Vast and Infinite

(Think of this as the afterword to Death of a Programmer) On Friday, I turned in my ID badge and left my tech writing job at Equifax. On Monday, I’ll begin an internship that will allow me to become licensed to practice as a professional counselor (a psychotherapist) in Georgia. To an outsider, this seems [...]

If you weren’t careful, you might think that ideas like post-scarcity or the singularity are relatively recent concepts. I certainly did. Then I came across this poem from 1967 by Richard Brautigan: I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony [...]

This weekend I finally got to see Bruce Almighty. Despite mediocre reviews, I really liked the film. There was also a decent director commentary audio track and some interesting deleted scenes. What I didn’t like was the DVD itself. Some bright fellow had decided to put four previews for other movies at the start of [...]

So my company, STC, is in the process of moving to newer, nicer, larger, offices. Despite the many benefits of the move, getting work done in the process of moving is not one of them. Last evening I packed up my office and hand-carried my computer and monitor across to the new office. But this [...]

So I went to the dentist today for a regular checkup. My teeth are pretty solid, so it wouldn’t have been bothering me except for the fact that I hadn’t gone once in the last three years. (Another bit of fallout from the dot-com-bomb). Nevertheless, everything’s okay. Strangely enough, I need to start brushing less. [...]

Last year, right around the holidays, I decided to set up a wireless network in my home so that I could surf the net from my laptop. So I found an old 802.11 card and hunted down the ancient drivers to make it work. That was all fine and good and soon I had a [...]

Weird stuff always seems to happen to me first thing on Sunday morning. Most Sundays I sleep in. Waking up some time late in the morning, I sit up in bed and flip on CNN. This is when the weirdness starts. Last time was 02 1st, when I saw a live, full-screen shot of a [...]

I’ve decided to ditch the green-on-black look of the blog for something a little more readable, not to mention up-to-date. After all, black backgrounds are so 1996. The old look was actually based on the displays used in Ghost in the Shell and the waterfall display in The Matrix. I think the new looks is [...]

I look around and I see people in jobs they really hate. The reasons for their unhappiness seem to be the same: management pressure to work longer and harder not for “crunch time”, but for business-as-usual. This is particularly true in software where it’s still anybody’s guess how long any given large project will take [...]

To celebrate my Birthday / Christmas / this-economy-getting-back-on-its-feet / what-have-you, I decided to indulge in a new PDA. I got a Zire 71. It’s not the best at anything, but it does a lot of nice reasonably well. For instance, it’s a camera, but not a 3+ megapixel butt-kicker like a dedicated camera, but a [...]