grack.com

… fantasies have to be unrealistic. Because the moment, the second you get what you seek, you don’t, you can’t want it anymore. In order to continue to exist, desire must have it’s objects perpetually absent. It’s not the it that you want; it’s the fantasy of it. So desire supports crazy fantasies. This is what Pascal means when he says that we are only truly happy when daydreaming about future happiness. Or why we say the hunt is sweeter than the kill, or be careful what you wish for. Not because you’ll get it, because you’re doomed not to want it once you do.

So the lesson of Leccan is, living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas and ideals, and not to measure your life by what you’ve attained in terms of your desires, but those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self sacrifice. Because in the end, the only way that we can measure the significance of our own lives, is by valuing the lives of others.

Just to keep those reading the front-page news up to date, 0.9 is in development and should be out once we’ve finishing implementing and polished up some of the neat new features that will be in this release:

• Josh’s awesome new ListView control - including, but not limited to:
  • quickfiltering
  • custom and multi-line headers
  • column reordering
  • generally nicer look than before
• Project loading/saving (also courtesy of Josh)
• Ashwin’s back/forward navigation code
• A new toolbar (hasn’t been started yet, but needs to go into 0.9)

There are two known bugs that I’m hoping to get fixed for 0.9 as well:

Just saw this one on boing boing - Mixmaster. 

[It] allows you to ‘mix’ two entirely different webpages.

The whitehouse.gov meets AOL HAXXOR has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.  Slightly amusing is Microsoft meets TheOnion and Instapundit meets Rense.com.

Should be work-safe.

Twice this week I’ve seen a situation where a popular blogger has been pestered by his readers to change the content of his blogs.

Last week, Chris Sells (of MSDN fame) posted an article entitled “Bush: Get Your Own Dream!” with his views on space exploration and foreign oil dependence.  There were two particularly asinine comments made:

Unsubscribed. Just lost a ton of respect for Sells. “nuff said”

and

The nprof 0.8b alpha release is now available. This release should fix the ASP.NET profiling problems that have come up during the 0.8 release cycle.