Checksum Arcanius

Heed these writings, both on politics and society. Powered by a keen mind that processes a lot of information, the Well of Mimir seldom fails to provide exceptional reading.

Some of my recent favorites:

• Review: Joel’s Interview
• Why an Inheritance Tax is a Bad Idea
• Cracks in the facade

Inspired by Chris Vincent’s recent post “Practical self-improvement,” I have decided to make public some of the plans I have to improve myself to remain a healthy and well-rounded individual. This is in the well–founded hope that making such a thing public will ultimately help me live up to the commitment. I have learned about myself that I am much better with commitments to others than I am with commitments to myself; and while this is a commitment to myself, making it public in a sense makes it a commitment to all of you also. Well, here goes:

1. I will go to bed – without my laptop – by midnight, every night that I am at home
   My eventual goal is to wake up before it becomes light outside. However, I realize that this is a way off, and these resolutions are to remain practical. Besides, going to sleep after it becomes light outside must be dealt with first. By adding in the “at home” clause, I will still allow myself to, for example, hang out with friends well past midnight as the occasion may arise. However, there are no good reasons for me to stay up past midnight in my day-to-day life.
2. I will read at least one page from a book every day
   I find it really sad how little I read, especially since when I do read, I tend to enjoy it so much. I figure that reading at least one page is a reasonable goal that will get me started. Hopefully, and I think it likely, I’ll get going and read well more than just one page.
3. I will exercise daily
   Another activity that, like Chris, I put off entirely too much. Again, keeping things practical, the plan is simply a daily regimen of at least push-ups, sit-ups, and something aerobic.
4. I will limit Counter-Stike to one hour a day
   I enojoy Counter-Strike quite a bit, but I find that I’ll get into a playing rut where I’m not really having fun, but rather I’m playing out of habit. This not only wastes copious amount of time and hurts my chances at my first goal (above), but it also turns out to be not so much fun afterwards. Limiting my playing time should address both problems.
5. I will overcome my irrational fears by consciously forcing myself to face them
   There are plenty of legitimate things to be wary of, but irrational fears are the foundation of so much that wrong with humantiy, and as much as possible, I don’t want to be a part of this unfortunate reality. So I will overcome my irrational fears by putting myself into situations where I am forced to deal with them, learning at the emotional level that there is indeed nothing to fear.
   UPDATE: this one has been striken at the beginning of day #2 because it is out of line from the others. It is not specific enough to adequately report on, nor is it daily, as the others are. Furthermore, I actually already do this from time to time, I don’t need the help of this support structure.

I think these four items will be a good start to improving myself in very real, yet quite practical ways. I hope to add to these slowly as time goes on and I achieve some level of mastery over the weaknesses these goals are intended to overome.

I kicked my 8-movie SIFF run off on Wednesday with “Shake Hands with the Devil,” a documentary about the return of Canadian Leuitenant General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN forces in Rwanda in 1994, to the land that was ravaged by genocide as he watched helpless, undermanned, underfunded, and ignored by the whole world. It was an excellent compliment to the also excellent Hotel Rwanda, also recommended.

One of the great things about some software packages is the immense amount of user interface and even behavioral customization one can perform on them. While not as desireable as a program that works exactly how you want it to out of the box, customization is really the only way to go when a more complex software package becomes sophisticated enough to be used for a variety of purposes. It is the only way to possibly please everyone.

I have been very impressed with the customization available in some programs recently. Just now, getting Microsoft Outlook to display messages exactly how I wanted them took a little bit of searching, but all of the customizations I wanted were available, and I am quite happy with their layout now.

Another program that has consistently impressed me with customize-ability is gVim, the graphical version of Vim for Windows. I really need to make an entire write-up on this one because I have been working at getting its layout more to my liking for several months now, making slow but very real progress. Since I use gVim extensively both at home and at work, I probably have some reconcilliation to do to make my editing experience more seamless. All that gVim needs, in my opinion, to be the perfect editor, is slightly better integration with the Windows Paradigm (ie, better knowledge of things like the user’s home directory), and real support for tabbed editing. However, even without these features, gVim is still so much better for me than the next best I’ve tried (Programmer’s Notepad and Notepad++) that it remains my preferred editor for almost all situations. Think macros, and no other editor stands a chance to Vim. And I’m certain that I’ve only scratched the surface.

Finally, the mother of all customizable music applications has been my preferred computer music player for at least a year now – FooBar2000. Check it out.

Sennheiser PX 100

Props to Erik for the heads up.

A couple of weeks ago, I Ebayed an OEM GPS module for $25, including shipping. Then about a week ago, I picked up a Mighty Mouse II from Tri-M Systems. Today, I finally got around to hooking them up. Using a breadbaord, a 5-volt regulator, a 6-volt power supply, a wire wrapper, and a good supply of wirewrap and other wires, I finally hooked it all up today. The result: incoming NMEA data words at 4800 Baud!

I quickly found some free (as in beer) software to help me make sense out of it. VisualGPS showed up in Google, and is working well. See a screenshot below.

This is all in preperation for an entry to the Seattle Robotics Society‘s Robo-Magellan.

Here are some pictures of the setup:
The Setup
The Breadboard
The GPS receiver – look at the pretty wirewrapping!
The Mighty Mouse II Active Antenna (first location)
The MMII (second location)
The result in Visual GPS

(warning: if you have been hiding in a hole for a while, the following may contain spoilers)
The second (or is that first?) Star Wars Trilogy had the potential of being something truly amazing. An epic with love, war, death and betrayal – what could possibly go wrong?

Well… the dialogue for one. Read the rest of this entry »