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Six Days of Soylent So Far
I promised Pedro that I would start blogging when I started on my Soylent diet, so here goes. I’m a bit late, considering that I actually started in on Soylent a few days ago, but preparations for my wedding have kept me away from the blagosphere. I’ll assume the reader is familiar with the purpose and origin…
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Meditations on Meditations – 1:4
It’s been a little over six months since my last meditations post. Let’s pick up where we left off, shall we? 4. MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER To avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well spent. (Hays, 1) My parents were huge believers in this method.…
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Perfect Craft, Imperfect Art
I was talking with my good friend Evan, discussing our philosophies of making things. Evan, a classically trained pianist, recalled an aphorism of one of his mentors: Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. This makes sense in some fields. In playing a piano, if one practices sloppily, one will perform sloppily – incorrect finger…
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Meditations on Meditations – 1:3
Some rather late-night rambling here, but a post nonetheless, so that I may move forward with this exercise. I attended a talk on blogging today by @jessejiryudavis which encouraged writing as practice for writing, so I’m taking that to heart. 3. MY MOTHER Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong…
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Meditations on Meditations – 1:2
MY FATHER (FROM MY OWN MEMORIES AND HIS REPUTATION) Integrity and manliness. (Hays, 1) Marcus’ lost his father at three. I am fortunate to have ever attended just one funeral. We can say what the average life expectancy is for our day and age only for those that die during it; perhaps the first person…
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Meditations on Meditations – 1:1
Introduction: This will be a series of blog posts, time permitting, in which I examine each chapter of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations”, as translated by Gregory Hays, Meric Casaubon, and George Long. I will use Hays’ translation mainly, as I find it the most approachable. The posts will be personal and most likely wandering, like Aurelius’ writings.…
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Zen of Broken Code
“Words cannot even describe the multitude of design flaws in your body, and yet it is still the vessel of your mind; it is still your connection to this world. Production code is broken, but so is nature.” —@jordanorelli
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The Artist and the Scientist
I posit that there are two distinct ways in which people become fascinated by programming. One way is via high-level languages, web development tools, and visual languages. This “way” in is for people who are more interested in the act of creating with code than coding itself. I call these people the “artist-programmers”: people who…
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SSD vs RAID0 for Gaming: SCIENCE!
A while ago, I bought an SSD (128GB Crucial M4) off Amazon, with the idea of putting it in my gaming rig as a “game cache”. My plan was to install my most played games on it, while the rest of my games sat on my current setup – Two 1TB Seagate Barracudas in RAID0.…
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One Letter at a Time
The other day, I saw the following brain-teaser posted on Reddit: along with the claim that “Startling” is the only 9 letter word where you can remove one letter at a time and still have a word. Let’s see if that’s true using IPython and a long list of words from http://www.mieliestronk.com/wordlist.html [ed. note in 2018…