More to Life than Being Happy

This article in the Atlantic struck a chord with me. It’s about how, in life, searching for meaning can leave people more satisfied than searching for happiness. As [Viktor Frankl] saw in the [concentration] camps, those who found meaning even in the most horrendous circumstances were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing”. Meaning, more than happiness, is long-term.…

The Compro-Flirt

Some times I’m not sure whether I’m trying to flirt with someone or not. The coffee shop was playing some crazy music from all over the World, like, a French song followed by some crazy Spanish dudes shouting to a dance tune. “Heh, this music… right?” Surely anybody would agree this was a crazy mix. “I kinda like it…” she said. “Yeah, it’s alright…” This reply doesn’t require any thought. I put my foot in my mouth so often, this reply is just a reflex at this point.…

Bash Dictionary - Terrible Hack of the Day

So, I just had a reason to implement something like a dictionary in Bash. Of course, I could try to determine if such a feature exists already (it does in Bash 4, alas the default on OS X seems to be 3.2), but why not just try to hack something together? Here’s what I got initially: OFFSETDICTkeyUno=5 OFFSETDICTkeyDos=4 OFFSETDICTkeyTres=17 OFFSETDICTkeyQuatro=21 keyToLookup="keyQuatro" value="$(eval echo '$OFFSETDICT'${keyToLookup})" echo $value > 21 So, that’s ridiculous.…

Meteor Shower

The back of a truck is an appropriate place to watch a meteor shower. I had driven out onto a back road in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to watch the meteors fall, and I was not disappointed. Orion knew where most of them were coming from - he was calling the shots. I had barely pulled off the two-lane dirt road and onto some tire tracks in the grass. A run-down barbed wire fence with old knotty posts ran alongside the road, and was only a few feet from the truck.…

It's Wonderful...

I dream of you, chips chips chips, du du du du du It was just a song, but one that Starbucks seemed to have on a tight loop. Every time I’d walk into one of the four Starbucks I had on rotation I’d hear the song - I’d hear it twenty times. The first few times I heard that old crooner belting out the difficult-to-understand lyrics, I enjoyed myself. Old timey music in a coffee shop is not unexpected, and not even unwelcome.…

Open Port

Every now and then when I’m at a coffee shop I wonder what ports I’ve got open on my home network. Normally I don’t have any ports open within Nmap’s default port list. Starting Nmap 6.01 Initiating SYN Stealth Scan at 16:41 Scanning myRouter [1000 ports] Discovered open port 1111/tcp on myRouter Completed SYN Stealth Scan (1000 total ports) Not shown: 999 filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 1111/tcp open lmsocialserver Read data files from: /usr/local/bin/.…

Mustache November

For some reason November is now Mustache November. Now we’ve got two months out of the year where we have to grow mustaches? I don’t get it. This is supposed to be some statement about masculinity or something? Whatever. You don’t have to grow a mustache, ride a motorcycle, or drink whiskey, to be a man (although admittedly all those things are awesome). Men should know how to stop a toilet that’s overflowing, and we should know how to change a tire.…

Google Scholar Does Citations

Google Scholar just added a citations feature which, among other things, lets you get a BibTeX formatted citation. This is so handy, and I’ve wondered for a while why they didn’t have that feature in there. Often you can go to the IEEE page or whatever to get the citation, but some journals make you login (IEEE, why do you do that?) and anyway this makes one less click. To copy a formatted citation, click on the “Cite” link below a search result and select from the available citation styles (currently MLA, APA, or Chicago) […] You can also use one of the import links to import the citation into BibTeX or another bibliography manager.…

Python's super()

I’ve been writing a lot of Python lately, and there are some things I love about it, some things I’m uncomfortable with, but nothing I hate. The super() builtin function makes life a lot easier when you’re using Python for object oriented code and have some inheritance going on. This blog post describes the best way I’ve seen it used so far. First of all, in Python3 you no longer need to write “super(CurrentClass, self).…

James Bond Infographic

So, you can spend all kinds of time looking through IMDB trying to get the order of the bond movies correct, or you can just look at this great infographic, thanks to these guys. So helpful, right? They put the years right there on the left side (it’d be easy not to notice that).…