The Closing of an Era

Cameron Highlands.
I’ve come here every year for Christmas break, and this is it, the
last time I’ll come here for ages. I’ll be getting married in a year
and two days, so I won’t be coming back here. It’s beautiful…. A
great place to come and have your mind cleared. That doesn’t mean you
can expect to have blog posts of particular brilliance and wit. I’ll
just be in a wistful mood when I write them….

Not now though…. Let me go out and enjoy the fresh air.

Sheena is a punk rocker

baka.... I busted up my shoulder today. Stupid shoulder.

Break the conventions. Keep the commandments.

-G.K. Chesterton

When I was in high school, I hung out with very…. conventional
people. That is a terrible word choice as in most senses of the word
it is completely false. I mean conventional as Chesterton meant it
above. Not neccessarily normal, but always in line with what was expected of
them.

From my flawed perspective, it seemed that everyone was either
like that or wasting their life away in obvious ways…. Drugs,
stealing…. People were either in the behaving properly crowd, the
ones who would be shocked to see someone drinking even if they were of
age, or they were in the worthless punks crowd.

I hated it, but I saw that I had to…. be conventional.

Now that I’m back in town, I see something that is actually quite
encouraging. I’ve grown a lot, found out that the Singapore drinking
age is 18 (so some of those people weren’t actually illegal),
and realized that there are some very respectable people who don’t
have a problem with reasonable alcohol consumption and things like
disagreeing with Martin Luther.

I think I knew it on some level all along, but I found out there actually were
people at ICS who were in neither
category. I found people who could live on the edge, not afraid of
controversy, and still be reasonable, fun beings.

It’s really kind of relieving to me. I hated being conventional, and
on the inside I never felt at peace just complying with
everything. (That can be blamed on my previous
hyper-authoritarian high school, but that’s another blog entry completely.)
Now I realize like Nell that blind acceptance is just as foolish—just
as blind—as unthinking rejection.

‘Break the conventions, keep the commandments,’ said
Chesterton. He’s definitely on to something there. The thing is, you
don’t have to break the conventions, as much as it bothers me to admit
it. (Blast, I love Chesterton) All you have to do is see them for what they really are:
conventions. In this case, your own actions are less important than
your outlook. The perception of a distinction between what is situationally inappropriate
and what is actually wrong makes all the difference, not whether you
actually do break the expectations.

In closing, another Chesterton classic:

‘We can thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of
them.’

-G.K. Chesterton

Thank you, it’s been a lovely evening.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night

Today my brother got The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock, and I saw my second ever Hitchcock film….
Things sure are different now. The whole time I was watching it, I was wondering if that kind of film could have been released today.
The slower pace is actually kind of refreshing. It bothered me at first a bit. But the way the movie can draw you in without hardly doing much is pretty impressive. Master of suspense, or so I hear. Well, it’s true. :sigh: They don’t make movies like they used to…. Except Signs…. Sort of…. I don’t know.. . . . . . .  .     .

And now, collected thoughts of your webmaster:

• I noticed all the cool blogs have catchy phrases describing their content or style. Now I have one as well. Maybe I’ll be cool, too.
  


• I’m redoing my Links page because the last one was a pile of unorganized garbage.
  


• Now I finished hagelberg.mine.nu and the Guthwine web photo album. I’m very happy with myself. I’ll implement it at the b1ksh some time soon.



• With all that work on a database-driven uber-l33t blog code…. I’m reduced to editing HTML code to update my blog. <whines> I want Penguinomicon back. </whines>


• I went back and realized I had that delayed-release code still in my blog software, and I totally forgot about it. lol. All that work. Oh well, I’m moving on to grander things!


• The poll is gone. Luigi won as favorite game character. The scurvy wretch. Aerith totally shoulda won.


• I don’t think the poll is coming back. I like having all that extra space.

Guthwine

For my mom’s Christmas gift:
Guthwine, a web photo display system.

Oh, and Google speaks l33t!

And Megatokyo is cool.

New coolest word ever

Props to Harry Cassin for neologizing my new favorite word: necricide
Cool, huh?

Hail Elessar Telcontar

Return of the King: best movie ever?
Perhaps.

First time I’ve shed a tear in a movie. (Last Samurai is the closest I’ve come)

Extremely cool

Try it: Armagetron. You’ll like it. Get 4 other friends to try it too. They’ll like it. Then you can all like it together!

I told you so

Read this.

Then read
this.

Then wonder how an asinine law like the DMCA got passed in the first place. Sometimes I wonder about where this country is headed. I’m sure we’re making Jefferson or John Adams turn over in his grave.

Double, Double

I had a twin.

Oh, oh, and in closing….
Go to MK12 and watch the movie Ultra Love Ninja.

Yuletide

The Christmas season is upon us.
In celebration, a tale. Christmas cheer to all.

On another note, I’ve done my RSA encryption project. You can download the code, but Windows users need to Download Perl to use it. Right now it only encrypts/decrypts numbers and not characters, but it can be scaled to numbers of arbitrary length. I may add character support later; it should be a simple matter.

In closing, visit Alisha’s web site she made for her computer class.

Occulti et quasi Ignoti

Several matters of business:

• I passed 100 hits. There should be a party any day now.



• Lem has a web site now. He’s got some pictures of me on it. Check it out.



• I’m writing a program that will be under export control by the US government when I finish it because of laws concerning strong cryptography. It’s not that I am making a really impressive program, but that the US has extremely restrictive laws concerning crypto. I’ll post the code when it’s done.



• Daniel Peckham has some great code for keeping photos and allowing comments on them. Some time maybe over Christmas break I may use it on this site.

I had a lot of more stuff to say, but I forgot it. Such is life.