It’s not easy being drunk all the time; Everyone would do it if it were easy. There’s a wide gap between a “social” drinker and an “alcoholic”. It’s a regrettably coarse span of choices found on personality inventories. Most who do imbibe can honestly choose the first. Some might convince themselves that because they drink to be social, they are social drinkers. Few wish to admit to the latter, which is more a medical diagnosis than a choice or a description of...
Waiting for a DNS change today, using <tt>dig</tt> to check the propagation, did a `man dig`, found mention of Chaosnet and Hesiod classes, the latter having been developed within the Athena Project, which also gave us the X Window System: In 1984, Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys set out the early principles of X:[2] Do not add new functionality unless an implementor cannot complete a real application without it. It is as important to decide what a system is not as to...
I’m working from home, and our company’s outsourced webmail leaves much to be desired. My desktop is Windows 7, since it offers the compatibility necessary in the corporate world, while most of my work is done through an xterm launched from my Linux box over CAT6. Rather than keeping up multiple webmail windows or collecting them all through one service (which usually leaves me with duplicate synchronizations across devices), I decided to choose an email client. First, it was Windows...
Yesterday, I watched the second half of Magnolia, started the evening before. I’ve watched it dozens of times, and it’s gone from “meh” to my top two favorite PT Anderson films. There’s a quote heard throughout, and the last line for narrator Ricky Jay: And the book says, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” In what “book” does this quote appear? After finding a clue on an archived thread that linked to...
My kitchen ceiling flooded yesterday. Not sure how this poesy parody came to mind, but here it is. Once upon a morning drizzly, while I hack-ed, gruff and grizzly, O’er many quaint and curious statements of programmatic lore— While I type-ed, buffers filling, suddenly there came a spilling, As of something gently dripping, dripping on my kitchen floor— “‘Tis rain fallen,” I muttered, “dripping on my kitchen floor— Only this and nothing more.” Ah, distinctly I...
Regarding the “injustice inherent in the system”, there is much hyperbole from students who ache to be involved in something more than the contrived lives of reality television. Few of them have experienced any real injustice that has not been instigated by themselves, e.g. by spitting in the face of a 9-5 cop with no more culpability in the state of the state than a 9-5 cashier. Not that such an act is “wrong” per se. It’s a … natural...
This post is about my first visit to a casino. I wish I’d done one about the strip club, but that’s faded into a dim I cannot properly recall except for the unexpected sadness of beautiful young women collecting crumpled dollars from a glowing glass floor. Subsequent visits made me realize it’s not as sad as the visual. Life, as cinema, has its actors, and the star of a tragic film is not necessarily a tragic person. But this is...
The narrative catalyst that brought about the ultimate physical separation of my wife from myself — when she texted me from Rochester threatening to never bring the children back unless I vacated our rental home — was a story I wrote about a character in a Star Wars role-playing game I’d started playing on the advice of my therapist. To start doing some of my “own” things. Apparently, to her, it resembled too closely our real family, and she took...
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