Irregular Expressions

On Blogging

2007-12-14T19:07:21Z

It seems that I don't have the discipline and interest to be a regular blogger. Alas.

So, here's my life in a nutshell: I'm writing lots of papers and working on my dissertation. I spend a lot of my free time hanging out with my sweetheart, the world's most awesome dog, and a noisy, pissy cat. When I can, I climb, hike, ski, and otherwise get my ass into the mointains. I'm a volunteer EMT, and I'm trying to be more active with that, especially doing wilderness rescue stuff.

That's all for this year!

Strange wpa_supplicant behavior

2007-08-07T19:56:00Z

I've seen a number of references to this problem on the Internet, but nobody's mentioned a solution.

The problem: wpa_supplicant doesn't seem to handle control interfaces on Debian or Debian-like systems such as Ubuntu. This manifests as:

wpa_supplicant itself throwing parse errors when it reads the control interface lines in its configuration file, even though they're syntactically correct. e.g.:

...
Line X: Invalid configuration line 'ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant'.
...
Failed to read read or parse configuration '/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf'.

wpa_cli failing to run at all, regardless of the command-line parameters. e.g.
```
CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE not defined - wpa_cli disabled
```

These are what one would expect if wpa_supplicant is compiled without -DCONFIG_CTRL_IFACE. Strangely, they occur in the debian 0.60 package even though the .config file produced by the package contains <code>CONFIG_CTRL_IFACE_DBUS=y</code>. I honestly have no idea why this is. If you download the source package, rebuild it and install, the problem persists, even though a lot of <code>-DCONFIG_CTRL_IFACE<code> es scroll by during compilation.

A "solution": This is ugly, but it seems to work:

download the package source
build it in the usual way
cd into wpa_supplicant
make clean
make wpa_cli wpa_supplicant
Copy the files produced over the ones installed by the package.
aptitude hold wpasupplicant

Happy Winter Solstice!

2006-12-22T06:35:15Z

That's all

Everything is New

2006-07-14T18:17:03Z

I'm realizing that I've had a pretty significant turnover in my circumstances and belongings recently.

First off, Jennifer and I are no longer together. We actually broke up a couple of months ago, but it's only now that I feel like I'm really experiencing my new life rather than just losing the old. It was very, very sad but I think we're both more or less OK at this point.

As a result of the preceding, I've moved. I now share a condo with two housemates and the world's cutest Collie mutt. My address is

3280 Sentinel Drive, Boulder, CO 80301.

I've made a point over the last few years of not needing a car to get to my work. I've failed to do the same for volunteering, though: I've been getting more involved with Rocky Mountain Rescue, and I just bought a car so as to be more useful. It's a 1998 Subaru Outback, and it's pretty handy.

Oh, and I bought a new camera in there somewhere. I've gone digital now, save for the 4x5.

Now for a dissertation.

Silly meme participation -- name that song!

2006-06-25T05:50:47Z

This is a game, see. And it is played according the rules below. I do numbers 1, 2, and 4. You do number 3.

1. On your current playlist hit shuffle and pick the first ten non-instrumental songs on the list (whatever they are).
2. Write down a line of the song. Try to avoid putting the song title in the line.
3. Have your friends comment and see if they know the songs. (NO CHEATING! i.e. No looking up on google etc.)
4. When someone guesses correctly, strike out or bold the line and name the smart alec who guessed it.

1. ~~"I see people turn their heads and quickly look away."~~ Paint it Black -- The Rolling Stones (credit: Sylmenya, Hazelsteapot)

2. "'cause life is hard, times are tough / When the goin' gets too rough, and the truth's just not good enough..."

3. "He could not help but hang his eyes, her beauty held him so / If this was not a state of grace, then grace he'd never know."

4. "Our dreams were like fugitive warlords / plotting triumphant returns to the city / keeping Tec-9s tucked under the floorboards."

5. ~~"When you're worried about security, the survival of our nation / what's wrong with some good advice about self-fornication?"~~ Dick Cheney -- John McCutcheon (credit: Redfierma)

6. ~~"You don't know the next thing you will say / This is your favorite kind of day"~~ The Beauty of the Rain -- Dar Williams (Credit: redfierma)

7. "Sister don't get worried / Because the world is almost done"

8. "And you gathered your hair behind your head / like god was gonna catch you by the pony tail"

9. "Bless the day it was I shared your name / Yesterday forever speaks your grave"

10. "And down there in the dark I can see the real truth about me."

And how could I forget?

2006-02-28T19:43:56Z

What got me thinking about LiveJournal in the first place was that I wanted to post the following:

If we can start the day without a cigarette, or caffeine, or pills;
If we can be consistently cheerful, ignoring aches and pains;
If we can resist complaining and boring people with our troubles;
If we can eat the same food every day, and be grateful for it;
If we can understand when our loved ones are too busy to give us any time;
If we can overlook it when those we love take it out on us, when, through no fault of our own, something goes wrong;
If we can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If we can ignore our friends’ limited education, and never correct them;
If we can resist treating a rich person better than a poor person;
If we can honestly say that, deep in our hearts, we harbor no prejudice against color, nationality, creed, or even political affiliation;
If we can relax without alcohol and sleep without the aid of drugs;
Then, my friends, we are almost as good as our dogs.

Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Birthday to Me, ...

2006-02-28T19:32:51Z

Birthdays don't usually mean much to me. I'm 9862 days old right now, and it doesn't feel appreciably unlike being, say, 9718. The only real difference is that I've lived a full year since the last birthday, now.

That's been no small thing the last couple of years. Most of my life it's seemed more or less given -- I mean, we all know that we could die at any time but there's no emotional reality to the idea most of the time. This year, I really notice it. It's February 28th again, I'm still alive, and I'm very very glad.

So Happy Birthday to me.

My only post in a month

2005-07-14T02:02:54Z

will be a quiz demonstrating that I don't post very often.

The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test
Category	Your Score	Average LJer
Community Attachment	6.45% You have one or two loyal pals on LJ... But you probably have better things to do with your time.	22.33%
MemeSheepage	12.28% You fill out forms at work - why should you fill them out for fun?	28.06%
Original Content	19.35% Monthly bitch sessions and occasional movie reviews	37.56%
Psychodrama Quotient	2.41% Warning: Can Flame When Necessary	16.85%
Attention Whoring	6.82% Low-key and lovin' it	20.51%
Take The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test and see how you match up!

Tag Meme

2005-06-05T05:55:08Z

Play Tag!

Make a list of things you enjoy doing alone, things you do not because you have to but because you WANT to. What lowers your stress/blood pressure/anxiety level? Post this in your journal, and then tag 5 friends and ask them to post it to theirs. And do it quickly - the whole LJ user population can only support 19 generations of this!

1. Backpack. Waking up in the wilderness by myself makes me feel like the whole world exists just to share its serenity with me. Occasional exceptions must be allowed for, of course.
(1b. Look at the stars on a clear moonless night in the mountains.)
2. Lay in the tub and listen to music.
3. Meditate.
4. Do photography.
5. Read. Especially, read gentle things.

I'm tagging...
1. canksayuhawin
2. christhawk
3. notmonochrome
4. lilzilla
5. grepper

Stuff

2005-05-31T06:05:51Z

I'm well-frisbeed. I'd almost forgotten how good getting a solid workout feels. This was another one of those randomness-affirming days: The people I thought I was going to hang out with this afternoon couldn't make it, so I decided to just explore Boston some more. I stumbled upon some people playing, and 'bee-deprivation trumped social awkwardness, so I asked to join them.

We got in a good hour and a half of playing, and then I went back to exploring those parts of Boston that would still have me in my newly grubby state. I found a good cheap Italian place, two decent gelaterias, and an awesome Asian grocery store.

Book Meme

2005-05-19T03:15:09Z

1.) Total number of books owned.
I have no idea; they're mostly in storage, and I wouldn't want to count them anyway. Guesstimating by number of bookshelves, I'd say about 500.

2.) The last book I bought:
Zagat survey Boston Restaurants 2005/2006. The last "real" book was Garrity, All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School.

3.) The last book I read?
Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude is still in-progress. The last one I finished was Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.

4.) Five books that mean a lot to me.
Plath, Collected Poems
Cohen, States of Denial
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness
Wharton, Ethan Frome

5.) Tag some people to fill this out.
All Y'all are it. If you want to be.

Oh. Heh. I'm feeling extra dorky because the "Music" field prompted me to put something on. That happens a lot.

On what is good

2005-05-17T03:22:56Z

Sometimes, good is sitting down on the couch to eat a plate of cheese, bread and apples, drinking wine and watching mediocre TV. It's not the be-all and end-all, but it's not half bad.

Myers-Briggs ? Isn't that a brand of rum?

2005-04-26T01:07:35Z

There's plenty of doubt about the validity of the MBTI, but by Internet Quiz standards, it's positively gospel. And it says that I am:

INFP - the Healer
You scored 45% I to E, 15% N to S, 33% F to T, and 78% J to P!

You are more introverted than extroverted. You are more intuitive than
observant, you are more feeling based than thinking based, and you
prefer to go with the flow rather than having a plan. Your type can
best be summarized by the word "Healer", which belongs to the larger
group of idealists. You have a capacity for caring that is deeper than
most. You strive for unity, are fascinated by the battles between good
and evil, and can be something of an idealist. Only 1% of the
population shares your type.

As a romantic partner, you are usually supprtive and nuturing, however,
you have a high need for individuality. Harmony is extremely important
to you as you are very affected by conflict and tension, which also
makes you resist confronting your partner directly about problems. When
you get angry, you usually blame yourself, rather than your partner.
You can also be stubborn and unyielding when you feel you are being
criticized or mistreated. You feel the most appreciated when your
partner listens to you carefully. You need to be understood. You need
to hear your partner express their feelings, the more often, the
better.
Your group summary: idealists (NF)

Your type summary: INFP

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 59% on I to E
You scored higher than 12% on N to S
You scored higher than 26% on F to T
You scored higher than 87% on J to P

Link: The LONG Scientific Personality Test written by unpretentious2 on Ok Cupid

And now for something ... exactly the same

2005-04-17T06:06:48Z

Well, now for the short version (which really *does* seem to be derived from the other.)

Your Linguistic Profile:

70% General American English

20% Yankee

5% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

The LONG dialect survey

2005-04-16T08:13:06Z

Take the real thing here:

http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/survey/

It doesn't give you any results, just gathers data. But it has

283. She _____ in the pool
both drownded and drowned sound right
drownded
drowned

284. I ____ her lifeless body from the pool
dragged
drug
I use both interchangeably

494. Yesterday I ____ in the backyard
shat
none of these forms sounds right to me
took a shit
shitted
shit

495. By the time they arrived at the party I _____ all the Courvoisier.
had drunk
had drank
had drunken
had dranken
had drinked

Incoherent Mumblings

2005-04-14T21:27:04Z

Why life is good:

* I had an unpleasant nightmare, and when I woke up it was clearly not true.
* I had The Perfect Pear (tm) with breakfast.

My Ascent to Financial Power:

* I sent in my state taxes today (yes, I know, that makes me a procrastinator). My net taxable income could be described as "mid-four-figure." Dude.
* Hospital bills for last summer are finally paid off.

Academia:

* I have a total of three papers in submission. If they were all accepted (as if,) my publications list would be quadrupled.

Internet Dating with Dead Philosophers (& Ayn Rand)

2005-04-12T05:16:36Z

By way of mendeia:

I've got serious hots for Immanuel Kant!

Kant	(100%)
John Stuart Mill	(88%)
Jeremy Bentham	(75%)
Jean-Paul Sartre	(73%)
Aquinas	(72%)
Ayn Rand	(56%)
Prescriptivism	(54%)
Spinoza	(51%)
Aristotle	(51%)
Stoics	(50%)
Epicureans	(45%)
St. Augustine	(42%)
Ockham	(38%)
Plato	(37%)
Nietzsche	(22%)
Nel Noddings	(19%)
David Hume	(10%)
Cynics	(5%)
Thomas Hobbes	(0%)

(http://selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY/)

Religion Quizzes

2005-04-01T00:13:31Z

Not answers, actual quizzes.

Beliefnet's Belief-o-matic
The Philosopher's Magazine - Battleground God

It's finally in transit!

2005-03-31T07:53:47Z

Long, long after I ordered the dang thing, my lovely new laptop has left the factory.

Right now, it's in Shanghai.
(Interestingly, the network card started its journey in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong)

shag

2005-03-10T07:09:46Z

Item for the to-do list: Write a risque song about a blue-eyed shag. Naturally, it would involve a cute chick.

Procrastination!

2005-02-22T23:54:32Z

I really need my laptop's replacement power cable to arrive. My best defense against procrastination on teh intarweb consists of (a) working in a congenial place so that the work itself is more appealing, and (b) unplugging the network card so as not to be led into temptation. Unfortunately, my current work requires a computer, and none of the machines I have available fit those strategies at all.

Whatever Became of Hubert?

2005-02-22T09:27:32Z

The American Spectator asks where all the moderate Democrats have gone. The answer, it seems, is here, but they don't really ask why. I feel vaguely qualified to offer a theory, since I suppose I'm a prime example of a moderate who's been "radicalized" of late.

Six or seven years ago, I was a registered Libertarian. I wasn't entirely enamored of that party, but I liked both the Democrats and the Republicans even less. I believed that a free market is most often the best solution to economic problems, that individual liberties are in and of themselves a societal good and that a strong burden of proof should be put upon anyone who proposes to limit them. I believed that the government should not endorse or favor one religion over another (or over irreligion,) that what people did for pleasure was no business of the state's as long as no-one was forced and public health was not endangered, that the growing size of the government sector as a fraction of GDP was a problem, and that privatization had some advantages over the current system of social security. Actually, I still believe all those things. I don't know what party that ought to have put me in, but I have - in writing - a friend's sympathy that it must be hard being a member of the Republican / conservative minority at Carleton.

In 1996 I couldn't vote, but I supported McCain and later Dole. This election, I spent the evenings working the phone lines at the local Democratic party office until closing time every night. I gave money I didn't have to both the Dean and Kerry campaigns. What went wrong?

To understand my own - and I think many of my fellow Democrats' - move away from the center, it is necessary to look at the Bush presidency. During the 2000 campaign, many of the positions Bush offered were not obviously incompatible with mine. I remember reading claims about Social Security reform and cussing at both candidates about equally. The only things that really bothered me about Bush were the troubling stories about the state of the state of Texas. And that's been the pattern since - what he's said (most of the time) hasn't sounded so bad until I've seen what it looks like in practice.

The Bush administration likes to say that September 11th, 2001 changed everything. This is patently false - the terrorist act per se is only a radical change in the world if you weren't paying attention to all the terrorism that had already been going on around us. But it did change U.S. policy a great deal, and mostly for the worse. The hard truth of the matter is that Al-Qaeda could not seriously damage the United States. As horrific as the attacks were, they could happen 20 times a year and still kill fewer Americans than smoking does. Add in alcohol and you could make it 30 times per year. That's once every two weeks, non-stop. None of this is to minimize the enormity, only to put the power of the enemy in perspective. Short of nuclear war, there was only one power strong enough to destroy our society - us. Al-Qaeda's success has been to lure us into being our own worst enemy, and the Bush administration has taken the bait with incredible zeal. And the moderate Democrats have happily trotted off after him. Which finally brings us back to the original point.

What am I looking for in a leader, a candidate, a party? Right now, I want someone with the guts to admit that we've blown it big-time and reverse course. The people saying that right now aren't the centrists. They're not the New Democrats. They're the Howard Deans, and they're the vegans with the "My other car is a pair of boots" bumper stickers. On their bikes. A fair number of them are too far left for my comfort. I don't thing most of them have heard of the abolitionist minister Samuel May, but they could well quote his words to Ellery Channing: "It is not our fault that those who might have conducted this great reform more prudently have left us to manage as me may. ... We are not to blame that you have not spoken. And now that inferior men have begun to speak and act ... it is not becoming of you to complain of us that we do it in an inferior style." And indeed it is not.

And so I'm standing in odd company a bit to the left of center at the moment. And why? Because I don't want "We had to destroy the village to save it" to describe our policy towards America.

Infamy, get yer infamy.

2005-02-21T23:41:32Z

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, an essay written in September of 2001 about the 9/11 attacks has suddenly become newsworthy in February of 2005. It's hard to guess why this became an issue now after been ignored for over three years, but it has. Perhaps David Horowitz has finally learned how to read. Who knows? Whatever the cause, 9/11/2001 is back at the center of attention around here.

One of the things this means is that you hear a lot of comparisons between that event and Pearl Harbor. That makes sense enough: They were both immoral, they were both unexpected, and they were both carried out using airplanes.

There's an important difference, though: Pearl Harbor was an unsuccessful effort to keep us out of a war. 9/11 was a successful effort to draw us into one.

In defense of (the idea of) Satan

2004-10-17T19:54:11Z

This started out as a response to Greyhame's post, but it evolved into a free-standing comment:

In the last couple of years, I've gained a lot of respect for the concept of a devil or tempter. One thing I've noticed among a lot of my atheist or non-religious friends is that they don't seriously think about the possibility that they could do evil. I don't really know how to phrase it properly, but I often get the sense that while people will theoretically acknowledge that they have the capacity to do wrong, they take it as self-evident that they will choose to do right. I get the sense that they think of evil as something inexplicable that Bad People (TM) do.

The problem I have with this view is that I think immoral behavior is a very natural and not-improbable consequence of human psychology; as long as we have pride, self-interest, fear, anger, in-group loyalty, and the like, we are in very real danger of doing evil. Further, I strongly suspect that much of the evil in the world is done by people who do not think that's what they're doing. There may well be some people who are willfully immoral, but I think there are a lot more ordinary folk who think they're justifiably angy, or who are "doing their duty," or who turn a blind eye to something because they don't want to lose their job (or go to jail, or worse).

I think there's a lot to be said for having a strong self-critical awareness of your own ability to do wrong. In that regard, the idea of a Devil constantly trying to tempt one is a very apt metaphor. You don't need to believe in Satan to question your own actions, of course, but it can't hurt. None of this is to say that the Devil isn't a dangerous concept in its own right - one needn't look very hard to find examples of it being used as an excuse, rather than a warning.

Why must so many smart people be putzes?

2004-05-25T06:17:18Z

The subject pretty much says it. How come so many people who would otherwise have a lot to contribute to conversations are self-important and imperious? Maybe there actually are people whose word should be beyond question by us mortals. I've met few of them, if any. But there's no shortage of people who seem to think they fall in that category, and react ungraciously to being challenged.

Oy veh es mir.