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Me

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:46:27 GMT

Hitched!

We thought getting married at City Hall and having a small reception at my, wait, our house would keep us from spending a ton of time, money and effort. Ha ha ha. We did make it through without going crazy, thanks to our immediate families and a couple old friends who swept in for the week and did it for us.

The ceremony was great. The judge, Jim, said some well-honed words, we answered the questions right, our very closest teared up and smiled in appropriate amounts, we took some nice photos, and got out of there in under half an hour. Then a few more friends accosted us as we left for some hijinks as documented at the link above.

The reception was even better. A fine proportion of our excellent friends got to meet each other, and hopefully all manner of entertaining, productive, and joyful things will ensue. At the least I know that someone might start playing the accordion. Cupcakes were eaten, and my new favorite cocktail the Diablo was promulgated.

Then towards the end, a couple of scalawags named McPuzo and Trotsky played, which I can recommend as an effective means of encouraging one's guests to leave.

My one regret is that we did not manage to rid ourselves of our redundant possessions, more about which in a subsequent post.

Dan O'Bannon

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 18:27:41 GMT

Dead!

Oral Roberts

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:28:58 GMT

Called Home!

After A Visit To Chuck's

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:57:21 GMT

Irresistible
My lap a Scarface mountain
post-powdered donut

New Favorite Drink

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:28:47 GMT

As long as I'm posting about comestibles, I must say the El Diablo I just made with Reed's Ginger Beer has simulanaeously changed my mind about cocktails with tequila and cocktails made with creme de cassis.

Bay Area Top 100 Acceptable Restaurants

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:26:30 GMT

There's a "Bay Area Top 100 Restaurants", but it's hamstrung by all sorts of non-dining constraints - geographic and ethnic diversity being two. I would give my own list, but I am way too non-picky. Half of my list would be various Del Taco, In-n-Out, and Popeye franchises.

Enter my fiants, who can demote a restaurant from good to intolerable in the span between settling up and parking the car. But she is not fickle! Rare is the eatery that makes it back into her good graces. My preliminary list is actually way shorter than one hundred. In alphabetical order:
Beretta
Chez Panisse
Chow
Dosa
El Toro
Gioia
Hog Island Oysters
Luka Tap Room
Nopa
Nopalito
Picante
Riva Cucina
Sea Salt
Thai House Express
The Front Porch

Did I miss any, darling?

Third cat post in a row

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:29:56 GMT

Bad sign!

It seems that the 'computer-simulated cat' story is only true in terms of neuron and connection quantity; CAT is still smarter than IBM. POO.link

Anyone want my fiancee's cat?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:54:57 GMT

He is friendly to humans and will come up and flop on his back in front of you, begging to be petted. If he didn't also inflame my sinuses, I'd definitely want him.

To other cats, he's a bit of a bully. Really, this is a cat for someone who wants one cat.

Black, long-haired, nine years old, healthy. Currently called Bela, but he's a cat, so who cares?

Catsparov?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:52:36 GMT

Computers with human intelligence? Still far off on the horizon.

Cat intelligence? Available today!

Chess genius intelligence? Twelve years ago!.

Edward Woodward

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:51:30 GMT

Equalized!

Ken Ober

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:36:21 GMT

Not Canadian!

Issue 9

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:40:44 GMT

-I'm still reading "Coders at Work", and had just gotten through the Ken Thompson interview where he's asked what he does at Google, and says something like, "I have pretty much free rein - mostly thinking about scaling issues". So it is interesting to see Go (or whatever it shall be called). The section of the tutorial with:

---
10 func generate() chan int {
11 ch := make(chan int);
12 go func(){
13 for i := 2; ; i++ {
14 ch <- i
15 }
16 }();
17 return ch;
18 }
---
This version does all the setup internally. It creates the output channel, launches a goroutine running a function literal, and returns the channel to the caller. It is a factory for concurrent execution, starting the goroutine and returning its connection.

...is where you can see them cracking their knuckles to get going.

-The video demo shows everything in the source tree compiling in 10s. Hm, the less-modern machine I built it on (Debian, one Celeron 2.66G, 1.5G RAM) took 510s.

Health Care "Reform"

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:18:38 GMT

Link to the aforementioned holiday for insurers.

Health Care Reform

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:15:51 GMT

evidently entails forcing people to buy policies with the much-maligned insurers. Woo, reform!

Dear Crazy Muslim Guy

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 02:08:07 GMT

Thank you so @#$% much.

Sincerely,
Sane Muslim Guy

User Support for Economists

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:18:07 GMT

< cb3rob> communism doesnt work
< bn`> cb3rob: capitalism doesnt work
< cb3rob> bn: works fine for me... maybe you are doing something wrong :P
< MalfermitaKodo> bn`: have you tried turning it off and on again? Link

You Can't Have Too Many Cardboard Robots

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:08:39 GMT

(pic is link)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:29:04 GMT

This interesting post claims that it's not math that's scary, it's doing any kind of problem solving - that most people only use rote knowledge every day. The main fault I find with the post is where he says he, a computer programmer, is always problem solving and never using rote knowledge. Which is probably hooey. There is plenty of room for cut-and-pasting in the "programming" world.

Another fault is that many people do problem-solving involving other people, and he discounts or does not recognize this.

Perhaps it is taking a decorator class

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:00:59 GMT

When my copy of Linux Educacional boots, the text doesn't quite fit in the monitor's display area. So it tells me it is

"tarting up..."

Dear Lazyweb

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:01:24 GMT

Does anyone have recommendations for a new sump pump? The one I have has decided to pursue a new career electrocuting people who touch it.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Yet Fiscally Disastrous Things

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 06:14:52 GMT

Ah, if only we had China's socialized journalism in the USA! Then no one would notice huge stonking ripoffs like this:

Senate Dems quietly move a bill to countermand a 21% cut in Medicare fees for doctors, which will add $247 billion to the deficit over ten years. Of course, the Baucus health care reform bill achieves its famed deficit neutrality through cuts in Medicare fees, mainly to non-physicians--saving (by my reading of the CBO analysis) at least $184 billion from Medicare over the same period. Plus there is a special panel set up to recommend further cuts. Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein might productively explain a) Why this isn't a shell game, with Dems granting Medicare increases in one bill and then taking ostentatious credit for partly-offsetting cuts in a separate bill; b) Why Congress' unwillingness to put up with the scheduled Medicare doctors' cuts this year doesn't indicate that it won't put up with scheduled cuts in future years...link

[etc]

Reviews of Things

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:40:57 GMT

-We saw Brief Encounter at the ACT last night. The staging and side characters were great, but some combination of the writing and lack of chemistry doomed the main plot (when two married people start an affair with each other, you shouldn't be wondering 'why?' or 'who cares?').

J. didn't want to speak ill of it while we were leaving with the crowds, for fear of tainting the experience of others. Perhaps this is also why everyone else was also silent, instead of saying things like, "That was so romantic, when he said 'perhaps I shall go to the pictures this afternoon as well' and 'Could I see you next Thursday?'".

-'Whip It', on the other hand, has roller derby and Juliette Lewis, and hita all the points that one would hope for. Director Barrymore gives herself multiple fun bits - nosebleeds, cold-cocking, dominance. The girl from Juno is in it and she is perfectly good when she isn't forced into Diablo Cody's retard-speak.

-Coders at Work is a collection of in-depth interviews with programmers. Most of the interviews as solo pieces are at least of interest to programmers. Because the subjects are mostly really bright and have brains that spin around a lot, there are a few bits of profound philosophy which fall out. But the interviewer generally keeps it technical. Read together, there are also a lot of interesting commonalities which I wouldn't necessarily have expected:

-Few have actually read through Knuth
-Fewer still have any regard for Design Patterns
-Most say that programming in modern practice involves a lot of aggregation, and knowing assembly and lower is handy but not as essential as it once was.
-Threading is a problem
-Most are willing to own up to debugging using printf

Cap'n Lou Albano

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:18:32 GMT

Dead!

The Big Macs Are Gone

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:45:39 GMT

From Reason commenter The Squatting Fields:

THE BIG MACS are gone.
And those who saw the Big Macs are gone.
Those who saw the Big Macs by thousands and how they held the two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun
with their hands, their great heads down chewing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the Big Macs are gone.
And the Big Macs are gone.

Link to story providing unnecessary context
Link to original poem

Badassedness

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:57:21 GMT