Today begins a new phase of my life. After a decade long bout of dithering about whether I was going to buy a house or not, I’ve finally signed over my life for 30 years to a mortgage company. I’ve watched the market go up, down, up down, and then spin around. I’ve watched friends buy and sell houses, and yet […]
Categories: personal
Tagged: financial, house, realestate
Many people have commented to me that I seem very “decisive” — which, come to think of it, is entirely too close to being the decider, so I’ll try not to be offended — but the illusion is quite thin if you know me well. Take, for example, the recent house purchase. From a distance, it appears as though I made a snap […]
Categories: personal
Tagged: decision, psychology, realestate
Two days ago, I took the plunge and made the formal decision to buy a house. I signed a contract on a new place committing to close before the end of March. I’m not sure if I’m numb, terrified, happy, sad, excited or all of the above.
Categories: personal
Tagged: finances, house, realestate
It doesn’t seem like much to ask. A tiny little thing. All I wanted was to get a copy of the PPD for my Samsung ML-2151N that has been my trusty laser printer for many years. I had misplaced it somehow, and couldn’t find the driver disk anywhere. So, naturally, I went to the Samsung website looking for it. What […]
Categories: technology
Tagged: mac, macosx, postscript, ppd, printer, rant, samsung, technology
We all have weird obsessions that we deal with. Mine is random numbers. Don’t ask. Anyway, I’ve also been playing with some simulations and crypto work and needed a better source of entropy. So, after a bunch of research, I decided to buy an Entropy Key from Simtec Electronics in the UK. They were the only ones who […]
Categories: programming
Tagged: crypto, cryptography, entropy, mac, osx, randomness
After several people I respect questioned my rush-to-judgement with Scala after my first exposure about a year ago, I’ve decided to dive back in and see if I can push through some initial squeamishness. I had picked up Programming in Scala by Martin Odersky, et. al. I had gotten around 50 pages into the book — out of 700+ — and run into something […]
Categories: programming
Tagged: book, clojure, functional, scala
Twenty plus years online, and it was eventually doomed to happen. Someone has decided to hijack my identity — or at least part of it — in order to commit a crime. Cleaning this mess up is going to be some kind of fun, but not sure it’s the kind I enjoy any more. The website that was registered was protectep.com, and […]
Categories: technology
N.B. I began this post about a month ago, but I never really could find a way to finish it. Rather than allow it to linger, I’ve decided to publish it. In Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr. writes: Unfortunately, when hope diminishes, the hate is often turned most bitterly toward those who […]
Categories: social
Tagged: democrats, government, liberalism, obama, politics
Where to begin in thinking about the tragedy in Tucson yesterday? It must be called, first, what it is: an assassination attempt intended to cause fear in others. It must be called a true act of terror in a time when the word has been diluted to mean any crime for which the government doesn’t wish to […]
Categories: social