Author: splicer

For a while I’ve been com­ing down on myself for let­ting my motor­cy­cling get in the way of my run­ning. I’ve put weight back on, and as I’ve been get­ting back to a run­ning sched­ule this year I’ve been bemoan­ing the con­di­tion­ing that I lost. 2005 was pret­ty much wast­ed for run­ning as I logged approx­i­mate­ly 60 miles total. So com­ing back into it I’ve been com­par­ing myself to where I was at the end of 2004.

It just … Read the rest

Vic­to­ry

Final­ly I got my SGI sys­tem run­ning! It took four SCSI CD-ROM dri­ves, two sets of install media and four years, but there it is, ful­ly operational.

Well, except that I haven’t quite got­ten it to see the net­work yet.… Read the rest

Las Vegas is a weird and scary place, as far as I can tell from the airport.… Read the rest

My moth­er sent me this book months ago, long before my dis­sat­is­fac­tion at work result­ed in the loss of my job. It’s a col­lec­tion of true sto­ries of peo­ple who have wres­tled with the Big Question.

This is per­son­al and authen­tic jour­nal­ism. Bron­son does not pre­tend that he does­n’t exist and tells us when he thinks that just talk­ing to him might have influ­enced the peo­ple he inter­viewed. The book con­tains a wide vari­ety of per­son­al his­to­ries that he uses … Read the rest

Edmund S. Mor­gan explores what inde­pen­dence meant to three of Amer­i­ca’s most promi­nent Found­ing Fathers: John Adams, George Wash­ing­ton, and Thomas Jef­fer­son. In doing so in such a short vol­ume, he refrains from much biog­ra­phy or his­to­ry les­son, includ­ing only what is nec­es­sary to dis­cuss the impor­tance of inde­pen­dence as it meant to each.

Rather than dates and places, Mor­gan explores the moti­va­tions and val­ues of each man. Adams the ambi­tious politi­cian, Wash­ing­ton the aloof mil­i­tary man, and Jef­fer­son the human­ist … Read the rest

Car­ni­val was hap­pen­ing here in San Fran­cis­co this week­end. The streets in the Mis­sion were closed off from 24^th Street all the way up to 16^th and each block had bar­ri­cades with secu­ri­ty guards to push the bar­ri­cades aside in case a vehi­cle had to get out or something.

Jolie and I got to Jolie’s place this morn­ing after she cheered me on to my fin­ish at the Mis­sion Rock 5k (I fin­ished in 27:39… Read the rest

I don’t think I’ll find answers to eth­i­cal dilem­mas in a book, but this was a thought­ful if some­times less than thor­ough explo­ration of the deci­sion­mak­ing process­es involved when faced with right-ver­sus-right situations.

The author clar­i­fied the ques­tion of eth­i­cal rel­a­tivism ver­sus eth­i­cal abso­lutism that has haunt­ed me for some time. On the one hand, sit­u­a­tion­al ethics seems like a dan­ger­ous slide into a total lack of val­ues, where there is no right or wrong except as deter­mined by the … Read the rest

Hav­ing a dis­cus­sion (more like hear­ing a lec­ture) about gun con­trol with a cowork­er recent­ly. He was going on about the restric­tion on the Bar­rett .50-cal­iber sniper rifle, and how it is unwieldy and expen­sive and not the sort of weapon that can be used to hold up a store or a bank. He made a very com­pelling case that the rifle was of no inter­est to criminals.

I said to him, “well what do you expect? These … Read the rest

I bought some parts to replace some dam­aged items on my Vira­go in antic­i­pa­tion of sell­ing it. One of the eas­i­est to replace was the tail­light lens, which had been bro­ken when the bike was acci­den­tal­ly backed into some­thing. I also bought six rub­ber grom­mets of the type that eas­i­ly come out and are lost, and which are inex­pen­sive to replace if one does­n’t mind wait­ing a cou­ple weeks for the fifty-cent part to arrive from Yamaha.

The item that … Read the rest

All too fre­quent­ly, I use words whose mean­ing I’ve gleaned only vague­ly from con­text. Occa­sion­al­ly this leads to some minor embarass­ment as I mis­use a word, although most fre­quent­ly this has been fol­lowed by a sense of grat­i­tude and relief for hav­ing come to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the word.

Some­times, how­ev­er, I’ll get so much con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion about a word that I devel­op a sub­con­scious knack for putting that word in the right place with­out real­ly under­stand­ing what it means … Read the rest