Title: terrible (and very obscure) wordplay.

Resent musings: possible repeat - idea that it is a virtue to confront people when they're being "difficult", rather than to avoid such confrontation, in order to act as a guardian of society's values. Criticism(?): by so acting, one isn't guarding values, one is promoting certain ones. Reply: While that is true, that is not a criticism, as they are the same thing. The rules of society have a certain tension applied to them by different visions of society - this does not mean society has no values or that such a struggle is not worthwhile. Memory: Being told by relatives that other relatives are "a bit broken" on some topics and these should be avoided. Instead, we should approach such topics with some care and sympathy for the person combined with a care for our own perspective and notion of society's interests.

Related: When an associate or friend makes a bad move, what is meaning of loyalty? When one has no ability to intervene directly in such situations and one is not sullied by association, in the general case, we might consider "sticking with" a friend making such decisions while honestly-but-carefully explaining why such a decision is wrong should the topic come up. Loyalty-in-friendships is more about commitment in one's choices (e.g. acting in ways that are compatible with the intent of others, e.g. sticking with a friend who makes a bad choice that cleaves social circles) than in one's judgement. Condemnation: those who would move from "sticking with" to "approving of the acts of" a friend - this steps beyond what loyalty should be and lessens one as a person. Of course, at some point a friend might commit such acts that would (or at least should) terminate a friendship - such things are presumably very rare.

Hoping for a nibble on the job fishing line. Ideally soon - while I'm feeling better, I still need to get out of Pittsburgh as soon as I can, both to avoid destroying my savings and to avoid the risk of things getting really bad again. In the meantime, I've been taking a lot of walks (no bus pass really bites), working on simple "Sugar" apps for the OLPC, and playing Dofus and the handful of games I have for Wii. Sugar is kind of limiting as an environment - it takes a lot of getting used to when the window manager and toolkit conspire to prevent one from doing a lot of things that would be very standard in another environment. It reminds me a bit of some esoteric programming languages/disciplines I've used. The OLPC would be really awesome if it were a bit faster - at some point it would be useful to profile the system as a whol to see if any unnecessary abstraction could be taken out - maybe sugar on SDL on a framebuffer would be faster? (Similar issues apply with the NeurosOSD). At the very least, a lot of the OLPC system config could be streamlined. The Wii controller is rapidly growing on me... Recently I've been wishing that all laptops came with a PDF showing how to disassemble the thing - the main fan on my Linux laptop is either clogged with cat fur or otherwise dying, and I spent a good amount of time removing screws but was unable to figure out how to get the case apart.

"Lost in Translation" and the ending of "Serial Experiments: Lain" both still feel very relevant.