Holiday Monday Madness

1. Which holidays (if any) do you consider more as a day off from work, than anything else?
The day after Thanksgiving, I suppose, if you count that as a part of the holiday (or if “Black Friday” is given its own holiday status). Labor Day or Memorial Day would fit too. I usually don't get Labor Day off from classes — I did, for once, today, but I did other work, so…

2. Which 3 holidays are most celebrated in your family?
Christmas, Independence Day and Easter, most likely. Sometimes Thanksgiving turns out to be a bigger “family celebration” kind of holiday, however.

3. Do you have an organized filing system at home?
Somewhat. My books are classified topically and I may move to Library of Congress classification someday, just for fun. Papers are filed in different parts of my file cabinet. Non-image documents on my computer are typically organized by date, with some types put into sub-folders. Photos are organized by iPhoto.

4. Do you clip coupons for groceries? If so, do you remember to use them? If not, why?
No — I usually just don't get to them. Aldi doesn't accept coupons either, so sometimes they just aren't relevant.

5. How many magazines do you subscribe to?
Two. eWeek and InfoWorld. I'd like to subscribe to Investor's Business Daily, however it is a bit too pricey and it is more of a newspaper anyway.

6. Do you play any computer games on a regular basis? If so, which is your favorite, and why?
No, but if I had time, I'd love to play some SimCity again someday.

7. Have you watched any movies worth recommending, lately?
What's Up Doc with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal was really funny the other night (my uncle lent his DVD to me). The movie I've seen in the last 45 days that I'd probably recommend most highly would be Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, however.

Evolution and Faith?

I received an interesting article on intelligent design (or rather an argument against it and for evolution from a religious perspective) in my mailbox. This is rather unusual, so I thought I'd share it:

Advocates of American-style “intelligent design” (ID) have had a tough year. Their anti-evolution arguments have been soundly rejected by the scientific community, they lost spectacularly in a highly-publicised federal trial on the issue of ID in schools, and most recently the voters in Kansas rejected ID school board candidates in a statewide election. So they may surely be forgiven for hoping that Pope Benedict's discussions on evolution this month with his former students could bring some rare good news.

You can read the rest here. What strikes me on this, as it does elsewhere, is confusion on the term Intelligent Design. If God is the ultimate causation of evolution, what is that other than Intelligent Design? Perhaps I'm just being a stickler, but I think there are three major positions — Naturalistic Darwinian Evolution, Intelligent Design Evolution and Creationism — and blurring the latter two together just muddies the waters needlessly.

Regardless, the article is worth a read. Thoughts?

Quandary

I was talking to a friend this week about American Literature. I am of the mindset that is rather dubious about the whole venture known as “American Literature.” This state of mind is not so much because I think there is a complete lack of good American works, but because I think the percentage of good to bad is quite a bit higher than in British Literature of the same period. The amount that actually innovates is even lower. As T. S. Eliot argues, true literature is not something entirely new or something that merely copies works of the past, but something that takes the traditions through the new poet's interpretive lens to create a blend of the recognizable and the innovative.

But, I digress. The quandary, my friend pointed out is quite simple: If one questions the existence of American Literature, that is a bit of a problem the questioner as someone who is both American and somewhat of a writer. I'm not so bold as to think I have (or will) produce literature, but if I question the status of American literature, where does that leave those of us dabbling in the minor leagues of American writing?

1,000 Posts (Belated)

Well, the thousand post milestone was passed several weeks ago here on asisaid, and while I planned to say something about it, when it occurred, for a long time prior to the event, I failed to say anything when it finally did happen!

Oh, well.

As a bit of festivity for the event, here's a question for y'all: what's the most interesting thing you've forgotten that you should have remembered?

TQ: (Programming) Languages

This week's TQ from Mark is on programming languages.

1. What was the first language that you learned/used?
If it counts, MS-DOS batch scripting. If not, then Visual Basic.

2. What is your favorite language and why?
Perl. Partly because I've just become comfortable with it, partially because it seems more efficient for most tasks I do than PHP and provides easier to read code than other alternatives such as Python.

3. What is you least favorite and why?
Of those I know anything about, Visual Basic, but the scope of my knowledge is rather limited.

4. What language would you like to learn next?
Latin, French or Spanish. Oh, sorry, programming languages. Er, right. I really don't have any big desire to learn another programming language, although back when I was more into that kind of stuff, it would have been C++.

5. What language do you have no desire to ever learn?
Fortran.

6. What language do you think is the best to start learning programming with?
Probably C/C++ just because of its flexibility.

7. What method you prefer, functional or OO?
For the most part, I've only used functional programming. I'm quite happy with that.

As Imperceptibly as Grief

With summer seeming to quickly fade into autumn this year, I though perhaps I should offer up the soapbox today to my friend Emily — Emily Dickinson, that is.

AS imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away,—
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.

A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.

The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone,—
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest who would be gone.

And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

The Big Thing that Was Ignored

After all the hubbub had settled down over WWDC '06 itself and, especially, the alleged lack of anything “really exciting” being announced by Apple, I stumbled across something that seems to have been mostly ignored that is very exciting: iCal Server. One of Apple's major server offering weaknesses has been the lack of a groupware solution. While Mac OS X Server comes with most everything else you might want in a SMB server package, it offers nothing analogous to the full Exchange package. OpenDirectory does provide directory services using OpenLDAP and Samba, and Apple has also long included Postfix for e-mail serving — but the lack of a server counterpart to iCal has always seemed odd to me.

While not much of a deal was made of it, Apple released a number of FOSS projects at WWDC, not the least of which was Darwin Calendar Server, a python based calendar server which will be included with the next Mac OS X Server as “iCal Server”. This is much like the arrangement by which Darwin Streaming Server is known at QuickTime Streaming Server when included with the OS.

Why is this big news? To my knowledge no FOSS calendaring server has claimed Microsoft Outlook compatibility thus far. I could be wrong, but to my knowledge, such servers, as FOSS versions of older proprietary products, have been stripped of that function, necessitating the purchase of a module from the donator of the code to achieve Outlook support. Support for Apple's own iCal has been even shakier for most of these projects (though Apple claims in a case study that is no longer the case for the Zimba Collaboration Suite). Now, I'm not sure exactly how Apple has this all worked out, but if you can truly get Outlook's calendaring to work with this FOSS project, it will prove a giant boon to system administrators looking for a completely Open Source groupware solution, when assembled with the rest of the Mac OS X Server middleware stack.

Apple also released its launchd startup manager (which, let me tell you, is far faster than any other *nix launching system I've seen and dramatically reduced Mac OS X's boot time when it made its debut in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger), the latest Bonjour (f.k.a. “Rendezvous”) zero-conf implementation and the “infamous” x86 version of the Darwin kernel code. While Apple continues to keep its crown jewels closed, it still seems to be creating a very decent portfolio of in-house created FOSS projects. Moreover, while Darwin Calendar Server is not yet cross-platform, I suspect it will be in the future, just as Darwin Streaming Server is.

In other words, this is big news for everyone who desires FOSS server components, not just Apple users.

The Beginning of the End

Of my time at Lindenwood, that is. Today was the first day of the last semester of my time at Lindenwood University. Having fulfilled all of the general requirements for graduation, as well as my religion major, last semester, this semester's primary purpose is to complete two courses for my English major, American Lit II and History of the English Language. Since I knew I was going to have at least one course spill over into this semester, last fall I picked up a philosophy minor, which meshes well enough into the religion major that I only needed to take three extra courses beyond the electives I had previously chosen in religion. One of those I took last fall, the remaining two I'm taking this fall — Aristotelean Logic and Medieval Philosophy.

Aristotelean Logic is an independent study my philosophy professor came up with as a substitute for normal logic. He thought I might especially enjoy this. In addition, because that left me with a light load, I'm doing another independent study with him just for fun: “Calvin and Aquinas.”

More on the courses themselves in the near future.

What I Need to Do to My Bug

With this guy's additions to his Volkswagen, I could get back and forth to where I need to go a lot faster. What do you think? Should I go ahead and add one to my Beetle?

Oh, and just imagine how well this would work as a solution for quieting those annoying drivers that always have that THUD-THUD-THUD of an overactive bass disturbing everyone sitting around them in traffic. A quick flip of a switch and I'd have their attention and their car might have a nice, blackish discoloration on it too.

DNS Woes Fixed

Well, I called Charter today and had the DNS issue elevated to level 2 support. After doing that, apparently they got right on the issue — I am able to access my sites via my Charter's DNS again. Although using Level 3's DNS servers on my home computer worked OK, I'm glad to be back on Charter's DNS, which seems to provide a bit snappier response.

Note: I think there was some confusion by those who read my last post. The problem was not one with my server or its DNS — those were operating normally the whole time down at the Planet's NOC in Dallas, Texas. The problem had to do with the DNS service that comes with my Charter High Speed cable internet access for my home. Charter's service would not refer my computer to the authoritative name server for the sites I host (my company's DNS). I have no idea why Charter's DNS would fail to work specifically on my site (most likely it also impacted other servers that I am not aware of), but that's apparently what happened.