Duncan, that you were taken from us so soon is both a travesty & lesson for everyone that knew you.

You embodied so many easily admired characteristics: You were endlessly inquisitive and enduringly dedicated to those things you were interested in.

The travesty is that we will never know what you could’ve accomplished had you lived to ripe old age. Our lives are darkened by the drinks never tried, the conversations never had, the schemes never considered. The world is a gloomier place without your smile, your music, & the ideas we’ll never know.

It is hard to find a lesson in all of this, but there is one: For myself, I have always admired the joie de vivre that you have displayed for as long as I have known you. If your friends & family can take anything from this, it is that we should squeeze every last drop from our lives: we should be endlessly inquisitive & love unconditionally.

Rest in Peace Duncan; you are well-loved & dearly missed.

3 questions from rms10:

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

I actually read a lot of good books in 2006. I think my favorite would have to be either The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy or My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk (I actually just finished Snow, and it was good, but it didn’t grab me the way My Name is Red did).

What is the biggest or most unexpected thing you’ve learned from teaching this semester?

Asking questions is really hard; Exam questions are pretty easy, because I have specific ideas of what they should be learning (gauging the number & difficulty of those questions is a different story!). But, asking questions in class that

1. elicit an answer from the class
2. cause them to actually realize something

Are very hard to ask. I’ve tried various forms of multiple choice questions (“so, given these things, what do you think the answer is”) and more basic questions (“in light of what we’re talking about, give me a property of X”), and so far it’s been hit or miss. n I’ve been reading books & blogs on presenting and education, though, and that’s all proving very helpful.

All-in-all, though, I really like teaching; and the students seem to be learning things, too!

Where would you most like to live?

I’d like to move west eventually; either to california (not LA) or washington state. I also wouldn’t mind somewhere on the east coast (like near boston, DC, etc). Someplace that has multiple seasons and isn’t the middle of the country basically.

If you'd like 3 questions, drop me comment and I promise I'll respond in less time than it took me to respond to rms10 (sorry!)

http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=928

I'm sure I've got friends who's job I know nothing about, so, if you're interested, let me know what you do (for instance, a large number of you are getting PhDs: what the hell is your thesis about?)

Damnit. Server was all happy and such, and what happens? I go to activate the packet filter, setup some rules, and lock myself out. Suck

After a bit of a hiatus, vja2.net is backup. It's still under a bit of construction, but all old entries have been restored, the new format is in place (mostly). As before, private entries will be at livejournal, and everything else will go here!!

read this.

Random weekend update coming soon!

let me know what you think of the link highlight: template fun!

Goodluck on exams and whatever else!

This public service announcement has been brought to you by the crackpots at Empty Head Productions

From Battleground God at TPM Online (The Philosophers' Magazine):

You have been awarded the TPM medal of distinction! This is our second highest award for outstanding service on the intellectual battleground.

A direct hit would have occurred had you answered in a way that implied a logical contradiction. The bitten bullets occurred because you responded in ways that required that you held views that most people would have found strange, incredible or unpalatable. However, because you bit only two bullets and avoided direct hits completely you still qualify for our second highest award. A good achievement!

Click here if you want to review the criteria by which hits and bullets are determined.

Analysis of your Bitten Bullets

Click here if you want to see a complete listing of the questions that you answered.

Bitten Bullet 1

You answered "True" to questions 7, 12 and 15.

These answers generated the following response:

You've just bitten a bullet! You are consistent in applying the principle that it is justifiable to base one's beliefs about the external world on a firm, inner conviction, regardless of the external evidence, or lack of it, for the truth or falsity this conviction. The problem is that it seems you have to accept that people might be justified in their belief that terrible things are right. You have agreed that the rapist is justified in believing that he carries out the will of God, and in an earlier answer you indicated that you think that God defines what is good and what is evil. Therefore, to be consistent, you must think the rapist is justified in believing that he acts morally when he acts on his inner conviction. Hence, you bite the bullet and justify the rapist.

Bitten Bullet 2

You answered "True" to Question 16.

This answer generated the following response:

You've just bitten a bullet! In saying that God has the freedom and power to do that which is logically impossible (like creating square circles), you are saying that any discussion of God and ultimate reality cannot be constrained by basic principles of rationality. This would seem to make rational discourse about God impossible. If rational discourse about God is impossible, there is nothing rational we can say about God and nothing rational we can say to support our belief or disbelief in God. To reject rational constraints on religious discourse in this fashion requires accepting that religious convictions, including your religious convictions, are beyond any debate or rational discussion. This is to bite a bullet.

Speechless. I used to serve mass with him. He is a good man.

I am tired. I've spent most of the day in the warehouse. We had to open the boxes on 70 detectors, install photocells, then pack them back up. We're done with 46 of them, and we're doing the other 24 on monday.

I went out to Panini's with Monk and Steve yesterday. That was cool. We had a couple of beers and just chatted (about waitresses, computers, beer, etc). That was good and relaxing. I like good and relaxing. I followed monk home after that, and got my ass kicked in Marvel vs. Capcom and chatted with melinda about various topics including her o-so-sexy radio. Come to think of it, swigging from the bottle of vodka probably didn't help my game playing skills.

Yeah. I'm moving in this weekend (in theory). Yay, says I.

My stomach's been bothered the last couple of days, which is a tad annoying. Of course, drinking yesterday didn't really help. And any drinking this weekend won't really help either. *shrug*

Take the What High School Stereotype Are You? quiz, by Angel.

So, Jim is evil. EVIL I say. He got me hooked on emulators. Like, I'm all rolling with the Sega Genesis, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. I'm getting my Megaman & Megaman 2 on! I'm ripping shit up in Castlevania. I administered brutal beatdowns in Streets of Rage and Spiderman (before dying - man, it's been a while. I'm rusty). Even better, I went and downloaded Shining Force and showed the Runefaust baddies what a real armchair general can do.

Right. Anyway. Emulators: Good. car: good. Life: not bad. It's looking less likely that I'll be able to go see Concrete Blonde play, as I won't even be able to pick up the moving van 'til 3, which doesn't leave me much time to move my furniture even assuming I get everything else moved.

In an e-mail I sent today:

But on the plus side, I'm going to go buy a bed today (a Queen size - it's only $30 more than the Queen!).

that's completely not what I meant to say.

:-)

I have my car. It is hot. I am about to post pictures. I am so unbelievably happy. The car rules. And then some!

Enjoy!! :-)

We bombed Canadians.

Recall Magician: Apprentice, "Among man's strange undertakings, war stood clearly forth as the strangest."

I'm all about posting random little tidbits all of a sudden. Like, I went to high school with a girl who was a grip for a movie called Rose's. I just think it's cool that I know someone in the IMDb.

I'm trying to compile Gnome on Cygwin. It's not easy. There's a network mapping tool called Nomad, but it requires the Gnome libraries to work, and that's the main thing I'm having trouble installing. Yay.

I grabbed a cup of coffee yesterday with Melinda. That was fun. Yay good company. And I got to talk to Christen and Dave! And Kiran! I spent a lot of time on the phone.

LJ's pretty cool, but I kinda want my own site back. I'm uber-interested in doing a nice clean php system with a db backend. That, and I've started doing a little research into importing PHP-Nuke data into a slashcode db.

Right.

Shoot me now. Twice, for good measure.

Hopefully, I'll have cwru.vja2.net up and running in a week or two. I think it'll be running on Slashcode (the same software slashdot uses. It will also have a dedicated server.

Chances are good that I'll also take the quoteWiki (a.k.a. qWiki) down as well. There'll still be a quotes page, but all entries will have to be submitted and then posted by moi. That kinda sucks, as "qWiki" was a nifty name (if I do say so myself).

Well. I've never had a website hacked before.

Assuredly, vja2.net will come back up, but nothing's certain about cwru.vja2.net.

Bastards.