Never been one to let the carrier drop

I’ve debated long and hard about whether to make this a public post, but I’ve decided that it should be, for reasons that I will later discuss.

As some of you may have noticed, there has been a 3.5 month hole in this blog. The reason for that is that I’ve been away from the internet, because I entered a drug treatment program in San Pedro to address my nitrous oxide addiction. The program went well, and I’ve now been clean for almost four months. (For the very few of you who don’t know, the web counter on www.sheer.us at the top is how long I’ve been clean).

It was a interesting experience, to say the least. I’m not sure what to write about it, other than it happened. I did manage to survive without the internet (not even a cell phone, except for ten-minute segments a few times a week) for several months. I’m glad that I did it, and I don’t ever want to do it again.

It was a 12-step based program, and as many of you know, I have a number of criticisms of 12-step. They remain valid – in fact, most of what was useful about the time is that it gave me a long period of time to focus on my thinking and my addiction and learn to recognize addictive thinking and stop it (with exercises from Smart Recovery. It was also good to have a support system of people to talk to about the problems surrounding addiction, as well as about spiritual principles.

That said, I’m back and I will be posting regularly again. (Actually I’ve been back for some time). I probably will – despite previous comments to the contrary – make another post about religion – although this one won’t be attacking any particular religion or set of beleifs, but merely explaining what the problem is, for me.

I had to debate with myself for a while before deciding to post this publicly, because there’s always the concern that some employer will see it and decide to fire me, or not to hire me, based on knowing that I am a nitrous oxide addict. (After all, the internet never forgets anything). I decided not to worry about that for several reasons:

1) Addiction is a disease, not a moral failing. As such, the only employers refusing to hire me would probably be people I wouldn’t want to work for anyway.

2) I can’t imagine any employer actually reading my entire blog, or stumbling across this out of the 2000+ entries based on a simple web search. Of course, I might be wrong. It did just occur to me that I’ve used the ‘e’ word a lot, so googling for sheer pullen employer would turn this up – and now by using those keywords all togeather I’ve increased the chances. <sigh> I think just about anything I do is going to make that situation worse, though, so I think I’ll leave it there. It’s a pity there’s not a keyword or html code you can put in a single document to indicate that that document, and only that document, shouldn’t be indexed. If I were really bored, I’d figure out how to exclude *just* this entry with robots.txt. I’m not that bored.. or that paranoid.

3) I think that acting as if being a addict is something horrible that I have to hide both feeds the addiction and helps support the social stigma that might lead to addicts being unable to find jobs. As a addict, I was still a hard and (except for a few times when I was on binges) dependable worker, I never stole anything from anybody, and I never had any run-ins with the law. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that all addicts are subhuman creatures who deserve nothing but contempt.

The side effect of all this is that I am going to talk about recovery-related topics in this journal. I will tag them as such, and you all can avoid them, but there may be some people out there who are interested in what mental gyrations I go through trying to stay away from nitrous, and anyway, it’s probably good for me to write about them.

So, now that we’ve been through that little digression, my new years resolution list

1) I will make 1 wshr broadcast a month in 2009

2) I will record one new, original song every 3 months n 2009

3) I will not use nitrous oxide in 2009. (So far, I’ve never managed to keep this one, but I think this is the year)

4) I will be able to run 2 miles at 4.7 miles an hour at a 4% grade by the end of 2009. (In other words, I will not be completely out of shape. I’m not going to try to be one of those super-healthy fitness fanatics)

5) I will try to remain open, honest, and willing

Anyway, happy new year, everybody!

For those of you who might be running into the same problem I was with using CentOS’s PAE kernel to support more than 4G of RAM – where the system would crash during the boot process – the solution is to upgrade the firmware for the RAID controller. You can find firmware for the PERC (Dell’s rebranded Adaptec RAID controller) on Dell’s web site – it requires two floppy disks and is a self-extracting archive that will write itself to the floppies. Those of you like me who haven’t been keeping floppy drives in your computers will be happy to know that a external USB floppy drive works just fine for writing the firmware.

Me and Tory were part of a experimental live electronica band called Mischief Committee. I won’t hype our single album here, since it’s already linked elsewhere in this blog.. he came down from Seattle to spend the weekend with me, and we did a jam session.. that audio is the first time me and Tory have played together in more than two years, and I think we were suprisingly tight – we are making up pretty much everything as we go along, improvisational-style.. I’m not sure what genre of electronic music what we did would fall under, although I think some of it would definately be trance and other bits might be d-n-b and other bits glitch..

So, you couldn’t make it to our housewarming party but you’re really wanting to hear what went down? or you DID make it, and you loved that impromptu drum-n-bass version of Axel F so much that you want to use it for a ringtone? Well, have no fear, because – for the first time ever – I actually captured non-distorted audio – which is *not* full of high frequency noise – and in general doesn’t suck.

So, check it out at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/HousewarmingParty2008-TorySheer/. I have to say, even when I was editing it down to find the good bits (avoid the 255 meg file, unless you actually want sound from the *entire* party including music between sets) I was pretty much thinking it didn’t suck.

Just a reminder that tomorrow will be Sheer & Kayti’s engagement and housewarming party – also known as a birthday party for Tory (of Mischief Committee) and Allie (the cat).

If you want any particular refreshments, feel free to forward your request along – remember to come early (5pish) as parking in Long Beach gets progressively more difficult after dark.

The event will be at Sheer & Kayti’s house: email for address and directions.

Tory & Sheer will be holding a jam session along with anyone else who wants to join in, as well. We look forward to seeing whichever of you can make it.

I’m off to DefCon 16 (which is actually 0x10 but shoudl be 0x0F because they should have started counting at zero – just what kind of hackers are these anyway?)

I am as usual bringing a arseload of music equipment – I will try to stream live from the Con at least one night and possibly two or three on http://www.wshr.us

I’m also looking for hotel parties to play at – if anyone knows anyone who knows anyone. I know I should have posted in the forums, and maybe I will do so once I get there.  I’ve got a pair of SRM450s with me, but no bass cubes because I figured it would be better to not get kicked out 😉

Me and Kayti are trying to decide on rings. These will be used both as engagement and as wedding rings. We have a choice of metals and gauges, so what we’re mostly looking for is advice on which style would be best.

We have decided that we want puzzle rings, as a symbol of the puzzle that life and relationships can be. (Also because they’re fun to play with)

Here are the three we are thinking of:

Choice A: 4 band
Choice B: 4 band
Choice C: 5 band

It’s time for Sheer and Kayti’s Housewarming, Tory’s Birthday, Allie the Cat’s Birthday, Sheer and Kayti’s Engagement, and Just Generally Let’s Have a Party Because There Needs to Be a Party Party!

The festivities will take place on 8/30 – feel free to show up any time after 5p. This will be a somewhat informal event, I’m guessing less than 30 will be there, and presents are optional. Tory of Mischief Committee, birthday boy extraordinaire,  will be present, so a jam session will likely ensue.  Other possible diversions include LAN-party sorts of activities (though if you want to play a 1st-person shooter, you’ll have to bring it yourself – Sheer, as always, is a fan of 3rd-party strategy games), sneakernet-style music exchange, a wide variety of board and card games, and of course our ever-entertaining birthday cat. (No longer a kitten, officially, he will be 1 year old on 9/2)

Also, on Sunday (9/1) we will be going to Six Flags with Tory, Meg, Jay and anyone else who wants to tag along. I will probably email a number of you individually since I don’t think very many of my SoCal friends read my journal anyway 😉

E-mail me for address and directions. Parking later at night can be challenging in Long Beach (too many cars, not enough spaces), so arrive early. 😉

So, over the years, I have come to the conclusion that much as I believe in PLUR (or at least PLR – I’m still not convinced that I know what ‘unity’ means in this context, or that it’s a universally good things) as a ideal for human behavior, I am a very long way from living up to it.

Today I’m fighting with the temptation to poke back at someone who I felt like was poking at me – over the weekend, I was listing cognitive distortions that we all fall into to $PERSON, and they said something to the effect of ‘Does your list have anything about blaming other people for your problems?’. Which, I take it to mean, $PERSON thinks that I blame other people for my problems. [Perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions, maybe it was just something that was on eir mind at the time, who knows…]

Anyway, the peaceful thing to do is to let it drop – assume that they didn’t mean any harm by it, and that if they did, it still isn’t a good idea to get into a fight over it, and bringing it up with the person could lead one of two ways – either to a resolution or to a fight – so the safest thing to do is just to leave it alone..

As far as Respect goes, I can’t really think about Christianity without getting angry, which certainly isn’t a very respectful atittude to take towards what is possibly the world’s majority religion. (And yes, I understand that the Christians are no more all one group and all the same than any other large block of people)

It’s sad to not be able to live up to my ideals. I think it’s probably normal, though.

Okay. So, over the last few months, a lot of you have heard me talking about what the universe ‘should’ be like. This is actually in direct violation of one of the things I’ve been trying to take some guidence from (Smart Recovery) but I feel sort of strongly that I should (there’s that word again ;-)) try to figure out what I think Utopia for Sheer looks like so I’ll have some idea when I’ve arrived, assuming I ever get there.

I don’t know if I’ve already done so or not, but I’m sure if I have, my views have changed, so I’m going to enumerate what my latest version of it looks like here.

First of all, a system of file permissions – including blocks on individual actions and grouped blocks on types of actions, which can be applied to individuals or groups. In other words, I can set it so people I don’t know can’t shoot me – or even so people I don’t know can’t communicate with me at all in any way. Or so that some particular person I do know can’t hit me. Or whatever. Protection from each other should be a natural law, like the law of gravity.

In one version of this, if you shoot me, you see me shot but I don’t see myself being shot, and our realities are divergant – tools would need to exist to help bring back togeather divergent realities. In another version – probably more practical to impliment – attempts to violate the file permissions of the universe just result in error messages.

Second of all, nearly limitless resources for all. Yes, that’s right, I think we all should be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams without needing to work for it. I think no life form should ever fear for hunger, or shelter, or physical safety. This isn’t saying that I don’t think we should be able to work, or that I don’t think there will be many worthwhile things to do. Just that I don’t think lack of will to work should result in any threat or danger to the non-worker.

Third of all, a better understanding of how to make human relationships work. I think that there should be a manual given to every child that explains what we know so far about how to live together as friends, and how to make love relationships work. Heinlien suggested in Stranger in a Strange Land that the problem is the language we are currently using isn’t well shaped to this task, and I think that’s one of many possible avenues that should be explored. I’d like to see a fair chunk of resources put into the task of writing such a book – I realize that we have more pressing concerns, like energy and war and whatnot, but I think that our lack of knowing how to be human without hurting each other costs us considerably in how far we get in achiving our other goals, and I think that a ‘work-smarter-not-harder’ approach might be to figure out human relationships and how to make them work without making us unhappy sooner rather than later.

Fourth of all, a lack of coercion. I would not want to force anyone to live in my utopia, and I’d like to think that no one would want to force me to live in theirs. It should be possible to build a universe where it’s not necessary to punish children for anything, because they can’t do anything truly dangerous and they will learn that hurting other people isn’t good on their own. Of course, it’s not like I’m raising a child so I’m really not in much of a position to talk, but I do feel like a lot of the things we do to our children are horrible. I really question whether any person – of any sort, be it diety, human, cat, etc – should have any authority over any other person.

I know I certainly keep abusing my power with my cat by picking him up and hugging him when he doesn’t want hugged. And I feel guilty about it, and I’m working on stopping, but if I abuse power – after thinking so much about how bad power is and how bad abuse of it is – who can we trust?