The Clearing

Would you ever meet up with someone who you only knew from email and a dating website?
Would you get into that person's car on the first meeting?
What about if you saw this in the car?

--02/11/2007--

His name is Ralph. Cause I said so.
--09/26/2006--

I got a kitty!! No name yet. He was named Triscuit at the shelter, but I don't think he likes it. I don't like it. I'll see what he earns as his name.
Pictures that I took in the first day
--09/22/2006--

And now for something completely different.
I saw this on my way to work today.

Why is there a turkey in Kendall Square?
--09/20/2006--

I'm gonig to rant about Scheme, and most of it will probably relate to any LISP, but I'll just stick with what I know.

Programming languages are designed to be written and read by people. The compiler (or interpreter) takes that writing and translates it into instructions that the computer can actually run. Langauges, therefore, should be readable and make sense to people. Let the compiler figure out how to get the computer to run it. Scheme was built the other way around. They made something that was easy to parse and compile, but isn't really that easy to read.
Functional programs are more easily proven correct and tend to have fewer lines. Those lines are harder to understand that in imperative languages. People want to say "do this thing 8 times." That's easy to do with a for loop. Too bad Scheme doesn't have for loops. You have to make a recursive function and do all the loop control variable manipulation by hand.
There are some nice things that Scheme has, it does recursion amazingly well and fast. It's got garbage collection which most good languages have now. It fails in what should be it's first priority, though. It's not easy for people.
--08/29/2005--

New page up, look to the left, and check out Donkey. Hopefully Muncus and I, and anyone else who wants, will turn this into a badass GPL'd project. This would also be a good excuse to develop Muncus's idea of a suite of programs to aid software developers. I see them being done in conjunction, since we're going to take our time and do this right. At least to start with.
-- 08/23/2005 --

I've got a job, w00t! Doing sysadmin work for MIT probably starting July 11, 2005.

Spent the weekend down in DC with Pete, loads of fun, see the quotes page for something memorable by Matt Shelton. We also ended up bailing on a cab, after him leaving us to buy gas for at least 10 minutes. There was another interesting thing that happened, but I don't think I'll mention it in print. Just ask.

I added a page for random quotes that I come up with/come across. Hmm, I should add a link to the Crew quotes page.

Everyone start freaking out, another update.

The great thing about dealing with a limited/slow resource at first, is that at some point you get to a more updated, faster version, and it's just amazing. I got a CD burner when they first came out, only wrote at 2x, took 45 minutes to burn a CD. I had that for about 2 years, then upgraded to a 48x, and now I can burn a CD in less than 5 minutes, so cool.

Most of the bit torrent stuff I do is on low seeds, so the downloads are ok, but the upload traffic is maxed out of my connection. I'm downloading Ubuntu Linux right now, maxing out my download pipe, and just trickling out my upload. :)
-- 11/22/04 --

Hey look, an update, for the imagninary people who visit this thing.

My latest hardware lustings are for power and storage. Aka, a good UPS and lotsa hard drives. The UPS seems fairly straightforward, APC seems to make a reasonably priced one for high end home users, Back-UPS LS series, a little over $100. Storage stuff is a more significant investment, as I want to play with RAID in the new computer case I found on the street.

The case has room for 7 drives, I believe, and has a P2 400MHz and 128MB of RAM. A little wimpy, but I'd just be using it as a file server, to start. Eventually I'd like to build a media server for the living room. I'd also like to have a home theater setup with nice speakers and stuff. The media server would do mp3s out to the speakers, and downloaded videos to the tv.
-- 11/18/04 --

Retooled, things a little bit. Thanks to Rudicus in #crew for the advice of server side includes. No one will notice (aside from the fact that no one comes here) but the nav-bar and footer are in separate files now, so that they can easily be included into any file on this site.
-- 08/19/04 --

I'm back, and now with real things to say. Now all I have to do is get people to read this thing.
The plan is to have navigation on the left bar, and rss feeds on the right. Right now I'm just leaving myself notes and feeling very cool for having figured out how to do this stuff all on my own (books and websites don't count).
-- 08/11/04 --