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Tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a cup of ambition
And yawn
and stretch
and try to come to life.
Jump in the shower
and the blood starts pumping
Out on the street
the traffic starts jumping
With folks like me on the job from nine to five.
Working nine to five
what a way to make living
Barely getting by
it's all taking and no giving.
They just use your mind
and they never give you credit
It's enough to drive you crazy
if you let it.

There has been interesting comparisons about the Americas: the rising of North America as dominant and more progressive compared to South America is more than religion. It has been put down to the tendencies of the Spanish and Portuguese to have more hierarchy; there were definitely rules and classes. Where, on the other hand, North America benefited from the contributions of all in society. When talking about religion it is possible to always look at the fanatics but it has also enabled some to do the most amazing things. There is a type of educated person who embraces the commonality of the world religions in a spiritual way. This has a lot of benefits and actually deep down I think it strikes the cord of nobility. If a person is to be truly a king among men he doesn't try and argue people out of their beliefs. First of all it's bad politics and second he illustrates he's not the leader. The relationship between those in power to religion is different from the average churchgoer--- there is a relationship between humility before God and power. It is a very useful political device; I do not doubt that politicians do believe. But it’s also useful to them.

calligraphies, set announcement Originally uploaded by clickykbd.

Some interesting swirls. Has typography lost the influence of the pen?

The first man who, having enclosed a land, thought of saying 'this is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. How many wars, crimes, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would hve been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and the earth belongs to no one!'

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, 1755

What is the relationship between common resources and property? I'd wager that most proprietry systems are build either using or on-top of commonly available code. Rarely is something so unique to be genuinely produced by the inventor. Rousseau is an idealist, a romantic; people forget outside the natural world is much worse. What animals do to each other in the natural world wouldn't be tollerated in civil society. If a squirel thinks he can get aways with it, he's pounce on an unsupecting pidgeon and have it for lunch.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;

I had an interesting conversation today about coding standards, it started with a document How to write unmaintainable code. One of my collegues sent this out after reading slash-dot. It reminded me of, perhaps a more cynical version, of How to get your abstract rejected.

How much of this is tongue in cheek and how much understanding of the natural processes involved is there. Quoting statements like:

Let's face it, you and I and everyone else are going to write crap code anyway, so it may as well be cheap and simple crap code that you understand and can afford to throw away rather than complicated and expensive crap code. (The fact that 90% of the code written by 90% of developers is crap is a corollary of Sturgeon's law that 90% of everything is crap.)