I’ve been working hard lately on the secret webby cloudy appy thing, and good progress is being made. So much so that I might actually do a blurb on it here in the next week or two, especially since it’s not actually supposed to be secret and we really want to be setting up trials.

Ruby on Rails is just a thing I accept now, and I’m familiar enough with it to hack around the bits I really don’t like.

Also, Facebook WTF? A hundred bucks per user sounds like a bit of a crazy over-valuation to me. I am trying not to pay too much attention to the IPO, because every time I think about the fact that more than 10% of the entire world’s population are using a proprietary service which is so obnoxiously walled off from the rest of the web… well let’s just say the red mist descends.

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.

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…

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.

Unlike most of the skeptical community I am not normally a huge fan of Mr Minchin, but this is a really catchy song.

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.

__________

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.

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.