Never been one to let the carrier drop

Well, I’m still here. I realize I haven’t had much to say of late – that’s because I’ve been in a strange sort of mental stasis. I guess I was avoiding actually thinking in the hopes that if I stopped, my life would go away. Or something.

I’m again working on the software for the mk3 boards, after quite a while of slacking. And qm.sheer.us has gained a average of one feature a day – at the current rate, in another year or so it might actually be pretty good.

Met with what may become my band the other day. Kind of a unusual situation – we all played every instrument.. [as in, I did one song on guitar, one song on drums, and a few songs on keys.. ] – I liked the vibe, and both the guitarist and the drummer seemed smart and leftward-inclined.

Speaking of leftward-inclined, I got a call from the guitarist from my *old* band [old here meaning when I was 18 or so].. I’m starting to think northern virginia poisens people’s minds. First Leeper, and now him – The quote I like the most is ‘I hate to think what would have happened if Gore had been president for Sept. 11th – he probably wouldn’t have done anything’.

Um, exactly.

So, let’s see.. which is better – killing a bunch of innocent people through disrupting aid efforts while completely failing to kill your target, or doing nothing.

Hrm. That’s not a very hard one, now is it?

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In other news, I note with some amusement that all of my doomsaying of past years is finally coming around, and the stock market is falling like a rock. Whups, I guess it wasn’t just the dot coms after all. In fact, as it turns out, some of the non-dot-coms were bigger con jobs than the dot coms.

I find george bush talking about financial accountability and responsability rather comic, though – I mean, here we have a guy who would almost certainly be doing time for a long list of things if the public ever found out a list of his crimes.

Anyway..

Quote from a story on MSN:

U.S. President George W. Bush said last week Washington would use all tools at its disposal to topple Saddam. He has branded Iraq part of an “axis of evil” supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Sometimes..

WE MAKE THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

WE DO.

Not Saddam, who may have some unsavory habits but probably couldn’t make a intertial guidence system with all the resources at his disposal..

Hell, he couldn’t even buy the silicon needed. Last I looked, his people can’t even buy antibiotics. And I don’t think there’s that much uranium in iraq.

We’re evil.

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Actually, maybe everyone’s evil. Wasn’t taht the tenant of some of the early christians? Mankind is fundamentally evil? Seems likely that it’s true.

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Last night, i dreamed I was in military school.

Not a particularly pleasant dream. I spent most of it running from the boss man, who was.. hrm.. a typical military asshole?

I was trying to tell him – and the students – why their entire way of thinking and existance was wrong. Unfortunately, the conversation wasn’t going so well, and so I was trying to escape the school..

I really wonder what this dream would ‘mean’, if I were one of those people who was inclined to assign meanings to dreams.

something must be wrong with the world.

[Link courtesy of

Not only do I have friends, but a suprising number of my friends also use the livejournal system. I should figure out what percentage of them are paying users – would be funny if LiveJournal had trouble running as a nonprofit because it kept making too much money.

My ‘friends’ page

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Ran into someone on the net today who told me that I was someone named ‘Mark’ in my past life who died in Berkeley, CA of a drug overdose in 1970.

Actually, I think i’ll just cut & paste the commentary. Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent

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X tells you ‘Yes. But your name was Mark, and you died of a drug
overdose in 1970 in Berkley, CA.’
X tells you ‘And you’re the reincarnation of him.’
X tells you ‘Hope that doesn’t ruin your day.’
You emote ‘Sheer chuckles. Not at all. But I would like to hear more..’ to
X
-> You tell X ‘Actually, dying from a drug overdose in berkeley doesn’t
sound like a bad way to go.. I’m guessing it wasn’t acid, though, that
usually doesn’t kill you. And I won’t touch the hard stuff..’
-> X tells you ‘Oh sure – you loved Sugar Crisp cereal, and you
kinda liked math and sci-fi cartoons, and after Sputnik you decided to go
into engineering. You also told your friends in college that you’d commit
suicide rather than go into the military if you were drafted.’
X tells you ‘Your dad was a high school science teacher, and your mom
was a nurse.’

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Now, what’s strange about this is that this person did not know me, approached me completely out of the blue and volunteered this information. I am, of course, inclined to take it with a grain or six of salt.. but.. still, it’s interesting. Probably just because I can see myself loving suger crisps and commiting suicide rather than going to shoot at innocent people.

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I wonder if the people who played ‘Born in the USA’ and ‘Keep on rocking in the free world’ for our 4th of July gathering of 20,000 people at the park realized that they were playing protest songs. I have to assume they did.. which I find very encouraging.

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I keep making progress on the mk3 software in fits and starts. It’s not that it’s a horribly complex problem – it’s just that there are so many little nitpicking peices involved. Today I wrote a more advanced serial debugger for the ‘wedge’, one that will let me look up variables and whatnot.

I also had a interesting idea last night.. instead of making a hard disk recording system that’s one big mondo computer, maybe we should try making one out of a network of microcontrollers..

but then, I always wanted stereo equipment to plug togeather with ethernet. Would be sooo much easier to deal with, you could have infinate inputs, outputs, and routings..

Ah well.

Shouts out to my newest reader! Thanks for joining, we’ll try not to bore you too much, but I am, let’s face it, a pretty boring person. 😉

So, the DMCA is winning, and 2600 just rolled over and played dead.

I can understand their point – of course they don’t have a prayer, none of us have a prayer against the powers that be in a land where justice is for sale to the highest bidder – but I’m still saddened.

Next up, pallidium. The consumers apparently accepted XP, so I suspect they’ll accept Pallidium too. And motherboards that won’t run linux..

It would appear that we’re too scared of everything from terrorism to economic collapse to care that we’re losing our freedom.

Well, said freedom was mostly illusion anyway. But we’re losing even the illusion, and we don’t, for the most part, care.

Sad, very sad.

Why can’t we turn off the TV?

Been watching lots of movies lately.. in fact, in the past four days, I have watched:

*) Men In Black
*) Scooby Doo
*) What’s the worst that could happen?
*) Smiling fish and goat on fire

Actually, the first two were rather comic – two movies in a row with talking dogs, even. I was actually the most impressed by Scooby Doo. I don’t know what it is with the movie remakes of 70s television shows, but this has to be one of the better examples of the genre..

I did, however, find myself more than mildly incensed by the 4 minutes (approximately) of full motion video advertisements taht preceded the movie.

In other thoughts..

You know, the christian church is what you get when you make god in man’s image.

Saw the great patriotic happenings at Gasworks park with P. – truly brilliant fireworks. And, being someone with a criminal record for fireworks posession [and someone who helped put togeather a fireworks show twice]

On a side note – what I want to do with the mpeg library..

is make it a library.

I know, mp3.com tried that. The music companies went nuts. But we could do something that mp3.com couldn’t do.

We could hold the physical assets.

If you have the physical CD, do you have the right to play it to ‘one’ person, for the cost of providing that service? (i.e. operating as a non profit corperation)

This opens up another interesting hole for you to slip through – because you don’t have to be *one* nonprofit. If only 1/1000th of the napster crowd are dedicated enough to set up a independant library service, you suddenly have a LOT of nonprofit orginizations to squash.

But the software has to be bulletproof.

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In the meantime, I seem to be repeating myself. I suppose this is what happens with senility – I’ll stop having new ideas shortly, and then I’ll just repeat the two dozen or so old ones I’ve had over and over in subtily different ways for the rest of eternity..

A survey of the computers in my house, for your amusement:

1) P4, 512M RAM, 120G disk, win2k/RH 7.3, ‘main dev machine’
2) Celeron 433, 64M RAM, 8G disk, NT 4.0, ‘NT test machine’
3) Celeron 433, 64M RAM, 8G disk, Win98, not mine.. P.’s machine
4) P-III, 192M RAM, 132G RAID-5, RH 6.1, file server
5) Celeron 433, 128M RAM, 2x20G disk, RH 6.2, firewall/web server
6) P-III laptop, 128M RAM, RH6.2/Win98, my typical travelling machine
7) G3 laptop, 128M RAM, OS 9, mac testing machine
8) K6-733, 40G disk, 128M RAM, Win98, 36″ SVGA display – TV replacement
9) 2xP-III, 128G RAID, 256M RAM, win2k, ‘music machine’
10) P-I, 64M RAM, win98, touchscreen/AVR programming station
11) p-I, 32M RAM, laptop, rh 6.2, car software dev and whatnot
12) Amiga 2k, 12M RAM, nostalgia purposes
13) Amiga 4k, 32M RAM, nostalgia purposes
14) P-III, 128M RAM, win98, game machine
15) Sparc 5, not currently in service
16) DEC Alpha LX164, not currently in service
17) DEC Multias, 2, not currently in service

This is getting a touch excessive. Even I have to admit that. 17 (!) computers, 15 of which have ethernet jacks.

Okay, so I find myself, though jcurious [I really should learn what the link format for people’s journals is] running into the journals of a whole lot people that I know.

This has good sides and bad sides. The good side is that I get to catch up, at least somewhat, on their lives. The bad side is that I get to find out what they made and make of my reactions to them and vice versa.

And, as usual, they think I suck. 😉

I should probably come to terms with sucking sooner or later.. the problem is that inwardly, deep down, I don’t want to suck. I still have some teenage compulsion to be ‘cool’ – long after there’s any hope of coolness, and long after I should have come to terms with the fact that there’s really not much point to being cool anyway..

I should just go about my business, try to survive and keep myself entertained. Maybe kill off a few more brain cells in some creative ways..

I don’t know.

Oh, and to friends of mine, please sign up for a account at qm.sheer.us, I’ll be locking it down soon and then you won’t be able to. 😉

On other related annoyance note, my second set of 30Gbyte maxtors seems to have gone the way of my first set – i.e. two of the drives have gone tits-up. Now this is getting sad and pathetic. When a set of warantee replacement drives does the same thing the original drives did – i.e. 2 out of the four drives fail – that’s just.. hrm.. pathetic? Sad? I wasn’t even pushing them that hard.

I’ll call maxtor warantee support and see what (if anything) they have to say. My option at this point is to either stop using maxtor altogeather, or get a replacement set of drives that is *not* from the 30Gbyte line.

S.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/

here you will find, among other things:

*) Description of a possible hardware implimentation designed to make the DMCA enforcable

*) Description of a possible attack to reverse engineer memory maps of microcontrollers, among other things.