I’m guessing my system clock is really out to lunch, since it seems to have dated this entry the 24th. But I’m not going to let that worry me.
Just a post to report that I and Kayti had a lovely thanksgiving dinnerr, some assembly required, and have successfully moved to 27262 Principe, Mission Viejo, CA. It’s sunny. It’s warm. My entire life is still in boxes. I got about a eighth of the studio unpacked, and a small portion of the LAN..
http://www.addictinggames.com/theidiottest.html
According to this test, I am ‘average’. I tried three times, and that’s where I ended up all three times. This is something I’ve suspected for a long time – even though people from time to time make a point of telling me I’m intelligent.. (almost as if they sense I have some weakness in my own personal opinion of my intelligence).
Actually, this is sort of a odd point. I’ve been thinking about it, and compliments about your DNA – like your intelligence, or your beauty, aren’t really as much directed at you as they are directed at whoever wrote your software. (Which probably wasn’t you, although the jury is still out on this). On the other hand, there are certain compliments that are very directed at you.. like that you’re a peaceful person, or that you write good software or good emails or good sex stories or what have you.
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Every year my Dad’s family gets togeather and has a holiday they call Thanksmas. For a long time I avoided them as most of my memories of my Dad’s family include things like being spanked for crying after one of my uncles took part of my kite to fix his kid’s kite with, and being forced to sit in on family photographs taht I didn’t want to be in and other similar events.
Then, I went for a few years.. my grandfather was dying (except it turned out that he wasn’t.. which I’m glad of), and then I thought I’d go back to see if the results were better, and they weren’t.
I’ve concluded that in my father’s side of the family, insulting someone is a way of showing love. I wish that I could adapt to this, but I really can’t. Every time I go to a family gathering with them, someone says something incredibly hurtful. They don’t like my culture, I don’t like theirs. I think the best thing to do is just to avoid them in the future.
There’s this sense that you’re supposed to have this obligation to your family no matter how they treat you or what they say. They can use physical violence as a reaction to your crying, or threaten physical violence in order to control you, and you’re still supposed to love them and go to their family events and listen to their negative comments about how you look, who your lover is, what you think is morally right and wrong, what your politics are, and probably what car you drive with good grace.
I don’t see the point. If we weren’t related, we would actively hate each other. These are the kind of people who think that the Iraq war is a beautiful thing. They drive a SUV and have a giant american flag on their house. I fly a U.N. flag (I’d rather fly a UFP flag, but no one would get it but other severely geeky types) and would devote my entire life to working for peace if I thought it would actually do any good.
So, my mother asked me if I was going to Thanksmas this year, and I answered no, that I’d had my quota of that side of the family for a while. And then I felt bad, because that’s a really harsh thing to say. But, on the other hand, it is the truth. My shrink keeps telling me I need to ask for what I want, and with regards to a lot of those people, what I want is to never see them again. I don’t want them to be unhappy, I don’t want them to suffer or fail to prosper in any way, I just don’t want to be exposed to them.
And I don’t think that that’s a unreasonable thing to want. But yet I feel bad about wanting it.
I think if they looked into their hearts, and listened really hard, what they’d find is that they don’t particularly want to hang out with a anti-war, left-wing, socialist-communist-grean-libretarian (yah, YOU try and figure out which bits of me are which bits of those;)) pro-drug, anti-religion, musician hippie beatnik computer programmer anarchist like me, who I’m sure they are convinced is destined for eternal suffering when this lifetime is over.
So I think by staying away I’m doing us all a favor. There are a few individual people in the group that I like quite well, and perhaps I will make some effort to run into them individually instead. (assuming, of course, that they don’t also want to stay as far away from me as possible, which they might).
I’m beginning to think that with the exceptions of raves and other IT people, I’m very antisocial. I’m not particularly comfortable in a bar, or a church, or any of the places people gather that aren’t all about the music. (I do music-parties and concerts just fine and enjoy them rather a lot). I enjoy seeing people within the framework of work, but we’re all working on solving some common problems, and those people generally don’t insult me (except occasionally on fuckedcompany.com) and they generally don’t make me feel threatened.
I also seem to be able to manage things like SEVA – groups of people trying to solve a particular problem. I think SEVA is just another kind of work for me.
Anyway, that’s enough of my thoughts for tonight I think.
So, for those of you who are wondering why I haven’t been updating lately, it’s mostly because I’ve been in the process of moving. I’ve brought the first vanload down along with Kayti’s car – the drive was uneventful, possibly even fun in spots. I’m flying back to Seattle tomorrow to repeat the process – unfortunately, the rest of the house isn’t exactly packed yet, so part of what I have to do is pack my house in three weeks..
I also have to get cases for the music equipment that doesn’t have cases yet (mostly the MP-9000 and the DA-7), change the battery pack in my car (I’ve ordered the new batteries – I’m temporarily going to use a cheap lead-acid pack in order to let me work on my battery management system without worrying about damaging anything – I went with PowerSonic AGMs – yes, I know they’re not the best batteries in the world, but the price was right.. ), drag much stuff to the dump, juggle a bunch of credit cards, and not go crazy.
S.
To those of you who followed the much earlier thread on AES <-> SPDIF conversion, the matching transformers suggested (provided by markertek video) worked beautifully. No more clicks, no more pops, no more Sheer tears out his hair, just sweet audio, digital all the way through.
It’s amazing how much better it sounds, actually. It doesn’t seem like it should make that big a difference, but I guess when you have many sound modules going to one summing bus, all the noise from all of them kind of adds up. Also, I think the A/D in the Behringer mixer might be better than the A/D in the E-Mu modules. Ultimately, of course, I want to go digital all the way to the recording interface – and there’s no reason to think that I won’t be able to. The only problem is that for some reason the Panasonic and the Behringer boards don’t seem to be able to stay in sync. I might try a word clock cable or I might try feeding the Panasonic via ADAT instead of analog.
The problem with this kind of thing is that it can turn into a obsession. First, I just wanted to hand off my racks as optical so that I had less things to connect. Then, I started wanting to keep things digital throughout the racks. Now, I’m thinking of buying different versions of sound modules (the Command Station version of the XL-7, for example) in order to get SP/DIF outputs. I’m trying to figure out where I could find a upgrade card for my Emu 6400 to give it SPDIF or AES outputs.
All this in the middle of moving.
Sick sick puppy I am.
So, I now have broadband in SoCal. There’s one linux server there right now – not actually running anything yet, but at least it can be ssh’d into.
I’m very tired – cable guy came @ 9a..
If anyone cares, I’m now past my previous all time high on the day counter. Woo hoo etc.
This article is in reaction to http://www.reddink.com/. Their guestbook was broken (I guess diety(s)-of-your-choice (henceforth referred to as DOYC) aren’t completely on their side) and I had written this whole big thing in it that I didn’t want to lose forever, so I’m putting it here. Please don’t feel that you have to read all, or even any of it.
I am assuming for the moment that this web site exists as a troll. As such, it’s a interesting beast, and some of the posts in this guestbook do appear to be worth reading.
For whatever it’s worth, here’s my stance on abortion.
Abortion is immoral if and only if a sentient/self-aware life form is being killed.
This brings up the question: When does a life form become self-aware? Obviously, we feel that things such as cows are not self-aware, at least not very, or we would feel a bit more remorse over killing and eating them. But yet, we’re very clear on humans being self-aware.
Heinlien believed – and stated in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress – that there’s a critical mass involved. Get a brain to a certain size, and self-awareness will just happen.
Others believe that our brains are merely radio receivers, and our bodies are merely shells – that we exist in some way immortal or outside the time domain of this universe.
I don’t know which I believe. Both sound plausable. However, if there is a omnipotent God, surely said being can move the soul thread / link from one body to another, probably with a trivial amount of work. So abortion doesn’t in fact kill a baby, it just closes a door. It’s also very, very unlikely that a baby that is less than four months old has enough of a brain for the soul-link to work IMHO.
If we are entirely contained in our bodies (which doesn’t neccesarily make us mortal, but getting into why that might be would take several pages) then a abortion becomes murder when the child becomes self-aware. This probably occurs somewhere around the second trimester. I know that abortion activists are always on about how the babies have a heartbeat from a few weeks in – but your computer can have a spinning system clock and still be unable to do anything but show you the bios screen – and a person can have their brain rendered useless and still have a heartbeat – people in comas sometimes never wake up, and yet their heart beats on even though they have gone from this world.
In addition, a child is a parasite until it is born. I think it is immoral to coerce women to support a parasite if they choose not to – although it’s not clear whether this or killing a self-aware lifeform is a greater wrong. I tend to lean on the side of no-abortions-after-life-is-self-aware.
However, I think that if the abortion activists really want to end abortion, what they should do instead of blowing up abortion clinics (which could easily kill a self-aware life form and therefore is about as bright as fighting to end war – but then, I suspect some of these people of not being the brightest bulbs on the string) is work on or support technological advances to make it possible to remove a very young (<3months) fetus from a female intact and raise it in a incubator. This way, abortions don't have to happen and the mothers don't have to be host to a baby they'd rather not be host to and there's still the possibility of the mother changing her mind and raising the child which, given some of the people I've talked to about their abortions, sometimes might be very emotionally helpful to the mothers much in the same way that the religious anti-abortion ads, sites, and clinics are very much not. I hope that if I've offended anyone, I've also managed to make them think at least a little bit.
We got the house. My new address is 27262 Principe, Mission Viejo, CA 92692. We will be moving in on Oct 15th (plus or minus six weeks ;-)).
I’ve ordered data (1.5 megabit symetrical with 8 static), phone (2 lines with one busy-rolling to the other – I’ve decided to do my own voicemail using Linux rather than continue to pay the phone company to do VM for me – this lets me do a lot of neat things, and gets rid of their annoying quota. I’m planning on using one of the linux boxen – probably qm, since it will have the requisite two unused PCI slots – or possibly gateway, though I’m thinking of turning it into a windowze video editing workstation (it has a uberfast disk array on it which could be made even uberfaster by putting in tiny 10k RPM drives, and with QM and Chloe I think I have my linux needs met – although I may need to keep a redhat system around to run d3 on… )
Blah blah blah. The life of a geek.
I’m really not too smart sometimes..
http://www.sheer.us/mischief_committee_archive/MC-82306.mp3 is the last session of MC with Joe. I apologize for the confusion.
One of our recent shows – the last ever with Joe – is here. It’s pretty good IMHO, though it starts out a little slow.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it’s a little scary to think of the broadband providers ganging up in a pack to perform acts of censorship and tax each individual packet. On the other hand, if they do that, we’ll just build a new internet without them, using all kinds of tricky amatuar techniques that will annoy the *#*% out of the censors, as well as make it much, much harder for the government to track our activities. I’m kind of suprised we haven’t already done this.
And, you might almost say that by definition, it’s the right of every network provider to choose what data they allow to travel through their networks – it’s just not very implimentable yet.