The Twilight Report

2008-12-05T02:53:00

27 November 2008 05:38pm: We're having leftovers for turkey day because we're having our bird on sunday.
1 December 2008 10:21am: Conference this week so I only have to work two days this week. Larry Wall is the keynote on Thursday. I know I know, who?
Yesterday at 10:42am: Made it to the conference of geek. First rule: no language bashing. Guess how long it took for someone to bash ruby.
Today at 08:53am: Day two of the conference and the internets are working this time. I think Larry Wall is wearing the same Hawaiian shirt as yesterday.
Today at 10:21am: In the microsft presentation the queen's portrait is on the wall. Guy is obsessed with lolcats :/
Today at 11:32am: Walked to the confrence today. Going to walk home too. Nice to not need a train or car or bus or stuff like that for once.
Today at 01:48pm: FOSS vs. The World talk is just as bad as I expected it would be. The ghost of Richard Stallman haunts these halls. Jerk.
Today at 09:48pm: Arianna Huffington made a terrible pitch about blogging on the Daily Report Colbert Report and so I decided to micro blog it on the twitter.

snowing sir spawn

2007-01-15T02:54:00

Back in high school my friend wingated and I used to totally snow Sean “Little Man” O’Dork (also known as Sir Spawn the Mediocre) with our computer jargon, which mostly consisted of real terms, but was strung together to be meaningless. On the Thursday edition of the Report, Colbert had an amusing rant on the new Apple iPhone, which reminded me of those days:

Computers aren’t supposed to be easier or cute. They’re supposed to be intimidating punch card reading hulks of metal that take up an entire refrigerated room and force you to manually implement recursive procedures and abstract data types in FORTRAN 77.

—Stephen Colbert 1/11/07

I’m clearly a computer dork though, because while I enjoyed the “uphills both ways in the snow” nature of this rant, my first thought was but you can’t do recursion in FORTRAN 77.

you

2006-12-22T00:21:00

I was watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report about Time’s lamest person of the year award ever: “you”, and today I walked past the newsagent and saw the cover which confirmed it really was as lame as I suspected. It also reminded me of an episode dating back to the New Mexico Super Computer Challenge...

When I was in high school, there was this thing were computer nerds got together from all over the state and competed to write scientific applications on the super computer hardware available at the national labs in New Mexico. It was sort of an academic decathlon for computer nerds, so it was the über in überdorky.

So there I was having lunch with my computer geek friends at the “challenge” and I says to Ellen (more or less out of nowhere), “did you hear what Jeff said about you?”

Nick thought this was hilarious, for reasons that I couldn’t fathom, but instead of admitting that I just nodded and agreed like I knew what was so funny. I mean, I had meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t that funny.

Then Ellen threw a piece of pie at Jeff, not because she was particularly mad at Jeff (who had not, in fact, said anything about her), but because someone had dared her to. That’s what wonderful upstanding young citizens we were in those days.

Later, I figured out that Nick thought that I was making a pun based on this Chinese girl that we knew whose name is a homonym for “you”. Still not very funny, but the joke became legendary for some reason, and I never admitted to anyone that I hadn’t intended it that way and anyway I didn’t even think it was that funny.

“You” was one of those classic over achievers. She was taking all AP classes, but did that make her smart? I saw what she did for her AP Computers final and it showed a complete misunderstanding of the technology that she was supposed to be learning. I also saw what the computer teacher wrote about her in his recommendation for her (pesky Unix permission bits). I don’t think she deserved the praise she got from him. I could see her being smart in English or Math or Science, because I didn’t see her perform in that capacity, but on the other hand, I could just as easily see her being good at taking tests. That would actually describe most of the people that I knew in high school.

My point is, I am much happier thinking that Time chose “You” (the person I knew in high school) rather than the second person plural as there Person of the Year.

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