Funny encounter today with some jailbait at the Woodstocks bar. Here’s how it went:
(2 young girls walk up next to me at the bar, and are wondering what the trinkets in the glass at the bar are)
Me: “those are bottle openers.”
Them: “you smell like beer.”
Me: “that’s because I’m drinking it.”
The real question, though, is how they know what beer smells like, but don’t know what a bottle opener looks like. Hmmmm….
1. Copy and paste answers from Wikipedia. Don’t bother paraphrasing them – leave them in their (somewhat) good English, so that they’re easy to pick up as plagiarized. Better yet, leave the blue text and active hyperlinks. Then justify it by saying the information was hard to find.
2. Treat your elder as the group secretary. He doesn’t get enough of this shit from the boss, and he looked lonely. Ask him to find you a desk, or better yet, make space for you.
3. Declare that it’s the TA’s fault that you don’t have a good sample to work with for lab. Demand that he provide a better one for next time. Ignore that other classmates got good results from the same sample, just a different region.
4. Do all of the above with charming enthusiasm and smiley faces.
On the suggestion of one of my new co-op friends, I tried eating a raw garlic clove to try to nip my cold in the bud. My body was unhappy with me the first time, and downright refused the second. I think I’ll stick to vitamins and horrible-tasting cough syrup.
In other news, I passed my qualifying exam. I’m now a dissertation away from being a mad doctor. Excitement abounds.
I wanted to make a nice, pretty text file from some log info, but python didn’t want to cooperate with string formatting.
I was trying something like this:
f=open(‘file’,'w’)
f.write(‘%-10s’ %string)
At the interactive prompt, the equivalent print command would give the desired result.
I got it to work by replacing f.write() with
print >> f, mystring.ljust(10)
This code has the same net result of printing to the file, but it actually does the spacing properly.
This thread gave me the hint I needed, though it looks like the poor guy never resolved his issue – he should have tried the print suggestion.
http://bytes.com/groups/python/25205-using-string-ljust-try-hold-fixed-width#links
From today’s school newspaper, an article that made me laugh quite a lot:
A recent study conducted by Janet Elise Rosenbaum yet again compares the sexual behavior between teens who take abstinence pledges and teens who don’t. She found that after five years of taking the pledge, 82 percent of the virginity pledgers deny having ever pledged and ultimately, there was no difference between the two groups in terms of sexual activity or sexually transmitted diseases. However, pledgers were less likely to use contraceptives, such as condoms, and Rosenbaum writes this may be because many abstinence-only programs disparage the effectiveness of contraceptives.
(Article by Helen Zou, available here )
I laughed a lot because I really hate faith-based initiatives, and to see them failing so miserably (indeed, being arguably counterproductive and potentially harmful) brings great joy to my twisted, cold, black heart. I hate them because they are pure nonsense initiated by people with likely good intentions, but absolutely absurd, borderline megalomaniacal obsessions with controlling thought. Of course the easiest targets for such thought control are young people, with the enormous potential for peer pressure in youth-oriented groups. To strive for prevention of disease and unwanted pregnancies is a noble goal, but to try to do so by fighting human nature is folly. I am delighted to see nature prove it as such.
If you haven’t already seen this, you really should watch it. It’s a 1985 documentary on Harvey Milk, the subject of the recent Sean Penn movie.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/49577/the-times-of-harvey-milk
It’s worth watching because Harvey Milk exemplified the kind of person that we desperately need – right now and always. He was gentle and compassionate, yet fiery and determined in his push for human rights. I have been forced throughout my life to learn about Christianity at various religious schools and from growing up Catholic. This man, more than anyone in the political history of the United States that I know of, truly exemplifies what it means to be a Christian politician (even though he was Jewish): accepting of others, peaceful, selfless, and relentless in his pursuit of human equality. I only mention Christianity because of the current political skew in that direction. It is irrelevant in understanding Milk’s life, but does provide a widely acknowledged standard of excellence, a standard through which Milk can be evaluated to be a truly praiseworthy man.
The Sean Penn movie is also worth watching, but this documentary is better, in my opinion. It covers the events after the assassination in much greater detail. If you do go to see the Sean Penn movie, please avoid Cinemark theaters, as the owner of that chain donated the maximum personal contribution to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign, and should not be profiting from the memory of such a great leader of the gay community.
I spent my New Year’s Eve Contra dancing in Sacramento. At some point, I realized that I was being followed/stalked by a woman. She first stood near me, and talked into space at no one in particular, I suppose hoping that I would listen and comment. Since I didn’t hear what she was saying, I paid no heed. Some time later, I got cornered near the snacks, coincidentally by the stack of progressive newspapers. She made sure to shout this time, though no more in my direction than before. I ignored her a couple of times, and started looking at the headlines of the newspapers. She shouted something about gun control. I finally realized she was trying to talk to me. See, I had suspected as much before, but I’m not used to people talking to me. Once she had my attention, she announced her status as a conservative lesbian. I thought it was rather oxymoronic. When I said as much, she said “What, have you been going to college? Who tells you this stuff?” Hmmm… Prop 8, anyone? It’s not news that conservatism and homosexuality do not go hand in hand these days (or ever have). I asked her if she ever wanted equal civil rights to heterosexuals. The conversation went nowhere. Never mind that she’s been following me (a guy) around looking for a dance. I dismissed her as confused, and went on my merry way, talking to other people so that she’d leave me alone. She never got her dance.
Now that I’m home, I decided to search up this funny sounding term, “conservative lesbianism.” There are at least a few things out there, but recent headlines are intermingled with stuff at least as far back as 2001. Mostly it’s the idea that these lesbians adhere to conservatism in the true sense – minimal government, and certainly minimal government interference in personal life. Since when, though, has the conservative element in this country actually adhered to those ideals? Certainly not recently. Why on earth would any lesbian or gay person currently identify with a party that is actively working to deny them civil rights, and whose religious core condemns them as hell-bound? What’s more important to you – your guns, or your dignity?
These people must wake up and get their priorities straight. The Republican party has no respect for them, and the Republicans have clearly shown no intention of minimizing government’s monitoring and control of people’s decisions. Until there is true conservatism in government, without the interference of religion and corporate greed, any conservative gay person would do well to lose that identity and focus on preserving their rights as equals.
Digital picture frames are neat little gizmos – especially for showing pics to my parents, who are rarely, if ever, inclined to poke around flickr (or anything much beyond their email). I have had various setups for a while using an old laptop. At first, I used Windows, because the wifi drivers for Linux were either missing for my card, or inadequate (non-functional, or locked up computer frequently). I have finally gotten a card that agrees with Linux (the Intel 2200BG MiniPCI), and the computer is now up and running with Xubuntu. Many options are out there for picking particular sets, or photos by interestingness, but I wanted simply a way to download my whole photostream and allow a screensaver to meander the collection. Not all of my photos are interesting, but they have other personal value of interest to parents.
The synopsis of what I do:
- Use flickrfs to mount my photos on the drive
- rsync to copy photos from flickrfs to local drive
- cron to run photo update scripts nightly
To do this yourself,
After running that command, a web browser will open for you to authorize flickrfs to access your account. Eventually, the command line window will spit out something about updating your sets, and tell you when it’s done.
If anyone finds it useful, here’s the script that I have cron run to update my local Pictures directory with the contents of my photostream. There’s also a bit in there to clean up empty files. rsync seems to be not quite perfect with flickrfs, and I accumulated a few empty jpg’s that confused the screensaver.
I display the pictures using GLslideshow, which is standard with xscreensaver. I replaced gnome-screensaver with xscreensaver, as configuration of xscreensaver is easier. To ensure that xscreensaver is always reading a fresh set of photos, I kill it and restart it nightly (cron is really useful!). I did have to tell XFCE to start xscreensaver at startup – it isn’t a completely automatic drop-in replacement for gnome-screensaver. To point xscreensaver at your local pictures directory, check the advanced tab in the upper right, and change the folder where it looks for pictures.
Side note: The Perl installation for Ubuntu 8.10 has a bug with xscreensaver. It dumps yellow text onscreen, something about a constant being changed. I fixed this by adding a debian sid repository to my third party software, and using the Perl version from there, since it’s more up to date. It fixed the yellow text problem for me. The older this post gets, the less likely this will be an issue for you – I imagine the Ubuntu people will update this soon.
do people find it necessary to forcefully and loudly inform me that I look like a retard/nerd while riding my bicycle? Honestly, there are better things to shout out your car window or from the driveway of your frat house – even if I really do look like a retarded nerd (which I doubt).
“What is our love? In the midst of pain and pleasure, we know it is exclusive, personal: my wife, my children, my country, my God. We know it as a flame in the midst of smoke, we know it through jealousy, we know it through domination, we know it through posession, we know it through loss when the other is gone. So we know love as a sensation, do we not? When we say we love, we know jealous, we know fear, we know anxiety. When you say you love someone, all that is implied: envy, the desire to posess, the desire to own, to dominate, the fear of loss, and so on. All this we call love, and we do not know love without fear, without envy, without posession; we merely verbalize that state of love which is without fear; we call it impersonal, pure, divine or God knows what else, but the fact is that we are jealous, we are dominating, possessive. We shall know that state of love only when jealousy, envy, possessiveness, domination, come to an end; and as long as we possess, we shall never love.”
A passage from On Love and Loneliness, a compilation of some of J. Krishnamurti’s talks on the topic.
It’s easy enough to say, but more difficult to truly embrace. I have been thinking a fair bit about “open” relationships lately. I’m a pretty simple, honestly closed-minded person when it comes to dating. I think it has caused a lot of problems for me, for exactly the reasons K describes. I don’t fully understand a difference between open relationships and polyamory. This idea of posession as a component of relationship is a source of great conflict. It’s a necessary component for easing fear of loss, though – for a general feeling of safety. That’s a hard thing to let go of. I see a lot of value in getting rid of the idea of posession, but I also have a really hard time getting rid of the idea of committing to one person. Can committing be independent of posession? Is committing only another way of seeking the same security?
It goes without saying that I am overthinking this, but why not?
” So we have made of love a thing of the mind. The mind becomes the instrument of love, and the mind is only sensation. Thought is the reaction of memory to sensation. Without the symbol, the word, the image, there is no memory, there is no thought. We know the sensation of so-called love, and we cling to that, and when it fails we want some other expression of that same sensation. So the more we cultivate sensation, the more we cultivate so-called knowledge – which is merely memory – the less there is of love.
As long as we are seeking love, there must be a self-enclosing process. Love implies vulnerability, love implies communion, and there can be no communion, no vulnerability, as long as there is the self-enclosing process of thought. The very process of thought is fear, and how can there be communion with another when there is fear, when we use thought as a means for further stimulation?
There can be love only when you understand the whole process of the mind. Love is not of the mind, and you cannot think about love. When you say, ‘I want love’, you are thinking about it, you are longing for it, which is a sensation, a means to an end. Therefore it is not love that you want, but stimulation; you want a means through which you can fulfill yourself, whether it be a person, a job, or a particular excitement, and so on. Surely, that is not love … Love is a state of being, and in that state, the ‘me’, with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions, is absent.”