one small voice

one small voice: personal

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stpeter.im

This blog has moved...

I've decided to upgrade to WordPress and at the same time move this blog to a shiny new domain. You'll find me now at stpeter.im. Please update your links and feeds accordingly!

Posted on 2007-05-31 at 23:59. File under personal.

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The Wisdom of the Brick

A wonderful stability...

While my wife and I were moving a largish pile of bricks today, I was reminded of some words from Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn (pp. 120-121):

Brick is a superlative building material, the product of 8,000 years of experience in firing clay into modular units that can be mortared together and stacked by hand into unreinforced structures as high as sixteen stories. [insert reference to the Monadnock Building here] .... 'Bricks are heavenly,' says contractor Matisse Enzer, 'because they require relatively little technology to create, build with, and modify. Bricks allow a wonderful variety of patterns and degrees of softness-hardness, permanence-temporariness. Most of all, they are intuitively obvious.' Bricks, more than any other material, look like they were made to fit the human hand. With dimensions of 8 inches by 4 inches by 2-2/3 inches, one brick long equals two bricks wide or three bricks wide (including mortar joints), so a wide variety of bond or decorative patterns is possible....

There is a wonderful stability in long-lived technologies like bricks. Humans have been making and handling them for so long that they do indeed feel natural and intuitively obvious. (To me, books have that same kind of wonderful stability.)

Posted on 2007-05-27 at 20:33. File under personal.

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Got Libel?

The benefits of non-commercial blogging...

Here's another good reason to keep your blog free of advertising and tipjars: non-commercial websites may protect you from libel lawsuits. (IANAL, YMMV.)

Posted on 2007-05-13 at 22:09. File under personal.

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Ineke

Perfumes in the family...

My cousin Ineke has launched her own line of perfumes and it's been getting quite a bit of attention -- check it out at ineke.com.

Posted on 2007-05-13 at 20:07. File under personal.

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A Sculpture Walk

Public statues on the Upper West Side...

The last time I was in New York City, I stole a few hours to walk around Morningside Heights and Riverside Park (in the pouring rain!) in search of the many fine public statues I remember from my days at Columbia University. At some point I'll write up a detailed walking tour, but before I forget here are some of the pieces I enjoyed most, in rough walking order from north to south:

Carl Schurz by Karl Bitter (Morningside Avenue at 116th Street)
One of 8 original recastings by Auguste Rodin of The Thinker (appropriately enough, in front of Philosophy Hall)
Scholar's Lion by Greg Wyatt (near Havemeyer Hall)
The Great God Pan by George Grey Barnard (near Lewisohn Hall)
Alma Mater by D.C. French (on College Walk)
Alexander Hamilton by William Ordway Partridge (in front of Hamilton Hall)
Thomas Jefferson by William Ordway Partridge (in front of Journalism Hall)
Art and Science by Charles Keck (at the main entrance to the Columbia University campus, Broadway at 116th Street)
On the campus of Barnard College, an unnamed statue by Charles Beach celebrating the Barnard Greek Games
Lajos Kossuth (sculptor unknown, further research required) (Riverside at 113th Street)
Samuel Tilden by William Ordway Partridge (Riverside at 112th Street)
The Straus Memorial by Augustus Lukeman (West End Avenue at 106th Street)
Frank Sigel by Karl Bitter (Riverside at 106th Street)
The Firemen's Memorial by Attilio Piccirilli (Riverside at 100th Street)
Joan of Arc by Anna Hyatt Huntington (Riverside at 93rd Street)

Posted on 2007-05-13 at 14:07. File under personal.

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✈ San Jose Bound ✈

Going to VON...

I'm flying to San Jose in a few hours for VON, where I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled "My Mother Uses Skype -- Why Bother With Standards?"

It should be a lot of fun. :)

Posted on 2007-03-21 at 12:37. File under personal.

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✈ Orlando Bound ✈

VoiceCon 2007...

I'm flying to Orlando tomorrow for VoiceCon, where I will be participating in a panel discussion (scroll down) on the role of open source software in converged networks. And no I will not be visiting Disney World! ;-)

Posted on 2007-03-06 at 22:17. File under personal.

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Remembering Samantha

Other saints on the net...

It seems that I'm not the only family member publishing things on the web. My sister Yvette has written a remembrance of Samantha Smith as part of the celebration of 200 years of diplomatic relations between America and Russia.

Posted on 2007-03-05 at 20:37. File under personal.

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✈ Brussels Bound ✈

Flying across the pond...

Tomorrow will be a travel day for me as I fly from Denver to Brussels for FOSDEM. I should be online again from Brussels sometime on Friday. TTFN. :-)

Posted on 2007-02-21 at 20:19. File under personal.

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Self-Experimentation

The power of one...

Tyler Cowen extols the work of Seth Roberts on self-experimentation -- methodically studying the effect on one's own life of changes in diet, exercise, and other habits. As a result of his studies, Roberts does some unusual things, such as stand at least 8 hours a day (which he claims greatly improves his sleep). Although I like the idea of self-experimentation, I think Roberts is too quick to extrapolate from his own experience to principles that might apply to others. While I don't want to sleep poorly, either, I've found that the best way for me to sleep soundly is to stay up later (e.g., last night I went to sleep too early and was awake between 3 and 4 AM or so). Roberts claims that eating breakfast is highly overrated, but I find that for myself it is absolutely essential to optimal functioning both physically and mentally. Etc. So as far as I can see, the key to self-experimentation is to take your own experience seriously. Just because something works for someone else, doesn't mean it will work for you. That's methodological individualism in action!

Posted on 2007-02-18 at 21:43. File under personal.

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Picture This

More photos.

When you give as many conference talks as I do, eventually someone is going snap some photos of you. That happened to me twice at EuroOSCON 2006, the shooters being Edwin Mons and Piers Cawley -- check out their photos here and here (that last one is a bit freaky, eh?).

Posted on 2007-01-28 at 20:43. File under personal.

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4554

Oil-consumption tipping point?

There's much talk of a tipping point in this WSJ article (HT: Glenn Reynolds), which notes that in 2006 oil consumption dropped in the developed countries dropped for the first time in twenty years. It's funny how consumption responds to price, eh? Last year I put 4554 miles on my '95 Trooper, and I bet this year the number will be even lower. One swallow does not a summer make, but I for one wouldn't complain if oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela started to feel the pinch of reduced demand...

Posted on 2007-01-19 at 19:09. File under personal.

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Fifty Books

Conceptually culling my collection.

I used to own a lot of books. Then I started selling them off. Eventually I hope to get down to a short list of fifty books (or fewer!). Here's my start at the list, roughly grouped into categories...

Philosophy: I need my two-volume complete works of Aristotle, plus the Nicomachean Ethics in Greek and English (Terence Irwin's translation) in case I get around to rendering it into English. That's 4.

More Philosophy: I want to translate and compile a "best of Nietzsche" sometime. So I need my four-volume Nietzsche in German, plus various translations by Kaufmann and Hollingdale. +15 = 19.

Even More Philosophy: the Tao Te Ching, the works of Epicurus in English and Greek, "A Soviet Heretic" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, and "On Love" by Jose Ortega y Gasset. +5 = 24.

Reference: The two-volume, photo-reduced version of the Oxford English Dictionary, a more user-friendly English dictionary, The Synonym Finder, and dictionaries and grammars for Latin, ancient Greek, and German. +10 = 34.

History: "The Evolution of Civilizations" by Carroll Quigley, "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer, "The Anglosphere Challenge" by Jim Bennett. +3 = 37.

Fiction: "WE" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, "Anthem" by Ayn Rand, "Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo, "I Am David" by Anne Holm. +4 = 41.

Poetry: The complete poems of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, A.E. Housman, Sappho (Greek and English), Horace (Latin and English), Emily Dickinson, and Walter Kaufmann. +9 = 50.

Ta-da!

Posted on 2007-01-18 at 22:31. File under personal.

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Clear Again

Back to the zen inbox.

For the first time since September, my inbox is clear. Wow, what a good feeling.

Posted on 2007-01-18 at 12:57. File under personal.

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Noisy World

Turning down the volume.

Why is the world so full of noise? So many people yammering on the phone all day like they can't stand to be alone in their own silence and solitude for more than two minutes. Television sets blaring away at the airport and the car repair place and the dentist's office. Those incessant announcements about homeland security threat levels being raised to orange or puce or mauve or whatever it is now. The visual noise of advertisements and billboards and pop-up ads and junk mail and spam. The vitriolic ravings and ceaseless chatter of talk radio and politicians and pundits. It's all gliding over the surface of things, indicative of a fundamental fear of diving deep into understanding, introspection, and reflection. And I'm tired of it!

End rant.

Posted on 2007-01-17 at 21:49. File under personal.

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The New Year

Resolutions and reformation.

Here's a choice and timely quote from Mark Twain regarding New Year's resolutions:

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.

I don't think I've ever made a New Year's resolution, and I don't think I ever shall.

But speaking of the new year, dontcha think it's appropriate to lop off the millennium and call this one "007"? :-)

Posted on 2006-12-31 at 22:15. File under personal.

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Page 123

Random book quote.

Here's a fun idea (HT: David Aitken):

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal...along with these instructions.
Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

I'd prefer it to be "the last book you've read", but in this case they are one and the same because I've just finished re-reading (parts of) Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. Page 123 is an illustration so I proceed to page 124, where the fifth sentence reads as follows:

Every part of the religious ritual of Congregational New England was thus centered on the word of God -- the design of the meetinghouse; the enforcement of Mosaic law; the structure of the sermon; the pattern of Puritan prayer; the form of psalmody.

Posted on 2006-12-30 at 22:01. File under personal.

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Inboxed In

The email wars, part 697.

This evening I got my inbox down below 300 messages. Unfortunately I'm going to be offline for the next four days, and when I sync back up with my inbox it'll be quite full again. Sigh.

Posted on 2006-12-14 at 21:51. File under personal.

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Not Clear

Personal unproductivity.

About six months ago I instituted drastic measures regarding the flood of email I receive. For a while I was doing quite well. Unfortunately, in the last few weeks my inbox has ballooned up to 700 items. Ouch! Time to get back to basics. Expect lots of outgoing email from me next week. :-)

Posted on 2006-10-13 at 15:53. File under personal.

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Booking It

What I'm reading.

In my copious spare time I've been reading the following books of late:

This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin
Restoring the Lost Constitution by Randy Barnett
The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition by Michael Tomasello
Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman
Aristotle's Ethics in the fine translation by Terence Irwin
Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade

I doubt I'll have time to report on them here, but they're all pretty interesting so far.

Posted on 2006-10-02 at 22:11. File under personal.

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Booking It

What I'm reading.

I'm currently reading the following books:

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez
The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq
Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries by Paul Fregosi

The last two are pretty depressing, but I'll probably post about that 25 days from now.

Posted on 2006-08-17 at 15:43. File under personal.

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Dvorak

Typing efficiency experiment.

On and off over the years, I've considered a switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout, but I've never gotten around to it. However, chatting with Kevin Smith and Remko Tronçon earlier today has spurred me to perhaps give it a try over the next few weeks. Bloggage may be light since my typing skills will be so challenged. :-)

Posted on 2006-07-21 at 14:53. File under personal.

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Montreal Bound

Heading north next week.

I'll be in Montreal most of next week for IETF 66. In addition to catching up on what's happening with various standardization efforts, I'll be giving brief presentations before the SIMPLE WG (about draft-saintandre-xmpp-simple) and the ATOM WG (about draft-saintandre-atompub-notify). See you in Montreal!

Posted on 2006-07-07 at 21:03. File under personal.

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Raptor Rescue

Excitement around the homestead.

There's a 120-year-old cottonwood tree in my front yard, which this year is home to a family of Cooper's Hawks. Last night around 8:00, one of the nestlings either fell out of the nest or, I think, was forced out by the parent hawks. This morning the nestling was on our porch and seemingly unable to fly, so we called around and located some volunteers who could collect the young hawk and take it to the Birds of Prey Foundation, where we hope it is being well take care of. Thanks to volunteers Ken and Theresa from Northglenn, Colorado, and to the folks at the Birds of Prey Foundation, it seems that the raptor rescue was a success.

Posted on 2006-07-03 at 20:49. File under personal.

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Favicon

Getting visual.

Well I added a picture of me to my blog template the other day, and today I created a favicon. What is that little image in your browser's location bar? Why, the keys of stpeter, naturally! :-)

Posted on 2006-06-29 at 21:49. File under personal.

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University Park, Denver

Website updates.

Last night I met with new UPCC president Bill Winn, communications chair Rosemary Stoffel, and my partner in crime Henry Ammons about the website for Denver's University Park neighborhood (where I moved last September). We're using MediaWiki as the content engine so it's easy to update, though the software has its quirks (e.g., modifying the templates is a bit of a pain). But at least I figured out how to link to the RSS feed. Now if only Google would learn that www.upcc.us deserves to be the highest ranking page for searches on University Park Denver... :-)

Posted on 2006-06-21 at 10:29. File under personal.

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Test Over

No more blegging.

OK, the experiment is ended: I've removed the Google Ads from this blog. A few reasons:

I notice the ads don't even show up when I use Tor (and Tor rocks)
I earned only $3.76 in a little over a month
I could have earned more but I would have needed to make the ads more prominent (and I didn't want to do that)
I was never very comfortable with the idea in the first place

I hope you enjoy this public-domain, ad-free corner of the web.

Posted on 2006-05-25 at 09:29. File under personal.

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Lunching Alone

Missing Peter.

These days I eat lunch alone at my desk. For three or four years I had lunch just about every workday with Peter Millard. There is something special about breaking bread with a friend and talking about anything you please. We had some great, wide-ranging conversations over the years, which I sorely miss.

BTW, the Rocky Mountain News has published an obituary of Peter.

Posted on 2006-05-15 at 12:51. File under personal.

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Remembering Peter

More about Peter Millard.

Joe Hildebrand has posted some information about the memorial service for Peter Millard, which will take place on Wednesday, May 3, 2006 at 7:30 PM, at the Broomfield United Methodist Church in Broomfield, Colorado.

Peter's family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Peter's name to the following charities:

The RMCC Foundation (1683 Red Poppy Drive, Suite 100, Brighton, CO 80601 USA)
The Boulder Community Hospital Foundation (P.O. Box 9019, Boulder, CO 80301 USA)

As promised, I am still thinking about ways to help Peter's wife Christina and infant daughter Zoe more directly.

Posted on 2006-04-29 at 21:39. File under personal.

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A Test

Or, how I sold out.

OK, despite my trepidations, I'm going to pilot-test inclusion of Google Ads in the right column of my blog. Consider this a temporary experiment.

Posted on 2006-04-19 at 21:47. File under personal.

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Ten Years

My online life.

It seems I forgot to mention that my website recently experienced its tenth anniversary. Back in January of 1996, I started converting The Ism Book and some of my essays to HTML, and the first, ultra-basic version of my website went live in February or March of that year. Although I had been active on various email discussion lists since 1993 (yes, I'm a relative latecomer to the Internet), I was still a clueless newbie when it came to things like HTML (which I probably edited in MS Word!) and FTP (which I recall confused me to no end at first). That sure seems like a long time ago now, but we've all got to start somewhere...

Posted on 2006-04-19 at 14:03. File under personal.

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Making Money

Blogging for food.

Stowe Boyd says that "the top 20,000 blogs or so (today) can make serious bank, enough to be, as Fleishman puts it, a "significant minority" of the author's income." Technorati says that my blog is ranked around 30,572. I suppose that if I worked at it -- blogged every day, added comments, used a real blogging tool instead of my homegrown system, etc. -- I could crack the top 20,000 quite easily. Then I could replace one of the columns in my layout with Google Ads and I could make some money off these scribblings. But do I want to? I'm not sure...

Posted on 2006-04-19 at 09:03. File under personal.

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Off the Wagon

Personal productivity redux.

I admit it: I've lapsed. In particular, my email inbox is no longer clear. Too much of travelling and catching up, not enough of following my personal productivity regimen. It's time to get back on track...

Posted on 2006-04-17 at 11:47. File under personal.

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Nashville Bound

Yet another conference.

I'm heading to Nashville today to give a talk tomorrow at the VoIPossibilities conference. Unfortunately I don't think I'll have time to check out any hot bluegrass. Maybe next time...

Posted on 2006-04-13 at 11:31. File under personal.

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Paying Respects

Honoring Chris Tame.

I spent today attending the funeral of Chris Tame. I never met Chris in person -- we corresponded only by email over the years. He re-published several of my essays at the Libertarian Alliance and encouraged me to write several new ones especially for LA, which I did in 2004 (Ayn Rand and American Culture and Ayn Rand and the Ascent of Man). I had always wanted to meet Chris if I ever got to London. This week I got to London but Chris was gone. May he rest in peace.

Posted on 2006-04-01 at 15:13. File under personal.

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London

Groggy but aware.

I've arrived in London. Body time says it's 06:53 AM, local time says it's 14:53 PM. I think I'll take a shower and find a meal -- I suppose that would be lunch...

Posted on 2006-03-28 at 06:53. File under personal.

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Bumper Stickers

As seen on the road...

Paul Hoffman posted the text of an amusing bumper sticker he spotted, so I figured I'd recount a few of my favorites:

Congress Happens.
Visualize Using Your Turn Signal.
Gravity: It's Not Just A Good Idea, It's The Law.
My Golden Retriever Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student.
Clinton: The President Who Did It Between The Bushes.

Posted on 2006-03-22 at 14:49. File under personal.

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Still Clear

More on personal productivity.

As mentioned, I've been working on my personal productivity habits. I'm happy to report that after 7 days my inbox is still empty! Also I've updated the format of my .plan to better reflect project priorities and the specific tasks I need to complete on each project (plus it's sortable now, too). So far I've studiously avoided the need to perform time and motion studies in my efforts to become a more productive individual... ;-)

OK, back to work!

Posted on 2006-03-21 at 16:05. File under personal.

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London Bound

A trip across the pond.

Next week I'll be participating in a panel discussion on Reinventing Enterprise Communications at the 21st Century Communications World Forum. I'll be in London for about five days, so if you want to get together to talk about Jabber or the Anglosphere or Ayn Rand or poetry or music or anything else (preferably over a pint), do let me know. My daytime schedule is pretty much full of meetings with various companies who are using Jabber, but my evenings are mostly free so far.

Posted on 2006-03-21 at 14:23. File under personal.

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Clear

The zen of an empty inbox.

For the last day and a half I've been reading through email. I was getting dangerously close to 1000 messages in my inbox again and feeling overloaded. Now my inbox is utterly empty -- that's right, zero messages. Following various suggestions about personal productivity found on the Net, my new regimen is this:

Dispatch all inbox emails immediately by deleting, replying (if brief), creating calendar events, or adding an item to my todo list.
If an email generates a calendar event or a todo list item, move it to a dedicated email folder for the relevant project (don't leave it in the inbox!).

Next step: prioritizing my todo list items and getting to work. :-)

Posted on 2006-03-14 at 10:57. File under personal.

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Forming a Habit

One approach to improving personal productivity.

Since my post earlier today, I've been thinking about ways to improve my personal productivity. Here's one approach I've come up with:

Devote the morning hours to my highest priority tasks for the day.
Don't check email, read news, or log into IM until after lunch.
At the end of each day, formulate a short list of priority tasks for the next morning.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

I may try this next week.

Posted on 2006-03-10 at 21:57. File under personal.

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Personal Productivity

Doing more in less time.

Productivity matters, both for nations and for individuals (national productivity is just the sum of the productivity of the individuals living there). Lately I've been feeling a pressing need to become more personally productive. Partly it's that I'm overwhelmed with work. There is so much to do, my email inbox is growing daily, I'm in IM conversations all day long, more and more people want to do stuff with Jabber and it's hard to service them all, and there are many XMPP extensions that I need to solidify because, well, I'm the guy who writes the docs (yes, "I write the specs that make the whole world sing"). So I've started to look into productivity tools and, especially, changes to my work habits. Unfortunately I know that behavior changes will require me to keep careful track of my time and all that, but I suppose there's no avoiding it. Sigh.

Posted on 2006-03-10 at 13:45. File under personal.

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Word Cloud

Blog visualization.

Here's the word cloud for one small voice:

Get yours here.

Posted on 2006-02-28 at 21:09. File under personal.

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Retraction

Blog entry deleted.

Last night I posted a cartoon (no, not those cartoons!) at my blog but after further reflection I realized that I don't agree with one of the premises behind it: the stereotyping of people from different cultures. I am deeply opposed to any attempt at stifling free speech -- whether that might happen in the Islamic world or in the West (e.g., the recent jailing of a Holocaust-denier in Austria). But not all Muslims or Westerners or whatever are equivalent. More than a defender of free speech or Western civilization, I am an individualist. I realize that individualism is a core value of the West, but it can flourish in non-Western societies as well. Sorry to have posted something with which I don't agree.

Posted on 2006-02-22 at 11:59. File under personal.

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Whelmed

Man overboard!

The OED says this about "whelm" as a transitive verb:

To cover completely with water or other fluid so as to ruin or destroy; to submerge, drown; occasionally, to sink (a boat).

To bury under a load of earth, snow, or the like.

To engulf or bear down like a flood, storm, avalanche, etc.; hence to involve in destruction or ruin.

I think I am now officially whelmed by work.

Posted on 2006-02-21 at 21:13. File under personal.

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UPCC II

More local info.

Since today is a company holiday at my employer, I finally found time to beef up the website of the University Park Community Council, which I started working on about three weeks ago. The site now includes lots more information about development and transportation, as well as contact information for neighborhood committee chairs, elected representatives, and the like.

Posted on 2006-02-20 at 15:47. File under personal.

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Free

The voice of the individual.

As usual, Stowe nails it:

Bloggers are individuals, in general. And as such, what we write on the web is personal, biased, unfiltered, unregulated, and, yes, free. Free as in free speech. Free as in uncensored. Free as in personal, idiosyncratic, and even unpopular.

And:

Bloggers are playing an important role in this new world, where the traditional gatekeepers have less sway. But we aren't the old gatekeepers, and looking at me and /Message like I am the New York Times or ABC News is laughable. There is no organization, no corporate policies, nothing. Just me. Stowe. The person.

I'm not into blogospheric navel-gazing, meta-blogging, or whatever you want to call it. But, dammit, blogging matters because it releases the free voice of the individual. It goes all the way back to the first flowing of individualism among the ancient Greeks, as I talked about in my podcast last night. No disclaimers, no restrictions, no permits, no licenses, no regulations, no censorship, no burkas for the thinking mind. Just the freedom to voice my own thoughts and take responsibility for the consequences.

Repeat after me: I am an individual!

Posted on 2006-02-09 at 21:41. File under personal.

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Split

Category cleanup at one small voice.

I just split the old "art" category here at one small voice into two categories, one for literature and one for music.

Posted on 2006-02-03 at 20:47. File under personal.

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UPCC

Getting local.

Last night I gave a short presentation at the meeting of my local neighborhood association, the University Park Community Council. Fellow UP resident Henry Ammons and I have been working on a new website for our neighborhood, which we've unveiled at <http://www.upcc.us/>. We still have a lot of content to add, but we'll work to get much of it online in the next few weeks. Enjoy!

Posted on 2006-02-02 at 14:47. File under personal.

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You Have to Be There

The presentation as performance art.

For my presentation at ETel yesterday, I adopted the rapid-fire presentation style pioneered by Larry Lessig. Ever since I saw Dick Hardt give his Identity 2.0 talk at OSCON 2005, I've been itching to try it out. It requires more preparation and practice to get the timing right, and the slides don't make much sense to someone who wasn't there, but rapid-fire presenting really grabs the audience (that's how I felt when Dick gave his presentation, and people who experienced my presentation seem to agree). The rapid-fire style also deeply engages the presenter, because you're not just speaking, you're performing. I found the experience similar to playing music, especially the kind of music I've played as a singer-songwriter -- you're all alone on stage with nowhere to hide. This is going to be my preferred presentation style from now on, at least before large groups (for small groups, up to 25 or 30 people, I prefer a more conversational approach with lots of ad-hoc scribbling on a whiteboard).

Posted on 2006-01-27 at 19:31. File under personal.

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Key Change

Yet another OpenPGP key.

Inspired by Phil Zimmerman's talk at ETel, I just generated a new PGP key. BTW, Phil's zFone technology for securing RTP might be of interest as we work on Jingle.

Posted on 2006-01-27 at 11:25. File under personal.

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Atomic

Feed fixes.

It seems that my Atom feeds have been causing problems because my XSLTs were rewriting ID tags (thanks to Joe LaPenna for the bug report!). I think I have that fixed now, but if not, feel free to let me know.

Posted on 2006-01-25 at 09:19. File under personal.

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APFLOE

Some website updates.

I just spent a few hours updating my essays on Ayn Rand -- mostly cosmetic changes and consistency checks (e.g., to make sure they are all properly labelled as in the public domain). One of these days I'll print them all out and edit them a bit, though I might wait until I finish my essay on Rand and Aristotle...

Update: I've also removed all instances of "obviously", "certainly", "of course", and other such lazy phrases, as well as all instances of "ought" and "should" (consistent with my essay Letting Go of Ought).

Update #2: I've also removed all instances of "very", "really", "just", "actually", and other such nothing words.

Posted on 2006-01-13 at 22:01. File under personal.

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Comments?

Another frequently provided answer to a frequently asked question.

No, this blog does not have a comments feature. There are several reasons:

I prefer to receive comments over a spam-free communications technology (a.k.a. Jabber).
I already have enough dealings with one spam-infested medium (a.k.a. email) and I don't want to deal with another (a.k.a. blog spam).
Everything at saint-andre.com is in the public domain. I have no idea if you want your comments to be in the public domain too, so to avoid any possible legal hassles I ask that you post your words somewhere else.

In short, it's not my job to provide an outlet for things you might want to say. If you want to say something in public, become a full citizen of the Internet and run your own damn website.

Yes, this is a harsh policy, but I'm not about to change it. Sorry. :-)

Posted on 2006-01-13 at 10:33. File under personal.

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Academic

Why I generally don't like academics.

After attending an academic gathering recently, I got to thinking about why I generally don't like university professors. It's not just that most of them have an ego the size of Canada, think they're morally and intellectually superior to us mere professionals, and have political views somewhere to the left of Fidel Castro. No, I realized it's because they are so insulated from the market yet so disdainful of the very market economy that makes it possible for them to have their cozy little existence safely ensconced within the groves of academe. Heck, even the free-market professors I respect tend to teach at large, government-run institutions of higher learning -- it's not as if they are educational entrepreneurs out there exposing themselves to market forces by starting small, innovative, or for-profit schools.

Posted on 2005-12-08 at 18:45. File under personal.

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RIMU Too

Server move in progress.

I've gone in halfsies with DizzyD on his new hosting arrangement with RimuHosting. Other than a blog snafu that I just fixed (my blog was pointing to his!), the move is going well so far. If you see anything awry, feel free to contact me.

Posted on 2005-11-30 at 21:37. File under personal.

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Future Readings

Some books I need to read.

One of the problems with reading large tomes of history and social science is that every book you pick up leads you to several more. Herewith a rather large number of books that have recently bubbled up onto my reading list:

C. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansionism
D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
E.L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economics, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia
W. McNeill, The Rise of the West
O. Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture
P. Rahe, Republics, Ancient and Modern
B. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization
R. Dales, The Intellectual Life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages
F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century: The Perspective of the World
S. Eisenstadt, Japanese Civilization: A Comparative View
G. Woodcock, The Marvellous Century: Archaic Man and the Awakening of Reason
D. Howell, The Edge of Now: New Questions for Democracy in the Network Age
T. Sowell, Conquests and Cultures: An International History
T. Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View
T. Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View
P. Johnson, The Offshore Islanders
N. Cantor, Imagining the Law: Common Law and the Foundations of the American Legal System
A. Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871
M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
D. Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents
Harrison and Huntington, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress
J. Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy
G. Das, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age
N. van Hear, New Diasporas: The Mass Exodus, Dispersal, and Regrouping of Communities
G. Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence
W. Mean, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
J. Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
J. Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life

Posted on 2005-11-27 at 20:37. File under personal.

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Scrape II

The folks next door.

Following up on my previous post about the construction project next door, a quick call to the city of Denver's building permit department this morning revealed that the builder is Sonoran Custom Homes. The folks there seemed quite friendly and at my request the superindendent stopped by our house today to chat, so we now have open communication lines, which is a Good Thing [tm]. Still, I'm surprised that it's not standard operating procedure for builders to stop by the homes of near neighbors before they start tearing down the house next door. Not only is that the neighborly thing to do, but you figure it would be a small price to pay for improved relations (read: fewer complaints lodged with the city inspectors).

Posted on 2005-11-16 at 16:19. File under personal.

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Scrape

Home improvement, Denver style.

There are two main forms of residential development in Denver: pops (remove the roof and "pop the top" by adding a second floor) and scrapes (tear down the old house and put up a new one). Sometimes these things can happen quite quickly. For example, I flew out of town on Sunday night to speak at the IP4IT conference in Las Vegas, and when I returned 48 hours later the house next door had been torn down. I don't think this scrape-in-progress is going to be a lot of fun for those of us who live next door. Step one: find out who the developer is...

Posted on 2005-11-15 at 21:11. File under personal.

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Clearing the Decks

Inbox overload.

A few weeks ago I got up to 2500 messages in my email inbox, at which point I vowed that something had to be done. So I implemented a simple rule: end each day with fewer emails than I started with. I've generally stuck to this rule, as a result of which I now have 23 messages in my inbox. It feels like a great weight has been lifted.

Posted on 2005-11-07 at 09:01. File under personal.

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All Moved

Settling in, catching up.

My scheduled quiescence is over and we're getting settled into our new house in the University Park neighborhood of Denver (plus I'm getting caught up on all the hundreds of emails I received while offline). Expect a return to blogging normalcy here soon...

Posted on 2005-09-28 at 10:03. File under personal.

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Scheduled Queiscence

Going offline for a spell.

After tomorrow's Jabber Council meeting, I'll be offline for about 10 days while Elisa and I complete our previously-mentioned move to the University Park neighborhood of Denver. Blogging forecast: light to nonexistent. :-)

Posted on 2005-09-13 at 12:53. File under personal.

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Blogiversary

Four years and counting.

It seems that today is my blogiversary, since the first post to this blog occurred on 2001-09-13 (right after the 9/11 atrocities). I don't know that it's worth celebrating, since the result has been been four years of ceaseless yammering at my little soapbox here (can you say blogorrhea?). We'll let history be the judge, I suppose. :-)

Posted on 2005-09-13 at 11:37. File under personal.

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Moving UP

Changing places.

Elisa and I will soon be moving to UP -- no, not to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, but to Denver's University Park neighborhood. Expect me to disappear for a week or so later this month as we move house about 2 miles south from our current location.

Posted on 2005-09-01 at 08:59. File under personal.

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Remembrance

August 30, 1999.

Six years ago today, my father died. I still remember.

Posted on 2005-08-30 at 10:17. File under personal.

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A Modern Trilogy

What I'm reading.

Several years ago I read The Blank Slate, last weekend I read The Language Instinct, now I'm reading How the Mind Works -- three blockbuster books by Steven Pinker. I'll try to report on them more fully soon.

Posted on 2005-08-12 at 20:21. File under personal.

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Down East

A quick visit to Maine.

I was up in Freeport, Maine over the weekend ever so briefly for my sister's wedding. A good time was had by all, though I can do without 100% humidity (Denver has me spoiled in the weather department). I also noticed that Routes 1 and 60 near Logan Airport have more donut shops per capita than any other location on the planet. At one intersection I saw two Dunkin Donuts stores across the street from each other. Weird.

Posted on 2005-07-19 at 13:19. File under personal.

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Pubs

Some essays on the way.

In the last few days I've submitted the following essays to their respective editors:

"Streaming XML with Jabber/XMPP" to Steve Woods for an upcoming issue of IEEE Internet Computing.
"Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" to Ed Younkins for Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion (forthcoming from Ashgate Press).
"The Conceptual Nature of Art" to Chris Sciabarra for a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.
"Nietzsche, Rand, and the Ethics of the Great Task" also to Chris Sciabarra for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

The last three will be part of my essays on Ayn Rand; only two more such essays to finish and I'll be done with that project.

Posted on 2005-07-06 at 20:17. File under personal.

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Swimmingly

A Friday evening ritual.

I've started going for a swim on the way home from work on Friday evenings whenever possible. The Denver Department of Parks and Recreation maintains a number of swimming pools, one of which is located downtown not far from the offices of Jabber Inc. Not many folks seem to use the pool around 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, but I've found it's a great way to unwind at the end of the week.

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 21:47. File under personal.

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13 Books

Intellectual influences.

Two weeks ago, Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek listed the twelve books that have most influenced his thinking in economics. In fact he treated himself to a baker's dozen by adding an extra book, so since I love the number 13 I figured I would follow his lead by listing (in roughly chronological order) the 13 books that have had the greatest influence on my mental life:

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Yes, it usually begins with Ayn Rand, or at least it did for me. I read this book nine times as a teenager but have not read it in twenty years (I tried to pick it up a few times but got turned off). One of these days I'll re-read it (as I have done in the last few years with Rand's other novels), but even though I disagree with much of her philosophy at this point, I know that Rand's ideas continue to influence me in many ways.
Complete Works by Aristotle. I basically majored in Aristotle back in college, which has quite influenced my style of thinking about problems. I'm currently (if slowly) re-reading all of Aristotle, which will enable me to determine how much influence his thought still holds for me.
The Epicurus Reader by Epicurus. From Aristotle I moved on to Epicurus. I appreciate the less scholastic approach of Epicurus to ethics and life in general, and his enlightened hedonism still holds quite an appeal for me. But I know that I'm too much of a modern American workaholic to follow his core ideas of pursuing mental calmness (ataraxia) and living in obscurity (lathe biosas).
Die Froehliche Wissenschaft by Friedrich Nietzsche. After reading Rand, Aristotle, and Epicurus I absorbed a lot of Nietzsche, and a year or two ago I re-read his complete writings in English. To me, Die Froehliche Wissenschaft (a title often translated into English as "The Gay Science", through I prefer the Provencal subtitle of "la gaya scienza") captures Nietzsche at his most positive and thought-provoking.
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Well, one needs to relax after all that serious philosophizing. I still feel that the gnomic expressions of Lao Tzu provide an attractive antidote to the categorical thinking characteristic of Western philosophy. That doesn't mean I'm a spontaneous free spirit, but I try to cultivate that side of my personality despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I am essentially a categorizing, logical person.
A Soviet Heretic by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Zamyatin is one of my big favorites -- a true individualist who provides deep insights into culture, society, and human experience.
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. About as close I've gotten to Christianity since I became a non-believer at the age of nine. But I find Gnostic thought to be quite appealing in many ways.
Complete Poems by Walt Whitman. True Americanism. A wonderful corrective to elitist thinkers like Rand and Nietzsche, with quite a whiff of Gnostic ideals mixed in, suitably democratized for the American experience.
The Evolution of Civilizations by Carroll Quigley. I think this is one of the most important books published in the twentieth century. The best analysis I have read of the origin and meaning of human civilizations.
How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand. The power of vernacular, low-road, truly organic architecture -- and, by extension, vernacular, low-road, truly organic thinking.
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer. The story of the transmission of America's founding cultures from the British Isles. This book gave me a deep appreciation for culture as opposed to ideology or philosophy.
Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss. Although this is "just" a textbook, it provides the best overview yet written of the ongoing application of evolutionary insights to human psychology.
The Structure of Liberty by Randy Barnett. The possibility of anarchism. I don't know if I'm really an anarchist, but I don't much believe in government anymore (where I use "believe" in the same sense here that I use when I call myself a religious non-believer), and this book more than any other led me in that direction.

Note that I've read many of these books only in the last few years, so as I read more I'll likely update my list of 13 most influential books. Or at least I hope so: better to keep growing intellectually, especially in these interesting times!

Posted on 2005-05-24 at 21:37. File under personal.

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They Call Me Saint Peter

How I got my nick.

Several people have asked me recently how I got the nickname "stpeter", so I figured I'd record the story here for all time.

My nick has nothing to do with Simon Peter, the "rock" on whom Jesus said he would build his church (and the first Pope), nor is it meant in any kind of anti-Catholic or anti-Christian sense (although I am post-Catholic and a quasi-Gnostic non-believer, I'm not a militant atheist or crusading anti-Christian by any means). No, its origins are a bit more prosaic. When I worked at IBM's Watson Research Center in my last year of high school and first year of college, the head of the materials science lab in which I worked was Jerry Woodall. Because there was already another guy named Peter working in the same lab, Jerry took to calling me "saint peter" -- a fairly natural combination of "Saint-Andre" (my last name) and "Peter" (my first name). A few years later I wrote a somewhat racy blues song using that idea, entitled Gatekeeper Blues (one of these days I'll record it, but it's something of a cross between "Steamroller" by James Taylor and "Doctor Professor Longhair" by New Orleans piano guru Professor Longhair). When I first got involved with the Jabber community back in late 1999, we held daily discussions using IRC (no groupchat back then!) and of course the first thing you have to do when firing up an IRC client is to choose a nick, so I fatefully typed in "stpeter". Little did I know that years later most people I work with would call me stpeter (or, sometimes, psa). Certainly the nick was never intended to confer any special status on me (as in "the patron saint of Jabber") or make me out to be some kind of pope-like figure in the Jabber community, it was a just a fun thing that Jerry came up with so that he could differentiate me from that other Peter in the lab.

Now you know!

Posted on 2005-04-27 at 21:12. File under personal.

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Quick Takes

A mish-mash of links.

Usually I prefer to comment on things I read, but sometimes I use my blog merely to note the existence of interesting sites and stories, so here's a list of some things I've glanced at and shall return to when I have more time:

Burt Rutan rocks.
If I get serious about self-publishing, I'll need some good fonts (hat tip: pgm).
Happiness is the best medicine.
English idioms are fun.
Will Colorado get sensible about drug policy?
Isn't it time to try liberty in Latin America?
They say you can't fight city hall, but perhaps you can rightsize it.
People still refer to the philosophical dictionary I wrote some years ago, but I now find it embarrassingly biased and simply must update it one of these years.
Life -- biological life, that is -- never ceases to fascinate.

Posted on 2005-04-26 at 21:01. File under personal.

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Juvenilia

Some early writings.

While cleaning out some old file folders last night, I found some early writings of mine. They're not really very good, but I've typed them into my computer and put them online anyway. I had not written much by that time in my life, and it shows. At least I've gotten to be a better writer through years of practice -- or so I hope!

The pieces are as follows:

A journal entry from 1992 that seems to have been an attempt to summarize my philosophy of life at that time. Things have changed since then.
An essay entitled Secular vs. Sacred: The Modern Dilemma, which won honorable mention in an essay contest run by The Humanist magazine in 1992. Similar in many ways to my blog entry from the other day on spirituality.
A very early essay entitled What I Love About Maine, which I wrote for my freshman English class at Columbia University. I was painfully afraid of writing back then and my teacher Victoria Redel helped me through that, for which I'm forever in her debt.

Not great writing, and best filed under the heading of juvenilia. But perhaps someone will find them interesting. :-)

Posted on 2005-04-16 at 17:53. File under personal.

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PoD

Printing on demand.

Amazon.com bought print-on-demand company BookSurge today. Makes sense. BookSurge's Competitors include AuthorHouse, iUniverse, XLibris, and Lightning Source.

(This is just a note to myself in case I ever decide to self-publish The Ism Book, Ancient Fire, A Philosophy for Living on Earth, or some future book through one of the print-on-demand companies....)

Posted on 2005-04-11 at 21:12. File under personal.

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Feeding a Cold

An idiosyncrasy.

One of my idiosyncrasies is that when I'm starting to catch a cold, I get ravenously hungry. I'm legendary for eating all the time, but when I begin to feel sick my usually fast metabolism seems to go into overdrive. For instance, today I was not feeling very well and ate a tremendous amount of food:

06:00: A handful of dried figs and half a cup of yogurt.
06:15: A fried egg on whole-grain toast, plus half a grapefruit.
06:30: Another fried egg on toast.
08:00: A huge bowl of oatmeal with raisins and walnuts.
09:30: An apple.
10:30: Another half cup of yogurt.
11:15: A whole bunch of almonds and some dried apricots.
12:15: A chicken fajita and a large bowl of beef chili.
14:00: Another half cup of yogurt.
16:00: Another fried egg on toast.
19:00: A large plate of sausage lasagna.
19:45: Two pieces of baklava and two cups of Turkish coffee.
21:15: More almonds and dried apricots.

Now excuse me while I rummage around in the kitchen for a snack... ;-)

Posted on 2005-04-07 at 21:57. File under personal.

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Life is Good

Words of wisdom.

My friend Chris Sciabarra saith:

Spring is here. Daylight Savings Time has returned. Baseball is back. Life is good.

Indeed.

Posted on 2005-04-04 at 21:31. File under personal.

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RMBB Runup

An updated list.

I've just updated my Colorado Weblogs List with the blogs mentioned here. Keep those cards and letters coming!

Posted on 2005-03-18 at 14:53. File under personal.

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Graham Strikes Again

How to start a startup.

Paul Graham strikes again, this time with a thought-provoking essay on How to Start a Startup. The key advice is in the first paragraph (don't you love it when writers get right to the point?):

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

Graham focuses on startups that enable one to get rich. Mostly these are product companies rather than consulting companies. Yet there is something attractive about starting a small consulting company (I've previously likened them to rock bands) whose focus is on solving problems in a more measured way than is possible in a product company, thus enabling all the team members to maximize happiness rather than money. The same considerations apply -- choosing the right people (especially the founders or "original settlers"), offering a service that customers really need (even if they don't know they want it -- thus the challenge of sales), and spending as little money as possible. The good thing about small consulting companies is that they can be self-funding from the beginning. The bad thing about them is that you'll never get filthy rich running one. But that part about maximizing happiness is important, I think. :-)

Posted on 2005-03-13 at 12:17. File under personal.

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RMBB 4.0

Mark your calendars.

I learned by surfing around the blogosphere Friday night that Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash 4.0 is coming up soon (April 2 at the Denver Press Club). I attended RMBB 1.0, but it seems I missed 2.0 and 3.0, and thus the opportunity to chat with older bloggers like Vodkapundit and Walter in Denver as well as meet all the newer bloggers around these parts (like FreedomSight, ZombyBoy, David Aitken, and many others -- I think my homegrown list of Colorado bloggers is woefully out of date). In any case, RMBB 4.0 should be fun -- be there or be square!

Posted on 2005-03-13 at 11:56. File under personal.

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Old Friends

From ARS to Nav3D.

Over lunch with pgm I mentioned my old friend Andy Barrows, with whom I studied at the long-defunct American Renaissance School before he went off to MIT and then Stanford (that's him on the left in this image of some flight testing over Alaska). Now it seems that Andy is CEO of Nav3D, a company that produces synthetic vision systems which integrate GPS data with 3D graphics, thus enabling people (e.g., pilots) to visualize scenes in real time. Kinda cool.

Posted on 2005-02-28 at 14:23. File under personal.

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Restless Exploration

Thoughts from recent retirees.

Two well-known commentators retired recently. The first was a traditional journalist: William Safire of the New York Times. The second was one of the most prominent bloggers: Andrew Sullivan. In one of his farewell columns (temproarily here, but you know that NYT policy of quickly archiving things), Safire quoted James Watson (co-discoverer of the biological double helix) and Bruce Barton (an old-school advertising executive) as follows:

"Never retire. Your brain needs exercise or it will atrophy."

"When you're through changing, you're through."

For his part, Andrew Sullivan provided the following words of wisdom in his farewell blog entry:

I've always thought it's a good idea to quit something after around five years or so. Before it becomes a chore. Before you become numb.

Combine these sentiments and the result is a career philosophy that encourages one to endlessly and restlessly explore new opportunities, not rest on one's laurels. Personally I've always experienced that five-year itch -- it's one reason I didn't get a Ph.D. (I'd burned out on higher education after 4 years of college), why I moved into web application development in 1996, and why I got heavily involved with Jabber in 2000. Astute readers will note that I've devoted the last five years of my life to Jabber. Whether I will stay true to form regarding the five-year itch remains to be seen. ;-)

Posted on 2005-02-07 at 19:43. File under personal.

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A Helping Hand

Charitable giving for tsunami victims.

Everyone wants to help those affected by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean (I heard that the Red Cross in Denver received over $2 million in donations), but personally I want to make sure that every penny I give helps those in need and not some organizational bureaucrat. Thanks to a link at Claire Wolfe's blog, I've discovered a group called Direct Relief International, which is a non-profit wholesale pharmacy that buys pharmaceuticals and medical equipment from the appropriate manufacturers (or gets them to donate such materials), then sends those materials to those in need all around the world. According to Charity Navigator, Direct Relief International devotes a whopping 99% of its income to program expenses and spends a miniscule 0.8% on fundraising and administration, making it one of the most efficient charities on the planet. Plus it is quite firm and explicit about its principles and activities with regard to the tsunami relief efforts. A worthy cause.

Posted on 2005-01-04 at 21:37. File under personal.

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Recent Reading

So many books, so little time...

In the last five days or so I've read the following books, each of which was about 200 pages long (perfect for absorbing in one evening):

Anti-Americanism by Jean-Francois Revel, who is perhaps the only outspoken pro-American in France. :-) Well, that's probably not quite true, but Revel argues persuasively that anti-Americanism the world over (and specifically in France) is a kind of mythology that is driven less by facts than by dogma. And the nature of that dogma is a near-religious opposition to capitalism, the free market, spontaneous order, classical liberalism, and the open society.

The Journey of Man by Spencer Wells, a fascinating reconstruction of the spread of humankind out of Africa to the far corners of the planet, starting sometime in the last 70,000 years (which happens to be sometime after the catastrophic eruption of Mount Toba). Population genetics is cool, especially as supplemented by archeology and linguistics in the study of human origins and diffusion.

On the same topic, I also just read Genes, People, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, which is not quite as engaging and coherent as Wells' account, but which has the virtue of more mathematical sophistication (plus it contains a final chapter on cultural evolution, which is quite fascinating).

The Way of the World by David Fromkin. Here Fromkin tells the story of the universe from the big bang to about 5 years ago. And I do not say that facetiously -- it's a rollicking romp through history as well a peek at what's next (hint: you ain't seen nothing yet, and open societies will be best prepared for the coming changes -- he even suggests the desirability of greater cooperation between America, Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand, although he does not mention the Anglosphere by name). I especially appreciate Fromkin's focus on the representation of information, from DNA to spoken language to writing to printing to the digital world. His book provides some helpful context for the coming phase shift.

I've also gotten about halfway through Fantastic Voyage by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman. Their basic argument is that if you take care of yourself now, you just might get to live forever (given the coming advances in medical science and nanotechnology). So cut those carbs, eat your vegetables, drink plenty of water, and exercise regularly -- you too could become immortal! ;-)

Posted on 2004-12-26 at 17:33. File under personal.

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Lazy Man's Eggnog

A quick treat.

I've always liked eggnog as a holiday treat, but the stuff they sell in the store is so processed (and overly sweet) that I never buy it, so this year I decided to make my own. The recipes I've seen tell you to separate the eggs, whip the egg whites and cream, and so on. But I'm too lazy to do that when all I want is a quick glass after dinner. After a bit of experimenting, I've settled on the following recipe, which I call "lazy man's eggnog":

1 egg
Half a cup of half-and-half
One-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar
One-and-a-half tablespoons of brandy

Place all ingredients in a blender or food processor and mix for 15 seconds or so.

Voila! One glass of eggnog. After pouring the resulting concoction into a glass, you may want to chill it in the fridge for 5 minutes before quaffing (I usually just chill the glass ahead of time, since I don't like to wait). You may also prefer more sugar -- I don't like things sweet, so I tend to lay off the sugar, but I find that most people like things sweeter than I do.

Posted on 2004-12-18 at 09:46. File under personal.

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Eleemosynary

Blogging and begging.

I don't like it when bloggers ask for money -- even when they're bloggers I like. If you can't afford to blog, don't do so. There's something pitiful about the self-perception of those who think of themselves as charity cases who must beg in order to blog. Better, methinks, for one's blogging activity to "emerge from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full" (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, Attempt at a Self-Criticism).

Posted on 2004-12-13 at 14:13. File under personal.

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Cast and Ye Shall Receive

Podcasting on the way.

OK, I need to start podcasting. For those who don't know, podcasting is a kind of do-it-yourself radio and lots of folks are doing it because it's easy and it's a great way to reach people. I'll have plenty of audio content to offer once I get a little more recording equipment, which I hope will happen Real Soon Now [tm]. Like what? Well, there's all the music I've written over the years (recording it will keep me engaged for quite a while), as well as spoken versions of my poems. Not sure what I'll do after I'm finished with my music and poetry, but I'm sure I'll think of something. :-)

Posted on 2004-12-10 at 16:37. File under personal.

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Well Met

Anglospherics IRL.

I had dinner and lots of good conversation last night with fellow Anglosphere enthusiasts Chris Huston (whom I first met at a meeting of the Denver Java Users Group) and Leif Smith of the Explorers Foundation (who it seems has just added a link to my essay on Zamyatin and Rand). As much as I live my life online, it's good to meet people IRL sometimes. I suppose that more and more I'm becoming "amphibious", as Jim Bennett calls it: dividing my time between the real world and the online world. It's a trend that will only gain strength in the coming years.

Posted on 2004-12-10 at 10:05. File under personal.

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TRSTNHM

A strange occurrence.

So I'm driving around Denver this evening and in front of me there's this Subaru station wagon with a bunch of ladders on top and the license plate reads TRSTNHM but it isn't a Colorado plate, it's an Israeli plate (says "Israel" on the top and "Jerusalem" on the bottom), plus the license plate holder reads "Ambassador for the Kingdom". Hmm, a Jewish carpenter who "trusts in Him" and claims to be an ambassador for the Kingdom? I suppose this finally answers the question "What would Jesus drive?"... ;-)

Posted on 2004-12-03 at 19:25. File under personal.

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Audiences

Multiple blogging personality disorder?

I was talking on the phone the other day with an old friend who happens to read my weblog. I found it amusing when he said that he pretty much skips over all my posts on techie topics like Jabber protocols, the IETF, and Internet security (knowing him, though, he probably devours my posts on music, philosophy, and history). By the same token, I'm sure there are people who couldn't care less about my philosophical or political opinions and would prefer that I stick to talking tech. That set me to thinking about how many audiences there are for this blog of mine. Is there a straight, two-cultures division here (science vs. art, technology vs. the humanities, and all that C.P. Snow kind of thing)? Am I weird for being a protocol geek by day and an amateur musician, poet, philosopher, and historian by night?

Posted on 2004-12-02 at 21:59. File under personal.

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POP

Toward a practical Objectivist politics.

I've just posted the first draft of a new essay entitled Toward a Practical Objectivist Politics.

Yesterday I described a list of my Jabber-related goals for the rest of the year, but I neglected to mention that my personal goal for December is to finish all but one of my essays on Ayn Rand and Objectivism. The exception is my essay on Rand and Aristotle, which I won't write until I finish re-reading all of Aristotle's writings, and that will take me a while (Aristotle wrote a lot!). This essay on practical Objectivist politics was on my list of essays to write. The other three I plan to finish this month are:

Friends, Lovers, and Comrades: Chosen Relationships in Atlas Shrugged
The Mind on Strike: Atlas Shrugged as the Revolt of the Engineers
Objectivism Without Platonism: Hao Wang on Kurt Gödel

I simply must finish the first one, since I've promised it to Ed Younkins for a book he's shopping around to publishers (in fact, I was supposed to have it done a month ago). The essay on the revolt of the engineers is mostly written, but I need to work in results of some more research I've done of late. And the paper on Kurt Gödel and his interpreter Hao Wang is something I've had lying around for many years but have never finished up, so I think the end-of-year deadline will motivate me to complete it. Then I'll need only to finish the Aristotle essay and I'll be ready to let go of the ladder.

Posted on 2004-12-01 at 21:56. File under personal.

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Personal Connections

Friends online.

Some random notes about a few friends of mine:

My friend Bretigne Shaffer has two newish articles online: Kick the Habit: Politics Is Not the Answer and Searching for Purpose in a Brutal World.
My friend Mary Catherine Dodson has a blog.
My friend Jimbo Wales (who happens to have been born the day after me!) also has a blog.

Posted on 2004-11-30 at 14:21. File under personal.

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Smarts

Aptitude tests and IQ.

Following a link from Doc Searls, I found this GRE to IQ converter, which says I have an IQ of 157 or 161, depending on how many points per standard deviation the IQ test uses. (It doesn't take into account one's score on the Analytical test, on which I didn't do quite as well as Verbal and Quantitative, though I took the GRE on a lark and didn't study or prepare, so who knows.) The main question is: does it really matter? I've known plenty of smart people who were jerks, bastards, and sonofabitches (not to mention uncreative, impractical, or just plain lazy), so I tend to downplay the importance of raw smarts in life.

Posted on 2004-11-10 at 14:01. File under personal.

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Ray

A night at the movies.

Longtime readers of this weblog will be shocked to hear that I went to the movies last night. My disdain for Halloween hoopla, combined with my love of music, compelled me to see "Ray", the seemingly biographical film about Ray Charles. It was great!

Posted on 2004-11-01 at 19:13. File under personal.

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Homeward Bound

Another trip.

FWIW, I'll be burning through some frequent flyer miles by visiting my family in Maine this weekend (leaving tomorrow, returning Sunday). I promise I'll catch up on all my Jabber to-do items when I return...

Posted on 2004-10-12 at 16:53. File under personal.

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SF Bound

Travelling again.

I'll be in San Francisco for the next few days participating in the IAB messaging summit and chatting IRL with other interesting folks. Not sure I'll be blogging much, but you never know...

Posted on 2004-10-05 at 14:51. File under personal.

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The Case

Protection for my Mac.

Whoop! My MacTruck arrived today! I'm not particularly happy that it took about a month to arrive, but it seems to be really solid. Now I can safely bike to work with my PowerBook in tow. Cherry Creek Trail, here I come! :-)

Posted on 2004-09-21 at 19:56. File under personal.

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Proofing

Putting my editing skills to work.

Today's Slashdot story finally spurred me to join the Distributed Proofreaders project. Not that I have lots of time for it, but I hope to contribute in my spare moments (especially on books that have a bit of Latin and Greek in them). It's a worthy cause.

Posted on 2004-08-25 at 15:32. File under personal.

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Running on Empty

The state of my inboxes.

I'm finally getting caught up on my voluminous correspondence. As of this moment, my inboxes stand as follows:

jabber.org (traditionally my main account) -- 6 messages
gmail (certain mail redirects to this account) -- 0 messages
gmane (Jabber and IETF discussion lists) -- 7 messages
saint-andre.com (personal mail) -- 0 messages

In my recent experience (say, the past 2 years), this is quite simply unprecedented. It feels good to clear the decks, because I have a lot of work to do.

And of course it helps that I'm asking people to contact me via Jabber, and that I've switched all possible discussion list reading to Gmane. Both of these measures have really cut down on my email (the vast majority of which is now spam, even with SpamAssassin's Bayesian filters doing their best).

Speaking of which, today Stowe pointed to yet another person who notes that the end of email may be nigh. Bring it on!

Posted on 2004-07-30 at 20:53. File under personal.

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The Book Machine

The future of book shopping?

Hey, my birthday is coming up soon, maybe I'll ask for one of these ;-)

Posted on 2004-07-21 at 11:49. File under personal.

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Escape Artist

RSS feeds updated.

A few readers of this blog have pinged me of late asking why my blog entries don't have links and such when appearing in their news aggregators, but show up fine when sourced from Planet Jabber. The answer is that Planet Jabber uses my ATOM feeds, which until this evening were more triumphant than my RSS feed. But I think I've fixed the problem now, thanks to some XSLT madness suggested in a post by Wendell Piez of Mulberry Technologies. Let me know (via Jabber, of course) if you experience further difficulties.

Posted on 2004-07-13 at 22:08. File under personal.

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Lorem Ipsum

Real books.

My Jabber friend Matt Mankins has started a bookstore in Cambridge (Mass.) called Lorem Ipsum Books. Nice! I've always wanted to start a bookstore or a small publishing company...

Posted on 2004-07-06 at 15:12. File under personal.

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Small World

Web links and IRL connections.

Got an email this morning from Brad Feld asking me to add his site to my Colorado weblogs page. Turns out he's with Mobius Venture Capital and knows Dave Jilk, who's now CEO of Xaffire. Small world.

Posted on 2004-06-14 at 21:26. File under personal.

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BlogTech

More fixes and changes to my blog format.

Over the last few weeks, I've hacked a bit on my weblog format. Thanks to some fancy XSLT stylesheets, it's no longer as simple as it once was, but it's more powerful. For instance, I now have dedicated ATOM feeds and HTML archive pages for each of the topics I use to categorize my entries. Want an ATOM feed just for my Jabber-related entries? We've got it. Want to read only the entries I've penned about art? Ditto. Will anyone use these features? I don't know. But they were fun to create. :-)

Posted on 2004-06-14 at 20:44. File under personal.

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Better

Now the hard part: catching up.

I'm back. First that cold+flu knocked me out (the doctor says it was not penumonia, but a few more days and it might have been), then I had a big Liberty Alliance deadline (I'm writing the technical specification for their presence team), then a nasty Mailman bug hit the jabber.org mailing lists and it took me a few days to get everything back in working order (despite the friendly service I received on the Mailman-users list in response to my call for help, I see our Mailman troubles as one more reason why email is a slum, since the Mailman bug was essentially caused by weirdness in the underlying protocols). Unfortunately my .plan is just as long as it was before I got sick and there are several important mailing list threads to catch up on, so now I'm even more woefully behind than ever. Sigh.

Posted on 2004-06-14 at 19:57. File under personal.

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Re-work

Some formatting changes.

I just made some fairly major changes to my weblog format, which enable me to offer dedicated feeds for each category (might make ralphm happy). Once these changes are stable, I'll also add one page for each category, so that it's easier to read only the entries I've written about politics or technology or whatever.

Posted on 2004-06-09 at 22:04. File under personal.

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Tempus Flugit

Home sick.

I've had some kind of nasty flu the past couple of days. I don't get sick often, but when I do I'm pretty much knocked out. Speaking of which, I think I'll go back to sleep now... :-)

Posted on 2004-06-03 at 13:53. File under personal.

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The Top Rungs

Letting go of the ladder.

Over the weekend, I wrote the first draft of an essay on Nietzsche and Rand (with quite a bit of Epicurus mixed in for good measure). Since I'm pretty much a first-draft kind of writer (followed by light editing), this puts me ever closer to letting go of the ladder of my early Randianism by completing all of my projected essays on Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Over the last few months I've written a number of these essays, some of which have been gestating in my brain for years. Now I have only to finish an essay comparing Rand with Kurt Gödel and to write a paper on Aristotle and Rand.

I'm on the top rungs of the ladder, and I'm looking forward to letting go.

Posted on 2004-06-02 at 10:11. File under personal.

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Back

Well, sort of. ;-)

I think I may be back. Been doing a lot of travelling of late, both business and personal, including NYC (I think I blogged about that, no?), the D.C. area, Tucson (that was the fun part), and yesterday San Francisco. Plus I've been burning the candle on both ends in the Jabber world. So my blogging time has been less than minimal -- and when I've wanted to write, I've been working to finish my Rand essays. But I hope to post more soon.

Posted on 2004-05-06 at 13:44. File under personal.

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Yow

What happened?

How did we get halfway through April already? One of the three regular readers of this weblog recently pinged me via email wondering if I'd fallen off the face of the earth. Well, I guess I have. I have previously confessed that I'm a workaholic, but the last month or so has been especially busy for me. With bandwidth so limited, blogging seems to have been the first thing to go. I have been doing a bit of philosophical writing (outside of all the protocol specs I'm working on, some of which border on philosophy ;-), but mostly when I knock off working at 10:00 at night I just want to play guitar or do a bit of reading. So my apologies, but I'm simply not sure when I'll return to full strength here.

Oh, and here's a thought for Tax Day (not to be confused with Tax Freedom Day): remove the space from "THE IRS" and you get "THEIRS" -- as in, all your money are belong to us.

Posted on 2004-04-15 at 17:00. File under personal.

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Gotham

A brief visit to NYC.

I was in New York City yesterday for a last-minute business meeting. It was hardly enough time to get back into that New York state of mind, but I did soak up the busy streets, hang out in Grand Central Terminal for a bit during rush hour, take the subway uptown to my favorite Greek restaurant, etc. I even stole an hour to visit the Frick, where I predictably enjoyed the three (!) Vermeers as well as van Dyke's portrait of Frans Snyder (one of my long-time favorites). I also found myself enjoying the Whistlers quite a bit, such as his Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean and several of his portraits. But the two pieces I found most mesmerizing were two small cloud studies by John Constable, located in the Garden Court but not even listed in the supposedly comprehensive listing of paintings at the museum.

All in all, a too-brief visit.

Posted on 2004-03-31 at 21:29. File under personal.

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Communalistic Meritocracy

Dono ergo sum.

Tim Bray, referring to a French report on the open-source threat to Microsoft, quotes the authors as explaining the appeal of open-source software to developers as "je donne donc je suis" -- "I give, therefore I am" -- or, I might add (mimicking the Latin of Descartes), "dono ergo sum".

Over the years I've had a hard time describing to my capitalist friends why I am so active in the open-source community (specifically Jabber) -- when I tell them it's a communalistic meritocracy, they look at me funny. Certainly lots of folks love open-source software because it is free as in beer; after all, who likes to part with their hard-earned cash? But what's in it for those who produce all this free stuff? Those of a libertarian persuasion like to quote Heinlein's dictum TANSTAAFL ("there ain't no such thing as a free lunch"); granting the truth of that statement makes it even less comprehensible why people would volunteer to cook the lunch for others to enjoy!

But people do. And not just starry-eyed communalists -- even long-time capitalists like me are active in the open-source world, often spending nights and weekends working to make things that we give away. Eric Raymond's anthropological musings have revealed that open-source is a gift culture, and that the members thereof compete with regard to the quality of what they share.

But I think it's more than that. Speaking only for myself, I got involved with Jabber because I felt it was community to which I could productively contribute and thereby give something back. Yes, we're talking about guilt -- I felt more than a bit guilty about taking all that Linux goodness for free without contributing anything in return. So I started giving. Not to compete or show how smart I was, but because I wanted to join in the fun and convince other people that Jabber was cool. I wanted to help Jabber succeed (this was late 1999 and early 2000 -- we needed a lot of help back then, believe me!).

Since I'm not the world's greatest coder, I started out writing documentation and eventually began documenting and developing Jabber protocols (in fact lots and lots of protocols), which provide the central focus in the Jabber world. Eventually it seems that I became the de facto leader of the Jabber community, which is an odd position for a moderate anarchist to be in, since every fiber of my being resists the temptation to give orders and tell people what to do.

When I started out in the open-source world as a mere Linux user (in 1998 or so), I really was a true capitalist pig of the Randian variety ("big business is America's persecuted minority" and all that). However, as I slowly became a more active contributor, I found myself living the classic Stoic metaphor of the circle of concern: Jabber people and Jabber technologies became important to me for their own sake, and their well-being became part of my well-being. Thus a corporate capitalist was transformed into an open-source communalist. It's funny how life goes sometimes...

Posted on 2004-03-04 at 20:35. File under personal.

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Photographs and Memories

A few pictures.

Speaking of idiosyncrasies, I must also admit that I don't especially care for photographs. I've never owned a camera, and I have no urge to take pictures of places I go or people I meet. I'd rather experience the moment than record it. But at least I don't mind any longer when people take my picture (I used to hate that!). Here's evidence: I've even created a web page of photos folks have taken of me over the years. My favorite is the picture Joe Hildebrand took of me (using his camera phone) at the Hell's Kitchen restaurant during IETF 58 in Minneapolis last year.

Posted on 2004-02-16 at 21:15. File under personal.

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Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.

Travelling blues.

The wake-up call at my hotel in Austin, Texas came at 3:00 body time this morning (4:00 local), so that I could make an early flight to Denver in time to run a JSF meeting and put in a full day's work on XMPP Working Group tasks. Yow!

BTW, I was in Austin for a Liberty Alliance meeting. And yes, the title of this entry is a Simon & Garfunkel reference...

Posted on 2004-01-28 at 20:25. File under personal.

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On Torsey Pond

A tale of giving.

The Kennebec Journal recently ran a story about a nature preserve on Torsey Pond in Readfield, Maine. Why do I care? Because my mother donated the land for it. I first walked the property with my father soon after my parents purchased it, and it's a beautiful lot, sloping from the ridge down to the pond, with a fine boggy area on the lake that is home to many birds and other creatures. After my father died, my mother donated the land to the town of Readfield, and most recently volunteers have cut some trails so that future generations can enjoy this area. I'm looking forward to walking the land again next summer when I head up to Maine for a visit.

Posted on 2004-01-05 at 21:57. File under personal.

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Gear

Researching personal studio stuff.

one small voice: personal

stpeter.im

The Wisdom of the Brick

Got Libel?

Ineke

A Sculpture Walk

✈ San Jose Bound ✈

✈ Orlando Bound ✈

Remembering Samantha

✈ Brussels Bound ✈

Self-Experimentation

Picture This

4554

Fifty Books

Clear Again

Noisy World

The New Year

Page 123

Inboxed In

Not Clear

Booking It

Booking It

Dvorak

Montreal Bound

Raptor Rescue

Favicon

University Park, Denver

Test Over

Lunching Alone

Remembering Peter

A Test

Ten Years

Making Money

Off the Wagon

Nashville Bound

Paying Respects

London

Bumper Stickers

Still Clear

London Bound

Clear

Forming a Habit

Personal Productivity

Word Cloud

Retraction

Whelmed

UPCC II

Free

Split

UPCC

You Have to Be There

Key Change

Atomic

More Readings

APFLOE

Comments?

Academic

RIMU Too

Future Readings

Scrape II

Scrape

Clearing the Decks

All Moved

Scheduled Queiscence

Blogiversary

Moving UP

Remembrance

A Modern Trilogy

Down East

Pubs

Swimmingly

13 Books

They Call Me Saint Peter

Quick Takes

Juvenilia

PoD

Feeding a Cold

Life is Good

RMBB Runup

Graham Strikes Again