In this moment, my sexual life is as fulfilling as a North Korean supermarket. I do have attractive and willing female friends, but I had to (for reasons that will become clear later) shut down my sexual desire towards women. This in itself was not a problem per se, but abstinence (that kind of self imposed abstinence) is definitely not working very well for me right now.... (above all that it's being going on for a while, and might extend a rather undefined amount of time in the future...)

Last night, for the first time ever, I had a full colour THX sound system erotic homosexual dream. Spending time having sex with a guy turned out (at least in my mind) not being unpleasant at all, but still...

This entry's title is pretty much the way I currently prepare my exams...

Don't try and understand the Operator Theory course; that's impossible. Instead, remember that Hilbert spaces do not exist :-)

When I check my online bank account to check how much money I have left for the month...

Note to self: Do not say "if you take a picture of it then I will put it on the weblog", because that's all the motivation she needs to actually do it ^_^

Aubrey and I fully separated few weeks ago, and I have been living by myself since. She won't write any more entries in this weblog (actually she had not done so for a while) and I will soon clear up her website(s). She doesn't want to be friend with me so I probably won't mention her here ever again...

We have had quite a serious outage of the entire the domain name over the past few days, resulting in every subdomain being unavailable, including the weblog but much more importantly the atlas server. So sorry to all the folks who were looking for documents. The account was suspended (probably) because of one misbehaving javascript routine which DOSed one of my service subdomains (which is quite a strange reason to suspend an hosting account, but I have other things to worry about than my hosting company internal policies).

The most painful for me was losing my email address, and this prompted the decision to redesign all my email redirections. For the moment, if you sent me an email to pascal@alseyn.net during the past 48 hours and do not get an answer, please send it back.

Why your college physics class sucked. If it didn’t, the wrong people would pass.

The following paragraphs come from a text that was sitting in my todo list for a long time and which through the workings of acitivity-sctream just popped up on the top of my evening list. I found it interesting. [ Original (complete) text here: http://essays.dayah.com/persistence-over-intelligence ]

----------------------------------------

This is why college is specifically designed to thwart the intelligent. It is entirely crafted to keep those naturally intelligent from succeeding in proportion to their intelligence. Instead, the curriculum encourages those who persevere. Intelligent people love subjects that interest them. To circumvent this annoyance, college is deliberately, almost comically irrelevant. For people other than scientists and engineers, college seems almost designed to prevent students from acquiring any useful, world-applicable knowledge. Learn the language of a distant country. Memorize events which occurred on another continent long ago. Write about unrelatable books from centuries ago. Solve outlandishly abstract math problems.

Naturally intelligent people are quite worthless if they’re undisciplined. Society has progressed to the point that the comparatively generalized interests of an intelligent person, no matter how intelligent he is, will never produce anything new. It is only those who persevere on the frustratingly specific (and therefore uninteresting) edges of knowledge who will contribute to society’s understanding. College finds these people by presenting thousands with deliberately uninteresting, frustrating coursework and seeing who remains after many years. The prestige of your degree is not determined by your accomplishment or intelligence but by how many years of adversity you could suffer without forfeit.

This is because for most, college is not a place to acquire useful knowledge and skill; it is a test of your ability to suffer. Can you sit through class after class of irrelevant facts that are designed to make you feel stupid and still persevere? If you can do so for four years, you’re going to be superb at suffering for the next forty-five years, churning through problems one day at a time. This is why a college diploma is so valuable to employers, despite virtually none of the knowledge acquired in college being relevant for any job. What society values is people who can push on for years despite depressive adversity, not people who are slightly more clever at solving problems that interest them. It would be nice to have both, but if you have to pick one, go for the former.

You've spent years studying hard the inner workings of computers, networks and various protocols, and now you are a hacker, congratulation. You are also activist and in order to sort of coordinate your work with others of your kind you spend time on forums, private chat rooms and the like. Because you are accumulating a bit of a reputation you tend to use the same pseudonym so that people can recognise you. And you even have a twitter account (with the same pseudonym...).

But then something happens, your account is compromised, you lost it to the hand of an opponent, maybe somebody from the secret services is trying to take over your identity. You need to redefine your online pseudonym, but then you don't feel like starting all from scratch, because people trust the existing one. What to do ?

Do it the Pascal way. Generate a sequence of sha1s, say 1024 of them, from x(0) up to x(1023), as follows: generate a random number and then hash it, that's x(0). Then you get x(n+1) as the hash of x(n). When you are done, use x(1023) as your (first) online name. If one day this id is compromised and disputed, send the following message on a public channel: "I am the true owner of the now compromised account x(1023), and from now on I will use x(1022) as my my twitter account (or whatever....). You can check that I am the real me just by hashing x(1022) and check that you get x(1023) - the other person claiming owning x(1023) would not be able to do that ^_^"

Of course, you do not want to keep the entire sequence on your own computer (where it could be compromised if one day the police storm into your bedroom), you just want to keep the seed, eg: x(0), somewhere safe on the internet. And also, in the unlikely event that you would need to change your identity more than 1024 times over the course of your career, no problem, as an exercise for you I let you guess what to do when you star using x(0) :-)

In fact there are lots of little nice things you can do with this idea, lots of nice little authentication mechanisms that one can devise, use your imagination... (^.^)