Output Stream of Consciousness

I find education... frustrating. It feels like two things are very common: Taking identified concerns and going into territory far beyond fair or reasonable to address them Putting undue emphasis on proxy measurements for go… more »

In our youth, when LANs were things you pretty much had to go to an office to get, when signing in after hours, we would often leave plausible-sounding spoof names instead of our real names. So I'm just going to keep this post around as a spot I can… more »

"Oh my god, somebody else is just about to steal my account!" That's the fear they prey on, hoping that you will do anything to stop your account being stolen, and in doing so, will type in your name and password on a fake site, thus ensuring that your… more »

Eight or nine years ago, I embarked on a small project to make non-blocking concurrent programming easier. There was a fair bit of code out there on semaphores and mutexes and getting threads to just wait, also known as blocking. The threads in this… more »

That is the fucking living end. To whomeverso left their fucking tires against our fence. FUCK YOU. JUST - FUCK - YOU. Other little bits of garbage, we could chalk up to the wind, but not the suddenly-appearing fucking little chair from some old… more »

Review of Jonathan Sarfati's Refuting Evolution: Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V more »

Our second son has joined us on the outside and been with us now for about three weeks. It has been a little bit of an adventure so far! He was supposed to be born on November 15. Why so sure? Well, we had a scheduled Cesarean section booked. We went… more »

HP needed to do an update of my printing software. Apparently, they have an issue with spurious "installation cancelled" errors cropping up. I don't think they handled this quite right: more »

Quite frankly, I thought they were done for when the very cool bookstore that they joined, McNally Robinson, closed its downtown Calgary store. It was sheer happenstance that on my way to pick up a lost book at the transit lost and found (what can I s… more »

The indomitable and unapologetically controversial Paul (PZ) Myers of the Pharyngula blog is coming to the University of Calgary next Sunday afternoon, January 25th (date confirmed!) in the ICT building (see here for maps of the campus), room 102 as the… more »

I finally got a little headspace to upgrade the b2evolution software from 1.8.1RC all the way up to 2.4.2. The upgrade scripts worked impressively; kudos to the b2evolution team for not leaving out those of us who were 21 versions behind :) It… more »

I thought we might escape the Canadian premiere of this poor documentary, having seen nothing of the sort in upcoming movie listings, but I am informed on the theatre locator page of the Expelled! movie site that there are two locations where it will be… more »

Not content with letting me in on my European lottery winnings, or being a company representative, or helping ousted generals smuggle their money out of foreign countries, they have now outdone themselves with THE DEATH THREAT. Full text and very… more »

It's his 199th birthday! Stay safe, and keep yourself in the gene pool, kiddies! more »

I had a bit of a rude awakening coming back home on Monday. My wife had dropped me off at work, or else I would had my shock in the morning, and perhaps waited for a bus that would never come. Calgary Transit opened their McKnight station for public… more »