stephan.com
scattered thoughts

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 [...]

in her blog, this girl who went to my high school wrote:
5. I don’t know if this is dorky or just sort of OCD, but when I’m anxious or bored, I try to come up with 5 five letter words using 25 letters of the alphabet. I’ve been trying to accomplish this feat for 9 [...]

I’ve scrubbed the playa dust from my fingernails and wanted to share some of my experiences from this year.
It was strange this year - my second burn, so I can’t say anything was “unusual” as I don’t have a large enough sample. But for me, it was strange… it seems as if I hardly [...]

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 [...]

Nice article in Psychology Today
“It was like I had an alien complex,” she says. “The result was that they treated me like an alien.”
Kiriana is attracted to men and sometimes longs to be in a relationship, yet it’s hard for her to have any idea whether men she meets—such as the ones who, captivated by [...]

a fragment of a longer unpublished report
Programming languages are all predicated on the notion creating an expressive form for humans to describe complex processes both to computers and to one another. Certainly it is possible to solve any problem in any Turing-complete language with sufficient access to required resources. One need only look [...]

a friend asked in his blog:
what part of speech are you? are you a noun? are you a verb? are you a direct object?
I repliedyou is a pronoun
i am an exclamation!
you are a dufus

Burning Man is the most beautiful thing ever made by the hand of man
I have spent the last week in a place of indescribable joy
It is the sum total of human kindness and good in π square miles
It is every dream you have ever had, all at the same time
Christmas and New Years and Hallowe’en [...]

I kinda feel bad about this one. I spent some time tonight playing mind games with a 419 scammer in Benin (location confirmed by my site logs)
1:17:54 AM mrstheresacolmbo0: COTONOU BENIN
1:17:58 AM mrstheresacolmbo0: REP
1:18:14 AM stephan: Good, you are telling the truth, you ARE in Benin
1:18:25 AM stephan: this is your IP address 81.91.239.5
1:18:39 AM [...]