Chance, Ayn Rand, and the Triumph of Narcissism

[Long post, with a rambling story. It’s worth it, I promise.]

When I was a wee lad in Italy, I had a horrendous Latin teacher. You must know that all high school kids in Italy need to learn Latin (at least back then), and in the higer grades of high schools Latin was taken very seriously. That meant that one of the two essays in the graduation exam had a good chance of being about Latin (the other was always about Italian literature). Having a lousy teacher meant that the rest of us had to go to remediation classes – long, boring, expensive.

‘Sup, Dudes?

Well, it’s been a long while since the last update. I just checked, and it looks like the last entry on this blog was from just after my participation in the AIDS LifeCycle ride – that was LifeCycle 8, and we are at 10 now. I guess living in San Diego has been a lot of fun and a lot of work, and I hadn’t had much time to keep this site updated. Plus, I’ve been posting on a trillion other places – mainly on Blogger – and didn’t feel the need to keep this up-to-date.

2011-01-12 Palomar Mountain W Torrey

2010

Creating Panoramas with Hugin

I stood at the bottom of this thing and took a picture of where I had come down. Then I took a picture of La Jolla to the South. Then one of the nudie beach to the North. Then one of the waves and the low sun. Then I decided I was just going to cover the whole world around me, and figure out a way to stitch the pictures together.

Use OpenOffice.org to Create an Image Gallery

I went on this hike on Christmas Eve – a steep trail down a ravine, with the most unusual people and the most unusual features. At the end, a gorgeous beach with surfers and pretty ladies with parasols waiting for them. Huge mansions staring down from lofty cliffs, and an amazing sunset that colored the cliffs a golden hue of honey.

I looked at the pictures, and they were pretty. Unfortunately, due to the unusual nature of the features and the number of different things you were looking at, it wasn’t quite clear how (or even if) they belonged together, and what the story behind them was. The pictures needed an explanation. A story had to be told.

The Live CD Web Server Project (Ongoing Series - Part I)

Imagine burning a CD with your latest and greatest in web sites, putting it into the computer’s CD drive, turning on, and magically you have your web server running? No installation, no configuration, no login – no viruses, no persistent hacking, no version conflicts?

The idea came to me when running a large computer cluster in a three-tier application. The front end web servers were always the worst problem: they handled all the load, they handled the majority of attacks, they were the entry point for vulnerabilities and denial-of-service abuses.

2010-12-24 Goat Trail To Blacks

2010-12-04 Hilo With Jeff

2010-11-26 Scripps Aquarium