Okay, Whatever.

This one time, this guy picked up a Timbit with his hands and then dropped it on the floor and then didn’t pick it up.

And this other time… nope. That’s all I’ve got.

Sorry to disappoint.

On a completely unrelated note, I can see the search terms that bring you to my blog. You weirdos.

Have you plumbed the depths of my narcissism?

1. I don’t eat fish. I watched a documentary once about what we’re doing to the oceans, and that put me off fish forever. The way we “harvest” fish is like burning down an entire forest just to capture a few birds.
2. I think skepticism is easier than faith for me. I don’t think this is true for everyone.
3. I would rather live in Europe than Canada. Specifically I’d rather live in Germany. I could use all the skills I have in the manufacturing sector there, and get paid better, and have more time off. I’d also settle for New Zealand or Chile.
4. I’ve played golf only once in my life. I’m pretty sure I’d enjoy golf, but I don’t have the time or money to invest in it.
5. I strongly prefer pencils over pens. The upside of pencils is that they almost always write, in almost all situations. I also suspect that our pens being made in China explains why pens seemed so much better when I was young. I also suspect that this is a cognitive bias, because I have absolutely no proof, and memory is a flimsy support for a theory.
6. I don’t trust memory. I’d rather forget than remember.
7. Urban Terror is my favourite video game ever. I like it more than I liked Call of Duty 4, and that says a lot. It helps that I’m pretty good at it.
8. I dislike “realism”, especially when realism focuses on violence. Films that claim to be realistic and then gloss over the boring parts just don’t cut it. Call your film “gritty” or something so I can avoid it. Violence does not equal realism especially in today’s world.
9. Cops make me angry. Especially when they outright lie to get more funding. Several chiefs of police in Toronto have used gun violence in Toronto to push for bigger budgets and tougher laws. This seems like callous exploitation, at least to me. In a decade that’s seen nothing but declines in crime rates here in Canada, to claim otherwise is to be willfully ignorant or willfully deceptive. Either way you’re a huge douche-nozzle.
10. I’ve had my car broken into four times, and my house broken into twice. Four of these six incidents have happened while living at my current residence. I’ve labeled it “The Worst Apartment Ever” for good reason.
11. I own a dog. It’s a Boston Terrier. It’s name is “Turtle” and she’s female.
12. My dream dog is a Greyhound or at the very least a Whippet. Turtle being a Boston is a compromise between my wife and I. She likes ugly dogs, low to the ground (I know, that’s pretty much me too); I like pretty dogs that go fast (I know, that’s pretty much my wife).
13. The reason I don’t post much here anymore? Twitter. All the things I used to say here I say on Twitter. I don’t often like the character limitations, though.
14. I have a hard time dishing out praise. This is a failing of mine, I know. It feels more genuine to be a critic than a fan. I don’t want to like everything. I don’t understand people who like everything.
15. I love Indian food. Or at least the Indian food of our Westernized restaurants. Pakistani food is okay too but not as nice.
16. I’m as nostalgic as the next person, and I’m not even 30. It’s odd to think that 1/3 of my life is over.
17. I can’t write novels. I’m not disciplined enough to write something that long. Even this post is pushing it. Sometimes I can’t even read novels, especially older novels with flowing, flowery wording. It seems to me that if you could have made your novel into a short story, you should have.
18. All the people who understand me are either a) Married to me, of b) People from the internet. My real-life friends are from different cultures and have different interests. None of them are nerds or geeks or interested in a wide range of things. Sometimes I feel profoundly alone in my own head. I don’t really have a lot of people to talk to in real life, at least people that won’t nod and smile, nod and smile. I would very much like someone to talk to about that stuff. Unfortunately, geography seems to have screwed me over. Peter is in Burlington, Art is in who knows where, Chris is in the land of the corn fields, Spencer is the other land of the corn fields, Goef is distributed over the internet by a fairly robust system of servers, and Keith is ensconced in his liberal paradise over the mountains. And it seems that every other real-life technophile I meet appears to be less than human. So here I am.
19. I drink coffee. For a while I went off coffee. That was okay. Now I’m back on it again.
20. I’m going to learn to play tennis, and you can’t stop me. I bought some cheap racquets and some balls the other day. There’s a tennis court close to our house.
21. I think the most annoying type of atheist or agnostic is the freshly minted kind. I also dislike hearing someone “embracing ambiguity”. Well bully for you; is it really so hard to not pick a position? Seems easy to me.
22. I wear size twelve shoes. Extrapolate from there if you must.
23. I’m sorry, but I can’t help disliking some people. Extended contact sometime breeds friction. I am not a very good person, yet.
24. There is a part of me that’s very open and willing to share as much information as you might wish. There’s another part of me that’s extremely private. Don’t open that door; you won’t like it.
25. Sometimes when I hear about a natural disaster I think, “Good. There are too many people anyways.” Then I think, “Am I that cynical already?” Then I think, “No-one can bear the weight of all the horrors todays media can report.” I wonder whether my children’s children will have any feeling left, at all.

I have a dream that one day there will be a People’s Church on one side of a road and a Robot’s Church on the other side of the road. I have a dream that though relations between the two will be tense at times, the bonds of ecumenical love will prevent any major conflicts from escalating and destroying the human race.

Yet I have a premonition that a tense stand-off might envelop the two churches, and after Sunday school one day there will a horrific explosion of violence as the robots and the humans fiercely debate their respective doctrines. The robots (whose doctrine consists of farming humans for energy) and the humans (whose doctrine consists mainly of not being farmed) will war in a war to end all wars, a war the survivors will of course call, “The Catechism Cataclysm”.

Seinfeld, season 8, episode 1. Kramer says, “I looked inside myself and found that part of my spirit that said, ‘Yes, I can!’ And now I dominate the dojo!”

Obama, you see, is dominating his dojo. Like Kramer and his karate, he has found that, yes, he can.

I get a hundred posts to read, thinking, “Wonderful! A hundred insightful posts about Ubuntu!”

Instead, I get to see how many times y’all typed “sudo” in terminal. Huzzah! My revenge? I’m going to post mine.

$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
144 cd
140 ls
105 sudo
20 rdiff-backup
16 rm
10 uname
8 man
8 cp
5 exit
5 crontab

I have a bin of paper clips on my desk. In this bin there are five different colours of paper clips. There was a divider at one time separating all the colours, a divider that has since disappeared . (As a side note, I’m pretty sure my office is infested with gnomes. And not the open-source kind, either.)

This morning I mixed all the colours together; I had begun hesitating before choosing, simply because there were discrete groups. So I lowered the selection threshold by distributing the colours at least somewhat randomly.

There you have it. I’m a freak. Wait, I just blogged this. I’m a huge freak.

Alles touristen und non-technischen looken peepers! Das machinkontrol is nicht for gefengerpoken und mittengrabben. Oderwise is easy schnappen der springenverk, blowenfus, undpoppencorken mit spitzensparken. Der machine is diggen by experten only. Is nicht fur geverken by das dumpkopfen. Das rubber necken sightseenen keepen das cotton-picken hands in das pockets. So relaxen, und vatchen das blinkenlights.

Inspired by the this webcomic, I cleaned out my keyboard (with highly compressed air, thanks to working at a manufacturing company). I didn’t think I’d actually notice a change, but darn, this thing is quiet again! How is that possible, you wonder; if I had video to show some of the stuff flying out of this thing, you’d understand why.

I don’t think I really want to continue this post, thought. That means I’d have to touch this keyboard even longer.

You get Mozilla Thunderbird saying “Oh! GREAT ODIN’S RAVEN!” every time an email comes in.

Thank you, internets.

I’m going to open a can of TLC on you.

dan (so very ghetto)