New Pix: Newtown Learning how to watch Cricket: Ravin, Mr. cannot-X-for-toffees himself gave me, with a great deal of effort, a lesson in how to watch and be entertained by cricket. Once you understand how the game is played it’s really actually moderately entertaining. I do have to say that running back and forth lacks a certain visible achievement like a good run around the bases, but nonetheless it’s fairly exciting. I have yet to see a player taken out by tagging the wicket though… Australian versus American body image Well, dig this, Australians are much better adapted vis-a-vis body image (well, this should not be a surprise given that Americans are the absolute worst).

I have always been very interested in going to the holy land. Regrettably, the political situation in the world does not make it very easy for an American to be in that part of the world with a whole lot of comfort. In particular, two fine Sydneysiders have made me think of it again. A few years back when I was taking French at Texas I went to a welcoming committe gathering for foreign students coming to the US. I remembered what it was like to be a foreigner in Holland at a school and was very thankful that so many great Dutch people went out of their way to help me feel welcome.

Within the last week I’ve seen two movies (Secretary and Thirteen) that feature girls with the “cutting” obssessive-compulsive behavior (self-mutilation). What a horrible, horrible (day I say again, “horrible”) affliction. I’ve been reading up on it and it’s so foreign, incomprehensible, and strange. At least bulemia or anorexia or agoraphobia all have a place where I can understand where the afflicted is coming from…this, no, no point of reference. There be no maps of those territiories. I also heard that Garbage chanteuse Shirley Manson was a sufferer as well - simply beyond me. Ex-girlfriend and reportatrix EC Barnett and I discussed it and I was counting her double X chromosomes to fill me in and explain the female psychology behind this (for it arises far more often in women than men) and she was likewise stymied.

In an email thread the following was written by me: From: Steven Harms (stharms) Subject: RE: NPR Story - “Google’s New Message Service Includes Voice” And their lightweight, open-standard (Jabber, etc.) and play nice with new platforms. Google’s making Andreesen’s predictions come true. Works great on my Mac :-D You see that I made an error there, I typed their instead of they’re. That’s just what can happen when you type quickly and don’t proofreed. I noticed the error and re-replied: From: Steven Harms (stharms) Subject: RE: NPR Story - “Google’s New Message Service Includes Voice” Egredious spelling error i was thinking “their lightweight client” but the situation called for they’re.

“All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.” – IBM maintenance manual (1925)

It has been said that he who has much knowledge has much worry. Sayeth Steven: He who has sexy laptop has much interest in bags. Following my new favorite lusty consumerism for guys site: Uncrate, I found this bag. What was particularly interesting to me was this comment: “Product of Australia - Assy in China” And suddenly I thought of a half-Chinese, Dickensian Australian reflecting upon his life and thinking this line. “It was in late 2005 that my father found himself working in Guangdong province as an advisor to the then-nascent Huang textile plants. After 3 months in the Chinese industrial capitol, he found himself sharing the evenings with my mother, a manager at the Huang assembly facility.

I’m having an ideabuzz at the moment. What’s an ideabuzz? It’s a feeling that there’s a connection between things ( which spawns an ideabuzz which reminds me of a bit in one of the Dune books by Frank Herbert where Herbert describes a mentat working through a very difficult problem shaking his hands and frothing because he was so close to the final calculation which resolved a very difficult series of unsolubles). An ideabuzz is when you type very fast and you’re not quite sure where the idea is going, but you keep typing very fast. So, I’m having one of those right now about fake things that are meant to be real.

Dedman has been on my case for many moons now to read this book and I finished it today. Setup The dead move to a city (the city) after undergoing a crossing which has no objective standard (wandering a desert, a forest, going underwater, etc.). The dead or, more precisely, the living dead, rest in the city until those who remember them die at which point they go into a different beyond. Good setup. The population starts swelling as a pandemic wipes out the population: sending people into the city by the barrel-load and, given the setup, the people who remember them, into death quite quickly.

Previous Additions to the German Lexicon …When you do something thinking you will save yourself doing something you don’t want to do, but then forget that you were smart enough to do that and wind up creating more work for yourself, because you just did the thing you didn’t want to, so as to remember that you did something “smart” with the thing you wanted and now you must do it in addition…. e.g. Guy 1: “I put my manila folder on the outside of my bag so that I could get to it without unbuckling the bag, Once I did that I remembered I’d put the folder in the convenient side access flap instead, so then I had to buckle the bag back up and then open the access flap to get it.

This evening after my classes I was sitting outside of the school at the ‘Dillo stop waiting for the, uh, ‘Dillo to come round. While waiting I was reading a textbook when I felt something alight to my lower calf. I looked down and sow a mosquito. I hate those bastards. And so I thought: “By God, it’s a mosquito mid-suck! If I kill it i will have bug guts and, uh, until-recently my blood on me.” About the same time another more primal message came in “Kill that ugly thing stealing your vital haemocytes.” Before I could be more than just barely conscious of these ideas I smacked the insect into oblivion.

I wandered lonely as a cloud It’s not often that one mentions Wordsworth and science fiction in the same sentence, yet his famous line kept coming to mind as I read this oddly moving and beautiful report from NPR which muses about what sorts of life may be wandering out in the Universe now that our base assumptions have forcibly been widened by our discovery of arsenic-based life forms. Says the author, Krulwich: Imagine a cloud of stellar dust several light years across quietly drifting through space. Powered by its own bursting stars feeding it oxygen, carbon, life-giving chemistries, could it not become a slightly lonely but vastly oversized life form?

When involved in the Ruby frequently one hears things about how great the job market for Ruby programmers is. It is great – especially when compared with the stagnation in other markets, regions, and disciplines. Recruiters bombard the Meetup groups, attend the meetups, show up at hackathons, and contact you via LinkedIn. It’s nice. Matsumoto-san created Ruby, and present with a slide reading “Great Pleasure” – happy runs deep Given the numbers of Ruby jobs, or, “opportunities,” I frequently see other Rubyists touting happiness in the job as the ne plus ultra of work motivation. The commentary is frequently of the form: “Leave your present situation for a Ruby situation because there is a great quantity of opportunity for Ruby jobs and, let’s face it, if you were to write Ruby all day how could you not be happy?

Probably the most significant constant in the entire history of this blog has been where I have spent several hours of my day each work-day. For a great many years, I have been an employee of Cisco Inc. As of the 19th of this month, that will end. I will commence employment at Carbon Five, a consulting and application development firm in San Francisco, on the 24th of this month. I am elated about joining Carbon Five’s team of energetic and innnovative developers. I will be doing Ruby and Rails development and I hope to learn more about mobile development, async server technologies, and sexy Javascript front-ends.