ISO-9001

My apartment in Montreal is near an ISO-9001 certified parking lot. I didn't even know that was possible. Or necessary. Or even something that would have occurred to anybody in a million years. But now... I'm just not sure anymore. Is it really safe to deal with those other, unprofessional, "fly by the seat of your pants" parking people? I mean, what if I'm parked there and they just go out of business, or the pavement falls off, or worse? Will they have all the requisite forms?

Writing stuff down

Before you read this, please understand that I never wanted to write this document, being grossly under-qualified, but I always wanted to read it, and this was the only way.
-- Paul "Rusty" Russell, Kernel Hacker

apm wonders if an expressed idea is more valuable than an unexpressed one. You can spin in circles for hours wondering what "valuable" means and what's the meaning of life and whether there's a God, but let's think of it this way instead: why exactly is it so hard to write things down?

Well, it is.

I think the reason I write stuff down, at least, is because writing it down forces me to make it better. It's so easy, once something is written down, to see that it completely doesn't make sense and you'd better start over. (Perhaps this is why salespeople don't write stuff down.) So even if you don't care whether writing your story will improve the lives of anyone else, maybe you can justify all that work by thinking that maybe you'll be improved in the telling.

Speaking of which, several people have asked me why exactly I write this journal, since it's pretty obvious that I mostly blather on about nothing important, there's no particular unifying theme, most people don't understand what the heck I'm talking about most of the time, I'm certainly never going to get rich doing it, and so on. I've made up several answers in the past. But here's another possibility: maybe writing it down helps me to clarify things in my own mind. And maybe pretending to write for a "real" audience keeps my standards a bit higher, so that I'm forced to clarify things even more. But in the end, maybe I just write because I enjoy reading what I write. And yes, I always laugh at my own jokes. Always. Even if it's just out of sympathy.

Err, my condolences if you actually enjoy reading this crap. Feel free to continue. But you'll be sorry:

High-level intellectual discussion

Okay, I just have to get this out of my system. The other day I was cleaning up a spill - as a purely scientific experiment done in the most hygienic way imaginable (given the circumstances) - with my tongue. And I noticed, to my amazement, just how effective it was. Now, we all know that smearing around a spill with your finger just smears it around and makes it worse. And paper towels sometimes help, particularly the extra-absorbant kind.

But as far as I know, my tongue isn't extra-absorbant. It's not like I lick stuff up, then pull it back in and squeeze it out so I can lick up some more. You just lick stuff up, and it goes in, and then you can lick more stuff up. Why can't my fingers do that? Isn't it amazing? Wow.