The weather is nice again, and I felt inspired, about 45 minutes ago, to go out and enjoy the sun. A part of me suggested that I wait for some other time, perhaps the weekend. Ahh, screw that. I need more spontinaeity in my life, and I'm working late tonight anyhow, so I went out and had a wonderful nap on Flagstaff hill. While starting to doze off, I had a nice sight of the buildings of east Pittsburgh, people playing frizbee, people walking their dogs, taking their laptops out with friends to sit and listen to music, and what's probably the first of people going light on clothing for this year. Perhaps I'll join them sometime -- I do tend to tan pretty nicely. The ground was a bit soggy though from the recent snow melting, so when I got up, I needed to wait a bit for my clothes to dry off. Life is good. If you, my reader, are in a similar clime, I suggest you also go out and enjoy some sun. If you're working a job where you can't do that, regardless of how well it pays it's a sucky job.

A quip from Father Ted, a BBC series I've been watching recently: "It's banned in most European countries, so that means it must be very good"

Last night, I also caught some nice radiation, at a backyard campfire at the home of some friends. Now that I've decided to go if I get a good offer, things are indeed becoming quite nice here. So it goes. Life is at least partly about choices. I want to buy a house, and I want to see the world. This can make that happen. I could move back to Pittsburgh if I want after my stay there.

An insight in programming -- part of the reason a lot of code is hard to read is that the act of programming involves a certain kind of mental activity -- focusing on a particular thing as you implement it, and then forgetting it as you move on to other tasks. This requires a certain amount of momentum in doing things one way, so that one can trust in that momentum when focusing on doing things that way without actually investigating. Imagine, for example, the act of navigating to a particular place in a park without knowing which way to go at any of the landmarks, just being comfortable enough knowing that in a given area, one's artistic sense would guide one to make the same turns, and that in sequence, these would take one to the same spot, even though the whole process would be unable to be explained to outsiders. This kind of straddles the line between implicit knowledge and consistancy in judgement. A lot of the way programming alone or in small groups with like-minded people works so well is that they can rely on this sense, and everything flows naturally with minimal note-taking or communication. As years pass, people change their habits and their artistic judgement changes, so this kind of being in the groove eventually stops working. This is at least one factor as to why reading old code is hard. It's like attempting to page-in/reconstruct memory from a swapfile when our paging algorithm has changed.

Google Maps recently added satellite info to their service. It's quite cool. Oddly, while you can scroll over into europe in satellite mode, you cannot in standard map mode (or rather you can, but you end up with ocean for any part of the world not in North America. Hopefully they'll fix that, and perhaps will also add the nighttime light data to their service as another view. That would be quite cool. Some neat satellite photos: Where I live How I don't get to work From my current really cool apartment to my old really cool apartment I'm a long way from where I was born

Apparently, for the interested, I was born in the Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas, located at 8200 Walnut Hill Lane, Dallas, TX 75231 I currently live 1279 miles from there (although I don't know if that's as the eagle flies or as the car drives). If I ever wanted to make a road trip to my birthplace, I'd pass through Columbus, Cincinnatti, Memphis, Jacksonville, and then enter Dallas. Looks like a pretty drive, based on the nice satellite photos.

Sometimes, there are interesting issues relating to free speech versus getting a proper trial. In this case, some kinds of information relating to a trial in Canada are subject to a publication ban until a jury can be found, and in this case, an American blogger breached that ban in the United States. I can understand the argument that it's very difficult to find a fair jury once information leaks out, and that in the United States, for high profile cases it's quite difficult to find people who arn't familiar with some kinds of court cases (the OJ case being an example). I imagine that if one is to wait until jury selection, one really needs to wait until the case ends to make public these things, because sometimes one needs a retrial.

Dayton Ohio has free Wireless internet downtown. Cool! My internet is scheduled to be reconnected on Thursday. Not too bad.

I've had a number of other interesting dreams recently, involving one strange and quirky one about the word MAYOR being printed blanked out in a newspaper, replaced by underscores, and that being a hint to something, and someone answering a question that I don't think I'll ever get to ask in real life. I didn't entirely like the answer, but it does provide some kind of an artificial resolution.

On the way to work today, I saw my badger(?) friend again in the field on the side of the highway. He's been alone since a car killed his (her?) mate a year ago. Roadkill really gets to me, especially because I go by foot so much. I keep thinking that we need to leave this planet, not for our sake, but for its own. And yes, I am fully comfortable using the planet as a metaphor for its biosphere (a number of non-eco types like to point out that planet != life on planet, just to give them something to distract). Some people say that any efforts to preserve endangered species or biodiversity are a sign of further arrogance of humanity, noting that we've already done enough to the planet with our meddling. Well, yes, as civilization, we have messed up the planet, but it wasn't purely being arrogant that did it -- it was not knowing and then not caring. Either we take steps to slow/halt/reverse the damage, or we don't. Life doesn't give us an undo button -- we can't arrange to never have done any of it in the first place. One can sit back and not care with some dumbheaded optimism that we'll fix it before we destroy ourselves and the environment, one can decide not to care about the long-term and distract oneself with lucre or other things, one can relapse or stay in blissful ignorance, or one can actually make a serious effort to lighten one's footprint on the environment. How could we fix roads to damage the environment less? Build fewer of them, mandate that alternate paths always exist to go under or over them (ideally ones that are wildlife-friendly), support public transit and take efforts to discourage or ban car use.