Page of Moss - Bloglet

in the supermarket, in France

Julia: Try to find the best avocados they have.
[I commence looking]
[a few minutes pass]
Julia: Having any luck?
I: Well, that depends... when you say "best", do you mean "most like rocks"? _
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03:07:31 AM, Tuesday 25 February 2003

This reminds me: reading Persuasion the other day, I was reminded of just how good Jane Austen is at portraying, with utter and complete realism, really shallow, crass, annoying people. _
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03:34:36 PM, Monday 24 February 2003

thinking back on particularly choice pageants performed at the ren faire...

Plan 9 From Outer Spain _
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03:08:12 PM, Monday 24 February 2003

There is nothing even remotely private about blogging. Blogging is talking in public. Public. Public public public. Saying nasty things about someone on your blog is saying nasty things about them in public. Revealing secrets on your blog is revealing them to all the world. There is nothing private about a blog. There is nothing diaryish about a blog. It is no different from standing up in front of a huge audience and talking--a more massively huge audience than you can ever imagine. The medium does not invite you to reveal your innermost thoughts; it invites you to say whatever you feel comfortable saying in public. Choosing not to say things on your blog is not a betrayal of the medium; it is a sign of sanity, in the same way that choosing not to yell things out on the street is a sign of sanity.

If there are feelings deep in your soul that you absolutely have to express, but that you can't risk expressing in public, then by all means, find some way to express them. But a public web page, readable and searchable by all the world, with your name attached to it, is probably not the way you want.

(Everybody knows this, I realize. But still, it seems weirdly easy to forget at times.) _
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02:28:02 PM, Monday 24 February 2003

There are now three pictures up from France, with more to follow later when I upload the ones from my digital camera. (These ones were taken by a friend of Julia's.) _
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01:32:24 PM, Monday 24 February 2003

So yeah, blogging may be kinda light for the next week. I'll be in France. _
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07:42:31 AM, Saturday 15 February 2003

All packed. Ready to go. At 3:20 this afternoon, I'll get on a plane. At about 12:15 pm tomorrow... oh... then I will see her. _
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07:41:55 AM, Saturday 15 February 2003

I've seen plenty liberals who support the war with Iraq, but I think this is the first time I've seen a revolutionary communist support it. _
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07:30:36 PM, Friday 14 February 2003

Say, have I gone on at length yet about how fast, easy, and efficient AT&T customer service is, about how reliable I find their long distance to be, about what a pleasure it is just to be one of their customers, and about how I'd recommend them to absolutely everyone?

No?

Well, there's a reason for that.

Still, it seems to have ended happily enough, and the support guy was certainly friendly and helpful when I finally got to talk to him. _
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06:23:36 PM, Friday 14 February 2003

Though I suppose that is kind of the theological equivalent of "I think you can find that in Knuth". _
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04:29:26 PM, Friday 14 February 2003

I'm... not really sure I'm going to get anything done today. _
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02:39:22 PM, Friday 14 February 2003

DeadJournal.
Badvogato [cached].
Any other sites with evil twins? _
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01:33:22 PM, Friday 14 February 2003

This just in: rich foreign lunatic responsible for Stonehenge.

[via Warren Ellis] _
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06:38:03 PM, Thursday 13 February 2003

When the great mysteries of the world are explained rationally, it only makes them more beautiful. _
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06:23:15 PM, Thursday 13 February 2003

God, now I'm once again tempted to switch to MT. Things that are holding me up: interface is a bit heavier than I'd prefer; not sure I could get solid enough wiki integration; pride. Les Orchard seems to have shown that pretty thorough integration between weblog and wiki is possible. XML-RPC could be used to make a very lightweight web interface for blogging. Pride is a sin.

God... it'd be so much less to think about. And I'd be able to go back to doing small incremental hacks, rather than designing one big system, which is really such a nicer way to do it. Hmm... maybe I should. _
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02:51:26 PM, Thursday 13 February 2003

Stand up and take it like a vertebrate! _
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12:48:30 PM, Thursday 13 February 2003

Okay, I'd already been meaning to read that before, but now... _
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12:28:51 PM, Thursday 13 February 2003

New York Times: "House and Senate negotiators have agreed that a Pentagon project intended to detect terrorists by monitoring Internet e-mail and commercial databases for health, financial and travel information cannot be used against Americans."

[via Tom Tomorrow] _
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06:55:02 PM, Wednesday 12 February 2003

AKMA: "I�ll demur at the theology, but I warmly approve of the typefaces"

Often enough, this is a fair summary of my own opinions about Anthroposophy. _
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06:31:29 PM, Wednesday 12 February 2003

I like this article mostly for the idea it implicitly presents, of using theft of hotel towels as a sort of baseline measure of insignificant lawlessness. One imagines this whole scale of badness, with, say, mp3 trading and speeding towards the bottom, towel theft and insurance fraud a little higher up, armed robbery higher still, and then genocide and such up around the top. _
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06:28:36 PM, Wednesday 12 February 2003

"A graffiti-covered carwash in south Santa Rosa is the focal point of a battle between the city and the property owner, who calls the city's cleanup efforts heavy-handed and anti-business."

Interesting story. At first I reacted viscerally against this kind of government interference in what seems like a purely private affair. After reading the article, it's easier for me to see why the city would have an interest in having the graffiti cleaned up, but it still seems heavy-handed at best. Also note that, for all his outrage, Menconi's suggestion for how the city should have behaved sounds entirely reasonable. Casey just sounds hysterical. _
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05:57:14 PM, Wednesday 12 February 2003

adding items to my LiveJournal Interests list

gilgamesh, taking long walks in the rain, legos, debugging, unix, balloons, go, the transcendental unity of apperception, cookies _
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03:45:11 PM, Wednesday 12 February 2003

Jason Kottke and David Sifry are finding interesting things on the web by using math. _
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02:52:21 PM, Wednesday 12 February 2003

"I agree, by using this code, never to bug author with any questions, comments, thanks or support-related issues after TWO months of release date when said author has moved on to other more interesting things to work on." _
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07:56:50 PM, Tuesday 11 February 2003

"My fellow Australians and I have been conned," I thought to myself. A fridge magnet is a durable plasticized rectangle with a magnetized rear surface to ensure that it sits flush on the enamel freezer compartment door. _
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06:45:28 PM, Tuesday 11 February 2003

Grr. Argh. _
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06:27:55 PM, Tuesday 11 February 2003

Hmm... is it that... it only works when it's run locally? _
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06:23:30 PM, Tuesday 11 February 2003

How to Not Get a Good Night�s Sleep, on She's Actual Size. Lots of useful advice on how to abuse your body horribly and make it function on far too little sleep. I haven't tried all of these, but I can vouch for the ones that I have tried. (I'd add that there are also circumstances in which coffee can be used well. But it's definitely a tradeoff.) _
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06:03:58 PM, Tuesday 11 February 2003

"All the blood is drained out of democracy -- it dies -- when only half the population votes. I would use the vote. It would seem to me that people who have been made afraid, if you don't like what's happening, if you don't want to go to war, if you don't want to be broke, well for God's sake don't go out and vote for the very bastards who are putting you there."

An interview with Hunter S. Thompson is enough to make even me read Salon. _
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07:54:36 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

'fun' size _
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06:48:07 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

On IBM developerWorks, there's what looks to be quite a nice series of three articles [2, 3] about PyXPCOM, the Python language binding for the Mozilla platform. _
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03:35:20 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

This is just wonderful. It makes me happy. _
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01:39:58 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

Frustratingly, Net News Wire has been crashing when I use it to post to my bloglet. I've downloaded the latest beta to see if it's fixed there.

Update: It is fixed. _
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01:37:53 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

Gandalf. Tea. Wednesday. _
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01:06:26 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

Hmm... bloglet's archive page rollovers are getting to annoy me more and more. Not sure what I could do about them, though, short of finishing Wobble. And God knows we couldn't have that, now, could we? _
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01:03:34 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

The quote of the day is from a comment on Jason Kottke's post "Weblogs and power laws". Matt Webb said: "The sad truth is I'm a bad man and my internal definition of 'scarce' would probably get me beaten to death with sticks by economists." _
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01:02:07 PM, Monday 10 February 2003

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