I've recently settled into a routine for weekends -- not a schedule because I sometimes skip parts of it if I want to be alone or want more company, but some fairly regular things I do. For this weekend, something that's normally on Friday was shifted to Saturday, and some new things showed up for today (Friday) to partially fill the time void. Additionally, there are some one-time events for today and tomorrow that I might want to go to, these naturally all conflicting with each other. I often wish there were a way to refiance my time so I could better mix events into empty times (weeknights, especially late at night) from packed times (weekends). Alas, that's not how it works.
I've decided to repurpose my Livejournal for the purpose of asking questions of people on political and philosophical matters. My statements of philosophy will remain here (on the BLOG and the website), but it's handy for people to be able to mark the lj thing as a friend and have my questions show up. I haven't been keeping up with the sci-fi blogging for various reasons..
- I'm lazy
- I don't have access to my internal wiki because I didn't reinstall mediawiki after reinstalling everything on my laptop
- I've been thinking more about programming projects and philosophy recently
- I've been playing a lot of Pokemon Emerald recently, and until I beat it, this will likely continue
- The biography of Kemal Ataturk is massive and interesting, taking even more of my time
For the last two nights I've been hanging out for awhile with KGB as it held the CMU fence for their annual event, Capture the Flag with Stuff. It's been fun -- for the first night, I played DJ, making several large playlists of music that I think is generally acceptable to KGBfolk (roughly 15% of my music). I was also able to get a lot of stuff for work done while there, and while I wasn't very social, it was good to be out of the house. The night before last, I went up to my office afterwards, worked until the morning, and went home to sleep most of yesterday.
I've decided not to post the PHP/MySQL guestbook I wrote for a friend because PHP and MySQL both suck and I don't want to encourage people to use them.
In the news:
- Pakistan decides to spend less money on military, for awhile, at least. Why Pakistan is wasting so much money on jets is still a mystery though.
- A few pointed questions by the EU might make it hard for the US to have it's secret torture camps overseas. This is a good thing.
- You can choose your judges if you're powerful enough is the message we learn from politicians. In a state that allows campaign contributions where every major city has a different political flavour, Tom Delay decided that a judge who is a democrat isn't going to judge him -- in fact, he decided that Austin is too liberal and he'd rather be tried in some other city.
- Shame is enough for the British courts, who decided that Wendolyn Markcrow should not serve jail time for killing her 36-year-old autistic son. Note that while I do think that rights should corrispond to various markers as one approaches normal human-level intelligence, I don't think that this was at all acceptable -- there are alternatives to this. Ideally, an inpatient treatment/life centre should be a final resort for dealing with this kind of situation. I don't know what kind of a social care system there is in Britain, but provided one isn't being irresponsible in having kids without or in spite of genetic testing that could detect a high probability of things like this in the genes of the parents, one should not need to take such a burden on oneself as this family did for 16 years.
- Pittsburgh may be getting a maglev. This is very exciting and cool. On the site, they describe that they may eventually extend it to Philly and Cleveland. This would be very convenient, and if done, will be even less of a reason to own a car.
- Stupid misunderstanding of the day
- Horror of the day -- Patents on storylines. Damned "Intellectual Property" people continue to create privilege for themselves and their clients. I would suggest shunning the law firm Knight and Associates, as well as all of their people.
- Similarly, corporations see animal names as a branding opportunity.
Two alternative laptops and similar I've been looking at while waiting for HP to release the dv8000z:
- Clevo D900K - Fairly vanilla 17" AMD laptop.
- Clevo L570W - Luggable LCD computer. Interesting concept. I could see myself getting one of these, but their site provides no way to actually purchase the system or see pricing with different configurations.
For now, I'm off to the Halal food place in Oakland -- Salim's. Yum.