Well, it's gone - and the story of how it went

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Posted 51 days ago

As of this afternoon, truist.com is no longer mine. I had it for 8 years, 4 months, and I find that I’m very sad to see it go :-(

But as Drew says: “think of the motorcycles” – and that is helping :)

So now that the sale is actually done, here’s the story:

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The Nerd Handbook

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Posted 235 days ago

From The Nerd Handbook:

For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

I received Managing Humans as a Christmas present, and it’s a fantastic book. It lead me to (back) to Rands in Repose which is now at the top of my list of great places to spend time on the internet. Enjoy :)

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Pictures finally uploaded

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Posted 359 days ago

I finally got around to uploading all my recent pictures to the gallery. “Recent,” in this case, is defined as “in the last 8 months.” Before this I hadn’t uploaded anything in 2007, even though I’ve been taking pictures all year. So without further ado, I present:

I’ve also uploaded pictures of our recent trip to Oregon, but I’ll be describing those in another post, momentarily. We also (also) have pictures from Kristina’s trip to Richmond, VA, but those haven’t been uploaded yet. Maybe they’ll make it up before Christmas ;)

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Recent events

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Posted 487 days ago

It’s been a while since I wrote and I have a small pile of small things that I wanted to write about, so I’m posting them all at once. In chronological order:

Cool blog / cool book

In my first case ever of one blog leading to another, Amitai’s blog led me to Bil Stachour’s blog, Journal Wunelle, on which I found this awesome post about evolutionary psychology and the book The Moral Animal. Bil writes intelligently, often, and interestingly, and his writeup of the book has led me to put it on my wishlist.

A combination street car and airplane

Check this out. Terrafugia has announced that they plan on creating the first commercially available flying car, called the Transition. I like living in this age :)

Buckeye Blast

On April 1st, I attended the Buckeye Blast, a fun-day shooting event put on by Buckeye Firearms Association, an orginzation heavily involved in passing the concealed carry laws in Ohio, and of which I am a member. The event is a fundraiser for the organization, and my wife bought my ticket as a birthday present.

The day was a blast! (ha ha) I learned more about real-life shooting in that day than I had in all my previous training and shooting, and greatly improved my shooting skills. I met a bunch of new people, and even got my picture taken. The event was held at the very impressive Tactical Defense Institute – I highly recommend them.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

One of my birthday presents was an awesome book called The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. For years the “designers” have been saying that the “coders” can’t learn what it takes to design great websites; this book tries to prove that wrong. You can judge for yourself when I update this site’s layout :) (someday soon…)

The shooting on my birthday

The Virginia Tech shooting happened on my birthday. It’s a very sad, tragic event, and I’m sorry that such things happen in this world. It was initially reminiscent of the Case Western shooting which was a little closer-to-home for me.

My mom asked me what I thought about the shooting, and my response sums up my whole belief about the issue: “if someone there had had a gun, they could have stopped the attacker.” It’s a shame that Virginia Tech (like Case Western) has a ban on all firearms on campus.

I know this is a big issue, but I don’t want to dwell on it. My middle sister (privately) wrote a great piece about her feelings and reflections after the event, and there’s a lot more like that on the web. I’ll leave it to others to hash out all the nuances, but I did want to get my broad-stroke opinion out in public.

Other

There is other news, about life, work, and family, but most of it isn’t really good fodder for a public forum. Suffice it to say that all three have been interesting, hard, and good. This is a good time, for me.

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What the terrorists want

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Posted 713 days ago

Bruce Schneier: “I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute … we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.”

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Could you become a citizen?

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Posted 792 days ago

I’m proud of myself: I got a 90% on this sample immigration test.

It frightens me that most people don’t do well. I have the vague notion that the decline of civil liberties in this country is directly related to the decline of teaching civics in school. Somehow, this post is reminding me of that, and of yesterday’s post.

Maybe we should just lock up anyone who can’t pass this test – that would fix all the problems! (grin)

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Liberty, by zefrank

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Posted 793 days ago

zefrank duckie

the show with zefrank is pretty rediculously funny. (It’s not particularly kid-safe, however.) Try this one, for example. You may notice that it’s also pretty damn good commentary on important issues. The point of all this? This one has the best explanation I’ve ever heard for why we shouldn’t give up our personal liberties for more security.

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