Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, maybe not. Maybe it just feels that way sometimes.. but sometimes I feel like the whole country has forgotten that whenever possible, you should always leave room for your enemy to become your friend.

I have begun to identify with both democrats and republicans – even though I don’t agree with most of what the republicans say, I think they’re just misguided, not evil or bad.. heck, there are many wonderful people who are republicans. I know this for a fact, having verified it personally.

And every time I think I can divide a group into black and white, and hate one side and love the other, I find out that I’ve just got more growing to do still, and that I’m wrong.

My life has been one long learning experience. What I’m learning lately is I’m extrordinarily lonely, and need more real life interaction with other humans. Apparently, that is to be the lesson from my year without external mind-altering chemicals.

(Yes, for those of you who are excited by such things in my life, Sheer is Drug Free. Voluntarily. Please don’t think less or more of me because of this. It’s just a personal choice that suits my current emotional situation. I have to get back to a nonaltered and balanced state, neurochemically, and figure out what the point of my life is, and where I’m going with it. To be honest, I feel pretty lost. If it weren’t for people like T. and A. and L. and K. and P. (journal names withheld for no particular reason) I think I’d be permanently lost.

Everybody seems to be cheering for me to stand back up, figure out a windmill, and go tilt another round. I’m all in favor. At least computers keep me fed and sleeping indoors while I figure out what my life is about.

I remember once someone talked about one of the large risks of being a hippie / openminded individual was that I would come to believe in everything. She made this sound like a truly awful disease, but in truth, isn’t believing in everything a whole lot better than believing in nothing?

Fighting for peace is impossible. You can’t win. You can’t even break even. All you can do is perpetuate a feedback loop that is older than the human race. Why bother?

Better solution: Create for peace. Love for peace. Work for peace – either with your mind, or with your body, or both.

WHen I write what looks like advice to humanity in these pages, assume that it is meant mostly for me. Yes, I write advice for myself. Do you all mind? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. I’m surely one of the most broken creatures out there, and I aim to find my way to being whole, whatever it takes.

http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/

DARPA – face of the department of defense, which one presumes is the department responsable for ‘defending’ us against Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”.. is now trying to create life.

Yes, really. They are trying to make self-aware computers. Which they will promptly use to kill more humans. Honestly, people, couldn’t you just stay in the sphere of making cool technologies and leave the whole blowing-people-up thing alone? If we’re short on resources, wouldn’t it suffice to come up with creative solutions that made us better able to use the resources we had, rather than blowing things up?

I don’t even know what I think about DARPA creating life.. other than, wow, we’ve really come full circle now.. First they create the net, which has the possibility, should it spread far enough and have enough creative backup systems, of stopping war by making the results of it impossible to ignore, even for people as talented at forgetting the past as Americans (and, yes, I include myself in this)

Don’t know. Wonder what classes I should be taking. It seems clear that I need to go back to school, because I don’t understand the world at *all*

Honestly, I don’t see how you all do it..

If I were to be inclined to follow every single rule out there, learning them all would probably take about ten years – and they write new ones, new tax code, new business rules, new whatevers.. as fast as I can learn them.

Being a ecologically responsable consumer is just about impossible unless one gives up buying.. I mean, figuring out the recycling plan for PC boards, monitors, canned goods, plastic goods, how to sort the recycling into the right bins, what should be reused..

I can’t even go out for a sushi dinner without worrying about which of these fish are most likely to go extinct.

How do you all manage it? Once you start worrying about the details (i.e. which forms to fill out for what part of your taxes), it turns out there are so many details that you can’t ever stop worrying. This way lies madness.

And yet – I sure don’t want to be responsable for lining up the grand design. Then we add the factor of me thinking about spirituality and spiritual dimensions and, oh, boy, now I’m *really* buried. If I have to think about the cosmic significance of the choices of words my friends make and what secondary and tertiary messages they might be trying to convey and..

it’s enough to make you whimper, I tell you.

All I ever wanted was to not hurt anybody. But yet, it’s likely that just by existing I hurt thousands. I use too much energy. I eat too much. I write too much.. think of all the poor electrons that are being abused because I wrote this journal entry..

Honestly, not only can I not take it, I’m not even sure that I can define what it is that I’m not able to take any more. There appear to be five billion forms filled out in triplicate to define every rule I’m breaking, and I appear to owe money to uncle sam until the day I die. Think you can own land? think again. You’re just paying a slower rate of rent, and we change the name to ‘taxes’.

And, someone granted the bank the right to always win. Why?

What a mess. I think I’ll get back to my nice, simple programming.

So I’m now modifying a tree control to support dragging. I’m rather thoroughly hooked on Laz, at least for the moment.. I think it has great possibilities for the future.

Is it perfect? No. but what is? As Lee once observed, there is a crack in everything.. that’s how the light gets in.

Thanks to the modern development of mental hospitals having computer terminals, we can now see postings from sheer when he’s crazy. Since apparently I have to spend some small portion of my life not entirely all there.. (we can hope that with the advent of my new, less chemically enhanced life these will be fewer and further between, but this may not in fact be the case, it’s difficult to say).. but somehow it amuses me to no end that I have LJ posts from when I was crazy

I have LJ posts from when my memory wasn’t even sequencing anything remotely close to right. This is just *funny*.

We’re coming up on four years of Sheer LJ – I wish that I’d been introduced to the concept earlier than that, as I do find looking back over my LJ enlightening at times. I suppose if I were really ont he ball, I would have been one of those kids who kept a diary.. but I’ve always been too busy poking my nose into various bits of technology to do anything that sensical.

I should go browse on sourceforge and see what scary bits of software are being developed today.

Far too much to take in here..

Well, my playing with lazlo has lead to something that you might almost call a application. THat’s probably being overgenerous, but you all can decide for yourself here. Please bear in mind that I’ve only been writing the script for a couple of days, and there is a bit of a learning curve involved.

I guess the real trick, on another topic, of designing a utopia is that you have to design it for 6 billion people – *AND* it has to be opt-in. After all, it’s not much of a utopia if you’re forced to go there / participate in it. So, how does one manage to:

a: give 6 billion people everything they want
b: permit Earth to return to a stable state – while being able to support those 6 billion people
c: not permit any of them to infringe on the rights of any others
d: Permit them to communicate and share art and creations and whatnot

Hm.

This is harder than it looks.

I would observe that one thing that might help is if we had a ‘bill of rights for sentient creatures of Earth’. Of course, then we’d all have to ahve a argument over who is sentient. Is a dog sentient with protected rights? How about a dolphin? And when we get done having six million wars over that..

oh, brother.

You think you know something about a technology, then you start RTFMing, and you discover that it goes several HUNDRED layers deeper than you thought.

Such is my recent experience with XSLT/XML/XPath.

I’ve been doing a *LOT* of things the hard way in webland.

Why didn’t anyone *tell* me about these things?

Can’t learn everything as fast as they create it.. it’s *insane*.. ‘far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be found..’

So, I was noticing that there are 2.6 million active LJs.

That’s got to be bordering on a cultural phenomenon that has global inpact. Especially since I know those aren’t all english, and I know there are other blogging sites, and I know as XML/RSS feeds get better, sooner or later there will be a unified blogreader site. Not that I can’t already read all my blogs togeather via Thunderbird in theory. (I haven’t yet tried this to see how it works in practice, but I expect it does)

I’ve been learning Lazlo, a open source shockwave/flash bytecode compiler. It’s been slow going in spots, especially since the eclipse plugin is still a little on the unstable side. But I’ve gotten my application to where it switches views based on a menu, pulls data from a XML data source, and whatnot. Not bad for a couple of days playing around. I hope inside a week to actually have a nice looking web applet for MC’s site. Then I have to convince people they should be paying me to develop these things for them.

I have my doubts as to whether this is a single solution, though.. I think a combination of flash and css, to offer a rich broadband experience and a tolerable narrowband, is probably where the future’s going. But it’s hard to say. Anyway, I’m having fun developing web applications. Hopefully soonish someone will be paying me to do that..

.. or something.

Anyway, I still can’t believe things like the net aren’t resulting in real political change, and real diversification of opinions. I feel like the world should be evolving faster.. but I guess I should just be grateful that it is evolving as fast as it is. I’d just like to not be seeing wars, and not be hearing about how I should be afraid of the big scary terrorists.

Actually, I’d like to be hearing about how television viewership is at a all time low, people are building their own community wireless networks, and open source software has just hit another explosive development curve – this one trying to bring open source back to the masses. [Actually, I’d argue that Thunderbird is about as mass-accessable a program as you can get. *Very* user friendly. Plugin-based. I haven’t tried extending it yet, but I’m guessing it’s not hard to do. And it’s lightweight and fast on its feet.. if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a shot.

I’ve mixed opinions about Eclipse. I guess I see promise, but I also see a lot of problems. Still, this is a IDE to keep a eye on in my opinion.

I’ve *seriously* mixed opinions about gentoo.. although it does make me look forward to genthree. If I had nothing better to do, maybe I would try and build a linux distribution that *actually* didn’t require any advanced knowledge. Or I’d go work for microsoft. [Actually, I’ve been having some corrispondence with M$ – applied for some jobs over there, talked to some people. It might be fun to come full circle, work for the evil empire. To be honest, I’m no longer convinced that they’re even remotely a bad thing. After all, they don’t seem to be shutting linux down, and they do seem to be learning from it. XP loads drivers without rebooting, kernal module style. It seems possible that maybe we *can* all get along.

Wonder how the IPv6 implimentation is coming over at my ISP. I’m envious.. my friends in other lands are on IPv6, and I’m still stuck in v4land.

Time to make the next quantum leap. 😉

S.

I tossed these two questions at my friend Cori, and she asked that I answer them as well.

1) What do you think the meaning/purpose of life is?
2) Of all the places you’ve been, what one thus far has been the most memorable for you?

1 is a particularly difficult one for me right now, because I’m feeling like there is no purpose and no point. But, I would say the purpose of life is to create and to love. And, I hope, to learn that love will always find a way.

2 – I think probably the acropolis in greece. I remember looking at the stones going up to the top which had been worn smooth with time and many, many, many visitors.. standing where some of the first great minds to pen down their ideas stood, and feeling the continuity through history.

Other places also stand out, of course.. but this is the one that first leaps to mind.