when Milami got photorefractive keratectomy on Thursday, they let me into the operating room with my camera gear.
Milami went in for photorefractive keratectomy today and I got to watch the operation armed with my still camera.
the robocam used for targeting by the eye laser software also records the whole thing to DVD, here for your pleasure.
from a very early age I was bothered by religion, but not for reasons you might expect. let me take you back to middle school and one of my last video game addictions: Sim City 2000. I loved that game, but it exposed my intense dislike for inconsistencies. observe:
nice 12x4 blocks of residential. 12x4 was my building block size. the property was all close enough to the street so it wouldn't undergo traffic starvation, but the blocks were big enough to scale well into the 4x4-building-sized endgame, without too much land being sacrificed to streets.
in no time, these blocks would fill, and my little city would begin to bustle — BUT WHAT'S THIS?!
I took issue with churches because I wanted to maximize population. people don't live in churches, so churches are wasting precious residentially-zoned land!
churches were a type of building that never went abandoned, so the only way to promote new construction was to destroy it. but when I bulldozed the church, the land beneath it was dezoned! look!
why do they get such a privilege? if every time a building is constructed, is there a 1/250 chance it becomes a church? is the church going to stage a slow takeover of all the land in my city by this method? NOT ON MY WATCH! I bulldozed every church and rezoned the land.
as a result of this strange childhood I've always viewed churches as land that could be used better, but never will be. they just clog up the streets every Sunday.
but Cindy and I just moved to a new place, and within throwing distance of our place is this daycare which looks kinda funny. I understand that a religiously-inclined daycare would want to look like a church, but it strikes me as silly.
and then I saw their sign today on my way to work:
edited on saturday november 19th, 2011 at 17:55:
in the summer of 2011, the day care had a series of liquidation sales and closed. as far as I know the site sits abandoned now. maybe Sim City 2000 was optimistic. that's a sad thought.
love notes, reminders, grocery lists, and our type case. photo links to flickr.
Cindy's mom is really into Scrabble, so it didn't surprise me when we moved into our new place and a box produced these magnetic letters. what did surprise me was how useful they are to have around.
one difference between Mac OS X and Windows these days is that I'll upgrade Milami's macbook in a recliner with a glass of wine, confident that she'll be able to use the new environment just as easily as the previous version. she may not even notice that things have really changed.
I'd come up with a witty Windows analogue, but we don't have a machine that runs it anymore.
My straight marriage is under more threat from discriminatory anti-gay voters than from same-sex couples wanting to be similarly recognized. I got married in order to embark upon a commitment of mutuality and love, not join a private country club for straights only. I am astounded by the shallowness of a legal and moral definition of marriage which privileges the sex of its participants beyond all other criteria Tom Ryberg
this is why Cindy and I have postponed our marriage indefinitely. as much as we'd like to enjoy the tax and legal benefits, it is not fair to our friends. their relationships are just as loving and devoted as ours.
Vinay's funeral proceedings were at 12:30 on November 3rd at Spangler Mortuaries in Sunnyvale.
there wasn't even room to stand in the lobby during the service.
even in death, Vinay brought people together. after the proceedings friends were at Chez Fun into the early hours of the morning. memories were shared, new friendships were made.
if you want to send wishes to the family, mail can be sent to:
82 Chestnut Hill Drive
New Providence, NJ 07974-2711
updated November 4th, 2009 at 10:18
Randall Munroe answering "what does xkcd really stand for?":
I've been using that as a unique point in the space of 4-character strings to point to me, you know I've been using it as my name on every service since the 90s because I got tired of changing my name every time my interests changed.
it started out when I was 10 years old and AOL first popped up and I was on there as … I think I had first skywalker4 and then animorph7 and then I'd pick other names … and then I was eventually like, "I'm tired of having names that point to other things, that identify me with those things, I want a string that will just point uniquely to me that's not my name because you know that's kinda boring."Randall Munroe (at 44:30)
he later complains about the 6-character limit of GMail, which caused my friend ozloy to become the ozzloy we know and love today.
Randall's talk is actually pretty neat, I'd recommend finding an hour to watch it. it's funny to me how we both started consuming comics with all of Calvin & Hobbes and taught ourselves braille.
also: how much Google actually knows about you.
I get asked "what does numist mean" quite a lot, and my answer is very much the same: I was really annoyed with all of the interest-based, numerically-suffixed nicks on the internet and how impersonal they were (are), referring to existing brands in order to give the identity a meaning — a first impression before the first impression, usually: "I spend too much time indoors". I spent an entire night and day trying to come up with something, typing it out, seeing if it looked or sounded awkward or already had a meaning, until I came up with numist.
finally, something entirely unique and easily pronounceable, or so I thought. at the time it didn't occur to me that it had a close neighbours in the English language, and I intended it to be pronounced nümist but every so often someone who's never learned another romance language comes up with a dumb-sounding alternative. I later discovered it should have been capitalized as well (Milami made the same mistake), which would have utterly ruined numist for me since I really didn't like the harshly angular properties of the capital N in contrast to the curves of the rest of the nick.
I discovered these shortcomings years after I'd chosen it, making it a bit silly to change. a lot of people know me by this nick now, and it's not uncommon for it to be used as my name in meatspace by folks I originally met online.
just got a primary care doctor in the area, and we did the normal back and forth about family history and the like, but I can never take these things seriously.
her: "says here you have a fiancée, are you monogamous?"
me: "that's what we tell each other"
she gives me a pointed look
I open my arms and say, "well I'm keeping up my end of the bargain!"
of course, now I wonder what she thinks of Cindy…
