a ba'b'ian journal

old stuff
'Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibulla ti qeleiV; respondebat illa: apoqanein qelw.'
    • September 29, 1999
    much better today. it comes and goes.

    at the wednesday ai meeting, a lot of biological stuff. stan asked for examples where sensory fusion of different modes actually gets used in recognition. my only contribution in the meeting was to suggest recognizing types of fruit, because it combines smell, taste and mouth feel.

    some people are so good looking it's almost painful to look at the them (the word is "ouch"). aimee is like that.

    i don't think my hair is curly so much as i'm just too lazy to brush it, and it just curls up instead of sticking straight out.

    i felt bad about it, but i did think i was better than andrea because i was smarter than her. but smarter isn't better. richer is better. and i wasn't smarter than her, anyway.

    • September 28, 1999
    saw weird al's video about this annakin guy. i like the tune. yoda is a much better song, though.

    i saw 'high art' with aimee. ally sheedy is a very thin lesbian. it was depressing.

    i'm a little blue today

    i also saw 'transpotting'. it was pretty depressing, even if it was funny in spots and had kind of a happy ending

    maybe i should keep a dream journal. like it said, know yourself. but i'm not sure that i have any dreams that i don't understand. i keep pretty close touch. and after all, i think that dreams are about things that we want to forget about.

    nothing. it's like there is nothing. just an emptiness.

    • September 27, 1999
    i saw sixth sense. it was pretty scary because the ghosts didn't look like disembodied spirits but rather like things with substance that could actually hurt you, sort of like zombies, and which, having taken serious abuse already and kept going, you couldn't stop by conventionally means. and if someone enters your house, beat him the hell up before he shoots you. the movie did use the cheap hollywood trick of getting quiet and playing a loud noise. i'll admit i jumped, but it's just a reflex. i ain't afraid of no ghosts. and yeah, since i don't believe in ghosts, i was a little disappointed. "de profundo clamo te domine"

    i spent all of sunday with aimee. i should have spent a little more time reading, but it was very pleasant.

    every technical society in this universe is going to be hit with the same problem: an information processing machine is limited in speed because of the speed of light, so computers need to be built smaller in order to be faster and more capable. i pretty simple consequence to this is that if you can make small computers, you are probably also going to develop the ability to make tiny robots (since you can make small stuff). It seems that nanotechnology, making molecule sized machines, would be a universal trend in technical societies. But that leads to another likely outcome. If you had things (or if you were) so small and light as an intelligent machine the size of a dust particle, it would be easy to spread copies throughout a galaxy at sublight speed (and they could be accelerate to near light speed fairly easily). We should expect that the whole universe would already be teeming with things such as this. But at this level of sophistication, we don't know what might happen. They might decide to have some type of noninterference directive. or they might be running great biological experiments. they could be all around us yet we couldn't see them.

    an additional consequence that i see that might make the situation even more complex comes when you think about what the "generation" after the intelligent nanomachines would be like. Again, the nanomachines have that speed of light restriction on them, and the very process of their development involved a kind of design improvement and development process in which there was a conscious and understood goal to get better and better designs. (in constrast to evolution which has no design goals, but has gradually developed many useful systems) If the whole nanotech design system keeps on it's implosive pressure (maybe even still spurred on by the animal greed of the meat generation) toward faster and smaller, eventually you will want to have subatomic and subnuclear computers, which would probably only be accessible to nanoscale machines. The intriguing physical aspect of such really small devices would be their strange properties from what we know of quantum physics, and behavior of things at that level. on that small scale, the world gets foamy, with virtual particles popping in and out of existence, particles skip from one place to another without ever being in the middle. little wormholes open up from place to place, and it is possible for particles to make small hops back in time. Essentially, our big body physics goes to hell and something else happens. (my quantum mech is a little weak so i'm not all sure what goes on down there). Conceivably, though, such (sub)picomachines would be able to travel through wormholes anywhere in the universe, and between different ones. I'm sure they'd be able to generate new universes if they wanted too, and cause the sort of mass inflation (inflation theory about the big bang says that the universe started off fairly small but gained a lot of mass before it went bang) that makes ours so interesting. So i come to a logical conclusion that godlike creatures are a likely result of technology. One of the painful assumptions in there, though, is that it is possible for things at the pico level to contain information, and manipulate things at that level. I think the physics people already would think that's wrong, because we have knowledge that us big things would not be able to get the information from those small things. (i suppose information doesn't necessarily have to be accessible from both directions)

    i bought a book of latin curses, berlitz french and spanish. a book on musoft networking essentials. something on intelligent agents in java.

    • September 25, 1999
    eek

    only i can prevent forest fires

    • September 20, 1999
    happy yom kippur

    monday night football party at matt's. we actually watched the game. it was just me matt dave and a couple from matt's work, tom and sarah. matt told me about the wednesday meeting at a-tan, and that he met stan franklin.

    interoperation of decision systems is the key to intelligence.

    knowing is an action. the act of accepting something and acting and continuing to think based on that statement's assumed truth

    i still haven't sent in my letter to gene at fedex. (or written it). shame on me.

    • September 18, 1999
    miss tennessee is from rhodes college. it doesn't look so much like a beauty pageant anymore, though. they seems a little plain. it's more about their platform, i guess. political.

    road runner has been having troubles. has been going down.

    got the linux connection up. i don't know what the problem was for sure. i changed the host name to match the one given by roadrunner. i may not have been running the rrlogin program from root before. we'll see. now i need to get the servlets going.

    • September 15, 1999
    man. talk about yer slacking off.

    so there was the big open house at fedex. there was actually a guy that was at memphis state in grad school when i was there who was the boss of the extranet division. they use a lot of java and servlets. i'm supposed to send the guy gene a description of the project i worked on, and some code, i think.

    i had a mensa party here on monday. church of monday night football. maybe 6 people showed up. i was panicked the day before because it was on abc, which is UHF here and basically you can't see it. i went out and got a new antenna, which helped somewhat but wasn't great. then i found that the cable from the cable modem also receives tv cable. so now i have cable. i was just watching the history channel and war engineers. anyway, the party was ok. i had some porn on the computer, and that was kind of bad when aimee showed up, but she acted cool about it, so i left it (still probably bad, though). people mostly didn't watch the football game, but spent a lot of time outside smoking. i should have just designated another room for smokers. And i grilled some burgers before, wanting them to be ready in advance, but i ended up having to reheat them, which is a bummer. people were nice about it. i wrote email invitations with long rambling and silly directions but they assumed you were coming from the freeway, and it turned out that pretty much nobody was.

    i just failed the microsoft assessment. 58%, needed 75%. there's quite a bit of nt administration i don't know, but it seems pretty easy. i guess i should read a manual.

    why should a person know why he does things?

    on the third day of the seventh month in the twenty-second year of the reign of Chota the great stone mover, the metalsmith swija found a wondrous material in his foundry. it seemed to shift like water at times, and at other times it stood fast hard like silver. he ground some, and it took an edge that would cut many skins without dulling. he cut a timber with the blade, and the timber fell away like an egg shell. he cleaved a great stone and it split into two pieces. but when he took the blade to a chicken for the pot, it mysteriously warped back to the shape of a smooth stone, and when in anger he tried to bash the chicken, the ingot splashed away like quicksilver.

    i am in a viscious feedback loop. i don't like how things are going, so i sleep a lot to avoid things, and sleeping a lot makes things worse. and i'm sure i have other cruel cycles going on.

    i believe in the basic orderliness of things. there are rules about how things work.

    it's not magical. things as they are now are a consequence of how they were and what was done to change them.

    • September 5, 1999
    the world does seem a little overpopulated with good looking unattached women. they are a little hard to find, though.

    burned some money at platinum again, after going to denim and diamonds. at dnd, there are some who have x's instead of bands. they tend to be really really cute. there were some with big hair that must have been intimidating, because they had to stick with themselves. i didn't dance with anyone, but there was one who was repeatedly knocking me with her elbow. she was in like a group of 4. it was playful. a couple guys seemed to want me to dance with some of those cuties. anyway, at pp, there was this one skinny girl (anna maybe). it was like her skin, which was a little thick, a small layer of fat, was just loosely draped on her bones, with hardly any muscle under it. i wonder how she moves around at all. sabrina, otoh, is small but strong. i see her a lot. and there was one girl(memory?) who drives down from kentucky.

    i downloaded a cool program, and x server for windows, so i can run x windows programs on my laptop. the evaluation is for 15 days but it only costs 25 dollars. mix

    doug came by yesterday and i helped him a little setting up a standalone apache installation on his laptop. but for some reason i couldn't get it to come up on my local network. it's simple to set up, i think, it just wouldn't send info through. now that i think about it. i know what it was. the ipmasquerading has to run a program called ipchains to enable it. you can set it to enable a whole series, or just individual addresses, and i enabled just my laptop's address. i think it gives a slight bit more hacking security.

    i'm liking my toys now. i may not need to sit at my desktop anymore. its a real server now. administered remotely, not using a monitor.

    pigs (i'm eating a sausage and egg samwich) are dirty noy because they play in mud but because they eat faeces.

    i need to do a quick cgi-chat, just a post a line and display of a file.

    something in the paper about kids helping the homeless. it seems like that's the government's job

    • September 4, 1999
    actually got the webcam to update right with a kludge suggested by dug. i use a cgi script to load the jpg, which doesn't get cached.

    i actually got up at 4 am, but i wasted the time on irc. but at least i wasn't sleeping. i did take a nap at lunchtime, though. overall, a waste of a day, but at least i switched it up

    and i can't find my copy of the kama sutra. where could it have gone? i'm bummed, i was going to look at it and the java stuff. i did find another book that was similar, though. with pictures. but not so much of the indian philosophy, which is what i wanted to read about.

    and i thought of something cute. i pointed the webcam to my food when i was eating dinner.

    • September 3, 1999
    i got aol working at work. it turns out that there are two different socks protocols and setting them up is quite different. winsock requires you to add permissions for the users, while socks requires permissions for the ip address of the machine. but i got it going, and now the office is all set up. i also installed a sound card in the pentium machine in the back. it runs win95, so it should be a good quake machine. one machine couldn't load netscape 3.0 because its version of win32s was too old, i don't know where i can find an update for win32s.

    temperance was interesting. davedavedave was hitting on a couple of women a few tables over. they told him they were having a tough time and were men bashing. he said we were a high iq society and could guarantee intelligent conversation. at one point dave got us four to whip out our mensa cards as proof. at least he kept at it. i suppose that gets sympathy. brad thought of going over and apologizing for dave, and dave kept pushing him till he did it. it was two of them, and three of us, so i left to make it even. i think maybe dave might have gotten some sympathy, though he shouldn't really be dating since his divorce isn't through. i hope it goes ok.

    September 2, 1999

proxies suck. i tried to set up aol on the proxy at work. there were like three pretty simple fields to fill in. but it just wouldn't work. and at home, netscape wouldn't work through the proxy, though ms int explorer would. i think maybe my netscape is corrupt , and i tried downloading through explorer, but that didn't work. and of course, aol doesn't work at home either. and wsftp didn't seem to work through the prozy, though it had a place to configure it. and it looks like netmeeting just work. no place to out in proxy stuff. no video. maybe i need to breakdown and get cuseeme. it's like $70. i'm spending way too much. but i'm having fun. a little keysian ec. priming the old pump. something to add to my voodoo economics that i live by. good old ron. 

i got a blue screen in win98. something in the video, probably some thread problem or other. too much disk use maybe.

 i ordered a plane ticket to washington for next weekend. only $140.

 i'm putting off studying java again

 aimee wrote back. when i first saw it, i was dreading checking it. i went to work without reading it. but she was nice about it.

 i took a nap, and woke up, scared about not having been working on the web page for reb

 i used perl for the first time in a while. i don't have an easy editor to use in the terminal. so i made a substitution with perl -pe 's?mod?/sbin/mod?'
 
 

  • September 1, 1999
well, i didn't eat very much, and i feel much better. the food is really emptying out of the refrigerator, though. no milk or oj. no more bacon. the roast beast is gone. i won't be so tempted.

 i finally got proxy server working at work. i had to set the anonymous user to a valid user on that machine. i should try to get it working at home now. but i'm not so interested. maybe just to get netmeeting going and have video chats. it doesn't work through linux ip masq

 and i did write aimee, but it was halfhearted. i saw her at the monthly meeting and chatted a little, but i didn't sit next to her (there wasn't a spot). but i did sit next to a really nice (and cute) girl, kimberly, who won a scholarship from mensa. she's from houston (like me) and lived in jackson since 97 (our farm is like 15 miles from there). She's studying for a masters in nursing to be a practical nurse or something like that. in that group is a woman nancy who is a phd in nursing and teaches, sitting opposite us. we chatted a little. i was on about my computer stuff to various people around there, and she talked about her computer. a compaq, since the hq is in texas. she just got a little intel video camera, and got her and her roommate's computers hooked up with ethernet and into a cable modem. but they get two ip address and pay a little more, while i just have one and play with weird configuations and software. i think i have more fun, but they have the easier way of doing things. and of course, i didn't get her e-mail address or anything sensible like that. silly me. but she seemed like one of those high energy over-achiever types. not my type at all. very pleasant, just not my type. then again, studying medical science at vanderbilt... and that type doesn't go for me, anyway, either. and she has an hk and a license to carry.

 i feel like the loser i am. but it's a very real feeling.