I got totally burned out on social media by the U.S. election. Rather than textual posts with partisan argumentation (that’s how you spell, “civil discourse,”) Twitter and Facebook were awash in nasty memes. A month later it feels kind of like the morning after a killer party: I’m slowly looking around for cat videos andContinue reading “Engage”
Category Archives: Intellectual Curiosity
Distortion
Back when Dubya was president, I read Slashdot every day. My wife worked as a journalist and then as a technical writer in the semiconductor industry and she mocked me when I told her about some cool thing I’d seen: either the “news” was like six months old or the story had misrepresented whatever theContinue reading “Distortion”
How to Draw a Line
I became a bit intimidated and frustrated with my simulation framework so I set it aside for a while. I played a lot of video games and I practiced my piping. I’m bored with the video games, though, and last night I came back to the sim. I’ve got some ideas for making the problemsContinue reading “How to Draw a Line”
It’s Alive!
So, I’ve been fooling around with Java FX for the past month or so, poking at a toy project just to see how the system works. And now I’ve built a discrete event simulation environment that lets me drop graphical components down onto a workspace and let them pass messages to each other. I’m prettyContinue reading “It’s Alive!”
Ars Gratia Artis
So, I came out of retirement to work on a neato project. I’m doing a lot of programming, architecture, release management, project management, and, um, reporting. So, that’s why I’m not doing a whole lot of bagpiping or anything. Because this is fun and important. But nobody cares about that. The interesting thing here isContinue reading “Ars Gratia Artis”
Going Anonymous
A friend posted a link to this story about the crypto and anonymity tools Edward Snowden used to communicate with journalists before his big reveal. It’s an interesting read, by itself, with lots of links out to various privacy tools. One that especially caught my attention was Tails, an operating system that, “you can startContinue reading “Going Anonymous”
Morning News
This morning’s news brief was just full of delightful bits. My head is whirling. We have the story about the Russian government performing cyberespionage. This will probably surprise someone; not anyone who has been checking their spam folder over the past 20 years, but yeah, the Russians have lots of programmers who write malware. AndContinue reading “Morning News”
Restricted Knowledge
I’m not really sure how to tell this story. I’ll start with the event that got me writing this post, but there’s a lot of backstory that explains why I even started writing, and then there are my observations of my changed thoughts and feelings about the phenomenon. It’s untidy in my mind; it doesn’tContinue reading “Restricted Knowledge”
Retro Bubble, Order’s Up!
I just read this article that says that Angela Merkel wants Europe to have its own network. Now, maybe I’m not understanding the story, and maybe the reporter didn’t understand what the chancellor said, and maybe the chancellor doesn’t understand how the Internet works. But it seems to me that if a laptop in BerlinContinue reading “Retro Bubble, Order’s Up!”
Simulation Distractibility
Yesterday I wrote about solving a problem using SmartThings. Thinking about some of the frustrations I felt during the process has led me back to thinking about the Salamander Simulation Engine. You know what it would be great for? Programming home automation.