Never been one to let the carrier drop

I’ve discovered it’s very hard to come up with a set of search terms to feed Google to find a support group for helping people recover from religion. Among other things, I suppose there’s some inherent irony (possibly quite a lot) in searching for a 12-step program to help you get over your view of your higher power.

But I do think I’d be better off with like-minded people. I’ve tried visiting Christian chat rooms, and this leads to me understanding why churches get firebombed. [Obviously, as one who is against war and for respect, even thinking about such actions make me inherently unhappy. I did have this rather humerous – to me – vision of me writing down my entire manifesto and going around nailing it to the doors of churches.]

I’m not going to make it out of this universe in one piece, am I?

[I have this interesting view that maybe the reason religions make me so angry is that they’re not right for me, and I resent that other people can just, you know, believe them and be happy. Once I’ve written one that I can just believe and be happy, perhaps I will feel better. The problem with this is that writing a religion is a fscking lot of work, and involves rather a large number of decisions, all of which are difficult]

The basic theory that just about every Christian who irritates the hell out of me subscribes to is that God is absolutely perfect, without flaw.

There’s, um, a problem with that.

Perfection implies, rather seriously, that no incorrect action is possible, and only the most optimal path can be followed.

Congradulations, you have just removed God’s free will.

I suppose that fits right in there with the utter torture that being omnipotent and omnicient would be.

Now, if we could all just try and draw some conclusions that maybe *match* the universe around us, so Sheer would spend less time in mental hospitals?

It’s not that I’m asking for much. I have no problem with the tenet that we may have to take some things on faith that we can’t directly observe.

But, I’ve been listening to Christian talk radio – and, at this point, I’ve vowed to stop – it’s just about the same thing as listening to Rush Limbaugh – i.e., makes me angry, doesn’t change my mind, doesn’t change his mind, and doesn’t improve the universe in any measurable way – but..

We’re supposed to reject the things of this world, according to said station. We’re supposed to believe in the perfection of a entity that time and time again, ordered the utter destruction of collections of self-aware peoples that it/*e had created. We’re supposed to *not* believe that the things of this world – sex, love, rock-n-roll, science fiction, lucid dreaming, chocolate, take your pick – are good, *even though, by the description of the Christians, diety-of-your-choice created them, and this world, and the Devil, and everything else*.

By my latest insanity, diety-of-your-choice didn’t create us (even though I think said diety exists), we just always were. But that’s subject to change next week.

(Strange – and I’m sure very old i.e. every mathematician learned it in kindergarden – thought: How do you split a infinity? Even if you cut it right down the middle, precisely, you still end up with infinity – i.e., what you started with. Well, kind of. As any Phillip K. Dick fan knows, there are subsets of infinity – i.e. different infinities. A whole infinity full of them, in fact. I think the word infinity might be somewhat heavily overloaded – kind of like love.

All (I think) my Galapagos pictures are up at http://galapagos.sheer.us/gallery2.

I’m trying to figure out a way to decouple the dictionary lookup and synthesis sections of FreeTTS so that it is possible to store something like a phoneme map in a file, and then read it and synthesize from it later. I’m also trying to get the synthesis portion working correctly under J2ME (I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently)

Does anyone have any suggested resources?

So, today two different people I care about told me that they disliked one of my favorite – possibly my most favorite – peices of all the music I have written/recorded. Within fifteen minutes of each other. And they both waxed eloquent about why exactly they hated it – it was for very different reasons, too.

I was crushed. I wanted to curl up in a little ball and cry. And I don’t see why this should bother me so much – I mean, surely there is a lot of variety in people’s tastes, and surely just because something is my favorite, doesn’t mean that other people have to like it as well. But it was still very upsetting. I think it probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it had just been one or the other – but both.. in such a short time span..

Well, my trip to the east coast had many wonderful and many terrible moments.

I got to see Scott, Cori, and Woody, along with his new boyfriend, and play a wonderful send-up of Monopoly called Gayopoly. (It has some interesting stratigic changes – for example, the boys go one way around the board while the girls go the other way). I lost horribly, Kayti and Cori were the winners. But it was fun and funny. Also got to have a wonderfully tasty meal called a ‘Garbage Plate’.

Also got to see my daughter, and I think that me and her adoptive mother are now on much better terms. It turned out that a lot of the things that I was worried about with that visit I needn’t have worried about, and a lot of the things that I thought were going to be the worst were mostly misunderstandings. So I will likely be seeing her again. I’m also planning on mailing her a mix CD soonish, as she’s got quite a love of Brittney and J-Lo and even though I’m sure she will hate it, I’d like to at least expose her to what I was listening to when I was her age.

The Galapagos were beautiful. Sadly, due to lack of sleep and a series of miscommunications, a family fued broke out and has now been magnified (at least in one case) to the kind of epic proportions that make it seem likely that certain members will never speak to each other again. Also sadly, it’s at least somewhat my fault. I don’t know what to do about it, other than to try not to make such mistakes in the future.

I’m planning on putting up my and Kayti’s photos at galapagos.sheer.us. I’m working on it right now.

After the Galapagos, I tried to contact my old friend Jessica but failed, saw my brother (well, in spirit anyway) Tavian, my good friend JL, a old, old friend from the IETF circuit Jennifer, and met a friend of Kayti’s from Philly. All good times.

Then I got some really disturbing email, and did some really stupid things. The end.

Well, the problem with my internet, that I Ranted and Grred and in general was a daily thorn in Cox’s side about, is now resolved.

The resolution isn’t due to anything Cox did.. it’s due to a relay on my UPS.

I had noticed that my UPS often made clicking noises, but I hadn’t really thought much of it until I got a isolation transformer to try and solve a hum problem in my nearfield monitors. It happened to have a voltmeter on the front, and I happened to leave it plugged in long after it was determined that it didn’t solve the hum problem. And I noticed that every click corrisponded to a 15 volt dip in the line voltage that only lasted a tenth of a second or so, and was followed by a 15 volt spike. (or so)

At some point today, I got annoyed enough about this (because each line voltage dip also made a slight humming noise in my new monitors) that I gave the power company a call. I kind of figured they’d blow me off, since they are after all delivering power to me, but no.. they promised they’d send a tech out tonight.

I had to go out to go shopping, but when I got back, the power to the house had clearly been interrupted, and it no longer fluctuates at all.

And, mysteriously, my internet connection no longer has 900ms ping times to the default gateway, and is now capable of moving many megabits with aboslutely no trouble at all.

Could these two things be connected? Well, consider this – the cable modem does NOT have a switchmode power supply, and any common mode noise getting into the cable modem’s power might very well find its way out the RF jack..

I feel really bad that I harrassed Cox so mercilessly. Although – any of their techs that came out could have stuck a voltmeter on the line and seen the noise in question. But, it is probably generally true that their problems don’t turn out to be power-supply related, so I really can’t blame them for not being able to diagnose this one.

Sometimes I think I should break my journal up into three or four little journellets, so that people could just subscribe to the ones that were aligned with the topics they were interested in.

Topics my journal breaks down into neatly:

1) Religion/metaphysics
2) Weird devices I am building/studying
3) Computer science related thoughts
4) “my life” stuff..
5) Music

Maybe there’s a easy way to do this sort of thing through the LJ interface? Hmmm.. might be that new field at the bottom marked tags?

I found another Oceanlab song I’ve never heard.

I love them so much..

Can anyone suggest any other groups that are similar to OceanLab?

There’s a new Emmit Swimming album!

I can’t wait to get my claws on it. I’m thinking about buying it via iTunes…