The Mandelbear's Musings

A big day, finishing the taxes. It goes pretty smoothly after all the data-gathering is done. Somewhere toward the end of it I went for a nice st/roll with Colleen around the Rose Garden. A pretty good day altogether. And Cash & Carry across the street has 3/4lb bags of beef jerkey, the component of lunch-at-my-desk that I can't get at Trader Joe's.

I made a pretty good chili for dinner.

Among the links, you'll find Ahem! Are You Talking to Me? (Or Texting?) at NYTimes.com. Although coming down mostly on the side of those who consider taking a phone call in the middle of a conversation a serious social offense and bemoaning the end of 20^th Century polite society, it does give a nod to the other side:

But all is not vanity. For anybody with children, a job or a significant other, the expectation these days is that certain special people, usually beginning with our bosses, can reach us at any minute of any day. Every once in a while something truly important tumbles into our in-box that requires immediate attention.

As somebody with all three of the above, I'm glad I have my phone. If somebody calls me on it, I'll at least do them the courtesy of finding out who they are before deciding whether to send them to voice mail.

A very productive couple of days at work; I hit my (largely symbolic) code freeze deadline yesterday evening at 5pm, in spite of having spent far too much time in meetings. There's another, very hard, very real handover deadline coming up on Monday -- I'll be spending the rest of the week documenting and testing.

I walked a little yesterday, and a full three miles on Monday. I was actually present in the moment for much of Monday's walk, and noticed that it felt better than when I spend the time worrying or beating myself up over things I should have done years ago. Not that there isn't plenty of time for that.

I also finished the data-entry for taxes, ran my summary program (which sorts the expenses into categories that are easy for me to put into the forms), and imported last year's data into The Program Formerly Known As TaxCut (henceforth probably TPFKATC).

One of the most annoying things about modern GUI software is that it has no notion of "current directory" even if you start it from a command line in the damned directory; it thinks that you want to put everything in "Documents" or some-such, and often won't even do you the courtesy of exporting into the same directory you saved the document into. Sometimes that's useful, e.g. if you're working on only one project at a time and all your exported .wav files (to give a current example) go into the same directory. If you jump around between projects it's annoying as heck.

I've been reading How To Be Happy, available for free on 17000 Days. There's a section on optimism, which had a different definition from the one I'm used to; you'll also find it in this post. I've always said that I'm a pessimist because I like pleasant surprises. But I've never much liked surprises of any kind, and I'm obviously not expecting any pleasant ones. The definition in the book is:

The biggest difference between optimists and pessimists is that optimists assume good things are permanent and pervade every area of their lives, but assume bad things are temporary and isolated to their limited context.

Pessimists, obviously, assume the opposite. So I'm a pessimist because I expect anything pleasant to be a surprise -- unplanned, unlikely, and temporary. It makes a difference.

As for links, there were several good ones, mostly about computer security. State of Texas exposes data on 3.5 million people is one -- the money quote is:

Often when I am talking with people at shows and seminars I ask them if they have an encryption program in place. Nearly always the answer is "Of course! We have deployed encryption to over 80% of our laptops already."

I then ask about the servers, databases and other critical storage locations of sensitive data and I see a scary look in their eyes... They usually respond with "Oh, that's OK, that information is all inside of our firewall."

Yeah, right.

The other one, Security researcher warns over Dropbox authentication security flaw, is kind of obvious. I mean, if you set up automatic syncing with someplace on the net, it's obvious that your credentials are going to be stored on your local machine, and can be exposed if your account is compromised. Duh.

A good day. (Though I've learned that potato chips are definitely a comfort food. Not so good.) The high point, definitely, was running into marypcb and sbisson in Barefoot while I was buying coffee. Had a good conversation, well worth not going for a walk; the weather was getting gloomy and cold by that point anyway.

Lots of puttering around the offsite backup scripts, disk drives on the router, and the the Starport's energy budget -- the three aren't entirely separate. The router and fileserver need to be upgraded to Squeeze soon, so a few extra reboots aren't going to be noticed in the general scheme of things.

A couple of good links under the cut. I particularly recommend A quintessence of dust - Roger Ebert's really nice ramble about the universe, evolution, and the consolations thereof. Definitely appeals to my particular flavor of scientific/druidic atheism.