Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Randall Randall's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
2:02 pm	Attn: prospective cable thieves If you're going to try to get cable for free, please use a splitter rather than just disconnecting mine. First, it's not very useful to disconnect mine, since I'll call the cable company to come and investigate. Second, you're actually taking *away* my signal so you can have signal. I don't mind sharing (Hello, all you using my free wireless), but I really do mind theft. Get it right. Current Mood: amused Current Music: Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance -- Jonathan Coulton (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 18th, 2008
9:10 am	Oh, no! Someone's *wrong* at a convention! So, last night I was in the audience for a panel on the "Generation Gap" in SF at CapClave. One of the offerings for why SF as a genre has an aging population was that, after all, there were a whole lot of changes in the 1890-1950 timeframe, but virtually none in the 1950-present range... Leaving aside the overall merit (or lack thereof) of that argument, I was struck by something as the arguments flew around the room: one major change from just 15 years ago is that due to the wide availability of search engines and other online information it reflects much more poorly on people when they're wrong on easily checkable facts, now. I think I heard "But you can just look it up!" or some fragment of it several times in a single hour panel, and I noticed that people who said that (with one major exception, whose name I didn't catch) didn't keep arguing -- they just sat and looked disgruntled after that. Clearly they felt that they'd *won* their argument, and didn't really get why the conversation hadn't moved on. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Mayday!!! -- Flobots (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 10th, 2008
10:08 am	From Michael Duff “If a Conservative is a Liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a Libertarian who just got robbed? You call him an Idiot for letting his gun permit lapse.” -- http://blogs.lubbockonline.com/geek/2008/08/10/iphones-are-great-until-they-get-stolen/ Current Mood: amused Current Music: Anybody Listening? -- Queensryche (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
8:24 am	life update So, major changes for me, recently. I've been living in Alabama near Columbus, GA since 2004, until last month, when I moved to the DC metro area. That's a bit vague because I haven't actually gotten a place of my own, yet, and I'm not sure exactly where that will be when I do. For years, I've been struggling at running a small business which never seemed to have enough income, and so I've thrown in the towel on that one, and got a W2 job. Actually, I'm still doing the business (RandallSquared), since the amount of work involved is so light that I can do both, but my main income-producing activity now has a title of "PHP Programmer". Not my favorite thing to do, but it pays 3-4 times what "Owner & Lead Developer of RandallSquared" did, and it's near the bottom of the pay scale for things I do in this area, so I'm feeling rather optimistic about the near future. The past few weeks have been my first experience with public transit for more than one or two trips, and while I'm impressed at how well it runs, I'm also very tired of it. Due to staying with friends in Alexandria, VA, and working in Gaithersburg, MD, there's 4-5 hours of public transit in every workday. Must buy car. I'm off in a few minutes to rent a used car, something I'm going to do repeatedly until I find something I really like so I know what to look for when I buy a car in a month or three. Anyway, rare update over. Current Mood: optimistic Current Music: What Have You Done -- Within Temptation (Comment on this)
8:21 am	A Public Service Announcement It's "Hear, hear", not "Here, here". Please. Current Music: Overweight -- Blue October (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 4th, 2008
9:25 pm	Fine Structure Fine Structure is a really great science fiction novel-in-progress. It's written in a fashion that lends itself to reading piece by piece. Recommended. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: none (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
8:20 pm	Well, Paul Graham just released the initial version of Arc, a new lispy language which he hopes to grow into a "100 year language". There were a lot of suggestions solicited for Arc, years ago, and I'm kinda disappointed that more of them didn't make it into this release. However, we did get callable structures (like lists, strings, and hashes), and composition of functions. So, we'll see. :) Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: J's Ventrilo server (Comment on this)
Monday, January 14th, 2008
10:19 am	A logical result of IP When I'm arguing against the idea that someone can own ideas, I usually use either cars or chairs as an example. If you buy a car, I say, then you own the car, and the car company doesn't try to restrict what you do with your own car in any IP sense: you can sell it to someone else, take it apart and modify it, rent it to people, or whatever you want, because it's none of the seller's business. Apparently, however, the car companies (well, Ford, at least) have been paying attention to the logical conclusions of the IP debate, because now they're claiming that pictures you take of your Ford-built car are their property. Current Mood: sad Current Music: None (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
3:32 pm	Ah, yes. The obligationholiday season. Grr. Current Mood: pissed off Current Music: none (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
1:34 pm	A problematic generation A NY Times article about the "adolescent" problems of the Baby Boom generation or for the condensed version http://madconomist.com/boomer-statistics-you-never-hear-about Current Mood: cynical Current Music: C9 internet radio (Comment on this)
1:19 am	Well, maybe not... Your home is a Gamer's Hideout Your kitchen is stocked with chips, dips, and assorted caffeinated beverages. There's a pantry with emergency backup caffeinated beverages. You also have some breakfast cereals in there, but you haven't had breakfast since last Spring. Your master bedroom has blankets printed with images of Mario and Link. Your study includes unread copies of various gamer magazines, each purchased for the free demo CDs. One of your garages houses your Hummer, and others contain your H2, and H3... with room for an H4, if they ever invent one. Your home also includes a roost for griffons. You've never actually seen a griffon, but you keep the roost ready anyway. Your guests enjoy your collection of every console and associated game ever made. Except the Intellivision -- those controllers drive them NUTS. Outside is the moat that protects your home from goblin invaders and extended family. And, you have a pet -- a koopa named "Shelly". Below is a snippet of the blueprints: Build YOUR Dream Home! Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: J's Ventrillo (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 23rd, 2007
2:33 pm	Made of win This is awesome: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=08&year=2007&base_name=antigua_threatens_the_united_s Current Mood: jubilant Current Music: J's Ventrillo (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 16th, 2007
5:52 pm	Seeing Yellow "When you print on a color laser printer, it's likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. [...] When one person asked his printer manufacturer about turning off the tracking dots, Secret Service agents showed up at his door several days later." More info: Seeing Yellow Current Mood: cynical Current Music: C9 internet radio (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 15th, 2007
8:36 pm	Another update to the tiny templating system Well, I finally wrote up a bit about OrthogoPlate and posted it, together with the latest version, at randallsquared.com. Current Mood: busy Current Music: Ron Paul @ Google (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 7th, 2007
12:41 am	Who would name a serious product "Clouseau", anyway? Via /. Yesterday, Safwat Fahmy appeared in front of the House Science and Technology Committee. During Fahmy's testimony, he claimed Safemedia's "P2P Disaggregator" technology uses traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks. And their Clouseau product will make it impossible to send or receive any illegal P2P transmission on any installed network. However, Clouseau allows tunneling and SSH and never opens packets to determine file legality. My question is, how many snakes does it take to make a can of that there oil? Current Mood: amused Current Music: none (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
3:03 am	The other day Charlie Stross wrote about lifelogging -- this guy's doing it: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-06/ps_transparency "Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book." Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: the dryer (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
8:51 am	Unintended consequences http://www.wendys.com/nyc.jsp Current Mood: pessimistic Current Music: birds (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
12:31 pm	Miscellaneous activities As some of you already know, I've been intending to create a site for people to gripe about bad landlords and such for a while now. Well, I finally got around to doing something about that idea: the dontrentfrom forum is now up. I have about 500 ideas for what to do to improve it, but it's not clear to me what people want, so, we'll see. That neat logo was by BlankPixel, by the way. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: 1.fm (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007
3:39 pm	Keith Henson arrested Keith Henson was arrested last night in Arizona. A Free Keith Henson blog has been set up which has somewhat more details, and the Extropy Institute has a donation form at the top of their membership page: http://www.extropy.org/membership.htm. A Wired article from 2001 has some more background here: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,43420,00.html. Current Mood: pessimistic Current Music: Von Ray -- I'll Show You (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, January 26th, 2007
12:47 am	The absence of the "car insurance crisis" explained. Why Is There No Car Insurance Crisis? Well, I found it entertaining. :) Current Mood: amused Current Music: None (1 Comment |Comment on this)