Never been one to let the carrier drop

I find some great irony in the fact that instead of 12-step programs helping me, they hindered my progress. They’re kind of like the drugs&alchohol answer to Christianity. Both of them have this fundamentally defeatist attitude that I find rather upsetting. In 12-step, you’re supposed to believe that you’re powerless, and that once a addict you’re a addict for life. In Christianity, you’re supposed to believe that mankind was born fundamentally sinful, that you’re a sinner no matter what.

I think I reject both of those ideas. I’ve been over why I think we make ‘mistakes’ in other entries, so I won’t bore you all with discussions about being a three dimensional being in a four dimensional world. But, I don’t really think that it’s true that mankind is fundamentally evil. I think it’s fundamentally neutral, with evil and good individuals.

My original suggestion for how to handle my addiction was that I go to the vendors that were selling to me with a card that gave them my name, a picture of me, and a explanation of why I’d rather not have them sell to me. I was told by various 12-step mavens that that was a horrible idea – never go back to the place where they sell to you. So I spent six months trying to make their way work – but my higher power failed to kick in, and eventually my shrink suggested that I didn’t *have* to listen to those who told me it was a horrible idea – so I did it. And it appears to have worked.

I think there’s a bunch of issues at play here. One is a empowerment issue – I think I was more willing to believe in my idea because it was my idea – and yes, I admit, that’s a little shameful – and also because it didn’t require me to go to meetings every day, or to claim that I was a addict for life – which I didn’t truly believe – or to say I was powerless and to put my faith in a higher power when I have a lot of, hrm, higher power issues.

So what I did wasn’t what the 12-steppers call ‘white knuckling it’ – for the most part, I’ve been at peace with not using and been able to enjoy being productive on the other parts of my life – and enjoy not having the headaches, nausea, and steadily mounting debt – to say nothing of the occasional psychotic break – that went with using regularly. I don’t feel like every day is a uphill battle – there have been a few days that are, but they’re few and far between.

I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to *not* do the 12-step program, or not be a Christian, if either one gave them happiness and peace – if either one provided what they were looking for. However, neither one provided what *I* was looking for. I don’t really harbor any resentment of NA, but I still seem to resent enourmously the Christians. At least I no longer go to chat rooms to harass them. Well, at least not very often 😉

Among other things, it should be possible to determine moral behavior in a vacuum. You shouldn’t need a cryptic instruction manual to figure out what is right and what is wrong – I use a cross of ‘do unto others as you would be done to’ and ‘do unto others as they would like to be done to, except when it directly harms you or a third party’. You could probably reframe Asamov’s three laws of robotics to cover reasonable behavior for all self-aware life.

The Christians, however, get to moralizing and before you know it they’re trying to ban gay marriage, censor books and television, and make church attendance manditory (at least for their children). Funnily, I don’t think this is what Jesus – if he existed, and I think it likely that he was at least written based on some real people – wanted.

My friend Rich observed that the people who banned me from the Christian Apologetics chat got all their morality from a book and weren’t actually able to embrace the real, living thing that is being a reasonable human in a ever-changing world. I think if you get all your morality from a book that was last updated 2000 years ago, you’re making a big mistake. Among other things, a lot of what is pawned off as morals in the Bible are actually customs. Customs are important in a ‘when-in-rome’ sense, but not as important when what’s going on is behind closed doors.

I guess a lot of my anger towards Christianity is based on the fact that every new generation is fed the same old lies – made to feel shame for things that are not shameful, made to feel guilt for things that are not wrong. I see encouraging trends in the world that are counter all the current crop of religions. I have high hopes that a new one that doesn’t require a strange form of insanity to believe will come. In the meantime, I’ve been writing my own – it doesn’t have to work for anyone but me. In a sense, I feel like one of the design features of the 21st century is the ease of authoring.

I’m currently working on a problem at work that I’ve been working on for a little over a day.

It’s a slowness issue in a database server that is due to be retired in three months anyway, but it’s *irritating* to me that it doesn’t behave the way it should. AT this point, there’s no sane reason I can give for continuing to try and figure out what’s wrong with it.. I’m not even sure if there’s a *insane* reason. But nonetheless.. I can’t stop. It’s like I’m obsessed.

So, I’ve gotten to being pretty sure that the source of the slowness is msgsnd() and msgrcv(), and that the difference between the two systems is one is 2.4 and the other is 2.6

So.. heh heh.. I just ported the 2.4 ipc code to 2.6. I’m currently compiling it on a test box.. some part of me thinks this is absolutely hilarious.. if not downright wrong.. but…

There’s this tendancy for every new release of a operating system to be bigger and heavier.. Vista exemplafies it. I tend to run very old operating systems.. the machine I’m writing this on is running windows 2000, and my laptop is running XP even though it came preinstalled with Vista.. (and let me tell you, the speed difference is impressive.)

I’m not alone in this either.. my friend Lee Hart runs Windows 3.11 on a P-III. How does he describe the performance? ‘Blazing.’

I seem to recall that it is the prosucution’s responsability to prove that you are guilty of a crime – hence, if they ever came to bust me, they would have to:

1) Determine what licenses I have. This would be fun all on it’s own, since I have several hundred CDs, and then several hundred jewel cases and/or inserts for CDs that I no longer own because they were stolen/became unreadable/etc.

So, picture it – for every track in my 10G+ MP3 library, they would have to *verify the license* by going through my physical collection of assets. Of course, first they need a warrent both for the data storage and for the physical assets, some of which *I don’t know the location of*.

And yet, they’d probably bother, because I’m sure somewhere there are still a few tracks that I don’t actually own the licenses for. And, after all, people who enjoy tearing things down / making the world worse rather than better are often relentless in their implimentation of same.

The funny thing is they’d claim they were making the world a better place. By bankrupting me, and thusly preventing me from making more music (hmm.. they might have a point there). By making sure the labels got their payola (which the artists would never see). By proving that they are Thugs With Power.

The music industry, which continues to complain bitterly about music piracy, and would cripple the internet if that’s what it took to stop music piracy (and it wouldn’t.. among other things, wifi is so cheap that if they crippled the internet, we would *build a new one* that would be awfully hard to cripple, is missing the boat.

Information wants to be free. In fact, information is already free. Shareaza is, as I’ve commented many times and as irritates just about everyone I talk to, just a service for locating really obnoxiously large numbers, which were always part of the number line and which we happen to experience as music. Someday we may find out that when we listen to a song, it gets encoded as DNA and stored somewhere, and then the music companies will want to find a way to delete that. [I can ‘hear’ in my head a song that I’ve heard ten or so times, with all the parts etc.. but I can’t make the bass move me, so I still prefer the old fashoned way]

But, it’s stupid to focus so much on money. Money is a tool that helps us get things done – but no one should ever go hungry, or lack a house, because of something as stupid as money. No one should ever die, or be tortured, over money.

Music inspires us, lifts us up, lowers us down, takes us to new mental realms, and I suspect raises both our empathy and our creativity. And if it weren’t for all the stupid music business hacks, installing music on our personal workstations would be as easy as installing software packages:

apt-get install Ani DiFranco.*

Honestly, I would welcome a system where anyone who was producing music got paid, either by the megabyte or as a flat rate, and we all paid for it as part of our taxes, and all the music was free to everyone. Then those same artists could get paid for public performances by those who went to the performances, and everyone would be happy. And the world would have unfettered access to music. I’m sure if you handed the problem of indexing and metadata and searching to Google, they could make something that would blow all of our collective minds.

Same story for fulltext of books. In fact, I think creators of any sort of digital media that even a few people can be said to enjoy should be getting checks from the government, and all that digital media should be indexed by the best wizards we can find, and free to all. In my version of $UTOPIA, that’s how it’d be. And as far as I can tell, the only way we’re ever going to get to my version of $UTOPIA is if we, and our children, and their children, and so on – build it ourselves.

And I believe, that we’ll conceive, to make in hell for us a heaven — VNV Nation, Kingdom

No, I don’t want your browser bar.
No, I don’t want your anti-spyware software.
No, I don’t want my homepage changed.
No, I don’t want your mail component.
No, I don’t want your ‘daily news’ when I log in.
No, I’d rather not have cute animated graphics replace my ‘:-)’
No, I’d rather you didn’t put your DLLs in C:/windows/system32. They belong in your application’s directory.
If you can get away with not registering them, I’d rather you didn’t do that either.
No, I’d rather you didn’t store your information in the registry. I hate the registry, and would rather have a bunch of little configuration databases, one per application, instead.
No, I don’t want you to start by default. I’ll *tell* you if I want you to start when the computer boots.
No, I don’t want to upgrade to Vista to get new features.
No, I don’t want you to check for upgrades by default. I’ll *tell* you if I want you to stay updated.
No, I don’t want to restart my browser, my computer, or anything else. For that matter, you’re a IM client, what are you doing affecting my browser in any way?
No, I don’t think it’s reasonable for the ‘default install’ to break my web browser.
No, I don’t want to pay 2 cents a minute for a service that many others, including Skype, provide for free.

I think I’ve decided Skype is the ultimate IM:

1) It does voice, video, file transfer, and tex
2) By default, it doesn’t start with the computer
3) It doesn’t attempt to do anything funny to my web browser. It’s a IM, it knows it’s a IM, and it stays there
4) It has sane settings right out of the box

In Seattle, I tried several brands of wireless headphones, looking for something that would set me free from the perpetual annoyance of tangled cords. I didn’t find anything that even remotely fit my needs – whenever I turned my head, the signal would degrade to mono and/or static.

(I wish someone would make digital spread spectrum wireless headphones. Actually, someone probably does – they just probably cost a bit more than I’m willing to spend..)

Anyway, after moving to CA, I found a pair and decided to try them out. Mysteriously, without all the reflections caused by the lathe plaster hung on chicken wire, they work wonderfully 😉

Only downside is that they are rechargable…

iTunes thinks that http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=9741 is explicit.

Um….?

http://www.reason.com/0203/fe.cf.in.shtml

Apparently the war between authority and music is a bit older than the rave scene. 😉

I had a couple of really bad nightmares last night. In one, I went camping at Blue Bend, and brought my PA system, and the cops showed up, and found one tiny flake of weed sticking to some part of the thing, and were summarily busting me..

In the other, I found myself in a plane – in the air, about 3000 feet above some CA mountains – with a coworker (not the one who’s a pilot, one who I suspect wouldn’t know what to do with a plane if there was a heads up display telling him which controls to change), and he was panicing (sp?) because he didn’t know how to fly, and I took the wheel (it was a reletively small plane, with a yolk, but not a Cessna.. the control panel didn’t look familiar, but all the instruments were standard) and immediately the plane stalls, complete with buzzer, airspeed falling below the redline. I push the throttle all the way up, bring the nose down, wait for the elevators to bite, and then gently pull back. As soon as I get it to level flight, it stalls again. We complete this until the altimiter is reading out in millimeters instead of feet, and then I somehow manage to shear the wings off trying to land it on a freeway.. then I wake up.

Now this makes no sense, because I have landed so many prop planes deadstick in a simulator that I could do it with one hand tied behind my back. It’s one of my favorite simulator games.. take the plane up, turn off the magnetos, and then find the airport and set it down in one peice, on one try.

It would be really cool to write a streaming application that had one transcover per client (from a bus source) and scaled the transcoder’s bitrate based on how many TCP_ACKs it was getting back. (up to some sort of sane limit). It seems like, combined with a bit of buffer on the client side, you could do transparent adaptive streaming from MP3 that way. (kind of like VBR on steroids)

Is there any easy way to see TCP_ACKs from userspace?

I have this love-hate relationship with iTunes.

I love the convenience of buying actual legal licenses for my content from the iTunes store.

I hate everything else about it.

It seems almost like it was designed to be exactly what I didn’t want in a content management system. It’s not very good at finding missing content when the underlying structure of the disk changes (and in my life, it does, often), it’s slow..

I enjoyed kplaylist, but my needs have gone far beyond it. I think I really am going to have to write something.