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my typing speed is like 39 wpm but you can write longhand about 25 wpm,
so i'm really pretty slow. but thinking of stuff to write me actually be
slower. and since writing longhand was learned earlier, it's a little
less conscious and doesn't get in the way as much as typing. or it
used to. typing is getting a lot more fluid now that i've been doing
it a lot. i'm not sure if i'd be any more prolific if i had voice
recognition stuff going (i should really get a little microphone amplifier
so it would work right on this laptop).
i'd need to get into the habit of having a lot of stuff to say. after whining about eating too much, i did it again today. but today was an actual feast, a barbecue with the relative. and i had half a pork chop. there's still one and a half pork chops left. and a bunch of barbecue. i was out looking over the barbecue smoker as the relatives were out sightseeing somewhere. the smell of the cooking meat had attracted a bunch of flies. Now, i considered that the problem of killing flies outside was going to be an unending problem, but that just meant that i should get started right away. and actually, as many as there were, it was going to be easy to get a lot of them at first, and as there were fewer and fewer, they would just be less and less of a problem. so i got out a flyswatter and started going at them. i got a whole bunch of them, and they thinned out pretty quickly actually. it seemed to make a difference (man my prose is terrible. i need to start soliciting stylistic advice, or get help or something, and it isn't in narrative form). Eventually it dropped down to the point where they were harder and harder to get. And it was fun to occasionally get two at a time. Flies have this playful habit of chasing each other. But i don't think i ever got more than two at once. When i did stop, there still were flies, but they were i guess average for a summer day and not the increased number that had been attracted by the smell. i did not check it later to see if the efforts were just in vain. or whether the effect lasted. freedom is making decisions my weight was up to 182 lbs a few days ago. i'm scared to check it. we had pork chops today, and i was craving more. i had three total. my mom made ten. there are four left. i just ate some bacon to help satify the desire. July 23, 1999 i had an appointment with a computer consulting client today. they have mostly been at 2:00, so i was thinking yesterday that it was at 2:00, and had the whole morning planned around that. and i went out to a party at the flying saucer for some peabody people. a real bunch of cuties. but the appointment was at 12:30, and when i got there at 1:45, the client had left, and is leaving town. that was a serious mistake, and now i'm pretty shaken. i am in seriously bad shape. one little factoid that creationism should have trouble with. the bible says that man was made from dust. well, people aren't made from dust. not even very closely. people are actually mostly made from salt water. there was a quote from jfk how we are very related to the ocean as the salt conten in our fluids is the same (roughly) as that in the ocean. the bible litteralists should be able to say that the concentration could have been anything god wanted. but a theory that allows anything to be possible doesn't provide much information and basically leaves us clueless. by the same reasoning, it could be true that we are really made of dust, but as a test for the non-believers, god makes it seems like we are really made out of bags of salt water. or whatever they would come up with to be consistent. and then there's pi being equal to 3.0... from popper: we accept a fact not because it is justified by experience, but just as a decision, an action. we have some process for making decisions about what to accept. A jury makes a verdict, which is an action of saying something is true (vere dictum), based on evidence and a system of rules. the verdict doesn't need justification, it is just an act, like a perception. a judge makes a judgement based on reasoning and rules (and i think it can be based on a verdict). a scientific theory is not about saying what can happen so much as saying what can't happen. it's about exluding things, and we can test scientific thereos by seein if what they say won't happen actually doesn't. people are stupid because they haven't spent enough time learning the right stuff andrea keeps suggesting that i go back to school. she's going to american university. there is a difference between acceptance and respect. some say you have to respect everyone, and yet respect must be earned. i found a bunch of midi files. seems like it has all the beatles songs there are, and some i'm not sure i know. i was surprised by the "you never give me your number". i thought it might be good because it has strong piano instrumental and that translates well to midi, but dude had not put in a track corresponding to the vocals, so i sang it. it was fun how they just came back to me. i guess i need to learn to play that one. i got some web tools from xoom. and a library of 5000 public domain text things most of them are less than a page. i ordered the cable modem from time warner, road runner (if he catches you you're through). it's like $53/month. the phone company has ADSL for $60/month, but it isn't shared. if the cable is slower than the phone thing, i could switch. the whirring noise went away. yay!. i got in really late, actually not so early, about 7a. i've been a little concerned about getting in after my mom is up. but this time, i bought the sunday paper, and my mom was happy about that. andrea (she's worked in executive placement) had to sort of trick me to get me in front of her computer to look at my resume. i've been putting it off and resisting. it really needs some polishing. I was inconsistent in how i capitalized java. it's a spelling mistake--something on a resume that pretty much will get it dumped in the trash can because it shows you aren't serious. but there were a couple bits where i was describing some fairly simple general skills, but she actually laughed at it. it didn't mean anything to her maybe, or was too vague, or didn't mention the technology or something. but laughing? it hurt a little because i didn't see how it was funny. i guess it wasn't personal. there was deep space nine episode that i hadn't seen. the lounge singer gets into trouble as his club is taken over by gangsters. there's a safe they try to crack. suzanne and paul bought a safe which they want to crack. i'm building up the ebay knowledge. i set up an account for bruce. suzanne has made like $1500 selling stuff on there over a few months. doug said he has written like 5 databases that are being used. but from what i have read in greenspun, there are a lot of issues that were worked out in the real databases that are quite serious that i'm not sure that doug has considered. i asked doug about concurrency, and he mentioned the issue of transaction rollback. his solution is to timestamp records. the problem here is that two people may be editing a record at the same time. if when the record is sent back the time stamp is wrong, you know someone else has updated the record. but the situation can get harder than this, and i believe that doug is using flat files and not relational databases anyway. but the way doug explained it, it seems like he never even considered the real issue i was talking about, parallel process, or multitasking. It's the kind of thing where the problem will only happen occasionally, but will really do nasty hard to find things. What can happen is that several processes will be running and operating on the file at the same time. one will check the time stamp, then the tasks will switch and the other process will get the same time stamp, so both process will think that it's ok to go back and write. as far as i know, with the perl stuff doug is using, there isn't any way of dealing with the issue. Java, though, has ways of protecting threads to keep out these concurrency issues. and big databases have also dealt with them. i didn't seem like doug was even aware that such problems exist. it's one of the things that you get in formal education, like college, but then again, in college, you wouldn't have written five database programs. so i'm looking for a web host to start doing sites. i think i want one that supports java servelets, but that seems uncommon. i found a site that searches for a lot of hosts by criteria, web hosters. doug uses interland, but that just does cgi, as far as i can tell. and they are way tied to microsoft.
some boys at hewlett packard created a transistor from a single molecule,
called something like rotaxane. a big nanotech thing. the media
alos added one of the projected nanotech apps, having computers in paint
so you could have video (and sensing) walls. it's in my laptop hard drive is now making a loud whirring noise. i used the windows standby option, and the light was blinking and i wanted to turn it on so i hit the power button, but that turned it off and the think came up with scandisk and i think i've busted my harddisk and i'm really stressed about it. man this computer is important to me. the girl is giving me a workout well, i was gonna do the journal, but i'm getting in later this week is moving slowly. our computer client showed up again, and she was expecting that the web site would be up already but no some people get disappointed because other people don't live up to their expectactions, but i'm thinking that their expectations are just wishful thinking and not reasonable. you expect people to do what they say, but may be they are just saying they will do something to appease. and people grab what they want if they can get away with it. if use compassion and see it from their side, maybe you understand and don't get as angry. maybe even you can share in their fun at whatever they get away with. i broke down and go microsoft frontpage. the client pointed out a real fancy bit of html that was created with front page. something of an explosion at the gizmo/font factory, but it didn't push it too much, and they had enough sense not go overboard with funky colors. i love the bud iguanas frank and louie and the ferret my mom bought a couple dozen old bananas for a dollar. so i dug out my old blender and have been downing banana drinks. the one i'm working on now has five bananas in it. some guy let his truck roll back into me. i couldn't react immediately. i was thinking, is he going to realize? how do i get into reverse, and it took to long for me to hit the horn. i need to be more sensitive and communicative. i don't want to take anyone for granted. i'm a little bit addled today. but i have more hope than i did. man, another long delay in posting. just too much time wasted in the intp newsgroup. i've got to learn not to try to read all of them. there's a 70's theme club on beale called the "have a nice day cafe", we tried to get in on saturday, but there was a longish line that didn't seem to be moving. maybe it was one of those lines where you can only go in if someone leaves. so we went to the club apocalypse, formerly 616. the waitresses wear really cute uniforms and are themselves quite babely. 616 had a problem with burning down, and i think they helped the situation by going with metal girders. i had a dream in which i was in an altered state of consciousness. that was pretty weird. it wasn't quite a lucid dream, but i definitely was aware that i was feeling strange. i also had a dream that i grabbed this guy by the neck and through him down so his head hit the bathroom floor. dreams are meaningless withough the daytime, context, however, and i forgetton what they were for these. dream analysis can be interesting, and i've made a bad habit of wanting to enjoy dreams and sleeping instead of enjoying real life. i was thinking more about holographic paint, and wrote about it to the intp list. one dude point out that there would be a whole lot of computation in a computed motion hologram, maybe 1 GBit/sec/pixel. but nanocomputers are really fast, and i'm sure there would be a lot of redundancy. then again, i'm not sure how it would be done. holograms work using interference patterns, but i'm not sure how a material records an interference pattern. there was an article in _science_ about how they produce 3-d images without any lenses, using an interferometer (which uses mirrors and a flat sensor) and a rotating target and some computational transforms (tomagraphy). and another article in _science_ about how carbon nanotubes could store hydrogen with energy content maybe half that of gasoline. excellent. now if we could only produce them cheaply.
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