Never been one to let the carrier drop

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/columnists/dave_lieber/7643262.html

Ah, reminds me of the good old days. You know, I had a friend who will remain nameless who wrote a peice of software that destroyed disk drives on apple-][es, and I don’t think they did anything to him for that. They finally suspended him for putting Virus Creation Labs on the LAN (which I don’t think they should have – I mean, it’s a good objective way to learn assembly programming, it’s about as educational as they come. I admit, you can do some pretty evil things with it, but come to that you can do some pretty evil things with a text editor too)

Anyway, a long standing reaction of the school systems everywhere to anything they don’t understand is to suspend, expell, or otherwise harass the people involved. There’s a long standing tradition of discouraging individual thought in schools, and it looks like it’s still alive and well.

No wonder we suck so much.

S.

In between working tonight, I’ve discovered (or was given a link to actually) a app which tracks my winamp song usage and compiles histories and stats using it. For those of you who are curious, you can now see what I’m currently listening to / into by looking here. I also linked it off my web page. I have no reason to expect it won’t just stay working as long as I manage to keep paying the phone bills.

Which reminds me, I’ve decided in order to save money that I’m going to close my account with Isomedia and turn my house line up to 5 megabits. This will result in my local loop bill being about $250 – but my Iso bill is currently $400 a month. In addition, this will give me a lot more bandwidth, since 5 megabits is my peak usage at Iso, and my average is closer to 64 kbits. ANd, since blarg is unmetered, this means I can do really interesting things..

S.

Parking meters are slowly creeping forward – that being what they generally do.

I had a dream last night.. well yesterday, since I’m sleeping during the day – that I was in a city that got nuke-bombed. It was a very odd dream – repeated shots of the buildings exploding and collapsing in a strange wave-front kind of way, then me driving frantically away in my dad’s old Camry (which was kind of unrealistic, givin EMP ;-)), then a direct hit – and then I was walking around on the remains. There was this strange sort of glass everywhere – I mean literally there were almost no structures and the ground everywhere had turned into black glass and it cut my feet and I was trying to clear a spot.

Then I woke up.

Very disturbing dream.

I’m not going to talk about the drama in my personal life yet – among other things, I’m not really sure what to say. It all hurts.

S.

Take the What
animal best portrays your sexual appetite?? Quiz

Yep, that’s me.

S.

My muttered comment as I crawl out of bed (entirely too early) and check my mail.. ‘maybe the spammers have taken christmas off’.

ha ha ha.

I’m so funny.

I’ve never _seen_ so much spam. My anti-spam system caught 83 peices today, and (horrors) six slipped through to my inbox. Not counting the wotch.com semi-spam which I’ve decided I like enough to put on t he whitelist.

Blah.

Yeesh, people, it’s christmas, take a break.

On the other hand, the peer-to-peer nets are humming. My download is almost half of my upload. 😉

[For those of you who don’t keep track, for whatever reason my line stays 100% in use in upload, but only about 30% in use in download for whatever bandwidth cap I sset. I theorize that this is because WinMX users are a bunch of leeches.]

I just hit the ‘latest 50 posts’ or something like that button on the front page of LJ. It’s interesting.. a random slice of a bunch of people’s lives, scrolling across your screen. It seemed almost like I could sort the people into types.. I mean, each of them a distinct and no doubt facinating individual, with loves and hates and thoughts and fears and all those things, but also they somehow all seemed to blur togeather into a great mass of humanity as well.

Peace out, people.

I did see many posts in otehr languages, which made me happy. I really love the journaling thing. I want to write a journal-spider that creates database tables that one can write all sorts of interesting queries on based on the global at-large journal world. but then, I also want to write a program that just evolves, and IS, and is connected to the net. Something that uses perl and eval and genetic algorythms to be as alive as code ever can be.

just like I’d like to build a robot. And I’d like to get a album out. And I’d like to clean the basement. And I’d like to mail off this stupid PC that’s been done for weeks and is sitting behind me gathering dust and being tripped over. I had a IM from Greg today.. probably wants to know where the hell his computer is. Can’t blame him.

Mostly, I want to be DONE with parking meters for a while.

My new years resolutions are as follows:

1) Buy less stuff. Specifically, buy less new stuff which is made in china by a bunch of slaves. Used stuff is okay IMHO.
2) Make more friends.
3) Save more money. I want to have a full year’s operating capitol banked in case of emergancy, _out_ of the stock market. Maybe even in gold or some other hard resource. [and no, I don’t think music gear counts]

If anyone is looking for last minute presents for me, a subscription to Home Power and/or Funny Times would be appriciated.

Some time in the future I will read this journal.. assuming it doesn’t get lost somehow.. and see it through the eyes of me ten years older. How odd that will be? Some day, assuming that M. chooses to reveal it to him, my son will read my words and see whatever echoes of me he cares to see.. (probably in between hating me for giving him up for adoption, but such is life.. ).

Remember that it’s not neccesarily true that the old are wiser than the young. There is wisdom in both, and shortsightedness in both. In the middle there is also wisdom and shortsightedness.

And the young deserve a vote just as much as the old. By young, I mean ten-year-olds if they were willing to go to the polls. Six year olds. two year olds.

Sometimes it seems to me that the young deserve more of a vote. After all, they have to live with the aftermath longer, in every decision we make.

I haven’t smoked weed for many weeks. Just haven’t felt like it. [and, I haven’t smoked tobacco in a couple of months now. But that was a choice, I have indeed felt like it, sometimes it kind of .. eats into me in a odd way. Definately a addictive drug.]

Drugs. Drags. Chemicals. Thoughts.

What will me at 80 think of me at 27? Sometimes I wish I’d started this journal earlier.. in order to capture my life over my life.

The amazing thing about LJ is how it will enable us ALL to capture our life over our life. It’s a amazing thing.

Now to figure out how to make it last millenia, would be the next logical step. To send it winging through the stars, saying we, too, in all our minutia ,were here.

LJers for eternaty.

It’s a neat idea, really. Once your words are spoken, they are etched in time. Of course, then the trick becomes finding the good ones. There are already so many LJs that I couldn’t even begint o read a tenth of them. Some of them quite poignent and good, some of them quite interesting stories. Others, like mine, quite dull. 😉

We are what we are.

S.

Darkness falls on winter lands
Time’s arrow again disbands
We also serve who lie in wait
Hour after hour, taught carefully to hate

Men will clash in fire for oil
Black gold rain nuclear fire on earth’s soil
In seven years the wells run dry
In seven years fire streaks across the sky

For men were never bred to share
While we dream of love, our leaders hatred bear
While we reach for peace, they build machines of war
while we search for hope, they close freedom’s door

All for money do the “good men” die
All for nothing do we to our children lie
The cycle burns on, another war
In another hundred thousand years again eagles will soar

How many times have we played this role
How many cycles only gods could know
How much hatred must man invent
How many more fights for ‘The President’?

You’re Turkey!
You have a good deal of history behind you, both good and
bad, but through it all, you’ve become a leader among your friends.  You
have an uncanny ability to make friends with people who hate each other, though
sometimes you just hate them instead.  Surprisingly fickle, you keep a
good balance in your life between religion and humanism, but most people think
you’re fanatical anyway.  You’re Istanbul, you’re
Constantinople.
Take
the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

—————————————————————————

Time keeps on slipping.. into the future like water, dreams wandering off and running away where you can’t look nor see nor find nor taste nor smell. I awaken from dreams more vivid each day, not sure which is sleep. Hallucinate reality, is there any difference between a hallucination of reality and what’s really real? What if my whole life is one large dream running on a very large computer somewhere? Not the matrix. Not the reality. Something huge and complex and shifting this way comes, and I beg for a root console, for a instruction manual that I can page through, for rules I can understand.

Programming windows opens new doors of perception?

I miss acid. But I’m too afraid of it to return. It’s not addiction.. not like nicotine was, before I decided to leave it behind. It’s more.. beauty. Amp up your pattern recognition tenfold. And yet, who would I trip with?

The fear. Weed brings out what is already there – except sometimes it doesn’t and is a truly good experience. I feel so small. So useless. So insignificant. So much like people would choose to not know me.

And yet.. ego. I am good at some things. I know this because people tell me.

I’m not under the influence of anything right now, for those of you who might think otherwise. Just pausing for a minute.

Wlell, back to the parking meters.

First of all, a story that will be giving me chills for weeks: http://www.livejournal.com/community/ljers4eternity/23038.html#cutid1

Second of all, I discovered this story while reading through a community devoted to LJers who have died. Which is a interesting thought.. apparently LJs time out these days, so you won’t be able to read about my thoughts and works forever, which is perhaps a good thing and perhaps just as well.. but if you could, then LJs would make a neat permanent archive..

Third of all, while reading through that community, I discovered a whole lot of people pissed off because of a journal-person who had maintained a fake charicter in order to kill it off. That person’s journal was also deleted.. (after s/he got 1000+ comments and outpourings of greif..)

Look, first of all, I’m getting tired of reading about how people’s LJs are deleted because they perform some infraction of the more or less nonexistant and/or loosely defined T.o.S. – to be honest, I’m starting to have a hard time trusting LJ – but second of all, there’s absolutely no reason that journal should have been deleted. At least it should have been left as a testiment to a brilliant snow job. It must have been astonishingly good fiction in order to garner 1000 comments on the last page – my journal will be lucky to get ten!

And, really, maintaining a fictinal LJ seems just as reasonable as maintaining a factual one. A journal’s just a notebook.. scribble anything you want. Doesn’t have to be the story of your life.. could be the story of someone else’s. Could be the story of the life you didn’t manage to have, walter mitty style. What’s the problem here?

Personally, I think it’s deplorable that Flash/Flashman’s journal was deleted. It’s even more deplorable that a admin of some BB that the charicter was on saw fit to abuse their admin privs to publish IP address information (http://www.livejournal.com/users/bubba_ray/37574.html) about the charicter. Look, it’s the net, fiction is out there, no journal was promised as fact.

Of course, I have a strange view of fact and fiction and death of fictional charicters anyway. Let’s just say that I am upset when fictinal charicters die as well.

Fact? Fiction? Who knows the difference?

Not george bush, that’s for sure.