The Armchair Politician

Oops. I wake up this morning at around 2, and figure I’ll try and get some work done. Lo and behold, my email account and several shell accounts seem to have forgotten that I exist. So, it looks like I’ll be unemployed four or five hours from now. Guess I’ll find out why in the morning.

Jordi, is PayPartners still looking for another coder or potentially a sysadmin?

I’ve been playing poker online for awhile. Still in the red, but I’m coming back quite nicely as of late. Anyway, I had just about the funniest thing ever happen in a game tonight. Long story short, I bluff early on and get called on it; however, I get lucky as hell and end up winning the hand anyway. Two of the players at the table taunt me for about five or ten minutes, leaning hard on me every pot I’m in. And then I take both of them out, winning about $100 of their money in the process.
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I have to say, I really enjoy the Budweiser “This is Budweiser. This is beer.” ad campaign. The concept that their brew is so bad that they actually need to convince people it’s beer is just too funny to me. “This is beer! We swear! No, seriously!”

Gwahahaha.

This post brought to you by the Beer Snobs of America.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry, but I had some recent inspiration. I don’t think it’s finishedyet –I’m unhappy with some of the pacing, and I’d like to make it longer. The current incarnation is pasted below.
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I’ve been reading some of Paul Graham’s previous essays, and came across one that really resonated with me. In “Inequality and Risk”, Paul argues that trying to eliminate economic equality (within a singular country, not globally) automatically implies reducing overall economic growth.

An analogy I found particularly resonant is that economic inequality is akin to the potential energy used to power a water mill. To make a similar analogy, the dispartiy betwene rich and poor is much like electric potential: without any, the circuit does nothing. If we were to have economic equality, there would be no difference in pressure to drive economic growth at all. And, of course, it’s a proportional relation; to the degree that we limit economic inequality, we inherently limit the speed of our growth.

Interesting stuff, especially for a Libertarian like me.

I suppose that’s what’s generally said around these times, anyways. Never seems to be all that merry for me, but I guess that’s just to be expected.

And yet again I enter the working force of the world. This time, as a contracted Perl programmer. I make significantly more than I did at my previous job, and as an added benefit, contracting lets me deduct many expenses from taxes.

Not to mention, my coworkers seem really intelligent and experienced, and are neat people with senses of humor! Hell, even the support people know what Linux is, and some of them even use it.

w00t.

Sometimes people on the Internet are just fun. But first, a little backstory to this one. I’m on FaceTheJury, where my AIM screen name is posted. Occasionally, I’ll have someone message me completely out of nowhere four or five months after we talked last. This usually means that I’ve been on their buddy list for a few months, and they have absolutely no clue who I am.

This happened to me last night. She signed off, and about five minutes later I get a completely random message from somebody I’ve never met. I pretty much figured out what was going on right from the bat, but I get great pleasure out of driving people absolutely insane.
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I like Saved by the Bell. I feel that it and its derivative works (excluding The New Class, which is impressive in that it didn’t let the fact that it was a festering pile of ass stop it from airing for something like eight years) are collectively the pinnacle of all human achievement.

Yesterday morning, I turned on my TV to discover that The College Years was on. To my delight, they played six episodes! However, it got me thinking: not a single person on the entire cast ever ended up actually amounting to anything.
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Well, it’s not really versioned, but we released the new version of my company’s website over the weekend (Friday morning, actually). I had photoshopped a few usability changes (just for the front page, although the rest of the site could use leagues more), which I sent to the developers about two months ago, but none of them seemed to bother listening to the suggestions. Due to problems with the developers’ code, it took us the better part of the week to do it.
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