Never been one to let the carrier drop

I was talking to a friend of mine on Brigidine (bandicoot.merseine.nu 9390) about T-shirts and misadventures, recalling the time I wore a linux T into a meeting at microsoft..

and this lead to recounting the story of the youth who wore a pepsi shirt to Coke day – and it occured to me – this guy was a local hero.

Maybe he originally did it as a joke.. and it is rather funny.. but he also was making a statement, possibly inadvertently, that his education was not for sale to any corperation that would make a business agreement with his school..

.. which is kind of a novel idea in this day and age, with channel one broadcasting to our children, coke and pepsi vying for their affections before they even get out of high school.. [start marketing to them early..]

No, seriously, I think it’s pretty shameful that we’re allowing our children to be invaded by corperate propiganda before they’ve learned enough to develop immunities to it. I remember back in my day (geeze, geeze) that we actually had, as part of our english courses, a few days spent on understanding the mechanisms of advertising – deliberate attempts to inject immunity from such things into us.

Now any teacher teaching people how to be immune from ads would probably be let go. Heck, students apparently get suspended for failing to toe the party line.

Nonconformity in a high school is a bad thing — The principal of Hylton High School, 1995

Here’s to all you future local heros out there.. those of you with the balls to inject your own signal on top of Channel One, wear Coke shirts on Pepsi day, point out in loud voices the obvious fallicy of nutritional education sponsered by McDonalds.. to the younger generation of intelligent rebels, we’re counting on you. Make it funny, and make it hit them where it hurts.

It occured to me the other day that LJ is the perfect medium for meme-echos to occur. Here we are, all reading each other’s journals.. (Well, I *think* we’re reading each other’s journals.. anyway, enough of you all keep commenting on mine to make me think I’m being read) and hence accepting the new input of each other’s ideas and being influenced by them..

So in a sense, the LJ community as a whole becomes one large ‘brain’ around which ideas echo, and in which we are each individual neurons. Of course, this is true of any community and any time people communicate, but the interesting thing about LJ is that there’s a record of it.

I wonder, if one took a computer and taught it to look for both correlations in who is friended who and correlations of ideas (as identified by keywords, URLs, etc) what one would learn? BEsides that quizzes migrate, which we already all knew 😉

I also wonder what, if a analasys was made, it would turn out the most popular ideas to mutter about were. I’m betting love and sex would be right up there, proving that humanity is what it is. (IT’s amazing, that with all the time we’ve collectively spent thinking about these issues, we haven’t found the perfect key to all happiness in sexual relationships.. you’d think.. ). But I wonder what topics #3 – #20 would be.

Carrier lights flickering in dusky twilight
Information dancing up a storm
VU meters dip to the beat, high as shit
Something about this scene is not the norm

Closing off the pulse, looking for the darkness
Turning up the dreams, looking for the light
Coming down from dreams, looking for a answer
Something about this scene is not quite right

Words scroll endlessly on the windows
People attest to care who lives or dies
Information living out it’s microsecond lifespan
Packets racing, no thought to hows or whys

Tube fed babies nestling in the flickering mirrors
“Buy now, you must have our product to be right”
Hard drive lights flashing on all the servers
Commercialism blazing terabits into the night

One single human sits behind one single desk
Thinking of one other single human who couldn’t care less
One single finger strikes one single key
One single answer finds its way to me

City spinning outward, the myriad millions
nine tenth asleep / one tenth awake
each one dreaming of commercialized answers
be rich and own a BMW, for capitolism’s sake

Did you see me there behind the windows
Could you recognize the flavor of my words
If I called tomorrow would you even answer
If I cried out, could you say you heard

Poetry, they say, is so self centered
Hard to imagine other, fictional plights
But you can write other people’s stories
You can send your own kilobits into the night

Hack the Spew!

Apparently Rep. Mark Souder (R-3rd/IN) declared on the floor of the house that drug use was “a sin” that must be stopped.

Okay, I have a few questions for the honorable (maybe) representitive. I don’t expect he’ll ever read my journal, but maybe this will help me marshel my thoughts for the next time someone says something like that in real life.

1) Have you ever had a drink? THat’s a drug, you’ve commited a sin.
2) If your children were suicidal, would you place them on psychoactive drugs (i.e. antidepressents)? That’s a drug, welcome to the sinful world.
3) Why is it we need laws against things just because some person happens to think they are sinful? I think war is a far, far bigger sin than any drug use could ever be – does that mean I can put the whole lot of you all in jail for authorizing a war on a false premise?
4) Why would drug use be a sin? This part I’m serously not getting. Maybe it’s because I haven’t done any of the hard drugs.. but my personal drug habits such as they are seem to me to be about as sinful as swatting a few moths. Really, I’m pretty sure they hurt nobody. They may stunt my personal development a very small amount.. but it’s a very small amount indeed, and they lead to much happiness.

ah well. I see my latest build is done, so I better go do some actual work. More on this theme later.. (and over, and over, and over..)

One of the things about working with Access in all it’s slowness is I have lots of time to do things like writing journal entries while I’m waiting for builds to finish

Feel like trash,
You make me feel clean
I’m in the black
Can’t see or be seen
Baby, baby, baby, light my way

A friend of mine once said, long ago, ‘Something’s up with the universe. Can you feel it?”.

Right now I definately get the sense something is up with my personal universe. I haven’t fully come to a understanding of what though, but it’s definately pretty significant, whatever it is.

Such memories.. I remember this song, crawling around my parents attic in fairfax wiring up the phone system and dragging speaker wires around in my teeth.. the Amiga I had built into my closet.. (I didn’t have a case for it, so I screwed it to a board. Eventaully this board found its way into a desk.. I remember the floppy drive, screwed into the desk.. I wish I had pictures, it was pretty funny.

I also remember booting the machine, a three floppy process as I copied all kinds of interesting things to the recoverable RAM disk.

I remember it was truly delightful the day I plugged in the hard disk. Ahh, no more flipping floppies.

Baby, baby, baby, light my way

Why is it no one ever puts big enough headphone amplifiers in CD players? It’s like they never consider that we might be driving full-size headphones with them.

Actually, this one isn’t so much not big enough (it does just fine on loud content) as it is not having enough gain for the quiet tracks.

I still remember how bitterly Spisak debated my assertation that these Labtec Elite-820s were good headphones. I have to admit, I’m still a little amazed.. but $10 for 20hz-20khz and something like 40 ohms impedance..

Okay, so I like low impedence phones. Quit smirking. I’m not a DJ, I’m allowed. To me it’s low impedence enough only if you can feel parts of the board / cd player / whatever warming up from the load. Nothing gives you that phat head-spacing bass like a nice 8 ohm pair of headphones. Hard on the battery life, though.

Of course, that was part of why Spisak was doubting my taste. No one goes for *LOW* impedence in headphones.

But you get so many more dBs per volt that way..

I haven’t found any phones.. and in this I include the $200 ones that the local music store sells.. that can match the 820s for precision bass, volume handling (i.e. doesn’t fall apart when driven at 1W), etc.

I think I better order some more pairs of them. [I tend to give them out to friends.. ‘here, check these out’.. ]

Heh heh heh. I just found a 24-pack of them. That might be a little bit of overkill.

Looking at digital cameras.. want to get a SLR, but don’t want to pay for it. Hmm.. What to do. I really like the ‘all-the-controls-are-on-the-lens’ style of my old Canon (35mm SLR) but I haven’t been able to find a digital with that style.

I wish I had some Dire Straits with me.. I’ve been feeling a hankering to listen to some.

I remember the first time I listened to ‘Money For Nothing’ – I got it because of the title track – just a MTV listener type, that’s me – but I remember how amazingly good I found it, starting from track 1. I was chipping paint from the back wall of my parents house, and I set up my stereo, with the two speakers that I’d rebuilt with piezo horns and good foam-surround woofers, driven by a Marantz receiver that I later gave to my dad and a Sony diskman.. and as I blasted away the paint with water, and scraped it with a scraper, I played that album over and over, and was totally floored with how good it was. (Aside from ‘Twisting by the pool’ which has always annoyed me)

I can still hear every song just by thinking about it.. such great stuff. It’s odd.. I think the memory of chipping paint off the house is fixed in my head *because* of the music.

I love the run in tunnel of love.. and brothers in arms, which ends with a line that is true eternally: But it’s written in the star light.. and every line in your palm.. we’re fools to make war on our brothers in arms..

And, of course, Telegraph Road.. a song I will never get tired of.

If I ever make anything a tenth as good as Dire Straits, I’ll be a happy camper.

One of the fun things about the job I do in Texas is the exciting oppertunity to dress up like a monkey every day, and go pretend to be, if not conservative, at least not so rabidly liberal that I’d donate to the ACLU or something. [Yes, I have. Card carrying member. Proud of it, too]

But, since I drop the act come lunchtime, this can lead to some amusing – um – confusions. One of the people who works here was overheard remarking I was very ‘Seattle’.

SEattle has become synonymous with liberal? Unreconstructed leftism, perhaps? [I’d try and point to P.’s journal entry on the subject, but I’ve given up on LJ-tags. They’re not consistant, and they don’t love me]

[I wonder if it would kill the LJ people to accept a few of the more obvious mispellings and perversions of their tags. I suppose every ounce of CPU counts.. ]

Anyway, come 1pm my ‘nice boy who would never march in the streets shouting about what a louse bush is’ act is back in place, and everyone is more or less happy.

But it’s always strange, when I catch myself in the mirrors which adorn so many of the cubicle walls.. [to make them feel slightly larger than the average elevator no doubt]. I don’t really recognize myself with my hair combed and tied back, in button up shirts and pants that don’t have Levi on them anywhere or any holes in them.

A friend recently asked if my hair was my security blanket. [And my old boss used to joke that like Sampson, if I were to cut it, I’d lose all my mysical make-the-machines-work powers]. I don’t think my hair is, exactly, but I think perhaps my entire appearance is. I find it reassuring that no one has yet managed to cram me into a suit and tie for more than a week at a time, and yet I’m not working at burger king. When someone does.. and I’m sure tehy will, sooner or later.. I’ll know that I’ve well and truly failed.

My friend at the search engine (Accenture? Overture? I can never remember what they’re called) emailed again offering me a job in pasadena. Oh, how nice. I’d take it, but I’ve got more than enough to do already.

Whups, dinner calls, must run

S.

Well, I saw fireworks from the freeway
and behind closed eyes I can not make them go away
Because you were born on the forth of july, freedom rings
but something on the surface it stinks

I said something on the surface,
well it kind of makes me nervious
who says that you deserve this
and what kind of god would serve this
We will cure this dirty old disease

Well if you’ve got the poisen, I’ve got’s the remedy

chorus
The remedy is the experience
this is a dangerous liason
the comedy is that it’s serious
this is a strange enough new play on words
I said the tragedy is how you’re gonna spend
the rest of your nights with the light on
so shine the light on all of your friends:
It all amounts to nothing in the end

I won’t worry my life away
I won’t worry my life away
End chorus

Well I heard two men talking ont he radio
In a cross-fire kind of new reality show
uncovering the ways to plan the next big attack
well they were counting down the ways
to stab the brother in the be right back after this
the unavoidable kiss
with the minty fresh breath, death is sure to outlast
this catastrophe
dance with me
Cuz if you’ve gots the poisen, I’ve got the remedy

[chorus repeats]
[bridge

When I fall in love
I take my time
There’s no need to hurry when I’m making up my mind
you can turn off the sun
but I’m still going to shine
and I’ll tell you why

[chorus repeats with really nifty bass walk behind it]

—————————————————————

Or, as Melissa Etheridge put it, Remember how they taught you, how much of it was fear. Refuse to hand it down – this legacy stops here

I’m sure we’re neither the first nor the last generation to recognize how much of our lives are ruled by fear – so many of the fears completely unreasonable, or even often pointless. [Of late I’ve been discovering that all of my friends are afraid of the same things that I am – the things that I always assumed that I was alone in being afraid of because no one else ever talked about them.]. Now which president was it who said ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself?’.

Why are we so afraid?

Well, the media is carefully set up to make us afraid. A afraid population is a population that is far easier to lead around by the nose.. it’s much easier to keep those damn radicals from complaining about the loss of their rights and civil liberties when you can play off the fears of the rest of the citizenry.. ‘We’re doing this for your own protection. See, you have to be afraid, be very afraid’..

It’s always comic watching old movies, seeing last year’s enemy. Once the germans, then the russians, and now the arabs are the bad boys. Who knows who it will be next year, but it’s for sure we’ll still need a enemy – and have a enemy.

I wonder, if I could ride inside the mind of the leaders of the world, of the broadcasters of the news and setters of the type, of those who spin the worlds events, if I could even understand their thoughts and mindsets..

I wonder where we learn to be afraid – is it something like hate, that has to be carefully taught? Did I learn fear of rejection through years of constant rejection? And why was I rejected?

I think it was Ani DiFranco who said They showed me a picture, and asked me which one was different and does not belong. They taught me different was wrong.

And I still remember the principal of Hylton high school, when faced with irrefutable logic, stating.. without even realizing how much he would skew forever my worldview by saying so, ‘Divirsity in a high school is a bad thing, absolutely’. I don’t think he would have said it if he’d realized how much of the school would know what he’d said the next day, and I still wish I’d had a tape deck, but he did, in fact, believe.

Look at standardized testing. The goal is to produce ten thousand identical units.. I think it was ‘The One And Only’ which said And you’ll find I can’t wear any uniform without some compromises, because you’ll find that we come in different shapes and sizes.

I will purge this fear from my life. I will say hello to strangers. I will hug my friends and near friends of both genders without worrying about what they think. Honestly.. how sick is it when you don’t hug someone because you think they might be afraid that you’re gay and attracted to them.. this has got to STOP.

I refuse to be afraid any more. [Now if only I could find the root password to my subconcious mind. Of course, one might make a good argument for not giving me that.. you delete too many fears, you might delete one that was important and was underpinning your survival. I mean, you have to figure that some of them are there for a reason. A fear of high voltages, for example, is probably reasonable for someone in my profession. ;-)]

Or perhaps I need to reword that thought too. A respect for high voltages is probably essentual. Fear, not so much.

Changing fear to respect.

Hmm

‘What do you care what other people think’ – Richard Feynman.

Except of course that I do. Entirely too much.

Back to work..

Actually, I’ve done lots of work today. But I’m going to pause for a breif station identification.

Moving ever closer to the perfect MP3 mix CD for working alongst to. Actually, I have two flavors of these – there are the 80s rock flavors and the trance flavors. [Depends on if I’m debugging or writing new code, and on how tired I am]

Anyway, a few favorite songs today

Sting – Desert Rose. [I’m sorry, I just looove this song – the version he did with Ceb Mani)
Jason Mraz – I won’t Worry (The Remedy) [Seems so appropriate, amidst all these paranoid and patriotic souls. I LOVE this song. Every once in a while I get a urge to mount my PA on the roof of my van and drive around playing it and jamming all TV signals. Then I realize that probably wouldn’t have the desired effect]
Roxette – Stars [I’ve always loved this one], a bunch of other Have A Nice Day stuff. 727.. such a upbeat depressing song. Salvation.. [sex is like giving someone your root password, except that you can’t change it afterwords. ]
REM – Fall On Me [This is rapidly climbing into my favorite songs list. I wonder if other people get the same meaning out of it I do.], Belong [always my favorite REM song], Losing My Religion, Stand [One of these days I’m going to go _do_ this.. I was trying to do it in my head and I got it all confused. I think when I stand in the place where I live and open my front door, I’m facing west, and then if I turn away from seattle I’m facing north. But it sort of scares me that I don’t know. Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t now?. I wonder if this is why I’m always getting lost.]
InSoc – Walking Away, How Long, Lay all your love on me
U2 – Walk on, In Gods Country, One Tree Hill [guess I was just in a U2 mood today]
Yes – Drama [Yes, the whole album. I looove that bouncing bass riff. I may have to sample it.]
Thailand Trance ANthems (who KNOWS who originally did it) – Neverending story, Second Nature
Queen – Who Wants To Live Forever
Cirque De Soliel soundtrack – Alligria [Freedom Circus! ;-)]
Dire Straits – Going Home
Shakira – Wherever Whenever
Simon And Garfunkel – America
Simple MInds – 7 deadly sins, she’s a river, all the things she said
Foghat – Sweet Home Chicago [sometimes you just need da blues…]
George Michael [don’t even say it!] – Father Figure, Faith [which I realized opens with the signature riff from ‘Freedom’.. why did I never get that before? it makes the song make so much more sense..], I want your sex [parts I and II], Hands To Mouth, Teacher
Infected Mushroom – Hallucinigin, Daddo Dirah, Blue Rythmic Night, Dream Theatre
Indigo Girls – Blood and Fire, Land of Canaan, Love Will Come To you [I almost started crying in the middle of that, though.. don’t listen to indigo girls at work. It’s a bad idea. luckily with my cold I’m sniffling so much anyway I doubt if anyone noticed]
Jackson Browne – For America [again, for good ol’ Texas]
Melissa Etheridge – Silent Legacy. [If I’d been really with it, I would have played this one at N.’s birth, too..]
Moodswings – Redemption Song [one of these days, I’ll have to write up my memory of listening to this song while tripping with one of my other LJ friends who knows who he is but is probably afraid they’d pull his security clearance if they knew he’d ever done such a thing.. there was a ‘perfect moment’ in there where the trees crystalized into fractals, and I was higher and happier than I’d ever been in my life, and suddenly, for just one breif second, everything made sense. Alas, the illusion faded all too quickly, leaving me as confused as I ever am.]

It’s amazing. There are no longer any sounds in any of this music I don’t know how to make. Not that I could have written any of it, but at least now I don’t sit there tearing my hair out and wondering ‘how did they DO that?’.I need to try some more multilayer recording, as soon as I get my mac back. [sniffle – still no call from the mac store. What are they _doing_ to it?]

So I started the paragraph below to thank JL for saying some things which, even though he probably had no idea of their significance to me, were really helpful. And then I just, um, forgot to stop. Some of you might find the list amusing.

Thanks to and for making me feel like I’m not nearly as alone as I thought. And to for the long and interesting discussion about meta-thought. [For the meta-challenged, that’s thought about thought, which sounds recursive mostly because it is. Facinating subject – I never get bored of it.]. And to Martin for being my friend. And to for too many things to list – whether this is a intermission or the curtain, it’s been fun and wonderful. And to for reassuring me that everyone roots for the Phantom (among other things). And to for being a good friend, and once much more. And to and Scott for talking, listening, and being nonmundane, and reassuring me that nonmundanity is good. And to for being a good friend and a facinating source of ideas and thoughts. And to for the jam, and introducing me to drugs, sex, and rock and roll – not neccesarily deliberately, or in that order. (Also for going out and having a good time with me the last time you were down here.. you gotta come to Seattle more). And to Martin, who doesn’t even read this, for making me laugh more than I have in months, among ten million other things. And to Linnea, who definately doesn’t read this, for teaching me a whole lot about myself. And to Ron, for giving me the experience of rockin’ the house. And to Lee, for teaching me, learning from me, and generally being a inspiration to me. [If I ever do grow up, I think I want to be like Lee.] And to Vinnie, for everything you were. Gone, but not forgotten – and if someday you want to talk to me again, you’ll know where to find me. And to Jessica, for apologizing. [It wasn’t neccesary, but it was a really, really nice thing to do and I’m truly touched]. And to Lucas and Joan, for taking me to my first rave. And to Sean and John, for jamming with me, and trying to keep me from harm when I had left myself. And to Jane, for the laughter, and Lisa for the company, and Esen for talking to me when I needed it, and Diane for kicking my ass when I needed it, and H.K. for being a world class partier to aspire to. And to Killroy for inviting me to all those parties, and to Chief for 420, and Leo & Mac for the car, and Mish for, well, I’m not really sure what, but I’m sure there are things ;-). And Scott for believing in me, and Greg for pushing me just hard enough but never too hard, and Dan S. for making me plug in and play, hence conquering one of my biggest fears even if I did suck. And to the music and the network, without which my existance would be quite pathetic indeed.

I may not have very many local friends. (if you stretch a point, like 7 of them. Probably three I see every month) But in total friends, I am blessed indeed. They’re just scattered throughout the U.S. and occasionally elsewhere. Thanks to all of you. I should print out this list to keep on my wall for when I’m feeling especially alone. Especially since it’s not even complete.. I’m sure I have other friends & once-friends lurking out there.