Merry Christmas to all

Engaged

I'm not sure who still reads this at this point, but I did ask the lovely Staci Smith to marry me this evening, and she said yes.

For you detail people, we have not set a date yet, nor a place.

And chicks sure do like shiny things...

I'm blogging elsewhere these days

I've devoted most of my free time lately to getting Stronico off the ground, and consequently I've been blogging at the Stronico Blog. I've decided to write about every problem that takes me more than 15 minutes to solve, it's my HowToFix series for Silverlight and related technology.

I'm still alive!

Not that you would know it by my pathetic posting. Here's some links for you, my loyal and neglected followers

• Comparing Modern Education to a Placebo
• Ideas and Execution
• More from Sivers -

  Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.
  
  A fancy tool just gives the second-rater one more pillar to hide behind. Which is why there are so many second-rate art directors with state-of-the-art Macintosh computers.

• I really liked Never Eat Alone

Why Nerds are Unpopular

I read this essay Why Nerds are Unpopular a few days ago and feel the need to share it with everyone. I don't agree with all of it, Graham is looking deeply into a shallow pool when he examines the American High School Experience but a lot of it rings true to me. School is the only place to be (outside of prison) where attend by law, with no real method of exit. I remember thinking that I hated life in middle and high school, only to find after I left that I just hated being in school, confined with people I didn't really know for eight hours a day with no option of leaving.

Eric Hoffer has several essays about being useful as the key to self fulfillment. Being in school, you are by definition, not being useful. I'm also reminded of Joel Spolsky's dictum "Happiness is controlling your environment. If you're the socially awkward type, (which I was!) then you have no control over the only environment you have any hope of controlling, which is your social environment.

Well worth reading.

DigitalToolFactory.net launches

After far too long, I finally got DigitalToolFactory.net up and going - it's my work site for those not aware.

Odd fact

There is no word for "Heresy" in Hebrew.

Stronico begins

As Silverlight 3 nears release - so does Stronico - my next killer app, or in this case, a visual contact and private network manager. Hopefully it will be done by the end of summer.

I just finished the home page for the site (albeit it will change in a few days as the logo gets completed. Check it out at Stronico.com

Since it's been a long time

I think I will check to see if the blog still works.

I'm big in Canada

Via the Trailer Park Boys, it's hilarious, for me anyway. Apparently I like weed and Enchiladas.

Check it out

The GOP biological problem

There has been much hubub about Arlen Specter's switch to the democrats, saying they're losing the "Moderate" wing. My theory: The GOP's primary impediment is not ideological, it's biological. They're stuck with their corrupt deadwood, made even more rotted by their brief period in control of the legislative and executive branch. They have no credible voice on the current spending orgy because they haven't been in the credibility business in any form for quite some time.

By getting rid of the old guard (albeit not intentionally) they would seem to be solving the problem.

Keeping the blog alive....

Sorry, I've been busy lately. Here is a random assortment

• Velvet Underground on YouTube
  
• Justice, War, Etc from David Friedman
• Interesting article about Crime in Atlanta
• A nice profile about a former client of mine.
• The Agitator puts it very well with "we’ve reached the point where even jaded libertarian cliches present an inaccurately optimistic picture of what’s going on"
• A very good explanatory video by Tim Hartford.
  

Yet another belated tab clearing post

• Economics of Ticket Scalping
• The end of newspapers and the future of newspapers
• A tech support secret handshake

Sparse posting and random thoughts

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, a happy development has taken up a my free time.

And the random thought - Obama's new "Smarter government, somehow!" push could serve to keep the nags, parasites, and do-gooders busy and let creative people create things, instead of having them filter into the general population as seems to have been the case over the past several years.