So..
I actually had a rather humerous incident at the airport (well, sadly, it probably wasn’t humerous for the airport employees, and sorry about scaring you guys.. really, it’s just a parking meter, I’m not a terrorist, and you should probably consider that if our country stopped hurting other countries, other countries wouldn’t be inclined to hurt us…)
Anyway, so, this might just be my rampant paranoia.. after all, we all know I have a little bit of that.. but..
First of all, I should reveal that I have been continuously in a obnoxiously.. Kayti might even say cloyingly.. good mood. So I walk into the airport radiantly happy. Now why this would make security nervious, I don’t know.. I’m kind and polite to everyone, I sign in for my flight at the workstation, walk through the airport security line – taking the parking meter out of the bag since I know it looks horrid on Xray.. and strangely, they don’t run a chemical scan on it which would seem like what I’d do.. they ask me about it, and I tell them it’s a parking meter.
Now, I’m wearing a DefCon shirt.. complete with a list of hotels that were blown up after DefCon, and then the Alexis Park, where they have been invited back. Mental note to go to DefCon this year and see what they’re up to.. I bet it’s some wicked cool stuff. I think 2005 may be one of the years where lots of cool robot things happen.. I mean, imagine hacking a PC interface to those robosapians! There’s a cool science project for ya, kids!
Oh dear, I’ve caught Skitch’s exclamation points. Oh well, I can live with that. As long as it’s not a permanent thing. Anyway, returning to my story.. I walk through the airport, sit down, start reading a book which showed up in the mail, ‘hackers and painters’. Talk to a guy who’s transferring numbers from one cell phone to another via manual data entry. (Poor guy. Someone should fix that. Someone should open source fix that. Maybe someone already has.)
Anyway, so, shortly thereafter I hear on the PA, ‘Alaska employees, please read page one, items eight through eleven’. (numbers may be incorrect, but it’s pretty obviously a idiot code. And then when I get on the plane, mysteriously I have one person wearing a wire (or just a handsfree phone adapter, one can take this paranoia thing way too far) and another really beefy security kind of guy. Naturally, security guy gets the outermost side. Now, lest you all should think I’m paranoid, a third passenger asks me if I should turn off the beeping thing in my bag. Now, obviously there’s nothing beeping in my bag, I know this, having packed my bag.. so I tell her I highly doubt this, then she says ‘no, sorry, blinking’. Okay, so passenger 3 either has X-ray vision, or also works for the federales. And I’m thinking, oh, good grief. They’re scared of a PARKING METER? The thing has slightly more CPU than your average pocket calculator. It generates less RFI than a old chopper-style tape walkman, I bet.
Or were they convinced it was a bomb? Anyway, I’m sure I left a interesting taste in their mouths with a long discussion about peace, love, respect, hackers, spirituality, christianity, virii.. well, basically, I was just myself. I enjoyed the conversation, too, and have been trading emails with the person. He frustrates me in that he’s stuck in a purely legalistic view of spirituality, and yet is using outdated laws/code.. (I have to look at laws and religious texts as both just the source code which holds society togeather.. or held it togeather.. or something)
In the meantime, imagination is power. And that was kind of fun, and if the government hasn’t yet figured out that I am not willing to hurt anyone in the name of any of my causes – at least in this stage of my development, and probably ever – they just aren’t paying enough attention. Might be willing to cause some mischief, eventually. But hurting people – even through just scaring them a whole bunch – is right out.
Although, as I should talk about sometime, I have to respect terrorists, for a number of reasons. First of all, Osama Bin Laden, from scanning his commentary, seemed to have reasonable reasons for what he did. I still can’t endorse blowing up buildings and killing people, but I also understand that we hurt him a lot. Of course, if you just keep hurting each other, back and forth, it just oscillates and gets worse and worse. As the man said, a eye for a eye leaves everybody blind.
On the other hand, colombine may have stopped some real and serious abuses that were hurting a lot of people. At least, I hope that it did.
Speaking of which, so far I’m only about 30 pages into Hackers and Painters, but it’s pretty good. And it promises to get better. That’s Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham. And thanks to whoever sent it to me! (it just showed up in my mailbox. Perhaps the envalope said who sent it, but I’m still not clear on the details)
I think for me, to accept dogmatically someone else’s religion would be fundamentally flawed. It’s easy to see why the religions were what they were, but they’re out of date and they need improved. That’s my super-arrogant take on it. I’m happy for those of you who derive your comfort from religion.. like the other man said, “I believe in whatever gets you through the night, whether it’s Jack Danials or Jesus Christ” – but personally, while I intend to explore the spiritual plane further now that I realize there is one to explore, I’m not taking anyone else’s source as gospel. (har har). I’ll read through it, yes. But none of it is likely to strike me as the One True Truth. And I’ve decided I don’t really *want* to learn much more history.. because I flat out don’t believe that those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. I think that’s a lie you just have to rise above. Learn good history. Learn when people got along, and how they did it. But learn about all the horrible things we’ve done to each other? Not at this stage in my development. Learn all the things that went wrong? Thanks, I’m already saddled with enough ‘I cannot do it’ of my own. And I think that there’s nothing that limits humanity, and maybe sentients in general, more than the belief that humanity and sentients are limited.
Anyway, I will continue to be Sheer just as hard as I can be. I apologize to any of you who feel I’m condecending. Perhaps I am. But I don’t want to be. I genuinely want to be friends..
(And, since this *is* my journal, I can say whatever I want. Which is a really nice feeling. Everyone needs one place where they can say whatever they want, eh?)
I realize that none of what I’m saying is probably that new.. I’m capable of doing new thinking in my own fields, but outside them I’m still far behind.. but that’s okay. They’re new thoughts to me. And it’s my bloody journal. Yeesh.