Rants and Ideas

“The pen is mightier than the sword, but a katana dipped in ink is a good compromise.”

The best way to understand something is to try to explain it to someone else. Here I go…

I don’t tend to proof-read. I will be putting up random thoughts here usually without revision, hoping to go back and clean them up later. But that often doesn’t happen. Please excuse the raw stream-of-consciousness writing style for which my highschool history teacher would lynch me. If it helps you, you can think of this as an organised blog.

Those Fucking SUVs and Nat’s version

That air that you breathe? That water that you drink? Those roads on which you want to be safe, that polar ice cap you don’t want melting and flooding your home, that world at peace? You liked those things, didn’t you? Well, FUCK YOU! They’re mine, and I will destroy them.

T9biguities

When your cell phone text messages go bad!

Boulder Café Guide for Grad Students

Since my lab is not a viable place to work, I am slowly putting together a list of good places to study. Please contribute!

On Government

Eric Raymond makes the best case for anarchy I know of, and there is much in what he says. But he forgot something kind of important. Why such an urgent need for big government?

Lie for Democracy!, or Why I Support the Teaching of Creationism in Schools

I’ve become pretty disillusioned with democracy since 2004-11-02. The fact that the turd of a president is in power for another four years ought to raise some pretty serious questions as to whether there is any hope for the USA and its peculiar elected aristrocracy. I do, however, have a solution. It is based on the premise that politicians will always lie, and yet it is robust to honesty.

The Great Laptop Email Solution

Laptops are cool. Email is cool. Unfortunately it took me a while to figure out how to make them cooperate. Here’s what I wanted to be able to do:

• Read and respond to email with or without my laptop.
• Read and respond to email from my laptop whether or not it is connected to the ’net.

Ical on Debian Unstable

Long, long ago, Sanjay Ghemawat wrote a nice little calendar program for X. Sadly, it's unmaintained. Happily, it is very easy to compile on a modern Debian system. I didn't even have to do any work, aside from a little googling. Thanks to Richard W. M. Jones and especially John Heidemann! One day I'll make a Debian package for this... until then, setup takes 3 minutes.

Religion

It can do wonders in the right hands, but keeping it there is impossible.

Buying a Car

In 1996 I bought my first car. I chose it based mainly on reputation for reliability. Turns out that it was a great car, but not for me. A friend was going through the process and asked for advice, which I offered. Then another friend wanted similar advice, so I made a webpage out of it.