On ‘Happy Holidays’ and ‘Seasons Greetings’

I recently commented in a thread on google+ discussing the expression ‘Happy Holidays’.

I hate ‘Happy Holidays’ and ‘Seasons Greetings’.

Wish me Merry Christmas, Happy Yule, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Hanukkah, Acceptable Festivus, whatever your winter celebration is, I get the sentiment.

‘Happy Holidays’ and ‘Seasons Greetings’ do not, in my opinion, ‘show acceptance and tolerance’. Those expressions hide how you celebrate this time of year and suck the soul out of the season.

Five years ago I went to my daughter’s school for their Christmas show. They had the kids sing a bunch of Christmas carols (including Silent Night and Away in a Manger) and one or two Hanukkah songs. Inclusive winter celebration, including some songs I grew up with and some I didn’t. They even had a sing-along portion where the audience could take part.  Awesome.

Either that year or the next, someone complained about it being ‘religion in school’ and it has since ‘evolved’ to ‘celebrating the world’ or ‘something Santa-related’ (why this doesn’t trigger the anti-religious types escapes me). My son’s school had a ‘Hockey at the North Pole’ ‘winter show’.

I’m about as areligious as you can get. I’m not ‘anti-religion’, if someone feels better believing in a skyfather or flying spaghetti monster or whatever, they’re welcome to it. I’m not interested, but I won’t try to convince anyone they’re wrong. I dunno, maybe they’re right; it doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe they are.

However, I do like tradition, and the trappings of Christmas bring back fond memories. If I wish someone ‘Merry Christmas’ it just means ‘hey, I like you and want to share some of that with you, and wish you well’. ‘Happy Holidays’ (how can you have a non-religious ‘holy day’, by the way?) and ‘Seasons Greetings’? Bugger that.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Poorly considered

One of the managers at work (the same one who came up with the Application Security Services Penetration Engineers, oddly enough… I think I may see a pattern), commenting about SULU, one of our servers, crashing:

Manager: It’s one thing when a woman goes down on you, it’s another when it’s SULU.
Me: You do know that George Takei is g…
Manager: Huh, yeah, I just realized. It might be better, then. He could be talented.
Me: Man, you realize you come up with the dumbest ‘clever’ comments.

Beef Stock

Soup stock is almost a staple in our kitchen.  It’s remarkably useful.

Almost any time we have chicken, we save the bones for use in making stock (freezing them until we have enough to use).  If I want beef stock, though, I usually have to go out and buy bones for use.

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Four-way Chess

I’ve been toying with an idea for a while regarding chess with more than two players.  I think I see a fairly simple way to play chess with four players.

Basic Rules

The board is pretty simple, take a standard board and put a half-board on each side such that the checkerboard pattern is continued, as shown in the diagram.

Each player has a different color set of pieces, arranged normally in the two outer-most ranks.  This arrangement gives each player two additional ranks to maneuver in before entering the mosh pit that the center board will become.  Pieces move according to normal rules, from the perspective of the player (thus, the player in the West position advances toward the East… but the East is not his only opponent).  Kings are removed when they are checkmated; play continues until only one king remains on the board.
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That was Fun

I had some rather deep red cayenne that I confused with paprika a few weeks ago. That was fun.

– tsingi, IRC

Universal Easter Eggs

“Studying Calculus and Physics makes me want to believe in god. I keep learning things that are so beautiful in their profound simplicity… it’s like someone left Easter Eggs all over the Universe just for me to discover and delight in.”

– Arienna Lee

PLS-00306: wrong number or types of arguments in call to ‘my_procedure’

I know I’ve asked this online before, but is Tourette Syndrome an occupational hazard of being a programmer?  I swear, it’s things like this that are going to cause me to develop it.

I’ve just been through one of the more frustrating exercises, debugging database calls that look just fine.

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Aren’t Reorgs Fun?

(after laying out a new table of organization on the whiteboard…)
Manager 1: “We’ll call this group the ‘Application Security Services Penetration Engineers’…”
*writes name on the whiteboard*
Manager 2: “ASS Penetration Engineers?”
*awkward silence*
Manager 1: “Uh, yeah. Forget I said that. I’d better go change the documentation now.”

Tourette Syndrome

Is Tourette Syndrome an occupational hazard of programmers?  Because I’m afraid this codebase is giving it to me.  WTF?!  FFS!  FMH!

(On that note, I’ll be starting a blog at http://www.onesharedlanguage.com/ for the sorts of things that made me consider this relationship.)

Primal Pasta Sauce

Squash, Sauce, and Salad

Ideally this recipe would use grass-fed meat.  I’m working on it.  The meat I used (both beef and the sausage) was lean enough I had to add olive oil to keep things from getting unpleasant, so if we don’t look too carefully we should be okay.

It’s my birthday later this week and my daughter wanted to do something nice for me for my present. I asked her to make supper for me.

I think she did a good job — a very good job, for someone nine years old.

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