Octopodial Chrome

The Wall Street Journal notes that wool is coming back: it insulates better, it is more attractive and it’s renewable. Frankly, I think it’s a lot more comfortable than synthetics too. A lot of folks disagree, but I think they’ve not taken the time to get used to wool; also, I wonder if they’ve encountered the new non-synthetic blends and varieties which are super-soft.

As for the notion that kids raised on synthetic pseudo-fleece won’t go near wool, I’m sure that kids raised on McDonald’s have trouble with French cuisine. That doesn’t mean I’m burning my Le Central gift card (thanks Dad!).

John Derbyshire wrote a nice little article on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Die Beiden, a pretty little poem which I’m glad now to know. Here it is in the original and in a translation:

Die Beiden

Sie trug den Becher in der Hand
—Ihr Kinn und Mund glich seinem Rand—,
So leicht und sicher war ihr Gang,
Kein Tropfen aus dem Becher sprang.

So leicht und fest war seine Hand:
Er ritt auf einem jungen Pferde,
Und mit nachlässiger Gebärde
Erzwang er, daß es zitternd stand.

Jedoch, wenn er aus ihrer Hand
Den leichten Becher nehmen sollte,
So war es beiden allzuschwer;
Denn beide bebten sie so sehr,
Daß keine Hand die andre fand
Und dunkler Wein am Boden rollte.

The Two

She carried the cup in her hand
—her chin and mouth were like its rim—
her gait was so light and assured,
not a drop spilled out of the cup.

His hand was equally light and firm;
he rode on a young horse,
and with a careless movement
he made it stand still, quivering.

But when he was to take
the light cup from her hand,
it was too heavy for both of them:
for both trembled so much
that no hand found the other hand,
and dark wine flowed on the ground.

Translation by Leonard Forster

I think it’s kind of sweet.

I saw this at National Review Online:

To All My Liberal Friends

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To All My Conservative Friends

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I like:-)

Last month the New York Times ran a surprisingly good set of features on hunting, composed of an article on the first turkey season on Long Island, a a video on urbanites going hunting and finally an accompanying article the third day. They’re worth a read.

I think a lot of people don’t really understand hunting. I don’t do it for the kill—if anything, actually killing the birds is the least fun part of a hunt—but for the camaraderie, the time spent with friends in the outdoors, the reality of tromping in a farmer’s field looking for birds to eat. There’s something honest and straightforward about it that I enjoy. I can look across a section and know that I walked across every one of those furrows; I can see the bootprints of the men who hunted them yesterday, or earlier this morning; I can see the tracks and sign of birds and rabbits and dogs and cattle; I can see a particular piece of territory and know that there’s a good change there’ll be a bird in there; other times, I’ll be surprised by one where I didn’t expect him. And at the end of the day, I know that for once in my life I’ve earned my food in a way I never used to.

It’s pretty neat to read that even in our coastal elites might be relearning the joys of hunting for themselves.

I wouldn’t ever wear this shirt, but it sure does have a point:

Of course, Che Guevara was a minor, petty thug—he doesn’t really rank with such monsters as Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. Still, it never ceases to amaze me that leftists wear the image of a man who gleefully executed scores of gay men with his own hand and stated for the record the he’d have fired the Cuban missiles at the US if he’d been allowed.

I’ve added a pastry recipe to my bachelor recipes. It’s pretty good—I use it whenever I’m cooking for folks who don’t like lard.

I had a complete blast today snowshoeing up around Brainard Lake with the guys (and one gal) from work. It was well-worth the trek up to Boulder, and even not sleeping in until noon, as is my wont on Saturdays. We all had a great time.

Incidentally, wool rocks: I was wearing wool long-johns, wool socks, a wool sweater, wool wristers, wool mittens and a wool balaclava. I spent the trip–in freezing temperatures, with high-speed winds and blowing snow–hotter than was strictly necessary. And yes, I made all but the long-johns.

I’m pretty sure that this means in some cultures I rock.

The New York Times discovers aging beer like fine wine (or maybe we should say that wine is aged like fine beer? I m deeply envious of the Coloradan gold mine filled with beer—that’s several different kinds of cool.

The Pedant-General over at Devil’s Kitchen has a great explanation of why the CRU revelations can’t be ignored. Elsewhere, Charles Murray points out that it’s the disappearing data which is damning.

Given reasonably trustworthy premises, one can argue to a reasonably trustworthy conclusion. It appears from the evidence that the CRU’s premises aren’t reasonably trustworthy, and their conclusions aren’t to be trusted.

USS Consitution has been designated the Ship of State, which means a stepped-up ceremonial role for the 212-year old ship. She’s the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, and one of the first six frigates in the US Navy.

When I was in Newport for DCO School we spent liberty on Saturday touring her. It was a great experience!

It has been twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty years since Eastern Europe broke its shackles, twenty years since our victory over socialist tyranny.

I grew up at the very tail end of the Cold War. As a small boy I remember leaving home before dawn to greet and say goodbye to my father as he sailed with the Navy. I grew up on movies like Top Gun. I was raised just outside of Norfolk, the headquarters of the Atlantic Fleet. Once I asked Dad what would happen to our family if there were a nuclear war; he replied that we’d be radioactive grit. It sounds harsh & heartless now, but it was true.

And then in the summer & fall of 1989 things started to change. The various states which formed the Soviet Empire started to lose their grip on their citizenry. The Hungarians opened their borders. The Poles rose up. Change was in the air.

But change was in the air in 1948, 1953 and in 1968—and nothing changed, except for the blood that was spilt & the lives which were lost, anyway. The Communists had crushed dissent then, and could have tried to do so again. But this time they didn’t. This time the people rose up, and they were allowed to stand. This time the people headed for freedom, and the border guards didn’t stop them. This time, the walls came tumbling down.

I was only eleven at the time, not much more than a boy, and I didn’t fully understand what was going one, but I knew enough to know that it wasn’t just historic—it defined historic. The radio the following year had Scorpions’ Wind of Change and Jesus Jones’ Right Here, Right Now on constant rotation. Event followed event: first the Wall, then Ceauşescu, then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics herself fell.

We. Had. Won.

After a world war, after a cold war, after numerous hot wars, after untold expenditures of blood and money, we had won. After the stalemate of Korea, after the losses of East Germany, Cuba & Vietnam, we had won. After the lies of the twenties and thirties, the necessity of the forties, the treasons of the fifties and sixties, the blindness of the seventies and the final struggle of the eighties, Truth and Freedom won the day. The appeasers, the dupes, the fellow-travellers, the traitors: they were shown for what they were; they lost.

But we—we had won!

The years since have been anything but simple or easy—or peaceful. Far from the end of history, what we have seen instead has been the resumption of history. The black-and-white of the Free World versus the Second World has been replaced with the grey of each nation’s self-interest. History continues, as it ever has.

But no matter what the future brings, one thing remains: we were right, and we won.

Slowly but surely the forces of freedom are pushing back the liberty-hating brigades of anti-smoking fascists. This is a Good Thing, not because cigarettes are particularly pleasant (they’re not) or because Big Tobacco is particularly decent or honest (it’s not), but because it’s a fundamental principles of property rights that a property owner has the right to allow what he wants within extremely broad limits, and the public has the right not to attend if they don’t want to.

David Rohde, a reporter for the New York Times, was held captive by the Taliban; he has now told his story. It’s an amazing read, detailing how he returned to religion, coöperated with & opposed his captors and dealt with captivity.

Of course, it’s his story in his words; no doubt there are inaccuracies of memory as well as of fact. But it is an excellent tale nonetheless, and a good example of what happens when a Westerner meets Islamic extremism face-to-face.

The Daily Mail suggests that oral contraceptives have changed women’s taste in men. It seems plausible enough to me: long-term use of hormones–particularly sex- and pregnancy-related hormones—might reasonably have interesting mental side effects.

But the current fad for baby-faced pseudo-men might also just be another one of those swings of fashion. The French ancien regime was about as poncy as it’s possible to be, without the involvement of a single hormone supplement.

My uncle—Father Joseph to the rest of y’all—recently led members of his current and former parishes on the Hotter’N Hell Hundred , a set of cycling races down in Texas in August.

He was up here in Denver a few weeks back training and I had the opportunity to ride with him. He’s in great form, better than I am…

On Sunday, 23rd August I had the honour of administering the commissioning oath to my brother John, who is now an ensign in the United States Navy. He is a Chaplain Candidate, attending Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

With his accession, all four of us are now in the naval service: three naval officers and one Marine!

I got forwarded this by a buddy of mine, so…

Three names I go by

Bob

Mr. Uhl

Ensign Uhl

Three jobs I have had

Chicken spitter

Dish washer

Deskside support

Three places I have lived

Newport, Rhode Island & Providence Plantations

Monterey, California

Virginia Beach, Virginia

Three favourite drinks

Microbrew

Coffee

Kombucha

Three TV shows I watch (N.B.: I watch on Hulu, not on cable)

Burn Notice

Royal Pains

Psyche

Three places I have been

Berlin, Germany

London, England

Langemarck, Flanders

Three people that text me regularly

None, because all my friends wish to remain my friends

Three of my favourite foods

Blue cheeses

Sausages

Anything Oriental

Three friends or family members I think will respond

Beats me

Three places I would rather be

Europe

Pacific Northwest

In the mountains

Three thing I am looking forward to

My uncle’s visit

The Great American Beer Festival

My kid brother’s return

Three favourite things to wear

Coat and tie

Uniform

Vibram FiveFingers

There you have it.

In the style of Jeff Foxworthy’s hilarious You Might be a Redneck routine, here’s a list of questions to determine if you’re a straight-razor or safety-razor type of guye.

I just discovered a source chocolate guns, ammunition and grenades. Christmas gifts for all my friends…

Carol Yoon pens an ode to the joys of classifying living organisms. You know, I’d not really given the subject much thought before, other than to know that it was mildly interesting, but she has some interesting factlets and whets the appetite for more.

Hat-tip to Drew.

Here’s a nifty list of 100 interview questions for developers. I can’t say that I can answer them all, but I know most…and will learn the rest.

I’ve recently been hearing from multiple sources that running shoes are actually counter-productive: they encourage poor running form and discourage using the natural shock absorbers the Lord provided for us, which leads to more injuries. Given that all three of my brothers have had leg problems in their training, this is an important concern for me, so I decided to take a leap of faith and get a pair of Vibram FiveFingers, a barefooting shoe.

The term sounds counter-intuitive, but it actually makes sense: it’s a shoe designed with no or minimal padding when allows the foot to flex freely, as though one were barefoot, but which protects one from glass and parasites which burrow through the feet (hookworm is nasty).

I like the FiveFingers because of the articulated toes. They look strange, but it’s so cool to actually be able to actually use my foot; it’s like the difference between gloves and mittens. Terra Plana make a line of more-traditional looking barefooting shoes which look traditional but have ultra-thin (about 1/8″), flexible soles. I might get a pair for the office.

The only warning I have is this: approach barefooting as though you were starting to run all over again. Your leg and foot muscles are almost certainly not developed enough due to years of under-use so you need to gradually get into the swing of things. I made the mistake of putting the shoes on and running a mile…very stupid.

Instead, use a staged program where you start off walking three times a week for a month, then start run/walk periods, increasing the ratio of running to walking, then eventually start running straight through. I’m doing that now.

It feels great to run like a little kid again!

Using only song names from one artist, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to 15 people and include me. You can’t use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It’s a lot harder than you think! Repost as My life according to <band name>.

Pick your artist

Pulp

Are you a male or female

I’m a Man

Describe yourself

Master of the Universe

Describe where you currently live

Nights of Suburbia

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?

The Trees (in a punning way…)

Your favourite form of transportation

Boats & Trains

Your best friend

Looking for Life

You and your best friends are

Party Hard

What’s the weather like?

Blue Glow

Favourite time of day

Goodnight

If your life were a TV show, what would it be called?

Glory Days

What is life to you?

I Love Life

Your last relationship

Have You Seen Her Lately?

Your fear

The Fear

What is the best advice you have to give?

Life Must Be So Wonderful

Thought for the day

Help for the Aged

How you would like to die

Sickly Grin

My soul’s present condition

The Professional

Your motto

Death Goes to the Disco

And y’know, I was trying to be serious…were I going for comedic effect, there are much, much better song titles to use…

I just read the beginning of this chapter and now I wonder how often I was explaining Star Trek source code…

The standard response to an unhappy marriage nowadays is to end it instead of mending it. Laura Munson chose not to do that, and saved her family and her marriage. Her husband was going through an emotional low and thought that leaving his family would solve the problem (not bloody likely); instead of giving in—which is the socially-expected course of action—she waited him out. And eventually he realised that the fault lay not in his family but in himself.

A friend challenged all of his friends to post the first fifteen movies we can think of that will stick with ’us. Well, I prefer twelve to fifteen any day, so here’s my selection:

1. Top Gun
2. Young Frankenstein
3. The Lighthorsemen
4. Breaker Morant
5. Die Fledermaus
6. Last of the Mohicans
7. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
8. 12 Monkeys
9. 90° South
10. Hors de Prix
11. Master and Commander
12. Animal House

Take it for whatever it’s worth…

So I was watching the video for Jefferson Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now and had an idea: a cheesy 80s film night. This isn’t for the true classics like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; it’s for the guilty pleasures like Top Gun, Adventures in Babysitting or Mannequin. Probably Weird Science, Real Genius and Revenge of the Nerds. Maybe License to Drive or Blind Date. I wonder what others would qualify? I’ve never seen Footloose, but it sounds like a likely candidate. Ditto on both counts for Dirty Dancing.

Anyone else have thoughts? There are probably too many for a single night, but a whole series of Cheesy 80s Film Nights sounds fun to me.

Theodore Dalrymple—a British subject and physician, and thus with intimate knowledge of their health care system—warns us that there is no fundamental right to health care and that State-funded health care is often insufficient. Takeaway line: There is no right to health care—any more than there is a right to chicken Kiev every second Thursday of the month.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a great article about how food safety is wreaking havoc on the environment. Apparently food buyers are trying to make plants—grown in nature, under the sky—as sterile as possible, by mandating dead zones around vegetable beds, killing off of animals and so forth.

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to…wait for it…just wash off the produce?

I recently happened upon Life Cycle of a Silver Bullet. It examines how it is that an approach that succeeds for one company doesn’t necessarily work at others. This isn’t rocket science, but one sees it happen over and over. Basically, cargo-cult imitation of what worked in one situation doesn’t necessarily work in another situation any more than the original cargo cults succeeded in bringing back the angels-with-gifts by setting up bamboo airfields and coconut headphones.

The real method behind every successful methodology is this: take an honest look at your problems, and find a specific solution for them. The solutions to someone else’s problems may address some of yours if they are sufficiently similar—or may lead you in entirely the wrong direction.

This should be well-known, but apparently it isn’t.

Use your head: stop at red.

Nat Friedman has some interesting thoughts about nerds and jocks. He refers to Germany as a country where engineering is respected. I wonder how true that is…isn’t football pretty popular over there?

On this anniversary of our independence, you might take a moment to consider how fortunate we were in our Founders. Unlike so many other revolutionaries, they didn’t trust in man’s good nature, but rather his baseness; they formed a government which was meant to control itself.

Smart guys.

You just can’t ask for a better headline than this. It looks like the London Stock Exchange, having lost a packet due to using Microsoft and Accenture technology, has decided to call the whole thing off. No word yet on what the replacement will be, although Linux is one option.

Not that Linux—or even Unix—is necessarily the best option. There are even better OSes out there, for example any mainframe OS. The remaining midrange OSes like IBM i might not be a bad fit either.

The problem with Windows is not simply that it’s shoddy: all software has bugs, generally lots of them (Lord knows Linux has plenty). The problem is that it’s not resilient to those bugs, and that one has a great deal of difficult working around those bugs and flaws. Unix really isn’t that great in and of itself but one can extend it and massage it into shape; Windows isn’t that great (although the operating system itself—I don’t mean the user interface—might actually be better), but what you see is more or less what you’re going to get.

This list has been circulating for years, but it’s true by all accounts.

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it grey and live in it for six months.
2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house, on the outside of the walls and label all the piping so you can identify what you just hit your head on.
3. Pump 10 inches of nasty crappy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean it up and paint the basement Terracotta.
4. Every couple of weeks dress up in your best clohtes and go to the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy bar you can, pay $20 per beer until you’re hammered, then walk home in the freezing cold.
5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawn mower.
6. Raise your bed within six inches of your ceiling.
7. Have your neighbor come over at 5am and blow a whistle so loud the Helen Keller would hear, and shout Reveille, reveille,all hands heave out and trice up.
8. Have your mother in law write down everything she wants you to do that day, then you must stand in the backyard at 6am and have her read it to you.
9. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere, this is to ensure that your engine is properly lit off.
10. Repaint your house once a month.
11. Have your neighbor collect your mail for a month, randomly losing every 5th item.
12. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, only to watch CNN and the Weather Channel.
13. Have your 5 year old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears.
14. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.
15. Periodically, shut off power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting Fire, fire, fire! and restore power.
16. Purchase 50 cases of toilet paper, locl up all but two rolls, ensure one of these two rolls is wet at all times.
17. Sleep on a shelf in the closet, replace the door with a curtain, have your wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you gp to sleep. She should then shine a bright flashlight directly into your eyes and then mumble Sorry, wrong rack.
18. Safety wire the lug nuts on your car.
19. Drive to the gas station, get permission from the service attendant to refuel your car, don rubber gloves, apron, and face shield, start pumping, then tell wife and kids in the car,We’ve commenced refueling.
20. Move in with all the guys you wouldn’t get caught dead hanging out with from high school for 6 months.
21. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night. Jump and get dressed as fast as you can, making sure you button the top button on your shirt and your pants tucked in your socks, run outside and uncoil the garden hose.
22. Install a small florescent lamp under the coffee table, get under it and read books and/or sleep.
23. Raise the thresholds and lower the top seals of your doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.
24. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan whlie it is in the oven, spread icing on real thick to level it off, serve at every meal.
25. Every so often throw the cat in the pool and shout man overboard, starboard side, then run into the kitchen and sweep all the pans and dishes off the counter, yell at the wife and kids for not securing for sea!
26. Put on the headphones from your stereo, hang a paper cup around your neck with a string. Go stand in front of the stove and say stove manned and ready. Stay there for 3-4 hours and say stove secured, going offline. Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box mounted on the wall.
27. Have your little sister yell We are in a training environment then have your dad frantically wave a red and black rag at you yelling Black smoke and fire while you wave an uncharged garden hose at him.
28. Stand in the doorway of your house and every time the dog comes through the doggie door, ring the doorbell twice and announce Peleliu arriving, then when he leaves, ring the bell twice and announce Peleliu departing.
29. Lock yourself in your home for six months, consuming only Snickers and Pepsi/Mountain Dew. At the end of the six months go to the high school track and try to run a mile and a half in 9 minutes and when you can’t, you must stand at attention whle your wife yells at you for not being Within Standards.
30. Go outside at midnight, open the fire hydrant full force, then try to hammer a piece of firewood in the hole.
31. Every hour for 4 hours walk about your house, checking the water level in the toilets and the refrigerator tempt, go over to the neighbors house. Ring the doorbell, when he answers, salute him and say All Secure.
32. Stand at the end of your walkway behind a podium with a stick, when your little sisters friends come over, ask to see their drivers licenses, those who can’t produce a valid ID, you must harass them about it but let them by anyway.
33. Have your mom sew your name on the back of all your pants.
34. At midnight, write on a legal pad which neighbors are home, what sinks, showers and ceiling fans are online, and whether or not your wife is at home.
35. Tag out all the power to your livingroom to change a lightbulb in an endtable lamp
36. Call your youngest kid Crank and make him do the dishes for 90 days.
37. Draw and test a daily lube oil sample from your car.
38. Yell Attention on Deck every time your wife enters the room you are in.
39. Paint a glow in the dark ring around every doorway leading outside your house. Then paint a glow in the dark box on every wall in the house. In the box write the name of the room and give it a useless nubmer and call that box a Bull’s Eye.
40. Put red lights in every light fixture leading outside the house and install a switch that turns this light off anyways when the door is opened.
41. Get the same phones used on stove watch, go the the backyard and say Aft Lookout Online and stay there all day.
42. Yell at your kids for wearing white socks.
43. Flip your kids’ mattress on the floor because the seam of their bedsheet was running the wrong way.
44. Install a 2 by 2 foot shower and try to wash your feet. (GOOD LUCK)
45. After a rainstorm, get a mop and get up all standing water from the porch and sidwalk, so the wife wont’ bitch, and don’t forget to sweep away all the standing water into the street.
46. Install a wooden box with a small slot in the top and a hole in the bottom that leads directly to the trashcan, and on the box in bold letters writte Suggestion Box.
47. Pay for the kids to go to small engine school. When the lawn moswer breaks call SEARS to come and fix it.
48. Serve dinner at 4pm. Give your fat son a generous serving because he looks hungry, and be sure to starve the skinny one who is actually very hungry, and secure dinner before everyone eats.

I sometimes think our old man might have been using some of these on us.

I added my recipe for sweet cornbread to my bachelor recipes.

I couldn’t put it any better myself.

Do you think that you know about Christianity? Why not get to know the original? It’s a pretty cool site with some nice high-level articles answering various questions and providing information folks might not know—like that the Bible came from us (yup: we’re not a Bible-based church, but rather the Bible is a Church-based book).

I’ve added more packages to my repository:

cl-vectors

An anti-aliased vector rasterization library

cl-zpb-ttf

A TrueType parser

cl-zpng

A library for creating PNG files

cl-vecto

A vector rasterization library which wraps CL-VECTORS

If you use Common Lisp to do graphics work, maybe these will be of some assistance.

Josh Kurz reports on why some people hate coriander so much. He calls it cilantro, which is of course not the proper English name for it, but it’s otherwise a good article.

Drie Fonteinen have lost 13,000 gallons (300 barrels) of beer to a thermostat failure. This is about a third of their annual revenue lost. The brewer is hoping to cut his losses a bit by distilling the spoilt beer.

Please go out an buy 3 Fonteinen wherever you can find it in order to help support the brewery.

A 10-year-old girl in Huntington Beach, Cali., was dying of cancer but wanted to stay alive long enough to see Up. By the time it came out, she was unable to leave her home—so Pixar sent a special DVD of the film to her, hand-carried by an employee with a bag of stuffed animals, a movie poster, a scrap book from the film and stories about the movie. She died a few hours after seeing it.

You may not recall it from high school, but Dracula is an epistolary novel—that is, it is composed of purported letters and diary entries. The modern format would be a blog novel, and now in the steps of the Pepys blog some has started the Dracula blog, with posts in real time. Pretty nifty idea!

A manicurist from Washington, DC sold her car and her home in order to build a school in her native village in Ethiopia. Not only that, she reserved a third of her salary and all of her tips for the project. Part of her inspiration came from the fact that a girl there was eaten by a hyena on the three-hour walk home from the then-nearest school.

This is an excellent example of the power of private charity. Bravo for her!

Announcing the Octopodial Chrome Yum Repository I have packaged many Common Lisp packages for Fedora 11. Furthermore, I have set up a Yum repository to make it very easy to install Common Lisp packages. All you need to do is grab the repository RPM and install it. If using Firefox then Package Kit should open automatically; if using a command line you can install with:

rpm -ivh octopodial-chrome-11-1.fc11.noarch.rpm

From then on you can install new software as normal, using yum on the command line, Add/Remove Software in the GUI or whatever your normal install method is.

The following software packages are currently available:

cl-alexandria

Public domain utilities for Common Lisp

cl-babel

Charset encoding/decoding library for Common Lisp

cl-base64

RFC 1521 base64 library for Common Lisp

cl-bordeaux-threads

A portable multithreading library for Common Lisp

cl-cffi

Common Foreign Function Interface for Common Lisp

cl-chunga

Portable chunked streams for Common Lisp

cl-fad

Unification layer atop Common Lisp’s pathname functions

cl-flexi-streams

"Virtual" bivalent streams that can be layered atop real binary or

cl-flexichain

Common Lisp library for editable sequences

cl-hunchentoot

A web server written in Common Lisp

cl-ironclad

Cryptography library for Common Lisp supporting many cyphers,

cl-mcclim

Common Lisp Interface Manager, a protable GUI for Lisp

cl-md5

Simple MD5 library for Common Lisp

cl-parse-number

Simple library to parse numbers from strings

cl-ppcre

Portable Perl-compatible regular expressions for Common Lisp

cl-rfc2388

RFC 1521 rfc2388 library for Common Lisp

cl-spatial-trees

Common Lisp Interface Manager, a protable GUI for Lisp

cl-split-sequence

Simple library to split a sequence on some delimiter

cl-sql-backend-postgresql

PostgreSQL for CLSQL, a Common Lisp SQL interface

cl-sql-common

Common files for CLSQL, a Common Lisp SQL interface

cl-ssl

Common Lisp interface to OpenSSL

cl-swank

SLIME Lisp-side server

cl-trivial-features

Ensuring consistent FEATURES across Common Lisp implementations

cl-trivial-gray-streams

Extremely thin compatibility library for gray streams

cl-usocket

A portable TCP/IP (and later on maybe UDP) socket interface for

cl-who

Common Lisp HTML markup library

cl-x

X11 interface for Common Lisp

emacs-common-slime

Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs

emacs-slime

Compiled elisp files to run slime under GNU Emacs

emacs-slime-el

Elisp source files for slime under GNU Emacs

xemacs-slime

Compiled elisp files to run slime under XEmacs

xemacs-slime-el

Elisp source files for slime under XEmacs

Please pass this information on to anyone who uses Common Lisp on Fedora.

Iain Murray argues that systematic risk in financial governments exist because of the State. I think he may very well be right: absent the expectation of a bailout, would markets more accurately price risk? It’s a reasonable proposition.

A fundamental principle of the Internet is that all hosts are peers, that is, there is nothing fundamentally different about your laptop or Time magazine’s web serving computers: each is a computer; each can run the same software and communicate in the same way; neither is privileged over the other.

Net neutrality is an important implication of this principle. Basically, all hosts on the Internet have the same access to resources as any other host. That doesn’t mean that one can’t charge people for different types of access (e.g. online subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal), but it does mean that one can’t forbid some hosts from trying to talk to you while allowing others to do the same.

The big entertainment corporations hate the idea of net neutrality, as it means that they actually have to convince their customers to purchase their wares; they prefer a model like basic cable, where every subscriber pays for BET or Nickelodeon regardless of whether he wants it. They would like to form partnerships with ISPs, charging all of an ISP’s customer in order to provide content that only a few use.

Disney is the first to actually go ahead with this. It doesn’t matter whether or not I want to use their sports website (let’s put it this way: I have never watched a sports game on my computer, and I don’t expect to ever watch a sports game on my computer); my ISP is paying Disney no matter what—much as a shopkeeper might pay a mafioso—and thus I am paying Disney a little bit of money every month.

Note that this has nothing to do with sports. It could be a service I like—maybe something about homebrewing, or about politics, or whatever: it’s outright wrong to sell access at the ISP level rather than at the customer level.

Although it is rather neat that this involves Disney. Another online commentator noted that Disney is to culture what thyroid cancer is to metabolism. It’s appropriate that The Mouse be behind this latest instance of a monopolist abusing its position.

One of the truly wonderful things about programming in Common Lisp is that the system is complete interactive: the programmer can manipulate anything at run time, including the language itself. This is a really powerful technique—but how does one preserve the state of the system between reboots? And how does one get an image-based Lisp system to play nice with Linux’s system service model?

Well, John Wiegley published a great technique a few years which I’ve adapted for Tasting Notes. It’s remarkably simple: create a user to run the system as (just like other services like PostgreSQL or httpd); then create a standard init.d script to run the system. The really clever thing he does is start the system itself, a Swank listener and a kill port. Starting the system is self-explanatory, but what about the rest?

Swank provides a live connexion to a running Lisp system via which one can interact with the system’s internals. It’s pretty cool, and Wiegley’s method gets the job done. So far this is pretty standard stuff; I’ve used it in my own software.

The really clever bit is this bit of code here:

(sb-bsd-sockets:socket-bind socket #(127 0 0 1) *kill-port*)
(sb-bsd-sockets:socket-listen socket 1) (multiple-value-bind
(client-socket addr port) (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-accept socket) (let
((stream (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-make-stream client-socket :element-type
’character :input t :output t :buffering :none))) (princ "Saving
core and shutting down…" stream) (terpri stream))

  ;; Close up the sockets (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-close client-socket)
  (sb-bsd-sockets:socket-close socket))

What this does is wait until someone connects to *KILL-PORT*, then proceeds to shut down the system, kill all threads and cleanly exit. Smart and very simple: all the shutdown script has to do is telnet $KILL_PORT and the software shuts down.

Finally, it calls SB-EXT:SAVE-LISP-AND-DIE to save the current Lisp environment to a file; the next time it starts up it will run that image, so the software’s complete history is saved.

All in all, extremely nifty; I ported Tasting Notes to start using it this weekend.

I was reading an article about the digital television changeover and noticed something a bit disturbing: they set up a call centre for folks having problems; the average overall wait time at the call centre was 8.4 minutes but the average overall wait time for Spanish-speaking callers was 1.8 minutes. I’m having a little bit of difficulty figuring out why folks who speak our native tongue have to wait 4 2/3 times longer than those who don’t. Why didn’t the call centre more accurately predict the distribution of callers it would get and arrange so that all languages would get equal service? For that matter, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure better service for English-speakers, given that English is our language?

When I was in Germany, I expected to wait longer if I wanted English service; when I was in India, I expected the same. Why are we privileging people who can’t even speak our language?

Apple uses H.264 for a lot of its trailers; unfortunately Fedora doesn’t come with it out of the box. Fortunately it turns out that ffmpeg (available from RPM Fusion) does support it, so all you need to do is run sudo yum install ffmpeg-libs gstreamer-ffmpeg and life is good.

Last night I upgraded to Fedora 11. I have to say that I’m impressed! It’s the first Fedora upgrade in a long time which went in quickly and cleanly, without any problems that had me tearing my hair out, which was a problem with past releases (and I—a professional sysadmin and geek—had trouble then you know that normal people did). Overall, Fedora 11 looks more like a polishing release than a feature release: for the most part, things look & behave the same, but they do it better, with fewer bugs.

The latest GNOME desktop looks even nicer than before, with clean lines and subtly eye-pleasing colours. It’s an improvement on the last, which was itself an improvement over previous versions. Session state appears to be working again, which is good (it was broken in Fedora 10).

I was able to get SBCL, PostgreSQL and CLSQL easily installed and got my beer tasting notes site back up and running very easily.

Likewise for the rest of this website and for all the other programmes I have installed on this computer. All in all it’s been a remarkably pain-free—even enjoyable—upgrade experience.

I can recommend the upgrade whole-heartedly. For those of you stuck on broken, proprietary, freedom-hating OSes: now’s the time to switch over. It’s worth it, really.

Yup, everyone’s busily rediscovering the joy of lard. Unlike synthetic shortening, it has no trans-fats. Its saturated fats do not impact blood cholesterol. It’s superior to butter and olive oil for cooking and pastry making.

Just watch out for the supermarket lard: most of them are partially or wholly hydrogenated, which means that the lard does have trans-fats. Dumb dumb dumb.

Heinz has developed a ketchup cake in order to celebrate its Canadian centennial. Apparently it tastes a lot like carrot cake. I kinda want to try it…it’s just too crazy not to!

So I think we all know that bottled water is horrendously expensive and bad for the environment (which is in large part why it’s so horrendously expensive: you’re paying for all the energy wasted in getting that bottle of water to you). A company named uscanteen has updated the old M-1910 canteen and offers it with stylish purse-like carriers for women. Pretty sweet idea, and at $90 for a canteen and carrier together it pays for itself fairly after a month or two.

As most of my readers know, my day job is as a Unix system administrator for a large outsourcing company. What’s Unix, the non-technical among you might ask. Well, basically it’s just about the greatest computer operating system to achieve widespread use (there have been better or more interesting ones, but they never really took off). It turns 40 this year. Kinda funny that I work on something almost nine years older than I am.

Kinda sad that the computing world hasn’t adopted anything better in the intervening decades either.

Right after college I got involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a bunch of amateur mediæval recreationists (rather amusingly, their website is broken…). It was a lot of fun for awhile learning to fence, making Anglo-Saxon, Renaissance Italian & Elizabethan clothing and so forth, but I eventually fell out of it, mostly for time reasons but partly out of disappointment that so many folks were more interested in fantasy and not history. This great video from CBS does a good job of capturing a lot of what I loved and hated about the SCA. Makes me a bit nostalgic! Happy days…

Today is Oak Apple Day, marking the restoration of King Charles II to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the elimination of the abominable Puritan tyranny in 1660. That was, for those not keeping count, 53 years after the founding of my home state—and thus it’s as Virginian a holiday as Jackson Lee Day.

I’m thirty-one years old now…oddly enough, I don’t feel the slightest bit different. Heh:-)

One of the things that annoys me is folks who have dogs instead of children. A dog will last maybe 14 years or so, and when he dies that’s it; in the normal course of things, a child lasts longer than his parents, and produces children of his own, and perhaps even affects the course of history. There’s nothing wrong with dogs, of course, but they’re not people.

Well, it turns out that this over-affection for beasts isn’t a new thing after all. In Geoffroy IV de la Tour Landry’s Book of the Knight of the Tower (written for the instruction of his daughters) we find the following story:

Of The Woman That Gaf The Flesshe To Her Honndes

I SHAL save to yow an Ensample of a lady that yaf the flesshe and good morsels to her lytell houdes. Ther was a lady whiche hadde two small houndes, whome she moche loued and had soo derworthe that she took in them greete playsaunce. She made for them dayly dysshes of sowpes, and after gaf to them flesshe and other fryandyses delycyous. And on a tyme there was a frere mendycaunt that said to her that it was euyll done to gyue suche metes to the houndes, that were grete & fatte, where as there were moche poure peple lene and drye for hogre. Thus he prechyd, vnto the lady, but for al that she wold not leue it. Soo thenne a lytel afterward this lady bycam seke vnto the deth, and ther happed a wonder thyng whiche was sene al apertely. For ther cam vpon her bed two lytel black dogges, and whan she drewe on and was in a traunce they were about her mouthe and lycked her lyppes. And where as they lycied her on the mouthe it bycam as black as a Cole. This I haue herd of a damoyselle that said that she had sene al this, and named to me the lady. This is a good ensample to euery good lady and woman, how they ought not to haue ouer grete plaisyre in suche thynges, ne to geue flesshe ne lychorous metes to the houdes, for lack of whiche the poure peple of god dye for honger, the whiche ben the creatures of god made to his semblaunce and lykenes, and be his seruauntes. Suche wymmen vnderstande not the word of god in the gospel, where as god sayth, He that dot wel to the poure doth to me seruyce. These wymmen resemble not vnto the good quene blache, that was moder of sayni lowys, whiche dyd do gyue in hir syght the mete to the moost nedy and meseased. And after saynt lowys dyd in lyke wyse, for he vysyted the poure peple and fedde them with his own honde. The Plaisire of euery good woman is to see the faderles and moderles children and lytel poure children and them norysshe and clothe, as dide the holy lady that was Countesse of Mauns, whiche norysshed wel thyrtty orphanes and the lytel poure children for pyte, and therin was al hir disporte. And therfor she was louyd of god and had an holy lyf and a goode ende. And ther was, sene at her deth a grete clercnes and lyght alle full of lytel children. These were not the smale houndes that were black whiche were sene with the other, as ye haue herd to fore.

Here’s my rendering, for those who don’t wish to dig through early modern English:

Of the woman who gave meat to her dogs

I shall give to you an example of a lady that gave meat and treats to her little dogs.

There was a lady who had two small dogs whom she loved so much and dearly that she took great pleasure in them. She made them nice meals every day, and gave them meats and other delicious food. One time a mendicant friar said to her that it was an evil deed to give such food to fat dogs when there were many skinny poor people dying of hunger. Thus he preached unto the lady, but she would not listen. So a little later this lady took deathly ill and there occurred a wonder which was seen by all. When she was in her final minutes and had fallen unconscious two little black dogs walked onto her bed and licked her lips, and where they licked her mouth it became as black as coal. I was told this by a girl who had seen it herself, and gave me the name of the lady in question.

This is a good example to every good lady and woman of how they shouldn’t take over-large pleasure in such things, not to give meat or luxurious food to dog when poor people—made in the image and likeness of God, His servants—die from hunger. Such women don’t understand God’s words in the Gospel that He that does good unto the poor does me service. These women are unlike good Queen Blanche, the mother of St. Louis, who fed the poor and abused. And St. Louis did likewise, visiting the poor and feeding them with his own hands. The pleasure of every good woman is to feed and clothe orphans and poor children, like the holy Countess of Mauns, whose only past-time was to feed thirty orphans and poor children out of pity. And therefor she was beloved by God and had a holy life and a good end. When she died there was seen a vision of light surrounding little children, not black hounds as were seen with the other lady.

So you see, you really shouldn’t treat dogs like people. Unless you have a really good mortician I guess.

Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the SHA-1 hashing algorithm, I am transitioning from my old PGP key to a new one. My old key was:

pub 1024D/47740A63 2001-06-26
Key fingerprint = 347A 5D07 607B 6D88 6882 5F64 4361 EBDA 4774 0A63

My new key is:

pub 4096R/A65E2454 2009-05-16
Key fingerprint = 0113 A3F5 598B 51C2 4D24 950B EC98 693D A65E 2454

An easy way to import the new key is to run gpg –fetch-keys http://www.octopodial-chrome.com/~ruhl/A65E2454.asc to fetch it from my webserver; alternatively you could fetch it from MIT’s public keyserver with gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –recv-key A65E2454 .

If you already know my old key, you can verify that the new key is signed by the old one with gpg –check-sigs A65E2454. If you don’t already know my old key, you can check the fingerprint against the one above with gpg –fingerprint A65E2454.

If you’re satisfied that you have the correct key and that you trust it and me, you can sign my key with gpg –sign-key A65E2454

If you _do_ choose to sign my key, it would be very useful if you would upload the signatures, either by emailing to me with gpg –armour –export A65E2454 | mail -s ’OpenPGP signatures for A65E2454’ eadmund42@gmail.com or by sending them to a key server with gpg –keyserver pgp.mit.edu –send-key A65E2454 .

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s the price we must pay in order to have security.

Many thanks to Daniel Gillmor for his quick guide to making the transition.

Jeremy Beer has an intriguing piece on how our meritocratic world has led to the downfall of small towns. I’m not certain yet what my thoughts are; it requires some mulling-over.

Sally Pipes makes some excellent points about health care. The most important one IMHO is that health care is a necessity but not a natural right. Here’s another good one: A little known fact is that of all of life’s necessities, save clothing, health care is by far the least costly. It’s not until Americans become senior citizens that the average household spends more out of pocket on heath care than entertainment and dining out. Yet we don’t decry the crisis in restaurant bills, football games, and rock concerts.

Apparently there’s some knitting blog meme going around wherein one describes what one has knit, plans to knit and doesn’t plan to do. Well, here’s mine. Strong means that I’ve done it; emphasis means I plan to do it; normal text means I’m not planning on it.

• Afghan/Blanket
• I-cord
• Garter stitch
• Knitting with metal wire
• Shawl
• Stockinette stitch
• Socks: top-down
• Socks: toe-up
• Knitting with camel yarn
• Mittens: Cuff-up
• Mittens: Tip-down
• Hat
• Knitting with silk
• Moebius band knitting
• Participating in a knit-along
• Sweater
• Drop stitch patterns
• Knitting with recycled/secondhand yarn
• Slip stitch patterns
• Knitting with banana fiber yarn
• Domino knitting (modular knitting)
• Twisted stitch patterns
• Knitting with bamboo yarn
• Two end knitting
• Charity knitting
• Knitting with soy yarn
• Cardigan
• Toy/doll clothing
• Knitting with circular needles
• Knitting with your own handspun yarn
• Slippers
• Graffiti knitting (knitting items on, or to be left on the street)
• Continental knitting
• Designing knitted garments
• Cable stitch patterns (incl. Aran)
• Lace patterns
• Publishing a knitting book (you never know…)
• Scarf
• American/English knitting (as opposed to continental)
• Knitting to make money
• Button holes
• Knitting with alpaca
• Fair Isle knitting
• Norwegian knitting
• Dyeing with plant colors
• Knitting items for a wedding
• Household items (dishcloths, washcloths, tea cozies…)
• Knitting socks (or other small tubular items) on two circulars
• Olympic knitting/Ravelympic knitting
• Knitting with someone else’s handspun yarn
• Knitting with DPNs
• Holiday related knitting
• Teaching a male how to knit
• Teaching a female how to knit
• Teaching a child to knit
• Reminding someone how to knit
• Bobbles
• Knitting for a living
• Knitting with cotton
• Knitting smocking
• Dyeing yarn
• Steeks
• Knitting art
• Fulling/felting
• Knitting with wool
• Textured knitting
• Kitchener BO
• Purses/bags
• Knitting with beads
• Swatching
• Long Tail CO
• Entrelac
• Knitting and purling backwards
• Machine knitting
• Knitting with self-patterning/self-striping/variegating yarn
• Stuffed toys
• Baby items
• Knitting with cashmere
• Darning
• Jewelry
• Knitting with synthetic yarn
• Writing a pattern
• Gloves
• Intarsia
• Knitting with linen
• Knitting for preemies
• Tubular CO
• Freeform knitting
• Short rows
• Cuffs/fingerless mitts/arm warmers
• Pillows
• Knitting a pattern from an online knitting magazine
• Rug
• Knitting on a loom
• Thrummed knitting
• Knitting a gift
• Knitting for pets
• Shrug/bolero/poncho
• Knitting with dog/cat hair
• Hair accessories
• Knitting in public

Oh, and if you hadn’t figured it out: I knit.

It turns out that speed bumps are deadly: while they save lives by slowing traffic, they also end lives by slowing ambulances. Apparently for every life saved up to 85 are lost. Whoops.

There was a good reason for all the exercise I’ve been doing: I attended Direct Commission Officer Indoctrination from 19 Apr–1 May. For almost all of my adult life I’ve been overweight & out of shape; I believed that my greatest challenge at school would be to keep up physically, so I developed a plan to address the issue, I executed it—and I ended up not having any problems whatsoever. On the contrary, I actually got the highest sit-up score in the class and didn’t do too poorly overall (I got an Excellent-Medium score).

Of course, now that I’m back I need to keep at it. My new goal is to complete 100 miles of running and walking by the 26th of June. I had 29 miles before I went to school, and with over 6 miles of running and 10 of marching (these are bare minima, since I wasn’t keeping track—I’m pretty sure we did more than a mile a day of marching) that puts me at 45 miles. This week I ran 2½ miles and walked 1; ran 1½ and walked 1; and finally today I ran 2½, bringing me up to 53½. Over the upcoming week I plan to knock out another nine miles at least.

A birthday party was invaded by two men—fortunately one of the students at the party had a handgun in his backpack. He drove off the assailants, mortally wounding one of them.

Bob Martin proposes that software development teams model themselves after craft guilds, with a master programmer supervising journeymen programmers who supervise apprentices. Not only that, but computer science degrees would be replaced by apprenticeship in most cases. He demonstrates that such a team would be fairly inexpensive and could be highly productive. It’s an intriguing idea.

My big concern with eliminating college is simply that higher education expands the mind. But is it really necessary to spend $200,000 between the ages of 18 and 22 in order to expand one’s mind? Perhaps that’s really just a luxury for the rich.

Oregon plans to raise the beer tax nineteen-fold, from $2.60 per barrel to $52.21. Crazy stuff.

Last week was a pretty good week. Monday I did 146 push-ups (28, 35, 25, 22 & 36) & 221 sit-ups (42, 52, 38, 33 & 56) and ran three miles in 28:20 (½: 4:28; 1: 8:56; 1½: 13:33; 2: 19:16; 2½: 24:00; 3: 28:20).

Wednesday I did 162 push-ups (18, 18, 20, 20, 14, 14, 16 & 42) & 244 sit-ups (27, 27, 30, 30, 21, 21, 24 & 64) and ran three miles in 27:37 (½: 4:26; 1½:13:18; 2: 18:57; 2½:23:27; 3: 27:37).

Friday I did 176 push-ups (18, 18, 20, 20, 17, 17, 20 & 46) & 262 sit-ups (26, 26, 30, 30, 26, 26, 30 & 68) and ran three miles in 28:35 (½: 4:49; 1: 10:13; 1½: 14:45; 2: 20:33; 2½: 25:01; 3: 28:35). I’m pretty proud of that run: while it was my worst two-mile time in quite awhile, I sprinted the final mile and turned in a not-too-shabby 8½ minute mile after already running two miles. That tells me that if I work on pacing I should have no problem getting three miles in under 27 minutes.

My total miles run since I started logging them is up to 29. Not that many—still, almost a third of the way to a century!

Gentlemen, the Lord’s Prayer

With these words, five American officers attempted to start Sunday services while imprisoned by the North Vietnamese, and were tortured for their trouble—but the sixth attempt succeeded. I’ve recently been reading up on the Code of Conduct instituted after the Korean War; this is exactly how one’s expected to behave.

I added banana pancakes to my list of bachelor recipes. Tasty stuff!

I don’t really have an excuse for being late. Of course, I guess my blog readers probably don’t care that much anyway. I was unable to run on Monday due to snow, but did do a sit-up and push-up exhaustion test. The verdict? Not nearly where I want be, but good enough for government work (literally). On Wednesday I combined my sit-ups & push-ups with my running (which is how the real PRT does it), doing 90 push-ups in sets of 17, 19, 15, 15 & 24, 150 sit-ups in sets of 26, 30, 23, 23 and 48 and running 1½ miles in 13:07 (4:03 for the half, 8:40 for the full mile).

Today I did another full slate of exercises: 101 push-ups in sets of 10, 10, 13, 13, 10, 10, 9 & 26; 171 sit-ups in sets pf 15, 15, 20, 20, 15, 15, 15 & 56; then I ran a full three miles and walked half a mile. Unfortunately I didn't properly hit my split timer at the three mile point: my split times were: ½ mile, 4:24, one mile, 9:02, 1½ miles 13:38, two miles19:04, 2½ miles 23:53 and 3½ miles at 37:34. I'm guessing that my three mile time was something like 29:00.

Roland Martin is a commenter on CNN; he lauds the recent tobacco tax increase. This is the single largest federal tobacco tax increase of all time: the excise tax on cigarettes has gone up from 39 cents per pack to $1.01; the tax on large cigars goes up 35.36 cents; on little cigars 97 cents; pipe tobacco goes from $1.75/lb to $2.83; rolling papers are going up $1.97. The worst of the increases is on loose cigarette tobacco: it has gone from $1.10/lb to $24.78. Indeed, the majority of the cost of rolling tobacco is not the tobacco itself but the tax.

Martin approves of this because he doesn’t like smoking and he thinks that increased taxes will decrease smoking. What if I don’t like fat people like Roland Martin? Is it okay to tax people by weight? I propose $1/pound/month.

Roland Martin can take a long walk off a short pier. The rest of us should support a fair, just and uniform tax code. Taxes are necessary; excess taxes are not.

One thing social conservatives often have trouble with is describing exactly why sexual conservatism matters. Jim Kalb has a pretty good list of frequently asked questions about exactly that. I don’t know that I’d phrase all of my own answers identically, but all-in-all he makes some excellent points.

In Britain 46% of families have only one child. This is a truly disturbing development, not just for demographics but for the moral and ethical development of future British subjects. I know from my own experience as an only child and as the oldest of four just how important it is to have siblings (and not just one: there’s a clear difference between those who only had a single brother or sister and those with several). You’re forced to learn how to tolerate others; you’re forced to learn that you’re not the centre of the universe; you’re forced to deal with your parents not always paying attention to you. These are all Good Things.

Plus, of course, there’s nothing better as an adult than spending time with one’s siblings.

I was unable to run yesterday due to the blizzard. Instead, I used my push-up program as a guide for chin-ups, using the very lowest level of 13 chin-ups in sets of 2, 3, 2, 2 and 4. Today I did 112 push-ups in sets of 13, 13, 15, 15, 12, 12, 10 & 22 (should have been 30) and 177 sit-ups in sets of 18, 18, 22, 22, 18, 18, 15 & 46. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing a max test to see how I shake out.

I did 92 push-ups in sets of 18, 20, 14, 16 & 25. Was supposed to get up to 40 on that last set, but it simply wasn’t happening. I may have to repeat this week.

Then I did 214 sit-ups in sets of 27, 27, 30, 30, 21, 21, 24 & 34. Should have gotten to 60, but as above it wasn’t happening. Will probably repeat this week.

I’m a day late posting this. Went out running yesterday just as the cold snap hit. Not at all fun. Also, I forgot to turn my phone on when I started. If my first ½ mile was like the rest, I turned in a fairly shabby 24-minute 2½ mile run. Kinda a bummer, since I’d done so well Saturday and Monday.

I won’t be able to run tomorrow due to the snow (we’re in the middle of a blizzard), so maybe I’ll do some other exercise instead.

Two days late on my update. I did a mere 48 push-ups today, in sets of 28 and then 20—and then I simply could do no more. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I was bombing out so really, really horribly (for reference, on Thursday less than a week ago I could do 140). Then I realised: I’ve been doing pull-ups, chin-ups and that thing in between with the hands perpendicular to the body all day long: my arms are worn out.

I’m a moron.

Then I proceeded to do 231 sit-ups in sets of 54, 52, 38, 33 and 54.

Charles Fountain has a great article on how subsidised spring training is basically welfare for wealthy teams. Yes, there is a positive impact to communities where spring training takes place (after all, the rich players come into town and spend money, and so do ball fans who want to see them), but is it worth the cost? Moreover, what’s the opportunity cost of that tax-based investment in spring training subsidies? Could that money be better spent by the communities themselves? Could it be better spent by the individual taxpayers? I can’t help but think that would be the case. For one thing, not all taxpayers care about sports; perhaps they would rather spend their money on ballet or opera. Or maybe just food.

Charles Murray argues that it’s a good thing that America has not followed Europe’s example. I tend to agree: my perception of Europe is that is a once-great but now-hollow civilisation, unable even to maintain itself, much less spread its ideals. It’s sad, really.

The Guardian uses lots of free software to run their website. Recently, they discovered a bug, tracked it down, fixed it and submitted the patch to the developers. Were it proprietary software, they would have discovered it, but would have been unable to track it down or fix it, and the odds are that their vendor would not have considered it a high priority.

Free software rocks.

I think most of us remember the cool Mandelbrot set images that were popular back in the ’90s. Well, this guy is generating Mandelbrot images as ASCII art. Geeky and fun.

Warning: do not view the source in your browser. It is huge.

I didn’t update (or exercise) on Friday, since I knew that I’d be PTing during drill on Saturday and wanted to be rested & ready. Which I was, managing to do more sit-ups and run longer than the rest. Saturday’s PT was tough: it was lots of warm-up stuff (which burns energy, obviously), plus a mini-PRT with push-ups, sit-ups and running, plus a whole bunch of stretches and yoga. The best thing I can say about it is that—as hard as it was—I was in no pain at all on Sunday: that’s how good the stretch regimen was. LTJG Benham knows what she’s doing.

Today I ran 2½ miles, with these times: ½ mile, 4:12; 1 mile, 8:11; 1½ miles, 12:32; 2 miles, 17:24; 2½ miles, 21:39. I then walked a further ½ mile; by the end of this week I’d like to be jogging it a bit, and next week I’d like to increase my run to 3 miles.

I also bought a pull-up bar and got a push-up aid for free through my company’s award programme. We’ll see if either is useful.

I recently discovered Craiglook, a mashup which adds a nifty search interface to Craigslist. For example, all bikes for sale within 20 miles of Denver. Might be more useful than the normal Craigslist.

Ugh…managed a very difficult 140 push-ups (25, 29, 25, 25 & 36) and ended up only managing 66 sit-ups in sets of 36 and 30. I really wish I knew why my performance is reversing itself. Diet maybe? Time of day?

Today I decided to do something different: instead of pacing myself to run 2½ miles, I ran the best 1½ mile time I could, then ran/walked the rest of the way. I managed half a mile in 4:11, 1 mile in 8:28, 1½ miles in 12:45, 2 miles in 18:54 and 2½ miles in 24:44. Not too bad, considering that I had worn myself out a mile previously.

I spent the past weekend in Telluride, staying at the nicest home I’ve ever been in ever. It’s owned by some real estate tycoon from Florida; my buddy Martin’s sister is friends with the woman who designed the interior of his mansion in Telluride Mountain Village, and he liked her work enough to let her use the house. To use it for free. A house which normally goes on the market for a max of $12,500 a night. This is the sort of place that some of the bigger celebrities stay at, and we were there.

It was nice, very nice. Really nice. Really incredibly nice.

To start off with, it’s huge (17,300 sq. foot interior, 3,000 sq. foot exterior, over an acre lot). It’s surprisingly cool to just have space for stuff. And all that space is definitely full of stuff: there’s a game room with pool and poker and backgammon tables; there’s a grotto with two pools and a waterfall; there’s a widescreen TV in every bedroom and most other rooms (complete with a library of thousands of DVDs); there’s even a stocked wine cellar. The kitchen is enormous, with four ovens. Oh, there’s also a private theatre in the basement with an excellent sound system (I watched Top Gun).

This place is so large that the kids could be in one end of the house playing in the grotto while the rest of us were lounging in the den listening to classic rock and no-one was bothered in one direction or another.

I have to say that the interior designer was brilliant: the house is extremely attractive and does a pretty good job of capturing the feel of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century park lodge, which was the owner’s intention.

All in all, it was one of the most fun, most luxurious weekends I’ve ever spent. I want to do it again this weekend!

No updates for a few days, as I've been out of town (about which more later). While I was out I went cross-country skiing every day: it's supposed to be an extremely good workout, so I did that instead of my usual exercises. Today I resumed my usual exercises, repeating last week; thus I did 120 push-ups in sets of 21, 25, 21, 21 & 32 and 184 sit-ups in sets of 32, 38, 32, 32 & 50.

CNN has discovered probiotics (that is, supplements of beneficial microbes). It seems to me that rather than taking supplements of saccharomyces cerebisiæ boulardii, one could just drink beer brewed with it; rather than taking supplements of lactobacillus acidophilus one could just eat sauerkraut. Or pickles. Or sauerkraut and pickles. With sausages (dry sausages are alive—how many people know that?). And a beer.

Or you could, you know, pop pills. ’Cause that’s healthy.

Writing on ethnonationalism, Jerry Z. Muller raises a really interesting point: we tend nowadays to regard nationalism as outdated and discredited, but in Europe it won. From the multi-ethnic British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires have emerged relatively homogeneous nation-states, and in fact there are now only two European states without a dominant nationality: Switzerland and Belgium.

A really, really good and thought-provoking read. The US, of course, is predominantly American, which is to say English-speaking, more-or-less theoretically Christian, paying at least lip service to liberty, but each of those attributes is rapidly changing: we’ve a growing non-English subclass; our churches are emptying but atheism is by no means dominant enough to be the state religion—and liberty has few friends these days. I wonder what that bodes for our future.

I did 122 push-ups today, in sets of 21, 25, 21, 21 & 34. Then I did 182 sit-ups in sets of 32, 38, 32, 32 & 48. Ouch.

I ran 2½ miles today; times were: ½ mile, 4:19; one mile, 8:51; 1½ miles, 13:16; two miles, 18:54; 2½ miles, 23:36. Oddly, I ran slower than I ran/walked last Friday. Maybe it was the cold? Or maybe I’m just an old man…every day I seem to run more slowly.

Today I did 124 push-ups in sets of 22, 30, 20, 20 & 32. I also did 181 sit-ups in sets of 33, 42, 30, 30 & 46.

Today I ran two miles and ran/walked another half mile. Times: half a mile, 4:17; mile, 8:48; 1½ miles, 13:18; two miles 18:56; 2½ miles, 23:34. I think maybe next week I’ll be able to run the entire two and a half miles. Then I need to start working back up to three miles…

Today I did 106 push-ups, in sets of 20, 25, 20 (because I misread the sheet—there’s a lesson there!), 15 & 26. I then did 154 sit-ups, in sets of 30, 38, 23, 23 & 40. I hurt. A lot. I can’t wait until I look back on this as easy.

I just discovered this list of Anglo-Saxon words for computer terms. I wish that my old professor Raymond Tripp were alive to enjoy it, but that’s not to be. Some gems:

anchor

ancor

anonymous

uncuðlic

uncouthly

automatic

selffremmende

self-performing

bandwidth

bendbradnes

band-broadness

bells and whistles

belle and hwistle

binary

twirimlic

two-rim-ly

bug

wyrm

cable

wir, rap

wire, wrap

data

giefe

To get this, you have to know that data is something which is given in Latin…

database

gifhord

givehoard…I like that

debug

wyrmbeslean

wyrm-slaying…need I say more?

digital

fingerlic

fingerly

drag and drop

dragan and dreopan

our language really hasn’t changed all that much in a thousand years…and any German-speaker knows what those -an endings mean…

foo

nathwæt

Not-known? Or does it mean something else entirely? Regardless, I want to use it once or twice, just to annoy people.

homepage

hamleaf

home-lead

screen

leohtspeccabord

light-speckle-board?

session

gesittungwhil

while-sitting

site license

stowgeleafe

place-leave

All in all, some really good stuff. But then, I’m a language geek…

Well, that title is a bit alarmist, but it’s true: Excel corrupts gene names and Riken identifiers in spreadsheets. I have to ask: if you’re doing anything important, why are you using Microsoft software to do it?

Today I ran two miles in 18:21, which is pretty lame, albeit within reason for one of my age. I’d like to knock three minutes off of that, but we’ll see how long that takes. My split distances and times were: half a mile, 4:17; one mile, 8:43; 1½ miles, 13:11 (just out of good-high range for the PRT, two miles, 18:21. I’ll do better on Friday!

I got lazy last fall: once it got too cold to run, I quit running (which makes some sense) and then quit doing sit-ups and push-ups indoors (which makes no sense, and is sheer laziness). Well, I'm getting back into shape now and to keep myself honest I thought it might be useful to blog my progress. It's a bit embarrassing how out-of-shape I am, but

The advice I've seen is not to do the same stuff two days in a row, but instead to alternate. So on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I run according to an approved programme and on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I do push-ups and sit-ups.

I ran two miles yesterday. Didn't track my time; tomorrow I'll bring my mobile phone along and use its stopwatch and see how I'm doing. Pretty badly, I suspect. Today I did Week 3, Day 1: sets of 14, 18, 14, 14 & 24 push-ups, for a total of 84. I then did the same for sit-ups: sets of 21, 27, 21, 21 & 41. Here's looking forward to Thursday!

Behold the fundamental building blocks of awesome. It’s all there, from the basis of all awesome—bacon—through beer, to sausage, to ninjas, Chuck Norris, grenades and trilobites (my favourite fossil).

Me, I think if we can get our top scientists working on combining whiskey (distilled beer), aliens, a catapult, three motorcycles and Samuel L. Jackson with a mohawk then we might possibly transcend the awesome continuum and usher in the Age of Awesomosity. Or something.

James Bach recently had a disturbing experience: the human being he chatted with over a computer seemed to be a robot due to an inflexible script. This serves as a reminder to me about the importance of flexibility in our processes. In this case the human beings used to communicate with customers are held to such a strong script that they might as well be computers. Why use humans then?

I recently had a similar experience with a state-funded, university-run telephone survey. They were asking questions about smoking but the questions fundamentally didn’t apply. I was asked if I’d smoke in the last 30 days. As it happened, I had not. Then I was asked if I’d tried to quit in the last 30 days. Ummm, I hadn’t smoked. But when I pointed this out, the questioner just asked the question again. That telephone survey was extremely poorly done in other ways (biased and slanted questions, making false conclusions from faulty assumptions and so forth), but that’s something I’d meant to blog about earlier. In this case, the problem could have been avoided by simply allowing the woman on the other end of the phone to use the brain God gave her.

If you’re going to use human beings, let them use their judgement; if you don’t want judgement, use computers. A man should never do what a computer can do; a computer should never do what a man must do.

Well, today is a black today in Colorado: the Rocky Mountain News is shutting down. Of Denver’s two daily newspapers, they were the oldest and best. When we moved here fifteen years ago, they were always the better, more intelligent, more thorough, more journalistic paper.

It’s a pity no-one could have bought them at a firesale. It’s a pity they couldn’t win the news war with the Denver Post. It’s a pity that they couldn’t have continued online. Farewell!

A popular note going around Facebook requests that one list…

…[fifteen] albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world.

Well, I don’t know if I’ll reach fifteen, but here are my picks:

Nevermind (Nirvana)

If you were alive in 1991, you know what I mean. With one album—really, one song—what I thought I knew about music was turned completely on its head. It was revolutionary, and it was well-done, unlike so much of the grunge which would follow (Pearl Jam, I’m looking at you).

Use Your Illusion I & II (Guns N’ Roses)

I didn’t really know a lot about GnR at the time, but I understood from the news that Use Your Illusion was a highly-anticipated release. My buddies and I could watch video for November Rain over and over and over (due in no small part to Axl Rose’s then-girlfriend Stephanie Seymour’s role therein) and loved that great guitar solo (it still gives me goosebumps), and I remember spending hours trying to hold the final note of Don’t Cry for as long as possible.

Cooleyhighharmony (Boyz II Men)

Another album that came out in 1991 (I was thirteen then—see a pattern?), the absurdly long-titled It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday seemed very meaningful at the time. I’ve grown up since, but those were good times then.

Top Gun, the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

I’ve written about Top Gun before; suffice it to say that it’s one of my all-time favourite films. The soundtrack itself is magnificent: from Kenny Loggins’s Danger Zone to Berlin’s Take My Breath Away to the Top Gun Anthem, it’s superb. There are only a few lame tracks, but the vast majority are grand. If you don’t like Top Gun you’re a commie, and if you don’t like the soundtrack you’re deaf. It’s that simple.

Different Class (Pulp)

This one came out before I entered college, but I didn’t discover it until after I’d graduated. I was still fairly young, living in my first apartment and used to visit a CD store within walking distance every few weeks. I found Different Class one day and played it near-constantly. Had it been vinyl, I’m sure I would have worn the grooves thin. As it was, I managed to discover Britpop nearly a decade late. Better late than never!

slowdrown (Dim Reflection)

This was the first album I bought that featured friends or acquaintances of mine. Now known as The Farstar, Dim Reflection were a pretty damned good band that my buddy Shannon put together in college.

Are You with Me? (Cowboy Mouth)

My junior year of college I decided not to go home for spring break and instead spent it hanging out with my buddy Phil and his girlfriend Jess. We played golf, ate out, went shooting, bought canes and bowler hats, got hit by a car on a freeway exit—and through it all, this tape was playing in the cassette player. It became the soundtrack for one of the best weeks I’d had up until that point. To this all I need is to hear the first few notes of Jenny Says and I’m in vacation mode.

The ’80s Hit(s) Back!)

I’m not certain, but I believe this is the first CD I ever bought in college. It was a simple compilation, but I played it and played it my freshman year. Good stuff and good times.

The Best of Bond…James Bond

In the fall of 2002 I returned to London for a weeklong vacation; on the way over and back British Airways had this CD playing on one its channels. The trip itself was a bit of a washout—I discovered that it’s always better to travel with people—but as soon as I got home I bought the CD and I’ve never looked back. As a small boy I imagined that I looked like James Bond whenever I wore a bow tie (my mother says I looked more like Barney Fife) and rather expected that I’d spend my adult life wearing tuxedos, drinking martinis, driving fast cars, playing with cool gadgets and chasing exotic double-entendre–spouting women. Those dreams might have been disappointed, but this CD never lets me down.

Get a Grip (Ærosmith)

Ærosmith is one of those bands whose lives are pitiable, but whose music is just spectacular. Ironically, I’ve never owned Get a Grip, but Cryin’ (which launched Alicia Silverstone’s brief career) and Crazy were huge favourites in my early teens in Virginia, while Amazing was constantly on the jukebox while I was at an engineering program shortly after moving to Denver. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and the rest have done a lot of things they should be ashamed of, but they sure did make some great rock & roll.

Well, that’s nine, and I honestly can’t think of any more so I’ll stop here. Besides, nine is so much more pleasant a number than fifteen anyway.

Switzerland’s socialists are trying to remove the right to store one’s military firearm at home. Two years ago they forbade the storage of military ammunition at home.

Seventy years ago the Swiss were able to keep Hitler’s war machine at bay (Fight to your last cartridge, then fight with your bayonets. No surrender. Fight to the death. —Gen. Henri Guisan); today they have turned into something far less fearsome.

Andrew Wakefield, the fellow who linked the measles, mumps \& rubella vaccine with autism, falsified his data.Meanwhile, too few people were immunised in order to provide herd immunity and measles cases in England \& Wales leapt from 56 in 1998 to 1,348 in 2008, leading to two deaths. Whoops.

You may have heard that the American military is an all-volunteer force. Well, that’s not strictly true: Command Sergeant Major Jeffrey Mellinger was drafted in 1972 and is still serving. Granted, he’s voluntarily re-enlisted repeatedly over the past 37 years. Still, it’s pretty cool that he’s a relic of a previous age.

One of the milestones in one’s path towards old age is this: hearing a grand old song from one’s youth turned into Muzak. Well, I just heard a smooth jazzy rendition of Boyz II Men’s End of the Road.

May I start belting my pants over my pecs now?

The Apple Macintosh turns twenty-five today. I still remember how amazing it was when Dad brought one home, and how much cooler the Mac, and Mac software, and Mac people, were than any other computer of the time. We boys spent hour upon hour playing Deja Vu and Dark Castle, making pictures in SuperPaint, writing papers and so on.

I’m a Linux geek now, but I’ll always have a certain soft spot in my heart for the classic black-and-white all-in-one Macs.

Hey folks, enormity is a bad thing: it means something outrageous or wicked. I don’t think that Kiran Chetry quite meant that.

Well, America has passed a milestone: we now have more people employed by the State than in manufacturing and construction. In other words, we have more leeches than producers.

I, of course, am one of those leeches, at least in part. In fact, looking at my family two of my brothers (as well as my sister-in-law) are paid by the State; my remaining brother lives off of scholarship money; and my parents both make their money off of the Church.

The exclusionary rule (based on court rulings from the 1920s) states that illegally-gotten-but-true evidence is excluded from criminal proceedings. There are good reasons for it to exist, but it remains worrisome: in order to prevent certain injustices in the future, we do an injustice now by allowing an admittedly-guilty man to go free. Glenn Reynolds suggests a fix: instead of excluding the evidence, revoke official immunity for police and warrant-issuing magistrates who violate the law. That would serve to dissuade the police from searching without warrants and magistrates from issuing baseless warrants, but would not cause the miscarriage of justice that exclusion of legitimate evidence is notorious for.

What do my readers think?

Once again the magnificent machinery of our republic has turned and we have a new president. It’s a remarkable thing for one man to cede power to another so easily, without violence or bloodshed–that’s terribly uncommon in an historical sense.

I’m sorry to see George Bush go. He did some things right and some wrong, but I think that history will agree that in the main he was a decent president and a fundamentally decent man. The Editors of National Review agree on that score; Peter Wehner has more to add and Victor Davis Hanson caps it off. Bush did his best to be bipartisan—his unprecedented renomination of Clinton appointees is just one instance—but the unfortunate circumstances of his initial election and a Left eager for vengeance for the Right’s Clinton Derangement Syndrome conspired to prevent that. I firmly believe that had he been a Democrat the media and the intelligentsia would have loved him to death and in eight years he’d be as popular as Bill Clinton is now. As it is, I imagine that we’ll have to wait a good 60–80 years for historians to honestly examine his record.

It’s pretty cool that we have a president perceived as black (really, he’s as white as he is black…). It’s a nice milestone in the road to racial equality. Now that we have a black president, can we get rid of racial discrimination finally?

90 years ago this month the Paris Peace Conference opened; its decisions and the treaties which codified them into international law would have far-reaching consequences for the rest of the 20th century and even down into the present day (ever wondered why so many of those Middle Eastern countries have straight-line borders which ignore geography?).

An old college professor of mine is now blogging the Paris Peace Conference, I believe in ninety-year-delayed realtime. Professor Hunt Tooley was hands-down my favourite professor; his teach style was inimitable (you gotta love a prof with a greenbottle-fly tweed coat!) and his insights heavily influenced my own thinking on Middle East, Russian and German history.

I’m really excited my this new blog; any student of history should be likewise so.

Divers have discovered 4,000,000 rounds of .303 ammo in the hold of RMS Lusitania. Those of you who’ve studied your history may recall that her sinking was one of the reasons we entered the Great War on the side of Britain and France and against Germany and Austro-Hungary.

Now it turns out that she was a legitimate military target after all. Whoops.

I recently found the first newsreel documenting Nazi atrocities. It’s disturbing, powerful stuff and serves as a reminder of just how evil that regime was.

Computers generally track time as the number of units of time (e.g. second or milliseconds) since some date (called the epoch); Unix counts the seconds since 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00 GMT. Well, at 23:31:30 on 13 February 2009 it will be 1,234,567,890 since the epoch.

Yeah, I’m just a bit of a geek…

Here’s some cool trivia about The Princess Bride, one of my favourite films of all time. I mean, it has swords, monsters, freaks and a hot babe—how could it get any better?

A study has found that men with longer ring fingers than index fingers are better financial traders due to increased exposure to androgen in the womb.

There are some big changes in society coming as we recognise the influence of genetic and pre-natal factors on human beings.

An Australian study has found that open-plan offices sicken workers and harm productivity. I knew it!

Joel Stein argues that the majority of nut allergies are an affliction of the idle rich. Roughly 4% of the population has a real food allergy; roughly 25% of parents believe their children have food allergies. Notably, according to a social scientist, We don’t see this problem much in African American or poor communities. So there’s something going on here. We don’t see them in Ecuador and Guatemala.

I suspected as much.

A week ago Father George Paulson passed away. He was the first parish priest I remember; he was the man who—teaching a Biblical Greek class—managed to convert my parents (and hence me & my brothers too) to Orthodox Christianity.

Fr. Paulson ran a very tight altar (he was the first Greek Orthodox chaplain in the military and retired as a captain): what with him, Dad (also former a naval officer) and Fr. Bartz (then and now a naval chaplain) we altar boys were squared away. One snap of the fingers from any of the three of them and all of us would settle down and snap to attention. There was a sequence of hand signals (invisible to the congregation) which indicated to us what we should be doing. He even set little plastic buttons (normally used for the bottoms of chair or table legs) into the solea (the floor in front of the icon screen) indicating where each altar boy should stand in order that we’d be lined up evenly. To this day, no-one who served on Father’s altar can abide sloppy acolyte-work—and I’m pretty sure any one of us could stand in and serve once more, so well-drilled were we.

Father was one of the first priests to celebrate the Liturgy in English, a practise which is now fairly well-accepted. That need to translate all the services into English is, I believe, what got Dad involved in building service books (a work which appears will be his own legacy). He also taught Dad how to sing & chant in the Byzantine style. Most importantly, Father Paulson encouraged and taught Dad in his path towards ordination, first as a deacon and later as a priest.

Here’s Father’s obituary:

Virginia Beach—The Rev. Father George I. Paulson, surrounded by his family and loved ones, fell asleep in the Lord in his home Jan. 5, 2009. He was born in Springfield, Mass., July 31, 1918, the son of Ignatius and Panorea Pavloglou. After his marriage to his beloved wife, Evangeline, June 11, 1944, Father Paulson was ordained into the Holy Priesthood Aug. 9, 1944.

After graduating from Bay Path Business College in 1935, Father Paulson attended Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, graduating in 1944. Always in pursuit of higher education, he also attended the University of Pennsylvania, George Williams College and Coastal Carolina Community College. In 1974, Father Paulson received a master’s degree in education from Boston University. In 1993, at the age of 75, he received a Doctorate in Ministry conferred upon him by Boston University.

Father Paulson’s ministry in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese began in 1944 at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Tacoma, Wash. He was transferred to the Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco in 1949. In 1952, Father Paulson was chosen by the Archbishop to become the first Greek Orthodox chaplain in the history of the U.S. military. During his 28 years of active service in the U.S. Navy, he attained the rank of captain and earned numerous awards and commendations.

Father Paulson’s naval career was highlighted by his organization and direction of the Leadership School. In response to the Navy and Marine Corps’ need to eradicate lingering racial tension among service personnel following the Vietnam War, Capt. Paulson developed the curriculum for the Leadership School. More than 15,000 Marines and sailors attended this school. A Navy Commendation Medal was awarded to him by the secretary of the Navy for this remarkable achievement. Father Paulson also earned the Navy Unit Commendation, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, a Combat Action Ribbon and decorations for National Defense Service, Armed Forces Expeditionary, Vietnam Service and the Republic of Vietnam Campaign. Father Paulson was commissioned by Saint Leo University to introduce the religious studies degree program in the Norfolk and Virginia Beach areas. He served as chairman of both the Psychology and Theology departments at Saint Leo and established a scholarship that is awarded annually to a deserving Saint Leo student. Father Paulson was a dynamic and illustrious educator whose teaching career culminated in a designation of full professor status at Saint Leo University.

Early in his career, as a direct result of his military service, Father Paulson developed a strong belief that “Jesus Christ belongs to all of us.” He felt that the most effective way for him to bring Christ to the people was to offer Greek Orthodox services in the United States in the language of the people, English. Utilizing this philosophy, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was established in Virginia Beach in 1980. Father Paulson served as pastor of St. Nicholas until his retirement in 2004 at the age of 85.

Father Paulson greatly valued the importance of family. His beloved Evangeline preceded his passing July 19, 2003, after 60 years of blissful marriage. He is survived by his sons, Ned and his wife Susan, Louis and his wife Jeannette, Bill and his wife Meg and George Jr. and his wife Gina. Father George and Evangeline were deeply devoted grandparents to their nine grandchildren, George, Carl, Elias, John, Matthew, Billy, Leah, Jon and Chris. They were also loving great-grandparents to their eight great-grandchildren, Madison, Alex, George, Max, Henry, Anastasia, Louis and Cathy. Father Paulson is survived by his brother, Vasilios Pavloglou and was predeceased by his brother, Peter Paulson. The family would like to extend a very special thank you to the warm-hearted ladies, Minnie Turner and Daisy Stephenson, who cared for Father Paulson for his last three years. Their love and devotion to Father George will forever be appreciated.

I was unable to attend his funeral on Saturday (I had to drill), but my parents were. Αιωνία η μνήμη—May his memory be eternal.