Journal entries for February, 2005

It seems governments [and by this I meant to say 'democracies' -Dan] have a lot in common with installations of Windows. I have no doubt that the people who first install a new government (say, the Founding Fathers) have nothing but the nation's best interests at heart. They just overthrew a tyrannical [or, less inflammatorily, 'unfair' -Dan] government and are full of idealism and altruism and govern based on what's best for their newly born country. However, with time, the system becomes more and more corrupt as people who desire power are drawn to the system and work their way into it; people who want to govern for personal, not altruistic, reasons. That seems to be an unavoidable aspect of government. Finally, the system gets so loaded down with crap that nothing is working correctly and it takes 10 minutes to start up MS Word (or three years to get innocent people, incarcerated without trial, released from a torturous prison) and the only solution is to reformat and start again with a new bunch of idealists, but with the sad knowledge that eventually it will all need to be torn down yet again.

The question, then, is to find which form of government is the analogue of Unix :)

"When you first look at his paintings, it's really cute, but when you look again, you gotta think... this Luke Chueh guy's got issues."

I would actually really like to own some of his paintings. Several of them are strangely moving. They are just the right mix of cute and creepy. It's a shame the ones I like best are already sold.

I love it when people who know what they're talking about take themselves lightly. A levelheaded, educational piece on how to destroy the Earth.

Seriously. I don't think you understand how enthusiastically my body clings to sleep. You know how the battle with AIDS is so difficult because it's a retrovirus that adapts to our every attempt to treat it? It's the same with waking me up. I'd like to delineate my current setup.

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i am bill

This morning I was in the kitchen fixing breakfast (mmm, oatmeal) and I noticed a brown smudge on my finger that looked like melted chocolate chip. As I lifted my finger to my mouth to lick it off, I stopped and decided, "You know, the miniscule enjoyment of eating a few micrograms of chocolate is probably not worth the gamble," and instead rinsed it off in the sink. That's a new tactic — NOT automatically putting everything I find into my mouth. I think that's a good step forward.

To compete with the SuperBowl, Animal Planet aired three hours of puppies wrestling on a football field mat. Genius. I totally would have tuned in if I had known about it :) I just may have to order the $10 DVD. It'd be a hit at parties!

I'm told it was also a hit among a previously unexplored demographic.

In Japanese, there are several different ways of expressing conditionality. For example, "[past tense verb ending in -ta] + ra" is one: "sore wo tabetara, byouki ni naru" = "If you eat that, you'll get sick." Another is "[plain form of verb] + to," as in: "sore wo taberu-to, byouki ni naru." The latter form always made sense to me because "-to" is also the Japanese word for "and." But at the same time, I was aware that this connection doesn't really make sense and I wasn't sure why it seemed to help me remember the conditional form.

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I was reading a post on Airbag Industries about a little design contest Greg, who runs Airbag, had arranged for a friend. The friend was starting a company and needed a logo, and Greg was too busy to design it himself, so they set up a few judges and offered an iPod Shuffle, worth $99, to whoever submitted the winning entry.

Suddenly the discussion exploded into claims that such contests "devalue the design market," because any real designer would charge $800+ for a logo design. I've seen these kinds of claims before; professional designers outraged at new designers fresh out of college and desperate for work, that charge relatively piddly prices for design work. They argue that these designers shouldn't accept such low prices for their work, because it hurts the value of design work as a whole.

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