bytex64.net/blog

Yesterday was Nancy's birthday. After wishing her a Happy Birthday, she requested that I do something special. She didn't tell me what I should do, just that I should do something to celebrate her birthday. When I asked her what she was doing for her birthday, she replied that she was going to eat some Pho. Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup typically made with beef broth, slices of beef, and various vegetables. I found a Vietnamese place in town, and with Alex and Andrea (who were celebrating the arrival of Alex's financial aid check), I had some Pho for Nancy's birthday.

On a trip to Barnes & Noble the other day, I picked up a copy of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. While all of Carroll's works are now in the public domain, you really should have a physical copy just for the accompanying illustrations. This particular version is part of "Barnes & Noble Classics," which adds historical and biographical footnotes as well as commentary from a literary critic. Most people know Carroll as an author of children's tales, but few know that he (under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was also a mathematician. At the end of the book is one of his mathematically-inclined short stories, "What the Tortise Said to Achilles," a followup to the famous treatment of Zeno's Paradox. It is amazing to me how well his fictional works reflect electronic computing, even though computers as we know them didn't exist for nearly a hundred years after Alice was published. For example:

"Come, we shall have some fun now!" thought Alice. "I'm glad they've begun asking riddles—I believe I can guess that," she added aloud.

"Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?" said the March Hare.

"Exactly so," said Alice.

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.

Each of Carroll's characters displays this peculiar logical obtuseness that seems eerily familiar to anyone who has worked with an "intelligent" computer system.

I've been spending some mental effort lately to come up with new and useful methods of digital communication. (Un)fortunately, every thing I've come up with already exists. Somehow we've gone from email to chat to instant messages to webmail to private messages on websites that you're notified of via email to messages broadcast on websites that you can also read in your news or email or SMS or... *gasp pant choke* Quite frankly, I find the whole progression retarded. It's like there's some sort of technological attention deficit disorder that makes people gravitate towards the next shiny thing without regard for whether or not it's actually an improvement. Last I checked, email worked just fine, so why do people feel the need to send messages via Myspace or Facebook? Maybe I'm just geting old.

Speaking of old, I've been reading the Unix Hater's Handbook. What's truly disturbing about the Handbook is not how old and outdated it is, but rather how, even with the advances of modern Linux, it's still mostly true. It is filled with historical anecdotes of Unix "lossage" that no longer apply, but quite a few of the issues it brings up are still valid. It's a great "Ha Ha Only Serious!" book that I recommend to any Unix fanboy.

And it is now September 11th, which means I need to find the company that currently owns my domain registration and renew. That's not even a joke. When I registered it initially, it was with RackShack. The following two years, it has been Ev1servers. It seems that Ev1 has been bought by The Planet. One of these years, my domain will just get lost in the shuffle, and it will disappear into the bit bucket. :/