Older blog entries for cmiller (starting at number 39)

29 May 2002 (updated 29 May 2002 at 23:01 UTC) »

Bring in the Clowns!

llan: 2+3: Storm Troopers must not be clones. Star Wars lore (non-canonical stories *) suggests that the Empire conscripts from its "citizens" to maintain its rank and file. Cloning could be just seeding the first generation. Accents? Term limits? C'mon. It's bad fiction at best, and that's picking nonexistent meat from the bone. Point 1 is almost interesting; there seems to be a lot of the same model 'droids about. Why should Vader recognize them?

* Yes, I've read two Star Wars books. Please don't hold it against me. I'm a book slut; I will read nearly anything....

Speaking of which, Salon had a recent article about personal intoleration of some authors, to which I add as my most hated authors list: Henry Miller, Kate Chopin (forgive me, Mary Ellen!), and J. D. Salinger, and Joseph Heller. It's a good article, though.

employment

I had a telephone-interview with a fellow at a central-US company who's looking for C programmers with some kernel-level experience. He called me on the phone number I gave the recruiter, my cell phone. It was going decently, until he asked about the difference "between multi-threaded and multi-processor programs." I knew he mentioned programming for MSFT Windows (of which I have zero experience), so I figured there might really be such a thing, so I sheepishly admitted that I had no idea. He congratulated me for my honesty and started describing multi-process (as in "pid=fork(); if (pid)...") execution. The noise on the cell phone made it sound like an extra syllable on "process" and me to sound like an idiot. *sigh* I politely asked him to call me back on a land-line.

After that, he asked me to describe a previous project, and I did it really poorly. So much for effective communication skills.

So, I stomped his first-impression of me into the ground. Since I got that out of the way, I did okay for the rest of the interview.

I did use Wiki for a bit, while browsing tk's work. The only "help" II gave was that I added a note on the Carl Sagan node. It's the first time I've used a real Wiki, and I like the idea. It seems less formal but more structured than "Everything". Both remind me of something I made some time in the last millennium -- well, 1997. On the scale of usefulness, mine was about as far from Wikipedia as it could get.

I feel raph's bad-web-browser-behavior pain; that was part of the impetus to write advodiary (the rest, being to try out XML-RPC). I too want a web browser that behaves better. I was delighted to find that AbiWord allows one to switch to VI keybindings for movement and (very) simple editing. I'd like to be able to do the same with mozilla. I doubt I'll find the time to produce a patch, though.

Well, no job yet. Two leads. Kernel programming (yow!) and jack-of-all-trade programming for a previous employer of mine.

I'm ready to kick Woody out the door. The hanger-on, ne'er-do-well!

27 May 2002 (updated 27 May 2002 at 02:36 UTC) »

employment

The company for which I work is gasping its terminal breaths, so I must find employment soon. I've resigned myself to having to relocate, as where I live is woefully lacking any programming industry. I'd love to stay near my family, here in the southeast U.S., but it might also be nice to move away (even emigrate!) for a few years.

I love Unix/Linux, and don't want to battle Microsoft bugs at part of my job, so no programming in Visual-{BASIC,C++,COBOL,Ada}, or whatever. As pie-in-the-sky, I recently (re-)discovered Lisp, so a Lisp-friendly company would make me very happy, but I really don't expect it. Good health insurance is my only really big requirement. I'm good at problem-solving, and hate to be bored. I don't like to deal with hardware problems, and I make really good chicken quesadillas. Surely someone could use me.

Since most jobs are found via word-of-mouth, I thought that I'd mention it here, to fish for leads from fellow Advogatoians. If you hear of a need for someone with my interests, then mail me at <employment@chad.org>. I'll reply with my resume.

photography

I collected together my negatives and slides, and am beginning to organize them. I got a few packs of three-ring-binder sheets for 35mm film negatives and for mounted 35mm slides, and started filling them. I'm dumbstruck at the amount of pictures I must be taking. Sure, I carry my camera (a 20-year-old Canon AE-1) around with me a fair amount, but I was amazed to compile all my output together and wind up with such a large stack of stuff. I'll need to buy more sheets and maybe a filing cabinet. I have to do some counting and math to decide if it's even feasable to scan all the picutes to large, good-quality JPEGs and store them on disk, as I was planning to do.

In looking over the older stuff, I'm pleasantly surprised to find that some of my earlier stuff is better than I remembered it was.

I liked the "fuzzy" border on ayan's scanned slides so much that I abandoned ImageMagic for my image processing, and wrote a Gimp plugin that resizes a JPEG to fit into a given square bounding box, creates a [crisp or fuzzy] [20]-pixel [black] border, and annotates the bottom left corner with some arbitrary [text] in [light-grey]. (Options are bracketed items with the defaults listed.) Oddly, it seems quicker, at 3200 MHz-seconds, than ImageMagick did. Maybe I'm comparing apples to antelopes, though.

tk's Baloney Debunking idea is hard to implement. People believe wierd things, for myriad of reasons, and I think it's folly to think anyone can address a significant fraction of them. Still, as long as one pushes the oddball metaideas to a higher, less specific node in a topic tree, it should be easier. "Don't believe Man has visited Luna? First, click _here_ if you're a Solipsist. Et c." So, tk, got a Wiki tree free? Let's give it a try!

Being good at Science and being good at public-relations rarely exists in the same person. In recent memory, only a very few people have stood against the populist anti-science tide. Richard Feynman, physicist, and Carl Sagan, cosmologist, are among the greatest thinkers and Science publicists of the last 50 years, and they have been dead for many years now.

Yesterday, Monday, one of the last great publicists of reason and science, Stephen Jay Gould, died in his home of cancer. Gould, a palentologist, evolutionary biologist, professor at Harvard, and author, was instrumental in helping keep pseudoscience out of public schools' Science cirricula.

Recently, I was in the toy section of a department store. While looking for a copy of Pente, I encountered a girl of about nine years who was vigorously shaking a "Magic 8-Ball" and peering into the little window. My presence broke her attention to the sphere and she walked to me and asked (in broken English) if the ball really foretold the future. I was too flabbergasted to answer.

Requiescat in pace, Gould. I'm sure I won't sleep as well, without you in the world.

I'm afraid that Man isn't birthing scientists at the rate we're losing them. Please help do something about it. Take the time to read to a kid when they're really young, help with homework when they're older, and always, always, always insist on the rationality of the Universe.

aeden: It's common, these days. I'm getting a few bounced emails a week about it. Come the Revolution, the author will be first up against the wall.

ME and I went to see "Star Wars: Bring in the Clowns" yesterday. 'Sokay. I especially liked it when Saruman says "Join me or die!" and started whoopin' ass with his voodoo hands.

(set! hottie-list (cons "Natalie Portman" hottie-list))

14 May 2002 (updated 23 May 2002 at 14:05 UTC) »
kholmes (and other theists who don't understand atheism), the words "believe in" connote sloppy thinking. There are (at least) two distinct ideas that the words "believe in" mean, and when users of those words find themselves stuck in a contradiction, they flip meanings and thoroughly confuse themselves.

One meaning of "believe in Foo" means "to trust Foo to behave in a certain (and presumably expected) way." One might "believe in Johnny" to score a winning hit in a baseball game. It presumes Johnny exists, of course.

The other meaning of "believe in" means "to believe exists", as in "I don't believe in the Easter Bunny." It has nothing to with whether one thinks that the Easter Bunny's imaginary actions would be virtuous.

kholmes, expressing discontent with the idea of how gods behave does not an atheist make. You're not an atheist until you say "I believe there are no beings that fit the definition of gods". [And, I believe the word you're trying to use is "disillusionment" -- to be free of enchantment -- instead of "disallutionation" (not a word).]

Now, if you think gods are irreconcilable with whatever's at the end of your reference to "pure evil", then you're on your way to becoming atheist. I'm just pointing out that unhappiness is not enough.

Hope has no effect on Truth.

And, you're right that atheism isn't a full philosophy. Theists may believe that gods have absolute control over Universe, which means that they can stub off their philosophical growth while pointing to celestial fiat. Being an atheist is harder, because one must think about all areas of philosophy and come to conclusions regarding metaphysics, epistimology, ethics, and politics. I've done it, so I might be able to help, if you want it.

badvogato's drivel about "God's eyes" and livestock are still useless doubletalk. He seems to be saying that a god won't care that you're atheist, because you were born. I hope that helps you more than it helped me.

photography: I finally uploaded some images from out of Mary Ellen's camera. ayan got a negative scanner yesterday, so my stacks and stacks of negatives and slides are really taunting me, now. I did write a script to scale, border, annotate, and do comment-insertion into my JPEGs. ImageMagick is pretty cool.

Mary Ellen ("ME" hereinafter) was fairly sheltered before she met me. She had a prejudice against "wierd" things like Sci-Fi or Fantasy fiction, having only been exposed to bad sci-fi, like Star Trek. I met her in college, where, among other things, she was in a sorority -- and as a rule, sorority girls don't like Robert Heinlein or Arthur Clark. I went about changing that by introducing her to Card's _Ender's Game_, and then to Jordan's Wheel of Time.

One day, ME was clutching her soon-to-be-purchased copy of _Path of Daggers_ as we walked to the bookstore's cashier. ME plopped down the book and smiled sheepishly at the girl behind the counter, seeming to hope that the cashier wouldn't notice that this was decidedly not a very "girly" book for ME to have. The girl smiled back, scanned the book, looked at ME (who was wearing an old sorority tee) and asked, ``Are you two going to the Psi Phi convention in Atlanta, this weekend?''

ME was horror-stricken! This girl seemed to be involved in some greek organization, and was tactfully implying a great distain for ME's choice of literature! ME tried to recover by concentrating on her ignorance of whatever sorority or fraternity the girl was talking about: ``I was Kappa Delta, not, uh, Psi Phi, is it?''

The cashier looked completely confused, so I interrupted by telling her that no, alas we were busy.

We collected our books and walked out, and then I explained: ``Dear, she was talking about a Sci-Fi con, as in Science Fiction convention.''

ME, stopped abruptly and stood in shocked silence, and then wailed ``Chad! You turned me into a nerd!''

I walked back, kissed her, and she read most of the book that night, after I went to sleep.

6 May 2002 (updated 6 May 2002 at 15:13 UTC) »
jlbec's entry was insightful. I'm more disgusted by the abstract reasons that such a conflict exists. Living in the US' "bible-belt", I'm often subjected to bromides asserting the "power of faith." Such conflicts as exist in Israel or existed in Kosovo are the only way "faith" seems to affect events in reality. Unprovable ideas exist only in the mind of the believer. When two sets of arbitrary ideas conflict, there can be no tests to decide which is right. The only possible resolution to such conflicting ideas is the destruction of one of the minds. When the scientific method cannot be brought to bear, the disputing parties must fall back to using a club.

Yes, faith is very powerful. This is not a virtue.

As for suicide bombers, the death they cause (other than their own) is tragic, but I'm reminded of the book Contact in which the protagonist says that some behavior ``is an especially good idea, because it tends to destroy any genetic disposition towards fanaticism.'' Of course, Ellie was talking about a celibate clergy, but it applies just as well to idiots with TNT in their pants.

As a side note, Mary Ellen suggests that celibacy is the reason behind the Catholic preisthood's recent PR debacle with pedophilia. I think it's more of a property of personalities willing to ignore reason and most social conventions in the way they act.

Here's a quiz: In the past decade or so, how many Catholic preists have been removed from service because of compelling allegations of pedophilia?

a) 0 - 20
b) 21 - 200
c) more than 200 .

Answer: You don't want to know.

raph: "Alan Matheson" is such a cool name. I recently got married, and the topic of children and their names has arisen a few times. Though I don't necessarily like the trend, children have increasingly been named with what are traditionally surnames. Anyway, I proposed a few names of people I respect a lot: Turing, Tesla, or Euler. My wife: "'Oiler!' Aiigh, no!" Needless to say, if I want to have much of a chance of naming a kid, I'll have to arrange it when my wife is sedated from birthing.

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