the rantbeast

word-wrap:break-word and floats

2010-02-25T12:19:00.002-07:00

Oddly, although IE6/7 wrapped text around floats when applying word-wrap:break-word, none of IE8, Firefox, or Chrome does. See my word-wrap:break-word float tests.

done

2009-04-28T03:05:00.002-06:00

Hope my teacher likes to get eleven-page papers with three-page data appendices when he asks for twenty pages. Without further ado, Labor Mobility in South and East Asia (.doc). It's poorly written, but I spent a lot of time on it, and it has SQL queries as footnotes. Abstract:

South and East Asia exhibit consistent migration participation rates of only half the global average. Several factors contribute to this result, including the exceptional size of India and China and the rise of outsourcing. However, the large Asian migrant stocks in the Middle East imply that legal restrictions on immigration in most of the developed world are the primary determinants of Asian migration. Evidence on the failure of factor-price equalization by trade and on the effects of migration suggests that these policies lead to significantly inefficient outcomes.

2009-04-18T16:03:00.004-06:00

This code delights me. Just wrote it as part of normalizing the Development Research Centre's Global Migrant Origin Database. Works for about 3/4 of them.

$resp = file_get_contents('http://www.google.com/search?q='
  .urlencode('"'.$name.'"').'+population');
if (preg_match('@Population</b>: ([\d,]+)@', $resp, $matches)) {
  $population = str_replace(',', '', $matches[1]);
}

2009-02-23T11:10:00.004-07:00

This describes my eating depressingly accurately.

I pretty much eat like Bryan Caplan on vacation all the time.

2009-01-02T12:52:00.002-07:00

I've become pretty enamored of Twitter of late. Between my Google Reader shared items and my Twitter feed, most of what I used to put on here is covered, with the bonus of sharing things in real time instead of compiling them over weeks for mega-posts. I dislike Twitter's proprietary nature--I wish Atom or RSS had some kind of "minipost" flag to encourage aggregators not to collapse posts--but I still expect that I'll only be using this for occasional thoughtful posts for the foreseeable future.

2008-12-07T18:14:00.002-07:00

"Males of species from each of the main classes of vertebrate animals (including bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals) have been affected by chemicals in the environment. Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence." Very interesting read. Seems slightly less worrisome than the reverse, though.

Uh, so there are currently three adorable Rottweilers at the Murray Humane Society. Maybe someone would like one?

2008-12-05T14:40:00.003-07:00

Normally, marginal analysis is pretty accurate for my salary: my hourly wage equivalent is about what it would take to convince me to work another hour at the end of the week. However, I'd be willing to work all of Saturday building Ajaxy interfaces at minimum wage. I love you, jQuery. (And yeah, Matt, you're right--event delegation owns. Much more elegant.)

2008-11-16T15:54:00.002-07:00

Finished a fun project for my labor econ class this week: uniongraphs, a sister site to Unionstats.com that uses Google Charts for union membership visualization. Check out an example report: Phoenix, Tucson, and overall Arizona union coverage, 1983--2007.

2008-11-15T23:21:00.002-07:00

From our World Vision 2008 Gift Catalog:

In drought-prone regions of Africa where crops can't yield sustainable food or income, all it takes is a few breeding hybrid bulls to produce the livestock--and the milk, meat, and income--that can help an entire village thrive.

I respect the sentiment, of course, but man, what a crime against incentives to argue that you should send people things because they live in areas suffering Malthusian catastrophes. Certainly, free immigration is politically intractable, but it's such an offensive dismissal of human potential to pay people to breed and starve rather than allow them to work.

Tangentially, I think it's funny that both World Vision and Heifer International appear to treat their catalogs as primarily marketing copy: the first page explains that "Each item is representative of the gift category in which it appears and donations will be used to provide assistance where it is needed most within that category or to address a similar need."

2008-11-07T12:50:00.002-07:00

The purple world map is cool, but I actually think it's as much of an oversimplification as the red/blue dichotomy--if you look on a county-by-county gradiated level, a lot of the country really is polarized. Check out the NYT president map. So far, the highest splits I've found are D.C., 92.9% Obama, and Ochiltree County, TX, 92.0% McCain. (Sorry, Utah County--78% can't compete with the Texas panhandle.)

Other good quantitative analysis: Red State, Blue State: "Election 2008: what really happened".

auditory processing disorder

2008-10-28T14:52:00.003-06:00

Apparently my husbands' union dues are being used well indeed:

People with APD intermittently experience an inability to process verbal information. When people with APD have a processing failure, they do not process what is being said to them. They may be able to repeat the words back word for word, but the meaning of the message is lost. Simply repeating the instruction is of no use if a person with APD is not processing. Neither will increasing the volume help. … Persons with CAPD often:
have trouble paying attention to and remembering information presented orally; cope better with visually acquired information
may have trouble paying attention and remembering information when information is simultaneously presented in multiple modalities
have problems carrying out multi-step directions given orally; need to hear only one direction at a time

2008-10-28T13:28:00.003-06:00

I would love to believe in the heralded adhocratic revolution--that Wikipedia is the vanguard of a glorious new Star-Trek-like age in which humanity's greatest accomplishments are driven by two hundred billion hours per year of collaborative volunteering--but more than ever, I am skeptical of that dream after starting Fable II last weekend. Honestly, if I were single, I think I would be considering asking work to drop me back to part-time or looking into just doing freelance work so I could spend most of my day smithing, trading, and investing for my character. I was frustrated needing to stop by the grocery store for hair gel last night after ditching class; adding "citation needed" flags to a Wikipedia article was the furthest thing from my mind.

You can argue that I'm unusual or that video games are at most a tempting (in the economic/neurological sense) diversion, devoid of lasting satisfaction, but ultimately, I think it's foolhardy to pit the inherent satisfaction of human progress against the creativity of content developers trained to trigger our addiction mechanisms and, especially in the case of subscription-model games, increasingly incentivized not only to provide a tantalizing marketing image but an enduringly enjoyable experience. Certainly, I would include the development of ever more engrossing television in this trend, but in the long run, I'm confident that video game producers will succeed in targeting broad segments of the general population.

Frankly, I don't think this is such a tragedy; for most users, user-created content is horrifying (see also every comment on cbsnews.com). In fact, in my opinion, the most disappointing aspect of a digital entertainment economy is the loss of free consumer surplus to abandonware.

2008-10-27T11:39:00.003-06:00

Well, my team got third in region in the ICPC. There were four fairly easy problems and four very difficult problems in our set, so when they cloaked the scoreboard, we were in second place by time among the ten teams who had finished four (of forty total teams), but University of Alberta managed to squeak out one of the hard ones before the testing server went down with five minutes left. Congrats, guys.

I'm going to apply for an eligibility exception next year since I've done so few CS classes, but that's a whole year; I totally should have respawned at the beginning of the competition and known which problems to attack first. Life is such a poor substitute for Fable II.

2008-10-19T23:12:00.002-06:00

That's not quite the graphical presentation of human migration throughout world history I was looking for, pretty though it is. But thanks, Internet. I love you too.

2008-10-16T14:02:00.002-06:00

Beautiful use of a transparent overlay in this animated header demo by Trevor Morris and Remy Sharp (via jQuery for Designers: Fun with Overflows). Uses a rainbow gradient background and a black transparent overlay.

2008-10-16T13:59:00.002-06:00

Interesting psychological tests from Harvard:

Moral Sense Test
Online Game Project (as in prisoner's dilemma game)
Project Implicit (subconscious biases)

2008-10-14T11:53:00.002-06:00

It's funny that intellectuals can openly not only recognize but endorse the betrayals of populist pandering predicted by Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter. From The Frontal Cortex: Agricultural Reform:

One can only hope that an Obama Administration will have better food and ethanol policies than Obama as a Senator, who has been a loyal supporter of Illinois corn farmers.

2008-10-10T12:19:00.002-06:00

Today's Penny Arcade newspost, "The Great Divide", referenced without linking Lost Garden's "Soul Bubbles: A classic game ill treated by expert reviewers". I think it's an insightful analysis not only of "expertise bias," as they term it, but the essence of gaming as a medium:

There is a big question if games work well as empathic media. Their stories are weak, characters flimsy and their exploration of universal truths are usually laughable. Instead, games tend to be strongest when they focus on learning, exploration and first time experiences. Games, more than any other media, are less about reacting and more about changing who we are.

2008-10-08T17:36:00.002-06:00

So I think I'm going to do the International Collegiate Programming Contest. It's a little scary--the only accepted languages are C, C++, and Java, and the U's coach reminds me of the professor from 21--but I really need practice thinking of non-naive algorithms for non-computationally-trivial problems, and this is the last year I'm eligible without an exception. Should be an interesting Saturday, at least.

2008-10-08T16:14:00.001-06:00

60% chance of snow this Saturday. Ugh. I'd like next fall to last more than two weeks, please.

2008-10-07T23:44:00.001-06:00

"History of $X" classes drive me nuts. It's impossible to force myself to remember incorrect theories.

2008-10-07T23:08:00.002-06:00

Quick teacher's-pet project for Discrete Math: factor graph. Naive algorithm with ridiculously limited range, but hey, it's pretty, and I finally own some code using the Google Charts API.

dear readers

2008-10-07T23:02:00.002-06:00

Anything you're tired of seeing here or would like to see more of? Any preference between more frequent short posts or more developed occasional posts? I feel like I address a lot from technical stuff and economics to personal stuff, video games, and random links, so I'd certainly understand if anyone would prefer I forked this thing.

2008-10-07T23:00:00.001-06:00

New internet danger: clickjacking, a CSRF variant that's difficult for trusted sites to defend against. As usual, NoScript protects you.

2008-10-07T22:56:00.000-06:00

I've enjoyed Will Wilkinson's liveblogs of the Presidential and VP debates.

2008-10-07T14:30:00.002-06:00

Huzzah, Ben Folds' Way to Normal is out. (And it's not about Frally.)

2008-10-07T10:58:00.002-06:00

The use of "probably" in this t-shirt ad from a softer world is non-standard, right? I'm pretty sure I'd never heard anyone use "probably" as a disjunct until Uffish Thought, a few years ago. I mean, I can certainly see it in the Ryan North dialect, but I'm still a bit surprised.

2008-10-07T10:03:00.003-06:00

I'm impressed how good the Google Sets results are for Tolkien Boy and Master Fob. It's funny that the first result in Google Sets: Bawb, Ambrosia is Sven--someday Google paleontologists will find us and conclude our cultural significance was commenting on Master Fob's blog.

2008-10-01T00:41:00.003-06:00

I was commenting on a blogger post just now, and I filled in the captcha and then pressed tab onto the first radio button and enter to submit the form. Except instead of submitting, suddenly my computer said "beep, beep, beep" and sounded a cacophony of voices. I was completely bewildered at having caught a virus that tuned my computer into a schizophrenic numbers station until I realized that I'd activated the audio captcha.

2008-09-30T19:51:00.002-06:00

My industrial organization professor just informed me that the author of the article we read last week, Managing Lock-In (gated), is now the chief economist at Google. Yikes.

What happens when perfect competition meets lock-in? How can we reconcile vigorous competition, which eliminates excess profits, with lock-in, which makes an installed base a valuable asset? Think about the extreme (and unpleasant) case in which you face fierce competition from equally capable rivals to attract customers in the first place. Both you and your rivals know that each customer will be locked into whatever vendor he or she selects. The result is that competitition indeed wrings excess profits out of the market, but only on a life-cycle basis. The inescapable conclusion: firms will lose money (invest) in attracting customers, and (just) recoupe these investments from profitable sales to locked-in customers....
In our view, Kodak's revenues from the service business were simply economic returns on its deep discounts on initial sales in the highly competitive copier market. Just as industry participants should look at the entire lock-in cycle, so should the antitrust authorities and the courts.

2008-09-28T23:56:00.002-06:00

I was wondering why I wasn't hearing more about Proposition 8 aside from sources in California. Then I read that the Defense of Marriage Act's quarantine of gay marriages hasn't been overturned. By gum.

Anyway, I was going to just say that it struck me as sort of funny that Brozy and my and Lunk and JB's marriage certificates say that we were married before God in this year of our Lord. I would think that religious people would be in favor of denying the state the right to act in God's name. If marriage were only the domain of the churches, I would think legislation to allow visitation rights, etc. for gay couples in civil unions would pass easily. But maybe I misunderstand American sentiment and people really are shooting for making it as unpleasant to be gay as possible.

And while I'm offending half of my friends, I've gotta say that on the ethics of birth rates, I'm inclined to agree with Will Wilkinson and Jared Diamond than Tyler Cowen and Greg Mankiw. As I see it, Diamond's fear that we could exhaust global farmlands, starve by the billions, and leave humanity in a pre-technological state without any easily accessible reserves of energy or minerals is at least possible, and would be sufficiently catastrophic that even the possibility should weigh heavily on our policy decisions. Contrarily, by limiting our population, we face--what? Slower technological progress preventing us from colonizing other worlds before an asteroid hits? Personally, I don't think we'd reach Mars significantly sooner with ten billion people on earth than five billion. I particularly object to Cowen's apparent assertion that ten billion people rating their happiness a six is ethically preferable to five billion people rating their happiness a nine. As long as we can avoid extinction, the aggregate happiness of our descendants dwarfs our own, and I would argue against Mankiw that most of them will be better off after Google has been around twice as long than if Google were twice as big.

To play devil's advocate to my own position, it seems to me that a more populated world is likely to be more interconnected, since transportation can benefit from economies of scale. So perhaps a more populated world will be less likely to see nuclear winter.

At any rate, if you're reading this, I almost certainly think that your particular children contribute more to humanity than they cost. So, uh, carry on.

world history bleg

2008-09-28T02:21:00.000-06:00

Does anyone know of a good map-oriented world history video? I really like Maps of War's empires video, but its growth animations and scope (empires controlling the Middle East) are a bit simplistic, and it doesn't have any narration. Ideally, I'd like something informed not only by military history but genetic and linguistic ethnography, including not only the origins and conquests of the Huns but at least a paragraph on each of the major branches of the Proto-Indo-European expansion and notes about the displacement of the Tai by the Han and the origins of the Basques.

It would be nice if I could name the current country at a random point on a blank globe, but failing that, I'd like to be able to identify the origins and military history of its residents--I still have basically no idea of the relationships among Ottomans, Persians, Arabs, Turks, and Saracens, for example; I classify everything from Northern Africa to Georgia to Western China as "uh, PIE, I think, but really hard to learn." Slicing along the other dimension, I'd like to be able to draw a rough map of the political organization of the world at any point in history and understand at least five of the most important events in the history of the Mongol Empire.

(Yeah, I've been playing Age of Empires again. Cavalry archers ftw.)

2008-09-24T11:16:00.000-06:00

I'm seriously considering selling my iPhone over Apple's recent behavior toward developers, even knowing it would make an insignificant dent in their value. Rejecting applications that reduce iTunes lock-in is bad, but forbidding discussion of rejection decisions themselves is completely unconscionable. Bravo, Apple--you've one-upped the worst possible future for computing I had previously imagined.

2008-09-17T18:11:00.000-06:00

If a competitor to the U started which forbade teachers from requiring attendance more than three days a semester, I'd pay at least 20% more for tuition. Professor, my brother is leaving on his mission after this semester, and then we won't be able to play Halo for TWO YEARS. What kind of monster are you?

2008-09-17T12:50:00.000-06:00

It's an exciting time to be in web dev. Native CSS-style selectors and trace-tree engines for Javascript. Custom autocomplete, built-in validation, multiple uploads, and built-in audio and video for HTML5. Closures and lamda functions for PHP. (Now if only PHP would add array_get or ifsetor.)

think fast

2008-09-07T15:51:00.000-06:00

Games like JezzBall and, to a lesser extent, Kobo Deluxe and other two-dimensional shooters, are interesting to me because they feel like a benchmark for your wetware GPU: continuous intuitive motion prediction. It's kind of funny that they're pleasant.

2008-09-04T20:32:00.000-06:00

It's remarkable how much a stubborn technical problem can depress me. I've been trying to get dual monitors on ATI working and a command-line Oracle client that doesn't suck installed, and every extra package and reboot chips at my soul. It's worse since I can only troubleshoot them at work, but man, I think I'd jump off a bridge if I were unintelligent, hedonic treadmill or no.

fresh install must-haves

2008-09-03T19:59:00.000-06:00

I'm loving my work laptop; it's awesome having something I can take to class less than five years old. I have both Windows and Linux configured mostly the way I want them now, and I thought I'd record what I've installed for my future reference. Hopefully something here will be useful to someone else.

Firefox add-ons

NoScript: A must-have for security, as I've discussed here.
Flashblock: Speeds up browsing tremendously. (You'll note that I don't have Adblock here; I don't actually mind static ads.)
GMarks: I installed this because Google Toolbar bookmarking was broken in the 64-bit Linux build, but I've actually come to prefer it to the Google Toolbar; Ctrl-D is better than clicking a little star, and it saves screen real estate. (Apparently Firefox now includes Google Suggest by default. Good times.)
Firebug: If you're doing web dev, you probably already know what a killer app this is for Firefox. Ajax development in particular is practically impossible without it.
HTML Validator: Nice debugging tool in a pinch. Broken in Linux right now.
Live HTTP Headers: Also very useful for Ajax and caching testing.

Windows apps

Firefox: Dependency for Firebug and NoScript.
Pidgin: Lightweight and pretty multi-protocol IM.
WinAmp: Easy-to-use media player with OGG support.
Paint.NET: Photoshop equivalent. A pleasure to use.
MultiMon: Adds a taskbar to your second monitor and sorts applications to appropriate taskbars.
Process Explorer: Task manager on steroids.
KeyTweak: Easy way to switch Caps Lock with Esc for vim.
Kobo Deluxe: Simple free-roaming scrolling shooter.
Powermanga: Top-scrolling upgrading shooter.
Poderosa: Best. Windows. Console. Ever. I almost forget I'm not using Konsole. (Haven't gotten global ssh-agent working smoothly yet.)
Cygwin: Linux commands for Windows. How I missed you, recursive grep.
Notepad++: Held me over until I installed vim under cygwin.
TortoiseSVN: Again, was great until I got command-line svn.
Wireshark: Network activity monitoring. Imperative for remote service call debugging for our Windows app.
SQL*Plus: Command-line access to Oracle. I can never read any of my results, though. Hopefully I can keep copying and pasting from our other queries.

Kubuntu packages

firefox
pidgin
amarok: King among music players. Can't wait for Windows support. Magnatune integration is cool; it was really easy grabbing American Baroque's Four Seasons.
wiki-lyrics: Much better lyrics browser than lyrc.
gnome-app-install: Sorry, adept, but sorting search results by popularity is awesome.
speedcrunch: Great calculator, long name. Alias calc=speedcrunch.
kolourpaint: Solid MS Paint equivalent.
openoffice: Meh. MS Office compatibility.
gimp: Photoshop equivalent. I've used this for a dozen hours or so, and it's still unpleasant.
k3b: Beautiful CD burning app. Wish I had an excuse to use it more often.
planetpenguin-racer: Fun 3d-penguin-steering game. Requires hardware acceleration.
kobodeluxe
powermanga
kdegames, gnome-games: Several dozen games between these two packs. Mostly pretty simple, but legitimately fun. (I especially like ktron and knetwalk.)
tuxtype, tuxmath: Cool "hurry; stuff is falling" educational games.
kubuntu-restricted-extras: Sorry, GNU movement, but I need to play Fantastic Contraption and the powder game.
msttcorefonts: Make websites look like normal.
ttf-bitstream-vera: Make everything look beautiful.
wine: Solid Windows compatibility layer. Plays Age of Empires II at tolerable speeds.
kde-icons-nuvola: Pretty icons.
gtk2-engines-qtcurve, kde-style-qtcurve: Fixes the Kubuntu checkbox focus bug. Nice, though my favorite is Polyester.
vim-full: Syntax highlighting, etc. for the ubereditor.
kate: Used this graphical editor for a long time. Good stuff. (The find-replace regex help in Kate and KWrite is a notably nice touch.)
kompare: Beautiful colorization and unified scrolling for diffs.
sqlplus
rlwrap: Adds readline support to Oracle's crappy command-line tool.

2008-09-02T20:36:00.000-06:00

Best feeling ever: turning in discrete math homework for the week two hours after it was posted online, thereby escaping a separate trip up to campus. 'Brozy, you're amazing for typing up the problems out of the text.

FYI, U of U CS department, your elevator security to the faculty office floor is vulnerable to knocking on the door at the top of the stairs. O praise you, kindest among TAs.

2008-08-24T23:18:00.000-06:00

This weekend: juggling practice, minor chores, a few hours on my example codebase for Eleka, a trip to the dog park together, bread pudding, gnocchi, and co-op through "Assault on the Control Room" in Halo 1. Guess who's wife of the year?

Tomorrow: new job, first day of classes. I'm freaking out, actually--it feels like my first Real World job, and I'm taking classes during the day on Tuesday and Thursday. I warned them about it during the interview, but still, three-hour lunches are a lot to ask for, even if I get a cellular modem so I can work while riding TRAX up. Also, putting /home/braden/ onto a flash drive and shredding /dev/hda feels like putting everything I own into a shopping cart to move across town and setting my house on fire.

2008-08-07T13:37:00.000-06:00

A few months ago, I considered blogging that, even though I'll never get used to the system in which our blue dumpster is for dirty trash and green is for clean, I love that Sandy picks up our garbage later in the day, so if I forget at night, I can put it out in the morning.

Two weeks ago, though, I came home and saw a note on the dumpster. "WARNING: I run this street between 7:15 and 7:30. Cans must be on the street by 7:30. Thanks." Duly chastened, when we came home late Sunday night this week, I put the cans out on the curb. When I came home from work, I saw another note. "FINAL WARNING: Cans must be on the street by 7:30 on Monday." I'd forgotten that we'd taken Monday off and put them out a day late, but he'd still picked up our trash. Um, dear everyone: please do not do nice things for me if it will make you hate me. I promise, the last thing I want is an undying feud with my trash collector.

I'm pretty sure that all but 1 of the 119 Google results for "bluej100" are me. Kind of fun looking over my history on the web.

Jeff Atwood's right: Windows Vista Jeff Atwood Edition is reasonably pleasant to use. I've been reformatting 'Brozy's sister's laptop, and I think that at this point I would actually not kill myself if work made me use Windows.

2008-07-12T01:04:00.000-06:00

Definition of a lucky man: one who gets omelettes in the morning and Halo after work for his birthday. Thanks, hon. (And thanks to the hundred people who wished me happy birthday. Also to my boss for a delicious lunch at Hagermann's.)

My brother flew up, too. It was wonderful. We had Ethiopian, yay.

So excited for our trip to California. Always makes me happy leaving the dogs at Camp Barkalot, especially with the little pool out for the summer. Hope we go boogey-boarding.

2008-07-08T14:35:00.000-06:00

Back cubicle + Festival plugin for Pidgin + Still Alive = really hard to fight solipsism. (Portal is so creepy and so great.)

informative home maintenance blog

2008-07-07T12:29:00.000-06:00

A Houston home inspector who blogs at Inspected Thoughts dropped by and left a non-spammy comment on one of my posts the other day. Since I expect at least a few people who read this blog are learning home maintenance and I like to encourage white hat SEO, I thought I'd post the link. I found the roof construction and care overview he posted recently especially informative.

information reliability 101

2008-07-02T12:09:00.000-06:00

You know that a web site is reliable when it tells you what you want to hear. Government agencies like the USDA, however, are generally not a good source for research.

2008-07-01T09:02:00.000-06:00

Ugh. Google now indexes Flash-based sites. Bad news.

useful and compelling economic news

2008-06-25T10:20:00.000-06:00

Driving 65 mph in a pickup instead of 75 saves $18.70/hour.

miscellaneous

2008-06-24T23:47:00.000-06:00

The cable guys sliced through two of our sprinkler zones. Good times.

I think my perception of luxury is almost entirely determined by coldness. Our house appreciated, like, $20k when I turned the swamp cooler on.

The Costco brand ramen cups are really quite good. Nothing like the Kirkland Signature label to get me to spend twice as much on cheap stuff. Contrarily, the Gourmandise chocolate muffins are worlds beyond Costco's. Who knew?

I think that if I get straight A's for every economics class I ever take, I will not be as proud as I am of the B I got in diversity.

I can't believe how much proprietary crap encumbers Home Depot. There are, like, ten incompatible brands of tub faucets, shower drains, and garage door openers. I'm surprised I didn't have to buy a brand of ladder that matched my roof manufacturer.

I'm seriously blown away by how solid Kubuntu Heron is. Firefox 3, Pidgin 2.4, and Amarok 1.4.9 are beautiful (especially Firebug 1.2 beta). ssh-agent works transparently across konsole tabs, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono remains the best monospace font around. There are a dozen games I really enjoy, especially Extreme Tux Racer, Super Tux, Frozen Bubble, KTron, KBounce, and KNetWalk, plus the excellent edutainment games TuxMath and TuxType. Speedcrunch is better than a TI-83+.

Over the weekend, I tossed the LiveCD in my trunk and, no joke, thought before I caught myself, "Hmmm, I should put that somewhere safe; someone will steal it." It's that good.

On the other hand, none of the Java plugins available for my 64-bit computer work for the powder game. The hardware drivers manager is great, but I really wish it prompted you to install kubuntu-restricted-extras during installation if an internet connection is available. Adept is great, but when they're collecting data on the most-used packages, it really shouldn't be that hard to provide a "sort by recommended/popular" view. Overall, I'd say that it's awesome for daily use when installed by someone experienced, but probably not quite good enough for a normal user flying solo to install and configure. (I mean, sure, it's pretty easy to just go through the installer and use it, but clearly it's zomg so awesum after I finish configuring it.) We'll see what 'Brozy's sister says, though--I tossed it on her molasses-slow Vista box last weekend.

2008-06-24T21:10:00.000-06:00

Blogging from my roof watching the swamp cooler fill up is fantastic. I think we have the nicest view in the city aside from my manager.

Home maintenance feels like living National Treasure: you have to correctly configure a series of decrepit and dangerous puzzles designed by people much more clever than you. Our swamp cooler water line, for example, runs from the outside of the fan base into the fan chute, emerges in the attic, dives into the insulation, and disappears into the floor. Only after pushing aside the drop ceiling panels in the basement, tracing the tangle of gas and water pipes in the ceiling, and knocking on the attic floor as 'Brozy wandered the second story did it occur to me that it followed another water pipe into the wall between our bathroom doors to snake out under our bathroom sink.

I'm actually surprised there aren't more people advertising their services as complete home maintenance solutions. Liability, perhaps? Maybe at least maintenance tutors--I'd take a pay cut to spend my day teaching programming as I coded.

2008-06-18T11:16:00.000-06:00

I got 137 throws with my new juggling rings last night. I'm pretty stoked.

With these clubs, on the other hand, I'm lucky to break 10--and that's catching them backwards more often than not.

2008-06-17T01:06:00.000-06:00

Tonight our power went out. It was pretty great: we played Stratego by candlelight, ate leftovers and melting ice cream, and took turns on the iPhone. Maybe we should have powerless night once a month.

2008-06-05T02:25:00.000-06:00

Budget Hero is fun.

2008-06-05T02:18:00.000-06:00

Having in the last week added a class late, paid for two classes late, bought a textbook halfway through the semester, appealed the revocation of my car's registration, replaced my magstripe-worn debit card, and paid two months-old citations, I can pretty confidently say that most problems don't get better if you ignore them. (Swamp coolers heal themselves, though, right?)

2008-06-05T02:15:00.000-06:00

It's kind of funny that Brozy and my current go-to game on the Wii is Bomberman '93, a $5-ish Virtual Console title that hasn't been updated in the slightest. I'm not a particularly nostalgic gamer, but the Bomberman formula is golden. (Dear Nintendo: Bomberman III for the SNES is way better, regardless of '93's five-player action.)

2008-06-05T02:10:00.000-06:00

My dad paid for me and my younger brother to do tandem skydives while I was down visiting last week. It's pretty amazing walking out of the back of a plane. I'd kind of like to try going solo sometime, but I'm not sure it's cooler than four new Wii games, and I probably have the wrong attitude about it--my favorite part is just hanging from the parachute being amazed how still and peaceful it is a mile above the ground, not the flipping and spinning as I hurtle toward the ground. (I'm shockingly bad at remembering to keep my heels to my butt during free-fall.)

2008-06-05T02:00:00.000-06:00

Yesterday in my diversity class, the teacher was talking about stepping outside our paradigms of hierarchy and capitalism, suggesting, hey, what about socialism? A student raised his hand and said, "Yeah, I mean, right now, communism's doing better than capitalism anyway." I think I will always hold a secret shame for being the little economist who was called on to testify but was Not Prepared. Time to go re-memorize Mankiw's Articles--er, Principles of Economics.

(Seriously, it drives me nuts how many articles we've read suggesting that we should have open immigration, equal education spending, universal health care, and free translators, and how we need to end cycles of oppression like denying credit to high-risk applicants. You have my sincere respect if you want to send all of your money beyond the bare minimum to the impoverished masses, but maybe you should try it for a few years before advocating that it be compulsory.)

new toy

2008-06-04T20:53:00.000-06:00

I'm typing this on my iPhone, a fun golden handcuff from work. I wouldn't buy it myself, but the interface is pretty incredible; it feels like I can type about half as fast as I can on a traditional keyboard between spelling corrections and automatic periods. You know something's built by Apple when you think, boy, adjusting the zoom on this is really annoying; I wish I could just double click a paragraph to match width, and hey, it works. It's pretty incredible to get an email about a new comment on my phone and be able to click the link and have it open. Man, though, it kills me not to be able to actually close an application.

2008-05-17T22:14:00.000-06:00

The Living Traditions Food Market isn't bad. It's definitely priced like carnival food, and the quality isn't worlds better, but hey, where else can you get Sudanese and Bosnian food? We'll go again next year, at least.

2008-05-16T20:54:00.001-06:00

Gmail's new loading progress bar is pretty great. Good job, Google.

on rigor

2008-05-15T03:23:00.000-06:00

I'm taking two three-credit courses the first block this summer: principles of microeconomics (econ 2010) and gender and society (gndr 3960).

For micro, between Monday and Wednesday, we had to do two math problems and answer twenty multiple-choice questions.

For gender, between Tuesday and Thursday, we have to fill out a seven-page personal history and values survey, read 102 pages of e-reserve PDF, read a selection from the textbook I don't have yet, and read an article from the library's physical reserve. That is, if we aren't up for the optional readings. Good job, guys! Maybe if everyone fails your class, it means it's not bullshit!

2008-05-10T16:14:00.000-06:00

I have the best dogs in the world. They even do imitations:

Bear (performed by Radar)

Dragon (performed by Shelby)

argh

2008-05-06T02:55:00.000-06:00

It drives me nuts when I can't find something I've read recently. I know I read an essay arguing that economics teachers should focus more on the essential conclusions of economics than relative minutiae like GDP component calculation, but for the life of me, I can't find it in Google Reader, Amazon Search Inside, or Google. If I knew it would make the difference between having this happen once a week and never for the rest of my life, I'd be first on the gurney for an intracranial neuron-silicon port.

another Python riddle script

2008-05-05T01:26:00.000-06:00

(Based on Katya's enigma.)


#!/usr/bin/python
import sys, random

default_favorable = 10
default_total = 100
default_iterations = 100
default_replacement = 0

print 'Katya\'s enigma tester' 
if len(sys.argv) == 2 and sys.argv[1] in ['help', '-h', '-?', '--help']:
 print 'Format: '+sys.argv[0]+' [$favorable ='\
  +str(default_favorable)+' [$total='\
  +str(default_total)+' [$iterations = '\
  +str(default_iterations)+' [$replacement = '\
  +str(default_replacement)+']]]]'
 exit()

favorable = (len(sys.argv) > 1 and sys.argv[1].isdigit()) and int(sys.argv[1]) or default_favorable
total = (len(sys.argv) > 2 and sys.argv[2].isdigit()) and int(sys.argv[2]) or default_total
iterations = (len(sys.argv) > 3 and sys.argv[3].isdigit()) and int(sys.argv[3]) or default_iterations
replacement = (len(sys.argv) > 4 and sys.argv[4].isdigit()) and int(sys.argv[4]) or default_replacement

if favorable > total:
 print 'Format: '+sys.argv[0]+' [$favorable ='\
  +str(default_favorable)+' [$total='\
  +str(default_total)+' [$iterations = '\
  +str(default_iterations)+' [$replacement = '\
  +str(default_replacement)+']]]]'
 print '$favorable must be less than or equal to $total.'
 exit()

print 'Testing',
drawcounts = []
for iteration in range(0, iterations):
 print '.',
 n = favorable
 m = total
 draws = 0
 successes = 0
 while n:
  draws += 1
  draw = random.randint(1, m)
  # print '; '+str(n)+', '+str(m)+', '+str(draw),
  if draw <= n:
   n -= 1
  if not replacement:
   m -= 1
 drawcounts.append(draws)
print ''

print 'Favorable: '+str(favorable)
print 'Total: '+str(total)
print 'Iterations: '+str(iterations)
print 'Predicted: '+str(float((favorable+1) * total) / float((total+1)))
print 'Average: '+str(float(sum(drawcounts)) / float(len(drawcounts)))

2008-04-30T18:38:00.000-06:00

I'm delighted with the rhythym tester I've written over the last couple of days. Google Charts are beautiful.

word riddle

2008-04-28T10:42:00.000-06:00

This was in SciAm:Mind, which 'Brozy grabbed for me the other day.

In the word gum, every letter can be replaced by y to form a valid word, as follows:

gum
yum
gym
guy

There are about forty such three-letter words, but a script I threw together only finds seven such four-letter words: two with e, two with l, one with o, and two with r. Can you find them?

My solution script follows. Remove the pound signs for the answers. (Download the /usr/share/dict/words I used.)

#! /usr/bin/env python

testlen = 4
dict = {}
f = open('/usr/share/dict/words', 'r')
for line in f:
        line = line.strip().lower()
        if len(line) == testlen:
                dict[line] = 1

chars = {}
for i in range(97, 123):
        chars[chr(i)] = 0

for word, v in dict.iteritems():
        for c, found in chars.iteritems():
                found = 1
                for j in range(testlen):
                        mod = word[:j]+c+word[j+1:]
                        if mod not in dict:
                                found = 0
                                break
                chars[c] += found
                #if found:
                #       print word+': '+c

print chars

Addendum: the o solution and one of the r solutions require proper nouns. Also, the o already has an o.

2008-04-26T13:45:00.000-06:00

I am not exaggerating to say that I think the shared to-do list iGoogle gadget is among the best things that have happened to our marriage.* Suddenly instead of 'Brozy having to remember and schedule for me all of our work around the house, we have a comprehensive list, and I just take care of things with no reminders required. Granted, it's not that much different from the lists on paper she usually keeps, but (a) I have access at work for all of the business-hours stuff and (b) it's prioritized, so it doesn't make me want to run for Canada. Best of all, my short-term memory remains gloriously free of everything but code.

* Smash Brawl's campaign mode was pretty great, though.

Kubuntu Gutsy

2008-04-15T16:57:00.000-06:00

I finally reached my threshold a couple days ago of the number of times I can read John Resig's recommendation of Firefox 3.0 without trying it. (Every jQuery developer has one, I expect.) Unfortunately, my attempts to upgrade MEPIS 6.0 onto the dependencies for Firefox 3.0 (GTK, primarily) involved half of the core libraries, so I decided it was time for a change. Unfortunately, MEPIS 7.0 wasn't cutting it--it felt shoddy, and within a few hours of playing with it, Firefox's tabbed browsing no longer worked. My distinct impression was that the transition from Ubuntu repositories back to straight Debian had left a lot of rough edges and that Warren wasn't putting much time into it anymore.

I'd heard that Kubuntu was the ugly stepchild of the Canonical family and particularly that its hardware support wasn't up to MEPIS's level. With a stock desktop, though, I figured it was safe and tossed it onto a CD.

I've been enormously impressed; the Ubuntu repositories are amazing. Installing Firefox 3.0 and Pidgin was a piece of cake, as was installing the nvidia-glx drivers for full resolution. It was a bit tricky getting Compiz working (I had to switch my dual-screen engine from Xinerama to Twinview), but the performance is worlds beyond what I had before. I'll keep posting my experiences, but I think this is going to be a pleasure to use.

soliciting donations

2008-04-11T22:54:00.000-06:00

For my professional writing class, we're required to do a service project that involves some writing. I ended up in a group organizing an organ donor registration drive for the Kidney Foundation, which struck me as kind of funny, since what I'd really like to do is agitate for legalizing the organ trade.

It then occurred to me that I totally should have written documentation for an open source project, instead--and marvelously, software economically makes sense as a gift economy, since it lends itself so easily to monopolistic market failure. I'll have to try that next semester if I fail.

the fulness of times

2008-04-11T22:27:00.000-06:00

It is ridiculously awesome that while installing a new operating system at work from a MEPIS LiveCD, I can pop open Firefox and wirelessly read my Google Reader subscriptions. (And as one of my coworkers pointed out, since it preserves my /home/ partition and thus my SSH key, I could even have been working!)

Also, Ubuntu Hardy will be able to install from within Windows, Firefox 3.0 will come with resumable downloads, and Konqueror is merging to WebKit (thank goodness, since Firefox seems determined that Linux == Gnome).

m to the third power

2008-04-07T00:49:00.001-06:00

Coolest thing about 'Brozy learning the viola: going through all of my old music and finding the fun things. I'd forgotten how much I like M to the Third Power (see also electric violin variations).

Also, I've really let things get out of control at work, in a few of my classes, and with household chores. Argh. All I ask is that I be able to play five hours of Smash Brawl and five of Starcraft a day. Is that so unreasonable?

Ethiopian experimentation

2008-03-25T13:57:00.000-06:00

I made doro wat and mesir wat last night. Since we'd gotten a five-pack of injera from the Ethiopian restaurant the last time we went, it was actually a reasonably easy meal. Unfortunately, they were both too spicy for my tastes with the median recommended amount of cayenne, the lentils never really fell apart, and I thought the doro wat had too much cinnamon. The chicken was quite nicely tender, though. I'll have to keep an eye out for more recipes.

2008-03-11T13:46:00.000-06:00

You know what peace is for me? Hearing that my dogs have dug under the fence and knowing that if I can't find them, it's not because God wants to teach me a lesson.

pyramid dreams: a composition in j

2008-02-06T16:05:00.001-07:00

This is this week's assignment for my Intro to Design class, a composition in glyphs. (Mine uses the capital J and lowercase v from Papyrus.)

It's sort of cluttery and haphazard in overall balance, but it's what my thoughts are shaped like. I'm pretty happy with the individual arrangements.

hints and tips

2008-01-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

(1) Don't burn poly blends (2) in a plastic sink.

Other than the toxic fumes and warping, it was a nice little ceremony.

halo music video

2008-01-30T13:45:00.000-07:00

Halo 3 demo footage set to the Mjolnir theme. I know, it's old, but man, the Halo music is amazing.

So ridiculously excited that Video Games Live counts for my intro to music course.

portal flash game

2007-11-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

If you have a few hours to kill, check out We Create Stuff's Flash version of Portal. (After that, get the real Portal from Steam. Or, if your computers' specs are like mine, covet the trailer and demo.)

mmmmm

2007-11-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

Since the only times 'Brozy posts about cooking is when it turns out horribly, I should note that this weekend, her lasagna was divine. Likewise, a couple weeks ago, she made broiled salmon with steamed asparagus, mashed potatoes, and tortellini, which was marvelous. (Salmon recipe was from America's Test Kitchen. Amazing.)

ugly dynamic typing bug

2007-10-15T09:35:00.000-06:00

In PHP, '0e00' == '00'. No, really. It's sick. Led to the nastiest bug I've ever seen in our hexadecimal permissions bitmasking at work: over a quarter of the time (whenever the hexadecimal string started with one or more zeros followed by a number greater than eight), permissions were wiped out. Fortunately, the bitmask is only a cache, so we didn't lose any data, but it was quite confusing. That'll teach me to use strict checking more often.

Update: after playing around with it a little more, we realized that it's interpreting it as scientific notation, not octal. (See php.net: string conversion to numbers.) The conversion itself is reasonable; the ridiculous part is comparing two strings and converting them both to floats.

2007-10-08T14:48:00.000-06:00

So we've finally signed away thirty years of mortgage payments. We ended up going with the broker 'Brozy's boss recommended, but I wanted to speak well of Rod Gibb of Home Money Loands. His proposal was unnervingly cheap, and he was extremely professional about our rejection.

new juggling balls

2007-10-01T23:35:00.000-06:00

Tonight I got BBs, electrical tape, and tennis balls to make juggling balls like the girl I talked to at the swing kids dance had. They're pretty awesome, especially for only a dollar or so each. Broke 150 catches in a row for the first time with them.

the benefits of inbox negligence

2007-10-01T11:49:00.000-06:00

Three more new e-mails and my gmail will be at 1337.

(Much cooler: my boss's cell phone is 555-1337.)

2007-09-29T19:17:00.000-06:00

FMSLogo is absurdly fun. I like the idea of paying my kids to do clever tricks with it.

(Download my current workspace.)

Also, I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that I mostly use Windows at home now--for me, coming out of hibernation smoothly in less than fifteen seconds is a killer app. Suspend to disk in MEPIS still looks and feels pretty much like Jeff Goldblum hacking the mothership.

gmail security warning

2007-09-29T00:17:00.000-06:00

If you have Javascript enabled, simply visiting a malicious site can cause your Gmail to be forwarded to them permanently. Even if you're using Firefox.

The solution: the NoScript extension for Firefox. It's easy to use--just click the icon in the bottom-right corner when you want to enable Javascript on a trusted site, and it'll remember your preference. For aimless web browsing, most sites should work without Javascript.

Even after Google fixes this vulnerability, NoScript is crucial from a security standpoint--when you have Javascript enabled without restriction, any site you visit can send a request to any other site, and it'll look like it's coming from you. The only way for sites to prevent this attack is to use random form tokens or otherwise unpredictable requests. It's not invincible, but it's one of the more difficult vulnerabilities to lock out, so you'll continue seeing attacks like this. Noscript protects you from them--and it's easy to use. Should be a simple decision.

family hobbies

2007-09-28T20:52:00.000-06:00

Tonight we have some free time. So 'Brozy's playing a transport puzzle (Teenage Daughter's Bedroom) and I'm trying out Logo implementations (KTurtle, FMSLogo). I think our children will die of nerdiness.

but it was nice working with you

2007-09-25T13:54:00.000-06:00

I hope our realtor doesn't die before we move again. They always seem like scumbags when you're trying to pick one and poor nice guys when you're telling them you signed with someone else.

musical miracle

2007-09-25T10:55:00.000-06:00

Amazon has high-quality DRM-free music requiring no installation or additional registration! Huzzah!

(My first purchase: American Pie, $1.94.)

residential burglary prevention

2007-09-23T01:53:00.001-06:00

We've had crime on our minds for the past few days as we've been looking at houses for sale, because the price difference in homes on major streets is staggering. One home in particular on a very busy road, which is absolutely gorgeous, is listed for about 15% less than comparables. (Of course, it's also a pain that kids can't play out front and that it's a bit noisy.)

I've found "Problem-Oriented Guides for Police: Burglary of Single-Family Houses" (PDF) quite informative. Here's the outline of the "Target Selection" section:

Familiarity with the target, and convenience of the location
- Houses near a ready pool of offenders
- Houses near major thoroughfares
- Houses on the outskirts of neighborhoods
- Houses previously burglarized/near previously burglarized homes
Occupancy
- Houses vacant for extended periods
- Houses routinely vacant during the day
- Houses of new residents
- Houses without dogs/security alarms
Visibility or surveillability
- Houses with cover (trees, shrubs, privacy fences)
- Houses that are secluded
- Houses with poor lighting
- Houses on corners
- Houses with concealing architectural designs
Accessibility
- Houses easily entered through side or back doors
- Houses next to alleys
Vunerability
- Houses with weakened entry points
- Houses whose residents are careless about security
- Houses with few or no security devices
Potential rewards
- Houses displaying signs of wealth

So 'Brozy's fears are confirmed. Unfortunate.

By the way, I'd recommend that those concerned about "houses with poor lighting" view the British Astronomical Association's "How-to install a 'security' floodlight" (Javascript-augmented; no <noscript> warning). It's a compelling demonstration of the danger of poorly-designed security lighting commented on by Bruce Schneier.

Mitt Romney: not a slave to Iowa corn?

2007-09-11T13:28:00.000-06:00

I'd been planning on voting for Ron Paul as a vote for libertarianism, even though he sounds sort of crazy and paranoid. This quote, though, from Mitt Romney's "Issue Watch: Competing with Asia", is so sexy I may have changed my mind:

We have to keep our markets open or we go the way of Russia and the Soviet Union, which is a collapse. And I recognize there are some people who will argue for protectionism because the short-term benefits sound pretty good, but long term you kill your economy, you kill the future. What you have to do in order to compete on a global basis long term is invest in education, invest in technology, reform our immigration laws to bring in more of the brains from around the world, eliminate the waste in our government. We have to use a lot less oil. These are the kinds of features you have to invest in, you have to change in order to make ourselves competitive long term.

best one-liner ever

2007-09-09T10:02:00.001-06:00

We recently added the following to our bash profile:

alias testsyntax = 'svn stat | grep "\.php\$" | awk "{print \"php -l \" \$2}' | sh'

In English, filter the changed files in SVN for a .php extension, construct a PHP lint command for each, then execute. It's marvelous.

And for the enterprising reader, of course, similar lines could be constructed with the perl -wc, Javascript lint, HTML tidy, or W3C CSS validator tools.

Taken from Objectively Oriented: How to quickly lint PHP files in an upcoming svn commit.

see the world

2007-09-02T02:46:00.000-06:00

I will never leave my house again. Google Earth flight simulator with buildings is the coolest thing ever. It's amazing hopping from city to city, flying through downtown. (Use ctrl+left/right to check out the side view.) It's also fantastic checking out the pictures. When Microsoft Photosynth and other promising automatic photo analysis algorithms enter the equation, I'll see little reason to leave the country at all.

It's also given me tremendous respect for stunt pilots.

happiness: moment to moment or month to month?

2007-08-23T22:26:00.000-06:00

'Brozy forwarded me this article the other day from MSN: "Let the Sunshine In: How Your Brain Controls Your Bliss". It's an interview with Daniel Gilbert about his book Stumbling on Happiness, and I was almost disappointed to see how well the essence of the book is captured in five paragraphs.

A funny thing has occurred to me since: Gilbert and the Church reach opposite conclusions about having children based on the same data: that children seem stressful on a day-to-day basis but fulfilling in memory. The data that's missing, to my mind, is whether, after the kids are gone, having had them actually increases daily delight, or only recollected joy--which gives a better emotional integral from birth to death. That's a very actuarial, utilitarian view of the pursuit of happiness, I realize, but it seems sensible to me. The Church's view, on the other hand, I think can be caricatured by the description that Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

On a related note, I really like the analysis of "the meaning of life" from Julian Baggini's What's it All About. We will be much more fruitful in trying to find meaning in life, he argues, if we think of it not as analogous to "a hammer is meant for hammering", but "this photo album means a lot to me".

known only to the initiated or the few

2007-08-20T10:23:00.001-06:00

We started going to a temple prep class this week. I don't understand why it's necessary to use double-speak about the temple. It's not secret ... it's just that I can't tell you what covenants you'll make there. And you can't learn anything specific about it unless you're baptized and pay a tenth of your yearly income. It's only for your own good ... that you can't be there for your daughter's wedding.

It's not so unreasonable to say that dedicated temples and their ordinances are reserved for those who have shown themselves to be dedicated to the Gospel. But a lot of the spin used to explain that seems stunningly dishonest. I think kept from the knowledge of any but the initiated or privileged is about the most accurate description possible of the temple ordinances.

That said, it's actually a pretty good class. I really like the teacher. And I must say, "The Book of Mormon--Artifact or Artifice", from Card's A Storyteller In Zion, has me quite concerned that the Church is actually true.

the game of who loves more than whom

2007-08-17T00:04:00.000-06:00

We had a really good Elder's Quorum lesson the other week. Our quorum president had compiled some quotes from the Brigham Young manual's "Parental Responsibility" lesson. It's excellent counsel; I highly recommend it.1 One particularly interesting part, I thought, was "Anger should never be permitted to rise in our bosoms, and words suggested by angry feelings should never be permitted to pass our lips." Rather surprising from the Lion of the Lord. We spent much of our time discussing the value in taking a time-out before discipline when angry. While I have no experience to speak of, having never even babysat, really, such a philosophy is my own natural inclination, and I was delighted to hear it recommended.

I've been ruminating on it since, and one interesting idea has occurred to me: I think that the only emotion that Mormons2 are really comfortable with is sorrow.

It does seem doctrinally reasonable, after all--who was our exemplar but a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief? Do we not read of godly sorrow? One in the quorum even pointed out that Mormons are much less comfortable attributing the driving of the money-changers to "righteous wrath" than most other Christians. Excepting lust, I think most sins of commission are tied to anger, and most sins of omission are tied to thoughtless happiness3--if you're happy, you're not serving hard enough.

I do not think, I must add, that this tendency is limited to Latter-day Saints; I believe there is plenty of precedent in early Christianity for a Gospel intended for the poor, the brokenhearted, the captives, the blind, the bruised, whose primary hope is a reward in heaven.

The crucial difference, however, is this: the canonical4 Christian heaven is a place of rest and joy, while the Celestial Kingdom is primarily a magnification of the life of an earthly saint. Consider what are perhaps the most beloved stories of modern canon: we are touched not only that our Prophet suffered wrongs and unlawful oppressions, but that our very God looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept.

It is disingenuous, I argue, to suggest that we are happier in any realistic sense for living a Godly life: to make this something that is more than only fair, to be the first to love, to, if any man will . . . take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also, exposes us ceaselessly to betrayal and stoniness of heart, to ending up compelled to go with him three miles and left with no shoes. Indeed, can any Latter-day Saint parent imagine a heaven more heart-rending than an eternity of wandering children, without affection toward parent or sibling? Is it any wonder that the righteous are so often promised peace and so rarely promised happiness?

I'm not suggesting any easy answers; I don't know, myself, what path leads to a satisfying life.5 It's just another sobering reminder to me of what a Big Deal true Christianity is. Speaking secularly, though, I must earnestly recommend both Stumbling on Happiness and What's it All About: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, respectively a psychological and a philosophical investigation of the problem. I even have both on my bookshelf, unborrowed. For now.

Do you think my analysis is reasonable from a sociological standpoint? From a doctrinal standpoint? Is it ethical or even realistic to seek a life of mostly happiness? Is it wiser to follow Card's6 assertion grief and joy [are] not weighed in the same scale, one making the other seem less substantial?

1) And, of course, it's full of gems like "I do not believe in making my authority as a husband or a father known by brute force; but by a superior intelligence . . . "

2) Somehow I doubt this <abbr> usage will ever enter the Church style guide.

3) Trianglers, I'm essentially arguing that the LDS triangle of emotion is yellow=happiness, red=anger, and blue=sorrow.

4) Programmer's canonical, not theologian's.

5) St. John's Wort seems pretty close sometimes, though.

6) I don't think 'Brozy mentioned what is, to me, the most amazing thing about OSC: apparently his writing process consists of a synopsis on a three-by-five card, followed by a few pages of notes, followed by a book, with virtually no editing aside from typos and referring only occasionally to the notes. Absolute genius.

good vet

2007-08-09T11:57:00.000-06:00

Banfield clinics, the ones in Petsmarts, are excellent veterinary clinics/pet hospitals. The vets seem to genuinely like animals, and they've been very understanding about financial constraints. I'd earnestly recommend them, particularly the one nearest me. (Also, Petsmart products have been more reasonably priced than those at Petco, in my experience.)

And if I find out who blowgunned Squint, I think Shelby will have a new bone.

which is written as 'rm' and indicates that a reduction with grammar rule m should be performed

2007-07-03T12:23:00.000-06:00

Overhauling my search string parser at work right now. Currently, it only supports quoted exact phrase searching and a few magic prefixes. I'd like to add support for "OR", "NOT"/"-"/"!", and parentheses for Boolean trees of arbitrary depth.* Yesterday's Wikipedia crash course in parsing has given me some second thoughts about going for a Master's--wow, this stuff is complicated. Perhaps I'm just that guy who knows the standard libraries really well. Or the plucky comic relief.

Makes me wish I hadn't been joking when I suggested to my boss that we require searches to be in reverse Polish notation.

* It's somewhat more convoluted than this because of real-world constraints: single-character searches are prohibitively expensive and are tacked on to nearby words for exact phrase searches, and negated searches only work at the end of AND sets. (Yes, both are probably because I'm going about the problem the wrong way in general.)

at NO COST

2007-06-27T01:06:00.000-06:00

Now, I admit that I'm a biased source, because the difficulty of implementing any programming project correlates perfectly with the degree of influence marketing has had on the spec. But I'm pretty sure that the only people I know in sales and marketing who aren't steaming cauldrons of evil are my father and The Franchise. As I see it, every job boils down into one of two descriptions:

solve problems
hide problems

What kind of people do you think the latter is going to attract?

This has been on my mind lately because of my internet provider, MSTAR Metro. On the whole, I think they're pretty good. They didn't object at all to my wireless router (in fact, so far as I can tell, they don't check MAC address at all), and our connection is quite speedy with very little downtime. If you're in Provo, I don't think you'd go wrong signing up for one of their fiber-to-the-home plans.

That said, back in February, they sent out an e-mail with the following opening:

Dear MSTAR Customer,
Thank you for your loyalty to MSTAR! Not only are you enjoying the world’s fastest Internet connection, but we have also made great strides in improving our customer service department to better support your needs.

I thought, "Hmmm, 15 mbps is quite respectable, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of better, even if we're only talking about residential service." Sure enough, with a little research, I found assertions that 100 mbps is available in South Korea, and 50 is available to some customers in Long Island. I e-mailed this information to them, joking that while I'm very happy with my service, they shouldn't get too cocky. I have yet to hear back from them.

Then last week, they sent out one of their "Did you know" e-mails to inform customers that "Mstar is now upgrading its filtering capabilities for customers by switching to a new, superior Internet filtering program free of charge. The new system will provide top-of-the-line filtering to customers at NO COST." Exciting, eh? "Beginning July 1", it continues, "the old Web Sentinel filtering system will no longer be available. Instead, Mstar customers have the option to choose K9 Web Protection, the most sophisticated and accurate Web filtering available today. Because Web Sentinel will not function after July 1, if you are using the application YOU MUST REMOVE WEB SENTINEL YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE THEN OR YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO ACCESS THE INTERNET."

Now, get this. I checked the K9 Web Protection website--it's free.

In other words, as far as I can tell, they've stopped paying their subscription fees for Web Sentinel and are recommending another locally installed, Windows-only filtering service. That's fine, I guess. But spinning it into "we're upgrading to the most sophisticated and accurate Web filtering available today"? Somebody's looking for a job in the Bush press corps.

I'm curious--do you make a point of avoiding companies who are consistently deceptive, even if harmlessly? Is it even possible?

in flagrant violation of the laws of thermodynamics

2007-06-25T12:17:00.000-06:00

It's hard for an Arizona boy to get used to Utah-style yard care. My first instinct is always to run and shout, "There are things growing outside! Come look; it's amazing!" It seems madness to grumble instead of rejoice when, miraculously, flowers grow in the lawn and trees sprout in the driveway of their own accord.

etiquette and privacy

2007-06-19T14:11:00.000-06:00

Say someone you don't know very well lends you his car to drive about fifty miles. It occurs to you to top off the tank. It's a pretty nice car, so you expect it takes premium, but you don't know for sure. "Huh," you think. "I could check the driver's manual."

What do you do? Open up the glove compartment? Just give it premium? Figure it doesn't really matter and save a couple bucks with regular? Leave ten bucks on the seat?

The next day, he says, "Hey, I saw that you filled up the car. Thanks." Do you tell him what you put in to ease any worries?

(I checked the owner's manual, but didn't tell him.)

tick tock

2007-06-11T22:01:00.000-06:00

In half an hour, we're rolling a huge update to the DAZ3d store. I think we're well-prepared, but it's stressful having new quirks popping up a few times an hour (curse you, IE6). A few minutes ago, I felt something at the back of my mind. "Oh, snap," I thought. "I think there was one more thing I wanted to do before the roll. Aargh, what was it?" I scanned through the to-do lists scrawled on various sheets around my desk. Everything checked off. Nothing unusual in the error logs. No TODO notes in recently edited files.

Oh, right. I wanted to grab the last slice of barbecue chicken pizza. Good times.

(Thanks, morale-oriented bosses.)

status

2007-06-10T23:36:00.000-06:00

Life has been really good these last couple weeks. We helped Jon Boy and Brinestone move, and they gave us Cafe Rio. Such good enchiladas. I actually enjoy carrying things around; it's a nice change of pace. Speaking of which, I also helped put up DAZ's motion capture studio. It's pretty impressive. The guys who sold it to us said that you could probably walk across those spans.

That night, we went and played Settlers of Catan with The Franchise and Cinderella. Great to see our Salt Lake couple friends, especially in the same day so we only have to drive up once.

We've been playing a lot of Age of Empires recently. 'Brozy's brothers are both legitimately good already, so we tried a 4v4 against the computer on hard, but 'Brozy and I got annihilated. (They decided I was the biggest threat, since I was leading the scoreboard, and plowed through her to get me.) 'Brozy and I did a couple more 4v4s tonight with two computer allies (all on hard still) and won twice. It's funny playing the computer--on hard, they're quite difficult, even though they have no idea how to use units effectively, whether on offense or defense.

The Ben Folds concert in Las Vegas was decent. We didn't see any, really, of Ben Folds' renowned crowd involvement, which was a shame, but eh, it's still good music. It was actually the low point of the trip--dinner at Claim Jumper's was amazing (thanks, Janssen!), and Apples to Apples with my uncle's family was fun.