white sale on smoke damaged furniture

I've been doing late night driving again, one of my simple pleasures. I used to drive out into the country a lot, which is either desert or mountains here. Nowadays I take the old routes around Southern California that people used before the freeways. For example, taking Euclid instead of the freeway to Ontario, or taking Imperial Highway or Manchester into Los Angeles from O.C.

It's an interesting way to see this part of the world. A lot of the businesses along these former arteries are roadside attractions frozen in time: motels for travelers, big old-style theme restaurants, etc. The streets mostly run along railroad tracks and there are lots of bars, industrial plants, and other working-class businesses.

It's a lot like hitting a small town in some other part of America. Less malls, more "Jolly Jack's Cocktails, Games, and Girls" and "Hazy 8 Motel".

People from other parts of the wolrd assume that Southern California is a set of malls connected by freeways. I think the rest of the real estate is now inhabited by the Morlocks they forgot, who work and drink and crawl about under the freeways, missed by the luxury cars roaring overhead from pavilion to pavilion.

geek culture is an oxymoron

I was thinking tonight about Larry Wall's famous quote in which he says that the great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. He's probably right: Larry is a smart guy.

Those three things are a big loser in just about every other area of life, however, from cooking to sex to financial planning or even just showering. And most geeks seem to carry their technical values over into every part of life with a determined consistency, as if all of our experiences and challenges were just special cases of software engineering.

This is disastrous. It's a kind of Slashdot mentality in which Geek Culture becomes an end to itself and a source for wisdom in all areas of life. I think we'd be better off if in most situations we asked "How could I do this in a non-geeky way?"