Lifestream

I am an unapologetic Downton Abbey fan. The series is full of memorable scenes, but one in particular has stuck with me. Daisy, one of the scullery maids, is asked if she turned on the electric lights in one of the rooms and she replies "No. I daren't".

It seems like such a minor, throwaway line, but I feel like it succinctly captures how the uninitiated must have felt about electricity back then. Daisy is downright afraid of it. Steam and fire are very direct and literal sources of energy, but electricity is much more abstract. You never see the electricity moving or burning, even as the motor spins or the lamp shines.

Read more »

Hearing the Community theme song makes me happy.

Pelican is my blogging engine of choice these days. Given that Emacs is usually (though not always) my text editor of choice, it made sense to try and streamline the process of writing blog entries for Pelican with Emacs. What follows is my attempt to document such an endeavour, partly because I think it might be useful to the (undoubtedly tiny) cross section of people who use both Emacs and Pelican, but mostly so that I have something to refer back to when the need arises.

Note that this blog entry does not cover things like actually setting up your Pelican blog. It also doesn't cover my reasons for using Pelican in the first place; for that, feel free to peruse my other blog entry on the subject.

Read more »

I find it weird how the word "dump" does not sound appetizing, and yet the word "dumpling" does sound very appetizing despite sounding like it should mean "small dump"

I've been a programmer by trade ever since I graduated from University. This is a fairly long time, as these things are measured. I still consider myself on a learning curve, but that's a separate conversation.

My career, such as it is, mostly sidestepped the whole static versus dynamic typing debate that roiled in the early 2000's. School, when it veered into software territory, mostly consisted of C and Java, two statically typed languages. My professional life, until fairly recently, has been mostly in Java (with a bit of C++ thrown in for good measure) and hence has almost exclusively revolved around statically typed languages.

Read more »

Though I find the story of Scheherazade both gruesome and disturbing, I still love the narrative conceit that you can stop your looming execution if you can only just come up with a good enough cliffhanger.

Porgs look pretty tasty, to be honest.

I saw like one YouTube video on how to make the perfect omelette and now I'm obsessed with making the perfect omelette. The perfect omelette has Boursin in it, apparently. I can't say that I completely disagree.

Is there a word for the suspicion a programmer feels when something they wrote works on the first try?

I saw Blade Runner 2049 recently. I have some (not very original) thoughts to share. Spoilers ahead.

The original Blade Runner only really caught my attention in my adult years. Unlike, say, Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Superman, it was not one of my "childhood movies". I saw it once when I was very young, found it boring and weird, and then promptly forgot about it until I was made to watch it sometime in my 20's or 30's with my eyes fully open.

Once I did, though...wow. That movie drips atmosphere. I'd be lying if I said it's one of my favourite movies of all time - I feel like that kind of designation is less about the movie itself and more about my frame of mind at the time I see it - but it's definitely up there as one of the movies I admire most from a visual standpoint. It's still beautiful 35 years later.

Read more »

Stuff Desmond learned: red vermouth is actually made (usually) from white wine and gets its color from other ingredients.

St Germain and Suze make a good combination.

Reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" feels like I'm reading, at time, a novelization of "The Revenge of the Sith"

I still have EDO RAM in little static protector baggies in my office cabinet.

Desmond's tasting notes for Strega: a less burny version of Chartreuse.

God deliver me from Perl

If you have functions with shared data, then what you have a class, whether or not you choose to use the word.

Starting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Wish me luck, everyone.

I cannot use Regina Spektor as background music.  Engages the brain way too much.

"Sleeping in Light" is a lovely turn of phrase.  And a lovely ending to Babylon 5.

As I've mentioned before, I've recently switched to pelican as my blogging engine.

Pelican is a static site generator. This means that it generates static HTML files using templates and content as input, which can be then uploaded (via rsync, for example) to a plain vanilla web server (I use nginx).

So far the experience has been fairly smooth. The web server setup is much simpler, since there's no application to run. And it's forced me to re-think what kinds of information I want on my pages. For example, in an effort to avoid regenerating the entire site every time I publish an article, I created standalone index pages for tags, categories and archives rather than display the counts on every page.

Read more »

Yes, it's a bit irrational to be mad at people who are 2500 years dead, but now I want to read The Iliad just to piss off Plato and Socrates

Surprise #1 while reading The Republic: Plato asserting, via Socrates, that the Iliad is unsuitable as literature in his ideal state.

Lindor chocolates look like little brown Death Stars.

...but I've just discovered it hiding under all the bean sprouts, and now I feel guilty.