procrastination diagram - February 2004

My mother points out that my blog is getting dusty, and as mothers have this unpleasant tendency to be, she's right.

Sadly, I don't have much to say.

Over the past two weeks, I've turned 31 and engaged in a lot of pointless introspection to no effect. I've been playing around with implementing some of the algorithms from The Craft of Text Editing in python, to see if I still get bogged down in string manipulation, and so far I haven't. We've gotten a bunch of fileserver machines in at work, and I've been working on deploying them. Really ho-hum stuff, really.

Ok, some links:

These giant microbes are really cute.

Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, which has been most enlightening in a sarcastic sort of way. It's certainly responsible for my deciding to purchase two CDs already. I didn't know how to say that I liked to listen to Turntablism, or Abstract Hip Hop, or Illbient, or Downtempo! I guess you learn something new every day.

I offer this with no explicit comment. (Thanks, Derrick.)

Other people have been emitting a lot of criticism of Orkut and its brethren; many on the basis of it making explicit what is more properly implicit, but Mark criticizes them (probably rightly) for their privacy policy, and Roger Clarke in Very Black 'Little Black Books' makes explicit many of the potential problems that this sort of service can pose. Mark, I think, is being too cynical; most of what I've typed into these things isn't very hard to dig up, but he does raise a valid point. Also, he said the following, which seemed like it was worth repeating:

"We use industry standard security measures to protect your information so that it is not made available to unauthorized parties."

My first thought: "industry standard" these days means "MyDoom.A is fighting with Seti@home for cycles".

On the other hand, thanks to Orkut, I am now back in contact with a couple of former coworker/friends who turn out to have blogs. This is actually way cool. I may have to give it a little credit for being useful.

I leave you with this random neuron firing: Justice, Freedom, and the Pursuit of Happiness do not go skipping together hand in hand down the yellow brick road of life; rather they are nervous associates, sometimes sharing goals, but often in opposition.

I went outside today (walking to S&S for brunch with Alexis, Assar, and Mike) and thought "Wow! It's warm out today!" and stuck my gloves (which I had not gotten around to putting on) into my pockets. After I got home, I looked at wunderground and discovered that it was just above freezing out. This winter has been warping my view of the universe.