Category Archives: Miscellaneous

The title of the movie is Dog Whistle. The main character is a young Arab-American slacker who generally tries to keep his head down and avoid any kind of social engagement. His life changes when he gets into a minor fender bender at a gas station. The other driver, a middle-aged white man in a […]

I started writing this in January 2010 and for some reason abandoned it. Lemme see if I can pick it up and complete the thought, with the caveat that the person completing it is living in a completely different decile of his life. For whatever reason, a theme has emerged for me in the last couple […]

This is a long, rambling diatribe that took me a couple weeks to write during odd hours. In that time it seemed that there was another major Google-related story every week and I kept coming up with new insights to add. What I really wanted to say is the stuff at the end. We will […]

I’m a big fan of English-like programming syntax. I love that Ruby has an unless operator and that both it and if can be put after the statement, like do_this if thisdo_this if this or do_this unless thatdo_this unless that . I also like Javascript’s this word. I’d like to see all the prepositions in […]

Oh hai. I’ll start writing here again, I swear. This is just a quick “I had an idea” post. An idea for a Firefox extension/Jetpack plugin: You right-click on some text, select “speak it”, the text gets sent to the cloud and returns with a hidden flash element that plays high-quality text to speech. Sounds […]

This reminded me of a local meme1 in my office, based on the blank cat is blank global meme. But while I have your attention, I want to talk about my software plans. One thing I’ve meant to work on for a while is the “sessions” situation in Gnome. The fact that it’s not clear […]

A dystopian “control” society based on distraction. Remember, in Brave New World it’s entertainment, in Brazil it’s bureaucracy and prolishness, in 1984 it’s fear and propaganda… but distraction as such is something different. You set your mind to do something and you get distracted, you forget to do it, you forget that you even wanted […]

I actually wrote this a couple of months ago, but I was too shy to post it then. I get the occasional weird spam mails that are sent to the alexandria-list-owner and I’m not sure if I can safely spam them in Gmail, so I end up reading a lot of interesting spam1. Most of […]