Really interesting article on LawMeme about "accidental privacy spills" (check the links to the left). This kind of thing is the reason I still read /. I wouldn't have stumbled across this on my own. Maybe I should just follow the links, and stop reading the comments...
I'm in a haze of beer and beef induced happiness at the moment, and feeling unusually mellow towards the world. (Lunch at a local Irish pub...mmmm...Guinness.... gurgle...)
"Jesus is coming, no one's safe!"
Or at least that's what it sounds like the evangelist that hangs out on the subway platform calls out each morning. I'm guessing that he means no one's saved, unless they're born again, but with his accent it's hard to tell.
Yet, since I'm feeling mellow, I sort of wonder about whatever impulse to altruism moves him to spend all his weekday mornings like this. The cynic in me would expect that the typical human impulse would go more like:
"I know how to avoid burning in hellfire for all eternity, and you don't, and I'm not going to tell you! HAha!"
or
"Wouldn't you like to know what God wants of you? Tough!"
So in a small way, maybe it's a good thing that people are built so that it's easy to put a bee in their bonnets about helping others out. Maybe the impulse to charity is the same among the nutjobs handing out leaflets as among those who do something more practical. Maybe.
I've been listening to P.D.Q. Bach while working lately. I'm particulary fond of Oedipus Tex. I was a latecomer to the whole mp3 thing, but now I've ripped pretty much all the music I own (at least that I still listen to) and stuffed it all on my Arcos Jukebox; it's about half-full (~ 5 gb of music), but now I can listen to it wherever and whenever. Before this I'd almost given up listening to music: it was just too inconvenient. I'd had three different Discman units over the years, and they never got good battery life or lasted very long (maybe I'm just hard on them), and deciding on which CDs to carry around was a hassle. I never seemed to have what I actually wanted to listen to at any given moment available.
Now that's all changed, and I listen to music constantly. I've even started buying new CDs again, something I thought would never happen.
The P.D.Q. Bach CDs that I'm listening to are a result of that. Actually they're a gift from redshoes, but she did it because she knew I had the Jukebox. redshoes is my consultant on matters consumer electronical; she's always ahead of the curve, or at least where I am on the curve: mp3 player, pda, digital camera, TiVo....
Lizzard invited me to join Friendster, another interesting but frustrating website. I've recently adopted the motto "You can never have too many friends", so the idea of a website to create a network of friends of friends of friends, etc. sounds pretty neat. Unfortunately, their website beta is so slow and cranky (every other click on a link or submit button on the site seems to result in a "Document Contains No Data" alert) that it's hard for me to picture most of my friends being persistent enough to use it. Maybe it's my corporate programmer bias, but we'd never let our clients see something as unpolished as this, even in beta. I hope it's just teething problems, and they fix what ails it.
Argh. Stupid Blogger deleted the "Powered by Blogger" img tag I put into my template in order to comply with their terms of service. I substituted some text, which seems to work, but is this any way to run a railroad?
Just got a new 19" monitor at work. Sometimes it's amazing how little it takes to make me happy. It'll wear off by tomorrow, but for now I revel in my new screen "real-estate."
Lizzard asked for a translation of the Cicero quote, so since it's good practice for me I won't just say "it's practically Spanish, puzzle it out" the way I did to my friend B, who speaks Portuguese... The quote is actually an amalgam of passages from Dē Officiīs (On Duty) and Dē Rē Pūblicā (On Public Affairs). First, an extremely literal translation, just to keep me honest about the cases:
The city war without good cause or on account of anger to wage war must not. If the fortunes and fields and modes of life of the people of ours without war defend we will be able to, then peace to conserve we must; if, on the other hand, we will not be able to serve the country and liberty of ours without war, war will be necessary. Always we must demontrate, nevertheless, great duty/care in war, and great clemency after victory.
Now, with a less Yoda-esque word order and phrasing:
The State must not wage war without good cause or on account of anger. If the fortunes, land, and way of life of our people can be defended without war, then we must preserve the peace; if, on the other hand, we cannot save our country and our liberty without war, then war will be necessary. Nevertheless, we must always demonstrate great duty in war, and great mercy after victory.
I talked with my friend Job the other night, and he's doing pretty well, all things considering. Job is this brilliant guy I went to college with, who had it all: a great career as an academic star, a loving wife, two sweet little kids (who were showing signs of brilliance themselves). Then, a couple of years ago, he started going blind; it turns out that he has this syndrome he inherited from his dad--who was blind, but had told him that it was a result of a childhood accident. But okay, he could cope: he's got tenure, so his job's not in danger, and thanks to his father he knows as well as anyone could what one needs to do to deal with an acedemic career while blind. Of course, the gene is dominant, so if either of his kids got it (50/50) they face the same thing.
Then, a year or so ago he found out that he also has a completely unrelated, hideous, 100% fatal hereditary neurological disorder. (And again, his kids might have it too--although since there's no cure and it's adult onset, there's no real point in testing them for it yet.)
This is too much for his wife, who dumps him.
Oh, and he finds out that he drew the short straw yet again in the genetic lottery, and he's got a severe gluten allergy. The good news is that now that it's been diagnosed and completely eliminated from his diet a lot of the symptoms that were still puzzling his doctors have cleared up.
I'll tell you, talking with him certainly puts my problems in perspective.
Anyway, his divorce is final, and he has a new sweetie. He met her through match.com, and they've hit it off. As he tells the story on their third date she said, "Gee, you seem too good to be true. What's the catch?" "Well, funny you should ask..." But unlike the dread ex, she doesn't seem at all freaked out about it, so he's a lot more chipper than he was last time we chatted. I'm going out to visit him in mid-March, and get to meet her.
In the mean time, he's always (well, at least since my marriage went bust) been bugging me to join a dating service, so I've started setting up a profile on match.com We'll see what happens.
"Yes, whether you want to be a computer programmer or just look like one, ITT Technical Institute can help you on your way..."
You know, when I graduated from college lo those many years ago, I never really anticipated that I would spend ten years (as of last August) programming pension benefits. You can't even tell people what you do without their eyes glazing over. Sometimes you can't even do it without your own eyes glazing over. For instance I've spent much of the last week writing an automated testing framework to try and prove that they way we're calculating Social Security benefits in our new system is close enough to the way the Social Security Adminstration system does it that no client (or auditor) will object. No wonder I'd rather blog. Oh well, I tell myself, at least I'm still employed.
Civitās bellum sine causā bonā aut propter īram gerere nōn dēbēt. Sī fortūnās et agrōs vītāsque populī nostrī sine bellō dēfendere poterimus, tum pācem cōnservāre dēbēbimus; sī, autem, nōn poterimus servāre pātriam lībertātemque nostram sine bellō, bellum erit necessārium. Semper dēbēmus dēmōnstrāre, tamen, magnum officium in bellō, et magnam clēmentiam post victōriam.
- Cicero
I've been brushing up on my Latin recently, and came across the above in Wheelock's; it seems strangely apropos
two thousand years later...
Lately I've been getting more and more into webcomics...or perhaps that should be into more and more webcomics. Among my current daily dose are:
That's all I have energy to cut and paste links to for now. I seem to discover more every day; some of them peter out, but I'm starting to think that this newfangled Internet thing may be a good way of distributing comics. Certainly a lot of the things I like are aimed at too small a niche to have ever been given a chance in the world of newpaper syndication; at this point I'm reading easily as many web comics as print comics, and as far as really making me laugh, the web comics definitely have the edge.
Well, last week was my 39th birthday, and my present to myself was not spending it with my family. Consequently, I ended up having to haul my ass into work on Tuesday, despite the snow, but overall I think it was worth it. Of course, it also meant that I had to dig out my car in the midst of the pouring rain on Saturday--at which point I was thinking that maybe being in California with my family wasn't so bad after all, but I persevered. A huge sushi dinner with my gaming friends on Sunday made up for it.
Why a blog? Why not? My pal Lizzard showed me hers and I was amused, and then an article appeared on /. about mobile blogging and the (predictable) response from Slashdolts was "Ew, blogging! Who would ever want to read the opinions and ramblings of people on the Internet anyway?" Apparently one of the adverse side-effects of too much /. is the loss of even trace amounts of irony from one's soul.
I figure I'd rather be part of the naive communicators than the sneering cynics any day, so here I am!