Thursday, August 7, 2003
Well, I had every intention of posting yesterday – had a couple of paragraphs ready to go, in fact – when the internet went down at work, and stayed down until mid-afternoon. And at that point, I’d forgotten about updating the journal. Yesterday was a frustrating day. A friend of mine has been out of town for a good chunk of the summer, and we’d arranged to meet for coffee (well, I’d drink tea) at a nearby Starbucks yesterday afternoon. […]
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
Warning: Long, rambling post today, responding to several online discussions and finishing with my enthusiasm for a film. Brennen‘s right; I didn’t read all of Orwell’s Lion and the Unicorn article before I wrote my response. But I did skim it to ensure that the paragraph I responded to was pretty much in tone with the rest of the article. And, sure, I can see why Orwell would believe that military might is the ultimate sign of political […]
Monday, August 4, 2003
Brennen quoted a bit of George Orwell: Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. I can’t agree with this. Orwell’s argument appears to be that the fascist system — “a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes” — worked incredibly well. It created great economic prosperity, and it turned Germany from a gasping, starving […]
Saturday, August 2, 2003
Just came across some interesting discussion on comp.games.development.design about “honeypots.” What’s a honeypot? Think of Whinnie the Pooh when presented with a pot of honey. He simply can’t resist it. From what I’ve read, a computer honeypot is a service/computer/etc. that’s very attractive to hack, that’s meant to be hacked. But once hacked, it actually does no damage, and provides information about the hack to the person who set […]
August 1, 2003
Stephen writes, as part of a larger discussion: “The more and more one focuses on daily life, the less and less one sees of the greater picture. It’s kind of like falling into a rut, eventually you don’t see very much at all because you’ve got dirt walls on both sides.” I have to disagree with this on some level. Daily life is life. The “greater picture” – and I don’t know exactly what Stephen […]
Thursday, July 31, 2003
I spent most of last evening wrestling with Adobe Premiere, which is surprisingly clunky. It doesn’t allow you to move clips “on top” of each other, and it wouldn’t let me move multiple clips on the timeline. Whenever I made one change at the beginning of the project, I had to re-position all the clips after it. Ironically, I found the “lightweight” personalStudio much easier to work with. Except that it can’t handle the wide […]
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
I wrote a long journal entry for today, then had an experience which sums it up: You know you’re too tired for work when you notice that the buttons on the Windows taskbar are flashing in sync with Daft Punk’s One More Time, and it amuses you. For context: I went to bed late Monday night, then overslept and woke up groggy and grumpy (which would be a great name for a preschoolers’ […]
Tuesday, July 29, 2003
I’ve begun taking photographs. …Wait. Arg. I’m taking pictures, but I never liked the generic feeling of that term. But no film is involved, so it’s not really a photograph, is it? Anyvay. I’m taking pictures, I guess, with my Kodak DC-5000. It’s a decent digital camera; 2 megapixels and a 3x zoom, but the picture quality just isn’t as crisp as I’d like. But I’ve begun […]
Monday, July 28, 2003
Ahhhh, it’s a new week, and it’s time for a fresh set of journal entries. Today’s topic: debt. Debt is bad. I think we can all agree about this. But why is debt bad? It’s bad because it costs you money. For any kind of debt, you have to pay a little extra money on your debt, namely, interest. For a credit card, the bank charges you every day, […]
Saturday, July 26, 2003
New poll. And, behind the scenes, a spiffy new poll generation script, so I should be able to update it reasonably frequently. Meanwhile, check out that little guy on the right, whom I see often around my neighborhood. He was kind enough to let me take a picture of him.