Sounds to me like he's just using Twitter the same way everyone else uses Twitter. Why does tweeting about yakisoba make him a remorseless narcissist? He may be that, but regardless Twitter isn't the best venue for heartfelt apologies. I bet he also failed to take responsibility for Mt Gox last time he sent a text or wrote a sticky note.

I got much the same out of Flowers when I first read it in middle school, and also learned a little about what sorts of things can make a good book. It was the first book I ever enjoyed in which the protagonist made questionable decisions, experienced things that never got explained, and didn't save the world. Charlie was the first character I encountered that I can recall who acted like a person and had nuances. It really broadened my horizons.

Genuine question, here, since I've never done any web dev. Why not write libraries in an existing language that spit out HTML/Javascript/PHP/whatever? Why do we need a new language to do this?

It sounds more like Google needs not a new language for this intended use, but some sort of new browser plugin that handles offline storage of web apps. I really don't get the emphasis on new language here.

You can always host stuff on your own website. Even then someone might use your content, and you're out of luck because they can pay their lawyers indefinitely and you're just a guy with a website.

I don't think that word means what you think it does. In my experience, nerd culture is more about cramming random science-y trivia facts into your skull than it is the dedicated pursuit of knowledge. Might as well say I study the back of the cereal box every morning. (Spoiler alert, they're still after his lucky charms.)

Also, it seems like there's a bit stereotyping underlying your post. Guess what, men are also turned off by constantly being made to feel stupid. They are also turned off by bad social skills, bad physical health, and the inclination to play video games and study all day every day (rather than going out and doing something fun with friends).

I don't think the dividing line here is men/women. I don't know that it's even geeks/non-geeks. Maybe it's closer to extroverts/introverts. Really what it seems like to me is that a minority of people who are dedicated to their hobbies are looked down on by people who pursue those hobbies only casually (or not at all.) Model train enthusiasts are going to have the same problems as video game geeks if they don't throw a little moderation into their lives. It's just that the latter is more common.

I looked into that, but I use a lot of specialized software in my work, and Android just doesn't cut it. I could install Ubuntu Touch, but I'd rather install another distro, which isn't easy to do. And 7 inches is friggin' tiny. I'm struggling with productivity on my 10 inch netbook.

The surface seems just about perfect for me. It's a tablet for reading papers when I want it in portrait mode, and I can plop it down and get some actual work done too. Even better, it seems like it's actually pretty easy to install whatever Linux distro I want on it.

From the article:

Yeah, I teach math at a large university in the deep south, and this doesn't surprise me at all. Students are unprepared for college math classes, and I see a lot of behavior that I wouldn't have expected in a math class. For example, I always have students that try to memorize their way through class, mostly in calculus 1. They don't practice any problems, they don't try to understand the material, but they've got flash cards and highlighted notes and sticky tabs out the wazoo.

It's like they all had a bunch of "study skills" drilled into them in high school and no one ever bothered to explain that these are supposed to aid actually understanding the material. They're so used to just regurgitating things onto tests that I guess a lot of them really do think memorizing is understanding.

Now I realize the following is just anecdotal, but I know several people who teach high school math throughout the deep south, and all of them say the same thing: they aren't really allowed to teach. School administrators have a death grip on teachers' jobs. Teachers are told what, when, and how to teach the material. They're basically reading scripts. And of course they're all teaching to the state end of course tests too, probably because those are used to measure administrators' performances.

Once, when I was curious what being old was like, I typed "the google" into Google and got this glorious Onion article.

I can configure the desktop to be more useful than just being there. For example, I work with a lot of LaTeX documents, in particular folders containing tests and assignments for the classes I teach. So I have a desktop with a set of folder view plasmoids pointing at this folder full of assignments. One view is filtered to show only .tex files, and the other view is filtered to show only .pdfs. Super convenient, better than popping open Konqueror (or Dolphin) and navigating the folder, even more convenient than popping open a terminal. Way nicer than the garbage dump of "maybe I'll need it later" files that desktops usually are.

Similarly I have a desktop full of folder views and other plasmoids that are useful for my research, a desktop full of folder views and plasmoids useful for coding, et cetera.

This is something I can't do with any other desktop environment, and I've looked. (Well, actually there's a couple of proprietary Windows 7 add-ons that give similar functionality, if I felt like forking over the dough. And using Windows 7.) And other than the desktop itself, the auxillary applications (the ones I use, at least) are all at least as good as they were in KDE3.

Also, KRunner (Alt+F2) with nepomuk is awesome. File search and program launching, yeah, every desktop is decent at those nowadays. But there's a lot of useful KRunner plugins too. Calculator, dictionary, spell-check, search wikipedia, mini command-line shell; it even has a task manager so if a process is misbehaving I don't even have to open a terminal and use htop (unless I'm in the mood to use htop.)

Give it a try, man; it's actually pretty great. And as far as eye-candy and bloat go, I do all this on a four year old netbook. I didn't even disable any of the eye-candy. What bloat?