Never been one to let the carrier drop

Has never been a believer in buying things off the shelf when building them would do just as well. A few cases in point:

1) When I was a kid, I used to love Capsella (actually, I still do, and my collection of the stuff now is prodigious, I just never have time to play with it any more). He built me, out of a radio shack kit and some truly ingenous hacks, including drilling appropriate sized holes in screws so that they could be used as terminals for the capsella jumper wires, a remote control for my capsella.

Later, capsella came out with a commercial remote, but it wasn’t nearly as cool as the one he built – it was infrared, for one thing, whereas his was 27Mhz RF..

2) FOr one of the churches we attended, he built a remote mixing console, complete with multiple modes (preset and remote), a box that you could basically wander around the church with ajusting levels, seperate feedback-removing shelving filters for every one of the inputs, and other features that boggle the mind. Not to mention the ‘supress-the-air-conditioning’ button, which may not have been the best idea because I think the chiller tended to freeze up the lines when they didn’t have air flowing over them at the other end – but used a really interesting hack to take advantage of unused bandwidth on the buzzer lines that notified the ushers when it was time to bring people in..

Now, the amazing thing about all this is that *everything* he did there, pretty much, took hours – even tens or hundreds of hours – and in many cases, it was available off the shelf. But, in all of it, he achived a level of craftsmanship I can only aspire to. Whether roll-your-own was the best move or not, you have to admire the quality level he achived in roll-your-own. Once, after getting the power supply for some widget or other put entirely togeather, he realized he had forgotten a fuse. Now, my usual reaction to goofs of this nature is to shrug and figure there’s a circuit breaker in the basement for just that reason, but he actually disassembled the entire mechanical collection o bits, added a fuse, and put it all back togeather – at a cost of some 2 hours, as I recall.

As I said, quality. And no, he doesn’t read my journal. 😉

As a side note, I think he got this from my Uncle Joe, who perhaps I should have had more exposure to.. Uncle Joe was a engineer, and in his 60s undertook to build a retaining wall for the creek below his house. several hundred bags of cement later.. well, let’s just say that the retaining wall will outlast the house – and, possibly, the creek.

It seems like everyone wants to keep their anger.. At every point in a argument, everyone involved has the option to either escalate or deescalate the argument, to either make things worse or make things better. And it always seems like people, once angry, want to stay angry – and being right is more important than being happy any day.

I don’t have any idea what I’m trying to say. I’m not trying to be holier-than-thou, since obviously I do the same things, possibly even for the same reasons as everyone else. I just wish the world had less escalation than it does.

So, as per Kayti’s requirement, I’ve removed P. from my journal friends list. The problem is that I know I’m going to resent her for this, and I don’t see any solution.. Kayti is requiring that I have no contact with P. until I stop being in love with her (P.) or Kayti will leave me.

Nothing is good right now.

iTunes music store still lacks much content, including local favorites Big Spoon and Emmitt Swimming, and any Information Society but the first album. Back to the peer-to-peer nets for me.

[grin] I wonder how hard it would be to get Mischief Committee’s CD on their store?

I finally installed itunes on my PC, and tried out the store. Pretty snazzy. I guess my stand on free music and the labels and whatnot has run out of energy.

I’m dangerously close to believing in nothing. Or everything. Or something.

For those of you curious, the four tracks I purchased:

Speed of Sound, Coldplay
Beautiful, Christina Aguilera
Your Song, Moulin Rouge
Elephant Love Meledy, Moulin Rouge

Just a couple more peices of proof that the world isn’t entirely a sane place:

1) I recently bought a computer vacuum, in the hopes of vacuuming out my laptop keyboard so it wouldn’t make so many crunching noises. I noticed the air the vacuum was blowing seemed awfully warm, so I looked in the tail end of it – and discovered it had heating elements. Anyone who can offer a sane explanation for this is encouraged to do so. Dropping resistor for a low voltage motor, is all I can figure. Either that, or the engineer lifted the design wholesale from a hair dryer.

2) I was listening to Rush while on a road trip the other day (I’m really not sure why I do this, other than as a exercise for my blood pressure) and he said that no hybrid technology, no new innovation could styme the U.S.’s thirst for oil, that oil was the fluid that kept the engine of freedom and democracy going. What, exactly, does Rush think is going to happen in 50 years? [Oh. I get it. He’ll be dead then so it won’t matter?] And why doesn’t he think new technology can help these things? Even just the ability to shut down while idling in traffic and creep along on a small electric motor looks to me like it would save millions of gallons, what with the state of our fine nation’s freeways at rush hour. 😉

3) I know there was one more, but it’s hiding in the back corner of my mind.

For those of you keeping track, I’m back in Seattle again.

After reading my last few journal entries, I can understand why you all think I’ve gone off the deep end.

If it’s any consolation, I seem to only blog when I’m contemplating things I shouldn’t be, imbibing things I shouldn’t be, or truly terrified about the world. But I’ll try and improve on the situation.. though I’m not sure what I’ll blog about.

I can’t fight the feeling that I have no real political power at all.. hey, a electronic voting machine network based on proprietary closed-source windows software, created by a public corperation in which the politicians own stock? Anyone see why I might feel that way?

I haven’t even been following in the world’s events – in some ways, I guess, I’m not really in the real world at all. Of course, who is, when it comes down to it?

Hope you all are well, LJ-friends, whichever of you are still reading my dreck..

Well, I return from rainforest #2, and now will spend a few days bumming around the east coast before flying back to Seattle for my regularly scheduled life.

Rainforest #2, aka the Mongahalia National Forest, had *lots* of rain. More rain than you could shake a soaked umbrella at. And not nearly as much interesting life.. lots of interesting bugs, but nothing mammelian. (Actually, technically I think they have bears but the bears have learned that it’s better to stay away from the people, and vice versa)

The idea found in this document has been grabbing my imagination lately. It’s so bizarre to think that, for example, the mischief committee CD that I recorded existed in the universe before I recorded it, lurking in the 180,000,352th digit of Pi and onward. 😉

It makes one really tempted to write software to search for contents in pi. What interesting secrets might lurk there?

One particularly interesting project would be to search for human DNA, expressed in binary form, inside Pi.. 😉

I came to a few interesting thoughts recently. At risk of eternal damnation – or worse – for saying them, but I’ll say them here anyway.

1) Creating a lifeform and then giving it a life of eternal damnation when it doesn’t like you is questionable behavior.

2) If the Christians are right, it’s very difficult to accept the concept of having children. I mean, eternity is a *long* time. Wish I’d thought of that earlier.

3) People would probably say that me thinking I can judge God is broken behavior. Well, yes, it probably is – I certainly don’t have any way to impliment my judgements. I continue to think that God is so much better than I think s/he is that I can’t even comprehend it. This is mutually exclusive with being a Christian.. or maybe I should say it’s mutually exclusive with *only* being a christian. I don’t know. Complicated thoughts abound.

4) It’s a beautiful world. And I have to give the author of the human DNA props – I mean, yes, it has bugs, yes, it could be better (looks out for lightning bolts) but still, it’s a better piece of code than anything humanity has written yet. I mean, contemplate it.. 12 gigabytes of machine code, that when expressed in a carbon based world, will result in a self-repairing, self-reproducing, self-aware entity that can do spectacular things.. it boggles the mind. I wonder if we’ll have compilers that target human DNA, a list of library routines inside it, etc, someday? One thing is for sure.. the high-level language you describe lifeforms in sure isn’t going to be procedural! 😉

5) One of the nice things about finally admitting that I am in fact a collosal screw-up in just about every category that is measurable is that it leaves me with nowhere to go but up.

6) Maybe.

7) MoooOOOOO!

I survived the Amazon. More later..

River dolphins, both grey and pink.. lots of them, and I got to handfeed a pink one a fish, which he snatched out of my hand. He had a lot of teeth.
Turtles the size of dinner plates
a very fat caymen
toucans
more birds in general than I could possibly list.
three toed sloths
green jungle monkeys
pygmy marmosets
howler monkeys
Pirannahs (I went fishing for them, too. Caught three using a cane pole!)
catfish (I ate lots of them, too)

All in all, a very satisfying vacation. On to phase two – temperate rainforests – after which I will resume my normally scheduled life.