CUViper

Some food for thought: The Denver Blizzard

Of course, I don’t live in Colorado anymore, but I still consider myself a Coloradan. People around the Bay Area are freaking out that the overnight temperatures are dipping below freezing – OMG! News sources are having a field day with how to protect from the cold, even telling people how to keep their pipes from freezing. Give me a break…

The internets are all a-buzz with chatter about the iPhone (this one, not those) so I thought I should throw in my 2¢. And then I realized that I’d need $498.98 more to actually get my hands on one, plus a 2-year contract. I find it ironic that people were so up-in-arms about the price of the PS3 — which ironically has the exact same pricing tiers — but a cellphone seems somehow reasonable at that price. I like my phone just fine, and a 2-year contract got mine and Millie’s for free. So while Apple’s new toy does look cool, I’ll be passing on it, thank you very much. I hope I don’t lose geek-cred for saying that though…

My blog has moved — its new home is http://blog.cuviper.com/. Of course, if you’re reading this, then you’ve already found it. Anyone who can’t find it, just let me know… Actually, those of you who use a feed-reader instead of probably won’t notice, assuming my redirects work properly. You might want to update your feed subscription though.

The move is mostly inspired by me being lazy. I used to have the blog on my own hosting account at AxisInternet, which worked great. WordPress keeps coming out with new versions though — it’s good to get new features and bug fixes, of course, and the upgrades have all gone smoothly, but it’s still a nuisance. So, I transferred my blog to the official wordpress.com site (with some DNS magic so you still see it on cuviper.com), and now they can update it for me.

Hosting WordPress on your own is good if you want to do a lot of customization, but I’m not really doing anything special. The new site is almost exactly the same as before. The only loss is to the people who subscribed to email updates before, and I’ll send a note to those on how to get updates now.

If you read this far, you are now rewarded with our Christmas pics. Bombs away!

Update: After writing up directions of the various ways to easily track new content on websites, I decided I might as well copy that here. When a site gives you a feed URL, here are some things you can do with it:

1. If you use a custom homepage like Google or Yahoo, they usually let you add feeds to see updates. Look for a place to add content by URL and copy in my feed link.
2. When you have a lot of sites you want to keep track of, an aggregator can come in handy — this is what I use to read all my websites. There are programs you can download to manage this, or you can use a website like Bloglines or Google Reader. Basically, you get all of your websites collected into one page for you to read, so you don’t have to go all over the place looking for updates.
3. If you really like getting email updates, you can do that too. There are several sites that can translate RSS feeds to email for you. RssFwd looks pretty good, or you could try R-mail or FeedBlitz.

For any of those, all you’ll need is my feed address: http://blog.cuviper.com/feed/

Enjoy!

I’ve always wondered…

You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Superman 70% Green Lantern 65% The Flash 65% Iron Man 60% Robin 55% Catwoman 40% Hulk 40% Wonder Woman 30% Supergirl 30% Batman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Spider-Man and Superman — I guess that makes me quite the goody-goody.

Tests like this are interesting, but not because of anything they reveal to yourself. Most of the time you’ll feel quite pleased with the result — since you provided the answers, of course it will align with your self-image. It’s more revealing for others as a way to see through your eyes in the mirror.

It might be a cool social experiment to flip it around — I tend to be curious about the way others see me. For example, if someone else found that I closely resemble the Hulk, that might indicate some areas for personal improvement. Anyone want to fill out the same quiz about me and let me know your result?

One of my favorite things about reading books is when I find something immediately worth quoting. I found this bit in The Fellowship of the Ring:

Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I enjoy the fact that a passage from a fantasy novel, written over fifty years ago, can still have so much relevance. Just replace “the Dark Lord” with “terrorism”, and Tolkien might as well have been Nostradamus. He often said that he wasn’t trying to make any metaphors with reality, but I suppose things like this are just universal truths. It is what we do in fear that is dangerous to our way of life, more than any one person who would do us harm.

Hmm — I haven’t blogged in while, so here’s some random tidbits for you all…

Millie and I started a Picture of the Day photo album. The idea was that we would take a picture of us every day, and over time we would have an interesting log of how we’ve changed. Yeah — that lasted exactly eight days. It’s boring to take pictures when you’re doing it just for some stupid album. So, instead, we’ll just make that a general album for pictures of us, as often as we have such pictures. I filled it back with older ones as well, so go check it out.

Last weekend we went up to Berkeley with our friend who used to go there. I was going to blog about the things we did up there, but she beat me to it. So I’ll just say that it was really nice there — a lot like Boulder in many ways, though perhaps a bit more upscale. Berkeley seems to have a lot of similar values, like supporting independent business, liberal political views, and strong school spirit (with the whole college town feel). I posted our pictures here.

On Friday night we went to a Halloween party. I left the camera in the car during the party, but I do have some pictures of the preparation. I was kinda lame anyway and didn’t wear a costume; Millie at least found a cute skeleton apron. My friend Dave decided to go as a school girl, and he embraced the costume fully! It was quite funny going to shop for all the accessories for him, especially the shoes. The amazing thing is that he actually pulled it off quite well — get rid of the beard shadow and get a better wig, and he would be very convincing.

Finally, a little note about Battlestar Galactica. (If you’re not watching this show, shame on you!) I was browsing around the official website watching some of the extras, and I noticed an ad for the latest MS Visual Studio: “Cylons. Why debugging matters.” I hope whoever came up with that got a raise, because that’s just perfect.

In the spirit of my last post, and the 9/11 5-year anniversary (yesterday), I wanted to point you all to a post by Luis Villa:

In the next five years, unlike the last five, I hope we use their memory to inspire us to actually make the US and the world safer for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, instead of making us less safe, or settling old scores. [more]

Perhaps it is a bit idealistic to hope for everything that he says, but I do believe that things can be much better than they are…

In a comment below, Chris mentioned God’s Debris, by Scott Adams. This is a book that I recommended to him, and I’ll recommend it now to everyone I know. It’s available as a free pdf download, so you really have no excuse not to check it out. It truly is a thought experiment, and even if you disagree with everything written, it should still open up some interesting discussions.

Anyway, without spoiling too much, one of the characters in the book talks about “levels” of the soul. Level 2 basically amounts to blind faith and complete self-assurance, and he asserts that most leaders fit into this category. My initial reaction with a laugh was that our dear president nearly defines this level, and he would love it if we would blindly follow him.

But it’s still generally true that this is a good level for leaders, as confidence tends to lend charisma — the more the better. Even if you’re wrong, it’s really about convincing other people that you know what you’re doing. And that will always frustrate people like me who aren’t so set in their beliefs, but would rather consider all options carefully and logically.

I guess I just need a leader who blindly believes in something that I can get behind…