I have a mild objection to the term “ambidextrous”, because I consider it prejudiced—dexter is Latin for “right”, so etymologically ambidextrous means “two right hands” or “both hands like the right hand” or “right-handed on both sides”. Hence I often use the terms “ambisinister” or “ambisinstrous”. Imagine my surprise upon reading the Wikipedia Handedness article and discovering that those terms were already in use—they’d already been appropriated to further anti-lefty prejudice!
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This evening I played AD&D, roleplaying for the first time in years. I was dropped into an already-running campaign and given the character of an Illusionist/Thief (2/3) performer and jeweler Gnome (who was also apparently Jewish).
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I’ve been using star-light by Dean Edwards for a while to do syntax highlighting in HTML, and it works extremely well.
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This video is truly something to behold. I got it via Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World, and feel that it just has to be shared.

I’d love to be wrong, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s parody.

Over the last few days, especially on Friday, I watched the count of the Irish election results. The difference from the American system is quite significant, and although there are many reasons for that, a key one is the voting system itself, Single Transferable Vote, which gives individual voters more influence than the winner-takes-all system used in the United States.
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(This is a continuation from yesterday’s post about what Episode II’s plot should have been.)

The Republic is at war, and has been for two years as Anakin Skywalker, commanding the forces of the Republic, has forced Dooku’s Separatists to the outer fringes and destroyed many of their power bases. The Republic is on a war footing, and Senator Palpatine has consolidated his power, with Padmé Amidala’s moderate faction increadingly isolated in their attempts to curtail him.
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(I had this idea for a better plot immediately after seeing Episode III, but have been prompted to write it down by the Star Wars Blog-a-Thon that’s marking the 30th anniversary of the first film.)

I’m willing to cede Episode I to Lucas. After all, he wanted to make one “for the kids”, right? So sure. He can have Episode I. Including the pod race, the wacky-implausible Anakin fighter pilot scene, and Jar-Jar. Yes, even Jar-Jar. Despite much of the awfulness there, Lucas still did a good job of introducing/reintroducting characters who made for a compelling story.
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Yesterday I decided to attempt the Tuesday Guardian’s “Countdown” nine-letter anagram, which was CUPTIEMAN. I spent maybe thirty minutes on it in total during the day, getting more or less nowhere, trying a bunch of likely-two letter combinations to begin the word that didn’t help me.
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Apparently it may be possible for single cars to break up traffic jams.
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It should be clear to any rational observer that the American political system is a complete mess. The fact that the country was suckered into a war under false pretences and hasn’t brought charges against those responsible (instead giving Bush the majority vote in 2004) is merely one sign of this. The lack of health care is another, and there are many others. Yet significant change seems rather unlikely.
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Immigration is a huge topic in the US right now. While in Philadelphia airport yesterday, I was unable to avoid CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who thinks that illegal immigration is a gigantic threat to America, and more generally, coverage of the Senate bill. I don’t know enough about the provisions of that bill to have a strong opinion on it, but there’s a lot of hysteria around the issue.
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It’s hardly an original observation that many of the doings of the Bush Administration have been so ludicrous as to be almost beyond satire. There are so many cases where a completely straight telling of their doings simply sounds like satire because of the content. Many commentators have made this point, as it’s one of the few ways the situation can still be satirized—the honest portrayal of ongoing shock. I’m sure that this has happened in the US before, and that a lot of people felt the same way during the Nixon years, but now it seems more extreme and more pervasive somehow.
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I played in a Two-Headed Giant Pro Tour Qualifier today, teaming up with my friend Lev. It didn’t go very well, but was nevertheless enjoyable.
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Following today’s loss to the Mets, the Yankees are now ten games behind the first-place Red Sox.

It wasn’t fun to type that.
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While walking around San Francisco this evening, I considered how the city’s topography gives it a distinct identity—specifically, how that might influence its assimilation (or lack thereof) into a profoundly brand-driven modern capitalist homogeneity.
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I can’t get over the testimony James Comey gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, specifically that White House political operatives (one of whom is now the Attorney General of the United States) attempted to do an end-run around an acting Attorney General by pressuring a recovering post-gall-bladder-operation John Ashcroft into signing documents (Ashcroft refused).
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Starting at Metaweb, I had to set up a new machine, something I haven’t done in a while. One thing that made it a lot easier this time is that I have a lot of my config in my Subversion repository, which saved me quite a lot of time. This also reflects some changes I’ve made since writing Essential Windows Software last year. (Oh, and all the software is Free Software.)
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Today was my first day at my new job, and it was good. Very strange, somehow unreal. That has nothing to do with Metaweb per se, and everything to do with my long tenure at Nimblefish. Almost five years there made it seem like the canonical work environment, so that a different environment seems to lack solidity.

It’s good to be there. It’s good to change it up, but more than that, I think that Metaweb is a really good environment for me.
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As reported by The Register, The UK Ministry of Defence is running a satellite network that will be used to control unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones… and the name of the network? Skynet. Presumably killer androids who like phased plasma rifles in the forty-watt range will be added to the network soon…
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I’m a big fan of Google Maps, but haven’t played around with it too much until recently. As far as I know it’s still prohibitively difficult to use waypoints for driving directions, but the the “My Maps” function lets you draw lines and set “placemarks”, which are useful for illustrative purposes. So I decided to map out the driving I did last night.
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In the eight months since writing Some Plans for sfmagic.org, I’ve made little progress. This is mainly because of gating factors such as moving it into subversion and getting my database backups into subversion as well. Now that those things are in place, I need to review how it works right now to figure out how to proceed.
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I haven’t been reading very much recently. I did finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Four Pillars of Investing recently, but overall it’s been a rather slow year, almost half gone already and only nine books finished.
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On the Grannan family’s recommendation, I recently read William Bernstein’s The Four Pillars of Investing. It’s really good, and I see no reason not to recommend it to more or less everyone.
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