Arctangential

This is not a political statement.

The rabbi said if police do not enact the plan, tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews will arm themselves with guns capable of spraying liquid pig lard at suspects.

Every day I come that much closer to turning into a character from an Albert Camus novel.

Well, that was dull. Roughly 10 hours of putative consciousness and I didn’t really do anything. I haven’t even had a shower yet; not sure if I will before bed or not.

For not doing anything, though, I did accomplish enough. I’ve been keeping a to-do list of things I want to get done in the future, and been trying pretty hard (mostly successfully) to only work on one of them at a time, as lack of focus is one of the main productivity killers I contend with. However, the past few weeks I’ve been pretty stymied on the (then) current task: writing an outline for my latest doomed screenplay project. Today I just sat down and banged out the last few things I had to get written down and I finally got it done. It’s not perfect, but I think any more attempts to work on it at this point will just result in a general increase in frustration.

After I was able to cross that item off my list, I was actually able to move on to and complete the next task, which was to write a program to convert my screenplay XML files into RTF (Microsoft Word documents) files. That only took about an hour or two, and now I’m working on some redesigns for my “blinking lights” project. There are 3 or 4 real goals at this point: first, I want to rearrange all the components so they’re laid out a little more reasonably. Next, I need to figure out the right way to sink the extra current that’s making things blink wrong and then I want to make sure everything works when running from a 9V battery instead of transformed wall signal. Finally, I need to figure out what all things I need to get in order to put all this stuff on a circuit board.

I’ve already taken my sleeping pill for tonight so I think I’ll eschew working with electricity, but I should be able to finish all that stuff up in a few days. The task after that is to write some code to help build LEGO mosaics; something I’ve been meaning to do for some time. Should be fun.

Via Stimps: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3451207.stm

This got me thinking about what kinds of things NOT to name a child. And I came up with a list. For each of these, just append your own last name to simulate it being your own child:

* Bucephalus Satan

* Elcardion M. Poughkiepsie

* Smithsonian “el Gorda” Clamato

* Clem

Did I miss any obvious ones?