As GoddessJ says, always be polite to the people in charge of your food.
Busy, busy, busy…
Sorry for the lack of posts recently. The title says it all — I’ve been quite busy for the last couple weeks.
For one thing, I’ve been working on my Stack Overflow reputation, with the goal of reaching 2,000 reputation points. Why, you ask? Well, I like explaining things to interested people, and I enjoy being recognized as an authority on topics that matter to me. Also, typos and misspellings really irritate me, and 2,000 reputation points is the level where you’re allowed to edit other people’s posts. 🙂 (I’ve almost achieved my goal: I’m at 1,995 as I write this. 😀 )
The second major thing absorbing my time has been Project X. It seemed to be stuck, so I decided to shake some ideas loose by writing a talk explaining how it worked, geared toward a large audience of smart software engineers that really wanted to hear it. I figured that would help keep me motivated, since (as I mentioned above) I like that sort of thing. The results were phenomenal: I’ve made more progress on the design in the last two weeks than I have in the previous eight months!
In fact, I think I’ve finally discovered a workable solution to the core problem that I’ve been wrestling with for the last five-plus years. 😀 It’s the toughest problem I’ve ever dealt with, and it’s a lot closer in complexity to particle physics than normal programming — easier in some respects because I don’t need to tinker with a huge particle accelerator to get any information, but harder in others because I didn’t even have a hypothesis that explained how it worked at the lowest levels. Now I do, and it’s on the fast-track to being promoted to theory. 🙂
With any luck, I’ll be able to get back to regular blogging soon.
The DMCA Bites Back
I love seeing politicians being caught in their own traps.
Autumn Office Cleaning
Spurred by the death of my desktop system a few days ago, I spent most of yesterday cleaning up and rearranging the office, especially my desk.
I hadn’t intended to spend much time on it. My initial plan was just to remove the carcass of the desktop system and store it somewhere out of the way until I decided to put together another one. But after pulling it out and seeing the layers of archaeological techno-strata of wires behind it, I knew it needed more drastic action.
As we used to say when playing Shadowrun: when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. 🙂 Some pondering and a trip to a nearby hardware store provided me with the supplies to implement a neat solution I originally saw on Lifehacker: mounting a good portion of my electronic devices on a pegboard under my desk, along with their wires. I also took the opportunity to label the power adapters that had somehow escaped before (I highly recommend labeling adapters with the name and model of the device they’re for, especially when you have a number of them and may not look at them again for several years).
So at the end of the first stage, I’ve got my cable modem, my wireless router, and a network switch all mounted on a vertical pegboard, out of the way under a corner of my desk, along with a power strip to feed them. I can easily see them if I need to as well. 🙂
Stage two involves mounting a second piece of pegboard horizontally below the desk itself, so I can mount certain other electronics onto it (such as my external DVD drive). That’s going to require a little more work though, and maybe a second hardware-store trip. Wish me luck!
LATER EDIT: Success! My external DVD drive, network-attached storage device, and electric pencil sharpener are now mounted to the underside of my desk. 😀
And The World Mourns The Passing Of Another Desktop Computer
This evening, as I was working away on the laptop that has been my main system for the last couple years, things got suddenly much quieter in the office — my desktop system, which had been running near-continuously for most of its five and a half years of life, had shut itself off very abruptly. It wouldn’t respond to the power button, and a second later I detected a faint electrical burning smell. I strongly suspected that it wasn’t just resting.
A few minutes of troubleshooting narrowed the problem down to either the power supply or the motherboard — both easy enough to replace, and relatively cheap these days. But I’m debating whether it’s worth resurrecting. In the past few years, I’ve used it less and less… its duties were down to acting as an interface for our Skype phones, holding archives of seldom-used files, and occasionally being pressed into service for a networked game of Age of Empires III when a guest comes over (which it was barely powerful enough for anymore). And it is a desktop, from near the you-can-fry-an-egg-on-it generation — it’s far more wasteful of electricity than most laptops.
So I think it’s “so long and thanks for all the files,” at least for now. Maybe I’ll replace it eventually, but for now I just don’t see any need for a desktop system.
Geeky Programmer Quote of the Day
From the first (and so far only) comment to this Stack Overflow answer:
BTW, it’s “complement”, not “compliment”. One’s compliment could be “that’s a nice sign bit you’re wearing today”. – Roddy
It’s a computer science thing. 🙂
“Wanted: Intelligent Aliens, for a Research Project”
A very interesting look at the problems with human perception, and how that affects our understanding of ourselves.
“You Can Have Anything You Want…”
“…but you can’t have everything you want.” Those wise words come from one of Barbara Sher’s life-planning books, I believe. The idea is that, if you devote yourself to it, you can achieve pretty much any goal you set your mind to — pretty standard stuff in that kind of book — but by the same token, there isn’t enough time to achieve every goal that might catch your fancy.
This was brought home to me a couple days ago, when I saw a note on LifeHacker about the pilot episode of an interesting-sounding TV show. I immediately wanted to watch it, and went to set my DVR-equipped desktop computer to record it… but paused to think first. When would I have the time and interest to actually watch it?
I haven’t been interested in sitting in front of a TV, passively absorbing whatever it throws at me, since I was a teenager. As far back as the late eighties, long before the popularity of the Internet, I preferred sitting in front of my computer and writing programs, or playing games, or reading a book. I didn’t even own a TV for years, and the only time I even turn one on now is to watch DVDs. If I recorded that show, would I ever get around to watching it? After a little soul-searching, I decided that I wouldn’t. It was a painful decision, but I felt a lot better after making it.
It’s easy to see the bad side of it: you don’t get to do all the things that you want to do. But it’s really the other side of the equation that’s the key, because you’re forced to clarify what it is you want most instead of accepting whatever comes into your head. It’s actively making a choice instead of passively letting one be made for you.
If everyone chose what they wanted to achieve in life, and pursued it instead of just “going with the flow,” imagine where the human race could be today.
It’s a sobering thought.
GTD Progress
While I was gearing up for my most recent attempt at GTD (and my most successful one, by far), I went to the local office-supply store and picked up several boxes of file folders. GoddessJ, my wife, protested: “what do you need all of those for?” (My flip answer, “it’s a GTD thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Followed by a full explanation when she informed me, in no uncertain terms, that she would understand, and I would explain it, or else! 😉 ).
Well, it has been about six weeks now since I started it. The house looks far better than it ever has, thanks to various repairs. You’d have a tough time discerning that our car is twelve years old now too. The office, my computers, and our various schedules are far more organized than I’ve ever had them before, and I’m in far better physical shape too. I’ve written several small but useful programs to keep track of various things (such as the car’s maintenance schedule). I’ve also come up with a new focus and a completely new design for Project X, and as other things get done I find that I’ve got more energy and attention for it than I did when it was pretty much my sole focus.
I was present when GoddessJ was talking to a friend recently about some of the things I’d been doing. She turned and told me, “dear, you can have as many file folders as you want.”
I must be doing something right. 🙂
There’s No Antonym of Authoritarian
In a conversation a while back, I needed a word to express the opposite of authoritarian. I couldn’t find one in my memory, which struck me as odd, so I later looked it up. It seems that there is no English word that describes the opposite of authoritarian; the closest thing I found, after perusing several thesauruses, was that authoritarian was considered a synonym of anti-democratic. Presumably “democratic” would be the closest thing there is to an antonym then.
The upcoming election, and the associated media feeding frenzy, brought this back to my mind. You couldn’t walk past a television in the past couple weeks without hearing talk about Sarah Palin, and how she and McCain would essentially be George W. Bush the Third, because they’re all very authoritarian.
A couple days ago, Scott Adams had a post about his recent survey of economists, which included these paragraphs:
[…] The big question this survey raises is why so many economists are Democrats in the first place. Democrats tell me that highly educated and rational folks, such as economists, gravitate toward the best argument. Case closed. Republicans tell me that liberals, mostly Democrats, drift toward academic jobs where they can best suck on the public teet. It’s easier to be a tenured professor than it is to run a company, so the thing that economists have in common is laziness as opposed to intelligence. And perhaps, think the Republicans, the so-called Independents in this survey are mostly liberals too, essentially Democrats who aren’t joiners. And besides, if economics was a real science, most economists would be rich. […]
It’s true that academia has long been known to be heavily populated with liberals. Why is that? It occurred to me that it could have a lot to do with the whole conservative authoritarian theme. Authoritarian governments don’t like people to think for themselves, because that leads to people questioning their authority. Hm… sounds an awful lot like most organized religions, especially the fundamentalist type, yes? “We have the One and Only Truth, and you must obey! Never question what we say, because it comes directly from God!” Thus the well-known and long-standing links between fundamentalist groups and the conservatives, perhaps.
When you think about it, the names “Democrat” and “Republican” mean absolutely nothing — this is both a democracy and a republic, after all. The parties could, with equal validity, call themselves Piscis Austrinus and Corona Borealis. So I always read the party references as liberals and conservatives. Or, using the link between conservative and authoritarian, we could define them as those who believe in authoritarianism and those who believe in democracy. Except, of course, that the party that claims to believe in democracy is still trying to grab political power so it can tell everyone else what to do, which means that they’re acting pretty authoritarian too. At least the conservatives are honest about their authoritarianism.
So what political party should an intelligent person favor? Damned if I know. I don’t like either party, nor any of the lesser-known parties, and I don’t care for any of the Presidential candidates I’ve seen to date. The best we voters can do is elect the lesser evil, it seems… that appears to be Obama, from what I’ve seen. But of course, I encourage people to think for themselves. 🙂