Now that wordpress has good support for tags and a decent tag cloud widget, I can’t figure out what the point of categories is.

I googled and everyone is very adamant that they are different things in a “no, no, no you don’t understand categories are hierarchical but tags are not” kind of way. But I don’t get it.

I am just about to delete all my categories and convert them to tags. Any reason why I wouldn’t?

I think I blogged before about how I am going to have a wall of heroes ifnwhen I get my own study ifnwhen we get our nice house.

I started planning this about twenty years ago. I am gonna have a B&W portrait of each of my heroes. G started me off on my collection a while back, but Albert is still rolled up in a tube. I’ll get the rest someday. Now that I can draw, I might even do them myself.

Paul Graham just wrote an essay about his heroes and his criteria are earily similar to mine

This is a list of people who’ve influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work.

His list has no overlap with my list though but it’s still a good list.

I go through phases with drinking. Not just beer and wine but tea and coffee too.

I’ll go three years drinking only black coffee and then, suddenly, I can’t stand it and I switch to tea. My current routine is a cup of tea in the bog before work, a coffee or two when I get there and then another nice cup o’ tea when I get home.

BTW we have this ridiculously complex, Rube Goldberg coffee machine at work that takes about about 15 minutes to make a freshly ground, freshly brewed cup of coffee. Coffee at work should be served from big buckets. Just dunk your cup in to fill it up and go. You shouldn’t have to stand in line for coffee.

After many years of drinking beer almost exclusively for many years, I switched to wine about four years ago. I go through phases with the wine too. Mostly cheap plonk but, very occasionally, I fancy some expensive plonk.

I have had a Sangiovese phase, a cab phase, a Pinot Grigio phase and, since I-don’t-know-when, Sauvignon Blanc.

Strangest of all, in recent years, I have found that red wine tastes quite unpleasant when I drink alone thus giving rise to the famous rule:

Only drink red wine with company

This is a real problem when you live in a tiny studio apartment hundreds of miles from *anyone who might want to drink with you. It’s getting worse too now because now Sauvignon Blanc is starting to taste bad, I can’t bear cheap Chardonnay and I can’t afford the expensive kind.

I tried drinking the Islay malt whisky I found in the cupboard - but malt whisky needs company too. Occasionally I’ll try a little of the Blue Sapphire that has been a special friend since I first met her a couple of years back. The trouble with gin, though, is you have a little bit in a glass with some ice and some orange juice and it tastes so good and you have another and it tastes even better and, before you know it, you wake up with a hangover and your underpants on backwards. No, gin is just not right.

Anyhoo. Last night I found the solution.

Georgina went to Richard and Judy’s without me for the first time last night and the Krinklies took a laptop to place in my spot and they Skyped me. Since I was with company I could open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon (cheap) and it tasted wonderful. It was just like being there and I had a marvellous time until Tom’s battery ran out.

* almost anyone. I have one faithful friend who will drink wine with me but he has in-laws.

Last year, we bought Lego Mindstorms with vague ideas of entering the First Lego League tournament but i was put off when I saw videos of previous competitions.

The standard approach is to build a robot with pluggable arms that has three brain-dead actions. Go forward. Move the arm. Come back again so the human operators can change the arm and point the robot in the right direction for the next trick. There is no robotic finesse whatsoever.

If I had seen this video a year ago, my life might have turned out very differently.

I was gonna bring Mindstorms for something to do during my enforced batchelorism but I had no room in the car. I have a hankering for some robotics about now.

Oh well, I still have my taxes to do. And my ironing. And I have to finish my new Wordpress theme. And practice my guitar. And draw something. And finish the genetic programming project and the diplomacy IM project and the Z80 emulator.

Three months to go.

NYT has a nice piece about the absurdity of the campaign trail. People are asking the candidates about all kinds of shit like whether to get rid of the penny and the dollar bill and trying to make them eat crap like onion rings and chocolate cake - “Go on! Just have half a fish!” - and all the time the reporters are there with their mics making sure that the candidate doesn’t say anything interesting.

Obama had to deal with this

In Lancaster, Mr. Obama, talked to a woman in tears because disability had left her impoverished, then fielded a question from an impatient fellow convinced that the secret world government was about to impose the Amero, a joint American-Mexican-Canadian currency. Mr. Obama explained that he could not do anything about the Amero because, alas, it did not exist.

immediately followed by this

The pivot comes fast. One minute you are talking about an imaginary currency, and the next you hear life rubbed raw. In Lancaster, Linda Hassel rises, hesitant and pained. Her son is an Army lieutenant. What can you say to mothers and fathers who fear that their sons and daughters have died in vain?

Mr. Obama stood silent before answering. He said that he wore a yellow wristband given to him by a woman in Green Bay, Wis., whose son had died in Iraq. He spoke of crying with her and recognizing the futility of offering comfort. “I meet parents all the time who have lost sons and daughters, but their service to our country is never in vain,” he said. “They have performed magnificently. Our military has acquitted itself with all the honor you could expect. That’s never a waste.”

“Getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” he continued, “that is an accomplishment; trying to reduce and contain violence, that is an accomplishment.”

He stood perched on the edge of the riser. “The failure is on the part of the civilian leadership who did not think through this war and its consequences.”

We want to honor that service going forward, he said; we want to care for maimed veterans and those who remain haunted by war. We will end the countless tours of duty, he said.

“We revere your sacrifice,” he said to Mrs. Hassel. “I am going to make sure that we as a nation are as great as those who sacrifice for us.”

I know it was rehearsed, but still…that was pretty good.