Never been one to let the carrier drop

Yet another health insurance provider has declined me.

I’ve pretty much decided to stop applying. Among other things, I don’t particularly feel like supporting the current system, and that’s what I’m doing if I pay in – in the unlikely event that I can find anyone willing to underwrite me.

I keep finding things, over and over, which make me think that money is a power for the side of the universe that I would describe as evil. Hm. I guess someone did say money was the root of all evil. And yet, very few embrace my desire to do away with money entirely.

Most geeks are familiar with the common types of computer timestamp – and the common types of human ones.

The rest of this post has absolutely no point at all. But it’s funny.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to do timestamps as seconds since the big bang? Yes, it’s true, it’d be a much larger feild, but it would represent all possible useful dates. Of course, since we don’t know precisely when the big bang occured (to the nearest millisecond) it might make figuring out what time it is now somewhat difficult…

Then, of course, someone is going to come along and say they want to be able to refer to times *before the big bang*, to which I will suggest using a negative integer. Then they will point out that it’s possible that the universe loops such that before the big bang IS after the big bang – and/or, there’s another big bang before that, and another after us, stretching infinately in both directions..

This problem comes up in other areas. One starts looking for absolutes, and a few jump out – absolute zero, for example. (Funny, they never talk about absolute one – is there a hottest possible temp?). What’s below absolute zero? What’s negative one Kelvin? The physics people sometimes tell us there’s no such animal, but I’m not so convinced. Yes, all the little subatomic particles may be at rest at zero K – but perhaps -1 K is where they do really, really interesting things? Or perhaps you just fall to a lower energy metastate, and the process repeats.

Feel free to criticize -n- correct my physics.

And in other news, 4 of my 6 credit cards are now paid off. I anticipate finishing paying them off by the beginning of September. This will leave me with just hospital bills, taxes, and personal loans to finish up – I am still thinking I will have paid off everything by December.

Thanks to helpful peeps including Dan S. and Chris M., I now have my wordpress blog up and running and crossposting to Livejournal. Perhaps I’ll set it to also crosspost to myspace.. wouldn’t that be fun?

Lately I’ve been feeling like digging up old friends.. I’ve managed to find a bunch of friends from relatively early in my childhood via MySpace, and I’ve been finding contact information for and spamming people from Seattle.. I sort of vary between intensely-social-wanting-to-be-in-touch-with-everybody and intensely antisocial and wanting to hide in my cave and write software.

The drug that I was using to help me sleep has now more-or-less conclusively been linked with my continous stream of nightmares, which leaves me with the difficult decision of do I return to being a often-insomniac with mostly good dreams, or do I return to having nightmares every night but being able to sleep predictably and on schedule?

Went to Seattle for the 4th and set off many large fireworks. Much fun was had by all. Thanks to Bruce S. (if he reads this which I doubt) for hosting me and other considerations.

Back in the swing of work, slowly.. trying to work out the kinks in some code that involves Flex talking to PHP talking to STOMP talking to Perl. Very multilingual.

Finally got around to convincing the Slingbox to talk to the network again after renumbering. There are still some machines that have some issues with talking to the net. Also finally shut down Gateway and AIXER – I hate to have machines not up and talkable-to, but it was just getting too bloody hot in my garage. I’ve got a managed power strip that I need to put out there so I can turn on and off individual machines as appropriate. Especially needed because my friend’s BSD box (and he’s constantly commenting on how much more reliable BSD is than Linux) seems to crash about once every month..

Bought tickets for the UK to visit Enyc and Maddy.

Not much else to report. Currently my religious investigations have me poking at unitarian universalism – I glance at these people every once in a while, and every internet ‘find your religion’ quiz I’ve ever taken has said that they’d be my first choice. I have to say I agree with just about everything I’ve read about them so far. Eerie.

(My $RELIGIOUS_FAMILY_MEMBER, of course, still can’t admit that clearly no $LOVING_SUPERUSER is going to $DO_AWFUL_THINGS to me $FOREVER for $NOT_BELIEVING_SOMETHING_THAT_I_CANT_BELIEVE.)

[guess who’s been reading alt.sysadmin.recovery]

It was good seeing T0ry & Meg, too.. I hope Tory will come down and do a music video or record a new track or something with me.

Testing WP -> livejournal crosspost.

After a breif outage while I tested several different blog packages, updated WordPress’s import to support private vs. public (friends-only isn’t something I’ve bothered to figure out yet, so those were all stuck in the ‘private’ bin), Sheer returns to the blogsphere. I’m sure that I won’t have nearly as many readers since I’m no longer in LJ’s ‘friends’ system – although I may later try to configure a automagic crossposter – but, anyway, I’m here.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

Do I believe there’s one being in the universe who is the most powerful? Probably. The most advanced? Probably. The most enlightened? Yes.

Do I believe that there’s a being in the universe who has superuser powers? I think it’s possible we all designed – or design, as we go – the universe so that was impossible in order to prevent things like Hell.

[[placeholder for a article I’d like to write someday]]

We’ve all seen the man at the liquor store beggin’ for your change
The hair on his face is dirty, dreadlocked and full of mange
He ask the man for what he could spare with shame in his eyes
Get a job you fuckin’ slob’s all he replied

Chorus
God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes
‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to sing the blues
Then you really might know what it’s like (X4)

Mary got pregnant from a kid named Tom who said he was in love
He said don’t worry about a thing baby doll I’m the man you’ve been dreamin’ of
But three months later he said he won’t date her or return her call
And she sweared god damn if I find that man I’m cuttin’ off his balls
And then she heads for the clinic and she gets some static walkin’ through the doors
They call her a killer, and they call her a sinner, and they call her a whore

Chorus
God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes
‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to have to choose
Then you really might know what it’s like (X4)

I’ve seen a rich man beg
I’ve seen a good man sin
I’ve seen a tough man cry
I’ve seen a loser win
And a sad man grin
I heard an honest man lie
I’ve seen the good side of bad
And the down side of up
And everything between
I licked the silver spoon
Drank from the golden cup
Smoked the finest green
I stroked daddies dimes at least a couple of times
Before I broke there heart
You know where it ends
Yo, it usually depends on where you start

I knew this kid named Max
He used to get fat stacks out on the corner with drugs
He liked to hang out late at night
Liked to get shit faced
And keep pace with thugs
Until late one night there was a big gun fight
Max lost his head
He pulled out his chrome .45
Talked some shit
And wound up dead
Now his wife and his kids are caught in the midst of all of his pain
You know it crumbles that way
At least that’s what they say when you play the game

Chorus
God forbid you ever had to wake up to hear the news
‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to have to lose
Then you really might know what it’s like (X4)

To have to lose…

A interesting solution for finding otherwise unfindable formulas:

Generate all possible legal (language of your choice) programs of a set length (say, 2k)

Get access to a massively parallel computing array

Define success in well codified terms

Test them all.