Hydrogen, schmydrogen

It's fine, after all. Let's continue this gas price crazyness, this record profit setting thanks to our inability to kick the dope of gas guzzling, because we will have hydrogen in the future.

Yeah, sure. Never mind where are we going to get the energy to obtain the hydrogen in the first place. Never mind where are we going to store the necessary amounts to guzzle like we do now. And by the way, I refuse to drive around FAE bombs waiting for a crash to explode.

For a long time I wondered how was it possible to continue to push hydrogen without looking at any other alternatives when clearly there are so many hurdles on the road. But then... maybe I'm wrong, but now it seems to me it's a stalling tactic.

In other words, let hydrogen fail. It will take a long time to do so, but until it does we will have an excellent excuse to avoid investing in anything that could possibly work. Meanwhile, oil prices will skyrocket to 5 figures per barrel, which is what some haves and have mores favor anyway.

Man... are we stupid or what???

Distinguish for yourself

Want to test how many distinctions can you handle at the same time? Do you want to check how fast you can distinguish for yourself? Then check this game out.

TARFU

Dude... things are really messed up. Did you know your printer could have been marking all the printed pages with information that could identify you? Check it out, utterly disgusting.

I am not buying a printer any time soon. Are ethernet cards spying on us as well? Screw this bullshit man!

Proper abuse of language

The last year plus has brought a number of changes. I am now in an environment where I can more easily share the fun I have when I do my job properly. And since 99% of the time I am in a good mood, phrases that reflect the fact come to me... and what's even better, others start using them as well...

Almost certainly, my most infamous hit so far is "my little friend", said with an obviously fake accent. At the office, my friend, people are starting to copy even the accent! It's a lot of fun and it immediately causes smiling by association. Working in a good mood with smiling people is very pleasant!

What's even better, other people start creating new language as well. Among friends, I have no problem describing bullshit as bullshit... but again, with the fake accent so it's clear it's joking in a good mood. Based on the fake accent, one of my colleagues gave me this lovely present:

boolshit = bad logic

Hilarious! Absolutely fantastic! It should be used more often!

The doorman just called me on the phone to tell me "ah my friend... you have a delivery my friend... have a good night my friend"... and yes, it is dinner time so catch you later.

What an amazing picture!!!

And it is for real --- check it out!

Extremely disgusting achievement

Oh, Apple, what a lovely patent. To think that I considered letting my next computer be a Mac... just pisses me off.

Sooner or later a corporation will be granted a patent for creating human beings followed by people themselves being considered copyright violations.

I shall continue listening to Borodine's In The Steppes of Central Asia at this time.

Consumer requirements

I was given an old Apple Powerbook 190. It has a black and white LCD display, a ~400mb hard drive with about 150mb free, 16 mb of ram, a floppy drive, and a touch pad. And it works. This could have been quite a nice computer some years ago.

But let me tell you what I found while I played with it. First of all, the operating system uses 4mb of ram to run. Doesn't that sound funny already? And it is also quite fast to open programs and such, especially because just a select few are larger than 500kb. With a setup like that, you don't even need virtual memory.

What's wrong with this computer? It can't run the latest applications, essentially. Because if I wanted to write, I could easily do that. I'm not sure about Smalltalk, but there must be one that runs in this machine.

So who changed our requirements such that we're not happy without much more? We were satisfied with that a few years ago, right? It's only by comparison that we think we can't do without the new.

I think that, sometimes, the newest stuff is designed to keep us occupied using the new features instead of significantly improving or changing what we do. There is too much of "buy, and then throw in the garbage 5 minutes later" going on.

But what about using your life to actually create something? Because evidently you can readily get yourself occupied with new features like everybody else. It is not unique nor special whatsoever. What about producing a valuable personal expression of the world as you see it?

Quite unfortunate, our situation as easily-duped consumers.

Good dealio!

I received a check from Don Knuth today. He also sent me a hardcopy of my modest suggestion for The Art of Computer Programming with some notes in his own handwriting. What a nice guy!

I feel quite strange, but good at the same time... very very weird. In any case, now I need to do more of my number crunching!

PS: the check number is 256, and it's for 32 cents.