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scattered thoughts

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 […]

To sum up briefly:
You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem
cell research and the best beaches.
We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole’ Miss.
We get 85 percent of America’s venture capital […]

As a Los Angeles resident, I am bombarded daily by the news of demonstrations in support of amnesty for Mexican immigrants. For example, just last month one protest resulted in students flying the Mexican flag above an inverted American flag.
I have some dear friends who are illegal aliens in this country, one in particular who […]

If we are to win the war on terror, we must allow ourselves to be invaded.