Author: jra

  • Having friends for parents

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    Going through the transitions where your parents go from “the people who’s job it is to form you”, to “fellow adults living in this world with you” is tricky. Not everyone goes through it, but my parents and I did, a few years into college. Happily, it went so well that we even progressed to…

  • Discretion is the better part of valor

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    I was up at Westerly this weekend, and wanted to go for an overnight camping trip while I was there. I decided to hike 4 miles up Noble Canyon to Noble Lake, then sleep under the stars and reverse the whole process Monday morning. I like summer camping trips like that, where you can keep…

  • Security in Bee Society

    Biology is neat, and is making huge progress towards being able to explain human nature. Check out this article on security mechanisms in bee populations. Perhaps someday we’ll know how to overcome human nature. Will we choose to do so?

  • Google Can’t Spell, pt 2

    It occured to me that if you were trying to remove the Connection header from in the middle of a char * buffer, the absolute fastest way to do it would be to use strstr() to get a pointer to it, then do a byte swap to change the token from “Connection” to “Cneonction”. If…

  • Sending Microsoft Packing

    Hpaul turned me on to Mulberry when I was bitching and moaning about something stupid Outlook Express did the other day. I decided to give it a try, and I’m delighted. In addition to being much faster than Outlook Express, it also supports server-side address books via IMSP. I set up an IMSP server, which…

  • Skipper Jeff

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    Last weekend I passed my BCC certification, which means that I’m allowed to charter boats up to 25 feet from anywhere in the Bay Area (and around the world, too). On Thursday, I went out on my first solo trip. Our crew worked together well, and we had a good mix of just relaxing sailing,…

  • NPR

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    Heard at work: “I don’t listen to NPR, they are too conservative. They are National Pentagon Radio.” And in reply: “Or National Pentagram Radio, depending on your point of view.” Perhaps this wide range of viewpoints is why we can never make any progress in American politics.

  • Weblogs are the ultimate profiling tool

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    Paolo makes a great observation about how accurate ad profiling can get when the advertiser is reading your weblog.

  • Great folk music

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    I enjoyed great music tonight at the Little Fox. The first set was Four Shillings Short, second set: Broceliande, third set: all 6 of them together. The venue was great, the bands were fun, the sound mix was awesome (that’s a big deal when the music itself is intrinsically acoustic), and the people I went…

  • String Cheese

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    I just stumbled across The String Cheese Incident via Hooping. It’s cool music. It makes me want to sit on a lawn with people I like talking to and enjoy a beer. Alas, the show coming up in the Bay Area is at the Warfield, which is not an outdoor venue.