An important change is happening right now: I am finding myself yelling more and more often for people to get out of my way on a wave. Just yesterday, I had to do it five times.
Now, you may ask, what is the reason for this change? Are people getting ruder and snaking more waves? Not so, it turns out. People are just as nice or as rude as they ever were, but I am getting better at surfing.
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FreeCiv is an amazing clone of the old Civilization games. It got stuck somewhere between Civ 2 and Civ 3 as far as the graphics are concerned, but the game play is as much fun as in the original. Plus, it’s open source and hence hackable, has a scripting interface (at least in the soon to be released version 2.4) and has built-in hackability.
Here is a quick primer on getting your very own, private nation implemented in FreeCiv. Once you are done, you can play as your favorite city, sports team, state, or whatever grouping you like. Want a battle between the Romulans and the Klingons? No problem!
Continue readingMy very first days in America were slightly chaotic. On top of having to deal with a new job and a new country, on top of missing my friends and having to make new ones, I had to deal with bureaucracy that operated in ways completely different than what I was used to. This article is to explain what I learned back in the day (1998). Much of it probably still applies.
Continue readingYesterday, end of day. I had nothing else to do, so I simply decided to pack up my stuff and go to Scripps for a late session. I could see that Pacific Beach was crowded, as usual, and I didn’t have the patience for Black’s. I knew I would be able to spot a spot at the pier, so I just went for it.
I wasn’t expecting much. There was the checkered flag out, which removes most of the best surfing area near the pier, so everybody was forced to huddle as close to the marker as possible to get a whiff of the waves. Plus, there was no spectacular surf in the forecast, and the cams were chatting of slow-rolling, smooth and flattish waves.
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In the previous post I made the claim that the Percentage of Premiums Returned (PPR) is the one number that all insurance companies should give us, so that we have a better idea of what we are buying. I also made the unsubstantiated claim that the PPR is shockingly low, despite a wealth of web sites (strangely affiliated with the insurance industry) claiming that the cost of payout frequently exceeds premiums. Who’s right?
Continue readingWhen you get a loan, they always give you two numbers: the (nominal) interest rate and the APR. The first one takes into account only the interest you pay the bank, while the second is supposed to include fees and other items that get tacked on. Since banks get creative with their fees, you should always consider the APR more important than the nominal interest rate: if a loan costs you 1% up-front, that’s a lot of money to add to a potentially enticing interest rate!
Continue readingY!I used to work at Yahoo! for a very long two and a half years, from mid-2001 to the end of 2003. It was a strange period, with monumental shifts in the Internet. Yahoo! was a the center of it all, but the other players were rapidly rearranging themselves. Microsoft, for the longest time the bane of Yahoo! (more accurately, Microsoft’s MSN division, later Live, later Bing) was rapidly driving itself into irrelevance. On the other hand, the tiny upstart Google was starting to bite at its former master’s heels as it managed its entrance into the email market and other derivative of popular and lucrative Yahoo! products.
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I was looking at the surf reports this morning. Surfline color-codes surf quality: grey means nothing going, blue means don’t go, green means you can go, and orange means you have to go. As soon as color codes were handed out, an ocean of green was staring at me. We don’t have these days often, so I packed my stuff and headed out.
I decided not to try my local break, Pacific Beach, because on Sunday mornings it’s incredibly crowded. That’s still better than on Sunday afternoon, when it’s impossibly crowded, but not exactly what I was looking for. So I headed over the hill (Mount Soledad, although it really is just a hill with a pretentious title) and parked at the Shores lot. I thought I’d walk to the Scripps Pier from there.
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Imagine an office. Two co-workers chatting over some tiny calorie-counting lunch. He is complaining about trifles and trivialities like the world is falling apart. She is listening empathetically, as if she could possibly care.
The two, for mysterious reasons, have a window office. For even more mysterious reasons, they are eating their lunch facing away from that giant status symbol of a window. And while they spoon their sugar-free yogurts and leaf away at that non-fat ranch dressing salad, mayhem ensues just outside the window.
Continue readingNot at all what I was expecting. I thought the ONN would be a news show much like Jon Stewart’s immensely popular The Daily Show on Comedy Channel. Instead, it’s a scripted show about the ugliness of the daily news cycle. It stars an adorable set of characters in various stages of neurotic and reminds one more of a Legend of Ron Burgundy without charisma.
The main character is a poor shmuck imported from Indiana (a stand-in for rural America) to the Big Apple, where he wants to make it big in news. The whole world makes of him, but in the end he gets his break and gets the job he’s been craving. The protagonist is a familiar actor, Christopher Masterson, who used to be Francis, the oldest of the kids in Malcolm in the Middle.
