Never been one to let the carrier drop

I’ve survived another adventure in the instability of parking meters and all things of that nature.

Or have I?

I created a IRmeter.dll that works wonderfully on my handheld, but doesn’t work at all on my boss’s – no clues as to why, except I have a more recent OS than he does which might have to do with it. So now I have to find images for the old OS and load them on my handheld, which takes for-flipping-ever because you have to do it over a serial port.

In more interesting news, I bought a accoustic guitar, finally – after years of thinking about it, I picked up a Ibenez 12-string at a local pawn shop. I wouldn’t have, but it has a action so low that I can easily bar on it – and you don’t find that in a 12-string every day!

So yesterday I took some time to play peter,paul and mary and Simon & Garfunkel tunes on it, savoring that accoustic sound and feel. She’s (I’ve decided it is gender-female for sure) a beautiful machine with a lovely voice – and a active pickup! Woo hoo!

She’s also tuned to Eb – I’m afraid to tune up to E because I feel like that might raise the action (more stress on the neck) and I don’t want that. So I guess I’ll invest in a capo.

And a strap. 😉

And after I learn a few more songs, maybe I’ll sit out on the ave and sing them, like so many other musicians do.. 😉 The neatest thing about a accoustic guitar is it requires no batteries, no speakers, no amps.. you just need a pick and strong fingers.

Of course, sadly, after only a hour or so of jamming, the twelve-stringed nature of it started to get to my fingers. I can see I’m going to gain some serious callouses out of playing this..

And luckily it was in tune (at Eb..) when I bought it – I don’t even want to think about how hard it must be to tune a 12-string. Maybe I better buy a tuner..

I want to learn ‘blackbird’ and ‘alice’s resteraunt’ and ‘city of new orleans’ and ‘walk on the ocean’… but honestly, peter paul and mary is probably more my speed.

Anyone know a good place to get guitar lessons? 😉

————–

In other news..

I always think of interesting things to write / talk about in my journal when I’m not sitting at my computer, and then when I sit down, all of it dissapears like a soap bubble. Well, I just woke up, what can I say.

[deletes several ruminations about recent dramas]

My office is a complete disaster. Maybe I’ll take some time and clean it today. And do the dishes, which are also scary.

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life,
when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”
– Einstein

http://fray.slate.msn.com/id/2090904/

I’m pleased to say my choice to support Kucinich was confirmed. 😉

http://www.margaretcho.com/blog/blog.htm

Yes, she has a blog.

Of course, this is the 21st century. Everyone has a blog. I don’t know whether we are going to get anything done or not, but we’re sure going to be a well-documented bunch.

You can stare out there into the piles of words until you get lost. I’m already lost, and I’ve been lost for a good long while now. The more I program parking meters, the loster I feel.

So, I met with a new musician the other day.. Tory – sent him email, but no replies. I think there are possibilities, but I also think I might have scared him. Well, if so, it’s not the first time. Another guy is trying to get me to cruise out to cap hill tonight.. and I honestly can’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t.

Other than the fact that I oughterbe working.

I wish I could get some serious momentum going on the parking meters thing again. Yesterday my sole accomplishment was creating header definitions for the (37!) feilds in the database table I’m going to be replicating to and from the handheld. I never want to type PROP_TAG again. I hate macros.

I feel like going downstairs and doing a WSHR broadcast to no one. [Hmm.. how’s that again?]. What I need to do is write out checks for people and go to the bank and go mail them.

Eating something other than candy might also be advised.

You can’t always get what you want.. but if you try sometimes, you just might find.. you get what you need…

S.

I so want to believe that I’m special, unique, worthwhile.

But sometimes it seems like I’m completely pointless, or even counterproductive..

I refuse to give up yet.

First of all, LoLs from Brig has a awesome photoblog. I direct you (and my future self) at http://www.apparentlynothing.com/

That said, let’s move on to more narccisic themes.

One of the first things that blogs and livejournal have taught me is that there are a whole lot of cool people in Netland. I like to think we feed off each other, bouncing ideas and concepts and memes around, and that at some point we will approach some larger solutions to the larger problems that as always face the world. This is probably just my innate optimism getting the better of me, but hey, what are you going to do?

My mom sent me some poll results which she intimated indicated that the american public was not behind a woman’s right to choose, nor gay rights (two things that she is adamently against). I sent her back a nice long well considered email in which I managed to not tell her to grow up even once. 😉 I thought it was one of my better works, so I stuck it in my letters to mom file on my web site. Hey, at least I’m a well documented bastard.

Actually, I don’t think my paternity is in any question at all.

Though you never know. I suspect it will come out in the end that despite the fact that my dad was in the army, my parents were in fact hippies. At least I hope so – I mean, they drove a VW microbus – not one, but two – and my mother has stated she was against Vietnam.

I can always hope. Figuring out my dad is something that I will probably spend the rest of my life doing, largely unsuccessfully. I wonder if he feels the same way about me?

Anyway, writing the email (which wasn’t really a flame, exactly, more sort of a discourse) was very emotionally satisfying. I’m sure I’ll get a annoyed email back from her, but it’ll have been worth it.

Lara came over and made a serious stab at cleaning the Lumina. I haven’t actually gone out to look at what she did, but it took her a while and she looked pretty busy, so I’m guessing it was good work. She’s good at cleaning things as well as a good artist. 😉 which puts her two up on me I guess.

I was going to go out somewhere and party tonight, but instead I slept from 6:30p to about 3a, and then read Spider Robinson until about 4:30. Today I plan on spending with P…

Assorted drama ensued last night, but I’ll save that for a friends-only post, or perhaps more likely for a sheer-only post. 😉

Infrared communications are still giving me headaches. The guy at D. who claimed that this wasn’t rocket science was lying – I’m starting to think D. is deliberately sabotoging my efforts by giving me wrong information, at the very least.

though why they would do that is beyond me.

defenestration

When I was hanging out in orange county I met someone who described to me his friend as having ‘idiot savant’ disease.

Then he described me fairly accurately.

Is that what I am?

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

build software that imports a huge chunk of pi into a database, then allows visual representation of that as arbitrary number of pixels bitmap etc.. see what pi ‘looks’ like.

One of the things that most people don’t know about me is that I send out probably only a quarter of the emails I write.

I wonder, if I were to be hit by a bus tomorrow, what would be made of all the emails I don’t send. I can’t decide if I’d want them to be delivered to their intended recipiants, or deleted – probably a little of both. They make for intereseting reading for me, though.

+————————————————————————————–

So, P. stayed over last night in order to help me face the scary Democrats (or the other way around, I think she was just as apprehensive as I was about the whole thing). It turned out to be rather a lot of fun, although I was truly pushing exhausted by the end of the thing, since I didn’t sleep at all last night. [Working and then playing music]

Anyway, sometime around 10ish we wandered down to a local school to cast our vote. My neighbor, who is a big Dean supporter, booed as I wrote in ‘Kucinich’ in the box, but it was completely in fun. Or mostly so anyway. There was one Kerry supporter who kind of scared me a little bit.. 😉

Anyway, so, after this our chair explained the rules of the system, and how we would be able to change our votes, horse-trade to get canidates viable, and whatever until the cutoff time. When we were told that any canidates with less than 15% of the vote were unviable, P. turned to me and said ‘Sorry’ and I started trying to figure out who I was going to change my vote to. I had just about decided on Kerry, despite the fact that there are a few things I really dislike about him – like how plastic he seems, how rich he is, and how he voted for the recent war – when I happened to glance over at the sheets.

You could plainly see everyone’s vote – I think this was a good thing, considering the horse-trading that later ensued, it made things simpler – and it didn’t look like Kucinich wasn’t a viable canidate _at all_. in fact, when the votes were tallied, in our precinct he got more than Kerry!

But then, I always knew I lived in a cool neighborhood.

It was neat in general – I got to meet some of my neighbors, which is something I definately don’t do enough of. In the end, we broke up into groups and decided who would take our issues to the county on May 1st and 8th. There were several volunteers, but I was chosen.

So now I’m active in local government. Well, kind of.

Anyway – I was also happy that at one point when it looked like Kucinich wasn’t going to get enough votes for a delegate after the horse-trading had ensued, P. was willing to change her vote to make Kucinich a viable canidate. 😉

It was a cool system – had almost a instant-runoff flavor to it. I think it would make a good system for electing a president – you could support multiple parties easily!