is a blog by Brendan
I experienced a surreal and Sumanaesque moment upon the sudden realization, tonight, that I have a LiveJournal! No, wait. I knew that. Stephen gave it to me. What was surreal was planning to set up another account, with the aim of syndicating NFD, and then discovering that a certain kind somebody had already done so!
LiveJournal: A neverending font of generosity. If you’re Brendan.
Work has been a tomb this afternoon–those of the developers who aren’t out with new babies are out watching Master and Commander or just avoiding the gloomy weather. I, as one of those unfortunates who’s still paid by the hour, don’t get to sneak out early, and I can’t do anything else on my project right now until somebody who’s gone gets back to me.
I’m kind of stuck for content on here lately, because it’s a strongly routined November so far–time passes quickly, but there’s not a lot of excitement or danger to be had. At work I run queries, wait on those queries, try to fix those queries so they won’t fail again, and repeat; at school I learn useful things, but they’re about as enthralling as you’d expect from a graduate comp sci schedule that’s heavy on algorithms. (Well, I had fun with string search, but I’m not going to write an entry about it.) And on Wednesdays I play Grand Theft Auto.
When I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for mean ol’ queries to yell at me, though, I keep finding myself at William Wu’s Riddles (via vitanuova). A lot of the riddles there are the kinds of problems I was given as “fun” challenges at Gifted Student stuff when I was younger, and at which I was completely horrible. I find that now, at 22 (and without a competitive atmosphere), I actually consider them fun and worthwhile. I still expend lots of time and effort on solving even the stuff in the easy section, but it’s a great payoff when I get one. The only letdown is that I immediately want to show this off to somebody, but a) that’s lame, they’re easy and b) that kind of defeats the point of a riddle site.
If I get a little more motivation under me, though, I hopefully will be able to reuse some of this knowledge in the next six weeks, as I insanely try to design an RPG system. Those of you nerds who read this but not Crummy: want in?
Via Sumana:
“It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a f***ing act of will.”
I just read my favorite girlsarepretty ever. I think the reason I like it so much is it’s like the best parts of GAP, plus choice morsels of Stephen, Leonard and Cody Powell. I want to write like that.
I’m glad I have a reason to talk about NewsBruiser again, because I’m on the front page! No, actually I want to talk about NewsBruiser because Leonard’s had version 2.0 (“Master Planarian”) out for weeks and I need to install it. Except I don’t want to install it, because a) NewsBruiser installations have traditionally been nightmarish for me (this is due to my hosts and my own incompetence, not NewsBruiser), and b) it has comments. NewsBruiser with comments! It’ll be anarchy!
Sumana and I had a conversation this morning about said comments, and about Leonard’s implementation of Bayesian heuristics in NewsBruiser. We agree that it’s capable of preventing comment spam, but I argued that it can’t entirely prevent tar pit syndrome, because it can’t filter out stupid. Sumana argued that it can. And then we jousted. No, actually we exchanged spam jokes.
(Yes, I know you can just turn off comments, I’m just whining. And yes, I do have a forum and am thus technically already sinking into a tar pit. However, you’ll note that the definition of the tar pit theory clearly states that “as long as no one actually uses the discussion forum, you are safe.” The only people who actually post there came from AZWP anyway, so I’m totally slopy.)
I do need to install 2.0, actually, so I can do trackbacks. I really don’t understand trackbacks, but they sound like they have something to do with RSS feeds or referrer logs, so I must consume them! Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m turning into an RSS evangelist like all the RSS early adopters, and I should be shot. And speaking of referrer logs, Cody Powell responded just as I planned to my goulash bait, and proceeded to write an entry about Cracked vs. MAD, which is a topic I was thinking about just this morning, during my pseudobreakfast. CODY POWELL CAN SEE INTO MY BRAIN.
I’ve decided that my pocket notebook counts as NFD Canon, so entries that are properly dated in there (eg during class) are now going into the blog at that date and time, just like regular entries. Some would say this is cheating. I would reply: you’re right! Get your own!
Also I just did a couple of those, from yesterday. You might notice.
Oh no! We have to live the same year all over again!
My RSS aggregator is now officially aggregating 39 blogs. Granted, a lot of those are dormant, but that’s still not bad for something that started as an experiment while I was bored at work.
Things I want to change about it:
I know thirty-nine isn’t actually a particularly large field for an aggregator, but it works nicely for me. It was pretty boring when I started out, but now there’s a good chance that any hour I hit it will yield at least one new post.
Well heck. While I was busy nonblogging, I managed to completely miss the two-year anniversary of this journal (this past Tuesday). This is why sometimes there will be things that say “2 Years Ago” over on the right.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
I highly recommend John Allison’s Girlspy, which I just got in the maaail to-day. And it’s great! There’s popes in it.