I just got.. get this.. a spam asking me to support Bush.
No shit. Really. Not a forwarded email, a genuine spam.
I don’t know if this is a republican thing or a democrat thing.
I’m not sure which would be funnier.
I had another nightmare last night. This one was far, far stranger than the first one.
I had a next door neighbor who was only visible when he was near his house.
His lover was always visible.. and would stand out in the front yard crying, waiting for him to appear.
I tried to ask him why he was only visible near his house, and I got the strange sense of my left and right eyes being pulled away from each other, almost like I was being pulled into another dimension or something.
Then I tried asking closer to the house and he explained it, and I know his explanation made sense, but I Don’t remember a single word of it.
So I had a couple of friends over (who happen to live on the other side of the world, Scott and Cori) and was explaining to them about my strange next door neighbor, when he walked through one of the walls and roared ‘YOU TOLD SOMEONE ABOUT ME..’ – and I just knew he was going to kill us all.
Then I woke up.
I don’t usually have nightmares.. having two in one week is a little disturbing. Hopefully this will be the last..
Or not all of.
A subset. Sheer is a subset of god. If indeed god there be.
Vibe would tend to suggest that humans are networkable, at least in some sense. They may not be networkable the way computers are.. I can’t think a thought in the direction of someone else and have it arrive.. or at least, I don’t _think_ I can think a thought at someone else and have it arrive, although sometimes some very strange things do happen..
but the experience of vibe *to me* makes it reletively clear that humans are networkable. I can experience something that is larger and more expansive than I am.
[I still resent the fact that the RAVE act is a direct assault on the closest thing to a religion that I have. Whatever happened to the first amendment? If they passed the RAPE act.. [stop priests from raping young boys by finding their churches responsable and charging them millions of dollars] we’d never hear the end of it..]
Remember our ‘mottos’?
What did mine mean? I’ve finally realized I don’t know, and don’t understand it one little bit.
(Mine, if you’ll recall, was ‘I am not god’.)
S.
THose of you who can’t stand such things should probably skip this entire entry. I’ll try and make it a lj cut
Well, good things and bad things have happened today..
On the bad things list, we’ve discovered a flaw in the charger boards [or our calculations, or something] which will require soldering a capacitor across a surface mount part on all thirty. Rats and shucks and drat and such.
On the good news list, Lee has, in yet another moment of brilliance (he has a lot of those.. ) figured out a way around BOTH the nasty-heavy-ugly-transformer circuit for transferring energy and the nasty-ugly-get-rid-of-too-many-watts circuit.
One wire. Probably can carry network data as well.
How does he do it?
Well, I’d probably better not divulge any of the details since it’s not my idea and he might want to patent it or something.. I haven’t yet gotten a definate ‘yes, sheer, you can use this’ but he doesn’t seem massively adverse to the idea either..
So hold onto your seats, it looks like the SheerREg has become the ‘Scotty’ [the name has to do with the cheapness of Lee’s latest brainchild] and can actually _move power around_. Series battery regulation never had it so good.
I’m not sure if I”m happy that we’ve found a new and far, far better solution to the problem (I even got Electronics Workbench to admit that it will work – and if it will admit that it will work, it almost surely will – it won’t even admit that a AM radio will work. ;-)).. well, Lee’s found a new and better solution, I haven’t done much except list reasons why I can’t believe it will work..
or unhappy that the Tango chargers will not, in fact, be done at the end of this week –
and can’t run the nifty token-ring version of the bus I envisioned even if they were done.. it’s just too tanj fast.. or they’re too tanj slow..
I mean, these things have trouble communicating at 9600 baud. It’s truly pathetic..
Well, two more days in sunny, warm Minnesota, then it’s back to (brrr) seattle and (boring) parking meters. IT’s been a good semi-vacation, and I’ll be hopefully all recharged and ready to knock out some serious parking-meter-age..
S.
soon to be alone.
Well, not really, but sort of.
I’m sure it will be good for me.
I wish ..
I don’t know what I wish any more.
S.
What a experience.
S.
apologies to my friends for past three journal entries.. I mean..
S.
I wanted to express my thanks to all of you who offered listening-time, thoughts, sympathy, and whatnot at my last few upset/confused/etc journal entries.
it’s nice to know taht people care. Really.
I’m going to go spend about 20 minutes playing, then I’m out for tonight. More job interviews tomorrow. (Always strange to be the interviewer instead of the interviewee, although I think I do all right..)
Had some very good Pakistani food today, no one expressed displeasure at me for anything which is always nice, and got PHP and MS SQL and IIS all on speaking terms..
The other night, someone told me PHP was a ‘shit language’. Actually, I think this guy just enjoys messing with me – either that, or he hates every tool I like. I mean, he even proports to prefer cocaine over weed – maybe someone’s taking things a little far here. (I admit, I’ve never tried cocaine. Am not going to either – it’s soooo not my sort of recreational chemical. Sounds more like a exotic form of torture to me – I rev hard enough on my own, even caffine is a bit more stimulant than I can handle at times..)
Anyway, so, somewhere in the middle of my standard lecture about how php, vb, c++, c, assembly, ad nausium are all just tools, he started to try and out-geek me.
That’s always a fun feeling. Actually, it was very educational – I learned what ACID is (with respect to databases – bet you didn’t know your database had ACID..) and what MVCC is, and a bunch of other geeky stuff..
he did not, however, out geek me.
That generally only happens at DefCon.
Shortage of geeks as geeky as me? I don’t know. Probably just as well, really.
Other events in my life today.. hmm. I’ve been on a rereading kick – this week we’ve done most of the Heinlien cannon (who *bounce* has a new book *bounce* coming out! I can’t wait.. and not only that, it was apparently too racy to be published at the time. sounds interesting) and now I’m rereading the Phantom Tollbooth. Not sure what I’ll do after that one.. (did you know there’s a EV in the phantom tollbooth? The car Milo drives around throughout most of the story is electric. And apparently never needs to charge, either.. I wonder what kind of range it gets
Sadly, I’ve exhausted harry potter 5 after a few rereadings.. I reread some Dianne Wynne Jones novels to make up for it (memo to Harry Potter fans: Dianne is at least as good a writer, and she’s got more books out. Feed your childrens-fantasy cravings! Go nuts!)
The focus motor on my right eye is going through underuse – which is a little alarming, partially because it means I haven’t been being my right side enough, and partially because, well, everything out of that eye is blurry now.
I guess I need to dig up a eyepatch and force myself to hang out on the right for a while.. I nearly always drift back over to the left when I’m reading as soon as I stop thinking about it.
On the other hand, maybe it’s handy. One eye for close up work, one eye for distance..
(This is waht we call making excuses)
Ah well. Probably better exercise that before it gets worse.
Reading with my right eye always feels so surreal – I mean, the fact that I can do it at all is odd, since I wasn’t using it at all when I learned to read. Really makes you wonder where words are stored. And I definately read slower with my right eye than my left.
Gives me the jitters to try and read two things at the same time, too, although I can sort of do it. (talk about your STupid Human Tricks)
Anyway, I’m rambling, but the basic upshot of all that is that I need to exercise my right eye before it flies south for the winter. Also need to visit a dentist – nothing hurts, but it’s been a while and I’d like to keep it that way. Was tlaking to a friend of mine today who had to have 7 bridges put in – of course, as I recall, this has something to do with him discovering the joys of meth, another drug that you couldn’t pay me enough to take.
[For that matter, you couldn’t pay me enough to take prozac..]
I always find the War On Drugs Kid Propiganda very amusing.. it’s like they completely forget, as they foist off Xanax, Prosc, and Rittilan on kids, that these are just as much drugs as the recreational kind.
The NWLNC broke up, which is sad.. I’ll miss the mini-raves in the middle of the westlake center. I keep wondering how one gets permission to do one of those – it occurs to me that with recent upgrades to my PA, it’s probably as many watts as the one they used.. of course, now that it’s getting into the colder months, it’d be a lot harder to get people interested in coming to a event.
They’re replacing the NWLNC for something that’s more anti-drug-war and pro-music – but I doubt if it’ll be as electronica-oriented..
[sigh] electronica is dying, I guess. And just as I was getting good at it, too.
Well, I see that I’ve rambled on for far longer than I intended to, so I’ll just leave it there
Fiction idea: It is discovered that the internet is ‘alive’ – in the process of waking up (I’ve talked about this one before) and all the spam we’re getting are the first thoughts of it – it’s reacting to what it’s been taught.
Hm.. I should explain that better, so that it’s funny to people other than me, but I can’t seem to be bothered.
Anyway, again, thanks to all my friends, especially those of you who actually read this tripe!
People have suggested that I should write journal entries about things other than the extremely technical details of my day to day life.
I’m not really sure what else to write about. Every once in a while, I find some trance or house or goa (I’m informed that it’s different from trance – I am apparently color blind to genre in electronica.)
Anyway, tonight I played some for a friend of ours (How).. I don’t know if he really liked it or not. He’s a hard guy to read. He gave me a thumbs up, and almost-not-quite fell asleep. Said he felt kind of entranced. Nicest compliment I’ve gotten this month, really..
He’s going to miss my jam session with Ron.. (and I’m going to have to work my tail off to get php working tomorrow unless Simon fixes it.. anyone out there know anything about PHP and IIS? oh, wait, I promised, no geekery..)
P. left the house upset with me today, for leaving a dish next to my computer while she’d been cleaning [I thought How was about to arrive and wanted to get showered and dressed – picking it up was still on the stack of things to do – really] and for having the dates for How wrong.
So we got off to a rolling good start. I also was up until 6 yesterday, thinking over what to write and how to write it and what the reuslts would be and what results i wanted.. ‘When the coin is in the air’, as my good friend M. used to say. M. is the aptly named Sir Not Appearing In This Film – but he’s a old friend of mine, and one of the most awesome people I know.
I hope I do get to work with him again.
I’m interviewing people for various roles around my consulting projects. For a minute I was afraid I had phased myself out, but then I realized, I can’t do that. No matter how hard I try, phasing myself out isn’t possible.
I must sleep.
Things must get better.
(in other, good news, aparently my grandfather is not going to die – this is good, as I’ve recently been realizing guiltily that I haven’t seen any of my father’s side of the extended family for many years.. except that I saw some when we went back to NoVa to go camping with my parents. It was suprisingly reassuring – somehow their taunts that were so upsetting when I was young, were just funny.. like I could meet them as equals.)
I guess one of the big problems with having a parent die before you’re a adult, is you never get to meet them as a equal.
(thought inspired by something out of a friend’s journal)
S.