yitz is an agnoster

The goal of this post is to collect a whole crapton of stuff I'd like to say about the world cup in one easy-to-ignore wall of text, rather than flooding Twitter with every banal little observation I have. (no, the banal observations will not stop - else why would I still have a Twitter account?)

Disclaimer: really, seriously, it's just me rambling in no sort of order about anything. This is like when you know you'll feel so much better after you vomit - it's not pleasant and you don't really want to involve anyone else, but you have to get it out.

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Man, I never post on this thing. But joaniechachi and I are getting married this summer, that seemed worth mentioning (already facebook-official and everything). And no, this doesn't mean we're going to settle down and be monogamous and start making babies. Well, ok, babies maybe in a couple years. Us getting married is not so much because we love each other and want to spend our lives together and make a family - we do, but it's unrelated - and more because then Joan can get a work permit here in Germany. Although I do feel somewhat more comfortable getting married somewhere where it's also possible for same-sex couples to marry, that helps ease the pain of feeling Judeo-Christian and hetero-normative. I'd say "you shouldn't need a piece of paper to prove your relationship is serious", but in Germany you need a piece of paper to prove everything, so I guess it makes sense. Also maybe it will be easier to explain that non-monogamy doesn't mean you're not committed to each other.

Just got a ton of paperwork to deal with to make it all happen, particularly because my last name will (in all likelihood) be changing to Wolkerstorfer...

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled program of radio silence!

Dear Livejournal and Chrome -

Why do you guys conspire to crash whenever I want to write a comment? It is most odd.

- Yitz

I've done some math. My courseload is 30 LP, or "Leistungspunkte" (Achievement Points?), each LP is estimated to be 30 hours of work. The semester is about 13 weeks. 900 hours over 13 weeks comes to about 70 hours a week, plus my 80hr/mo job (19ish hours a week)... my schedule's gonna be pretty packed. I've been more on less on vacation for months now, not sure how I'll adjust.

Oh, and I am expecting my German citizenship approval in the mail any day now, meaning it'll be time to go down to the American consulate and formally renounce my citizenship.

Whoa.

I blame Obama that I don't really want to. Such is life!

I haven't written anything here in a while, so I guess a sort of update is in order. For a while there was nothing to say, really; it was just same-old-same-old.

• I quit my job at Yahoo!


• Visited friends in LA, Boston, NYC


• ScavHunt!


• Moved to Berlin


• Joan's getting here in less than a week


• Went to the Bürgeramt to get information and forms to apply for German citizenship


• Probably getting my citizenship in the next 6 months or so, which involves giving up my US citizenship before I get my German one, meaning I'll be without any citizenship for a couple days. (Any suggestions of interesting legal situations I can create during this time?)


• Looked at apartments, probably going to just wait until Joan gets here to continue


• Looking for a job or going back to school - I don't really have a focused enough topic to start my Ph. D., so I might do a master's first

And that's pretty much where I am now.

Don't forget, soon Joan and I will have an apartment in Berlin with a guest room and everything. Visitors welcome!

P. S. Following up to my previous entry, my main laptop in now named Gilgamesh, and my little netbook is named Tock.

So, I'm officially unemployed now and I'm moving back to Berlin end of May. But that's not why I'm writing my first post in a long long time. It's because there is a pressing question to answer: ( Collapse )In related news, now that I'm unemployed I'm going to try working on a personal project that is audacious enough to keep me busy for a while but not so much so that anyone would actually care if I do it or not. The basic overview is... card games, I like them (in particular I've had a healthy dose of chinese poker (technically Big Two) injected into my week thanks to Daniela visiting). So, like everything else I like, I want to analyze, formalize, and program it. But of course simply writing a program that allows me to play chinese poker with other people I'm not in the same room as would be too simple*, so instead what I really want to do is develop a way of expressing the rules of any card game (played with standard playing cards - have to concede to at least one constraint) in a formal language that's simple enough for non-programmers to write. Then, have a website where users can play the games I and others create, with scorekeeping and tracking popular games and whatnot. Oh, and of course you should be able to play over facebook. And iPhones. And possibly carrier pigeons. Bonus points if I can establish a peer-to-peer mode that doesn't require a trusted server to "deal" (though something tells me information theory makes this impossible with any card game where opponent's hands should be secret from each other).

* - Doable in finite time, and thus not interesting enough

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."

- Agatha Heterodyne

That is all.

via the Guardian

Not sure what to think about this. What do you think?

Yitz's opinion will be determined by the lucky participant presenting the most cogent argument. Void where prohibited, places of participation may vary, some restrictions may apply.

(Thanks, TechCrunch. ThtechCrunch.)

Well... that sucks. I've never used the "mood" thing on LJ before... but it looks like it doesn't have a "dejected" option, anyway.

I don't disagree that oftentimes uncomfortable compromises are necessary, but this was not one of those times. Obama said, "My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people." In effect, he's claiming national security trumps the right to privacy, the constitution, even the rule of law itself (law with ex-post-facto immunity isn't a law at all). What in the hell happened to "give me liberty or give me death"? Compromise isn't a bad thing, but there are certain things you cannot compromise on - certain, shall we say, unalienable rights.

Maybe I shouldn't have hoped that this time would be any different.