I hear you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. It’s tough trying to look like you can do something to actually solve the terrorist problem. Especially since anyone can be a terrorist: white guys, Asian guys, or maybe Islamic guys. Heck, you need a big list to keep track of whose who, and you need to update it daily…
A judge in Washington, DC, is apparently very easily stressed out. His life was ruined when a pair of pants he dropped off at the dry cleaners were lost. And the terrible mental trauma this has inflicted upon him is worth a mere $54 million dollars. He initially sued the ordinary working class owners of the dry cleaning shop for $67 million, but apparently concluded that he could shave $13 million off of that since the pants were used.
Continue reading Mentally retarded or evil: You be the Judge
My friend Chris and I make a regular habit of going together to airshows. I’m not terribly knowledgeable about aircraft, but I greatly enjoy the chance to walk up close and see the planes. And watching the performances put on by the incredibly skilled pilots that headline the major shows is something I look forward to.
I’ve been watching e-Ink technology, waiting for it to be mature enough to make it a practical choice for supplementing/replacing my paper technical books. Products using this technology started to become available a little over a year ago, and I wrote a bit about them at the time.
I’m a technical worker. I think that the more generic term for my kind of work is “knowledge worker”, but whatever you call it, my stock in trade is generated by my gray matter.
I am not a genius: far from it, in fact. Every complex thing I figure out takes a tremendous amount of effort on my part. I’m good at seeing correlations: logical interactions or the like. But that doesn’t mean that I just pick up a book and instantly understand something. I really wish I did.
Part of my work involves designing and writing computer software. I come from an era when it was actually possible to understand a programming language more or less completely. I develop in several language frameworks these days, but even the simplest of them seems to me to be beyond the capabilities of one person to truly understand.
I found the following today during my usual morning coffee + web browsing session:
Wayne Crookes, a former campaign manager of the Green Party of Canada, said he “suffered an immense amount of frustration and emotional distress†over postings on Google’s Blogspot.com, a free blog-hosting website, within an entry under his name in Wikipedia, and on openpolitics.ca, an interactive political forum set up by Michael Pilling, an Ontario and federal Green Party activist.
I was reading one of my new favorite comics (thanks, Leaha!), and came across a mention of this:
April 19, 2007 (BELLEVUE, Wash.) – Paizo Publishing and Wizards of the Coast today announced the conclusion of Paizo’s license to produce DRAGON and DUNGEON magazines effective September 2007.
Source: NEWS: Paizo Publishing to Cease Publication of DRAGON and DUNGEON
It is odd how the death of a magazine that I haven’t read in years has caused me to pause
I am getting tired of the periodic pseudo-scientific “cellphones cause <catastrophe of your choice>” claptrap that gets picked up by the media. The latest one was brought to my attention earlier today via Slashdot:
I am fortunate to have an employer who was able to allow me to work from home while Irene recovered from her second hip replacement. It made things much less stressful for all involved.
Working from home for a month, though, leads to some odd behavior. My hours of work were scattered all over the 24 hour day, partly in order to accommodate things Irene needed me for, partly because I found it convenient to work when Irene was asleep. I could take naps whenever my eyes started to feel heavy. There were several days where I didn’t bother to dress.
I work in cubicle-land (when I’m not working from home), so I can find a lot to laugh about in the following song…