On the easy levels, Civilization teaches you that it’s okay if you’re a pariah state if you’ve got the biggest military. This sort of tracks with realpolitik, but it’s only a partial match. See, this bugs me. Civilization hooks me with its complexity and infrastructure. I love building a complex system. But it fails meContinue reading “Why Zero-Sum?”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
So, I’m Out
It’s already been well over a year since I looked at Facebook or Instagram, and at the beginning of the month I stopped looking at Twitter. After two weeks, I checked back in and nope, I hadn’t missed anything amazing, but I sure had missed out on a bunch of anxiety and whatever we’re callingContinue reading “So, I’m Out”
Three Dots at the Mall
I get that wearing your N95 mask under your chin keeps your neckbeard from getting COVID but what’s the deal with the women doing it? … I am sure your dog is awesome and I’d love to hang out but not inside the restaurant …
San José, City of Murderous Douchebags
We went over the hill to visit the dentist today. Yesterday, the governor signed a law requiring people to wear masks in public. We took two of the dogs, because our hygienist appointments were an hour apart and there’s a park a couple of blocks from the dentist. You see where this is going? TheContinue reading “San José, City of Murderous Douchebags”
Great Man Theory
Historians seem not to like the great man story of history nowadays, preferring to talk about how the actions of lots of people wind up being at least as important as the actions of a single leader. And that makes a lot of sense, really. So why are the papers and the politicians all aboutContinue reading “Great Man Theory”
Announcing DMS Calc
A few years back, I was playing Kerbal Space Program and had the need to convert back and forth between decimal degrees and degrees-minutes-seconds. I found some online tools to do it, but they were naive and forgot that floating point numbers are still kind of tricky on a computer. I wrote a post aboutContinue reading “Announcing DMS Calc”
I Wrote A Thing
Hey, I wrote an app and got it published on the App Store! It’s free and it only does one thing: it lets you slide a selector back and forth and show the equivalent temperature readings in Fahrenheit and Celsius. So, if that’s a thing that you want on your phone, go check it out!Continue reading “I Wrote A Thing”
Yep, I Still Hate Your Framework
I have been writing a couple of mobile apps in Flutter for the past few months, and as I neared feature-complete ready-for-internal-beta I started getting frustrated by the framework’s limitations with the app stores. The build system won’t build an artifact that the Google Play Store will accept come August, and the iOS build hasContinue reading “Yep, I Still Hate Your Framework”
Cranky Old Guy
Yeah, so I’m listening to Surveillance Valley (see previous post) and it’s got me thinking all paranoid and crotchety, as one might expect. So now I’m reminiscing fondly about UUCP, UseNet, FidoNet, and RumorMonger/LACS. Thinking about how, if I were going to try to come up with some sort of communication network that was hardContinue reading “Cranky Old Guy”
What to Do
A five hour flight is enough time to write several unit tests. So, yesterday I started working on the band sets for 2019 and I wrote tests and new library functions and fixed a latent bug in an old library function. And now we’re in Hawaii!