Sad story

An article at the NYT about a kid who gets bullied repeatedly here. I was a subject of bullying in the 6th through 9th grade. The memories are painful. I really feel for this kid. It's a very isolating feeling, and a vicious circle. If you "tell," then you are a tattle-tale, and fair game for worse treatment. Also, it's surprising how often (most of the time) you get no help from school authorities. What I came away with was the feeling that they were afraid of the bullies too.

For me, learning to play guitar helped get me out of that lowest social class: awkward misfits who could always be taunted as "faggots." Being in that box and looking out at things like the pretty girls feels like being on the moon. It's easy to hate everyone, because it seems like everyone is complicit in what's happening to you. Now that I'm older I know they were just unaware.

Anyway...not so good times.

Kris made me a sweater!

Look, Kris made me this amazing sweater, in just 9 days of constant knitting!





I really like it. It's going to be cold this week so I should get to wear it a lot. I've also got a great scarf, many pairs of socks, a hat and some mittens from Kris. I just need knitted pants and underwear and I'm completely swaddled in wool!

Reaction to Obama's speech

A couple of great editorials from the NYT on Obama's speech on race: Roger Cohen, and N. Kristof.

A hilarious, very short story by Desmond Warzel in an online magazine Abyss & Apex. Check it out here.

Mountain Hangman

Going through old things I found this Flash game that I made back in 2001 or so. You need to be up on your obscure mountains in Washington State!

(I just noticed that in Google Reader you don't see the Flash game. Visit the original post for that).

Knuth on TeX

Lately I've really been into the TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt typesetting systems. I have some book ideas, and also I want to archive my trip reports in print form, removing most of them from my web site too (yikes! I hear one guy say :D).

Anyway, I liked this interview with the great Knuth that I found while browsing the TUGBoat archives: Donald Knuth, University of Oslo, 30 August 2002.