I'm sort of in shock, still.

She had a seizure -- she'd had one before, at Christmas, but recovered fully. Then she was perfectly fine until she had another one last night... and I don't even want to think about what happened. It was over in less than 5 minutes; we figured out later she had passed on before we could even make it into the car.

I broke 95 on the freeway to the vet, but ultimately it didn't matter. There is nothing we could have done.

Phoebe, we miss you. :( Thank you so much for being in our lives.

-- Des

Facebook is the new Emacs. (A social networking site that has games? Really? As if Tetris in Emacs wasn't enough...)

And the old adage still holds true...

Emacs is a great operating system; too bad it doesn't have a good text editor.
Facebook is a great operating system; too bad it sucks at social networking.

[For the record, it sucks because it fails at protecting user data, which is important when collecting a lot of it.]

-- Des

Thank you, that is all.

-- Des

This has been an absolute fuckup of a day.

I'm sorry. I'll do my best tomorrow, I promise.

Love,
Des

Comment with "Ask me about how you can save up to 15% percent on [goofy item X]" and I'll ask you five questions, for you to answer here or on your own journal, or both.

Here are my questions from ensuing:

1. If you weren't a kitty, what sort of animal would you like to be?
Probably a wolf. They get to run long distances and howl and stuff. ^.^ But they also have a dedicated, loyal pack structure, and that's always something I've admired. I'd like to think I share those traits, and that I am a loyal friend, who will be there no matter what.

2. Who is the best fictional character ever?
EVER? Wow, that's a tough one. I dunno about "ever".

But for the moment... Xandir, from Drawn Together, because he's just so, well, gay. (And cute :3)

3. You are so awesome that the government decides to build a device to play your theme music wherever you go. What is your theme music?
hmmmm. I think the rather-jaunty Austin Powers theme song would do nicely!

4. You've just discovered the ultimate power source! What is it?
Antimatter, of course! Because Antimatter wins over ATOMIC POWER~!

5. For your achievements, you are allowed to captain a vehicle (real or fictional). What vessel do you command?
Oh man, such a tough choice! I guess it depends on how big the vessel gets to be. If it gets to be huuuuge, then I want a fast, nimble starship capable of travelling at faster-than-light speeds, with a full complement of scientific equipment and defensive shielding and weaponry. And, of course, a full crew.

Otherwise, I want Shiro, but with rear-wheel drive, an onboard computer for music, GPS and car diagnostics, and sophisticated equipment for detecting and evading cops handing out speeding tickets. *nod*

-- Des

Just as a reminder, my emergency (contact, medical, etc.) info is located here. You can also find it at the bottom of my profile page.

Anyone who knows me IRL can see this page, but I figured the rest of you should probably know it exists, just in case.

-- Des

Woohoo! I managed to accomplish my first heel-toe downshift in Shiro yesterday.

I even managed to repeat my success a couple times more during the day. The amusing thing is I was smoother on heel-toe than I have been recently on normal downshifting... O.o

Everytime I change my driving style to be more race-like with Shiro, he seems to get happier. >.>

-- Des

I had a rare chat with northing last night. Every time I talk to him, I'm reminded of why I value his friendship so much. He always asks me insightful questions that nobody else does.

This time, he asked me about my mission in life. I really don't have one. I gave the subject a lot of thought a while back, but couldn't find something that wasn't in some way arbitrary. So I settled on the appropriately-vague "make the world a happier/better place", and have contented myself with doing whatever seems right in any particular moment.

But as any regular reader of this journal knows, I'm ... bored a lot of the time. I go to work, I do a job that's fun but not fulfilling, and then most evenings I come home and sit around on IM until it's time to go to bed. Part of the reason for the latter is that work does take a lot of effort, and on most nights by the time I get home, I'm in no mood to do anything constructive.

I've contented myself with making trips to Disneyland, or trips to visit friends in various parts of the state. Those are enjoyable, and if I'm making trips almost every weekend in a given month, it's almost enough. :)

The other thing I complain about a lot in here, and on the phone with friends, is that I don't feel I have much of a social life locally. That has actually improved slightly in the past month or two -- I see yelang once every couple of weeks or so, and glaurungs_spawn almost every week when I go down to Sunnyvale. (I find it a bit depressing that my social life only seems to improve when I'm in the South bay, but that's another post.)

And that leads me to North's next question: Why is it that I feel such a strong need for companionship? Why do I want a regular, close group of friends to hang out with?

I have an easy answer to that one: it makes me happy. One thing I have always had a strong appreciation for is interpersonal relationships -- it gives me an indescribable amount of pleasure to spend time with a friend, one whom I know very well, and be able to appreciate all the little nuances, mannerisms, banter, etc. that is unique to the two of us alone. Every friend is different -- unique and special.

I have a strong appreciation for that uniqueness, an appreciation that only grows stronger the longer I've known someone.

I like seeing people happy. I like making them happy. When they laugh, and when I can laugh with them, I feel like it all means something.

-- Des

I often find myself wishing that I had someone, or multiple someones, of whom I could ask any question at all and get a comprehensive, unambiguous and correct answer.

I wonder if that's why we invented religion.

-- Des

The first rain of the season is happening while we speak -- a strong start in the form of a torrential downpour, leaving everything soaked. Rain has been dumping out of the sky continuously since I awoke at 7:30, and only now has it let up somewhat.

I have a raw, sore throat (even after 2 Ibuprofen), and until the Sudafed kicked in, gallons of snot clogging my sinuses. It seems the first cold of the season beat the first rain of the season by a day. :) But I'm thankful it didn't hit until after I returned from Disneyland.

Despite my cold, or perhaps because of it, I'm calm and happy.

-- Des

Everything I said before about 9/11 still applies today.

(Yes, I'm looking at you, people with your "God Bless America" signs on the freeway overpasses.)

I think this country has not learned (or has forgotten, even) the lessons available about treating ourselves and other countries with basic decency and compassion, about respecting the rule of law, and about applying our laws and values fairly, justly, with an appropriate level of restraint.

9/11 presented us with an opportunity to learn those lessons, and some of us did, but many of us chose not to.

In either case, let's move on already.

-- Des

You read that right, and I'll say it again just so the point sinks in -- I bought a MacBook Pro on Friday.

No, I'm not sick. Yes, I'm in my right mind. And yes, I do still think Apple is evil, the Mac UI is annoying, and Steve Jobs needs to get smacked with an open-platform cluebat. I still won't buy an iPhone or an iPod, and I won't use iTunes, either. I still believe that if I buy a piece of hardware, I have the Dog-given right to run whatever the hell piece of software on it I feel like.

So what gives?

Well, first off I want to correct a commonly-held misconception: I am not an operating system zealot.

I believe in using the best tool for the job. I have strong opinions about what tool that is, depending on the job in question. (Dev = Linux, Games = Windows, boring everyday shit = Mac) And I categorically reject the notion (espoused by the Free Software Foundation) that proprietary software is inherently bad or somehow immoral. (Indeed, I feel the FSF is acting somewhat immorally--or at least disrespectfully--by trying to shove their particular brand of "freedom" down everyone else's throats.) I feel there are a whole host of PRAGMATIC reasons to choose Open Source over proprietary software, and I'll discuss those below. But I have no problem with proprietary software as such.

In my case, there are a number of fairly compelling, pragmatic reasons for buying a new machine, and a Mac in particular. First, I need a new laptop -- I discovered a while back that my current machine eats (and I do mean EATS) laptop batteries, so I effectively have no laptop. Having a mobile computer is important to me, because I like to travel on the weekends and need a machine I can take with me. Also, the importance of getting a server machine has diminished, because I'm trying to stay away from the computer while I'm not at work -- I just can't afford to use my hands that much anymore if I still want to be able to type in 20 years.

So why a MacBook, instead of a Linux laptop?

Honestly, there is a certain class of problems for which the Mac is better than any other system out there. I'm thinking here of bread-and-butter PIM, mail, chat, etc. The Mac is a package deal in the sense that you buy it once, it works (almost) out of the box (well, except when it breaks, in which case you're screwed, but I digress), it's pretty, and everything is really nicely-integrated. I can sync my Google and Exchange accounts, (yet keep them separate -- work doesn't get to know what I do on the weekends). I now have a (mostly-)full set of Outlook tools that doesn't make me want to stab my eyes out with a spork. Safari is a respectable browser, and I can get Firefox if I need it. Adium has an interface superior to any other IM client, on any platform, that I've seen so far.

Linux, even KDE (which is by far the best of the bunch) doesn't come close to this. Exchange support is being worked on for KDE 4.4 (thanks, greeneg!), but the CalDAV stuff for syncing Google Calendar doesn't work, and there's no way to sync the address book. And forget pushing my contacts to my phone. Linux has no idea what to do with Bluetooth, let alone a RAZR, and I don't feel like spending an entire weekend figuring it out.

Now, all of these problems are fixable. But the focus of KDE, in particular, seems to have shifted from "bread-and-butter make-it-work so I can get my shit done", to "pretty-shiny desktop widgets and social networking". I've never been much for social networking (except the kind that you do yourself), and while the desktop widgets are pretty-shiny, they spend most of their time on my desktop, buried under windows in which--you guessed it--I'm doing actual work.

I guess I feel the KDE project has lost its way.

It seems like everyone is focusing on this Plasma thingy to the exclusion of relatively boring programs that do something useful. Kopete is limping along -- every time Yahoo changes its protocol, Kopete can't log in for a few weeks until one of the developers has time to port the relevant change over from Pidgin's libpurple. The UI is better than Pidgin's, but still clunky -- and hasn't seen any major work since the contact list was re-written. KMail has turned into a massive pile of spaghetti code which may or may not lose your mail if you try to use, e.g. offline IMAP. It has a superior user interface (I'm sorry, Mail.app just doesn't do threading right), but under the hood, I question its stability. Konqueror is based on KHTML, which is fine, but now we have developer infighting over whether it should switch to WebKit or not. (The infighting is a waste of time -- maintain both, let them fight it out, and then kill off whichever is inferior.) Its JavaScript engine hasn't kept up in terms of speed or functionality, and it too is becoming more of a maintenance nightmare.

If we move down the stack, we get to Qt and X11. Qt is well-maintained, clean, etc. -- though it should be, it's now owned by Nokia. The graphics and audio stacks are a different story, however. X11 is plagued with driver problems and instability -- we have several different acceleration architectures that all do the same thing (and do it badly -- in a lot of cases, it's actually faster NOT to accelerate), and we're shoehorning all of this into a windowing system that was badly-designed when it was written 30 or so years ago, nevermind today. (Never try to write raw Xlib code, BTW. It really, really sucks.) We have the PulseAudio, ALSA and GStreamer religions, in which everyone is having a bad case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome, loudly arguing back and forth while the whole multimedia stack suffers. Even Qt itself has now sprouted multiple multimedia frameworks that do almost the same thing.

Moving even further down, the kernel itself is rock-solid. I have very few complaints, other than to ask the kernel developers to make sure they support the desktop people as well as they can. Linux is damn good at the "bread-and-butter" of the server room -- networking, storing data, and hardcore computing (peg those CPUs, baby!). I've always relied, and will continue to rely on Linux for safely storing my shit. XFS (and soon, btrfs) just kicks the pants off of HFS+ in terms of scalability (and probably reliability, though I don't know).

Linux is also a much better development environment, for the simple reason that its UIs (well, except for GNOME, but why the hell would anyone use that?) are customizable to a fault. Want focus-follows-mouse with a key-press to raise and lower windows? No problem. Or maybe a text editor (Vim) so powerful it was ported to Mac and Windows? Sure. Want to peg the CPU and fill up your RAM *without* your system falling over? Linux does better at that than Mac has so far (for me, at least).

In the OSS world, there is no such thing as an "undocumented" protocol or API -- even if the documentation is inadequate, you can read the source. (Yes, I've actually done this. No, it's not nearly as hard as it sounds. If you can't read other people's reasonably-structured code, you shouldn't be writing it in the first place. =P) And BECAUSE you can read the source, you have the built-in assurance that your data won't be locked away in some proprietary format that's impossible to read because it depends on some implementation-specific detail hidden away in Microsoft Excel 5.0.427-6b for the Mac. (Well, it might be, but you can still figure out what the hell is going on.) In the OSS world, it's to the developer's ADVANTAGE to make their formats and protocols open and easy to read -- it encourages people to use and work on their project.

So to the extent that I'm concerned about keeping my data safe, I'm not going to trust the Mac. It will be synced frequently with the Linux box, and the Linux box still gets to do backups and be the authoritative storage point. I'm still a KDE user--particularly at work--and while I'll be happy to see Mac ports of KDE apps, I'm still planning on using some of them, even on my old machine. I can't live without KMyMoney, which is almost exactly what I want in a finance program, even if the UI's a bit awkward. Digikam also does an excellent job at managing my images, and I'm not sure I'd trust iPhoto with the task.

But the reality is, KDE is diverging from what I need in an "everyday" (web, IM, Mail, etc.) desktop environment, and OSX is getting closer. I don't have the time, the energy, or the muscles and tendons (in my hands :P) required to fix the problem, and there's a lot more work than one man can do, anyway. I really, really hope this gets fixed soon, but we're up to KDE 4.3 and it doesn't look like it will be.

Don't get me wrong -- I still like KDE and I want to see it succeed. I'm still going to follow trunk and help out where and when I can. (Maybe I can help test KDE/Mac. :D) But right now, for a laptop that primarily does everyday kinds of things, a Mac suits my needs better.

-- Des

It dawned on me last week--and I can't shake the feeling that I knew this already, but what the hell, I'll write about it anyway--that communication isn't so much about presenting ideas or abstractions to other people, as it is about creating a certain desired state in their minds. Effective communication is inherently persuasive; not only does the recipient understand the idea, he groks it -- the idea, and the reasoning supporting it, become intuitively obvious.

I stumbled on this at work, actually. Without going into too much detail, we regularly have group meetings in which we come together and discuss our ideas for designing and implementing whatever the hell it is we're working on. In those meetings, there are often several competing ideas on the table. The result, while often a synthesis of all of them, is usually heavily influenced by one "primary" idea.

I'm going to ignore, for the moment, the cases where I'm wrong because they're much less interesting. :D In cases where my idea turns out to be the "right" one, however, one of three things usually happens: (A) we spend a lot of time arguing back and forth, passionately stating our positions and poking holes in others', until finally they all give up and admit I'm right; (B) rather than stating my position outright, I just start asking questions until the others arrive at my idea on their own; or (C) the idea is so simple and obviously correct there's not that much discussion about it.

[Just in case anyone missed it, there are plenty of times when I'm wrong. But, well, this is my journal and my thoughts, so. Substitute "person X, where person X is right" for "me" if you like.]

If it wasn't immediately obvious, options (B) and (C) are far less painful (and shorter!) than option (A). In the past, I've rather cynically posed option (B) as, "Slip them the idea, and let them think they thought it up." But I got to wondering, why does that work so well?

Obviously, being less confrontational allows the other party to be more receptive to my ideas. But it's just as obviously more than that, because even in a non-confrontational educational setting, asking (sometimes-leading) questions allows the student to attain a greater understanding than simply presenting information or requiring memorization. (Indeed, this is why homework exists, and why good teachers ask questions during class.)

So there's something more to it, even beyond how one presents the information, and I think it has to do with the end goal.

If my goal in communicating is to get someone to agree with me that assertion X is true but assertion Y is not, I will inevitably wind up in situation (A). That's because from the very beginning, my motivation is confrontational -- I've already set up the conditions for the confrontation in my mind, and all that remains is to act them out. If I'm lucky, the person will get dragged, kicking and screaming, into begrudgingly agreeing with me. Even if they agree, they may not fully understand the reasoning or the perspective behind my position.

If, however, my goal is to demonstrate my reasoning, and to provide the same context and conditions under which I arrived at my position, the atmosphere of confrontation is much less pronounced. By posing the right questions--sometimes the very questions I wrangled with in reaching my position--I'm posing a challenge they will naturally try to meet. I'm giving them an opportunity to reach a conclusion, possibly different from and maybe even better than mine, without forcing one upon them. They will naturally walk through the same or a similar thought process, and arrive at or near my position almost as a side effect.

By changing my goal--my own internal motivator--I've altered the thrust of my own action, which in turn alters the other's response, leading to an overall more favorable outcome. It's a neat little bit of karma.

Now that I've figured this out, I intuitively know how to apply it, but I'm not sure how to distill it into something simple. Maybe I can't. (But that's the other thing -- simple, clear communication is often more effective than long-winded, rambling LJ posts. ;P)

What's your experience? Got any good examples? (Maybe I'll post a contrived one later, hands permitting.)

-- Des

( 100 truths )

-- Des

So normally I don't side with ISPs on issues like this, but in this case AT&T did the right thing in blocking 4chan. 4chan was sending traffic specifically intended to disrupt some users' access to the rest of the network, so AT&T was perfectly justified in blocking them as it did.

Yeah, they could've communicated better about it. But the /b/tards were being, well, /b/tards, and earned their blocking fair and square.

-- Des

Work has been a comedy of errors today. My fingers hurt from typing. I think I'm going to go home and have a drink.

I wish I had something useful to say here, other than to use it as an exercise log and political rant jar. But really, nothing terribly exciting has been happening in my life. I've settled into a routine, and my biggest problems right now are I'm lazy and I'm not meeting new and interesting people.

I need to find new ways to engage.

-- Des

I've been bad about actually logging exercise in here.

Since my leg is still bugging me (WTF?), I've decided to give myself the week off of running and focus on upper-body strength. (If/when I resume next week, it'll be a walk/hike, not a run/hike, until I'm confident I'm not injured somehow.) This means (for me, at least), sit-ups and push-ups.

Today I managed 40 on-my-knees push-ups and 120 sit-ups in a half an hour. This is certainly much better than I was doing, say, a year ago during my previous attempt at exercise (when I was struggling to do 30/100 in 45-60 min).

I feel like I could've pushed harder today, but due to past rather negative experiences with strength-building, I'm taking that part of it slowly. I don't want to go into heavy mood swings again -- those are just Not Fun.

In other news, I didn't make it to Pride last weekend. :/ (Bad bi boy, I know.) But I did get a fair amount of stuff cleaned up around the apartment.

Also, my fingers are getting worse again. If this trend continues, I'm going in to the doc and asking for physical therapy. And I might need to make some arrangements with work, but we'll see.

Now, off to the shower!

-- Des

This whole thing stinks to high heaven. Imprisoning people indefinitely flies in the face of the Rule of Law, not to mention Due Process rights in the Constitution.

Our Constitutional Scholar president should be aware of, and understand this. If he chooses to ignore it, that will send a strong and very negative message about him and his administration.

The guy is starting to look more and more like an eloquent, slimier version of Bush. Bush, at least, was reasonably honest about what he was doing -- Obama, not so much. Obama so far has failed at living up to his promises on LGBT rights, and it seems likely he will fail again on more general civil rights -- such as the right to a fair trial.

It seems like the latter is one of the few things all Americans, Republican or Democrat, should be able to agree on. It is extremely disappointing that Obama seems to be ignoring this.

[Edit: I've added a link to Americablog's breakdown of the brief the Justice Department in federal court defending the Defense of Marriage Act in the text above. Please read it before commenting.]

-- Des

For both Monday and Wednesday. I've switched to an MWF schedule, and I'm trying to do stuff in the mornings to see if it makes my day better or worse. (So far, it's neutral.)

Monday was lowering-myself push-ups (so resistance on the down part, no up part), sit-ups, and Albany Hill. Did 10 push-ups, 20 sit-ups, and ran most of the way there and back (say, 40 minutes of active running or hill-climbing). I did quite well, and felt appropriately sore afterward (except for my abs -- I need to work on my sit-up form better, or something).

Wednesday--this morning--wasn't nearly as good. My legs/ankles were complaining of muscle fatigue almost from the start, so I didn't run nearly as much as I did on Monday. I ended up walking half the route home due to soreness. Had similar problems with push-ups, and I still haven't figured out what I need to do for sit-ups.

In short, my body's repair cycle seems to last longer than 48 hours. This does not bode well for doing an every-other-day schedule.

I've been told I need to have a concentrated stretching session on days off. I'll give that a try, but I was already stretching quite a bit yesterday, so I don't know.

-- Des

I left a comment on luphinus' post about the fur dealer at Califur, which he saw fit to delete. I'm reposting it here, along with his (similarly deleted) response.

[As a quick side note, I automatically repost things like that on the theory that if someone gets upset enough to actually delete it, it obviously had enough of an impact to make it worth keeping around. Plus, I'm not a fan of censorship in general, particularly where it concerns civil discussion. I won't delete comments in my journal--unless they are patently abusive, or spam--for this reason.

I thought about not posting it, as I don't want to spread drama. But, (a) I feel pretty strongly about the censorship thing, and (b) it's funny in a tragic sort of way. >.> I trust those of you who read this to treat it for what it is -- silliness.]

( Cut for drama and general stupidity. Don't bother reading if you don't care about the discussion at hand. )

-- Des