Never been one to let the carrier drop

Trying very hard to concentrate and get work stuff done.. my todo list grows ever longer

Laundry for 5 days
Documentation! (must get screen grabber)
Get DLL stuff copied to laptop
Pack 2 laptops, CDs of music, handheld, parking meter, headphones, partridge, pear tree
? install reason on little laptop ?
SEe if P. will stop by every couple of days and check for boxes [canadian customs seems to have delayed my package in shipment.]

Wanted: your samples of yourself. Do you have any funny sayings? Un-funny sayings? Thoughts about the universe, (or life, or Everything?) Record samples in a low noise enviornment and e-mail them (44khz 16-bit mono WAVs preferred) to sheer@sheer.us.

Also Wanted: Your favorite spoken-word samples, period. Favorite recordings of comics, movie quotes, whatever. If you have truly large files, contact sheer@sheer.us for ftp space. Otherwise, just e-mail them to sheer@sheer.us

1) The tunnel. (This is going to be a *lot* of work – hopefully a smallish stereo will be as effective as a full PA in terms of making ‘the chord’)
2) Mechanical parking meter in 8 or 9 ways, for rhythm tracks
3) Hard drive array spinning up. [Then we start pushing and pulling on it]
4) 56k negotiation and connect. [So it’s been done before, so what?]
5) ‘This call can not be completed as dialed..’ (I wonder if AT&T has copyrighted this and will then sue me?)
6) Bush being a asshole. [This shouldn’t be hard. Really.]
7) Dan Spisak doing Monty Python. [No, I don’t know how I’m going to do this either. Maybe I’ll invade him with a tape recorder while i’m in SoCal. Good thing he doesn’t read my journal. ;-)]
8) Esen
9) Spoons and chains
10) Okay, so I could only think of 9. That’ll be enough to get me started

Okay, enough with the lists already. I better go download a framegrabber and write some documentation.

Must remember to put out the sunflowers before I leave. Otherwise bad things will happen.

I think I will plant sunflowers next year. Never mind the fact that my thumb is not only not green, it’s not even brown..

Okay, enough slacking. More work! [gets out whip and whips himself] Mush you huskies, mush! mush!

This isn’t working.

Had a fun night with Martin.. 6 hours of misc database parking meter boringness, then we jammed for a couple of hours.. [First with him on guitar and me on the keys, then vice versa.. ], then we played a couple of hours of GTA.. [ahh, the memories.. ]

Felt good to laugh. We’ve developed sort of a tendancy to taunt each other while we’re playing, and it’s just sooo funny. We each won one game.. which I suppose is predictable. I’ll have to dig up STA and C&C so we can play some more strategy-oriented stuff the next time he’s down here.

[Hmm.. it occurs to me that Craig might like video games. Or he might not – how many people who work at a pizza hut enjoy eating pizza, after all?]

Definately have to try and dig up some more real-life-friends. How does one make friends of the real, flesh-and-blood, in the same city persuasion? Should I get a part time gig at the music store? [I wonder if they’d hire me? I’m sure they would if I offered not to charge them.. some other subtle advantages to that, also – chances to play with LOTS of assorted hardware.. ]

I’ve had many other journalish thoughts, but I’m letting them simmer for a while. Martin’s journal package (he’s writing one) has a ‘drafts’ feature.. I like this idea a lot. I guess one can get a similar effect on LJ by marking a entry ‘private’, but it’s not nearly as convenient.

Martin is here, working on database stuff and stats.

I’m getting sick or something, which is not making me a happy camper, since I am flying to texas on Sunday.

Work goes well, if slowly.

Went to see Phantom of the Opera last night with P. – I still always find myself rooting for the Phantom – I wonder how many people do? I mean, sure, he’s a murderer and a terrorist and whatnot, but still..

Certainly people always clap the loudest at the end for the Phantom. Maybe everybody has a soft spot for the guy..

Nothing else new to report. My life is as always..

I was a Bad Sheer and bought a sampler on e-bay – so much for budget plans 😉 On the other hand, I just landed another several-day job in SoCal with the high-bucks people, so my financial future is still looking quite rosy.

I suppose i should pay in quarterly taxes, then I wouldn’t be tempted to spend my tax money.

Some day the IRS is going to come lock me up and throw away the key.. I mean, I try to follow most of the rules most of the time, but.. first of all, it’s hard to want to pay a lot of money into te system when they do such _horrible_ things with the money I do give them, and second of all, it’s all so _complicated_..

Went out psy-trancing the other night, which was a lot of fun.. was among those spinning, and kicked tail as usual. Saw Craig again, and some of the other regulars who I have not yet gotten to know.

It would be nice to have real life friends. 😉 I realized, hanging out with Martin (old RL friend from SoCal/Epoch) that I haven’t really had any for a while, besides P. – now that she doesn’t live here any more, I won’t see _anyone_. How eerie. In SoCal I had several friends who would drop by every once in a while, or who I would hang out with after work. But I’ve usually made friends through work, and, well, consulting just doesn’t have that many chances for social interaction. And all the people I do know through consulting live in other parts of the world, since almost all of my consulting is determinedly not local.

I just got.. get this.. a spam asking me to support Bush.

No shit. Really. Not a forwarded email, a genuine spam.

I don’t know if this is a republican thing or a democrat thing.

I’m not sure which would be funnier.

I had another nightmare last night. This one was far, far stranger than the first one.

I had a next door neighbor who was only visible when he was near his house.

His lover was always visible.. and would stand out in the front yard crying, waiting for him to appear.

I tried to ask him why he was only visible near his house, and I got the strange sense of my left and right eyes being pulled away from each other, almost like I was being pulled into another dimension or something.

Then I tried asking closer to the house and he explained it, and I know his explanation made sense, but I Don’t remember a single word of it.

So I had a couple of friends over (who happen to live on the other side of the world, Scott and Cori) and was explaining to them about my strange next door neighbor, when he walked through one of the walls and roared ‘YOU TOLD SOMEONE ABOUT ME..’ – and I just knew he was going to kill us all.

Then I woke up.

I don’t usually have nightmares.. having two in one week is a little disturbing. Hopefully this will be the last..

Or not all of.

A subset. Sheer is a subset of god. If indeed god there be.

Vibe would tend to suggest that humans are networkable, at least in some sense. They may not be networkable the way computers are.. I can’t think a thought in the direction of someone else and have it arrive.. or at least, I don’t _think_ I can think a thought at someone else and have it arrive, although sometimes some very strange things do happen..

but the experience of vibe *to me* makes it reletively clear that humans are networkable. I can experience something that is larger and more expansive than I am.

[I still resent the fact that the RAVE act is a direct assault on the closest thing to a religion that I have. Whatever happened to the first amendment? If they passed the RAPE act.. [stop priests from raping young boys by finding their churches responsable and charging them millions of dollars] we’d never hear the end of it..]

Remember our ‘mottos’?

What did mine mean? I’ve finally realized I don’t know, and don’t understand it one little bit.

(Mine, if you’ll recall, was ‘I am not god’.)

S.

THose of you who can’t stand such things should probably skip this entire entry. I’ll try and make it a lj cut

Well, good things and bad things have happened today..

On the bad things list, we’ve discovered a flaw in the charger boards [or our calculations, or something] which will require soldering a capacitor across a surface mount part on all thirty. Rats and shucks and drat and such.

On the good news list, Lee has, in yet another moment of brilliance (he has a lot of those.. ) figured out a way around BOTH the nasty-heavy-ugly-transformer circuit for transferring energy and the nasty-ugly-get-rid-of-too-many-watts circuit.

One wire. Probably can carry network data as well.

How does he do it?

Well, I’d probably better not divulge any of the details since it’s not my idea and he might want to patent it or something.. I haven’t yet gotten a definate ‘yes, sheer, you can use this’ but he doesn’t seem massively adverse to the idea either..

So hold onto your seats, it looks like the SheerREg has become the ‘Scotty’ [the name has to do with the cheapness of Lee’s latest brainchild] and can actually _move power around_. Series battery regulation never had it so good.

I’m not sure if I”m happy that we’ve found a new and far, far better solution to the problem (I even got Electronics Workbench to admit that it will work – and if it will admit that it will work, it almost surely will – it won’t even admit that a AM radio will work. ;-)).. well, Lee’s found a new and better solution, I haven’t done much except list reasons why I can’t believe it will work..

or unhappy that the Tango chargers will not, in fact, be done at the end of this week –

and can’t run the nifty token-ring version of the bus I envisioned even if they were done.. it’s just too tanj fast.. or they’re too tanj slow..

I mean, these things have trouble communicating at 9600 baud. It’s truly pathetic..

Well, two more days in sunny, warm Minnesota, then it’s back to (brrr) seattle and (boring) parking meters. IT’s been a good semi-vacation, and I’ll be hopefully all recharged and ready to knock out some serious parking-meter-age..

S.

soon to be alone.

Well, not really, but sort of.

I’m sure it will be good for me.

I wish ..

I don’t know what I wish any more.

S.