a ba'b'ian journal

• December 30, 2003

• December 15, 2003

• December 15, 2003

there is more to computer programming than algorithms. computer science, as best i can tell, is mathematical (ie abstract) analysis of algorithms. programming also involves domain knowledge and historical knowledge. a big component is an appreciation of programming styles, and just basic understanding of other programmers. not only for working with their code--which is the biggest part of programming, but also working with them. knuth got it right--computer programming is an art, and "computer science" is a terrible thing to call a study of computer programming. engineering almost captures it, since there is more of a doing-ness about it. programming really is learned by doing, which makes it more of an art.

silence is not a message. too often i have found women who thought they could convey something by silence. unfortunately, not saying something does not necessarily imply not wanting to communicate, as much as they might think it does. guys quite often don't communicate for other sorts of reasons, because we have a different approach to interacting that fosters independence, such that not talking can have completely different sets of reason. sharing things by talking is just not the male way of doing things, which is it for females, so cutting that off just doesn't have the same sort of implication, or meaning. and they just don't seem to get that.

why is it that i always want to look for a job in the early morning when i can't sleep and not in the afternoon after work and there are actual people to talk to? maybe i hate the talking to people part, because that's where the constant rejection happens.

and it's more natural to take naps in the afternoon. industrialized society has made it so that people need to be up, out, and doing stuff during all the daylight hours, and they say that's normal, but really, it isn't so biologically normal.

a twelve year old was the youngest person to break out in country music. tom petty said once about his fairly mediocre musical performance: "it's rock and rock, it doesn't have to be good." that goes a lot more for cuntly music. and it doesnt even sound very good. but rednecks like having a distinctive poor white music. country music fits the bill.

black man carrying papers crossing estate at poplar going east into the sun had a tear under his right eye. it was cold. wiped it off with his glove.

• December 14, 2003

that milk is poison. i had to get out of there. i'm languishing. i need to really move away. dude.

read the dark elf trilogy. three books in two days. eight hundred pages. kind of a page turner, though very cartoonish fantasy characters. a drow, though. i guess i really love drow. existentially angst. trying to be good when assumed to be evil because different. odd explanation of diety as immanent. drizzt's culture worships the spider queen. finds a ranger who reveals that his goddess is in his heart. and sitting on the mural here:
"God/Goddess
one dollar
demeter and Dionysus
Celestial Concepts Earth"

i'm hoping to go out christmas shopping. i am really not in the spirit, though. i'd really rather go stay with holly for the holidays. last year, i was thinking that, at least. she doesn't write much now.

FRL--former regime loyalists. I just found out that they got saddam after i got back. on 60 minutes edan rather's review of his prewar interview, the arab guy he was chatting with. said the miltary uses the acronym FRL which he says is "former regime loyalists". well, knowing americans and acronyms, that clearly means something more like "fucking rag-head losers"

the darn mall. abercrombie and fitch had model dudes not wearing shirts. and a blonde girl, i think. very aryan. i just wanted to go up to them, sun salute, and say "Heil, Hitler". It made me quite angry, and i feel bad that i wimped out.

Drizzt also became a ranger. a fighter in tune with nature who fights the bad races to protect the good ones. sort of a romantic thing. it seems like i ocassionally would pose the question "how should I live?" as what kind of character should I play. not a terribly bad way of thinking about the problem. but if i make the mistake of thinking that the d&d character types are all the options, then i do have a problem. not that they aren't an interesting list. it's just that they are about ways of life for an adventurer. they are exciting ways to be. i don't think after all i really want anything exciting, whereas, as something to dream about, i have had a bad tendency to think that something that isn't a grand adventure is not also a noble way of life.

my mom is spending a lot of time clipping coupon. that just does not seem like a valuable use of time. it does save money, i guess, but it would be better just to make more than try to save on little bits.

doug just got a porche. he's still working on his first childhood. but then, so am i.

• December 6, 2003

• November 29, 2003

the Blockbuster I go to has a large number of movies for sale that they don't rent. _clan of the cave bear_ is one i'm thinking of. I know they want to optimize their income, but jeez, dude, try just increasing the quality of your service, in their case their rental selection, instead of doing something sleazy like that. I need to say that most of them we rmmMmemeane very obscure, discounted dvds that probably wouldn't rent well, but they could try just making more room or something.

• November 28, 2003

i finally cooked an egg in the microwave using the little omelette plastic cooker dish. it was really fast and convenient and I will probably have to do it more often. i've had the little gadget for a while and haven't used it, i think mostly because i have a bit of fear of cooking eggs in the microwave because they explode. but i'm now sure that it's only eggs in the shell that explode. which they certainly should. i've been using a microwave egg boiler gadget that is ingenious in being essestially a shield from microwaves sitting above a little tub of water that gets boiled. the eggs are cooked basically by sitting in a steam chamber, which holds them right at the boiling point of water for however long it's running. but that takes ten minutes to cook them to roughly hard boiled. cooking the eggs directly with microwaves in the omelette cooker took about 2 minutes for two, which is the kind of speed I really expect from a microwave. it did turn out a little bit rubbery, though, which wasn't great. it tasted fine, though. i cook a lot of stuff in the microwave because it's easy, and i think it tastes good, but i am sort of afraid it's not good enough for other people. it doesn't look like conventionally cooked food because it isn't browned. but really, browned is bad-- the food has changed chemically and some of the breakdown products are actually somewhat bad for you, though there isn't very much of it, and digestive systems really do deal with a lot of stuff that isn't good at all. like bacteria. it really probably would scare people to really know how much live bacteria they actually eat. most of it is completely harmless, and the worst thing about bacteria and food is that some bacteria simply excretes poisonous material, and it's that stuff that actual causes the food poisoning, not the bacteria themselves, which pretty much die immediately when they hit the brutally acidic stomach. anyway, i basically don't cook fancy, eye-appealing stuff like a mom would. but i think i should finally admit to myself that i actually cook very well. my food tastes very good, though i guess i really dont cook vegetables like i should. the comparison i would make is with kim. she cooked for me a lot, and as a mom, she cooks a lot. but she had trouble cooking rice other than with the little bag things. i tried cooking a duck for her, and somehow manage to do the worst job i have ever done cooking a duck--maybe i wasn't used to that stove or something. but she was nice about it. and one time she was over at my place, and i gave her some of my favorite easy cheap convenience microwave food. chicken leg quarters nuked from frozen with microwaved potatoes. it doesn't look like much, but i really like it and i eat it pretty often, like almost every day. i think she was really hungry, but she said it was good (then again, she has always been nice).

lately i have been deep frying stuff more, and it was kim who fried some stuff for me and got me over my fear of frying. unfortunately for me, lately i've been buying stuff at fried chicken places, trying to evaluate where is the best to get it, because it is just about my favorite food. i used to eat a lot of frozen fried chicken as a convenience food, but i actually like the plain cooked from frozen stuff better. at least better than the frozen fried chicken stuff, which lately has seemed as good to me. freshly fried stuff is a nice treat for me, though i tend to eat too much when i get it. now kfc has 12 pieces for 10 bucks, which is pretty good. a lot of the other places are about the same, but it doesn't taste so good. one store i went to recently, those only has original recipe and hot and spicy, and i tried the original recipe again, and i just dont like it. their extra crispy is just about the best. i tried popeye's recentely, and it was just too bland. church's actually seemed to have the best flavor of any of them, and they cut their pieces a little different--a wing actually has a third of the breast attached, though that made the other breast pieces smaller, of course. it seemed like the breast was cut into three pieces, which would have made them really small. but at least they used fairly big chickens. i got kroger's store chicken, which is the cheapest you can get around here at $5 for eight pieces, but they use teeny tiny midget chickens, and it doesn't taste particularly good, and it is always long cooled off. it just isn't worth it at all. and when i was there, i asked at the counter for some, and they directed me to stuff that had been sitting out already boxed, long sitting under the hear lamps, like i might not be particular enough to want some fresher stuff. kind of pissed me off. bruce's dad, a bit of a gormand, said the best chicken in town was at jack pirtles, but i have tried the one next to platinum plus two or three times, and it is always dissappointing, the taste isn't very good, and it has always been cold. i'm probably going to have to break down and start frying up my own, if i can find a good way to defrost the leg quarters. i hate having to plan it in advance and take some out to defrost, because it's supposed to be comfort food-- convenient-- and i just don't know in advance that i'll feel like it. the best chicken, though, that i have ever had, without question, is gus's fried chicken down town, but down town is very far from being convenient, and the stuff is a little bit expensive, though not all that expensive really, i suppose, considering how much i've wasted recently on fast food chicken that wasn't very good. maybe i'll go down there soon. at least it will remind how it can be done right, and it might inspire me to do it myself. i tried recently frying some pieces without any breading, and it was really nice to have it hot right out of the oil. i did over cook it a little, and i think the oil soaked breaded "skin" is one of the best things about the stuff, and this didn't have it, so it wasn't really the best. i was inspired by bruce, who always fries turkeys this time of year. but my oil turned red and cloudy, and i don't know if now it isn't ruined. i had many batches of fries with no problem or change, but this was way diferrent. i'd hate to have to buy five dollars worth of oil every time i want to cook a dollar's worth of chicken. we'll see.

i'm sitting here at the camel, which might be temperance, but probably no one will show up. people are off, so they wouldn''t be coming in from work. and it looks like there is no one at the hotel. band setting up. i can handle a beer. there comes david n.

• November 27, 2003

I really hate the word "blog". Binary log. It's so grungy. Sounds like "slug". Or maybe "blech". But I guess it's the word that's now being used for what I've been writing for the past few years. I think I'm going to stick to "online journal", even though, since it isn't "daily", that isn't really accurate.

I just had a couple of dreams which really stick out. And though I'm not a hard-core Freudian, I still think he had a valuable idea about the usefulness of dream interpretation. He's gotten a bad rap, since a lot of his dogma is not especially scientifically valid, but dreams are certainly symbolic, since our minds are symbolic, and bits that come up in dreams that a disturbing enough that we think about them when we don't understand them can clearly lead to personal insight. You don't have to accept that some subconscious process is sending messages to some other mental area. It would be enough that dreams were a fairly random source of inspiration-- perhaps like shapes in clouds. Anyway, the first one had a woman who had about a 2 inch diagonal slash on her left front abdomen, and so her bare midriff was just covered in blood. Now, I know this had a little to do with the Tomb Raider 2 thing I had just seen, where Lara cuts herself to attract a shark to get her out of an hidden underwater cave. I though that was both disturbing-- a woman cutting herself has personal resonance with me, and I really hate the idea-- and silly, but like I said this relates to something personal. Man, normally I don't shrink from talking about that kind of thing, but I won't say anything at this point. Anyway, so there is this woman with a tummy covered in blood, but she doesn't really look like she is doing so bad. I was thinking about this after I woke up, and was trying to come up with a technical term which i have forgotten. "someone who suffers for christ". This image, of course, was of a "stigmata", which i found looking it up on dictionary.com is just the greek plural of stigma which means mark or tattoo which in latin referred to marks of slaves. Stigmata refer to wounds that are like the wounds that christ suffered, and yes, they usually mean ones on the hands from the crucifixion (though really the nails went into the wrists), but jesus did also get stabbed in the side, and the depictions i remember are on the left right in the same spot. trippy symbolism for me, then. and i've decided it had resonance for me (I kept thinking about it) because personally i have a bad tendency to feel nobility in suffering, and I need to get over it. I googled "nobility in suffering" and found some church dude taking about it. he did talk about how thinking suffering had some kind of meaning or value was a common enough interpretation, but really a poor one. his feeling was that the resurrection actually makes suffering meaningless, but suffering does give people exposure to god's mercy. it all sounds like a crock to me, but it is good to realize that i might have gotten caught up in one of those pernicious cultural mistakes that "sometimes pain is good". And, some of the symbolism must have been about conspicuous suffering, and having it all out in view. The other dream image, which seemed like it had a similar theme, was a little more obviously movie inspired. for some reason, i and a bunch of folk, were in a clubhouse or something, and through the glass doors out back, you could look into a field, and in the field, we could see Tom Cruise dressed up like he was in that _Last Samurai_ movie, and he was doing some kind of martial arts training, that involve breaking pieces of wood by hitting it with sort of straight cupped finger tips (instead of, say, with a karate chop hand blade or with his knuckles) it was actually plywood sheets, and he was actually chopping it up pretty good. he was clearly getting tired out though, and sometimes he wouldn't break it up. And it was the actor, and not some character, and it really seemed like maybe he had kind of lost it or something, so we all went out there. the group i was with included some of the folks from the philosophers' club who have actually had really martial arts training, and i was getting the feeling that Mr. Cruise had let the month or whatever of movie training get to his head and make him think he actually know what he was doing, even though he probably didn't really know what kind of damage he could have been doing to himself and risk he was taking. And I thought that was pretty much the consensus. And he was breaking the wood as it lay on the ground so I asked "do you need a holder?" and we picked it up for him. another sheer a ways away had been on a kind of box stand, and it was ripped up pretty good. I would definitely say this all doesn't mean much, just your typical dreaming brain coming up with patchwork imagery, but it does again have the notion of suffering conspicuously as if it were a good thing.

and i'm feeling a little sick. runny nose (maybe it's just because it's gotten colder), and a little bit of nausea, though that isn't unusual for me. just need to rest up.

and thanksgiving day has simply become "turkey day". i think this year really marks the end of real thanksgiving as the most popular way to cook turkeys around here is to deep fry them. that really has nothing to do with the model thanksgiving, as turkey is now just comfort food with only a distant ritual meaning that is basically lost. it's now about the food and not the thankfulness at having the food.

but one thing i'm doing today instead of having turkey with the family is putting out food for the birds in the feeder in the back. squirrels keep coming, and I've been shooting at them with a pellet gun. maybe i could kill one and eat it, but it mostly just scares them away so birds can it. just a few minutes ago, a bluejay flew over to it, and must not have seen anything, because it looked a bit at the plate, and then on the ground, where i spread seed because it is easier for a whole bunch of them to eat at once, and then flew off. for a few minutes after that, there weren't any birds at all. then i looked again, and there were about a dozen. and i realized that i don't care if they are thankful. i only care that they are fed. of course, i have always had a problem with the notion of thanks. it denies selflessness and altruism to think that thanks are desired. "cheapens the gift"

a word or two about the chicks on match.com who have a very high opinion of themselves. I've been looking at the women on match.com, and it is true that some of them seem pretty nice. but i've notice that a few of them who are somewhat above average in intellect really think they are extremely special. the ones who have had sense enough to be moderately fit and pretty smart seemed to really feel entitled to a rich smart guy, as little a trick it is to be fit and above average. perhaps it's true that women can be choosy, but what seems to have happened is that these girls, having constantly having guys to choose from, because we are such lapdogs, that they really are special. lots of positive reinforcement. great self-esteem. but generally covering up an appalling shallowness.

so president pinhead went to iraq. pretty cool, i have to admit. ballsy. maybe not super bright, but still. he did say something that oddly started making a bit more sense since he said it over there. he said they are fighting terrorists over there so they don't come to north america. and i have to admit, a lot of the really violent psycho martyr wannabees that hate america can and do just drive over to iraq to kill americans, and we can just kill them off one by one. we take losses, sure, but body by body, we actually will be killing off terrorrists. it's almost a crazy approach--making ourselves easy to reach targets so we can just kill the bad guys in a war zone-- but it makes sense in it's barbaric military way. the danger, of course, is that we are making enemies, but now that they occasionally go after the iraqis themselves, they might actually lose support of your dye-in-wool raghead.

• November 23, 2003

• November 17, 2003

• November 14, 2003

i'm getting the feeling that most people that you hear about who have become enlightened are the ones who were extremely self-absorbed in their personal quest, and you here about them because it is that aspect of their personality that holds out and makes them get the point of being well known. fame may be an acid fruit--a warning rather than a draw--and perhaps the best teachers are the anonymous ones.

• November 13, 2003

why would you hide stuff from people who don't care? what are you afraid of? that they might suddenly care and then take advantage of you? you can't live your life as a bunny in a hole. unless you are just very furry.

• November 12, 2003

• Novmber 11, 2003

controlled flight relies on wing warping (ailerons in modern planes) which control roll. Stability can come from proper control or natural dynamics. The natural dynamics usually provide a linear operating region which is fairly easy to control and has enough stability that control isn't too tough. I'm watching the show on the wright brothers. a propeller is a spinning wing. The did empirical science with a wind tunnel to find out aeronautical wing data. they had an extremely efficient propeller based on their data which ensured their success. dec 17, 1903-- sustainedflight at kitty hawk. they were practical bicycle builders who had to develop basic science. tinkers. bicycles have a hidden stability because spinning wheels act sort of like gyroscopes.

An intelligent engineering program would be a great ai system. solving problems based on knowledge is what intelligence is about.

i was really sleepy today because i hadn't gotten to sleep till late. i was thinking i was going to go try to go meet space cadet claire, but after a nap, i was still tired, and decided i wasn't feeling very sociable today. and it's been like that every time i was thinking about going over there. and i've been thinking i should give up. i was going to talk to her about getting into teaching, but since she's into physics and i've realized that i don't have any friends into hard science at all,and i'd like some , i've had this strange pressure, fear of messing up thing going. grr.

right after major conflict in Iraq was over, and let's at least admit that now we really don't have major conflict in that same sense, though we do have about 30 incidents a day which could be called guerilla bombing, the pro-war peoplefelt vindicated. It was a triumph of the strength of military violence to destroy a nasty strong man. It is clear, though that the strong man kept the peace. It should also be seen, though, that people who lived there believed in the whole way of life under a strong man. It is right to them that violence should be used to preserve their way of life. The most stunning thing for me has been to see an Iraqi doctor on TV say that the security they had made them wish we had not moved in. I guess they were looking at the brightest part of their old way of being. But then, someone well off like that was probably benefitting more than a lot of others. They could walk down the street in Bagdad in total safety, and now they can't. They were used to that, and it has changed. Maybe now we are in a transition phase and eventually things will get back to that, but there is something else going on too. There are many people there who believe in the culture of military violence being the right way to establish security. And so we have plenty of resistence fighting. The army just dissolved away when the American forces were clearly winning. This makes sense to that mindset. But to that same person who will give up to the strong, it is also right to attack when they see weekness. And that's what they do. Of course, it may well be true that the American military has the same mindset, but they also have a home to go to where the system isn't handled quite so ruthlessly. And I'm still not sure whether Iraqi has been more deadly to Americans than Los Angeles in the same period. And I feel almost certain that drunk drivers in America have killed more people than the American military has killed Iraqis. We're all pretty vicious mad-dog killers here, and really in the end it just got to the point where the rag-heads finally pissed us off enough to invade. Starving babies just hadn't been enough for us.

• November 10, 2003

and dude. i'm sitting here in starbucks. there's a rugged looking dude sitting there studying international law. and so far, three really hot chicks have walked up to him and started talking. people who know him from school, it seems like. but still, dude, get some priorities.

the charlie brown christmas stuff came on the box. they started into and then skipped over the first couple to get to linus and lucy, then started over and turned it up. manager dude said it was the best christmas song ever. not officially christmas till we have it.

woah! so, i leave the starbucks, and decide to drive over to bookstar to pick up a copy of "the elegant universe". i was going to get one at borders, but they didn't have any in stock. and as i'm sitting at a the light at poplar and white station, a tubby guy on a motorcycle pulls out into the intersection, takes a spill, and obviously breaks his arm. i'm just sitting there, and i pull out the phone to call 911. other folks have gotten out of their cars, and a couple of folks have walked over from the starbucks there, and there is a little crowd of half a dozen folks. around this guy lying in the street. traffic of course is stopped. and it's taking a few rings for 911, and i see at least two people standing over him on the phone, so i hang up. and dude from car on my right i waving me through the intersection. i don't go at first, but then seeing that this isn't too big a deal--dude clearly broke his arm, but he's got plenty of folk around and he'll be ok, so i just go on. then i make to bookstar. i see that it closes at 10, and i check the clock on my phone and it says 9:55 so i go on it. door isn't locked, but dude at the counter said they just closed. i knew exactly what i wanted, but that bugged me, so i didnt argue. grr. now i'm trying to chill down from that bit of a shock, plus the caffeine of a venti soy chai. there was a table of policemen sitting outside here, and now there are a couple sitting inside. a cute red-head also came in, and before i could find the journal entry from april of last about stephanie the nursing student whom she reminded me of, she and her friend were out the door. ah well.

one project that would be nice to actually do and finish would be to set up a big antenna and get my wireless to a range where i could use it at starbucks. maybe the tv antenna would work. point it at the right direction. i don't know if the frequency is right for it. the distance i need is three miles, and that isn't unreasonable. the little pringles can directional thing is supposed to go 10 miles. it's all line of sight, anyway.

thinking about long distance wireless internet, i should forget about starbucks. i should go for hooters and platinum plus. much closer. actually, the police station is right there. maybe they'd be interested.

something disturbed me tonight, which may have been why i went out. on king of the hill, they just casually showed a guy killed in a pig slaughterhouse. spike into the brain. didn't actually show that shot, but it was in there. he was "turned into sausage". a truly horrific thing. he had been a bad person through much of it, but still. the lightness with which they put it in there really got to me. it was kind of the reaction i had to memento. i generally have been into this whole celebration of violence culture, but occasionally it gets too much for me, and it just makes me sad about people.

can a person's value be measured by how many friends he has? well, maybe it does show how much other people like him. but it also indicated how much he likes other people. if i don't have a lot of friends, it may just be that there aren't a lot of people that i like, and i'll admit that there aren't. i do have different values from most people that i encounter. but i would say that popularity isn't too bad a measure of a person, although that becomes a matter of having an in-group, and it's possible to be completely terrible to the every oneelse who is not in the in-group, and because of that being popular. that's where being liked can break down as a good way to evaluate. nice to friends but evil to enemies is just plain bad character.

• November 4, 2003

that's pretty crazy. I owe citibank $19,000, and they raised my credit limit $2500 more. I think I can avoid using it, though. probably the nicest thing about it is that i could go another month or two with no income at all, and it would make it easier if i move to somewhere else. still, it is a little silly.

• October 28, 2003

• October 25, 2003

I finally got around to watching bridget jones' diary. rene zellwigger, mrowr :) And the commentary from the director was interesting. quite a motormouth. and she a couple of times denied it, but she was the blonde that liked to say "fuck" a lot. She had been friends with the writer before she wrote the bridget jones column and book. the funny thing is that in the commentary, she did fairly innocuous cussing, like "crap", but after introducing the character based on her, she must have become self conscious, because even that little bit dropped off. and i noticed that the actress playing her was really hot, compared to everyone else. I'm glad she has such a good self image.

I almost went out to hope, but i dragged just a few minutes, and i wouldn't have made it. I'm probably happier sitting here and writing. And Antigone is at MUS, should I choose to sit through bad acting. Probably not, but it's nice to have the option. And the saturday mensa thing. I'm getting tired of Memphis Mensa. But then, I'm getting tired of Memphis.

I heard back from Alex Bruce, who is a professor now of English at Florida Southern College. I wrote him to tell him how nice it was to hear that he was doing so well, but in writing it, I realized that it had really been a very long time, so long that there was really no connection between us, and I wasn't all that interested in make what would have been a connection from nothing. But he did write back. It took me a while to even read it. He's really busy these days. He took the time to give me some advice: to write every day. And he looked at my web site, and presumable gathered from my resume that i was doing alright. he noted that i was pursuing a ph.d. (he's got one). i really need to change that on my resume. but i had to write him back saying that i agree with the advice, and i had intended to do just that. That's what this journal is for. "journal" is supposed to mean "daily". i have let it slide, unfortunately. Grr. maybe i should get back to being more regular. he actually didn't mean writing self-indulgent, meaningless rambling like this, but computer programs if that is what i'm into, but still. i am watching more tv than i should. writing it slightly work though. something i saw recently or read said men's brains need to be vacuous at the end of the day, whereas women need to talk about the problems of their day. not to be sexist,or anything.

• October 21, 2003

the hardest part of being rational is knowing what you want, because in many subtle ways, the mechanism that really determines what you want is not perfectly accurately rational. the cruel thing is that it might work better if it managed to be perfectly rational, and it really appears to be trying to be rational (economics assumes we act as rational agents), but there are flaws in the calculation process making it "non-linear" or biased in various ways. i've actually read science articles trying to justify why the biases are actually better than perfect rationality. the best and most significant, i think, is that to us, bad things hurt more than good things please us. for a sensible system, this shouldn't really matter, but for people's psyches, that's the way it is. the rationalization (heh) I've read about is that in the wild, it does often happen that mistakes will kill you, and you won't get a chance to balance it out by whatever benefit you might get. so fear and caution really tend to win out over friendliness and cooperation in general, which in the end really would be a better policy. in fact, it's almost a wonder how the meme of being good to others can even really work for people. it turns out that this really can only work in an established human culture that already has good and proper legal enforcement. it is no coincidence that christianity rose out of the roman empire. the jewish religion had a very strong legal code, but its good neighbor policy (if you look really at it), only extended to other jews, and of necessity left out everybody else, who really couldn't have been trusted to have a proper system of laws. And a legal system doesn't really supply "the good" it simply harnesses evil and makes it possible to be successful without having to be unfair. There is an undying strain between liberty, equality, and fraternity (I think that's the third one), and a culture simply finds its balance. An interesting other case is Islam. It too has a good neighbor policy, and it's a little like the Jewish in not being too happy working with infidels. But that system includes its own system of proper government and law, which is a little harsher than a more Roman legal system, possibly, depending on how you look at it. Of course, in a pure Roman legal system, the punishment for stealing might well have been death, so losing a hand would seem to be a merciful step, but the islamic goal is to restrict the freedom to do evil, instead of simple getting rid of evil that has happened. It's a difference in intent. It shows up in what is widely considered the harshest part of Islam-- the treatment of women. Covering them up in public and restricting their liberties in fact eliminates some of the biggest sources of evil, which comes from the male drive to do whatever it takes to get the prettiest ones. America likes to harness that horse, but it does get us into trouble. We are forcing these values on Iraq, and they aren't fully ready to deal with it. But bollocks them-- they ended up with an unacceptably cruel dictatorship which was about the only thing holding their value system together while they sat on a huge field of oil. America, I would speculate, is held together by a culture of fear. It's strong medicine, and it might not work for them. The rest of the world has got many other systems that aren't quite so bad but are at least like ours.

And there is the unpleasant nature of mood. It can happen that the ills build up, and our awareness of our failings can hold us down. It is easier to forget than to remember and let go, but forgetting is ignorance. the more noble buddhist approach is to think even harder, and eventually accept and let go (as opposed to thinking even less and relying on faith, I guess).

• October 21, 2003

• October 12, 2003

• October 12, 2003

Trippy issue of _Science_ this week. An article about Buddhist meditators helping scientists (neuroscience and psychology). And cannabis as something helpful against epileptic seizures. And a couple of weeks ago, I was astounded at a scientific correction about MDMA, AKA ecstasy. There was a study that showed that it could cause nerve damage, and that it was therefore dangerous. But it turns out that a vial got mislabeled, and the damage they saw was caused by methamphetamine, which was already kno peopw to cause such damage. So it isn't harmful in this way after all. Since it is a variation on speed, it does cause your heart to race, and that can be a problem, but forget the nerve damage scare tactics. Of course, there is still no way for them to legalize drugs for recreational use. Not with the government of fear. There's always that little bit of protestant fear that someone somewhere may be having a good time.

• October 11, 2003

I'm just going to say it like I see it. Jesus dying for your sins makes no sense. Two wrongs don't make a right and somebody a long time ago has no relevance two anything you could be doing today. If somehow it suddenly makes sense and things click into place, that is not the sound of the gears engaging but the sound of sprockets finally snapping under the emotional strain. Christian religious conversion is sometimes describes as "acccepting the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior". An act of accepting. Accepting things is good. Letting go of your previous problems as someone else's burden to handle is a good attitude to adopt, and generally a nice thing to do. Getting some ancient dead guy involved-- however wonderful he may have been, even wonderful enough to have been united with "God" in some sense-- is just a bunch of crap. It is this idol-worship that pissed off Mohammed and started Islam, and frankly makes Christians look stupid. Humans have a natural tendency to idolize people. It's how we have cults and celebrity worship, but it's also why we try to follow good men and do the right thing. Christianity has gotten way carried away though. The cult of Jesus. If you look at India, where you can actually find enlightened teachers even today who are worth giving yourself over to, the use the same acceptance psychological mechanism, but don't need ancient dead guys. The problem with using the ancient dead guy is that the whole system requires living people to act as intermediaries and to help people out. People who are just not likely to be worth dealing with.

• October 9, 2003

• October 5, 2003

at dan mcguinness. i missed the band. cd player play old tunes better than bands.

ok, so i'm being wimpy and writing about it instead of getting up and doing something. well, i was walking away from dan mcguinness's, and a couple of very young women in matching magenta dresses were walking toward beale street. well, having come barefoot, mary-catherine the social worker in knoxville from arkansas, (circe) talked to me for a while in silky's. she thought it was not nice that i laughed at her, and seemed to have trouble that i didn't like social workers. drunk, far from home. at her cousins wedding. blonde. little tubby. caring, bored, a little lonely. i had been looking for someone to talk with, and she came right up to me and talked. and she didnt even know where her shoes were. i wished i was barefoot. maybe that's what made me laugh. i really wish i had talked to that red-head instead. she didn't look like she deserved to be bored.

• September 20, 2003

I'm sitting here writing at starbucks with a venti soy chocolate. I felt I could use being around people, and sitting here writing was a fun pastime that I miss. It's much more stimulating than just watching videos, which I've been doing. Somehow, though, it seems a little too depressing for me to just sit at home and write. People-watching is kind of nice, though I hate having to buy the over-priced drinks, and with no internets.it's quite annoying.

• September 6, 2003

i tried going to the saturday memphis mensa in-depth discussion group. i had gone to the friday temperance meeting, and there were several people whom I asked and said they might show up. Matt did. about the only thing he every wants to ask me is about some bogus tech thing call MEG or something. it's part of his clueless anti-science hope. i think i looked it up one time and it was obviously a perpetual motion machine. he doesn't seem to get that i don't have to look any further once I have found that out from the description. he holds out that irrational "maybe it could be true" attitude that is just annoying to me. people who prefer ignorance. and consider it be a good thing. that it makes their minds open in some way. but i got a girl to smile. i guess that doesn't make it an empty experience.

• September 3, 2003

• August 21, 2003

i of course, am truly risk averse. i only really go after almost sure things. this can be a very bad thing if there isn't a greater average tendency work for the income as there is to collect the payofescf. in the game theory puzzle of iterated prisoners delemma, i would tend to defect mostly, if not always, and would thus fall way behind a cooperator, who is more of a constant gambler. i also seem to have a different time scale as to when my decisions are made. i stick with things instead of changing a decision, and a cooperative, gambling approach benefits the most from frequent interactions, decisions, and thus decision point. iterative prisoners dilemma doesn't seem to capture the real restriction that the different times between interactions really places on strategies. time-cost in game theory.

bowling for columbine came out on dvd finally. it, like fat-ass Michael Moore, sucked. Just a bunch of emotional spew. no real intent to investigate, like you expect in a documentary. or maybe you don't. and cannes changed it's rule to let it compete. to me, it was more of a bad found-object tone painting than a serious documentary, so i could see it going over well in the liberal artsy farsty world. no attempt to look at the psychology of the gun crazy columbine folks. he didn't even examine how far different doom and quake are from typically violent video games. these make you think like a cold-blooded spree killer. he didn't investigate why american culture celebrates violence. he just keep asking questions of people who obviously won't give give answers. just to be an annoying fat-ass, I suppose. some one's gotta do it. he said concerning his oscar piece that he's just always going to be himself. and that self is mostly just an annoying whiner. and the commentary was from interns and a secretary. they really didn't seem to have anything to say, so i turned it off after 10 minutes. and i have been renting dvds lately just to hear the commentaries. like i said, it sucked.

not knowing better is a terrible reason to do something, but it's usually one of the big reasons for everything.

the south beach diet guy explained the dieting problem such that it fit one of the big puzzle pieces into place for me. I knew that carbohydrate like white bread cause a sugar crash periodically that makes you hungry after a shortbit. my great weight loss through fasting in '97 really helpeed me understand the whole hunger thing. you can go without eating if you pass through the little hunger phase. But the thing I didn't understand about was the role of fiber in the digestion ofplant foods. I never really understoof the value of fiber in foods until this point. They slow down digestion. That's it. and that always sounded bad to me. But what that means for starches (the main bulk plant carbohydrate) is that it talks a long time to convert them to fuel if they come from whole grains. It might take a whole day to get at some of it, and it could travel all the way to the end of our extremely long digestive tract. The simply refined starches we get today have no "fiber" coating (cellulose), so the can be digested immediately. Saliva actually has an initial enzyme in it that starts the process of breaking down starch into glucose, so we have a sugar hit immediately. It starts satisfying us almost instantly. Sugars and fats make things taste good, but starch, the real bulk of a plant diet, definitely makes us feel fed right away. we as animals need immediate fedback like that to learn about what is good to eat, and what is empty taste without calories (as opposed to simply empty calories, which is what junk food is accused of being. but without some partial cellulose covering, it is all immediately available, instead of taking a while to digest. So we have a sudden sugar hit, and then it all has to be stored (as glycogen in the liver), and then eventually excess could turn to fat. But it is pretty clear that the first form of calorie storage was really just undigested seed or plant material sitting in the intestines, and that really served to balance out the tendency to get food in big bunches. Liver glycogen storage is just a very useful system because that isn't all that reliable. And I guess something has to deal with protein and fat calorie production of sugars (though I don't know if that gets converted to glucose, or it stays as acetyl). I'm not really so big on physiology.

• August 20, 2003

• August 15, 2003

I had a scary or maybe the word would be "moving" dream when I took a nap this afternoon. There were a bunch of us swimming in something like the ocean. somebody suggested diving to the bottom, and there was stuff to pick up. I for some reason thought it was 20 feet to the bottom, but thinking about it later, the distance didn't really feel like more than maybe 15 ft. I felt like I was holding my breath as I kind of floated down, and I had to paddle a little to get all the way to the bottom. then i pushed off the bottom to get back up, but just was floating up and as i was maybe two thirds the way up, i started to feel like i was running out of air. i'm not sure whether i wasn't really holding my breath, because it really did feel like it. and then i started paddling, and i didn't think i was going to make it, and i was running out of air. then i just woke up and i could breathe ok. but i really felt emotionally effected. i was just happy to be breathing, and i sure didn't feel like going swimming, or at least not diving down. that preciousness of life thing.

i thought about it a little. an aunt of mine in canada just had a terrible stroke and wasn't able to breathe on her own. she's on life support. she isn't expected to make it. i'm sure that's what it was about for me.

• July 31, 2003

• July 29, 2003

the state of nature is not one without government. it is one where some strong person is in charge. significant things have happened up to that point only because some one has taken charge and made things happen.

• July 18, 2003

i finally killed some squirrels. with my pellet gun in the back yard. just two, for now, but there are probably more that will come out there, and I'll see how this goes. they are cleaned and soaking in marinade in the refrigerator. i just wanted to kill something and eat it myself, instead of someone else killing it for me. and, unfortunately, i guess, i mostly went after the squirrels originally because i was angry that they were greedily eating all of the bird food i set out. i they were better able to live with the others, i might have let it go. i watch a whole bunch of different bird species sharing, though there is some rivalry, and the bigger ones tend to take over. the squirrels scare off all the birds, though, in addition to just eating until it's all gone. and i suppose being bigger is what makes squirrels actually worth eating.

and like Homer Simpson said, just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.

• July 13, 2003

• July 12, 2003

• July 2, 2003

So after that wasted couple of hours, I went to Walmart to try to shop for electronic calls for the coyote hunt. They don't sell them there. And I looked at the multifunction printer fax copier scanner devices. The Lexmark X125 is $120 and does everything. HP doesn't even seen to make a c liberomparable low end device anymore. I was looking at the 6110 for $300, but I saw several bad reviews, and it's a flatbed scanner with document feeder, which is way too complicated. I'm really getting tired of HP's thing about having stuff that is top of the line but way overpriced.

So, now I'm sitting at my friendly neighborhood Hooters. But I got extra lucky. The keg of Guinness was empty, and they tapped a new one, and this has happened once before, and at this place. Guinness is often quite bitter, but this is extremely smooth and easy. Well, for Guinness.

So now I'm torn. I have an extremely loving girlfriend. How loving, well she's a mother already, which means she has many years of just living for her children, and I gotta say, it really shows in how she treats me. I mean, someone else I know was extremely insistent that we both be equal. But how can I be equal with someone? I've let my financial situation go to hell for various reasons, I guess because my life plan is a little more long term than most people, and I for one recognize that eventually, with smart machines, personal income and work will make some of the basic foundations of our economic system obsolete. So, right now I'm near financial collapse. But my girlfriend is so supportive that she is looking for jobs that I can apply to, but she's looking for them in the city that she is about to move back. A town where she owns a house, and she wants me to live with her. She's being nurturing and helpful, but it's also about making it possible for me to be with her. Attachment. It all comes down to attachment, the source of human suffering according to the Buddha. Grr. Where do my ideals lie?

So the barbabe, Jennifer, is getting married to James Scheffield in September.

I've been spending more money than I've made. Not good to do at the edge of bankrupcy. But I've got stress piled up on choosing what I want to do next, and none of my options is even worth living for. So may I am just going to give up.

I have misunderstood the Buddha's claim that attachment is the cause of suffering. I had always understood "attachment" to be desire that things be the way we want, when actually, "attachment" simply meant the desire that things stay the same, with the very natural assumption that we have already tried to get what we want and succeeded to a varying extent. All things are impermanent, and there is no core eternal self or way we are. There is only the arising of thoughts and causes and conditions. This all is of course, just one perspective onto to true nature of things and it comes with a recommendation of how we should proceed from there.

• July 1, 2003

I'm sitting in the doctor's office again. Some girl in a white coat is having people in the waiting room fill out a survey on alternative medicine. What you have used and whether it worked and whether the doctor's got involved with the decision to use them.

I'm tired. I've been doing lots of stuff in the evenings, getting ready for the 4th. I'm having a party at the farm, which is why I'm trying to make some of my special recipe firecrackers, and I got a battery to have electricity out in the woods. And a friend, Kim, has sent my a bunch of job leads at a university, but they are all right about at the dealine for applying. And I went out and got books and I rented my free video from blockbuster for June. I got the set 1.3 of episode of the Andromeda TV show. 4 hours. I watched two last night I think, but I'm going to be needing to get proper sleep soon. I spent a whole hour in the waiting room, and the stress at maybe not being able to pay off this months bills is getting quite annoying.

45 minute wait in the room for the doctor. grr.

• June 29, 2003

Sometime's it's harder to do the right thing, and we resist the impulse to go out and do it, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't just do it. and of course people will take advantage of it. that's what it means for it to be a good thing to do.

an additional note on the recipe for acetone peroxide. the easiest two ingredients are the acetone (paint thinner or maybe nail polish remover) and hydrogen peroxide (the disinfectant is a little weak-- it's better to use the higher strength hair bleach and "Clairoxide" is still available in 20-40 volumn strengths). The tricky bit is the sulfuric acid needed as a catalyst. This use to be available as a plumbing supply, somI spent ething like "drano". I really wish it was, because sulfuric acid is cheap and very useful for an amateur chemist in many ways. you can add some kind of nitrate, like potassium nitrate (saltpeter) and do any kind of nitration you want. Many explosives are maybe simply by nitration, probably the best example is nitrocellulose, or "guncotton" which is what smokeless powder is. actually double base powders are nitrocellulose plus nitroglycerin, and nitroglycerin, which is very finicky, is just a nitration of glycerin, which you can easily find as an "emollient"-- something by the hand lotions to help with chapped skin. And for some more amateur chemical trivia, it turns out that glycerin, a clear but heavy and water-soluble chemical, is the main ingredient in most sex-lubes. It doesn't make a bad lube in itself, actually, but generally if they are going to market a sex-lube, their going to want to put in spermicidal stuff and anti-germ stuff and what-not. The inportant thing for glycerin it is click but isn't an oil, which wouldn't wash off easily and naturally with water or sweat or water, and I think and oil might be likely to dissolve and thus weaken a latex condom. Plus, an oil would just feed the germs in addition to not washing off easily, and glycerin is indigestible to most critters. Enough rambling chemistry, though. The additional insight I have is that instead of sulfuric acid, it appears that simply sodium bisulfite (NaHSO4) will work. This is sold at Walmart as a pool ph decreaser. It is still pretty acidic, as the H+ ion will mostly break off from the SO4-. I never figured out what the catalytic function of the sulfuric acid was supposed to be, having only gotten a B and C in organic chem, but in solution it really just looks like sulfuric acid mixed with water and a little soda lye (drano), so I don't know how that would affect it. I don't know if the sodium ion will do anything nasty, but it's all pretty simple. After a couple of days, stuff appears to be precipitating out, so I guess it's working. The advantage of just using the sodium bisulfate "pool ph reducer" is that the other way to get sulfuric acid is just to get a car battery (car battery juice is sulfuric acid) and suck up the juice. I was going to do that, but it's kind of expensive, and I'm a little light this time of the month. I've been meaning to get me an "off the grid electricity" kit though, which I guess is worth describing, because it's total cost is only about $200. There are only three things to buy: a marine deep cycle battery (about $60 at Walmart), the good 700 watt power inverter (about $70 I think at Walmart, it converts DC voltage from the battery to AC), and a solar powered battery charger (which I saw a long time ago at Sears for around $70, but I haven't seen recently). I'm sure that the whole setup wouldn't be able to be used continuously, because the power from the solar will get used up pretty fast, but for a cabin in the woods that I would only visit once in a while, it would be nice. That way, I could have several little isolated cabins in the woods. And if they were just little underground bomb shelter kinds of places, it would be an ideal kind of approach for electricy because again, it doesn't use public grid electricity and yet is modern 120 volt AC so comsumer creature comfort devices will work fine. TVs and radios and computers, I think. Electric lighting, of course, is a fairly stupid waste of power, but it is the American way to consume.

been shopping. looked for electronic calls for coyote hunting. guy tried to push a $200 special purpose device just for predator. then backed off to recommend the $100 one with tapes to add. salespeople always pushing the most expensive, even if it isn't a good choice. then to Cooterville, but the feed store was closed. got to best buy just before close, looking for partition magic and then looked at all the combo scanner printer scanner faxes for bruce. tried to get to sears, but they looked closed. Grr. frustration. So I'm sitting at hooters. Ashley is the barbabe and she is stressed out. She's got final exams tomorrow in Lit and Spanish. And while washing dishes in from of me, one of the glasses busted into the sink. Now she has glass in her hands. Bad day for her. Goes to school at Northwest.

• June 26, 2003

Turns out there was nothing seriously wrong with my brakes. The light was on because of air in the fluid. I ended up springing for a very expensive brake light bulb--$5 dollar part and $20 to install-- and some kind of corrosion spray on the battery terminal, so they got me for $60. I'm an easy mark, but did you every play the indian? you lose, but you have fun.

nerds may be fools, but we aren't idiots.

• June 23, 2003

Augh, I haven't been able to f fil p to anywhere for a while. strangeness with dsl and my server has trouble. but at bruce's office, myriad had anonymous ftp left on and two whole monitoring programs were installed. loaded into the registry to start automatically, too. the registry key to check is something like hk_local_machine>software>current_entries>microsoft>windows>run the logs listed a whole lot of activity. i was thinking the ftp was the big problem, but there was also a whole lot of http entries that tried to access /scripts/..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe with parameters that "tftp"d files onto the thing. I looked on the web, and it seems that that is just nimda or code-red trying toload itself onto the computer. but the mcafee scan on friday found around 30 files or so that were viruses. most of it was just stuff from "skynet" which seemed to be some keypressmonitoring program which got installed. i don't know how bad of that computer is. i turned off executable on the iis web server, which i hope helped it.

read brave new world. it seemed really dated. we're going to discuss it in the MMLD tomorrow at aimee's, i think. but i no longer thing so much of it. i hope more people show up.

and I watched "Hulk" the movie. while i was in the theater, i was thinking it was really boring. they put the science kind of in the background, where it needed to be, so i was able to ignore it. it was pretty absurd. but in general it just didn't make any sense. i just wanted to see Hulk smash. and hulk smashed. it was ok when he was on the screen, but otherwise a waste. but the funny thing was that when I was out of it and thinking back on it, it didn't seem so bad. or maybe i was just glad to be out of there.

• June 13, 2003

• June 8, 2003

I remember Steve Martin, in a comedy bit, recommending the sports taunt "Die, you gravy-sucking pigs." I've seen some of the fat guys who when sweating appear to make their own gravy. My bm sometimes has about the consistency of gravy. And I've often thought eating pork was cannibalism, which is probably why it isn't kosher.

truth is probably notte lational, in the database set-theoretical sense, having to do with human judgemental complexity limitations. We can't keep everything in mind at onces to understand the kinds of really complex statements that computers can use, so our truth just isn't the pure formal kind of thing. If there is such a thing as "emotional truth", something that resonates with people because we have the same affective makeup, then real human truth is moderated by our limitted spans of attention.

My mom makes up for being stupid--that is, willfully ignorant-- by working hard.

Nine ways for a good woman to break glass:
Drop it or whatever it's part of.
Sing at a loud, high pitch to shatter the glass.
Become so beautiful that your cheek bones can cut glass. Use same to scratch the glass, then tap to break in a nice decorative pattern.
Get a man to do it. They love showing off their violent side.
Step on it with high heels.
Beer bottles only--crack over thick head of husband, boyfriend, or date.
Shoot with fashionable black or nickel-plated compact handgun.
Give it to junior.
Wait for a fireman to come along.

What do you do if your race keeps you from buying a house in a nice neighborhood? Buy a fancy car.

• June 6, 2003

• June 4, 2003

One thing about Mrs. Warner's math class, see spent time at the beginning where we would get up and work the homework problems on the board. There was a thing on boys and girls educational differences on PBS (the formerly mcneil-lehrer newshour) about how boys don't like to sit still. but girls do and like to talk. so school has been all talking. and boys just don't like it, and are giving up on it. at least the sports after it are fun. something needs to be done. school education is cruel and unusual punishment for boys. and now they get medicated with ritalin, and my sister-in-law Julie tells me they no longer get recess. that just isn't right. something needs to be done. maybe i should go into teaching kids after all instead of trying to be a professor for some kind of ego thing.

"somebody fixin to give up a seat" said a boy. four girls sitting on swings. the biggest and one thnere first got up and he was right. aggression worked.

Alex Williams. Wild man and drummer. He is now a potter in New Orleans. Wife and kids. He makes pots. And lives his life.

• May 22, 2003

• May 17, 2003

• April 25, 2003

I think I may actually love everyone.

• April 23, 2003

• April 17, 2003

• April 16, 2003

privacy is a shield for the greedy.

intelligence is about handling changes. strength is about doing the same thing repeatedly.

FedEx does not know what a good computer programmer is worth compared to an average programmer. so they have essentially decided to make do with average ones, and to work on the assumption that everyone is average. it makes them also believe that the job positions are pretty interchangeable, which is frankly absurd. they also have broad flat levels of pay that are quite a bit less than the overall industry. so anyone who is good is going to inevitably be frustrated. they hold on to people who are stable and stuck in memphis. pretty much the definition of mediocrity. but that's what they have to work with. i saw them recruiting at arkansas state university. isn't arkansas near the bottom of the country. maybe i am overestimating fedex, and they have settled for below average programmers. anyway, good programmers do things correctly in the earlier stages, so the cost over a longer period is less. but the are entitled to more money, and they usually demand it up front. they cost more because they are worth it. i learned all about what my inexperience did wrong for me. i accepted bad decisions, and I fell into the newby trap of trying to be fancy rather than simple. but i was already a very good veteran programmer, but maybe not at an industrial strength level. we'll see how the future turns out for me. i'd really like to go into bioinformatics, though that's quite an obscure niche. i think mostly they retrain biochemistry phds to do programming instead of programmers to do biochem. but i know a lot about all of that. i guess I just need to apply to places.

• April 10, 2003

• April 5, 2003

Holly has decided that she can't make a decision about me. I had told her I was tired of her excuses about not coming to memphis, and she got mad enough at me to tell me completely off. I also said I'd work for Bruce. He's having trouble with his little college worker, erin (senioritis), should have just fired her, but she cried. she was getting internship credit and it would have meant that she wouldn't graduate. i've been answering phones, and trying to get his computers to a clean boot. i know bruce wanted me in the office so he could make sure i finish his container management software. i've decided to go pure java minimalist. java web server. old version. i'm hoping to get something in a 1.1 platform so it will work on embedded devices. that's a whole lot of backwards compatibility issues. but i'm trying to use doug's appley.com idea of totally web based database management. the core will be a sql browse screen. i think. i'm just trying to get a program base that i own for future consulting work.

but to lose Holly! ick. she wants her independence, and thinks i appear to dependent because i live in my parents house. what can i say? i'm close to hooters and platinum. she needed me to be free with her. she was feeling tied down and crowded, pulled and pushed in all directions with no one caring what she wants. that's pretty much life. but to suddenly let a little indecision cause her to abandon a future with me. that's a bit of a serious sign of something. i think. of course, i don't think anything is wrong with _me_, but everyone pretty well has to think that way unless there is some kind of social force working on them.

• March 27, 2003

i mailed out the checks for the last of the income tax refund checks. now i have to go for more income. i've got a project for bruce amd doug wants to give me some vbscript tuff he doesn't have time for. subcontracted. he'll give me the work and the foundation code and pay me 25/h while he pockets 15. seems fair. management overhead.

i'm reading freedom evolves. there is a theory on value decision-making by Ainslie that is blowing my mind in how it Informs ethical and life-plan behavior control. we don't discount the future exponentially which is the most rational function, but hyperbolically, which causes a temporal value conflict when the time of reward get near, and the near term goal suddenly becomes more heavily wieghted. because of this, a bias to the short term, our internal conflict of will is a dynamic contest which we influence through the medium of what might be called our character, which is a historical understand of what kinds of decisions we make. the amazing complexity of intelligence! sometimes we give up freedom and fix our will to some purpose.

went to once upon a mattress at MUS a musical fairy tale. left at intermission. now sitting at the half moon club. or is it the full moon club. listening to sooj. her current song is the one bitching about memphis. but she's only been here for two years. she's just a visitor. it's hardly home yet. not quite a heap o' living, I'd say.

full moon club. there's some kind of drum ring. african. i guess. just drums. but white kids. poseurs. pardon my french. did i mention that everyone hates the french? the constantly speed up. very american. first time playing in a bar. they haven't quite figured out kindness in showmanship.

• March 11, 2003

86'ed. not the first time. jethro tull on the box. kathy the bartender. smart enough blonde. well she's a bartender. it's her job. but in the deep philosophical German tradition. I deny her American understanding of the nature of current reality. skating away

• March 7, 2003

and i missed the performance of S.J. at the Gibson place. i'm bummed. i was really tired from not sleeping so much, with the maternal disturbances into my lifestyle, and all i had to do friday was find out where it was. i knew it was downtown so i thought it would be easy to find out. but it wasn't in the phone book! i checked that at about 5 and it started at 7. mom had dinner ready at 5:30, so i missed temperance where i could have asked someone. at 6:05 i was panicking. i hunted the web sight from the v-day people who organized it and found the address. 165 Lt. George. W. Lee Avenue. Not on the durn map. never heard of the street myself. not in mapquest. it couldn't have been hard to find if i had physically been downtown and looked, which i was thinking was going to do friday afternoon, but downtown is a long way, and i was assuming that it was going to be one of those rational addresses that it was possible to actually find on some map somewhere when i knew what it was. Directions? do males ask directions? hell no. and who was i going to call at 6:30 anyway to get to a place that was going to take half an hour to travel to? i think there was a phone number on the web page for the venue, but tired men who have already missed one party just aren't going to mess with actually calling for directions to another. and Holly was going to call me sometime after 7 as she usually does on Friday. I mean, does everything involving scheduled relaxation have to happen on Friday night? Is Saturday somehow reserved for serious party people and established couples? Grr.

• March 7, 2003

• March 5, 2003

doctor visit went well. dr. limburg even told me that limburg was in southern germany, bavaria. got some scripts,exactly as i wanted them. they took some blood tests. i paid on plastic even though i still actually have "tenncare" tlc. govt insurance plans suck, so i just don't do it. much easier to pay my own medical. actually, paying myself is cheaper, and for emergency, i could fall back on it, but somebody has to pay. this "spread the pain" attitude people have with insurance is just all bullshit. don't share pain. share joy, you idiots. he recommended "benadryl" for sleep issues. safe for old people and kids. i showed him that i had a script for "diazepam" from long ago and he said i could call him if i needed something more. as an independent and working on my own, it's nice to work at night when it's quiet, but then i seriously mess up a regular sleep schedule. my mom has trouble sometimes, which is why i asked, but that happens when you get older. and finally i might get some ear relief! they said they would call with my referrel to an ear nose throat. i have lost what seems like 70% of the hearing in my left ear, and dude said it was full of wax. he also said i might have ruptured an eardrum, and i told him as a rock an roller, i have obviously blown my eardrum. we'll see how it ends up. my main problem is that when my head is under water, my right ear is always fine, but my left ear always gets clogged some kind of way. i was getting tired of it, and just this month, it was really bad. my blood pressure was 140/96. pretty high, but not so bad as i've seen it. it was about time to get serious about my health again, i guess. i don't like to see a doctor if i'm not having problems. american medics are really excessively, um maybe greedy, but more like protective in a bad way. they think it's a good idea to see them for no reason. they overprescribe and then require you to spend more money seeing them in order to maintain the extra drugs they push on you. it's a big racket with the pharmaceutical companies that they don't even seem aware of

• February 21, 2003

so i'm looking at teaching positions. talk to dr. familoni and he said money was so tight they only offered ta's to people registered. went to cbu and asked at brother louis's office who to talk to. i have to talk to department chairs. in ee ce it is dr eric welsh. matt works at itt and i sent them a note. it sound like it would be a nice job, but i dont know. now at temperance they seem to say 850 or 1500 per class. i guess that's fair. seems a little low. 11 weeks. grr. hard way to make a living.

• February 17, 2003

andrea is in town. her gramma died

my internet access is gone.

i need to design a relation-based knowledge system. rdb theory is quite well-developed, but adding expert's knowledge is still a problem. i want to use searle's philosophy of mind about how to do it, though. minds are not computer programs, and something can't be intelligent simplyby intstantiating a computer program, but surely computers a very powerful tools of thought. the most fundamental relation needs to be a "rules" table which contains two "things" and a direction of fit, and a rule type, i guess, so we might classify rules. the idea of a direction of fit is from searle. we might have a grocery list and say, "the world", and if we are shopping, then we want to make the world fit our list. if so, the rule will be "satisfied". each rule has conditions of satisfaction. but we might be a detective, and we might be trying to get a grocery list of what some guy actually bought. this has the opposite direction of fit, and thus also has different conditions of satisfaction. the system will need a little engine to generate queries to the rdb. and issue updates.

• February 16, 2003

i am being foolish about keeping in contact with aimee though she told me not to. i think my feelings for her are more like awe and amazement than love or lust. she's got great skill at getting people organized, and i am as chaotic as they come. i've even started saying that i am a "chaotician". and maybe she caused me to be a little more organized myself just by casual contact. and i think i never really relaxed around her, and that has been the problem for all these years. so recently, i have been loaning her stuff. a music CD, and now the philosophy of mind lectures by Searle from the teaching company.

and i saw tur-duk-hen at wal-mart for fifty dollars in the bin for duck. they had a goose and that, but no duck. but a tur-duk-hen is extremely decadent: it is a boneless turkey which is stuffed with a duck which is stuffed with a chicken. i am simply going to need to try it some day.

• January 26, 2003

and the temperance meeting had the entire excom, because they were meeting to pick roles. gary wagoner told me a story about some relative that handed over his hydraulics company to a relative someone with no money sense who ran it into the ground, and the orginal guy took it back. i had told him about my uncle gunther fuchs. i mention this, because this afternoon, while i was slowly heading back from collierville where the meeting was (and i had a tremendous chili dog and chocolate malt at Dairy Queen to keep me moving also I saw a power inverter at target, and i need to replace mine--note to self) I went to my happy place, borders bookstore and gary was there. i was deeply tired and he was looking down at books and didnt see me but his teenager girl was flitting about the way they do. i want sure it was him, but went he went over to the guitar book section (which i had just looked at myself) i knew it was him, and he turned away from me, but spotted me across the shelf. i was just going to get a magazine on oracle, but i decided that was a good sign to run into a friend, and i bought a book on MS .net to learn about newe technology, and then i spied on the shelf a copy of Liber IV by aleister crowlie. i lost a copy i used to have, and i really wanted a new one. now was the time. magick is trippy. and this was an epic book about it, which i hadnt fully read. maybe now I'll have the time and energy. it was on my shelf at FedEx. computers and kind of magical.

• January 26, 2003

i looked up thomas jefferson's quote "i cannot live without books" and found a digital image of the actual letter to john adams in 1815. pretty fancy, this internet. now if it were only in text instead of ancient handwriting, i might have been able to read it all. he was sending some of his personal books to replace what was lost by british vandilism, and said basically that he could spare a few since he wanted them for amusement and not "use". i was thinking of writing aimee to get that copy of "i am that" from gathering dust on her bookshelf if she is done with it. i'm pretty sure she thinks it was a gift and not an indefinite loan with expectations that it be passed back or onward when she was done. then i was thinking i should write the memphis mensa people something about books in general. i have now loaned books out to four people in memphis mensa and not gotten any of them back. didn't lincoln walk five miles or something to return a book? there is a books lunch on tuesday. and at the end of february, aimee is hosting a meeting of the memphis mensa literature discussion sig. i guess the meeting announcement has brought back old torment and confusion. suddenly wanting to write again.

i should just let it go

starve a cold and feed a fever, or however it goes. its valuable a saying i guess. first of course, it is horrible advice to ever starve a sick person, but if it is just a cold, fluids are more important and you can maybe get away with not eating a lot. he can eat what he wants. but a feverish person is weak. he may need to be forced to ear more or helped out by some nursing person. he will definitely neeed to eat, if he can keep it down. colds may be an issue with vomitting. rough solids can tear up digestive linings when vomiting, so maybe that was the kind of risk the advice was about. however it went.

i may have a cold. sinus stuff. headache. restlessness. and it is cold weather. im not in contact with many people though. i need to watch out for pneumonia. i dont have a cough, though.

• January 22, 2003

i'm having lunch at a-tan and writing this while waiting for someone to show up. i think today might be grim. one person already showed up, bill howell ithink, who has never been to one. he thought it was at 12 and had to leave. well, it can start at 12. he said stan has been sick. ouch. Dr. Kozma and Jim McGee showed up. Stan is actually in the hospital. still, it was a friendly enough meeting.

• January 19, 2003

And finally the internet works here at Starbucks! Yay! it is tres cool

I read a whole book entitled "phone sex", but I am non-plussed. I just dont get it. admittedly, most of the stories were really kinky and just not my thing, but none of it seemed like it would help me out. I guess I should look at it again. She did say that she had trouble herself at first.

something to do with myself. i redid my partitions on my server so I should be able to burn some disks, maybe some dvds. i wanted to transfer some tapes to vcd. i could be doing that. i also dont have x-windows properly configured since I reinstalled redhat 7.2. I probably need to just break down and get a new redhat. this is just silly. unfortunately, its all bloatware now. i think i only gave the partition 6 gig. still, with x-windows not going, it's pretty useless. like i need to spend more money on something that's free.

Grr. i laid down some plastic for redhat 7.3, and what does it do? it loads all the files, taking about an hour, and then freezes up the computer in the middle of some "post install process". i knew it would do the same thing the second time, but i did it a second time anyway. booo. I am not pleased.

so now I'm sitting at murphy's drinking a guinness. s.j. is setting up.

well, she put her stuff up on stage, but doesn't seem to be playing. just as well. nobody here.

since i'm feeling grim, let me write something grim. i am nothing. should i just whine? i just sit quietly and decay. no hope. nothing to be done. just to sit.

ok, sj waited till the football game was over. of course, now most everybody has left. she came over and sat with me. shared her french fries. people came in. cheerful people. good. well there were some. I dont know where they went.

yay. she played :) she seemed to have fun. people tipped. bonus. i'm still nothing, but it wasn't a total waste of an evening.

"jesus christ, there's a twenty in here"

so now it's twenty till twelve, sunday night. nothing to do to save his life

• January 11, 2003

i'm starting to read "visual complex analysis" to fill in a bit of math i'm missing. i guess i also need to go back to discrete math. and study actual algebra and groups and fields and such. so much know, and so poorly explained.

all entities are complex. i should use complex numbers in programs instead of scalars. physicists use them for probability. also, complex numbers nake certain problems simpler. in signal analysis, a fairly simple operation of breaking apart the real and imaginary pieces gives two distinct and significant bits of info.complex valued hidden markov modeling for signal recognition tasks

• January 10, 2003

American philosophy: lower the average until everyone is above it.

it's evening now. I went to temperance. of all things to happen, doug showed up and was meeting lyle and shanna, lyle's squeeze from des moine. or dakota. somewhere up north. i ended up hanging around. i really need to stop going to this, but being away from holly is really messing with my head. I have got to settle down. at the camel, leslie was telling me i needed to cut my hair. trying to help out. i was saying that i want to have a st. valentine's day massacre party, but it would be friday, competing with temperance. i don't know. i have been thinking i should quit. it's a bad habit. and now i smell like smoke. and i only came to starbucks because i wanted to see that blonde girl and if she was coming here to study on a friday night again.

• January 9, 2003

children will think their parents are inferior. not always, but eventually as they grow older and time passes. it is part of the developmental cycle.

tang is a drink the astronauts had. i wonder what happens when it goes poony.

• January 8, 2003

and still no dunctioning internet here at starbucks. but at least i'm out of the house and writing instead of slouching and watching TV in my room at home.

There is a couple speaking what sounds like Japanese in the table in front of me now. I forgot about sekisui the Japanese restaurant across the street. It makes sense that there might be actually Japanese people in this Starbucks. Cool. They have already left, though. I was thinking about talking to them.

I'm actually out tonight because I wanted to get the light bulb replacement for the light. I thought the hard part would have been finding a 120V bulb with the right base diameter. But it turns out that that was a standard-"candelabra" I think. And that I needed to know the power rating, which I don't yet. Walmart had a huge selection with 15,25 and 40 watt ratings, plus different tip styles, such as blunt or bent. I had no idea. So I decided not to guess, but I didn't want to go back to my tired mom who was about four hours into eight hours of soap operas on tape. I have been getting on to her for watching too much. at one point over the holidays she denied that it was wasting time and said that she wanted to and that was what mattered. She was talking to Grace, I guess, but i said that, no, there a lot of things that people wanted to do and that didn't make it right. Some people are guided by their feelings and do not understand that this is often a foolish way to float through life.

some kind of karaoke here at hooters. looks like a private party in the back room. quite trippy. Jenn at the bar asked me if I used to wear glasses. other manager dude asked if i work at the health department. i told him, i quit that job.

at the walmarts there was a little girl riding the mechanical horse. little black girl with her mom standing there. girls like riding. so it would seem.

• January 5, 2003

i recognize on of the girls in the corner. she was cramming for algebra before the holidays. i think that's her. and the cute redhead and her blonde buddy. and i think the biker punk. yes. he must be the biker punk.

i just had to get out of the house. i was trapped. edgar's bunch came over while i was brushing my teeth, and before i could grab a shower. some kind of barbecue had been sort of planned and coordinated. my dad still has not gotten them together to get notarized signatures on whatever land title he wanted to arrange. and then daniel got them to play scrabble. at the end he was trying to get me to help him. i told him it was cheating. he lost, and was coming to tears because he had played five games and lost five times. suck it down, kid. he even interrupted me when i was playing drums, and whined that i didn't take requests. he asked why i can't . i told him i can, but i don't. bossy people are manipulators. daniel asked permission to go out and play football with aaron, then they didn't play football, they played with the charcoals in the fire outside, throwing sticks on them. his brother nathan ratted him out, and then julie, the mom got nathan to go tell him to stop. great. a family with american ethics. i tried calling Holly, but got no answer, and I'm afraid she thinks I'm a crybaby. but i really sympathize with her not wanting to meet my family in a bunch like that. hey zeus, the christ, on a popcicle stick.

and when i finally get out of the house to go to radio shack to get a simple passive splitter so i can listen to my dvd player in my room without the whole house hearing (i need my porn, thank you) they have trapped me in the house until after radio shack is closed. dictate all the times for a person to act, and you control him completely. there are limited decision points possible for willed action. much action is not willed, but i guess those actions would be out of our control, now, wouldn't they be?

and julie was taking about how filthy india is, based on reports from people she knew from church. cultural bigotry at its most southern baptist.

and i wrote an e-mail to aimee. it was about a mensa d&d game as part of a night or a convention. and i asked her about jobs at ftb for Holly. i dont regret sending it, but i had been told not to. i expect resistence.

chewy little yuppies, yum.

• January 3, 2003

somebody said that a marriage is like a bath. the longer you're in it, the colder it gets.

beauty in all its forms. funny how hatred can also be a beautiful thing. when its sharp as a knife.

sarah in the chain mail bikini. not wanting to get her 18-yo friend in trouble. but the friend went home with her parents. only a drivers permit.

women don't need logic. they have breasts.

at platinum, there was a swedish woman. i wonder what a european dance was supposed to be...

my happiness is more important than my health. health must eventually fail. and will go up and down in any case. people think that health is the first priority, but that just seems foolish to me. i think the reasoning is that if you arent healthy, you wont be happy, so you must take care of health first, but what is reakky true is that health is easier to manage than happiness, so other people can set up ways to help health, while they cant help our happiness. happiness is harder to provide, but more important.

January 3, 2003 sitting at shadowcon. people playing. tall girl Kat is sleeping on the couch. i just created the change of year file. such tedium in html. the wolfgirl mela (indian, means necklace) is an IT paralegal. short for melanie. smokes something delicate. redhead, though. was wearing black ears and a white tail. dude kestrel sitting there. four-eyed. kat is four-eyed too. odd resemblance. a krispy kreme franchise is going for $40k. the odd things you pick up in the comfy chairs. dude was mitch. robert te dude. kestrels real name is brian

so i've held off because ive been procrastinating splitting the file. sent a note to holly to memphis-mensa list.,

kara-freaking-oke! well, at least i'm in the well lit, quiet room next to the drunk sad people singing and maybe dancing in the dark. just not enough alcohol.

something about dying today or not dying today. what was it? something in a song lyric? american pie reminded me about it. but it was latin. or before. a recreation from the greek. which was clearly taken from ideas at the time. the middle east was always a crossroads. all you need is love. parity. but when you split the sexes and get an even division, there will be one half that takes more risks or something, and then it becomes unbalanced. so they take their chances. it cannot be balance. it is an open cycle. and in the end there is nothing but the awareness.

i went by cbc. i saw the copy of _i am that_ that i donated with the little christian brothers stamp. it already had been checked out. and i realized somethng about the title. i am that. why would a person think that he is not that. it is only a restriction on belief. part of the thing to examine in the life is was we are not. not this, not that. but why would we not relate think we are that.

fantasy we have. beliefs. can we know something that is not true? we can attribute truth to statements or make claims about truth or knowledge.

and something that happened on the first. aarons birthday party. they were altogether, and i didnt want to be family-like so i played piano. got out the fake book. i played for four hours. thats a lot of songs. on the second, we went over to eddie's house and a cake for my mom. they got a piano. and i helped nathan tune his new squier 5-string bass.

and i hung out around that blonde chick. the interesting one. kind of tall. from minnesota. speaks russian. somehow artsy and yet a businesswoman. and i cannot remember her name. very attractive. friend of roy's and ebo's.