Never been one to let the carrier drop

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. 😉

I registered www.sheersound.com, www.sheersoundstudios.com, and a few other varients. Look for ‘Sheer Sound Studios’, the alliteration kings, coming soon to a web browser near you. Features will include downloadable tracks and a attempt to sucker more electronica musicians into my lair by offering free recording time 😉

Beginning to make forward progress on the parking meter code again, after a long case of writer’s block.

[They never tell you writer’s block applies to programmers. Perhaps it doesn’t apply to *all* programmers. I wouldn’t know. I just know that sometimes I can spit out code as fast as I can type, and other times it takes me several minutes for each line. I call the second condition being ‘blocked’, and it’s really frustrating. ]

Ron is hopefully coming over tonight – he was supposed to come last night, but didn’t quite get out of some meeting in time. Looking forward to taht, no doubt.

Some anonymous person [and I hate to guess who] posted in my journal ‘oh, yeah, quitting is easy, I’ve done it dozens of times’. Well, obviously. I imagine in this case I will restart on purpose.. but I want to go a few months first, to make sure I’m not addicted. [This makes no sense, does it?]

Whoever said dance like no one’s watching didn’t really mean it? Or did they?

Sometimes I wonder about the significance of the fact that the english word ‘mean’ means both ‘average’ and ‘cruel’.

I talked to a really cool guy last night.. he was just standing, waiting for the bus.. I’m slowly getting used to the idea that most of the people wandering the streets are, in fact, friendly.

Is P. right? Do I still see rejection where none exists? Am I outcast by my own mind? How humerous..

Maybe I should see a counsoler.

[watches the hard drive lights blink for a second or three]

I can’t shake the feeling that my reality comes in frames, with frames of nonreality interleaving. Or something.

Right eye swirls the colors togeather. Left eye renders absolute fact. Who would think that left/right stereotypes could apply to vision? Perhaps we’re never supposed to learn how to switch.

Being on the right side is almost like a drug experience in and of itself.

Why does it matter if I’m crazy? I have to be crazy to do what I have to do. But I must start moving forward again.. I’ve spent a year standing still on everything except making money, and in ten years, a hundred years, it will matter not one bit how much money I’ve made.

Learn to have perspective.

I’ve decided, after experimentation, that it’s better to have lots of friends than lots of money. I’ve tried both ways, and it’s pretty clear which one is more fun and ultimately more productive.

Maybe I’ll go to SeattleWireless’s hack night. I want to try and get the baby laptop working anyway.. and, really, isn’t that kind of thing what hack night is all about? That, and it sounds like I could find several friends in the SW crew. Apparently one of the founders is also a musician who records technoesque stuff.. maybe he’d like to jam sometime?

It’s rediculous that I have almost no friends to hang with.

Ah well.

back to work