Counting Down

Tagged as Lessig, Linux, Personal, Programming Languages

Written on 2009-01-13 00:45:25

It's been a pretty eventful holiday season. I wrecked my Maxima on Dad's birthday (the 23rd), in particular. I didn't want to mention something until I had a concrete opinion to express and now I do. It was for the best. Seriously. I had spent considerable amounts of money trying to keep the car in good repair this year, it wasn't paid off yet and my parents and I had long since agreed it was a lemon but had no way to get rid of it.

Luckily, the insurance has paid off the car, I'm fine and this enables me to cancel my insurance and have a bit more financial leeway for the coming school year. I had to figure out a method of public transit from Brookhaven to Marietta but that didn't turn out to be too tricky. It ultimately just means I'll spend about 3 hours twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) on CCT and Marta. Today I went for the first time as a test run. The ride was enjoyable and afforded me a bit of time to get some sampling done. I took care of a few on-campus errands, bumped into several disparate acquaintances such as John Valentine and some Fayeteville folks and scoped out food options.

In short, I'm ready for school to start even though they're going to make me learn C#. I hope I can use Mono most of the way.

I keep reading about the economy, earmarks and entitlements. Is no one else thinking that the real issue here is sustainability, limited resources and population control? Minsky gave a talk on this but he's not the first person to raise the issue. When are we going to admit the planet can't indefinitely support 6 billion people or at least do the math/research to prove that it can? That's the question I'd really like us to be thinking about. If we want to be honest and accountable, the big picture is the only place to talk. The futurists and sustainability freaks seem to be pretty much the only people doing that. I'll rant about that more later but I wanted to at least note that it's been occupying increasing amounts of headspace for the past 6 months.

Speaking of mindspace, I still really love ogling the stack languages. I played with Forth a little bit but didn't get too far. It was just a fun diversion from Lisp at the time. I still really want to check out Factor.  Frankly, after seeing how fast the factor guys grow the ecosystem and libraries around the language I believe their productivity gain claims. Go Planet Factor, Go Slava. I'm sure I'll get around to playing with it sooner or later. I have a nightly installed and FUEL setup...which actually popped up on Reddit today ironically enough.

The only consumer-y thing I can think of that I'm excited about for the foreseeable future is the upcoming release of a PS3 game called Skate 2. Skate 2 is really just a patched-up and glorified Skate 1 to me. I'm still excited and I don't mean to speak ill of EA Blackbox but I could care less about much of the new stuff. I just wanted custom soundtracks, a tripod camera and good PS3 framerates. It comes out on January 21st and I'll disappear for a week in all likelihood exploring all it's corners.

I still marvel at and love my new X200 and btdubs, btrfs is in for 2.6.29. For the record, I've had a newsgroups subscription with Astraweb for about a week now. I've poked around for a few Oscar screeners but haven't observed anything I couldn't find on isohunt or thepiratebay. Sure, the download speed is a boon but I'm looking for content that isn't readily available on other networks. I've checked out nzbmatrix and alt.binaries.nl. What am I missing?

The RIAA has said they're giving up lawsuits and trying something else. I'll be keeping an eye out and looking for service that don't discriminate to Static IP users with their own blogs or pander to RIAA/MPAA/etc. In IP related news, Lawrence Lessig appeared on the Colbert Report. He has much more interesting things to say beyond what was covered so I'd recommend picking up some of his books, reading them free online or at least reading the Wikipedia articles on his first book and Free Content.

I've also been catching up on my music obsession over the cold season and particularly enjoyed White Winter Hymnal by Fleet Foxes and Grounds for Divorce by Elbow the last few days. Also, I love Battles at least a little bit for writing Tonto, Atlas and Leyendecker. I'm also enjoying Amon Tobin all over again because he's a damn genius.

I haven't been keeping up tremendously well with my New Years Blogging resolution, as you may have noticed, but I think that will change now that I'm busier. I've been doing much better with the music sampling and skateboarding. On to the coding and schooling.

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