More Pablo: all

2019-08-01 — 🐄 Beefs with Docker 🐳. (🕑 7 min) I have some beefs with Docker, also talk about what's good about it.
2019-07-29 — ⛰ Celeste 8b Golden 🍓. (🕑 1 min) I recorded myself beat a hard level of Celeste with no deaths. A different one this time!
2019-07-13 — 🐕 What I've learned from Sapo 🐸. (🕑 7 min) Almost 4 years with my dog, it's been a journey.
2019-06-26 — 😈 Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night 🌕. (🕑 5 min) Longer-form writeup of reactions to Bloodstained: RotN
2019-06-18 — ⛰ Celeste 6b Golden 🍓. (🕑 1 min) I recorded myself beat a hard level of Celeste with no deaths.
2019-06-11 — 🤔 Introspective questions 🤜🤛. (🕑 5 min) I answer some questions about myself from a "kill small-talk" blog post.
2019-06-05 — 🌎 The Light Brigade 👩‍🚀👨‍🚀. (🕑 3 min) I read (and enjoyed) The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley
2019-05-31 — 🐠 Introducing Cichlidia 🐟. (🕑 2 min) Karen and I bought a house, want to build a space for good people 😄
2019-05-27 — 💊 Deconstruct 2018 Talk: A Fresh Look on Failure 🗣. (🕑 1 min) My Deconstruct talk is up! Links to the talk, further reading, the proposal video, and more
2019-05-16 — 💻 Back on my bullshit: Self-hosted Adventures ✉️. (🕑 10 min) Overthinking self-hosted services.
2019-05-10 — 💻 That Consumption life: The Big Nine 9️⃣. (🕑 13 min) I read The Big Nine, liked it fine, but with many qualms.
2019-04-26 — 🤖 Machine Learning: Programming's Asbestos 🧠. (🕑 6 min) Recent Machine Learning advances are cool but IMO pretty overhyped.
2019-04-21 — 🧙🏼‍♂️ Tabletop character: Ralmahant 🦝. (🕑 6 min) Description of a new tabletop character; a magic-using stout feline asshole
2019-04-11 — 🇸🇬🇮🇩 Asia Trip 2019 🇹🇼🇰🇷. (🕑 7 min) I spent two weeks traveling Asia, it was extremely gratifying.
2019-04-09 — 🌓 The City In The Middle Of The Night 🐊. (🕑 4 min) I talk about a book I read (The City In The Middle Of The Night, by Charlie Jane Anders).
2019-01-18 — Recent Metroidvanias 🐛. (🕑 4 min) I played 3 video games this past month. Games are fun!
2019-01-16 — Fast food, fascism, banality 🍔. (🕑 2 min) Fascists are the worst, and they can't even be interesting about what they eat.
2019-01-12 — Mario, made better 🍄. (🕑 3 min) Examples of the Mario universe, remixed and interpreted.
2019-01-03 — 2018 in Review 📅. (🕑 4 min) Greatest hits of 2018, looking forward into 2019.
2018-12-22 — I don't recognize that 🗣 🙉. (🕑 3 min) Suggesting that CSS-In-JS is just another example of "not my problem, therefore invalid."
2018-12-08 — Tumblr banning porn 🤦‍♂️. (🕑 5 min) Tumblr is banning porn; I think this is Bad, and part of a few Bad trends.
2018-11-17 — Bye, Facebook. You're terrible.. (🕑 3 min) I'm deactivating Facebook, it's Bad.
2018-11-11 — That Consumption Life: Jane, Inkeeper, Gentleman, ROUS. (🕑 5 min) Some things I've watched/read that I loved
2018-10-18 — Favorite Sketches. (🕑 2 min) Some videos I've been watching for years and years.
2018-09-10 — Burning Man 2018 🔥. (🕑 5 min) I went to Burning Man and here's a lot of text and photos.
2018-08-18 — Huevo con Chorizo 🍳. (🕑 2 min) I wrote about my lunch for the office once.
2018-08-18 — Working hours for engineers 🗓. (🕑 4 min) Engineering is weird work, so talking about hours is weird too
2018-08-18 — Weight, bodies, agency, and a few good months 📉. (🕑 7 min) I lost some weight after making some changes, rather happy with it.
2018-06-28 — Movie roundup 🎬. (🕑 3 min) I've watched a lot of movies this summer.
2018-06-04 — GitHub + Microsoft ramble 😼. (🕑 4 min) Some rambles about the recent acquisition news.
2018-06-01 — Thanks Fred Rogers, albeit briefly 😌. (🕑 2 min) I like Fred Rogers
2018-05-23 — Deconstruct gratitude 🙏🏼. (🕑 1 min) Grateful for Deconstruct, fresh off the presses.
2018-05-18 — "What do you think of JavaScript"? 👾. (🕑 5 min) JavaScript is a lot to think about
2018-05-14 — Stop lionizing Elon Musk 🤡. (🕑 4 min) If you admire Elon Musk I think you're wrong, or at least focus on the wrong things.
2018-05-10 — Alice Goldfuss: Foot Candles in tech 📹. (🕑 1 min) A favorite thing on tech culture I've read.
2018-05-01 — That consumption life: Enneagrams, Jessica Jones, more Celeste. (🕑 3 min) Recent things I've consumed.
2018-04-20 — Deconstruct and Donuts 🍩. (🕑 3 min) I got accepted into Deconstruct, and want to celebrate my wins.
2018-04-19 — Hugh Jass Message 🗣. (🕑 2 min) A small project to troll your friends.
2018-04-17 — Stories, making things, education, hopes 💻. (🕑 3 min) Thoughts and reactions to a great story on One Laptop Per Child.
2018-04-12 — Product, metrics, and who to serve 📊. (🕑 5 min) Feeling like smart things are happening doesn't mean they're happening
2018-04-09 — Tabletop Character: Ángel Salinas 👴🏼🇳🇮. (🕑 6 min) Description of my Fate character, Ángel Salinas.
2018-04-04 — Tabletop Character: Gun person (process) 🔫. (🕑 3 min) I needed a gun character, here are some concepts.
2018-04-03 — Tabletop character: Gorlif 🐭⚔️. (🕑 4 min) Wrote up my Mouse Guard character
2018-04-03 — Tabletop character: Homage/Karreus! 😈. (🕑 5 min) Meet my most recent D&D character.
2018-03-29 — Overthinking a Tomb Raider. (🕑 4 min) I saw Tomb Raider, played Tomb Raider
2018-03-23 — Celeste playthrough. (🕑 1 min) Video when I played through a game I love
2018-03-21 — 🐍 Python, classes, tuples. (🕑 3 min) Resources I used to learn (and kind of enjoy) Python
2018-03-20 — That consumption life: Broken Earth, Celeste, Avatar. (🕑 3 min) Here are three things I loved and recommend immediately.
2018-03-18 — My setup. (🕑 5 min) What my computer usually looks like, workspace tools.
2018-03-13 — Another week. (🕑 3 min) Articles I liked this week.
2018-03-12 — NYer article on communities, social media. (🕑 3 min) Don't say "there are no good solutions," there are.
2018-03-09 — Engineer Showboating. (🕑 8 min) How to fake it (in 2010, anyways)
2018-03-05 — This week. (🕑 1 min) Things I liked this week
2018-03-01 — What developers mean when they say "Legacy Code". (🕑 5 min) I talk a bit about meanings behind the phrase "legacy code."
2018-02-25 — This week. (🕑 2 min) Reading I enjoyed this week
2018-02-24 — Moved to Brooklyn. (🕑 1 min) 200-odd words after being awake for 28 hours, packing and moving.
2018-02-20 — Trying OCaml 🐫. (🕑 4 min) I announce a static site generator I wrote and describe first OCaml impressions. 🐫
2018-02-19 — Millenials, Attention Spans, Discourse, Creepers. (🕑 5 min)
2018-02-12 — Fun rituals for the Coder at Work 🖥. (🕑 3 min)
2018-02-08 — 🗣 Meetings, Part 2: Behind the symptom. (🕑 5 min)
2018-02-01 — 🗣 Meetings, Part 1: Leaders and Org Worms. (🕑 6 min) 🎵 The song for this post is , by Destiny's Child 🎵.
2018-01-29 — Blogs, and many of my favorites. (🕑 4 min) 🎵 The song for this post is , by The Temptations. 🎵
2018-01-28 — Pablo seeking a date in 2016. (🕑 4 min) 🎵 The song for this post is , by Biggie Smalls.🎵
2018-01-23 — Services, monoliths, modularity. (🕑 7 min) A people perspective to why so many startups wanna Microservice, and why I think this isn't the right call.
2018-01-18 — That consumption life: Culture Lectures. (🕑 5 min) 🎵 The song for this PR is , by Public Enemy 🎵
2018-01-16 — Paper worlds, the heroes who inhabit them. (🕑 3 min) 🎵 The song for this post is , by Neil Cicierega and community 🎵
2018-01-15 — n > 1. (🕑 2 min)
2018-01-14 — 🐸 Sapo 🐸 surgery update. (🕑 2 min)
2018-01-13 — 🐸 Sapo 🐸 going into surgery. (🕑 2 min)
2018-01-11 — I feel like him. (🕑 0 min)
2018-01-10 — ⛓ＢＬＯＣＫＣＨＡＩＮ⛓. (🕑 4 min)
2018-01-07 — Feeling good when you're feeling bad. (🕑 3 min)
2018-01-05 — Shoutout to Steve Ballmer. (🕑 1 min) On :
2018-01-04 — Minimal Pages, brought to you by the letter F. (🕑 1 min) New look! of the before (and the previous new look was logged ).
2018-01-02 — Towards a More Open Web. (🕑 3 min) I've started blogging more. I've also invested more recently in tooling around modifying this site. This was never a bad idea for me to do, but there is a reason behind it: I'm consciously trying to move away from my dependence and contribution to , where all the power is held and gated by Facebook, Google, and Amazon. I don't think this is good for me, and I don't think it's been good for societies, generally.
2017-12-30 — 2017 in Review. (🕑 5 min) I've done this twice recently ( , ), let's do it for 2017!
2017-12-29 — Animal Crossing: New Leaf. (🕑 5 min) I used to blog about , so here's one I've been enjoying recently:
2017-12-21 — Blog updates (2017). (🕑 2 min) I posted yesterday!
2017-12-20 — Two anecdotes about culture. (🕑 3 min) Here are two little anecdotes about companies and culture, apropos of nothing.
2017-06-17 — Dip your toes into some MUSIC (part 1: Chip, Dub, #Deep, Mashup). (🕑 6 min) One of the most fun parts of dating someone can be learning about the art that moves them and sharing the art that moves you. I've read books for people, eaten albums, played video games, binged TV shows, and generally been exposed to all sorts of amazing this way.
2017-06-05 — An anecdote on runtimes. (🕑 5 min) My first gig was working on , a (comparably) little-loved app runtime that was ahead of its time; I'd argue its fate as a faded silhouette of its potential was, as with most products, due to People Issues and changes in the context, in this case related to Macromedia's acquisition that touched everything in the Flash family, and . But that's a deeper post for another time that I'm absolutely not qualified to write. Here, I just want to go into a cute engineering anecdote that tickled me.
2017-06-05 — 2016 in review. (🕑 8 min) I wrote most of this on the last day of 2016. Then I put it down and forgot about it. I'm publishing it late, but will throw color commentary in italics . Here we go.
2016-12-29 — Advent of Code 2016. (🕑 3 min) A co-worker linked a few of us to , a coding challenge that released a new puzzle every day for December, leading to the 25th.
2016-10-12 — Observations after another go-round of tech interviewing. (🕑 4 min) Ha! So I'm leaving Reonomy. Not what I thought I'd write after the way ended. But we muster the most hope when it's most desperately needed, and I was needing it then.
2016-08-18 — Six Months of Managing. (🕑 8 min) It's been a pretty momentous few months for me at . Like I mentioned in my post, it's been the most professionally fulfilling job I've had, and looks on track to be the gig I've kept the longest (currently Adobe, where I was for about 2 years).
2016-08-18 — Businesses I don't hate the idea of building. (🕑 5 min) I referred previously to the desire to maybe build my own business one day, and here are two ideas that I don't entirely hate (which, if you know me, is a rare thing).
2016-06-26 — New look, new page. (🕑 1 min) I've decided to take another shot at this page. While the ole' poop-colored serif site was nice, now it's time to make things MODERN 👽
2016-01-06 — Augmenting Dropwizard with Swagger and Rollbar. (🕑 7 min) The following is a cross-post with the . It was made to soar and look good there, but figured I'd put it here since it's still my writing. 😛
2016-01-02 — 2015 in review. (🕑 9 min) Let's blog blog this one, and talk about what my life is like for a bit. Like it's LiveJournal again! Here's my 2015 in review and hopes for 2016; a brief, incomplete, mostly incorrect list.
2015-07-05 — Using Erlang. (🕑 7 min) The following is cross-posted with the Ghostlight blog.
2015-05-28 — My favorite hypothetical virus. (🕑 1 min) I took and TA-ed my college's , where we did things like write malware and put it on VMs, or sillier projects like . Who knows what they're doing now.
2015-05-11 — I like Java fine. (🕑 6 min) Statement: I am plenty happy to use Java in a large number of contexts.
2015-05-01 — Salary, compensation, and tech labor.. (🕑 3 min) Today on Twitter is , where we do what's common in many countries (but taboo here) and talk openly about our salary experiences. While I'll tweet my numbers, here are some other thoughts on salaries, tech, and pay.
2014-12-01 — _Sup for Android_ - Part 3. (🕑 3 min) And the final part!! covered architecture, and covered libraries. Let’s finish this pup up!
2014-12-01 — _Sup for Android_ Part 2: Electric Boogaloo. (🕑 7 min) Welcome back! covered architecture, and covers testing and miscellany. Here we’ll talk about --
2014-12-01 — Tech overview for _Sup for Android_ - Part 1. (🕑 4 min) I’m one of a small team of engineers for , now on the and . Download it! Use it! Every day! Make our founders and their investors happy. The more people are happy, the more likely it is I continue to get paid. I don’t need the money, but the people I owe do.
2014-02-23 — Why I Play StarCraft. (🕑 4 min) Last year my cousin Diego posted a Facebook status along the lines of "dude... I'm actually liking Chipotle! What's happening to me?" to which I responded "Diego, my love for Chipotle has lasted longer than all my relationships combined. Get with the program."
2013-12-17 — Philly Murals. (🕑 1 min) I've been living in Philadelphia now for about a month, and I'm very impressed with the murals in the city. Most city art projects are small-scale, unobtrusive, and extremely tepid.
2013-12-04 — Done with Compilers. (🕑 6 min) I'm on a bit of a professional hiatus right now, having left Google in August to pursue Big Life Things. I had some ideas for a big engineering project to do in the meantime, and like any language nerd, I wanted to write my own language. This is daunting -- L. Peter Deutsch , and a perusal of the does a good job to scare you away.
2013-12-04 — Joss Whedon, the word Feminist. (🕑 9 min) [Disclaimer: I benefit from virtually every type of privilege society grants: namely, I'm White-presenting, cis, male, straight, thin, well-off, etc. Privileged people talking about movements aiming to equal the playing field are often and questions over to what degree I should involve myself in conversations like this are , so take the below with this in mind. I couldn't find the original, but remember this reproduction of just to be clear.]
2013-11-12 — Adventures in Programming Language Bikeshedding. (🕑 3 min) opens a great little on rust-dev, proving that you can wink and "ironically" be aware that you're doing something you might think is uncool in the general sense while still totally doing it (see ). While much less harmful than marginalizing people, he's suggesting in the subject title ("For Great Justice") and his many qualifications ('I am aware that I am jumping into an issue at a point in time that's considered "late in the game".') that he's aware that his suggestions, no matter how worthy or well-intentioned, are coming from a place where they probably can't or won't be implemented, but he still just can't help himself but send them.
2013-11-11 — Blogging Solutions. (🕑 6 min) A friend recently asked for some advice regarding blogging solutions, and I realized it's a pretty big space. Here's some advice after a few years of blogging, a bit of experience with blogging engines, and general technical proficiency.
2013-11-05 — The Smash Brothers. (🕑 1 min) While , one of the games closest to my heart is Super Smash Bros. Melee. I probably played that game more than any other in high school, and only as I was having to focus on my senior year and a major production did I discover that there was a high-level scene, where people (about my age, often younger) from disparate cities would drive up and down coasts to play and learn from each other.
2013-11-04 — Quick write-up of some books. (🕑 6 min) I've driven a lot these last few months: first from San Francisco to Austin, from Austin to Washington DC, a few trips from DC to Philadelphia, and recently DC to Wooster, Ohio (not having a boss is great for this).
2013-10-22 — Two works by Peter Bussigel. (🕑 1 min) In college, as part of I got to see some works by I'm glad he was better at archiving his work than I was.
2013-10-18 — On Depression (mine). (🕑 8 min)
2013-09-30 — Breaking Bad. (🕑 6 min)
2013-09-30 — Excellent read on Gone Home. (🕑 2 min) just published so far. An excerpt:
2013-09-29 — Verbing Software. (🕑 4 min) I've mentioned that often people will often , hoping to invoke some feeling from the reader. It's obviously done with software too, and I'd like to "verb" two particular projects attack certain software problems, and hope more software tackles similar problems.
2013-09-17 — BioShock: Infinite. (🕑 5 min) When I upgraded my video card, a key came with the purchase. Given that all my friends loved it, I played it through and had some OPINIONS on it.
2013-01-04 — Good ole 14/14. (🕑 4 min) My buddy and I had a Twitter conversation about learning Zerg in the lower levels of Starcraft 2, and asked what a good beginner build would be for a low-level player trying to get the basics.
2012-12-18 — Stream Ads. (🕑 9 min)
2012-12-14 — Shootings. (🕑 4 min)
2012-10-22 — loving yourself with EBOOKS. (🕑 4 min) While I'm still ramping up at the , I've found a love of code again and recently launched new side project. I may still work on it yet, but chances are I'll leave it be for a bit while I pursue other interests (hey, it works well as is and I'm not shipping it :-p).
2012-01-18 — Smoke Weed Every Day. (🕑 1 min) In the tradition of educating the masses on memes and Internet trends, I've recently been in love with appropriation of Snoop Dogg. This post isn't personally an endorsement of marijuana, nor is this disclaimer a recommendation against it.
2012-01-17 — Testing, and the lost art of the manual. (🕑 7 min) Note: I edited a bunch of this language to be a bit more, uh, fair. Looking back, I was very angry! This is also an example of "ignoring Hot New Things is its own skill."
2011-11-14 — Pretentious Titles and Pedantry, Part Paul. (🕑 4 min) Here's a long overdue post: what the hell is up with the title to your earlier post, mainly the term I admit to indulging a bit; I'll try my best to explain the term here since it right well blew my mind when I learned it.
2011-05-31 — On Failure (Personal). (🕑 2 min) To contrast to the of this double-post, let's talk about something a little more familiar to the folk at home: failing at life. This is prescient to me because of this:
2011-05-31 — On Failure (Computing). (🕑 3 min) While I'd also like to speak of today, I've been thinking a lot more about system failure.
2011-04-01 — Homebrew comfort music. (🕑 1 min) Often when coding and confronted by a problem you don't know how to solve, it's nice to have music that's fun/good/comfortable enough to tune the world out, but not one that will overtake you. Here's a bunch of YouTube links that I bounce between.
2011-03-24 — Kill Null. (🕑 4 min) The other day, I :
2011-03-14 — "First, try to be something, anything, else.". (🕑 3 min) Here's an old, but . The author is pretty funny, and I think most of what he writes applies just as well to any endeavor you choose to pursue with any interest.
2011-03-07 — No Time Like the Present. (🕑 1 min) After playing Skies of Arcadia (probably my favorite JRPG of all time, with the ), I took a liking to the Age of Exploration: a time where new lands could be explored with a good ship and a lot of gumption.
2011-03-03 — An Anecdote on Observational Indistinguishibility. (🕑 1 min) I once saw Tony Kushner speak (playwright, author of and , among other things). During his talk he mentioned a cute litle anecdote to illustrate how he felt about in the playwriting process.
2011-01-06 — Welcome to the new blog!. (🕑 1 min) Welcome to the new morepablo.com! After tons of reading, I decided to move my blog over to , for a variety of reasons:
2011-01-06 — I'll be blogging again soon.... (🕑 1 min) I just got back to work after a lovely, lovely break, and will get back to blogging Real Things soon. In the meantime, recording a milestone:
2010-12-13 — How to tell someone their code sucks. (🕑 1 min) Some days I just wish I were David Korn
2010-12-10 — Something nice about every language I've used. (🕑 2 min) Inspired by (and more great answers on the ), here's one nice thing about each of the languages I can remember using in any meaningful capacity:
2010-12-07 — STOP IT WITH YOUR STATE. (🕑 4 min) Alright forks, time for some smugness. I know, on this blog?!? But bear with me. I'm just completely pissed at a number of bugs I've been chasing down, at work and at home, and after looking for the more general problem, it's all about state. ALL OF IT.
2010-11-21 — Another lazy video post. (🕑 1 min) The weekends are when I get lazy. I got promoted to Diamond League in Starcraft. I'm still plugging away on ScrabbleCheat (see the branch 'feature-curses-ui'). Did me some laundry.
2010-11-18 — Every morning of my undergrad. (🕑 1 min) I had a Serious post all lined up, made of words and things, but found an old video I forgot the name of, and decided to post it instead.
2010-11-13 — I have a music degree, too. (🕑 1 min) Little known fact, but true. While I took traditional music theory and piano, I kind of endured that; the degree had a focus on Electronic Music and digital media production. It was affiliated with the program at Brown.
2010-11-13 — The Road to Lisp Survey. (🕑 3 min) I, Paul Meier, do solemnly offer these responses to the Road to Lisp Survey
2010-11-07 — THE LAND OF LISP. (🕑 1 min) It's been a while since I've been able to run through a code book, with life throwing me so many welcome curveballs since the summer. But I'm finally taking the time to work through a book like old times; this go-round is with Conrad Barski's . I probably wouldn't have gone for it, but the music video he made was just too cute:
2010-10-27 — CS Pranks: Push it!. (🕑 2 min) While working as a at Brown, my buddy and I would frequently find ways to 'spice up' the workspace. If we ever found the other person's workstation empty without being properly xlocked, we'd usually pull pranks on each other: 'alias ls='eject; ls' being a popular harmless one, or writing zwrite username -m "PAUL LOGGED OUT" on my .logout file, executed anytime I logged out.
2010-10-24 — Fear and Loathing. (🕑 3 min) has , this time over after his "I's afraid of Muslins!" kerfuffle. His article is great by describing the general trend of fear and loathing in America:
2010-10-24 — Back from Istanbul!. (🕑 2 min) I'm a week back from my marvelous trip, photos over at and .
2010-10-08 — Off to Istanbul!. (🕑 1 min) I'm off next week to visit Madly Brilliant in her current home of Istanbul, Turkey. She's abroad for the first time, spending 5-ish months as a lab tech, so my visit bisects hers. Mad props to Adobe for letting me do this ^_^
2010-10-04 — moar remixes. (🕑 1 min) I'm a tired, grumpy Geodude, but I have to post these remixes, because they're quite lovely. 16 pop tunes:
2010-09-30 — Some Professor Layton Prolog!. (🕑 1 min) Time to combine two of my favorite things: and obscure languages! There was one puzzle (of the hardest diffficulty) that I could have spent 40 minutes working out, but instead spent an hour and half solving in Prolog (for those unfamiliar with Prolog, check out for a description of what this magic language is!).
2010-09-26 — Repost: Professor Layton and the Hell Yes. (🕑 3 min) My last blog before this got digitally bulldozed: I was hosting on a pay-per-webserver and when I got a new credit card forgetting to update the account, they sent one spam-collected warning before they deleted my site. Luckily I was able to salvage most of the posts via Google Cache, with the hope that I could write a script to de-WordPress-HTMLize them, and upload again so they could see another day. I haven't done it yet, but might still. The main reason I haven't is because a) those posts had lots of images I hosted on the server as well, which makes them uglier, and b) those posts are like these, but much more boring.
2010-09-23 — Vimcakes, Backin' Up Song. (🕑 1 min) I found , which itself links to other excellent Vim posts. these links, kids, and if you haven't already!
2010-09-21 — Because I backtraced it!. (🕑 3 min) Here's another story of Internet lore, documented pretty well here at . I've about remixes), and , and this one kind of combines the two.
2010-09-16 — Living Openly. (🕑 2 min) I just wrote a long blog post talking about why it sucks playing Zerg in Starcraft 2. But friends, there has been too much whining on this blog of late! It's time to bring back two things we've missed for some time: computers and whimsy!
2010-09-14 — Updates to previous posts. (🕑 2 min) On my post, Lindy West over at The Stranger that more or less echoes my sentiments (like I imagine for Ms. West, the sentiments get vicious primarily for entertainment value). If you haven't seen her , its similar in style, tone, entertainment, and parallels with how I feel.
2010-09-12 — It's not that hard. (🕑 1 min) Concerning Teh Gays:
2010-09-08 — Life Update/Book Burning. (🕑 3 min) Time for a small life update, as the posts have slowed down for a while and some narration is due:
2010-08-25 — Strong words, Bed Intruder. (🕑 1 min) A few things. One, cursing, and strong words!
2010-08-14 — In light of the Essays that were the last two posts.... (🕑 1 min) ... enjoy some lulz. Some Nirvana meets Jackson 5:
2010-08-14 — Making a living being an artist. (🕑 5 min) This blog seems to have veered from and to and . Lets add one more post to that list, in part spurred by a post by Jason Robert Brown (writer/composer of Parade and The Last 5 Years, among others) that was making the rounds for a while. You should skim it, but he's basically making his case for how it's wrong that artists get cheated out of their royalties by technology by debating the issue with someone who is actively giving away and receiving his music.
2010-08-12 — Life isn't fair and Eat, Pray, Love. (🕑 5 min) One of the smartest people I know recently wrote a blog post on Eat, Pray, Love and the backlash against it; the post was something of a defense against that backlash.
2010-07-26 — Fooled. (🕑 1 min) Taken from , this passage hit a bit close to home:
2010-07-23 — GADDAG and Capitalism. (🕑 1 min) I decided to revisit (took a break for administrivia), and wrote on the data structure I'm refitting it with, to celebrate. It's rare that you can write something on Wikipedia that isn't there, so I had to pounce.
2010-07-23 — One of the more convincing arguments for atheism.... (🕑 1 min) ... for me, anyways, was the size and scope of everything that has nothing to do with us. Statements like "If the whole history of the universe were as your arm span, you can eliminate the entire history of humanity with the scrape of a fingernail." (I can't find the official reference, but it's used in the irrelevant introduction to , until I can find the real one).
2010-07-22 — \"Everything is Amazing Right Now and Nobody Is Happy.\". (🕑 1 min) This video (at least the middle segment on banks, flying) got a lot of coverage on some programmer blogs about a year ago, I'm glad I finally found it again and can share it with you all:
2010-07-21 — Ben Stein is an idiot.. (🕑 3 min) It's my blog, so I'm free to feel smug and righteous as I like. Today, I'll target Ben Stein, mostly because a few days ago :
2010-07-18 — MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?. (🕑 1 min) Let this be a myriad post with some of the trends that currently come up in this blog:
2010-07-08 — On Freedom of Speech. (🕑 4 min) Back in DC, my family is hosting an international student for a few days as part of a summer program, and she had a wonderful conversation with us regarding her faith and country. She's a Muslim, and her progressiveness, eloquence, and intelligence really gives a jaded, disillusioned person like myself hope for the future.
2010-07-06 — Languages to describe Languages. (🕑 2 min) We're in a beautiful, exciting, and unsustainable time in programming languages. For any combination of features you could want, someone's made or making an interpreter/VM for you. Want dynamic message passing and objects (but Objective-C doesn't give you enough functional features)? Try . Want Ruby syntaxed immutable objects with Erlang's concurrency model? Try . Hell, did you Perl programmers feel left out of the JVM after the success of and ? Someone made a
2010-07-05 — I WANT AN IPHONE 4!!!!. (🕑 1 min) This was done by a Best Buy employee, who almost certainly got fired afterwards. I lolled.
2010-07-01 — Link Aggregation - Paul Edition. (🕑 2 min) I don't get much feedback on the blog, but the little I get is usually something along the lines of I would read it more, but you don't write about don't write about anything interesting ...
2010-06-28 — Coding socially. (🕑 1 min) I decided to finally get a account, since I've downloaded countless great software from it, and think it's about time I joined/gave back. So check out feel free to be my friend (or follow my project[s], whatever it is...), and check out my first "release" of a side project, a program to
2010-06-27 — Video Games, and the failure of the word "Art" Redux. (🕑 1 min) UPDATE (7/20/10): A little old, but by saying that, while he still thinks he's right, he shouldn't have brought it up in the first place. He essentially says "I'm not wrong, but I can't explain why I feel that I'm right." It's actually a pretty nice piece.
2010-06-25 — Terrible, Wonderful Music Videos. (🕑 2 min) Here's a bunch. The first is probably the most cringe-worthy. This is why the terrorists hate us.
2010-06-23 — Type Systems, From 1000 feet high. (🕑 3 min) I posted a link to one of my favorite articles ever on Facebook that is now gone. Here's the reddit link ; the article was about what you should know before you debate type systems, since most people have fuzzy notions of what type systems are, what they do, and their properties. He said it best, but now that it's gone, I'll go over a few points that I remember the author addressed.
2010-06-23 — Playing Video Games Again. (🕑 2 min) A brief summary of my video gaming:
2010-06-13 — Quickie on Atheism. (🕑 1 min) I love . It offers excellent analysis containing many sides of the news; what separates it from other blog is the conversations he mediates with the readers.
2010-06-09 — Assorted interestings. (🕑 1 min) I've always loved the Google "Did you mean?" (favorite is ), but this one came up recently while helping my sister with some definitions:
2010-06-08 — Keep Up that Racket!. (🕑 2 min) PLT Scheme, formerly my favorite Scheme implementation and in my writings, as . I'm very excited about this: Racket is a language of unbelievable potential, and hopefully it's re-branding will make people aware of this.
2010-06-01 — Really, Apple?. (🕑 2 min) Apple just showed themselves to be a bit lame about security, at least on Mac OS X two years ago. Here's the story:
2010-05-20 — Everyone Draw Mohammed. (🕑 1 min) Today is Everyone Draw Mohammed Day ( , ). A small day where you can stand up for free speech in the face of bullying and the threat of terrorism. Sadly, I've loaned out my tablet (and am burned out from studying), so I can't do anything really epic. I still want to participate, so here's a quickie:
2010-05-19 — My last study break. (🕑 2 min) My final Final Exam is tomorrow; after that, my graduation is at the mercy of my graders. I'm studying for , which has been a most excellent way to finish college. While Biology was always my least favorite science (chemistry!), the brain and how we study it is out-of-this world cool. Neuroscience is tied with dancing in the Big Regrets That I Didn't Pursue This Further At Brown (it's no exaggeration that, had I taken these classes earlier, I may have become a Neuroscience major).
2010-05-18 — Today's study break. (🕑 3 min) Still studying like a madman for Neuroscience, but took a few minutes to catch up on some news. First, a co-creator of Flash as a platform I've seen, many echo my sentiments exactly. Some money quotes (emphasis mine):
2010-05-17 — I'm still neck-deep in exam studies.... (🕑 1 min) ... but there's a really, really great post on in 4 different languages. It's the clearest example I've seen for SML, especially. Also note the 'This space reserved for JELLY STAINS' at the top ^_^
2010-05-15 — Another game on Android Market!. (🕑 1 min) is happy and proud to release Momenta (development title ) to the Market today!
2010-05-13 — My first game is on the Android Market. (🕑 1 min) Pick it up! I don't know of a way to link to the market itself (unless you're on an android phone, in which case, ). If you search 'Rat Race' from your phone, it's the only app that comes up.
2010-05-10 — Funny images. (🕑 1 min) I've posted a and notable videos] earlier, even a more serious . There are about a dozen more golden ones I've left out, but that's for another time. This is the post for themed image sites.
2010-05-09 — PAUL IS BOTHERED. (🕑 1 min) You can talk all you want about 'practicality,' but one way in which I see functional languages will ALWAYS beat imperative is the built-in love of lists. I simply can't express my distaste for always writing:
2010-05-06 — Social Golfer problem. (🕑 2 min) One summer I spent working with a professor, the father of a friend heard my plans and remarked (to my friend, not to me)
2010-05-02 — The Gods must be crazy!. (🕑 2 min) Over 60% of the video online containing Paul was only uploaded in the last month. Here's another! I'm acting in , a new show with some really wonderful people involved.
2010-04-30 — I read the news. (🕑 3 min) If you aren't head-explodingly outraged with the Catholic church, you aren't paying enough attention (or, alternatively, you're incapable of independent thought).
2010-04-29 — Videos with me!. (🕑 1 min) ME ME ME! STOP
2010-04-25 — Patriotas!. (🕑 1 min) I can write about Spring Weekend a bit later (this was the first and last time I'll do Spring Weekend as a student). In the meantime, I'll procrastinate by posting another favorite video. Sadly for you gringos , you have to speak Spanish to glean much meaning from it:
2010-04-23 — Video Games, and the failure of the word "Art". (🕑 4 min) Roger Ebert decided to revisit a topic that got him a lot of attention a few years ago, where . Now he's strengthened his claim, stating that .
2010-04-20 — Metaphors I use to describe software development.. (🕑 2 min) [ ]
2010-04-19 — Another Remix. (🕑 1 min) I went over a few days ago, but here's another I forgot (I might do this from time to time): Wilford Brimley raps about his experience with Diabetes. It really picks up after a minute and a half, and like the Trolls Love, is underscored by Ratatat.
2010-04-19 — Mooooovies!. (🕑 2 min) I posted these on the last blog, months before I was digitally evicted. Last summer I participated with some friends in the , making two movies.
2010-04-17 — Baal Bless the Internet. (🕑 1 min) I love remixes, and hope sometime (probably after I graduate) I can get my lazy bum off the computer chair so I can make a few myself. Here are a few that I really love (I also link to the original sources, you should check them out if you get the chance):
2010-04-17 — On Programming Interviews. (🕑 3 min) Lots of great things have been written on the subject of programming interviews, but since I'll be entering the workforce very soon, I've taken away a few notes on how I would like to conduct them in the future, having just run the job search gauntlet.
2010-04-08 — Software and Evolution. (🕑 4 min) I think the software is growing, and will continue to grow, the way lifeforms have grown and evolved on Earth. By tthis I mean we started with a single ancestor, likely of a few proteins or perhaps a single cell, only to become a planet housing humans, echidnas, sponges, fungi, insects, trees, and more.
2010-04-07 — Being lucky, being strange. Being lucky to be strange.. (🕑 1 min) The Olympics brought more opportunities for people to be hatin' on Johnny Weir and his style of performance. I love what he said: "Every little boy should be so lucky to turn into me."
2010-04-06 — Common Lisp. (🕑 2 min) I've been playing around with Common Lisp recently, using and as guides (not gonna lie, having LOL on the spine of your book is wonderful). Last year when I went through my Scheme phase (the original URL of this blog was littleschemer.blogspot.com), I never thought I'd see the day that I'd switch sides.
2010-03-31 — Code-related lulz. (🕑 1 min) The first is the I could think of for . The second is .
2010-03-31 — Paul the lil' misogynist. (🕑 4 min) The longer I'm away from home, the more I forget about where I come from. I'm on Spring Break now, and usually when I'm home I spend some time digging around the house for archiving material. During my last Spring Break I put that was met with much enthusiasm from my family. This time, I have a video.
2010-03-23 — Books, Books, the Musical Fruit. (🕑 5 min) A lot of big-time, their 10 most influential books. I'll present mine here. Stealing some terminology: this is my 'gut list,' not my 'I've thought about this for a long time' list:
2010-03-22 — Games. (🕑 1 min) Made two demo videos, for my The first was our collaborative effort, a Hungry Hungry Hippos-type game called Penguins :
2010-03-21 — On Jazz, popularity. (🕑 6 min) Another not-very-hackery article on Hacker News caught my attention. Dyske Suematsu (in 2003) gives a few reasons to why we don't hear jazz on Top-40 radio stations, making claims like "our ears are getting lazier."
2010-03-17 — On how knowledge turns to Snobbery. (🕑 2 min) I used to read religiously, back when I was a lamer-than-lame "web developer.*" I've slacked off on reading it because I haven't touched much web dev recently, but it's still an amazing online magazine, an example of well-published content on the web.
2010-03-16 — A fun twist on Queues from Stacks. (🕑 2 min) There's too, too much to write about, but I'm going to make a little diversion known, because it blew my mind. I have to give credit where it's due: this comes to us from the peerless Matt Wilde ( , ).
2010-03-11 — Good Music. (🕑 2 min) I've been hitting some hard times this last year, namely aftershocks of , as well as personal/relationship troubles which may or may not be related. It isn't the purpose of this blog to delve into them, I'd rather share the better parts of my life, and part of that is the music that helps lift one out of the blues.
2010-03-08 — Comix, miscellanous. (🕑 1 min) This weekend I treated myself and bought the first Deluxe Set of (issues 1-10, I had the second set before by a happy accident). It's really a marvelous comic, and suggest people take a look at it.
2010-03-07 — TeX, Culture.. (🕑 3 min) On the old (lost) blog I had a long post as to why I used LaTeX instead of Word, even for non- mathematical documents. I'll surely re-post it sometime (I have the source somewhere...), but in the meantime, beautifully demonstrates the aesthetic advantages. It also links to , which very articulately describes many of the other advantages.
2010-03-02 — My brother and I. (🕑 1 min) I just finished two major works of code and a midterm, but why not share some graphics love?
2010-03-01 — YEEEAAAAAAH. (🕑 1 min) I love memes, but haven't produced any of my own. In light of this awful, awful late night coding, as well as the newest episode of Burn Notice, here's a quickie:
2010-02-24 — GC, Continuations, Ruby Internals. (🕑 2 min) When I was about 6, I told my mom I wanted to be a garbageman when I grew up. I mostly just liked the truck, and hanging from the side of it while it drove from house to house.
2010-02-22 — m4d H4X. (🕑 3 min) For two years I was a UTA for our department's course, and my current roommate is the current Head TA. So when a friend was looking for someone to perform a security audit on his web application, he called my roommate, who called me in as his surgeon's assistant. Here's what we found:
2010-02-19 — Fruits. (🕑 1 min) I made a video game! Czech it out ^_^
2010-02-18 — A short history of my belief. (🕑 2 min) One of the (few) things I used to blog about was my atheism. Since I'm starting fresh in this new blog, an introduction is in order, since my relationship to belief has varied widely over the years, and religious belief is something I care passionately about.
2010-02-17 — This made me laugh today.. (🕑 1 min) Yes he was a traitor, but I don't mind taking orders from Lando Calrissian when he
2010-02-15 — Hiatus - And a voyage of vim. (🕑 4 min) Sorry for the lack of updates. I hate when blogs say that, but publishing less than once a month defeats the purpose of a blog. I blame what I always have: my insistence that what I publish be Significant (the last two posts were more than epic enough), even when it goes against the interests of a) myself, and b) my readers (are there any there)?
2009-12-28 — On-Demand Prime Generation. (🕑 4 min) Many problems are made easier if you have a good facility for generating and detecting prime numbers. Usually when I see such a problem, I would immediately switch to Haskell, but the other day a problem took about a minute to solve (way too long), so I ported the functionality to C.
2009-12-14 — Prologgin'. (🕑 5 min) Exam season is a royal pain, but I find ways to entertain myself. My most recent delight has been : I discovered it late last semester, and took a break until about November to tackle some . But with the gaps between commitments getting smaller and smaller, and with a desire to use some more unorthodox languages (Facebook doesn't accept Scheme or SML submissions, for example), tackling 15 or so of the easier Project Euler problems proved fitting.
2009-11-14 — Reading List. (🕑 1 min) Almost as contentious (maybe more) than asking a programmer what their favorite editor/language is would be to ask them what the most important books are for a budding programmer to read. Every smart programmer I know has a small list of books that are essential (they claim) to know anything important about programming, software, etc.
2009-11-11 — New Blog. (🕑 2 min) Hi all,