Dear iPhone

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Dear _______ iPhone,

Please stop dropping my _______ VOIP calls without _______ warning, just because you lose _______ wifi for a few _______ seconds. It’s really quite _______ irritating when I’m using _______ Facetime or _______ Viber that I so often find myself talking into a _______ void without any _______ audible alerts to this fact just because an entirely _______ foreseeable network glitch has not been foreseen by your various _______ apps which all seem to think the logical response is to just silently drop the _______ connection.

Why I am Not a Libertarian

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Short answer: I am a grown-up.

A recent comment on this post got me thinking about libertarianism again, and why it bugs me so much. I recalled a thread on Michael Shermer’s blog a long time back in which I was a little more vocal than I normally am on other people’s blogs, so I figured I would just re-state my response here to give you the basic idea of where I stand.

Unless you were educated under a bush, and commuted to work on a bike you made yourself out of bamboo and coconut shells, I think your outlook is totally lacking in appreciation for the way you and everyone you care about have benefited from a society and infrastructure that was largely paid for by “stealing” the wealth of previous generations (and which wealth would otherwise now be concentrated in the hands of offspring who were lucky enough to be born into it I suppose).

It is incredibly unrealistic to argue that we don’t need to pay taxes toward the public good (because we would give money willingly). I don’t want to dick around deciding who is worthy of my support, and I sure as hell hate the idea of *anyone* dying of neglect because no one deemed them worthy of attention. A lot of people are rather selfish and would rather not give anything at all. A lot of people are racist and would refuse to allow money to assist minorities they despise. And if raising funds for public works were become a popularity/PR exercise they risk becoming disconnected from actual needs and benefits.

I feel sorry for liberals and conservatives alike when people tell them to “love it or leave it”–because everyone has a right to want to change things… but when it comes to libertarians I think this response is quite appropriate; since it really sounds like you resent having any obligations placed on you as a citizen, surely you would be happier going Galt and living on an island somewhere with like-minded friends.

It’s worth a look if you have a lot of time to kill and want to see some interesting arguments from different perspectives (including the libertarian socialist one).

The fact that libertarianism is so popular amongst skeptics is probably why it bugs me so much. I see a lot of myself in these people so it creeps me out when they decide that tax is theft and the only duty of government is as police force. Give me the frikkin nanny state over that any day…

2012

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Unlike last year, I spent this new year’s eve stone cold sober, largely because I ate something bad the night before (most likely undercooked chicken). Still, it was a great night in the end because this time around I wasn’t Mr Lonely Bastard, and got to see the fireworks over Sydney Harbour with my dearest from a rather stunning vantage point in North Sydney.

That’s is a very crummy photo I took with my phone– no doubt you will have seen much more spectacular pics from the night since we in Sydney pride ourselves on spending a massive amount on fireworks here so that we can gloat over how much better ours was than everyone else’s.

As soon as the show ended everybody took off as quick as they could, which meant that there was a terrible traffic jam getting home (it took 20 minutes to drive there, 2 hours to drive back). That’s the last time I try driving in Sydney in the wee hours of the new year.

I’ve made no specific resolutions this time around, but on some level I guess I hoped I would find some untapped reserve of self-discipline in order that I should Get Things Done. I am, after all, going to be 40 this year, and yet still I’ve neglected to secure any kind of financial future for myself. It is therefore more pressing than ever that I work doubly-hard on the project which has occupied me these last few months. This week was to be a week of great strides, but instead I find myself this Thursday night sheepishly apologizing to my friend and boss that I have thus far achieved sod all.

Although I make no resolutions this year, there is an observation I would like to make, so that I might remember it in future.

When you’re pushing 40, procrastination is no longer cute.

I think I may be reaching that point in my life where I have to resist the urge to describe myself as a procrastinator, because it comes off a bit fatalistic (with a whiff of humblebrag, since I so often get away with procrastinating). I should rather acknowledge that I am sometimes indecisive, often lazy, always apprehensive about commitment, and terrified of failure. That’s less cute, but more true.

Festivus approaches

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Apologies for the lack of updates lately– I have some work commitments that tend to eat up my spare screen time. It’s a project I’m working on with a friend which will hopefully end up being a big deal and making us lots of money, but for now it’s a race to get an alpha ready for limited testing and raise some early funding. I’ll probably write some more about it here sometime soon but for now let me say it has nothing to do with any of my pet projects and is in fact a webby-cloudy-appy thing written in Ruby on Rails (which I’m still not a huge fan of, but at least I’m kind of used to it now).

As the weekend approaches I am already dreading what my bathroom scale is going to tell me next week, since I’ve already managed to creep back up to 100kg again (220lb). I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world whose morning ritual includes flipping the bird and telling the scale to fuck off just for being honest.

Time time time keeps going by way too fast. Yesterday I found an old system backup and set up a very slow import into gmail from my old Outlook Express mailbox folders, adding messages from 1998-2004 to my viewable mail archive. Somehow I have utterly misplaced 2005 though, which is kind of annoying… but then maybe it would be better if it had all been lost, because a history of messages can be a great reminder of how little has changed in a decade or more– just like a blog can be.

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Importing Outlook Express messages into gmail

Don’t google for the best method, you will get some really bad info about using 3rd party garbage. This method worked as well as I could possibly expect, preserving dates and adding threading seamlessly.

  1. Enable imap in gmail
  2. Add your gmail account to OE (temporary, just for this process)
  3. Create a new target folder (tag) in gmail to easier see your imported messages.
  4. In OE, drag your old messages into the new imap folder (or into ‘all mail’ if you skipped step 3)
  5. Go to bed. It took my setup about a second per message, so this is something best left as an overnight thing.

Some Video Games

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Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 

I played this game recently… for all of about 30 minutes. I really hated it, largely because:

  • I think dragons are dumb.
  • I think magic is even dumber than dragons.
  • I hate fighting with a sword, especially when you have to do it using a standard game controller.
  • I hate the idea of a world so clearly divided into races like Aryan dude, Broad-featured warrior dude, Hideous elf dude, and Person with lizard or cat head, as though these are all equally different.
  • I can’t accept the idea of a world where there are peaceful villages and yet somehow every single goddamn person you meet immediately tries to kill you. It’s like Mad Max meets Lord of the Rings.
  • I wanted a horse, and it wasn’t clear how long I’d have to trudge around this stupid world before I got one. Riding a horse is about the only cool thing I can think of about being stuck in a stupid medieval/fantasy world.

Apart from the fact that this game clearly wasn’t made for me, I was also totally underwhelmed by the quality of the landscape. When in the open it all looked toylike and lifeless; when in a village it looked visually muddy. Possibly this is just a problem with the PS3 version, I don’t know.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

This was pretty good, very story-driven with massive action set-pieces. But it felt a bit too similar to Uncharted 2, especially the final chapter. One thing I was grateful for is that the final scene wasn’t a stupid impossible boss battle as it was in the previous game.

I got to ride a horse in this but truly the physics were terrible and it was more like I was wearing a horse than riding it; the way it swayed weightlessly with my movements.

It’s sort of got magic in it too, but it’s more vague Indiana Jones style magic than bullshit potion and spell collecting magic.

The Uncharted series is well written and doesn’t take itself too seriously, and has some of the best hair and butt modelling in its class today.

Battlefield 3

This looked great, but for some reason I found it annoying. Especially a particular scene where I needed to sprint from one rooftop to another to take out an escaping car. I kept failing and having to try again, and the load time was about twice as long as the sequence itself, so it drove me a bit mad and I just abandoned it.

Modern Warfare 3

This one also looked great, but also kept the story moving nicely and was basically just easier to roll through. I was actually surprised to finish this one because I was just playing it for an hour here or there to take a break from work. All you have to do is follow the white dot to whatever the hell you’re supposed to blow-up/murder next.

Reader: Just because it’s free …

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… doesn’t mean Google aren’t being assholes by breaking it. Especially when they try to spin the changes as “improvements” they’ve made due to popular demand (I’d love to see them publish a before-and-after feature list and still claim that the new version is in any way better).

5 years ago I ditched Bloglines because the relatively new Google Reader was better. Heaps of other people did similar things, and before long there was virtually no serious competition for reading RSS feeds online.

If you make a useful product, get everyone used to it, many dependant on it, then break that product in a ham-fisted attempt to further your ambitions in the social networking space, you are are being a giant dick. Google is being a giant dick.

As depressing as their new flat-n-grey theme is (just like intepid at the time of writing, but I’m just one guy and I’m color-blind), it’s the removal of a key feature that has me still fuming even days after the deed was done–  the demise of the “share” function.

Before, when I shared a post on Reader it would be available as a special feed to anyone who was interested. Effectively it was an incredibly convenient way to create a curated feed. In fact that’s how I’ve been generating my “Things I’m reading” links in the sidebar here. Anyone could visit an URL to see this feed, regardless of whether they had a google profile or not. I could even share new articles into this feed using a nifty bookmarklet! I also subscribed to the shared feeds of friends, because I am interested in reading the things that my friends deem interesting.  If I commented on a post in reader, it would be visible to any of my friends who read the same post.

Now, the only sharing option visible is to hit the +1 button, and then hit it again to Share to your G+ stream. The same stream that has every other bit of ephemeral crap I might fart out on G+. And you can’t easily get a feed of that stream, not that you’d really want to. That’s why I was starting to use Reader more and more and Twitter less and less. I really don’t give a shit about people’s status updates 99% of the time. If I comment on a post, my friends don’t even see it in G+ unless they are reading the exact same post, which is unlikely because they are probably seeing a version shared in G+ so it has a whole different set of comments attached– unlike in pre-lobotomised Reader, where when you shared a post it would still be the same, canonical post.

I don’t have a problem with them adding the +1 sharing option, I just don’t see why they had to tear out one of the best features of the product to make room for it.

As of this writing, it seems the shared items feed is still active on the back-end, and can even be added to via 3rd party apps like Flipboard, so I have some small hope they will bring it back. But considering that they’ve already killed the “Share to Reader” bookmarklet I’m not holding my breath.

Update: Flipboard just removed the ability to share to Google Reader, so I’m guessing it’s not coming back. Thanks a bunch, Google.

Is belief in Heaven idiotic?

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Yes, I think it is.

Is it rude to call it idiotic when you’re talking to a bunch of people who are professing this belief? Yes, I think it is.

But there is a difference between being rude and being wrong.

That’s the problem with the believers’ response in the above video; they are clearly appalled and offended to be called idiots by the rather unapologetic atheist Kate Smurthwaite, but then they immediately set about defending their belief using utterly idiotic rationale. So basically they come off as indignant idiots defending their idiocy.

This is not how someone with access to a divine truth should ever need to sound. But listen to a believer lecture you about the strange and specific details of their faith and you realize where PZ Myers got the idea for the Courtier’s Reply.

Here are just a few of the common idiotic ways that religious beliefs are often defended.

  • You believe in other things you can’t see, why can’t you believe in God?
  • There’s no difference between your faith in science and my faith in God.
  • If I’m wrong I die and nothing happens. If you’re wrong you die and spend eternity in Hell!
  • You can’t prove it’s not true, so how dare you criticise?
  • If you would just take our course/read our book you would soon see we are right!
  • God can only show Himself to those who are willing to believe in Him.
  • The chances of everything happening by chance are so small, therefore there must be a God.
  • Faith gives us a spiritual richness that is so lacking in the lives of poor sad atheists. We feel sorry for you!
  • The vast majority of people believe in some kind of afterlife, so you should too!

Also, to clarify something: A belief in heaven, even if it is idiotic, does not automatically mean the believer is an idiot. It’s perfectly possible for an otherwise highly intelligent person to choose to believe something ridiculous; Isaac Newton, one of the cleverest people who ever lived, was also a devout Christian.

Here are some idiotic things I have believed at various points in my life, which thankfully I came to realize were idiotic mostly by the time I reached adulthood:

  • That humans can, on rare occasions, spontaneously combust.
  • That Ayn Rand had some really good ideas about the individual vs society.
  • That there is some kind of afterlife which somehow balances out all the bad crap that happens in life.
  • That there is such a thing as ESP.
  • That there is such a thing as telekinesis.
  • That there are morphogenetic fields connecting all living things in a way that is beyond the scope of regular physics and biology.

Of course I grew up in a safe environment where there was no danger or risk in letting go of these various silly ideas. I might have held on to some very strange beliefs were it otherwise. But whether or not something is easy or hard has no bearing on whether it is right or wrong. Plenty of religious people have sacrificed and even died for their beliefs, and while I can admire their courage, it adds nothing to the credibility of their faith.

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See also: