I had really hoped that things would fall in place and the mild flirtation we shared would eventually allow me to kiss you but instead you went back to your room and i paused, only for a second and saw myself in third person as a movie star in some passionate melodramatic nineteenforties black and white […]
“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—’Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.” — Steve Jobs
I like daylight savings time because it reminds me that my perception of time is a completely arbitrary abstraction based on the base 60 / 12 number system of a dead civilization which I have to translate into base 10 numerals in my head because my ancestors never thought to use their closed […]
It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it. She asked me how I can take the boredom of just sitting there writing instructions to a computer for hours. “Don’t you ever just want to scream?” If I was writing a novel, she’d get it. It’s romantic even… the image of the reclusive writer […]
Sometimes it’s good to just hack. Don’t worry about scalability or maintainability, don’t sweat coding standards, ignore DRY but mutter YAGNI as often as possible – just duct tape things together as you think of them. It’s like sketching, but instead of a pencil you have a text editor. You pop around the control flow […]
So it is — the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it […]
If you’re reading these words and you’re not an archiving bot sifting through the digital detritus of the early internet a thousand years from now, you were born as a squishy bag of meat. The fact that you are the particular sort of meatbag that can perceive light to such fine detail that you can […]
I love this talk by Sebastian Hermida called Zombies in my Workplace:
There was a story about the Zen master Suzuki Roshi. This was a situation where his students had been sitting and they were 3 or 4 hours into a very hard sitting period, a sesshin. The person who told the story said every bone in his body was hurting, his back, his ankles, his […]