Mindbat

Tech, Text, and Tact

I recently picked up Programming Clojure and started working through it, trying to wrap my head around this new variant of Lisp.
Installing clojure itself was pretty simple (sudo apt-get install clojure, since I’m using Ubuntu), but I had a hard time figuring out how to make the clojure contrib libraries available from the clojure REPL [...]

A few months ago, when Apple bought Lala.com, I didn’t panic. I thought Apple’d integrate Lala.com’s store into iTunes, rebrand the site, and keep things rolling.
I was wrong:
Dear Ron T.,
The Lala service will be shut down on May 31st.
In appreciation of your support over the last five years, you will receive a credit in the [...]

Finished reading Just a Geek. Surprisingly, my experiences and feelings toward NASA parallel Wheaton’s feelings toward Star Trek in many ways: the feeling that I need to prove leaving was the right decision, the odd mix of guilt, excitement and nostalgia I feel whenever I see someone I used to work with, the worry that [...]

This weekend, a friend of my wife’s was gushing about how her church had just started a program to help the poor in Uganda: they take unwanted clothes from Ugandans, ship them over to the US so her church-members can sew them back together using Christian-themed patches, sell the clothes to people in the US, [...]

I was going to write up a list of the differences between my three careers (optical engineering, writing, and programming) and post them here, but then I realized what all my differences had in common: they were changes in the way people thought of me.
As a NASA employee I was awe-inspiring, as a writer [...]