Erdos Had The Number First

Personal adds are strange things. Theoretically, personal adds should be the best thing since sliced bread for dating.
I mean, we use the market for everything else, why not us too?

Ebay should totally get into personal adds. But here’s the thing, personal adds have recently gotten into vogue. I think
a big part of it is that internet personals tend to have pictures. And judging from the “featured personals” on the onion
These people are what I’m talking about.

Casual sex must be back in style. I’ve heard that, through friends who are younger (and lets face it) more in touch with the Yoot than I am, but how can this be? How can causual sex have come back in the midst of a dramatic increase in a broad spectrum of STDS.

Oh.

I am not against sex. I am not against casual sex (though if having sex with you is casual you should work on your technique ). What I do have a problem with is people being risky without need or caution. These 20 year olds looking for Play in the online personals kinda freak me out. I think all the doom and gloom surrounding sex when I went to school didn’t work because not enough people died. The speeches worked, the problem is now people don’t think it’s a problem.
Or worse, it’s someone elses problem.

This situation may be like those dumbasses on the drive weaving in traffic in their motorcycles with their girlfriends on the back wearing high heels. My wife seems them and get’s pissed because they should be wearing helmets and I ussually remind her that the problem isn’t that they aren’t wearing helmets it’s that too few of them every really crash.

Anyway, you should look at these personal adds. Even if your not looking, because they are an infant social movement that is gaining ground.

I love cheesy proverbs. Today, whilst having a stand-up meeting somebody said some quip and then someone perverted it into a nonsense quip that had the same tone and I though ‘Hey, theres a program to do just that’ and so I wrote it and
so there is.

It’s a python script, it’s really, really simple, it takes a formated file of beginings and endings and and chooses a random
way to put them together,
example output:

The ox is stronger
But the man is patient

The output is not always this good, but it’s often funny.

This may sound simple, but it’s going to be used to test spam bayes fooling stuff, which if your interested contact me
and I’ll tell you about. NOTE: I am not a spammer, when I say ‘fooling stuff’ I’m talking about test suites to combat
nonsense bombing (you know, the spam that’s filled with non-sensical strings of dictionary words).
This software is released under the GPL.
Get the Proverable Here

The ACE wrappers are NOT hard to build. They are easy to build on a variety of operating systems. Macros
are my friends. Any complaints I had before were due to my own ingnorance/incompetence and in
no way the fault of the ACE people.

I am sorry. Mostly.

I was wrong. This happens from time to time. From the time I turned to my wife and said “Honey, you’re
going to hear a lot more about these blog things” some years ago I have thought that blogs were both (simultaneously) a fad and without significant import vis a vis ¹
society and technology.

We live in a distributed world. We have friends that are far flung and family that are not next door. Human communication has always had some amount of difficulty with distance. Blogs bridge that distance.

Blogging as a way of keeping in touch with those aforementioned distant friends. “Oh, I forgot to tell you” is a thing of the past. And it lets you
tell people all the things you’ve been meaning to tell them but are at such a low priority you might not tell them.
Time is another issue. I don’t have time to tell everyone I know everything. You don’t have time to sit and listen to me blather. BUT, if I blog it and you read the blog you can select what information your interested in. You’re going to do that anyway, especially with me because I’m not always
worth listening to (this is not self-deprecation on my part, this is true of everyone: even you are not worth listening to sometimes gentle reader. Sorry.).

The blog may seem impersonal, but I don’t think it is. It just seems impersonal the way a telephone call used to. People used to write letters to one another and not taking the time to write a letter was considered thoughtless. But letters have come back, in a strange way. They’ve come back in the form of the panaply of electronic communication. email/blog/IM are all extensions of the same thing.

Not only are we creating our own Long Memory but we create the scaffolding of community. Note that I say it is the scaffolding of community. Forms and methods of communication do not build a community, they allow a community to be built. And that is the little nugget of thought I’ve been digging for here. Communities do
not happen by accident. They are built and maintained. One of the more important building materials is communication.

So I say “Blog On” and encourage your friends to blog and read their blogs and comment on their blogs and don’t hide behind your blog and don’t let others
hide behind theirs.

I’m on a mission to misuse vis a vis and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

I’m having trouble building the ACE framework. I just bought the programers handbook for it and I am really very interested in using it.

It’s got this logging framework that seems to be just what I want, which is a rare thing indeed. The logging framework looks to be as good as Log4cpp but with the added benefit of being able to do arbitrary logging over network connections and groovy stuff like that.

ACE also has a lot of cross platform stuff and is supposed to make network programming simple. So until there is a Boost::socketstream or something else like that I’ve been looking at ACE.

But the build process is SCREWY. Maybe I just can’t appreciate it’s beauty, and it does compile for a truely freakish number of systems (from VxWorks to MVS for god’s sake).

It’s building now, and I may have gotten it licked, but geesh.

Here I was at a New Year’s Day party thrown by some people we know. I don’t know if I would call them friends, but I like them a lot (so does my wife) and we hope they like us. But this isn’t about them.

We’re at their party, it was a good party. I was talking to this guy, at somewhat great length. I didn’t know anybody and tend to get a little nervous in social situations. He seemed like a smart guy we talked about a bunch of stuff. I got up on my soap box a couple of times. This was, for me, basic party bullshit. I didn’t know anyone else at the party and he seemed
to be interested in continuing the rabbit trail of a discussion that was going on. I don’t think
I had him trapped like some kind of B movie bad-party guest.

He then noted to me that I had an interesting rhetorical technique, sprinkleing my conversation with a few facts to establish a position if you don’t know what your talking about. Not that I didn’t know what I was talking about, he said, but people who don’t know what they’re talking about might do this same thing. I forget his exact wording and I was like “What?”. He said all this and then excused himself to go the bathroom.

I’m an asshole? I was too taken back to ask what the hell he meant. Did I take it wrong? Is giving facts an “intersting rhetorical technique”? What? Huh?

I don’t even really know how much of my “facts” were really even facts. I didn’t go look them up. I was at a party. I’ve been kindof obsessing about this since it’s a rather sensitve spot for me. I’m really vain about the brain, as it were. My wife laughed it off because, lets face it, who thinks about someones “rehtorical technique” at a party? But I’m not so sure.
I think about peoples rehtorical technique at parties. I’m a really fun guy
Other than that rather strange incident, the party was fun. Lots of people, hopping jack in a crockpot (I love hoppin jack) and cool people to hang out with. I’m going to let this go now.

But it’s a new year, and I’m certainly not going to discuss anything but Football at the next party I go to, you count on that. And I really don’t know anything about american Football other than I like the St. Louis Browns.