I believe that God created the world, and that those who are chosen by him should obey him to the best of their abilities.  Despite these aspirations, I'm a terrible sinner.

Nonetheless, at least I've got goals to aspire to, right?  Sure, there are quite a few that most people don't agree with, especially the ones that prohibit actions that non-Christians (and even many self-proclaimed Christians) don't want to call evil.

Still, most people are on board with the second-greatest commandment – in fact, according to popular culture, that is in fact the main point of Jesus' coming to Earth!

37 Jesus said to him, "'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.'

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'

40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

Matthew 22:37-40 (NKJV)

(And for those paying attention, yes, I consider Penny Arcade to be an arbiter of popular culture.)

But if I'm not engaging in weekly gay-hunts, what IS my Christianity doing for me?  Well, among the many other instructions for living life that God passed down to us, it seems that he really does care about Christians being an improvement for the quality-of-life of the people around us:

"Let me tell you why you are here. You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. If you lose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You've lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage." Matthew 5:13 (MSG)

Seriously, what is this post even about

All right, so Christians aren't supposed to be assholes.  Most people sort of assume that already, even given plenty of implicit counter-arguments via the actions of Christians they know.

However, I've noticed a high correlation between driving a vehicle on the road and anger.  While driving as a passenger, I've noticed that it is extremely common for a driver to express anger at

• The drivers sharing the road with him
• Shitty things that happen while driving (inconvenient red lights, poor road signs, etc)

The former is by far the most common – the other vehicles on the road have a tendency to cut you off, slow you down, fail to announce where they are going, and generally just act like jerks.

Why does that burn people up so much?

If I accidentally bump my shopping cart into someone else at the grocery store, I'll quickly apologize – and the odds are that they'll say something to the effect of "ah, don't worry" or give an understanding smile, or at worst give a small huff and push on in annoyance.

If I turn left on a street and someone in oncoming traffic has to slow down to avoid me safely, I don't usually get a chance to hear their response.  I've driven with enough people to imagine it, though – when you see someone doing something stupid or unnecessary in a way that inconveniences you, you generally feel a quick flash of anger toward them, and may say something to that effect at their expense.

Maybe it's because you just see vehicles – you're not dealing with humans, you're dealing with 4 wheels and a bumper sticker pushing [political party you hate]!  Most people are polite enough to be diplomatic in the face of being inconvenienced by another human face, but if a hunk of metal cuts you off, you feel real rage at the theoretical person inside of it!

I'm glad I'm smarter than that!

Oh wait, no, I get mad exactly like that, all the time.  Despite the Bible hammering in the fact that God expects you to be working on this self-control thing, I've raged at other drivers about 100% more than I should have.  What am I supposed to do, turn every driving excursion into a painful turn-the-other-cheek exercise?

Well, that has kind of happened – but not until after I started adopted a proactive stance towards driving smart.

My life was changed (no, really!) when I read this site written by an engineer on the internet.  I'd recommend reading it over, but here's the basic premise:

• Busy roads (especially big ones like highways) get inefficient to travel on quite a bit
• It turns out that if you drive in a certain way, you can make highway driving a lot more efficient… not for you, but for all the people behind you, too

So how does a motivated engineer make the world better?  It turns out, you can improve the quality-of-life of those around you by simply leaving a big gap between you and the vehicle in front of you.

I don't want to belabor all of the points he makes (seriously, you should read his site), but the general idea is

• If you never hit your brakes, the people behind you never have to hit their brakes, which lets everyone avoid the burst-forward-then-come-to-nearly-a-complete-stop situation that happens way too often on busy roads
• It's easy for people to merge in in front of you, which lets the lanes next to you avoid the someone-driving-really-slow-trying-to-merge-lanes situation

Is that really how you drive like a Christian?

So you're leaving a carefully-engineered gap between you and the traffic in front of you.  Traffic behind you is demonstrably better because of it.  What's the big deal?

Well, it turns out that this habit is not natural at all.  At least not to me.  When did I turn into a competitive driver looking to beat everyone else to my exit?  I'm not sure.  Maybe it was the day I got my drivers license.  Maybe it was the day I was born with two working testicles.  I haven't been able to pin it down.

They just… keep… merging!

People will merge in front of you.  And man, no matter how zen I've been feeling about driving lately, my first instinct is STILL "gotta close the gap so the rest of the horde doesn't jump in in front of me!"

Calm yourself with these facts: each car who merges in front of you (potentially forcing you to let up on the accelerator in order to maintain good distance between you and the car ahead) adds… maybe 5 seconds to your trip.  Sure, there's a slim chance that those 5 seconds could cause you to miss a light somewhere, but aren't those low odds worth improving the driving situation for all those around you and behind you?

Don't forget: the easier it is for people to merge into your lane, the smoother traffic will be for all of the people behind you!

Not dying is good, too

So yeah, this falls by the wayside whenever people are in a hurry, but it turns out that the more space you leave between you and the vehicle in front of you, the safer you are.

I'm struggling not to write a 500-word rant on this topic alone.  Two seconds to respond to sudden developments ahead of you makes a massive difference compared to one second… and protip: you've been counting seconds too fast.  Giving yourself a larger margin of error turns "accidents" into much safer near-misses.

But keeping your car and skull dent-free are just happy side effects that can happen when you decide to try to apply the biblical principle of making-life-better-for-others to driving.

Resist the power of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory – start training yourself to be a blessing to the anonymized people on the road around you!

If universities really cared about educating their students, they would take an audit once a year (at least) to take scope of the current programming world.

They would look at the currently available development platforms, and identify the ones that were well-established and provided the best introduction to tools that could solve real-world problems that real-world application developers were working on.

Then they would go out and hire professionals with real experience in these languages (!) to train the students in using these tools without sucking.

This would comprise most of the third and fourth year studies for computer scientists (or whatever bachelor's degree that would represent "practical programming").

But wait, what about the first two years? Oh, well that would be spent teaching developers to work on projects in a way that would make them (the software projects) not suck.

Everyone initially sucks at writing software that coders (even themselves) will have to maintain. It generally takes at least a year or two to work the worst of these symptoms out of your system.

If universities focused on the practical, they would work on beating that stupidity out of every student who wanted to write software.

If universities were practical, while simultaneously forward-thinking, they would smack the stupidity out of students while *also* training them on systems that real companies were using to solve current problems.

Based on my limited education, I note that universities spend most of their efforts on the completely irrelevant (general electives, ho!) and mathematical work that is only useful to coders who are already well-educated.

But don't take my opinion too seriously – I am a college dropout, after all.

Perhaps I should be consoled by the fact that the reason I'm looking at these prior works now isn't because they broke in front of a customer. This time, at least.

In some issue of Maxim (November 2005?) there was an article featuring absurd sandwich-based foods.  So ridiculous were these edibles that some fraternity brothers of mine decided that the consumption of one such sandwich would make a fitting end-of-semester celebration.

I was unable to find the original article online, but found the ingredients here.  I post them here for posterity.

The Dirty Mother

"Use two slices of buttery Texas toast as bookends, and slap together a sausage patty, hash browns, and three generous chops of ham, separating each layer with a slice of cheddar cheese. Throw two fried eggs in the mix, and comfort them with four strips of crispy bacon. A splash of ketchup or Worcestershire sauce is your choice, but tons of S&P is mandatory."

We would usually go to IHOP, order the ingredients individually, and assemble the sandwiches ourselves.  The braver souls in the group would purchase fries as a side dish.

These memories are making me hungry.

I wanted a fun campaign (duh) with rules and story that would be hard for me to mess up.  For most of the campaign, the only players were two good friends with solid role-playing experience, so I was able to rely on the players to contribute a good amount of quality.

The story

I took a stab at running an old-west campaign, borrowing every western-movie trope I could think of.  The PCs played gunslinging lawmen for hire, riding into a town oppressed by a gang of n'er-do-wells populated with plenty of tobacco-spitting, expendable, no-good outlaws to gun down.

Without going into too much detail: the players cleaned out a counterfeiting operation in an old widow's basement, were recruited to clean up the town, used aggressive negotiations to get rid of gang members harassing the mayor's house, and stopped another group of enforcers who were coercing money from some water-starved farmers.

Back in town, they took over the town prison, had a gun fight in a booby-trapped house, escaped just as it blew sky high, confronted the aristocratic gang leader on the porch of his ranch house, and finished with a gun battle on main street.

The system

At the recommendation of an experienced GM, I used the Boot Hill (second edition) rules, a creation of Gary Gygax and Brian Blume.

I was looking for super-lightweight rules, so I didn't even use the full rules set described by the Boot Hill book – the only dice rolling during the campaign happened during combat.  Boot Hill gun combat is simple:

• The fastest draw (based on weapon speed and personal speed) goes first
• Roll percentile dice (based on your weapon, personal accuracy, and a relatively short list of modifiers) to see if you hit:

• Roll percentile dice on a wound chart to see where you hit:

Mortal wounds kill you.

Any wound at all gives you a -5% chance at getting to shoot first, and also to hitting the other guy.

Once your strength drops below 50% of what it is normally (which can often be done with a single serious wound), you start getting -20% to shooting first, and hitting.

It's a simple system, but one that facilitates characters dying pretty often.  A couple good rolls, and a single shot can permanently take out any character – even if he just rolled into town with a new bandanna and a pocket full of hit points.

Wait, easy character death?

I wanted my players to enjoy a good old-fashioned movie version of the wild west.  They were supposed to play the heroes – the guys who go flying through bar windows and come up swinging!

I wanted quick and dirty combat, but I wanted my PCs to be a bit more survivable.  I tried a few things to counteract the cheapness of life:

Giving the PCs slightly better stats

Standard nerfing – most of my NPCs would drop below half strength after one serious wound (which severely limits a character for the rest of the combat).  The player characters could took at least two (non-mortal) wounds before things got really sticky.

Making healing much more trivial than the rules suggested

According to the rules, healing is a fairly slow process, taking days or weeks to recover from any sort of combat wound.  My player characters needed to be able to get into gun battles every few hours – they could be rejuvenated by a good night's sleep, or the restorative powers of a kindly old lady's stew.

Adding a new game mechanic

I decided to take a hint from the awesome and successful video game Left 4 Dead.  In that universe, survivor characters who go down are immobilized, but can still fire handguns until their teammates pull them up (or the zombies fill up at the brain buffet).

Any time one of the PCs took mortal damage, I did something similar – instead of the characters dying, they dropped to the ground and could fire their handguns at a reduced rate.  If another player made it over to them and used a round to pull them up, that character could enter the fray with some of their strength restored.

It wasn't a mechanic that saw a lot of use, but it turned several potential defeats into narrow victories.  I was happy with this – narrowly beating the baddies is a lot more exhilarating than seeing one side gun down the other like dogs.

Also, I'm a noob

I found it a highly enjoyable experience, but there were weak spots.  The campaign was fairly light on dialog, which isn't necessarily a bad thing – I just wish I were better at having a conversation in character, and thinking on my feet.

My weaknesses were most evident in the final session, where my PCs held the big baddy in prison and were looking around for a way to prove his guilt (they were lawful, after all) or uncover the next plot hook.

I left them wandering around looking for a clue far too long before I initiated the next action for them to deal with.  They grilled the prisoner for some time (good roleplaying, at least), looking for the magic words that would advance the plot.  Blah.

I think I might try this again

I was very glad to have such great (and forgiving) roleplayers in my campaign.  When the GM is fresh, there's a lot less room for noobs or troublemakers.

I'm definitely sold on lightweight rules sets, especially when going for a more cinematic feel.  The less of a barrier there is between the players and the cool things they want their characters to do, the better.

I have a suspicion that we might try this (noobs GMs practicing with friends) again sometime soon – if you have any suggestions for easy-to-pick-up gaming systems, or good scenarios for some one-shot sessions, then surrender your knowledge to my gaping mind-hole!

That is to say, I did not sleep when it was dark – I slept when I felt tired enough to do so.  This happened to occur less often than nighttime.  To see a similar sleep schedule displayed in a handy timeline, check out this XKCD comic.

Over Christmas weekend (4 days), I tried the same thing – I fell asleep very late the evening of the first day, very early the morning of third day, and again the afternoon of the fourth day.

This is the end of that experiment – over 4 days, I have slept 3 times.  As I go to work right now, I have already been awake for 8 hours.  I will probably feel like sleeping not long after I leave work.

The odd sleep schedule has some benefits: it's not hard to fall asleep (because my bed time is defined by when I feel sleepy), and depending on my sleep patterns, there is the possibility of actually spending less time sleeping every week.

The abnormal waking hours definitely felt odd at times, though I feel that I started to get used to them a bit.  I'm considering trying a similar schedule over the course of a work week some time.  If I do, I will report back with my findings.

It's bitter (not in a good way, like beer) and unpleasant to my tastory senses.

However, it is difficult to beat coffee's efficiency as a vehicle for caffeine.  I generally drink my coffee with several heaping doses of hot chocolate powder, but the burnt bean flavor still comes through.

That was then

I recently discovered espresso – a drink that focuses on distilling the essence of coffee (CAFFEINE) into as tiny a beverage as possible, and then filling up the rest of the cup with things that taste good.

Sweeeeeet.

I've been indulging pretty regularly lately.  The stuff is expensive when you buy retail, but I have a friend who is mastering the art of Making Espresso That Doesn't Suck, and I intend to exploit him to the fullest extent possible.

However, I'm still not a big fan of it when it comes to seeing other people's content.

The problem

Facebook shoves too much information down my throat, even if it's about people I care for.

The way it works on the rest of the internet

The things that you can post on Facebook (blog posts/notes, status updates, photo albums, sharing links) can all be released on other services.

Other people can subscribe to each of those sites individually – if someone posts interesting status updates, I follow them on Twitter.  If they take cool pictures or write insightful blog posts, I add those respective feeds to my RSS reader.

I follow only the things I am interested in – and because I can be picky about what I follow, I end up reading everything that comes through those feeds.

Facebook doesn't let me choose

The recent Facebook update gives the content providers (you and your friends) control over who CAN see certain information.  This is definitely useful, and I appreciate it.

But I don't get many options about what information I see in my news feed – if someone else publishes information to their feed, my only options are to

• Block ALL information from that user, and not see anything they post
• See every single thing they publish to their feed
• In the case of third-party apps, I could block the application and not see any information from that app, for any user.

If I have a friend who makes really funny status updates and posts a ton of photos to their Facebook album, it's all or nothing for me – Facebook doesn't let me select what I'm interested in seeing from the other user.

As a result, my Facebook feed is full of information ranging from interesting content to wastes of pixels.

I don't roll that way

I consume a lot of information over the internet – My feed reader tracks over 150 feeds the last time I checked, and I follow over 100 people on Twitter.  And I read almost every piece of information that comes through those feeds!

I can do this because I am picky about what I follow.  If I'm not sure that at least 95% of the posts in a feed are going to be interesting to me, I don't follow it.

If a blogger, Twitter user, or photo album is publishing more than a few new items per day, I don't follow it (no matter how interesting it is) because my feed reader would get too cluttered, too quickly.  I wouldn't be able to keep up.

It's not the fault of my friends

Well, not most of them, anyway.  Some of them do post really stupid stuff to their feeds.  But I can block those users without feeling bad.

Let's say I take pictures of local scenery fairly often, and upload them to Facebook photo albums.  Facebook photo permissions are set per-album – I would probably have an album set up to be publicly viewable to everyone (because why wouldn't I share those pictures with whoever was interested?).

Now, when I upload the pictures, I have an option to share them with people.  When I do this, the photo will show up in their feed (unless they've blocked me).

At this point, the responsibility is all on me – which of my friends would be interested in a photo of a sunrise just starting to brighten O street? I can share it with a specific group of people – maybe I even set up a list of people who I know like photography, and only post the new pictures into their feeds.

But those people don't get any say in the matter – if I post my new photos in the feeds of everyone on my friends list (which is the way Facebook has worked historically, and still acts by default), then those photos will be cluttering up their feed.

And if I try to be considerate, and only announce my newly discovered art to the few people I think would be most interested, then other people could be missing out – if I have friends who are actually interested in these photos, but I am not aware, I could very easily leave them out of the loop. And there's nothing they can do about it.

Facebook really wants to keep people happy

They're trying so hard to give people the tools they need to share their information reasonably.

I can understand why they're making the security so granular (so much so that it's getting really confusing to administrate) – security is something that almost everyone is concerned with, and a small group of people complain VERY loudly about.

But there's more to social networking than security

For people who care about the information they consume (and want to consume as much as possible), security settings do nothing.  They don't even matter.

If I'm not allowed to see someone's photo album, I don't care in the slightest – the only thing I do care about is whether or not I can filter the information that IS available to me, so that I only see things that are guaranteed to be worth my time.

And until Facebook lets me do that, there's no reason to consider using it as one of my primary social networking tools.

What did they do?

Facebook users get more choices about who will see the content they put online.  Here are my current settings:

However, there are still some catches – third party applications have the ability to see all the users who you are currently friends with, and you can't do anything about it.

Facebook used to be way lamer

Until this change, Facebook wasn't (in my mind) a great place for me to put content on the internet.

When you're sharing information of any sort with other people, there are a few things you should take into account:

You don't always want everyone to know

Having trouble with the spouse?  Angry with your boss?  It's natural to look for a shoulder to cry on, but you really shouldn't be sharing those sorts of details with just anyone.

There are entire web sites devoted to making fun of people who posted private or embarrassing information for all their Facebook acquaintances to see.  If you're wise, you keep those sorts of things to yourself.

You might want EVERYONE to know

Maybe you added a hilarious caption to a picture of a cat – maybe you wrote an eloquent post exposing the truth about that one professor everybody likes.  There are some things that just need to be shared with the world, you know?

In the past, Facebook was not the place for such coolness – that witty status update would only ever be seen by people who knew you in some fashion.

Not everyone cares

My Facebook status updates are currently pulled straight from my Twitter feed.  I try to make posts that have some kernel of interest to people with similar interests to mine – even if they don't know me personally.

This results in a lot of status updates that are confusing or uninteresting to people who actually are my friends – my mother really doesn't care if I'm looking for someone to play L4D2 with (let alone know what it stands for).

In the interest of keeping my status feeds accessible, I also avoid posting things with a limited appeal.  I could announce every new band I discovered, but few people would actually care.

As an aside, I've noted that most Facebook users seem to have no concept of this – they post any update that occurs to them, regardless of how little I may care.  (The nerve of some people, right?)

Facebook finally reflects reality

If you're one of those responsible people who are conscious about your audience when you say things on the internet, Facebook is now a lot more attractive.  Now, everything you add on that site can be filtered based on whether or not you want certain people to see it.

Until now, these aforementioned responsible people have generally taken this content elsewhere – either to a public site, where people who are interested in your content voluntarily choose to follow it, or by taking their private conversations to email or private chats.

It's especially important that certain information be public

I don't personally care that my friend list is publicly available to anyone who writes an application that accesses Facebook – though on principle, I am annoyed that there is no option to keep that private.

I do understand why Facebook would want to make this sort of information available to outside sources, though.

Other people can do useful things with that information

Since it's popularity explosion, Twitter's web site has had a pretty small feature set.  You could make posts, pick people to follow, and access other people's posts and follow lists.  You could even pick some posts to be your favorite posts – but not a lot else.

But Twitter has become highly popular (particularly to the nerdy crowd), in part because:

• Almost all the information is public – very few people choose to make their profiles private
• All of that public information is easily accessible to anyone

Anyone can write a handy application or web site that does something cool with the information people put on Twitter.  You have access to things people have said, and the the things that they're interested in seeing.

If you're the sort of person who likes to derive a useful meaning from large quantities of information, Twitter is a dream come true.

I haven't looked into Facebook's API at all – I don't know how simple it is to access information as a programmer.  But as a developer, having access to more information instantly makes Facebook more attractive to me when I'm looking to write an application to analyze the differences between high school cliques and college cliques (or whatever).

Facebook wants to be the definitive social network – but for some time, Twitter has been the most attractive place to get social networking data from.  I can see why Facebook wants to draw the line where they have, and I don't blame them.

Anyways, the cops got pretty rough, and by all accounts were really getting into throwing people around (focusing entirely on the males), and now one of the patrons is in a coma after some nasty head trauma.

The justification for their over-the-top violence is that they claim one of the officers was felt up by a male patron. As if any rational man would risk offending an authority figure backed by friends with guns. The owner of the bar noted: "We're gay, not stupid."

Many people are getting really angry about this, assuming that the police officers were prejudiced against homosexual males and took pleasure in harassing them. And you know what, it's probably true.

But that's not why we should all be indignant – we should be angry because there are places in our country where "peace officers" believe they have the right to use violence against citizens with little or no provocation. And, for all intents and purposes, they do.

We've given all the responsibility for upholding the law to a group of armed, uniformed human beings. Human beings are not perfect.

Imagine officers bursting into the home of a homeschooling family, throwing parents to the ground, and taking children away.

Imagine police breaking up a prayer meeting and dragging people off to jail for zoning issues.

Handcuffing a group of inoffensive hippies on their way to pick up some munchies.

Detaining a group of Mexicans without reason on their way home from work.

We all have our prejudices and stereotypes of other groups of people – it's just that some of us have the power to punish other people with little or no repercussions.

How do you feel about it?