Charleston

Chorus angelorum te suscipiat
Et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
Aeternam habeas requiem

A friend of mine put it well: "Lord, may Your saints find justice."

I have nothing to say, politically, about what happened Wednesday night.

Philosophically, I must point out that any worldview that has discarded the idea of objective truth or morality has no basis to describe the murder as the evil that it was. Hold something above yourself, else you will hold yourself above everything; that way lies the Devil.

Busy Times!

Whew.

Been a busy couple weeks. Got a software deployment this evening that will be the culmination of nearly a year's work, so posting has been light.

On a very related note, a word of advice to all you developers out there: if you change a web service, you best get your docs changed too. There's no customer service experience quite like the one I had this morning...

Me: Hi, I think there might be an error with your getWidgetModelByColor service. It started returning widgets even when the latest model no longer comes in a particular color.

Support: Well, the gWMBC service looks at past models too. So if you're searching for red widgets, and widget Alpha was available in red back in 2006, it will be returned.

Me: But the documentation says that gWMBC only returns a widget if the requested color is available in the latest model.

Support: Thanks for pointing that out. The documentation is out of date in this case. We'll make sure it's updated for the Summer release.

Me: Well, that's kind of a non-trivial change, isn't it? If a customer wants a red widget, my application isn't supposed to show them obsolete 20th century widgets. What can we do as a workaround for this?

Support: *crickets*

And on a totally unrelated note -- if you have yourself a smoker, get some boneless/skinless chicken thighs. Brine them, wrap each one in two slices of thick-cut bacon, and smoke over your hardwood of choice for about an hour at 250 degrees. It's G-E-W-D gewd.

Chicken Update: If you're one of those folks who only likes white meat, such as my girlfriend, you can wrap 'n' smoke chicken breasts too. Just put a pat of butter on top of each one before you wrap them.

Funky Friday!

Okay, I called out Sonic last week. So gotta follow up on that with a couple of the old-school tracks!

Seriously, they did some delicious things with the YM2612 synthesizer chip.

Jumping forward a few years, Ragnarok Online also nailed their soundtrack. Fun synth bass going on here:

And that's enough from the video game industry for now. Next week we'll get to some of the more standard stuff.

Empiricism and Transgendered Identity

Apparently Bruce Jenner has, somehow, become female, and we have to call Bruce "Caitlyn" and "her". Let's talk about this.

You may be trans.

You may be biologically male, but think you're a woman -- identify as a woman -- KNOW you're a woman.

How will you prove this truth to anyone else? How can we know, with the same certainty you have, that what you believe is true?

And most importantly, in the absence of such a proof, what right do you have to DEMAND that we believe -- and communicate -- an empirically false proposition?

I cannot say whether society benefits when we are compelled to lie, when we are compelled to place some other principle above what is true.

But then, I'm not sure that I have to.

The pencil felt thick and awkward in his fingers. He began to write down the thoughts that came into his head. He wrote first in large clumsy capitals:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
Then almost without a pause he wrote beneath it:
TWO AND TWO MAKE FIVE

George Orwell, 1984

Funky Friday!

Oh, that tasty, tasty synth bass! Somewhere between George Clinton and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Caitlyn Jenner and Language

We'll cover the matter in greater depth a bit later, but for now I think this is spot on:

On most days of the week, liberals are fond of claiming that Republicans are "anti-science" on everything from global warming to evolution. Well, last I checked, biology hadn’t been declared a branch of the humanities.

Bruce Jenner was 65 years old when he decided to be a she, but that’s not why Caitlyn can’t have a baby. Figuratively speaking, removing the spigot won’t change the rest of the plumbing. That’s not patriarchal oppression talking. That’s science. And no matter how fluid gender may or may not be, the biological category of "female" isn’t going away anytime soon.

Read the whole thing.

COTTON / POLYESTER BLENDS

There is an argument floating around the Internet. Well -- truer words were never written.

But there's one I mean in particular. You may have seen it on Facebook, perhaps posted by an acquaintance who happens to be on the pro- side of the gay marriage kerfuffle.

Here's how it usually goes:

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EXT. COFFEE HOUSE - ABOUT 10:00 PM

TOLERANT PROGRESSIVE and CHRISTIAN STRAWMAN are seated at a table, sipping coffee-based beverages.

TOLERANT PROGRESSIVE

So, the Bible forbids gay marriage, eh?

CHRISTIAN STRAWMAN

Yes, according to Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13.

TOLERANT PROGRESSIVE

(preparing rhetorical deathblow)

And you believe the Bible is the inspired Word Of God?

CHRISTIAN STRAWMAN

(unaware of impending doom)

I sure do!

TOLERANT PROGRESSIVE

Well!

(beat)

Did you know the Bible also forbids wearing clothes made from two different kinds of fiber?

CHRISTIAN STRAWMAN rips off his polo shirt and checks the tag. ABJECT HORROR dawns in his eyes as he slowly looks up.

OTHER CHRISTIANS emerge from the shadowed street, clutching fist-size rocks.

TOLERANT PROGRESSIVE

Get 'im, boys!

CUT TO: 

INT. CHUCK-E-CHEESE - TWO WEEKS LATER

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