I went to see see Chomsky speak last Saturday night at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre. The speech was on “Obama, the Middle East, and Prospects for Peace”.
It felt like a somewhat low-key talk, in the sense that there weren’t many revelations in it. Plenty of interesting information, and perhaps most illuminating in the way that even thought I knew many of the broad outlines, I was still surprised by some of the specifics that he cited.
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More accurately, Club Deportivo O’Higgins. I had already thought about visiting Chile, but now it seems like I should not only do that but try to see this team play a match, preferably at home.
Naturally, they’re based in Rancagua, capital of The O’Higgins Region.
(Yes, somewhere back along the line, I’m distantly related to Bernardo O’Higgins.)
It took me a while to get there, but I now have a working toolchain to automate going from an RTF file (or a Word document) to reStructuredText. The final link took the longest to find, and turned out to have been right there all along (no, I’m not going to turn this into a retelling of The Alchemist). But if you’re interested in how to get from Word to a sane format (like reStructuredText), this post will interest you.
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I travelled from Dublin to Timişoara and back recently, and had a great time at and around Kev and Oana’s wedding. I’m not going to write about the good times, though—I’m going to write about some of the maddening little things that can make travel so vexing.
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I made it to CrossFit Ireland today, eventually—it wasn’t that easy for me to find it, and I probably should have watched their driving video rather than just using Google Maps. As I’ve stated before, Irish signage is terrible, and I shouldn’t have expected that it would be easy to identify the Hibernian Industrial Estate.
I did find it in the end, and even managed to just about be on time.
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Several months ago I wrote a piece on Racism and Science Fiction/Fantasy. I wanted to write more about that, but it’s been tough for me to work my thoughts into something cogent enough to post; I still have at least one unfinished post on it lying around. Some recent online reading has helped me to identify one of the things that was disturbing me, however: the role of offendedness in the discussion. Its role in other discussions, including wider cultural debates, has also bothered me for a while, and this post is about my view on it and the path that led me to this articulation of it.
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At the start of the year I laid out some goals for 2009, and it’s time to review how they’re going.
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Last week I posted about my setup for going from reStructuredText to WordPress. It involved a shell script, some Python scripts, and the pbpaste and pbcopy commands. It worked, but it was a little on the convoluted side.
Now I have a slightly better process, and one that I will have used to publish this post.
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I can be a terrible correspondent. I go through patches, some of them years long, where, unless I respond to an email immediately (which is essentially a function of chance), I might not respond ever. This becomes cumulatively worse very quickly, because I become more and more overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff in my inbox, and this makes me less willing to engage with older emails.
Recently, I’ve figured out some methods for dealing with it better.
(To those of you who are owed email from me who are still reading this: you might receive long-overdue replies in the near future, even if they’re to messages that could be classified as “ancient”.)
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(Actually, I’m considering a return to a wider variety of omnivorism, but that’s not as cool a title.)
I gave up eating meat about ten years ago. Since then I’ve been an ovo-lacto-pesce-vegetarian. Now, for the first time, I’m seriously considering eating meat again.
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I wrote about moving my writing over to reStructuredText on Sunday, and since then I’ve moved both my morning pages and my blog writing to it. The latter proved more complicated, primarily because I wanted to make the process almost as easy as writing pseudo-HTML (which is more or less WordPress’ native format, and kind of mine, too, for the last several years). With some hacky wrangling, I’ve managed to set that up.
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I went to the West Wave Dance Festival last night with my friends Brian and Anne. I had never heard of Katie Faulkner before, but when I left, I was a fan. I’m pretty sure she’s the first choreographer I’ve even considered being a fan of. That’s not to say I’ve never seen “better” choreographers, but in the past I never really felt I should make an effort to follow their work.
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I’ve written before about my wish for semantic word processing tools, and two years on I still haven’t found something that suits me. I think that WYMeditor has definite promise, but unfortunately the authors are aiming that at browser-to-server functionality, rather than in-browser standalone functionality. This isn’t such a major obstacle for me, but it is one of the reasons why I’m hesitant to move over to using a project that hasn’t reached version 0.5 yet.
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I started CrossFit proper, after having done three intro classes, on 01 Jun. I’ve managed to keep it going since, five days a week with Fridays and Sundays off. (I missed one Tuesday because of the first PyWebSF meetup.)
In that time, I’ve run a 5K, run a 10K, gained the ability to do overhand pullups, done some ridiculous number of burpees, and lifted serious weights for the first time in my life.
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So last week I started CrossFit proper, that is, not doing intro classes but actual CrossFit classes. In certain respects it didn’t make a difference, since the workouts are still scaled to what I can do. I did five sessions, taking Friday and Sunday as rest days.
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Since I started playing tennis again, I’ve been looking for tips to improve my game. I already knew it could do with a lot of improvement, but unfortunately there’s even more than I had realized.
I’ve been extremely impressed with the annoyingly-named site Fuzzy Yellow Balls. They have a pretty good selection of videos that take you through more or less everything a beginner could want, and plenty that beginner-intermediate players like me could want, also.
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Monika and I have been playing squash at UCSF Mission Bay for about a couple of years, but with a ruleset that was based on our past experience rather than actually looking up the rules. For the past couple of months I’ve had the responsibility of doing that looking up, but have always forgotten about it except when either at the court or on my way there. This evening I finally examined the Wikipedia entry for squash.
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This is the thousandth published post on this site. It’s not the thousandth blog entry per se, since some of the entries on this site predate the blog (some predate the site itself, and indeed my awareness of the web). Still, it’s a fairly major milestone, and (working off a suggestion of Jeff’s) I used Wordle to create a kind of commemorative graphic.
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Despite having written at least twenty-one posts about tennis over the last two years, I haven’t really been playing any. I’ve been on court several times with Monika, which is fun, but she’s a beginner and we don’t play actual games, and seem to have reverted to playing squash instead. Several years ago (I can’t believe it’s been that long) I used to play with Lara, who was at about my level (although her technique is better than mine).
Yesterday an ex-colleague, Jeremy, got me out on court in Dolores Park to play, and I remembered how much I love the game.
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I took my first Intro to CrossFit a while ago (2 Mar) and then failed to go to another for a while. Even though it really wasn’t a tough class.
Despite this lack of commitment, I quite like the philosophy of CrossFit (summarized in the “World-Class Fitness In 100 Words” section on this page), and the reading I’ve done around it suggests that it’s quite effective. So yesterday I pushed myself to go to another intro class.
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I recently started playing the daily Set puzzle again, and was thinking about other ways to play the game without other players.
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