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we had a couple of coupons that gave us two free two liter bottles of coke zero. this time i noticed the new ingredient--acesulfame potassium. it does have aspartame, but it has that too. it's just another sweetener, recently approved. it has a bit of a bitter aftertaste like saccharine, so they mix it with aspartame. i just tried some. quite noticeable aftertaste. we'll see if it makes me feel sick. and there is a substance called resveratrol, that may have anti-aging properties. it occurs in grape skins, and might be the stuff in red wine that lets the frenchies stay so healthy with the fatty diet. it also can activate one of the genes that gets activated in the calorie restriction diet that makes animals live longer, and has been shown at least to make yeast live longer. unfortunately, eating it doesn't seem to provide enough to activate the gene in people, according to one source i saw. still, it's a reason to drink red grape juice. maybe i can find some extracts somewhere, like at the wild goats market. pattern recognition? recognition? i'm seeing more things that suggest that we don't ever go one way. it is never just analyzing and taking things in. it is always construction. we try to get our internal model to create something like what is coming in. to understand is to imitate. to make a copy. and then once we can make that initial copy, remembering is making that copy again. it is not repeating an input. it is repeating the initial output we had. this is not the way we think of it now. but it seems to make sense to me. saw some mit bunch on ai. actually googled artificial intelligence optimism. i forget what they called themselves, but they said they would figure out intelligence in ten years. they even said that some might say they've heard that before. they had an interesting example, though, that in thinking we often come up with a visual situation or example to manipulate to try to solve a problem. as opposed to more traditional ai thing which would be more like explaining something in words and never coming up with a concrete image or example that you could picture. it might be interesting to see if anyone ever really does that, or do we also imagine some situation. if not, then ai might really have issues. that embodied stuff does point in that direction. played piano for a couple of hours today. christmas music practice. songbook with chord. they have a little bit from jesu joy of man's desire. but the arrangement is incomplete. makes me really want to find and play some bach. there's also that thing from ludwig van's 9th. so ditto for the beethoven. i think i appreciate it now more in my old age. and i'm getting better at the _christmas time is here_. really cool, rich, but tricky jazz chords. maybe i should study more music. reminds me of some computer projects i wanted to do. a program to analyze sound and pull out the notes. maybe something to do singing, voice production for singing. i'm not sure if anyone has tried very had. i know speech synthesizers all sound crappy. and i wanted to hook up a midi keyboard so i could add tunes to the journal. so much to do. so little initiative. talking to ben at the christmas party. he could see us having really neat pdas. doesn't buy ai optimism. and i was trying to talk about kurzweil. sure, we're getting the cpu power, but the software isn't there. i remembered that kurzweil had a chapter about what looks promising with the software, but i couldn't explain it. i looked at it again and i'm still unclear. and really, it seems short, and a little weak. is viewpoint is sort of moving towards getting a brain simulator so we can upload ourselves. neurobiological analysis, i guess. maybe i'm just missing. ben was totally pessimistic. i'm hopeful, but i'm thinking there isn't so much in kurzweil's thing to justify optimism. the consciousness book continues to be interesting. how consciousness is really full of gaps. we just think we have a continuous panoramic stream, even though it isn't even very close to that. we just don't know any better. sue has already talked about the buddha. a bundle theorist. the self is just a bundle and not a real thing in itself. more people believe the self is a real thing, but sue is into the bundle theory and that the self is an illusion. heard that one somewhere before. we had the piano tuner out. my mom said she always wanted to play. but she made her kids play. and she keeps trying to get me to play. and i played a little. and she i was already pretty good. but i need to practice. being bossy. i see it in a different light, though. i said she should learn, but she said she can't do the two hands doing separate things and keeping the beat. hmm. they do have different ways of learning now, but she's so j'ish. once she decided against something, like computers, she stubbornly won't change. then again, if i don't go out and spend money, i don't write much. christmastime. the charlie brown christmas cd is in the player for when i takea shower, and i have chicago's chistmas cd (25) going now. mom has the tree done. fire going. got some soy hot chocolate. now i have an issue. i have a car insurance bill due thmonth. i can send them half now, or i can try to scrape up enough to pay it all. i don't quite have it all. and then i would have much less for christmas presents. i should probably just pay half, but maybe i'll have more money later. so maybe i should wait. and i really should be able to find some kind of christmassy temporary job. i want to be doing computer installs and stuff. i applied at best buy online again. i did once before, but it said it's only good for 45 days. i get the teaching company catalogs, and they often have articles which are little samples of the courses. one little sample talks about the kalahari bushmen. they used to be called the !kung, but that's not what they call themselves, so now they are called the dobe je. hunter gatherers. they never go hungry, and only need to work 20 hours a week. hmm. since they are nomadic, it would be inconvenient if they had a bunch of possesions, since they would have to carry them around. they talk about the idea of affluence, which can be used to compare cultures. one measure of affluence, to a western mind, would be how much stuff you have, and they wouldn't look so good by that measure. and anyway, like i said, for nomadic folk, too much stuff is inconvenient. another way to judge affluence is leisure time, and with that, they do very well. better than poor american wage/salary slaves. and they also consider the fraction of people who go to bed hungry. i'm not sure where they come up with a third in some places, but there are still places in america where folks are hungry, and different places in the world have hungry folk. the dobe don't go hungry. they have some kind of nut that is their biggest food, and it takes maybe a couple of hours to get a week's worth. low population density. not the worst life. they didn't mention the chance of being eaten by lions, though. i guess everyone has their own problems. some anthroplogist calls it the zen road to affluence. want nothing, have nothing. the wednesday ai lunch at a-tan is dead for now. not enough folk showing up. just me and stan lately. may try in january again. he suggested a couple psychology web sites-- brains, minds, and media and science and consciousness review which you could google if you want. and i brought susan blackmore's consciousness book. stan said he was buds with her. he's actually in the acknowledgements, and got emailed early drafts of chapters. she also wrote _the meme machine_. she started out researching parapsychology, but didn't find any evidence, and gave it up. she was a lecturer, but at recently decided to just become a writer. women learn about what an ideal man is like from their fathers. but how did their fathers act towards them romantically? they most probably didn't act interested, which may be one reason that women really aren't so attracted to someone who seems interested. i've see the uninterested approach recommended by someone who just empirically decided that, and i don't thin that was the reason he came up with why that should be, but that might have something to do with it. in esquire magazine, i saw a thing about a sort of porn site beautifulagony.com. a little bit different in that there is no nudity. just shoulder up shots. but it's video of people having orgasms. plus sound. now the thing that gets me is that have a thing that if you have a blog, and sign up with them to get an idea, and you put a link to them with that idea and a couple of people sign up with them because of your link, you can get credit for a month. so they get like a minimum of $30, and you get something that they charge for, but they could potential give for free. hmm. whatever. i'm sure they spend money getting the folks to do it, and there is some expense to them, i guess. they have a free sample. if i had way too much money again and broadband, i might spend the $20 and download all they had. then again, i was thinking i was going to subscribe to the hustler site for a month and download oodles of their stuff, which they said you could do, but i never did that. anyway, i don't mind having a link, but since i wouldn't expect anyone reading me to actually spend money on porn, i'm not bothering to get one of their little id thingies. i also looked a little closer at their system. they have various banners and things that you could use. they even have some little teaser videos that you could put on your site, but they're just frustrating little bits cut off before the happy ending. and it all just makes me miss my sweetie. who hasn't called. grr. my mom said i should be looking for a job with what they have in the paper. and she looked it up and it was careerbuilder.com. grr. where does she think i've been looking? I can't seem to stop spending money. argh! at starbucks. getting a cider extra hot. was at the ai lunch. me, stan, and his son sam. i said i looked at some algebra classes there when i was trying to get in the t2t program. i didn't explain it all so clearly, and stan kept needing to ask clarification questions. and i mentioned that they didn't have a computer teacher. so ws kids take it at ridgeway. but sam had transport issues so he didn't take it. anyway, stan suggested that they might not have hired me because they picked up that i wasn't completely interested. bit of a tough memory, though. jimmy carter at davis kidd today. right about now. i when by there from lunch. to see the line. and maybe look for a computer book. but the section with the computerbooks was kind of cordoned off, with a big flag behin it. lots of secret service guys. not quite the suits you see in the movies, but very obvious. i know there's something i'm forgetting. i'm reading something from the singularity institute. i forget the link. "Levels of by rganization in General Intelligence" by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. they have some kind of challenge page saying they want programmers to create a seed AI. would need to be one in 10,000 or 100,000. and yet they have maybe two people and can't really afford to pay them. more hype. the paper has some interesting ideas. it insists that an ai really needs a sensory level and that higher levels need to be able to feed back to recreate patterns at the lower level. something like what hawkins was talking about. starbucks gets your name, and calls it out. so everybody can know your name. kind of a potentially friendly practice. the cider doesn't last long enough. they were really, really cheerful, though. not really in the mood for it. it occurs to me that there are two different things that are part of artificial intelligence. there's trying to make computers do things that we do intelligently, and there's trying to find the key general process we use in our intelligence. i am interested in the second and not so much the first. and the distinction is important be computers handle information in their own way, and can do these sorts of thing much better when they do it their way. maybe, while stumbling around doing working on that, we might find the general process, but maybe not. speaks to what i want to do with my life. kurzweil talks about upload a person into an intellient machine. this assumes that the self is a real thing. it isn't. at best we can only say we are the same person now that we before. i mean, it is only a kind of belief or way of talking. if we do the whole uploading thing, it will still only be a way of talking. kurzeil also does the whole "which god?" response to the question "Do you believe in God". and God with a capital 'G' as if were the name of some object or person. If something exists, it must have a location. that's locgical reasoning principle i came up with a long time ago to help me with questions like this. it also helps to understand what kind of thing a thing might be. does love exist? then where is it. well, sure, it's in the heart and mind of someone who loves. which makes it a little more like a thought or action. but then, you think about god. is it just a thought? if you've gone done one of the common cultural routes, there is only one god, and he is the creator. generally past tense, but i would probably have to say that maybe it's more useful to think present tense as well. because you have a question, was it created long ago and is now neglected? that sure wouldn't be very nice. most people want it to be a benevolent god, and frankly are counting on it for their religion to work. maybe it's true and maybe it's not. it is logically possible that there is a god but he is not benevolent. i'm not sure what arguments they use other than "we say so, and don't you think so too?" which makes it subject to being merely accepted because of social pressure whether or not it's true. so the concept has issues. i'm an exercise minimalist. i just did one set of the sun salutation. i guess that takes about two minutes. if i did a dozen sets, which i think is a recommendation from the book i got the instruction from, that might be a real workout. i think she was an angel. maybe 5'11. red-hair. fuzzy white sweater. couple of spots ahead of me here in line at starbucks. flitted a little bit quietly and then was gone. a sign. i'm not sure of the proper order they need. venti soy extra-hot nowhip hot chocolate. the knee i bumped doesn't hurt, but the other does. it was the knee i hurt as a kid. maybe that's it. or it could be gout. but the mood is a lot better. it could have been the letter from Linda, or just haven't written stuff. or maybe it was the hot chocolate. or a combination. didn't go see _wizard of oz_. wasn't really my school. and it's just something for the little kids, anyway. i was out a doug's. maybe some javaish ejb stuff at hilton. the laptop he wants to get for me is about looking professional. extra hot rocks! i didn't say something interesting that mark weiss said he was into on wednesday. he's a counselor. he uses some ki? of trauma release therapy which involves remembering and thinking about tramautic events, and then hi, tapping on acupuncture points to release the blocked energy flow and reduce the stress that comes with the trauma. because the big problem with traumatic memories is the trouble that it takes us in trying to hold back and resist the painful memories. he's got a web page that had links to it. i think it was markweissphd.com i don't care if it weighs a ton. i had a bit of wine at doug's. and i had a little at aimee's . i don't know what that's about. and i've got this bottle sometime for one of my cook-outs. they had a little mechanical puzzle at temperance. one of those with metal rings and a string through slot on a pole. i have forgotten one of the details, though-- whether the rings on the string were the same size or smaller than the ring around the pole you are supposed to remove. i have a runny nose. grr. so gary was at the doctor, and he had something. and the doctor said "it isn't you. it's in your genes." and he said "i'm gonna get me a new pair of pants." whole bunch of folks at temperance. at least ten. let's see. me, gary, marsha, neville, david and marilyn,david norris, mary, susan and nathan, brent and his wife (great, i've forgotten her name again). women are crazy. take my wife. please. i fried some chicken up again yesterday. ate way too much. finished the hot chocolate. decided to try asparklying juice they have. bit of a waste. and, there was this little pack of three jailtail. i wanted to see if they would get up and move to the good chairs in the pair. i'm in one of those. they left, though. could have gotten half a gallon of oj for the price. but wouldn't be here. live and learn. that was one of the things in the hp movie. the girls all moved in packs, so it was hard to approach them to ask them out. so i decided to go to mulligans. some cover band. a tired _turn the page_. i guess that's the idea. but it just strikes me as funny. they had a purple haze that made me feel like listening and staying. seems like the guitarist is somewhat serious. sang the haze. and did a kind of shy what's so funny about peace love and understanding. but there was a cover. and i only took out $10. it smelled of pork products in there, anyway. and some kind of wedding party. fairly lame. but then, i'm fairly lame, my own self. some kind of buxom girls, though. and even though they kept repeating it, i couldn't remember their name. but they said it again. shifting gears. no wifi. bummer the two orders ahead of me were 170 degrees and 130 degrees. barista asked "the venti soy.. andy? do you want whipping cream on that?" i'm still trying to get my head around why they think someone who bypassed cow milk, for whatever reason, would want cow cream. i suppose it's possible, and they should ask. maybe i'll start saying no-whip. but that would be conceding to the stupidity of the system. anyway, i said no and asked how hot could he make it. and he said he'd already poured it. thanks for the lip, pal. to get him to answer my question, i said, for next time. if they ask for extra hot, he can make it 180. but otherwise 160. i want to pound them into dust. that's the kind of feeling i've been having today. i chopped some wood. i hit my knee pretty hard on the door frame. i posted on the intp list a reply to this german guy that humanity isn't going into space. maybe machines could, but they would more likely just fix whaever emotional problem made us think it was a good idea. i thought i had a cute play on words. he was saying we would go into space, and i said "Who's we, Deutschkind?" i don't know if it works. my german isn't all that good. "deutsch" is german, and "kind" in german is child. but i'm thinking it might also look like german-kind. because i was going to go on and say he's just another german looking for lebensraum. probably not necessary. but at least i was looking towards the next move in the conversation. art recently gave a talk on discourse process. on of the experiments they tried was to have people think of the first ten things they would say in one half of a phone conversation, and the experiment would be to see when the conversation would break down. the average was on the second move. the harry potter movie was alright. seemed like a lot of bits left out, and maybe needed to be already familiar with it. actually, maybe they trimmed it so all the necessary information to understand it was there. there was this look from sports hero krum and hermione, and a little look down and smile. really understated, but you could totally get it. i guess it's a kids thing, so it isn't particularly deep. the whole thing with the dance was i guess a bigger deal in this than i remember from the book. harry and ron wait too long to ask whom they really want, and then they ask these twins. and it was really horrible to watch. they were all really cute and all. but shoot. and then hermione talked about having guts to ask early and not as a last resort. i felt harry had a bit of an excuse because he was sort of obligated to go, if though he didn't really care about. just looking for arm candy. ron never even danced with his date. bad memories. i can only hope i can be inspired to train or do something because of this. but i was thinking. this little school dance thing is all about getting ready fro the real world where you do need to task a risk and ask. if you are going down that whole breeder path. which i'm not. my other knee is hurting me too. does that seem right to you? so, i have a bad habit of spending money to help me feel better. and i do spend money when i think i'm doing pretty well. i was thinking about my bad habits. i was thinking that e-mailing aimee was a bad habit. i e-mailed her a while ago with some book suggestions, and she did pick one of mine, _on intelligence_, which is still in the car from the meeting yesterday. and then i thought of a few more, and told her. and i told her how the ai lunch was going. at that one, it was just stan and me, and i said it wasn't lloking so good. she had said she might want to go to one. and she said that again. so next week, when it went a little better, and there were four of us, i said it was going better. but at the meeting she didn't ask about it. and i didn't say anything. and i realize that she really doesn't particularly want to hear from me. it's just a bad habit i get into now and again. there's a couple in the two comfy chairs next to me. i actually moved from the corner, where i had to sit even though some numbnuts just left his book bag in one of them and didn't sit there for, like 15 minutes. but i moved over there and sat down. but saw the other good chair by itself was free, and moved over there. and then the old worse half of the couple sat down in one of the two. so i got a call from ted simpson. mus alumni phone-a-thon for donation. missed them at the reunion. and he put owen tabor on the phone. he said he ahd mentioned me recently. he was talking to beth edmonson. and back when he was taking trig or something, he came over to my house for maybe 45 minutes, and i said this stuff was easy, and i explained a bunch of stuff to him. he made it sound memorable. ted gave me dede malmo's e-mail. maybe we could get together. something at malmomemphis.com. not bad memories, i guess. but i was a different person then. no relation, now, i think. but dumbledore introduces the pensieve. and suggests that harry extract or release the memories of his bad dream of voldemort. wouldn't it be nice. burn, burn, burn in a burning ring of fire. yeah. i would have liked to go see some goth chicks. some dude talking about chick who took all his stuff. atm cards. guns. watch. aw. divorce is pending. and it sounded like someone is doing the wizard of oz. i wonder if it's hutch again. maybe i'll drive down ridgeway and look for a sign. yeah, they're doing it. maybe i'll go watch it. nostalgia. got a paul mccartney live cd in the player in the car. back in the early seventies, there was some paul tune that i liked to dance to. i'm not sure. could have been band on the run. i was different then, too. so, aimee had a problem in _on intelligence_ with a quote "but really, there are no random thought." i guess it's that old denial of free will that materialism has. wow, i was in a bad mood most of the day. i think it was a disarming e-mail from dr. Linda on the intp list that got me to laugh, and then i was better. funny. i was really wanting to go out to mulligans and write something. i had some wine at the book meeting at aimee's, and that could have been and excuse to drink some more. i don't know. after seeing that a cream pie only costs $3, i don't feel like wasting the money as much. sitting by the fire. but the tv is on. i don't write well when the tv is on. there was a commercial for coke zero. maybe i should try it. seems like diet drinks make me feel sick. at mike's the other day, i had some sugar free cool-aid and it did. before that, at the wedding, i had some diet dr. perrper at mike's folk's house and felt sick for most of the day. thing for superman returns. sounded like they had brando. so, what was there to write about? was going down to freezing yesterday, so i started a fire. didn't turn on the heat, and thought that would be good enough. it was quite cold in the morning. cold enough that the battery in the thermostat didn't work. so i turned the heat on. and my computer mysteriously wouldn't turn on. came up with a little striped color screen that i've never seen before. came up after i reset it. i think it must have been from the cold. it would have warmed up a little after the minute or so. when i turned the heat on, the thermostat recovered a bit and said it was 53 degrees. so, i'm reading kurzweil's _the singularity is near_. he mentions the fermi paradox. if civilizations progress the way he thinks, an advanced technology should be able to spread across the universe. but we don't see any such. so kurzweil concludes that we must be the most advanced. which is pretty amazing arrogance. another option is that an advanced civilization would just leave the universe. personally, i think his notion of always increasing and expanding is an emotional problem of his and the other transhumanist, and machines that become more intelligent than us do not have that problem. bummer, man. was at the ai-lunch at a-tan. stan was sick. there were some other people there, though. pat paterson, who works at nasa and is working on stan's project. he's studied philosophy, math, and comp sci, but systems engineering is his degree. there was also mark weiss, who used to go to them. he's a psychologist and counselor. not much happening. and the cog sci seminar is student presentations. i waited outside there, but they didn't break and let in other folk. so i've got nothing. there's some kind of conference happening. here. pat said art is going to give a talk on auto-tutor but it's part of the conference thing, i guess. i was going to maybe try to get on a computer and try the pictionary demo. but it doesn't seem like i will. and i read a message about it on the onintelligence.org forum. there was a guy who wasn't impressed. just a bayesian net, which is old technology. Happy Halloween! still no kiddies. about ten till seven. the bankruptcy meeting at the court was extremely minor. i came in about half an hour early. at two, the appointed time, they called me. i think i was about first. maybe a couple minutes after. my lawyer wasn't even there yet. so i had to wait. and he came, at like 2:04, and then we had to wait a little for the folks who went in already. lawyer was socializing with the other lawyers. then we went into the little room, and waited behind maybe one person. then our turn. sworn in. asked me if i filled out the form, and was it all correct. took maybe thirty seconds. room was full though. probably a hundred people. at 2:15 i was outside. if your gonna get a lawyer, pick one alphabetically at the front. went to a party at roy's on saturday. it was a party. lot's of married folk. and that seems to include roy and katrina. i'm a bit of a fuddy-duddy, i guess. i did finish off a thing of this blackberry schnapps that roy said was vile an needed to be finished. it was pretty vile. kind of a vaguely blackberry flavored rubbing alcohol. mixed it with dr. pepper. there was a really cute blue girl. didn't catch her name. fell asleep on the couch at about midnight and was there at 3 when i left. don't quite get that. but nothing much interesting happening, i guess. tark and meg were there. roy and tark talked about mead. so, a little after 3, katrina said she was getting a migraine, and was going to go take a shower, so she got all the coats out of the bedroom. she gave me my coat, so i left. but she said very clearly, twice even, that it didn't mean i had to leave, but i mean, there it was. i heard (and saw) kiddies across the street. did not come over here yet. now the light is off across the street. and the neighbors on either side have their lights off. i guess no reason to even come on this block. and the wireless card on jordy got really bent at the party. i thought for sure it was busted. it didn't seem to work when i came home. little plastic cover came off. but i bent it back, and it seems ok. cover is loose. finally, at 7:50, some kids came over. three girls. well, now, that was interesting. i had a lucidish dream, and was able to explore it a little. i was trying to go back to sleep, but it isn't working. and jordy seems to have come back. maybe the dust was loosened. anyway, somewhere in there,i was thinking i should go to new york, since i am now tending to wake up in the night and want to do things. i was driving a truck there, and lost it some kind of way. so i saw it was a dream. now i'm typing with my thumbs, so maybe one of those little keyboards will work. i told the guy i was dreaming. shortly shifted into going into a house with two folk, some guy sitting, and a woman bringing stuff in. maybe groceries, that i helped with. a little strange house. the door pushed open and back and away. holographically. i looked at abthe guy, and he was clearly me, so this was to be a self-exploring dream. i go in, and there's folk there, so i try to find who's good for me. and there are cats. i played with kira at aimee's, so that's what that's about. there was one, and she's fading. kind of strong. i said i was looking for an alpha. and she seemed a little sj'ish and lawyerly. or at least willing to argue. which is good, i think. i woke up with close eyes, or false woke up, however you want to say it. that encounter with her faded. and she was just sitting in front of me. went back to sleep, roughly in the house. upstairs, no people yet. found a book of enraged people. realized i needed to take the blood pressure medication. did that in the dream, but then woke up and took it. tried to go back. wrote this instead. her name was shelby, which was, of course, my old car. hmm. maybe i just miss my car. jordy's screen is just about out. it has been flickering, and for a while it will go out, grey. it may be that the lower temperature is making a weak connection go out, because when i have it under the covers and it warms up, it gets better. it's ok right this minute. but i am thinking of alternatives. i don't think i'll replace it if it goes out. it's just not worth the high price if it's only good for two or three years. i guess that comes out to about $30 a month. watched doom. the movie. surprisingly boring. i was expecting it to be like the video game, which would have been fine, but it only got like that towards the end. it was boring before that. watched _what the bleep do we know?_ didn't seem like much. the word that came to mind was "crap". girl was a cutie, though. quantum mech just doesn't have much to do with consciousness. and i was thinking, i think the wave nature oww matter has more to do with the cloud of virtual particles than something freakish like parallel universes. the behavior is a superposition because it is actually a superposition of the action of oodles of virtual particles, and the wave function "collapses" only when one of the cloud of these virtual particles is forced into being in a definite place and staying there. is that really so difficult to understand? and it's probably all just string vibrations, anyway. so, i went to temperance at bennigans again. i decided to get some chicken tenders so they would have a bill to put the lemonade on. and they still didn't charge me for it. grr. but this time, i at least i had a bill and could see that the cute waitress's name is Jennifer, if they do that right. so i went and spent some money. i worked a little more for bruce so i have a little more. it bugs me that i'm spending so much, though. i didn't go out and blow it on beer friday, so i went and got some groceries, and splurged on a box of chicken at aldi's. they seem to have reduced the weight again. it seems like they always do that. and i got that movie from blockbuster. i didn't think it was so good, but i had wanted to see it. i mean, jeez, there was someone who was supposed to be channeling "ramtha". and i was almost going to go to mulligans to write this. i gotta get out of this bad habit. but i think it's about wanting to go be with some folk. maybe i should find some friends. that was kind of nasty. i left a little bit of milk in the jug for cooking things, like batter for the fried chicken. but i looked in it, and it was all lumpy. becoming cheese, i guess. got on the intp list again. roxie was asking about where to get a free blog, and somebody made a distinction between a journal and a diary, which is more about letting friends catch up with what is happening with you. i suppose i've tended to let this devolve into more of a diary, which is inherently boring, than a journal which is more about writing content. but it's not so easy to think of interesting new things to say, and sometimes i think it's better to at least say something boring just to be writing than to do nothing and maybe i'll think of something. so what could be done to make a better gun. if you had a material that was a lot stronger, instead of just using smokeless poweder, which for double-base is nitrocellulose and 1% or 3% nitroglycerin, you could use a more powerful explosive instead of just a low propellant. i seem to remember that chamber pressure is somewhere around 40k psi. i think a high explosive could get it to around a million psi. that could create a much faster bullet, and a faster does the whole hydrodynamic shock thing. and you don't need a very high caliber, thick bullet. the damage isn't from the channel of the bullet but from the "splash" as all the energy is absorbed. and i kind of get the idea from atomic weapons, which do use high explosives to slam the nuclear reactive materials together at high speed. which high explosive? well, nitroglycerin is as powerful as it gets, so it might just be a matter of changing the mix on the double-base powder to match the chamber and barrel strength. did a little bit for bruce, and made some money. it's nice when you get so low. got $20 of gas. i hate that that doesn't fill it up anymore. just over half a tank. and bought some chicken legs and lemon juice. i decided to bbq them. turned out good. eight three quarters. piggish, but i was feasting. and i hadn't eaten anything else, except pretzel sticks. and had lemonade. also saw wallace and grommit. i'm glad i saw it after having the money taken care of. it wasn't all that good, and i would have felt bad about spending the money as much as i had before. and i decided not to go to the ai lunch at a-tan, which has started up again. didn't feel like spending the money. and i was trying to sleep some more. i'm starting to get up around 3 to do internet stuff, and look at the intp list. not real good. and i hope i don't start spending money like what i have now is spare. gotta save up.
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at the cog sci seminar, the topic of the lecture was language evolution, which was part of the intro to linguistics which is the subject for the semester. and the question was to discover the sources of flexibility and diversity for vocalizations. there is sexual selection, which is important in the calls of birds and songs of whales. it doesn't seem so important for people. there is alsoo social cohesion, which is probably important. there is some guy whose theory is that vocalization served the role of grooming as a social bond as groups got larger. there was some question as to whether groups really were larger, though, since baboon get very large. they also talked about the aquatic ape theory, which implies the development of breath control. and we are able to swim at birth, when most apes fear water and sk. we have a layer of subcutaneous fat. lost our hair, which loses it's insulating properties when wet. we don't regulate our salt well. there is also some retrovirus that is common in most land species but not in us that indicates we were isolated at some time, which would be true on the shore. where does the time go? fried some chicken. i bought some frozen a while back. but i'm almost out of money. i think about $40. i do think i appreciate it a little more. wish i hadn't wasted it the way i have been. but it hasn't been long enough for the lesson to have completely sunk in yet. the war-criminal bush had a really tall one yesterday. something about how we haven't done anything to make the islamo-fascists upset. i forget exactly the phrasing. but it was truly a whopper. download a new version of mame. and i got a version of pacman. pretty fun, actually. oh yeah, the demo of the hawkins stuff in matlab. with great pain i got linux going, though without x-windows. i got a copy of ubuntu from doug, and in playing with the partitions, i turned off the active partition, and it stopped booting. it would go into the network boot, which was pretty strange. did figure that out pretty quick, though, booting to a floppy and running fdisk. but felt a little shy about ubuntu. i tried redhat 9 again, and one of it's other kernels actually worked. it was a smaller kernel, and it may have been one without the video card driver. anyway, it had octave, but the old version of octave gagged on the demo. something not yet implemented. cell array, maybe. so i tried the latest beta version. it seemed to get a little further, but then had other problems. data format issues, it looked like. seemed pretty hopeless. but at least i got it going enough to see that it didn't work. so i download another matlab clone, scilab. it has somekind of matlab to scilab translator. but it gagged. couldn't find the "mfile_path" variable. i did at least try defining it for it, but then there were other problems. i figured i would go to u of m and use a lab computer. but i was in the lab, and moved the mouse to stop the screen saver, and it needed a login. probably they all need logins. i didn't really feel like asking somebody. oh well. i could just look at the code. it doesn't seem all that tough. i don't get to see what it does, though. maybe some time. i did find out that the ai lunch is meeting again at a-tan. i was bringing a book back to the main library before going to the wednesday cog sci seminar, and i decided to look in and see. stan and john sanford were there. i got there after they were done, though. i mentioned jeff hawkins and his book to stan and he said he saw him give a presentation a while back at a conference on consciousness. and one of the graduate students gave a presentation on his book. it sounded good, though maybe simplistic. had a series of dreams about wandering around chicago. not sure why chicago, exactly, but i'm guessing the wandering was because i was playing pacman. and it was a little odd that there were more than one that were connected together with a little more than continuity than i would expect. suzanne was at temperance. no ben this time. some turbulence, but she seems to be doing ok. i forgot that ben was there when the grizzly deer came after us. so doug was talking to the guy looking for a perl tech advisor. had talked to someone and saw some code from him. wasn't happy somehow. not sure what you would be looking for in perl code. it can be quite ugly. saw serenity. it was quite good. certainly there could be things that you might not like in it. the whole creation of the reavers thing doesn't seem to fit with them being such a legend. and river became a little more like a wacky buffy. I don't know. it was a movie. maybe i'll just focus on my dissolving, illusory ego. how could they kill off wash? augh! it happened again. waiter didn't ring up the lemonade. gave him the 3 bucks. do i just inspire sympathy? evil email. minion of satan. gotto watch them i don'ee nougt know. octave wouldn't work. it might be in my redhat distribution. i tried to see if my computer third would boot to linux, with all the shifting about it has had. kernel panic. i think it may have gotten a new motherboard since i installed it. and may the drives have been shifter around. still, a kernel panic. trippy. maybe i should reinstall. the previews. there was a preview for the _doom_ movie. got the creatures and everything. she went there. man. but a psychic fighter is basically what a jedi is. now i just have to have the money in advance. gotta see what it's like. it's a different way of thinking, i guess. she had the whole fighting multiple attackers things. i guess most systems really deal with that. i know bagua is designed around it. she wasn't really moving around like in bagua, though. of course, most systems are about standing very solidly and getting them. bagua isn't. aikido isn't so much. it has a lot of movement, but maybe not so constant. filed the bankruptcy. didn't really seem like a big thing. we'll see how it goes. did a huge load of work to compile octave. but then it didn't work. felt like a drink. got a countly band, though. mulligans. the internet signal is immensely strong. the identifier says zyxel. seems like my card is coming apart, though. flickering. so felix wrote again. said i "need to get a job. any job. your writings are boring." seemed a little mean spirited. but i thought about it. it's all true. kind felt a little defensive and upset at first, though. that kind of bugs me. i mean, it makes sense. no need for me to be angry. but it struck me as sort of calvinistic. that i should be judged by my works. i did google him to see if maybe he has something written. didn't find anything. 'course, if i google cliff, i don't find his blog. and out at hooters with tarkight, we were wondering what type of beans they use to make baked beans. and i came back and looked on the can. pea beans. googled it. also called navy beans or white pea beans or yankee beans. i think navy beans is the main thing. but sure. boring. i'm trying to get through minsky's _emotion machine_. it does follow his society of mind, multiple module theory. the first chapter talks about how when your in love, your critical evaluation processes are turned off. now there's a perspective. other emotional systems and reactions are like that. some countly-fried rock in there,i guess. family tradition. grr. but i was walking around to avoid listening to it. this place has a table with a bunch of computers around it on the internet. a real serious internet access site. they got some kind of poker application loaded up. but it's real internet. sweet home alabama. gives me pause. i was going to leave. it got me thought. now there doing ice-cream man. still i remember that song one time on beale street with some black band. home sickness. now curtis lowe. hmm. augh! at least i'm smiling. and i came back to the house, and got that little roach. it was about the same size as the one i saw before. and i had put a little shoe out, because last time i saw it, i was barefoot and didn't want to squash it, and when i had gotten a shoe and came back, it was gone. i left the shoe there for the next time. and i came in just now, turned on the light, and it was inches away from the shoe. an in moved forward a bit till it was almost under it. almost beyong coincidence. did i mention there was a guy with a badge hanging around near the entrance? the drummer, after the end, came by the bar where i was standing. truly drunk. but he had another tequila sunrise. talked to the lawyer again. the bankruptcy looks real grim. fire. burn. die. die. make you suffer. thought something was on my mind. i guess not. so, david schiffman hasn't remembered a dream in 45 years. probably not missing anything. but i don't what you could do with that. seems like last night, i was remembering every single one, but they were really pretty insignificant, and i don't remember any anymore. but hat was like 6 or 7. i wouldn't know what to suggest. i know some of it is a matter of expectation. and as i have said, the meditation of observing self with self seems to really increase my awareness of dreams. but i don't know what it would do for him. some thing on pbs about turkey. so, turkeys came from mexico, but there, they thought they came from india, and called them hindis. but in, like, england, they thought they came from turkey. hence the name. so the country came before the bird. place closing. it's about 12. that's pretty sad. no muse tonight. well, i thought they were closing. leanne offered me another. sheri-ann in pink had a mich ultra. in memphis ten years. high school here. being talked up by cueball insurance dude from nashville. and some cover of prince's little nikki song. somebody covered that? well, ok. i assume she was a popular girl. dude just said "like, this is paradise". i don't know what he was talking about. but, seriously, dude. ex-drummer dude. there's that whole question of possibility? can anything be different from the way it is? that's just a funky aspect of our brains. trying to get things the way we want. to change things. well, things will change, but we want them to change to be advantageous to us. to satisfy out goals. our will to life. so, they were talking about were everyone was from. and leanne asked me where i would be if i could be anywhere (after establishing that i was from here). and i gave my standard answer. i'd want to be right here. i'm kind of questioning it these days. but it's true. it's so try. where else would i be? i asked leanne how she was doing. she said she was doing great. and i said i'd like to believe she was doing great. and she didn't know what i could mean. she's optimistic. leanne netherland. or something like that. maybe. anyway. sheri-anne went to the bathroom. dude left and she came back. and she was asking if he left, and she was saying something about, you'll be talking to someone new, and you'll see a pickup and ick. or something. new thing to me. well, i guess i should finish that thought. so leanne was trying to get out of there. she closed me out. and the gorgeous blond waitress who i had been watching came up to the bar and wanted to try out the beers. especially harps, which she had been recommending, but not really knowing. bud light drinker. not really a beer person. leanne gave her stuff out of a shot glass. liked that woodchuck stuff. did like harps. anyway, at one point, she says, you want to know the shit, or something, and then starts talking to leanne, but personal, like. so i figure i'll go to the other bar. and there's a few folk there, and sheri-anne is at the end next to an old regular, whom i recognize, and i sit next to him. he complained about being cut off and not even being allowed to finish his food. i think it was at tghe belmonte. i wasn't really listening. i was just trying to finish my guinness. but then i was talking to sheri-anne. actually before he left. she asked me if i was writing a novel. just a journal. she writes a journal. every day. i don't even do it every day. i asked for how long. since she was twelve. and i said, it was one of those. a habit. anyway we were talking. she said she was just a waitress. i said that is a perfectly fine life. my mom was a waitress. retired a waitress. my dad started as a waiter and moved into management. she thought she might like to go into management. she liked her regulars. what am i doing? i said i was a computer person. and i the music looped around again. more human than human. and then that cover of little nikki. and i told her about how i was wondering if the guy covering it was doing it because he had dated her. i mean, she was popular. she laughed at that. such a nice girl. anyway, i should have gotten another guinness. shawn asked me. but, and i didn't admit it, i was out of cash. i did say i should have gotten another. she got something else. but i left. i did say shari-anne or something. i think she said good-night sir. anyway, maybe it was good to connect to someone in a friendly way. man, it has been a while. and even longer since i uploaded this thing. so, i pedaled into starbucks, here. and it's, like 8:25. line up to the front door. i figure i won't hold up all the folkwho must be going into work. so i'm just sitting here waiting for it to thinout. if that's going to happen. so, the conservatives are unhappy with bush's slow response to the katrina disaster. and i'm a little puzzled. they aren't bothered by him lying? and invading other countries? killing babies is fine? but look a little slow in handling a disaster, and lose respect of the cons? and i was thinking, i guess that's their mentality. they are used to following blindly people who lie. religions are like that. that's a big conservative thing. don't question follow. you'll be treated ok. but if you aren't treated ok, it all breaks down. conservatives really want a king.
so, this starbucks has become a t-mobile hotspot. argh! t-mobile wants to charge terrible high ratm
.
weekend a week ago, we had the big garage sale. an experience. maybe learned a little bit. made $75. some bad deals in there, sure. was going to be friday and saturday, but sissy and mike only came on friday night, so they got us to extend it to sunday, too. which worked for me, because i sold $20 something on sunday. on saturday, a young guy asked me if i had any albums. i wasn't thinking of selling them, but i brought them out. he asked what i wanted, and i said $2. he did buy 4. t'heads 77. the white album. i was bummed because i was alittle rushed, handling the money and calculating everything, i didn't notice what the other two albums were. he had some young women with them, and they bought some clothes. great, now the line is gone. i did get in line in a little pause, though. anyway, i sold some. i think the price was a little high. and then later, a fat old guy came in and said they usually cost 50 cents at garage sales, so i was set up to be confused. he picked out 13. and said he only had $9, which he offered to me. it sounds dumb now, but on the spot, he got me. i took it. and he took my entire beatles collection. i thought about it later. it's true, my price was a little high. but at garagesales, you always have junk. i had really good stuff sitting out. should have sold it on ebay. and i had it ata sortof average price, and he just took the very best stuff at the average price. i should have priced things individually. like i had books at $2. i had paperbacks and hardbacks. and i had my copy of the latest harry potter, and one of the earlier ones. that went pretty quick. but, shoot, $9 for 13. so many things i should have done instead. my conclusion, after some pondering, is just that i have trouble saying "no". so, sunday, i guy came, and wanted to know if i would take $1 for the books. already fairly culled. i was actually brushing my teeth, and sissy came in and asked, because she wouldn't say that. and she didn't like him too much. it seems like for some people, like these two guys, it's more about a dominance game than getting the stuff. now that was beautiful grande vanilla latte! anyway, dominance. and trying to take advantage. so he bought, like 8. and probably the best of what was left. stuff that i'm pretty sure i could have gone to a used book store and gotten more. somebody was saying that dealers come to these things. but then, he comes to the old books sets from andrea. i had them at $8per set. i originally had them at $10. anyway, he offered $12 (the rest of the $20) for them. so i said no. if i wanted to do the work, i would have taken them to a dealer and seen if they were worth anything. probably the best thing to do. but i guess i needed to concede that i wasn't going to do that, and i let them go. i had just been storing them. better to give them to someone who might look at them. so he left them. but later, he came back! he said he told his wife about them, and she said to get them, so he did. sissy changed the sign to $8 firm, which was a silly low price, anyway. but i suppose i just didn't want to play this guy's games. of course, in some cultures, haggling is an important part of the thing. i'm sure it's something to make life entertaining. i'm guessing these are cultures without tv. so you have to pass the time somehow. he took the one, the old one from 1917, and then decided to get the other one, too.
couple guys at the table with laptops. i wonder if they sprung for the tmobile.and they moved the chairs around. the comfy red chairs are now tucked in different corners.
so, now doug is trying to get work for me to do. he had someone looking for someone to do sql server reporting services stuff, and wanted me to do it. and i looked at that, a little. forms stuff. doug offered for appley to pay me for a week instead of them. i think it's promus stuff (where he's working). but it seems they found someone one the coast already on the payroll that has reporting services experience. and there' a perl tech lead thing. doug believe that i need a laptop to do this stuff. ok, i guess. i don't have one. so he ordered me one. mighty kind of him. but his plan is that i should only get %50 of what he charges. i'm not sure about that. because that's clearly a deal that is never going away. i mean, getting work at all is something. i'm basically expecting it not to happen at all. and he has 21 days to take the thing back.
cyborg just left. phone attached to his ear. carrying a suitcase, it looked like.
this bankruptcy thing is looking grim.
of course, someone who goes to starbucks is a sucker. they do have bobby d. on the box, though. some kind of sm satellite. one tubbo does seem to be using the internet. was on the u of m site. and now my card isn't hitting it. i'm not sure what they've done.
couple of girls just in from the gym. probably drove. actually, i'm sure they drove. i wonder how big their cars are. probably suvs. one bought the $1.80 water.
i feel nauseated. caffeine does that, but i felt like that before. and i'm trying to read sartre's _nausea_. joss whedon mentioned it in the commentary for _out of gas_ in the firefly series. he said it was the most important book he's read. existentialism. and he's not overly intellectual. the starbucks here has a little bookshelf. and there's a copy of plato's _gorgias_. haven't read it. skimmed over the intro. talks about rhetoric, which is about persuasion, and then goes into morality. also has a purpose driven life. i guess i should look at that.
at the library, where i was getting the sartre, a big fat black guy came up, and was looking for money. asked if i was a christian. was looking for a twenty, or maybe a ten. was from arizon. somebody had given him the bus ticket. he was looking for pocket money. had had heart trouble or something. i got out my money, i had a twenty and some ones. he really wanted the twenty. i was thinking the ones weren't going to work for him, so i was putting them up. but i gave the ones to him, and he said i was putting the 20 back. i asked if the ones would help, he said every little bit helps.
i think the water brand is "ethos"
first impressions of _purpose driven life_. the jacket says unless you look to god for it, your purpose won't make sense. but i'm guessing if it's just god's purpose, it won't make sense, accept in the way religion makes sense. god's will is just god's unscrutable will, and all you can do is accept it. so it makes sense only in that it's the way it is and all you can do, orreally have to do, is accept it. just a first impression. seems all about the religious thing. so i can hardly stand it. accepting an assignment and surrender. the whole conservative taking orders thing.
gotta love a preening redhead in black. facing away, though.
and the wifi light is on. i'm sure it won't hit the net, though. ah! some kind of sign up page. $0.10 per minute! man. sounds like aol in the beginning. i think that's actually about what they charged then. and now it's gone. the light is on, but it's searching and seems not to actually be connected. grr.
katrina. big storm. new orleans is flooding. levy broke. bruce hasn't heard from his daughter kim. i am wondering about my kim, too. i should have gone down to see her when she asked.
bit of gout again.
i'm hearing people say that a little bit is better than nothing. but i don't believe that. and i could be wrong about that. something that is not quite right is wrong.
but if i push back what i don't want, i can't get anything. all attainment has both good and bad together.
Happy Birthday, Edgar and Daniel.
Bruce's daughter Kim came home.
dreamed about visiting a warehouse to negotiate setting up it's online shopping. on my mind because my dad is trying to put stuff up on e-bay for our neighbor. kind of a big warehouse with just assorted stuff, not very organized. not quite a furniture place, but like it. lots of unique items. crafted things. though not really arty. owned by indians. in the desert. kind of on a mesa, or patch surrounded by canyons. with a narrow elevated road, and a fifty foot drop on either side. it was wearing out on the edges. needed just to build a bridge to widen it. on driving in, a truck was kind of stuck at the edge, and had broken its wheel. i told them to stop, and they slid off. had to ask the drivers in my car to call 911 on their cell phones. anyway, as for selling stuff in this warehouse, it seemed like their inventory shifted around a lot, and it wasn't catalogued. people would just come in. so i decided that the only online thing to do was to have a robot with a camera be controllable on the net, so you could browse. and the robot could possible set up a store virtual video model that you could navigate. kind of the way you can get quicktime rotatable panoramas. needed to create a robot with a camera on a pole (to go up and down and rotate). but once you had the robot, you could sell it to other places. it needed to be able to avoid hitting things, of course. i'm not sure how great an idea it is. but it's an idea.
talked about _life of pi_ at the book thing. aimee was convinced that the whole tiger story was a creation so that pi didn't have to think about the real story, which he told at the end. the real story was pretty horrible, and the people were much like animals. i may need to read it again. which would be a third time.
been out to mike's he had some kind of worn. was thinking it was zotob. it could have been, i guess. i didn't see botzor.exe or some of the other variations i saw on mcafee. there was a file mousebm.exe that was infected. installed as a service file. f-prot recognized it, but couldn't do much with it. and when it was plugged into the internet, it would reboot. i tried doing the updates, and it was reinfected before it could finish. i hate microsoft. mike said it was enough to start to hate them. doug recommended getting a mac.
out here on the perimeter, we is stoned. immaculate.
so, i email the memphis city schools to try to get into the substitute teacher orientation, which is tomorrow. they said i needed to reapply. i had been signed up in the spring. some people just won't work with you.
now at dan mcguinness. becky's here. it's nice to see her. but there was a cover. so i can only get one guinness. which is probably enough. cute girls. not so busy. some older folks. can't hit any wifi spots. grr.
maybe i should read inferno.
i think i would have liked to go to a vinmil, if there is one in memphis. and i had wanted to go to the wu shu tai chi place if i had finished with mike's stuff early enough. i didn't.
some cover of "behind blue eyes". for a cover, you wonder if there was some point to a new version. does it add anything? someone doing if for fun? this guy doesn't seem to have anything to say, really, as far as i can tell.
i'm ready for my diamond bullet in the middle of my forehead, mr. demille.
i'm going out to the farm tomorrow. maybe i'll cut out the dsl before i go. make it significantly harder to upload journal updates. whatever. what was the point of it, anyway?
is it clobbering time yet?
did i mention that jedi don't kill people? they don't need to, at least. generally.
reading one of the critiques, it looks like coppola intended the movie to end ambiguously, where maybe willard takes over, but brando didn't want that. redux does have them riding off, but in the french plantation scene, willard says he isn't going back, so it is almost there. and the movie can't really decide what it wants to make of kurtz. so it has no center. in the book it was about greed,but the movie at best is about the psychopathic value of being ruthless to achieve your will. fascist. and willard is an inarticulate and unsympathetic assassin instead of marlow's worldly buddha.
then, again, one essay treats the movie on it's own, and is more sympathetic. conrad is still late victorian, and has individual heroes that triumph despite a crumbling world. yay, britannia, or whatever. these days, there is nothing left to believe in. hence it's the apocalypse.
tv in my room just died. vertical hold got a little loose when I checked the end of apocalypse earlier today. put it on for a little bit, and now it's a horizontal line. i've heard of that kind of death for a tv. oh well, it was old. almost 30. did catch me at a bad time.
and an evil guy talking to the answering machine. asked for 'andrew'. did not leave a message. and wasn't a timid little telemarketer, by the sound of it. and the phone just rang again. and he wasn't an overseas guy. sounds like they're after me.
somehow, i have left might lights on. car battery drained. i hope the battery isn't also dead.
so i've come downtown. i'm at the hooters here. heather, my "hooters girl" was nice enough to write her name down on a napkin. i gather they want me to order something. i saw where aimee's place is. and i went to tower records. they don't have firefly. i guess i should move on. seems like the prices are higher here. and the all you can eat wings on wednesday is 9.99. i thought it used to be about $7. not good.
now jordy's screen is messed up. i guess they are using techno-voodoo.
or maybe it's only karma. i'm in huey's, and jordy seems better. there was a blue suede patrol person outside. but no internet at the new hooters. oh well. none here either. i'm curious who the elderlish bartender dude. he was counting money. i wonder if he is mr. b. he prowls around a bit. and he's sitting at the bar reading a paper. sounds ownerish instead of employeeish. need to check his picture some time. i'm not sure if he'd be familiar.
ok. so this ai book is being quite annoying. i find very much that i don't agree with, or don't like. i've really gotten burned with ai optimism, which he has. hasn't worked for the past 50 years. and many cars have come down the pike.
also, he has a notion that ai depends on that one big central operation, and once you get that, you have almost everything. and i was thinking that for a long time. i don't really think so, at least not so much anymore. i've come to think that at the miminum, there are adaptations for different modules. genetic modifications to enable those modules. this guy seems to say, from what i've seen so far, that the only big difference is cortex size. and in this chapter, he's said some stuff i just didn't follow. he has said that one thing about the patterns that neural groups see is that they are invariant, and he said the low level groups in vision are somehow invariant, but they are the level that jumps around--something like the bitmap version. so i don't follow. so i'm getting annoyed with it. hence the break to read _heart of darkness_. and to drive downtown. and visit hooters. and huey's. anyway, the ai book. his fundamental operation is memory-driven prediction. the central fact that makes it plausible to me, which he mentioned and i hadn't heard before, is that there are many more feedback connections than feedforward connection. prediction makes sense for that. i guess i should try to finish it.
so, bartenders don't care much for folks that come in and only want one soda.
i feel really small. like that indian chief.
something that made me sort of angry, recently. suzie ormann was on pbs giving her financial advice. she said first you should put money in your ira as much as your company will match and only after that should you pay down on the credit cards. she also said not to charge to go out to eat or anything splurgy like that. pay for groceries, maybe. and when i was fedex, i knew about that. and people told me about that. but i knew some things that make my situation different. medical conditions. not likely to make it to retirement. one is randomly fatal. don't talk about it. even i have limits. and i have a kidney issue, which just gets worse over time till it kills you. so i'm just not saving for retirement. i don't have to hope. i'm gonna die before i get old.
i wonder about vision. but right now i'm wondering about what are the basic psychological or cogntive skills that people have, that would be important in ai. i've been googling analogy and computers, which is something i'm sort of into. actually, i'm playing with google's other searches. you can search the text of scanned books, and "scholarly articles". there aren't too many references in books that look promising. the idea in searching those is really just to find a book that looks good, and then you go out and get the book. but a lot of the pages seem to require a login, which is how they are dealing with the copyright issues. the scholarly articles seem even worse, as a lot of them are completely blocked by something calling itself "portal". at least the books give you occasional bits. people just wanting to get paid. grr.
and I haven't gotten any e-mail for almost two days now. i'm wondering if maybe it's broken. trippy. or maybe i'm just especially repellant at present.
decided to spend some money. thought about getting firefly, a sci-fi/western series recommended by cliff and michael b, and best buy had it but it was $41, and amazon has it for $35. and there were a couple of books that caught my eye : _on intelligence_ by jeff hawkins, who started palm and did the treo. a successful guy who also has my dream of intelligent machines. but i expect it's just crap. still, maybe it will be inspiring. or counter inspiring. and heart of darkness, a critical version. somewhere buried in the boxes is my old copy, but it doesn't have the critical essays, and after reading those from lord of the flies, which is a little kids book, i realized i really like the commentaries, sometimes more than the book. and one of the essays is about apocalypse now and a comparison. so thath should be interesting. now i'm in starbucks. i wanted a venti chocolate chai. trevis and bo are working. bo corrected me that they call it a venti soy mocha chai. so now i know.
i was reading the intelligence book. dude says he prefers the term "real intelligence" to artificial intelligence. so i think i'm in trouble. sales and marketing pinhead attitude. but i'm not bitter. what made me decide to write is this two sitting over there studying something. i'm not sure what. looks like tutoring. only one textbook, i think. and bigger girl could be a parent. the thing that gets me is that the taller on has a can of diet doctor pepper, and little blondie has a subway cup. now that's ballsy. sit in a starbucks. forget the overpriced coffee. but i'm not bitter.
maybe i'll try for the substitute thing. i think the training is this week.
something about rectangles.
i looked at the treo in best buy. now that was a really small keyboard. i think the screen was just a plastic picture covering it, so i didn't quite get to see it.
because she has a wedding ring, i think.
one thing makes me feel better. dude graduated in 1979. ee from cornell. has 10 years on me. and that was the good time for techies. me bro graduated then. beginning of the boom times. get you into the system. he still sounds like he's got nothing to say. but his sitch is different from mine.
augh!. alanis morrisette _ironic_. i think alanis has a cd that is just at starbucks. nothing in the song actually fits the definition of ironic. is she just stupid? is it cosmic irony? and dude is talking about how he wasnt to know how brains work, and tried going to MIT, but they thought it was a bad idea to try to use how brains work. kind of a pisser. didn't get in. or, they didn't accept his proposal.
now they're talking about squaring and a radical sign. sounds like tutoring. bigger girl sounds older. bit of a rougher voice.
home now. just before six. golf is on cbs. pga championship. they just suspended play for the day. does it have something to do with 60 minutes being about to start? last week they just moved to the golf channel. tv's a big deal, i guess. just repeats, though. 60 minutes has gotten fluffy. the arnie interview. hilary swank. the other one is the diploma mill thing. they say arnie is 6'2". that's not what i heard.
just checked the wickipedia. people were saying 6'2". that's what sixty minutes said. but peopls say he seems shorter. one magazine said 5'10". that's what i heard. his people now say 6' even. and a picture showed him an inch shorter than the war criminal Bush, who is 5'11". so sounds like 60 minutes has gone over the edge into lies and propaganda. or maybe that's just infotainment.
what's the deal with murdoch, arch conservative quasi-fascist supporting family guy, which makes fun of conservative values. at least it asserts that they are the ones to have, even if they can be funny. but i see it, and it is just mean-spiritedness. not even funny. i guess the simpsons were like that, too. they were characatures, but they ended up being the good guys. conservative propaganda after all. good intentions. ends justify the means. that's what the war criminal Bush and Karl Himmler Rove have been promoting.
so now I feel a little sick to my stomach. anger does that to me. and now I think caffeine and an empty stomach do that to me, and they kind of make me feel a bit angry, so it kind of cascades. and i remember kind of feeling like this after mike's wedding when we were all going out. after the diet dr. peppers. and i was kind of grumpy, then, too. so maybe that's what it was. haven't eaten anything today. was thinking i might go to aldi's and get some more fried chicken. bought the books instead.
and so I did something that seems like a good idea when i get worked up. i did some exercise. a little circle-walking from bagua. and some bench presses. to do those, i need to move my bench from it's sort of tucked in place by the side, to sticking out more into the middle of the room. i think back when i actually did it more seriously, i just left it sticking in the middle of the room, and that little bit of effort has been enough recently to keep me from doing it as consistently as i need to do. i say a little bit of effort. some of it is bending over and lifting, which i doubt ireally do right, so it could be bad for my back. and i think my back does hurt on occasion. and i increased the weight (by 20 pounds) which you are supposed to do when you are building up. i had started kind of low. i think it was 70 in weights and 20(18) for the bar. 90 pounds. but i was starting over. and i think i was just being too lazy to dig out the extra pieces. Or maybe the real reason i was keeping it at 90 was because i was also doing squats, and to do that, i have to press it over my head (and back), basically a military press, and that's a little bit harder than a bench. and it takes a curl (raising it to the neck level) which is also harder. so now it has the 25 and two 10s on each side. that's a sort of cumbersome factor difference from having the two fifties on each side. that's what i was doing before. it's more work to have to take of the 50s and put back on the 25s and tens, so i'm hoping to get back over it again. i don't remember what weight i used to bench as a workout, but i do remember having a max of about 170. really quite a light beginners weight, but it's more than what i'm at now.
so i'm looking at the cover of this intelligence book, and it was written "with sandra blakeslee". so dude didn't even write it. now i have and even worse feeling.
maybe a distinction between what this is and a blog. blogs, and blog tools, are set up such that you submit some bit of writing, and it gets stuck up in reverse chronological order, that is, most recent at the top. I put the most recent day at the top, but within that day, I keep things as order written, so there is a kind of tempoal flow as I go through a day or an evening. and i might leave and come back and write the later stuff in the day down below. a kind of progression that may or may not add something, but it is at least there, and is not part of the convention of "blogs". plus, of course, blog convention is now to have comments and to promote a kind of community, which I just don't do. i could say it's just a journal. there are differences between it and a blog, but I guess it would be more confusing and a little too fussy, since people understand what a blog is, and wouldn't know what i meant if i said online journal.
did i mention tark got married? in the little program for the thing, which was never referred to as a "wedding" but only a celebration and recognition of their marriage, they referred to god the creator and preserver, but seemed to slight siva, the destroyer. and yet later in the ceremony, they had various talks about death and such, so they actually included siva after all. which i think is good. doug seemed to be a little into "decorating" mike's car. he was gonna bring me along to get the materiale, but i didn't go along. not so much into it. cliff did point out how important it is to propitiate Loki, but it just didn't seem like such a big thing to me.
bummer about the internet. maybe i'll move on.
so i've given up on the credit cards. and suddenly I get some cash. i think it's too late, though.
i googled trying to find out how to get access to the sound stream from the voice modem i have. there is tapi, which is an application interface for telephony from microsoft which should let me do it. the drivers aren't installed. but looking for that, i found a company, voxeo, which already does all the stuff i was wanting to do. plus they have some kind of developer tools to help write stuff like that, and they said 10,000 developers have used them. shoot, man, if that many folks have been working on this stuff, i guess there isn't much room for me. i did finally get cmu-sphinx working. it's a free speech recognition system written in java. it didn't work very well. it seems like the microphone sound level is really low and that might be effecting it. and i want to try it on the phone thing. i should also try it on voice over ip. i need to find out how to play with those. one thing i'd really like to get into is phone application. phones are getting to be pretty powerful little computers these days. one question i have is whether the little voice dial things that some phone companies do is on the central server or on the phone. probably the server, but the phone is getting powerful enough to do it it's own self.
i have rebooted jordy to turn off the wireless card. again bummer that i can't see the wireless thing here. might as well save the battery. maybe i will be inspired to write something interesting. they do have 'stairway' going.
so cliff is working on a book. and he has one of his stories published. sounded like some kind of fanzine, but he said he got real money. zelaszny maybe. dude next to me ask if i was a writer. i said not really. just for fun. pitiful.
personal happiness pretty obviously isn't everything. america does a lot of things to avoid happiness, and it does pretty darn well. it's a matter of priorities. you can go for power instead of happiness. you can go for material and technological advancement. you get a bit of happiness along the way with that stuff. i guess it's kind of self-defeating to have a goal of happiness. if happiness itself is the goal, instead of just being a guide to help you with other goals, all the other goals just become irrelevant or at least less important.
so, _kung fu hustle_ finally came out on video this week. i rented it, and darn, but the disk i got had some kind of error on it and it would not read it to copy it. and i played it in a dvd player, and yes, there were a few frame that were messed up, but it would play so i couldn't take it back to blockbuster and complain. augh. so i don't have my own copy. it was funny. i wish i could have made a copy. maybe i will try again. but somehow, it didn't seem quite as good. it's all in chinese. even the commentary was in chinese with subtitles. in one of the special features, stephen chow is talking to a guy from inside kung fu. he clearly isn't reallymuch of a kung fu person. and the guy is asking about chi. and stephen says it's a kind of superpower or magic. but it's supposed to be real and he wants to believe in it. i think there are reasonable tricks involved. magic is always like that.
as i have said, truth is truth however much you've had to drink. and if you've had few, maybe you will stop thinking about the same old, everyday stuff you normally run through. in vino, veritas. i'm not sure about beer, though. did the romans have beer? i have said that neural nets have an advantage over algorithms in that they can wander around and randomly land on things when they aren't sure. i like to think that causing oneself to be confused through chemistry can be like that as well.
so becky is taking classes in the fall. starting on the 23th. that's good. she took some time off. i wouldn't want her to get stuck.
i associate skills that you retain when drunk with martial arts. you still have some abilities even with reduced capacity. in martial arts, its important, because in a real fight, you are likely to be hurt, and losing blood, or in various ways not able to really think clearly. so you have to be able to have something that will still work with diminished capacity. but luckily for me, thinking of stuf to write about also is something that sticks around. at least i hope. i guess time will tell. but look at hemingway.
couple next to me are getting married tomorrow. keeping drunk. dude said he was having a good time. there was an empty seat on either side of me. i tend to repel people. and woman sat to my left, and dude stood. someone took the chair away to might right. so after a bit, i moved over and gave dude a chair. without speaking. and now their talking to dana. i said she just got married. three months ago. dude's name is kevin.
man. so kim was sweet enough to ask me to come down to help her unpack after she moved to take a teaching job on the coast. but i saw how far it was and i balked because i didn't think my car was up to it. that is a serious lack of will.
the phoenix eye fist! take your index finger and stick the first knuckle out a little. or, really, push it out with your thumb. so you have that one knuckle sticking out. a really simple shift, and a pointy little beastie. keeps a little precision for hitting those critical points. quick and easy to do. and something to think about when barbabes do annoying little things that barbabes do.
hmm. what is it about the indians. they are just a bit east of the cradle of civilization. not the first. but they were close, and have a very old tradition. one of the first to think about how things really are and how things work. kind of stuck in the whole divinities and gods idea. how things work is not so much a matter of there being personal and powerful things out ther that shape the world. that is just a projection we put on the world. other cultures, though, just forget the core. they don't focus on the truth and just stick to things that work fairly well for them. marginally getting by. out on the edges. bleakly. not in a great land of abundance.
dangly bits. from the ears. what is that about?
the london bombers, at least the ones that only blew up the caps and not the main charge, used hmtd. never played with it myself. the best recipe uses citric acid, hydrogen peroxide (hair bleach) and hexamine. hexamine has been available as heater fuel for military rations. but i have never been able to find it for that. there is a different thing they can use for that, trioxane or something. and if hexamine is available, it's so the spooks can make hmtd and rdx. but one thing they didn't talk about. hmtd can also be made with fomaldehyde. i haven't seen that easy to get anymore. that's proably what the london bombers used. but that's not what got into the news.
so, a little bit ago, both becky and dana tied their hair back into pony tails. and they are kind of short, anyway, so their hair probably wasn't really getting in their way.
i guess i might kind of lose inspiration if i can't see what i'm writing.
band finally starting. probably don't have much longer that i can stay.
some of the songs the band plays are from from the sixties. and they are about the vietnam war and killing people for reasons that have gotten completely knocked away from the original reason. the beginning of american cultural insanity.
so that's it. america has developed a tradition (?!) of cultural insanity. things that don't reasonably follow, follow because of tradition, despite not making any sense at all. not only not making sense. but simply not making any sense at all. that's just the way things are.
so then, you have to wonder. do all cultures reach the point where they no longer abide by the dictates of reason, and just go along with tradition, even though they no longer make sense. because empires always fall into decline. maybe they just reach a point where they are pulled away from doing the sensible that is going to work into doing the things they have always done, and it eventually no longer makes sense, and they fade away. a culture or tradition is just sticking to the way thing have been. the way things have been has just ben a reaction, a wall against the way things are in some particular time. things will change, the wall will change. it will hold up as the way people try to fight stays. but eventually that way of fighting will move on.
dana just sneezed. i said "you're very good looking". it's something i saw on seinfeld.
So, that provides a question to ask. is there a point in history whereyou can find that that they have been stressed to the point where they must have gone insane? athens in the war with sparta surely must have lost it. rome when they burned under nero. haven't been many empires since then. britannia. don't know much about them. must have happened. probably america.
so there we have it. all cultures pass into insanity. an inevitable decline.
i made it to the band's first break. i am slowing down.
becky has just decided not to deal with me today. i guess it's fair. dana is getting stuff for me.
i'm on the last one. got to make it count.
dana's dad came in. such a nerd. took a digital picture.
is there really anything missing? how could that be? we can imagine that there might be something more. but that's just something in our heads. not something that isn't there.
can't count the tears of a life with no love.
they got panama going. it always means for me the place where the six seal team members drowned in six feet of water.
you cannot get beyond that kind of dedication. and just thrown away. jumped out of an airplane and landed in six feet of water. just to drown. now that is american insanity.
i guess i still haven't really dealt with the american civil war. now that's real insanity. brother fighting brother. developing the machine gun, to slaughter cousins. and then the world had a way to slaughter people with little effort. just the beginning of american technological insanity. we managed to forget about it, and mostly move on, but it was there. we developed the way to annihilated each other. how could we live with ourselves? we just did. and we keep going. no where to go, really.
i'm just wondering who this chick is that becky's dad is with. band is on another break. i'm paid up. paid $40, it was $31 something. want to get out of here. i'm nobody at this point. sometimes i seek rock bottom. there is no rock bottom. there are no absolutes.
so i went on to platinum from there, and the security guard tried to shake me down. said he was a cop. gave me a choice to be hauled in or take a cab, and i took a cab. jumped on the freeway instead of taking white station like i said. went back and collected my stuff. so that's how it works.
aimee wrote to announce her new address and phone to "family and friends". but just this morning, i had started an email to her to talk about the book we are reading this month _life of pi_, which i had just stayed up all night and read. it started slow, but kind of changed gears and was more of a page turner. and had said i hope the move went well. but then i deleted it without sending it because i was thinking we're really not friends, so why would i be writing this, except just to pretend we were, and i should quit pretending. but of course, later that day she sends me this message addressed to "friends and family". what's up with that? well, i think i have a different view as to what "friends" are. there's an extroverted view of friendship, where you would call an acquaintance a friend. then again, it could be that she doesn't really think of me as a friend. probably that's more like it. she isn't comfortable with getting together with me to talk. but cliff was here, and we went out with roy and michael brannan, and it emphasized for me something i knew. i just don't do well in more than pairs. i don't feel like talking about stuff i want to talk about, and i'm not really much interested in what the group ends up talking about. i ended up just being really negative about everything, and i was just not very pleasant. not that i would have been very pleasant otherwise, maybe. but it seems like there wasn't much value to my having been there, except maybe that i got to see it. so i think it was really a bit of a waste. i need to just accept that if i'm going to hang out, it needs to be only in a pair. three's a crowd, and i don't like crowds. i think i keep doing them, but i don't do them well. or maybe as mick said, "two's a crowd"
so what do i want to do. i had a dream where i got something from an engineering firm. mostly minorities, though. somehow "english" was listed as a minority. anyway, it might be nice to actually work as a computer engineer. i'd like to be an embedded java person. robots and such. i also had a dream where i was riding my go-cart. then it shut down nd i couldn't start it, and had to push it. but when i woke up, i though of having an electric one. or maybe a hybrid. i wonder how tough that is.
saw mike and doug and mike's brother phil the other evening. phil's a doctor. i said doug was interested in being a doctor, and phil said he persuaded him against it. doug asked about me, and i said i hadn't given up the hope. phil said i might be a pathologist. some of the smartest ones are into the detail of that.
on ethics, in one class, they asked for applications of behaviorism in the classroom. i decided what my feeling is on behaviorism. i think it is unethical to treat people as mindless, which is what behaviorism does. people are free agents and have a right to determine their own behavior. at best we can negotiate with them. but we should not try to manipulate them with rewards and punishments like animals.
yeah, and now the power went out.
was out for 4 hours. i called them finally five minutes ago, and now it's on. coincidence? they said it was a "fuse" outage. i learn that my little flashlight here was dead. time to rechartge the batteries.
[later in the day] went out and got the harry potter book. still need to do some hoemwork before getting into it. first went to best buy, and they wanted $23 for it. no way. went to barnes and noble, and it was, like $17, just under $20 with tax. so i got six dollars of gas.
and now i'm really falling behind on my homework. plus one assignment it to do an interview with a handicapable student. i have no idea where i am supposed to find one. i don't see how i can even do this assignment.
I'm watching spy on PBS. They used the Kobiashi-Maru test. A test they couldn't win to see how they deal with failure.
I checked, and the interview is worth 5% of the class grade. I suppose I could drop that. and i don't have to have an 'A'.
got some money from bruce, so i paid a couple of bills. still have the big one. but i splurged and got some chocolate. i tried to find nutty buddies, but they didn't have those, so i got some other knockoff. it's something.
and bruce gave me a little something to do. maybe i'll make it a little longer, till i find something. i applied at best buy, but that doesn't look too likely. i really need to do some ejb stuff. and MUS said no. looks ke this teaching thing doesn't have the kind of job availability that i was thinking. but mr. haguewood wants me to talk to the academic dean about something in the future. didn't know they had an academic dean. seems like it would be pointless. eddie suggested talking to the county schools. i guess maybe. or maybe it's time for me to look at colleges. anything.
and i was thinking about my time at college and high school. i was a different person in most of high school than when i left, and when i was in college. and i wonder who i am now. these classes are taking a lot of time. and i'm late on one because i've been procrastinating. i waited for it till the last day, anat was pushed back because another class was late because i procrastinated on that. some of this is that i'm not motivated and i don't think this stuff is very interesting. but what was the deal in high school? i did work sort of nervously, worried that i wouldn't do it right. spent a lot of time because i didn't have much else to do. i don't know. i should be sleeping.
man, since they didn't hire me, i'm just angry, and i don't what to help anyone. i mean i was always pretty angry. i was getting better, lately, i think. but now it's back.
so i canceled my cell phone, or i thought i did. they said the cycle goes to the 26 and they don't prorate it so would i like to keep it going. i was thinking it was paid for so just let it go on. but that's not the deal. i got the bill today after doing that, and i have to pay for it. and that was the thing, i don't have the money to pay this bill. so now i don't know. what are they going to do? they said they would send a bill saying it was cancelled.
man. and bruce wanted me to do something for him today, but with this school stuff, i just blew him off. it was something they could do, and didn't need me, really. i am just getting too out of it to want to do anything. i feel like i have given up. when i paid off this round of bills, i was thinking i was up for trying, but that push is fading. i did apply for network admin stuff today, though. do i accept that i'm a failure? am i a failure? can i do anything?
so, one of tark's folks heard from munch's grandfolks. munch is on their farm, raising blueberries. we need to find where that is. and if there are folks who like to see pictures, munch is short for munchkin, and refers to mike moore. you should be able to guess tark. maybe i should email roy, if i still have his email somewhere.
so there are kids shooting fireworks. makes me wish i had done something. but i didn't. i don't really feel free. i have a lot of gunpowder, though, and i need to try to do something. i have a blackpowder gun. maybe i should load i with blanks. plus i have the spud gun. maybe i should try to shoot that off. that might be fun. i need to come up with a simpler primary than acetone peroxide. match tips might work. and they have fireworks do wwntown.
and i think it needs to be repeat. bush lies. or at least tried to fool people. the weapons of mass distruction. and he's not trying to save social security, he's trying to destroy it. but christians like being lied to. it's what the religion is about.
there's a guy here, milton glaser, on now. he suggests that bush won because he is more entertaining. he's got some cool art. "better dead than red" buttons. i need one of those. it looks like the subtitle of his book, _the design of dissent_ was censored. in the middle of a mosaic of ipod ads, there are some iRaq ads with the guy on the box with the wires. there is a cool picture of a kind of handprint in a peace sign, which is actually a 'V' for victory, but made because the other fingers are blown off, kind of a graphically comment on the price of victory.
and sandra day o'connor is retiring. that's just scary. i really felt grim today. i need to get to a blue state, though they aren't particularly safe.
i decided to re-join the intp mailing list. my old address was still banned from two years ago, or whenever it was. but it wasn't a site ban, and i just made a new account. still, it made me really angry that i was still banned, and i'm not sure i will really want to stay on it. and i thought about the mensa list, but i decided i am still too mad about getting kicked off that. the intpish are more my people, anyway, and it was some j'ish moderated that kicked me off there, anyway.
there was a post on the intp list about the beatitudes. specifically what "poor in spirit" was supposed to mean. Roxi guessed it meant "needy", and i went back to the greek. the word "ptochoi" gets translated as poor, but my greek dictionary says beggar, or beggarly, along with poor. mainly beggarly. so that is a really bad translation. it makes it really tough to see what it's getting at, whereas "beggar" is a real image. goes with that hungry and thirsty for righteousness later. translating it as poor just messes the whole thing up. but now it's traditional.
i guess i'm bummed that memphis city schools didn't hire me. kind of angry at folks and not much wanting to do teaching. i still haven't even written mr. haguewood at mus. but i feel a little more like at least doing it. i need to get my hair cut if i'm going to see him.
my parents are in town for today. i thought the dream woke me up, and i thought i was thinking about it for a couple of minutes, but i heard car doors outside, too, so i'm not sure if they woke me up or what. mr. aubrey brown from across has had a stroke and is at the veterans hospital. he is not going to make it home from there, so they are going to say goodbye. seems like i should go down there, but they rushed off. i have a car. i guess i could go down there myself. i'm not good about that kind of stuff, though.
i'm not pleased about tom cruise and his scientology talk against psychiatric drug use. and for the record, it is a logical fallacy that problems in the history of something effect it's truth. a theory is true or false on its own merit, wherever it came from. he said psychiatry is a pseudo-science. maybe some of it is. analysis and talk therapy, like that freud stuff, does seem not to be much into the whole verification thing. but the whole thing about psychopharmicology is that they try stuff, and use it if it works. that's pretty basically scientific. i'm not sure what he was on about. i don't see scientific demonstrations of the vitamins and supplements they recommend. i don't know whether he means that the drugs don't work, or whether they do work, but have additional negative consequences that outweight they're benefit. he really needs to make some testable claims, or he's just farting from his mouth. but it all makes sense now that i heard that he's getting a percentage from the war of the worlds movie. he just wants publicity. the stunts with the girlfriend. the crap about the psycho drugs. the critics seem to like it. and they are saying it's a spielberg thing, so maybe i'm thinking about it. but because of tom, maybe not. and i think about it, an alien invasion sounds stupid to me. it was an allegory, anyway. originally of industrialization, on the radio of fascism, in the movie of communism, and probably now of terrorism. and metacritic had it at 80 last night, but 72 now. that's a serious drop. i was thinking of going when it was 80, but at 72, i feel much better about missing it. maybe _kung fu hustle_ is out on video. of course, maybe i should give it a chance. still, i do have a bad attitude about movies these days. the metacritic thing also had a link to _battlefield earth_ as a scientology movie that failed. it got a 9. ick. i still think highlander 2 set the bar for how bad movies can be, in the way _citizen kane_ shows you the best a movie can ever be. some day if i have way too much time, i might want to watch both of them and compare, though it probably would be hard to find them anywhere.
got an email from a company i sent a resume to. i knew what it was going to be. a no, but thank you for your interest. and i don't know what it is, but more and more emails are coming in a format that can't be read on jordy's fairly old email reader. like this one. done as some type of attachment, maybe. i have to go to my web mail page.
saw the batman movie. needed an escape. it worked for that. seemed better than the other batman movies.
A goof in one class. The stuff in all the different classes is kind of scattered around, and somehow I didn't look at the page in one of the classes that had all the stuff on it, so I ended up doing only three out of six of the assignments before I took the quiz. The quiz had a deadline, and the assignments, didn't, so I didn't notice so easily. I did figure I was ready for the quiz, so I did it yesterday, but today when I noticed the assignments that i missed, I did think I would have been a little surer of myself had I done them in the right order. Still, I got a 10/10 on the quiz, though I'm not positive that I didn't maybe miss one, and he's just a nice grader. I really did think I might have missed a couple. And it was a first quiz, so I figure I haven't quite gotten used to the tickiness of the questions. I think we all haven't quite gotten into being very active in the discussions, yet, either.
so I went and borrowed off the cards to pay off the car insurance. I felt like just getting that done today to have something less to worry about. For some reason, the thing for my sticker hasn't come, and it's due this month. I was right on the edge of being able to pay everything with just the credit I had, but I had forgotten about those two, so it looks bad. Now I might not make it. I suppose I could miss one. That's really kind of bad, and they really hate that, but city already has me on an evil punitive rate. I still haven't tried to get a student loan. I really need to do that. But something even more evil is happening. They still haven't decided to hire me, and this Saturday is the job fair where they pretty much do all the hiring they have left. So I might just be out of luck. And then I have to pay for the classes myself. Which would truly suck. So if it plays out like that, it's definitely gonna have to be bankruptcy, unless I can get real lucky and find a job at the last minute, which is not likely. So I'm feeling a bit stressed. And it's nice to get rid of the one bill standing there. Actually, though, maybe I should look at it. I have $100 on one card, I think about $80 on another, and about $300 on citi. That $480 would get me to the middle of July. I have one card that has about $800, but I'm going to need $600 of that to pay citi's bill, And I could get to the end of July, but then in the beginning of August, I would be stuck needing another $400. So it's still possible, but iffy, and this was all counting on having a teaching job, which would start in August, but now that might not happen. Ugly. We'll see how it goes. It's possible that I will do work some time in there. That'd be nice.
Another ugly thing. I took my amp to consignment music to see what I could get for it. If you put something on consignment, they will give you 75% of what it goes for, but you keep it with them for 90 days, and it could take that long, or it might not even sell. If I just sold it, they'd give maybe 25%. They were saying it might go for $400. Blech, so he might give me $100. I have no interest in just being ripped off, so I didn't go for that. He did say business was tough. And dude before I saw boss dude showed me all the amps they have. They've got way more than they are going to unload, so it's not likely that consignment would have helped me anyway. And it wouldn't really be fast enough, anyway. I was also interested in selling maybe one of my guns. I checked a price guide, and the 1911 would be worth $280 in good condition, but I look at it, and it has scratches, so I don't know. It's just sitting loose in the bag, and I think the loose clips probably scratched it. not good. The S&W (it's a model 457) is worth only about $190 in good, but somewhere around $300 (I didn't write that one down) in excellent condition, and it's a bit less worn and newer. Still, if I'm gonna be faced with a dealer who will only pay 25%, that just wouldn't even be worth doing. I guess I could at least bring them buy a dealer. I really don't need both. Unfortunately, the 1911 is not good to actually carry (single action), but it has sentimental value since it was my first, so I'd like to hang onto it. But if I get rid of the S&W, I have nothing to carry, if I felt like it, but actually, I'm a little disappointed in it because if I have one in the chamber, I can't quite put a full clip in--it's just a little too tight or something. Still, I have no desire to just be ripped off, and I'm fairly close to not needing to. And there's always bankruptcy.
I like having the new bagua dvds. I still haven't started doing the circle walking, though, but that's just laziness. I haven't fully digested everything. Two dvds are about two different main attack styles of the lion style of yin style bagua, sweeping and smashing. Smashing is just attacks with a fist, and sweeping is an open hand thing. Each of those disks has seven forms, with seven moves in each form, so maybe 50 techniques, though I think there is a good bit of repetition, so I'm not sure how many are unique. It seems like every one ends with a poke to the eyes. I think this is the specialty of the snake style, from what I gather from the Qinna dvd. I am noticing that there is a lot of attacks on specific pressure points. I also have the qinna dvd. 64 techniques. Each of the 8 animals has 8 attacks, and just one attack gets it's own DVD, but their also giving it one Qinna technique, which is probably really not quite right, but it's a way for them to organize them, I guess. I say it's not right, because the Qinna technique for Lion smashing strike, which I have a whole dvd with 50 moves again, never occurs on that dvd, as far as I can remember. They had all those chance to illustrate it. It's kind of a cool move, too. you kind of reach around behind the guy and pull his chin up and around. It seems that about half the applications on the general disk are throws, or pushes, and a lot of pressure point hits. But now I know what these guys mean by Qinna. They are |
