January 2001 Archives
The winners of the Bloggies will be announced tonight on BlogIRC. In the mantime, you have less than twelve hours to participate in Nikolai's pet project, if you haven't already. So what if it's only a popularity contest – it's never made any pretense of being anything more.
The rumors have been confirmed; Sega's Dreamcast console is not long for this world. Too bad, but I can still enjoy the games I have already.
<joshua>Shall we play a game?</joshua> The U.S. military begins to plan for the next war to be fought in space, in a complex wargame including such elements as "cyber-warfare" and privately-owned strategic satelites.
Its engines are spaced so far apart that their exhaust could fry a runway's guide lights. Its body is so wide and tall that tower controllers may have to ban aircraft from nearby runways and taxiways before the plane lands or takes off.That's a big damn plane; many airports are going to have major problems accommodating the Airbus A380.
Open source in the banking industry: "We have to take fundamentally important steps such as speeding up connectivity for all our clients even at the so-called expense of helping our competitors." Open source is also making inroads in mass network storage, and even the Big M can see some value in it.
Naturally, the Curmudgeon has something to say on the Monty Hall issue as well.
I spent an hour yesterday arguing Monty Hall with a cow orker. I'm still trying to convince him that your chances of winning double if you switch doors after a losing door is revealed. I'm hoping he'll be a little more open to a mathematical analysis based on the principles of conditional probability and Bayes’ Theorem.
"In other words, the debate about whether poor countries can treat AIDS is over. The question is how." [via Ethel]
It seems that one of my favorite role-playing game companies, FASA, is going to close its doors. Fortunately, it looks like another company, WizKids, will be picking up its main game systems, Battletech and (my favorite) Shadowrun. I wonder how much of FASA's problems came from trying to introduce a couple of (rather pricey) miniatures wargames into the market. [via RPGnet]
Ever heard of the Monty Hall problem? It's a fairly famous mathematical brainteaser with a particularly counter-intuitive solution. This week, the Car Talk guys revealed the surprising answer to another mathematical conundrum: the Magic Hat Puzzler. I'm still trying to get my head around this one, but if you enjoy mathematical riddles, take a look.
Not only does censorware not work, it may be spying on you for commercial purposes.
There's been a bit of talk about the International Herald Tribune lately on MeFi, mostly for its user interface. I've finally started fiddling around with its features, and while I feel I've only begun to scratch the surface, this may be the most brilliant use of dynamic HTML I've seen to date. So far, my favorite feature is the "clippings" icon next to each headline that lets you add that article to a list for later perusal. Wow.
Another great Yes Prime Minister quote: "...you don't want to go on record as saying somebody is no good. You must be seen to be their friend. After all, it is necessary to get behind someone before you can stab them in the back." Indeed.
For later examination at my leisure: ScriptSearch claims to be "The world's largest CGI library". I'm disappointed that they don't have any sort of ratings, and that they don't include Python. I'd submit greymatter, but I don't know if Noah wants the attention.
A disturbingly large number of companies – over a third of a random sample and a quarter of the Fortune 1000 – seem to be putting all their nameservers in one basket, the same architecture that has caused Microsoft so much trouble this week. Mind you, the Big M has had other problems as well.
A little experimentation with the Ape-Licator suggests that none of the settings except "Gender" have any effect on the result. Sorry, Zannah.
Some harsh words against Democrats' post-election anti-Nader hysteria:
Contrary to Slavin's claim, politics is not a game. And politics based solely on strategy, devoid of idealism, is relegated to the election cycle with its fund-raisers, pollsters, handlers, its cynical rhetoric and jockeying for power. It is the Democrats who refused the dialogue the Greens proposed; now they need a scapegoat for their own inept, unprincipled campaign in the wake of the Republican theft of the presidency.However, such complaints are likely to fall on deaf ears, as the Democrats seem determined to move further right in the name of power.
Nothing exceeds like excess.
OS-skinning fans should love Athena.
The first beta is out for Athena, which will be a customizable object-oriented interface that can sit on top of any operating system's kernel including Linux, Mac OS and Windows. The modular design enables developers to write one source code base that can be run on all three platforms without rewriting the code.
Athena can be run on PCs as well as embedded devices such as Internet appliances and kiosks. Beta testers like the ability to customize Athena's interface. "The main thing I like is they are promising to unify configuration and general manipulation of the whole operating system, from the application to desktop to operating system fundamentals, all through the same type of interface," said James Stallings, a beta tester and developer from Houston, Texas.The scrrenshots look great, and you can get more information on the system from the company's site.
Yesterday's Microsoft DNS foulup raises some questions about the desirability of the company's planned move to network-centric services:
"One of the great things the PC revolution bought us is a lot of stability," says Peter Wayner, a columnist and author of Free For All, a book about free software. "If one mainframe went out, a whole company could go down. If one PC fails, it's just one person affected."
"Now we're moving back to a vision of one central point of failure. There are a lot of advantages -- you don't have to send tech support out to everyone's desk -- but there's a danger in everything getting knocked out by something as simple as a DNS server disappearing," Wayner says. "They want to put everything in one central spot. If that breaks, we're hosed."A lot of people just don't consider Microsoft's server products a good enough basket. (BTW, I won't even pretend to be above Microsoft-bashing.)
Follow Me Here's summary of American newspapers seems suspiciously similar to an old categorization of the British press from the BBC series Yes, Prime Minister. Not That There's Anything Wrong With That.
Heinlein's Mobile Infantry comes one step closer.
Dr. Mike takes a break from Bush-bashing (I say that as though I'm above Bush-bashing myself) in praise of Terry Pratchett, linking some great interviews I've never seen before.
Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has an extinct turtle named after him, cartoonist Gary Larson has an insect, and now guitarist Mark Knopfler has a dinosaur.
Talk about your disturbing search requests...
The one day that I want to go to Microsoft's web site and their nameservers are hosed.
The local WB affiliate had a hockey game to show last night, so I don't get to see Buffy until this weekend. *grumble* Had to get my slayer fix from Scott's Spoilers until the weekend rolls around. At least my TiVo was bright enough to seek out the rebroadcast in a time slot I would never have found on my own. By the way, if SMG does take a hike, I wouldn't have many problems with Willow becoming the star of the show.
Yesterday was my boss Anne's final day with the company. This article on female bosses seems to articulate some of the reasons I'm sad to see her go. [via Rebecca]
Inamongst some of the usual gratuitous (and already tiresome) Bush-bashing, a quick look at Adam Smith on Taxes:
The alternative to the "it's your money" view begins by pointing out that the money I pay in taxes is not really just "my" money. When I take a job or start a business, I will make money only if I get significant help from my society and my government. My efforts will fail if I am not protected against theft and attack, if there are no decent roads to and from my firm, if environmental blight or urban decay keeps people away from my retail outlet or if the general population is so poorly educated, ill or despairing that my firm can find no customers or good workers. In this sense, my earnings are not purely "my" money. They are the product, rather, of a collaborative effort between me and my neighbors and political officials. And I owe some of the earnings back to the society and government agencies that have helped me.I wish I'd seen some of these arguments before sitting on the sidelines of a discussion on government between a couple of friends this weekend.
For those who think that a Bush administration will have no redeeming values:
The core of the difference is in the sort of people George W. hires. Past administrations hired people who were like us journalists; they went to the same parties, they read the same small magazines, they dated journalists and thought it might be fun to become journalists after government service. Clintonians were eager to put their feelings into words and to impress journalists by spreading little bits of inside dope. Bush Administration members, by contrast, admire business leaders and regard journalists as servants if they are useful and vermin if they are not. It's not only that they don't leak to us, they don't even flatter us.Oh dear. The Washington media might have to start working for a living again. How horrible. [via MediaNews]
Harry Shearer and Jon Carroll have a good idea for dealing with the Voter News Service and other political polls:
Here it is: Don't cooperate with exit pollsters. When they ask you something, just say no. If you really can't restrain yourself, lie in a particularly gaudy way. Say that you wrote in Abraham Lincoln or Sean Penn. Do something to screw up the numbers so badly that they will become unusable.Although I occasionally click on a website poll, I've gotten to the point where I blow off any other kind of poll or survey. Perhaps it's time to start monkeywrenching surveys — all surveys — instead.
The latest round of Harry Potter domain disputes has begun, with Warner Brothers back up to its old bullying tactics.
What makes Christie's case even more emotive is the fact that she doesn't even use the domain because she thinks it "awful" as a URL. So on the one hand we have a teenager's fickleness deciding she doesn't really like a URL and on the other a huge conglomerate convinced that the self-same URL is some form of global plot to pull dollars out of its greasy palms. It really is depressing how global companies continue to justify outrageous, immoral behaviour through profit or control.
However, Christie Chan has vowed to fight the company over her domain name, Claire Field still has control of hers (and has had offers of legal defence) and a bloke called Alasdair Alexander has set up www.potterwar.org.uk to protest against Warner Brothers' behaviour. It may just start to swing the other way again.
It's been a long, odd weekend.
Friday night, after work and a little bit of shopping, I got home just in time to lunge for my ringing telephone. It was my cousin Jeanne, asking if I wanted to go out for Sushi with her and her daughters. Now, I've never had sushi before, and am enough of a redneck to refer to it as "bait". However, I've been watching enough Iron Chef lately to wear down my resistance to exotic Asian food, and enjoy a chance to hang out with Jeanne and the girls. I had just enough time to change and get over to the restaurant, and didn't have to wait too long for my perpetually-late cousin. While we were waiting in the severely-crowded entrance to the Japanese restaurant in a converted IHOP, she explained that the girls had brought home good enough report cards to take them out for their favorite foods. I would have never guessed 11-year-old Hayley for a sushi addict, but that was her selection. (Unfortunately, I missed 5-year-old Tess's Indian expedition the next night. No telling what that kid will like.)
Eventually we were seated; I let Jeanne pick out a selection of sushi, and ordered miso soup and warm sake as well. Now I think I understand why sake is served in such small cups, and why (as some comedian once observed) the Japanese sit so close to the floor to drink it. I wasn't thrilled with the soup in itself, though I can see why Iron Chef Morimoto uses it so much in more complex dishes. Then the enormous platter of sushi arrived: Eight or nine varieties, in varying amounts, with plenty of wasabi and ginger. As I went for a huge dollop of wasabi, Jeanne explained how to mix it with the soy, and advised against mixing all the wasabi in at once. I thought I was just going to humor her by doing so (I do enjoy spicy food), but my first bite told me she was right about being careful. Anyway, I tried all the different varieties we ordered. The eel (Hayley's favorite, and therefore the most plentiful) became my favorite as well, and I enjoyed the tuna and salmon too. I could have lived without the mackerel, however. A spicy tuna roll was good, too, but a bit overwhelming when I added wasabi. All in all, I liked sushi a lot better than I thought I would. I don't know how quick I'd be to seek it out on my own, but it wouldn't take twisting my arm for someone else to get me to go back.
Afterwards, I went over to Jeanne's to watch this past week's episode of Angel with her and the girls (all Buffy, Angel, and Charmed fans). Gratuitous Drusilla ravings good; Angel voice-overs bad. Then (after I finally convinced Jeanne that Hayley didn't want to see it) we watched Fight Club, which I've been after her to watch for months; I figured she'd enjoy the bizarre psychology, and she did. And then I finally went home and crashed.
I may write more weekend news (of cursed daggers and accursed backups) later.
Bad computer joke of the day: Infoarchaeologists have found what may be the world's first C compiler.
Carbon dating is expected to confirm that the discovery dates back to around the time of the first Unix systems: the point at which, historians now recognise, modern man departed from the apes. Although barely recognisable from modern development tools, the source code could represent the 'Missing Linker'.
You know Microsoft is running into trouble when long-loyal developers start talking about shunning the next upgrade.
The bottom line, according to Barclay, one of 600 outside programmers to receive Microsoft's "Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) designation for Visual Basic: "This is a stupid move by Microsoft that will, in my opinion, hurt the deployment of (Microsoft .Net), as well as their position with developers."
Some people are concerned about the future of free-speech rights on the internet if John Ashcroft is confirmed as Attourney General, but Brock Meeks wonders just how much worse things could be under Ashcroft:
The current Democratic administration showed no backbone for defending the tenets of free speech; such are the darker angels of the liberal platform. This administration always talked a good game but could never quite "go to the hoop," as my basketball buddies like to say.
"Quite frankly I haven't seen much resistance on the part of either party to First Amendment incursions," says Robert Corn-Revere, a communications lawyer in the firm of Hogan & Hartson, who has been in the trenches of online censorship battles.This kind of reflects why I'm not in hysterics over the incoming administration: So many of the issues that the Democrats played up in their anti-Republican scare tactics are those to which they showed little more than benign neglect while they were in office.
Good interview with Perl creator Larry Wall over at Linux Weekly News.
You know, ActiveState really does believe in Perl philosophy, "There's More Than One Way To Do It." One of the ways is the Perl way, another way is the Python way. Both of those are valid, different people like one or the other. They're in the business of enabling everyone to get the job done. Particularly, if Zope can be useful for both Perl and Python programmers, that will be great. I think they should add Ruby, too. Well, for some reason people don't know about Ruby in the US very much...
It really depends on the kind of the programmer you are talking to. Ruby and Python are languages that are designed more with the computer science mind-set, trying to be minimalistic. Some people prefer that kind of language. Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.I'm glad to see that Wall has a broader view of the scripting universe than a lot of the Perl fanatics I've encountered, who seem to see Perl as The Only Way To Do It.
Software patent madness may be about to hit a new low as AltaVista gears up for a legal seige against competing search engines:
Which means that since AltaVista has patents on spidering and indexing, it is going to try to screw any competitors that happen to spider or index the Web - so that'll be all of them, then. In Wetherell's words: "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several of those key patents."Essentially, AltaVista is claiming legal rights to most of the fundamental principles upon which all net searches operate. It seems that they're more likely to posture and threaten in hopes of an out-of-court financial settlement, than to really try and shut the competition down.
At last, our Long National Nightmare will soon be over.
Live by the spam, die by the spam.
Amidst musings on the California energy mess, Jon Carroll touches upon the truth of why we have the kind of government we deserve:
It is common to believe that politicians are buffoons. Some of them are, but a lot of them aren't. They are interested in public policy. We reward this sincere interest in the minutiae of government by calling these people "wonks. " It is, alas, a sad fact that buffoons have an easier time getting elected than wonks.
Buffoon or wonk, though, the reality is that all politicians have to spend an enormous amount of time raising money. They must attend fund-raising banquets or private receptions for bigwigs, or they have to get on the phone to rich people -- which means that they are not spending that time trying to untangle energy policy.[via YAWL, y'all]
Microsoft's new ad campaign: "Buy Windows 2000 because NT really sucks!"
In general, I haven't gotten too worked up over the makeup of President-Elect Bush's "Back to the 80's" cabinet, but Matt Welch voices concern over a return to the old Reagan / Bush worldview:
Rumsfeld, who like Dubya's other retreads is believably "anti-racism," illustrates the classic Republican path toward supporting rotten regimes: if they are anticommunist, vaguely friendly and their economy is large enough to excite the Chamber of Commerce (or the company you happen to be CEO of), then "engagement" with "moderates" always beats sanctions. If countries were big enough, like China, or "strategic" enough, like Saudi Arabia, that commie/repression deal could be overlooked as needed. It was standard Cold War realpolitik from the 1980s on back, and those who breathed it are once again running U.S. foreign policy.
More on the stifling effects of digital rights management on legitimate consumer rights: It may also undermine the first-sale doctrine, which allows you to sell works on to someone else if you no longer want or need them.
Both Griffin and Barlow echoed a similar argument that is gaining a growing acceptance in the technology industry. Increasingly, digital rights management systems are being looked upon as a way to circumvent the spirit of copyright law which was meant both to grant a limited right of protection to copyright owners and guarantee that the general population has access to that content.[via Lot 49]
So, I've been making noises lately about Great and Frightening Changes in my life, without specifying what was happening. Well, the memo is finally circulating around the office, so I finally feel free to write about it: My boss is leaving the company for a job where she'll have more opportunities. I like her, she's been very helpful to me, and she's been one of the main reasons I like working here. More than that, I've been worried about what was going to happen to the IT department in her absence. Right now, things don't look too bad; even though we're being placed under the (non-techie) head of Accounting, the company seems to understand the value of our work, and I think they'll continue to be supportive.
According to some economic theories surrounding the NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment), a certain minimum level of unemployment is absolutely necessary to hold off the grim specter of inflation. A contrarian opinion questions the applicability of NAIRU to today's economic policy:
This issue is extremely important, since these estimates of the NAIRU will be used to justify interest rate hikes that will throw people out of jobs. It would have been appropriate to note the complete inability of the economists who promote the NAIRU theory to predict the actual relationship between inflation and unemployment in recent years. It is harder to justify deliberately throwing people out of work if the rationale is a NAIRU theory that has been disproven by events.The author also has a more detailed analysys of economic news that I'll have to start reading more regularly.
When I first heard about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), I had high hopes for an independent body which would, at he very least, handle domain-ownership disputes fairly. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. If you're interested in following the wheeling and dealing of ICANN, you could do worse than to read Bret Fausett's ICANN Blog for the lastest news and events.
Greymatter 1.2, a stand-alone Perl script for maintaining a weblog, is out. I've been tinkering with it a little bit, and have decided that I'm probably going to use it to relaunch the Blog of Holding sometime soon; a number of its features (built-in comments and karma, as well as extended-text posts) seem particularly sited to my plans. While I'm kind of disappoined that Noah is discontinuing his work on the project for the forseeable future, I can hardly fault him or his reasons. Both this and the Organizine shutdown seem to be sad examples of what can happen when a personal project starts growing out of hand.
I completely forgot that yesterday was Considered Harmful's blogday. I posted the first entry to the original version of my weblog on January 11, 2000. (And to answer my rhetorical question of that day, she is.)
If you value your time and / or sanity, do not go to Bejeweled. Curse you to a thousand hells, Death Peach!
Everybody seems to be getting caught up in the hype over some mysterious gizmo called Ginger, which, by everybody's best guess, is probably some sort of personal transportation device. I'll be interested to see what this is, but the personal transport I really want is a suit of powered armor. [via The Reg]
Digging through some old articles about HTML Tidy
led me to some other el cheapo web-coding tools that I need to check out. While I prefer a basic text editor with decent syntax highlighting to a WYSIWYG tag-mangler, HTML-Kit may be a reasonable balance between the two, and the price (free) may make it worth a shot. As far as text editors go, while I've often professed my love for UltraEdit, I've heard some nice words about NoteTab of late.
I saw this book at Borders today, and became curious about just what's Ruby? Well, Ruby appears to be another free scripting language; the biggest different seems to be its absolutely fanatic object orientation. I suppose that the proliferation of scripting languages is all fine and well (Update via /usr/bin/zannah: maybe not), but I can't see anything here to interest me more than languages that are already in common use such as Perl or Python.
To download when I get home: UltraEdit -- my text, script, and HTML editor of choice -- has just released Version 8.0. Among the spiffy new features is some sort of built-in HTML Tidy support to help write proper HTML code.
Been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt. As Brad notes, in the modern tech industry, "a project isn't real until it has a t-shirt."
Some people have too much spare time on their Palms. Such people may now download a Pamela Anderson virtual pet.
XML class has been pretty interesting, although the labs have been pretty easy, leaving me a bit of spare time to explore further details on my own. With my renewed interest in both XML and Python, I'll have to give the Pyxie XML-processing library for Python a closer look when I have the time. This year I think I'd really like to play around with rolling my own blog/journal/content management scripts in Python, with an XML back end; the class just keeps giving me new ideas for how I could use XML in such a project.
It appears that the htmlGear website add-ons (guestbook, etc.) that I set up on my site a while back (and have basically ignored for months) have been shut down. Been meaning to remove that stuff from my pages anyway. Update: Hmm. Seems to be working again. Perhaps it was just the brain-damaged DNS at the office.
Will a LEGO / Microsoft technology exchange mean that Microsoft will finally get some help on "Plug and Play" or "component architecture" from someone who knows how to make it work? Or will my toy bricks just fall apart for no apparent reason twice a day?
After class this afternoon, it's back to work for The Meeting. The purpose of The Meeting is to settle the details and reprecussions of the big news I received last week; maybe I'll be able to write about it tonight. At any rate, upcoming events don't look quite as scary now that I'm over the initial shock, but I'll be nervous at least as long as things are still up in the air.
In case you hadn't heard, Organizine has fallen by the wayside after about a week of availability. A pity; I was looking forward to exploring its capabilities. From what I understand, it was a web-based web publishing tool sorta kinda like Blogger, but page- rather than entry-based. In other words, you could set up a template for the overall presentation of your pages, log onto the webside and enter the body of a new page, and have the app publish it to your own website. The MetaFilterites are providing all the post-mortem one could hope for, including the inevitable calls to Open Source the bloody thing and turn its maintenance over to The People. (Not that I think that's an inherently bad idea, provided someone were to demonstrate to Adam a serious level of commitment. However, it is Adam's baby, and therefore his decision.) Some folks are already making noises about reviving Organizine, or perhaps recreating its functionality; I'll have to keep an eye out for any new developments.
A $25 computer (P75, enough for the Linux/Apache experiment I've had in mind for months) can seem like a good buy until you find out that the shop wants $15 a pair for drive rails that no other brand of computer uses. And so another piece of hardware goes on the pile until I can find a super-cheap source for Compaq drive rails. At the very least, a computer show usually rolls through St. Charles the first weekend in February.
I'm taking a class on XML this week, so posts will be even more sporadic than usual. At least this class is in the STL area.
I just got some fairly shocking news, though I'm not yet at liberty to write about it. Looks like there are some pretty major changes coming in the very near future; while they look pretty scary at the moment, they may very well turn out for the best. The first week of the new millennium has been an easy ride, but suddenly the rest of 2001 looks like a massive rollercoaster as seen from the top of a stratospheric lift hill. Hold on...
In praise of LaTeX.
Quite likely the most powerful document creation and management system available, LaTeX (and its underlying typesetting engine, TeX) is favored in academia and is the required format for many scholarly papers. It takes typesetting issues such as line-breaks and inter-character spacing very seriously, and it arguably has no peer in the task of formatting complex math equations. It's been ported to just about every major platform and a bunch of minor ones.
Soft drink companies' attempts to dictate school dress codes may be odious, but at least they're a bit more obvious than contracting with schools to push their products.
The sale of exclusive ``pouring rights'' is perhaps the least wholesome of all the corporate marketing gimmicks that lately have found their way into public education. Typically, these contracts require the schools to promise to sell a certain number of sodas a year. This transforms the school's role from simple provider of vending machines (can anyone remember that the mere presence of soda machines in schools was once controversial?) to active peddler of the sodas.Next thing you know, schools will be advertising cigarettes on campus.
An inability to update could lead one to desparate measures.
If I come up with a schedule for these things, the schedule Will Not Happen. Therefore, the resolutions will get posted when the resolutions get posted. That being said...
Resolution 2: Do more stuff on the web
I write this one week short of my Blogday; I posted my first entry to the original Considered Harmful on January 11, 2000. I've enjoyed keeping a weblog over the past year, especially some of the things it's taught me about myself. But it's time for me to do more.
The first order of business is to get the Blog of Holding up and running with broader focus, hopefully more active and with more contributors than I did before; I'd like to make it into more of a "community" site. (That may be delayed, since my gaming attention is currently being focused on starting up a Shadowrun campaign, but it will happen.)
But aside from that, there are some other things I want to do on the web as well. I want to do more with graphics, and some longer-form writing. I want to learn a bit more web programming, possibly using Python or Zope. I want to play around with some other content-management tools, such as Greymatter and Organizine, possibly with an eye towards eventually rolling my own. And I want to come up with new ideas beyond the really simple stuff I've outlined here.
I wonder if Zannah has stuck with Pyroto Mountain long enough to see that it's more than just a trivia game. How much more? I'm sorry, you're not cleared for that information. And neither am I... yet.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Wittler...
QOTD: "If I can put my stuff out there for a million people to read, I can put it out there for a million people to ignore." -- Dan Hartung
If that doesn't sum up web self-publishing in a nutshell, I don't know what does.
The Intel Wireless Base Station may very well be the silliest-looking piece of computer hardware I've ever seen in my life. The corresponding game controller has to be in the top ten as well.
Oh my. Rowan Atkinson spoofing Doctor Who. Must get. [via Pith, and I hope that gun isn't for link-stealers]
Resolution 1: Lose more weight
I lost some weight, though not as much as I'd hoped, in 2000, which was the first year ever when I haven't gained weight. I slacked off and backslid at times, but I learned a lot that I'll try to use to do better this time: Don't hate yourself for being fat. Don't obsess. Don't make yourself so miserable that you'll give up entirely. Most of the other people in the world aren't as bothered by your weight as you are, unless you start annoying them about your diet. Exercise feels good if you do it regularly. If you blow off stretching after a workout, you will pay for it the next day. Find something to distract yourself if a show you despise is on the bank of TV's in front of the bikes, or you'll be discouraged from coming back. Drink lots of water while working out. Books on tape are even better for stationary bikes that they are for road trips. Don't skip special foods that you can only get on special occasions. Don't beat yourself up for slacking off or backsliding. Don't worry about "making up" for your mistakes, just go back to trying to do the right things. Don't worry about whether you'll ever be thin, or even average build; just try to become less unhealthy.
I'm not going to set some specific weight loss goal, target weight, sizes, or anything like that. I'm just going to try to concentrate on doing what I can at the time.
In case anybody was wondering, none of my resolutions involve making posts when I say I will.
A pseudo-historical perspective: When the Boy King Ruled. [via Looka!]
It's only fitting that Arthur C. Clarke should be sending a DNA sample along with with a deep-space message pod to be carried on The Wind from the Sun
If you're working up a new dead pool list for internet companies, you could do worse than to wait for the Super Bowl, the ads in particular. Seven of the seventeen dotcoms which bought ad time during last year's game have gone out of business since.
"He's that most dangerous of creatures, a clever sheep. 'e's realized that a sheep's life consists of standin' around for a few months and then bein' sacrificed. And that's a depressing prospect for an ambitious sheep." [via TOS]
I really meant to write yesterday. Of course, that was before I crashed on my cousin's couch on the principle that I wasn't certain I was OK to drive home after New Year's Eve celebrations. (No, I didn't go overboard, but I drink so rarely that I don't have much tolerance for the stuff.) I'll probably write up some stuff on Resolutions sometime today, but maybe it's just as well not to write a long reflection on the False Millennium. I always seem to enter a new year with a lot of despair about the previous turn around the sun and a lot of hope for the next; perhaps it's best just to leave the past year behind.
