about universal rights and values, ( Read more... )

Every so often I listen to Danny Elfman's 「The Little Things」, an Oingo-Boingo-esque song he wrote for the film 「Wanted」. It's like a 「What if?」 peek into a world of if OB had not broken up. Taking the long view, I think OB is probably my favourite band, better than TMBG and perhaps better than (or at least on par with) Firewater and Zappa.