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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 all just throws. Quite a few hip and leg throws. A lot of arm throws, which do used the joints. There were no standing holds. A few had them holding the guys arm while he was one the ground. This is all consistent with what I thought was bagua main principle, that you are facing multiplee attackers, and you need to get rid of them quick. The forms also seem like you are taking care of several people standing around you in a circle, because the moves are all in different directions. It seems like I saw all the main aikido throws, though it looked like maybe a couple, like the irimi nage the one almost like a clothes-line, wasn't done quite the same way. It's not really it's main emphasis I'm sure. A lot of them just seem like body checks. But with chi. I guess. And they are doing them all on a wood floor, not with mats. that's gotta be tough. Anyway, I need to understand the applications a little better, and see what is done with the basic sweeping move in the simple circle walking, so I can do it with some idea of what it's for. All the forms are done as part of circle walking, too. So, I thought the moves seemed a lot like aikido moves, but I don't know if that's just because there are a limited number of throws that are possible, and I don't know about a lot of other styles. They may all have the same things. But it didn't have all the fancy flying spinning kicks and things, so it wasn't taekwondo.
And a neat little thing happening. Ashley MacArthur wrote me. She was the Hutchison valedictorian that I mentioned a while ago, saying she was probably smarter than the M.U.S. valedictorian Austin Chu, and her friend Erin had written. Did the vanity google that everyone tries eventually. And she said that she wasn't as smart as him. But I don't know. I'm not sure I buy it. And she's almost certainly more fun. Which may be more important. Anyway, it was nice of her to write, but I don't really have any reason to write back. I really should get some comments going.
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Happy birthday, Frank Lloyd Wright! I saw a "Dale Gribble for president" sticker on the back of a car. and occasionally a puff of smoke would blow out the windows. i did a work-out today, which is good, but my knee was hurting a bit. that's no fun, but it'll probably go away. and i ended up really sweaty. i have the thermostat at 78. maybe that's just a little too warm. i went to aldi's to get some fried chicken, strawberries, and ham. i've been wanting some ham and eggs. they had sandwich ham, and real ham. and there was two kinds of sandwich ham. one in, like a big package, and some in little bitty packages, for like 25 cents. the little bit packages were 10 cents an ounce, and the big ones were 16 cents an ounce. that seems a little strange. anyway, i got a few of the little ones. it's pressed stuff though. and when i had some, i noticed that it rely does taste distinctly different, so it wasn't exactly what i was looking for. but it was close enough. it'll be good to be eating eggs. they're about the cheapest thing to eat, but surprisingly nutricious. Anne Bancroft died today. I need to watch _the graduate_ again. classes have started. one looks really tough. huge numbers of assignments. All of them are asking for us to give an introduction. So far it looks like people have just written one and are putting that for each class. seems like a cop-out to me. so I'm writing one for each class, trying to relate it to the class in some way. on the news, they're talking about how kindergarten is changing. science, social studies. reading. pushing hard on those poor little 5-year-olds. Happy D-Day! kind of a turning point kind of a day. i made some money from bruce, and it looks like now i could just make it to when i'd start teaching without completely running out of money or credit. i still haven't gotten a letter from memphis city schools saying they want to hire me, though. that's a little scary. and there was a new teacher reception, but i didn't see any high school principals, and i'm kind of set on some place where i'd have a chance to teach a computer science class. got my books yesterday. classes start on the 6th. ordered two bagua applications dvds. and the qinna dvd. qinna is the joint lock submission hold stuff mixed into pretty much all chinese martial arts. i always thought that was cool. i guess really if i wanted to study martial arts, that's what i would want to study. not so much a;ll the strikes and stuff. the tricky little stuff. i'm kind of curious as to what bagua will do with them since one of it's principles is to always keep moving, and it was developed to be able to defend against eight people at a time, so it doesn't sound like you would hold someone, like in a qinna technique. we'll see. didn't go out drinking. felt like it, but didn't. i'm still trying to resist. but i did feel really fat today, and want to start working out, but didn't do anything this evening. we'll see how it goes. and i harvested the little patch of wheat that was around where i fed the birds. i need to separate out the chaff somehow. it seems like a pretty good amount, for such a sparse little bunch. i wonder how my patch will turn out. it probably needs to be fertilized, and i have to make sure to water it. and i need to do something with this fresh wheat i have. it's not too bad just eating the kernels as they are. they aren't all dried out and hard yet. wow. wendy smith (rice) died this morning. daugther of fred smith, the fedex founder. i knew her. she was in my humanities class in my senior year in high school. as was wynne morrison. and i was in a play with her. _she stoops to conquer_. at a cast party for that, i think it was her singing scat. i don't remember ever speaking to her personally. i was already lost at that point. but that was terribly young. they said "natural causes". heart attack. A bit of a pause. So I was reading some umberto eco, and he had a thing about everyone has a dark place in his soul, so we always have people fighting about something, revolutionaries, freedom fighters, or just terrorists or whatever. punks and gangbangers. but whatever reason they have is just a rationalization. they just really want to fight, and their cause is just an excuse. also read about half of a book on tantra. was just an indian aboriginal (ie dravidian and not aryan) earth mother cult. celebrate the feminine and all. life's a good thing and all. seems like all patriarchal systems say this life is a bad thing. wait for the next one. gurus dying of cancer from their smoking habits. there's also a bit of animisim. it of course, had all the sex training practices. kegel exercises and stopping ejaculation. there's a really nasty one about sucking stuff back in. and then stretching the pee-hole to have sex with a clit. really freaky. i mean, i heard the gay version of that, but i just don't see it. anyway, he had a point with how they are healthy yoga people, whereas most other religious dudes tend to be sickly. or fat. closer to being in teaching. not sure it's a great thing. but they seem to have a feeling that being a caring people is the only was to do it. my feeling has always been that caring can easily get in the way, and be more trouble than help. better to be able to work unburdened by all the fear and guilt and stuff. for example, psychology. most people who study it, and i assume practice it, are not people who deeply care about people, but people who are just very curious and interested. and they are not likely to let how they want people to be to cloud their view of how they actually are. here's one: "Nach dem Essem sollst du rauchen, oder eine Frau gebrauchen" helped eddie with the concrete. i am way out of shape. got too tired and had to take a break. bending all the way over to do something really tires you more than just doing something standing straight up. i guess. in this case i was moving a two-by-four back and forth to even out the concrete. doesn't sound like much. tired me out, though. the star wars midnight first showing would just about be getting out now. i'm glad i was sleeping instead. i was having this strange group fighting dreams, though. maybe it was on my mind. so, kool-aid has finally gone to using artificial orange flavor in the orange kool-aid. it used to be natural flavor. and it really made a difference. the artificial flavor noticeable tastes worse, and has a nasty sort of aftertaste. i think the lemon may still be natural flavor. it's not like it was juice or anything. probably just orange peels, or waste left over from orange juice production. but i liked it, and i noticed. maybe i should write them. i had tried the new stuff, but i just found a couple of packets sitting in the back of the cupboard. i'm sure that using artificial flavor saves them a little money, and believe it or not, koolaid prices have been noticeably going up, and there are other cheaper competing brands. They also have dozens of other flavors that have always been purely artificial, so i guess it isn't so much of a blip. but to me this really was a nice little corner of purity in the world. naturally flavored orange koolaid. gone. on andromeda recently, rommie waved her hand and said "these are not the 'droids you're looking for". doyle asked, what was that. rommie replied, i don't know. it didn't work. but i think about it now. 'droids can use the force because it only works for lifeforms. and with that whole midiclorian garbage that lucas ruined star wars with, there is logic now that only living cells could really use the force. and, something that is supposed to happen in that sith movie, though i haven't seen, is that annakin, who has more midiclorians than anyone else, loses most of them when he loses his arms and legs, and because of that becomes much less powerful. which is just crappy. seems like the only midiclorians that could possibly matter are the ones close to the brain. but it was always terrible science fiction. just a space fantasy. i read some of the really harsh reviews. got pretty funny. "a break me a fucking give." and people bop around the galaxy, but a girl can't get an ultrasound to see that she has twins. and now i've seen the star wars movie. i just didn't like it. no heart, no soul. jedis being scummy. annakin being a dumbass. padme not having an ultrasound didn't really bother me, but just dying because she lost the will to live didn't make sense. that happens to people when they are hurt, but i couldn't see it just because she's giving birth. i suppose it's supposed to be some kind of dark side voodoo, but i really don't care. too much just didn't make sense, and the action ended up just being boring to me. i didn't buy the jedi just losing so easily. i guess reading all the reviews made me more annoyed by the terrible dialog. and bad acting. knowing the main characters were going to live also took out all the tension that might have been there. the special effects just seemed busy. maybe it was me, but i just didn't care. not a bit. through the whole thing. except maybe to be annoyed. i actually liked the two before a little more than this one. maybe just because i was still holding onto my fannishness back then. or maybe i didn't like it so dark. and not because the bad guys were dark, but because the good guys were dark. i mean, somehow obiwan "loses" his lightsaber (yeah right), and ends up blasting the cyborg. i mean, i was counting down the arms. with the first two down, i don't see how he couldn't get the other two. and then instead of just blowing off the other two arms, he kills him? is this a jedi? lucas just blows the entire mythology. i doubt he ever really got it. what was the good thing in star wars? the heart. and the occasional humor. maybe the myth and ethos were pretty lame, but take them away and you just have crap. that's what people didn't like about episode I, and i guess it's taken two more movies for it to be bad enough to bother me. so for me, _kung fu hustle_ has been the best movie of the year so far. much better than this travesty. felt like i needed to go out and think. maybe see becky. she's not there at the bar. actually, no one at the other bar. non-smoking. so eddie called today. germantown is changing the construction regs and he wants to pour some concrete in a couple of days if it doesn't rain. i guess i'd be up for that. and the grant is just to cover tuition. i didn't remember it being that much. so now i don't have a solution to running out of money. except that i might be able to get a student loan, maybe. which i guess would be an answer. i have to look into it. so, i looked at a sign in deciding to come here. i decided if the letter at the beginning of the cnn headline was toward the beginning of the alphabet, yes, if toward the end, no. don't know the statistical breakdown. "amber alert". that's pretty unambiguous. but ashley's tending the smoking bar over here. she's cute. i don't know if it's the same management as mulligans or what. i've been playing strip poker a lot for the past couple days. starpoker.com. lost all my old links so i googled strip poker and found it. it's got bunches of "models". which i guess makes me just want to try them all. the poker playing is generally pretty weak. still, i do occasionally lose. that's gambling, i guess. the choices are rated by skill, too. there is a "low" that plays horribly. lots of max betting with nothing. playing to lose. doesn't work on jordy, though. boo. and occasionally crashes. so ashley told me, she's about to cry. no bar mats. ten hours walking and standing on concrete. her back is noticeably hurting. and she came up and talked to me about it. bit of a sweetheart. um. poor guy in the suit next to me didn't even finish his brownish and clear ice mixed whatever. aw. poor mr. businessman. and ashley remarked on it, too. big blonde from mulligans is here. forgot her name. and dude in the baseball cap. that what it was. job fair today. i tried print out my resume. printer was out of ink. just as well though. nothing for me. except st. jude stuff. but they seemed to say just look at the web site. didn't really talk to them, though. not sure what i would have had to say. they had lists of jobs, and several looking interesting. and the one's i'd like all had anita onida as the recruiter. so i need to talk to her. i did apply to something. but i should do more than just one email. so they were talking. and ashley passed on the info that king's trio is playing at mulligans cordova tonight. felix chien emailed out of the blue. i haven't written him back. not sure really what to say. didn't say how he was doing. so, maybe i should just declare bankruptcy. then again, bankruptcy is a form of legal protection from debtors, and my understanding is that it is to keep them from taking some bits of your stuff, like your house, and since all my debt is just unsecured credit card debt, i don't really need protect. so i could maybe just abandon the debt. but i'm not doing that either. i don't know. they've been nice to me. pretty much. waittresses off. having a martini called a "french kiss". also got some water,. wouldn't want to get toasted, i guess. bar dude with stubs for some of his fingers is shane. and tuesdays is steak night. specials. 12.95 for the 16 oz ribeye and 8 oz whatevers. it says till 9, though, so i guess i'm sol today. i should keep it in mind, though. i'm still wanting to try the bangers and mash, though. kool, man, dude in white cap with polo on it is part owner. and said, the more he gets into it, the more he hates people. people are so, what did he say. seemed like grasping, but he has his own way of saying it. older guy talking to him. must be a family thing. ashley calling a cab. metro. young dude is brian. old guy is roommate, wrecked car, loaning yukon. because of ashley. old man is talking to himself. trippy. broken. so there a cute blonde waitress. used to work for fedex. was saying,one time she thought she had hyperthermia. soaked in sweat from her tank top to her fedex coat. things don't bother her much now. im trying the sausage and batter. i taste sausage in there somewhere. dont see it. tastes alright. something like a corndog. and now it looks like cable is out. bummer. they haven't figured out how to turn on the sound. has lots of cheese. so ashley did a half a shot. with some guy. trippy. one of those evenings. and a real quick pour from ashley. laddie, little skinny young friend of ashley. businessman came back. talking to laddie. looks like ashley is getting out of here. or maybe not. little black kitchen working asked if i was alright, captain. i said, yes sir. he said, he's alright if i'm alright. or maybe. she's starting a newcastle. and brian is back. maybe the old dude is rufus. anyway. so, brian was asking for a jaeger. and i was snapping my fingers. ashley said, don't do that, slapping the bar, or hitting it with the glass. shane asked my name. they're calling me guinness. i said i'm andy. and he's shane. not that it makes any difference. so, ashley has to get up. dana's wedding is tomorrow. so, brian has a palmtop and can do all the stuff on it. wanted me to help him with it. unfortunately, i haven't played with that one enough. hopefully he'll be able to play with it enough to figure it out. so, i asked ashley what she was going to be when she grows up. and she said she didn't know. but threw out model. girl has it together. some kind of stones cd playing. but this room has no tunes. shane was having trouble switching the stuff around. dude took a spill onto the concrete. drinking bud. scared everyone. lattie, not laddie. latimer, i think. he works at bennigans. andrew lattimer. i did admit to ashley, though, that guinness is an affectation. though, for some reason, i guess it was the four pints, my tongue skipped a beat and i said affection before i realized i meant to say affectation. twisted. but i think it's the drinking beer at all that is the affectation. i'd really rather drink water. and ashley did not go off with brian, it looked like. huh. brian did tell shane that she shouldn't pay for anything there since he's the owner. heh. anyway, it was an interesting evening. i didn't get as much thinking done as i might have liked. but it was interesting. Happy Friday the 13th! so, i'm sitting at the dan mscuinness. i'm in a slightly different spot, and the internet is working. and becky is tending the bar. that's neat. but then, i came here so i could see her, maybe. i thought she was managing. maybe she is. seems moderately busy. some kind of band setting up. finally went to see laine about her computer class at ridgeway. i didn't have as many questions as i was thinking. one of the reasons i was thinking math was that i could get a job anywhere, but she said computer teaching would be like that. still don't know about that. she id say the city only has four teachers. so they might well want me to do that. i don't know if it's compatible with the program i'm getting into. i haven't talked to any human resources people. i guess i should call them. but one thing seemed to point out possibilities. she had several people in her class who drove over from white station. so they might be up for having ther own teacher. i guess it shouldn't be to hard to find something, but that whole licensing is still there. and i have to make it to august without busting. just don't know about that. finished _canticle for leibowitz_. the lit disc. group book of the month. not so much to it this second time. but i read it. at least it was easy. lots of girls with these black jaegermeister tank tops and flashing red lights. ok, so the wifi is coming and going. band started. covering my baby wrote me a letter. loud. uninspired. not terrible. new bartender babe. gotta love books that end in nuclear war, though. even if it's strangely about a catholic order. ok, becky's back. just on break. but the bar has cleared out. :( only me left here. boyfriend justin is graduating on friday. trying to find someone to cover for her. i guess the two places are somehow related. i did apply for a web development job at st.jude. maybe i'm gonna get serious about looking for something, instead of just drifting into teaching. man. man. i edited a journal entry recently. quite unusual for me. some things just don't come off well. people misinterpret. plus they could have bad consequences sometimes. still. i feel bad to be afraid to say some things. i guess everybody has limits. so, this was supposed to be a non-smoking bar. but they caved. it was a stupid idea, anyway. so, i think nobody in laine's class was going to take an exam. so she wouldn't have to make one out. but there was someone who was on the edge or something, so he asked for one. so she bumped him up. so easy to manipulate. much younger people here. and critical point. used the restroom herre. horrible. one person at a time. so you gotta lock it behind you. ick. wheelchair accessible, though. ew. joy. ok, so there are these two young women at the bar. obviously quite bored. stacked brunette in a white tank top and a beret. and a blonde. the blond is playing whatever video game thing thy have sitting by the bar. augh. got the other bartender back. pigtails. just about my height. maybe an inch shorter. i need to order the applications dvd for bagua. so, they go the music too loud to hear anything. but they have a band, too, which is the same thing. on break. inhale mary. pigtails it does have more of a pub vibe to it. all in it together. public. open. ok. who could the brunette be calling? blonde, but dark roots. oh, man. "baby come back'. i'm paid up. invisible. perhaps i should go to ireland. girl and dude sitting next to me were dancing in their seat, and i motioned that they should get up and dance, and chickee offered her hand as to ask me to go up with her, man. failure on so many levels. maybe bloomsday. it's june 16. it would be during summer vacation. i bet it's a thing for high school english teachers. you know. failure. lost. but appreciating really good writing. so, i've been ripping off my napkin and making little wads of paper. manager dude next to me has been throwing them at folk. and now becky is picking them up and throwing them away. and ashley showed up. trippy. she shook my hand. i guess i should have kissed it. the volumn knob for the music is on a shelf here behind the bar. becks had to pull something out to adjust it. they git real anarchists in athens. hiding back in the cop-free university. but still. makes me feel inadequate. i paid up after the last one. fifth. so i nursed it. when i was leaving. becky said to have a good evening. and she hoped i enjoyed it. i nodded. I guess it's like washing your car. I watered the plants, and it rained. it's been weeks, but i had more lucid dreams today. this time it was definitely because i did self-reflective meditation. i haven't been doing that lately, really. but, of course, i can't be sure if it's the meditation, or the expectation caused by the meditation. but, then again, the self-reflection is somewhat similar to the lucidity itself, so that could well be it. so i biked here to starbucks. exercise. doesn't quite ofset the 700 calories from the venti strawberries and cream. but this exercise is more about getting the heart rate above a little. but some guy in a group of four that came in in a convertible volvo, was yapping about starting some job, and he took some days off, and they said you don't get days off till you've been there a year. if he'd know that, he'd rea have just started a week later. you just shouldn't treat professionals that way. maybe a secretary. but you just gotta wonder, professional what? dumbass? if you're not getting any days off until after a year, doesn't really sound like you have the job of a professional. two guys and two chickees. maybe thirtyish. dude has the hair recession going. or twenty-somethings. pity the chickees. i ate bacon and scrambled eggs a couple times now. it's been a long time since i've done that. nuked the bacon, cut it up put it in the pan and the scambled the eggs in. i really liked it. to an unusual extent, i think. maybe i was just hungry. maybe it's nostalgia. i've been doing that with sausage. something about the bacon though. just craving bacon lately. three little teeny boppers. well, little. i wasn't standing, but one of them could have been taller than me. mom came over, one of them asked could they make it twenty minutes, she doesn't want to get in trouble. shouted that across the place. anyway, mom came over, and said she would just call themwhen she pulled up in the parking lot. huh? bourgeois, aw, now i can't remember the word, ennui? or is she respecting their adolescent space? laziness? too proud to be a servant to her puppy? the chickees have each other, at least, it seems. sounds like he's a lawyer. my eyes are losing focus. blonde running boomer. leathery. lexus guzzler with "run the trails" bumper sticker. darn boomers. bile rising. striking resemblance. it is mother's day. revenge of the nerds. scary thing is, their roots are the same color. lowlifes. playing a stupid game. i watered the plants. they hadn't wilted since i planted them yesterday, which is good. the wheat is quite thick, but it was looking a little dry. i'm a little wet,myself. sweaty. I don't feel so bad today. I think I was just lonely, but in denial about being lonely, and getting frustrated because i was not doing anything about it. but all in a strangely subconscious way. the subconscious can do funny things. The wheat is coming up in my little patch. it's pretty uneven. thick bunches and bare spots. but i only spent maybe 10 minutes planting it, so i guess that's what happens. just threw it out and raked a little dirt over it. so there's a little patch in the lawn around the bird feeder that has gone to see, but it's been like that for weeks but they aren't solid kernels. i don't really know how long it should take for it to ripen. i would ask holly about it, but she hasn't called me back. grr. and i have to admit that's getting me angry. seems like i've got things making me angry, and they are sort of accumulating. tt's how anger goes, i guess. my web host has gone and charged me at the double rate after i talked to them about it. and several folks haven't responded to emails i've sent. maybe i need to start filling monitors with gasoline. that is one thing in the _fight club_ book that was a bit better than the movie. dude kills his boss by drilling a hole in and filling his monitor with gasoline while it's turned off. he turns it on and boom. so, i didn't go out on cinco de mayo. but i'm at t.j. mulligans again. dana has a bit over week before she's getting married. and becky is here. but becky is actually working the other end, so i don't know if i'll get to speak to her. dana said she had had a little bit of cold feet, but she's better. had ear congestion.sounds like she's in a tunnel. becky works at the dan mcguinness on tuesday and wednesday. she took the semester off. i guess i don't talk to her much. so, i don't know. it seems like my punches have a lot of power. i don't know if it's internal or external power though. and i'm not even that sure what that is anymore. my guess is that internal power comes from doing a technique with the proper form, which channels the force of body weight shifting to the punch. that actually takes a fair amount of training. and actually, to increase it, i could well see that it requires a kind of muscles flexibility that requires a relaxation kind of training. a good hit is much more like a whip, from a lash of soft leather, than a clubbing, like a big dumb brute swinging a baseball bat. the tai chi master story is like an iron rod wrapped in cotton, but again, i think that's more a relection that real hits have the whole body behind them. there is a saying, that i swear most round-eyes completely miss: use your whole body as a weapon. i guess, gadget-minded, gun-toting, martial wannabes take that as using all the pieces as weapon. silly little white devil. speaka no englais? so dana just said: i washed my hands fifty times today. i just can't seem to get the beer off them. got the chickees out on the dance floor. one little blondie really looked like she wanted someone to dance with. i guess, at some point, though. they just give up and dance by themselves. or with each other. which is truly sad. i guess i just like martial arts secrets. i'd love to have great internal martial power. unfortunately, i don't really care to have great gung fu, which they recognize as real source of martial greatness. and to translate that into english, great gung fu just means a really good effort. working hard. which is really what it takes. but i'm a typical western dumbass. lazy. so, i guess it's a consequence of becky being at the other end of the bar, and her getting me stuff, but the last two stouts, i got to the end of them, and the glass sat there empty. and it was a strange sort of abandoned feeling. dana asked me if i wanted another. but, i don't know. nad there's a dude from jamaica. asked for guiness in bottles. there, they drink heinie-hoes, red-stripe, or guinness. the lock on the driver's door on my car still doesn't work. so i'm leaving it open. i'm tempting the evil in the world. i believe that even evil can be tamed. it's just people with fear. quite possible to manipulate. bronze are here. so i was sitting listening to the band. right next to the speakers. actually, my right arm was resting on one of the speakers. sometimes it's just not loud enough. probably bad for my ears, but i've been thinking about shooting myself in the head, so this doesn't seem like so much of a sacrifice. i mean. what's left? enlightenment is just nothingness. pleasure is nice, but it comes and goes, and you just want more. it's a sort of biological way of pulling you along to things that help biology. happiness? again, it comes and goes. it pulls toward the good, above and beyond what is simply biologically useful, but it is a way for society to reach it's ends. to elucidate, we are social creatures. simply biology will help us to be better individuals, but our biology has had to create something to make us better for all of society. seeking happiness, above just seeking pleasure, makes us better people better for serving the need to make society better. tear down a veneer of rationality with alcohol, and it becomes more clear. so the band was arguing. drummer dude loved them like brothers, but they could agree to not do it anymore. not sure what it was about. emotional dudes trying to be rational. dana asked me if i was still with them. was i ever with them? i guess so. to be or not to be. the question makes a whole lot more sense to me, right this second. i feel bad. new waitress, christina. taller than me. talking to charlie and the manager. standing behind me. she didn't trust the manager to shake his hand. but charlie, um, attracts girls. hmm. so dana asked me if i was ok. i'm sure, i don't look like i'm doing so good. a bit out of it. but i did respond and nod. i guess that was right. i'm not totally bad off. so, this one waitress had a $35 walkout. bummer. Felice Cinco de Mayo! 5/5/05 my reaction: I want to pound them into dust. a passage in foucault's pendulum. in his professional life, dr. so-and-so has not seen anyone made neurotic by his own divorce. the problem is always the divorce of the Other. and belbo's chickeepoo leaves her husband "for him" , goes off for time alone, then goes with some gypsy. sounds about right. Read _Sweet Dreams_ by Dan Dennett. Recent, this year actually, book about consciousness. The main idea is that consciousness is "fame in the brain". Some thoughts just achieve a wide broadcast across the brain, for various reason. Heard that one before. Baars workspace model of consciousness. But one thing that was a little new to me was how he is really down on the concept of qualia. how things feel. to him, it is not anything hugely special. just more information that has been processed, though since it is part of the conscious information, it can be remembered and it has emotional content and value. but it is only some more information processing. personally, i don't like the concept of the brain doing information processing, but that's me. Got me to thinking about searle's chinese room. it's a simple enough argument. guy sitting in a room playing with symbols might act like a person who understands chinese without really understanding chinese. but, i just realized that it is also possible that the instructions could actually be teaching searle chinese. it's a reasonable possibility. so if a computer is able to learn meanings, then it can. the conclusion of the argument is only that just acting like there is understanding, like passing the turing test, does not necessarily implyactually understanding. and searle likes to say that the conclusion is that just manipulating symbols even with proficiency enough to pass a turing test, is not enough for undersanding. i think he says that that means computers can't understand, but it seems to me now that it is only not necessarily so. he is also big on the qualia of understanding. how it feels to understand. and having just seen the dennett stuff, i see how important are the emotive value and associative power of conscious thoughts in forming meaning. when a thought is conscious, it brings up the possibility of bring up many memories and associations that help us think about what is good and bad depending on what else is being thought of. simple symbol transfer and manipulation probably lacks all the activity and power that goes along with this. but it seems like, if the system is done right, it could well have this kind of activity and power. anyway, searle invented the phrase "strong AI", that computers could really think, and basically said that the chinese room shows that it is wrong. dennett seems to clearly say that strong ai is, or possibly just could be, true. i really would like to see these guys argue directly. and what is meaning. well, meaning is a part of understanding, which is a conscious thing. you feel like you understand the meaning of something. and now with this "fame in the brain" concept of consciousness we can say something significant about meaning. for something to have meaning, we must have at some point had some conscious understanding of it, and thus at that time, the whole brain was sort of lit up and everything had a possible contribution to make, some kind of reaction, though of course, only a limited amount of these possible reactions actually themselves won out and because conscious as well. So if we were to think the word "tree", it's meaning would just be the potential reactions of all the parts of memory and the brain. and all these potential reactions would interact with the other thoughts going on to result in the next conscious thoughts. we might think of spreading chestnut trees and village smithies. or just some generic oak or maple. or maybe an organization chart. or leaves or acorns. or any number of possible things. but i suppose generally we have to pick a meaning appropriate to a context, and then we say that's what the meaning is here. tree could mean in a particular case some particular tree that fell on someone's car. so meaning could be some specific intended possible reaction or association. but in general it is bunch of possible reactions and associations. another thing that dennett claims, that might be a little dubious, is that episodic memory, remembering sequences of things happening like a movie, is a human thing because we replay stuff in our heads. it's something that dogs don't do. they remember that they like their master and don't like mean nasty kids, but they don't remember, say, playing catch yesterday. bold claim. don't know if i by it. there was something in there about if someone were to try to prove it, they would have to at least accept his fame in the brain concept of consciousness either way. and a scary experiment in the book was about "change blindness". two pictures, with one difference. it's actually a kitchen and one of the cabinets has a brown color. it takes a while to notice the difference, and once you see it, the difference always stands out. the question is, were the qualia different before you noticed the difference. and however you answer that has problems, according to dennett, such that you really should conclude that it is a bogus concept. there isn't any hard problem or special thing like qualia. i don't know about that. personally, the scene was complicated enough that i couldn't tell for sure that the pictures were or weren't exactly the same. he seems to pretty often just kind of say to people who say things he disagrees with, well maybe you're wrong. doesn't really give proof, but they didn't really give any proof either. seems like a freakish kind of arguing. Happy May Day! so Jennifer Wilbanks, the bride runaway, just had cold feet and wasn't raped and murdered. I'm not sure why it was national news. except that people want bad news. i guess bad news makes people feel better about the natural pain in their lives. but what strikes me now is that much of the reaction is anger. and i think about it, and that kind of reaction is essential in the conservative mindset. it is a reaction that she did not have the kind of discipline to stick things out. she acted weak, and to a conservative, that means she was a bad person. no compassion or sympathy. anger. thinking of themselves. and she lied to the police. oo, god forbid. i really feel like following up on the cnn article about the reaction and asking the angry people if they are little bushies or what. also, they say she left her id and eveven that she told a cabbie that she needed a hotel, but they didn't add the fairly significant conclusion. i guess they leave it up to the reader. she got there, and without an id, she couldn't get a hotel. she in addition to being freaked out by the wedding, and having jumped to another part of the country, she hadn't slept in a bed, so she wasn't thinking so clearly. lying to the police like that, though illegal, isn't such a big deal since she was very impaired. and yet, i'm sure they didn't let her sleep it off. they just keep asking her the story, and not being all there, she couldn't always give the same details. standard quasi-torture interrigation techniques. pigs. locusts are kosher. still no lucid dreams. i remembered them a little more today than earlier in the week. and a lot of stuff about being in classrooms. as a student. i was thinking about looking up 'supper' and 'dinner' in the dictionary before going to sleep, and I had a dream where a person said 'episode' had to be underlined because it wasn't a real word, i guess english word. but i couldn't look it up in the dictionary. couldn't find it, and things kept shifting, making it hard to even look. that should have been a signal that i was dreaming, but i didn't catch it. grr. anyway, i did look up supper and dinner. dinner is the main meal of the day and can be at noon or in the evening. supper is the evening meal, especially when dinner was a noon. lunch is just at noon, but generally is light. and lunch seems to derive from a word meaning a thick slice of food. i am st of dreading seeing the _hitchhiker's guide_ movie. i read a really long review by a fanboy site saying how terrible it was. magrathea.com or something. they took out all the jokes, and focused on the plot, which was always weak, and made little adjustments so it makes no sense. but metacritic.com has it at 62, marginally good. doug wants to go see it this afternoon. well, it wasn't completely humorless, but it was mostly. there were a few bits of fairly weak humor. but there were a lot of scenes with all the humor removed. which is sad. and the timing was pretty poor. there was this romantic stuff with arthur and trillian that I thought just didn't work. and zaphod wanted the question and trillian too. but the point was that no one really cared about the question. arthur just wanted tea and zaphod money (not for the question but from magrathea) and ford a party and trillian some excitement. all ignoring the question. that's a funny thing. arthur wanting trillian isn't funny. maybe romantic and endearing. but not funny. i was surprised that there was anything at all funny, and there were a few laughs, but most of the humor was removed. Can I even write with a pen anymore? I'm sitting in the doctor's office, and I decided not to carry in Jordy, but I grabbed a piece of paper, and I'm writing stuff on it. Maybe I will type it in to Jordy. So, I had 3 lucid dreams in two days, but nothing since then. It's bee almost a week. I guess that's how it goes. But, I haven't bee waking up as much to go to the bathroom, so maybe that'w been making a difference. They were going to let me work as a substitute teacher. I was signed up for the orientation, but wouldn't you know it, my doctor's appointment conflicted with it, and I wasn't able to get another one. I really should have gotten a more available doctor. But there are only a few weeks left in the school year, so it isn't such a big loss. And I'm not sure why it took me so long, but I finally applied to Memphis city schools. Maybe I just didn't see how to doono it. I'm pretty lost Read _fight club_. I didn't think the book was so good as the movie. The writing wasn't very detailed. It was pretty much the same though, in content Well, doctor said I was doing OK. about the same I guess. I have been playing Diablo II again. I had this level 16 babrbarian character, but I don't really remember it. And it was at the beginning, but it wasn't a "sir" which I thought indicated it had gone through once, Maybe it had something to do with being a new installation or hard disk. Happy Earth Day! not only lucid dreams two days in a row, but i had two this morning. sitting here at the new dan mcguinness. barbabe wanted to see my i.d. and it's the non-smoking bar. they have a smoking bar. that's where everyone is. girl offered to start a tab. but i don't think so. the internet access seems to be just out of range. oh well. so much for coming here. book discussion at aimee's i guess i don't have much to say anymore. mike and nat. and i got back a book i borrowed from her. le ton beau de marot. but her cat had peed on it. she wanted to get me a new one, but i said it was fine. i don't think it matters, but she felt bad about it. she'll get over it, though, i'm sure. dreams came up. aimee keeps a journal, and she says she's had some interesting dreams. i said i've been having a lot of lucid dreams lately. i have. seems like a couple a week, which is not so bad, for the past month or so. the new form of meditation has made a difference. aimee said she has had maybe three in her life. nat said maybe once. mike never. I'm sitting here at steak and ale waiting on a table. man. i don't get out much. asked me smoking or non and i didn't get it. I decided I wanted to get some prime rib. In remembrance of Howard Shearon. At his funeral, his preacher friend told a story how, when they were picking a restaurant to go to, he'd ask if they had prime rib. He'd always have that. Celebrate. But they asked me how I like it. I didn't know they asked on prime rib. I guess it's possible. And rice. and soup. Clam chowder, they had lobster bisque and something else. And a root beer. ibc in a bottle. not having an ale. they have a little loaf of bread with it. i guess i'll read the rubaiyat. Never been to a funeral before. so, rare was probably not so good a choice. i think the definition of rare is that it be cool in the middle. but prime rib is just a solid cut. so the whole thing was just not so hot. and solid reddish pink. not bloody. it wasn't raw, which would have been ok. but it wasn't especially hot. the plate was pretty hot. how i'm sitting at starbucks. i'm the only white guy sitting here. which is unusual, i guess. (half a dozen other folk) i went out this afternoon looking for the place on colonial that becky said she was managing. i didn't see a tj mulligans, but i did realize that she didn't actually say mulligans. and she mentioned "by target". it must be the dan mcguinness that is sitting there, with the "we're hiring" sign. and it isn't open yet. i stood outside it and got a wifi hit, which is a good sign. rented _ocean's twelve_ a couple days ago. watched it after coming back from mulligans. seemed confusing, like they wanted you to have to watch it twice in order to get everything. not sure it's worth it. i did watch it a second time in the morning. there was a bit that happened on the sixth day before, which they showed in a flashback at the end, that was important to know that it came before what happened on the fifth day before, which they show in the middle, and by that time you probably have forgotten exactly what day was what. so i was curious about that, but it was such an empty fluffy thing, that i'm not sure i really care. did have some interesting names for crime schemes that i tried googling but didn't find. i did make a copy, though. or put it on the hard disk. i have to reinstall nero to burn anything, and i haven't done that. and i'm not sure where the key is. it might be in the email, but that's all in the os install that was slagged. When I went to bring it back, I got _sideways_. i looked at the deleted scenes. they deleted a bit where he hits a dog with his car, and the dog gets away, and later on he's being eaten by some bird. i'm not sure how it's supposed to be funny. but i didn't really think it was very funny in general. more sad than anything. i started listening to the commentary. that was a bad thing about the ocean's twelve-- it didn't have a commentary at all, which is a rip these days. this one was the two actors, and they seem to be laughing and having a good time. it might be funnier than the movie. i'm missing the simpson's. oh well. been angry today. i feel this was sometimes when i forget the blood pressure pills. but that wasn't it. just on edge. maybe it's because mom is coming back tomorrow. that gets annoying. peace just randomly disrupted. got a billy blanks tae-bo workout kit thing. a couple of dvds, and a little inflatable stand up speed bag. i haven't looked at the video yet, and i'm not sure how the bag is supposed to work, because if i hit it free standing, it takes a second or too to come back. that's no good. but now i have it sitting so it will bounce against something (actually, in this case it's bouncing against my heavy bag, which is a little silly perhaps), but now it works the way it probably should. good quick rhythm. but it seems like my hits are completely empty, since i'm not seeing any resistance at all. the heavy bag at least i would give some noticeable juice. but that gets really noisy. i don't know. we'll see. i've let the aerobics slide, which i certainly expected. maybe i'll get back to it. control is an illusion. trevis, the starbuckeroo, asked me if i had everything under control. and that's what i said. installed nero. now burning the dvds that i put on there. funny thing though. the key was in an email, and i had to setup the mail client to look at the old stuff, but all of 2004's emails were missing from the main place they should have been. it looks like i used a different client to such them up. but i found them in a different spot and moved most of them back into the regular spot. i think i still don't have a couple of months, but they're probably on there somewhere. that whole partition was almost full, but i moved that freaky new area to a different one to free up some space. i probably should just move everything to the new partition, and maybe back it up to cd, for good measure. hundreds of megs of emails over at least 7 years. i figure i'd save it because it doesn't cost anything, but it's getting quite copious. one annoying thing. when jordy crashes, i lose all the emails that i've sent. so that's not so nice. at least if i think what i write is important. and i guess, if i'm keeping a journal, i probably do. Happy Tax Day! I just decided I wanted to see Becky. So I'm here at tj mulligans. She's here. She gave me beer. So they need to ask. Did the Jews do anything wrong that made the Germans mad enough to exterminate them? And are they still doing it? So, Dana hit Becky in the nose with her fist. Fuck yeah. Dana said Becky was yacking at her while she was looking the other way. Then she turned putting her dukes up. Caught her under the nose. "Accidentally" So, I'm having an attack of gout, so drinking is really bad right now, and it's going to cause actual pain. Actually, the attack of gout is probably because I went here with Mike and had a few pints. Whatever. Self-improvement is masturbation. But self-destruction.... I want to put a bullet between the eyes of every panda that won't screw to save its species. so, i'm still seeing this who ego/self illusion. but it's starting to fade. t But I am feeling a few extra needles sticking in my toe. Man, there are, like, five cops in here. late shifters just getting some lunch, i guess. hanging out. talking to folks. Just imagine, "dirty deeds done dirt cheap" playing with a bunch of cops in the house. i can't think of anything to say. how 'bout this from ozzie: we're going off the rails on a crazy train. i think it was the indians that really figured it out. everyone wants something. but what they want changes with time, and generally follows a pattern, maybe a sequence. the sequence ends up with folks seeing that it's all silly and they want out. and there is an out, because it is all just a game played by, well, we'll say the universe on everyone that's a part of the universe. gotta do something to pass the time. before that, people _think_ that they want a bunch of things. they think they want immediately is stuff that makes them feel good. i guess they always thing stuff that makes them feel good is what they want, but stuff that makes them feel good immediately is what some people think they want. but some folk get sophisticated enough to see that this kind of stuff, pleasure, is pretty unsatisfying. they go for other stuff that makes them feel good over time. for a lot of people, that's just being better than other people. winning. success. maybe it's just human psychology. because some people realize that this really can't be satisfying. because you just can't win all the time, and even if you do, then you end up not really even winning, just coasting because you are already in a position to beat anyone that might come along because they can't compete with your rep and folks around you. but having played with people by that time, you see how good it feels to help people out, instead of just trying to beat them out. so you think you want to help people out. funny how it happens that this isn't satisfying. people really don't accept charity too well. it feels good in spite of that. but it really can't ever ultimately be the end of things. there will always be poor, pathetically struggling. accept the fine oils to annoint your head, like jesus. well, you might think that, fuck, can't get no satisfaction. shit man. as I said. fuck. goddamn. probably god does not love us. more than likely, he hates us. well. what the hell. then we really need to look for something. we end up completely stuck. and we have to look for a really answer. where in the universe? it's god's fault. we seriously need to understand god. what the hell is he thinking? everywhere. doing everything. did he not make me? what am I? how can I be suffering? am I suffering? and of course, no I'm not really suffering. sometimes I think I am. but people think a lot of foolish things. So Dana's getting married in May, I gather. To an "industrial engineer" not licensed. at wright something, part of dow corning. hasn't finished his degree. not sure if he wants to. so now i have to wonder what it is with engineers and bartenders. becky said there's a new place on colonial she's working at on tuesdays and i think wednesdays. so dana hasn't been in school for five years. will wait until dude pays for it. 5 majors. psych. interior design. likes science. test said she should be a therapist. so, becky took my cash, but she let dana talk to me, pretty much all that needed to be done. becky is gonna be the manager of the new place. Can't sleep because my toe hurts. Gout. I'm trying to research doctors a bit. I'm thinking of going to visit William Wadsworth in Hernando, for advice if nothing else. I don't think I can accept not being able to see the doctor on short notice if I have something critical. He was a really nice guy in high school. I was trying to think. I wouldn't say we were friends. But I thought it was a little better than just schoolmates. Maybe friendly schoolmates. That had to be more because he was just a friendly person. As opposed to not so friendly schoolmates. I wasn't so friendly with say, Michael Woodbury. But I think I was with Salil Parikh. he's is a diagnostic radiologist in florida now. or maybe i should sit in the triage thing for the doctor's office i go to now. but they pissed me off. they used the threat of eventualling on dialysis. i find it to be a hollow threat if it is not backed up by at least an indication that something can be done to prevent it. i don't find it persuasive enough to make me take more tests or consult with another nephrologist. my conclusion when i was doing that was that there wasn't going to be anything more they could do. and, unfortunately, i did not feel i could just go out and confront them with that, because that would kill any kind of trust relationship there might be. i don't know. and i'm working on a networking computer project with doug. the big thing for me is that i'm putting connectors on ethernet cables, and making cables. i never did that before, and i was kind of afraid to, because i didn't see that it could work very well. when you make them, you don't strip insulation off, so i didn't see how it could be especially reliable that it would work. i didn't know if it just touched on the little bit on the end, which would be very unreliable if the lengths of the wires weren't the same. but it seems like it pokes through the wire, but that too could well be unreliable if you do it wrong and maybe the wires don't precisely line up, or it doesn't go in all the way, and it seems like the crimp too itself doesn't quite line up exactly right. i don't know. i never had any confidence in it before i had done it, just from looking at the tools and instructions. and they don't explain exactly what is going on, which certainly gives me no rational basis for reassurance. somehow doug seemed to find it reassuring that network technicians do it all the time, and he doesn't think they are all that sharp, but that rationale doesn't work for me. physical technical skills can be well developed just from practice and experience. doing something a few times general makes you good at something. just knowing theoretically how to do something does not necessarily do that.. but i've done it for two cables now, and they seem to work pretty well with no problems. i've learned a lot of theoretical things. i haven't got the confidence though that the things i know about theoritically i can actually do. which is bad in looking for a job. and it's not just about my confidence in myself. since i think it's generally true, i do tend to buy into the belief that people need the experience to be able do things, and that seems to be what people hiring believe too. but i could be wrong and for them it's more a matter of wanting proof and having a sure thing. so jordy crashed again. memory full, so it locked up and i had to take the batteries out to do a hard reset, and it wiped main memory. so the wireless card drivers were gone. and my desktop third was messed up since i took out the hard disk to sell to bruce. so i had to get third running to get jordy going (actually jordy would work with the ethernet card, but that's not the same). i added yet a third win2k install. i think i've lost my main one, which has all my software installed. i think it has problems because i put the virtual memory files across disks, and it doesn't seem to be able to adjust. and it won't let me edit the registry to reset it. and windows sucks. and i can't seem to find a way to edit the registry of a different operating system install. somehow, when i was trying to use some free downloaded software that appears to allow registry editing, it nuked my second install such that it no longer reads any of my other partitions. that software seems like it's just a small linux kernel on a floppy, and winnt2 seems to just think that the partitions are not enabled. but it seems hosed. and i was really afraid i had lost everything. wanted to cry. and this bit happened when i was trying to write the essays for the application for the teaching license program. pretty sick of computers right then. jordy crashed a week or so later. but it was something i could handle better. the last big thing on jordy i needed to fix was to set the environment so i could ftp upload this journal. and i always have problems doing it, because i forget what i need, and the format. i have to add a key "environment" to hk local machine. and strings in it for unixrootdir, shell, and HOME. i think home may be ticky about case. and maybe the paths are ticky about case. because i thought i had put them in right, but for quite a while it acted like it couldn't find .netrc. it gives an error message when it can't find /etc/services, so i could tell when unixrootdir has problems. has to have forward slashes. but i didn't even know about home because it just ignores it if it can't find .netrc. and i need that in order to input the password, for some reason this ftp client doesn't wait for me to input the password--it has to be done in the .netrc script as far as i've been able to determine. but i've got that done. i guess i was holding off writing in this journal until i could upload it. so doing stuff for doug and i got money from bruce for my computer. i've gotten a little money in. i'm almost out of unemployment, but i've been trying to hang on to it. maybe i should give it up. i'm not looking for a job as hard as i need to be. i'm glad that's done. an anoying bit though today. really cute young woman, a redhead i think, came up with some friend and asked about us. i said we were folks at the top 2% IQ, and she asked what community service we did. i couldn't think of any. friend was particularly obnoxious about it. i don't know about it? but red was talking about the stuff she does. in psi chi they help autistic people. and some national honor society. but she was on about how if we are supposed to be top 2%, how could we not do community service? i guess it's the whole holier than thou thing that happens in the south. but she said she might be interested if we did more. friend said it sounds like we were a club for assholes. but i guess that says more about her. or maybe me. anyway, i'm a bit bummed over the interchange. and i w yy a little bit stammered at having such a cute chick come and talk to me. and speaking of cute chicks, turned out that linda was a computer person, but maybe was teaching. i'm sorry i didn't get to talk to her more or get an email address or something. then again, she didn't seem very into me, like i must have seemed into her. and she went to smu, so she may well have been from texas. i was thinking i might have seen her again, but they were about to go check out when i talked to them. did get mentioned in the paper, though. there was an article in the commercial appeal about the convention. there was a line: "An engineer at the Mensa booth recruits applicants". I don't remember saying exactly that I was an engineer. I guess I might have said something like that. maybe it was the computer. cute redhead named linda, and redhead friend named julia. still at the con. brent has been here all day. dave shiffman has come by and marilyn. that lottery win was a joke. Happy April Fools Day! sitting here at midsouthcon. at the mensa table. giving away m&ms. which stands for forrest mars and bruce murrie. people also take the chips. but not so much. there was some little girl who teaches math. more ap calculus. husband did the alt c thing. said i should talk to him. teaches at ridgeway. she did say they were looking for folks, but with no child left behind, you need to be in a program. saw roy. things about the same. one dude, eric von hase, supposedly just won 10 mill in the lottery. it is april fools day, though. Happy birthday to me! I'm sitting here at the farm. A few days ago, I saw a herd of about 5 deer just a little piece up the road from the house. and they didn't even run away when we drove past in the gator. i haven't been carrying my gun with me, but if i had had then, i think i probably would have been able to kill one. i woke up this morning, and had this feeling of anxiety. it's been happening once in a while lately, and generally i stay in bed, and try to relax or sleep a little more, and that helps. but i didn't this morning, and most of the day i've had this anxiety. i've been having it lately because of the stuff that i've been needing to do and haven't finished. like today i hadn't sent an email to the mensa people about going to midsouthcon. and i haven't filled out the forms for the teachers ed program yet. i really need to get to that. grr. i came up here to work on building this shed. still working on getting the ground level. and i think it's because of that that i had ticks crawling on me today. not very fun. at least i feel lovable. i remember i used to not feel lovable. that was no fun at all.
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didn't go out and drink watered down green beer for st. patrick's day. that's pretty sad. maybe not completely terrible, but pretty sad. went to sleep at maybe 7 in the evening, and it's 5 am, though i did catch dave and conan, that really probably is plenty. i didn't sleep very much yesterday, maybe a total of 4 hours, with lots and lots of lying awake trying to go to sleep. i suppose that's bound to happen sometimes when you often get 14 hours, which i think i did the day before. i really should get a better schedule. so, some dreams i have i'm not even in. some are sorts of tv show dreams. like in this one i just had, there were some folks fighting back in i guess it was wwii, and suddenly there was an alien space ship that they were shooting at. there was the alien who was impersonating a person, and she got stuck here. because somehow we stole a little fighter ship, and blew up the main ship. i forget if that was what happened in _independence day_ or what. anyway, it just made me wonder what exactly it would be like to become lucid and realize you're dreaming, when you're not even there in the dream. i'm sure the people who are really into it have said something about it, but i can't picture it. I finally transferred just about all of my tapes to DVD. I haven't written the last few out to disk yet, but they're waiting on the hard drive. and i lost a couple. _barbara the barbarian_ and a christie brinkley workout. they had just gotten too messed up. and i think it was from playing them when my vcr bits were dirty. i cleaned everything up before doing this. it looks like the tapes are just damaged. and the tape from my graduation is busted in some funky way. it plays for about 15 minutes and gets stuck. i got a lot of it, including the speeches from me and salil parikh. found him on the web recently. doctor somewhere in florida, i think. maybe a gas-passer, i forget exactly. and it seems funny, that i didn't really care all that much to have it, but since i do have it mostly, i'm a little more bummed because it doesn't quite work. And now i just remembered another one i need to do. the one from the 50th wedding aniversary of the ramonats, the folks that went with my mom's family when they were fleeing in the war. but the hope was when i was done, i could finally move the vcr back from being by the computer to being by the tv, and i could tape the dave and conan monologs, which i like to see, instead of always staying up for them. and laughter is such an important thing to have. priorities. but it'd be better to have a more practical schedule, without giving up the little things that make life nice. and man, if i had cable again i'd probably end up getting my news from the daily show. especially now that tom has left. tried the circle walking from the bagua videos i got. made me dizzy. what is it with martial arts exercises and being dizzy. aikido did that to me to, though that was from rolling on the ground. i really hate that. now i'm not so sure i'm going be into it. maybe it has something to do with chi flow. seems unnecessarily unpleasant. the best defense is probably running away really quick. i've been wondering if the talk with peter and jesus about agape and philos could have been in the aramiac. googling about it, i found that hebrew supposedly has 13 words for love, so aramaic must have had some of those differences, and there is one, rakhmii, which corresponds roughly to agape, and gets translated to "mercy" in the king james. part of the sermon on the mount. blessed are the merciful. i don't know if there was something like philos in aramaic, but probably there is. so it's likely the agape/philos thing could have been in the aramaic. but looking at my greek intralinear bible, the translation may be a little fishy. the greek which says merciful is eleimones, not agape, the word that is used to mean unconditional love, so that site might not quite have it right. happy st. patrick's day! a military job is the only form of welfare acceptable to the conservative. he believes that individuals must be allowed to fail and should not be supported. privatization, or "private accounts" is the only way social security can be made acceptable to him. they chafe at the notion. the only exception is the pragmatists, who just want what the people want. pubes, of course, is not a pragmatist and is trying to kill it. and one intriguing thing is that there is a myth that social security actually was a form of investment account--that you pay in and then you get your money out. well, when you get it out, it is your money, but it wasn't what you put it. it's a collective more like insurance. social insurance is a good word. and i think it isn't quite even a "pension" though i'm not sure how those work, because they are pretty close to individual investments, handled by a corporation. and yeah, current people pay for people who paid in in the past. i hate to call it a ponzi scheme, because one of the perfectly valid reasons it can work is that the economy keeps growing, and the money coming in does keep growing. and it's not a bad thing in general, but it hurts the viability of the system that people keep getting older. the natural thing should have been to raise the retirement age to reflect that. the private accounts thing is not to make it work, but to make it acceptable to conservatives. and, possibly a hidden agenda is to kill it, by making it impossible for the lucky ones making money to pay for poorer people. conservatives really hate that. that is a morally wrong thing to them. and some people just really think that way, and some people think conservatively about some things and liberally about others, and the conservative strategists manages to swing the focus to issues that worked for them. unfortunately for progressives, there are very few progressive strategists. conservatives have money to spend on strategy because they on principle are averse to spending it to help people. a progressive group is likely to spend its money on aide programs. conservatives just appear to lack charity on principle, which to me seems evil. they don't mind helping disaster victims, but do mind helping people who are responsible for their failure. and what's the deal with putting up wolfowitz to head the world bank? he's a hawk, maybe one of the main hawks as the architect of the war. i sounds like conservatives want to dismantle a global system for helping people out. now, i heard that the world bank actually used to be a military thing, about handling war reparations. we trashed it, so we fix it. so one of the early heads was military. but this is just freaky. the world isn't very nice if you aren't sure what you want. a sad thing. sometimes i wake up and can't go back to sleep. but most of the job search i do is when that happens. and then in the day i'm asleep when i need to be calling these people. grr. and i think it's a bit of approach/avoidance. i'd probably be too scared to call, so it's a lot easier looking when i'm not going to be able to call. that and the procrastinating. i fried some chicken yesterday. undercooked the first two pieces. it wasn't the best i've had, but it was adequate. craving for oils, i guess. and i like it hot. seems like it's usually cold from fast food places. I am not having a good week. trouble getting started in the morning. not getting stuff done. I did finally have a lucid dream. i think it was from waking up and drifting off again a few times that i managed it. just held on to the idea that i was sleeping, because i had just been awake. seems like the normal trouble is that i start dreaming so long after i have fallen asleep, that any thoughts i might have been having before falling asleep of trying to notice, or thinking of whether i might be dreaming, have long faded away. and i fall in to the old habit in dreaming of just accepting whatever is happening without question. and this morning, i was either having false awakenings, dreaming of opening my eyes, or i was actually waking up and opening my eyes,as i was trying to get up. i should have gotten up at 6 or 7. i did wake up then, but went baco s leep. grr. not very good of me to do. but this final dream, i was in my room, so i was sort of dreaming of having woken and gotten up, and i looked outside and saw some ducks, and realized i was dreaming, and i went outside to catch one, and since i knew i was dreaming, i decided to fly after them when they flew away. white ducks lick the afleck duck, and little brown ducklings (doesn't have to make sense, it's a dream after all). sitting around the dafodils in the front yard. and they flew away and i chased after them. took a while to catch one. i'm not the best flyer. the one i got was having some kind of trouble flying. and i had some trouble breaking its neck. pretty silly dream, perhaps. and i think i must have been hungry. i was considering buying and cooking a duck. anyway, i'm never particularly interested in the content of these dreams, but i like to see what kind of new things i can get to happen. oh man, now _that_ is a cruel joke. i go down to white station. and it's already 2:15, so school would be about over. and i blew it off yesterday. nobody was there. it is spring freaking break. some things are just evil. killing babies (come on, sell them. they're worth money), stealing from the poor to give to the rich (despite what republicans say), and microsoft. since i didn't have anyone to talk to at white station. i decided to go talk to mr. brown at MUS. ran into mr. batey in the hall. he's there again. and there is no computer stuff there at all anymore. mr brown is out of it. and they really dumped him out of it. one time he asked some kid about his computer class, and kid said it wasn't on the preregistration. course gone, no warning to the teacher. that was the 9th grade class. and he tried to teach the ap class. but with no feeder class he couldn't get any good students. only kids with no life. kids that play on the computer, but aren't serious. and when they get a car and find girls, they aren't interested anymore. i was going to go talk to laine. i need to go do that. but mr. brown said i need to e-mail "ellis" and tell him i'm interested in teaching computer stuff. and he was telling me how some problems with being a teacher there. benefits not so good compared to city. can't retire easily on what they give. i was planning to come to starbucks for a hot chocolate and some writing before i dropped by to see mr brown. and i'm here. i wonder what i was going to write about. i got the ebook, awakening from the dream. i put in the complaint to the payment company, and i also wrote the guy at the site. the guy at the site was the author of the book. i really didn't want to bug him. i mean, he writes like he might be an enlightened dude. anyway, he gave me a link to the download page that works. turns out that the link on the download page that access the .pdf file is a relative link, and will work if you use the address he gave, but the merchant gave me a link that redirects to that page, but the address in the browser is still the one for the merchant site, some cgi-bin subdir, and so the relative link tries to load to the file in the merchants cgi-bin dir. i tried to explain all this to leo, the enlightened dude/author/site owner. and i explaines what he needed to do to fix it, make the line and absolute link, and gave him the html. he said, thanks, it was helpful. but i look back at it. problem still there. grr. read his book yesterday as i was blowing off talking to the guy at white station. one of the impressions i am getting from reading about actually enlightened people, is that they really don't give a fuck. and i'm really starting to sincerely believe that if that's what it means, then i'm opposed to it. i mean look at all the christian saints who put up with torture and death. fuck that. i think the black supremist muslims like malcolm x and kin may have gotten it right. fuck the system. and fuck getting into heaven and letting every one else deal with their own problems. oh man. had some thought. and some curly blonde teeny bopper comes in asks the other high school kids if her brother came in, and my brain is empty. so,i don't know yet how much i like kids, but teaching seems a little cooler with all the time off. i'll have time to work on other projects. and, like i told holly one time, i'm really kind of biding my time till the intelligent robots are sufficient to eliminate the fundamental principle of all economies, that there are limits on available goods. if robots can make things for nothing, then there aren't such limits. certainly rich people will and do try to prevent this kind of thing from happening, because they have a lust for power. power will always be limited and require a distribution mechanism. but the powerful continue to use the material products as a tool for this control, when it need not alwaus be so. people are controlled by instilling in them wants for things, and doling them out in exchange for control of their time and effort. blech. Blondie is either Holly or Molly, according to her cup. and the time off will let me work on projects. some kind of medical student studying from _cardiac something or other and defibrillation_ and something made her break out in a bit of a smile. trippy. what kind of projects? well, those ai things. maybe some educational software. though mr. brown explained that teaching is about motivating and pushing people. all the software is crap. one thing he said though. he was really regretting now being out of industry. he lost around $1.5 million by switching careers. hmm. gives one pause. and he's going to have to stick with it a few years past normal retirement to manage. i hadn't seen anybody today. and i don't think i saw anyone yesterday. maybe i did. but i felt like going out. so i'm at tj mulligans. i've been thinking it would be bad for me to come here. waste of money. bad for me. bad experience last time. whatever. ashley was sitting at the bar when i came in. left. i don't even know the name of the bartender chick. so, i tried to order the ebook of awakening to the dream and it didn't work. augh! i was set to put in the time to read it this evening. should have been easy. i actually had ordered it on amazon with something else, but i didn't see that it was 2 to 3 weeks, and the other item was a couple of days, so it split the shipment, and i canceled that bit. and after that, amazon said it was no longer available. but then i saw there was a site. i have been waiting a while to order it. and today was going to be the day. didn't work. a couple days ago, i started on hemingway's _in our time_. dude was a great writer, but his world was so bleak and hollow. finished it. short stories. it was a book from high school. but i don't think i read it then. i have notes in it in my handwriting. i was out of the whole studying thing at that point. we must have talked about it in class. since it's american, that must have been mr. haguewood's class. i think i learned exactly nothing from that class. probably didn't read a single thing. he's headmaster now. i saw him recently one time when i went by. it was the only class i took from him. by that time i was faking it. i was going somewhere. i forgot now. anyway, read the hemingway. then i read _the broker_ by grisham. best-seller. crap on a stick. but it is the book for this month's mensa lit group discussion. kind of pissed at the choice. only in hardback. all the library copies checked out. had to buy it to read it. and crap. the kind of stuff i had. just made the fuck up. no relevance. at least it was easy to read. [lauren] and not particularly short. like 350 pages. but i guess the type was huge, and the words must have been simple. i mean, i've read shorter stuff that was much slower. i don't know. does that make it somehow good writing? freaky. fluffy words. i guess it was a diversion. distraction. people like that kind of thing. it's worth money to them. so that's it then. life is suffering. people keep trying to distract themselves. and life is often pretty good. hell, it's mostly pretty good, but there are just these annoying little bits. however good it gets, it just seems, i don't know, not quite right. just a little irritating. something wrong somehow. heh. letting go is pretty important to being happy. people do tend to cling even though things must change. that whole freedom thing might in fact just be an illusion, but hidden in there is the truth that trying to maintain control can make you unhappy, because it is ultimately impossible. man. there's a couple of, well, older women who came in here. sitting over to my right. drinking white wine. dude jeff is talking to the brunette. big hair. they were talking about the hair. and she's talking about how they just wanted to go out and have a drink. keeps talking. i don't know. maybe they're having fun. jesus fuck, man. brent milton has by now gotten married again. this is like 3 or 4. talk about the triumph of hope over experience. he loses half of everything each time. and he scrapes to have anything. ex-marine. gi bill computer dude. i just don't get the whole serial marriage thing. either it's till death do you part, or you are just doing civil unions. there is a deep difference. it weakens the concept to call these multiple things "marriages". it's a completely other thing. there are marriages. some people find the person that they stay with for the rest of their lives. some people don't. i guess maybe when the government got involved, that messed it up. you can't end a "marriage". you can end a civil union. it's either a marriage or it isn't. the legal thing is not a marriage. i guess i'm bugged the way churches stopped being particular and just would consecrate anything. i guess they are just basically optimistic. maybe it will be the real thing. ok, man. i asked lauren how much i was in for when she wanted to give me a fourth guinness. she said that was number 4. the reason i asked is that they seem to vary the cost of each one according to some scheme i don't quite know. last time i was here, i'm pretty sure they were 3.75. now they are 4.75. i only had a twenty. she was going to get what was left. and now, that's only a dollar. makes me feel bad. but she did not answer the question i had. i guess it's all she has coming. and she's tubby, anyway. it's all she's gonna get. the american culture is quite manipulative. tries to trick people. but doesn't threaten them. i guess most cultures are much more into the threats. so that's probably its best point. so i guess a culture is just a system of manipulating people. boiling water probably cleans as well as soap. this operating system, on jordy, seems to have problems with deadlocks on the file system. it could just be the pc card wireless adapted. but it sometimes freezes up when i turn it on and try to save. i just lost a little bit that i was trying to save. it's basic computer science kind of stuff. and yet microsoft has problems with it. they are just evil. they ignore stuff that is known to cause problems. it's 4 in the morning. but i actually went to sleep early enough that despite having lain awake a bit in there, i've gotten 8 hours. had what passes for a nightmare for me, which is a dream that makes me go, hmm, and want to think about it, so it keeps me awake. as opposed to a dream earlier which was kind of like a video game and i was attacked by a zombie. zombie back away though, so it wasn't so scary i guess. and in neither of these did i realize i was dreaming, which i think is sad for me because it seems like they had to be. it's cold in here. i should have the heat higher. cold enough that my nose is running. and it was noticeable when i was waking up because my foot was out of the covers. that was the experience of waking up. noticing my foot was cold. i was sitting in a bedroom, a family of strangers, redneck types. i had gotten up here, climbing up some confused ladder like stairs. there were extra stories since i had gone down hthe stairs. but some little kids, some girls had come in, and i asked for the lady of the house, and adults came in. a tubby momma did come (61 is too cold) and then a graying dad type, and then some others. the dad said i wanted to know what was going on, and then the long-haired redneck said he had read what i had in print, and wanted to give it a bad review. he said he added fifteen years. but i got the feeling that what had just been happening had been an elaborate invention, staged, it had seemed like my house, and he wanted to see what i was really like. and he said "i wasn't shit". and there was all the other folks around, and i said i would admit to that. but what had been happening. i had gone to that place, and jenn was there, but she left. and wynne had come there with me, but she stayed in another room. i stayed up watching a videotape. what was on the videotape? some kind of talk show stuff. a bit of it even involved jenn and some boyfriend, but looking back through it, i couldn't find that spot. a lot of talking about couples, though. and eventually, the sun came up, and i could hear stirring in the room i thought wynne was in, and the door was open, but i didn't want to bother her. and i couldn't see her from outside. i went back to my room to make up the bed, though i hadn't really slept in it. and i wanted something to talk about, what i had been doin with myself, and i did think seeking enlightenment. went downstairs, and it looked like this house, but the outside was different. i wondered if it was a dream, but i guess i don't know how to properly do reality checks yet. it seemed pretty real. other than being a very odd situation as i think about it. and i went back up stairs, like i said, but the layout changed. more floors. so i think about it. a symbolic recapitulation of my life, which i presented to myself. and i asked my self, what is enlightenment? it is an "aha" moment when you see that even what you think is your waking life and self is just this video tape you've been watching, and it's really more like a dream. but after you see that, you can become free. my mom still bugs me about dressing warmer, even though i just don't feel so cold mostly. but she told a story to sissy that explains why. when she was a little girl, in an eastern german settlement (actually outside of germany, in poland), they had to evacuate one night when the russians came. her family had a covered wagon, but a lot of others had open wagons, and many froze to death and were dumped out by the side of the road. that's the kind of memory that can make you insistent about dressing warmly. went out today doing business. there are some cuties out there. boringness. we had edgar's fire engine out here to work on cutting branches off trees. i was the one who moved the ladder around. it was fairly neat. for a few days, i've been having what could be called tacit lucid dreams. i feel like i must be dreaming, but i don't quite admit it to myself in words, and it doesn't become quite as clear as lucid dreams. but i have been having quite a few lucid dreams recently. just this afternoon, i had one, and i tried rubbing my hands together, which is supposed to help prolong it. it didn't really seem to do much. another thing that is supposed to help is to spin around. this will tend to change the dream around, though. there are several theories about why these might work. one of those is that the feeling in the dream of either of those techiques isn't compatible with how you would feel lying asleep, so your bran isn't able to make the transition as easily from one to the other, that is from the feeling of handrubbing or spinning to lying still. sounds a little strange to me. maybe i was too skeptical for it to work for me. seems like a lot of this dream stuff depends a great deal on your expectations. ok, i feel like saying something about the italian journalist that was shot and the negotiator that was killed. the americans said they ignored warnings and then shot at the block. and her story was that they shot with no reason. they were laughing one second and being shot at the next. it seems like the stories are completely consistent. the people in the car were totally oblivious to what was going on outside. that seems to be what they are describing. just not paying attention. living in their own little bubble, just happy to be freed, not even watching out anymore. not smart in a warzone. march is coming in like a lamb. mild. maybe a little cool. it might go down to freezing. but it's still winter, so that's reasonable. i guess it's not going to be good, though, because the buds are already coming out. and the daffodils are blooming. i had two lucid dreams this morning. i have been reading articles about the at a lucidity site, and i tried some stuff i hard heard about. one happened when i was in a finished attic with freddie. i told him he was just a character in my dream. people are supposed to have funny reactions when you do that in a dream. he didn't say much and wasn't very convinced. and i asked him if he had a psychic connection with his real self, and asked what the weather was in california. i think he just asked, "the weather in california?" sort if nonplussed, and didn't answer. and i just forgot what the second one was about. grr. i guess it wasn't that important. but i tried closing my eyes. and then since there wasn't anything in the dream anymore, i woke up. or actually, i couldn't tell if i was still dreaming anymore. maybe i was still asleep. i opened my eyes, and i saw little a light, some kind of symbol, closed them, and opened them and saw a different one. i guess it was actually a false awakening. it was different, though. one technique that is supposed to help, is to ask yourself throughout the day whether you are dreaming, but i could never remember to do that, and i think it doesn't work that well, if you just always say no. i think i just thought that i would get lucid. made a positive assertion to myself. the site mentions some other things that can happen. a person can realize that the dream things are just in the head, and they can stop. a person can have pure consciousness, without thoughts. and it's possible to be aware in dreamless sleep. this mostly just happens to advanced TM meditators, they are practically monks. also, one guy appealed to the "highest power" and got some kind of ecstasy. i think i remember the dream now. i was riding through alaska with some guy in some kind of truck. at one point, i am shooting a mounted machine and i shot an elk that was in a little group of them. we kept going, and eventually go into a cave, which turned out to be a very secret doctor's office, and he was a pscychiatrist. i forget at what point i realized i was dreaming. by that time, i definitely was, though i think i did drift in and out, or forget, as it were. anyway, we were in a group, and i took it as an opportunity to ask what was wrong with me, and my life. he went into something fairly long, and i didn't quite follow it, but generally, it was that i'm negative, and don't trust that things will work out, and i sabotage my success. or something like that. i mean, it was just a part of me talking to myself. no magic there. sort of a strange thing. i order three videos from caiman.com. they are sort of a third party. discount store that uses amazon com's billing and links right from their page in the used and new section. same stuff, just cheaper. and it turns out, slower. took them almost a week to ship, and then 6 and 8 days to arrive. i've gotten stuff from amazon in, like 2 or 3 days from just regular shipping. but the strange thing was the order they came in. caiman sent confirmations of when they shipped. two of them shipped at about the same time. then one shipped later that evening. that was thursday. the one that shipped last came on wednesday, and it was in a little envelope thing. i figured the rest would come the next day, but they didn't. they came on friday. but they were in a little cardboard box. i guess the box just takes longer to get through their system. oh well. man, so the cockeyed camel moved. back in December. now it's where the o'grady's was. which is nice for me, because this really is walking distance, wheras before it really was just outside. but i didn't see the mensa people. i don't know if temperance is still trying to be here. i made breaded pork chops again. i still don't quite have it down. and i ate four. that's just too many. but i didn't eat much else today. maybe a burrito. so, the other two dvds are _totally nude aerobics_ and _nude yoga and tai chi_. the first one is called _nude cardiovascular workout_. the aerobics one seems more like just something to watch, but i tried it, and it is not unreasonable to work out to. not quite as balanced as the cardio one, but doable. a definite difference between them is that the cardio one has no taco shots, but the totally one seems to emphasize them. and that's what exercise is about, i guess, so it makes sense. the yoga one is alright from what i've seen so far. great headstand. the shoulder stand is pretty poor-- a very angled back when i think the goal is for it to be straight up. it's possible to do a shoulder stand with the arms going straight up too and not holding you up. also, the sun salutation is done very slowly, but when i read about it and started doing it myself recently, it was clear that it is meant to be synchronized with breathing. there are movements with your head back where you are breathing in, alternating with ones with the head forward where you are breathing out. so i thought that was somewhat disappointing. everyone in the reviews hated the tai chi one, and i haven't tried working through it, but it didn't seem quite so terrible. the movements are repeated again and again instead of being strung together in a sequence, and I didn't really see how well they were done, but it's just exercises, so it didn't seem too bad. you aren't going to learn tai chi from a video, in any case. it's an internal art, with lots of subtlety that you probably couldn't see if you watched an expert. you would need someone to correct you. and it didn't look all that bad as i sped through it. i googled the "tai chi adviser". he does some chi gung, and has studied tai chi for a while. it said 9 years. not a master, but i'm not really expecting much from this. to tell the truth, now i'm thinking i'd much rather practice ba gua, because its form is done faster, so it can be more of a cardio workout, and it's a little bit simpler. very little hope of finding a teacher for it, though. would have to move specially for that. i guess i was sold by the book on internal martial arts. and because it said it looked like o'sensei got some of his cool stuff from studying bagua when he was in china. specifically the trick where you move around someone so fast, you seem to disappear. that would just be freaking cool. so i googled for dvds. i found a huge library some guy in colorado dr. xie is trying to make. he's trying to preserve his system before he kicks it. actually, i guess it does seem pretty complicated. four sets of ten discs. but i probably only need 2 or 4 discs (they only sell them in pairs). not that i could learn them from the discs. supposedly, it is a very bad idea to try, because you almost certainly pick up bad habits that are really hard to unlearn. but i guess i'm not trying to be a serious martial artist. i just want a good form that i know the martial applications for, that i can get some exercise doing. i haven't seen many, but the karate forms i have seen are generally full of crap. plus they don't even usually teach you the actually applications. just made up ones that are vaguely plausible to satisfy the round eyes while keeping them weak and stupid. for example, there are no blocks in forms, no matter what they may say. but i've been spending too much money lately. we'll see. had a different sort of dream. lately I've been trying, when I think of it, to focus on the 'I', awareness of awareness, so to speak. This afternoon when I was dreaming during a nap, I did it as well. and of course, I realized when I did that that I was dreaming, so it became a lucid dream as well. but, like I said, it wasn't just that I knew that I was dreaming, I was also doing this mindful awareness practice. I forget what the dream was about, mostly, because it wasn't so important as the experience. it's similar to that other dream where I was dreaming that I was sitting and meditating. so I guess this just happens to me when I start a new form of meditating. back then it only happened the one time, so i don't expect this to happen again, but we'll see. and 'mindfulness' might be a better word for this. exercised again. probably won't keep it up too long, but maybe. wow. wendy shut her blog down. only did it for two years. what a lightweight. got a nude workout dvd. worked out to it. hopefully it will be enough for me to keep doing it. the instructor, though, is wearing a whole lot. i mean leggings even, not even shorts. she's such a chicken. a bit of a shame. but it's a 45 minute cardio set, so it's pretty good. one of the girls is not able to stay synchronized, which is pretty funny. i think it might get distracting after a while, and it might bother some people, but it seems alright to me. i probably didn't do so well my first time as she is doing. i had a lot of trouble even finding any videos like that. seems like there should be a few more, at least. and i'm a little surprise that more professional instructors wouldn't be willing to get naked if it might make guys get off their lazy fat asses. the country is in a serious medical crisis because of overweight, and it seems like a worthy thing to sacrifice one's modesty for. i mean, if it would get guys exercising, being naked would be so honorable as to no longer be shameful. and, heck, people pay for aerobics instruction as it is. it might well increase business. though they really are cute enough with their clothes on. i mean, sure, some people just like to work out, and can get motivated enough by just wanting to feel healthier, but a lot of people can't, and they need someone to reach out to them. make it a little more fun. did my taxes. with hr block online. it was free this year. last year they charged me. i'm getting a little over $100 back. not as much as i hoped. last year i got more than $300 back. so star trek enterprise is explaining why the kirk era klingons didn't have head knobbles. it's a bit of a strech, but they've tied it in with other stuff they've done. turns out they were using human augmented DNA like from kahn and his bunch and what was being used by the evil dr. soong to create genetically superior klingons. it didn't work so well, and the changed klingons have been dying. and this dna has been encorporated into a flu virus so it is airborn contagious. something about klingon pride or desire not to be weak is going to keep it a secret. like worf said in a DS9 episode that went back to the kirk period, they don't talk about it. the episodes that explain it aren't all out yet, but they had the first one which pretty much explains it. they'll probably cure the fatal part of the disease, but klingons will still have the condition. the human dna dissolves their forehead ridges. a bit silly that they felt like explaining it, but there it is. and it doesn't really make sense. dna works while an organism is developing. changing dna afterwards isn't going to go back and change things. typical bad science. and there's this new show, numb3rs. i'm too scared to watch it because i know it will be horrible. if you get writers who don't really know what they're writing about, and you just add some advisor, he's probably not going to rake out the essential core garbage. now that's trippy. today i was listening to the anchorman commentary again, and christina and the directory were talking about her not having just fallen off the turnip truck. well, she said vegatable truck, and he corrected her, so i googled it to see for sure what it was supposed to be. turnip truck. hick in the city sort of thing. and the dumb hick what would fall off the truck. and whay do you know, but the simpson's right in the beginning has a guy falling off a turnip truck. trippy. and what's the deal with a warning about being about same sex marriage. and now another one. they had said that the simpsons might be outing one of the characters. i think everyone assumed smithers, but it's marge's sister patty. trippy again. i went to see _sideways_. i heard it was a comedy. i could use a good comedy. up for best picture. really it wasn't especially funny. more deeply into the character thing. loser writer who teaches 8th grade english. and really sleazy dude getting some in before marriage. there was male frontal nudity and two pretty graphic sex scenes, one of which was with tubbos. i guess they're being nice with the R rating. i mean, jay and silent bob was gonna get an nc17 for language on the first few cuts. i think it was good though because it made me worry about the whole wasting my life thing. so i started doing some stuff around here. i washed the dishes for a start. then i cleaned up some of the books and magazines that are strewn over the room and put them in boxes, which i bought some time over the holidays. i was doing it while watching the snl first years special, and it's over, so i've quit. but now there's floor space. there's still quite a bit left, though. i need to clear out the stuff piled up on the dresser and night stand and the desk. somewhere in there i'm thinking must be the application for the teaching stuff. i need to find it. i don't remember for sure when the deadline is. i think it's some time in april. i'd hate to be wrong about it. since i got some money out of the bank, i wanted to go out and spend money on some food. but a steak would probably almost $10 from the grocery store. i decided not to spend the money. i had some chicken. it's meat, i guess. not quite the same. the name of the big tall blonde checkout girl at schnucks is christina. i was getting some burritos. not impressive, i'm sure. she is cute, though i didn't really feel like going to the mensa meeting and talking to whoever might have shown up. but i did feel like going to get weird al's album. it won the grammy for best comedy album. it beat triumph the insult comic dog. went to borders. didn't have it. some lame dude singing. rick jones. last week it was andrue sullivan, whom i think is a friend of sooj's. i haven't made it to any of her shows lately. anyway, this guy just made me want to say "someone shoot me in the head". had to get out of there. went to best buy. found it. i'm listening to it. it hasn't grown on me yet. and i'm not so familiar with the original songs. that makes a difference, i guess. so al has gotten lasik, so he doesn't wear glasses anymore. and he shaved his facial hair. a significantly different look. still with the long clown hair. finished listening to it. i'm listening to some of the songs again reading the words. there is an inspired song called "bob" that is nothing but palindromes (sentences the same backwards as forward), and it sounds just like a bob dylan song. much too short, too. there's a song "genius in france" that i gather from reading a review is supposed to be an homage to frank zappa, but i don't know his stuff well enough to see it. finished that spiritual enlightenment book. i think i was getting used to it towards the end so it wasn't so painful. or maybe i was happy that it was almost over. if i were to describe it with one word... is 'craphole' one word? i'd have to go with craphole. it was way too made up. it made some intellectual points. enlightenment is seeing the truth that there is no ego. most people think of it as some form of happiness or bliss. he makes up this concept of first step where you become disillusioned and start on the road of questioning that inevitably ends in enlightenment. not sure what to think of that exactly. sounds like just more crap. sitting here at starbucks having a chai. not feeling very inspired. after finishing that crappy book, i surfed a bit for some more real people. there's an old guy robert rose, and he had some sort of commune and some of his students seem somewhat interesting, like bob fergeson and bob cergol. you can see where the jed mckenna dude is supposed to come from. but reading it made me thinking of the scene in anchorman when ron is down and out, and he goes into the restaurant where he was friends with the owner, and he gives him a plate of cat poop, and the guy says he has to eat the poop but he'll give him a steak after it, and ron says he won't, but he gives in and eats it. that's kind of what it was like reading that thing. there are some little preppy girls studying some kind of physics. talking about charges and voltage. and yet somehow friction is part of whatever it is they are studying. it intrigues a poor ee nerd. still haven't found a spring for my car door lock. went to the autozone on summer. they didn't have anything different than the little autozone. i didn't even find the little spring that they found at the other place. i'm not really sure what i need to do. somewhere in there, though, i was getting the feeling that enlightenment isn't necessarily the greatest thing in itself. it doesn't necessarily help anyone, or make life nicer for people, so just being a nicer person might be a better goal. and material improvements might be a good thing too, as long as it doesn't make you into a jerk. Happy St. Valentine's Day! man. I've been feeling like having a big batch of pork chops. mom made some on thursday when i left the farm. we had them for lunch, and i brought two home. but i always feel like eating as many as i can. so i went to the store and got some. kroger said it had them on say, but i went there and they didn't appear marked down. so i went to schnuck's. i got about $4.50 worth at $1.60 per pound. at the register, i got in the line with the cute big tall blonde, even though the line was pretty long, but the register next to her had only one person in it, so i went into that one. so i didn't get to talk to the big tall blonde. but i was standing next to her. did i mention she's cute? oh well. there were seven pork chops. the first batch i had trouble getting done. they were pretty thick. and the second batch i managed to burn. not too bad, though. didn't really taste too bad. i ate six of them. pork is cannabalism. especially in those quantities. so i got _spiritual enlightenment: the damnedest thing_ by jed mckenna in the mail today. total crap. not quite craptastic. I'm only on page 45. i guess i'm pretty biased against it though. i found one page that pointed out that it was pretty clearly just fiction, since no one has actually said they knew this guy. and then i get to the part where he argues about people whom haven't gotten people enlightened, which i figure is pretty ironic, those he does say he's gotten quite a few people to enlightenment. haven't gotten to the part where he really says how it's supposed to happen. but i did come across a site yesterday that i thought was interesting. the instructions are just about basic meditation, which is nothing new, but the interesting part i thought was that it pointed out that nisargadatta and ramana maharshi both say you need to work at it, focusing on the 'i'. not like the people who say nothing is to be done. there is a neat site with ratings of gurus and i went to compusa to get a cpu case to put my old motherboad in. $30, which less than i thought. and a little cutie molly in a pink top for valentine's day. she seemed to walk a little funny in her heels. I don't know what the statistic actually is, but they put it in a really misleading way. they say something like one out 3 marriages ends in divorce. even if it is one out of two marriages, that means for every person who gets 3 divorces, there are three people who didn't get a divorce at all. the whole till death do us part thing. which isn't so bad. there are just some serial monogamists out there. what's this private accounts, formerly privatization, thing about for social security.. Pubes said it won't help, but it's part of a solution. which is pretty freaking said. I'm mean if it's not gonna help, it's not gonna help. But there must be hidden things in it. Well one is that in the conservative view of morality, people don't help each other out--they let the other people fail. tough love is the big thing. discipline. so they want to be sure that one person's money can't help other people. at least in part. the whole idea of a big common fund just bums them out and they want to stop it. there has been a myth that it's a fund that you pay into and you get your money out. that's wrong. that's not what it is. bad myth. maybe people used to say that's what it was. but it never was. people paying now pay for the old people. and people who are taking stuff out are taking out a lot more than they put it. even counting "interest" that they think they are making. but the real hidden bit of this plan is in what the government actually does. right now, the government, in it's budget, tends to just borrow from social security. the conservatives want to starve out programs they don't like by taking away money from the government. private accounts would do that. that's also what the tax breaks were for. this plan even has a weird bit of added expense built in because it will cost a lot of money to get it all organized, and then the money will be set aside off limits. it's all just part of their philosophy of not paying for things. also, splitting it up like that will make it impossible for them to take that money and pay for the current retirees, which is the way it works. he very clearly is trying to destroy it. rich people don't need it. if he says he is trying to save it, he means save it in the way they saved witches by burning them. i'd like someone to burn him first. ideologically, he is opposed to the idea of social security. they don't like taking money from some people to give to others. that's what social security is. they think that's wrong. people need to see that they just want that to end. it just happens that it's one of the things the government should do. and pubes talks about putting partisanship aside. he means giving up what you want and accepting what he wants. that's barbaric. and of course it also means he won't attempt to do anything remotely acceptable to liberals. wowsers. so there are some folks who are producing new episodes of the original star trek series. the first one was more than a year ago. i wasn't able to download all of it, but i got the first fifteen minutes or so, and it was bad enough that i didn't really feel like working any more to get it. plus it was early in the morning. i did get all of the second one though. it was quite well done, i thought. very exciting. lots of special effects, actually. i guess the computer effects are not so hard to do. and these guys are just volunteers with no budget at all. but it was a time travel episode and i positively loathe time-travel episodes. somehow, the action bits did make me forget about that for a bit. and there was a little thing at the end that just annoyed me a lot. they had chris pike in the little dalek roller machine thing with the bleeping lights, but he could lean forward and move. that was just wrong. if he could move his upper back and neck, he would have not have needed the blinky light thing. and he probably would have been able to talk. maybe it's just a nit, but it really seemed to miss the point of how bad off he was. wow, sixty minutes did a thing on the diploma mills. u of phoenix and itt-tech had been investigated a bit. they make money mostly on the federal student loans, and the dreams of folks to get the great jobs. but they mostly aren't there. some folks do well, though, but the schools tend to lie about graduation rates and placement. something of a scam. i guess it's good that i didn't get into that. and a fluff piece with hilary swank. battling mike wallace no less. and he gets her to tell a story that makes her cry. good thing he's jewish, because he's so going to hell. jesus freak. there was state senator john ford with the multiple "wives". now memphis' mayor willie herenton has just announced that he has a kid by someone he had a relationship with. what a degenerate city this is. mensa literary talk about _sun also rises_. not overly memorable. i was trying to read some analysis from some only school thing. but now i've gotten bored with it. i'm sitting here at mulligans. some band was playing. people are coming in. and i'm really starting not to care. but becky is here. she is cute. but shoot man, i see what the iraqi rebels are on about. my kidneys hurt. that's got to be a bad sign. it could just be my back. but i dunno. what about that guy that parked his truck on the tracks. he cut his wrists and stabbed himself in the chest, but not well enough. not there gonna charge him with murder. but there is some kind of issue as to whether he had criminal intent. man. somebody on the news or something was said to be wounded by a grease gun. i'm not sure why i didn't know what that was (some kind of .45). i thought it was a tommy gun. but it was a different thing, an m3 or m3a1. i;m kind of a .45 person. i'd like one of those. so, the pints of guinness are $3.75. i swear they used to be $4.50. and on pint night (which was thursday, they were $2.50). maybe i just don't remember. v whatever. it makes some difference to me. or maybe it doesn't. it's just money. some kind of band playing. i just tried to post to russell's site. needed some kind of security thing. i was just bitching about him not having anything to say, so no big thing that it failed. so, the thing was about the lost generation. dudes wounded by the war to end all wars. aw. poor things. bunch of drunks. it really doesn't make you cry. trippy man. lee bob has showed up. he went to go see bruce earlier today. he's out of town, too. before you slip into unconcsiousness, i'd like to have another kiss. for some reason, beckyswitched off that doors toon to some rappish thing. they do that sort of stuff around here. then again, i was singing it, so it makes sense. try to get rid of folks. ok. i need some last minute notes there was a rotund but jovial black guy named cory, who introduced me to andy and somebody. there was a brunette birthday girl named fut ( a shot), and i couldn't finish me last guinness. becky said it was 7, but it didn't seem like 7 to me. mary was a sports journalism person at penn. not that it really makes any difference, but i think i'd like to write down all the facts as i know them a mistake i made.i took a drag from mary's cig. not used to it. there is a ladybug here in the kitchen. i think it came here from the farm. i found another baby roach in a drawer about a week ago. i prefer the ladybug to the roach. but it was sitting on my apple juice glass. so i've been doing housework stuff today. washed dishes. washed clothes. raked some leaves into the trash can. i even chopped some wood. it was sixty degrees outside today. kind of gave me a bit of a boost to do some stuff. and the unemployment check came today. nice to have that going again. maybe i'll go to the grocery store. i need to get some orange juice. i took out a chicken. i'm probably going to roast it. but i'm a little tired right this second. there are always such wonderful articles about things happening in Memphis decided to come out to starbucks. no place to sit. well, no good place. sitting by the fireplace, so i have to type with my thumbs, which isn't so good. maybe i'll get up. somebody got up. or let the crew with kids sit. sitting at a table. man. looked at Russell Whitaker's blog. Mike told me about it. boring. empty. has links to other blogs. mostly empty. there was one by monica white, some bristisher. nice writing, but vacuous. one guy had a thing mentioning the singularity, which seems like it would be interesting, but it was about some guy who wrote some kind of poorly done piece about how the singularity is bogus. junk about junk. higher order crap. but i haven't thought so much about the singularity, so this was an interesting oportunity. the idea is that at some point in the future, as technology developsmore and more rapidly, it become impossible to predict what things will be like next, sort of like looking into a black hole. eventually we will have the ability to manipulate atoms and rebuild everything from scratch, so it would be possible to remake the world completely from one day to the next. for this to be possible, there have to be smart machine that are able to do these thing, and that can be seen to be a natural consequence of moore's law, according to which computer power keeps doubling every couple of years (or so). on thing i have seen recently is that "intelligence" isn't quite such a straight-forward logical thing. there aren't things that are just right or wrong, and better isn't always so easy to tell. and it seems like some of the great achievements aren't so much products of an especially great intellect so much as a nice idea, perhaps novel, and a lot of patient work to develop it. still, if we could have somewhat intelligent machine patiently developing, that could have great results, but i'm not so sure about singularity. that would have to be much more about some great will toward change. yeah, i would have to say that will is more important than intelligence. sure, i guess there has to be some kind of ability to get stuff done. but coming up with new things is a little different from being about to do stuff with them once they are found. dr.familioni came in here. didn't talk to him. i'm trying the "chantico",a drinking chocolate. it is freaking hardcore chocolate. seems like they just melted a candy bar and diluted it a little with something. a bit overkill. in a little cup. whoof. but what good is just pure thinking? machines would need to affect the world to have some value, and some of the basic intellectual skills need to work in the world are the muddy sorts of things that we haven't been trying to put into them. we'll see. computers aren't real good at getting close enough for government work. they have issues when things aren't exactly perfect for them. language only prompts for meaning. one of the notable claims in that book i was reading was that language does not and cannot encode meaning. it can only prompt for it. the pushes back the question of what meaning can possibly be, but it is a very profound and rich statement. i think i buy it. meaning is a bit mysterious, but this really pushes back the handle on in. these guys tend to draw a lot of diagrams with links to thing between frames. i don't know. it does seem like meaning must involve links and pointing to things already known. but those links, since they have to be interpreted, seem like they can quite be the meaning either. well, meaning can only be something that exists inside a mind, it can't really be external, though there can, of course, be external things that prompt us to create meaning. and language is a game that we learn to play that more or less we learn to do in common ways, that have vaguely similar results when done by skilled players. but we each have our own little internal worlds of meaning that we live in. and we're lucky that there are similarities between our worlds, but really, we are quite separate. ok. girl at the table there has a little book titled "clinical neuroanatomy made ridiculously simple". the mind boggles. one thing about russell's links to other blogs. several of them don't work on my browser. so now i'm googling singularity, and the second link (the first one was on math something or other) was cut off. grr. so i came to mulligan's for a pint. i was only gonna have one, but ashley started me a second before i was even half done. i saw an article about how one one drink a day can cut down on alzheimers. but it was an effect that had to do with increased blood flow. so exercise would probably work better. anyway, singularity. seems like the people who talk about it are just people that don't buy it. maybe it's a concept going out of fashion. geeks like it. but all it is is a statement that things will be unpredictable because of technology, so it isn't such a bfd. one person said that it sort of already happened. could you help me live a little more? i expect good news. that was trippy. so my glass was empty. and i was getting up to go, but dude next to me had been asking ashley about her love life, and they established that she didn't have a boyfriend, but she was seeing something. and right then she was giving the rundown on what she was looking for. tall. thin. very smart. dark brown hair, blue eyes. in school. not older. she doesn't like older guys. maybe 22-28. she doesn't want someone that won't be there with her. anyway, it was trippy. i forget why i missed it the first time. maybe something war related. or a power outage. the two and a half men with jeri ryan. it's on today. mrowr. i started watching the good, the bad, and the ugly. paused, but i had to unplug it from the r/f modulator to see it. and she is being like such a man. and dude is ending up acting like a girl. they mentioned schadenfreude! yay! dating himself. gorgeous, promiscuous, commitment-phobic. glaukenstucken. neighbor babe proposes that as a word meaning guilt for feeling schadenfreude. great episode. oh well. i had managed a while without drinking anything. now i feel like my kidneys hurt. it seemed like they were maybe getting a little better. ashley was just describing the guy she was seeing. i really was hoping to see becky. so, i'm sitting here at the unemployment office again. i did a little bit of work for bruce, and i told the unemployment thing about it and it was enough that they cancelled me, so i have to reapply. and probably i will lose out a bit because it takes a few weeks for them to get the whole thing digested. there is a marginal wifi signal here, but it doesn't seem to actually work. had a frustrating visit to the u of m campus yesterday. i wanted to go to the cog sci seminar, and see what it was about this semester. the catalog thingie said dr. danielle is handling it this time, so it will be some sort of psychology something or other, and probably not so interesting to me, but they didn't have anything up on the web about it, so i just didn't know. i went to the room that it has been at for the past couple of semesters, but that wasn't the right one. and the wifi on campus has some kind of gated access, so i couldn't just look up the room it was at. it turned out when i got back home that the room was on the 4th floor. that floor has these nasty no trespassing, top secret work going on signs, so i didn't check up there. and it sounds like i wouldn't really be able to go up there, either. grr. i also wanted to see the syllabus for the natural language processing class they have this semester. i did find the professors office who was teaching it, and i saw it, but it didn't look very interesting. the textbook is jurafsky and martin, and i read through it a little while ago. didn't seem all that big a deal. and i went to the bookstore and saw the textbooks for the classes i had been looking at. and i had been wanting to get the ai a modern approach book for a while, and they had it, but the line to get out of there was huge. each one reached across half the store, and there were several. i also tried to go and see the person in the education department and show her my test score, but when i got there, i didn't find a listing that said where her office was, and i had forgotten her last name, so i didn't see her. i probably just should email her, and get the scores sent over there. anyway, it was a frustrating trip. i read _the sun also rises_ for the mensa literary discussion group. that hemingway chap could write some mean prose. the characters were kind of sad. that whole lost generation thing. but great writing. i need to read some more of his stuff. ok, so what is this double scope conceptual blending that those guys are talking about. well, there are these mental things they call frames. sort of general situations or relationships. like a guy walking up a mountain, or a boxing match or a boat race, or a person being someones father or surgery. repeatable situations where there general roles, and typical things that happen. they talk about a very simple blend, "simplex", where you [called in to the case worker] just insert some person or thing into the role. "joe is jill's boss" is a simplex network. in a double scope blend, you have two different frames blended together such that bits are taken from both. "the pope's heavy headgear makes fighting difficult" is one of those double-scoped networks, taking the frame of boxing and the pope with his dignity and funny hat and making a complicated blend with bits of both frames. they list a couple more types, mirros and single scope, which depend on how how many frames and how they are mixed together. so i kind of got through the unemployment thing quickly. she just needed to call bruce to verify, though he was out to lunch. then i went to hooters. had some wings and got a calendar. brandy, the barbabe, turned a few degrees cooler when i paid and didn't immediately leave her a tip. i could see her little blonde brain thinking that i was gonna stiff her. and it actually made me smile a bit. seems like they're always the same. after i finished my mountain dew, i left a twenty in the tip jar and then i go out, and the lock on my driver's side car door didn't work. i had to go in through the passenger side. i took the little door panel off and looked into it. a little spring had broken off. i need to go get a new one. a little 5 cent piece. i'm sure it would cost $50 if i got a mechanic to go in and replace it. and i was thinking about it, even when i found it, because it looked like it was going to be a pain to hook the little thing on there. but i'm just going to leave it till i feel like doing it. and i just won't lock it. so georgie pubes talked about freedom. and yet he arrests protestors. he's a lying cunt. i think it would be trippy if it were actually significant. but who knows, maybe it is. it certainly seems as if snoring must be evolutionarily bad. i mean, loud noise when sleeping seems like it would have to attract predators. of course, the human species hasn't been prey for a long time, probably not since we've had our real vocal apparatus, and it does seem like snoring requires that, or is just a problem with our throat configuration that must involve our having voices. anyway, something i was wondering about is whether i snore when i'm on my side. if i don't, then i don't snore when i'm spooning up, and then it makes a lot more sense that girls seem to natural to sleep on their sides, inviting me to spoon up against them, and keeping me from snoring, and making it easier for them to sleep. and that has the whole bond reinforcing thing, which might have some kind of social advantage. sexual selection has all sort of evolutionary power. almost certainly a lot of our mental powers developed from that. people picked mates who were better at certain things. and musical ability seems like it could only have some from some kind of sexual pressure. then again, maybe i do snore when i'm on my side. some things make you proud to be in memphis so, nobody likes being told what to do. i guess it's always demeaning or something. it seems like some people must like it, because most people in fact actually just do what they are told, or what is expected of them, but maybe they never like the being told part, and are only satisfied if they have internalized it, and in some sense are doing it on their own. even though it is what they are told. it seems a little obvious, but it changes the way you would think about interacting with people. i see my mom suggesting that i fill the trash can with leaves, and i bristle. but she is trying to be nice and just makes it a suggestion. beef is expensive these days. a couple days ago, i went into schnucks, and thought about getting a steak, but they were more than i wanted to pay. i just got some beef and bean burritos. and it seems like kroger is more likely to have steaks marked down, so if i wanted, i might have gone there later. but today, i was coming back from u of m, and i went into subway. i asked for a six-inch roast beef. she asked me what kind of bread. wheat. toasted? no. she gets the bread out. and then i see her grab the ham and put it on there. i don't say anything. turns out, it saves me a buck fifty, because they have this special on the ham. was it just a habit for her? did she know i was unemployed? decided to come to starbucks to write. was about 8:30, and i felt i needed to get up and write, and maybe get out of the house. venti hot chocolate. lots of business people. martin luther king junior holiday. may just be a normal morning crowd. there is someones little granddaughter. so, what i had to write about. i'm reading this book, how we think, aboujt conceptual blending. one of the things it seems to talk about is how some fundamental logical operations, like comparison for equality, are not done in the mind in the simple logical way that is done in computers. and an implication of this is that ai people start with an assumption, a problem that they think is solved that is a foundation for their systems, that is inadequate. whether something is true or false, whether something is or is not something else, making this decision is something they leave to the binary, true/false, logical operation, when for a proper intelligence, this is a very involved and derived process. i have always felt that this operation is inadequate, and now i'm starting to see a clearer theory about what the needed operation is. i have long felt that analogy would be a better basis. there is an approach, fuzzy logic, which uses a continuous range of truth values, that tries to address this issue, but i always got the sense that it is does not really get the problem completely. Decisions are more flexible. I'm going to need to give some example of the problem. The authors give lots of examples of the conceptual blends, but they are not really as focused as i am on a basic operation of what "is" is. for them, the function of equality is just something that falls out of a cognitive system that uses the different forms of conceptual blends. but here goes. zeus is the father of athena. athena sprung full grown in armor from his head. now, what kind of twisted mental apparatus would let "springing full grown in armor from the head of" mean the same as being the father of. it seems like from what i've seen, most formal semantic systems, the kind of computer-like systems for understanding natural language, would have a little indicator that takes the "is" for granted, and means "is_father_of", so maybe my point about equality isn't so good. what the blending people seem to say, though, is that we set up a kind of little mini-world, or descriptive frame, that represents the situation. we stick zeus in the role of father and athena in the role of daughter, even though the conventional bits of the frame, like a mom, and pregnancy and infancy and childbirth arent there. we don't say that zeus is the birthplace of athena. his a male figure. and it was a sort of painful bodily process, so it was sort of like childbirth, i guess. here is something they said that i really wanted to put here: "the adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech". that's a trippy one. it doesn't even have a definite or clear meaning. maybe adjectives are disposable. maybe they are just covering that you throw away, and the important thing is what's after you get done with it. or maybe you judge the quality of the thing by looking at the adjective. still, it's a freakish thing to say. and what could "is" possibly be doing here? roughly it's an indicator to try to stick things in the roles indicated. i guess the kind of thing i'm getting at is that computers deal with perfect matches, but people never deal with perfect matches, and the mechanism we use is so fast, natural, and unconscious that we don't even see that our matches we are seeing are imperfect and that it took us a lot of "processing" to arrive at them. it is a lacuna, a gap in what we see, that causes a problem in artificial intellignece solutions because we miss that we are missing a real problem. sunday crosswords. the main one i got, but was pretty slow. but they had the new york times crossword. i worked for a long time. most of the afternoon and all evening. then gave up. got about 80%, i think. really tough. or at least, i wasn't used to they way it gives clues, compared with the other. not very clear clues. grr. wasted a day. but then, i think i blew the unemployment, so i wanted distraction. i said i made the money i got from bruce, and since it was more than my benefit amount, i am cut off. it said to go back if i'm unemployed again, which i am. but who knows. i may have severely messed myself up again. I've been doing crossword puzzles. yesterday, while procrastinating from going to bruce's to do some work, i saw the crossword in the paper, and remembered aimee and mike d talking about them at the literary meeting, so i decided to do it. i'm not good. would get stuck in the wrong sense of the clue. and i used google a lot. but i finished it out. and after finishing up at bruce's, i came back and did all the rest of the puzzles for the week. instead of going to temperance or to the so sooj was doing. sooj's show was at the gay and lesbian community center, though, so i didn't have such a good feeling about going to that. and i watched the star trek episode. it seemed really lame. at least it wasn't a three-parter. those are getting on my nerves. i did complete all the crosswords, though of course i googled quite a bit, and was quite slow. whatever. must be very bored. So I rented _Anchorman_. I just really love the a cappella version of afternoon delight, so I ripped it and put it on the site. the talk around it illustrates the latin phrase _amans amens_-- lovers are out of their minds. mostly i'm a fan of vocal harmony. the whole beatles thing. and silly love songs are nice. though maybe here, love should be in quotes. i googled the song, and somebody said it was one of the top worst songs. something about how one of the later verses compares a girl to a fish. the dvd also has a video with the song but with instrumental. i think this one is much better. one for the ages. well, i like it anyway. what makes teenagers know-it-alls? maybe it's because the educational system gives them cognitive tools, and then constantly gives them problems to work on that those tools are effective on, while shielding them from the harder problems for which they won't work, so they don't get discourages. so they get a lot of confidence without knowing the real sorts of difficulties the real life brings up. Freakish Memphis weather. Ten days ago, in the teens and a sleet storm. Today, seventy degrees. And a bit of a cold. Happy New Year! Haven't been writing much. Was at the farm, and left Jordy in Memphis. Getting quite crowded. Aaron's birthday party today, so everyone was around. Enough people for me.
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