Life Update/Book Burning

Time for a small life update, as the posts have slowed down for a while and some narration is due:

I just moved to San Francisco after graduating from Brown in Providence, RI. For a myriad of reasons I didn't spend much time at home over the summer, and have been living in and out of boxes since May. Just last week I moved in to my new apartment, and will slowly, surely become a normal well-adjusted human being again.

Despite the change in locale, the main reason I've not updated (or been so fast to move, or had much time to play) is that I'm happily and proudly an engineer at Adobe Systems, working on their AIR product. It's really a fantastic product, I suggest you all give it a look.

Products built on AIR that I particularly like are Times Reader, TweetDeck, and (in a silly and simple way) Webcam To Gif. It's the first time I'm programming professionally, and I can't be happier.




Of course, it also doesn't help that Starcraft 2 was released on my second day of work. I rarely get to play, but when I do, look out for sicp, the Platinum Zerg Menace on the US server.

Occasionally, I can still program for fun. I picked up ScrabbleCheat again and virtually re-wrote the little I had: the previous approach was quickly demoable, but hits a wall as soon as you try to generate moves from an existing game board. Besides, the sooner I finish that, the sooner I can work on my AIR app, SlashR ^_-

---

Now, forgive the language, but there's no better way to describe it: there's some stupid-ass shit happening right now regarding Muslims in this country. First there's the manufactured Cordoba House controversy (I think Greenwald sums it up best: if you think past a fourth-grade level about the opponent's arguments, what they really want but obviously can't say is a Muslim-free zone of unspecified distance. This set of photographs is telling.).

Then we get arson of a mosque in Tennessee.

The most personally insulting is "Burn a Koran Day," since it's clearly an unoriginal, hateful knockoff of Everyone Draw Mohammed Day (I describe the event and my participation here). Clearly, they misunderstood Everyone Draw since they're doing it all wrong.

Never mind the fact that these are Christians, apparently:

In Everyone Draw, there were direct threats and acts of violence being perpetrated in response to a specific, concrete expression of freedom of speech, the result of which unambiguously terrorized people from exercising their Constitutional rights. If we were threatened and attacked by McDonalds, we'd be agitating McDonalds.

The people behind Burn a Koran Day aren't in any direct danger and don't have their rights directly threatened. They're doing this simply because they hate and wish to hurt all Muslims simply by virtue of being Muslim. If they try to give an explanation, it's normally some vague babble of being a response to 9/11. Please. Yes, some (crazy few) Muslims want to kill you and I. I'll bet that so do some (crazy few) Jews, some (crazy few) handicapped people, and some (crazy few) vegans. This doesn't mean I should eat a lobster-bacon cheeseburger while caning an invalid just to prove a point.

Is their religion stupid? Definitely. So is yours. You all have the right to peacefully practice your silly superstitions, and you have every right to insult them as badly as you want. Neither of you have the right to escape criticism, and those of you planning this are the most stupid, hypocritical, and pathetic people of this news cycle (and there is some stiff competition).

Really kids, what would Jesus do?