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an excercise shop! freddie has just suggested going shopping to a mall so the little kids will get some exercise. now there's an idea that I need to try. so i went down in the morning, and the fan was sitting there. and I saw Colin playing with it after that, so maybe he took it away. i don't know. it's a shame if aaron takes heat for colin's stuff. and i keep seeing colin do stuff to assert his dominance over his parents. Merry Christmas! So, my nephew Aaron has some thing about playing with this fan I just bought to blow on the fire with. He had it upstairs in the afternoon when I wanted and I had to get him to bring it to me. Then when I had gotten the fire going again, he asked if he could have it, and I told him to keep it down here. It wasn't down here in the evening when I wanted to blow on the fire again, but he had gone to sleep. This has really irked me. It was hard to get, too. It was the last one, and on clear out, since it's out of season. I was lucky to get it. And I think either he or his brother broke the last one I had. So if I get it back, he isn't going to get it again. But I'm not so sure how to talk to him about it. He has shown me that I can't trust him, so I guess there isn't much point in telling him anything. And if I tell him not to take it, he would probably sneak it. He several times tried to sneak looks into my room where the presents were before I wrapped them. But I think it has other consequences for me. I found myself no longer caring so much for his dad, my brother. I was thinking that was mostly other stuff. We are different enough. But maybe it's just this thing with Aaron. And some kind of lucky break for me. There was no church service to go to. I didn't want to go, and probably wouldn't have, but they all bug me to go. and this year, I was starting to have theological problems with that bunch. they said the bread and wine (and they use grape juice) was symbolic. well, then I guess god is just symbolic, too. I had a dream a few days ago where i was explain transubstantiation, and how without the idea that there is actually a separate spiritual substance, the very idea that there could be a god is just pointless. so i will pose the problem this way: is god made of atoms? i think it points out a common problem with religious people today. they try to pretend to have a kind of factual religious truth that misses the point entirely. and yet they also want to hold on to a tradition, christianity, which has some very fundamental core principles that they just wouldn't be able to hold. and i keep seeing that these are very greek principles. a lot of plato. I hope everyone had a Happy Festivus! I would have linked to the main festivus site, but it has exceeded its bandwidth. Here's another festivus site. CNN did a bit about it, and I guess their link must have flooded it. It turns out that somewhere some seinfeldians took advantage of an equal time policy to put up an alternative to a nativity scene in a public place. I might have done something myself, but I didn't know where to go get an aluminum pole, and there was the little mini ice storm thingie that made it hard to get around. Oh well. Another disappointment. But now it's Christmasbe Eve. I just finished my wrapping a little while ago. Three hours. Twenty-one packages. Mostly just little stuff. Almost almost of it from Walmart. A couple of fairly biggish things, though. I should have done it last night, but I didn't feel so much like it. I was thinking that if I finished it last night, I might go out. so maybe it's better that i didn't. man. a couple of weeks at the farm. hardly did anything. played some computer games. actually loaded them up and played them. he had a disk of like 50 little games. i think they were supposed to be part of some online games thing. part of that whole dot com thing, i guess. the programs were .dxr files, whatever that is. they included a little lunar lander thing which i thought was pretty fun. plus a galaga type of game. but then i decided to go ahead and install mame. and i got the actual galaga rom. somehow the mame program i got wasn't the same as the one i loaded before on my computer. i remember that i had some kind of windows based starting screen. this thing had to be started from the command prompt. so i'm probably the only one who would know how to use it. i needed to write a batch file or something to start the games. and i got gauntlet. i'm not so good, i guess, and i just tend to burn health, since it don't cost nuthin'. it's nice to just wade through stuff. i remember that it used to get stuck after some level. i didn't play it enough to find out if these roms had that problem. and i should look for mame for jordy. that'd be neat. Happy Day that will live in infamy! so, pollution increases the GDP. people have to spend money to get clean air and water. that was in reich's book. agape adonai. translates to i "love you lord". a real biblical thing. but it can only be really said in the greek, though i don't know the aramaic, because the whole concept of christian love is that little word agape, which is different from the concept of love in all other languages, especially english, which has just one word and therefore has a complex combined concept. and that leads me to the idea that i just thought of. christianity is essentially greek. it is not about jesus and what he said at all. it is about this new idea that sprung up, around an odd core of a man. and the core is that of an enlightened person, in the hindu or buddhist, and yet educated in a jewish tradition, and at least trying to preach to them. that had to be a strange situation. judaism by that time was more a political group than just what we think of as a religion. our idea of religion is alot more like just a philosophy. but the jesus idea was so out there compared to judaism, that only a multicultural culture, like the greek with the empire that embraced and encompasses all sorts of different subcultures, could try to do something with it. i always heard than indian culture, or hindu religion at least, would just absorb different local bits, but i don't know if it did it in a way to make a great common empire like the greek. the romans did unify it politically and legally later, but people were still actually speaking greek out east for a long time when they were in charge. hmm. and i still am a little partial to the idea that there was no actual jesus, and he was invented as people were talking around the notion of this enlightened jew construction worker. and yes, carpenter now has a different connotation so it's probably a poor translation. it seems to be more like woodworker which can be more artsy. the greek word wasn't like that. anyway, one thing the world needs is more attempts to reconcile religions, and if possible also rational nonreligious thinking. so maybe i should work on that whole religious book i was thinking of after all. Sitting out here at the farm. dad has a fractured lumbar disk, and mom didn't want him to be alone. I'm hoping to use up the big box of ammo I have. I used up some today. I'm getting pretty rusty. Jordy froze. the off button didn't even work. i had to unplug the battery to turn it off. not nice. the reset would start it up again, but it would be frozen when the destop came up. a "hard reset" fixed it. taking the backup battery out and main battery and clearing out the cmos. but i lost all kind of installed stuff. i had to reinstall the wifi card. and ftp stopped working. and perl. who knows what all else. but i added some registry keys (in HKLM\environment) and ftp is back again. but i'm at the farm so i can't connect to anything. but pocket chess works. i don't know if i was ever that good at playing chess, but i have never been able to beat this computer program. and it isn't particularly good. but it is relentless. and doesn't make simple mistakes like a lot of people will, and i do far too often. i've been doing the sun salutation for the past couple of days. getting some use out of that yoga book i got just before losing my income. i say losing my income. i've made $250 on a few little computer projects since then. and i don't know if i should report it on the unemployment thing. i mean i'm theoretically supposed to, and it's punishable "fraud" if i don't. but i get the feeling that they don't really care all that much. man, that was an eye-opener. i googled "high school computer teacher" and one of the articles was this one on using scheme. i had been thinking how i might teach a class on computer stuff, and i was thinking transistors and architecture, but i that would just be boring. this article suggests that scheme, which has really simple syntax, would be good to start kids into programming. i really disagree, though. programming isn't really so much about loops and conditionals anymore. or even algorithms. it's more about calling routines that do the stuff you want. now, computer science is still about algorithms. it's just that now, most programming is not. if you want to sort, you call the sort routine. you don't write one. actually, i think perl might even be better than scheme to start off with. unfortunately, you really do have to deal with syntax. anyway, i tried learning a little more about natasha chen, who wrote that article. she ended up a math major, and then working at as an analyst at a investment services company, moody's. not a programmer. and she was in a really hardcore enriched math program. i mean, they did abstract algebra, and had a class on propositional logic. so it makes sense that she would like scheme, which is very close to lambda calculus, which is a kind of logical, mathy sort of thing with functions. and she had already been studying computer programming for, like two years and it was her third language. but it seems to me it would be much more helpful to get kids writing cool useful programs, which you can do calling all the library of neat stuff in java, or maybe perl. sitting here at the unemployment office. i looked at their list of available jobs, and didn't see anything. but the wage rates all seems pretty low. i said i wouldn't take anything less than $15 per hour. i hope that isn't too high. cnn had an article about the "geek squad" at best buy. i was thinking about talking to them before that. i was working on tark's computer and saw something that makes me think this whole virus thing is more serious than i have been thinking. i loaded a copy of win 2k, and got online, and after going to a few web sites, a process, svchost, started taking up 99% of the cpu. i google that, and that's a symptom of the blaster worm. i installed the patches for the blaster worm (which i would have thought ould have been in service pack 4, which i installed, but no) and it went away. so the thing got attacked immediately when it went on line. that's terrible. who knows what else will go wrong with it. while that trouble was happening, i was seeing "tftp.exe" processes. tftp is a file transfer program, so the worm must have been trying to load other files. another problem that was happening before all this was that i would try to open the registry editor, and it would close immediately. i googled it, and it was looking like it was probably a virus, but i didn't believe it. i did decide after that to reinstall win 2k, but only because i had messed up the modem driver, and since i couldn't edit the registry, there wasn't much i could do. but i guess it probably was a virus after all. those things are tough. i went into best buy, but i chickened out in talking to them. maybe some other time. or i'll send them an email. so for unemployment, i don't have to mail in cards. i call stuff in on the phone every sunday. it's going to take a few weeks for them to make a decision, but i have to start calling this sunday. it isn't a whole lot of money, but it should slow down the onset of bankruptcy, if i get it, which seems a little doubtful. i ought to be able to find something, though. schemata. foci. matrices. because latin and greek are no longer really a big part of education, we should give up the classical plural forms. say focuses. schemas, matrixes. i mean, i remember in college a dude saying matricee, singlular. lets just not confuse people. sitting here at the cognitive science seminar. kinch's contruction inegration model as a cognitive model. uh, oh. i'm in trouble now. i took the sample questions on the ets.org site for the test i'm going to take on saturday. 26 questions took me a whole 2 hours. some of that was me having to go back and look up how my calculator worked, so maybe it will be better. and some of it was just me getting stuck on some problems. but the real thing is 50 questions in 2 hours. and i missed 2 questions out of 26, which i guess is pretty good, if i can speed it up. i guess we'll see. and i'm really starting to feel like a three year commitment is not going to be worth it. especially in city schools. i need to try it somewhere first. or maybe teach college instead. or just get a real job. woke up at 4, and my stomach felt a little uneasy. didn't quite hurt. kind of like knots from stress. or maybe the orange juice. i still kind of deny to myself that orange juice gives me stomach problems. and i some dream that seemed unusually vivid, and must have been symbolic of something, but i forgot most of it, and don't really understand it offhand. but i know what the stress is about. i finally lost the job for bruce. there were problems with the accounts, and he had to go and figure them out very tediously himself, and in addition to the problems, and one of them was forgetting to pay the payroll tax one month which is pretty bad, if he has to do the work himself then he can't justify having me. so i'm not sure if it's my fault in the way that would make me not eligible for unemployment or what. he did say some of the problems had to do with how some other ex-employee had put things in the computer. but a headhunter from rhi called when i got home. this is the headhuntress brandy that i had given up on before, who doesn't seem very serious, but it at least gave me a feeling that i might be able to find something, that there are some java jobs out there. but i just spent about $400 upgrading my computer, and another $100 on books. and right after going home, i went and got the parachute book, which i figure is a good idea so i'll finally do the stuff it says. i'm just not that likely to do the stuff from the book a year ago. and i got two computer magazine, which i hope will help me out. one is a dr. dobbs, which is a general computer programmer toolkit kind of thing. for serious programmers, so i can get back into stuff. and it was only $5. the other was the java developers journal, which was $10. i tried to get it last month for the article about java jobs. but it comes with a cd archive of all the articles ever printed, so it really should be helpful. i did splurge and get a maxim for $5, because laura prepon was on the cover, as a hot blonde. with hair coming in red. mrowr. she says people come on to her a lot more now. well, she is pretty hot. "muy caliente". but she doesn't seem to have freckles. that just seems wrong. finished watching "stand and deliver". and then googled it and read more about the real story . and i have to agree with the author of that article. when they scrunched the story down to make it a movie, they changed the whole nature of the lesson about education that you might get from it. i think the point is that one very serious teacher can make a difference even in a poor school, but in the movie what happens is that a teacher takes a bunch of remedial math students and in a year gets them all to pass the ap calculus exam, which is basically the ultimate in high school math. i can no longer remember if i took the ab or the bc, (bc is for second year), and i checked my transcript and it doesn't say, but i did get a 5, which is the top. anyway, that's not what really happened. jaime (high-mee) escalante transformed the math program so that eventually there were a bunch of folks who passed. 87 in the best year, but around 18 in '82 when they had the controversy from the movie. he actually started in '74 and taught five years before teaching calculus. the whole miracle with converting the remedial students is a pretty serious distortion, but i'm guessing it's intended more as a metaphor for the more boring and abstract transformation he really did of changing a remedial program into a dynasty. but it seems like it says that you can take any random group and teach them to be great, whereas his best achievement actually was to be able to get 18 or 87 out of 1000 students to be really great, which is a good accomplishment, but an entirely different thing. having that many really good students was a better fraction than the rich schools, but the movie doesn't reflect what he did to the other feeder classes in the program, and how he changed the whole pool of math students so that there would be more of the really great. by raising the average or distribution, he made it so there were more at the top. but to do that he did things like require people who were taking basic math to take algebra at the same time. and he arranged for intensive little short summer classes. and by the time you had calculus, you had algebra 1&2, geometry, trig, and "math analysis", which i guess is function theory with analytic geometry and transcendental function analysis. another thing the article mentions is how the principal supported him, and how the program fell apart after he left. some of it could have just been how hard this guy pushed people, and acted like a coach for a team. but i'm sure busholini's testing program would squash attempts to have an approach where some people are made to do well, and others are "left behind". in fact, it sounds like the soundbyte name is intended exactly to discourage that kind of thing. the secret goal is to crush the spirit out of public schools, and if you can hinder an effort to occasionally have a few really good students, then, you not only suck out top students, forcing them to go private and thus continuously lowering the quality of schools, but you seriously discourage teachers. it might be necessary to take some kind of stand, or to develop computer programs to help. i might be better off working on a grant to write free web based-education software. i know memphis state has the big auto-tutor program. perhaps it could be expanded to other areas.i did find my good calculator, though. hp48s. completely forgot how to use it. found the manual, though, and i'm relearning how to use it. it does a limited symbolic integration. polynomials. simple functions. has no idea how to integrate by parts. one of the scenes in "stand an deliver" has a guy working out the integral of x^2 sin x, which is probably the classic integration by parts. i had long forgotten how to do those, so i had to look it up. which is good since i've got this math test on saturday. i also always forget the trig angle sum formulas. i know one is (sin x cos y + sin y cos x) and the other is (cos x cos y - sin x sin y) but i forget which goes with sin(x+y) and which goes with cos(x+y). then i figured that since sin 0 = 0 and cos 0 = 1, the only way for the cos of 0 + 0 not to come out zero is for the two cosines to be multiplied by each other. anyway, i need to go ahead and try to take the sample test. maybe a little more sleep first. and dude in the movie had of course started the integration by parts backwards, so his next term had the integral of 1/3 x^3 cos x. teacher dude shows a tabular shortcut which i don't remember and i don't want to clutter my brain with. i'll use a freakin' table if i have issues like that. went to see the incredibles. it was good. not great. i'm not sure what it would take for a movie to be great to me anymore. i do remember having the feeling "that was great!" after seeing joe's apartment. but i tried watching that recently and didn't think so much of it. but the incredibles. flexigirl was such ahousewife mom. i guess you just had this sense of people even though they were cartoon characters. and the action was diverting. so i decided to come by starbucks for a venti soy hot chocolate. haven't done it for a while. getting on towards christmas. sit here and write amongst the common folk. and i come in, and two of the good chairs in the middle are empty, and as i'm getting stuff, a couple of folks come and sit over there. grr. so i'm sitting on over in the corner. it's nice because i can rest my head on the wall. a couple of cute girls about twenty are sitting at the other end of he little bench thing here. talking about their relationships. what a cliche. a little toero much preening for my taste. i was trying to read the reviews of the incredibles before. on metacritic, in the reader comments, some girl said she was 18 with a 141 IQ and couldn't figure out what was going on. maybe she couldn't relate to the whole midlife crisis thing. and i get the feeling that there might have been some deeper stuff going on that i wasn't quite getting. and, i will admit that i can't relate to the whole breeder mid-life thing. the cute girls mentioned tests they have to take and studying they have to do. i still haven't taken the practice test for that praxis test. and the test is next saturday. i have to take the test, and then study if i don't do well. it was definitely one of the things i needed to do this week. too much procrastinating. and i haven't dug out the calculator i'm going to use. i'm sure it'll need batteries. if i can even get them for it. augh. it's just high school math, though. at some point i'm going to have to take the test which is long answer questions requiring advanced college level math. why, i'm not sure, but it is on the list of stuff i have to do. now i'm just making my stuff worried. it seems likely that i'll default on the whole contract thing. i mean, it turns out that it's three years total teaching in the high need districts. not just anywhere in tennessee, like i was figuring. and shelby count schools are out. they just did a rating thing, and i think shelby county got an a rating in high chool math. city got like a d. teaching people who don't care at all is just no fun at all. there's a little teeny bopper girl who was sitting in the other nice chair in the middle. white tank top. black bra that sticks out quite a bit. glasses. brunette. studying some book or other and writing stuff. kind of jewish-looking. something interesting to say. i don't know. it really does help to have a topic to focus on. so, talking to ben on tuesday over the oatmeal stouts, we were remembering that there are three subjects you're not supposed to talk about. religion, politics, and something else. we just couldn't remember what that third was. and those really are the fun things to talk about anyway. especially over good stout. i don't know what we were on about. something religious i think. i always pretend i know something about religion. the common enlightened state of the religious founders, that get's lost as the never-to-be-enlightened religious community needs guidance about how to live a good and proper life. i don't know. bonus! borders had stand and deliver on dvd for $8, saving me the time to make the copy, and not costing much more than the rental. well, ok, it didn't really save me any money, because, as it was my happy place, and a bookstore, i ended up buying a few books, for a total of $75. one of them was just an impulse that caught my eye, with the intriguing title of yoga, tantra, and meditiation in everyday life. it is short, and simple little sections easily digestible. maybe i'll get back to doing yoga. i used to take classes, but it really isn't as good to just go to classes and not practice every day. you don't really need classes. at least i don't think i do. a teacher is nice, but it isn't a great think to not take personal responsibilty for doing. this, book though, does have the little section on tantra with the naked pictures. it talks about two ways to practice. either just do it and let go, or sit in one of the poses and not move. the not moving seems a little strange. it all does make me wish i had managed to be with holly. maybe i should call her some time. so, i didn't eat anything all day. and i wasn't particularly hungry when i ate something. but i was hungry after i ate. one book i got is a book to help with a condition i have. it doesn't seem to actually have anything that can help me with how bad i've let it go. i guess it'll take some years for me to get it together. i was thinking about getting yet another copy of _what color is my parachute_. it didn't really help me last year, but i didn't really follow it then. and a cool thing about the movie was that it had a whole section in the credits with software engineers. well, that sucks. i think the new router has disabled my ability to transfer files with ftp, so this journal has actually been down. or partially, since it quits after only a little bit loads up. quite annoying. but i finally got doom3 going. some problem with my operating system installation made it not install, so i installed it to my second, much cleaner os installation. and then it had some kind of graphics problem and i had to get the new drivers, and for that i had to install the most recent service pack. my first os install fails when i try to load the service pack. and it's getting quite cluttered with stuff that it loads up. i tried battlefield 1942 again, and it still froze with the new motherboard. but in the clean and updated os install it played a lot longer, but did eventually blue screen. which is better than a freeze because it said what module crashed, and it was the video drivers after al i looked it up and it does have problems with my card, an ati 8500dv. maybe i'll work on it some more. i think i like having people-like images to shoot at better than zombies. and doom was getting quite annoying, because when i couldn't read anything with that graphics problem, all i was doing for quite a while was wandering around. which is boring. and battlefield was getting like that too, because of all the terrain to cover. first person _shooter_ not first person wander-around-trying-to-find-stuff. of course, in a real war, the shooting only comes in big burst, and most of the time is waiting for stuff to happen. unless you just get bogged down in a trench, and then it's just noisy. had saving private ryan on in the background when i was still working on getting everything together. i still couldnt tell if the guy going up to the tank with the sticky bomb blew himself up or what. it seemed like there was a camera angle switch when it happened. but you can't miss the guy picking up his own arm. such a lovingly-presented image. i wonder if any of the zombies in doom 3 do that. i didn't want to turn on the heat, because i can be pretty cheap when i get in the mood. but i checked it, and the temperature was 56 degrees in here. i have a definitely cutoff. 63 degrees is cold as i will take it. so, there's a potluck mensa meeting tonight. the only things i have ever cooked for other people are duck and wienerschnitzel. the schnitzel didn't turn out so good since i tend not to season things very much, and it's been a long time since i made it. and for some reason i haven't been so lucky with the duck either. i would have thought it's hard to mess up duck, but i think i somehow managed it. seems likely that i won't do anything. and there is usually a logical problem with potlucks. if everybody brings something, and everybody who brings something brings more than he or she could personally eat himself, if that's all he or she would eat, then there will be too much food. very simple math. but who would eat a whole pot of green bean caserole? probably no one. so there will be quite a few items that aren't finished off, and the occasional really good on that runs out. it just seems like they are naturally a mess. i guess now there are items that are meals in themselves, like pizza, which you might sensibly be able to do. or i guess sub sandwiches. i could bake some bread. that would be good. yeah, maybe i should bake some bread. that really can be a meal in itself. and it costs me almost nothing and is actually pretty easy. still, i really could go for some schnitzel. i'll think about it. local news blondie joyce peterson was interviewing someone this morning about some book, glory the hair. she said hair is the ultimate accessory. you don't have to buy it. and you fix it however you want. i just think it's horrible to have hair as an accessory, but chicks do that. and jp's hair color does sem to shift around. seems like multitoned is some kind of fashion thing these days. i mean, i always thought blonde with dark roots was just tacky, but maybe that's what people are going for. and there i some kind of site called "freecycle.com" where you can give away junk and get free junk. Happy Armistice Day! Or veterans day if prefer the new name. i'm just shy. yeah that's it. and hannibal the cannibal was just hungry. dude on sixty minutes, kind of a motivational speaker guy, suggests just not using credit cards because you spend more. it just makes it so easy to spend just a little more and not question the excessive prices. and now you wonder why grocery stores held off so long to accept plastic. sure, it costs them in the equipment and cost per transaction, but i bet they finally realize that it does in fact make people spend more. and dude mentioned bubba bob with his fancy new truck and bass boat sitting out in front of his trailer. it made me think, well, conservatives are generally people who think they are rich, and therefore want to keep it and not share. well, most people are not rich, but if people judge how rich they are based on how much th spend, as opposed to how much they make, then with all the personal deficit spending and plastic, people really do have reason to think they are richer than they are. a perception thing. chalk that one up for the regressives. i ordered a new motherboard and cpu on friday, and it came on wednesday, which was pretty fast delivery, i think. but i open it up, and the agp port says it only takes agp 1.5v, and since my card is somewhat older, i thought i was screwed. but i googled it, and ati on their site said that my card had been made compatible with the first two standards, and 1.5was the second, so i was in luck. but taking apart my old computer, i saw that it was a 250 watt power supply, i was hoping for at least a 300, but no. so i went out and got a 350 watt power supply, but not sure if the screw holes would line up. looks like there is some kind of standard. thank the market for standards! i was thinking i might just get a new case with supply, but the comp usa guy said all their cases are empty, and maybe i'll just wait on that. but in addition to the power supply, i got a new wireless router, so jordy is on the net again at home. oh frabjous day! went to the farm and left jordy at home. now sitting at the monthly mensa meeting. down with busholini! the talk tonight is about islam after 9/11. by a surgeon in town. i support the idea of the perennial philosophy that all religions are at heart the same, but islam does seem to be quite distant from the true core of religion. i got some junk snail mail recently, soliciting for the magazine, free inquiry, that mentioned an article suggesting that islam should just be eliminated. i'd like to read that. but i was thinking on the drive back what questions i would have. i'd wonder if islam is truly a living religion. does it have a way for new thinking to evolve in the tradition. are there contemplatives that thiink about current issues. thae monastic traditions in christianity really add value to that tradition. another thought, has he flown recently and been flagged for search? oatmeal stout, yum. dr akbic says, one god, man all linked together, and meaning something or other, i forget. mohammed the prophet. mohammed's life is about selflessness. he mentioned islamic schools. what is islamic truth that it would need a school. as for the interpretation, they have a scholarly approach. but they don't have the enforcement ability like the church. At tj mulligans. quite uncomfortable. no space at the bar. sitting at the little side bar across from it. and no cute bartending babes. some kind of football game with u of m and louisville. but i needed to come out and write. jordy can't get on the net at home, so i don't even use it. of course, i'm truly bummed that pubes won re-election, even though i was expecting it. and he got an actually majority, so he's gonna feel like he has approval to do whatever he wants. not that he ever would compromise or reach out. he even said that democrats are going to have come to him. so he's a godfather now. an evil crime boss. i'm not even supposed to be here today. work is going terrible. i'm going to take next week off. i doubt i'm going to finish everything i really should have gotten done. i made some serious mistakes, but bruce was still encouraging. it was julie's birthday. she's my brother edgar's wife. my mom had them all over for dinner. and after, i got daniel and nathan to make themselves some little electric motors, like the one i made, but they didn't have nearly as much luck as i had, and daniel got really frustrated when it didn't work right away. nathan didn't get it working, but did keep at it. i guess daniel is still a bit of a baby. it worked a bit better with a bigger battery. nathan really didn't seem to care much, though. i was thinking of getting daniel a copy of it, but it really looks like he isn't that kind of kid. oh well. disappointing. then again, things are generally pretty fine. man, i'm feeling boring today. but i felt like writing. maybe i was just wishing i had something to say. so wendy is moving to canada. i was thinking maybe i should go to a place that is a little less fascist, like russia or germany. it used to be that germany was looking for computer people. man, game over, u of m lost because of a loiusville td with about 45 seconds left. so people clearing out, and there's a spot at the bar. i was nursing the last one (also the first one), but i guess i'll have another. why the hell not? we're at war. so, last night i was much better able to remember what i was dreaming. that seems to happen when i skip a particular activity. one dream, though, had a deep sort of altered consciousness feel to it. i was watching a bunch of people, and i suddenly shifted perspective to in the middle of them, but it was like my internal dialog had stopped, like i was almost sort of catatonic or something. the woman who was right in front of me looked a little concerned and asked, "can you hear me?" and i nodded. i guess dreams are generally pretty weird, but this one was pretty intense and weird. a kind of peaceful state, though. but i definately feel the loosening of all the bonds of desire, and a greater movement towards peace. considering how angry i can be, i guess i'd pretty much have to move towards being peaceful some of the time. i guess one thing that must have effected me at some deep level, was an essay that some dude wrote on a web site somewhere that killing bush was really just a bad idea. i think it must be working on me. i think i had some counterarguments, but still. and another thing working on me. that guy who had me on his blog of how to be interesting. i like to think i am, but only once in a while, and not consistently. sometimes i have pretended i could really be a writer, but really i'm just a blogger. i don't have the discipline to really write well. and i probably wouldn't like the real pain of writing. i really should find a real job, then. that song, you're everywhere to me. is it about god, or is about love, and in a deep sense god is about love. the deep sense is that the belief in god is about our need for love, parental love, a love that cares about us and cares for us, and the sense that the world really gives us the feeling that we are cared for mysteriously. despite many problems and dissappointments because of our endless neediness, we do get by and are really treated fairly well, despite our nastiness and undeserving. i googled it a bit and i'm reading a little on michelle branch. just a kid. so nothing really deep in there, i don't think. one bad thing about me, i don't have that whole 'striving for excellence' thing going. i did get the whole mistaking notion that the striving and desire was bad in itself and should be avoided, when really, it should just be seen as the trap it is and moved beyond, without being avoided. avoiding too is a trap. the magic isn't in the signs, it's in the reading. Happy Halloween! the toe has definitely gotten worse. ouch. still no wireless here. i moved the router downstairs, so it's more convenient to play with, and i can see the status lights. i was hoping that would maybe help, but it didn't it's after 6. it's been dark almost an hour. just one bunch of trick or treaters. the only actual trick or treater in this group was a teeny little girl dressed like glenda the good witch, i think. but there was also a kid in a stroller, and the two moms. really cute moms. both a lot younger than me. next was a medium size girl with glasses all by herself dressed like a witch. nothing but onesies. a little boy. i think it was a lord of the rings something or other. it looks like i might have trouble getting rid of all this candy. i got about 5 pounds, and i already ate at least a pound myself. but it's going really slow. andwith the simpsons halloween special not being on, even though it's sunday? there was football on before, but it looks like they're showing the x-files movie. it's spooky enough. durn, i missed the intro to 60 minutes. it's now an hour later. 7:30. no more trick or treaters. three. what's up with that? ah-ight. a pair of boys came by at 7:50 maybe there will be a late bunch. nope. that was it. i didn't even use up one bag. the big toe joint (metatarsophalangeal) on my right foot hurts. nothing like when it hit on the other foot. and not so swollen. but annoying. it was hurting yesterday, but aimee offered me a beer (she was having one) and i couldn't say no, even though. orions. on star trek enterprise. an orion slave girl. they got a few of the crew for slaves. brent spiner is on it as a bad guy. and a bunch of cool genetically engi,neered folks. well they looked cool when they took over the klingon ship. but one tried to kill another, breaking the will of their father, and then the other one killed the first. really stupid. i feel stressed, or just frustrated, because the wireless is not working on jordy. it works at work. and my kensington wifi finder sees it. or maybe it's because it's extra warm in the house. i should turn on the air conditioner. and i got a new citibank credit card in the mail, and i go to replace it in my wallet. and the old one is gone. i called and i don't seem to have any charges, but it is annoying. i reported it, and i'm getting a new one. it had some automatic payment put on it, and i need to change those. grr. anyway, i'm feeling kind of stressed. i got some kind of spam about trading links. fbhome or something. just a bunch of links, and most of them seem to be fake. and i don't know how they do it, but the links seem to go to domains, but then it redirects to some bogus product page. one of the pages there did link to my site, actually this journal. so i googled a ba'b'ian to see where else there are links that refer to it the way it did. yeah, i know vanity googling is lame. but i found a guy David Brittanwho must be an associate of wendy. he wrote about me and my blog in april. i can't see where this blog has been updated much after that. i think he's actually a real writer, and his writing does seem quite clear and concise. it doesn't even seem like i aspire to that quality of writing. and i guess it is sort of 'journalistic'. writing about something. sticking to a topic. i look at it a little more now, and it looks like this was to be a themed blog, like the title says, about 'how to be interesting'. not an easy subject. i guess he gave up on it. sitting here in the dark, i heard a buzzing, like a mosquito. i wanted to get him, so i turned on the light to see him, and i could still hear him, but a few seconds later, the freezer's compressor turned on, and i can't hear him anymore. and it looks like she bit me on the top of the fourth finger on my left hand. aw, man. i wrote for a good piece, tried to save it, and jordy got stuck with the hourglass and i lost it. i hate when that happens. so, reading more from d.b.'s stuff. he has a bit where he talks about where someone writes about how blogs are all about ego. with jordy's wifi down, i'd have to type in the link, and that's too much a bother. i look at the thing, and it does say that, but it mostly does other stuff. it gives examples of blogs, and a bit of history. it's not an essay. d.b. seems to be into essays. anyway, my reaction is to think about what the alternatives might be to just being about ego. i just recently got the notion that real writing, for money, is all about the reader. fiction is written with the conscious intent to entertain. a focus on the reader. and other writing might be meant to inform, or persuade, but at least the writer is thinking about the reader and trying to be interesting. d.b. does seem to be thinking that way in his stuff. they do talk about the typical teenage girl blogger who is trying to let her buddies know what is happening in her life. that's a lot more about her. i know that i write mostly to keep thoughts flowing out, and not just sitting stuck. i don't know. i think this was better the first time i wrote it. i wasn't even paying attention, but it was on. the boston red sox won the world series. i fried a chicken. part of my plan to not spend so much on convenience foods and make my own. but it didn't turn out very good. kind of bland. i was looking forward to doing it, but when the evening came around, i wasn't so hungry. and somehow, my wireless nextwork here at home is not working. i think it's my card on jordy, but i didn't seem to have any trouble at work. maybe it's the router. i finally baked some bread again. i think it's been six months. it took longer than i thought to get the stuff together, but i guess it wasn't too bad. dinner was bread and butter and bologna, but the bologna was really salty and not so good. still it was filling. i don't know if i'm gonna go back to eating bread mostly. i still need to go to the store and get some halloween candy. and i miss the burritoes. i was thishinking, for like 10 4 oz. for 3.25,in i'm not sure i could make them cheaper. hmm. not if i had to buy cans of refried beans. i guess beans are not that hard to cook. maybe i should try it. it's a shame i spent all my extra money. so, even though i didn't get my nap, i'm at tj. mulligans. and it's already after midnight. but i felt like i should be celebratory. today was the last day for me to get my project done so bruce could show it to his potential new customers when he meets with them on monday, and i added three new features, as well as debugging some funky problem it had when it moved to the server. the problem on the server was especially bad because code that worked fine came up with "an internal error" and said maybe look at the log files. i tried sending the site admins a email, and it took quite a while for them to write back. before that happens, i used my quick script to examine the files on the server to hunt down first where the log might be and then to look at the logs. nothing in the log. then i had to use the old fashioned approach of playing with the code to see where the error occurs. and the error looks like a compile error, so i didn't know if that would even help. cutting out sections. it ended up being reallyclose to the top. the "http/1.1 200" first http response line. i thought i needed it, and i might for iis, but it messes up apache. hours wasted. i could have been sleeping. plus on thursday i helped jimmy jones with his new laptop and got some extra cash. i don't know. maybe i should go into more of this computer support stuff. it's hard to get enough jobs to really get a sufficient income. but there are a lot of computer problems out there in the world. and if i became a better perl hacker, i could handle a lot more simple stuff. java projects are just necessarily pretty long term. so, man, my thought was that while i was sitting here, i would make a list of the things i was go buy at the grocery store, except that more than likely i will spend all my extra cash here. cause i don't have any small bills to tip the band. so i had to give them a ten. dammit people, tips are not optional. i'm sure i would have tipped them eventually. this song was don henley boys of summer. i believe it was '84. now that was a year for me. whether it was a year to remember or forget, i don't know. but it was definitely a year. man, on one of those little cop shops, the reality tv cop shows, they had this cop who had a little 17 year old cadet with him, and he went to a little shoplifting call to maybe show him how these things go. a real calm, but caring, blue shirt. shoplifter bitch had this skinhead boyfriend sitting out by the car. (curtis lowe) dude walked up with his hands in his pockets . cop dude says take your hands out your pockets. dude says, i've got a knife. cope dude says, should i be concerned about my safety. cop dude gets behind him and pins his arms back, and, as you might expect, the gun comes out. out trick. i've seen it. have a gun and a knife. scare them with the knife. use the gun. skinhead uses the gun. shoots the cop in the face. face, not head, though. skinheads never were that bright. then arm. breaks the guys right arm. paralyzed. sometimes skinhead make thoughtful moves. then a few to the chest an side. because this cop is not out. surely skinhead is scared. but cop falls. and somehow rips the hell out of his left hand. they don't mention it, but i'm guessing it was knife in skinhands other hand. just a guess. security guy goes after skinhead. sh stabs guard. cadet, who, as minor, is gunless and cowering in corner. skinhead goes into car after cops backup gun. automatic rifle. primo. skinhead gonna kills some motherfuckers. having trouble with the latches or whatever they secure them with. cop tries to draw gun. right arm broken, so no good. cop calls rookie to draw his gun. and put it in his left (fucked up) hand. cadet complies. cop gets a couple off. skinhead pays attention. does not give up, though. cop shoots again. skinhead "removed as threat". skinhead later dies. he might have made it, i guess theoretically. cop demonstrates the value of experience and calmness in emergencies. cop still in risk of bleeding to death. cop falls back onto deep breathing training to prevent immanent death. cop impresses the hell out of one anarchist. tears well up thinking about it. jarhead with the cuffs is having dinner. tj's door gunner. i bet he would say something nietzshean like "where there's life, there's hope" as he strikes a match for his camel. i tried striking one of these camel matches with one hand. it's a box of stick matches, not a book of paper matches. those seem easier. i could hold the box down onto the bar. i like to do that just in case i lose an arm sometime. you never know. things i was thinking of getting from the grocery store, before i decided on spending all my money on beer and company: breakfast sausage, in a box, already cut out, not a roll; a box of corky's ribs; orange juice; some marie calendars pot pies; deoderant, mitchum. i don't know. it's harder and harder to find stuff that they are offereing that tempts me. i need to start baking bread again. man, back in the winter and the spring when i was baking bread i felt so free from this excessively modernized world. bread, man. the biblical saying was that man does not live by bread alone. but, shoot man, that was just to say that that all that a guy really needs to eat to get by. the occasionaly vitamin c bearing fruit probably would have helped, i guess. seems like wine has vitamin c. i forget. googled it. can't tell right off. so, the little satellite thing was doing come beach boys. forget which. maybe good vibrations. i was whistling. dana switched it to some more whiny alternate stuff. probably good to shut me up. but still. won't hold it against her. we all survive on the kindness of strangers. i'm eating vitamins now. i really don't need any fucking kind of fancy foods. i really should go back to bread. actually, i think about it. during spring and summer, there are lots of other things, but fall and winter, i could see just bread. we'll see. band base-player dude tried an intriguing mix. godiva some kind of liqueur, and jaeger. some kind of german thing but balanced out. offered me some. had dana taste it with a straw. dana said this was her favorite song. i don't wanna be anyhing other than what i'm trying to be or me. whatever this song is. man, so becky pulled out a cigarette, and i wanted to light it for her, and i lit a match, but she did not make any motions to have it lit. and some flashdance tune was on. i son't even know if she smoked it, but i certainly did not light it.so, becky, just now, squatted down in front of the cabinet with the radio. and she pulled out a brush. and she was brushing her shoulder length hair. feeling disordered. she's tired, and she looked before like she had a headache. maybe just tired. she said allergies. stopped up. those were demons in his eyes. it's cold in here. i'm naturally cold. threatening movement next to me here. jarhead checking it out. becky yawning. dana smiling. such characteristic actions. and becky didn't finish her dinner. she's so skinny, i guess that's characteristic as well. so, becky is cold. i'm cold. dana is hot. don't know what that's all about. anyway, at about 2:34, jarhead turned on the lights. and yet, i finished one off, and becky still offered to get me another. chicks next to me are shooting "piece of ass"--southen comfort, peach schnapps and something or other. and they're pulling out quarters. hitting a smoke. dana told me. jason is the name of the jarhead door-guy. i was gonna ask becky. i think it's much better to have his name than to think of him as jar-head door guy. so, they tried to charge me for six. but i only had 5. and i challenged becky. and she redid it for 5. dana was the one who cashed me out. we'll see how it ends up. it's after 3. my question was whether they'd letme finish i off after selling it to me. it looks like they will. but i've been going pretty fast. so i was wondering if i was the only person who thought that someone should tornadoes in the area. so the cbs station has full-time storm coverage. i'm bummed because jeri ryan (seven of nine her own self) was going to be on two and a half men. but no. shoot. she's hot. i decided to go out to my happy place--the bookstore. i wanted to see if they had robert reich's book, reason: why liberals will win the battle for america. i could use something hopeful. they didn't have it. there were some other books that i might have bought if they had that. s and i wanted the java developers journal, which i had seen in there a week ago. gone. it had an article on java careers. grr. i was thinking of getting one of those test help books for praxis. i've signed up to take the praxis mathematics content test 0061. i need it to go for the alternative c licensure program. i've gotten e-mails from somebody at u of m about the program. since i'm not really doing anything, i might as well sink into teaching. but they have sample test at ets.org and list of requirements, and that might be enough. i'll take it some time, and worry about studying harder if i don't do so well. i did notice that one of their math tests is really hard--it looks like it's for college math majors. i'd like to try to take it, but i think it would be beyond me. i think i saw a question about "abelian groups". i'm not sure i know what that means. i think "abelian" means it is commutative. i can't remember if a group has one operator or two. i actually saw it talked about in a book i'm reading on real analysis, but the way i was reading it, without doing the homework and exercises, i guess it isn't really sticking. i could get multiple choise questions, but i think this was a short answer or essay question. the test i'm taking is really just all high school math, though there is a fair amount of calculus. it even will have one computer question. the one they had one the sample was annoying. i only glanced through the thing and saw this problem. it was a little flow chart of an algorithm. it had one answer that was "A/2" and another answer that was "[A/2]". now, i don't know what square brackets are supposed to mean in this magical flow chart language they seem to think exists. I know a lot of programming languages, too. and i've been programming a long time. square brackets usually mean array reference. my guess is that they wanted the "floor" symbol, which is like square brackets with the serif (little horizonal nub) only on the bottom. maybe when i look at it again, that's what it'll have. that is a real mathematical notation that corresponds to a computer function that is often called "int" which takes the integer below or equal to the number. the correct answer actually does require that, because dividing by 2 at one point would start creating answers with fractional components. but if they're going to have bogus questions, i'm gonna be upset. it's the kind of test where, you can afford to miss a few, and they don't expect you to get them all right. but that's no excuse for having bogus questions. 50 questions in 2 hours. graphic calculator required, though i probably wouldn't need it-- calculators are such a crutch. let's not forget that people were using slide rules during the space race. maybe i should bring a slide rule. of course, they don't allow mini-computers, so jordy is out. durn. so a few people died in the storms. the weather guy on cbs said that's why they were doing this. he makes no apologies. i admit, i was upset at missing blondie, but he didn't need to get defensive. i did mention that jeri seven of nine ryan was the first woman to make me think that barbie isn't that unrealistic after all.
ok, so leaving the bookstore, i saw a piece of paper on the ground outside by the trash can with writing on it. it's quadrille--the one with the little squares. it had some kind of schedule written on it, and i thought it might be interesting, so i picked it up. and it even had a couple of phone numbers, which i'm probably going to reverse lookup. here's all that was written on it: Tues 5:00-6:30 (pink ?) Art 6:45-7:30 (pink ?) wed 5:30-7:00 Thur 5:45-7:15 SAT 9-1030 Jazz 11:45-1 (other half of page) Ballet 7 Jazz II Begin Aug.16 4 per week 737-7322 (other side) 1-877-989-3268 MTCN 905 3825 791 Robisen 4383 2200 ------ 2183 2025 ------ 155 (that's what it says. i'm guessing she needs to work on her subtraction, it could be that it's 2028 and not 2025, but it sure looks like a 5) Katie Mae Poodle (a column of multiple choice answers. one column is blue, and presumably corrections in black) Aa c c ac ca a&d b c d c c b a a cool. the 737- phone number is for ballet memphis on trinity, which is near doug. so it's for dance class. i hate when i can't sleep. so i've googling for airguns and squirrels. it looks like my airgun, a crossman 1077, is just basically underpowered for squirrels. i haven't quite figured the ft-lbs, but it only puts .177 cal at a max of 625fps, so i'm thinking maybe 9ftlb. dude on one page said minimum of 12. 15-20 is best. i have been able kill three of the durn tree-rats, but maybe i was lucky. i've found a .22 at 900 fps with 18 ftlbs for about $160. i'm not sure i'm ready to spend that. i also found the rat zapper which might work fine. i really want them fresh, though, so i can eat them, and i'm not sure if that's so likely with a trap. probably fine in the winter. about $50 and darn it but i forgot that they were going to show all the regularly scheduled stuff again starting at 2 am. i just missed seven of nine. again. grr. i mean, it looks like i thought of it and turned it on five minutes after it was over. double grr. saw team america: world police. it was pretty good. seemed like it could be funnier. the puppet sex scene was interesting. i wonder what they cut out. it had a bunch of positions. the last one was very different. girl on her head and the guy standing behind her. don't know what that's called. roger ebert gave it one out of four stars. it might have just been personal. he didn't like it because it was nihilist--they didn't have a message or any particular thing that was bad. i thought that was their point. it's all silly. whatever. lots of blood. heads being blown off. i think one had just the top half of his or her head. i think it was janeane garafalo. there were a lot of songs, and i can remember the lyrics, but i can't remember how the tunes go. and yes, there is a song at the end of the credits wheim jong il explains what his deal was. he's an alien. it was a prelude to invasion thing. bug creature that controls people like in star trek wrath of khan. anyway, so, i'm here at tj mulligans again. some kind of band. has a girl singer. otherwise lame. green something or other. maybe green dream. and off-key. ouch. then again, the place is empty, so who cares? then again, people are sounding a little annoying with it. but, shoot, man, they gotten people up of their old saggy asses and up their dancing. celebration and get down tonight. gotta love disco. i was gonna go up and tip them, but they don't even have a jar or a hat or anything. man. if you're so bad not to even expect a tip... argh. mean green music machine so, they did joan jett's i love rock and roll. it was horrible. but i had to go tip them $5. and dude said they sucked. and i just had to quote tom petty: "it's rock and roll. it doesn't have to be good." i just wish this guy wasn't standing right in my face. his girl was putting her hand on his back, and i was thinking, i'd love to stick a knife through her hand and into his back, with the edge pointing toward her so that when she pulled it towards her, it would cut across his back. man, that would have been sweet. so, i went to the in depth discussion group mensa meeting at mcallisters earlier this evening. david moncrief and brent milton were there. david was on about some lecture he got a notice from u of m about-- jonathan weinberg, the case for neopragmatism in normative metaepistemology next friday at 3:00. and some site disputing the big bang theory cosmology something or other. what a freak. talked to brent about politics. he is thinking about a third party, and has a probram in mind to start everyone with a million dollar grant for education. he couldn't go to the strong computer science college he wanted, even with his gi bill money. had to settle for number 5. aw. i guess they remind me of my own underachievement. nothing but guys here left at the bar. it's pretty freakin' sad. ok, man, so this is trippy. i decided to head out. and then i decided to get some cash and head out to platinum, and the first tennessee cash machine said it was out of service, and the amsouth bank machine said it was out of service. i guess the network is down. shoot. i suppose i'm out of luck. ok. it is called "piledriver". here's about what i remember them doing: missionary, cowgirl, doggie, standing with man behind, reverse cowgirl, and, as i said, piledriver. and this was all in a little 30 second or so scene. so you wonder what the original scene was. just puppets and no plumbing, but i could see not wanting children to see it. the heads blowing off is a little nasty too, i guess, but i'm sure that doesn't get it an nc-17, since that's all still there. oh yeah, the passion of the christ proved you can't get an nc-17 for violence. a dream. i was at a hotel, and my mom had left me there and was going to come back in a couple days, but not just a hotel because folks were getting help for mental problems. and i was just accepting being stuck there. but there was one guy i really pissed off, like that guy at tj mulligans. so it was about the feelings of being left here. the folks came here for a day and left. i almost went by tj mulligans yesterday, so it through in though feelings. and i was trying to get away from him, so at the end of it, i tried to go back to my room, and clean service had cleaned up, and i was scared i had lost all my stuff, but i found it, and i went and lay down to sleep. i am afraid of losing my stuff, i have to say. so it's another nightmare. working through fears i'm having. and it woke me up, so i'm having trouble going back to sleep. i guess that's what nightmares are. the dreaming mind dealing with fears we're having, and they get scary enough to wake us up, and sometimes they keep us awake. if dreams are a way for the brain to use an opportunity to imagine how things are without the senses of the day intruding (so they can be much more vivid) then i guess we risk dealing with stuff that scares us too much. so they are just an opportunity that brain dna has exploited. sleeping clearly is an opportunity to rest and not think or move when it's dark forget our troubles. if we were awake, we'd probably be moving around, and since our animal ancestors were probably always hungry, we'd be out looking for food when it was most dangerous. asleep we forget being hungry and cold and stay more safe. it makes sense for these to have appeared in evolution. i admit that i've always thought monetary success and having a lot of stuff could be a trap, but i should also admit that being in debt a lot has been a trap for me. i was reading about a comic about some old japanese warcrimes, and some possible historical revisionism about it. an interesting thing mentioned was that there is some japanese shrine for lost veterans, and they say it honors war criminals as well. that could be a little bit of spin (from the losers) but it does sound rather japanese. they are a little bit into their fighting. like kerry said, we commit war crimes too. what else would you call nagasaki and hiroshima?and i didn't realize until i saw the frontline special yesterday. in vietnam we had "free fire zones" where you were allowed to just shoot anyone you caught in there. that's a war crime. man. and, officially, the invasion of iraq itself was illegal. it is such a big bad deal that there is no way for regressives--it is just too ironic to call them conservatives since, in addition to being against environmental conservation, they are trying not to keep the country the way it is or has ever been, but to change it to a cold and mean-spirited place-- to admit that it is wrong. if they do that, it would follow that they are criminals. is it a crime to go out and kill someone for just saying they want to kill you? it is self defense to kill them when they try, but it is premeditated murder to do it before they try. that's what we have done. of course, we haven't killed saddam. so it's only attempted murder for him, but we did kill a lot of other people. osama is a little different. he is guilty of conspiracy, and because of that he continues to be an actual threat. but iraq was just cold blooded murder. for the iraqis, it's a different story. he was a threat to them. and so, actually, since it is acceptable to kill someone to save someone else, i guess you could justify it. but that's an internal thing. the big shift is the thinking that killing bad guys is good. that happened in the comic book world (i wonder if it has anything to do with the conservative campaign to change american values). but really, killing bad guys is bad, and we always thought that until recently. we sometimes thought it necessary, but we did at least think it was bad.we needed to get rid of al quaeda before taking on iraq. we let them go, and then gave them, not just a great recruitment tool, but thousands of unemployed trained army guys that they could recruit. man, that was a serious mistake. it might have all been ok except for that. that's almost trying not to win the war on terrorists. or maybe that was the plan. nah, probably it was another bumbled decision from w the pinhead. that's what you get when you elect a well meaning idiot. just the occasional major foul-up. it doesn't matter if you're "god-fearing" if you're as incompetent as that. i'm sure he did it as a simple matter of right and wrong. they were working for a bad army, so they need to be punished and not given a free job. it follows from conservative values. and yet it is a total disaster. sitting at tj mulligans. ashley has left. it's just becky at the bar. gennon is here. kind of boring. but i finally got some vitamins. for me, they seem to prevent hangover pain, so going here was my bribe to go get them. jesus, ass-fucking, christ. wendy is getting married to joey. man. i asked becky what she thought about it. she said it's gonna happen, but she's so young, that it isn't on her mind. so, what do i think about marriage? black dude sitting next to my just talked about chick who came up to him in a wedding dress and cheetah shoes, cummerbund, purse, and cat in the hat top hat. and fucked her good. marriage is a sacrament. it lets you go from wild, live-for-yourself, fuck when you want, to acceptable, good person. questionable to accepted. forget the past. but it's just a convention. there was never a problem but thinking made it so. society offers it as a solution to a problem it made. it's just that, for me, accepting a solution to a false problem seems to me to encourage the system that creates the problem. now, controlling sexual relationships is one of the big things that defines a culture. it has tremendous effects. the puritannical nature of the u.s. is one of the things that makes it into the sublimated industrial powerhouse that it is. it's got me all twitchy, now. it is intended as a source of frustration, a frustration which gets pushed into economic achievement. economic in the sense of scarcity, and sex is made scarce. one day, i will have that vorpal weapon. i can just see how nanotechnology will make it possible. fuck light sabers. though, the whole retractable thing is kind of neat. i would probably want the vorpal weapon to be retractable like that. yeah, light sabers are magic swords, for super knights errant. bfd. ancient mythological archetypes. the knights in the star wars series as it is developing don't even seem marginally enlightened. yoda, almost. ok, yoda is enlightened. personally, i would insist that the defenders of the realm be enlightened. the whole thing was presumably based on the buddhist notion, with samurai warriors as the knights who were at least seeking spiritual attainment. ok, so how did i get from marriage to the jedi way. man. it's about ideal traditions and how a society should work. a society must have defenders. the star wars universe has a greatness because the defenders required are very few, and they are idealized heroes. it all lets you think about the right way to live, and what is really, really good, what is an ideal. so, what do i think? marriage is mediocrity. the very essence of safe sex. still. it makes a lot of people happy. which can be good. satan sits in the center of hell, frozen in a lake of ice. but does he have a smile on his face? i need to read dante. adonai, lama sabachthani? man, so now they have little micro-sized atomic clocks. typical digital electronic clocks use quartz oscillator, which can vary based on temperature, so they aren't all that accurate. an atomic clock uses the oscillation of cesium atom and are about a thousand times more accurate. this new micro-atomic clocks put a teeny bit off cesium gas on the silicon chip, which a little micro laser. right now it costs about $100, and uses a good amount of power (73 milliwatts), but i tell you right now, it's going to change clocks. the pricewill keep coming down, and hopefully the power. it will take a bigger battery, and maybe it will just go into cell phones, but having an atomic clcok will make it so we can have super duper position finding gps. that's a serious techincal development. proper time-keeping was a central accomplishment to good navigation a couple centuries ago, and led to empire building. modern quartz digital watching didn't really change much, since they really weren't that huge an improvement, except in cost, but portable atomic clock accuracy could really change some stuff. or maybe not. one thing that might change. right now, most computers use an external quartz real time clock, but now they could encorporate the atomic clock on chip. orat least on board in a much smaller setup. the computer clock gets used to manage the dynamic ram, so it turns out to be important to the computer. one thing that computers can do is to synchronize over a network. computers now have a battery backup clock to maintain the time when it's turned off, but a networked computer (and they do this now) can call a a remote server to get the right time. they havge to do this now because quartz clocks aren't that accurate, but it could just work that when you turn the thing on, it gets the exact time. i guess that would open up some other great applications. robotics would really be helped be super accurate positioning which would be enabled by gps based on this. so maybe that's what the conservatives have against gay-marriage. they see homosexuality as a punishable moral failing, and marriage, as a sacrament, is a way to wipe the slate clean and forgive. they can't do it. no self-control? what is the self that i could be control? it is a phantom. it is unreal. an illusion. it is just a delusion that it can be controlled. there can be stability and consistency in behavior. this ain't self-control. discipline is based on a false premise. it is a lie that they must support and propagate at great cost. it gets harder and harder. but the lie gives them power. a little lip to snag and pull on to yank people in the direction they want. so, i suppose technogocial cultures eventually become krell. and beyond krell, they must do something. ok. the krell had machines that could take what they were thinking and make it happen. i don't know the whole story, but that is, of course, not a compatible thing, and they thought themselves out of existence. but probably, occasionally, krells survive. they would be pretty freaking godlike. star trek voyager had a cool episode that made me think about post krell-stage society. it's likely that you would have the remnant biologicals, who would keep a traditional society, and a split off godlike group. anyway, i think it's an interesting thing to think about. so, a guy walked up and asked if this was a jornada. he has one. and becky seems to pay him a lot of attention as he's sitting at the end of the bar. i asked. he works here at night. and comes in for lunch. one of her good friends. aw. i made becky mad. i said she was lying, and she was being sarcastic. i've been talking with this guy, who said he was george when becky said she was victoria, that there isn't any difference between lying and sarcasm. he's been on about how lying has the intent of gain or harm, and sarcasm has humor or i forget what. all bullshit. peace through social isolation, that's what i seem to be going for. freeze me in carbonite. it's fairly late at night, but the cnn headlines have been changing. updates about the fight in iraq. so much for pint night. it was thursday, but i was charged 4.50 per pint instead of 2.50. well, i did notice that it wasn't written up on the board. i guess that's what you get when you piss off the bartender. dependency is death. that's something tyr anasazi said on the tv show _andromeda_. he's a nietzshean. genetically engineered human. or was. they killed him off. why do i think of it? nietzscheans did not need vitamins, and i just ate a vitamin tonight. they are able to synthesize them internally. they do need some kind of organic energy source, but they could live on wood if they had to. the ultimate survivor. but he died off, though that was just because the actor moved on to another gig. i suppose he moved on because it was such a boring concept. not much interesting is likely to happen to you if you have no significant needs. but that's just what an ideal is. it doesn't have anything missing. so, my aproach is this: don't complain, don't protest. remember. make decisions based on what i remember. write stuff down to remember when i can. people will always try to take advantage. just try to keep track. do something different when i need to to trick them. Happy Wednesday the 13th! So I'm finally sitting at starbucks. the cantenna doesn't seem to have enabled me to hit any open wifi points. grr. bummer. i'm trying a venti strawberries and cream frappuccino. one of the highest calorie items here. it's like a strawberry milkshake. i didn't see what he poured in there. probably half and half. some grey-haired guy asked if i had wireless. not here. and was this a psion. no, it's an hp. there's this red head sitting outside, and there was a guy standing up about to sit down at the next table. she's just preening like a daddy-fucker. some matronly woman is sewing. or spinstressoid. i felt like being among folk. and maybe i wanted to see if there was anyone studying math. as for the wireless not working, i think i should just get doug in )here with his laptop and hack the connection from upstairs. i think it's time for mere anarchy to be loosed on the world. i'm just in that kind of mood. so, matt and trey were on sixty minutes 2, getting some free publicity for team america: world police. i'm pretty psyched, though i'm a little bummed since i learned they were libertarian. libertarians are such pussies. it was interesting that they said that matt was a math whiz. heh. and to tell the truth, i'm sitting here to avoid the debate. if i was home i'd have it on in the background, or switch it on and off. i really just want to let it go, but it has that whole train-wreck fascination thing. this cream thing is starting to get nasty towards the end. so there was a guy with a laptop,and i saw him get ready to go. coiling up him power adapter, and i decided to finish my drink, and easily manage to get up and leave before him. i love how convenient jordy is. wow. a mom in arizona died about a week after her son was killed in iraq. just after the body came back. now that's grief. and the doctor said the chest pain is probably reflux. i guess. so i'm just a wimp. season premiere of star trek enterprise. time travel. i hate time travel shows. i just watched a classic trek episode "tomorrow is yesterday". it was a time travel one. it made even less sense than most time travel ones. i'm trying not to watch the debate, but man, these guys are getting worked up. i turned it off once but turned it back on. it's off again. on again. off. i need to let it go. i was wrong about the other evening. the stuff i wanted to go to is on the second tuesday, and that was only the first tuesday. oh well. but now that i'm resigned to have missed them, i'm not so intereanssted in going. if i ever really was. man, i blew my whole evening. i was thinking i might finally go to the tai chi school, except in the back of my mind there was something i was wanting to do. then at like 6:30, when dinner was coming out of the microwave from being warmed, i remember that i wanted either to go to the monthly mensa meeting, or the ham radio. grr. the mensa meeting was at 6:30, and the ham radio meeting 7:00. i thought, well, maybe i'll watch nova. but it ended up being about pearl culture, and i didn't really care about it the first time i watched bits of it. and, great, Jordy's screen is starting to flicker off. i would hate to lose such a nice tool. and i know what did it. this morning, jimmy jones came by the office and was asking about laptops, and i show him this one, and was talking about internet connections, and i was saying how nice wireless is, and how jordy has wireless, and i pulled out the wireless card, and i knew it was a bad idea. it had a bunch of dust on it. last time i did that, i had some kind of trouble. hopefully it won't be too be this time. problems with dust can just go away on their own. i've got the vice presidential debate in the background. it's about 40 minutes into it. after the first-- wait i just heard from edwards "that was a complete distortion of my record" and something about "shocked" and now there's some smiling. i'm really not paying attention to this. i've deicded just don't really care about this stuff anymore. anyway, i was gonna say that in the response after the first question, cheney looked like he was almost snarling and going to break out in a growl. for the past few minutes, he's been looking like he's back to his stone face. i don't know how this is gonna go. and i don't care. and actually, now, after a few minutes, and after pulling out the wireless card a couple of times and trying to blow out the dust, the screen isn't flickering. we'll see how it goes. cool! i made a motor! my ingredients were a piece of cardboard (dude's recipe asked for a battery holder, but the cardboard works fine) which acts as a frame for sticking the wire through and holding the magnets. i use two batteries on either side of the cardboard. it turns out that the battery has a steel can so it is held on by the battery, which works well. and a foot of 18 gauge bare wire and about a yard of 22 gauge enameled magnet wire. it spins pretty fast, too, though it seems like maybe the connection is bad and it isn't so steady. right now, i have to hold the wires to the ends of the battery. but still, it's cool. really kind of trippy. so, i guess i really need to have a tinkering mensa meeting. and i feel good that i didn't pig out quite so much for dinner. mom maybe me some food yesterday--chicken with some kind of mushroom tomatoey sauce. she said it was enough for three days-- it was 3 leg quarters--but i ate half of it yesterday. well, mom and dad came into town sunday afternoon, and made a barbecue, or technically my dad called it a "mixed grill"-- some steaks, some lamb, and some fancy sausage and a couple shishkabobs. serious grease fire in the grill. my dad had a dental appointment in the morning, and they left in the afternoon. but my mom was nice enough to cook something extra, and they didn't even have anyhing. but it was done at around 3, so i had a leg then. so then, at dinner later i had a leg and a thigh, so half of it was gone, and i figure i'd just finish it off today. but no. i only had a thigh today. so i still have a full portion tomorrow. and i made the rice using the stock that i made. like a week ago, i was watching a cooking show, _simply ming_ i think, and he was making a stock, and he recommended freezing it in cubes, which sounded like a good idea. so i decided to make some. i didn't freeze it into cubes, though. i put it into zipoc bags measured with two cups each, which is a good amount to cook with. it heats up easily in the microwave. i used it for the rice, and i also used it with some canned peas. at the time i did it, i also tried making some risotto, because it sounded interesting how they did it on ming's show. they first sauteed some onions in oil and toasted the rice a little bit with it before adding some wine and then the stock. i didn't have any wine, and it all didn't seem to really make any difference. but it seemed an interesting thing to do. maybe i'll try it again. woah! where did that come from? bill o'reilly is on dave. and o'reilly said they should lay off what happened 35 years ago. and dave said back then, in '69, he was classified 1a and was sitting waiting to be called up and shipped out, but they started the lottery, and that's why he didn't go. but he knew people that went and didn't come back. and there's two schools of thought. you can join the national guard, or volunteer to go there twice. dude. watching matt and trey. funny guys. shame they were on jay. i don't care for jay. if we had had a president who believed in communicating with people, instead of being tough and handling things himself, maybe the public might have been warned about 9/11. the plane that went down in pennsylvania was taken out. people went along with the rejaks one the other planes thinking it was just a hijacking because they had no idea what was going on. but a memo "al qaeda determined to attack in us" could have gotten a wiser president to at least get people looking. but the pubes mindset was to not appear weak. but it's much better to try to get help from people, even if it might make you look a little weak. that's just something pubes can't do. and cnn said it was hard to tell why kerry won the debate. it's because everyone hates whiny bitches, likeque bush was off in his corner. in a debate people try to judge character, and if they can't get it from the words, they'll get it from body language. i'm watching supersize me. in dude's beginning checkup, he did thirty-six push-up, which they said was average for his group, and i thought i could that easy, and dang, but i barely managed thirty. i swear i used to do better. shoot, like 5 years ago i did 4000 push-up over a couple of weeks in sets of 50. aimee had said she liked big shoulders and i asked what i could do, and she said do 5000 pushups. i gave up, sure, because it was pointless. but still, i could do them pretty easily. i've really been lazy lately, i guess. but i'm gonna get back into it. i did some squats two. hey! memphis isn't even in the top 15 fattest cities in america. least healthy city in america my ass. no child left untested. relief from paying your bills. yeah, it used to be we could count on an assassination every twenty years or so. they messed up ron's. maybe they can back on track i came up with the monogamy rights reframing, but lakoff's idea seems a little better. you just ask if they think the government should be able to say who you can and can't marry. this can hit conservative where they live. i was talking to terry and dial today a a mensa book meeting thing, and got terry with this, and she went on about marrying your relatives, which i thought was a little strange, i think her point was that the government already tells people that, and i was willing to take that as an exception, except she never really came clean as to what her position was. i think she actually was in favor of the government interference and had some kind of reason for the anti gay stuff, like there presumably was reason for the anti family stuff, and yet she also said something about how it has been shown that in-breeding isn't a risk, which i think i wrong, but hey. but i thought of something bad that could happen if bush does get elected, and now it turns out that it's about tied again after bush seemed to pull ahead after the repubican convention. right now, the rest of the world kind of hates america, though more than anything else, they hate bush and the government, and not really all of america. but if we were to reelected him, they might just figure that we are really like that nimrod after all. i mean, four years ago maybe we just might not have known what a snot-nosed little evil shit he actually is, but if we go along with him for some more, then maybe we are just his little bitches after all. i mean, what's with this trying to scare everybody that the government is trying to pull? so some ragheads got lucky. are we a bunch of little scaredy pussies now? couldn't average joe sixpack have kicked any of their hairy asses? and seriously what happened to two wrongs don't make a right? 2,752 more wrongs will still not make a right, and i'm sorry to say, killing a bunch of ragheads not only will not make us safer, it has already made us a lot less safe. hopefully it's made bush a lot less safe. he has something coming, if you ask me. then again, the adminstration wants us to be scared so it all works out for them. maybe we'll get back to being nice to people soon, though. but not the french of course. Nope, Doom 3 does not work on my desktop. not enough juice, i guess. doesn't even install, though it doesn't give an error message. it just quits silently.i guess i'll just have to finally upgrade my motherboard. a poison is something you do not recover from. there is a church in monterrey that is using an israeli cell phone jammer to keep cell phones to ring in services. one initeresting thing that Lakoff says is that tax cuts is about making sure that there isn't money for social support programs. they don't like social support. they think everyone needs discipline and shouldn't be coddled. and they use and repeat the phrase "tax relief" so it looks like paying bills is a bad thing. it is a strategy. it turns out that quite a while ago, like 30 years ago, when we were becoming a more sensible place, "conservative" was the dirty word it should be. the regressives decided to get organized, and set up bunches-- dozens--.. of think tanks and groups of thinkers to write stuff and come up with plans. lots of money invested. the progressives don't have stuff like that. when they have money, they end up spending it on helping people, and not on planning, organizing and creating strategy. lakoff does talk about one progressive think tank that he's a part of, the rockridge institute. so right now, just based on the amount of work being done, it's no wonder that the regressives are doing so well. even though they really are pretty obnoxious. if you're poor, it's because you're bad. and not because they just really need the cheap workers and they've made sure that some people stay poor. pinheads. another coolly insidious thing the "no child left behind" program is about testing. where there's testing, there will be failures, so they can punish the failures and not pay for them, and then crush the public school system, and move toward a system with vouchers and private schools where people have to pay for schools. again, another indirect strategy. and tort reform. turns out that public protection lawyers are major contributors to democrats. so if they can limit settlements, they reduce the funding of the dems. plus big corporations can do whatever they want without fearing significant penalty. so kerry won the debate. and he won mostly because of the reaction shots which were against the official rules. good thing the tv people didn't listen to those. pubes just looked really annoyed. and he was ready to explode. that would have been cool. when someone finally gets him in the head with a high powered bullet, i bet someone else will catch it on video. but they're gonna have a vice presidential debate. i saw one commentor say watch that one. the gloves will be off. not that the first one was a love fest. Happy Rocktober! Man, I had a dream when I was taking a nap this afternoon. i was playing guitar. and i was playing better than i actually play, but more in the sense that i played effectively by ear-- i could get the notes i wanted from the sound instead of just sort of randomly getting stuff from the chords and scales. but then it got into the freaky symbolic stuff. the neck go all bendy, rubbery, but i could still sort of play, and then i set it down, and it was broken in the middle. i was thinking probably mostly about the programming i'm doing, which is a fun thing for me, but lately i've been having frustrating problems. then again, i haven't been playing guitar like i wanted to before, and training up my ear. and doing the other stuff i want. so went out shopping for the parts for the science projects in gstronzo gizmos. i had left my lights on, and i guy who works there said hey, your lights are on. not a great start to an evening of shopping. home depot at about 9:45. they closed at ten, so i just wasn't gonna go in, but that guy said you still got fifteen minutes. i was looking for 1/8" copper tubing. nada. plenty of 1/4". so i'm thinking, it sure seems like the guy with the book has written up the recipes with obscure little parts so that you have to go to his web site and buy the stuff from. i'm sure you could do it with 1/4", but he put it with 1/8" which i'm not sure i'm gonna find. and he has a really cool project he calls a gauss gun, with magnets and iron balls, but he uses gold plated iron molybdenum bismuth something or super magnetic alloy super magnets. fuck him. fuck him up his greasy pale white nerd ass. so i went on to the land of the walmartians. i wanted to get a copy of doom3, and maybe some cheap 1/4" copper tubing. but no. denied. and they didn't have the basic 18 gauge wire that i was looking for, which was sitting on impulse buy display at homje depot. i guess walmartians don't do potentially hazardous repairs. lots of extension cords. so i'm thinking, i need to go look at the shotguns, and if by chance walmoron asks what i'm looking for, i'll say a cheap shotgun. something good for shooting niggers, but cheap so i can chuck it in the river when i'm done, but in the back of my mind is that i want something i can use as a grenade launcher. there is a cool recipe in ragnar and the black books for a grenade launcher using a shotgun. you take a shotgun, take a shell and take the shot out and half the powder, and a wooden dowel. you need something on the end of the doel to hold the grenade, but that's pretty much it. simple recipe. something every patriotic citizen should know about when the government starts getting fascist, like it is with pubes in charge. it's funny, i take odd comfort in the thought that when he's reelected, that'll be four more years of opportunity for someone to scramble his brains with lead. so, i got doom3. i don't know if it will even work on my computer, since i don't have the minimum requirement of a pentium4 1.5Mhz. jeez, freakin' hogware. but i also sprung for neverwinter nights. the d&d game. we'll see how it is. so with the guitar think, and the growing extreme distaste for the human race and personal survival, i decided to go to tj mulligans. i've got, like, two serious medical reasons not to drink. but, now that i'm having chest pains, and alcohol can be good for that, i decided, why the hell not? we're at war. wonderful time for being crazy. and speaking of crazy, king's trio is playing "purple rain". brings me back to the wonderful '84-'85 people in my life. ah, the reagan years. so, it's ashley's birthday. i think i heard that right. dana and becky are tending bar. she's sitting with us little people. she did smile at me quite a bit when she stood next to me getting her next coke sort of drink. and she was tapping my guinness as it sat here empty after i had ordered a new one. i thought she was getting one. but she didn't. i don't understand. boo. so, i'm thinking i shoot start praising the name of jebus. just to fuck with the heads of cross worshippers. will they get that it's a simpsons reference? maybe, maybe not. the elderly black lady checking me out at wally world, before picking up my stuff, gave me an intense look in the eye for like a second or two before getting to my stuff. did she know the venom in my heart? was she looking for some reason to deny service, or call in the guardians of a safe world? it was an intense moment. and i don't remember if i backed off, or she did. goddammit, becky got me my third guinness and when she brought it to me, i said, thanks dana. i didn't even really look at her, so with the short straight hair, she seemed like she was her, but then i felt terrible. grr. i tried to make nice and ask her about her house, which she said she lovers. argh. i wonder if actual enlightened people make careless mistakes like that. cool, so i asked dana, doesn't she have a boyfriend? and dana said, she's my sister, her boyfriend is over there somewhere. well, i thought she had just been over with ashley, but it was someone else. interesting reaction, though. and i think dana told ashley about it. in truth, all there is is unchangeability. is there virtue? man is not a being attached to truth. there would be no man without lies. truth is an ideal that is separate from life. but often, people chase this ideal. i don't want to be anything other than me. ok, my count was five, but the tab said for. i guess i could well have lost count. confusion. so I was looking for an OT Hebrew English interlinear bible. i found a couple that looked interesting. one, the cheaper one, actually, by jp green has both the ot and the nt, but has small print and is hard to read, and i already have a greek one. it might be a little better, though, because the other one is an niv one, and the "literal" word for word translations tend more to just match what the niv said. a little too much bias, i think. anyway, looking over the reviews, one mentioned john 21:15, so i looked it up. it's a bit after jesus has risen from the dead and is talking to peter (and remember that peter denied him before this). jesus asks several times, "do you love me?" and peter says back, "you know i love you, lord" and jesus keeps saying tend my sheep. this tubingart i remembered. but there is something you see in the greek that doesn't come out in the translation, that really adds something. first, you gotta remember that there are 3 words in greek that come out as the one word love in english: eros (romantic love), philos (brotherly or family love), and agape (now called christian love but back then they were figuring it out, maybe unconditional love or my greek dictionary says charity). what is actually happening is that jesus is asking "do you love me unconditionally [agapas]?" and peter says "you know, lord, i love you like a brother [philo]". the people reading the english just see this passage as "jesus reinstates peter" which is what my translation puts as the heading of the section, but in addition it has a more profound statement to make. jesus or god wants us to have this special kind of love (agape) and peter (or the solid (rock) christian) has this brotherly love. and it seems like peter is thinking they are the same thing. or maybe even he knows they aren't quite the same, but all he has (right now) is the brotherly love. or maybe he has trouble telling them apart. it is actually one of the central problems in chistianity. paul spends lots of time trying to explain love (agape). and in addition to just having that confusion, peter doesn't just say he loves jesus like a brother, he says jesus knows that. jesus or god knows that there is this situation. what can you do? so he call on peter to tend his sheep. plus he predicts his doom. but another subtle point in there that you can think about with the new interchange, is that maybe it is precisely because he still needs to learn about agape that he is called to be the religious leader. he still has a bit of travelling on his path to do. and so the relevance to us--religious leaders in being teachers are following the path of peter, still trying to perfect their unconditional love while what they may still only have is brotherly love. ok. it's after four in the morning. i was really wound up from reading in "moral politics" by george lakoff, so maybe i should say a little of what struck me. his main thesis is that conservative and liberal politics come from two different views of proper family life, and the notion that the nation is a big family and the government acts as parents. conservatives believe that there should be a strict father who controls with discipline and punishment, so welfare and coddling is bad as are drugs and permitting homosexuality--it's quite complex but a lot of conservative attitudes can fit into this explanation. liberals in a nurturing family, where the more important thing is caring and supporting. it seemed pretty clear reading it that I did know much about this nurturing family concept, which is kind of sad I guess. any kind of asceticism or denial (which i have always been into) can only be seen as a good thing with the strict father mentality. and one thing about the nurturing family concept that hit me is that it is very important to sustain and support and try to maintain social relationships. that's clearly not my thing at all. in fact, i think it's just not an introverted thing, but introverts do like one on one relationships, they just don't like big groups. except that i personally don't care for many one on one relationships either. so it's like finding about a whole different way of living and looking at the world. where having fun is always a good thing. not like some people who are always afraid someone somewhere is having a good time (i forget who that's supposed to be, maybe baptists, but it's generally a protestant thing). and in that world view, i have some pretty bad attitudes, which is probably true. one of the things i did, to pass the time, in addition to looking up interlinear bibles was looking at match.com. there is this one girl, who they match me at 82%, which is the highest of anyone, is this gorgeous girl, who seems to be a little jesus freak, but works as an it manager. and maybe a bit of an airhead, but she said one of her favorite things is intelligent conversation. which i expect is pretty one-sided on the rare occasions that someone provides her with it. so i was struck by my own bitterness. plus i think i already wrote her once, like maybe a month ago, and she didn't write back, but match.com decided to send her to me again in their periodic list of matches. grr. unfortunately, i don't think i'm actually a match according to what she is looking for. turns out, she makes more than $75k and is only looking for someone who makes a comparable amount. reasonable enough, i guess. for a stuck-up jesus freak. i was going to write her again, but Jordy's browser crashes when i log in to match.com. it will let me see the prospect's profile when i click the link from the email, but if i go to sign in to try to send an email, it crashes. very frustrating. and in the hours since then i could have turned on my desktop, but i moved on to other things. plus it's probably best if i cool down for that one. another thing i did was to write aimee with a link to bible the stuff up at the top here, and to ask about chatting, but her autoemail at work sent a message back out of town. more disappointment. i guess i'm just lonely. i even read some of wendy's page, and even her bf joey's. joey had stuff about the childfree section of livejournal. trippy. i probably would have been more into that, but lakoff's analysis of family values and political attitude has me looking at it in a new way. and now it's after 5, so i really need to try to sleep. one thing that might be promising, i'm doing a little perl at work, so maybe i'll get around to doing my web page interface thing now that i'm getting a refresher. another disturbing thing is that bush has the values that must be more ingrained in me, and yet they are values that i reject. plus he's anti-intellectual, and i have to admit that i pretend to be intellectual, so he's against me personally. and it's mutual. they got the whole debate thing tonight, and i'm expecting a defeat for kerry unless bush comes across as the pinhead he is. and this is a nonconfrontational debate where the candidates can't talk to each other, so kerry can't stump him with a surprise and fluster him like mccain did. i expect kerry to lose it because he's going to be boring. georgie-porgie is going to keep saying he flip-flops and make him look weak, which is morally bad in the conservative mind-set (says lakoff). kerry needs to shoot for caring and helpful and try to be a little upbeat. maybe he could show how pubes is a cold baby-killer. so, i had a craving for burritoes a while back and i got some today (or yesterday by now). ate two, wanted some more. ate two more, felt pretty full, but still wanted some more, then ate two more. then i read how many calories there were. should have done that first, i guess. 300 each. so that was 1800 calories all in a bunch. that's a whole days worth. grr. luckily, i didn't eat much else. and i hadn't eaten so much the day before. oink. decided to try writing people from match.com. it's nice just to write to people. and one of them actually wrote back tonight. so i got to write again. it's better writing to someone who was written. went to the bookstore. this time i actually found a book i had previously made a special trip for. looked in a different section this time. gonzo gizmos. very simple little science projects. nothing like the spud gun, which Freddie successfully put together. I'm just not yet much of a tinker, but I'm hoping success with these simple things might encourage me to do more. because, hey, I do have a couple of degrees in engineering, so i know theoretically how to do stuff, but i haven't really done enough (actually any) completed projects to have confidence or the kind of practical experience and improvising habits that it really takes to get stuff done. there's a little steam powered boat (no moving parts, just a steam jet) made of a plastic bottle, a candle, some 1/8" copper tube, and some tape. i really should try that one. and i should make the motor and finally try that crystal radio experiment that cub scouts do. man, he talks about how troops in world war one made radios with rusty razor blades. grr. the girl who wrote asked me if i ever came out of the computer to play. i'm not so sure. man, this thing does not do well in full sun. i'm sitting out in the overton park shell. some kind of pagan fest thing. so, this morning i had a couple of dreams that mad me think in a different way about interpreting dreams. i had a dream with a theme that i have fairly often. i was in school, but i had trouble. finding where my next class was. when i woke up, i realized that it was probably more about the feeling. and the feeling was not knowing what i should have been doing. so it was about my concern that i don't where mylife is going. and i had another dream where we had been sitting on a hill, and the other peoplein my family had been packing up to go away, but i just sat there trying to pick stuff up and i didn't go on. which i guess is about my not moving away, and getting on with my life. some kind of harvest celbration. i will admit that there was one table where people had some canned stuff., so at least one person did, presumable have a harvest. "pagan pride" another thing i thought of this morning. atheist need to establish some sort of source for optimistic feelings. christians have going for them the whole things are the way their supposed to be, and the world is good. but rationally, we can see how people have realy made things pretty good for themselves. i mean, even people with stupid delusions can do well. man, no sooj. :( i see her sitting up here at the top. don't know what happened. bit of a waste of an afternoon. saw people. drunk girl victoria introduced herself. and some fag bob. there were lots of cuties. some lady who sat next to me with an animal rights magazine. two-toned blonde brunette. some girl who looks to be about 6'5". an extremely pale girl. there's a subway that just opened up nearby. next to the blockbusters. i got a six inch turkey on wheat with provolone and lettuce, tomatoes, onion, and mayonnaise. it was pretty good. man. this morning i found in my mouth a little chip of something, that looked like a little piece of tooth or bone or egg shell. but it's probably tooth. and i reach back and feel the farthest back tooth on the right top, and i feels jagged like it's broken off. i think it's a wisdom tooth, though and it doesn't come in flat, so it isn't really used. and i'm afraid it has a cavity. i've never had a cavity before. i guess i'm due. but i had just eaten a hotdog. maybe it was from that. it seems to me the headline should be more like "cnn supports tyranny" instead of Laura Bush heckled by mom of soldier killed in Iraq. and i know they'll change their gripper line on this story. suffice it that another protester was arrested by the bush campaign. i guess every time they do that, it becomes less newsworthy. it really should chill the blood of any american, but i'm guessing they figure if they do it enough, people will thing its ok, instead of the creeping evil act it really is. they really are chipping away at the freedom-loving nature of american society. and it really seems to be a cold and calculated plan. scaring people, and making it look like bush protesters are lawbreakers. yeah, i rented south park's _the passion of the jew_ dvd. those guys really like to make money. one of the episodes was about illegal music downloads, in addition to christian rock, which gave is a theme close enough to put on the dvd. they may have been conceived as a set to put out as a dvd to make money from mel gibson's passion dvd. and i mention that episode because i went to copy the disk, and it said it was copyrighted. i don't really copy much, yet, so i hadn't seen that before. pissed me off for a second. i googled to find out the scene, then i just had to use another program that was already installed. the bums. i paid money to rent it, so at least there was a possibility that they weren't just out the money. video stores really should just get masters of everything available, and make copies if the need to rent more. blockbuster has such a pitiful selection. i really need to look into some of those by mail things. happy ides of september! happy monday the 13th! es ist zeit für rache. wir mussen die juden ausrotten. well, it's ten till three in the morning. can't fall back asleep, though i'm still kind of tired. or maybe i'm just not waking up so i can have an excuse not to do work. so at 8:00, i really wanted to take a nap, and then get up and do work. but first i wrote a little in my journal, the various trivial little things that had just happened to me, and then it took me a while to fall asleep,so it was maybe 10 or after when i fell asleep. and i was thinking that if i got up at 4, given the 2 hour nap in the afternoon, that would make 8 hours sleep, which would be plenty, but what would more likely happen is that i'd wake up at 3 and not be able to go back to sleep, and then not really have enough. but of course, it has ended worse than the bad situation i was expecting. i don't like not getting enough sleep. but then i thought that maybe i could manage today getting ready to go to work before everything, and then taking a nap just before, when i'm usually waking up like at 6:30, and getting up at 7:45 and then leaving immediately. something new to try. and i decided to wake up and read about that one famous really successful american who was well known to have an alternate sleep plan. i googled edison and catnaps and i found a page of quotes. and i know that a little of this is just more procrastination, but i wanted to write about some of my reactions to them, now that i've thought a little more about life and all. first, edison got a lot of stuff done. he was successful, and he worked hard or long at getting useful stuff done. and it's important that he didn't just work, but always kept an eye on doing stuff that was going to help people out in some way--he focused on what people needed. he said he got maybe six hours sleep, with four or five hours a night and catnaps during the day. i read a while back a description of what happens when you don't sleep enough--you fall asleep right away, which clearly describes someone who catnaps, and really describes most people. having trouble or taking time to fall asleep means you're getting plenty. my experience also has been that once you get about the right enough, you slip fairly easily into too much, and then it's easy again to keep sleeping, which is probably not a good thing. so it seems easier to sleep 9 to 14 hours, then a reasonable amount of 8 or so. i'm not really sure what to do with sleeping 7. it seems like if i have slept too much the day before, like yesterday, i naturally wake up such that i would get about 7, like today, but i feel tired in the morning. but i get the feeling that an important thing in there is that the time of day has a lot more to do with when i feel tired or more awake. whatever. enough about sleep. edison also said something kind of deep, which i don't buy. "show me a satisfied person and i'll show you a failure" roughly. but the whole spiritual quest seems to me a matter of seeking the ultimate satisfaction. i could actually be wrong about that, though. giving up the whole attachement to personal ego and desire thing isn't actually satisfaction. but it sounds like it. anyway, this constant striving does seem like a whole western way of doing things, even calvinist if i might use a silly social studies concept. it does lead to the kind of material success that edison exemplifies. and he was proud not to have invented implements of killing. whatever. like having light bulbs didn't let other people plan and carry out wars and such. what else. he was happy to take other peoples ideas and find things to do with them. and he was concerned that people don't learn to think. learning math is supposed to be about learning to think. i think learning to program a computer is a little better for it, too. though maybe i'm not quite seeing it right this second. clarity, precision, and working till you get to the end are a big deal in math. here's quote: "The three things that are most essential to achievement are common sense, hard work and stick-to-it-iv-ness....." i think you get that in math, and if that's all you get, it's worth the work. i get the feeling that in school, that's all they are really going for. the ability to do math is needed sometimes, but it is not so important as the habits of methodically working through stuff. and the greek word "mathemas" means learning or science. and i looked up mathematics on dictionary.com for the etymology. it doesn't exactly agree with me, but i looked up the word in my greek dictionary. one other thing i got from it, is that they say math has three parts-- arithmetic, geometry, and analysis. analysis uses letters, and includes algebra, analytic geometry, and calculus. i'm not sure i an quite go along with how they break that up since analytic geometry really sounds like it is geometry, and trigonometry uses letters too. actually geometry uses letters too. i guess i'm really not clear on what they mean. but it's an interesting idea that there is a kind of math that is "analysis". i hadn't really thought of it with that term. so, great, now it's four o'clock when i wanted to get up and do work, but i got two hours less sleep than i wanted. grr. at least i thought and wrote a little more about life and stuff. i really do need to try to be more practical and focus on helpful stuff. some computer stuff i want to do is to get something simpler for using a computer as an answering machine. they could be doing that, but aren't, so i think something is wrong. then again, kim did have it going on her computer and was using it, so just using it as an answering machine is not a big thing. that whole phone tree thing, though, seems like it could be done. information and help menus. i wonder what people use for that. one thing people would like is a secretary that would call people for them. making appointments and ordering stuff. it's just the kind of thing a computer phone thing could do. maybe not very well, but it could do it. and certainly, a computer could call a person up and remind him of his appointments. there are all sorts of gadgets that can do appointment books, but the phone and talking really is the proper interface. nagging. it's not great to get a machine to nag you, but who else is going to? you've got alarm clocks, that's a start. the lentil soup tastes better the next day. got the cantenna. the signal in the house is only one bar less than full, so its putting it to maximum doesn't tell me much. and i'm pretty sure this scale is logarithmic anyway, so it might not make much difference. i don't feel like going out to starbucks tonight because i need to get that laptop worked on. i haven't worked on it yet tonight, though. not good. i tried making a lentil soup, but it turned out pretty tasteless. i didn't have any carrots or garlic or sage, and i didn't put in any sausage. i had peppers and onions, but that didn't make much difference. it isn't terrible, it just doesn't taste like the good lentil soups that i remember. it just tastes like boiled lentils. it's food, though. and i did gain a couple of pounds from that steak yesterday, so it's better if i don't eat so much. i didn't have a vegetarian day. i had a turkey sandwich for lunch. with onions, lettuce, tomato, and cheese. it was quite tasty. unlike this lentil soup. but eggs for breakfast, thought that's more octo-lavo vegetarian. and i googled octo-lavo vegetarian there were 45 hits and i was on page 2. i bet if i keep talking about it, i might make it to page one. it's just such a silly term. washing eight times. and yet it gets used. and i went ahead and ordered the star trek original series, first season, from amazon. just $85--that's where i got how much i was willing to spend when i went to buy it around here. and free shipping. no chekov this season, though. and i watched "joey". i don't think that character can carry an episode, much less a series. it wasn't very funny, but friends wasn't very funny either. i will admit that i did laugh in a couple of spots. the physical stuff is good. but some bits were kind of painful, and having a "rocket scientist" nephew and roommate just doesn't seem engaging. just fake.
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"an unquantified scientific degradation". a charming turn of phrase describing the effect of the crash landing of the genesis solar probe. i suppose they don't know for sure that it was a complete loss, hence it is unquantified. but if smashing into the desert doesn't ruin i, i don't know what would. i mean, they were going to catch it in the air, so presumably it would have been damaged, or contaminated simply by landing on the ground with a parachute. but it has a surprisingly hopeful sound because maybe they have something they can use. "negative drogue negative chute". laura prepon blonde. she was really pretty as a red-head, and is still pretty, but it just isn't the same. now she seems a little common. so i went out and looked for the classic star strek season one set. didn't find it at walmart. i might have missed it, i guess, but i didn't see it. and i decided i would only buy it for 86.03 or less. and then i tried borders. still nothing. i can't buy it if they don't have it. but it was early enough that best buy was still open, do i tried them. $107. blech. way more than i was going to pay. i guess i should order it from amazon. so i decided to go buy some food, and i went to the first tennessee machine at exxon. and i went in there, and they have an interent kiosk right next to it. i didn't try surfing, and they had a pitiful rate of 19 cent per minute. actually that might be less than what aol was charging ten years ago. i forget. anyway, i think it's cool. so i go to kroger. i found a porterhouse at $8 discounted like $5 because it seemed to be getting old. about 20 ounce. and some chips and some o.j. and i went home and ate the steak and chips and watched "natural born killers". so i tried to have fun. i should have been doing some work, but it's good to pamper yourself sometimes. or maybe i was procrastinating. i got my citibank bill, and i wasn't too happy. i owed more than i thought. so i looked at last month's bill, and this was right, i had just forgotten how much it was. also my limit used to be smaller, but it had recently gone up even before this latest increase. the one putting it at $25k was only a $300 increase. the thing that bugged me was that the minimum payment went up this month. the balance had actually gone down a little bit, the the minimum payment went up. one of the interest rates (there are several on this account) went up .25%, but i run the numbers and that made less than a dollar's difference. the big thing was that this billing period was for four more days. so 9/11 is coming up in a few days. today they had on the nova episode about why the towers fell. won an emmy. sounded like they en wouldn't have fallen if the insulation on the steel beams hadn't blown off in the airplane crashes. the floor trusses buckled and broke from the heat. a lot of stuff had gotten smashed, but it held after the crash. in the north tower, the plane hit the center and smashed the core, such that the people above were trapped, and the core collapsed first. in the south tower, the plane hit at an angle, not annihilating the core, leaving a stairwell for people to get out, and the shell collapsed first. i think it wouldn't be so bad for pubes to be reelected if he was assassinated after two or three years. i got an "it's over" feeling for kerry just a couple days ago. something about him saying something about being against the war, and the pubes team hitting him with the flip-flop thing again. plus they had a bounce from the convention. kind of a smell of blood feeling. oh well. those tomato plants have a serious will to live. most of their leaves are dead and brown, but i just picked half a dozen tomatoes. they're smaller than before in the season, but still nice. i just ate a burger. it feels more like a lead weight. oh man. i just found out that classic star trek's first season is out on dvd for $90. it's only a matter of time before i go out and get it. i should just go get it. i've been spending too much money lately, though. so rhi had already given away the java contract, but they talked to me anyway because they get them pretty regularly, and need people right away. not quite, but almost a waste of time. actually, probably a waste of time. seems like they wanted j2ee and websphere, whichi just haven't done. i think i have a book on it. and i didn't really care toomuor the l ittle blonde girl brandy. a marketter. and citibank raised my credit limit yet again. i think they are just trying to keep me afloat. still it was a nice, if silly gesture. and it's at that magical number $25k. but i'm at a penalty interest rate of like 28%, which i didn't think was legal. oh well. so i orderedSeptember 2, 2004 September? where does the time go. wherever morris day says, i guess. base, color, and topcoat. just aline from a nail polish commercial. but it just got me. women just work too hard. so, rhi called me up asking if i could do a five week java contract. i said no on at first, thinking i didn't want to give up the thing with bruce for something so short, but i talked to bruce, and he was cool with it, if i'd be available to help if computer stuff came up. so i called her back and i have to go in tomorrow. i'm afraid their going to make me take a java test, and i might be rusty.and from the certification test, they can be pretty darn tricky. maybe i should look over the stuff. watched a movie, the anarchist cookbook. actually, i just now listened to the commentary. the writer/director jordan somebody seemed really up and interesting, though his crew seemed a little quiet. it was cool. a little nonviolent give |