Older blog entries for nosinut (starting at number 23)

I've been hacking up an Advogato journalling client. It's pretty slick. The code was originally based on logjam, but I have ended up rewriting everything, piece by piece.

15 Aug 2001 (updated 15 Aug 2001 at 16:05 UTC) »

Eight months since my last entry here. I've been keeping my journal here instead.

Note to self:

Make sure you get more than 5 hours of sleep before undergoing 9 hours of technical interviews. But I have to say, Laminar Software ranks pretty high on the "coolness" scale.

Skiing locally today and tomorrow, flying to Austin on Thursday.

So many things have happened, and my diary entries aren't going to be able to catch up.

Trilogy flyout (Austin, TX). Escalate flyout (south of San Francisco, CA). Much work. Some play. Dreamcast -- Soul Calibur in particular.

Some awkwardness -- note to self: asking a girl to dinner and finding out about her boyfriend afterward is embarassing.

2 weeks left, studying punctuated by exams. Then Florida for Christmas break, then Wyoming for some skiing, then back to Pittsburgh for a short bit of do-nothing relaxation before the next semester.

Many good books during the long plane flights: The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay), Microserfs (Douglas Coupland), Jumpers (Tom Stoppard), Roll-out Racquetball (Charles Brumfield). And I reread The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) for like the third time. I've also been on a psychology-of-gender kick that started with my Uncle's recommendation of Natalie Angier's Woman and is currently in the middle of Deborah Blum's Sex on the Brain. Some good discussions of feminism versus evolutionary psychology along the way.

There was some irony in the fact that I read Microserfs on the plane flight out to interview in the bay area.

So this whole growing-up facing the realworld graduating from college thing. It's kind of thrilling, really. Rent.net must love me for the ad hits they get as I think, "wow, I could live here if I lived in Austin" and a few seconds later, "or I could live here, or here, or here".

Also looking at a few Pittsburgh start-ups. Funny how unattractive start-ups have become these days: lots of work, little pay, poor stock options. Such a switch from a couple of years ago. (When it was lots of work, little pay, millionaire stock options.) But it could be fun.

Donovan's Compass project is apparently coming along fabulously, I'll have to check out the source code in a bit.

So, I should really be cleaning my room. Actually that's a lie. I should really be studying for exams, but I'll be cleaning my room instead.

Did you know that a loaded Audi TT only costs $35k?

Just in case you were thinking of voting for the bigger loser: this man admits to drinking and driving -- and you want him to be President?

Spent most of my day trying to find the zen of Prolog.

On a similar note, I gave blood today for the first time. They use a friggin' gigantic needle. "Have you eaten today?" Yeah, if you count the nestea I drank on the way to class this morning.

Galapagos

Plans are underway to start hacking on a web-based front end to the Evolution libraries. Not that the groupware-app-over-the-web idea hasn't been attempted enough times, but the current open source implementations suck badly. And a lot of the hard work of abstracting away the concept of mail and folders and the entire calendar interface has been done already by HelixCode folks.

The code base will start from mod_virgule, which is pretty damn cool. If you haven't looked at it, you should.

I was going to call this beast Darwin, but someone already took that name.

Anyway, this is all pie-in-the-sky at the moment. I'll put up a tarball somewhere when I have something worth showing.

Thursday, grandparents came to visit. Saturday, parents came to visit. Much fun was had, much good food eaten.

Made a patch for eog to allow it to load arbitrary uris with gnome-vfs, like:

`eog http://www.ruthschris.com/images/steak_darkbg3.jpg`

Mmm, tasty.

Gore came to speak on campus today. About this year's election, I have to say that I'm not really thrilled with either candidate. I can't help but feel that it's a lose-lose situation.

(But please -- don't tell me to vote Nader. The Green Party is a joke. Dismantle the top 500 corporations? People, corporations do a lot of bad things, but they do a lot of good things too. They are the reason we have such a great economy right now. Baby, bath water, and so forth.)

I guess what it comes down to is this: I dislike Gore less. I'm not a believer in "big government", but I fear the consequences if we elect Bush. Three supreme court justices are a matter too important to be left in the hands of a man who doesn't care about human life.

Remember the second debate? "It's going to be hard to punish them any worse after they get put to DEATH." The quote might have been forgivable if he hadn't been smiling when he said it, like he relished the thought. I just think it's incredibly ironic that Bush can be such a stickler for the rules after his bout with cocaine. Daddy's little boy doesn't have to go to jail, but god-durn-it if someone else gets caught they should get the electric chair.

Speaking of irony, how can one party manage to hold so much of it? Life matters deeply when it's an unborn fetus. But adults, if you screw up, you're marched straight to the gas chamber.

The Republican party just seems to have too many factions that are governed by hate instead of understanding.

I sure wish Gore wasn't such a moron.

Glasses is a homophone, and not a homonym.

Or is it the other way around?

15 Oct 2000 (updated 15 Oct 2000 at 19:14 UTC) »

Exams this week. Feh.

Looked a bit at the new control center, but have yet to get it to compile and run without segfaulting.

Ha ha.

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