EveningSpeaking frankly (as I am apt to do although it gets me in trouble sometimes),
The Wikimedia Foundation elections are over, and not surprisingly, I wasn't elected to the board. I believe this is at least partly because I'm not that well known an editor. This itself doesn't bother me a lot, but I'm bothered by who won. I'm not sure if disaster is exactly the right word, but it's not far off from my perspective -- the person who won is rather arrogant, and further was the only candidate to engage in the traditional political practices that mar democracies. He left a very bad impression on me (and others) at Wikimania as well. I would've loved to see the second or third place runners elected - I was quite sure that the second place was going to be the one, (she was my second choice) and the third place was my first choice. I worry about the effects of the winner during his term in office, and further worry that future elections will involved polished, ego-driven campaigns like his, likely introducing elements of deceit (which, as far as I can tell, he has not done). I worry for the future of the Foundation. The seat is, fortunately, for only one year. Hopefully the voters will have more sense next year.
Bill Cosby is coming to town on 9 October. I got myself a ticket in the orchestra pit area for the (early) 19:00 showing. If anyone else is going, we won't be able to sit together, but I'd be happy to head over there with you. Tickets are around $50. Cosby is one of my favourite comedians - I've liked every time I've seen him in person.
Winter is invoking my tendency to hibernate, as well as my depressive tendencies. Neither are that great, and they both tend to feed off of each other. These are part of a cycle I recognise now - summer is for wanderlust (almost going to Qatar, almost going to Boston), winter is for withdrawl. Spring is sometimes for new romance, and Fall.. doesn't really exist on my mental map, where summer and winter instead rub shoulders.
I will be in Columbus Ohio sometime around Halloween, at least partly to go to Outland's Halloween stuff, and partly to hang out with old friends.
Misc:
- The manpage for the cmuwmtopbm utility (having had tab-completion give me that thing too often) led me, via Google, to this, and eventualy this. CMU Window Manager bitmaps are another piece of the old software infrastructure that CMU worked on back when they still took CS innovation seriously. Naturally, none of the stuff is still available on their cluster systems. Thinking about how CS curricula suck now makes me sad. I'm glad that I got to contribute to some interesting projects in applied CS (a lipid database, a distributed computation infrastructure, etc) when I was an undergrad at OSU. It's a pity though that Unix itself doesn't get the same development focus in modern times - such projects are good for encouraging budding CS minds.
- I don't remember what gave me the link here, but even the headline amuses me. The person presumes that one gets a choice of realities between where a fantasy is true and where it is not. Sure, maybe hobbit fans prefer to believe they're from the middle earth too :)
- I was born in a state (Texas) without an official beverage, mostly grew up in a state (Ohio) where it was Tomato Juice, and now live in a state (PA) where it's Milk. I sometimes wonder why politicians bother with all this stuff.
- Yay diplomacy, and yay torture. What a wonderful world..
- The French and Saudi intelligence services believe Osama bin Laden to be dead.
- OkCupid updated their general Quiz. I am still classified as The Boy Next Door. It describes me pretty well. The female form of that combination of characteristics also describes me well (although the romance from afar part is completely, totally off). It's amusing to try to classify everyone I've dated into their framework.