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Google and Larry Page: "Google has been profitable since the first quarter of 2001. Why did we make becoming profitable such a priority? It's good that we did, because we might well be gone if we hadn't. The real reason is that we became profitable in the first quarter of 2001 because Sergey Brin made it a priority. You see, Sergey would try to go out on dates. He would call up women. And to impress them he would say, 'I'm the president of a money-losing dot-com.' But in Palo Alto in 2000, a huge number of people were presidents of money-losing dot-coms. And so they would not call him back. And he thought, 'If only I were president of a money-making dot-com, things would be very different...'"

'I lit the match': "Who did they think they were? God? Surely God can fight his own battles." --READ THIS

Had an exciting trip to Wal-Mart yesterday during which the power went out. I didn't think it did that at Wal-Mart; I always assumed that they had hordes of underpaid workers to run on treadmills and power their generators. Afterwards watched After Life with uilos, nixve, zerblinitzky, and Davebob who hasn't got a LiveJournal. It was pretty good. Slow, but thought-provoking. It would have been cool to have sat around and talked about it for awhile, but it's a fairly personal kind of movie; it more easily inspires thought than conversation. So instead we (along with laughin) sat around until four AM talking about ... stuff. Yeah. Hanging out with cool people makes it easy to forget that various aspects of my life are down the drain, and to generally feel good about existence. (Note to scathach and others who a) care and b) are a bit lost: Nixve == Kelly.)

Of course, we only stayed up until four instead of going to sleep so we could get up and go to class (well, except for Davebob the insane) because Tech is actually closed today, for the first time since I've been here [1]. So I actually managed to sleep in 'til eleven. I ought to spend (at least some of) today working on a three-page summary of Kierkegaard's arguments in Sickness Unto Death, but that's less than a thousand words, so it's trivial. And I have The Macarena Of Time.


[1] According to vt_komainu, it's the first time in eight years. I'm not sure if he means '94-95 or '95-96; I don't remember classes being cancelled in '95-96 but there's a lot about my first two years of college that I'm fuzzy on, and there was that big blizzard.

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Normally I stay away from these because they're just not that interesting to me, but this one's pretty good (and sufficiently meta to amuse me): Last Friday's Five.

1. Explain why you started to journal/blog.
Two separate questions there. My freshman year of high school, Mrs Barbara Nelson required her English students to keep a journal for class. She didn't read it (or at least claimed not to); she just wanted us to be writing something every day or so. It got me in the habit of writing, so starting that summer I kept a paper journal through the beginning of college. It sort of trailed off once I got to college, but so did a lot of things. In retrospect I'm glad I kept the journal (despite the physical pain at some of the stupid things I did in high school), and very upset that I don't have a record of 1997-2000.
As for blogging, shadowsong told me to get an[1] LJ account in September 2000, when she went off to Scotland and was keeping people updated that way. So I did. And after about three months it occurred to me that I could maybe use it myself. I didn't really start until I got the Exegetics job in the middle of January 2001, though; it was a sufficient life-change that I felt like it was worth writing about.

2. Do people you interact with day to day or family members know about your journal/blog? Why or why not?
Pretty much all my local friends do, and a decent number of the distant ones that I still keep in touch with. Jeff Firestone and Katie Wanschura (among my closest friends in high school) are the only ones I can think of offhand that don't. My family remains blissfully unaware of the existence of this blog, due in large part to my reluctance to let them in on anything in my personal life. (Scars from years ago that probably really should have healed over by now.)

3. Do you have a theme for your journal/blog?
Not really. I try to split entries between what's happened in my life, my reactions to it (occasionally locked), and cool stuff I've found on the Web.

4. What direction would you like to have your journal/blog go in over the next year?
More of the 'my reactions to stuff' part, since I consider that to be at least as important as the events reacted to and I tend to be slack about that.

5. Pimp five of your favorite journals/blogs.
Apart from everyone on my friends list, there's:
Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things (Cory Doctorow et al)
Nearly Empty Rooms (Gareth Hanrahan) (also, Gar's gaming blog)
Neil Gaiman
Games * Design * Art * Culture (Greg Costikyan)
Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)



[1] Is it "a LJ" or "an LJ?"