I find myself really wondering about my dreams sometimes. Last night, I had two, the first was one of my fairly regular have-mental/magic-powers dreams where I basically live life with added powers that nobody else has.. yeah, I know, stereotypical geek stuff.. blah. The other was more interesting -- it was another living life thing, but although there wern't really any elements in it that should've caused this, there was a pervasive horror I felt the entire time I was in that dream.. part of me was telling myself constantly it'll be over soon, but all I really was doing was walking around, doing normal life things, really nothing unpleasant. This may be related to some present oddities in my life, or to some kind of generic fear of life or death, or something.. I don't really understand it -- I've never before, as far as I can recall, had such an inappropriate pairing of sensation and emotion. I would, na klar, be a lot more worried if I were awake and had such a thing going on.

Last night was, naturlich, philosophy gathering. The topic this week was one I suggested -- the Persian Islamic revolution. We're fortunate to have 2 Parsi people in our group, and they were able to share a good amount of personal information, experiences, and perspective of the Parsi-American community, which is a lot bigger than I knew. R brought some classical Persian music on CD as a background, and it was, as usual, a lot of fun. I'm going to try to get some of the Generalists into rock-climbing -- perhaps the weekend after the coming one, as this one is closed for the holiday. It seems that everyone I meet, I'm trying to get them to give it a try.. it's a lot of fun, and it's a great thing to do with friends.

After the Generalists disbanded for the evening, R and I went to India Garden and talked about relationships -- largely, I wanted some advice, as well as to explore the angles made visible by two perspectives on the topic. We dug into how the border between friends and significant others works, emotional and other forms of intimacy, and rationality and emotionality in relationships in life. Yes, reader, I know that it's probably dull for you to read this without the content, but a big part of having a blog for me is so I know that I could go back and remember things :)

I'm running my first fMRI next week. Hurrah!

A developer at Microsoft has some rules of thumb for software development. Some thoughts on a few... Rule#1 - Be forthright with you don't know -- wave it on a banner sometimes to stay in the habit This is excellent advice, but not just in software development -- unless you're applying for a job, in life it's almost always a plus to be able to be honest with oneself and others on one's skills and knowledge. Rule#5 - Use milestones, not letting people move on to the next set of bugs until the product reaches a particular state of goodness, and have these periodically This is interesting -- it has definite plusses because it's easy for developers not to understand what each other do, and these occasional periods of working together to make the milestone can build better understanding which can pay off in the long run. However, sometimes people have specialized skills that, if they're the people holding up the milestone, nobody else will understand what the fnord they do, and so everyone else's time is wasted. Hmm. Rule#6 - Be wary of lone-star developers I think they're talking about me here -- In programming, I tend to like to do it in a solitary way, with minimal feedback to supervisors. I *hope* I'm more like the innovator rather than the savior complex person they describe, but there's probably a bit of each in me. I agree that for group programming, my type is not usually very suitable, but think that provided the tasks are chosen and divided sensibly, I can be very productive, and indeed was as a developer Rule#9 - Shipping understood, conservative solutions is a good thing I agree -- attempts to be too fancy with software too often end up creating disaster. This is, alas, true of government as well -- I've been reading in a philosophy magazine a set of examples of the difficulties in attempting to steer the masses with laws.. twisty rules create twisty abuses Rule#10 - Design first, code later Here I disagree. I think planning needs to take place, certainly, but a lot of it should happen at runtime, and the initial planning is best kept light lest time be wasted on something that'll prove inappropriate or suboptimal later. If, for instance, I find a better way to do something as I go, I'm going to do it, and talking to management about every little improvement would be wasteful. Rule#11 - Compile as often as possible, to keep the code close to working A great general mandate that should occasionally be breached for large redesign/refactoring. Use tinderbox for this. It's great! Rule#12 - Portability is for canoes Don't be portable I disagree, but not entirely. Being worried about platforms that are sufficiently different is tough, but easy portability steps are nice, and there are many steps that can be taken that cost nothing.

I came across this article, and the general theme of stages of Kapitalismus, by random chance on wikipedia recently. It is very topical for my recent study of econopolitical systems. I also randomly found an event in China that's absent from the history books I was taught with -- the Taiping Rebellion. I've come, over many years, to come to the conclusion that the American educational system is partly to blame for why the masses here are so bloody ignorant. Over the course of 13 years, I think I got more American History than European History, and Asian History was hardly covered, saying nothing of Middle Eastern or African History. Yes, things happened in the United States, but it's a young country, and to understand the world, sticking exclusively to one's own history is a distraction. It's even sadder that all this was from what was probably one of the most wealthy, best-staffed public schools in the country.

Either our government is being disturbing or stupid with this thing -- it claims that it's technically incapable of meeting FOIA requests. Upgrade your stupid systems, if that's what it's really about...

I don't remember who pointed me at this, but it's funny.

A friend has gotten me interested in a rather expensive restaurant. Wow.

Fujitsu has decided to fund some interesting PostgreSQL development. Thanks, Fujitsu! I'm not sure how it fits into their business plan, but I like seeing new features going into my favourite database. I think I can finally say that I like it better than DB/2 and Oracle, a recent change.

I'm thinking about going climbing tonight... not certain yet. Holiday weekends are a bit strange for me -- I'm used to knowing how much to unwind on a normal weekend which I usually have entirely to myself, nearly unplanned. Tacking an extra day on and taking away a normal activity (Sunday climb) messes with the formula.. but .. the fact that I live life in a formulaic way is itself disturbing. Hmm. It's a minimal formula though, mainly designed to get the essentials done so I can improvise the rest.. but it also accidentally tends to meet my needs for certain amounts of human contact and similar, so I've perhaps been letting it mentally slip into a uniform rather than a set of clothes among many that I like.. ahhh, but life has been .. different.. recently. So I'll skip the analysis for now.