So I'm back from the LGSSP/Lucent Global Summit trip. It's always funny to watch Americans and Brits discuss politics. The Americans always are temporarily confused ("okay ... Parliament is different from Congress? Well, I guess that sorta makes sense"), but Brits tend to be absolutely flummoxed by the electoral college and US social services ("wait ... you do what?").

Finished my Campus Comfort order tonight - 3 weeks and counting!

Food: meager. Pace: grueling. Killing off everyone in your party before the first river: priceless.

Took me forever to get through security at the airport today. They didn't have a guy around to do patdowns; then my scooter set off the spectrometer (or whatever it is that checks for explosives) three times.

I got patted down twice, which is a pointless reaction to the alarm. And it's kinda worrying that they didn't do any "special" searching or interviewing even though they never got a clean spectrometer run (i.e., my scooter kept setting off the alarm like it had explosives residue).

Not very comforting!

Post on /. re iTune's 500,000,000th song: "So, does this make iTunes the new Walmart, except less evil and with naughty words?"

If you're looking for a good chuckle, google for, "TEA DAMMIT!" and start clicking. The animated gif is my favorite.

So The Daily Show's guest tonight is an idiot. No good at giving an interview. But this quote ... "So let's say there was a 'Bigot Channel' [example of a point]. And on this channel, Hispanics are spics, Jews are kikes, gays are faggots, and black people are you-know-what." WTF? He can say spics, kikes, and faggots to give examples of what we consider unacceptable language, but he can't bring himself to say nigger in EXACTLY THE SAME CONTEXT?

I mean, I find the word midget offensive (although you get a freebie if you legitimately didn't know), but I don't call it "you-know-what" or "the M word". Same with the word crip (and yeah, I know that's been 'reclaimed' by some folks, most noticeably in the UK).

I've been doing some thinking about perspective lately - how much our perspective and experiences shape our worldview - and ran across some interesting statements on a BBC message board. Would've gotten into the convo, too, except that the Beeb has some really weird rules about their message boards (only on from 9-12, UK time, etc.) and I couldn't get it to work anyway.

Anyway, it got me wondering: since I am a product of my experiences, of the world that has surrounded me so far, is my perspective going to be at all comparable to anyone else's? In other words, is any given person's perspective close enough to another's that they can bend their viewpoint and really accurately predict how another person reacts to the world around them?

Example: the London bombings a few days ago were viewed by my society, and much of the rest of the world, as horrific acts of violence, and this reaction seems very basic and obvious to us. Yet somewhere, people who are aware of the incident are celebrating it; somewhere else, people have never heard of it.

I'm thinking that many of my "different" interests - computing, linguistics, history - are actually rooted in a much deeper interest in general epistemology.

I don't know how you will react to this, nor do I know if you'll understand what I meant. And if you comment (which I'm not discouraging, BTW), I don't know if I'll understand what you mean. This sounds negative (heck, the whole post sounds kinda negative), but it actually isn't; I'm not seeing this as a bad thing, just as the way it is. Or at least, the way it is according to my current perspective ...

On a lighter note, child-proof tops on jars and bottles are EVIL ;-)

Just got back from the LPA conference in Orlando. Had a great time, lots of stories, etc.

And I have to say, Riven is a heck of a lot more fun when you're not switching CDs! Yay for Amazon.

STOP THE PRESSES! It appears that there is now a way to write Python scripts that use AppleScript interfaces. I think I saw something about Perl and maybe some other scripting languages too, but I'm too busy playing with this to check.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet.

Well, I just went through the process of putting all of my GMail contacts into my Macintosh Address Book. Took a long time, but now I can export it as a CSV file that can be imported into just about any other address program. I'm also going to look at web publishing it (behind a password, for those of you worried about spam), but I'm not sure if I can do that without .Mac.

I was weeding out the email addresses that I don't want anymore - obsoleted ones, ones that got added to my address book when I put 150+ invites on iSpool.com or whatever it was for people to take, ones for people I'm no longer in touch with, or for teachers/administrators I don't think I'll be emailing - and I came across some really weird emails I didn't even recognize (although I assume I knew most or all of 'em at some point). Domains removed to protect the innocent.

Example: RevolutionOfTheProletariat@[].com, ThisIsntMyEmail@[].com, Root@[fairlycommondomain].com (no idea how they managed that!), and so on. I even came across a palindrome - something like moc.niamod@domain.com. Of course, just as emails are case-insensitive, '.'s don't count (e.g., that last email was exactly the same as mocniamod@domain.com).