stephan.com
scattered thoughts

I need to start this off by saying that I did, in fact, vote against Proposition 8. A great many of my friends are gay, I support them with all of my heart, and fully understand why this means so much to them. But I feel like I didn’t really stick to my [...]

I got called for jury duty this week, got released yesterday, here’s the description I wrote for my boss:
I got potentially picked for a jury, gang member with face tattoos, two counts (1) felony possession of firearm, (2) possession of marijuana with intent to sell. 36 brought in, 12 needed, 18 interviewed in the first [...]

I am not a scientologist.
Let’s begin there.
I have never given money to the Church of Scientology, nor do I intend to.
I can believe that a second-rate science fiction writer with a checkered past could come up with something useful. L. Ron Hubbard was plainly a smart man. I can imagine a 1950’s engineering [...]

An innovative use of an iPhone

Originally uploaded by StephanCom.

I already had a scan of my driver’s license for emergencies, so I decided to keep it on my iPhone. The aspect ratio is almost exactly the same, and it looks really slick when you whip it [...]

Last night, in a fit of nostalgia over my formative years programming the TI-99, I got a hankering for a t-shirt with some hexadecimal digits. See, we used to program sprites in hex, and that was my introduction to computer graphics, and I can pretty much do hex math in my head. It [...]

In response to a thread on Facebook about privacy stemming from this interesting presentation that I can’t be arsed to watch the whole way through, I wrote this:
There is no big brother, and never will be. Thanks to openness and the internet, our culture has dodged that bullet. All we have are a thousand little [...]

People ask me to explain things to them sometimes, and so I do. My friend Felicity asked:
So i’ve been researching North Korea lately, and trying to learn stuff. I never really did understand communism…i mean i understand the idea of it…but it just seems really complex. So i’ve always been kind of [...]

The Ten Commandments of the Ethical Atheist

Thou SHALT NOT believe all thou art told.
Thou SHALT seek knowledge and truth constantly.
Thou SHALT educate thy fellow man in the Laws of Science.
Thou SHALT NOT forget the atrocities committed in the name of god.
Thou SHALT leave valuable contributions for future generations.
Thou SHALT live in peace with thy fellow [...]