Mar 2008
- Mar 1
- this is a house of a crazy person
I surveyed the chaos and squalor that is my apartment and quickly stopped because I didn't want to vomit. This is how insane people live.
· Read more… - Mar 1
- only now, at the end, do i understand
A movie (that I have yet to watch) produces a memorable catch phrase that is destined to be used and abused to no end, and which has already spread across the blogosphere like the way wildfires spreads through San Diego County:
· Read more… - Mar 1
- flashback (the hazards of having gone to berkeley)
A week ago, it was sunny and warm, and I headed up to L.A. I was wearing my "Barack the Vote" T-shirt that my sister gave me for Christmas. I didn't realize I was running on empty until I got to Carlsbad, so I got off the freeway and stopped at the nearest gas station. All of the sudden, I got self-conscious about wearing the shirt. North County San Diego is notorious for being rabidly right-wing, and I wondered if anyone would react. But I finished filling up my tank, got back in my car, and got on the freeway. Somewhat fittingly, the next song my iPod decided to play was "Get Together" by the Youngbloods.
· Read more… - Mar 2
- uncool
Well, that was a little creepy. Some dude started knocking on my door around 3:55 a.m., calling out for Greg or Martin. I wonder if he was just so trashed out of his mind that he thought he was somewhere else completely. I did contemplate whether he would try to crash through my door, and figured that the only two thing I could fend him off with would be my kali sticks and my wrought iron coat hanger. I ended up not being able to go back to sleep and just camped out in the living room playing on my laptop with my kali sticks at hand. Stupid drunk people.
· Read more… - Mar 2
- alternate solution vis-a-vis version targeting
I looks like the version targeting debacle is still very much a heated topic.
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- Mar 3
- profession: astrophysicist/neurosurgeon
I'm sure you've heard the phrase "it's not rocket science" to describe something that should be easy. So Raymond Chen asks what actual rocket scientists say when they want to describe something easy. The common answer seems to be "it's not brain surgery."
· Read more… - Mar 4
- franklin delano roosevelt and barack hussein obama
This morning NPR's Renee Montagne interviewed Donald Ritchie, author of Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932. He seems to implicitly, tacitly compare FDR to Obama, noting that when FDR was campaigning, he stuck to a message of optimism, without getting mired in the specifics. He also pointed out that in 1932, the choice seemed to be between FDR's message of hope and Herbert Hoover's message of fear.
· Read more… - Mar 4
- unix: it's fan-tastic
The great thing about running UNIX is that it's like running around with a loaded
· Read more…gunrocket-launcher with a hair trigger. One of the things that frustrated me the most with Windows is that if something broke, the only reasonable solution was to reformat your hard drive and reinstall. - Mar 8
- one man's slack as another man's creative meditation
There is a meme floating around on the blogosphere, promulgated by Duncan Riley's spin on a post by Jason Calcanis of Mahalo fame, and seconded by technophiliac Robert Scoble. The idea is that startup companies cannot afford slackers, so anyone who is not a work-a-holic needs to be fired. (Note that Calcanis has eased off on this statement.)
· Read more… - Mar 9
- ho
(Sardonic flag on. Don't take any of the following too seriously.)
· Read more… - Mar 9
- folly
cracked, but still I've got to keep it together
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time out of joint, the sunlight seeps through the window pane
am I coming or am I going
hope is like a little gnat, biting and buzzing
that I can never swat away. - Mar 11
- looking back at the last decade of my life
It seems like an infinitely long time since I last claimed to understand what love is. There was a time in what seems like another lifetime when I thought I got it. In nerd slang, I grokked it, once upon a time.
· Read more… - Mar 12
- the long stretch
Man, I thought I was done with these. I don't have another day off until nine days from now, and I'm already exhausted. I ended up being stuck at work until 7:45 p.m. today. I knew I should've just gone home and gone to sleep, but instead I went to Tommy's and had a chili burger, which guarantees that I'm going to have a rough night of GERD symptoms. So I'm trying to postpone that moment of lying down supine.
· Read more… - Mar 14
- semantics of time
I must admit that I like the fact that the sun is still up when I come home from work. It gives me the illusion that my time off from work is much longer than it actually is. Waking up in the morning sucks big time, though. Nothing makes you want to pull the covers back over your head than waking up to your alarm clock, looking outside the window, and finding it pitch black.
· Read more… - Mar 14
- wound care
not every wound heals
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some fester and drip
leaking poison into your blood stream
infiltrating your very being
even sometimes invading the chambers of your wounded heart
hiding in the scars of your memory
or in the pockets of darkness within your soul - Mar 14
- through the gate
Out of the desert
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I am come to thine gates
I bring the emptiness of the wilderness
and the silence of the bitter wind
unlooked for, I crossed that threshold
no one cared whither I went or no
among the teeming masses
I am but one man
alone
voice drowned out by the bazaar
the moneychangers
the tax collectors
the merchants
the con artists
I tread the worn-down road
a million footprints
turning the soil into concrete - Mar 14
- wind
Where do I go from here? Isn't that always the question?
· Read more… - Mar 19
- my god, it's full of stars!
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(from Deadly Computer Blog) - Mar 22
- racism is part of american culture
His opponents on both sides of the aisle are trying to make hay with Obama's comment about the "typical white person" who is afraid of black men. But they miss the point entirely. He's not throwing his grandmother under the bus, as some are wont to say. He's not trying to insult white people. He's merely illustrating an unfortunate truism about American culture, which Chris Rock touched upon a long time ago:
· Read more… - Mar 22
- crisis of faith
It is interesting that Arthur C Clarke recognized that physicians are more likely to be atheist. The first story of his that I ever read was "The Star" which describes a Jesuit astronaut coming upon the blasted remains of a civilization that once orbited the star that supposedly went nova in order to announce Jesus' birth. In other words, the Christmas Star. The question asked is, how could God destroy an entire civilization just so that the shepherds and the Magi would know where Jesus was born?
· Read more… - Mar 22
- how to: lose the faith of your customers
So I used to have an array of external hard drives attached to my Mac Mini by Firewire. Most of the hard drives were encased in Venus DS3s. Like many Firewire 400/IEEE 1394a hard drive enclosures, it's based on the venerable but reliable Oxford Semiconductor 911 chipset.
· Read more… - Mar 22
- os timeline
- Mar 23
- reading material
Jean's post about how her parents did not think fiction was appropriate reading material got me thinking about how I got sucked into the written word. As long as I can remember, I have this image of my dad reading something: the newspaper, Time magazine, the latest New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, or American Family Physician, or dime-store type paperback spy novels. If he wasn't watching TV, he was reading, and sometimes he would do both—the book/magazine/or paper would get him through the interminable commercial breaks. It's obvious that this impacted me greatly.
· Read more… - Mar 29
- all at once
It seems like this week has been filled with bad news. S's grandfather died. My neighbor was recently diagnosed with metastatic small cell lung cancer. JdG—one of my closest friends from college—just recently found out her mom has breast cancer, and both the sentinel node and the margins were positive.
· Read more… - Mar 29
- beast's curse
It is interesting that the dark night will arouse strange thoughts that you can't imagine thinking during the day time. Maybe it's because of the fact that I'm excessively sleep-deprived and not-a-little delirious. Maybe it was because it was 1 o'clock in the morning, and we all know only crazy people are out on the open road at that hour.
· Read more… - Mar 31
- escape from the black iron prison
Philip K Dick coined the phrase "black iron prison" to describe the illusory world that we are trapped in, forever living and reliving the first century anno domini. It is an instrument of the tyrannical Empire, initially identified with Rome but also identified with any wielder of imperialist power descended from Rome, culminating with the tyrannical elements that rule the United States. Dick identified Richard Nixon as the apex of this tyranny. (God only knows what Dick would've thought of George W Bush and Dick Cheney.)
· Read more… - Mar 31
- swears like a sailor
Apparently, I'm a foul-mouthed bastard.
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