Never been one to let the carrier drop

I thought I’d throw out one more thought while I had it, even though it means that my journal entries are a few minutes apart, which makes it appear that I have no life. [Well, that’s probebly actually true, I probebly have no life. But, hey..]

I’ve been studying the dynamics of how keeping a journal – and a publicly readable one at that – affects my life. The first thing I’ve noticed is that keeping a journal at all is a very useful thing – it helps me focus my thoughts, and develop threads over a long period of time – by going back and skimming entries I made earlier, I can see if my thoughts were well explained, and if not explain them better – and I can also see if I still agree with myself two weeks down the road.

However, I kind of wonder about the publicly accessable nature. There are a lot of things that I think about that I don’t write down because I know people will be reading this – secrets that I have to keep, ideas that I wouldn’t want others to develop, all sorts of things along that vein.

On the other hand, knowing that others are or someday might be reading what I’m typing does tend to make me form my thoughts better, and word them better, and voice my opinions more clearly and consider the other sides that will be presented as I’m voicing them.

It also, of course, means that I have a slight titch of paranoia that some of my more unpopular ideas will attract the attention of the powers that be, which could have very interesting rammifcations.

To a certain extent, I guess I shouldn’t worry – I write so many things that are publicly published that I don’t feel I should have any fear to speak of that anyone will ever take the time to read them all – but then again, there’s also always the risk that some small peice of them will be read out of context.

I hope to continue to find time to update this as I grow and change, so that eventually I can read back over my entire life history. One of the things I firmly beleive is that both youth and age have their advantages, and both are neccesary to a successful speices as a whole. I hope that as I grow older, I don’t become convinced that the ‘radical’ ideas the younger people are having [and I’m sure they will] are evil, wrong, and bad.

I am to a certain extent guilty of this in the musical arena – I have a very hard time enjoying gangsta rap as they talk about bitch-slappen’ their hos and capping their enemies [I’m sure I screwed that up somehow, but oh well] because I find this message to be very negative and I don’t really like to listen to music that is very negative – because I feel that whatever music I listen to programs and shapes me. But I also have to wonder to what extent I dislike the music [and the music of bands like Korn] just because it’s something that came into fashon after my tastes in music had carmalized [to whatever extent that they have – which isn’t clear, I keep finding new types of music and new peices that I like to this day – though I admit it isn’t as frequent as it once was]

Anyway, to return to my topic thread, I do think that keeping a journal is helpful to my development as a person – and I’d like to think that at least a small percentage of my ramblings will be useful to other people like me who are likewise trying to figure out the world. But I don’t know.

Anyway, I’d better go take a shower and get ready to fly out. Unfortunately looks like I won’t be able to find anyone to share my last meal in CA – tried a few people, but everyone’s either at work (on a saturday – isn’t the modern economy great?) or out with far more interesting people than me ;-). So I think I’ll just hit up mcdonalds in the airport.

Had a great visit in southern california – a wonderful time, wonderful weather [but isn’t it always], saw the friends who are most important to me [except for CM, but he’s always at work these days, making up for the long stretch of unemployment he just experienced I imagine], laughed more than I have in six months [I’ll have to tell a few of the funnier stories later, with the names changed of course], and in general it has been a high point in my recent life. I go home refreshed, happy – a little confused/conflicted about a few things that I can’t really talk about, but for the most part feeling better about myself and the world around me than I have for a while.

In general, it’s been a wonderful visit, and financially lucrative, but now it’s time to get back to the ‘real’ work that doesn’t pay nearly as much. 😉

Actually, there are two possible projects in the offing that may require a return, and pay – and I will keep my fingers crossed that one or both goes through. Not only could I use the money, I could _definately_ do with some more time in the big CA.

I think at some point I’m going to have to admit that I really secretly love california. All of it – from the southernmost to the northernmost – there’s just something about it that I like. City of dreams.

I really like the culture in seattle, too – but the weather _sucks_. It’s not the rain that bugs me, it’s the fact that it’s always cold. It was (on april 18th) 36 degrees when I flew out. That’s too effen’ cold for my tastes.

Well, enough babbling for now, I’d better return to my regularly scheduled life.

S.

You know, Richard Marx must have a LOT of interesting relationship problems. I’ve been listening to his music lately, and he seems to face – and stare in the face of – a lot of the classics. Cheating, distance seperating, being accused of killing your lover ;-)..

Actually, I’ve noticed that musicians as a class seem to have more problems in their love and lust lives than most. I wonder why this is – and which is teh chicken and which is the egg. Is it that pain produces art, or art produces pain? Or somewhere in between? I don’t know – I find life entirely too complex, especially at the moment. I am, however, going to cite a Richard Marx song, just to illustrate my point.

[This is just another example of my 80s tastes gone rampant – I imagihne pretty much all my friends – and perhaps everyone in the world – thinks of RM as utter schlock]

Anyway – ‘Hold On To The Night’

Just when I beleived I couldn’t ever want for more
This ever changing world pushes me through another door
I saw you smile – and my mind could not erase the beauty of your face
Just for a while, won’t you let me shelter you

Hold on to the night
Hold on to the memory
I wish that I could give you something more
that I could be yours

How do we explain something that took us by suprise
Promises in vain, love that is real but in disguise
What happens now – do we break another rule,
let our lovers play the fool
I don’t know how to stop feeling this way

[chorus repeats]

[into bridge:]

Well I think that I’ve been true to everybody else but me
And the way I feel about you makes my heart long to be free
Every time I look into your eyes I’m helplessly aware
That the someone I’ve been searching for is right there

Okay, this is pushing the shlock-o-meter even for my notouriously shlocky tastes

[into chorus]

—-

Anyway, see my point? Happy people in well ajusted relationships do not generally write music like this. Or do they? Or does RM even write his own songs? Increasingly, I’ve noticed that people don’t – write their own songs, that is – and it seems like you seldom get the attributtes of a good songwriter and a good singer in the same person. I think that’s cool – teamwork and all – but occasionally I’m tempted to psychoanalyze performers by the work they do, and that makes it a bit more difficult. Still, one presumes that they at least choose which songs to do, and what inflection to put into them.

Again, maybe not. The corperate label machine probebly just chooses which songs they think will appeal to a band’s demographic and then forces that band to perform those songs.

In a way, this is what I find so ironic about Metallica’s suing of napster – here is a band that actually complained that the label was stifling them, and then when they saw a oppertunity for not only them but every single musician in america to get free, they sued it. Yes, that makes a whole lot of sense, now doesn’t it?

[the scene.. a long haired, thinnish, geekish boy, who looks like he is stuck in the 80s, carrying a suitcase and a laptop case, walking slowly through the streets of a city]

Phish [Sample In a jar]: (playing in background)

It’s hidden far away
But some day I may tell
The tale of mental tangle
when into your world I fell

Without you now I wander, soaking,
secretly afraid
But in your grasp, the fears don’t last,
though some of them have stayed

I wheeled around because I didn’t hear what you had said
and saw you dancing with elihu up on limo’s bed
and I was foggy, rather groggy, you helped me to my car
the mind that melts enclosing me,
a sample in a jar

[Switch image to a black and white shot, stock footage, white caption at bottom, ‘Bell labs invents the transistor’ and the date (1954?)]

Now the market stands unfolding
with all the willies and their wares
I shuffle by, alert but numb,
to all the glances and the glares
I think of you unheeding all the times I raised my cup
it’s now I know that you knew that I’d soon end up
(end up?)

[Image shifts to stock footage of semiconductor/IC fab facility. Caption [‘Atmel corperation introduces minaturized low power nonvolitile memory (1994)’]]

[Image shifts to page of X10 ads. Caption ‘X10 begins aggressive marketing campaign for miniturized CCD cameras, at first marketing their product to voyuers’ (1999)]

[Image shifts to split screen between dog and active transponder equipment next to a penny [active transponder is much, much smaller] ‘The first active transponders are inserted into living flesh commercially, to identify pets (2000)]

[Image shifts to monolithic IC next to penny [‘Atmel dataflash replaces the hard disk drive with smaller, lower power consumption nonvolitile memory. A device capable of recording 8 hours of video will now operate off a single battery for several months. (2005)]

[Image shifts back to person walking down the street, then change depth of feild focus to small box on light post person has just passed, then change to pixellated image of walking person to imply pickup by that box]

[image shifts to person watching a video on a laptop in a car (on a realplayer screen), cell phone obviously connected to computer. Caption: ‘High speed internet, capable of video transmission, is available to consumers over the digital cell phone network. (2006)]

[image shifts to small PCB that is obviously camera [has lens] powered off a single double-A battery – ‘Corperations begin using active transponders to track their employees, combined with a distributed video camera network that records their actions, wherever they are, 24 hours a day. Evidence gathered this way is determined to be legal in court (2007)’]

[Image shifts to MiniSoft logo, then to easy drop down menus for setting up security system. Caption ‘Minisoft sells software and partners with hardware manufactorers to sell security software to perform this operation to corperations that can be set up by nontechnical employees (2008)’]

[music transitions to ‘Welcome To My Mind’ (hard, hard techno), series of flashes of factory where thousands of these boxes are produced, then to older man talking on cell phone (we hear clearly through the music ‘He knows!’, then to image of person walking down street on screen, then to police car with lights flashing, then to flashing alteration between kid at keyboard in dark room and scope screen showing data pulse]

[Return to software, mouse pointer select ‘Corrective Actions’, then ‘Minor Discomfort’ (other options include a greyed-out ‘Terminate’). Caption ‘Minisoft develops implants capable of delivering corrective stimulation to nerves, to encourage productivity of employees.’ then scrolls up and the next caption appears ‘At first, this technology is outlawed in the united states but used in fabrication plants in China’. Scrolls again ‘However, after a major economic collapse, this technique is legalized in the US (2018)’]

[Return to person walking down street. Person sees police car round the corner, tires squealing – person gets paniced look [at the same time as the lyric ‘dying in a world of new devices’], grabs something from a pocket and slaps it on the back of another individual.]

[Shot of clear glass office door, wording says human resources. Inside are HR person with white coat and person in suit. Person in suit has one arm bare, and HR person is injecting something into it with a syringe. Caption ‘A standerd requirement of employment becomes the implanting of tracking device, which also can monitor the levels of alchohol and THC in the bloodstream. (2024)’]

[Return to shot of street, but this time pixellated and focusing on person that previous individual slapped patch on the back of. Police are placing cuffs on this person and herding him, roughly, into a police cruiser]

—–

Anyone read this far? Anyone narritively hooked and want to hear the rest of the story? Pls comment. 😉

S.

Watched a interesting video on the net today, courtesy of a friend of mine..

click here to see some cleverly edited footage of the events of Sept 11, along with a question or three we might want to address sooner or later.

One of the things I’ve discovered, much to my suprise [and yes, this is a change of topic] is that there are actually a few television shows with some redeeming qualities. That is, when you download them from morpheus with all the advertising removed. So far, supringly good shows include The Simpsons [suprisingly political, suprisingly left. No wonder my parents hated it ;-)] and Star Trek: The Next Generation. [Suprisingly right on about human nature. I guess it’s social training for geeks or something. Seriously, though, download and watch a few episodes, you’ll find it very refreshing.]

That said, I still am not going to be running out and buying a television set. At some later date, I’ll detail why NTSC is evil and television is physiologically addicting. But for the moment, just accept that I have my reasons. Besides, I’ve got a 36″ SVGA monitor. 😉

More later.

finally on day schedule. Whoopee.

# 1 Missouri
# 2 Mississippi
# 3 North Carolina
# 4 Virginia
# 5 Alabama
# 6 Arkansas
# 7 Florida
# 8 Georgia
# 9 Kentucky
# 10 Louisiana
# 11 South Carolina
# 12 Tennessee
# 13 Texas

I find it telling that texas was the worst possible case. Then again, mississippi? (sp?) What are they _thinking_?

It occurs to me that there may be some people reading this journal somewhere someday who don’t know the dramatas personale. So let me name a few of the major players.

P. is my significant other. I’ll spare you the glowing words, but she’s close enough to perfect that it seems pretty inevitable that I will spend my life with her unless she chooses otherwise.

M. is my closest female friend. She’s a lot like me
C. is one of my closer male friends and a long time coworker [at not one, but two jobs – and I’d hire him again in a heartbeat. his value isn’t always immediately obvious, though]
V. is my ex-significant other, now male.
N. is my ex-child with V., now adopted and living with MY. I’ve had just about nothing to do with his life, though I try to keep in touch with his parents.
DB. is MY.’s ex-SO
NI. & JL. are my oldest friends, and, after P., probebly the people who know me best.

EV personalities and coworkers are considered to be ‘public’ and will be named as such [I.e. Lee Hart, Bruce Sherry, Roy LeMur, Rich Rudman etc] since the majority of my dialogue with them is on projects which are for public consumption.

My parents I will generally refer to as my father and my mother, P.’s father I will refer to as J.

That’s pretty much all the very-active links in my social network.

Realized I forgot to explain why I am crazy eddie.

If you’ll remember, crazy eddie was the charicter in The Mote In God’s Eye, by Pournelle and Niven [labelled by heinlien ‘possibly the best science fiction I have ever read’], who personified {and I’m not quoting, this is from memory)

‘When a city has gotten as full as it can get, when there is barely enough power and food to feed and shelter those in it, it is then that this person moves those removing garbage from it to strike for better wages’.

He’s also described as the engineer using tomorrow’s profits to build today’s devices, etc.

And he’s also the one who sent a probe to the human race, resulting in the humans discovering the moties, a race locked in a endless cycle of wars because they reproduce too quickly. A motie has two choices.. have sex or die.

And, he is also me.

The trained worker, working on a invention that has already been tried, and failed commercially, many times. Aware that he will fail, doing the best he can to share as much of his progress as publicly as possible, so that others can follow in his footsteps. Tilting against a windmill.

This is why I play april fools jokes on the EV list. This is why I laugh so much, both at myself and at the situation. Because I have to – because if I ever forget, even for a second, that I’m not doing something completely insane by the majority definition of sane, I’ll let go.

I’m sure each person can only keep it up so long. You either actually do go crazy, or you back off and return to more useful and profitible work. And, if someone waves a job in front of me, I might take it. I won’t give up on my EV hobby, but it will be condensed to evenings and weekends.

It seems someone like me can’t get a government grant – you have to jump through a lot of hoops that I’m not really set up to jump through. P. is trying, though, and for this I really respect her. She’s just as aware as I am of the crazy-eddieness of it all.

Actually, I’ve found a little ‘enclave’ of crazy eddies in seattle. SEVA has 40 or 50 members who regularly attend, and at least five are ‘pros’ – they make their living on electric vehicles.

I’m going to try to explain my views on this whole Osama thing, because it seems a lot of my friends misunderstand, and maybe some of them read my journal.

I’m on Osama’s side.

I don’t like the guy – his humans rights violations are atrocious – but I can understand where he’s coming from, if he sent us those commercial airliners on september 11th. A matter that still hasn’t been proved to me, by the way – doesn’t it bother ANYONE that we’re fighting a war for a crime that we have no proof of the perpitrators of, just allegations?

I don’t condone violence against innocent people – I don’t want more people to do what Osama did. Hit those who hurt you, not those who are innocent. The world trade towers had many, many innocent people in them. Thumbs up on the pentagon, though. 😉

I can’t lie about this. If you work for the US military, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. If you can really beleive that the US military is not abusive, you don’t know what military training is like. Would you want people trained like that wandering with you? Maybe it’s a pity that soldiers don’t have to stay with civilians any more – in today’s world, with a video camera in everyone’s hands, a world like that might be very desirable.

Many of my friends work for the US military, or did. Including my own parents. I’m sorry. You made a mistake. Go back and learn why, please, don’t sit there bleating like sheep and insisting that we’re the freeist country in the world. It’s a lie, okay, it was always a lie and it’s still a lie. Get on the internet and learn that.

Anyway, about the Osama thing.

We want to build a pipeline for oil through the middle of a country _we_ turned into a war zone.

How many times will a puncture from a mini-war the oil spill? Oil is _nasty_ stuff, and they HAVE NO FUCKING WATER LEFT!

Wake up, smell the coffee. Osama is RIGHT! We are WRONG!

We do NOT have ANY fucking moral authority to go put a oil pipeline in someone’s backyard who doesn’t want it, because we want to keep driving our SUVs and making our profits. I’m sorry that it’s going to destroy the economy, but this has GOT to fucking STOP! Or I, for one, am out of here, and half our youngest and brightest will be right behind me.

MEMO TO BUSH ET AL: We know what’s going on. We’re not all stupid television-addicted morons.

Another Freedom Of Speech Test [tm] brought to you by Sheer Pullen.

Nope, I haven’t fallen off yet. Woke up at 11pm, though, feel sleep deprived – don’t think I’ve gotten a decent bit of REM in days. But no rest for the weary.. have to pull the battery pack in the EV, it’s gotten unbalanced.. damn it, must work harder on regs. Slacked all morning. And talked to a good friend for several hours.

Sancho, my armor seems to have a few more holes in it every day.

When I was a kid (15? 16? I don’t remember exactly when) I figured out that the human race, or at least the american slice of it, is fundamentally fucked up when it comes to sex.

It first of all doesn’t help that males appear to have about eight times the sex drive females do, as a general rule of thumb. [Now how’s _that_ for a design bug? Yeah, that really proves a intelligent god has our best interests at heart, now doesn’t it?]. Yes, there are exceptions, but generally..

It second of all doesn’t help that we’re not supposed to talk about sex. At any rate, this is always the impression my parents have foisted off on me. If you’re a child, you’re supposed to think the thought of your parents being romantically involved is disguisting – and if you’re a parent, you certainly don’t want to know that your child just lost his or her virginity at seventeen. Hrm, this is a great setup, now isn’t it. Can’t talk about it..

It gets better. Heinlien spent a lot of his writing stabbing in the dark, trying to figure out what was going on with human sexuality. I think he missed the target a lot, but I’m impressed that he was trying. Other fans seem to write this off as him being a ‘dirty old man’. Well, he made you fucking think, didn’t he? Beats the hell out of your average TV show! Even if you thought ‘ewww’ [and one thing you might ask yourself is WHY you thought ewww] you at least were thinking.

What’s the one thing that makes heinlien’s sexual utopias impossible? Jealousy. You all know it’s there. You all also know it’s not particularly useful. Jealousy makes sense when there is no birth control, at least if you apply the ‘mother of my immortality’ thoughts [Think about it for a minute]. But does jealousy make sense otherwise?

I don’t know. It’s all too confusing for me. I’ll reattack this thread later. [I love the fact that I don’t in fact have to make sense in this thing. I hope they don’t delete my entire journal someday because they don’t like my thoughts. Or, worse, sic the FBI on me. 😉

———————————————————————————

In other subjects, I can record and play audio from a dataflash – little side project I did for Bruce. [Who, I suspect, could have done it better than I did.. the actual code took two hours, the electrical debugging took me two _days_. Let’s face it, I’m a failure as a engineer].

———————————————————————————

In still other subjects, watched a simpsons episode tonight that spent several minutes bagging on Ed Bagly jr and electric vehicles. This is real fucking encouraging, now isn’t it.. 😉

I wish the actual EV were more impressive. Roy keeps getting after me to clean it up and make it pretty – but it seems to me it’s more productive, in a helping-the-human-race sort of way, to build the perfect battery management system.

Have a killer headache. This lack of sleep stuff is going to drive me crazy. What time zone am I in?

S.

Ye gods. 6 am, and it’s not even light out. I think i’ve wandered into the twilight zone. Damned daylight savings time.

Not one, but two ‘small world’ events today.

First, observe this message. I did not post it. I’ve never had the email address sheer@usa.net. That means, that through whatever statistically unlikely series of events drives such things, there are two Jon Pullens out there that chose the alias Sheer, and both of them are geeks. Synchronicity, hello? does anyone else find this vuagely disturbing? Occasionally I wonder if I have a split personality, and HE is sheer@usa.net – but if so, he doesn’t exist any more. Tried emailing that address, got a bounce.

Okay, so I’m guilty of doing the vanity search. Doesn’t everyone at some point? But I had a reason for it..

My dad ran into someone in west virginia who had heard of me.

I mean, I know the internet makes this possible and even likely – look at all the junk I write on a daily basis, emails to mailing lists, my own mailing list, I mean, yes, I’m a prolific author of completely useless murmerings. I even write this journal, I suspect, for a audience of one. [besides me, that is.] Actually, I mostly write it for me, it helps me to straighten out my thoughts and refine them.

Anyway, how freaky is that? West Virginia, and he’s heard of me. Who else finds that scary? Raise your hands.. I had a email from India, telling me my april fools joke was in fact funny. [Now there’s a topic which could turn into a entire journal entry all by itself].

Also pondering love and sex – reading Heinlien, which leads one to these ponderences anyway. And P. read me a bit out of someone’s dairy – 300 years ago, and still petting every warm female bit o’ flesh his hands came near. And his wife still being hurt by it. Jealousy, still with us, check. Sexual hunger, still with us, check. Pregnancy, mercifully not as with us.

Someday I will pen down my thoughts on the whole matter, but not until after I’ve given them a few more lifetimes of thought. For now, I’ll stick with electronics, electric cars, power generation, the evils of dubya, and other topics that I can speak on elloquantly and usually with only pissing off half the known universe. Besides, I’m sure at some point P. will get sufficiently bored to read at least a few pages of this and I’d hate to give her any bad ideas.

I also note that I seem to have singlehandedly generated serious attention for Evercel, Inc. Wonder what they think about that? Well, beats the hell out of trying to sell them as trolling motor batteries.

The car continues to run fairly well – had a ‘just barely made it home’ event the other day, after which I noticed a faint gassing on one of the back pack during charge. NEED those mk3s on there. Got to finish them. Bad sheer. stop slacking. Work harder. Lay out board. Pin up schematic with new software. _learn_ new software.

No rest for the wicked, and such.

Not even sure what time zone I’m on any more.

S.