There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical, and "devastating to the sites you love". The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant.

Let's talk about ethics. How about some ethics for businesses?

1. Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.
2. Stop trying to grab my attention, evoke emotional responses in me, manipulate my mind, and trick me into spending money on crap I don't need. This is what advertisement is. Stop disrespecting me and insulting my intelligence. Stop viewing me as an anonymous, money-spending piece of cattle.
3. Stop trying to track my every move online. How many people understand tracking cookies? How many companies make it clear that every click is being recorded and data-mined? How is this ethical?

Here's the state of the world today: I can't drive down the street without seeing billboards everywhere. The radio is literally 25 to 50% ads, which is why I don't listen to the radio. Television is what, 20 minutes of commercials per hour? Which is why I haven't had television in 6 years. Newspapers and magazines are saturated with ads, and of course I don't read them either. Even then, ads are nearly unavoidable.

(By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads, no distractions. A few pages at the back maybe, but I can ignore those. Books are nice.)

The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to.

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I'll give you money. Real money. I've done it before. But I will never give you my attention for free. No business has a right to that.

Businesses are not your friends. Businesses are not ethical entities. Businesses do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Businesses exist to milk you of as much of your money as possible. The only sane reaction for the average person is a similar one: I want to deprive businesses of my money. I want to get as much from them as I can, while giving up as little as possible.

If I politely suggested that it's "unfair" for a business to have such a huge profit margin, and "if they cared about their customers, they would lower all their prices", I'd be laughed at. Why would a company do anything less than the absolute most they can do to bleed money out of me, after all? I laugh at any business (e.g. Ars Technica) which says the same thing to me. I will bleed you of product, as far as it's legal to do so. It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being. Up to this point I have rarely read Ars Technica, and from now on I'll make it a point not to. If I do read it, I will block ads with the greatest feeling of malice I can manage.

I run my own website(s) at a loss specifically because I'd rather pay out of my own pocket than force people to look at ads. Admittedly my sites are so small that it's not much money. But there you have it. If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

I love my ad-blocker. The only thing better would be an internet where I didn't need to use it.

Approximately one in twenty times when I try to log on to my work computer (running Windows 7 Professional™), it lags for 2 minutes and then I see this:

That's the Microsoft I know and love. (By "love", I mean the opposite of love.) Just like the good old days. I'm glad my employer bought this computer and I didn't have to spend my own money.

80% of the time on this machine I'm sitting in Virtualbox using Ubuntu, thankfully.

Let's discuss can openers.

Growing up, my parents would often invest in electric can openers. These things never worked. Some of them sit robot-like on top of the can and walk themselves around the top while chopping the metal. Some of them were mounted on the wall and you somehow get the can to hang in a harness while the device spins the can around. It takes a PhD and double-jointedness to get the can set up in these devices properly. And then you push a button, a lot of noise happens, and usually the can ends up half-open, half-bent up to the point where it's un-openable short of dynamite.

When I open a can, I use one of these. You jam the metal bit into the can and turn the crank, the can spins in a circle and 10 seconds later, off comes the razer-sharp top. The one I own was probably manufactured in the 1980's and it's still sharp enough to open a can with minimal effort.

Is it really that hard to turn a handle for 10 seconds? Do we really need computer-controlled robotic can-opening devices?

Consider books. I still buy and read all of my books in the form of compressed wood pulp. There are newfangled e-book readers, but I don't want one. Why? Because the only places I read are 1) In the bathtub, and 2) Lying in bed. Taking a computer into the bathtub is generally not a good idea, and holding a Kindle above my head for 3 hours is awkward compared to lying a (3-D) book on the bed beside me with one page bent up so I can read it. (Note: I have dropped a book in the bathtub on more than one occasion, and contrary to my expectations, once it dried it was still perfectly readable, no ink runnage at all.)

I know some day, maybe soon, paper books are going to be gone and we're all going to read books from digital devices. But I like my books. I know there are benefits to having electronic books instead of paper ones. But even though they're a waste of space, even though they can have pages ripped out, even though they can burn up or smudge or age and become brittle, I like paper books better.

Mostly I like paper books because they're simple, analog devices. I don't have to mess with any kind of user interface. Books don't have battery life. Books don't have copy protection. Books don't require me to sign up for user accounts at some website and worry about having an internet connection. I can flip through the pages with my fingers. I can tell how many pages are left by the thickness of the pages that are left. I have actually never comfortably finished a long e-book, not even books about programming, where you'd think the ability to copy/paste code would be a boon. I'll pay good money for a paper copy of a book even if the electronic version is free.

This is probably the most banal thing I've ever written about. But there is such a thing as too much technology. I say this as a person who spends all day trying to get people to use databases instead of keeping drawers full of paper records. Technology for the sake of technology is a waste of time.

I'm sitting here in Canada trying to work for my employer back in the US for a month. It's been a few weeks already, and I'm surprisingly pleased (or pleasantly surprised) with how well it's working. At the same time, certain aspects of this rather suck.

One huge obstacle so far is (of course) Windows. Aside from the Linux server that I convinced IT to let me run out of a closet, the whole place is Microsoft. Whatever MS VPN software we're using is slow, clunky, unreliable, and generally annoying.

At one point I tried to fetch a file from a network drive and watched it download at 0.2 k/sec. Then I had someone back home copy it onto my Linux box, and I downloaded from there at 120 k/sec. The Windows and Linux servers are in the same room in the same building behind the same network connection; I don't understand how VPN overhead slowed things down by that many orders of magnitude.

After connecting to VPN, there's about a 25% chance that Outlook will be able to connect to the Exchange server at work. Generally I have to fire up the VPN, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on and then Outlook will find it. Sometimes I close Outlook, but it lives on as a zombie, futilely hammering away at the server but unable to find it, until I CTRL-ALT-DEL and kill it. This is with Office 2007.

But the work I do on the Linux server is (of course) easy. No problems whatsoever. Working over SSH is how I did things when I was sitting in my office anyways. I tunnel in and use local GUI SQL clients. I put VirtualBox on my laptop and I do a bunch of stuff in a Linux VM and rsync it back home with no problems. I can edit files over SSH right in Emacs as if they were on my local box, if I care to.

Sometimes I wonder if my dislike of Microsoft is irrational. Any belief that is caused by or results in a strong emotional response should be subject to questioning. Then reality comes waltzing by and reminds me that no, MS software really does suck.

I've worked for this company for over two years before moving. I don't know how well I'd be doing if this was a company I just started with. It's hard to see how important face-to-face communication is until it's impossible. Email is OK, but the benefit of knowing people in person and knowing how they talk and how they think really goes a long way to being able to interpret and understand plaintext communication.

2009 sucked because I was living in a different country than my wife, thanks to months of Canadian immigration paperwork and bureaucracy. This situation is going to be changing in the immediate future, which means 2010 will not suck.

I did have a lot of time to learn things, which is good. I got all kinds of things accomplished at work, learned some supervisory skills (shudder), wrote some code that was put to good use etc. My websites grew in popularity slightly. I learned Clojure and had lots of fun banging out a few apps. I tried to learn Haskell and failed. I feel like I advanced in origami a bit. I inched ahead slightly learning Japanese. I figure in another 50 years I'll know Japanese enough to say "Hello, I know Japanese but I'm too old to use it for anything now".

I read a gratuitous amount of books. I got into Asimov for the first time; usually I dislike sci-fi, but his stuff is good. I found Neal Stephenson, and wish I'd have found him earlier. I read more programming books than I can remember. I found some interesting books on psychopathy and other psychology-related topics, and read plenty of Richard Dawkins and other sciency and atheismy books.

There just isn't enough time in the day to learn everything I want to learn. I come home from a day of writing code all day at work, goof off on the internet a bit, talk to my wife, and then I read books and write code until 3 or 4AM, and it's still not enough time.

I have apps I want to code, drawings I want to draw, origami I want to fold, video games I want to play, movies I want to watch, music I want to listen to, and the list of books I want to read keeps growing faster than I can read them, even given that I already read 4 or 5 books per month. If I had a social life, I can't imagine how little time I'd have for these things.

This year I almost want to slam the brakes on, spend a lot of time with my wife, and let my brain settle. I will definitely do that to some degree, but I can't stop learning in the meantime. I'm running out of years. 29 years old, only four or five good decades left, if I'm lucky, and my brain will be deteriorating the whole time. At least I have plenty to keep me busy.

Here's my theory of respect.

Everyone deserves some level of basic respect, just for being a fellow human being. This kind of respect means that I won't step on your toes, I'll smile and nod when you talk, I'll hold the door for you. This kind of respect isn't worth much.

The important kind of respect is the one where I will listen carefully to things you say and give your words a lot of consideration and weight. When we disagree, I will sometimes give you the benefit of a doubt (where applicable) and believe your opinion over my own. I will consider you to be a good person. I will want to emulate you. I will make every effort to treat you especially well. Your opinion of me will matter to me. The dictionary uses the words "deference" and "esteem" and that's accurate.

This is the kind of respect that's worth a lot. This is the kind of respect I hope to earn from people (though I don't know how much I succeed), and the people I respect in this way are the ones I seek out in life, the people I want to be around.

I'm in the process of moving all my domains the heck off of Godaddy. I'm trying Namecheap which seems slightly less evil, if the sheer amount of ad banners and upselling bullcrap is any indication. But probably only slightly less evil.

Honestly Godaddy has so many ads I can't even find the button to renew my domains. The process of buying anything takes you through 6 or 7 pages of the most garish, fanatical sleaze-peddling that you are likely to encounter on a website.

Domain registrars are the used car salesmen of the internet.

Now that Windows 7 is out, it's only a matter of time before I'm forced to buy it. I don't want it. I won't use it. But as a programmer, it's nearly impossible to survive without owning a copy of the latest and greatest latest version of Windows.

Why? Because if you want a job, unless you're one of the fortunate few who get to pick your development platform AND dictate the platform for all of your users, you need to know Windows. You need to know how to navigate around it when you're forced to use it on your work computer. You need to know how to troubleshoot (to some degree) your users' Windowsy problems as they try to install and use your program. If you want to communicate with people in the world, inevitably they're going to send you a bunch of MS Word documents and nothing is ever going to read them properly 100% of the time except MS Word itself.

I have a copy of Vista Business on my laptop which I am deeply ashamed for having bought, but at the same time it helped me land a very nice work contract. Without being able to VPN into the company's network (via some MS proprietary VPN software that I tried VERY hard and failed to get to work in Linux) I wouldn't have been able to complete the job on time, and I might be living in a cardboard box under a bridge right now.

For this contract I actually developed the app at home entirely in Linux. I used only Linux-centric tools (Vim, Gimp, Firefox, Ruby etc.). Thank God most of those tools have Windows versions, because deploying it to Windows land at work and working on it there when necessary was (mostly) trivial. But I still needed Windows to finish the job. And all the users of this app were Windows users. The specs for the app were sent to me in Word and Excel documents. The website frontend is being viewed in IE much of the time in spite of my pleadings to the contrary, so I have to support it.

Such is the life of a programmer. I'll probably buy Windows 7 eventually but it'll sting. It'll rankle.

Somehow my post from yesterday about Church numerals in Clojure hit the front page of Reddit briefly. I don't understand why. It wasn't that interesting. It was an interesting topic, but there are other sites with better information about the topic. (Even Wikipedia has more/better info. This one is nice too in spite of being C#.)

I think it's because it was submitted to Reddit with a vague and inflammatory title about brain explosions, and people click links without thinking too much about what they're doing. Even programmers do, I guess.

My blog got around 14,000 visits yesterday, which is not much these days, but a lot by the standards of my tiny blog. If you added up everyone I ever had a conversation with in real life, would it be 14,000 people? I doubt it. Kind of crazy.

I run three websites out of one JVM/Clojure instance on my lowly VPS server and it didn't crash, so I'm kind of happy about that. I've crashed from lesser loads than that in the past. So either my programming is getting better, or my new host is better than my old one, or it was dumb luck.

All of my data is persisted in Tokyo Cabinet nowadays but mostly it's read from caches in Clojure refs, so maybe that helped a bit too. Maybe. Who knows? I know nothing about scaling websites. Slashdot would reduce this site to a puddle of goo.

In any case I appreciate the opportunity to blather about things and have people listen.

Testing a remote SMTP server is kind of hard when Comcast is secretly blocking all inbound and outbound traffic on port 25. I only figured it out when telnet wouldn't even work. I could've saved myself an hour of frustration if I'd known this. Thanks, Comcrap.