January 2010
11 posts
My Favourite Things
The two best things in the world:
Creating Something
I posit there is nothing like the visceral feeling you get when you’ve made something yourself; taken something that existed soley in your mind and reified into the physical plane. I love programming and writing in particular, as these are pursuits where you truly create something from nothing: You start with a blank page, an empty...
Those yaks just have too much hair
For fun, I decided to write a little Service to upload my Tumblr entries (which I compose in Markdown, using Emacs). It’s a pretty simple workflow, with most of the work being done by this shell script:
bash:
source ~/.tumblr-private
TITLE=$(head -n 1 "$1" | sed -e 's/^Title: //g')
BODY=$( tail -n +2 "$1")
curl -X POST -d email="${TUMBLR_USER}" -d password="${TUMBLR_PASSWD}" \
-d...
New Books
Today, I decided to walk through the U of T bookstore after class, killing some time before going to the gym. While there, I spotted a book that looked interesting, entitled People First Economics. It seemed to be about the kind of things that I enjoy discussing, so I picked it up.
Later, when I arrived home, I discovered that I apparently had ordered a book from Amazon a while ago, then...
“We all must fear evil, but the evil we must fear the most is the indifference of...”
– Priest, Boondock Saints
Shock and $$$ →
2 tags
Hypocrisy, Rampant on a Field of Haitians
The unending hypocrisy and/or deliberate blindness of everyone involved in this whole Haiti relief effort is truly infuriating. While everyone is making a huge deal out of what big, damn heroes they are, no-one seems to be mentioning that it’s only due to centuries of oppression, neglect, and exploitation by us1 that they’re even in this position; so poor they can neither construct...
On Exercise
I despise this fleshy prison in which my consciousness is entombed; if I can’t escape it, I’ll do my damnedest to shape it to my will
On Stupid Questions
(Context: A week or so ago, I’m at a preliminary session to see about getting some therapy to hopeful not be a crazy person. We’ve discussed the ways in which aforementioned craziness manifests itself and then:)
Therapist: “…so, what do you think we can do to help?”
Me: “I’m really not sure”
Therapist: “Well, what do you...
The Bane of Cool Stuff
Over the last several days, I’ve been listening to the archives of the “Mac Power Users” podcast while in transit. I like that it provides a way for me to be acquiring new information while I’m doing stuff that would normally preclude, e.g. reading a book or writing, plus I get to find out about all sorts of cool technologies and ways of applying them—but therein...
Braindump
Some random things I’ve been working on/thinking about the last little while…
CurrMap
A couple months ago, I was brought into an interesting project for U of T’s Engineering faculty, to assist a good friend of mine on an interesting project, which has been dubbed “Cirriculum Mapper”, or “CurrMap”. The elevator pitch is that it provides a simple way for...
Five Minute Stories
Since I’ve been studying engineering, I haven’t been able to write much. In high school, I used to have to write a fair amount, and I rather enjoyed it, and I began to worry that my ability would atrophy without use. So, in October, I came up with a fun scheme to give me an opportunity to keep my hand in, so to speak.
The idea is that I use some sort of random story-idea generator ...