Month: October 2004
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ADD and Working Adults
Excellent Article by Lisa Belkin on how adults with signs of ADD deal with full time jobs. One obvious point: many bloggers exhibit signs of ADD as well, and having internet access for a cubicle worker is (for me at least) outright torture. It is accepted wisdom in A.D.D. circles that certain types of work…
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Osama Bin Laden: Very Good!
Thanks, Tom Tomorrow (and yes, I’ve bought your book!). I’m sure the Democratic Party engages in some reductionism, although not as much as Republicans. When listening to Republicans speak, I just can’t help thinking that they have turned off their brains and think you must do too.
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Kiss and Tell (in Context)
Vitaly Tretyakov, (in a lovely interview with Anna Malpas ), describes how Russian critics write film reviews: “Our Russian reviewers write their reviews, as a rule, in the following way: ‘While watching the new film by director X, I remembered my first kiss.’ (Then follows the story of the first, second and 15th love of…
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Jogging v. Novelwriting
Russian translator Kevin Kinsella compares jogging to novel writing: In addition to killing a couple of morning hours, jogging so regularly lends me a bit of respectability otherwise sorely lacking in my life. When someone learns of my early morning regimen, I like to think that they say, ?Wow, Kevin?s really got his act together!?…
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Alter Egos
When I was growing up I went by the name Bobby Nagle. I changed my name to Robert Nagle in my middle twenties. Who would have ever thought that on google the number one search result for “Bobby Nagle” would a gay European porn star? I pity the elementary school teacher or high school sweetheart…
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Too Many Writers? No Way!
Dan Green summarizes some laments about writing in the Antioch Review. A sample quote from Daniel Harris’s “The Writing Life: Envy and Editing”: The unsettling new power of PR has delivered a crippling blow to the writer’s very sense of himself as an artist, since what he treasures most, his talent, his skill, can be…
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A Bunch of People Criticize the President
Letter by Business and Economics Professors Criticizing Bush’s economic policies. Novelists are supporting Kerry too (surprise surprise). Joyce Carole Oates writes: Like virtually everyone I know, I’m voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to…
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Good Art Can Have (And Should Have) Political Values
TX litblogger Robert Nagle explores the uneasy relationship between art and political engagement.
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Finding Donut Recipes in Telephone Books
Amid the talk recently of Nobel Prizes, here’s an idea: give the prize to a sci fi writer! I’m no fan of sci fi, but Lem and Bradbury would be excellent candidates of world class stature. Lem in particular would be a particularly cerebral choice. I’ve only read Futurological Congress, but I remember my teacher…
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Institutional Power
In discussing the Supreme Court’s allowing ISP’s not to disclose user’s identities to copyright owners through subpoena, Instapundit explains why automated law enforcement is a bad idea. The brief also identifies a file entitled “harry potter book report.rtf” whose name and tiny size (1K) make obvious that it is not an illegal copy of the…
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Debugging Zope and Python
Debugging Zope via the command line. Also, boa constrictor is a crossplatform python IDE with zope support (More about boa-constrictor). Shane Hathaway (a blogger ) and author of several zope tools including zope, DCWorkflow and others, has a product, Verbose Security, for use with BoaConstructor. Shane has been fiddling around with Zope3 and seems to…
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Why Do They Hate Us?
from Blogdex, I find these tidbits: Jonathan Freedland talks about why other countries should have a say in American elections. His point here is merely rhetorical, but he ends with a closer: Besides, every good Republican knows the world is solid Kerry territory. A survey by pollsters HI Europe earlier this month found that, if…
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Bass Ackwards
Dave Astels on Why Your Code Sucks. OK, so you decide to add tests to your code. That typically isn’t so easy. The odds are that your code wasn’t designed and/or implemented to be easily testable. That means you will have to make changes to it to make it testable… without breaking any of it…
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Essay Question
Essay Question: Though this blog has blogged about practically every conceivable topic under the sun for the past three years, it receives practically no comments from readers. Why? Discuss. (Bonus Question: Why does this weblog receive more comments in a day than the one here receives in a year? )