Never been one to let the carrier drop

Yes, I actually go back and reread parts of my journal from time to time. How narsaccistic (sp?) is that?

Anyway, this is from a couple months ago:

[root@gateway lists]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4127076 147656 3769776 4% /
none 192292 0 192292 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2 12096756 3576228 7906044 32% /usr
/dev/sda1 15385852 352572 14251720 3% /var
/dev/sda2 192251992 17187412 165298668 10% /home

and this is from now

[root@gateway home]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4127076 374936 3542496 10% /
none 192292 0 192292 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2 12096756 3665188 7817084 32% /usr
/dev/sda1 15385852 306704 14297588 3% /var
/dev/sda2 192251992 55080820 127405260 31% /home
[root@gateway home]#

Let’s face it. I’m a digital packrat.

[Now to be perfectly fair: part of that is that I hadn’t done backups before that first df, and I have been backing up my workstation to this machine..]

But still. At this rate, I’ll need more disk by next year. Of course, I guess I could throw out some of those TV shows I never intend to watch.. 😉

S.

Find yourself in the gutter in a lonely part of town
Where death waits in the darkness with a weapon to cut some stranger down
Sleeping with an empty bottle, he’s a sad and an empty hearted man
All he needs is a job, and a little respect, so he can get out while he can
We always need to hear both sides of the story
A neighbourhood peace is shattered it’s the middle of the night
Young faces hide in the shadows, while they watch their mother and father fight
He says she’s been unfaithful, she says her love for him has gone
And the brother shrugs to his sister and says “looks like it’s just us from now on”
We always need to hear both sides of the story
And the lights are all on, the world is watching now
People looking for truth, we must not fail them now
Be sure, before we close our eyes
Don’t walk away from here
’til you hear both sides
Here we are all gathered in what seems to be the centre of the storm
Neighbours once friendly now stand each side of the line that has been drawn
They’ve been fighting here for years, but now there’s killing on the streets
While small coffins are lined up sadly, now united in defeat
We always need to hear both sides of the story
And the lights are all on, the world is watching now
People looking for truth, we must not fail them now
Be sure, before we close our eyes
Don’t walk away from here
’til you see both sides
White man turns the corner, finds himself within a different world
Ghetto kid grabs his shoulder, throws him up against the wall
He says “would you respect me if I didn’t have this gun
‘cos without it, I don’t get it, and that’s why I carry one”
We always need to hear both sides of the story

———————————————————————————

Tonight, I did something very odd. (My mom will be happy. Well, no, she won’t, because I’m not going to tell her that I did it) – I joined a christian chat group – to give the reasons why I feel christianity is fundamentally wrong, and to honestly find out how people reconcile themselves to these.

I didn’t learn anything that compelling, although I did meet several christians who didn’t feel that their views were absolute truth and should be applied to other people, which was cool. No one could explain to me why killing someone should save the world [and in fact every explanation I got only made it seem more wrong..] or why god changed personalities completely from the old testiment to the new testiment.. [this is a really big problem for me. God just doesn’t change personalities like that, methinks..]

I’ve been backing up somewhat from my original statement that there is no god. I don’t think I’m really exactly a athiest any more.. once you’ve experience vibe, it’s hard to claim there’s nothing bigger than individual humans – it seems unquestionably true to me that humans aggregate to something larger than we are as individuals..

But Christianity still seems, well, just wrong. I like to think I’m mostly over my anger at my parents in attempting to force me, through a wide variety of coercive methods, to be Methodist.

Why does it seem wrong to me?

1) It seems to me a fundamental contridiction to say that god created the human race as we are and that being homosexualility is a sin. If god created us (not something I’m neccesarily willing to stipulate – there are a awful lot of really vicious bugs in humanity, which makes me think that maybe we evolved. On the other hand, there’s a awful lot of beautiful and complex things that make me think maybe we were designed. And sometimes I think it’s a mix of the two) and if some of us are gay, it’s because that’s how we were made. You don’t think being homosexual is built into gay people? Well, let me ask you this, is being heterosexual a choice? Could you suddenly start lusting after people of your own gender tomorrow if the herd required it? let’s not be silly here.. homosexuality is no more a choice than heterosexuality.

2) IT seems to me unbelievable that god would only provide one right answer, and if you didn’t happen to guess that right answer (or be born into a family that supported it), you’d be condemned to hell. I mean, I can’t make Christianity make sense to me, and I’ve tried, so I should be condemned to a eternity of suffering? 80 years – eternity – 80 years – eternity.. this makes no sense to me at all. It does seem beleivable to me that perhaps we just get sent back over and over until we get it.. (actually, this makes a _lot_ of sense to me.. resonates, you might say..) so I might be able to throw in with the Bhuddists.. but, as a friend of mine pointed out, many of the american ones seem to be as flaky as a bowl of special K..

3) In fact, the idea of any being both being mercifull and loving, and condemning souls to torment for eternity, seems fundamentally flawed.

4) While we’re on this whole ‘making sense’ issue, the whole idea of god having his son killed so that you can be saved makes none. Zero. Zip. Twist it any way you want, and it still makes no sense.. except one, and this is a extremely twisted view of it. If you view the bible as a history of god.. of what humanity thought they’d learned about a supreme power.. and if you stipulate that Jesus really was the son of god.. (not something I’m willing to agree to, except insofar as we might all be children of same) then if you view killing Jesus as a test of just what god would put up with without smiting horribly, then okay, fine, what you could say is ‘what we learned from the whole Jesus thing is that god will forgive *anything*. Quit worrying about your sins, you ain’t done nothing.’. (well, unless you’re Dubya or Hitler or something…)

I could go on for a while, listing things about Christianity that just won’t make sense to me, but the basic upshot is that I can’t make the religion make sense to me. And yes, I’ve heard the argument that I must have faith first, and then understand that god works in mysterious ways, and then after I’ve accepted the fact that the religion makes no sense and had faith, then it’ll all make sense and I’ll have found god and all will be well with the world.

Well, I can’t accept the bootstrapping conditions.. and I don’t get the sense that I have to. I think I have some basic inate sense internally of what is right and wrong, and I think it’s sufficient to my needs. And yes, I will insist that my religion strikes me as being correct before I accept it. If I ever do.. I think they refer to this as personal spirituality.. 😉

But anyway, they were for the most part nice people. They just all struck me as a trifle misguided. I was pleased, though, that I was able to walk away without a single attempt at removing their misguidedness. If they have their faith, more power to them.

Now if only they’d stop trying to ask that I live my life according to their view of what’s moral. Specifically, if they could get over the whole gay marriage thing, it’d be really nice. If they could let go of the abortion thing, it’d be even nicer. And if they could stop starting wars, I’d be ecstatic. [Now, to be fair here, I know that almost all religions were against Bush’s most recent war. But I bet after that partial-birth abortion thing, they’re going to flock to the polls in record numbers to re-elect him. Sadly, it seems being faithfull has a rather negative impact on your memory]

Hmm.. we’ve devolved into one of the two or three standard endings for a journal entry by me, a political rant. That doesn’t seem that productive.. even I am tired of listening to myself rant by now. For that matter, even I am tired of listening to myself whine about my relationship, so I’ll let that one go too. I’m also really tired of being sick, so I think maybe I’ll just go to bed in the hopes of feeling better tomorrow.

I have to admit, it was odd not smoking up tonight, it being friday and me not having gone dancing this week and all. But only in a not-following-habits sort of way.

I’m soo tired of being sick.

I found out why my embedded C compiler broke. SP4 and Ms Embedded C++ do not get along. No idea WHY that is, although I think it has to do with SP4 replacing one of the DLLs that the M$ WINCE compiler uses.

Ah well.

I figured I’d detract a little from my angst and inability to compliment someone successfully to write a rant in the general direction of the consumer electronics industry.

I have a 35mm SLR. I don’t use it much, because I hate film.. there’s just no instant gratification there.. but it has, without a doubt, the best user interface I’ve used on a camera. The shutter speed is a nice easy to spin dial on the top, the apeture control is right behind the focus control on the lens.. exactly where it should be, since the two are so intrinsicly connected. [If you’re not into photography, just tune out now.. ;-)]

I plan to buy a nice digital SLR, paying large chunks of money for it. That is, I plan to buy a digital SLR as soon as I find one that I can ajust exposure time and apeture/iris without having to wander through sixty menus.

It’s like the whole music and pc vs. mac thing. I like being geeky and wandering through menus and figuring out IRQs and things, yes, sure, but not while I’m trying to be artistic. A good test of a user interface for a artistic product, like a camera, is whether it ever requires one to refer to the manual. A properly designed artistic product shouldn’t, IMHO. Controls for exposure, iris, whatever, make ’em big fat dials, with clear labels and a clearly labelled ‘automatic’ position for when we’re feeling like letting the micro deal with it.

Please don’t make me figure out any more complicated user interfaces. My brain is full.

Moral of story: Do not make jokes that involve trophication or objectification of females. Period. It’s a sore spot for them, probably because of the last 500 years.

Anyway, if you all would like to yell at me some more, I’ll be over here. Have fun, please, by all means. I will certainly acknowledge that what I did was wrong, even if my intentions were not dishonorable.

But I won’t apologize for my friends-only, stream-of-conciousness writing – and if people are going to get angry with me based on what I put in here, perhaps I should just start using the ‘private’ setting instead. Not encouraging though, at all.

It appears taht I was right not to trust the government.

On vote.com (republican stronghold of the internet, although not as in vouge as it once was), there’s currently a vote for ‘should the patriot act be used to prosecute criminals?’. In other words, ‘should we in fact seriously abridge your civil liberties, start holding clandestine searches without warrents, and turn this into even more of a police state.’

54% of those voting said, ‘Yes! I loved the Nazis! The KGB always sounded like so much FUN! Bring us our very own police state’.

Are these people NUTS? Well, they’re republicans, which may be synonymous..

No, seriously. I can understand republicans most of the time. I don’t agree with them, but I can understand how they can be what they are. Most of them, I suspect, just never really grew up enough to empathize with other people.

But to vote in your very own police state? Would these people vote for their own hanging, too?


And then there’s the marrige protection act.

Because we all know people are attacking marrage. No, really, seriously, Bush has come about as close as I’ve ever seen to openly criticizing gays and lesbians. I’m wondering if they are going to be the jews to his Hitler act. [If you think I don’t like Bush, you’re wrong. It’s not so much that I don’t like him as I see him as a evil, homicidal maniac. Perhaps because I watched him lie to the world in order to start a war – TWICE IN A ROW. (Now what are the odds that Bin Laden, who needs dialasys, is living somewhere with no operable power grid? I’d say zero, wouldn’t you? But we’ll never bomb the Saudis, because we need their oil..)]

I mean, the latest post on the whitehouse site, which I’m sure you’ve all seen, had me so angry i couldn’t see straight. THIS is the best we can do? This unelected slimeball feels so threatened by the idea of gay marrage that he has to make a national holiday out of males and females getting married? (Because we all know how having male-male or female-female marrages would threaten the institution of marriage..)

Oh, never mind. I’ll write more later. I just don’t have the energy for it..

On the list of all the fucking stupid things I’ve ever worried about – and, believe me, that’s a long list – I think I inhereted my mother’s ‘worry about stupid things’ gene – I think I’ve set a new highest item.

No, if you don’t want to die, of course you’re not going to commit suicide. Bloody obvious. It’s not like just one day you wake up and decide, ‘Oh, life’s not worth living today, think I’ll grab a gun and off myself’. It’s not a snap decision. And it doesn’t ‘sneak up on you’..

I can’t even believe that was worrying me.

No, I can, actually, it’s consistant with my charicter. It’s just not very bright.

So the person I didn’t even really know who nonetheless affected me by logging out permanently apparently thought about it for a long time first, by all appearances. And even though they had some personality traits in common with me (procedural mind, programmer, parents who didn’t always approve of them or what they did, religious parents, etc.. ) they were still quite, quite different from me in a number of basic ways.

Okay. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way.. I’ll have to find something _new_ to worry about. 😉

I’ll just worry about my relationship problems. That ought to keep me busy for a while.

For those of you who care about these things and haven’t already heard them, the rough (uncut, unmixed, right off the PA feed during jam session) mp3s of me with Ron Miller are found at these URLs:

10.8.03
8.28.02

remember, this is rough stuff. I’m working on editing it for future consumption, but that will take a while.. [it takes a while to mix down 74 minutes of audio – not to mention paring 160 minutes down to 74. I’ve enlisted OMCN’s help, since that’s really more his forte than mine..]

S.

Had a good afternoon.. did a quick isomedia run, then went and stuffed more hard disks in a friend’s computer and talked with her for a while about life, the universe, and everything. Learned the answers to a few things that had been bothering me, tried to share some Reason knowledge, and in general socially interacted.

So that’s a record 3 friends in a 24 hour period I’ve seen. Things are definately improving on the friends score. 😉 And Danial Marsh (SWN guy) sent me a invite to the next hack night I can attend.. And Kent called me just to say hi..

Okay, so I don’t have no friends – and likely I’d have more if I didn’t hide in my office all day and never talk to anyone.. so it’s no one’s fault but mine that I don’t see other humans very often..

[Note to sheer: You want to see someone? Try stepping outside. There’s lots of people out there. Really. Most of them are even interesting. You live in, from a social standpoint, one of the coolest places in the U.S. – if you can’t make friends here, you can’t make them anywhere]

I’m sure that right-wing pundits and peoples wince whenever they hear the name.

Rep. McDermott has a remarkable history of voting for the right thing [from my opinions anyway]. He consistantly votes the long view [not what is best for us right now, but what is best in 50 years], he consistantly votes against war and warmongering, and he consistantly votes against the removal of civil liberties. On social services he’s mixed – but I almost always agree with his choices.

It makes it kind of hard to send the guy letters, though. I mean, my best mode for writing to congresspeople is irate – but all I can ever say when writing a letter to McDermott is ‘You done good. Keep up the good work.’

Sometimes I wonder if I should just stop.. but it seems that a show of support is a nice thing to do.. and it’s so reassuring to have a representative that represents me.

Of course, that makes me wonder about my fellow constituants. Enough of them must agree with McDermott to vote him into office.

I’ve only heard him speak once – at an antiwar rally – and he said what needed to be said, and pulled no punches. He was a good public speaker – I suppose that’s hardly suprising – but he looked older than I expected. I guess not everyone turns warmongering and conservative as they age – well, I knew that already..

Mostly, I wish he were younger because I want him around and voting in the house for another 50 years. 😉