Local Insanity

It’s been fairly strongly suggested that I look into a location closer than Jim & Lisa’s. It is somewhat far away, but it is flexible as far as number of people and type of food etc. Given that I don’t really care, I’m leaving it up to you. Post your preference here and discuss if you like.

I can look for something in a closer restaurant, though I’m not sure how booked they’ll all be. There are places within walking distance, places in Santa Monica (10-30 min), places in Beverly Hills (10-30 min). Dad has told me that he doesn’t mind going to Jim’s as long as he gets back to the airport in time, and Gma&Gpa Donovan have said they don’t mind much. If I don’t get any response I’ll just assume Jim’s is fine.

I found this awesome javascript library a while back called prototype. I’ve started using it on bruinwalk.com and it’s been great. One of the things I implemented on the home page was a rotator for the Daily Bruin headlines, but there wasn’t a built-in object to handle it, so I wrote a crappy set of functions to wrap Effect.Appear and Effect.Fade, but it’s not extensible and it’d have to be rewritten to work with any other setup.

Now I’ve done that. You can download it from here, and it is dependent on the prototype library. It was written against version 1.2.1, but with Effect2 in mind. If you find it useful and modify it, post a comment on what you did with it.

Google has done it again. This time, they’ve got themselves into the portal arena. If you have a Google account (like Gmail) then you can try it. It’s really easy to set up and it feels right. Like a desktop app, not a web app. It doesn’t offer everything you might want yet, but it does it well, and it even offers drag-n-drop customization! Yay for Google!

I messed up the Daily Bruin website, but now it’s fixed. Not by me either. I was told that I should come back to LA on the weekend to fix it, and then they fix it by restoring from a backup that neither I nor they knew existed. Justin, my old coworker, fixed it. I asked them if they could let me access it from home, but they said they couldn’t do it. They can, but they don’t know how. Justin knew how to. They didn’t even bother to call me when they knew I was coming down and that they didn’t need me to fix it. This whole mess was my fault, but at least they could have done the courtesy of letting me spend the rest of Mother’s day with my family.

So I’ve quit, and I’m glad. I have two more weeks left, and I don’t think I’ll be doing much during that time. This incident was simply the last straw - I’d been dissatisfied for a while. As mom pointed out, this may give me a bad reference, but all I can do is hope it doesn’t.

Home for mother’s day, but I screwed up the Daily Bruin web site, so I may have to spend some of today fixing it (if I can). Kelly and I just got into another argument about political theory, human nature, reason etc. She and I never do seem to be able to have constructive discussions about it.

It started when we were talking about physician assisted suicide, and then suicide in general. I made the assertion that a person has the right to commit suicide if they so choose - she thought otherwise. What I don’t understand is where she and most others think their right to force their will upon others comes from. Does god give them a right to do it? Are we a collective and I’m just too dumb to see it?

BEGIN RANT On that note, why is it that whenever someone talks about communism (even me circa two years ago) they always preface it with, “Well, it’s a good idea, and works in theory.” Are they trying to apologize? Like, the theory is right, if only human nature would live up to it. Aren’t we damning ourselves with that preface? And what’s this about working in theory? It does not work in theory, unless you have a theory not based on reality. END RANT

I’ve found it difficult as of late to argue with people who don’t want to use reason and reality as their basis for argument. Those of you who know me well enough to know I recently finished reading Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead will probably attribute this attitude of mine to them. Clearly this is partly true, but it is not because I have just taken it in as my own. I’ve thought about it many times before, but I never really had anyone that agreed with me. I’ve always felt that there is something wrong with the world when people say that they are not self-interested and that they want to work for the good of the community etc etc. This attitude leads to unhappiness in many of the cases I’ve seen, including my own.

I thought earlier that I’d seen some of the error in Atlas Shrugged, and I have. There are problems with that philosophy. The fact that I’ve given a little ground has apparently not closed the chasm between me and my sister. I’ll try to avoid the issue in the future, since neither one of us gets anything out of it. If she wants to continue to live in a world that by definition has no rhyme or reason, so be it - it is her life, after all.

It’s back! That was a long two weeks. I got Tiger too! So far it’s pretty good, though the compatibility issues are annoying me somewhat. That should be over and done with in a matter of months. After one day of Spotlight, I must admit that I find it hard to be without.

Oh, and it didn’t fix my sleep problem.