I just wrapped up a phone interview with the Perl shop in SB(view full entry for contents)This'd be a good place to work, I think.

Looking a bit at SB apartments on Craigslist, I discovered that I shall have to pass go much more frequently in order to have a comparable standard of living. As stated, $500/month would "buy me a toilet" in SB, even though in Pittsburgh it gets me my reasonably nice apartment. I'd feel weird asking for a salary with precisely adjusted cost-of-living stuff (a place like what I have now would probably be $1500/month there), and I've been pretty happy being able to live comfortably while saving money on salaries in the 40s-50s range. I suppose if I had a family, I'd want more money though.

So, having made my resumé public again has led to a lot of phone calls and emails by local recruiters (mainly folk looking for a sysadmin) - it's nice how after I've told some of them that I'm not looking locally, a barrier goes down and I've had some good tech conversations with people I don't know. Some of them are other sysadmins looking to hire their replacement(!) - once one has some stuff on one's resumé, there's a lot of good jobs floating around locally for a unix sysadmin - good to know :)

Foodwise, I have been neglecting to occasionally drink alcohol, and that's made it hard for me to enjoy fondue or a cup of wine with dinner. I'm coming to think of it as a duty - if I can manage to get my alcohol tolerance up to something sane over the next year, that would be good. Also, Dominic said that there's a Cajun restaurant somewhere on the northside - I want to give that a try soon. Alsø Alsø wik, I must visit Abay again soon. Company for either/both of these would be welcome.

Wow! The b43 wireless driver for my (main) laptop's wireless adapter actually works now (previous versions hardlocked the system as soon as they loaded, and ndiswrapper never worked very well). After all these years of making do without, I now can reliably use the built-in wireless on my laptop... and I'm still the new 21" laptops that are starting to come out :)

People who have ever played the old PC game Digger may find this to be interesting.

6 May 2008 snapshot of my BLOG/Wiki software

I would post a list of changes, but I don't remember when I last posted a version.

Productive second phone interview - things have progressed to the point of beginning paperwork. At this point, I should probably should be thinking seriously about what I can throw/give away and start packing more seriously. I'm pretty nervous. (view full entry for contents)

Idea: Use IETF-style vocabulary when constructing abstract models of government that a real movement (with all the internal disagreement and partial/full solidarity/communion that entails) could adopt. The grammar would help establish a clear pale and spur discussion on the differences between dogma (Fard), things proscribed (Haraam), and similar middling terms (mubaah, mandoob, etc).

I had a nice walk in the woods today - I was in the CMU area to enter some passwords in my ex-workplace (weird to be there again), had two lunches (one due to randomly running into Elise), and on the way back home, whim pulled me deep into Schenley Park. I sometimes wonder if I would remember the trails I used to run on were I to return to the Brecksville metroparks - remembering these things is not a matter of explicit memory so much as a collection of "it feels right to take this path given the choice I see before me" given one's goals of reaching someplace in particular.

Not exactly mopey, but definitely introspective and meandering into meaning-of-life philosophy..(view full entry for contents)

I was recently weirded out to discover the reason that my server was getting hammered is that a spam/pr0n site (surprising how many of those there are) randomly (?) selected an image of my face that was included from Livejournal and included it in a bunch of machine-generated text (in Spanish). Not that it would stop the hammering bit, but I told Apache to give a 304 redirect for any requests with a referrer set to that site to a giant picture of an Iguana on Wikipedia. I find Iguanas beautiful, perhaps purveyors of pr0n will too (even if they're not particularly sexy).

woot.com's daily stories they use to showcase their item-of-the-day really crack me up.

Le Mond: (view full entry for contents)

Would people be interested if I made "quizzes" every so often that would ask interesting questions about current events and history in a short-answer/essay invitation format? I would suspect they might lead people to look into events and history that they otherwise might not, and that might lead people to a better understanding of how the world fits together today.

First experiment with making "Quizzes" - sets of interesting questions that people might want to look into, primarily dealing with current events and history, sometimes asking for analysis, sometimes more concrete. Answers and/or discussions on any of the topics would be welcome by email or comment on the Livejournal version of my blog.

(view full entry for contents)

That's probably enough for a first go :)

I've been having problems with getting my Spanish and German versions of the same construct right (or at least, similar constructs, but maybe they only seem similar because I don't grasp them correctly). In English, we describe the state of the world using phrases like "It is XXXX", where "it" is understood, absent some topic of conversation that might compete for its attention ("it" is very jealous!), to be the beginning of what I think of as a "special construct" in English. "It is cold", "It's not safe to talk to them when they're arguing", etc. In some cases, Spanish uses phrases with the verb hacer for this idiom, e.g. "hace frio" for "it is cold". In some cases, German uses "es gibt" (it gives) for this idiom, e.g. "Es gibt Berge". In both languages, I *think* there are circumstances where one would conjugate ser/sein instead of using the idiom. If someone fluent in either/both languages would clarify for me when each usage is appropriate, I would be appreciative. Given that I occasionally communicate with people in German and Spanish, getting it right would be helpful :)

Also, to people who have studied linguistics, is there a name for that "it is" idiomatic construct?

This reminds me of that old LISP joke: "State-of-the-universe-p?" "Yes, the universe has a state"...

As I mentioned on a poll on the LJ side of my blog (maybe I should add poll support to pound?), I don't mind editing out parts of songs that I don't like, from surrounding bits to entire interludes. (view full entry for contents)

Yesterday's rain was glorious.

An offer letter is on its way. If the salary/benefit details are appropriate, I'll have a job in SB soon. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't want me to do an in-person first (as they said they wanted when I first started talking with them). I suddenly have a lot to arrange. They want me there in 2 or 3 weeks, which will be a bit of an adventure to arrange (especially apartment-wise).

Moving details that's uninteresting unless you can give me advice on doing it better: (view full entry for contents)

My cats sometimes try to guess my passwords when I am away. I am thus convinced that cats would make very good information security employees - their passwords, at the very least, are fantastic.

A long time ago, as an undergrad, I took a variety of courses that exposed me to ideas that I've rejected-as-presented, some more-or-less entirely, some having acquired nuance enough that they no longer closely resemble what was taught. Highlight today: A set of ideas that I had the most careful exposure to in Philosophy of Art and one of the Women's Studies classes I took (both of which I quite enjoyed) but also heard a fair bit about during discussions with various groups on campus. The set of ideas: Feminist Science (and related topics). (view full entry for contents)

While gathering my thoughts on this topic, I stumbled across someone else having bumped into those talking about feminist math. This reminded me of the importance of "translation layers" between different philosophies.(view full entry for contents)

Note that this idea of translations has a troublesome relationship with an idea stressed by many branches of feminism that I like - not letting others solely controlling the framing/language of the discussion. (view full entry for contents)

My apologies for any spelling mistakes/poor grammar/poor style - this happened to pop into my head while I was going to bed.