azure qa

i feel trapped by my pc. i worked long hours yesterday, and ended the day on the frustrating note upon which i've begun the new one: debugging a worker role that runs perfectly locally, and throws weird exceptions in the cloud :S

and every now and again i have trouble with the internet. usually it's just the browser, but restarting that doesn't help so it forces me to either restart the computeror the router instead. it's very annoying.

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pg seems to be sick, and i'm starting to feel a bit better. the rollerblading route last night was cool, although a lot of it was spent in a shouting match with one of the guys - it began with a misunderstanding, and then turned into a conversation about misunderstandings that was completely lost on him. at least there was a sanity check at the end, someone else had overheard and wanted to know what we were talking about, and he understood what i was getting at.

the bottom line with religion is that it's always a war. if you're not religious, you can say things like "live and let live". but that's because you don't care about cognitive contamination, you're (relatively) happy to discover that you've been wrong all along. but that attitude doesn't hold for a religious person, because any possible contamination is an obstacle to their belief. so every time you present an idea that's somehow incompatible with their worldview, you're forcing *your* beliefs on them. it's a perspective thing, and there's no non-violent way around it (in the long run). this global interconnectedness is anti-religious by nature, because we're constantly exposing ourselves to other opinions and points of view.

in the war of ideas, we cannot achieve zero casualties.

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it bothers me that i sat online for three hours this morning, until my vision blurred, doing something completely useless and not particularly enjoyable. i could have been sleeping, or working on a paper. why do i make such bad calls?

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it bothers me even more that israel has formally authorized a university across the green line, effectively ruining any chance for a two-state solution and pulling more funds away from our other, already underfunded establishments. very smart.