Microblog '21

Microblog posts from 2021. Newest posts are on top. Back to this year

Thursday, December 30, 2021 at 03:30:48 PM (EST)

Reject modernity, embrace Mendelssohn

Wednesday, December 29, 2021 at 04:22:48 PM (EST)

Eventually, we won't be able to trust Wikipedia to even provide accurate information about math.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021 at 02:00:53 PM (EST)

Being a Christian is the most rational thing I could possibly do, by a wide, wide margin.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021 at 01:54:02 PM (EST)

Progressives are starting to realize they have no morals (they stole theirs from Christianity and then mutated them for their own perverse ends). By their marked embrace of authoritarianism, it would seem they are enjoying this realization.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021 at 12:16:48 PM (EST)

Often, Christians praying is the equivalent of progressives voting.

Tuesday, December 28, 2021 at 03:57:20 PM (EST)

No memory corruption issues since the 32GB of new RAM, M.2 cooler, and third 120mm cooling fan. knocks on nearest wooden object

Tuesday, December 28, 2021 at 02:39:53 PM (EST)

Man, it's just crazy how many wrong things we all believe.

Monday, December 27, 2021 at 04:16:07 PM (EST)

Here I sit, in rapidly declining East Berlin, thinking to myself... I'm not gonna make it, am I.

Monday, December 27, 2021 at 12:44:45 PM (EST)

The hardest part about deciding what to do next is figuring out what excites me. Nothing does, really.

Sunday, December 26, 2021 at 02:48:05 PM (EST)

Lazy Sunday afternoon activity: synchronizing terminal colors and hardware RGB colors based on a scheme derived from the current randomly-chosen wallpaper (thanks wal and openrgb)

Thursday, December 23, 2021 at 02:30:25 PM (EST)

Sometimes I get optimistic about the future, and other times I visit the web site of some department of the PA government

Thursday, December 23, 2021 at 12:43:36 PM (EST)

I'll never be a productive person. But, I wonder if I can trick computers into being productive for me?

Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 02:14:44 PM (EST)

Aaaand it already exists.

Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 01:38:40 PM (EST)

A handful of strawberries at the local gas station cost more than a candy bar. Inflation is not just theft, it's also murder. (A bit of a stretch, okay. But you get the idea.)

Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 01:34:56 PM (EST)

I can't shake the feeling that instead of learning Pelican, I should have just been learning Make. Publishing this static website is essentially the same as building a source tree, after all.

Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 12:07:12 PM (EST)

Sad to see that Openbox hasn't really been maintained, aside from some patches by various distros, since 2015. It's still my favorite window manager.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021 at 04:32:08 PM (EST)

It's possible I did have covid, in fact it's quite likely since I've been exposed to hundreds of customers every weekend for the past couple of years. But during that time I have never had anything worse than a minor sore throat or cough.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021 at 04:30:37 PM (EST)

But seriously, my secret is threefold: One, fast daily (Skip breakfast). Two, generally try to avoid sugar and starchy carbs though you don't have to be 100% on that, I've been more like 50%. Three, take 1000mg vitamin C, 50mg zinc, and 5000IU vitamin D w/ K2 daily (with a fatty meal).

Tuesday, December 21, 2021 at 04:25:56 PM (EST)

At this point I'm one of the only people I know who hasn't had covid. My secret: Never get tested for it.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021 at 12:06:08 PM (EST)

My Amazon history is a pretty good record of all the projects I haven't completed.

Friday, December 17, 2021 at 10:41:19 PM (EST)

What the heck ever happened to man pages? Seems like no one inclues them any more

Friday, December 17, 2021 at 10:22:15 PM (EST)

Phones have ruined computers.

Thursday, December 16, 2021 at 11:16:40 PM (EST)

Christ is the solution to the paradox of God being the highest justice and the highest mercy. He is also therefore the solution to the paradox of right vs left.

Thursday, December 16, 2021 at 11:23:50 AM (EST)

When you look around you and realize that you ended up in hell, you will know full well that you're the one who decided to go there.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 03:27:07 PM (EST)

I hereby vow to never again accept the task of recommending a computer to anyone. Never has anyone, other than myself, appreciated my recommendation. (My recommendation: Use either Linux or a pencil and paper)

Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 01:34:40 PM (EST)

It's not that I hate computers. It's just that I hate the people who program them. And the people who use them without bothering to understand them.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021 at 11:58:58 AM (EST)

The government must never try to prop up unsound health situations; it must never lock down or require masks or vaccines to control a pandemic. Doing this will simply prolong the agony and convert a sharp and quick immunity acquisition phase into a lingering and chronic disease.
-Murray Rothbard if he was alive today, probably.

Monday, December 13, 2021 at 10:35:12 AM (EST)

It's amazing how quickly any thoughts of the form "I should stop eating grains" go out the window when someone brings donuts in to the office.

Saturday, December 11, 2021 at 09:06:41 PM (EST)

I bet all those poor tornado victims in Kentucky wish they were vaccinated now

Saturday, December 11, 2021 at 01:58:43 AM (EST)

Don't put dielectric grease on your well pressure switch contacts if they're arcing. It will make it much, much worse. Thanks for tuning in for another homesteading tip.

Friday, December 10, 2021 at 12:34:43 PM (EST)

Note to future self: virtualenv is your friend.

Friday, December 10, 2021 at 11:28:07 AM (EST)

I could probably make a full-time business out of fixing people's botched SPF entries

Thursday, December 09, 2021 at 03:16:19 PM (EST)

Apparently I am such a gosh darn introvert that I get an adrenaline rush and nearly go into shock just from interacting with someone on Twitter

Wednesday, December 08, 2021 at 04:01:28 PM (EST)

Of course I'm going to drop the ball if you don't tell me why you're throwing it at me

Wednesday, December 08, 2021 at 12:00:24 PM (EST)

After messing around in my PC's bios, it would seem that the memory corruption issues were due to the memory being underclocked, oddly enough. No issues in over a week, at least.

Monday, December 06, 2021 at 12:01:02 PM (EST)

PHP obfuscation is theft

Sunday, December 05, 2021 at 08:53:55 PM (EST)

Hmm, very interesting... by OCing my memory, I increased my RandomX mining speed by the equivalent of about .0001 XMR/day.

Friday, December 03, 2021 at 04:01:16 PM (EST)

Just had a realization: As much as I love hot coffee, when it comes to cold brew, I greatly prefer unsweetened black iced tea to coffee. Weird.

Friday, December 03, 2021 at 12:25:52 PM (EST)

(Also, the thing I enjoyed the most was doing absolutely nothing)

Friday, December 03, 2021 at 12:17:32 PM (EST)

My big downfall might have been that I enjoyed too many things, and therefore never got good at any of them. I guess if that's true, I have no chance of fixing it.

Friday, December 03, 2021 at 10:48:12 AM (EST)

I failed the first half of my life. I wish I knew why, so that I might have a shot at succeeding in the second half.

Thursday, December 02, 2021 at 11:13:25 AM (EST)

They will know we are Christians by our Twitter bios

Thursday, December 02, 2021 at 10:38:48 AM (EST)

Apparently, re-writing my 'bio' is a full time job at this point. I should at least offer myself some employment benefits.

Thursday, December 02, 2021 at 10:28:37 AM (EST)

How can I bring glory to God if I'm not comfortable with who he's made me to be? Maybe I just don't understand who he's made me to be. The next few months might be my last opportunity to figure that out.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021 at 09:32:23 PM (EST)

The intro to Spain always gives me chills, every time. The Rhodes is such a sublime instrument, and no one brings it to life like Chick.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021 at 09:29:04 PM (EST)

Currently mining Monero, ripping a Return to Forever record, browsing the web, and sipping egg nog. Life is ok sometimes.

Wednesday, December 01, 2021 at 03:24:00 PM (EST)

How many times have you said to yourself in the last couple of years, "Ok they're definitely just messing with us now"?

Tuesday, November 30, 2021 at 07:15:32 PM (EST)

Either this McDonalds decaf k-cup is actually decent or there's something dreadfully wrong with me

Tuesday, November 30, 2021 at 10:59:31 AM (EST)

So you want to build a brewery? I hope you like making spreadsheets to figure out how many times your customers pee in a day.

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 10:38:23 PM (EST)

I sort of tongue-in-cheek complain about learning ReactJS, but it's actually a natural thing to learn to brush up my coding skills a bit. After the tangled jQuery mess that Multistream ended up being (though hey, it works), React seems relatively straightforward. Maybe these young whipper-snappers and their OOP have something going for them after all.

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 09:07:50 PM (EST)

Been really fighting a lot of memory corruption lately, must be time to get new memory (maybe this time with a built in cooler)

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 09:03:52 PM (EST)

AAAAAND after reinstalling Awk because of a memory corruption issue and getting my system completely updated maybe now I can microblog?

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 08:18:12 PM (EST)

LOL and now I can't even microblog without downgrading, because I'm using Less (part of Node)

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 08:15:42 PM (EST)

Come on Arch, all I want to do is set up a local NodeJS dev environment, do I really need to update my entire system? (Yes.)

Monday, November 29, 2021 at 03:44:44 PM (EST)

I don't really know what to do next.

Sunday, November 28, 2021 at 11:06:17 PM (EST)

Why do dudes just build cabins instead of going to therapy? I guess because building cabins works. (In my case, the cabin is also a brewery.)

Sunday, November 28, 2021 at 10:32:28 PM (EST)

If I'm lucky, I'll be around for about thirty three thousand days. I wonder why I haven't used a single one of them to do anything meaningful.

Sunday, November 28, 2021 at 10:29:56 PM (EST)

I like my dogs. When interacting with them, they don't secretly judge me. Nor am I secretly trying to gain status with them or one-up them in any way.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021 at 10:15:22 AM (EST)

Now no Starlink in our area until mid 2022. Sigh.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021 at 10:09:15 AM (EST)

The "lizard people" conspiracy theory keeps getting more plausible every day.

Tuesday, November 23, 2021 at 05:15:56 PM (EST)

Slowly, I'm starting to realize that someone is going to have to go back in time and take the sports almanac from Biff Tannen

Tuesday, November 23, 2021 at 10:32:56 AM (EST)

I swear the PROs (ASCAP/BMI/SESAC) make their reporting process time consuming and tedious just to add insult to tyrannical injury

Tuesday, November 23, 2021 at 10:28:46 AM (EST)

Performance Rights Organizations are Theft (yes, I'm filing their tedious quarterly reports right now, in case you were wondering)

Monday, November 22, 2021 at 10:25:03 PM (EST)

Me, in 2021, remebering how fun it was to make C64 games, now trying to learn ReactJS: "How did we go so very wrong?"

Monday, November 22, 2021 at 09:07:08 PM (EST)

The most terrifying prospect that accompanies applying for a new job is that of actually being hired.

Monday, November 22, 2021 at 08:10:53 PM (EST)

INTPs Unite! And by that I mean, write about uniting on your blog that you hope no one else reads.

Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 03:32:37 PM (EST)

"SpaceHey" is so gloriously Web 1.5. I'm actually kind of tempted to use it.

Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 02:01:11 PM (EST)

$5 afternoon cold brew was a mistake that I don't regret

Tuesday, November 16, 2021 at 03:38:29 PM (EST)

It's so easy to say the things that enter my head when no one's around.

Monday, November 15, 2021 at 11:18:21 AM (EST)

Not sure if lying about religious beliefs to keep my job is against my religion

Friday, November 12, 2021 at 04:10:28 PM (EST)

It's odd to me that since everyone has reasonably fast computers in their pockets now, companies are slowly replacing open standards like the web with closed Java and Swift fat clients.

Thursday, November 11, 2021 at 04:01:47 PM (EST)

Infinite scrolling is theft

Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 02:13:11 PM (EST)

You know, we were making pretty good progress in this country before the progressives took over.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 02:02:52 PM (EST)

I've got a great idea. Rather than anarchy, which would clearly lead to the possible rise of mobs who would require dues (which they determine) in exchange for their "protection", we should instead have 3 layers of government bureacracy which each require unfathomably complicated paperwork and a percentage of our incomes (which they determine), a percentage of our sales revenue (which they determine), fees based on a percentage of the money we pay our employees (which they determine), and fees based on the volume of the ethanol we manufacture (which they determine), in exchange for their "protection".

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 at 04:28:35 PM (EST)

Looking through error logs for a Java application is like trying to find a wrong note in a Schoenberg piece

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 at 10:28:31 AM (EST)

That's not to say the Linux desktop can't be flashy, in fact Win 10 was just a step closer to looking like Linux looked for the previous 10 years. And Win 11 just looks like KDE has looked for the last 5. But still, give me good ol' Openbox any day, and let me use my computer for what I want rather than just being a member of the great global Windows Update botnet.

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 at 10:26:17 AM (EST)

One of the big criticisms of f/oss projects is also one of their greatest strengths: i.e., that they develop slowly. I'd much rather have a desktop environment that looks like it's from the 90s but works well, than a flashy "modern" environment that's full of security holes and needless bloat.

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 at 10:16:00 AM (EST)

Also, storing critical settings in a database is always a bad idea.

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 at 10:14:50 AM (EST)

As is common with f/oss projects, Wordpress became popular because it was built using f/oss methodology and became garbage when non-f/oss interests became dominant

Tuesday, November 09, 2021 at 10:13:03 AM (EST)

RT @me The Wordpress plugin ecosystem is theft

Friday, November 05, 2021 at 03:47:59 PM (EDT)

That may seem like an uninteresting observation, I'm sure many people think that way... but what's a bit disturbing is when I notice that both realities are continuing to evolve independently, and one will eventually consume the other.

Friday, November 05, 2021 at 03:44:42 PM (EDT)

Sometimes I have to live in two different realities, one where I'm happy and content and another where I'm not -- and while in one I pretend the other doesn't exist.

Friday, November 05, 2021 at 02:58:53 PM (EDT)

Never give up on the pursuit of humility, because your Father in heaven is humble.

Friday, November 05, 2021 at 10:40:11 AM (EDT)

Upon further reflection, the Turing machine is redundant, because God has at least all the features of a Turing machine. So he need not rely on an external processor, he can do the work himself. In fact, a perfectly loving God would go about it no other way.

Friday, November 05, 2021 at 10:30:26 AM (EDT)

My mental model for how the universe works is now as follows: God sits at a typewriter with an infinitely long stack of paper. He types nothing but ones and zeroes, and fills each page with an unfathomable number of digits. He then feeds each page into the most simple Turing machine possible, and each time the machine processes a page we observe that as our time dimension advancing by one Planck unit. He then uses the results generated by the Turing machine to begin composing the next page, in an endlessly iterative process. It might take God weeks or months or centuries in his own time dimension to write each page, and it might take the machine a similar amount of time to process them, but because every quanta of our brains are contained in the data on the pages, we can only observe the rapid advancing of the pages, not the careful and lengthy consideration involved in their composition. Interestingly, this model for the universe simulator is equally as scientifically valid as any other that's been proposed.

Thursday, November 04, 2021 at 04:13:22 PM (EDT)

Quantization creates dimensions.

Thursday, November 04, 2021 at 04:08:35 PM (EDT)

If time in this universe is quantized, then there is an infinitie amount of time available to God in between each moment. Perhaps that's when he fiddles with the knobs to steer the ship.

Thursday, November 04, 2021 at 04:02:48 PM (EDT)

Advertising that pushes woke nonsense is like spyware for your brain

Thursday, November 04, 2021 at 01:45:23 PM (EDT)

Smells that trigger memories: The occasional whiff of freshly opened PC hardware that reminds me of the college computer lab where I learned to program in Pascal on a DEC mainframe in 8th grade. Same lab where I later played Duke Nukem 3D in high school, and where I printed out half-hearted research papers in college.

Thursday, November 04, 2021 at 11:47:23 AM (EDT)

Today I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices cried out in rage and quickly reorganized into small companies of 99 employees.

Wednesday, November 03, 2021 at 11:14:15 AM (EDT)

A few thoughts for today. I shouldn't be so angry, and instead should use this space to share cool stuff I like. Currently, I'm reading about writing code for the NES. Also, I never really thought about making videos and/or blog posts as a way to find other like-minded individuals. But how else are liberty-minded people (and Linux nerds, and outdoor enthusiasts, and whatever other categories I belong to) going to find each other? I certainly don't know any in real life. Maybe that just says something about my inability to make friends.

Tuesday, November 02, 2021 at 03:15:22 PM (EDT)

I'm fairly certain at this point that any ambition I have left to start my own business has been sufficiently squashed from existence by not just Uncle Sam (as you'd expect), but also general disappointment in and frustration with the average consumer.

Tuesday, November 02, 2021 at 03:08:43 PM (EDT)

Oh you like Brandon too? Yeah I'm a pretty big fan as well.

Tuesday, November 02, 2021 at 12:51:58 PM (EDT)

"Bureauocracy" is a word that is actually impossible to spell.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 04:34:10 PM (EDT)

I can finally say that I'm vaccinated! Against Cat Scratch Disease. Thanks, little angry stray kitty who chomped the heck out of my hand yesterday, you're helping me do my part.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 04:27:21 PM (EDT)

What the heck happened to Slashdot? It's been a long time and I considered adding it back in to my "checkin' the news" rotation, but 10/10 articles on the front page are from major news sites. Do not want. At least HN is still mostly more obscure and interesting (and maybe even truthful) material. (I will admit, Principal Skinner meme possibly applies here.)

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 04:11:00 PM (EDT)

A.k.a. the SDN Defense

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 04:10:20 PM (EDT)

Me if anyone ever refutes any of my ideas: "Oh I don't know, I'm just some dumb nerd on the internet"

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:38:10 PM (EDT)

And God is just the dude who loves us enough to keep hitting the equals button for the rest of eternity.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:36:00 PM (EDT)

OR it is a calculator that constantly takes the previous result of the iterative version of the wave equation, and plugs it back into the equation, at steady increments of Planck's interval, starting from some seed (the singularity).

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:33:43 PM (EDT)

Time is just a calculator that constantly plugs numbers into the time-dependent version of the wave equation, at steady increments of Planck's interval.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:27:39 PM (EDT)

The simulation argument implies that something is doing the simulating.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:23:41 PM (EDT)

Once again it comes back to Chesterton. There are no 'laws of nature' in the causal sense, only in the descriptive sense. Math can tell us what is possible, but not what is actual. It can help us predict the future, but it cannot bring the future into being.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:19:07 PM (EDT)

I guess what I mean is, is it just a coincidence that the wave function is continuous? Is nature fundamentally continuous or iterative? Math is a language and should be able to describe nature, but that doesn't give math causality. I.e., just because we can describe a particle using a time-dependent continuous equation, doesn't mean the particle is caused by a continuous process.

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 03:01:28 PM (EDT)

But hey, Einstein was a patent clerk, and I don't even believe in patents, so I've already got a leg up, right?

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 02:58:04 PM (EDT)

Clearly, thinking about chaos emerging from iteration of complex formulas has got me, a hippie who flunked out of t-ball, attempting to take the plate in the major leagues...

Monday, November 01, 2021 at 02:55:01 PM (EDT)

Because time is quantized, I wonder if Schrödinger's equation can be written in terms of iteration rather than as a continuous function?

Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 03:12:39 PM (EDT)

Lessons learned today: wear gloves when taming kittens, your firewood must be dry, and keeping a weekly schedule is helpful for avoiding small-business burnout.

Sunday, October 31, 2021 at 03:08:54 PM (EDT)

Nothing's changed, yet. Heating up a slice of frozen pizza though, so I've got that going for me.

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 04:14:14 PM (EDT)

Being treated like a child over and over eventually wears down even a relatively patient person, as it turns out.

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 04:11:32 PM (EDT)

I've thought about quitting before, and even tried once and regretted it. This time though there might be staying power with that feeling.

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 04:05:47 PM (EDT)

That might have been the last straw. Possibly. I will have to revisit this microblog entry at a future date, with an update as to whether or not it really was.

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 03:22:23 PM (EDT)

Can't be cancelled if you were never on the air to begin with thinking guy meme

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 01:19:38 PM (EDT)

Actually maybe I'll just completely ignore any and all such requests from now on unless from a family member

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 01:11:17 PM (EDT)

I think my policy from now on will be, when someone asks me to do something, I will defer any sort of reply or reaction until after I'm done being pissed about it... whether or not I actually decide to comply with the request.

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 12:16:09 PM (EDT)

"If I am hired at ${organization}, I promise to do at most the very minimum required to retain employment."

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 11:20:25 AM (EDT)

Browser fingerprinting is theft

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 11:15:24 AM (EDT)

Can we go back to the days of typing rofl rather than reacting with some dumb emoji

Friday, October 29, 2021 at 10:04:12 AM (EDT)

I don't want to live forever. Just long enough to see the end of all governments and violent democracies, and the global flourishing of free markets and peace. Small ask, I know.

Thursday, October 28, 2021 at 12:51:22 PM (EDT)

I can't even imagine the psycological damage the fearmongering about this idiotic virus has done to folks with obsessive-compulsive disorder

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 04:40:11 PM (EDT)

The hardest thing I will ever do is stop working for someone I respect

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 04:20:55 PM (EDT)

If you go for long enough without a Sabbath, your body begins to cry out for one.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 03:25:41 PM (EDT)

It's one of those days when I'm so bored that I'm looking through old web browser bookmarks to see if the sites still exist

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 02:24:35 PM (EDT)

Oh wait, actually that's easy. I documented my first all-Arch machine here.

Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 02:23:03 PM (EDT)

I wonder how I might go about figuring out how long I've been using Arch Linux?

Tuesday, October 26, 2021 at 04:30:42 PM (EDT)

There are times -- and the frequency is increasing -- when I'd be willing to give up everything I own and live out of the back of a pickup truck if it meant I didn't have to deal with taxes or regulations any more. I guess I'd rather be free than rich.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021 at 11:59:25 AM (EDT)

All it took for me to (re)delete my Twitter account was seeing that someone I know is on there

Monday, October 25, 2021 at 09:57:14 AM (EDT)

I have to wonder if the Fed & it's budies are intentionally trying to create a crash and it's just not working because capitalism is more powerful than their centralized/socialized efforts

Friday, October 22, 2021 at 04:03:40 PM (EDT)

I'm just kidding, obviously the left is wrong

Friday, October 22, 2021 at 03:51:32 PM (EDT)

What if both the left and the right are equally correct? What if we're not witnessing a division, but a bifurcation?

Friday, October 22, 2021 at 01:23:17 PM (EDT)

Every once in a while I accidentally stumble across a real human being on Twitter, and jarringly think to myself, "wait, what am I doing on this site again?"

Friday, October 22, 2021 at 10:06:45 AM (EDT)

A great way to make me ignore your email is to mark it as "important"

Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 03:45:34 PM (EDT)

Today I joined the highly exclusive "Double Chainsaw Owners" club.

Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 03:43:42 PM (EDT)

Quality > Equality

Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 03:34:33 PM (EDT)

You know who isn't experiencing supply chain issues? The Amish.

Thursday, October 21, 2021 at 02:09:29 PM (EDT)

No, 3rd party support company for a software package, it would not be hard to give you remote access to our SQL databases. However, in this particular moment there's nothing in the world that I would hate doing more.

Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 12:27:58 AM (EDT)

Spent some time reminiscing tonight by looking back at the KBMOD timeline on Twitter. Reminds me of a time when I wasn't so wrapped up in current events and was just having fun. Now it seems I have no choice but to keep tabs on the dominoes as they fall in the west.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021 at 03:55:50 PM (EDT)

RE: "Are black holes shaped like the Mandlebrot set?" Of course not, because the Mandlebrot set only exists in parameter space. What might be shaped like the Mandlebrot set, therefore, is a graph of all possible black holes. Perhaps, then, event horizons are shaped like Julia sets?

Friday, October 15, 2021 at 11:58:07 AM (EDT)

The cage was built long ago. Only now are we starting to see the bars... and what's beyond them.

Friday, October 15, 2021 at 09:06:31 AM (EDT)

It's not that I'm not a morning person, I actually like the mornings... it's moreso that I would rather my downtime every day be in the morning, and work productively in the evening. I think that's why I don't ever get anything meaningful done at work. Well, that and because my work isn't particularly meaningful.

Friday, October 15, 2021 at 12:42:55 AM (EDT)

Most people have absolutely no idea the lengths small businesses go to in an effort to stay afloat.

Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 03:50:57 PM (EDT)

Performance rights organizations are theft

Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 01:47:19 PM (EDT)

Statists: "But who would build the roads?" Jeepertarians: "Roads?"

Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 11:39:56 AM (EDT)

Why would a search engine that's supposed to be focused on privacy block you if you access it via a VPN? (StartPage does this, and is therefore stupid)

Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 04:49:24 PM (EDT)

Sometimes the biggest enemy of success is too much of it

Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 04:07:23 PM (EDT)

It seems like every so many years I need to just start over, going a totally new direction. If I'm lucky, I'll start from a point that escapes the event horizon. If I'm not (and I'm usually not), I get trapped chaotically iterating about the origin.

Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 03:55:41 PM (EDT)

Follow up question: Are black holes shaped like the Mandlebrot set?

Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 03:40:04 PM (EDT)

It seems as though wherever there is iteration, there are fractals lurking. Our universe is iterative by nature. Is that why we see so many fractals in nature?

Friday, October 08, 2021 at 11:15:49 AM (EDT)

Twitter seems like it's mostly narcissists, but that makes it really meaningful when I notice that there are normal people who aren't constantly clamoring for attention on there too.

Friday, October 08, 2021 at 10:47:01 AM (EDT)

Perhaps if I decide to tweet more, I'll use this page as a scratchpad of sorts... to keep track of thoughts that I'd like to put out into the world after they fester in my mind for a while. And by "the world" I mean my 3 followers.

Thursday, October 07, 2021 at 11:17:11 AM (EDT)

It feels like the great arc of history is actually more of a logistic map bifurcation diagram.

Thursday, October 07, 2021 at 10:27:50 AM (EDT)

What the CCP and Russian governments don't realize is that if they succeed in dividing up the US, the west will only prosper. Well, the portions of it that remain in or return to freedom.

Wednesday, October 06, 2021 at 03:12:15 PM (EDT)

It's not about left vs. right... nor is it about autoritarianism vs liberalism/libertarianism. It is about violence vs peace.

Tuesday, October 05, 2021 at 04:46:42 PM (EDT)

Being on the right side of history isn't all that great when history will keep happening after I'm dead

Tuesday, October 05, 2021 at 04:02:05 PM (EDT)

As a ---P, the hardest part about making a decision is making a decision

Tuesday, October 05, 2021 at 11:04:40 AM (EDT)

Putting a bookmark in my GPS app for an Amish store just seems wrong

Tuesday, October 05, 2021 at 08:27:34 AM (EDT)

I wonder if I can unregister to vote

Tuesday, October 05, 2021 at 08:20:32 AM (EDT)

Why I shouldn't be trusted with things, reason number 29948: sometimes I'm so absent minded I run the coffe pot without actually putting any grounds in it

Monday, October 04, 2021 at 10:20:00 PM (EDT)

Maybe all these libertarian and anarchist influencers really are Russian and Chinese assets after all? Because splitting up the country sure would be good for Russia and China. But hey, if it means we'll stop killing kids with drones, I'll allow it.

Monday, October 04, 2021 at 04:39:13 PM (EDT)

Apparently Facebook, Instagram, and Gmail have been totally or partially down all day? I hadn't even noticed. smirk

Monday, October 04, 2021 at 01:16:04 PM (EDT)

If covid-19 doesn't kill me, the internalized anger from everyone's insane reaction to it will likely give me a heart attack

Monday, October 04, 2021 at 12:43:24 PM (EDT)

Sometimes I just need to see my dogs. Even if it means going all the way home at lunch time. They remind me of God's goodness when nothing else in the world does.

Monday, October 04, 2021 at 10:39:25 AM (EDT)

"The Fed ruins everything" is not an exaggeration. Literally everything suffers when the money is poison.

Monday, October 04, 2021 at 08:03:04 AM (EDT)

Am I carrying my cross, or just a big rock?

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 04:52:17 PM (EDT)

Me, starting work at 7am every morning: "ok, only 9.5 hours left in the day, then I can go home."

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 04:31:46 PM (EDT)

Started sitting at my desk instead of standing. I guess I'm just getting tired these days. Tired of work, tired of politics, tired of stress, tired of taxes & regulation... tired, tired, tired.

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 04:25:20 PM (EDT)

My new hobby: following about 70-80 accounts on Twitter then deleting my account, and repeating about every 3 months.

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 09:50:54 AM (EDT)

Currently crowdfunding a study on the long term effects of the PTSD caused by mailing list subscription form pop-ups

Wednesday, September 29, 2021 at 09:46:09 AM (EDT)

I remember the days when I used to watch the latest Zelda game trailer dozens of times looking for clues about this new world I would soon be exploring.

Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 12:25:07 PM (EDT)

Saw a super riced-out, jacked up, noisy 24-valve at the gas station at lunch time. In no universe would I trade my trusty old stock 12-valve for a truck like that.

Monday, September 27, 2021 at 09:16:04 PM (EDT)

If I have kids someday, let it be known to them that the world was a pretty great place and I lived a happy life for a good handful of years before the communists won and killed off all the Christians and real libertarians. I was engaged to a beautiful redhead (your mother), we had a quiet old farmhouse in the country, I had a cool Jeep that I would drive around with the top down on nice clear days back when the sun used to shine, and I even had a noisy old 3/4 ton diesel pickup truck (a 12 valve Cummins, one of the best) before they outlawed them. We had two super cute wiener dogs, worked our butts off on two successful businesses -- I was part owner of a brewery, how cool is that? And I got to sit in on guitar (an old Gibson semi-hollowbody!) with the bands who played there sometimes. Other than not preparing well enough for the impending end of the world, I had very few regrets in the grand scheme of things.

Monday, September 27, 2021 at 05:35:23 PM (EDT)

It sure is tempting to worry all the time. Maybe I should stop doing that.

Monday, September 27, 2021 at 05:34:06 PM (EDT)

Heard a random redneck at the bank today say "well the government will just print some up for you" after the teller said she didn't have enough $1's for me in the drawer. Maybe there's hope for us after all

Monday, September 27, 2021 at 03:31:02 PM (EDT)

If the LPMC can't save the LP, I guess I'll just go back to being a pessimistic registered Republican instead of a pessimistic registered Libertarian

Monday, September 27, 2021 at 07:57:31 AM (EDT)

I hope that, if I do catch covid-19, it puts me out of my misery... because that would be better than living in a world of despots. Unfortunately, the chances of that are vanishingly small.

Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 04:10:08 PM (EDT)

I guess I'm just sick of waiting around for something to happen. There will likely come a day, however, when I will wish I was still waiting.

Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 04:06:26 PM (EDT)

Cryptocurrencies might be the thing that introduces a lot of people to both Austrian economics and open-source software who would otherwise not give a crap about either. Which is why it's weird that I'm not more excited about them.

Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 03:13:49 PM (EDT)

When this just feels like, spinning coefficients in a Fourier series

Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 08:18:13 AM (EDT)

I'm burnt out on fighting burnout

Wednesday, September 22, 2021 at 10:27:54 AM (EDT)

My new form of escapism: looking at pictures of cabins for sale in New Hampshire

Wednesday, September 22, 2021 at 08:19:50 AM (EDT)

Hacker News needs a feature that lets you filter out propaganda sites like the Atlantic and NYT. I'm interested in learning, not having an agenda forced upon me.

Friday, September 17, 2021 at 10:42:01 AM (EDT)

After being an entrepreneur for so long, it will be an odd feeling if I ever have free evenings where I don't feel guilty for not working on something. I hope I get there, someday. I miss doing things like having friends over for a camp fire, grilling out steaks just because I feel like it, hitting the lake for an evening float, going out to dinner or seeing a concert...

Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 11:08:54 AM (EDT)

Powershell was apparently invented by taking the worst hacky features of Bash scripting and the worst of Microsoft's baroque ecosystem and forcing them to mate

Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 10:33:30 AM (EDT)

I'm lazy, but that's not the reason I procrastinate. I procrastinate because every project option I have in front of me right now is completely meaningless. So I kill time to get to the end of the work day, at which point I've run out of the willpower I would need to do the interesting projects that I care about. It is a futile cycle.

Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 09:40:16 AM (EDT)

Though come to think of it, even in a company, monarchy is preferable to democracy.

Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 09:36:48 AM (EDT)

In a company, democracy is fine and probably the best way to resolve conflicts, especially if it's equity-weighted. In a government, it is pure evil, because it's the same thing as saying "the largest group gets the guns for the next 4 years."

Tuesday, September 14, 2021 at 10:07:42 PM (EDT)

Starting to think about reinstalling my 5-year-old Arch/AwesomeWM machine, replacing with Artix/Qtile, just for something to do. Problem is, I'd have to re-create my Lua layout scripts in Python. Might be too lazy for all that.

Tuesday, September 14, 2021 at 02:02:45 PM (EDT)

The modern donut might be the perfect anti-food.

Friday, September 10, 2021 at 03:24:13 PM (EDT)

Grizzly bears are just God's angels sent to guard the various entrances to the underworld.

Thursday, September 09, 2021 at 10:04:54 AM (EDT)

Progressives are like coronaviruses. We'll never beat them, they'll just be around making us miserable forever... so we should start thinking about how to live with them and minimize their impact on our lives.

Wednesday, September 08, 2021 at 03:33:48 PM (EDT)

It may very well be that in order for this universe to contain any stories, it has to contain natural evils. A universe without scarcity, and therefore a universe without capitalism, would be either impossible or pointless or both.

Wednesday, September 08, 2021 at 01:22:27 PM (EDT)

Would he have realized that prices become meaningless under socialism, therefore efficieny and prosperity become impossible to measure?

Wednesday, September 08, 2021 at 01:16:24 PM (EDT)

I wonder if Marx had tried to start a business, would history be different? Would he have realized that the essential role of the capitalist is to bear the risk of entrepreneurship? Would he have realized that economic value is subjective and has nothing to do with labor or material inputs?

Wednesday, September 08, 2021 at 09:30:46 AM (EDT)

To sum up many of my previous ramblings: There are two causes destroying the west. One, the Federal Reserve. Two, thefallacy of hasty generalization. It's also possible they're ultimately one and the same.

Wednesday, September 08, 2021 at 08:32:42 AM (EDT)

Maybe that'll have to be an essay on this site. But it would take me the equivalent time of a masters thesis to research... right now it's just a (well-founded) hunch.

Wednesday, September 08, 2021 at 08:31:46 AM (EDT)

In an alternate timeline, the thesis for my masters degree in economics would be something like: "The reason everything is cheap and made in China, and America doesn't make anything any more besides crappy phone apps, is because of the Federal Reserve."

Tuesday, September 07, 2021 at 08:49:47 AM (EDT)

This might have to go on my quotes page: "One idiot can ask more questions than ten wise men can answer." -Mongolian Proverb

Friday, September 03, 2021 at 11:28:03 AM (EDT)

It might seem like an odd novelty, but the old "3D view" from Firefox's dev console really came in handy sometimes, especially when trying to customize someone else's CSS.

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 03:30:42 PM (EDT)

The worst thing about putting kids in movies is that it virtually guarantees they'll grow up to be insufferable

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 03:01:20 PM (EDT)

Apparently Babylon Bee's writers are reading my microblog

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 10:44:14 AM (EDT)

Or if we're to presume innocence, one can convey mistruths using facts, if one's worldview is sufficiently narrow.

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 10:42:18 AM (EDT)

Truth is not the same thing as objectivity. Reality is more than just facts. I often pick on John Oliver but he's just the most obvious and egregious example that comes to mind. I'm sure he has fact-checkers on his team, but one can absolutely lie -- and he usually does -- using facts.

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 09:58:59 AM (EDT)

Though who am I kidding, I'd barely get any tips because nobody likes an angry nerd.

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 09:57:01 AM (EDT)

The American tradition of tipping servers, but paying them less than the minimum wage for their time, is actually awesome. If we paid our bartenders a "living wage" instead of letting them earn tips, they would be making significantly less. As it stands now, on an hourly basis, they make quite a bit more than we (the business owners) could afford to pay even ourselves. And because a lot of their tips are cash and their pay on paper is less than the minimum wage, they're barely paying any taxes. It's really quite beautiful and I should probably step in to bar tend more often.

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 09:32:10 AM (EDT)

The correct system of government is actually a global one: i.e., roughly 7 billion monarchies.

Thursday, September 02, 2021 at 09:29:33 AM (EDT)

Having to do a background check for my job every two years seems a bit funny to me, because when the heck would I have had time to commit a crime in the last two years?

Wednesday, September 01, 2021 at 03:54:19 PM (EDT)

Do you think an unborn baby, if given the choice, would flee to a state where abortion is outlawed?

Wednesday, September 01, 2021 at 02:03:36 PM (EDT)

Of all the unpleasant things to come out of the last year and a half, the large uptick in the frequency of online meetings might be the worst

Wednesday, September 01, 2021 at 10:03:25 AM (EDT)

Seems like every time I look at someone else's Python script there is some kind of new syntax that I've never seen before.

Wednesday, September 01, 2021 at 09:25:35 AM (EDT)

The Carlson->Shapiro->Crowder->Benjamin->Smith->Woods->Rothbard->Malice->Yarvin->NoWaitActuallyRothbardWasRight->Hoppe pipeline is real. Or at least I hope it is, for the future's sake.

Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 10:25:47 AM (EDT)

After living through the past year and a half, there is precisely a zero-percent chance that I would ever send my kids to public school. If I had kids, of course.

Monday, August 30, 2021 at 05:43:46 PM (EDT)

For the introverted, lazy, nerd musician, every day is like a mid life crisis because you're constantly trying to escape who you are.

Monday, August 30, 2021 at 04:03:42 PM (EDT)

My favorite thing is when a government web site uses poor security and also forces you to use an almost-certainly compromised password.

Monday, August 30, 2021 at 02:50:59 PM (EDT)

Anyone else remember weekends?

Monday, August 30, 2021 at 11:51:02 AM (EDT)

Peace maximalist

Monday, August 30, 2021 at 11:46:52 AM (EDT)

Hardware capitalist, software communist

Friday, August 27, 2021 at 04:19:43 PM (EDT)

If you had your own bank, could print your own money, and could force the public to use it, how much of that money would you print? A little bit, or a lot?

Friday, August 27, 2021 at 01:45:25 PM (EDT)

"This Tweet is misleading." = pretty much a badge of honor at this point. Does Twitter not realize this? Or are they intentionally sowing division? There goes Hanlon's razor dragging across a rock again...

Friday, August 27, 2021 at 11:20:54 AM (EDT)

The whole, entire point of the free market is to help average, normal people. The whole, entire point of socialism is to enrich those who are already powerful.

Friday, August 27, 2021 at 11:07:25 AM (EDT)

Eviction moratoria are theft.

Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 10:33:04 PM (EDT)

At this point I've deleted my Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and probably other accounts I'm forgetting. Amazon, for this horrible FireTV experience, you're next.

Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 10:29:21 PM (EDT)

No more compromises involving proprietary software. They're never worth it. I guess I just have to make my own smart TV.

Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 02:34:08 PM (EDT)

I miss my younger days, when people would get in touch with me for some reason other than asking a favor.

Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 11:29:01 AM (EDT)

Me: "I'd like to adjust the background color of the links on one particular page." CSS: "Well okay, but you're gonna have to also adjust the bottom padding on all your images, except the ones that are floated left or right."

Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 10:59:46 AM (EDT)

I can see now that we should have skipped right over the whole CSS thing. Instead, we should have done all our styling in a turing-complete scripting language right from the beginning.

Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 10:27:23 AM (EDT)

Apparently Pelican doesn't have a solution to that age old problem, "style anchors that contain images differently than regular anchors". You'd think someone other than me would have encountered it and come up with a fix.

Wednesday, August 25, 2021 at 04:30:26 PM (EDT)

It's pretty disturbing how much time I waste every day.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 10:41:45 PM (EDT)

Want to feel like you accomplished nothing all evening? Simply update an Arch Linux PC over a Satellite internet connection.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 01:45:34 PM (EDT)

Creation is inherently structured. Anarchism, in particular of the Christian variety, isn't about taking away those structures. It's about taking away violent coercion. Follow God's law, and ditch the pharisees.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 12:55:05 PM (EDT)

I wonder what percentage of the people who cite the Dunning-Kruger Effect are too dumb to properly identify the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Tuesday, August 24, 2021 at 09:12:05 AM (EDT)

I may have missed my chance to be a good musician, but maybe I can still help people find good music.

Saturday, August 21, 2021 at 04:16:34 PM (EDT)

The power of writing a book is that if you write the right book, you become immortal because all of your readers become you.

Friday, August 20, 2021 at 01:58:50 PM (EDT)

As president, my first executive action will slightly adjust the firearms, drinking, driving, working, and smoking ages to zero, and the voting, military service, and income tax ages to one hundred and fifty two.

Thursday, August 19, 2021 at 02:20:30 PM (EDT)

Me, roughly every Thursday morning: "well, the week's almost over, no sense in starting up a new project at this point."

Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 04:03:10 PM (EDT)

Man, how hard can it possibly be to just call jQueryUI's draggable() on all your modals? Sometimes your users need to be able to see whatever is behind them.

Wednesday, August 18, 2021 at 01:58:56 PM (EDT)

The answer to "what PC would you recommend for x y and z" is "if you don't want to use Linux, then I'd recommend a pen and paper."

Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 03:02:58 PM (EDT)

You might have been an internet nerd for a long time if you know how to pronounce "Fhqwhgads"

Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 11:06:20 AM (EDT)

The older I get, the more apt I am to pay other people to do tasks and pay for products that solve problems. I guess that's the natural way of things. Shout outs to the division of labor.

Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 10:24:06 AM (EDT)

I didn't drop the ball. I threw it out the window.

Monday, August 16, 2021 at 10:02:40 PM (EDT)

It will be a strange turn of events if we have both immigrants trying to escape Mexico into the US, and emmigrants trying to escape the US into Mexico, at the same time.

Monday, August 16, 2021 at 10:55:52 AM (EDT)

I would say that it's possible to have a consciousness of quality in some areas but not others. For example, the person who runs a recording studio and really understands how to produce great timeless recordings but doesn't care to use open source software, nor do they care whether or not the company that owns Pro Tools this year is solvent, or whether or not the company is taking part in the destruction/woke-ification of western society, etc. We all often ignore quality when we just want to get stuff done and pay our bills, to the detriment of the bigger picture.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 01:11:57 PM (EDT)

If there's actually anyone out there who reads this, please don't ever tell me you do, because I would immediately delete this entire web site.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 01:06:58 PM (EDT)

You can tell when I have a bad day at work by the frequency of the microblog posts.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 01:01:39 PM (EDT)

Rights are a perspective-reversed subset of duties, the subset defined by whether violence is appropriate retaliation for neglect.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 12:57:55 PM (EDT)

Libertarianism is not incompatible with deontology. The former is a subset of the latter. There is some merit in saying there is no such thing as rights, only duties. However I do think rights and duties are distinct in that there are some duties which, when neglected, make the neglecter worthy of being thrown in a cage (e.g. the duty to not commit murder) and other duties which do not (e.g. the duty to help someone who is sick or injured). So, we all have the right not to be murdered, but we don't have the right to free healthcare.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 11:52:55 AM (EDT)

If my coworkers ever get the sense that I have a bad attitude, it didn't just come out of nowhere. It took years of their abuse to hone in.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 11:43:58 AM (EDT)

I hereby vow never to get a job in IT ever again, with one exception: developing open source software. Though I don't really count that as 'IT', rather I consider it creating something useful and improving the world. The implication, of course, being that IT is neither of those things.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 10:31:33 AM (EDT)

Hello there, fellow meek. If we're all still thinking about inheriting the earth, now would be a pretty good time.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 10:28:14 AM (EDT)

Again I'll say it... this might not all be some big conspiracy to divide us and make us weak. But it sure is doing that extremely well. Though the flip side of that is, we were already pretty good at dividing ourselves before, maybe this is just the final straw.

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 10:14:35 AM (EDT)

Actually I'd go further: if you use HTML email, you're part of the problem

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 10:13:29 AM (EDT)

If you have an email signature with your picture in it, you're part of the problem

Friday, August 13, 2021 at 09:43:22 AM (EDT)

The Pfizer jab is only 42% effective, and we now know you can still pass the virus on just as easily if you're jabbed. Are we ready to admit this is just the new influenza and go back to living normally? (The mini-dictators of the world aren't ready to admit that.)

Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 03:09:41 PM (EDT)

Everyone succeeds eventually... some just end up dying first.

Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 02:43:21 PM (EDT)

I need to write a script that turns up my PC's volume by a click every time the building's AC kicks in

Wednesday, August 11, 2021 at 02:05:08 PM (EDT)

The truth is, thinking for yourself takes a lot of energy. I am not someone who typically has a lot of energy. So if the evil wins and turns me into a slave, it will probably just be because it outlasted me.

Wednesday, August 11, 2021 at 09:47:55 AM (EDT)

Million dollar idea: start selling a matching mask and dunce cap set.

Tuesday, August 10, 2021 at 10:12:54 AM (EDT)

Right after writing that, I made the mistake of reading some replies to a heroic tweet by Rand Paul (who, let's be clear, is not always good on everything). Yeah, Hanlon was retarded. Or was he evil?

Tuesday, August 10, 2021 at 10:06:24 AM (EDT)

I used to generally subscribe to Hanlon's Razor. 2020, and now 2021, will likely force me to change this naive stance. Either that, or I am just now fully beginning to grasp the depths of the average person's stupidity. (And to borrow from Carlin, half of us are even stupider than that.)

Friday, August 06, 2021 at 02:08:37 PM (EDT)

An employer feeling they should follow the CDC's guidelines is like a teacher feeling they should follow the Department of Education's guidelines

Friday, August 06, 2021 at 09:47:57 AM (EDT)

I wonder if homework is designed to get kids used to the idea of filling out completely useless paperwork as adults. It didn't work on me.

Thursday, August 05, 2021 at 11:05:29 AM (EDT)

I mean and of course it would be super cool to have a mixer that runs Linux

Thursday, August 05, 2021 at 10:36:23 AM (EDT)

I really wish pro sound companies would embrace the concept of open platforms. In the 70s, when you bought a mixer, they'd give you a huge manual with schematics, making modifications relatively easy if you had the skills. Today, when you buy a (digital) mixer, they should send you the source code rather than a EULA.

Thursday, August 05, 2021 at 08:35:10 AM (EDT)

Never thought that in my 40's I would still be taking road trips to buy PA systems.

Wednesday, August 04, 2021 at 11:20:11 AM (EDT)

I also often wonder if we're already in the good place.

Tuesday, August 03, 2021 at 03:43:27 PM (EDT)

I often wonder if we're already in the bad place.

Tuesday, August 03, 2021 at 10:02:29 AM (EDT)

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I can't put on a mask... I have a condition that prevents me from being able to do nonsensical things. It's called autism."

Monday, August 02, 2021 at 09:27:27 AM (EDT)

A "leader" is someone who thinks other people's time is worthless compared to their own.

Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 12:21:10 PM (EDT)

I like to buy books that I don't read about solving problems that I can't fix using money that I don't have

Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 11:02:14 AM (EDT)

My phone lets me make phone calls, but why do I want it to also run elegant software instead of bloated and/or evil proprietary software? There's the practical side of achieving the goal of communication more effectively, but there has to be more than that because proprietary software would meet that goal with less effort. Do I value open software more highly, not because it works better (though often it does), but because it approaches some higher standard? If that's true, then phenomena like DRM and other anti-features are not just inconvenient, they are actually evil... like a motorcycle part that's intentionally difficult to repair so that you have to take it to the dealer.

Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 10:50:26 AM (EDT)

I.e., the Austrian school is by itself inherently relativistic. Humans act purposefully, employing means to achieve ends... But how good are those ends? And could the means be better, not just at helping them achieve those ends, but really better in an absolute sense?

Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 10:39:26 AM (EDT)

The rejection of subject-object dualism, a la Pirsig, would have some really interesting implications for economic value theories. I think in an economic context, value is for all practical purposes subjective as the Austrians contend (the labor/cost theory of value is certainly incorrect, at least)... but maybe that's not the whole picture? The value is the alignment of the means/object with the actor/subject's ends, but the alignment of both the means and ends with quality is the realm of the divine: neither in the subject nor the object.

Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 03:44:43 PM (EDT)

Trying to enable Redis and the ultimate solution was of course to upgrade Ubuntu

Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 11:57:45 AM (EDT)

I hereby vow never to purchase another Wordpress plugin as long as I live. I have never once been pleased with the experience.

Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 11:39:39 AM (EDT)

I still, mostly, like the internet. But man, do I hate the web.

Wednesday, July 28, 2021 at 11:39:12 AM (EDT)

trying to add functionality to a web site using plugins is like trying to add power to a car by adding a second engine from a different car

Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 05:02:56 PM (EDT)

Never be tempted to put CSS there. Always put it in your own stylesheet.

Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 05:02:21 PM (EDT)

First sign of a bad Wordpress plugin: they let you put custom CSS in a box in the WP admin page

Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 04:25:36 PM (EDT)

I don't understand how someone can very clearly put so, so many hours into a WP plugin, charge money for it, and still put out complete garbage.

Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 02:21:41 PM (EDT)

...And that probably also has something to do with why politicians seem totally fine with shutting down people's livelihoods for no good reason.

Tuesday, July 27, 2021 at 02:19:07 PM (EDT)

There's this old adage that only people who are unproductive and incompetent go into politics because everyone else has a job. As I consider helping out with the LP, I'm beginning to see the reality of this... the chances of me having time to help out a political organization, even one I mostly align with, get slimmer the more time I put into improving myself and my situation. Starting to regret getting involved at all, and I'm sure I'm not alone... this is how the lazy despots win, I suppose.

Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 06:32:02 AM (EDT)

Reason number 7436 that government harms society: it drives decent people away from owning a small business. You have to be an asshole to deal with the government idiocy, and if you arent, you will either become one or give up on your dreams.

Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 02:32:13 PM (EDT)

I'd like to introduce a new type of logical fallacy, called The Fallacy Of Occam's Sandpaper. In this fallacy, an argument is rejected on the basis that it's not complex enough. To see it in action, just look at the field of science journalism.

Wednesday, July 21, 2021 at 02:05:27 PM (EDT)

I used to be a libertarian based on principle, that the government can only steal and impede progress, it's capable of nothing else. I am now a libertarian based on the real world experience of exactly that.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021 at 03:48:40 PM (EDT)

If you use robots.txt to outlaw crawlers from indexing your site, only outlaw crawlers will index your site

Tuesday, July 20, 2021 at 10:24:23 AM (EDT)

Procrastination can actually be very powerful. For example, instead of doing work-related stuff, I often find myself putting that off and writing here. Assuming I don't get fired, I will look back with much more fondness on my various writings, capturing different phases of my life, than anything I did at work.

Tuesday, July 20, 2021 at 08:55:22 AM (EDT)

Something that's rather disturbing: the frequency with which I have to give the server-wide sysadmin role to applications hitting a MSSQL database, as opposed to giving them just enough privilege to access their own database. I suppose that's just a minor extrapolation of the old adage, "the solution to every helpdesk ticket is that Windows is a bad operating system." I've never run into an app built on a MySQL database that needs server-wide permissions.

Monday, July 19, 2021 at 10:57:01 PM (EDT)

Sometimes when you look out the front door there's a huge cow with giant horns standing there, staring at you somewhat menacingly. I guess that qualifies as a "country folk problem." (Turns out she was just a neighbor's cow who jumped the fence and got lost looking for her calf)

Friday, July 16, 2021 at 07:26:35 PM (EDT)

I wonder how a conversation between Robert Pirsig and Jordan Peterson would have gone.

Friday, July 09, 2021 at 04:28:21 PM (EDT)

I know without a doubt that someday I will regret not putting a manual transmission in my truck. There are some things that are just meant to go together: peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, diesel engines and manual transmissions. Unfortunately all I can afford are the first two combinations.

Thursday, July 08, 2021 at 04:19:42 PM (EDT)

I wonder how my life would have been different if I had discovered bulletin board systems back in my C64 days. Perhaps I would be more apt to use social media now?

Wednesday, July 07, 2021 at 11:10:08 AM (EDT)

Communication on the internet is funtdamentally unreasonable because, being semi-anonymous and separated from immediate social clues, everyone's egos take center stage by default. It takes a purposeful awareness of this and a conscious, concerted effort to combat one's own ego to make reasonable communication possible. And even then there's no guarantee.

Tuesday, July 06, 2021 at 10:22:49 PM (EDT)

IT people watching any sort of heated debate on TV where they're on an internet video call and talking over each other: 'Man, the most uncomfortable part about all this is how bad the latency is'

Monday, July 05, 2021 at 05:42:19 PM (EDT)

I would seriously prefer to hook an old 1080p monitor up to a Raspberry Pi + Kodi (or some similar setup) rather than use a Roku/Fire/Apple/Whatever/Garbage 'smart' TV

Monday, July 05, 2021 at 04:45:03 PM (EDT)

Smart TVs are theft

Monday, July 05, 2021 at 02:45:42 PM (EDT)

My take on flying the American flag: On the one hand, it represents our insanely huge government, its various modes of murder, its money counterfeiting, and its completely overbearing regulatory state. On the other hand, that's not what it was designed to represent. Originally, it represented classical liberalism, rejecting and fighting tyrants, a system of government that decentralizes power, and having a generally independent and individualistic mindset. Kind of like how many (most?) people who fly the confederate flag probably aren't actually racist or want to reinstate slavery, they just long for southern independence. So, fly it if you want, I'm cool either way.

Sunday, July 04, 2021 at 10:13:48 PM (EDT)

Facebook is preventing users from searching the term 'revolution'. I guess people planning a revolution will have to use a platform that doesn't suck.

Sunday, July 04, 2021 at 10:07:39 PM (EDT)

If you think forward to your future self, well advanced in years, what do you think you will wish you had done more of? For me, there are many things... playing guitar, reading, spending time in nature (including offroading & kayaking), working with my hands.

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 10:01:35 PM (EDT)

I suppose we could have physical banknotes backed by cryptos. But then you're not doing anything more interesting than banknotes backed by silver or gold, which again, the average person will probably trust more (whether correctly or not).

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 09:59:12 PM (EDT)

I really just can't imagine the average person learning how to use cryptos. They're neat, and powerful, and there's definitely a place for them in the internet age, but will your mom really trust them as much she trusts a physical coin?

Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 09:54:17 PM (EDT)

Trying to set up a cryptocurrency wallet on a satellite internet connection. Yeeeeah we country folk are gonna end up using silver after fiat dies, aren't we

Monday, June 28, 2021 at 03:52:46 PM (EDT)

Beginning to think this whole "following the progress of LP and the Mises Caucus" thing is just another form of escapism. Some people waste time watching Netflix, I waste time pretending that there's hope for humanity.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 12:47:31 PM (EDT)

Though there's an easy solution to that... just wait a year and it'll be obsolete.

Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 12:47:00 PM (EDT)

I have the sinking feeling it might be time to just give up on video games. The hardest part about admitting that is realizing how nice my gaming PC is.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 02:39:24 PM (EDT)

And occasionally, my satisfaction with a job well done. But usually it's discontent.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 02:34:22 PM (EDT)

One of the most frustrating things about my job (and probably any sort of advanced IT job) is that I don't know a single person outside of work who would understand what I do. So any time I try to vent about it, at best it doesn't land and at worst I can't form the right words to properly communicate my discontent.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 10:56:49 AM (EDT)

I have painted myself into a corner where if I ever stop pretending to care about computers, I won't be able to afford my house payments. Kinda sucks.

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 10:51:50 AM (EDT)

Why even maintain this website, for example? I suppose it's my version of keeping a journal. But why not just, you know, keep a journal?

Tuesday, June 22, 2021 at 10:47:37 AM (EDT)

I should have listened to my gut all those years ago when it told me to become Amish. Or at least, I should have been learning how to live rather than wasting so many thousands of hours messing with computers.

Monday, June 21, 2021 at 04:52:18 PM (EDT)

I have to say, I really enjoy a good heavy rain sometimes (as long as I'm not out there getting soaked).

Thursday, June 17, 2021 at 01:48:52 PM (EDT)

Hard lesson that I learned today: no matter how good you think you are, always back up a hard drive before shrinking partitions.

Wednesday, June 16, 2021 at 10:11:09 AM (EDT)

Also, if your tactic for keeping yourself sane while at your job is "All I have to do is make it through this, I'll be quitting soon", you might just want to go ahead and quit now.

Wednesday, June 16, 2021 at 09:49:45 AM (EDT)

The correct resolution for every helpdesk ticket is: Windows is a terrible operating system.

Wednesday, June 16, 2021 at 09:11:51 AM (EDT)

Zinc on an empty stomach: never again.

Tuesday, June 15, 2021 at 04:25:53 PM (EDT)

I need to remember, the point of this blog is to document stuff... whatever it might be. Even if it's just a paragraph of text or a couple pictures. Not everything has to be a long-form essay.

Monday, June 14, 2021 at 03:10:49 PM (EDT)

There are a strikingly large number of people who simultaneously reject intellectual property and embrace net neutrality, or vice versa. Cognitive dissonance much?

Monday, June 14, 2021 at 02:16:33 PM (EDT)

While I'm not implying that I have the answer to the question, at least I know it's the correct question to ask.

Monday, June 14, 2021 at 01:29:35 PM (EDT)

There is one question, the answer to which -- if everyone understood it -- would immediately end all political division in this country and even the world. That question is: "What are rights?"

Thursday, June 10, 2021 at 03:13:39 PM (EDT)

T-shirt slogan: Nobody cares about that thing you said on the internet.

Thursday, June 10, 2021 at 03:05:29 PM (EDT)

Mandated irrelevant online training is theft

Thursday, June 10, 2021 at 09:25:21 AM (EDT)

So far, there are only two things in life that consistently make me shake with rage: dealing with crappy internet connections and putting the soft top on my Jeep.

Tuesday, June 08, 2021 at 10:25:08 AM (EDT)

Save a thousand crickets: eat a progressive.

Monday, June 07, 2021 at 11:05:12 AM (EDT)

Save thousands of crickets: eat a cow.

Friday, June 04, 2021 at 11:45:11 AM (EDT)

It's odd how sometimes old memories can simultaneously seem like they were another lifetime ago, and also more recent than the number of years passed would suggest.

Thursday, June 03, 2021 at 10:16:51 AM (EDT)

I suspect that we're just poking holes in the fabric of the universe when we sense the Divine through love, beauty, reason, justice, or any other divine attribute. But if we could tear the whole fabric away, we'd see that there is just one continuous and unending Good.

Thursday, June 03, 2021 at 10:14:01 AM (EDT)

In other words, why does the infinite Godliness manifest itself in different ways?

Thursday, June 03, 2021 at 10:12:44 AM (EDT)

The question isn't 'how could love and math be the same thing?'... the question is 'what is it about our existence in this universe that makes them seem like separate things?'

Wednesday, June 02, 2021 at 01:53:14 PM (EDT)

To quote Bob Murphy, God loves you more than you can possibly imagine.

Wednesday, June 02, 2021 at 01:22:12 PM (EDT)

To put that Chesterton quote that I like so much into practical application: Not only is every particle in the universe built on a tower of infinite height and not only does each tower have its own construction, but God is also so patient and full of love that he is actively building each tower, working out the coefficients of every n-dimensional Fourier series one at a time. The simulation is just love and math. And what's more, as positive divine attributes, they are one in the same.

Tuesday, June 01, 2021 at 02:46:21 PM (EDT)

Dear pro audio manufacturers, I do not want to buy into your software ecosystem... I just want a mixer. Sincerely, every reasonable sound engineer.

Tuesday, June 01, 2021 at 11:40:47 AM (EDT)

Maybe the purpose of the LP is to say to Republicans, 'hey idiots, be pro-freedom or people will vote for us.' I'm Ok with that if it results in more freedom.

Friday, May 28, 2021 at 09:57:40 AM (EDT)

I can't remember his name, but I think the first time I was introduced to someone who called themself an anarchist was on the old Make blog. He created a device that lets you turn off all the TVs in a sports bar. That guy is awesome, wherever he is.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 10:04:11 PM (EDT)

That was probably poorly worded and/or incompletely worked out. But the gist is correct.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 07:15:37 PM (EDT)

My hope is that eventually, libertarians will begin to realize that there is no natural law (and thus no nonagression principle) without Christianity, and Christians will begin to realize that the Golden Rule (the negative version, at least) is essentially the nonagression principle.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 04:51:16 PM (EDT)

(Not as bad as Shopify's, though)

Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 04:50:49 PM (EDT)

The Wordpress plugin ecosystem is theft

Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 01:32:26 PM (EDT)

How do you tell someone 'I like you, but not enough to hang out with you'? #IntrovertProblems

Wednesday, May 26, 2021 at 11:44:23 AM (EDT)

Looks like I actually made it just over a week before deleting my Twitter account.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 11:52:00 PM (EDT)

You know what's cringe-inducing? Using the word 'cringe' as an adjective. It's a verb. #Amirite #ThePedantsShallInheritTheEarf

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 04:30:13 PM (EDT)

Rule number ${n} of the internet: if you thought you had a novel idea, ESR already wrote a book about it 10+ years ago.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 04:26:02 PM (EDT)

Just found a hyperlink pointing from a page on mises.org to a page on catb.org. Worlds colliding.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 04:22:35 PM (EDT)

I'm pretty sure the definition of a 'good leader' is just someone who's too lazy to do things so they make other people do them

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 03:28:55 PM (EDT)

Calculating excise tax is absolutely maddening. It would be like a jewelry maker being required to pay a tax based on the weight of all the items they sold every month. The numbers never seem to tie out and make sense.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 09:10:54 AM (EDT)

Occam be darned.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 09:09:53 AM (EDT)

If God is infinitely creative, then it may very well be that every particle in the universe is not only built on a tower of infinite height, but that each tower has its own completely unique construction.

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 08:59:51 AM (EDT)

So again I ask, is music Turing complete? And in this context, by 'music' I mean any sort of intentionally coordinated system of oscillations, such as superstrings or whatever underpins them. Can one create a Turing machine by singing, if you know enough about the medium you're singing into?

Tuesday, May 25, 2021 at 08:54:06 AM (EDT)

And then, it hit me. It doesn't matter what the simulation is running on. All it has to be is Turing-complete. Any TC system can simulate a universe of any complexity.

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 10:24:52 PM (EDT)

Is it good to be correct? Or is it correct to be good? Seems like something Euthyphro would have asked. I believe the answer must be similar to the solution to his classic dilemma: Namely that there is a third option, that both goodness and correctness are qualities of the almighty. They exist in every possible world and are therefore inseperable.

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 10:18:39 PM (EDT)

The Ontological and Moral arguments are based on the same Axiom: that some qualities of things are better than others.

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 04:58:30 PM (EDT)

God doesn't need to be outside of time to manipulate the universe as it runs... all He needs is one additional time dimension beyond what we've got access to.

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 04:08:32 PM (EDT)

I can see now why Godel went mad

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 04:06:59 PM (EDT)

Is music Turing complete?

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 11:31:06 AM (EDT)

You know you're probably not in the right line of work when you use the excuse 'Sorry, I forgot about that issue' instead of the truth, which is that you didn't really want to fix that issue and you definitely didn't want to call the user to talk to them about it

Monday, May 24, 2021 at 10:52:01 AM (EDT)

This just made me a little bit more excited about the future of the LP. Still mostly a pessimist, of course, but I'll take what I can get.

Friday, May 21, 2021 at 11:32:00 AM (EDT)

Actually, I'd also add a couple more items: that not getting vaccinated is a perfectly acceptable option, and boosting your immune system in various ways is a good approach to fighting all sorts of coronaviruses. (This is from personal experience, as I never gets colds or flus anymore after I started fasting daily, following a roughly 80% paleo diet, and supplementing with C/D/Zinc/Magnesium)

Friday, May 21, 2021 at 11:24:15 AM (EDT)

It's possible to believe all 3 of the following: that masks and lockdowns accomplished nothing but damage the economy, that no one should ever have to show vaccination papers anywhere even when traveling, and that getting the jab, even with the new mRNA vaccines, is probably relatively safe and effective. Shocking, I know.

Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 02:57:48 PM (EDT)

Dear past me: Unless, of course, your role at the brewery is to handle the IT.

Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 02:54:56 PM (EDT)

Dear past me: Though, the latter is preferable to the former.

Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 02:54:17 PM (EDT)

Dear past me: Don't try to start a brewery. Especially not in PA.

Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 02:51:04 PM (EDT)

Dear past me: Don't get a job in IT.

Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 09:48:44 AM (EDT)

Things that people (like myself) who will never get strong do: buy books about getting strong

Wednesday, May 19, 2021 at 10:14:10 AM (EDT)

The art of economics consists in saying, over and over, 'what is really going on here?'

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 04:52:18 PM (EDT)

I don't know if I've said this elsewhere, but it won't be the last time I mention it: We all already believe in the least likely miracle of them all, namely the spontaneous appearance of an orderly universe out of nothing. All the other miracles are just 'kind of unlikely' compared to that one.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 03:12:35 PM (EDT)

Maybe I'm not an agorist? I keep hearing liberty people bashing the concept, so maybe I need to read up on it some more. I always just thought it meant you support the idea of developing new and 'unapproved' markets as a way to subvert political power. I don't see the harm in that, and I also think pursuing change through the political process has its merits too. Use every tool available to you (even if you're a pessimist about winning).

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 02:05:45 PM (EDT)

The sign of a 'good' worldview is not that it immediately comes across as making intuitive sense, but that any criticism of it, upon further examination, turns out to be a better criticism of the alternative(s). Kind of like how most criticisms of cryptocurrencies are actually more true of fiat money.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 02:04:00 PM (EDT)

Yes. You're right. Christianity is a completely insane worldview. But that's just because reality is completely insane. Relatively speaking, Christianity is the most plausible of a long list of incredibly implausible worldviews.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 12:09:40 PM (EDT)

Every pint of beer sold in PA gets taxed six times. Federal, state, and local income tax, state use tax, state and federal excise tax. No wonder there have been rebellions over alcohol in this country.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 11:52:16 AM (EDT)

I found myself occasionally checking people's Twitter profiles to get news, and there are some folks whose follower counts I don't mind boosting while I'm at it. Tweetdeck is the only saving grace the platform has left, without that it is completely unusable.

Tuesday, May 18, 2021 at 11:49:22 AM (EDT)

Finally gave in and followed some accounts on Twitter, mainly to get news. Not planning on tweeting at all... why would I? I wonder how long it will be until I realize it was a terrible, time-wasting, poisonous idea and delete my account (again). I give it a week, tops.

Sunday, May 16, 2021 at 08:24:30 AM (EDT)

I wonder if the LP is basically the libertarian version of Qanon. A pacifier and a distraction meant to keep the masses from rising up in revlot by placing their hope in the myth that we need just the right leader(s).

Saturday, May 15, 2021 at 09:31:56 PM (EDT)

I'd love to help seed the LBRY network, but my internet connection is so bad that they really shouldn't want me helping

Saturday, May 15, 2021 at 09:18:20 PM (EDT)

If you're someone out there who's thinking about getting satellite internet (Hughesnet, in particular) just go ahead and cut off one of your feet with a butter knife instead, your life will be better for it

Friday, May 14, 2021 at 04:02:23 PM (EDT)

The fallacy of hasty generalization is the one and only ultimate cause destroying the entirety of western civilization

Friday, May 14, 2021 at 10:27:42 AM (EDT)

Approaching 100 games on my Steam wishlist. I'm not sure if that makes me a big gamer nerd, or not a big gamer nerd because of the fact that I don't have time or money to play games any more, and thus my wishlist has become more of a place to collect games than my actual Steam library.

Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 04:21:39 PM (EDT)

At least that's how it seemed from browsing mailing lists looking for the right place to add a Flatpak directory to $XDG_DATA_DIRS. Turns out it was much easier to copy the .desktop file to my ~/Desktop folder than to actually understand the entire history and reasoning for every file Bash sources.

Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 12:21:46 PM (EDT)

When tracking down an issue on Debian, apparently it's helpful to have the entire development histroy of all Unix-like OSes memorized so you know the correct place to put your environment variables.

Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 11:47:36 AM (EDT)

Spoke too soon... retried the installation with the internet connected and it worked. Now to get WiFi (Broadcom) working...

Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 10:28:29 AM (EDT)

....And the installation failed. Gotta love Debian.

Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 10:03:51 AM (EDT)

Installing 32-bit Buster on a Compaq Mini netbook with 1GB of RAM. Feeling delightfully old-school.

Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 05:01:26 PM (EDT)

Making sysadmins hang out in the ticket tracker = just another straw on the ol' camel's back.

Monday, May 10, 2021 at 03:14:24 PM (EDT)

We are watching the real time extermination of nuance.

Monday, May 10, 2021 at 02:52:39 PM (EDT)

One of my favorite outdoor brew fests is requiring proof of vaccination from all attendees this year. Deeply saddened, to say the least... not just that I won't be attending, but even moreso that common sense is truly dead, it would seem. Sometimes it feels like I'm just watching the dominoes fall one by one, and eventually one will land on me.

Monday, May 10, 2021 at 02:06:52 PM (EDT)

If conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit, most libertarians are going just a few miles an hour slower than that.

Monday, May 10, 2021 at 02:03:35 PM (EDT)

We should have expected the end of the world to come in a way we didn't expect.

Monday, May 10, 2021 at 12:04:35 PM (EDT)

those who can't do, watch a video about it

Sunday, May 09, 2021 at 11:53:34 AM (EDT)

There might be something wrong with you if you get excited watching a video about installing compound turbos on a 24-valve Cummins and then equally excited watching a video about testing out a super clean IBM computer from 1997

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 04:05:42 PM (EDT)

"I was right, this does suck. Thank goodness."

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 04:05:15 PM (EDT)

It is an odd combination of relieving, depressing, and reaffirming to have something you made be completely ignored by those you shared it with.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 12:08:34 PM (EDT)

Or for that matter, any reality. I believe I have stumbled into a tautology. Any reality is, by definition, actual. With that, it is time for lunch.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 12:03:49 PM (EDT)

Though even the language of "novelty" presupposes finitude. Perhaps the very distinction between actual and possible is the defining characteristic of our reality.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 11:48:32 AM (EDT)

Finitude was a novel invention, and is the defining characteristic of our reality.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 11:47:21 AM (EDT)

Perhaps creation is not the right word for what we're doing. We're discovering the infinite mind of God. Therefore, once we tell the world about our discovery, we have no right to suppress the information from the minds of others.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 11:40:01 AM (EDT)

I guess that's why the only "license" that ever made sense to me is the public domain. When you make something intangible and release it to the world, you don't own it any more. More accurately, you never really owned it to begin with, but initially no one knew about it but you.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 11:33:22 AM (EDT)

Similarly, licenses like the GPL that require code to be contributed back are not consistent with a proper understanding of natural rights.

Friday, May 07, 2021 at 11:24:21 AM (EDT)

The "access to the source code" precondition of Freedom 1 is not a true freedom, i.e. it's not a negative liberty. It is a privilige and a selling point for free software, and as with other privileges, requiring it legally would violate the requiree's negative liberties. As such, I should not be required to release my source code, but if I want my software to be competitive with other freely-distributed software on a long time scale, it's a really good idea to do so.

Thursday, May 06, 2021 at 08:35:20 AM (EDT)

The human body is the original capital good. Therefore, the ultimate logical conclusion of the collective ownership of the means of production is that we all own each other's bodies and must vote on what each person should wear each day.

Wednesday, May 05, 2021 at 10:20:57 AM (EDT)

It is astonishing to me given the three layers of incredibly unreasonable tax and regulatory burden in the US that small businesses still somehow manage to get off the ground anyway. I guess that says a lot about the resilience of entrepreneurs.

Tuesday, May 04, 2021 at 03:33:56 PM (EDT)

Sharing anything I've written is terrifying not because I think the writing is bad or even that I might be wrong... rather it's terrifying because it might be incomplete, and that fact might be obvious to everyone other than myself.

Tuesday, May 04, 2021 at 03:20:31 PM (EDT)

Also had to use uBlock Origin. Brave's built-in adblock was just a bit cumbersome to create custom filters for, in comparison.

Tuesday, May 04, 2021 at 09:52:57 AM (EDT)

Officially switched to Brave from Librewolf... Just couldn't quite get LW to cooperate with Odysee livestreaming. Seems to be CORS-related, from the errors in the console. With the Nextcloud passwords app and Tabliss, it's a pretty solid experience so far.

Tuesday, May 04, 2021 at 09:14:54 AM (EDT)

Suddenly feeling what I'm sure many others are feeling this month: "Oh man, I need to get the Jeep fixed before Bantam..."

Friday, April 30, 2021 at 03:20:35 PM (EDT)

I have to say, I enjoy the extra challenge that a standing desk brings to afternoon naptime at work

Friday, April 30, 2021 at 02:37:10 PM (EDT)

Progressivism is the opposite of curiosity.

Friday, April 30, 2021 at 02:36:53 PM (EDT)

Marxism is the opposite of economics.

Friday, April 30, 2021 at 10:17:53 AM (EDT)

That might actually be more than just a metaphor.

Friday, April 30, 2021 at 10:14:50 AM (EDT)

A compromise between left and right is like a compromise between Satan and Zeus.

Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 12:51:10 PM (EDT)

Is software a capital good? Or a good at all? Is the english language a good? Is that even a reasonable comparison?

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 04:07:16 PM (EDT)

The biggest hindrance to my getting more involved in groups supporting causes I like is that I hate getting more involved in groups

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 02:59:24 PM (EDT)

They already tried to cancel truth once, and it came back to life.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 at 09:55:32 AM (EDT)

A great way to make employees just a little bit more unhappy: Force them to do arbitrary stuff, like training that has nothing to do with their position. Better yet, put randomly generated deadlines on the training modules and constantly email them about upcoming deadlines.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 05:06:37 PM (EDT)

The code is so old and amateurish that I worry integrating with more modern web apps will be a huge undertaking. Perhaps worth it, though... I do believe in the future of the plaftorm.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 05:04:52 PM (EDT)

Now that Odysee is implementing livestreaming, perhaps it's finally time to add support for a streaming service other than Twitch?

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 04:59:24 PM (EDT)

I haven't looked at the analytics in a while... looks like it still gets over 200k unique visitors per month. I never did figure out how to make money from it. #HumbleBrags

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 04:56:53 PM (EDT)

Hmm, another use for code-hosting on this web site would be to share the source code for Multistream. It's definitely somewhat aged at this point and it might be nice to set it free so others can improve upon it.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 04:47:02 PM (EDT)

I copied a few of my game-related articles from my days as a KBMOD.com staffer over here. I didn't write a whole lot for them since I was the web developer, but I enjoyed writing a few little reviews here and there. I have lots of fond memories from my time being involved and I hope someday I'll meet up with those nerds again. The articles are all under the geekery category (everything from Oct '12 to Dec '17).

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 02:13:50 PM (EDT)

How soon will cancel culture come for Stevie Wonder for saying that superstition ain't the way?

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 11:49:24 AM (EDT)

Arguments in favor of anarchism are always very powerful, but I'm still not entirely convinced. The truth is, I'm a universal monarchist, and there's no way around that. The fundamental question in my mind is, in the absence of the one true King, does anyone deserve to be in charge of anyone else?

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 10:55:49 AM (EDT)

Bug #1: More people have heard of Karl Marx than Ludwig von Mises.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 10:24:20 AM (EDT)

This made me struggle to hold back explitives and/or tears (I'll never reveal which), in a good way.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 at 09:50:01 AM (EDT)

I am quite certain the only reason I am still in the IT field and generally not hating my life is that I am allowed to use Linux and spend the vast majority of my time there. Hearing the other techs tell me about the things they deal with in Windows world makes me seriously wonder why they would continue using it.

Monday, April 26, 2021 at 03:51:59 PM (EDT)

Mainly I want to share my awesome Awesome config that has taken me 4 years to get just right.

Monday, April 26, 2021 at 03:50:11 PM (EDT)

Posting one's dotfiles seems to be all the rage... I'd like to do that here but it's gonna take some hackery. You'd think it would be easy with a static website generator, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Sunday, April 25, 2021 at 10:41:43 PM (EDT)

(obligatory) I'm a poet and I didn't even know that I was one.

Sunday, April 25, 2021 at 10:40:46 PM (EDT)

On an unrelated note, I should buy a boat.

Sunday, April 25, 2021 at 10:39:49 PM (EDT)

Maybe the meek who will inherit the earth are just the people who will go into hiding until all the crazies destroy each other.

Sunday, April 25, 2021 at 09:04:21 PM (EDT)

If you ever want to lose what little faith in humanity you have left, just open a retail business.

Saturday, April 24, 2021 at 11:20:29 PM (EDT)

The problem with burning a candle at both ends is that you eventually run out of candle. Maybe that's the whole point of the metaphor.

Friday, April 23, 2021 at 11:28:06 AM (EDT)

If an employer required their employees to wear clown shoes and a polka dot bow tie because they believed it made people healthier, would you work there?

Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 04:46:22 PM (EDT)

Probably the most terrifying possibility of them all is finding out I was right.

Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 11:58:55 AM (EDT)

Is it harder to burn a physical book or a digital one?

Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 11:45:14 AM (EDT)

Oh man, I just discovered that this web site looks way better if you resize your browser to a 4:3 aspect ratio. I should have guessed.

Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 11:24:42 AM (EDT)

New rule: given John Oliver's take on any subject, either the exact opposite is true, or there is a third, unexplored option. I'd say the latter is more likely... his perspective, like that of the rest of the corporate press, generally seems to be built on false dichotomies. "Two movies on one screen" is a feature, not a bug.

Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 09:34:41 AM (EDT)

My goal for this site is to make it so easy to publish content that I actually do it sometimes.

Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 08:45:01 AM (EDT)

It's odd how something as simple as different tires can make a vehicle seem new again. It's also odd how something as simple as a broken windshield wiper blade can make a vehicle seem like a piece of junk.

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 11:21:28 AM (EDT)

Not sure why I use hash tags on this page. I guess it's an attempt at some sort of ironic jab at the social media world.

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 11:17:33 AM (EDT)

I can't believe I actually logged into my Twitter account today. I was thinking about using it to follow some liberty-minded folks and free software nerds (with some notable overlaps between those categories) whose insights I appreciate. But I just couldn't do it. I immediately felt the poison of social media creeping into my mind. #DeleteYourAccount

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 09:33:48 AM (EDT)

If a church told you that you had to wear clown shoes and a polka dot bow tie to attend your grandmother's funeral, would you do it?

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 at 01:30:59 PM (EDT)

People are starting to get it. A central bank is the only ingredient needed to achieve socialism. There is a virtually endless multitude of ways that fake money can be used to alter society... it just takes time. #EndTheFed

Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 10:13:39 AM (EDT)

Avid indoorsman

Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 10:12:38 AM (EDT)

Master of singletasking

Sunday, April 18, 2021 at 10:11:44 AM (EDT)

Addicted to melatonin

Friday, April 16, 2021 at 05:31:07 PM (EDT)

Instagram wants to track me sooo bad that they want me to log in if I view their site over a VPN connection.

Friday, April 16, 2021 at 11:25:52 AM (EDT)

The more offensive theft than taxation is the time it takes you to calculate how much they're going to steal from you. Stealing money is bad enough... but there is always more money to be made by being more clever. Once they've stolen your time, though, you can't innovate more into existence.

Friday, April 16, 2021 at 10:55:18 AM (EDT)

Socialism and atheism have one curious thing in common: it's not possible to act in a manner that is consistent with believing either of them are valid. I.e., whether you say your are a socialist or an atheist, you will still not act like either one.

Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 04:13:09 PM (EDT)

I need to spend more time wallowing in the joy of not knowing something.

Thursday, April 15, 2021 at 03:44:39 PM (EDT)

One nice thing about being a pessimist is that reality is always either reaffirming or pleasantly surprising

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 01:02:52 PM (EDT)

There are no "alpha" or "beta" males. There are only those who tell the truth and those who lie.

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 10:48:25 AM (EDT)

In case you were wondering, this microblog is for me, not for you, dear reader.

Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 10:47:45 AM (EDT)

Always tell the Truth. Truth is a man.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 07:48:19 PM (EDT)

Actually, you can yell fire in a crowded theater... if there is a fire.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 04:08:41 PM (EDT)

Me on a software keyboard (i.e., my phone): 10 seconds of typing a message, followed by 60 seconds worth of corrections

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 04:02:18 PM (EDT)

Okay, turns out having a different color scheme for each category was just too jarring. Forget I ever suggested it.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 02:38:02 PM (EDT)

Neat animated JBP video.

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 01:42:22 PM (EDT)

If the CDC told you that wearing clown shoes and a polka dot bow tie to the grocery store would help slow the spread of a virus, would you do it?

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 11:12:29 AM (EDT)

Updated the color scheme here to be a bit more C64 like. Also, I can now easily apply the color scheme from different Commodore machines. Perhaps I'll give each category its own scheme? (though some of them are pretty ugly)

Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 09:33:22 AM (EDT)

This is my aesthetic.

Monday, April 12, 2021 at 11:21:37 PM (EDT)

Just made a site update from my phone by SSHing into my PC, and now I'm microblogging in bed. Try that with Wordpress.

Monday, April 12, 2021 at 10:26:00 PM (EDT)

I think I'm finally satisfied with the file structure around here. Categories now have their own folder and index.html file.

Monday, April 12, 2021 at 09:09:30 AM (EDT)

You might be addicted to coffee when you start thinking about your second cup before even finishing your first

Sunday, April 11, 2021 at 09:53:41 AM (EDT)

Every particle in the universe is built on a tower of infinite height.

Friday, April 09, 2021 at 03:28:09 PM (EDT)

I sure do overuse the phrase 'as God intended'. I actually have no idea what He intends

Friday, April 09, 2021 at 03:02:30 PM (EDT)

I wish it was as easy to get addicted to creating stuff as it is to get addicted to novelty (i.e. other people creating stuff).

Friday, April 09, 2021 at 10:03:52 AM (EDT)

I'm a proponent of putting soybean oil in our diesel trucks, and grass-fed tallow in our deep fryers, as the good Lord intended.

Thursday, April 08, 2021 at 03:02:23 PM (EDT)

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity, especially Twitter profiles
-Solomon, probably

Wednesday, April 07, 2021 at 11:48:16 AM (EDT)

We should stop calling it Easter and instead call it what it is: Resurrection Day. Happy belated Resurrection Day. (I was too busy on Sunday to think of this then.)

Wednesday, April 07, 2021 at 11:07:40 AM (EDT)

A neat find: this website is a community of folks who sample weird old instruments and release the samples for free. As you'd expect the results are all over the place but there are some real gems. (Funny the stuff you get tipped on by lurking the linux audio mailing list) https://www.pianobook.co.uk/

Wednesday, April 07, 2021 at 08:50:38 AM (EDT)

Yet I still manage to forget to clock in on time

Wednesday, April 07, 2021 at 08:04:57 AM (EDT)

Some days I'm so bored in the morning that I end up going to work on time.

Tuesday, April 06, 2021 at 09:30:15 AM (EDT)

Every time I start a project in a different programming language I have to relearn its syntax because they all jumble together in my head. #OldProgrammerProblems

Monday, April 05, 2021 at 01:54:33 PM (EDT)

If P == NP, then people are computers. If P != NP, they might still be computers, but it is at least possible that they are something more.

Monday, April 05, 2021 at 01:18:40 PM (EDT)

Remember: if you don't own the hardware, you don't own the software or the data on it. The Cloud is really just Someone Else's Computers.

Monday, April 05, 2021 at 01:15:07 PM (EDT)

Social media companies are the ultimate end result of IP law. Keep your software free, and you'll be free too.

Friday, April 02, 2021 at 08:31:06 AM (EDT)

Unsure of the best compressor settings to use for a 12 gauge shotgun recorded in mid/side.

Thursday, April 01, 2021 at 11:36:01 PM (EDT)

mixing kick drums is hard. scratch that... mixing is hard.

Thursday, April 01, 2021 at 11:53:07 AM (EDT)

I wonder how many sentences I've typed into a chat/comment window and then deleted either before posting or shortly after. Probably more than the ones I actually went through with.

Thursday, April 01, 2021 at 09:08:04 AM (EDT)

Abolish the ([A-Z]{3,4}).

Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 01:56:35 PM (EDT)

A better metaphor than fingerprints of the designer would be echoes of the designer's voice. God might not actually have fingers, but He definitely has a voice. We are all living, breathing Fourier transforms.

Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 12:01:02 PM (EDT)

Think about our ablity to play music. Then think about 10 (11? 12?) dimensional superstring theory, which -- if true -- is basically God playing music. That's how far separated we are from Him in every other way, also.

Wednesday, March 31, 2021 at 10:12:47 AM (EDT)

Wow, it's pretty exciting to see a game I wrote 18 years ago compile and run on Linux. Kudos to QB64!

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 04:44:19 PM (EDT)

Seems odd to me that in 2021 you can't set the background color of the audio player in the major browsers using just CSS. I had to give in and write two lines of JavaScript to make the player blend in with the C64 theme. One nice side effect is that it looks better in no-style mode, also.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 01:47:48 PM (EDT)

Of course the universe is a simulation. This is exactly what theists have been saying for centuries, they just didn't have the language of computers to express the idea at the time. We're in a limited reality, embedded within a larger one. The larger reality is outside the scope of the scientific method, so we can't do experiments to test its nature. But, the Designer has left his fingerprints in this reality, if we're willing to see them.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 12:08:33 PM (EDT)

Do
line
breaks
work?

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 12:06:23 PM (EDT)

I guess I should eventually add pagination to this page's template.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 12:04:47 PM (EDT)

I am going to port The Maze to QB64. I guess it's not really a port, since it already is a QB program, but what I mean is I will use QB64 to build some modern binaries and keep developing it. I always wanted to fix the controls and add some custom graphics.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 11:56:48 AM (EDT)

ASCII tables make me happy.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 11:22:50 AM (EDT)

Sundays are better than others. #MisheardSayings

Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 09:07:21 AM (EDT)

The whole cryptocurrency space is in danger due to overreach of the SEC. Help LBRY Save Crypto. #TheGovernmentIsTheVirus

Monday, March 29, 2021 at 01:59:54 PM (EDT)

I guess if you can convince yourself that the best diet for a carnivore is artificially manufactured food clumps that are 60% pasta, then it's ok to listen to your vet's nutritional advice.

Sunday, March 28, 2021 at 10:21:57 PM (EDT)

I really enjoy wiring things. Spent all of last weekend wiring new light switches and outlets at the brewery retail building, and today wired the electronic valve for our new fermenter.

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 10:11:51 PM (EDT)

Sattelite internet is pretty bad. Let's hope Starlink is all it's cracked up to be.

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 05:06:20 PM (EDT)

Time to go can up a bunch of beer.

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 11:35:54 AM (EDT)

Publish and upload works, now I can start using this for real. Thanks to HexDSL for the idea. (Also this will be my first hyperlink attempt.)

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 11:29:42 AM (EDT)

Time to try a real publish and upload.

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 10:35:40 AM (EDT)

Seems to be working now. Let's try publishing next

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 10:34:55 AM (EDT)

Another test

Friday, March 26, 2021 at 10:33:46 AM (EDT)

This is a test