jmoiron.net

I have been programming in Python for quite some time now, and I've been doing it professionally for over 2 years. Despite this, I am not nearly as proficient at the language as I could be, probably because I am using it professionally and have to devote time I could be using learning the language to solving problems.

read the rest of "Pythonicism"

read the rest of "A Tale of Two Sausages"

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)"