Prejudice[2]

Reviewing some of the comments on my last post it occurred to me that, for many Christian science-fiction fans, fandom was almost certainly their first encounter with religious prejudice directed against them. And the present backlash against the excesses of the Religious Right, feeble though it is, represents the first time that I can remember public criticism of any sort being directed against Christians in the US (at least of the Protestant variety -- when I was growing up, Catholics were regarded in some parts of the country with almost as much suspicion as Jews).

I'm going to resist a number of temptations here, all of which seem likely to lead me into a swamp of bad memories and worse writing, and just drop the subject for now.

Grumph

The chaoswolf took the family out for sushi again, in celebration of having received a paycheck yesterday. It's her favorite restaurant, and her money -- I'm not complaining.

What I am complaining about is the fact that, somewhere along the way, I got a bit of sticky rice lodged in my throat. It's gone now, luckily, but the resultant coughing has given me a sore throat that my usual remedies (dark chocolate and ginger tea) have done little to mitigate.

Got very little done at work, beyond some documentation and a long meeting at which finagler and I continued to be in violent agreement with GW -- who is approaching our current research topic from a totally different direction and with a totally different agenda -- without being convinced that his view of the problem domain has much to do with what we're doing. We did find out that we'd arrived simultaneously at the same technique for synchronizing collections of annotations, though I expect to find that we differ considerably in the details of exactly what we're synchronizing.

And between lunch and a conversation with mr_kurt finagler and I convinced each other that certain questions of how much information to reveal in filenames (important in a distributed system in which most information is encrypted) can be deferred until run-time, and changed on a case-by-case basis. This will complicate some things but greatly simplify, through generalization, others.

But of course I missed my usual lunchtime walk.