jmoiron.net

I am taking a class in Quantitative Software Engineering. It's a discipline that likes to throw around all these numbers, but is mostly posturing as something more defined and understood than it really is. The professor is smart and encouraging and I like to write on the discussion boards.

read the rest of "The formality of formal software engineering"

Checking in from rural Virginia, USA, traveling at about 60 miles per hour on some country road somewhere. Someday in the future, you can do this too in your Volkswagen, and I would have retired to Okinawa.

read the rest of "60 miles per hour"

I think I've done this before.

read the rest of "Round in circles"

Glenn Greenwald, whose writing is better than mine is and will likely ever be, put into words quite succinctly the major problem with media in the united states in a column today. As is all too often, Chomsky's propaganda model is at least peripherally relevant to the discussion, and in fact (as elegant as a logically flawless mathematical theorem) is but a superset of the specific observed behavior.

read the rest of "Mind Travel"

I just came off a day at work, a week at work, that was legendary in frustration and triumph. I'm pretty sure that most of the details of what I struggled through, heroically, are confidential at worst and tangential to an NDA at best, so I'll gloss over things in generic but jargon laden terms.

read the rest of "Consistency"

Went to the/a doctor today. From what she told me, my lower abdominal pain and other symptoms can be one of 4 possibilities:

read the rest of "Jaystorm"

read the rest of "Pepsi Ice Cucumber"

Sitting in my 6-tatami room in the Daiya Ryokan in Kyoto. For the uninitiated, a tatami is a small woven mat; kind of like a rug made out of straw. You cover the floor with tatami panels which are about 3 feet by 6 feet, and however many you can fit in the room, that's how big it is. Most rooms are made purposefully to dimensions that allow maximum tatami coverage.

read the rest of "京都 (Kyoto)"

John McCain's 2000 campaign for president was nicknamed the "Straight Talk Express." The theory was that he was going to give people what everyone assumes they might want: a politician that speaks frankly and truthfully about the government. He failed to do so in 2000 and lost his parties nomination. He's running again in 2008, and again he's failing spectacularly to live up to his campaigns moniker. It was kind of to be expected, since he was a politician, but still it's still a sorry reflection on our political climate. Even a terrible ordeal in a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp couldn't persuade someone to be honest to their constituents.

read the rest of "Straight Talk Express"

I have something in the works about the recent political "debates" on (MS)NBC. It's about Gravel and Kucinich and how both of them kinda get it and kinda don't. It's about how scary it is that seemingly smart people in the so called liberal party have to appear hawkish in order to be popular. It's about the ridiculous worship of Ronald Reagan, and how 9 of 10 Republican nominees outright disapprove of allowing abortions at all and 3 of 10 don't "believe" in evolution. It's about how ridiculous it is that questions about evolution are even posed like that in this country; as if evolution or science in general is something that is to be believed and not understood, this really frightening push (from both directions) to appear to take things more on faith than reason.

read the rest of "Technical difficulties"