Domain: warplife.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to warplife.com.
Comments · 23
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While I no longer Believe, I yet read of His Word
I was at one time a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer Inc. - remember when Apple was a computer company? If you had no clue where the bug in new system software builds, that bug came to me or one of the other members of my small team of Debug Meisters.
I earned one hundred fifty grand in 2008, then resigned in protest from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation because they flatly refused to test my hardware RAID driver in the same configuration as the customers use it.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people, so my far-wealthier colleagues often criticize me for buying hot pizza for homeless people.
A while back I was in a real bad part of Oldtown Portland, Oregon. An obviously mentally ill woman approached me in the darkness to ask for money. "Did you know there's a woman's shelter not far from here?"
"No."
"I will take you there." To the Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter (S.A.F.E.S.). It's real bad for women to be homeless, they are often sexually assaulted.
I returned with two slices of hot pizza for her.
I've been homeless for a couple of years now, however I have been contributing to society through articles on my website, both on the topic of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as technical stuff.
I spent these last two years working diligently to find a job. However even if you don't want to actually read my site, have a quick look at it:
At the top of every single page on the site, are prominent links to Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear.
It happens quite a lot, that I'll have an interview scheduled, then the hiring company just disappears, or else they claim they offered the position to some other candidate, but then they openly repost it on the job boards, or all the recruiters approach me about the job that just got filled.
That's actually a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission would be happy to sue upon my behalf, but in the end I decided not to pursue any lawsuits.
Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke.
Happily I just scored a real good remote contract, so I am working out of my Mom's guest room, debugging some GPL C++ Linux code. I'd tell you what that is exactly but I decided I should leave it up to my clients.
They are quite astute coders but they are not C++ coders.
I've been doing some research. I could have charged them quite a lot more per hour than what I am presently earning.
But no, I don't need that money. When I get my first check in about a week, I will rent a single room in a shared house, then I will be happy as a clam.
And I will go back to buying hot pizza for the homeless.
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While I no longer Believe, I yet read of His Word
I was at one time a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer Inc. - remember when Apple was a computer company? If you had no clue where the bug in new system software builds, that bug came to me or one of the other members of my small team of Debug Meisters.
I earned one hundred fifty grand in 2008, then resigned in protest from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation because they flatly refused to test my hardware RAID driver in the same configuration as the customers use it.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people, so my far-wealthier colleagues often criticize me for buying hot pizza for homeless people.
A while back I was in a real bad part of Oldtown Portland, Oregon. An obviously mentally ill woman approached me in the darkness to ask for money. "Did you know there's a woman's shelter not far from here?"
"No."
"I will take you there." To the Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter (S.A.F.E.S.). It's real bad for women to be homeless, they are often sexually assaulted.
I returned with two slices of hot pizza for her.
I've been homeless for a couple of years now, however I have been contributing to society through articles on my website, both on the topic of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as technical stuff.
I spent these last two years working diligently to find a job. However even if you don't want to actually read my site, have a quick look at it:
At the top of every single page on the site, are prominent links to Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear.
It happens quite a lot, that I'll have an interview scheduled, then the hiring company just disappears, or else they claim they offered the position to some other candidate, but then they openly repost it on the job boards, or all the recruiters approach me about the job that just got filled.
That's actually a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission would be happy to sue upon my behalf, but in the end I decided not to pursue any lawsuits.
Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke.
Happily I just scored a real good remote contract, so I am working out of my Mom's guest room, debugging some GPL C++ Linux code. I'd tell you what that is exactly but I decided I should leave it up to my clients.
They are quite astute coders but they are not C++ coders.
I've been doing some research. I could have charged them quite a lot more per hour than what I am presently earning.
But no, I don't need that money. When I get my first check in about a week, I will rent a single room in a shared house, then I will be happy as a clam.
And I will go back to buying hot pizza for the homeless.
-
While I no longer Believe, I yet read of His Word
I was at one time a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer Inc. - remember when Apple was a computer company? If you had no clue where the bug in new system software builds, that bug came to me or one of the other members of my small team of Debug Meisters.
I earned one hundred fifty grand in 2008, then resigned in protest from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation because they flatly refused to test my hardware RAID driver in the same configuration as the customers use it.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people, so my far-wealthier colleagues often criticize me for buying hot pizza for homeless people.
A while back I was in a real bad part of Oldtown Portland, Oregon. An obviously mentally ill woman approached me in the darkness to ask for money. "Did you know there's a woman's shelter not far from here?"
"No."
"I will take you there." To the Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter (S.A.F.E.S.). It's real bad for women to be homeless, they are often sexually assaulted.
I returned with two slices of hot pizza for her.
I've been homeless for a couple of years now, however I have been contributing to society through articles on my website, both on the topic of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as technical stuff.
I spent these last two years working diligently to find a job. However even if you don't want to actually read my site, have a quick look at it:
At the top of every single page on the site, are prominent links to Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear.
It happens quite a lot, that I'll have an interview scheduled, then the hiring company just disappears, or else they claim they offered the position to some other candidate, but then they openly repost it on the job boards, or all the recruiters approach me about the job that just got filled.
That's actually a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission would be happy to sue upon my behalf, but in the end I decided not to pursue any lawsuits.
Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke.
Happily I just scored a real good remote contract, so I am working out of my Mom's guest room, debugging some GPL C++ Linux code. I'd tell you what that is exactly but I decided I should leave it up to my clients.
They are quite astute coders but they are not C++ coders.
I've been doing some research. I could have charged them quite a lot more per hour than what I am presently earning.
But no, I don't need that money. When I get my first check in about a week, I will rent a single room in a shared house, then I will be happy as a clam.
And I will go back to buying hot pizza for the homeless.
-
While I no longer Believe, I yet read of His Word
I was at one time a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer Inc. - remember when Apple was a computer company? If you had no clue where the bug in new system software builds, that bug came to me or one of the other members of my small team of Debug Meisters.
I earned one hundred fifty grand in 2008, then resigned in protest from Applied Micro Circuits Corporation because they flatly refused to test my hardware RAID driver in the same configuration as the customers use it.
I owe a lot of money to a lot of people, so my far-wealthier colleagues often criticize me for buying hot pizza for homeless people.
A while back I was in a real bad part of Oldtown Portland, Oregon. An obviously mentally ill woman approached me in the darkness to ask for money. "Did you know there's a woman's shelter not far from here?"
"No."
"I will take you there." To the Salvation Army Female Emergency Shelter (S.A.F.E.S.). It's real bad for women to be homeless, they are often sexually assaulted.
I returned with two slices of hot pizza for her.
I've been homeless for a couple of years now, however I have been contributing to society through articles on my website, both on the topic of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as technical stuff.
I spent these last two years working diligently to find a job. However even if you don't want to actually read my site, have a quick look at it:
At the top of every single page on the site, are prominent links to Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear.
It happens quite a lot, that I'll have an interview scheduled, then the hiring company just disappears, or else they claim they offered the position to some other candidate, but then they openly repost it on the job boards, or all the recruiters approach me about the job that just got filled.
That's actually a gross violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The US Federal Equal Opportunity Commission would be happy to sue upon my behalf, but in the end I decided not to pursue any lawsuits.
Fuck 'Em If They Can't Take A Joke.
Happily I just scored a real good remote contract, so I am working out of my Mom's guest room, debugging some GPL C++ Linux code. I'd tell you what that is exactly but I decided I should leave it up to my clients.
They are quite astute coders but they are not C++ coders.
I've been doing some research. I could have charged them quite a lot more per hour than what I am presently earning.
But no, I don't need that money. When I get my first check in about a week, I will rent a single room in a shared house, then I will be happy as a clam.
And I will go back to buying hot pizza for the homeless.
-
UP FOR SOME CHESS? YOU TOOK WHITE.
Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract
The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".
When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.
I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.
Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.
It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.
She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.
I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.
Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.
Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.
YOUR.
MOVE.Sigh.
Kids these days...
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UP FOR SOME CHESS? YOU TOOK WHITE.
Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract
The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".
When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.
I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.
Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.
It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.
She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.
I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.
Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.
Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.
YOUR.
MOVE.Sigh.
Kids these days...
-
UP FOR SOME CHESS? YOU TOOK WHITE.
Actually I have a lucrative C++/Linux contract
The client just tonight said "We want you to own the code".
When I hesitantly asked for permission to do some things that upstream might find offensive, he told me to go to town.
I expect the reason I've been homeless is that I quite prominently link Living with Schizoaffective Disorder and My Deepest Fear quite prominently at the top of every page of my site - including my seven page resume.
Word seems to have also gotten around that I have very high ethical standards, and so regard my half-dozen or so protest resignation letters as among my very finest written works. One of them is online somewhere but I don't recall the link.
It is true that I am unlikely to figure out how many times I have been in mental hospitals. I really am that crazy at times. However I have only just once been in one for more than a few days at a time. I got three extra months for spending twenty solid minutes quite lucidly explaining to a Court Commissioner who was quite clearly out of her depth when attempting to determine whether the mentally ill should be held involuntarily, that she was a seething idiot.
She started shouting at me. Repeatedly. I mean she totally blew her stack. She then locked me up in Western State Hospital in Lakewood Washington. They wouldn't let me have my Macbook Pro there, so I continued the development of my iOS App by hand, on paper, with a pencil.
I'm old enough to know that there was a time that that was the only way you COULD write software, as keypunch machines and trained keypunch operators were such scarce and expensive resources.
Quite commonly social workers and case managers try to force me onto the disability check, or into government subsidized housing. Always I refuse; despite being mentally ill, I am in reality not in any way disabled.
Look man: half the reason I'm a coder, is that I can still write good coder while I am floridly psychotic! That is G-d's Gospel Truth. The NAZIs used to hold Panzer manuevers in the parking lot of my old office. I'd just shut the blinds, turn out the lights, tell myself I was hallucinating, then continue with my code.
YOUR.
MOVE.Sigh.
Kids these days...
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Your child is unlikely to be born a slave
If you murder someone, your male children are unlikely to die for your crime in a Vendetta.
Yes that's the original meaning of Vendetta. Renaissance Italian courts decreed them. Fuck up bad enough, and any male from the offended party's family, had the right to murder any male from three successive generations of the offending party's family - but only when that right was provided by a court of law!
If you have the wherewithal to post to Slashdot, then the life expectancy of your children is likely to be around seventy years. While there are parts of the world that have not made much progress in life expectancy, people in those parts of the world tend not to have computers or Internet.
I reiterate the points that some others have made: your children could be the ones to bring peace and prosperity.
I myself am deeply in debt, profoundly mentally ill, totally busted broke even if I weren't in debt, but I know a great deal, mostly learned through hard-won experience. So I work to educate others, for the most part mostly through my writing, all of which is available online for free, none of which earns me a penny.
-
Your child is unlikely to be born a slave
If you murder someone, your male children are unlikely to die for your crime in a Vendetta.
Yes that's the original meaning of Vendetta. Renaissance Italian courts decreed them. Fuck up bad enough, and any male from the offended party's family, had the right to murder any male from three successive generations of the offending party's family - but only when that right was provided by a court of law!
If you have the wherewithal to post to Slashdot, then the life expectancy of your children is likely to be around seventy years. While there are parts of the world that have not made much progress in life expectancy, people in those parts of the world tend not to have computers or Internet.
I reiterate the points that some others have made: your children could be the ones to bring peace and prosperity.
I myself am deeply in debt, profoundly mentally ill, totally busted broke even if I weren't in debt, but I know a great deal, mostly learned through hard-won experience. So I work to educate others, for the most part mostly through my writing, all of which is available online for free, none of which earns me a penny.
-
Your child is unlikely to be born a slave
If you murder someone, your male children are unlikely to die for your crime in a Vendetta.
Yes that's the original meaning of Vendetta. Renaissance Italian courts decreed them. Fuck up bad enough, and any male from the offended party's family, had the right to murder any male from three successive generations of the offending party's family - but only when that right was provided by a court of law!
If you have the wherewithal to post to Slashdot, then the life expectancy of your children is likely to be around seventy years. While there are parts of the world that have not made much progress in life expectancy, people in those parts of the world tend not to have computers or Internet.
I reiterate the points that some others have made: your children could be the ones to bring peace and prosperity.
I myself am deeply in debt, profoundly mentally ill, totally busted broke even if I weren't in debt, but I know a great deal, mostly learned through hard-won experience. So I work to educate others, for the most part mostly through my writing, all of which is available online for free, none of which earns me a penny.
-
That was the case with my father
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder.
My father's part-time job during high schools was performing mineral assays for the Sierra Nevada, California gold mining industry, so he was accepted to study chemistry at UC Berkeley with wild enthusiasm, right out of high school at the age of eighteen.
Unfortunately he realized just before the last day to withdraw without any grades being recorded, that he'd blown off his entire first term of school by partying with the UCB marching band. He played the sax in the marching band, and was always heavily into music. So he withdrew just before the deadline. When I was a boy, he quite sadly told me that his Berkeley transcripts just say he "attended". No grades, no credit, no fails, but he is recorded to have attended.
He returned home to Grass Valley, and took up the traditional trade of the men in his side of the family, that of carpentry.
When he was twenty-three or so, he joined the Navy as an enlisted man. The Navy sent him to study EE at the U of Idaho, in a program meant for enlisted men who were recognized to have leadership potential. He wasn't actually in the U of I's NROTC, but he studied along with the NROTC students.
When I was born in 1964, he had a BSEE and was a lieutenant in the Navy.
In 1970, a couple of his fellow officers were visiting our home. "Your father is very smart," one of them said to me. "You should ask him questions."
One of my happiest memories is of a contest he proposed, where he and I spent all day long attempting - but both of use failing! - to make working telephones out of random stuff we found lying around the house.
I was accepted to study Astronomy at Caltech in 1982. I was the third coauthor on some Astrophysical Journal articles during the Summer of 1983, as a result of my summer job with Jeremy R. Mould, who is now regarded as the world's most highly-cited Astronomer. I later changed my major to Physics.
I was PERSONALLY tutored in Quantum Mechanics by Richard Feynman.
I was forced to leave the Institute due to my mental illness, but transferred to University of California Santa Cruz, where I earned a BA in Physics. I received an Energy Department grant to write my undergraduate - UNDERGRADUATE now! - thesis at CERN, in Geneva. My advisor Clem Heusch was searching for non-conservation of Lepton number. That was very exciting work; had Clem found what he was looking for, he would have earned the Nobel Prize, and my name would have been on the paper.
I've been a coder now for twenty-six years. My resume is seven pages long.
Could I have done all that had I been born before my father joined the Navy? There's no way to really know but for sure I had many advantages over what I would have had available to me, had he fathered me much younger than he did.
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That was the case with my father
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder.
My father's part-time job during high schools was performing mineral assays for the Sierra Nevada, California gold mining industry, so he was accepted to study chemistry at UC Berkeley with wild enthusiasm, right out of high school at the age of eighteen.
Unfortunately he realized just before the last day to withdraw without any grades being recorded, that he'd blown off his entire first term of school by partying with the UCB marching band. He played the sax in the marching band, and was always heavily into music. So he withdrew just before the deadline. When I was a boy, he quite sadly told me that his Berkeley transcripts just say he "attended". No grades, no credit, no fails, but he is recorded to have attended.
He returned home to Grass Valley, and took up the traditional trade of the men in his side of the family, that of carpentry.
When he was twenty-three or so, he joined the Navy as an enlisted man. The Navy sent him to study EE at the U of Idaho, in a program meant for enlisted men who were recognized to have leadership potential. He wasn't actually in the U of I's NROTC, but he studied along with the NROTC students.
When I was born in 1964, he had a BSEE and was a lieutenant in the Navy.
In 1970, a couple of his fellow officers were visiting our home. "Your father is very smart," one of them said to me. "You should ask him questions."
One of my happiest memories is of a contest he proposed, where he and I spent all day long attempting - but both of use failing! - to make working telephones out of random stuff we found lying around the house.
I was accepted to study Astronomy at Caltech in 1982. I was the third coauthor on some Astrophysical Journal articles during the Summer of 1983, as a result of my summer job with Jeremy R. Mould, who is now regarded as the world's most highly-cited Astronomer. I later changed my major to Physics.
I was PERSONALLY tutored in Quantum Mechanics by Richard Feynman.
I was forced to leave the Institute due to my mental illness, but transferred to University of California Santa Cruz, where I earned a BA in Physics. I received an Energy Department grant to write my undergraduate - UNDERGRADUATE now! - thesis at CERN, in Geneva. My advisor Clem Heusch was searching for non-conservation of Lepton number. That was very exciting work; had Clem found what he was looking for, he would have earned the Nobel Prize, and my name would have been on the paper.
I've been a coder now for twenty-six years. My resume is seven pages long.
Could I have done all that had I been born before my father joined the Navy? There's no way to really know but for sure I had many advantages over what I would have had available to me, had he fathered me much younger than he did.
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Warp Life for iOS
Warp Life is a particularly fast implementation of the Conway's Game of Life Cellular Automaton.
However it is not in the App Store yet. I'm the only one who can play it at present because I wrote the source.
I hocked my iPad when I needed the money. Someone stole my iPhone 4 when I left it on the table at McDonald's while using the can. I've been out of work for a long time so now I don't have the $99.00 for the Apple Tax, nor to buy a new iDevice.
If you gave me like four hours of consulting work I could buy a used iPhone and renew my IOS ddeveloper program membership. Then I could get Warp Life into the App Store in short order.
If I had but one App in the App Store, then I wouldn't be out of work anymore. There is a huge demand for iOS coders, but no one wants to touch me because I don't have an App in the App Store yet.
I have already started the Android build but have put that on hold until the iOS version ships.
There are some competitors presently in the App Store. Golly may be faster but due to its more complex UI it only runs on iPad. Warp Life runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with a very simple, minimalist UI.
When it actually hits the App Store, the source code will be bundled with the App, and published under the Affero General Public License v3. I'll be providing a git repository, that after I set it up, will be here.
-
Warp Life for iOS
Warp Life is a particularly fast implementation of the Conway's Game of Life Cellular Automaton.
However it is not in the App Store yet. I'm the only one who can play it at present because I wrote the source.
I hocked my iPad when I needed the money. Someone stole my iPhone 4 when I left it on the table at McDonald's while using the can. I've been out of work for a long time so now I don't have the $99.00 for the Apple Tax, nor to buy a new iDevice.
If you gave me like four hours of consulting work I could buy a used iPhone and renew my IOS ddeveloper program membership. Then I could get Warp Life into the App Store in short order.
If I had but one App in the App Store, then I wouldn't be out of work anymore. There is a huge demand for iOS coders, but no one wants to touch me because I don't have an App in the App Store yet.
I have already started the Android build but have put that on hold until the iOS version ships.
There are some competitors presently in the App Store. Golly may be faster but due to its more complex UI it only runs on iPad. Warp Life runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with a very simple, minimalist UI.
When it actually hits the App Store, the source code will be bundled with the App, and published under the Affero General Public License v3. I'll be providing a git repository, that after I set it up, will be here.
-
Warp Life for iOS
Warp Life is a particularly fast implementation of the Conway's Game of Life Cellular Automaton.
However it is not in the App Store yet. I'm the only one who can play it at present because I wrote the source.
I hocked my iPad when I needed the money. Someone stole my iPhone 4 when I left it on the table at McDonald's while using the can. I've been out of work for a long time so now I don't have the $99.00 for the Apple Tax, nor to buy a new iDevice.
If you gave me like four hours of consulting work I could buy a used iPhone and renew my IOS ddeveloper program membership. Then I could get Warp Life into the App Store in short order.
If I had but one App in the App Store, then I wouldn't be out of work anymore. There is a huge demand for iOS coders, but no one wants to touch me because I don't have an App in the App Store yet.
I have already started the Android build but have put that on hold until the iOS version ships.
There are some competitors presently in the App Store. Golly may be faster but due to its more complex UI it only runs on iPad. Warp Life runs on iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, with a very simple, minimalist UI.
When it actually hits the App Store, the source code will be bundled with the App, and published under the Affero General Public License v3. I'll be providing a git repository, that after I set it up, will be here.
-
You had the wrong teacher. I could teach you.
I've actually been wanting to take a stab at teaching piano, so I could practice on you, even if remotely. The best teacher I ever had was Angela Bonilla of Vancouver, British Columbia. She is from Colombia, and has a master's in concert piano from the conservatory in versailles, france so she is no slouch. Most piano teachers have very set methods. For example one teacher I had was very fixated on how I should learn certain specific songs from certain specific lesson books. Those books are admittedly good books, but there are certain songs that I could just never learn how to play, which frustrated both of us. But Angela would observe what specific problems I had, then on the spot would come up with very simple exercises that, when I practiced them, would solve those specific problems. Each time I tried to learn a new song she would observe new problems, then develop new exercises. That is how I would teach you. It is very uncommon for teachers of any sort to do something like that. But yes, muscle memory is how one learns many things. I understand that it is actually straightforward to learn how to shred on a guitar, it just takes a lot of time and patience. My piano compositions. All creative commons and the sheet music to two of them. It would be very easy for you to play "Emergence". "Recursion" is easier than it looks.
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we're already there: genetic testing of In Vitro..
... fertilization. I think it was the NYT that discussed this a week or two ago. A woman who carried a gene for a cruel genetic disease wanted to have children, but not to pass on the disease. So she opted for In Vitro Fertilization, with the fertilized zygotes being genetically tested. She has had I think two or three children from zygotes that tested negative. If everyone who carries her disease gene does this, than a rare but terrible scourge could be eliminated from the earth. Her father, for example, is doomed to die young and is already suffering. However I myself have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. It is as yet unclear whether that is a unique disease or the, uh, "lucky" combination of Manic Depression and Schizophrenia. The cause of Schizophrenia is as yet unclear but is thought to be due to infectious disease of the brain. It may have other causes, as it is likely to be more than one disease, each of which causes the psychotic symptoms of delusions and hallucinations. Manic Depression is quite clearly genetic, due to studies in which twins were adopted out to different parents at birth. There is a strong correlation between whether one twin is Bipolar, and whether the other is. That can't be due to environmental factors, or how one is raised. Manic depression is arguably a horrible disease. I myself have attempted suicide in a serious way a number of times, the last time in 2010 when I wrapped my car around a concrete highway overpass post at a hundred miles per hour. But dammit I forgot to unbuckle my seatbelt. It was a sudden decision, the end it all, you see. However Manic Depressives are well-documented to be uncommonly creative. Besides coding, I have a BA in Physics, while I did not complete my doctorate I stymied my fellow students, even the faculty, with my insight into the nature of reality when was in grad school. I draw, paint, sculpt, compose for and play the piano, sing and play drums. I invent all manner of things. I could have lots of patents if I could be bothered to ever file for them. Kay Redfield Jamison is a noted authority on manic depression, and a Johns Hopkins University psychology professor. She speculates that Manic Depression has persisted through evolution despite its obvious disadvantages because "it brings new ideas into the social consciousness". Hollowell and Ratey propose a similar theory for why Attention Deficit Disorder has persisted through evolution as well. Their theory is that people with ADHD are able to connect otherwise unrelated ideas in a way that the brains of normal people would be incapable of, thereby synthesizing novel ideas. For example despite being bent on suicide the whole time I worked at Medior, I invented then implemented a novel lossless bitmapped graphics compression algorithm and format, that enabled the company to stuff more assets on its multimedia CD-ROMs. Now suppose you chose In Vitro Fertilization because you or your mate had spent your whole lives contemplating suicide. You have a choice of a normal zygote, or one that will quite obviously bear a child who will be Bipolar as an adult. Which one do you choose? Were manic depression eliminated from the species, what would our society be like a thousand years from now? Jamison's new ideas wouldn't be getting contributed to the social consciousness nearly as much anymore.
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This has been happening to me for yearsWhenever someone is seriously ill or has died, an announcement is sent to a distribution list that mistakenly includes me. Just now I was notified that someone who I had never heard of had suddenly died. My reply to the entire list:
Dear Friends, I am very sorry for your pain. I need to correct an unfortunate error with your email distribution list. My name is Michael D. Crawford, my address is mdcrawford@gmail.com. Your email distribution includes a Marsha Crawford, but also at mdcrawford@gmail.com. That's definitely not Marsha's address, it has been mine for many years. This means that Marsha cannot receive your announcements of concerns. I suggest you find some alternate way to contact her, to find out her proper address. Best Wishes, Michael D. Crawford mdcrawford@gmail.com http://www.warplife.com/mdc/
Rather more seriously is that I required so many years to get off a distribution list for a hospital in New Zealand, where a doctor worked who was also named Michael Crawford. Whenever a particularly ill patient required extra attention from the medical staff, an announcement was broadcast to this list, but Dr. Crawford never got the message.
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France is just getting even for CERN's Neutrinos
When I was at CERN over the Summer of 1993, they were searching for Neutrino oscillations by firing an intense beam of neutrinos through a long pile of photographic film, down the main street of St. Genis then through the Jura Mountains.
Oddly, none of the people of St. Genis seemed to notice nor object.
Michael David Crawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.
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When I was four, Dad said not to cross the street
So I didn't:
I lived on Mare Island Naval Shipyard at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968.
Well, actually I did cross the street, but just once.
Michael David Crawford, who can't be bothered to recover his password.
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Russkiy Yazik: "Samizdat"
That's why, back during the Communist era, all typewriters, mimeograph machines, photocopiers, and personal or office printers were registered with the K.G.B.
Funny, though, the Samizdat had a way of getting published, printed then distributed anyway.
Back in the day "Pamphleteering" was of quite some significance in bringing about what, at one time, was Democracy, Freedom of Speech and the like. Those rights are largely gone now, present in name only but not really in effect.
However, to the extent that we can continue to published openly online, for the most part on the Web, but also via eMail and other IP protocols, we now have a far more effective form of pamphleteering.
Get a Load of This Shit:
the man who "threatens explosions, guns" was yours truly, Michael David Crawford.
What the Portland taxpayer got out of my, uh, "threat", was six of Portland's Finest guarding the Portland Startup Weekend FROM ME for about thirty, maybe thirty-three hours, with everyone attending having to pass through a metal detector upon entering the premises.
Now, it's not like I don't know how Cell Tower Triangulation works.
But what *I* got out of it, was a rather fascinating twenty-minute cell chat with a delightful young female Portland Police Bureau Officer, who did her best to pretend she had not already read every last one of my "Tweets" - oh do I hate that word - in which I tore a new one into Seattle's Startup Weekend Corporation for duping perhaps one hundred innocent, naive young fraud victims into spilling all of their trade secrets, business plans, what should have been their domain names but no longer can be, as a result of better-funded competitors, for the most part in foreign lands, subscribing to their Twitter, FaceBook and quite likely YouTube feeds as well.
Here's what the Portland Police Bureau had to say to me just this evening, when I dropped by their customer service lobby, to ask for all their written and recorded audio records, for use as evidence in my Civil Defamation Complaint against Startup Weekend, Inc., Twitter - for deleting my account, thereby removing exculpatory evidence that would have rescued my reputation - and The Oregonian, for failing to ask for my take on the incident, as well as having failed, for example, to ask the Portland Police Bureau why they didn't even try to arrest me, but did nothing other than piss themselves laughing when they rang me up on my cell.
And I Blockquote:
"When you get off work - I know you're busy - visit http://www.oregonlive.com/ then put my full name, "Michael David Crawford into the search box, then press the button. There is only one article about me, "Startup Weekend entrepreneurial event on alert after man threatens explosions, guns", by a Cub Reporter named Molly Young."
"If you keep coming round here, you're going to have to share that ice cream with us."
I was quite hungry, you see, and being Summer and all, it's been a tad warm around here.
Those are the EXACT WORDS of a uniformed, on-duty Portland Police Bureau Officer, that I asked for directions to their Customer Service Lobby, so that I could request their police report, any other written records, the names and badge numbers of all of their officers that were involved - at least seven, maybe more - and a WHOLE BUNCH of audio recordings, not just of 9-1-1 calls, but my chat with that amused young lady cop, recordings of calls between each other, audio recordings of their patrol car conversations and the like.
There are a whole bunch of really good reasons that Law Enforcement takes at least audio recordings of everything they possibly can. If you have at least three independent recordings of a gunshot, or if you're lucky, maybe just
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You Must Not Know Much About Physics.
It's not like I don't understand cryptography, but my client Wiebetech got flamed by the "Pros" at the MacWorld Expo back in the day.
They were very excited that I'd implemented FireWire Encrypt hard drive AES encryption in ARM assembly code in the Oxford 911 storage bridge firmware. That enabled us to secure your external drives without the need of a driver, just a simple OS X GUI to enter your password, then transmit it over a proprietary FireWire protocol to the drive.
After confirming the password, the drive performed a bus reset, then appeared on the bus as an SBP-2/RBC storage device, as if unencrypted.
However, because I had a bit of a hard time getting that assembly code right - I called it "The Data Motel" until my encryptor and decryptor were BOTH fully debugged - James Wiebe appeared at the show, with my GUI transmitting the passphrase to the firmware in cleartext.
Now see if you can figure out why I'm calling you a damn fool.
As my father once said of his work at Mare Island Naval Shipyard:
"Every time we install a new computer, we have to wait for three months for someone to fly out from Washington, then another month while he spends a solid month before he is willing to "bless" it."
It was plainly apparent to me what he meant by "blessing" a computer at a Nuclear Submarine maintenance shipyard, but the proper term for "bless" was classified way, way about Top Secret, with the actual name of that classification being itself classified.
Perhaps you can take High School Physics at your local adult school, you knew where you'd go to study for your G.E.D. If not, I'm sure your local community college could fix you right up.
- Michael David Crawford, who can't be bothered to reset his password
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I used to do something like this at Apple
I used to do something just like that when I worked for Apple. Michael A. Crawford was some manner of really important MIS person. I worked there on two occasions, in 1989-90 as a QA engineer for MacTCP, and in 1995-96 as a "Debug Meister" for the Traditional OS Integration Team.
After a while I grew weary of taking calls from clueless Apple employees who did not think to look at our middle initials in the company directory, so I just started making up random nonsense that sounded plausible. After hanging up I would forget all about it.
No doubt this is why Apple laid off 4,000 people both times I was there.