Yes I know...

You don't love me.
You don't care.
You keep calling.
You keep asking.
You don't want me.
You don't need me.
You keep wanting.
You keep lying.

You go so far as to call my friends and involve them in your life. You never ask about me exactly. You never mention your new men. You just want to be there, to inhabit that space in my head.

The part of me that wants.

I love you, and I despise you, but I still miss you.

Let me go so I can live my life.

Being Normal

This is a difficult thing to write, but my flamboyantly LGBT friends need to back off.

I love you all. I love your wit, humor, faces, and most of all I love your honesty. It is too bad that right now you are being a little counter-productive.

The battle going on right now in American politics is silly but it needs to happen. Gay people are just like us. They deserve equal protection under the law. They deserve to be married. They deserve to be equal. However this also means they don’t get to be special.

Drag queens don’t get to be angry if they threaten people openly. You are a six foot five man, in eight inch platform shoes and a pink gown you scare normal people. If you live as a woman you don’t get to be a caricature. If you are dressed fashionably and tastefully then rock on, but if you dress like a freak I will call you on it.

The more you look like us, the more you will be considered normal.

No this isn’t applicable in a Cabaret show at midnight, but it matters when you speak to Senators, march on your City Hall, and engage in real dialog.

Show the world how normal you are, so we can show you how much we don’t care. You can be just like us, and we can all live together.

Namaste,

Ross Winn

The Whys of Programming Languages

I am commenting on this story here...

This is for Michael most especially but for my other code-wielders as well. This story was obviously written by a programmer who had become a journalist and not vice versa. Why do I say this? 

"Over time, you'd expect that as developers get older, they'd get more wisdom; they'd learn more languages," Meyerovich says. "We've found that's not true. They plateau."

Why would you expect that? Do you expect people to generally learn more languages as they get older? This is not logical as I understand the term any more than it is logical to read this statement:

"There's a tendency in academics of trying to solve a problem when no one actually ever had that problem," said Rabkin, who recently received his computer science PhD at Berkeley and is now at Princeton working on a post-doc.

This is how academics work. Now quite a bit of amazing innovation has come from this supposition, but so has a vast ocean of navel gazing. So it is completely possible that this story was written by someone with no real exposure to academics either.

One huge issue that the author leaves out is the fact that college and university professors write the textbooks, and they don't want to constantly have to relearn something that they can more easily teach by rote. 

Also, C is the lingua franca. This is important. Airline pilots use English, Chefs usually have a working knowledge of French. This allows a free flow of ideas between people who cannot usually communicate. 

Spoiler Free Prometheus Review

I don’t know what I was expecting with Prometheus, but I definitely wanted to see it. John made a funny comment walking out of the theatre, he said he was glad he and I had the sex talk a few years back. If we had had that talk just before we walked in to the theatre he assured me he would be scarred for life. No, there aren’t any sex scenes in the film per se, but if you see the film you might laugh too.

Though not all of the ideas are 100% effective the film does a nice job of expanding on some of the ideas presented in the other films, as well as explaining some backstory. I am sure you must have seen Peter Weyland’s TED talk or the David 8 advertisement. I am generally pleased with the film, especially the acting. The performances by Noomi Rapace and Idris Elba are especially apt.

The ending was a bit of a left turn as well. All in all I think this is a solid film. Go see it, John and I both give it thumbs up.

Ray Bradbury, R is for Rest In Peace

A force in modern American literature has passed from the Earth at age 91.

In my opinion Bradbury had a sensibility that was unmatched in his peers. The Martian Chronicles are amazing, as was Something Wicked This Way Comes, but his singular work was definitely Fahrenheit 451. I believe it to be the most important work of literature in the twentieth century. 

Good rest to you Grandmaster. 

“If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

Your Facebook "Privacy Notice" Is Unenforceable Nonsense

This is 2012, and this is the internet. It is all public, and you own none of it. The topless photo you sent your boyfriend before prom is public. The suggestive pic that your girlfriend took while you were eating a carrot, public. The time you cried, public. Your love for your children is public too. 

The biggest issue that I have with all of this is the innate ignorance and complete lack of thought most of you have given this.

I decided about twenty minutes after I established my first email account on Netcom in 1995 that there was neither a reasonable expectation of privacy nor was there a shred of chance that there would ever be one. How could anyone think so?

Face it, you didn’t think about it, and you are well and truly fucked now. Your life is making other people money, you get a free email account and the ability to see what your friends are doing this weekend. Congratulations, and good luck with that.