[random] There are 3 kinds of people

I'd like to wish everyone reading this a (belated) Happy Pesach - as stated elsewhere, I'm an atheist and a lapsed Catholic, but I really like Passover. It's a pretty radical celebration of freedom, and as such should be a welcome addition to the family traditions of anyone who practices one of the religions of Abraham. Given the lack of a central governing body in Judaism, you have a lot of freedom in the script that you choose for your seder: queer, feminist, radical, liberal, pagan (I shit you not)... Even a mainstream hagaddah (the book with the readings and songs for the seder) is going to have some pretty intense stuff in it - the title of this blog entry is a reference to one of these gems:

There are 3 kinds of people: those who are not free, those who do not care about the freedoms of others, and those who are free and who work for the freedom of others.

Quibble with the number of categories if you will, but still... Pretty powerful stuff the nonce. And how can you not like an excuse to get together with like-minded people, eat food, drink lots of wine, and discuss politics? So, we drove down to Portland for Passover with the in-laws - Powell's Books did not emerge unscathed, and I finally made it to their technical bookstore on Burnside... sigh I'm still wiped out from the trip, and it is excruciatingly slow at work today... I'm waiting for a client to get their act together so I can actually start working on the contract that they're already paying us for, but until then... I mess around. I'm fooling around with some of the (beta) Visual Studio 2005 Express editions and getting excited about .NET 2.0 (generics rock!). I'm also getting acquainted with JavaScript (I'm a desktop guy, so scripting is not exactly my strong suit), and I'm, well... blogging. (I think I'm pretty close to a client-side JavaScript-based hack that'll let me implement post categories, though! Woo-hoo! If it works, I'll post the details once I get the implementation done right... I'm gonna do some tweaking of my post titles - it should make the code a little more straightforward.)