Tonight reminded me that, just as Catholic Nuns are unfortunate enough to be considered "married to god", a sysadmin who did enough at a job is considered "married to the servers" - even long after a job ends and another sysadmin has taken over, I occasionally get people calling up with questions or asking me to log in and do things.

Also: reminded that being unusually honest/open makes one look possibly a bit like a schmuck in circumstances where others feel the same but keep their mouth shut, and likewise how easy it is to misunderstand nuances in what is said. C'est la condition humaine...

C's birthday: incredibly tasty quesadillas followed by pretty good fondue.. and also lots of people. I didn't really feel welcome there, but a decent time was had. On the way home I stopped to watch the sky, and could've sworn that there was someone there with me.. perhaps wishful thinking, or maybe some inner sensor on the fritz.

I've been wondering if there are any cheeses that are reasonably close to Gruyere in taste but are grown domestically (and are presumably not $14/pound).

In some ways, things haven't been going particularly well. For now though, the stomach is happy.

With the speed of internet communication, when two people decide to write to each other it becomes a noteworthy event when write-send-recieve-read isn't transactional and the letters "cross each other in the ether" (if we pretend the ether includes not having checked one's inbox), while I'm sure it used to be commonplace. When I think of all the letters I wrote as a child to penpals in Japan, Europe, and other parts of the United States, I kind of miss the timeless tone one is forced to write in - emails are much more "in the present". For older people for whom letters became more of a habit that persisted through adulthood I wonder if their emails retained that timeless tone or if they've learned to adapt them more to the immediate "phonelike" tone most people seem to use. Amusing: the "grandstanding/mocking" tone of much of Usenet seems not to have been passed directly on into other media. To each form of communication its own traditions..

I rarely explain my titles, but (view full entry for contents)

Currently struggling to keep the mental representation needed for German's "doch" in my heaad, also imagining how awesome/not-awesome it would be if we filled our apartments/houses with sand in every room. It would be most decidedly un-awesome with cats - while they're desert creatures, their habits WRT waste would mean heavier folk would routinely step in things they shouldn't want to step in. I wonder if real deserts have that problem, or if there are under-sand things that break that stuff down.

Damon Zex's MTV is DEAD! video amuses me - something that puzzles me is how much of that is the use of subtitles to underly the main points he's making. Visual aids have long been considered part of making a point, but use of them to make a visual underline of points made feels different in nature from adding background - it feels to me like his text is meant to add a feeling of "officiality" to what's said. Compare this to the (also highly questionable, but not intended to be funny) use, in L Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, where he uses each page's footer as an opportunity to (re)define any terms the user might not be completely familiar with. I suspect it'd be difficult to find a way to do the "we agree!" restatement in a book - the viewer needs to be already distracted/under a time crunch to not find such things ridiculous, while the opportunity to redefine common terms would be difficult to fit into a time-tied presentation. Both, I think, are particularly dangerous for people who are not good at critical thinking, although the world in general is a dangerous place for those people. I believe critical thinking can and should be taught at a fairly young age - at least as early as middle school.

"If you took the most ardent revolutionary and vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself" -- Mikhail Bakunin, Anarchosocialist activist/political philosopher

"It has often happened that a man of this sort has risen to the highest office, and, when he has got there, has looked at things more closely and (view full entry for contents)" -- Niccolo Machiavelli, political theorist

It's easy enough to imagine either, and no doubt both are common - people becoming compacent about the status quo/seduced by power/too torn between what is needed to stay in power to have an effect and actually purging corruption (and not surviving in office long), all that versus people realising that what seemed like a simple problem from the outside has enough variables within it either so as not to be easily fixed or to be widely misunderstood from the outside. This seems to be a communications problem that hinges on openness, trust, and the ability of the electorate to understand current issues well enough for their mandates to make sense.

(view full entry for contents)

A bit more vain playing with image editing software :): (view full entry for contents)

Memory: A boulder in Connecticut that I particularly liked during the year my family lived there. I wonder if it's still there - I have a lot of pictures of myself on it, apparently quite happy.

Tonight there was RHPS, the beginning of this cast's regular showings. I've come to the conclusion that expecting it to be up to operatic standards of organisation is silly - for what it is, it's quite good, and a lot of the little nuances (from helping people be better actors to tactfully weeding out bad ones) will presumably happen in time. Most importantly though, it was a lot of fun, and there was a lot of creativity and enjoyment by everyone involved. It was also nice to have the company. Helping after/before the show was pretty fulfilling too - left me nice and tired.

Earlier: visited Kiva Han and realised that it reminded me of my old apartment on Northwood Street in Columbus. Realised that if I ever involuntarily found myself living in Cowtown again I would rent that place again in a heartbeat. I also spent far too long staring at hand-written HTML and HTML generated by my blog software and trying to figure out where they differed in meaningful ways. I do that far too often.

I recently turned down a fairly nice position at UCSB now that that town is out-of-bounds for me. Le sigh. Next week: apply for more jobs at CMU and at universities in other cities. Long term task: still must figure out grad programme.

Still amused by how nervous I get in the Wii surgery game. Also, I am very happy that, as attested by the "latest random posts" on LJ RSS feed, the Wii fit seems to be incredibly popular.

Stop, Drop, and Sleep.

At lunch yesterday, I was told that I have a "dad" sense of humour, which seems rather apt.

More details on last night's RHPS: (view full entry for contents)

Recently: Terrible headaches have eaten entire days. There was a nice recent social evening with Gustavo and Chrisamaphone and Wjl though - conversation and some hanging out that was as comfortable as I've been in a long time. Gaming at J/R's has also been good (albeit too infrequent).

Thinking about social circles and "resets" in my personal life:(view full entry for contents)

Thinking again about language we use in discussions on politics, philosophy, and values in general.(view full entry for contents)

I met a cute girl at Rocky that I'm kind of tempted to contact, although I'm not sure if I'm going to remain in Pgh, my existing crushes haven't really gone away, and I'm starting to emotionally slide downwards again. OKC suggests possibly interesting compatibilities though. Hmm.

Hopefully I can arrange gainful employment again soon.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about sleek and ethiopiean food. If headache permits, I'll at least have wonderfully fresh morning bagels at Brugger's this morning.

My priority in relationships: (view full entry for contents)

I wonder how others differ in this regard. I sometimes hear guys talking about sex as the primary value of relationships, and I wonder if they're really being honest or if they're just "towing the party line" on masculinity. It frustrates me that such a party line exists and it taints honest discussion of needs and wants in our society as much as it does.

I read a lot of international news, probably almost none that's American. This is not hard because Reuters and AP together seem to write about 95% of news, and while in theory newspapers and news programmes are not supposed to pass it along word-for-word, they in fact do (google news makes this completely apparent). Fortunately, other countries seem to have a news tradition that has not yet been stifled, and both through scanning the headlines in Google news and regularly reading a few foreign newspapers one likes, one can get a broader perspective on world events. One of the odd things one notices is that their coverage of events in the USA is quite good - American elections are covered with equal or greater weight than local elections (when applicable). I initially thought this was a feature of either language or IP-based traffic, but one can look at picture captions (and possibly understand bits of other languages) and go through various proxies to find this largely untrue. If the American political/economic star is fading (I believe it is, although not as rapidly as I would like), I wonder how long we'll still see this level of coverage - I doubt more than 1% of Americans could distinguish Chirac and Sarkozy or even know who Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel are, but people are talking about Obama, Clinton, and McCain all over the world. Maybe some of this is how much style over substance we have in American politics - a more straightforward "job application for a CEO" with lots of in-depth info on one's political past combined with organised and detailed information on policy and intuitions seems like it would provide voters with a much more useful perspective than the media circus we have with advertisements and emotion-centred pitches. Another part of it probably is the unfortunate fact that the USA has disproportionate power in the world, economically, diplomatically, militarily (I would've discounted this before BushJr decided that invading other countries was chic), and through effective control of several large international bodies. We can expect all these things to continue to slip.

I wonder if ideas/traditions from the german Jugendweihe should be considered useful material/inspiration for those building a secular society in the USA. Standard disclaimer: I do not self-identify as a secular humanist(view full entry for contents)

Some time ago, I bought a bottle of brandy, as I did not know what brandy tastes like. Since then, I've occsaionally tried the smallest sip and found it insisting on being loathsome. Recently, I have discovered that it is a fantastic cooking ingredient, and am starting to feel out which recipes in which it would be appropriate. Tonight's spaghetti was partcularly good. Yum! Now I don't need to keep drinking it or throw it away.

It appears that Barack Obama has enough delegates to win the nomination for the Democratic candidacy. I am very pleased about this - while I don't think Clinton was a bad candidate, I think Obama is a better one, and hope that he goes on to win the presidential election. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the longshot possibility that he asks Russ Feingold to be his running mate.

It appears that *finally* the "main" Perl6 implementation is approaching usability (main meaning the implementation that runs on the Parrot VM - as Perl6 has a spec, there are some other implementations in various stages of completion). Ruby's pretty awesome too though, and I'll need to feel out more which one I'll migrate to as my main language for personal projects over the next few months. I think the ParrotVM itself is very cool, but in the long run I don't think I'll have to choose - there's a project to implement Ruby on ParrotVM. I sometimes wonder if programming in C will stop feeling so *right* to me at some point - given all the other languages I've learned and loved, from Scheme to MIPS Assembly, I still get warm fuzzies whenever I program in C (and C++ still makes me "gut"-angry/jealous for ObjC).