Happiness is chemical is a tumblelog.

Blind Guardian and other things

Not sure if it’s my two-day sleep deprivation talking but why isn’t this track the best?

Two-day sleep deprivation due to:

* reading about various political schools of thought, the -isms: fascism, Social Darwinism, militarism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism and such

* a study of a bunch of file I/O syscalls from TLPI. I even did one of the exercises (cp with holes support). Go me!

* progress on my re-read of The Fountainhead. And some thought on individualism and objectivism w.r.t. America brought up by an interesting question (http://www.quora.com/Americans/Why-do-so-many-Americans-like-Atlas-Shrugged-when-everyone-else-in-the-world-thinks-its-tedious-nonsense).

* a productive brainstorm with the boss

* half a chapter of Odensky’s Scala book. I’m liking what I read! Can’t wait until I get to the meat.

* some revisiting of the distant past with an old friend, and

* some more realization that I’m just really curious and not much else

It’s 10:10a. Alarm for 4:30p. Here’s to screwing with my sleep schedule yet again…

TLPI

I’ve been making a big fuss about this book to anyone who does anything even remotely programmer-y.

I think a great way to understand a computer system is to know its syscalls. And this is a great UNIX/Linux resource for just that.

Fareed Zakaria's 2012 Harvard Graduation Speech

Oh, how I miss you, Optimism.

Clipboard

Exactly what I’ve been waiting for.

Sure, they have a shoddy UI, use Trebuchet MS and something about them using 0.97 opacity (correct me if I’m wrong but it doesn’t do anything) on the .tagLineRibbon <section> of their homepage makes their (corny) tagline looks like someone turned off text antialiasing in OS X a.k.a. jagged shit, but hopefully they get some design talent in there and it’ll be great.

Why Facebook is Killing Silicon Valley

Something I’ve been deeply worried about.

And I don’t worry about things too much. Who gives? Right?

But this sucks.

"Make good art" - Neil Gaiman

“More and more of today’s world is freelance. Because:

1. their work is good,
2. they’re easy to get along with, and
3. they deliver the work on time.

And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine:

1. people will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time,
2. people will forgive the lateness of your work if it’s good and they like you, and
3. you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if it’s on time and it’s a pleasure to hear from you.

[…]

Make good art.”

Baby, don't you want to go

To my sweet home Chicago!

found this while researching the song for my Roots of Rock & Roll (79-345) final essay