Every time I think the PR hype machine that is Second Life will come to an end, reality steps in and proves me wrong. I guess there is no end of Celebrity X Appears in SL stories to write and the press seems total happy to print them no matter how inane they are. Here’s…

I don’t watch much TV anymore. I watched enough when I was younger to last for a couple of lives. We only get basic cable which luckily includes the Discovery channel so I get a Myth busters fix every now and then. We get the coveting channel too which has Living with Ed which is…

A long time ago I was in Vegas watching a man gamble his money away at roulette. He was betting red or black and mostly losing. But he was determined and each time he lost he would double his bet thinking he would make up the next time and be back to where he was,…

Like alot of people I have been on a kind of spirtual quest for answers. It probably started 20+ years ago when I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and for the first time started to think there might actually be a need to find answers that weren’t going to be in any…

I do believe in the power of the markets to maximize efficiency. From an engineering perspective I respect all processes which seek to create a more optimal solution via continual refinement. There are two common pitfalls which keep us from getting to this optimal state. One is when the process gets stuck in local maxima…

This sunday morning NPR was close to perfect. No Iraq war just Jonathan Coulton and Alton Brown back to back. It possible that Code Monkey is no longer my fav JC song. I think its been replaced by Shop Vac. Maybe you don’t like Alton. But really how can you not like someone that makes…

I have nothing much to add to this. So I’ll just quote it alot. Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness. – Chuang-Tzu (350 B.C.) Openly agitating against the very pursuit of happiness was considered a sedition of the most insidious hazard. Because nearly everyone feels its weird invisible pressure – driving them…

Pretty neat little blog experiment. For the month of November, I’m only spending $30 on food. The only exception will be things that are freely available to the average person (salt taken from restaurants, sauce packets from Taco Bell, free coffee from an office). Buying in advance is fine, but at the end of the…

I hope that the Legacy Code post doesn’t imply that I am any kind of fan of the Intelligent Design movement. As someone who finds value in both faith and science, a movement which so horribly distorts the things I find wonderful about both is pretty unappealing to me except in the context perhaps of…

I don’t know much about genetics but I have done some research into it lately. Mostly, I wanted to learn more about how genes mutate and combine to form new genes and see how this relates to the way computer programs are constructed. Not surprisingly our genetic code does not seem to be very clean…