Bullets

[prog]

* There's an really annoying bug with volity.net that isn't going away no matter how often I think I kill it. I am feeling really spring fevery and don't wanna fix it, but this afternoon's really the best time to do it.

* Ha ha ha I fixed it in the time between I wrote the above paragraph and now. No more blank game records.

* misuba sent the Andys and I some core web client code. We're going to look at it tonight duirng our regular biweekly meeting. The goal is to get a "Hello World" working demonstrably enough that we can check the whole thing into public Subversion. It's very important to me that this project go beta this year.

* Mailed first invoice to the new and magical client today. Mixing the advices of a random web page and taskboy3000, now that I have a plurality of clients I have stopped serially numbering my invoices and instead switched to the format TLAYYYYMMDD, where TLA is some three-letter code that reminds me which client this is. The date is the date I mailed the invoice. (Though it occurs to me now that there ought to be another digit there in case I need to mail two or more in one day. Hm.)

* Here is a talk by Vernor Vinge titled "What if the Singularity does not happen?" I listened to the MP3 version while lightly dozing on my couch below an open window last night.

* I am swinging back into a more active interest in transhumanism. I think step one is to investigate just what my feelings are. As much as I find attractive, there's a lot I find repellant, embarrassing fairly tales out of a 1988 issue of Omni. I owe myself an essay. The possible key phrase "make your own damn afterlife" came to me today, which appeals to me for personal reasons, though I'm not sure it fits perfectly.

Comments

[lediva.livejournal.com]

Transhumanism sounds great, and I'm a bit of a devotee myself. I just worry that the tech in question will end up exacerbating the chasm between rich and poor. Or perhaps even worse, people will stop caring about existing problems (hunger, homelessness, etc.) in lieu of metaphorically twiddling their thumbs and waiting for everything to fix itself when the Singularity comes.

[prog.livejournal.com]

You say "people will stop caring", but I assert that the people who would act as you predict never cared in the first place. It doesn't make sense to me than an individual with an altruistic bent would suddenly become completely selfish once their own needs are fulfilled.

[lediva.livejournal.com]

I agree that someone who was going to fight for a particular cause anyway is likely to continue fighting for that cause.

I guess I'm thinking of people who feel like they should help out/donate out of guilt or whatnot. Presumably if those people believed everything would be solved shortly by magical future-tech, they'd no longer feel a need to act altruistically.

Of course, I have no idea whether a population such as that constitutes a significant portion of time/effort/money put towards various causes, so this may not, in fact, be an issue.

And of course, none of this particularly prevents selfish CEOs/politicians from taking full advantage of the tech and leaving all that messy getting-sick-and-dying business to the poor plebes who will undoubtedly eventually reap some benefit due to mumblemumblehandwave trickle-down.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

(Though it occurs to me now that there ought to be another digit there in case I need to mail two or more in one day. Hm.)

I use TLA#### where #### starts at 0001 and increases by one with each invoice to that client. Keeping the date and the invoice number separate seems like a good idea to me, although I can argue it both ways.

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

I've been using the format for 5 years without a problem. Having the date in the ID helps me with my bookkeeping and general organization.

However, any old invoice ID will work if your methodical about your bookkeeping.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm now considering changing to the system you suggest... I'm pretty strict about my book-keeping (I can hear my accountant laughing in the background) so it's been no big deal, but I have had one invoice that was incorrectly numbered. That makes an argument for using dates, as it is obvious that you are out of sequence. I don't use any invoicing software, so everything is done by hand, and that does make the date-based system superior.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

I can't read about transhumanism without thinking of Malcolm Reynold's statement in Serenity: "They will swing back to the belief that they can make people better. And I do not hold with that."