Blog - /Personal

Lauri Lebo's book The Devil in Dover is a moving account of the 2005 "Intelligent Design" trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. The author does an excellent job of fusing the real stories of many participants in this debacle into a comprehensible timeline. She writes in a way that makes for an enjoyable, diverse, and moving read, preserving the human element of the tale. I recommend it.

I went to a concert featuring The National, Modest Mouse, and R.E.M. I caught only the last song from The National, which was pretty good. It was good enough to cast doubt in my mind as to whether they were Modest Mouse — it would have been depressing to miss MM.

Luckily, I didn't miss them, and enjoyed about an hour and 10 minutes worth of material. There was a good mix of old and new. Isaac Brock was fucking fantastic to see in person. Some kids next to me lit up a cigarette when Modest Mouse played the song Fire It Up, which prompted a security guard to take them aside for a talking to. Paper Thin Walls was a personal favorite, due to the walls on my apartment conducting a bit too much sound. The instrumental work in Doin' the Cockroach was particularly snappy. I was able to see one of the band members break out a trumpet with a mute on some of the songs. They did a really good job of bringing the concert songs at least up to par with how they sounded on the albums, which was quite a feat.

R.E.M. was about how I expected them to be. In a word: mediocre. I left about halfway through their set because I didn't hear any of their older stuff.

I enjoyed the setting for the concert. In the backdrop were some hills with a tiny bit of vegetation on them, and a bit of the famous Hollywood sign. Not so enjoyable was the gaudy eyesore of an electrically-lit cross off to the right in the background. With the hills, it was a contrast of majesty and masochism.

There were only a couple of songs from the Modest Mouse set that I didn't recognize, probably because they were from the latest album. I'll have to pick it up now.

In celebration of my old Volvo passing a smog inspections test (well ... actually I was just trying to go around the block after finding a grocery store), I took it for a drive south on Coldwater Canyon and Mulholland. The view was really something, as these roads wind their way up a hill with a significant drop-off. The hairpin turns reminded me of playing Need for Speed and MotoRacer 9 years ago, except at lower speeds and with a vehicle that handles better at that speed. I wonder if these roads are part of any video game I've played; they gave me a certain sense of deja vu.

It has now been three weeks since I relocated to LA. The process of moving in lends itself to the analogy of bootstrapping a system. The goal of not sleeping on the floor (an important one for me) has the following dependency chain:

1. Block until movers arrive with computer and other items
2. Install Internet service (for getting directions and evaluating furniture options ahead of time)
3. Block until arrival of car from a different mover
4. Obtain driver's license and temporary permit for car from the DMV, which involved a very long metro trip
5. Clean driver's side window and front window to make it safe to drive more than a block
6. Take car to car wash place to make it safer to drive for longer distances
7. Make trip to furniture place
8. Receive couch and bed from delivery people
9. Install couch
10. Reboot the system (sleep)
11. Install bed

I decided to use the metro instead of renting a car, based on some decent experiences in West Lafayette with their transportation system. That has been a somewhat dismal choice, mostly due to needing to learn several lessons about life in a big city. Such as: don't sit on a bench for more than a half hour if an angry panhandler is known to be in the area. And also: the LA Dash tends to zigzag across different roads, rather than staying on its current road, leaving me an uphill walk of perhaps a mile and a half to get back on track. I got my car a few days ago, and I have never been more happy to have one.

It's interesting to go to a place like Starbucks at different times of the day and note how the atmosphere changes. I had never seen anything like that until I came here.

I went to IKEA yesterday to get a couch and a bed, as I did not bring any furniture here with me. The couch looked easy to set up, so I did that yesterday. Even though the couch was a tad narrow, it beat sleeping on the floor. My goal for the end of the weekend is to set up the bed and buy a microwave.

I will be an associate software engineer at a company with good open source intentions in LA, as of next month. It is a very exciting time.

It has now been approximately one year since I decided to identify myself as a "positive" atheist. I have spent today reflecting on how I came to this point, what I prioritize most, and how I want to proceed in the future.

It feels good to be rid of a text which contains many ideas that can be used for great harm, and only a minority of which contain good. Justifying the preeminence of a (self-evident) selection of moral ideas over others from the same text is tedious, and leaves room for error.

The claimed exclusivity of this text is also a problem. It aggravates one's senses to be contained inside of a monoculture, a walled garden of thought. "There is something here which doesn't love a wall" — Robert Frost.

When I went to a local non-theists meeting at college, there were a few young members who were openly rude in conversation to some of those who had theistic beliefs. I don't like that. As a general rule, I think it important to be respectful and to respond thoughtfully to what people say. The American Atheists talk show can sometimes have that same sort of hostile feel (though to a lesser extent, and much of what they say I enjoy hearing). The Minnesota Atheists podcasts and radio show, on the other hand, are more even-handed.

The most recent works by authors Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are excellent reads — both were once theists, and have some understanding for the positions of their opponents. It is neat to hear about the unexpected popularity of these books when the authors went on tour to promote them.

One of the perks of purchasing an OLPC laptop was that T-mobile offers a year of free Internet access at their hotspots in Borders and Starbucks. When the OLPC foundations send you the "order has shipped" email, you have to click on the numeric IP address link in that message to activate the account.

I tested this access briefly today in the Borders and Starbucks locations in West Lafayette. The hotspot access worked quite well, though I had to use the normal login via HTTPS web form through an unauthenticated access point, rather than WPA, since the OLPC can't yet do username+password authentication to an access point. While in Starbucks, a girl asked me some questions about who made the laptop and what it was. This is definitely another benefit of ownership :^) .