Personal: March 2005 Archives

I'm in a foreign country right now, and I just called home to hear that my wife because a guy has been calling the house and harassing her. This started on Saturday, before I left. He was calling and breathing heavy and muttering things in Spanish. I kept telling him he has the wrong number (in broken Spanish), but since I left he has been asking Paige to speak Spanish. She called the police, and they sent a Spanish-speaking officer over. When the guy called, the officer told him to stop calling and it was against the law.

So what did the guy do? Naturally, he waited until the officer left, and started calling again. Needless to say, Paige is freaked out, and I get to listen to her being freaked out from a hotel room 1,700 miles away, with absolutely nothing I can do about it except pray for her safety and my children's.

Somebody tell me again why it's so important that we let lots of non-English-speaking, unskilled immigrants into this country? I don't know with absolute certainty that he fit into that category...but I would be willing to take 10-to-1 odds that he does.

As part of my M.A. thesis project, I have to write a companion paper to the Web site I created, Open Source Shakespeare. I finished the draft of the paper, and although the citations need to be cleaned up and I have to add a few more paragraphs, it is substantially finished. I would love to get some feedback on it — in particular, tell me if the writing is clear, as I am taking pains to keep it as simple as possible. Coward, I particularly invite you to comment, either in public or via e-mail.

(WARNING: with all the screenshots, this is a 2.1mb download.)
Dig it

P.S. This is also an explanation as to why I have not been blogging much lately, except for my rant about Fairfax County taxes.

Today is my birthday, a day I share with Albert Einstein and Lawrence Welk (who was a good Catholic, incidently, and hated contemporary church music.) According to the Angelic Doctor, since I am now 33, I have reached my peak:

All will rise in the condition of perfect age, which is of thirty-two or thirty-three years. This is because all who were not yet arrived at this age, did not possess this perfect age, and the old had already lost it. Hence, youths and children will be given what they lack, and what the aged once had will be restored to them....

Although elsewhere, he writes that the age of 30 is the perfect age:

Christ was fittingly baptized in His thirtieth year. First, because Christ was baptized as though for the reason that He was about forthwith to begin to teach and preach: for which purpose perfect age is required, such as is the age of thirty. Thus we read (Gn. 41:46) that "Joseph was thirty" years old when he undertook the government of Egypt. In like manner we read (2 Kgs. 5:4) that "David was thirty years old when he began to reign." Again, Ezechiel began to prophesy in "his thirtieth year," as we read Ezech. 1:1.

Either way, it's all downhill from here. And if this is how I'm supposed to look at the Resurrection and for all eternity...well, I'm definitely going to lose a few more pounds, and get a better haircut.

During the beginning of Holy Week, I have to travel to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and I'm wondering if there are any Catholic Light readers in the D.R. It's a long shot, I know, but there are certainly plenty of good Catholics down there. I'll be meeting my friend Tomás, whom I have not seen in five years, and his lovely wife and children.

Tomás would always bring back cigars, rum, and coffee whenever he came back to the States (he got his batchelor and master's degrees here). These are a few of my favorite things, as the song goes. So even if you're not in Santo Domingo, perhaps we should have a D.C.-area get-together, and I'll bring the consumables.

I wanted to call attention to the latest official release of Open Source Shakespeare. The new functions and changes listed below have been phased in over the last few months, and the site has a stable "build" right now, so I'm going to call it version 2.0.

SEARCH FUNCTION

• Stemming option: You may search for word stems as well as keywords.
Thus a search for "play" will find "plays," "playing," "played," etc.

• Phonetic option: Words are converted into phonetic values, which are
then located in the texts. Searching for "their" will also turn up
"they're" and "there."

• Print/save version: Clicking on this link will give you a simple
version of the search results, suitable for printing or saving onto your
hard drive.

• Search results browsing: For searches that return lots of results, you
can view them page-by-page, instead of viewing all results at once.

• Help function on the advanced search page: Each element of the search
page is explained.

• Conjunction labels changed: instead of the Boolean "and/or" functions,
you may use "find" or "not." The former includes a keyword in the
search, and the latter excludes results based on keywords.

• Results formatting: You can remove the keyword highlighting in the
search results. Also, you can display 10 to 100 results at a time, and
opt to hide the line text in each result.

PLAY DISPLAY

• Print/save version: There is a link at the top of every text
displayed, which will show the text in a version suitable for saving or
printing.

• Navigation aids: There are jumps to the previous and next scene/act
changes at the top of the page, and at the beginning and end of every scene.

• Quotations on "please wait" notice: Instead of showing a generic
message asking a user to wait while the server works, there are now
rotated quotations, too.

OTHER CHANGES

• Quick links to all works are shown on left side of home page.

• There is a new statistics page.

• I added a list of all the characters.

• ...or you can also use a search box to search for a character.

• Actors will find this useful — they will be able to show how their
cue lines and thus memorize their dialogue more easily.

How come soft-restart switches have disappeared from computers today? Perhaps the engineers who design them live in a world where computers never break, but on Earth, that still happens. Every once in a while, my PCs hang when they're restarting or shutting down. In the good old days, I would either hit the soft-restart switch to simulate a hard reboot without cycling the power, or I would just cut off the power.

But today, since the power switches now communicate with the OS, if the OS becomes unresponsive, that leaves me with one option: pull the power cable out of the back of the machine. That's a pain, and it creates wear-and-tear on the electronics (because when I plug it back in, the circuits will recieve a jolt of electricity.) What's the rationale behind removing the switches? I see no advantage here.

The classic philosophical distinctions between form, substance, and accident are essential to computer application development, much more than any particular knowledge of a command or process. You can apply them to databases (schema, data, datatype), text documents (structure, words, character formatting), and a hundred other things. It seems to me that a survey course on ancient and medieval philosophy, beginning with the pre-Socratics and ending with Aquinas, would be much more valuable for a computer-science student than learning any specific programming language or networking protocol.

And don't get me started with how useful teleology is!