Tag: Livejournal

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It’s Almost Lunch!

Happy Friday, everyone.

Had a pretty good dream this morning. I was working on a project with . We were building a gigantic mecha robot. I was surprised with the efficiency of my work. I accomplished much more than I thought I would. My task was building a whole bunch of rack mounted compartments, including the main radio. The robot was about the size of the 5 story building I live in.

I guess this dream is pretty easy to interpret. First of all I am planning to rebuild all of my computers in inexpensive rack mount cases (these things sell for about $60-100 a pop on eBay). I’ll also probably get a cheap and slow, but sexy 1 unit rack mount computer for an mp3 file server, home automation and other always-on type services. They are also within a range of a few hundred dollars on eBay.

Second, I came up with an idea last night. There’s an application that I want to write. First I got to make sure nobody else has written it already. It’s gonna be extra awesome!

Now for a bunch of unrelated cool news:

1) Google started spidering livejournal and other blogs again! Sergey probably read my rant and repented. Yep, that’s what it must have been. Oh, and google’s new toolbar is so damn awesome. It even has a popup blocker. http://www.livejournal.com/users/deadprogrammer has pagerank of 4, but deadprogrammer.com – of 1. Link to me more, people.

2) Some Cubans tried to reach the US Junkyard Wars style, in a 1951 Chevy with pontoons and an engine driven prop. I can’t believe Coast Guard sent them back. That just sucks!

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Journal News

I will be eliminating , my Russian journal. I will repost some of the stuff from there in .
In addition to badly floundering community, I just created . I’ll put my subway rants there. While there will be few subscribers, I will be crossposting in my own journal.

Unfortunately, there is no “plugging” mechanism in livejournal. I would love to get more readers, but there is no easy way to promote my journal and communities. I think I’ve seen a post about a feature like that in someone’s blog, but I can’t find the link. I need a good url manager. In any way, plugs are appreciated here, at Deadprogrammer Inc.

Also, here’s a beef I have with you, readers. Every time I ask for some interesting blog recommendations you are silent. What’s up with that? Don’t you know any good journals?

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Vomitorium

I encounter many lj-users whose posts make me want to vomit in horror. Some just annoy me. Some annoy or horrify me enough to get into a discussion. My belief is that such arguments will better my reasoning skills

I noticed that , , and read certain journals just for this annoyance or horrification factor. And sometimes their posts bait me into getting involved in pointless debates with other lj users.

I think I know how to get a bit better at this loosely sport of arguing. A very intelligent friend of mine recommended this book called “Attacking Faulty Reasoning“. It seems very promising.

Circular reasoning, semantical ambiguity, missing the point, appeal to the gallery, appeal to force or threat, appeal to tradition, distortion, attacking a straw, resort to humor or ridicule. These are just some of the chapters in the book, and I’ve seen most of those in livejournal arguments. Heck, in fact, I am guilty of most of them!

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Book Matters

You know, how come livejournal posts have a “Music:” field but no “Reading:” field? That’s just unfair.

What am I reading now? Two books. “Bad Boy Ballmer: The Man Who Rules Microsoft ” and “The Book on the Bookshelf” (thanks ) . Wait, no three books. I am also reading “Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists”

I’ve just finished “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure” and “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside ” (thanks ). Good, good stuff.

“Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire” , “Pour Your Heart into It : How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time” and “Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters: What I Learned in Ten Years As a Microsoft Programmer” are on their way. Mmmmmm.

You know what, I have not even read that much science fiction lately. And I haven’t read anything in Russian lately.

One exception though. The last book in Russian that I’ve read was «ÐšÐ«Ð¡Ð¬» by Tatyana Tolstaya. Ha, it’s translated as “The Slynx“. On preorder. Gotta get it.

Checked today what’s new in NESFA press – they republish good old science fiction. “Dimensions of Sheckley:The Short Novels of Robert Sheckley”. Still no Kuttner anthology. Too bad.

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What’s wrong with PigeonRankTM?

Is it just me, or did Google start sucking?
The relevance of search results is not nearly what it used to be..

My grievances:

a) Google does not crawl livejournal and I think other blogs as well. And robots.txt does not have anything to do with it. I made sure that my robots.txt permits crawlers and even submitted the url to Google, but I am not in there (except for the about page). I guess this is because of “google bombing”, but I think that it does more harm than good. Livejournal contains a lot of useful information, but is unsearchable!

b)That stupid javascript that “focuses” on Google’s search bar when the page loads. This makes me want to remove Google from my start page. It just sucks.

c) Google does not respect quotes and has weird ideas about commonly used short words and punctuation. For instance if you search for “to-do”, resulting pages won’t even have “to-do” in them. Even if you use advanced search “with the exact phrase”.

Hrrrmpf. Stupid pigeons. I think it’s all because of those PHDs. Come on, 50 PHDs working in a company? That can’t be good.

I wonder, if I write Sergey, will he answer?

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Rubor, Dolor, Tumor, Color!

Found new LiveJournal community, med-school.livejournal.com. Oh, man! What was I missing!

“I was poking around in my cadaver today just kind of checking out the pelvis”
“I did a history and physical on a patient today with one of those “weird” problems”
“They flush out all the blood in our cadavers”

And most importantly:


“Getting a radioactive seed implant for prostate cancer is pretty humiliating. You get to lie on your back, spread eagle, while somebody shoves a phallic-shaped ultrasound up your ass [skip] My patient farted about 50 times during the procedure”

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Meanwhile in the Dreamspace…

I’ve had a dream tonight. On my way to work I typed it up on my Blackberry.

I learn that my grandfather, for his work on the Manhattan project, was given a castle in England. I go there to take a look.

From the outside the castle looks like a bigger version of some of those cute Tudor style houses in Brooklyn. When I go inside, I meet a housekeeper, who tells me that she is very happy, because she was able to rent an apartment in a castle across the street.

Thinking about why she would want to rent an apartment in another castle, I proceed. Now I see why she wanted another apartment: even though it seemed to be made of brick on the outside, on the inside my grandfather’s castle is made of wooden boards. I’ve seen boards like that on the New Yankee Workshop: they are huge, very old and not produced anymore. Furniture makers pay a fortune for them.

I start going up to the second floor when I notice a weird thing: even though every floor is solid, there are no ceilings.

I reach the last floor (third) and enter a room. Surprisingly it has a ceiling. I meet my dad there. I tell him about my doubts about the structural integrity of the castle.

In order to demonstrate me how strong the castle is, he shakes the entire structure. It feels kind of how the Manhattan Bridge sways when huge trucks cross over it, but stronger. Meanwhile, I turn out to be standing over a void in the boards of the floor and almost fall down.

After this demonstration dad tells me that there are ropes connected to the walls of the castle that are tied to a ring in the middle of the house. That ring nexus is what reinforces the building.

Then I had a secondary dream about typing this up in my LiveJournal.