Did you know that Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville? That explains a lot. (I will now neglect to explain what that explains.)
Category: Discoveries
Hey, I found Mister Munson! He’s still in Korea, apparently, at the Taejon Christian International School. He would have been there for about three and a half years by now, so he must be enjoying it. He looks good.
Google can’t seem to find a tribute or anything out there from any of his other students, which is disappointing. He deserves one. For that matter, I don’t have him mentioned in my own bio, which I should a) fix and b) really, really update.
I have a list of teachers I once planned to thank in my Oscar speech. A lot of them have disappeared from it, because I realized that they owed as much to me as I to them. But Bryan Munson remains.
Whoa! Moon shot!
If this ever comes to anything, it could actually make things really convenient for a certain movie franchise that has yet to be written.
I say “you gotta believe” a lot, because… well, I believe it, philosophically and biologically. It’s a motto and a mantra. I don’t think I’ll ever know if I picked it up subconsciously somewhere, or whether it’s just one of those examples of convergent phrase evolution.
Turns out there is a specific person to whom it’s ascribed, though, and his name was Tug McGraw, and he died yesterday. His obituary is sad, but it’s also good reading. He lived what he said.
“For example, there are two categories of people in this world: Us, and pirates.”
I think Kris and Atticus should get together and conquer the world.
No, seriously
If you eat puffy Cheetos and M&Ms together, it tastes like s’mores.
“The real Universe arched sickeningly away beneath them. Various pretend ones flitted silently by, like mountain goats. Primal light exploded, splattering space-time as with gobbets of Jell-O. Time blossomed, matter shrank away. The highest prime number coalesced quietly in a corner and hid itself away forever.”
Okay, it’s not the highest prime number period, just the highest one yet. Still pretty cool.
I experienced a surreal and Sumanaesque moment upon the sudden realization, tonight, that I have a LiveJournal! No, wait. I knew that. Stephen gave it to me. What was surreal was planning to set up another account, with the aim of syndicating NFD, and then discovering that a certain kind somebody had already done so!
LiveJournal: A neverending font of generosity. If you’re Brendan.
I should probably never really have a country.
“Public nudity is compulsory, euthanasia is illegal, military funding has been stripped back, and young children are regularly seen wagering pocket money at blackjack tables.”
Work has been a tomb this afternoon–those of the developers who aren’t out with new babies are out watching Master and Commander or just avoiding the gloomy weather. I, as one of those unfortunates who’s still paid by the hour, don’t get to sneak out early, and I can’t do anything else on my project right now until somebody who’s gone gets back to me.
I’m kind of stuck for content on here lately, because it’s a strongly routined November so far–time passes quickly, but there’s not a lot of excitement or danger to be had. At work I run queries, wait on those queries, try to fix those queries so they won’t fail again, and repeat; at school I learn useful things, but they’re about as enthralling as you’d expect from a graduate comp sci schedule that’s heavy on algorithms. (Well, I had fun with string search, but I’m not going to write an entry about it.) And on Wednesdays I play Grand Theft Auto.
When I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for mean ol’ queries to yell at me, though, I keep finding myself at William Wu’s Riddles (via vitanuova). A lot of the riddles there are the kinds of problems I was given as “fun” challenges at Gifted Student stuff when I was younger, and at which I was completely horrible. I find that now, at 22 (and without a competitive atmosphere), I actually consider them fun and worthwhile. I still expend lots of time and effort on solving even the stuff in the easy section, but it’s a great payoff when I get one. The only letdown is that I immediately want to show this off to somebody, but a) that’s lame, they’re easy and b) that kind of defeats the point of a riddle site.
If I get a little more motivation under me, though, I hopefully will be able to reuse some of this knowledge in the next six weeks, as I insanely try to design an RPG system. Those of you nerds who read this but not Crummy: want in?