ingenui-tea

So, going home for Christmas netted (among other things) a "new" coffee mug so that I no longer have to get the silly little to-go cups at the Mill every morning. Of course, the translation of "new" in the previous sentence means I stole an electric company mug from my parents' cupboard. It was everything I could have hoped for...except that the little slider on the top was too loose and it would fall to close the hole every time the user attempts to drink.

This, however is a small obstacle. It is easily solved with glue, or maybe some other adhesive.

Like nails.

(from the top of the lid)

(from the bottom)

I do realize it's just a coffee mug. I can get another one (probably even steal a different one from home), but this one happened to meet all of my criteria, with the exception of the lid not working. But now the lid works, so now it's perfect.

Mostly, though, I'm bored and haven't posted in a while, so I thought I should reward you all with pictures. Text can be fairly monotonous.

it's the little things

Just now, I discovered the remains of a Vincenzo's pizza I had left in the fridge at work on Friday.

It immediately made my life immeasurably better.

picture perplexing

An odd thing happened to me on the way home from work.

I was walking along on 8th St. at around 6:00 pm (so it was getting dark), and had just walked under the O St. overpass (as I do every day on the way home from work). It had been cold in the morning, so I was wearing my nice, full-length wool topcoat and my God scarf (that's another story), but at the time it wasn't all that chilly so I had the coat unbuttoned and the scarf loosely draped across my neck. The coat was held together a bit by the strap of my messenger bag, slung from my right shoulder diagonally across my body. So far, all this is rather mundane, but you can judge the relevance as you read on.

As I was walking down the sidewalk past Jack's Bar and Grill, I noticed a girl (late teens to mid-20s, it appeared) walking down the same sidewalk in the opposite direction, about half a block ahead of me. The girl reached into her purse, pulled out a digital camera, flipped it open, pointed it directly at me, and snapped a flash photo. She then calmly closed the camera, put it back in her purse, and continued on. I made eye contact as we passed on the sidewalk, but only got the sort of polite, terse little smile that people give to random people they make eye contact with on the sidewalk.

Now, I have no idea what this girl was doing. The only thing I can think is that there was either something going on directly behind me of which I was unaware, or that the situation, framed by overpass, perhaps some smoking exhaust, etc. was just a sort of generically photogenic scene. I don't know.

But it was a little surreal.

on honor

For those of you who don't know, I went ahead and got the tattoo described in the earlier post. It's now permanently inscribed on my right forearm, from near the elbow to about halfway up the wrist. So that happened.

Subsequently, I've had a few people ask me why "honor" is so important, why that was worth getting a tattoo about. Well, that's a tough question. About the best I can say is that being an honorable man is the ideal that I strive more than any other. I'm not too concerned about wealth or knowledge or righteousness or even truth. For me, the main ideal is honor.

Culturally, that word is a little loose, so here's the best description I could come up with; for a man to act with honor is for him to do all of the things he is responsible for and only the things he has a right to do. Not is right to do, mind you, but things he has a right to do. Some things that happen are not right--they are not just or moral or good--but they are things that a man may not have the right to prevent. It's a rough concept, and not one for which I have explicit rules. But that's the ideal for which I strive. I can't say I fulfill it always; I do fail, just like everyone else.

But that's what's tattooed on my arm. Honor. Right where I can see it, right where I can read it. For the rest of my life.

I hope that's enough explanation to suit you all.

branding

So, I'm a crazy person. Right, now on to business.

For some reason, I was struck tonight with an intense, irrational desire to get drunk and get a tattoo. I don't know why. Regardless, whenever the idea of a tattoo comes up, I generally lean toward getting something done in Ogham, which is an ancient Celtic script usually found carved onto standing monoliths and things. It's pretty simple stuff; lines of various lengths carved either orthogonal or oblique to some center stroke. In any case, I think it usually looks neat.

So, with that settled, I had to decide on a word. I picked the Irish word for "honor"/"respect" (onóir, pretty much pronounced the same), just because I felt like it. So, I looked that up in Ogham and drew up what it would look like (that's the picture posted below, read from bottom-to-top).



On basically a whim, I thought that would be nice on the inside of my right forearm (with the bottom near my elbow, up to the wrist), so I drew it on with magic marker to test it out for a bit. I could get used to it, especially if it was done by someone with any talent (i.e., not drawn by me with my left hand on my right arm).

Of course, I couldn't just leave it at that, so I did more research. Apparently, each letter in the Ogham alphabet was associated with a tree sacred to the druids (so sayeth the Internet) and each tree was associated with some sort of mystical/divinatory properties. So, here's a brief description.

• gorse/furze (o) - A yellow, flowering shrub. Signifies finding that which is sought, abundant knowledge and blessings, and invokes a reminder to share of this bounty.
• ash (n) - The tree, obviously. Associated with interconnectedness and a recognition that one's problems and questions are not his alone. Urges one to recognize the effects of his actions and to balance himself with the world.
• gorse/furze (ó) - I just want to spell out the whole word.
  
• yew (i) - An evergreen tree with poisonous berries, used to make bows and things. Heralds a coming change, or perhaps the recognition that nothing lasts forever and one should let go of the past.
• elder (r) - A hearty, fast-growing shrub. Represents renewal and the cyclical nature of life, with change bringing newfound creativity.

Anyway, that's been my night.

aer lingus, erlang-us

First off, an update on the Ireland thing; I sent off an email to the course director at Trinity. Still no response, but hey...it's only been a couple of days (and despite the title of the post, it'll be a while before I'm buying plane tickets; it's only there for cleverness).

Secondly, in preparation for potentially becoming a distributed computed grad student, I've been learning Erlang. For those of you who don't care about clicking the link, Erlang is a language for distributed systems that has primitive support for concurrency and error recovery while still maintaining the benefits of a high-level, functional language. So far, I like it. It's been fun to learn a new syntax and I like the thought of something distributed (I mean, seriously; think about all the unused cycles in my apartment!). I'm planning on eventually writing some sort of digital ant farm; for now, I'm working on a simple hill-climber that will grow into a swarm algorithm of some sort.

Also, I've been on a wine kick lately; I might be posting about that from time to time in the near future.

the pipes, the pipes are calling

For those of you who may not already know, I have a plan. I tell the Internet my plan for two reasons: (1) I'm rather excited about the plan, and (2) if more people know about it, there's more pressure for me to follow through.

So, anyway, here's the plan: I'm going to apply for a master's degree in computer science at Trinity College, Dublin (Ireland, if that wasn't immediately obvious).

For those of you who know me only marginally or through certain circles, that may be a bit of a surprise; a foreign M. Sc. in networks and distributed systems is a far cry from a domestic Ph. D. in philosophy. When it comes right down to it, though, computer science is what I do. And if I can do it in Ireland, I am in like Friends was in the mid-to-late 90s.

Although I haven't worked out all the details, here's what I know about the plan so far:

• My background in JDE seems to match well with the program (or should I say, programme), so I think my application would be well received,
• Provided I get in, the course would last me from October 2007-September 2008 (or 2008/2009, pending discussions on fellowships),
• I would end up with a M. Sc. in computer science from Trinity, and
  
• It's in Ireland.

Overall, I see no real problems with this plan, so I'm going to do it. I'll give more details as I get them.

potent potables

Apparently, one shouldn't leave containers of perishable liquid sitting around for multiple months without at least checking on them once in a while. I have two testimonials.

One: A jug of milk was left half-full in the office fridge for approximately 3 months. The milk had been slightly sour when purchased (thanks, SunMart!) and, of course, got progressively worse. However, no one was ever planning on drinking it, and no one really used the fridge for much, so it wasn't an issue...

...until the pressure building inside caused the bottom of the jug to rupture and leak mostly-curdled milk all over the inside of the fridge and onto the floor outside it (the office smelled like puke last Friday).

Two: My roommate purchased a bottle of mead from James Arthur Vineyards about six months ago (you'll have to correct me if that's wrong, Jesse) and placed in the wine rack, where it sat quite contentedly...

...until Tuesday, when some combination of a bad cork, oxygen in the bottle, and overactive yeast managed to spontaneously fire the cork across the living room. The bottle happily gurgled half of its contents onto the futon before we recovered enough from the shock to tip it upright (the futon mat still somewhat smells like vinegar).

here there be dragons

Sometimes, I am far dorkier than I would usually care to admit (in this instance, "sometimes" actually means every hour of the day).

As an example, consider one of the (admittedly many) allegorical devices I use every day at work: dragons. I grew up with a rather fantasy-based imagination--King Arthur, Tolkien, plastic swords, Dragon Warrior on the NES, the Dragonlance series, etc.--so I suppose it's really no wonder that I've drawn that cognitive set with me to the present day, but the thing that gets me about it is that I've made it work so well (at least, as far as I'm concerned).

So, here's how the dragons work for me now. In the current setting, "dragons" refer to considerations or parts of the software that we have acknowledged but not yet dealt with. It can apply to both business risks (say, the terms of an NDA we haven't written yet) or parts of the design that have yet to be implemented (such as a stub function within a larger sequence). I even made a definition in my little task-list plugin in my IDE for "//HTBD" so I can denote places in the code that I have to come back to and finish.

In general, the reference comes from the practice of ancient cartographers drawing serpents or other mythological creatures at the edges of the known world (the title phrase of this post loosely comes from the Lenox Globe, ca. 1503). Those parts of the system that have yet to be defined are hence "off the edge of the map" and are thus "dragons".

In any case, it keeps me entertained at work. I always used to daydream about slaying dragons, and now I get to.

killing me sweetly

I think my job is going to kill me.

Not because of the stress, not because of the potentially long hours, but because of the adult-onset diabetes.

Granted, programming isn't the healthiest job in the world anyway; I stare at a computer monitor all day (eyes), type into a keyboard for hours (wrists), and sit at a desk doing very little in the way of exercise (heart). But what takes the cake in this case (ha!) is the sugar.

The office fridge is stocked with Pepsi, cream soda, etc. We've even made a little pop-can tetrahedron, which is currently starting into its eighth triangular layer; right now it's at 86 cans. Figuring most of those are Pepsi and only a couple are diet, I'd say we can look at an average of around 140 calories and about 38 grams of sugar. All told, that brings us close to 12,000 calories in the stack and about 3,200 grams of sugar consumed. Granted, it's not all me and it's taken us a few months, but still...that's a lot of high fructose corn syrup.

Maybe we should switch to diet.

fiddle me this

For future reference, all else being equal, girls who play the violin are far more attractive that those who do not.

Especially if they're Irish.

backtalk

Something has really been annoying me lately, and even though no one seems to want to provide me with any feedback on this blog of mine, I figure I'll open it up to the community for further discussion.

First, here's an example situation: last night about seven o'clock, I was sitting around watching football and trying to figure out what to do with my night. In the process of doing this, I talked
back and forth with two friends about the prospect of going downtown. The first exchange ended around 7:30, and I was told "I'll call you when I'm ready". The second exchange ended around 8:30 with "I'll give you a call back when we leave here, which should be in just a little bit". Having supposedly settled that I was going to be going downtown in a while, I threw on a belt, shaved, etc. and finished up watching the college football, expecting to get a couple of phone calls when the time came. Around 10:00, all the games on TV were over, so I wandered over to the computer to check the postgame reports on the other ones, still patiently waiting for the phone to ring. About 11:00, I started getting a little impatient and decided to call my people to see what was up. No answer. No return phone call. No contact of any sort. I heard through the grapevine that both actually did end up downtown, and supposedly had a great time.

Now, I don't know what the rest of the world thinks about this, but that pisses me off. And I feel like I'm completely justified.

If I'm not justified in that sort of situation, then where's the disconnect? Did I miss the lesson on interpersonal interaction that gives the rules on when you call someone back and when you don't? Is there some unwritten law that forbids giving someone a call if you decide to cancel pending plans? Have the common-courtesy police decided that there's no need to apologize for basically ditching someone?

I can understand if some plans just sort of fall through. If the situation is like "Hey, I'm going downtown too--maybe I'll call you when we get down there", then I don't really expect a call. When the voice mail says "Hey, just thought I'd see what you're up to--give me a call", there's no real responsibility to return that. I can understand if something comes up and you just can't answer the phone, or if you're too busy at the moment to respond immediately. There are valid reasons out there to miss a call or be late on returning one. But if the plan is specifically to go out with someone and it's down to the "call me to tell me where we're meeting" phase, that's a call you need to make. When it's "Hey, I need to buy tickets tomorrow. Call me back and tell me whether you're coming or not", that's a call you need to make.

I'm not saying that people should always follow through with social plans and should never cancel. That's fine. But is a phone call to the cancelee to tell them you're calling it off too much to ask?

anthro-promiscuous

Here's one of the things that I consider among my top idiosyncracies: I tend to personify inanimate objects a lot.

It's usually pretty innocuous, and I doubt most people realize how much I do it, but it happens with everything. If I need some unnamed object near another person, I usually ask for it by saying, "Hey, hand me that guy" or "Pass me one of the little blue dudes". It's not a guy; they're not dudes. They're lumps of lifeless material.

It happens even more frequently when I'm working; I've developed this intensely anthropomorphic ontology for my system, complete with a God-like registry object, "angels" and "devils" controlling the various models objects, etc. It's built right in; the objects don't call other functions, they "ask" for the standard controller and "tell" each other about the various events that happen in regards to the user. But there's really no asking or telling, there's only functional execution. The intelligence inherent in the system is mine, not that of the "agents" I have constructed. They only exist for metaphorical purposes.

And yet, as odd as that sometimes seems to me, it appears to be commonplace throughout human thought. Personification of nature or emotion happens frequently in literature or poetry, pagan or tribal religions use the anger or sadness of the spirits inhabiting all things as a rhetorical tool all the time. In philosophy, Aristotle's physics focused on the tendencies of each kind of element to "seek" its sphere (fire goes up, earth down, etc.). Even in more modern, "scientific" disciplines like software, we still put that to use all the time; functions are easily understood as being the actions that the objects undertake upon each other. It simplifies the description because we can understand it; people know what it's like to be people, so if non-human concepts can be described by personification, so much the better.

I guess it's not so strange that I apply my understanding of humanity to these sorts of things. It just strikes me as odd that people tend to glaze over such an incongrous heuristic.

earbads

I've never really been much of one to listen to music constantly, but recently I bought an MP3 player and I've learned something.

The little earbuds that come free with audio equipment are pretty uncomfortable.

Anyway, just an observation.

you can't go home

I went back to my hometown this weekend for their centennial celebration. Yes, that's right--Polk, NE turns 100 this year.

For those of you who are from small towns (especially if they happen to be in the general vicinity of central Nebraska) might have an idea of how the event went down. First, there was a tiny little parade down Main Street (all two blocks of it), then beans and ice cream in the park (at the end of Main Street) and a vintage car show at the elementary school (on the other side of the park). In the evening, the part of Main Street outside the town bar was closed off and there was a beer garden and street dance with some little cover band out of Grand Island (I don't remember the name). I went for the early afternoon and wandered around with my family, then hit the beer garden and hoped for some people I knew.

Luckily enough (I guess), there was a pretty good showing of the younger crowd; only a couple from my class directly, but a few from the classes around me. Now, in high school, I never really liked the people in the classes around me. Sadly--but not too surprisingly--few of them seemed to have changed much.

I can't really believe that, though; I feel like I've changed a great deal in the last five years, and any of the classmates I kept in touch with have as well. I think what happens in those cases is that going back to Polk also means going back to who you were then. People fell back into their old roles, cracked the same sorts of jokes with their old buddies; if we hadn't done that, it would have been awkward. None of us really knew each other any more, we only knew the old versions and tried our best to apply them to these otherwise new people (hell, almost none of my high school buddies had ever seen me drink before). It was kind of depressing; here we all are, back from five years of adult life, and we were trying to bring back something that most of us had easily given up on graduation day.

Still, it wasn't all depressing. After the beer garden closed, we took off for the pasture surrounding a buddy's pond with some Busch Light for a good old-fashioned bonfire. I spent most of the night avoiding the other guests and staring at the sky (Lincoln's got nothing for stars, let me assure you) but after the bulk of the party left, it was down to myself and two of the guys with whom I graduated. We stood around talking about life and watching the bonfire go out until the sun came up and we figured it was probably time to go home.

I always felt constrained in Polk; for that matter, I feel a bit constrained in Lincoln. I think it's very unlikely that I'll even go back for my 10-year reunion. So, I think Saturday night might be my last pasture party, my last Busch Light bonfire; I never really enjoyed them anyway.

But I can't help but be a little sad.

making pretty pictures

I love Inkscape. If I could get a job doing nothing but making diagrams in Inkscape, I'd probably take it. Here's an exported PNG to give you an (inadequate) example (text blurred to protect the innocent):


Trust me, it looks much better in its full, scalable vector glory.

applied metaphysics

There's something I want to set the record straight on. I met a fair number of people this weekend, and in most cases meeting new folks follows a conversation pattern something like this:

• Person: "So, do you go to school?"
• Me: "I graduated in May."
• Person: "Oh, really? What'd you study?"
• Me: "I got my B.A. in philosophy."
• Person: "Oooo...so what are doing with that now?"
• Me: "Actually, I'm a software architect. I wrote tools for insurance agents."
• Person: "Wow! Talk about diverse interests..."

Now, I still do not quite understand why our society is so enamored with (a) the idea that everyone should immediately get a job in exactly the major they got in college and (b) the thought that any degree in the humanities is like professional suicide, but those are not the points I want to clear up here. The point I want to clear up is that philosophy and computer science are not so dissimilar after all. Some of you may already have heard this from me before, but here it is for the world to read so I can stop having to tell it to everyone (or at least, all 2-3 people who read my blog).

Everyone who knows anything about computer science understands that it is fundamentally based on the basic rules of bivalent logic: true and false, 1 and 0, on and off, "and" and "or", if-then. Logic is based in philosophy; it's still one of the focus disciplines within the greater subject. In that regard, computer science and philosophy are linked, but, again, that's not the connection I am after right now.

What I focus on is a different kind of connection that exists between software engineering on one hand and metaphysics on the other. Since I assume most of my readership comes from the software side of this, we'll start with metaphysics--metaphysics is, briefly, the study of things in general. Questions about what sorts of things exist (i.e., physical things or mental things, collections of general properties or individual particular objects) and how they can relate to each other (e.g., causal relationships) are questions that fall under the purview of metaphysics. In essence, it is the most abstract of all branches of philosophy, because a metaphysical truth must hold for everything--tables, chairs, the number '2', cats, dogs, trees, all points exactly 4 light years from Venus, beer, people, last Wednesday, next October, even God himself (depending on who you side with). That's metaphysics.

Now, then--software engineering. The subject of this one is more intuitively clear; a software engineer is responsible for the design of whatever system he or she is working on, from determining the class structure, process flow, and component interaction (whatever is necessary) to choosing an implementation. It's a broad subject, too, but for now let's just focus on the part that I enjoy the most, which is the design work.

So, we have two subjects--metaphysics, which focuses on the sorts of things and the kinds or interactions which do/can exist in our universe; and software engineering, which focuses on developing the design for the components and activity of some program or another. Hopefully by now you can see the connection I'm trying to evoke; metaphysics is philosophy's way of reverse engineering the design of the actual universe, whereas software engineering is the computer scientist's way of constructing his own little microcosm.

I've heard it said that technology is applied science; in much the same way, I see software engineering as applied metaphysics.

I had a friend berate me once for choosing philosophy as a major; she accused me of wanting to "be God". Well, I'll admit--there is some merit to her accusation. But I have no desire to actually design the universe; I want to understand it, yes, but I most certainly do not want to be in charge. After all, I'm a software architect. I get to play God every day, to sit at the helm of my own little personal universe and direct its ontology. I get to determine which concepts are acceptable and which are not, which causal relationships to allow and which to forbid. I determine the laws of nature and I determine the essential properties of the objects within my personal metaphysical sandbox, and it's hard sometimes. It's hard to design a system even as small as the one I work on, so I can't even imagine trying to wrap my brain around something so complex, so stable, and so vastly intricate as the universe.

So, I'll just stick to my software. I'm not quite qualified for Infinity.

code aesthetics

Today at work I was sitting in front of JEdit (the IDE of choice for the current project) and for some reason I found it very hard to actually code the design I had been working on. Not because it was hard, not because I was unmotivated to work, but because I was overcome with a powerful feeling that the code would be ugly. It simply repulsed me. I did not want to write it.

I don't really know what set me off; usually I find my code to be quite beautiful. I generally carefully set up my development environment to gain the maximum distinction between categorically similar portions of the code (such as the standard text, the comments, and the string literals, the digits and the operators, etc.) while still maintaining a comfortable level of contrast between the text and the background color (pure white on pure black hurts). This practice has generally led me to what I consider to be a very beautiful display when combined with my general style practices, to which I adhere quite religiously (specifically, K&R style for the braces with 4-space tabs and a fair bit of commenting).

Today, though, I was sickened. I don't know why.

In any case, I did have a lot of code to write so I had to move on. I decided that the best way to move forward was to switch my color scheme in an attempt to dissuade my disillusionment. It seems to have worked fairly well.

in the beginning

There sometimes comes a day when boredom and peer pressure together contrive to overwhelm a man's misgivings and force him to do something he would not have otherwise done. Thus, I have decided to start blogging again, mostly so I have something that seems at least creative (if not productive) to do in the evenings. I warn you now, however--it will most likely be boring and infrequently updated. That being said, read on, should you so desire.

This entry is mostly introductory, so I suppose I'll cover what I plan to put up here. In general, my life is rather boring, so I don't imagine the Internet needs any descriptions of that (plus, I'm rather uncertain I can come up with anything worth posting when considering my day-to-day activities). As such, I'm planning on posting more of the things I observe in the world and what I think about those things (after all, this blog is for you more than for me; I already know what I think about). So, anyway, if that sounds intriguing, check back later. I'll probably have some real content up eventually.