A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

All over twitter. Worth posting:

So I’ve got this C++ Unit Testing Framework (which, due to naming clashes with everything under the sun I may end up having to call “Mikey’s C++ Unit Testing Framework” or “MFCUTF” for short.)

I was about to post this thing on google code when I got to the “select a license” section. Now the whole field of open source licensing is one of the most contemptible garbage heaps of legalese every to have been created by the godless manufactured profession that is contract law.

So go here and see what I mean: http://opensource.org/licenses/category

I have to pick one of these… or create my own, which is right out.

Frankly I want my license to consist largely of “Use it, but don’t be an asshole about it.”

Which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be an option.

Get Your Cyborg Name

I was back and forth with @kylaworld the other night and she mentioned The Cult. Or maybe she blip.fm‘ed it. Dunno.

I’m a big fan of The Cult, have been for almost 25 years.

As I’m also a perpetual fan of Pandora.com for most of my music needs I decided to see what would come up if I seeded a new station with “The Cult”.

Holy Righteous Shit!

The Cult
Alice In Chains
AC/DC
Zepplin
Soundgarden

It just keeps going.

Most of it is stuff I know cold. I’ve only down voted one tune (because frankly I’ve heard enough Guns & Roses for this lifetime.)

So here’s the link to the station. Give it a listen if you’re of a mind to.

o/

Got an interview tomorrow. It’s an odd one. I know almost nothing about the job itself and it’s for a company that doesn’t show up on any search I’ve been able to compose. The web site it registered to the guy who contacted me.

OUGHT to be interesting.

Over the last day and a half I tried building on my candied ginger success with papaya, but it just doesn’t work. The boiling process breaks down the tough cellular structure of the ginger, so when it’s applied to something soft, with as high a water content as papaya, it nearly disintegrates. All that is fine really, but the final step, which with ginger is rolling it around in granulated sugar, just makes a godawful mess with the papaya. I spent most of the last 30 hours or so trying to get it dried out sufficiently. Finally, after making a really awful mess, I tossed it all. A loss after a fashion, but now another thing I know that won’t work.

Aside from that I’m just getting a bit sick of my own company. The cabin fever is driving me a bit out of my gourd. A “change of pace” consists of either switching video games (or software projects) or standing up from my computer, going to the couch, and turning on my laptop.

I can’t seem to walk out my apartment door without spending $40.

But the job search does seem to be picking up pace, which is good. I had a company want a programming test (which I took on Thursday evening) and a code sample. Nobody’s ever asked me for a code sample before. The only thing I could think of that stood on it’s own, rather than being a part of a larger system that wouldn’t make any sense was my C+ Unit Testing library. I’d been trying to work up the nerve to post it online as a source-available project and ended up using it for that purpose. I wrote up a readme on why it made sense to write one given that there are a few popular ones out there already (especially since there are some design decisions that look a little odd if you don’t know why they were done,) added some example code to exercise it, and shipped the whole schmegeggy off.

*gulp*

So who knows what will come of that. The cleanup task, hasty as it was (though thorough enough that I’m pleased with the result) does leave me entirely without excuses for posting the thing online. Google code? Sourceforge?

Hmm…

I think I know what’s next.

New post up on The Vortigaunt Shuffle: Really? More EverQuest I

o/

Now THAT’S what I call a stimulus package I can get behind:

New Post over at The Vortigaunt Shuffle on EverQuest I, 10 years later.

I saw a web comic some years ago that I haven’t been able to find.

“It went something like this.”

A man is sitting underneath a tree atop a hill in central park in less than quiet consternation. A woman is, well, frolicking in the field around them, doing cartwheels, picking flowers. He goes on…

“How can you just DO that? Don’t you understand what’s going on? There’s war across the globe. The economy is in the toilette. We have crises in every area you can name, and you’re just playing with flowers? You’re ignoring what’s going on around you!”

She takes a deep breath and smiles at the sun, giggling and says “So are you.”

It’s been a while since I’ve had a real solid Capital Funkitude entry.

Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) posted this to a Twitter last night.

I proceeded to listen to it no less than 15 times in a row.

Give it a couple minutes to get started.

Knocked my socks off.

Ok, so it’s not long enough to be a rut.

Yesterday I had about 7 substantial blog posts between here and The Vortigaunt Shuffle. Readership went nuts for the day. I remember the palpable feeling that there was just no end to it but that the ends of my fingers were sore from banging on the keyboard. (I’m a bit ham fisted with these things.)

It felt really good. Consistently I would hit a stride about 2/3 of the way through a post. But I stopped myself most of the time because I was getting a bit too winded for the form. The right thing to do instead I suppose is to just let it rip then edit down into either individual posts or subsections somehow.

Dunno, there was a glimmer of something yesterday that I’ve been looking for for quite some time.

see more Fail Blog

Well, I suppose it’s what happens when you write something at 5:00 am and decide to post it.

In the On Faith post the final question read:

Is not having Faith in God the ultimate expression of free will?

I read “Is not” in my head (and wrote it) to mean “Is it not true that…”

I did NOT mean “Is lack of Faith…”

And while it was pointed out as a very clever ambiguity, leaving the reader to read what they were inclined to, it was not what I meant.

So I had to change that to:

Does it not follow then that having Faith in God the ultimate expression of free will?

Which seems to me to be clear.

A very particular toy.

Between TVS and here and a couple other things I’ve got kicking around, I’m beginning to have serious trouble managing profiles, concurrent applications and such.

One trick that’s helped so far is to use multiple browsers. Logging in to gmail under madwilliamflint under firefox, then under my “job searching” id on safari, etc.

But I’d like a keyboard bar, like a few extra rows of function keys. Nothing fancy, just something that sits between my monitor and keyboard, providing a panel of a few dozen more keys that I can map to app executions.

I’m sure it’s out there someplace.

I love listening to thunder crawl it’s way across the sky the way it’s doing here in NYC at the moment. Just a constant low rumble.

Can’t wait for the rain.

Never can.

I just dropped my first substantial post up over at The Vortigaunt Shuffle.

I’ve covered some of the topics here before, to the extent that I wonder if I should dig up my gaming posts and go cross-post them.

Dunno, probably.

Anyway if the topic of gaming doesn’t numb your mind completely, go have a read.

I’ve had a remarkably tumultuous relationship with the word Faith over the last 40 years.

It started as a child at family gatherings.  While our household was religiously ambivalent, the maternal arm of my extended family was decidedly not so.  In fact of my mother’s 6 brothers and sisters, a fairly distressing number of them were born again Christian, all of them having been raised Catholic.  This subset of my family provided a uniquely bad example of religiosity during my formative years.  It is certainly not the case with all of them, but there are a couple spectacularly bad apples.

During my early years I remember vaguely my father neck deep in religious argument, against the religious aunts and uncles, and winning handily.  I took from this time and these people a concrete picture of what Christianity meant.  How the born agains were uniformly vapid, with minds as empty as they were closed.  I took away an understanding of Catholicism being a domineering institution used by Italian immigrants to keep their seven children under a yoke.

As I grew up my father retired from these conversations a bit more quickly than our family retired from large extended family gatherings.  Into my teens I took up the mantle of Dismissive.  It was easy.  I was dealing with no great intellect and no arguments of substance.

I distinctly remember trying to drag, kicking and screaming, a reason WHY The Word was The Word and not just words.  My uncle would smile broadly, shake his head, and proudly utter the word.

Faith

I argued that by his estimation he’s willfully dispensed with the capacity for reason.

More he smiled, farther he shook his head.  All arguments resulted in his growing ever more triumphant and smug. And the more I, a budding intellectual overflowing with teenage rage, began to loathe him.

It had gotten to a point where the utterance of the word was revolting. I had a girlfriend for a brief time who would speak so proudly of how she Had Faith and I would flinch, disgusted completely.  It had become a symbol of all that I hated, the willful divestature of one’s most powerful capacity.  The power to reason, and by reasoning to decide and by deciding, to then act.  If there was to be a religion or spiritual path for me it must not only allow for reason, but it must exalt it.  To do less was to be revolting beyond measure.

So I turned elsewhere.  To paths with less structured belief systems, believing that believing was the problem.  I went through western eclectic neo-paganism.  But I found it a perfectly hollow spiritual structure based largely on sensate pleasures and boundary free existance, full of people pathetically demanding respect and validation of beliefs they made up as they went along and didn’t honestly hold.

I looked at Eastern philosophies.  They were complete philosophical systems based entirely around casting a strange mystical sense over a core of nihilism.  They were full of interesting exercises, while perfectly skirting the issue of cosmology.

There was Buddhism, with it’s hierarchical reincarnation structure so obviously designed around he social caste system of it’s home cultures.

Throughout all this time there were always a couple curious exceptions.  A couple people, thoughtful, serious and intelligent who wore their belief, faith and exploration proudly.

One is an uncle, of the same family.  He was always somewhat different.  Never pushy, always serious about Christianity and his faith when it arose.  A persistently kind and funny person.

There was a girl I dated for a time, a medical malpractice lawyer who wretled quite seriously with her faith and career.

A blogger friend, whose spiritual journeys were well documented and fascinating.

None of these people were idiots.  None were the brainless gum-smacking toll takers I’d extrapolated them to be.  They didn’t make sense to me at all.

But really… I’d given up.  It’s only now that I understand that I gave up, but I did.  There was a period of almost 10 years where I had no particular expansion of interest or knowledge.

A few years ago though I was recommended The Man Who Was Thursday, but G.K.Chesterton.  It’s a strange little book, entirely off topic for this area.  But it did lead me to read him more thoroughly.  Chesterton is a Catholic apologist of the highest order.  His writing is peerless, surpassing the Bard in my estimation of his wordsmithing skills. The subject matter of such a craftsman is entirely irrelevant.  Anything to get more of his words to pass in front of my eyes.

So I read Orthodoxy. I read The Everlasting Man, and many others.  I settled on Manalive, which has since become my favorite piece of artwork the world has yet offered me to judge.

And aspects of Christianity and Catholocism more specifically were brought into focus.  This was not the mindless “I just believe because I believe and it’s true because they said” religion of my flatlining uncle.  It was a very thoughtful thing full of questions that were allowed and answers to most of them that were borne of reason and logic.  I ventured elsewhere, mildly and found that nowhere did someone, in their defence of Catholocism, try to wave The Book in my face as a dismissive gesture designed to shortcut questioning.

And so for the last couple years i’ve been doing an awful lot of thinking.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be Christian.  As much of it as makes sense to me I still can’t get to the leap of faith that is belief in the divinity of Christ.  It’s too far away.  Most of the ideas of the church make a great deal more sense to me than the vapid thoughtlessness I’d experienced on those Thanksgiving afternoons and even a great deal more sense than any other of my intentional pursuits had made.  But to take that step without believing it is true is a lie I can’t commit.

But the topic is still fascinating to me.

Family gatherings have certainly taken on a different tenor, now that I go to them again after more than 15 years of self-induced absence. Yes my devout brainwashed uncle and couple of aunts are still maddening, even more so given that I know how much more there is there than they represent.

Lately, after the Letterman/Palin debaucle, there was an awful lot of revised talk around the internet about feminism as opposed to Feminism. (Camile Paglia vs. Paige Mellish.)  I recalled a quote that I’d heard some decades ago.  An interesting if pithy idea.

“A woman is not free until she can decide she wants to raise children and be a home-maker.”

Now, I’ve got that wrong, not having tracked down the original.  I’m satisfied with the paraphrasal.  But it’s an interesting idea that highlights the reason Feminism is a complete and total sham, a thinly disguised anti-establishment movement.  Capital F Feminists react pretty violently to that quote.  It’s a good barometer to test the honesty of their adherence to the cause they purport to be fighting for.

But leaving feminism behind specifically, it distills down into a compelling concept:  The notion of being able to chose the role that would have been chosen for you, as an expression of freedom having come full circle is fascinating to me.

My mixed up brainsauce being what it is, these thoughts and ideas overlapped in time and therefore in content with my recent cogitations about deism and more specifically, Catholocism.

So as a thought experiment, let’s start with “Catholocism is true”:

God could easily have created us such that we would serve him and his purposes and plans.  But he didn’t.  God created us with free will.  Free will to decide to live well or poorly, to love or hate, to create or destroy.  Most importantly the freedom to decide to seek Him out or not.

If God granted us free will, then I put it to you:  Does it not follow then that having Faith in God the ultimate expression of free will?

UPDATE: Despite the entertaining accidental ambiguity, I had to adjust the final question. “Is not having free will…” can be read either way depending on the merely the internal annunciation of the sentence. It makes for a clever experiment in “reading what you want to read” but as it’s not what I meant, it needed to change. Sorry for the confusion. o/

Starting tomorrow I’m going to kick off a gaming blog. Lord knows they kick around in my head enough to justify the energy spent. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, anything that gets me writing is just fine with me. Besides, it really doesn’t belong here. So, without further ado…

The Vortigaunt Shuffle

Yeah yeah yeah, it needs a fansite kit or something. I definitely need to (or need someone to) muck around with the template and such. But for now it’ll do.

A variation of this happens most days ending in a Y:

- Get done with a half-hour block of doing something.
- Realize I’m hungry
- Go to freezer/fridge/cabinets looking for something
- Empty the ice trays into the bucket thingie and re-fill them.
- Get frustrated and go noodle around online.
- Realize I’m hungry
- Go to cabinets/freezer/fridge looking for something
- Get disgusted with dishes and wash two small plates and a spoon
- Put the washed two plates and spoon right back on top of the pile where I found them.
- GO back and noodle around online
- Realize I’m still hungry
- Go to the cabinets/freezer/freezer looking for something
- Wonder why the hell my freezer doesn’t work as the ice is still water.
- Walk half-way back to the computer, and yell “GOD DAMMIT”
- Go to the little boy’s room
- Go back and noodle around online
- Realize I’m STILL hungry
- Walk to the cabinets/cabinets/fridge looking for something.
- Grab something to eat, and put it on the counter
- Go back and check the market.
- Realize I’m still hungry
- Go back to the counter, open the partially and unintentionally thawed something to eat
- Put it in the microwave
- Hit start
- Go noodle around online, listening for the ding
- Check the weather both at the forecast.weather.gov and “thefuckingweather.com”
- Apply to another couple jobs that were just posted
- Realize I’m hungry
- Walk to the kitchen and look in the fridge/fridge/freezer for something to eat
- Walk back to the computer
- Sit down and yell “GOD DAMMIT!” again
- Go to the microwave, and re-start it to heat the now cold food
- Go sit down and noodle around on line.
- Reach for a now-empty bottle of diet dew
- Go back to the fridge looking for a new, nonexistent bottle.
- Look for boat shoes I can wear without socks because socks I’d have to add a “go find” entry for as well
- Shuffle off to the stupidmarket for new dew.
- Come back home and fetch my glass
- Go to freezer looking for ice cubes.
- Bitch some more that freezer doesn’t work, take ice cubes from bin.
- Enjoy half a bottle of diet dew while noodling around online and applying to what I hope isn’t the same job again
- Wonder what that bizarre nagging feeling is
- Realize I’m hungry
- Go to cabinets/cabinets/fridge looking for something to eat, annoyed by nagging feeling
- wash the same spoon, not realizing it’s the same spoon
- Get half way to my computer and yell “GOD DAMMIT!”
- Go back and turn the microwave back on
- STAND THERE WHILE BURRITOS COOK, WAITING FOR DING
- Flip burritos over and start microwave for 2nd half of cooking process
- Go noodle around online
- Realize I’m hungry
- Fetch food and bring it to computer, grumbling incoherently
- Exhibit an uncharacteristic moment of clarity as I realize what has just happened
- Open the blog posting interface and title a new post “The ADD Diet”
- Spend 20 minutes typing a reasonably accurate list of the events that took place.
- Noodle around online
- Look down at the plate of burritos and realize they’re cold.
- Eat them anyway.
- Hit Post

And people wonder why I get excited about cold speg-o’s out of the can.

“The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.” by Helen Keller

Nice, but uhm…

How the hell would SHE know?