My name is
David Robins:
Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner,
libertarian (voluntaryist),
and student.
This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.
Seattle tax day tea party
News, Political ·Wednesday April 15, 2009 @ 20:28 EDT (link)
Tax day tea party: left work around 1700; parked at Overlake transit center, took the 545 at 1715 into Seattle (5th and Pine) and the crowd was easily audible and visible. "Liberty Belle" was the M.C. and had several speakers, including a doctor who will run against Murray in 2010, and some veterans. It finished up around 1920 and I caught the 545 back right next to Westlake Park, where the event took place, back to Overlake, and drove home.
And with that, I'm actually caught up on all of my OneNote notes. Still have some other material that I want to post, but it's not time-sensitive.
Tom G. commented on your wall post...
News ·Tuesday April 14, 2009 @ 21:26 EDT (link)
I felt worse as the weekend progressed, and stayed home from work sick yesterday and today; I expect to be back in tomorrow.
TG and I have been discussing libertarianism (and socialism) again, this time on a post he made to my wall (quoting from one of Phred Galt's posts). My mutt inbox looks like this of late:
1143 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1144 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1145 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1147 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1148 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1149 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1150 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1151 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1152 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1153 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1154 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
1155 N Apr 14 Facebook Tom G----- commented on your wall post...
My only consolation is that his does too! Ha! (Unless he disabled email notifications.)
When I'm back in that part of the country we need to find a nice quiet pub someplace and argue in person until we fall off our bar stools. :)
Print 3 million and take 1 million for yourself
Political ·Monday April 13, 2009 @ 01:29 EDT (link)
This is a speech by Ron Paul given in 1979, but oh so apropos (Pillars of Prosperity, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008):
Congressional Record—U.S. House of Representatives
May 31, 1979
Mr. Speaker, David Ottaway, in writing about Idi Amin's economic atrocities, discussed with a salesman for a British banknote firm who personally negotiated a contract with the former dictator of Uganda for printing up 2 million Ugandan shillings worth of 100 shilling notes. "At the close of our conversation," said Mr. Ottaway, the salesman "gingerly asked how he was to be paid."
"Print 3 million and take 1 million for yourself," Amin angrily retorted.
Inflation, the expansion of the money supply, helped destroy Uganda's economy, along with other forms of government regulation and interference. Amin doubled the money supply in his last two years as dictator, flooding the country with paper money. Prices naturally skyrocketed.
Idi Amin is no longer oppressing the people of Uganda, but his monetary policies live on, in more moderate form, at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board.
We will never have stable prices until we stop flooding our country with paper dollars, and solving—or trying to solve—our problems by printing more money. It will not work for us, any more than it did for Idi Amin.
Books finished: The New Market Wizards.
Database management homework 1
News, School ·Friday April 10, 2009 @ 23:14 EDT (link)
Finished taxes. Actually finished last weekend, printed some forms I needed during the week, and we copied out the results out to the final forms today.
Almost finished CSE P 544 homework 1 (8 of 9 questions). For question 9, I had an extra table which made the query into a cross join (it ran 20 minutes before I stopped it); after fixing that, it was plain sailing to the end. Not too tough an assignment, but probably good coverage of what we did in class. I think some of my answers were a bit awkward with some repetition that I couldn't eliminate; we'll see what the answer key comes out.
A wretched 'flu-like thing
News, Technical ·Friday April 10, 2009 @ 22:22 EDT (link)
Goodreads documented some more of their API for me (e.g. I'd asked for a way to add the date read to a book review; it was possible, but undocumented). I updated all my books from my database, and also added my reviews, forking my book.notes field into a read.review field: some of the notes entries actually had notes (e.g. about the edition) but others were reviews, so they were moved.
I may be coming down with what Honey had: a wretched 'flu-like thing. So far just a stuffy nose and a wee bit of fatigue.
Stay away from the "Flixter" Facebook app (it shows up as "Movies" with a white F on a blue background for a logo, although they have non-movie related quizzes). I took a British road signs quiz (saw on another bloke's wall) (I got 12/20, he got 10/20; he drives there, I don't…). This is what I wrote when I removed it, with a 1 out of 5 star rating (letting you rate and comment on applications you remove is new; I like it):
Very spammy-looking. Lots of ads trying to get you to submit your information to various disreputable sites.
Also they don't quite force you to send it to friends, but they make it tough not to. Stay away.
Q: How many mystery writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two: One to screw it almost all the way in and the other to give it a
surprising twist at the end.
(That was one of the great light bulb jokes I found here while looking up British road signs after doing so badly on the quiz.)
Books finished: Galactic Pot-Healer.
A fan of God on Facebook
News, Theology ·Thursday April 9, 2009 @ 20:20 EDT (link)
Bad driver (observed by Honey, around 3pm): WA 341 XEK silver Saturn SUV pulled out in front of her on Novelty Hill Road at Redmond Ridge.
Being a fan of God on Facebook strikes me as a bit sacrilegious.
I set that as my status, and Tim Whitson said he didnÂt understand. I asked, "Which part? Being a fan of God or that it seems sacrilegious (it seems to trivialize God)?"
TS: And people are talking to "him" through posts on his wall… I guess prayer is so web 1.0.
TW: The link explained it all and I agree.
KA: Um, "God joined Facebook" strikes me a little weird. I think I'm with you on this one.
Books finished: Real Education, Starship Troopers.
Random musings about elementary school
School ·Tuesday April 7, 2009 @ 02:18 EDT (link)
On reading Murray's Real Education, the topic of influential teachers came up. A few came to mind for me: of course my father was always supportive, but neither one of us were great communicators (we've definitely both improved), and he frequently didn't understand what school was like for me, what my (largely self-taught) learning goals were.
In second form in England, Miss Williams was understanding, although I don't remember much that far back. I was only in that class a half year, and then we moved to Canada. My first teacher in Canada (grade five, skipping a grade in the move) was Mrs. Ozog, who let me pick my own spelling words since the ones from the book were too easy. Moved to gifted class in grade six, I know I acted out a lot in Mrs. Rashleigh's (she was some other R. before that; she got married during the year) class (I cut some girl's hair once—only a very little—Shelly D. was her name, and I've no idea why I did it, but it didn't go over well. I learned that girls value their hair much more than boys do). I also think I did some things (chucking a binder, telling the teacher I'd take a zero for an assignment because something didn't go the way I wanted) for effect, too. It was a good class, though; I made some good friends there.
In seventh and eighth grade I was in Mr. Sinclair's class (and he was also on my paper route, and I learned the meaning of not mixing business and pleasure when I ignorantly tried to collect the weekly subscription in class one day). He was a good teacher; he kept things challenging (I remember his A(rithmetic?) and P(problem) sets he gave us at the beginning of class). I sometimes see him walking his dog past my parents' house when I'm visiting.
High school was more of the same. Grade nine was miserable; I suppose this is expected. Several teachers had no control of their classes (The names Kemp and Simpson—Yoda—come to mind). I do remember Mrs. Lazowski (technically, as she told us, it was the feminine form Lazowska), a tough but fair old lady who taught typing and could easily be coaxed to stop the lesson and hold forth on various hot-button issues such as abortion. (I think it was she that first noticed that I needed glasses, since I had trouble seeing the board.) In later years, especially in the advanced track (which wasn't all that advanced, really—when picking classes in grade eight I had selected the general (out of basic, general, and advanced) geography class because geography wasn't my strong suit, but whatever teacher was overseeing it told me to check advanced).
As now, I read voraciously (usually in math class, although I once got kicked out of class by an exchange teacher from New Mexico for reading in English class), taught myself computer programming and to some extent computer science, and although was pretty small, didn't put up with crap from anybody (not wanting to get killed, though, I usually left class rather than starting fights: if the teacher couldn't keep order, I felt morally justified to go to my locker and read). It wasn't my fault that I fell asleep in Mr. Chambers'—grade 11?—computer science class: it was mind-numbing since I'd taught myself the day's lesson at a single-digit age; he sent me to the office and then had the gall to check that I made it there: I hadn't (I went to read by my locker), so the principal had me paged. There he (Willard Thorne) attempted to browbeat me into confessing that I didn't know the topic and should have been paying attention, except I did know the topic pretty thoroughly (it was still rude to fall asleep, but I was a kid; give me a break, plus I'd probably been up late in BBS land).
Paul McCormick was an influence in grade 12: he taught physics. Unfortunately he came down with cancer that year and did not survive; the class was finished by a substitute. He gave me (and another girl in the class that did well) a book: Hawking's Black Holes and Baby Universes, which I still have (I keep it with my textbooks), and in which he inscribed the following:
January, 1995
David:
Congratulations on your oustanding achievement in SPH 4A0.
I trust you will find, as I continue to do, something new and wonderful in this book every time you read it.
Best wishes for success in whatever you choose to do with your abilities.
Sincerely,
Paul McCormick
I think I'll read the book a while again now…
I was never more than about halfway up the class. (It was a very bright class.) My classwork was very untidy, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers. But my classmates gave me the nickname Einstein, so presumably they saw signs of something better. When I was twelve, one of my friends bet another friend a bag of sweets that I would never come to anything. I don't know if this bet was ever settled and, if so, which way it was decided.
…
When it came to the last two years of school, I wanted to specialize in mathematics and physics. There was an inspirational maths teacher, Mr. Tahta, and the school had just built a new maths room, which the maths set had as their classroom. But my father was very much against it. He thought there wouldn't be any jobs for mathematicians except as teachers. He would really have liked me to do medicine, but I showed no interest in biology, which seemed to me to be too descriptive and not sufficiently fundamental.
Ah, the English, what a talent for understatement and wondrous dry humor we have. (My handwriting was never that great either; the computer printer was a godsend. And right there with you on biology, old boy—too squishy. "Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there.")
Officer 444
School ·Monday April 6, 2009 @ 19:36 EDT (link)
Officer 444 on IMDb is "Up 70% in popularity this week." I don't need to get IMDb Pro (as they so kindly offer) to see why: it's one of the movies in our homework. Granted this isn't a huge class, but several of us probably looked it up to verify an answer and for a 1926 movie, that's easily a 70% increase in interest!
Books finished: What It Means To Be a Libertarian.
PSCU book club
News, Political ·Sunday April 5, 2009 @ 20:55 EDT (link)
Went to initial Puget Sound Conservative Underground book club meetup at Jersey's in Shoreline (1630 to 1700 to pick up our books, for those that didn't already have them, and arrange future meetings: bi-weekly, starting April 19). We're studying The 5000 Year Leap. It's my first book club (not counting an abortive attempt at a Word book club reading The Sun Also Rises), so we'll see how it goes. Afterwards I stayed to watch Media Malpractice ("How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted"): not bad, but I'd probably seen all the individual clips before during the election coverage.
Books finished: Keys To Investing In Options and Futures.
Second Amendment Day #2
News, Guns ·Saturday April 4, 2009 @ 19:08 EDT (link)
It was a beautiful sunny day for shooting with the Microsoft gun group (not the Gun Club, just a group organized via an internal e-mail list about guns). This was our second "Second Amendment Day" celebration. A good time was had by all, everyone was safe, and plenty of ammunition was expended and targets destroyed.
We left around 1130, got to the pit in Sultan at around noon, firing lines were set up (with bright orange tape), targets placed, ear protection installed, and firing commenced. Had a great time; got to meet some people in person that I'd only communicated with via the mailing list. Two other people from Word were there (developer SI and tester DP… no representative from program management). Note that this was around tax time and we'd just finished our taxes, so I brought the 1040 instruction booklet for some catharsis (middle, top).
This is only the second time I had the AR-15 out (Honey is shooting it in the bottom of the first set of photos, I'm shooting it in the last photo—thanks Stoyan for taking the picture—and Stoyan is shooting it above me; Drew also shot with it, but in the photo he's shooting a different rifle). It was a lot of fun to shoot, and it eats cheap Wolf ammo just fine (of course I cleaned it afterward). DM's video of the "all-out assault" at the end.
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