Save me from modern fiction

The movie was better

If I'm realistic, it's not going to happen…

Board games are not necessarily boring

OK, well, comic books

Boy, I sure do like his short stories

Mars Family Robinson?

Yeah, well

<p> There&#39;s not many things that I fear, at least in terms of things that could happen to me; in fact, the only one that really scares the hell out of me is losing my sense of self.</p> <p> My fear is, I know, partly grounded in the fact that it&#39;s almost certainly in my future; though only one of my grandparents has passed away as a direct consequence of Alzheimers, it lurks in the background.</p>

<p> I generally enjoy these sorts of books—the sort of things Bill Bryson specializes in, where he choses some through-line that gives him a lens for presenting some particular view on a bunch of events through history.</p> <p> And in fact Mark Kurlansky&#39;s <em>Cod</em> is a great example of the genre.</p> <p> To say that all of the things mentioned are a direct consequence of the great durability and fecundity of cod would be to take things too far—but its influence seems clear, and while there may not be causation, there certainly seems to be correlation.</p>

Setting up infrastructure

More consistent

Building a library

Upon what to base couchdb-simple?

Here we go again

Yep, another year down

Oh, God, I feel so bad…

How I would start out now

<p> This is what I expect will become the first of a series of posts where I detail some of the solutions I&#39;ve arrived at, based on the test programs that I&#39;ve written to work through the problem.</p> <p> The situation I was running into was this:</p> <p> I was writing tests for some parsing code. The output of the parse was a nested data structure. Some (well, many) parts of the data structure were optional. One in particular was giving me a hard time, though—it was a default being set from a dynamic value being passed into the parser. Obviously I had to get that same dynamic value into the test data as well, in order for them to match.</p>

<p> Some days, you just need you some Dumas pastiche. Or, at least, I do.</p> <p> I&#39;ve read this, and its immediate sequel, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">500 Years After</span> a dozen times since it first came out. My affection for it runs deep and wide. If it is not a profound work of literature, it is an exemplary entertainment (which, really, I would say about Steven Brust&#39;s entire oeuvre).</p> <p> That said, there is An Incident that this book will always remind me of.</p>

<p> The immediate sequel of #11. &#39;Nuff said.</p>

<p> by Mauro Jaskelioff, Russell O&#39;Connor</p> <p> <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1699">Link</a></p>

<p> I suppose you could say that I&#39;m cheating a little bit here, insofar as <em>Locke &amp; Key</em> is a comic book. But at this point it&#39;s finished—36 issues from beginning to end—and I read it through in its entirety.</p> <p> I&#39;m definitely going to recommend this book; I only picked up the first volume a few months ago, and I&#39;ve been waiting for the conclusion to be collected ever since.</p> <p> The story builds methodically from page one. In re-reading the earlier collections, I was impressed with how dense it actually is—in this era of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decompression_(comics)">decompressed storytelling</a>, there is no filler here. I suspect that on future re-readings, I will continue to notice more subtle details from the beginning and middle that have ramifications for—or are referenced in—the end.</p>

<p> I guess you could say this was a guilt read.</p> <p> I read Cory Doctrow&#39;s first three novels (<span style="text-decoration: underline;">Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom</span>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Eastern Standard Tribe</span>, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town</span>) and found them all perfectly enjoyable…but I&#39;ve never re-read any of them, which is actually very unusual for me; I&#39;ve even been known to re-read books I didn&#39;t like the first time around. Anyway, something about them just doesn&#39;t inspire a desire to re-experience them in me.</p>

<p> So, <a href="//2010/03/01/malcolm-gladwells-outliers">I am on record</a> as being somewhat skeptical about Malcolm Gladwell&#39;s books: with with a style that demands that he work to demonstrate his thesis across a broad set of subjects some of which his knowledge must be necessarily shallow…it is perhaps unsurprising that on subjects where I have deep knowledge, I often feel like he has let a desire to fit his thesis distort the facts. Probably not intentionally, but it still feels like it means you must take all of it with a grain of salt.</p>

<p> Yeah, another week, another Reacher novel. I could probably do something more productive with my time, but you can only bang on your drums for so long before the other inhabitants of your home call &#34;enough!&#34;</p>

<p> Whoa.</p> <p> I&#39;m a little surprised that the entirety of the kerfuffle that this book seems to have kicked up (at least as far as I&#39;m aware) was an moronic challenge from a Fox News idiot.</p> <p> Now, any realistic review should note that this book is doing a lot of extrapolation—as Aslan himself notes, the historical record on Jesus of Nazareth is spectacularly minimal. However, the few facts we have, when placed in the historical context—of which we have much more of a record—suggest that the constituency and central tenets of the bevy of sects that hold Jesus as their central focus are far removed from anything he intended.</p>

<p> The &#34;Jack Reacher&#34; novels are causing me to realize that I haven&#39;t actually read a lot of conventional thrillers in…well, maybe ever. I mean, I read Tom Clancy&#39;s first few novels—basically, the ones that were published before I finished college—and that&#39;s about it.</p> <p> That said, I&#39;ve seen plenty of movies in this mold, so the conventions of the genre are pretty familiar. And truly, these don&#39;t seem to be bad renditions of the type…except for the sex elements.</p>

<p> My e-readers says this book is nearly 400 pages. That sounds improbable to me, since I think I read the whole thing in no more than 6 hours.</p> <p> It is a perhaps telling irony that I started reading <span style="text-decoration: underline;">The Fault in Our Stars</span> in the same week that my Mom started chemotherapy for a recurrence of the breast cancer that had been in remission for nearly 15 years.</p> <p> Anyway, it is sad, funny, impossibly earnest, full of lies and woven through with truths. I know that it&#39;s positioned as a Young Adult novel, but I think that&#39;s a lack of imagination on the part of reviewers as much as anything—the idea that any book featuring teenagers could be anything else being hard to process.</p>

<p> For as long as I remember, I have been a fan of the Beatles.</p> <p> But in my youth, that love may have expressed itself…in unnatural ways.</p> <p> For instance, I can remember in 1979 or 1980 watching <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_Pepper%27s_Lonely_Hearts_Club_Band_(movie)">Sergeant_Pepper&#39;s Lonely Hearts Club Band</a> repeatedly, almost obsessively on HBO.</p> <p> Haven&#39;t seen it in the intervening 30+ years.</p> <p> I noticed at some point in the none-too-distant past that it had showed up on Netflix, and I felt compelled to watch it…you know, For Science.</p>

<p> OK, there&#39;s a certain amusement from the fact that much of this interview verges in incomprehensible because, well, Scottish accents. Serious Scottish accents—none of this Hollywood Scottish accent shite.</p> <p> But I actually think this interview is worth your 30 minutes. As a hook, I&#39;ll point to the moment when Frankie Boyle suggests the idea that all the Batman stories ever written are just the dying moments of Bruce Wayne, age 5, dying in the street when he&#39;s been shot along with his parents.</p>

<p> Going through a bunch of old files with the intent of scanning what was needed, and shredding what wasn&#39;t, I ran across this interesting artifact, from my first PC (which is, of course, distinct from my first computer):</p> <figure> <img src="../gateway.jpg" alt="../gateway.jpg" title="../gateway.jpg" /><figcaption> I even took advantage of it… </figcaption> </figure> <p> Even more amusing was the detritus of my 20-years-gone flirtation with OS/2.</p>

<p> Over the last few months, I&#39;ve ended up reading a few biographies of entertainment figures. The best, hands down, was ?love&#39;s <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Mo&#39; Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove</span> which I will recommend to anyone anytime.</p> <p> <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Nicholson: A Biography</span> doesn&#39;t rise to that level—not by a long shot. I wonder if it&#39;s because Jack Nicholson is simply not someone who will ever really let you in—certainly the patterns of his interpersonal relationship suggest that to be the case.</p>

<p> If anyone wasn&#39;t completely certain that I was reading (and am now ripping off) Chet&#39;s posts about books last year, then this book selection will probably eliminate any doubts.</p> <p> I was looking for some low-effort entertainment, and based on the fact that the movie had been completely watchable, and that Chet has apparently read all of them, I figured that the Jack Reacher novels were at least unlikely to offend me terribly, since Chet tends to be somewhat more sensitive to such things than I.</p>

<p> The other day, I found myself describing Neal Stephenson&#39;s <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Cryptonomicon</span> to some friends, and admitted that as much as I enjoyed his work, he was an author who never met a digression he didn&#39;t like.</p> <p> Bill Bryson occupies a niche that allows him to produce books that are often the accumulation of their digressions. I don&#39;t say that negatively—I enjoy the style and the content, and he does it well, diligently making the connections that thread the digressions into a narrative.</p>

<figure> <img src="../2014-01-03.jpg" alt="../2014-01-03.jpg" title="../2014-01-03.jpg" /><figcaption> The world outside my window </figcaption> </figure>

<figure> <img src="../2014-01-02.jpg" alt="../2014-01-02.jpg" title="../2014-01-02.jpg" /><figcaption> The world outside my window </figcaption> </figure>

<figure> <img src="../2014-01-01.jpg" alt="../2014-01-01.jpg" title="../2014-01-01.jpg" /><figcaption> The world outside my window </figcaption> </figure>

<p> Hey, it was the 70&#39;s, so maybe it wasn&#39;t that unusual, but all of the men in Alien were surprisingly old, at least compared to what I would speculate would be the case now: at the end of the year of it&#39;s release (1979), they were, in order:</p> <ul> <li>John Hurt - 39</li> <li>Yaphet Kotto - 40</li> <li>Tom Skerrit - 46</li> <li>Ian Holm - 48</li> <li>Harry Dean Stanton - 53</li> </ul> <p>There&#39;s only two guys on that list who were younger then than I am now. Harry Dean Stanton is just shy of 90 these days.</p>

<p> <a href="http://leepike.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/stop-regression-testing/">Stop Regression Testing</a> is perhaps a little strong, all things considered, but I do find the idea that if you&#39;re expressing your application as a language, you&#39;re in a position to work around certain sorts of bugs <strong>once</strong>, in <strong>one place</strong>, kind of compelling.</p>

<p> So I was watching the Daily Show a few nights ago, and they were discussing the many problems that seem to arise from this odd notion of regarding corporations as people, when I finally realized the appropriate test to apply.</p> <p> I direct you to <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/merchant.3.1.html">The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 1</a>:</p> <div class="verse-block"> <p>To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what&#39;s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.</p>

Lou Reed, dead at 71

I don't know Questlove from a hole in the ground

Embarrassing admissions…

Young Avengers is the bomb

Handling user-level securiy with couchdb-conduit

A few relics seen at the Computer History Museum

Moving to the new exporter

We have a functioning org-blog-save

The machinery of interacting with WordPress