Geoff Rickly, who some might know as the singer of Thursday, recently published a fantastic novel called "Soneone Who Isn't Me," which is a lightly fictionalized account of his experience using Ibogaine to kick a heroin habit. It's an artful, stream of consciousness book, and contains fascinating details about his experience at an addiction clinic in Mexico that offers the treatment.

I hadn't heard about the drug before reading the book and found it very fascinating.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/25/1189278437/someone-who-isnt-m...

I have a friend who successfully kicked heroin about 20 years ago with it. Thankful it was a possibility for them, illegal as it was.

I know of two people, both hopeless by all definitions, kicking it immediately after a session.

Thanks for mentioning this. I've actually been working through that book over the past few days and think that anecdote really got under my skin. For some reason it didn't dawn on me when writing the article. I'll make note of it.

pg made a similar comment in Undergraduation (http://www.paulgraham.com/college.html):

> My mother, who has the same [thermostat], diligently spent a day reading the user's manual to learn how to operate hers. She assumed the problem was with her. But I can think to myself "If someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this thermostat, it must be badly designed."

I'm surprised to hear so much negativity about Amtrak. I live in NYC and head upstate (to Rochester) for business regularly and Amtrak is by far my favorite way to make the trip.

A bus might make more sense on a shorter trip (like the aforementioned NYC to Boston example), but I think there's a real sweet spot for taking the Amtrak on trips longer than, say, 4-5 hours on the bus but shorter than a 2 hour flight (excluding baggage/security/travel to and from airport time).

Especially Amtrak's business class, which is extremely comfortable, with plenty of space for a computer and stretching out, quiet and spacious enough to get work done, and usually only an extra $20 or so.

I admit my fear of flying sways me toward Amtrak when a flight might make the most sense, but to me a bus is almost always the worst possible transportation option available.

If you compare Amtrak to Greyhound, the price difference might not be so bad, but if you compare it to the more competitive bus lines routes (NYC-BOS, NYC-DC) like leelin does, you can see it's pretty awful value.

Agreed that Amtrak is a much more pleasant experience, though - much less stop and go, generally higher reliability of arrival time, more legroom, smoother ride.

I wonder what it would take for Amtrak to be able to compete on price with the competitive bus lines in the northeast corridor. Subsidies on rails comparable to those on the interstates, perhaps (or getting rid of the interstates' subsidies and making them self-funded)...

It strongly depends on what part of the country you are in. Amtrak routes and delays south of about DC, for example, are pretty miserable.

This is great!

I work at a startup building apps ( http://zerography.com is currently live; hopefully more soon) to get custom printed stuff into people's hands for free, and think it's really great to see Google getting involved.

There's something extra special about getting a letter or package in the mail, and with the amount of time and cost involved in mailing something to friends and family, I'm really surprised I (and almost everyone else I know, too!) don't take advantage of things like this more.

These are all pretty good examples.

That being said, I recently spent some time reading through the source of both Gemcutter.org and RailsDevelopment.com and found both to be very educational to me personally:

http://github.com/engineyard/rails_dev_directory http://github.com/qrush/gemcutter/

Aww, thanks :)

Still reeling from the weekend; my first Rumble.

We also got an app built and deployed, a simple little game: http://marryboffkill.com

The whole time I expected that it would be the smoothing-over of rough edges, double-checking, and doing general "cleanup" that would take the most time, but even so was surprised how quickly the deadline snuck up on us the last day.

I have a feeling if the rumble was over a long weekend instead we would have been able to clean up all the rough edges, but I have a feeling there are many other teams in this boat as well. :-)

Was definitely a great way to spend a weekend (creating something) with friends and a real learning experience. I'm already excited to do it again next year.

Heh, your app is pretty hilarious. It definitely needs a gender section though. Since 99% of the users will be male for the time being, maybe you should have made it female only list.

Having to think about boffing Salman Ruschdie was too terrifying to continue playing.

I'm suddenly reminded of the Eggers novel "You Shall Know Our Velocity!" wherein the characters go on a week-long international journey trying to give away an inherited sum of money.

Sounds like a great experiment. I'm especially interested to see if these bizarre flights trigger any inquiry by authorities.

While I agree mostly with your view, I just spent quite a bit of time looking over the local sex offender lists of several cities I've lived in, and I can say for sure that at least in these random samples, the outliers you mention (public urination, high school sweethearts separated by too many years, etc) are nowhere to be found on any of the lists I have looked through.

I think it's strangely primitive and archaic for this sort of public humiliation to exist in our modern society either way, but a few moments of clicking around these samples at random goes to show that a vast, vast majority of these people have been convicted of what most would consider "serious" sex crimes.

I was hoping I was about to read a comparison similar to http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/ (which is concise and intelligent, even with its inherent bias).

This title might have struck me as even more surprising had it read "Apple Sold Half As Many Macs As iPhones Last Quarter."

Yeah, really, shouldn't that be expected? A phone costs much less than a computer and people are not impeded from side-switching by loads of apps that run on a specific OS.

Not these phones. Recall that you're also signing up for a two-year contract with AT&T. So about $2000 over two years.

People discount the monthly cost when considering a device with a service contract. And when it comes to phones most of them are just deciding which provider to go with, so the difference in monthly cost between two phones may be a consideration but the total cost is already factored in.