Feb 2008
- Feb 1
- eastern sky before dawn in the desert
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- Feb 3
- the underdog has his day
The narrative of the New York Giants appeals to me. They started the season 0-2. They were the wildcard team. They were expected to lose by 12 points to the seemingly unstoppable, undefeated Patriots. Talk about David slaying Goliath.
· Read more… - Feb 4
- acute gastroenteritis
Man, driving 6 hours while you have the runs sucks. And the Grapevine is closed.
· Read more… - Feb 6
- branches, lines
this trigger
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sending millions of
particles of light
laser beams
gamma rays
sunshine
starlight - Feb 7
- violently ill
It's been a while since I've been this sick. I've gotten sick over the past few years, usually with some kind of upper respiratory illness, and I even missed at least one day of work, but it was usually just something I could power through, and eventually shake off. A speed bump, if you will.
· Read more… - Feb 8
- the failure of vista
It seems to be conventional wisdom that Microsoft Vista sucks, and most Windows users are not going to be comfortable with switching to a Linux distro. (Mostly because they can't play their games, but my advice for them is to invest in a PS3 or a Wii, or buy a Mac and install Parallels so that you have Windows around whenever you need to get your game on.)
· Read more… - Feb 9
- 40 year symmetry
My sister reminds me of the 1968 Democratic National Convention which ended up erupting into riots. 1968 was a crazy year. Both MLK and RFK had been assassinated. The Vietnam War was still raging and sending body bags back at an obscene rate, and the American public was in an uproar. LBJ had announced that he would not seek re-election. The front-runners of the Democratic presidential nomination were Hubert Humphrey (who would end up losing ignobly to Nixon), the more status quo candidate, and Eugene McCarthy, whose platform rested heavily on an anti-war stance, with the goal of rapid withdrawal from Vietnam. The undemocratic manner in which Humphrey won the nomination without having participated in a single primary ended up being a liability in the general election, and resulted in permanent changes in the nomination process.
· Read more… - Feb 10
- nerdy tasks for today
For the last three years now, I've been trying to build GNOME on Mac OS X using Fink, but I always end up bailing out long before I get through the myriad of dependencies. Now I realize the easier thing would be just to bail on Fink and go with MacPorts, but I had already taken the trouble to learn Fink's packaging format. Moreover, while MacPorts has a *BSD heritage (as does Mac OS X itself), Fink has more of a Linux heritage, which I'm far more familiar with.
· Read more… - Feb 10
- time marches on
This week's I-5 playlist, featuring cheesy love songs and songs to commit suicide to:
· Read more… - Feb 11
- something inside me may have died a long time ago
I don't know. Sometimes I wonder if I've just lost my capacity for friendship. For love. For caring.
· Read more… - Feb 14
- fire and rain
should my soul catch fire again
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(the embers smolder, glow bright in the darkest hour)
not a wildfire streaking through the fields
up the mountainsides
leaving smoking disaster and ruinous ash - Feb 15
- dreaming like water trickling through my wall of cynicism
- Feb 15
- the market share myth: why mac os x will never be completely open source
Some people just don't get it.
· Read more… - Feb 16
- desktop linux
All sorts of theories have been proposed about why Linux has not taken a significant chunk of the market for desktop OSes. While there may be merit in some of the psychosocial economics presented, it ignores big, more concrete reasons why Linux hasn't seriously eroded Windows market share, and why even Mac OS X is outstripping it on the desktop front.
· Read more… - Feb 17
- google reader
I find it really ironic. Despite the fact that I'm drawn to technology, I find myself resisting dominant trends. When everyone had CD players, I was still hanging on to cassette tapes. When the world was dominated with x86 clones, I was still banging away at my 8-bit Commodore 64. When Windows 3.0 came out, I stuck with MS-DOS.
· Read more… - Feb 17
- cerebral malaria
Erythropoietin protects children from the cerebrovascular ischemic effects of cerebral malaria.
· Read more… - Feb 20
- worst president ever
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- Feb 20
- not finding
were I not to find
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that which I most desperately seek
what would this life be worth?
not nil, I pray
even in this half-existence
can I not steal a few drops of
reflected sunlight
from ghosts and phantoms
of things that could never be?
like a half-starved cur
begging at his master's feet. - Feb 21
- trying to avoid misogyny
Now I've been an Obama supporter since he ran for Illinois State Senate. I definitely want him to win the Democratic nomination so that he can kick McCain's ass and win the presidency.
· Read more… - Feb 22
- urban warfare
Apparently the Glendale Freeway is closed right before the exit to my parents' house because some guys started firing on cops with automatic weapons, and the LAPD shot a few of them back and killed one.
· Read more… - Feb 24
- random walking through pubmed
I'm a sucker for cross-disciplinary, cross-age demographic topics, and Grand Rounds today was given by Martina Brueckner, M.D., a pediatric cardiologist and scientist from Yale.
· Read more… - Feb 24
- serious geekery
Well, this is a fun little puzzle from Google Blogoscoped
· Read more… - Feb 24
- quiz: what punctuation mark are you?
- Feb 25
- genetics: only the abnormal is interesting
One of the things that drew me to the field of genetics when I was an undergraduate was the fact that geneticists seemed to value the abnormal over the normal. Genes are named for the "abnormal" phenotype, rather than the wild-type phenotype. So you get names like hedgehog, a gene, which when mutated, causes a fruitfly to develop "lawns" of prickly denticles, and fringe, which makes the fruit-fly have, well, fringes. And geneticists aren't afraid to appropriate facets of sociology and popular culture. So one of the better known mammalian analogues of hedgehog is sonic hedgehog, named after the video game character.
· Read more… - Feb 28
- strange
Not good.
· Read more… - Feb 29
- can't sleep, clowns will eat me
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- Feb 29
- a sickness
This is probably getting a little obsessive.
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