A Trip Down Memory Lane

When I started blogging in earnest, around 2007, I basically pushed aside all of the old content on my website in favour of the new. The stuff I had written up until that point was largely forgotten, and started gathering dust on my old Sun Ultra 10, which was the last machine to host my site before I finally gave in and started using a web hosting company.

I've recently dug out my Sun Ultra 10 from my closet and have since been knee-deep in nostalgia. I think my old site or, at least, selected parts of it, deserves a home, and this page will act as such - your gateway to the past! Expect new (well, actually, old) things to show up here as I work my way through the years.

The content, for the most part, remains unchanged, with a few exceptions (like converting the HTML to markdown and fixing broken links where possible). Enjoy! Or not...

Personal Stuff

• PEY - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Desmond's Trip to France. I had a lot of vacation time coming to me, so I took three weeks off work and decided to visit France in the fall of 2003.

Projects

• The Graphics Pipeline. A graphics library I wrote.
• Animats and Active Vision Systems. My undergrad thesis.

Various Essays

• In Defense of Emacs. I use emacs. I sometimes feel the need to defend this.
• The Computer as a Tool. An apology for Microsoft. I was young once.
• Why I'll Never Torture Cats. My version of free will. Developed from a talk I had with my friends Scott and Philip.
• Metal Souls and Mental Darwinism. I wrote this one about 6 years ago. It was my first attempt to put into words my beliefs about the validity of A.I. I think I was on the wrong track with this essay, but it remains here for reference.
• The Moral Basis for the Right to Health Care. I went through a libertarian phase in my youth. Take this essay with a grain of salt.
• The Nature of Omnipotence. My first attempt at explaining why I'm an atheist.
• Defending Physicalism. This one was written for my fourth year philosophy of mind course. I think it's a persuasive essay.
• When A Red Ball Is Not A Red Ball. My as-yet unfinished follow up to The Nature of Omnipotence. Unpolished but the outline is clear. Heavily influenced by the philosophy of mind course I took in my 4th year at U of T