Fortunately, I have candles. Unfortunately, Wean Hall is apparently flooded again. Tomorrow won't be fun (my machine room is there). Fortunately, I have some very good peanut butter and my laptop's power is holding out.
Finished: 「Heirs of Mohammad」. Thoughts on piety, values, what it means to be a good person: (view full entry for contents)
PZ Meyers, while a good professor (I have learned quite a bit of assorted biology from reading his blog), is a troll on the topic of atheism. It is not that I think a hardline position on atheism is unwarranted, but a kneejerk one is. There exist people who believe there to be no god(view full entry for contents)
If I wanted to live somewhere where the power is unreliable, I'd move to Azerbaijan. Damnit. Second day of coming home to darkness.
Here's to hoping the cats remain afraid of the candles and that the batteries to my various laptops last me awhile.
I suspect that everything in the fridge is going to rot, sadly including the Paneer I was hoping to experiment with. Still, maybe the timing is not so terrible as being on a mood downswing makes me want to sleep all the time anyhow.
I also made the mistake of buying candles that smell like food, which make me hungry. These candles *really* smell like delicious pies. I suspect there is someone whose entire job is to make candles smell like food. Mmm. Sigh.
(Mohammad Khatami on the left, Mohammad Ali Abtahi on the right)
Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former reformist government minister under Mohammad Khatami, was recently arrested in Iran, according to a guest-blogger on his blog.
I have long enjoyed the candid commentary by Abtahi over the years I have read his blog, and wish him, Khatami, and Mosavi well in the ongoing political mess over there. I feel like I have a personal stake in this now as I've exchanged a mail or two with Abtahi and respect him. (In politics, you don't always get to design the people or the circumstances you like from scratch, but some people, regardless of how they would move things relative to where you are, are good people).
You may do a google news search and find your own story on him.
(I am still without power)
A quick cheat sheet to the Iranian Soap Opera (I have seen news organisations get much of this terribly wrong in the last few days): (view full entry for contents)
This has turned into a particularly difficult and lonely weekend. (view full entry for contents)
However, I did manage to make some Paneer Tikka Makhni that was pretty good. Paneer is in fact very easy to cook with, and there are some wonderful canned sauces (like tomato sauce in preparedness) at Whole Foods. I am not sure what it would take to actually make those sauces from their sources, but it might be good to learn - the sauces are not quite right (India Garden's version at spiciness level 8/10 is reasonably close to the way they should be but also not quite there). Whole Foods has a number of other canned indian sauces that look promising for other meals. I need to get some wild rice, as I like its taste better than white rice in almost all dishes. Apart from puffed rice, I really like most types of rice. I hope it's healthy for a vegetarian diet.
I really don't like father's day very much, a bit beyond not liking most holidays. (view full entry for contents)
Rereading Murakami's 「Wind-Up Bird Chronicle」, recently re-watched 「Pollock」 and 「Naked Lunch」. All three are among the best cultural products of recent times, I think.
It's also a little bit weird to be getting pseudopersonal email from Michelle Obama. Everything this administration does makes me wonder what's going to become precedent.
FC11 has some awesome stuff in its repositories that is not (but should be) installed by default.
"yum install padevchooser paprefs"
This gives you a widget called "Pulseaudio Device Chooser" which you can use to either publish your sound card on the local network or send your audio to other published devices on the local network. It's pretty easy to pipe all your audio to another machine - I don't yet see a GUI way to mirror your audio between local and remote. Bandwidth use seems to be pretty reasonable.
It's been possible to do this manually for quite a long time (with various sound servers), but maintaining different sets of configfiles based on where one physically is (for laptop users) is a shoddy solution. It takes some getting used to that your local volume control is not honoured - I am not sure whether it should be or not.
(this probably applies to those of you on other Linux distros too)
Wherein I try to constrain my mopiness and tell tales of animals: (view full entry for contents)
Oh, also, I have a very large collection of random documents that have caught my eye over the years, and occasionally I pick a random one and read it. I recently chose this one, and thought it was particularly cute (and a bit challenging) - it's about applied statistics in Monty Hall-type games. My intuitions on it were initially wrong (my approach to statistics is mostly based on intuition and while not very formal is generally pretty good), and so it took me awhile to translate the paper's logic into my perspective. It was a good exercise and feels like a full mental meal - I feel that it helps remind me about the right way of statistics so hopefully I got useful broader regularities out of it.
Portal was a lot of fun, but it was very good at making me queasy and upsetting my stomach. I imagine it would only be worse to be the main character - in the challenge mode at the end of the game, there should be a challenge to make it through the level without being sick all over oneself. I can't say I liked the timing-critical parts, but the puzzle aspect was quite good. I've played portal before now, but never more than a bit of playing around (and never enough to feel ill).
When I was younger I sometimes got this from visiting Omnitheatres.
Portal felt too easy, but I am not sure how one could make it harder without making it impossible - there were times when I had to think (mostly in the bonus levels), but not *that* deeply.
The downside to Portal sickness is that, like tetris, the puzzles pop back in my mind and even the memory of them is enough to make me feel sick again.
It is potentially just as interesting to imagine what we would design buildings like if we had portals and springshoes as if we had usable wings (which I often daydream about).
Attn broadcast news media, (view full entry for contents)
Al Jazeera's article about institutional Christianity in the US military worries me. Also, I kinda like Bruce Schneier, but he recently had a post advocating an end to password masking that strikes me as being so horrifically wrong that it's left me pretty much speechless.
