a ba'b'ian journal

• December 1, 2007

Would you believe I hung out with Melissa again? I think I'm hitting diminishing returns, though. I definitely love her, and she is always very friendly and open. But I'm just pitiful around her, and I don't really have anything left to say. Or maybe not so much nothing left, as that everytime I've tried saying anything, it's fallen flat, so I've just been gradually nudged into being Morn--the barfly from Deep Space 9. Or, a different hypothesis I came up with. I just don't love myself now. I'm not doing anything good or worth talking about or sharing or supporting. So if I don't love myself, there isn't any way anybody else could, either.

So, Monica Anderson emailed me a message about her AI site, and she suggested commenting on it in my blog. Sounds good to me. I'm just saving a link now. I haven't looked over it yet, but maybe I'll talk about it later.

• November 25, 2007

So I'm reading a book that has a bunch of koans with answers. I mentioned it it one guy, and he said he thought they didn't have answers. I know on the Simpson's, they mentioned the sound of one hand, wrongly saying that it was "one hand clapping" and said, i found the quote somewhere:" Lisa: No, Bart, it's a 3000-year-old riddle with no anwer. It's supposed to clear your mind of conscious thought." Such deep misinformation! Well, for one, the koan is maybe 500 years old. Like I said, it has an answer. And the was she asked it, though a common mistake, is not the right way to ask the question. And actually, it has plenty of answers, including the one Bart gave, which was snapping his fingers or closing his hand, or whatever it was, I forget, but it also has a traditional correct answer for the Zen monk folks. And "clearing your mind of conscious thought" is also a pretty bad but not too unusual misunderstanding of what the enlightenment, or maybe they call it satori, realization is. I had mentioned the book to Aaron, a guy from the various atheist meetup thingies. Aaron almost went to episcopal seminar, then thought about things and realized well, no, he is more of an atheist. what we talking about, hmm. I had mentioned the perennial philosophy, and he had sort of heard of it, also as perrenialism. I said it was about seeing a common core to religions. And it was his thought that maybe they had some common elements, but were different enough. I could see that I would not be able to explain it to him, and he just did not see the core I saw. Which is fine. A lot of people are just unaware that there might be anything else to spiritual understanding. I was explaining how Robert Orr had said that atheist are like fundamentalists in having a kind of literal, physical notion of god. Which is clearly missing the point. Anyway, Aaron in the way he had said that he thought koans had no answers, really gave me the feeling he had gotten his knowledge of koans from the Simpsons. Pitiful! I need to write them a letter. But it seems like maybe that episode was before Lisa official became a Buddhist. I don't remember.

• November 19, 2007

Or it could just have been that Tatyana left and I wasn't doing so well at work.

• November 11, 2007

So there is a misconception that leads logical to a contradiction. It got me, I know. It certainly contributed to my really being an atheist, which maybe I should accept. There are established attributes of "god". All-powerful, all-knowing, present everywhere--the three omni's of omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent-- and god is good. But if evil exists, then something wrong and god is not all good. The problem, of course, is that god is not all good. That isn't even ever really said, but it is a misconception. It can only at be good in sum. There are some evil bits that are part of god, but in total he could be good and still have all the omnis. Something has to give, and pretty clearly, and it isn't really mentioned much that I can see, but god is good, but not completely good. And there is no way people could really talk about it much, because then it all would start to look a little silly. Which probably it does anyway. Religion is the sausage of intellectual pursuits. It can be tasty, but sometimes it's not such a good idea to look too closely at what goes into it. Good thing people have damaged little monkey brains and are mostly pretty stupid. Funny, though.

• October 28, 2007

I don't think my paretns get it. They drink milk, but I don't (lactose intolerance--it hurts me). But I need calcium. They always leave milk when they come, and I drink it, though it hurts. But I've hit on drinking tang, which has calcium. I'm sorry, there isn't a substitute for it. And my mom asks why I drink it, and I always say it has calcium, but it doesn't seem to sink in. She buys groceries, But I think tang just is too expensive for her, and she doesn't see my need.

• October 27, 2007

• October 25, 2007

So the thought or question occured to me. Can you seek enlightenment? In the sense that you can certainly form the thought that you are seeking enlightenment, you sort of can. But it is like seeking to not seek. It's contradictory. But then you can think, well, what's wrong with contradictions? They can be silly time wasters, but everyone needs a hobby. Yeah, I haven't played Sudoku in a while now.

ok, back to windows. man, i finally figured out how to set grub to boot to windows by default. it was the config file /boot/grub/menu.lst. and the durn thing believed that i was not the owner. the freaking gall. Well, who the heck do you think owns it then? There's only one user, and that's me. it's my box. sure, in the os terminology, this is supposed to mean I'm not using the admin account, and it's for my safety, blah, blah, blah. I had to get a terminal and sudo gedit it. If they're just going to make things hard, i might just have to stick to windows. the wine config program just mysterious quite being able to browse so I couldn't find applications to set up. Just still not ready for prime time. And I heard that maybe OS 10.5 might not ship with Java 6. I swear, I was thinking of getting a mac, but if they can't ship an open source development environment, then I may have to give up. The linux video drivers just aren't that good, and I can't read some encrypted .wmv's

Why was I even booting to ubuntu? It was a little faster to come up. It was a little harder to get to windows because it wasn't the default. Matbe I liked the idea of linux. i don't know.

Rainy, and getting cold. I'm not liking being cold. I was thinking when the temperature was nice, i'd ride my electric bike, but now it's rainy and cold. and it's going to be getting dark early. so much for that idea.

I'm getting a better idea how to write the stuff to improve the blogger capabilities here. It will need to be javascript. Somehow, I was just thinking an external separate cgi as a different page, and certainly I might need something like that. But I really just haven't thought ajaxy. In the other column, i just need something to display comments links and permalinks that relate to whatever paragraph is next to it. Hmm.

• October 23, 2007

• October 21, 2007

I bought a new mattress. The parents were in town so we had the pickup. And It's like 6-8 inches higher than the one I had so it kind of changes things around. I now look down to the monitor for third, and night desk is below it instead of above it. buit that's just different. no more groove to lie on. They had a freaky foam mattress thing that I might have considered, but it was just too weird. we'll see how it goes. it's just a mattress.

• October 10, 2007

• October 9, 2007

Learning means forming new analogies.

In one of my posts, I considered what was a thought. AW suggested, and I must concede the point, that thought is thinking. There isn't and individual thing that is a thought. The it pushes back my question to, what is thinking that it can bring to bear the whole resources in the brain, as in consciousness.

• October 8, 2007

And there was another funny moment i had yesterday talking to steve and liz and sheila. I don't even remember what i had said. i think they were asking me what they think of as a straightforward, yes or no question, "do you believe in god?" and I have a worked out canned answer "which god?" just as they have a worked out answer, "no" And their trying to get me to explain or answer or whatever they are doing. Maybe if i said yes they could know where i was and try their practiced approaches to dealing with people say yes, and they probably have friendly things to say for people who say no. and it wasn't right after that, so it was probably somewhere in where i was saying i have tried to appreciate what is behind what all the god people were thinking, and that i had really found that there was some stuff there that typical atheists don't get. Since I used to be a typical what I call, reactionary atheist, but i went through a developmental people while and after sitting next to Robert Orr, who again, if you, dear reader, haven't found my talking about him, was an ex-philosophy professor whom I sat next to at FedEx. and also went to seminary, but was now some kind of eastern seeker, advaitin but don't use the name "words may cease" kind of guy. I don't know, i had and still have trouble distinguishing what he thought with nihilism, and steve even asked me if I was a nihilist, and i had to talk about that thing with whether Robert was a nihilist. As I say, _nihil sum_, roughly translated, i am nothing. So i don't know if that counts as being a nihilist. Anyway, i sitting there talking to them. And I have this sort of feeling i've had a few times before. Kind of weird like deja vu, but more of a one with the universe, this has hidden meaning, sort of feeling. I don't remember when I might have written about it, but i might have described it as having a religious experience. I need to work on getting a proper search on this site again. There probably is a way to get google to just look at things just under this journal, but i need a way to be able to pull up just particular paragraphs. Maybe I should ask Russell, he works for Google. He's busy, though. But anyway, this feeling. it was pretty intense. And it was my reaction to them saying, "well you are just looking for something" and i was trying to understand whether i am still looking for something, because i thought i wasn't, but i could easily be fooling myself. I don't know, maybe their right. Have I not given up looking yet? Like I said, i don't think i really got the sound of one hand clapping before. Maybe i am still looking. It's something to do, i guess. I would probably concede that I'm looking for a girlfriend. And liz was really cute. And she's 33 married to a guy, Dave, who is 60 years old. That's one I could realistically wait out. They have like a two-year-old together. Isn't that special? But the feeling passed pretty quickly. It was just a feeling, after all. All these things like that are just feelings, and quite often people get stuck on them and want to get them back and hold onto them. But I've had enough of them, and I know you just have to let them. Like Tyler Durden says, "Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!"

wow! i just texted melissa whether she was still out studying and she should go to sleep soon. And she wrote back saying she knew but could never find a stopping place. So I wrote back saying this was her rescue call. Dave called liz at least once to rescue her. The meeting started at 2, and we ended up leaving at 7:30. man, that was some bull session. for old people. kind of trippy. and steve and sheila, they're about 60 and had to drive back 70 miles to bolivar. after a few guinness. They actually cleaned them out and there was no more guinness, and steve had to have a last bass. such silliness. i think guinness must be the atheist drink. like tea for the buddhists or wine for the catholics. i guess it's coffee for the damn protestants. shoot, man, hope church has coffee sitting out in the lobby. don't ask me how i know this. anyway, no reply to the reply. i had been thinking of asking if i could go see her, but i guess that's just creepy.

• October 6, 2007

Man, so I took my mom to Pearl's. I thought I was taking her there because she likes fried oysters, and Pearl's has pretty good fried oysters. But I guess I needed to admit to myself that some of it was about her seeing Melissa, so she would know whom I'm talking about when I say I'm going out to see her. I don't know if I wanted Melissa to meet her. That would just be freakin' sad. But I suppose I can be freakin' sad sometimes. Anyway, Melissa was nice. She hugged me when I showed up and left, and even gave my mom a bit of a hug. Sweet girl. I hope I haven't been too stupid.

And it's like I'm starting to feel neediness from women. They seem to all want someone to talk to who will listen to them. I guess I like to listen. Still, I just right now am getting this odd sort of pulled in feeling. Wille zum Leben, I suppose.

And sometimes peace just seems stupid. In a Roy Batty, "not yet", nail through the hand, not ready to die now, kind of way. Nisargadatta Maharaj spoke of being double dead, and there have been other advaita comparisons to death. Maybe I'm just not there yet, or I see that it is not really such a good thing.

• October 4, 2007

So dreams definitely are made from little recent memory fragments. I was dreaming about buying godiva chocolate on sale at a store just now because i had been thinking about seeing them at bookstar and going to buy them. The too heads was because someone reminded me of hitchhiker. Actually it was an atheist chick on meetup.com who said she was a hoopy frood.

there was a thing about the "urban challenge" the robot race with city driving. the MIT car used ten quad computers, so 40 cpus. That's a huge amount of computer power. I don't know what they could possibly need that much for, how they could even utilize it. They need an extra air-conditioner for that. I'm guessing some kind of massibe neural net or connectionist something or other. It's hard to even have a system that can effectively use that leve of parallel processing. But OK. The problem isn't quite AI complete, but it does involve obeying traffic rules and possibly understanding other drivers, which is starting to get pretty complicated.

So I booted third (my desktop) to windows again, instead of linux. I don't know, the video is faster in windows and there's my ultraedit application that I use for typing across ftp. In the past I've given up on linux because it wasn't quite there. I don't know if I will again.

Editors. Probably Emacs would be able to save to ftp. And it has autosave. I think ultraedit does not autosave, but that hasn't been a problem. I haven't had my computer die and lose my work for a long time. Laptops make this pretty hard to happen, what with running on batteries when there is no power. Undo is really importnat, though. And I often need to control when I save. I don't want some in between version of code save. I want it only in spots that I decide, or an ability to revert to the last version and restart. I do have to revert somewhat often. And for work, version control is good for that. I just added the ultraedit syntax highlighting for sql files. that's something that emacs can also do. maybe if i get more into lisp i might pick it up, so i can use linux more. I hate to have to memorize keystroke combinations.

• October 2, 2007

Really trippy. I was dreaming that I had two heads. And not side by side but one behind the other, and I felt like I was the one in front. And I was trying to take a shower (seems like someone mentioned doing that recently, maybe Doug) and it was trouble washing the hair of the head in back. Very weird. But I have been remembering a larger number of dreams. And more often I'll realize that I'm dreaming, but I don't try to change it, it'll just make unpleasant situations in the dream seem not such a big deal. It just softens the emotional reaction. But I seriously don't know what the two heads thing was about.

• September 25, 2007

Again from Alan Watts, I find that the concept "Laws of nature" is a reflection of the Judeo/Christian concept of god as king and the world as kingdom ruled by decree. There is some power that dictates how things should be. And a scientist is forced to try to adapt the concept of "law" as meaning something descriptive of how the world works, but it is still a word meaning rule enforced by a government. That there is something else above the world telling it how it needs to operate, which in itself is sort of a Platonic notion. The church did sort of adobt a platonic outlook. AW also picked an intriguing quote from Jesus "I am the vine and you are the branches". It has been my assumption that Jesus was an elnlightened guy in the eastern sense, but they built a church around him that conformed with the western notions. Including the submission idea. You don't let anyone else be king, or try to see things how he saw things. And the only thing I could point to was the apocryphal quote from the gospel of Thomas, the kingdom of heaven is all around and they do not see it, but i can't verify that because I don't even have a copy. Googling didn't help me, so I might have gotten that wrong. I think it was something I heard from Joseph Campbell. The closest I can find is "the kingdom of heaven is within". Anyway, this one is from John 15:5. And while it still has people as subservient, it at least does have the idea of Jesus as unified with the world, which is the nirvana idea. the philosophy that AW is talking about would have to say that other people are the vine, too, but I kist don't see Jesus as that good, at least the church talking about him didn't show that.

OK, so AW doesn't speak Japanese. But he does understand Chinese. He even talks about about a conversation with a Zen abbot in Japan, with two interpreters, the wife of the abbot and his own interpreter from the group he was in. And they would encounter a word that the translators didn't know== Zen isn't very widely understood or really very popular in Japan-- and they would write down the character and he could understand that.

OK AW's 4 great philosophical questions (which are mistakes), about the world: 1. who started it? 2. Are we going to make it? 3. Where are we going to put it? 4. Who's going to clean up?

• September 22, 2007

And when I say that thought is evocative, that idea shows the importance of consciousness in intelligence. And I mean consciousness in the global worksapce theory which is an important part of Stan Franklin's work. For a thought to become conscious or the subject of awareness or however you want to call it, it suddenly becomes the focus of all the brain recognizer hardware. And I guess that has implication for what it would mean to have a complete generally intelligent system. It has to be something that can apply active knowledge from a wide pool of available resources to a problem. There is never a simple isolated specific routine applied to a thought. From our perspective, it looks to us like a thought leads to some other thought, but that next thought is just the winner in the vast subconscious shouting match of what to think next.

My preferred approach to AGI on one of the overview sites, I forget which it was, was described as "hybrid" and there weren't any examples of it, though there were examples of different types which were a little more unified. I think an intelligent computer system is likely to have a lot of patched together processing systems that will have different abilities to deal with any particular problem at a time. But what kind of problems does an intelligence face? Well, stan posed the problem as what to do next, but how about I change it a bit. Given what I have been thinking, what do I think next? Maybe that isn't quite so clear, because presumably there is subconscious "thinking" and that does effect what goes on in human minds (priming effects in cognitive science) and also almost certainly thoughts don't come in discrete chunks, but it might be a profitable way of looking at things. Then for this sort of discussion, the question arises how you would make a thing like a thought that could be accessible to all the sorts of resources in our hybrid intelligent system. And even if you don't like a hybrid system, you can still wonder what kind of thing is a thought that your particular idea of an intelligent system can entertain it.

• September 18, 2007

the electric yellow's got me by the brain banana

• September 16, 2007

Man, so I hung out with Melissa on Friday, and she was talking about her problems with her computer. I didn't offer to help her when I was with her, and then I offered in a text message later. Which she just thought was nice, but I guess didn't take seriously. And now I feel kind of sad about it. I guess I was just pretending that we might really have been friends, but this forces me to acknowledge that that's not really true. I've kind of gotten down to only going up there maybe every other week. Or maybe it's just that things have been coming up every other weekend more often. Thursday I've got the book thing, so I will likely go down there. I don't know. I got some dances from Jennifer on Saturday. I wanted to see Chrome/Alexis, but I didn't see her, and I didn't really know whom to ask about her.

So thought is evocative. One important thing about a thought in itself is that it evokes other thoughts, and it activates a lot of memories under the surface that only eventually cause another to rise to the surface. One implication for AI is that a thinking system just needs to be something that contains thoughts. And we have an anthropocentrism that it will need to be a contained unit, distinct from other units, but that's not really necessary. It's perfectly reasonable that thoughts will move around from computer to computer. Even typical talk now of AI systems has computers networked together to make an intelligent system, so people need to really give up this bias they seem to have that a thing to be intelligent has to be one little thing like a person in a box. Some of the projects are thinking of having an intelligence be an avatar in a simulation like second life. Such a limiting idea.

• September 13, 2007

Love and Consciousness--these are two things that people generally romanticize. The common belief is that there is something magical and mysterious about them, but I think they really aren't as big a deal as people thing. At least they aren't really magical in themselves. That's more something about how people react to thinking about them.

• September 11, 2007

I went to the Singularity Summit. There were several people blogging about it. I should have said I was blogging, and gotten one of the read press passes. That would have been cool. So, how was it. Well, Ben Goertzel said he thought they could get an AGI in 9 years if they really really tried. last year he said 10 years if they really tried, so no we have a pattern. Peter Voss said they would have something in 5 years, but Ben said he knew a little about it and wasn't too optimistic. And I doubt it will be especially impressive. A guy from the Ansari X-prize said they were looking at trying to get a prize for teaching tools. Tutoring stuff. If they could really find something measurable that would be helpful if it is really stuck. He was really looking for suggestions. I'm guessing that it's not going to happen, though. Seemed quite vague. Peter Voss speech, I forget exactly what it was, but it seemed so lame that I just left and sat in the lobby. Overall it didn't sound like much was going on. Some folks had some wildly optimistic sorts of hopes, but like one guy said, it was no love-fest.

The most interesting thing, possibly, that happened to me was on the plane over. There were some military looking guys in camis. I was sitting far in the back, near the restrooms, and I look up and theres an old guy in camis, and I see three stars. Kind of a double take. I'm not sure I'm really getting it. But sure enough, when we are leaving they say that there was a three-star general on board. I didn't quite absorb the name. Somebody in charge of the Katrina stuff. So maybe national guard, I don't know. And later, waiting out at the curb, he was smoking a cigar. I took pictures, but I don't know how they turned out.

• September 3, 2007

Man, so Melissa paid of her husband's credit card. I had been thinking that she was in over her head, but clearly she isn't. Which is good for her. She has a bunch of other bills, though. She was telling me how she needs to pay them, but first she has to balance her checkbook to see how much she has, so it's work. And then she has to actually pay them. She says she does it over the phone. And we were talking about car insurance. I talked about how I've been late a couple times in the past couple years, but my agent, Warren Martin, just calls me up to remind me. I didn't mention it to Melissa, but one time, it was bad because I didn't quite have the money, but the most recent was just because I forgot since I don't really have monthly bills any more. Melissa was saying how they come every three months, but she doesn't really save up, so they are kind of a panicky thing where suddenly she needs the money. So she sees the silliness of it. It seems like women are always so sensible with money. My mom is the sensible one where my dad is the big spender. I'm off course, no good with money. I quit blancing my checkbook a long time ago. I kept the running balance thing for a long time. And Melissa was talking about using the check card, but that just makes it so hard to keep track of the account, which is why she was concerned about paying the bills and needing to get the balance for it. Hmm. Holly is really good with money. I think she said she was saving up money even in college, and she always was saving up money. And she bought a house when she finally moved out from Guy's place. She said she didn't make that much, but she always spent less. Too bad I caught her when I wasn't working. But that's most of the time. And I'm sure that my finding her was causally related to my not working. When I've been in relationships, I've either been underemployed or unemployed. Maybe it's just from having extra time. Or it could be a mood thing. Never any luck when I have money. And maybe there is something to that. Too many other things that are satisfying that I don't feel like taking big emotional risks. Hmm. Or even small emotional risks. It's a scary thing trying to ask a girl out. And probably scarier when you haven't had much luck with it.

• September 2, 2007

Ok, sitting at pearls again. Transitt is playing. Their first song was 'Why Geordia?, I told Melissa, that was the first tune I bought from itunes. Slow night. Melissa is already cleaning up. And I='m at the bar typing. Well it's upstairs. Not actually in view of the band. Gotto be somewhere. I had the chicken alfredo.

After leaving here last night, I wnet home and place world of warcraft till about eleven in the morning. I guess that"s not too bad. I started at three, so that"s not too unreasonable. I explored the big city, and found a claymore that I wanted to buy, so I spent time trying to earn the money. It"s nice to have a goal. And I was working on it, and I needed to go to the store, and since I was worried. About sleeping through the day and missing it, I decided to keep going until I was ready to go. The I do that, and I"m ready to crash. And I crash for a few hours. And I heard a noise I have set up to know when people are trying to reach me by instajnt message My dad with some computer issues. And old computer complaing about cmos needing to be setup. That"s going back a ways And I start playing again. I decide to go on a quest that I have put aside. And man, it is way over my head. May I was cocky because I had the neat, fancy new two-handed sword. It's bad ass, and I was shopping up bears with two hits. But, shoot, the critters were higher level than me. One of them seemed invulnerable or something. I was level twelve, and the quest was to kill eight of these level sixteen critters, and they ganged up on me, and wouldn"t let me go. I guess I got frustrated. But I was starting to loss the whole desire for endless violence. There were these really big critters. Harvest Golems. And they are just working in the fields. Just robots, and somebody's property. And they've clearly been set up to defend the place and attack intruders. Man, I just can argue with that. I think one came after me went I went through a planted field. I ran away and he left me alone. And I was the one doing wrong. The quest I picked up was against gnolls, but one right next to it was to fight bandits. Killing men. What drives men to banditry? Desperation? Who am I to argue? Why fight over property? I can"t see it. It is not the world I want to live in. What"s to be done? I wanted to treat this not as a fantasy world, but a a small piece of the real world, where I can help think about how I want to act in the real world. And I can see hunting and killing the critters. And the bandits just up and attack me when I come into their territory. Real critters do that too. If you go into their space, they don"t like that and are likely to go after you. I have to think about it. And I finally tried talking to people. Some guy challenged me to a duel. And I said. 'Parley' to which he 'lol' And I asked him if he had no honor, and he said 'nope', so I said, then there's no reason to duel.

Man, so super chris showed up. Transit is playing. And they were talking about music or something. Sounded like they mentioned cheap equipment, and dude was all, you dont need a netter guitar, you need to practice. And i tried to tell me story about how i told my brother who was trying learn how much difference a nice guitar makes. So I went to his house earlier this year, and he has a strat and a nice yamaha. It was sweet. I should get me some good stuff like that. But i'm trying to talk, and chris really wasn"t listening, and some chick comes and talks to him. So i switched to talking to Melissa. And there"s a thing with pianos. I asked Chris if he played piano, and he said no, but he had lessons as a kid. A nazi or something. So hje picked up guitar as a teenager. Better for picking up chicks. I said it didn"t work for me. Anyway, so i did really have anyone who might relate to it. I told melissa grand pianos are fun to play. And i like to play a piano to get its character. The style I used to play was heavily improvisational. I haven"t really done that as much lately. But it really felt like pianos have a character that i can feel, and i try to play in a way that feels right for the particular one. I don't know. It's been a while. And Im not so good at doing that anymore. When I tried to start studying music at U of M, I decided that I needed lessons, and they evaluated me to give me a place. And they found a graduate student to teach me. I was trying to sight read and do scales. I don't know. I had gone in so cold, I must have been pitiful. But these were such kindly old professors. I don't think so much of my playing since then. But I do try to break out the fake book on occasion.

I am finding some real subtleties in the bagua. For a while I've understood that it's really set up to fight in the dark, so quite often I practice at night in the dark. Not completely dark since the street light shines in the window of the room where I practice. But doing it just recently I got another bit. The teacher has been telling me to look at my hands or a least in that direction. That's even more significant in the dark where you can see. Also, there is a particular type of tenuos walk where your weight stays on your back feet that I've been struggling with. And it is good for when you can't see the ground, but it's also good for uneven ground, which it seems like is another thing that say karate has dropped.

I had a guest blogger, who saw my keyboard and want to try it
My name is hanah i uesd to work here. I have had a great night. I met this guy andy and we talked about martial arts. I love the feel of the martial arts areobics. I just saw my friend dan.i am talking to my bf who just got his car broken into. goodnight

Man, so I'm feeling grim. I was in a pretty good mood. Maybe it was because Super Chris got a hug from Melissa when he came in and I didn't.

Here was something alan watts was saying about relaxing and strain. Say someone tells you to look at a place in front of you, and really look, and then just see it. The difference is just a tension you put in your face, just a feeling that actually messes you up because it is distracting.. I finished out the south park. And it just didnt seem so funny. The seemed kind of stupid, again. Man, there was the one where the kindergarten teacher was doing it with ike, and they showed her falling after jumping off the building, thinking she and ike were doing it together. It just hit me the wrong was. I didn't think it was remotely funny. At least i don't as actively feel that way anymore. A little more content to wait. But not waking up sounds nice.

So instead of just leaving and going somewhere directly, I decided to come to the green beetle. Kenny said he was heading here, and i asked if he would ne closing it, and he said yes, but he's not here. It wasn't a commitment or anything. I wanted to check it out. Bit of a dive. I remember Leigh Ann saying yesterday that they were headed I here. I was later kind of regretting not going, but I just um, wanted to get home. And I'm trying to maybe keep from going somewhere where I will spend too much money. Or at least delay it. And it's different. A place where I can sit and write. Pearl's isn't so much like that. People to watch or talk to. Hanah even wrote something. Now my keyboard gave out. Dont know why. I should just shut up.

And here they are. Hunter and leigh ann just came in

It took a long time to type that last, because I had to swtich to qrack's keyboard and I kept making mistakes. And when I looked up. Hunter and Leigh Ann were gone. I think they checked in, saw that all the folks had left, and didn't stay. But since I was typing, I didn't see them, or hear them if they might have tried to talk to me. Oh well.

At least this time I slept a reasonable amount. And I didn't go and spend the rest of my money. One thing, though. Sleeping on it has made me sort of forget about the frustration I was feeling with World of Warcraft, and I might try it again. Maybe that's the way with bad habits. You can forget the pain so easily that you pick it up again.

• September 1, 2007

• August 27, 2007

And I didn't really know how to check myself on reddit. I finally did. My Karma was 1. I had a huge negative for dissing some stupid video of a guy pretending to beat up little kids. I hated it because it was mislabeled. It did not look like he was beating them up, it was just some cutesy, ain't it nice to have a litter of kids kind of video. Still makes my bile rise that I looked at it. But it stands at -14, which just balanced out any minor positives that have accumulated. I've wanted to go and see what replies I've gotten. I still haven't exactly found how to do that. I assume if I click each individual (these are just comments I've made) link it will bring me back in context. But which ones would I really care about. I think I got a +8 on one just recently that was about a Hendrix video from Friday. Somebody mentioned Hey Joe, and I pointed out that he didn't write it, but he sure did play the heck out of it. I'd probably just find the -14 one upsetting, and the +8 one upsetting in the way people can just be dumb. I guess I need to concede that people are just going to be disappointing. I wanted to tell Melissa that one time. I wonder how I would search for that. There's a problem for Google. How would I search for a time where maybe I was talking about Melissa disappointing Josh? I don't know. Searching for "Melissa" finds too many things even on this page for me to go through. I'm not positive I even used the word "disappoint". It's the idea that you can't help but disappoint people. Being in love means that you are more likely to ignore it, but it also means that you will always want more and more. Until you eventually become pitiful. It's a weird kind of unstable positive feedback loop. And it's so easy for women just to get turned off by it. *sigh*

So the hybrid smug episode has cartman going to San Francisco, though he sword he wouldn't. In a diving suit for protection. And I'm going there in a couple of weeks. Lord help me. So I guess that was another thing. I was considering getting a hybrid, and I ran the numbers, and the extra cost of getting a "Pious" wasn't going to be made up by the gas savings. Now I have more money, and I would have been able to do it if I had waited. But it still would have been the wrong decision. I want a pluggable. That would be cool. And they can convert the hybrids. I might have done that. But again, just from the money, it would have been a mistake. I don't know. I still haven't done anything about renting a car out there. It's SF. Maybe I don't need one. But there are so many places I might want to go. I still haven't written anybody. I'm really not very psyched at all. Maybe I just don't like travel. I haven't looked at the conference site. I don't remember where they are having it. I have this odd dread, perhaps. Kind of funny. It was an odd place of doom for me. And I cut my time there to an absurd minimum, thinking that I just don't want to miss work. Doug actually arranged it so I'm leaving Friday afternoon and coming back red-eye Sunday night. I probably would have chosen red-eye on Friday, but I think Doug was an experienced enough traveler to know that it's no fun being so tired going into a trip. Haven't told my boss or my team. I think I just don't like being away from home. I've become such a mouse.

Then again, maybe they are just dumbasses. I've moved on to the one where they are supposed to show pictures of Mohammad. And they seem to say the problem was just that Mohammad was sacred. It's only a few minutes into it, I don't know. Doesn't sound like they even knew that it's images of Mohammad, actually all images, that are expressly forbidden. I mean it's written down. They have reasons. And then the Danish cartoons were trying to make fun of him and at the same time disobey "God's" will. Just a lack of respect. But even that wasn't enough. Western nations have been invading their countries. That could make anyone a little pissed, so that really more than anything else gave people something to focus on. So Matt and Trey at this point to me are sounding a little clueless. Trying to take an easy target. And it ended up not really being such a big deal for Muslims, I don't think, though I'm sure the Fox people were shitting bricks. I don't know. But they are graciously deigning to give us three more years

School started this week at U of M. Now I'm wishing I had gone to see Melissa to talk to her about it. I almost took BioChem because of her. It's something I'd like to study. She almost inspired me to take it. But I pansied out. And honestly, I've got other things I should be doing, but a class is something that pushes you, even when you get tired. I'm a little too lazy to do things on my own. But school. One guy on the agi list is in Memphis, and told me about this semester's cog sci seminar. That's probably something I should try to go to. But I have team staff meetings on Wednesdays. Grr.

Anyway, these guys seems inspired. I mean seriously. "Cowabunga, Motherf*cker".

So, the world of warcraft was submitted for the emmy. Watching it. cool. I may have to finally break down and play. Or maybe I should get a life.

• August 26, 2007

OK, so I'm thinking of going out to the freethought alliance meeting at 1. I can actually trust that the young woman will be fine. Just more foolishness, on my part. She did sneeze, and I said 'bless you'. Good enough for me. A double. Heh.

I tried to take a few notes about the people at the memphis freethought alliance. Michael. Smaller debate. Member lecture. Bill. Bill the official mfa mesiah. Ben tech guy. Chris the organizer. maxi the black newbie. Jeff. Preston. Wanda the old-timer she organized a local Atheist "meet up". Wed. This week. At bookstar. There were two newbies from Germantown., Candace and Linda. aaron chris. ikoi

So, I ran into the Dial's widow, Terry, waiting to get into the library. I was going to the atheist meeting, more precisely the memphis freethought alliance meeting, and she was going to try to find out some information about her phone. I don't know exactly. May she was going to use the internet to look at the online docs. That would be deeply sad. She managed to sound a little bit cheerful, but had a kind of deeply unsettled vibe, that you might expect from a recent widow. I don't know. I had to go to my meeting, but I should have offered to talk sometime, I guess. I do have a bit of a lack of friendliness most times.

Man, there was all kinds of stuff going on, but I called Doug and talked about most of them. I really should avoid the whole diary thing, so maybe that's good. Any way, at the atheist group, seems like i had thought of some stuff. One guy, maybe Michael, just happened to be a guy among many whose name I lost track of, OK, quick digression, cute barista sandy, I came in, and i see from the guy in front of me has change of 90 something. Dude has paid for his and his buddy's drink with a c-note. I'm thinking i should guess. My thoughts were, drug-dealer, trust-fund baby, or it. Kids. Then i thought well, i should probably have started with trust-fund baby. And talking with doug, maybe out on a date or gigolo. Anyway, i paid with ones, and sandy said good, they needed ones. And i should have tipped the hundred. But i didn't feel like it, because hey, they serve drug dealers, or trust fund babies, or whatever it was. OK, so Michael suggested that maybe Mosesdidn't exist. I hadn't really thought of it, but I could see it. I always thought that he came up with the notion of monotheism having studied with the eqyptians, but I could see him being mythical. And Michael said his theory was that they came up with monotheism to move people towards atheism, which, really I think is silly. Personally, I think it's more likely that monotheism just has more survivability as a religous idea than all the many gods, which are basically pretty easy to dibelieve. It's much harder to argue against invisible people who may or may not be doing things. When in doubt, be vague. It's pretty workable. But I had to admit that there is a lot of atheism in Judaism.

Watching season 10 of South Park. It seems pretty good to me. I guess these guys are getting pretty good.

In the atheist meeting, they suggested having a debate. I thought it might be better to have a socratic dialog. Wanda was saying that debates end up being about who is a better debater. That's actually one of the things that socrates was about, a reaction against rhetoric as a skill that can support anything. Didn't mention it though. They don't particular have a good system for discussing, you just have to interject when you feel like. I did that a couple times, but nothing super serious. Preston, one of the organizers, had opened a discussion about whether they want to pursue getting a location, and Maxi, the newb, got to jawing. That happens. Someone will just feel comfortable with talking and then monopolize, when they don't really have a lot to say. He had 3 points. Largely about how an atheist building would be a target. I just had to point out that it could just be an office. The room had a big projector up on the ceiling, but they couldn't get it to work. Ben, the tech guy who was trying to get it working, mentioned that the library had some kind of charge for it. There were connectors on the floor, though. But one of them was a 9-pin D connector with a black a white and a red. Hmm. That's a switch. I don't know if there is some standard they are following, but it shouldn't be two tough. There were two of though connector boxes on the floor, so clearly they needed something to turn one or the other on. whatever. They talked about needing money for the place, and other stuff they want to do. They mentioned a grant, which you need real organization, like officers and a charter or whatever companies usually have. Or they could go for a benefactor. The Lightmans are supposed to somehow be associated. And I was thinking of supporting, since they kind of money they were looking at for an office is about the level of my throwing away cash. If you read me, you know about that. I'm wondering if I should try to support a group. I donated a C. They had a basket for donations. This time I put it in while they could see it. I think Chris was happy. But he didn't remember my name. And that's generally annoying, but it fit in with my philosophy that giving should be anonymous. I had never before, though, actually done it in quite this form of anonymity where they knew me by face, and not by name. And, of course, I've moved into just tipping where the babes know who I am. But I think that can't be helped. They are just too darn cute, and worth every penny. At one point, Chris threw out a number, $20,000 and I asked him if he had anything specific in mind. But he didn't. They just don't seem that serious. I don't know. We'll see.

The other thing I wanted to say. It was in reply to something Maxi said in talking about debates. Maybe something about their reasons not persuading people or changing their position. I wanted to ask if reasons ever persuaded anyone, and how positions are never based on reasons, but always on feelings, and people only use reason to rationalize. I guess I've kind of lost the context. And I still don't really feel comfortable in the group. And I've gotten to the South Park commentaries on their episodes about atheism. How Dawkins and Sam Harris are just whiners. I'll buy that.

• August 24, 2007

Man, I was really talking to Jenny a lot today. We have been talking about seeing Jet Li's new movie _War_. And I was thinking I would finally build up to asking go with me. What did we talk about? She said she wakes up and it's Monday. My first thought was about drinking hard. But she meant it's just too short. She was talking about how on the weekend she is so busy shopping, cleaning, and cooking. And she has friends over. I was finding out that she has a real life. Man. I said it's probably too late for me to make friends, but she was encouraging. Somehow we were talking about the Wii. She plays the sports one, and Zelda. I ended up asking if I could go with her, the lamest way to put it, but I decided to go lame. In the Wayne's World hurl/bolt philosophy. So she says she usually goes on a date an he wouldn't like..., but that was enough for me. She went for the bf shutdown. And I had been in such a good mood talking to her. That actually lasted for a bit. Only later did it really piss me off. And just before going, Metacritic had only one review for _War_ and it was one star. But I was psyched, and went to go see it at 4:40. The guy had said it was boring, but I liked it. I thought it had some subtlety. Metaphorical and deep. There were quick shots of him meditating. There was a die is cast scene where he has to disobey an order, and a shot of him thinking about it. Quiet shots of a person thinking. I guess that comes across as boring to some people, but I liked it.

And I decided not to go see Melissa, but to go see the Brian Johnson band at the Billiards Club/Hog's Head. It was different. I felt like an outsider. But it was interesting. Afterward, the was some woman, who was kind of showing off her tits, but no one was watching. That was different. And there was this tall brunette in a short skirt who must have worked there or something because she went behind the bar, but she was out leading dances or helping it be a party. She took pictures for the bulletin board. And she smiled a lot.

I'm, like, worn out. Two really vigorous dances with Jennifer, and then Camille. One girl came up to me being kind of pushy for a dance, and I said I was looking for some girls, Chrome, who she said wasn't there, and Jennifer, who she said had left. But the Jennifer found me. Yummy, I guess I don't know what it is about her really that I like. Maybe because she smiles or is skinny. I don't know. Camille, not so much, but I like her pretty freckles. She remembered me. And she came up to me to say she remembered me, but she said she wasn't asking me for a dance. And then I lost track of her, and Jennifer got to me first. I didn't even really get to recover, but Camille asked me, and I said I needed to recover, but then I said I was OK, and she thought I was saying no. I really think she's cute, but somehow she just didn't really do it for me. It was odd. Like I said, I guess I just don't know what it is.

• August 23, 2007

The market has been quite silly. i think it's just people who sold short trying to play with it, and stick it to the suckers.

Intelligence and thinking are generative not selective. They create not choose.

Wow, there's a trippy concept. A blogger, a real blogger, someone who seems to write professionally, and is trying to be a resource for people, asks If Your Blog Disappeared,Who Would Miss It?. I never really even considered trying have something that somebody would miss. That I would even have regular readers. Seems like a few people I know sometimes read this. I've gotten I guess less than half a dozen emails from people about it. And that's in ten years. Hmm. I don't support comments. There's no significant way for people to link to me. I don't read it. He suggests talking to readers. I don't think I would have a way to even do that. Whatever. Not really something I'm going for. But something to think about.

• August 16, 2007

• August 15, 2007

Wow, so I finally hunted down the banquet fried chicken on the internet. It's made by conagra foods, and they actually have a store locator where you can find particular products, and I found it. There are a few different variations on the fried chicken product, and I didn't try them all, but the one I tried was at only a few stores around here. So I guess it is the particular stores that aren't carrying them. But they had some at the Schnucks that is near the office, so I tried going by there. They said to call first to see if they did stock it, and on the way I was losing the fiaht and worrying that I should have tried. But they ended up having it. Yay!

And I went by Dan McGuinness's on the way back to see how Karaoke was going. There were a few people, and someone was doing _Life in a Northern Town_, but it was pretty empty. And I saw Tiffany at the bar. She looked sweet and did say hey. Merely made me wish I had stayed a bit as I was driving away, But I had the frozen stuff in the car, and it was kind of sadly empty. It wasn't enough to make me want to stay, but it was enouogh to make me feel bad about it. And I don't need the caffeine from a Dr. Pepper keeping me awake. And I want to finish _the Black Swan_ All sort of weak but plausible reasons. Anyway, this is the song where the funner part is the background, heya nana nu meya, or however it went. There is some kind of lead vocals which I sure don't know, and maybe this guy did, but I don't. I was happy to sing the background. Maybe someday I will do the Karaoke thing. And I could go back tonight. not likely, though.

• August 13, 2007

• August 12, 2007

• August 11, 2007

Jeanette, like LeAnne, was a little bit heavy. I was just seeing something recently. Women out there can't compete with porn. The bar was freaking full of women. Quite a few of the tables full with just women with no men. And I was looking and it struck me that Melissa was the prettiest one in there. And I told her that, and she took it as a complement, and maybe I meant it like that a little, but I was thinking of it more as a sad commentary. There were all these women. And they were generally pretty attractive, but not super. Not 10s. I would say Melissa is a 10, but she's a hired gun, so it makes sense. And these girls were by themselves. There were quite a few lesbians. A couple of them, who were mostly dancing, also started kissing a bit while they were dancing. Some gothic chick with a studded collar and some blonde. Kind of trippy to watch. Seemed like not too many people caught it. But one kind of older chick near me did, who did happen to also actually have guys with her. But from what I here, it's gotten really tough on women. There was a graph that says Memphis has a excess of single women, as opposed to the Silicon Valley towns where there are extra men. But shoot. So Willow has started excersizing two hours a day. Right now, she's a bit heavy, and I'm thinking she probably has no chance right now. The thing is, I used to hear that it was no problem for any chick to get laid if she really wanted to, but I'm thinking maybe it's just not like that any more, if it ever was. A harsh, cruel world. I suppose. So from what I hear, Mystery's new VH1 show is supposed to be starting this week. Something about pickup artists. To bad I don't have cable. I was telling Melissa about it. I hear he's quite a machine. Of course, it seems like Melissa is bored by everything I have any interest in. *sigh* Shoot, so how was I doing. One cutie came right up next to me, and I think I dropped it. And there was the blonde who was really drunk that was sitting next to me talking. I thought for sure she was with the bass player, so I didn't really try anything. She showed interest in my phone, and what I did and where I working. Touching my arm with her arm. Maybe it was just the whole make him jealous thing, I don't know, or maybe she really just wanted to talk to someone. I saw them toting the equipment out. Who knows.

• August 9, 2007

I've been writing to the intp list a little too much, I think. grr. And I didn't go see Melissa last weekend. I remember last time I did that, she seemed a little more distant when I did go. The reason I was thinking about when I didn't go was that I sold the Nova. That means the car port would look empty. We did get robbed one time, and it always made me feel a little safer about leaving for most of an evening. And I had money that wasn't the easy money I get from overpaid IT work, but hard-earned, blood-sweat-and-tears money. Also, I was thinking that the nova's engine was doing better. I thought it wasn't smoking any more, but when the guy started it up to take it away, it did some. So maybe I was afraid he would come back. I hope he has good luck with it. It was a dependable car. Mostly. Maybe a little hard to start when it was cold. Like on a particular morning in the mountains of Arkansas. *sigh* And I just let slip asking these girls out that I talk to. It's a sad thing. Faint heart never won fair lady.

• July 29, 2007

the ipod clicked on some Crash Test Dummies while I was driving away. Afternoons and Coffeespoons. And T.S. Eliot. I actually pulled over and selected the whole album. And when I got home, I put it on the nano, and I'm listening to it now. I guess I should review what the point of T.S. Eliot is. I think I've said it somewhere before, but I guess it's worth a review. Eliot explore a notion of morality that came out around the time. Generally, people think that the most fundamental question for morality is deciding whether something you are considering doing is good or bad. But actually, there is a more fundamental question before that. First you have to decide whether to do something or not. It might turn out good or bad after that, but first you have to decide whether to try it. And maybe you can decide later whether it is good and stop if it's bad. But it is hard to stop once you have started doing something. That is where character comes in, I suppose.

A couple nights last week, I got up and was writing on the INTP list. Some angry stuff. I don't know how deep I got. One guy wrote some deep sort of religious stuff, how some of the god beliefs were reasonable. I railed a bit against one girl who is stupidly faithful. Somehow the writing made me feel good, and I paid for it quite a bit being tired at work, but I had a real sense that I was finally doing stuff that I wanted. And interacting with people. Sort of. Shoot. It seems like the Crash Test Dummies on here is not in order. I think these were on here from Jeff. I need to rescan it so I have them in order. Terribly grating transitions. One song ends in crickets chirping, which is meant to transition into the song "in the days of the caveman". Grr. Sometimes a song will click on (I run shuffle songs) and I will just want it to go to the next in the sequence. The biggest one is the ZZtop, "Waiting for the Bus", which I think of as just the first part of the song that ends with "Jesus just left Chicago". Queens "we will rock you/ we are the champions" is the same way. OK now I'm just rambling. But I like to ramble sometimes. I pretend it's a stream of consciousness style. It gives me something to do. Jumping from thing to thing. Maybe I'll study music.

• July 24, 2007

Shan Yu wrote: ""live with a man 40 years, share his house, his meals, speak on every subject. Then tie him up and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day you will finally meet the man."

• July 20, 2007

I rode my electic bike to work yesterday. Ir was nice because it was not so much work, but it wasn't completely effortless, because you like to do some pedalling. Usually what's bad though is that it takes some strain starting up or going up a hill, and there was no strain, so it was really nice. When I rode my bike in before, I would end up with very tireed rubbery legs and all sweaty, but not so much this time. We'll see how it goes. It was pretty slow, though. It would almost certainly faster if I just got a proper road bike.

Wow, Joel actually wrote an article about not putting comments in a blog. For a long time I've been thinking I should write some stuff so people could put comments. So this blog would be more like others. But maybe not. Onbe thing I also don't do is have permalinks, so I wouldn't be able to submit one of my posts somewhere so other people could just go to the link. The software addition I was think would do that too, and maybe that would be worth it. But I'm not so sure comments is such a good idea. I never really thought it would be so great. I'm not trying to foster community.

• July 18, 2007

Being in love is not enough.

So, the book I'm reading for Aimee's book club, _Fooled By Randomness_ said something interesting to me. Economics uses mathematics but mathematics sometimes doesn't work. More specifically, if you have a situation, which is the common thing in business and fame, where how well you have done in the past increases your probability of success in the next transaction. Probability theory in mathematics requires independence of events, so the whole math theory just doesn't work. It's nonlinear for one, which adds some problems, and I've studied nonlinear dynamics and that's tough and all, and there isn't too much you can get from it, yet. But that's a completely different thing from informational dependence, which is this problem he was focusing on. But he has a way of dealing with it. Computer simulations handle these sorts of issues with no problem. Bonus! I'm a computer guy. It's a whole area that is extremely unexplored. I should really look more into it. Not completely unexplored, though, and a lot of those investment folk might be working on that kind of stuff, potentially. But it is a serious oppoprtunity for me. And it has a bit of that AI stuff in it, too.

a little more about random-schedule positive reinforcement. It's a powerful concept to explain why some people have the habits they do. The most powerful thing that makes a person keep doing something is if it is randomly positively reinforced. Which might be a bit counterintutive, actual. If it was regularly scheduled, it wouldn't be as good. If you did something, and automatically got some kind of reward, it is less reinforcing than if you get the reward only sometimes. It's similar if you get it every third time or wharever, some predictable amount. If the reward isn't predictable, you are more likely to keep trying until you get it. Gambling is like that. But I think there are a lot of more subtle things like that. Watching TV. A lot of times there is just junk that does nothing for you, but some times there is, and you keep watching the junk for those occasional time when something does make you feel good, or whatever. TV has been working a long time on honing its addictiveness. Consistency is not all that important. But if there aren't any positives at all, then "extinction" is positive, a technical word for the person quitting the behavior. And the context I was thinking about this was going out to bars. Another thing with random positive reinforcement. Maybe nothing good will happen, but sometimes it does, and you are likely to keep coming back because sometimes something good will happen. Also, redditing has been like that for me. Sometimes there is a good article on reddit.com. Mostly junk, but occasionally something good. So I'll look at a lot of junk because of that occasionally interesting thing. It's randomly-scheduled positive reinforcement.

• July 13, 2007

One thing that my kung fu teacher pointed out. Quite a bit of the way our forms have us walking around is stuff where we might be walking around in the dark where we can't see. That is the most dangerous time, after all. And that's stuff that has been completely removed in karate, but does exist in some of the older kung fu stuff, and also in tai chi.

• July 11, 2007

• July 8, 2007

Wow, and there's this guy, Dan, who was out there dancing. He found a girl to dance with. And it made me realize that what a guy's role in dancing is to make the woman look good. Dan danced with some kind of advanced form of ballroom. Very heavily tossing the girl around. And dips. Dips really look cool, and he does all the work. Some other dancer later was doing dips. Anyway, the poor girl could only barely follow. Not really her kind of dancing. Actually lots of women there, and I just wasn't brave enough to try dancing this time. I have decided on a rule that I need to know the woman's name before dancing. To have at least some kind of a connection first. I'm not at Dan's proficiency and confidence yet. And there were these too girls who worked there, but were really hotly dressed. Ready to go. And They went down stairs, One of them asked one of the other staff whom she was sitting with to go down there. They really clearly wanted to dance. And were even dancing a bit with Bryan. But did I do anything but watch? Silly me.

And when I first got there, I tolded Melissa I needed to talk to her about some stuff. It really came off as more serious than I meant to. I said it could wait, and she was really busy right then. Then I never really got around to talking. And there was that drama again. And poor Robert, one of her roommates, was involved, so they were talking. And some new drama. Downtown seems to make people aggravated. At 3, I had ended up not talking about whatever it was I had, and really, after all that I had heard, it seemed deeply unimportant. Melissa, walking me out (and she always gives me a hug when I leave, so I had waited for her to get off the phone), remembered that I had wanted to talk to her. I told it was not important. And she asked if I wanted to talk on the phone. Hmm. That was kind of different. I didn't really feel it was on the phone kinds of stuff, but I just said it was not important. Maybe I meant it would wait. She said it sounded important. Maybe it seemed important to me at the time.

What was something else I heard. Melissa was talking with super Chris about how recently she saw this guy Riley. Owns a liquor store maybe. Melissa was talking about maybe getting a job at a liquor store. They had made it a sweet deal. So she had gone to this guy's house. They had some really good wine. Now I can't remember the label, durn, but it was like $140 a bottle. And poor Randy was saying how it was the same as a $20 bottle. But Melissa was saying how it was really good. And we were talking about wine. Not my thing, but I know some people into it. Not quite a hobby. But an extravagent pursuit. She wouldn't spend that kind of money on it. But she really was able to appreciate it. Bruce always gives us wine. And it reminded me of _Sideways_. Dude wasn't rich, but he cared about good wine. They watched videos, and Riley gave her one of those expensive bottles of wine. She had it there. And if she worked at the liqour store, she'd get a 50% discount. Randy was saying how if she needs to get a job in a liquor store for a discount, she's drinking too much. Heh.

• July 7, 2007

So, I was hanging out with Melissa. And I don't quite get it, but afterwards, I felt satisfied, and I didn't feel like going on to maybe see Alexis. Filled my need for attention, maybe. And I kind of felt bad because I was totally untalkative and didn't really contribute anything. But Melissa was deeply friendly and attentive as usual. Maybe stroked? I'm not sure how to describe it. "Loved" doesn't get it, but maybe it's close. And Josh and his group were there. He invited me to go to CK's with them. And Josh remembered about my raise, which actually impressed Melissa. I tipped Melissa a lesser amount, too, which I also didn't feel good about after. I was thinking I was saving it to spend at the pony, but then, again, I didn't feel like going. Of course, it could be that all the friendliness just put me out of the sexy mood. And maybe when Josh is there, that makes me repress sexy feelings even more. There was a bit when one guy in Josh's group was talking to Melissa about working with some kind of celebrites in town, and Melissa gave an extremely lukewarm mm-hmm, and he was commenting on it, and then moved on. I actually said she could have acted a little more interested. And then she said that he always hits on her in front of Josh. The poor games that girls have to play! Anyway, I don't understand it, but I like it. And hopefully it inpires me to talk more, and maybe get a real girlfriend. practice relating. It's a really valuable service. Maybe similar to the whole stripper/whore thing. And I think it demonstrably helped, because I did end up talking more to Dani and Leigh. Bryan, the barback, was talking about he thinks he would like to settle, but he really has trouble talking to girls. And then Melissa was talking about how he should appreciate his freedom. She doesn't want to be stuck in a relationship. Actually, there seemed to be a little drama there. Melissa said she wanted to go home, and Josh was hungry and wanted to go to CKs, and Melissa kind of avoided his question and said maybe. And Josh was actually thinking of her, and mentioned the ladies that work there Ann and Erma, whom she likes. I know she didn't want to hurt his feelings. But I get the feeling that she was also wanting a little "space". I have always heard that one, but I haven't had that much experience with it. I think it was an issue that Holly and I talked about, but we never really got to the point where I could have dealt with it. I'm not sure how I would handle it. Hmm. Relationships! Augh!

There has to be something else to write about. the intp list has a thread about the genesis story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I could put my post here:
The forbidden fruit could have been sex, I suppose, but that doesn't really make a lot of sense as an interpretation, because the bible is pretty pro-sex. Seems like I heard a cool interpretation in _Ishtar Rising_ that "apple" was a way of saying breasts, so it could be seen to be about having sex for fun. The interpretation I have fancied for a while now is the sort of Buddhist one. It's a story about how judgement itself and the sort of dualistic thinking that arises in most people is the cause of suffering. The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_Knowledge_of_Good_and_Evil) has some interesting commentaries, and I kind of like the suggestion that the fruit is wheat, and that all of this is commentary about how agrarian society (as opposed to hunter gatherer) is a lot more work and trouble. How can wheat be part of the tree of knowledge of good and evil? It becomes the beginning of civilization, and it is civilization that brings judgements of good and evil. It's a nice little story, but I would suggest just treating it as a story, and not some literal kind of thing that has some absolute true meaning behind it.

And there was someone I read about recently that demonstrated humility in what I thought was an interesting way. And Google desktop to the rescue! It must be able to search my browser cache, because I found it, looking for "humility". It was Huo Yuanjia, the kung fu person on whom the Jet Li movie _fearless_ is vaguely based. Man, I read the real story, and the movie just seems so deeply far from it. I mean, in the movie, he is poisoned and dies in the tournament, but in real life it looks like he died from being poisoned possibly because of it, but well after. And the Japanese opponent did really concede that he thought Yuanjia won. I don't know. I like the real story, but I guess it isn't dramatic enough for a movie. I actually haven't sat through the DVD here yet. Watched the commentaries. Jet Li says it conveys his feelings about martial arts. Kind of the way Bruce was working on a movie that would express his martial philosophy, though it didn't get finished really. And I don't think that kind of stuff really makes for a good movie, because they might sense to the guy with the vision, but not likely to me. The Bruce Lee movie I'm talking about is "Game of Death" and it's the one with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He has to fight his way up the top of a house with each level guarded by fighters of different styles, and it's supposed to be a way of talking about the progression of his martial arts style. But who really cares? He died before it was done, so maybe it could have been put together better, and it sucks as it is, but I think the idea was way too contrived, and seriously just didn't make a whole lot of sense. Maybe the fighting was interesting if you are a serious martial arts student. I really resist the word "stupid", but I do get the feeling that there were just profound things that Bruce didn't understand that well. He was just so young.

• June 30, 2007

Ack, so Melissa's husband ran up the credit cards. Grr. That girl has some sad stories. She was talking about coming up on her day off before close, and getting money for doing people's side work, because they are all too lazy. There was one girl, Helen, who Melissa thought was going to give either the barback (Hunter) or the food runner 20 bucks to do her side work (cleaning up the tables), because her girlfriend was drunk and she needed to leave. And Melissa thought she had given Hunter the money to do it, but he said he didn't. Randy ended up cleaning them up. So Helen just ran off without doing it.

What am I going to do with myself? Today, I felt really unsociable, so I didn't go talk to Martha or Jenny like I was thinking of doing. I haven't talked to Martha all week. Just threw that away, though I asked her about going dancing some time and she seemed to be up for it. It needs to be more important to me. But today I didn't feel like it. But then I felt like going to see Melissa. And I went to the Pony because I got a raise, but I didn't especially feel like it. Hmm. Maybe sleep. I need to lose weight. Get into better shape. I tried to get onto R.Don's email list, but nothing. He did say if you make some kind of mistake in the filling out the question list he had, that's what would happen. Nothing. Figure it out and try again. But last time I tried, I got an email that it was undeliverable. So I don't even know if he's still keeping it up. Maybe I don't need them. But maybe I do. Hmm.

• June 27, 2007

And one thing that R.Don hit on, I think, when he started writing about dating young women. They don't want attachment at that age. Not ready for it, anyway. Which is also what a guy trying to pick up a lot of women would also want. Older women are just more into having a "boyfriend" in a relationship or a husband, or some type of serial monogamy.

• June 25, 2007

A guy at work was telling an interesting story. He was talking about when they were looking at hiring someone, and the boss shows him a resume, and looked at it and said, this only has successes listed. He never learned anything, he just did what other people explained to him. No failures is no learning, I guess was the idea.

And hanging out with Melissa, she offered me a cigarette, and I smoked one. I had actually done that with her before. And she didn't want me to start. But it was sharing.

went out for a walk. it's about a mile to a little excersize trail, which itself is a mile long. Couldn't do a pull up, and I couldn't even get across the monkey bars, but that seemed to be because my hands were sweaty, but also both of those kind of hurt my skin. seemed like there was some kind of corrosion on them. I'd forgotten the word for how you travel on monkey bars. Found it on google, though-- "brachiation". I remember Cliff used it. And there was a video of a robot doing it that I saw in class. Man, I used to be great at that. But that was at least 40 pounds ago. And I could climb trees. I seriously need to lose weight. I'm a bit pissed that I've already gained 10 back, though, according to the scale this morning, I lost a couple, but that was probably water. But coming back, and crossing Quince into my actually neighborhood, maybe 50 paces ahead of me was a cute thin, tall brunette tied in a bun, maybe 20-something, with maybe a mini ipod. The player was strapped on the forearm. I need to do that. Having one of the bigger ipods which I have to put in my pocket I'm seeing is really restrictive. And when it's in a pocket, the cord might yank out if I do anything fairly vigorous, and shorts with pockets, ick. Seems like the only thing I can get are fairly long ones, which hide my short but muscular legs. Looked like a young housewife, out for a daily whatever. I mean, seemed to be in shape, but was walking. And then after a couple blocks, turned down into one of the little inner short streets (shoot I bet there's a word for it, so much for being a writer, my vocabulary seems to suck). And I could see that she had gone from the sidewalk to the street, and was back to a really short-stride jog. Hmm. On the little track I had tried a jog, but running always causes a pain in my lower leg that holds me back, which hurts me much worse than just being out of shape. A couple of times walking back on the long inner cross street, Timmons, which is a short block south and parallel to the main street, Quince, I could see her down the side streets, across the fairly long block. I'm really bad at estimating these distances. I should work on that. When I got to my street, I decided to try the interval sprints, which was a workout I was doing for a while. It's much more intense than what I'm doing now, and probably a more effective workout, but much more boring. And it's outside. I don't like working out outside. Wait, that's not a strong enough way of putting it. I hate working out outside. I hating being outside. Give me air-conditioning, durnit. No freezing air in winter, bugs, annoying heat, sometimes rain, darkness at night (a slip during sprinting would be pretty scary). And the lower leg pain didn't help. So now I just play the wii boxing video game, which surprisingly can work up a sweat. And doing the bagua, which is starting to take more time than I'd like. I've been doing it while watching voyager episodes or listening to the teaching company lectures, but that's not great. I don't think I could possibly do it with the ipod I have--the cord would just be too much in the way. Maybe a should get one of those mini ones. I'm kind of unhappy with all the whiny junk music that I've kept from Jeff, so maybe I could tolerate a smaller music selection. And maybe I should relearn the short taichi form (24 i think is what Li Lao Shr calls it), and find some park somewhere around here where people practice it. And then maybe go to China and practice. I've learned a bagua exercise, which is walking figure 8, that I barely have enough space for indoors. It all takes so much time! The interval sprints were so efficient.

• June 24, 2007

• June 23, 2007

This whole pickup thing, though. Maybe I could find a different perspective. I forget what it was, but something yesterday made me look up Buscaglia, again. I didn't know he died of a heart attack in '98. And he was an academic psychologist, who taught special needs children, including deaf-blind. I guess that means more to me now since I've taking a class on, now i can't remember the title, maybe special education? It seems a lot deeper, though, to me now. A deeply profound man. Opening up to love in truly brave way. And living for now. And I am thinking that only in this way would I be able to practive these amorous arts. Not trying play this game selfishly, but in openness and sharing. I may have to consider the sort of canned BS routines of the Mystery Method a little more. And then there's R. Don's approach. I should really go back to it, I guess. He always gave me a sort of sick, queasy feeling of extreme ego, though. I don't know. And it's all about being a very talkative, interesting person, and somehow I'm just not that happy with that. My values are really far different from just about everyone, and I do have a sort of anger disease. Lately I keep thinking about how Holly was probably right about her decision to shut me out. Makes me wistful, of course. Or is it that the thinking about it is itself the wistfulness?

Hmm, not only did I hang out with Melissa. I went to lunch by myself to Dan McGuinness to sit at the bar and hang out with Dani. We have not opened up to eat other yet, and she asked where my buddies were. I was, um, rather shy, I guess. But there was a bit of a hint. I asked how she was, and she said she can't complain too much, and I asked, but a little? and she said, just trying to make ends meet. So just hinting that maybe business wasn't going so well, which can be very scary when you work for tips. I didn't push. And Dani likes to sing. I smiled a lot with her. There was an old fat guy that came in and asked for a diet coke, and she asked if diet pepsi was OK (I don't know how she knew to ask), and he asked for tea (durn I can't remember if he said iced tea or sweet tea or what, pay attention to details man!) Shit! and then some younger guy asked for a coke, and I smiled, and Dani just made the drink and asked me what was amusing me, and I asked is pepsi OK? And they talked a bit about it. Old guy couldn't have been pleased, but he was on the other side. And later, I said how my Dad used to work for Pizza Hut, and I remember he used to ask specifically for "Pepsi". And I think they had pepsico stock. She seemed to appreciate it. So I was trying to share an be talkative. Baby steps, maybe. But maybe I will trying hanging out with Dani some. But I'll probably just get stuck in the friend zone if I don't do something immediately. I probably already messed it up. Actually yeah. I think you have to establish some kind of attraction in the first few minutes. So it's too late. She's a hired gun, and is always flirty, though. I wanted to ask her if she has a boyfriend. That's really mostly curiosity, though, maybe. I've seen her sitting by herself at the bar after work. I think that's just not right. She is just way too cute for that. I gave her a C. If a server is willing to open enough to admit money problems, I'm glad to try to help, and at least reward the openness. Melissa has done that a couple of times. Just a couple of weeks ago, she said she was talking about how she really didn't need to miss work by staying an extra few days in Florida with Josh because she was broke. So I really wanted to help her out. And she did end up staying, but she made it back for Saturday night. I would have come to see her if I'd know she was back. But I decided to sleep that night. And I blew off an "ambient electronic" music performance by a friend of Cliff's, Robert Rich that night, too. Doug let me, um, listen to his CD. I find it a bit boring, if unusual.

just heard an interesting quote from the teaching company lectures on the confessions of St. Augustine, according to Paul "what christianity is all about is it offers freedom from the bondage of sin". ok, great. every body gets addicted to something, and it helps you get out of that. nice summary.

• June 20, 2007

I really shouldn't write when I'm watching something. I never can concentrate. Star Trek Voyager, season 4, which has Seven of Nine. The definitive geek cutie. Mrowr. I'm in ur DVD, making u hotzors. maybe I just spend too much time just watching stuff and hmm. and hanging out with Melissa? OK, I paused it. I just saw the pretty amazing scene of Janeway reading the letter from her squeeze back home. Smiled a bit at first, and then just from the expression on her face, you saw where whe was reading that he had to move on. Acting. I guess I'm no expert. I'm still not quite seeing how bad everyone said Jeri Ryan's Seven was. I mean, she was a Borg. her emotions were supposed to be really poorly expressed an inappropriate. And the Simpson's just this past weekend, did a flashback where they were all watching the finale of Voyager. Lenny was dressed as Seven. They had Dr. Hibert in Tuvok's yellow security uniform, though I don't remember if he had the ears. But hanging out with Melissa. I think this writing is about making some communicative emotional connection with others, or at least an expression coming from that desire. And I kind of satisfy that desire for connection sometimes with Melissa. And I said I might be interested in taking BioChem, and she really opened up. Told me about how hard the class was. And I'm thinking about it, at one point she was on our side of the bar smoking a cigarette and talking to me. It does seem to be "the friendship zone" where the woman is comfortable but has no significant romantic interest. And as far as I know, guys aren't capable of having no romantic interest, though I guess they can manage to "just be friends" if it's cowered into submission. A difference.

And finished _the Mystery Method_. There were some interesting concepts. Some terminology, maybe, or at least a framework for understanding how relationships have to develop. Specifically, attraction has to be established, and really it has to be done initially and be maintained. Because for women, a desire for a comfortable emotional connection to others is comparable, if not greater than, sexual desire and it's likely to get stuck that way. And after you establish some kind of attraction, it will take a large amount of time to "establish comfort" and build up that emotional connection, but that's really more the easy part, because that's something they want indepently. "They", man. I don't like the way it is sort of treated adversarially. We want that. Everyone wants that, which is just friendship, or maybe real love. But the tricky insight (well, I'm not sure how much Mystery is aware of it), is that women can lose the attraction fairly easily, but men not so much. Because for women, the attractiveness comes from male dominance and power, which can dissolve pretty quickly when a cute chick melts his brain. One of the whole deals of Mystery's method is to practice enough to be very resistance to this brain melting. Unfortunately for me, it seems like he recommends so much time (four hours x four days a week), that Memphis would run out pretty quick. Kind of a big city system. And he was in L.A. Then again, he said he's done thousands. But all these guys end up with solid single relationships. So the annoying thing about this hobby is that it's doomed to eventually end. And not after that long really. But everything is like that, I guess. It seems like most martial arts guys eventually largely stop, too. And maybe sometimes they teach, which I guess lets them keep on. But I have finally been studying BaGua. It's gotten to where I have too much to go through to do it in the morning, which is when I really need the exercise. So I'm going to need to work something out. I haven't quite started practicing the amorous arts, yet. I'm not really sure I want to really go for the full thing. That's seems like kind of like the deal. Everyone wants just one person. The players just go after it by trying out large numbers of them. Maybe it's a fun way to do it. And I imagine the sex has got to be an amazing reinforcer. But, I think drug probably hit those reinforcements centers just as hard. And anything is somewhat limiting, I guess. Plus, like I said, all these guys end up with just one girlfriend. So women clearly have something extra special they manage to pull out to deal with these types, when they feel like it. Or maybe. Hmm. It seems like there was something mystery was talking about that is always hard. Something scary about putting yourself out there, maybe. And there was something I saw about somewhere else, and Mystery touched on it. Part of the male emotional system, built up in the tribal, low populated system of the savannah, is that it is emotionally important not to mess up your chance with any particular woman, because in the evolutionary original environment, you didn't have a lot of available women and not a lot of chance. So part of what the player game is about is the thrill from each encounter, because emotionally it feels like it means a lot, even if it doesn't really. Anyway. We'll see.

Butt shot of Seven. meow. and this was an episode where seven disobeyed the captain, but Janeway had stuck with her principles to ne nice, but they would have all died because of it. they lost. i don't know. it was stupid. but seven was cute.

and shoot, in the past couple of weeks, or maybe it's three now, i've gained back 10 pounds. and i've sort of been exercising more. maybe going out to eat too much. grr.

• June 9, 2007

So, i've decided not to try to take up the drums right now. it would have been $5000 for the really sweet electronic drum kit i was looking for. that could pay for a lot of stuff for other hobbies. and it is a lot of time that i really should spend on other things, and i'm not really that likely to put into drums, anyway. though it would have made it more likely that i would get into a band. it would be more realistic for me to practice guitar again and be one of those lone guys and a guitar. but i would like to play music that people, well, girls, could dance to. and that pretty much means drums. i suppose i could go acoustic and play the cojon with jeff. or at least i should try jamming or something. i finally actually started studying martial arts instead of just reading about it. i'm just reading about the venusian arts now, like i have for a long time. maybe i will start practicing that (them?), too.

and i finally bought something from iTunes. John Mayer, "Why Georgia". I'd really like to learn to play it. It seems like a great guy by himself on a guitar kind of tune, fitting with my possible plan to take that up. and maybe i will write that program to figure out which guitar notes are being played in songs. it's not too hard to just listen and figure it out. and seeing a video makes it even better. i'm sure i can find a video of john mayer playing that. transitt at dan mcguinness played that early in the set, but the lead riffs were done by the keyboard player, of all things. the singer player rhythm. but he did get the chords. freaking G,D,A basics. and strumming with those and singing seems to do pretty well. the riff doesn't seem too bad, either.

• June 2, 2007

Wow, who did I see tonight? Melissa, of course. Kellie and Katie, two cute sisters. Kellie seemed to like talking to me, until I asked what she was thinking, she said "nothing" and I said blondes can think nothing. She was pissed after that. But she's going to be a lawyer, so no love lost. And I saw Vanessa again, and her boyfriend Alex. And Jenn and Todd and Kristie. And then Jennifer. It's her birthday! Happy birthday Jennifer! And then Stephanie (aka. Luna). That was a little odd. You never know about these things, but she said she liked my technique, possibly using the word "best". Like I said, you never know about this stuff. And Al was there. But I don't think I saw Alexis. And while I was with Steph, I figured I would just let her go. But later I realized what the difference was. Or remembered that there was a reason why I was looking for her.

And I was thinking today. Maybe I thought of it before. But Bagua was developed in the mid-1800s, at about the same time the Shuri crucible was transforming Okinawan karate. Both were clearly developed to be a possible defense against guns. Now, with modern automatic fire guns, an unarmed fighter wouldn't really have much chance, but those weren't the guns then. They were slow. The most important thing in all martial arts is speed. Karate emphasizes hitting fast and hard. Bagua emphasizes fast sidestepping footwork. It is perfectly possible to get out of the way of someone trying to shoot at you, or any other bad thing they might be trying. Certainly, they can't only be a defense against guns, and they aren't super likely to be effective at that, anyway, but they were developed keeping this in mind as a possibility.

I got Dr. Yang Jwing-Ming's book on Baguazhang. I've been a fan of his books for a long time. I think the first one of his was on Chin Na, the seizing pressure point subsystem that is part of most martial arts. He's not really a Bagua guy, so he wrote this with some other folk. But he had an insight into the role of Da-Mo in the martial arts. If you don't know the story, Da-Mo, also called (a) Bodhisattva, was a Buddhist monk who travelled from India to China, and when he was at the Shaolin temple, he saw that the monks were out of shape, and as the most popular version goes, taught them martial arts as a way of exercise. Now, this is sort of mythical, and one other book I read said is just false. Martial arts were around the shaolin temple before that, and it wasn't so much that they were the center of martial arts, they just had a bunch of folks who new martial arts from the outside. They had they're own guards system, had a lot of guys who were from the army and who could be drafted any time. What Dr. Yang added was that what Da-Mo actually did was to write a couple of books on internal exercise, basically about some kind of yoga, the muscles/tendon changing and brain/marrow washing classics. The Chinese would call this kind of stuff chi kung, now, which just means chi exercise, which would be another way of saying internal exercise since chi is the internal life force. I actually have book about it from way back, but the idea of chi is so silly to me, I could never get through it, and if Dr. Yang made his point back then, I missed it. Anyway, after that point, people who practiced martial arts started incorporating these internal exercises, or chi kung. And now some martial arts are largely just chi kung, with some martial applications. That's what tai chi is for a lot of folk. Just exercise.

Nick got me a shot, so I did one. It had been a long time. I tell people I've quit, but I'll accept if it comes to that. I could just about feel my toe starting to hurt. But it was only one, so it couldn't have been too bad.

• May 12, 2007

So, Willow said something about relaxing with a cigarette. And then she tried to explain it somehow with it changes your neurochemistry. I never found it relaxing when I tried it, but I realized that if you're addicted to it, then getting another dose would certainly make you more relaxed. And maybe that's all it is. Because it's really more of a stimulant. Unless you are addicted, then you need it to maintain. I recently read that caffeine is similar. People drink it to get alert, but they don't get any more alert than if they had never become addicted.

Went to see how Melissa's trip to New York had gone. She actually called me by accident at the airport. She was with some other Andy, and thought she had his number in her phone. I didn't recognize the number at the time, and didn't notice her name, and then didn't quite recognize her voice, but I figured it out afterward. And she had thought to ask me about it. She went to all the touristy things in New York. Liked Greenwich Village. Went to Club Wah, where Jimi and Janice had played. And she had a picture from there on her phone. She was showing it to the people in the band, who were sitting to my left, but it never got to me. And I was in a gloomy mood. But the anger was turned inward, which I suppose isn't all that usual for me. And then Josh came in. Ashley actually said hi, having come over and seen Josh and then noticing me. But I had enough.

I went over to Christie's to be distracted. But no naked chicks. Still it was distracting, and I got a pretty fair dance from voluptous Brooke. I don't think she danced as many songs as she said she would have, though.

I've now had 4 Bagua classes. Seems like the teacher is piling on the moves to catch me up to the other folk. There is one walking sequence where every step is a front kick. That gets to be some work.

The guitar player Chris (of the band Deep Shag) mentioned teaching a kid about the dorian mode, a major scale with 3rd and 7th flat.

So much to do. My dad found someone who offered $250 for the nova (actually $200, but my dad got up a bit). But I have been wanting to have a car to tinker on. My dad got me a car that needed work when I didn't have another one. That really wasn't what I wanted. To be forced to work on one or have nothing. How do you get parts? So maybe I will just keep it and work on it a bit. But I'm not sure I will. Probably would be better just to get rid of it. Do other things. I've got so many other things. And maybe I should sleep.

• May 2, 2007

• May 1, 2007

So, Melissa has quit Dan McGuinness. Gone to work downtown at Pearl's Oyster House with Randy, Ashley, LeAnne, and maybe Tiffany. I'm going to need to try to go down there. Shoot, last time I was at DM, Tiffany was hanging out and I did not ask her to dance, nor did I ask the cute blonde, Vanessa, who remembered me. And she had a tall friend, Lauren, who totally was not a Pink Floyd fan. Lauren had this top, and she seemed a little preoccupied with how it stuck out in front of her tummy, so it didn't really show her off. And Vanessa was bra-free.

help me to live a little longer, i'm expecting good news.

• April 21, 2007

And finally I danced a bit. Only half a song. Tiffany asked me why I wasn't dancing, and I said I had no one to dance with, so I danced with her. She's such a sweet little "baby doll" some of the other guys were calling her. And again, there were plenty of girls who didn't have anyone to dance with, and I just didn't have it to ask them. Sad, really. I just don't like dancing with anyone if I don't even know their name. And even with Tiffany, it was no touch, but this was the Georgia Satellites one, keep your hands to yourself, so it seemed like an appropriate style. But it has been too long since I danced, so I was very out of practice. I'm not sure I could have even managed any of the more disciplined types of dancing where the man actually leads the woman. maybe it's because i'd want to dance properly that i don't try to dance with just any old girl. There was a little girl I was hoping to see. Actually one of the two that left with Super Brad one time I saw them play. I can't remember her name. I remember her friends name, Kaylie. I think I got a picture that was messed up. Not having luck with my camera phone. Honestly, I might have seen her there, but I wasn't sure. She studied dance, and piano. Working in finance, I think.

• April 20, 2007

this article has sort of affected me. i saw it on reddit, and it got to the front page and then was downmodded to zero. it complaings about excessive pride. maybe guilty. the perl people talk about how excess pride can be good. poor grooming and bad fashion. guilty, i guess. not a super priority for me. and then he talks about being a dabbler. I'm a dabbler. hmm. some feeling that you can be good without the work? I don't know. over-inflated sense of worth. i've felt this about computer work for a while. the like a child thing. that sounds like me. anyway, it has affected me this week, and I've had to reevaluate. he has another article that mentiones a geek holocaust but "not seriously". simply distracting them with non-procreative sex toys would be enough. So it is clearly hate-speech, if a little watery.

• April 19, 2007

• April 18, 2007

Relaxed training addsv power by reducing reistance thus adding speed and letting you go longer.

• April 15, 2007

so, mudflap king canceled. broke up (lost the drum and bass). i think that was the band that gave me back the c-note.

ok, well, i was just having a wasting-my-time reaction hanging out at dan mcguinness, which was good. i felt marginally like it was a nice thing to be doing, but i thinking i've had enough. one principle for life is to try things until you've had enough. hopefully, that was it for me.

and i started on hofstadter's book (_I am a strange loop_). It's trying to be a restatement of the point of _Goedel, Escher, Bach_ without the fancy writing and asides into interesting topics. OK. unfortunately, i finally came to the conclusion that GEB _seemed_ to have an interesting point, but it really didn't. it was really just fancy fluff around nothing significant. the literary equivalent to having the feeling that you know the meaning of everything, or just some profound feeling of understanding everything, when you're stoned, and then later trying to remember what it was or explaining it, and it really wasn't anything. just a feeling. now, that's a nice feeling, and the book was really cool for doing that. and it talked about a lot of intersting things, but there was no center. Now I know that Hofstadter really thinks there was a significant point. and i think it isn't a matter of me not getting it, just that it wasn't a real point. Self's are strange loopy recursive things. Fine. not really significant. I said that now as a person who has come through a sort of deep, fairly buddhist, passage of spiritual search where i personally experienced the real nature of self. and really, it was talking with Robert Orr, who had the same reaction about GEB, that got me sort of that way. I'm not sure i would call him a guide or a mentor. it was more like i was focused on stuff in one direction, area, and came across him, and he pointed to some stuff in a section of the forest that i hadn't looked, and i looked in that section of the jungle and came away with a whole new area of understanding.

happy euler's 300th birthday! i gave (hopefully loaned) my copy of _where mathematics comes from_ yesterday to doug, because it has a section explaning euler's equation, which is really quite deep. e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0. Euler did some cool stuff that i don't have the background to understand. that one i sort of followed a bit. there was another one i was reading about sitting at dan mcguinness. should i say hanging out with melissa? that's what i was wanting to do, but she was so busy, basically i wasn't, i was just there. i said hardly anything. i started explaining that i had gotten a cajon, but she had to go off, and i never finished. i think that's why i had the wasting my time reaction. thank goodness for my web browsing phone! anyway. it was on reddit, i guess as part of the euler celebrations:
1-2+3-4+5-6...=1/4 .
It's deep because the sequence diverges for a typical way of doing sums, so i it doesn't have a regular sum, but if you do some other fancy sorts of ways of trying to find the sum, you can find an answer, and if you get an answer, it will be 1/4. trippy. but math can be trippy.

oh great, and now hofstadter is on to some thing about vegetarianism and how how living things have souls. great. i think maybe the book on chinese martial arts books is going to be more interesting.

And actually, at dan mcguinness, i lingered at the end because they had two different fighting shows. one was a kicboxing thing between some lightweights a white puncher and a black kicker. The kicker had a really fast kick, but several times the puncher caught his kick and kicked out his supporting leg. sweet. i did see the puncher fall once, though, i didn't see why. 5 rounds. grueling. and it seemed like at the end the kicks would usually miss, but the other guy could get in punches. looked like a good fight. no wrestling stuff. but at the same time there was another fight show, and it was basically wresting with some type of gloves and they were allowed to hit each other. so the two guys would be on the ground, one holding the other down, and one would be hitting the other. i'm not sure how well that worked. seemed a little harsh. and i had heard that most fights end up on the ground. like i said, i got that book about chinna ground fighting. so i thought it was cool to watch that. and then i was talking to melissa about all that. and she just gave me a look of completely not being interested, or maybe horrified. because on thursday she was talking about how she has seen a lot of bar fights, and was telling me about this one really bad one where cops came in and just beat the shit out of some guys who's only thing they had done was to have some pvc pipe fall off their truck. i don't know. i'm just one of her regulars. i didn't pursue having breakfast with her, and i think she may think i really wasn't that interested. maybe i wasn't. i mostly like to watch her be nice to people. And she drinks non-fat vanilla lattes from starbucks.

• April 14, 2007

A regret. I didn't think having a girfriend was that important. I didn't make it a priority. I wish I had. I'm not into the whole get married and have kids life plan. And I tend to picture it as the whole western suburbia thing to be like everyone else. Cliff was talking about doing that, and I said that's so western. and he pointed out that it is a human thing. But I'm still not so sure that thinking that being judgemental about it and thinking it is somehow 'right' or 'good' is not a western thing. and having a plan about it. that there is a scheme involved. But still, having a girlfriend should have been more important to me. And now I don't really try as hard as I'd like to have one. and lately i've been remembering an interaction on 'criminal minds' there's the chick and the geeky guy. and the nerd is complaining he doesn't have dates. and the chick asks, have you asked any one?

there is a hole in the side of the house, in the corner between the wall by my room and the carport. Birds have made a nest there. this morning, there was an egg shell lying on the ground by it. my mom found it. it seemed kind of sad. but then i realized, it's just the shell. the bird must have hatched. and sure enough, you can now hear a little baby bird chirping.

i finally went to the wushu/taiji school to ask about bagua. actually, the schedule on the web said there was a class to 10:30 on saturday, and i went there just barely on time for that, but that wasn't the current schedule. now it's tuesdays and thursdays. but at least i made an effort and showed up there once. hopefully i'll go on tuesday since i broke the initial barrier.

i went out spending money today. i bought some books. i had a 'personal shopping day' at borders coming, so i decided to use it. there was a there was a book on ground fighting chin na that i have had my eye on. i've heard that all fighting ends up on the ground, so i'd be interesting in seeing what to do. and there was a book on martial arts training manuals. i've realized that much of my martial arts interest is just reading and fantasy, so this made sense to me to get. and i got south park season 8. and i brought that home, took off the shrink rap, and then realized that i had already gotten it. from amazon or something. too absent minded of me. and i probably should take it back, but i've done that before. i think it would be good to keep as a reminder. ok, maybe not good, but that's the rationalization i'm going to stick with. i went down to what used to be strings & things to look for an electric drum kit. liquidated. little stock left and no new stuff. grr. driving back, i went by consignment music and picked up a cajon, a kind of drum box. price was not low but neither was the quality high. oh well. maybe it'll be fun. seems like everything i've gotten from there has been sort of middling. but i don't really spend a lot, so i guess that's what i get. and i went by the little book store at the oak court mall. i found hofstader's new book is out (_I Am a Strange Loop_). and i found the book for the lit group which i didn't find at borders. and there was the cute little skinny redhead i'd seen at roy's forgot her name this time. and didn't take the time to look it up in the journal. i know i must have it somewhere. i said to her, i missed you at roy's mardi gras party. and i had mentioned her to roy at the party, so it was true. maybe roy had mentioned her first, i forget. roy said she was working two jobs and going to school. and she said her boyfriend was in town. ouch. actually, now that i think of it, roy may have said that too. i was staggered, but i had a little wind left. so i said there was nudidity. which seemed to impressed her. Stephanie. it was small but exciting. and my recollection was that i missed her because she seems to like girls and would have enjoyed that. and probably would have made it more interesting. but i didn't tell her that. and i got some chicken from kfc. there was a cute little white girl at the counter. seemed like a teenager. and they had 7 pieces (dark) for 4.99. it's better if i don't get too much. i tend to binge eat. that was just about right. and it came to 5.45. and i just happened to have exactly 45 cents in my pocket, after all the shopping. right on the dime she said. i tried to smile and be nice, but she seemed to be thinking 'crazy old man'.

• April 13, 2007

• April 12, 2007

Kurt Vonnegut has died. So it goes.

• March 29, 2007

I had a good con over the weekend. MidSouthCon. I was more outgoing than maybe I've ever been. I learned and used a lot of people's name. I didn't dance, though, at the dance, mostly because of my foot not feeling so good. I talked quite a bit with this cute little red-headed belly dancing guest, Linda Donahue. She writes the sci-fi fantasy stuff now, but she used to teach computer science in high school, which is something i was thinking of. But she did it a lot better than I would, so maybe it's good that I leave it to people folks like her. Did I mention she was cute? And we smiled a lot at each other, which I think is a nice thing. And she teaches tai chi, and has studied some bagua, which I'm trying to eventually start studying. Who else? I think Joy was the only one who actually learned my name, but there was Beth (who I've seen at Roy's things but for some reason it hasn't really stuck till now) and Alexis, another cute redhead who I like but she doesn't really seem to know me at all yet. Alexis was drawing some pictures of robots, and on one of them she wrote NCC-1701, so I really need to make more of an effort to get to know her. There was a little kid Rebecca who kept going past, so I had to get her name. And a cute little kid Emily, who was dressed up very obscurely, like some slashed victim from a movie _High Tension_. Stephanie was there. How could I forget Stephanie? even though the pictures didn't turn out. There was a guy Jerry Schultze, the Nashville Mensa locsec. And Bill Blair, the alien makeup guy, and Les "is more" Johnson, from NASA though I didn't really speak to him. OK, so maybe I was a little heavy on remember the girls names, but you gotta start somewhere. No drumming for belly dancers, though. If there was some, I missed it.

Something profound, something profound. Certainly having a happier, optimistic view is much better. Smiling a lot really seems to be working out, or at least I'm getting positively reinforced. Personally, I do think I've dropped a lot of the worries and concerns that seem to plague people. Bush is still annoying, though. What can you do? Being in the now, so to speak, valuing every moment, that's kind of a nice way to be, and I'm not so sure how much you can really work to get there. Can you struggle to stop struggling? Seems contradictory, and really it's not the struggling that ends the struggling, it just happens eventually despite it.

• March 23, 2007

finished the dang robotics class. i didn't study enough for the final, and it was harder than i was expecting, i didnt do so well. on the midterm, i had answers for everything, but not on this one. i really don't care about the grade anymore, though.

Go Tigers! I was at Dan McGuinness after the exam, hanging out with Melissa and watching the game between the Tigers and Texas A&M. a battle at the end, by one point with the last second bomb that missed.

• March 10, 2007

A friend is someone who has been there with a hug when you needed one. Wow, there are a lot of people who have been my friend that I haven't appreciated. and i haven't always been the friend i could.

So, Melissa is a pleaser. Kim is a pleaser too. They like making other people happy. And it seems like they get attached with people who have problems. And I'm thinking, maybe it's because you can best please someone who is the most unhappy. But you can't make them happy, so they end up breaking up. I think marriage is just wrong for people like that. It should be a little more accepted to just try to be with someone, and make them a little happier for a while, even though you know it can't last forever. This dream of a marriage lasting forever is a bad sort of ideal for some. And if you want to get extropian, it would be an especially bad concept if you were to, say, live 200 years or more. It would be much better to share your life with more people.

I found a neat little blogger, the Sarcastic Journalist. She must be inptish. And I appreciate good writing more and more. I'm just a wannabe.

• March 9, 2007

I saw the little red bird yesterday morning. I used to see her almost every day, but it had been a month since I saw her. I didn't see her this morning.

• March 8, 2007

Yeah, I'm thinking of a philosophy masterwork. I would want a system that uses the whole PC as its blackboard. Right now in AI, there is a type of model of intelligence which is a blackboard. One part of the program writes up something on the blackboard and all the other parts of the program can look at it, or write something else or erase, or doodle, or whatever. The whole desktop on the PC is a natural extension to that analogy, but I don't think it has been really exploited. The hard thing for me on projects, and it's often a problem in Ph.D. dissertations, is finding something that's doable by one person in a reasonable amount of time. Plus, when you write for academia, you are trying to contribute to the state of the art, so by definition, it can't be anything that you yourself own afterword. And I think legally the dissertation ends up being the property of the university, but I could be wrong about that.

For an extrovert a friend is someone whom your lifetime word count in conversation is at least 2 or 3 digits. For an introvert that is still just an acquaintance and friendship takes at least 4 digits word count.

I know a hack. He writes small amounts of code that can fit into other peoples big system. Small enough that he can print them out and tape them onto walls to look at them. I don't even know anyone else who prints out source code, and I just realized why. It's because they work on full complete systems that completely solve peoples problems. Not hacks.

Under stress I get talkative, and I've been under an above average amount of stress. Not serious, but noticeable.

• March 6, 2007

And Melissa has a sense of humor. Somebody asked for a vodka and redbull. And said something about how she would only pour a little bit of vodka. So she just gave him the whole glass of straight vodka, and a can of red bull on the side. And so he had to ask for a glass to mix it in. She can be very blonde, though.

Wow, the scale said #189. So I'm not eating. That's probably not a good sign. But I have been doing the Wii workout. I've played boxing a few times now, and that can get the heartrate up. I'm getting my ass-kicked by one character, katrin, though. I'm not sure what I'm doing, but she has these quick jab combinations, and I think these stop hits keep my punches from going through, so it seems from my perspective that the controls aren't responding to my motions, which honestly do get slow and lumbering after a little while. So it's also frustrating. If I've been winning at all it's because a really slow right haymaker translates to a strong punch in game world, though in my world it's generally more tired laziness. Still, theoretically, it takes some ability to be able to get the really slow, powerful moves in on an opponent. One weird thing is that this game keeps a rating on skill level, and what's happening to me now is that I can get a knock-out and win a match against a higher rated opponent, but it will deduct points from my skill level. So clearly it thinks I'm doing something wrong. I certainly am bad at dodging. Always have been.

• March 4, 2007

Anarchist riots in belgium i was thnking i need to go out there and show solidarity.

And then there is the party anchor. There were three hotties yesterday here who left. No one to hit on them i guess and then four studs walked through. Are there reliable places for them to go? Walmart can suport shopping for a community but it doesnt supply a social center. So what replaces it? Church. Ick. For the partyer maybe bars. But those roam.

I woke and i was solid. I didnt want to sleep anymore. Seems unusual for me. Stuck in a cali house dream. Thinking of the lifeextending diet of mostly vegetables. Or maybe i just ate too much fried chicken. Or maybe im in love.

Wow, hanging out at closing with chuck and Melissa. Jennifer Wells (according to her receipt) asked me if I liked Panic. or Phish. I said I was into classic rock. Zeppelin? sure. Ah. it was the hair. Thought I was a neohippy, or whatever they are calling themselves. Chuck straightened me out. He's an old jazz man. Trumpet. Said he was with the Dead in '76. Jam bands. He mentioned one, I guess. It must have been the hair. Bonaroo. Said he sold glad bags with nitrous. Asked me if I huffed. Heh. So, they knew Brad Boswell. Melissa called him a whore. old times friends. Texted him with something. Melissa just rolled a house for the first time a year ago. Stoner. But brought over Eric, who works with her brother Harold. a computer guy with Service Master. Eric said he had a rep for being lazy. but that's how computer people go. Likes to go see the shuttle launches. Hmm. Ah. So it was busy and Melissa insisted no tipping. As if it were up to her and she had some control of the situation. So I asked Chuck if I should defy Melissa. (Actually he introduced himself as Charles) Didn't have the context. Just a yes or no question. But he did finally say yes. Melissa said he was an opposite guy. I should do the opposite of what he says. Hmm. so that made it my choice, which it always was. The advice was sound. Never cave to a woman. Still, I caved. Concede. Josh did text her. Got to get some priorities. And she hit the codeine cough syrup right there. Brad and Melissa at 16 with a jug of wine. Man, if I hear another stoner who thinks marijuana could be taxed. The analogy, I guess, is with tobacco, and maybe alcohol. But they've never tried to grow tobacco or brew beer or distill gin. It is too tough. Growing pot is not. It could never be taxed, except in a stoner's dream. The anarchists have it right. What killed prohibition? It was the violence. Maybe that's the only way. But that's probably just the anger talking. Stand still, laddie! I don't want efficiency in killing, I want blood in the streets. OK, whatever version of the Wall is on my iPod is alphabetized. So "The Happiest Days of our Lives" does not lead into "Another Brick in the Wall, part 2", and I'm finding it quite frustrating.

Would you believe the Wushu Taichi school in Bartlett has a web page? One of the things that has kept me from even trying them out is not knowing their schedule, but there it is, quite plainly. I'm not sure why I didn't find it before. it's as plain as anything. And they do have Bagua, which I was more interested in.

• March 3, 2007

Went to Dan McGuinness again. Very slow, unlike last week which was busy. Freeworld, a sort of greatfull dead sort of band with a really Jerr-bear looking bass player, played _Manic Depression_ shortly after I got there. I tipped them a C. Some really wasted punk was getting abused, which sort of scared Melissa, I think, by Josh. I think Josh was the boyfriend sort of guy, maybe. He did mention that he might take her out for sushi. I don't know. She picked up his ticket. And she was on about how she has to split her tip 5 ways. So I think she had it coming when I tipped her a C, but she did protest quite a bit, which I thought was cute, I guess, but about as effective as ever. And the little waitress Heather and her BF Mike. And Jacob from Ronnie Grisanti's. Nicole just got married a couple of weeks ago. Ashley's cousin Tiffany was working the oher bar, so they were way overstaffed, but they wouldn't let anybody go home. I don't know. Management.

I got a 95% on my robotics midterm! So I was in a good mood. The average on the test was 90%. So I'm suspecting grade inflation, but still, I will admit that the teaching is very good, and I really did learn a lot. I'm not sure I quite got 95%, but at least a respectable amount. I'll take it.

I've started on Minsky's _Emotion Machine_. He's calling the components of the mind "resources" now instead of "agents". I think the idea of emotions for him is to turn some capacities off. For example, when you're in love, you turn off the critical faculties that might make you concerned about the bad things about another person. With anger, you stop worrying about consequences that might follow from your angry behavior.

• February 26, 2007

Willow actually came up with another good reason for a humanoid form factor for a robot. You want it to be able to sit shotgun. Sitting in the passenger seat of a car, possibly with an actual shotgun. Willow, though, has expressed a preference for emitting volleys of plasma. She wants me to make her a robot, and has already named it Torvok.

• February 20, 2007

Wild party at Roy's on Saturday. Not so many people, but there was a naked chick running around. Naked chicks are nice.

• February 17, 2007

So, on the intp list, there is a 'what is the meaning of life thread'. Here is my contribution: Wow, a classic question. I haven't really been following the thread, but I'm glad it exists, at least. I thought about this question in the past. And even then my reaction, after not really finding an answer, was to ask why ask the question. And I was thinking it was all just some attempt to master and control life. If I think about it now, I consider that it is people that invent meaning, not that meaning really exists out there in any sense. So it's still all about the human striving. And people have a bit of a hyperactive tendency to find meaning, so maybe they finding meaning in things that really have none. But if you find meaning, fine. Also, one result I heard way back was that people tend to remember things in the form of narrative, and one of the features of narratives is that they have a moral, which is a kind of meaning. So it's just natural that we might think of life as having a meaning. Personally, I just prefer to accept it as it is and not make it anything more than it is. Or maybe I'm just being lazy.

• February 12, 2007

I'm sitting out here in Palo Alto at my brother's house. It's pretty nice out here, and it's a nice house. I don't really take much advantage of everything out here, or I haven't yet, so there it isn't that much of a big deal. Warm weather in Winter. Freddie has some nice guitars, too. A pretty nice Yamaha acoustic and a Fender Stratocaster. I should get one of those. It's sweet.

• February 9, 2007

So, poor Melissa. she had a test on Thursday (yesterday), so I went to see her and see how she did. she didn't get any sleep since sunday. She thinks it was the Claritin-D. And she dozed off during the test. There was a multiple choice part where she only answered a few, and was going to go back. Then she did the essay,which she thought she did pretty well but when the teacher called time, she hadn't gone back to do the multiple choice, and just put b's. Ick. so she went to hand it all, in, but the teacher said to keep the questions. ok. and she gets home, and she has handed in the wrong thing. grr. now she doesn't even want to go and try to at least talk, because she's embarassed, and she really hasn't been having any luck. there was the test where she had an allergic reaction. but it'll be a year before this class comes up again. (biochem 2). And then there's the whole Anna Nicole thing. Well, I like talking to Melissa, but I'm surprisingly not all that attracted to her, at least not as much as it seems like I might be. Not my type, I guess. Personality and body type. Beautiful, though. And I like talking to her, and seeing her smile, which she does a lot.

So, I was thinking that Judaism is actually a fairly poor spiritual tradition. It's got some fairly lame sacred stories, and is into silly sort of miraculous stuff. And I think they have really gone the wrong way with their notion of 'holy land'. That there is this piece of desert that is holy to them in some way other than them living on it. I get the feeling, it was much more like the native american sense that land is holy, and we take care of it, but the moderns have gotten stuck on this wrong-headed notion that that patch of desert is somehow special and holy in and of itself to them, even if they are not there. It was holy because they were there, not for some specialness of the location. It's foolish of them to have tried to reclaim it, instead of just making new lands holy. Plus they've got that whole chosen people, neener neener, thing. When I say poor spiritual tradition, I mean poor in the way that buddhism (and some aspects of hinduism) have a pretty well developed system for trying to seek what you might call enlightenment. I would say Christianity and Islam inherit that poverty.

• January 19, 2007

So I just had a attack of gout. Actually, it was hurting a little last weekend. And it's because I've lost some weight. Down to 196. And I haven't even started the whole video exercise thing, yet.

• January 19, 2007

I guess, while I'm blogging I could mention the evening last night. the book discussion group at Aimee's talked about Terry Pratchett's _Small Gods_. The largest group ever, maybe 9 people. I think most of them liked it that read it. I got the jokes but wasn't impressed and didn't think them too funny. not after the schwartzwelder. I was sitting next to Aimee, and in a side conversation, we talked about the new Perfume movie, She saw that it was played at ridgeway a while back, and we checked, and it was playing at Studio on the square acording to the paper on Thursday, but I checked the computer, and that was it's last day. So we missed it by a few hours! Grr. Before going I had checked dan mscguinness's web site, and saw that king's trio was playing, so i was planning to do there after, to help forget about aimee. She was looking so gorgeous as usual. So I go to dan mcguinness's, and melissa is working the bar in the other room away from the band, so i'm kind of torn. i guess it's no contest, really, so i mostly stayed over there and occasionally went to see the band. They played well, though it was completely dead. No Hendrix, though. And I didn't see a tip jar, so i didn't tip anything. i should get over it. I should have just given them some cash, and maybe asked for some Jimi. And I couldn't tell for sure if some of the girls there were band girls or what, since they seemed to do gf types of things. Anyway, hung out with Melissa. The credit card machine was down for a while near close, and she seemed to be stressing, It took a while but i eventually offered to cover the big group who was over $100. But she said no. And she gave me reasons i guess. Seems like the must have had some way to handle it. And then it started working again and it was all fine. Actually, the guy Randy had said the message was tappy something, and the guy sitting next to me, who seemed to know about these pos things (and they're using micros, which Doug and Jeff actually have a few of sitting around and have played with quite a bit) and recognized right away that that was "tcp/ip" and said it was an internet problem. So probably Randy played with whatever internet setup they have, and got it working. I'll try not to attribute to my sometimes strange uncanny luck computers. Seems like they've been remarkably good to me over the years. There was a really loud girl Leanne there for a while, who used to bartend there at the beginning. And I found out that Melissa has Ashley as a roomate, the Ashley that worked there and used to work at TJ Mulligans on Quince. Now there's an exciting-sounding house! Ashley is working downtown now. And I asked about Becky, who used to be studying biology, and Melissa said she dropped out, and was partying too hard, and someday is going to wake up and get her act together, but everyone has to learn that for themselves. Hmm. The guy that was with Leanne (maybe steven?) said he used to carpool with Melissa in high school. Briarcrest. *sigh* ok, I was going somewhere with all this. There was another girl, Cara, kind of oriental, and must have been maybe military of some sort. admitted to being military spouse at least. Cara asked Melissa about the new guy, and it wasn't all that clear to me. Melissa had a bouquet of roses sitting there. I think that was an apology from the manager Randy maybe, and not the new guy. And I don't remember what she was saying about the new guy, but he wasn't happy about the not having sex. OK! too much information! I think Cara said most of them don't like it, and Melissa was like it wasn't her idea. I don't know. It does give one pause for thought, though. Later, I realized that I had crossed the no sex idea with Suzanne in my notion that I'd be up for doing the massage thing without sex. It would be fun in itself. I think. Whatever. Anyway, after that, I got out of there. It was about close, anyway. I gave her a $20, which is I think a tip she can live with. And she gave me a hug on the way out. Isn't she sweet?

anyway, finished it. aw, she felt bad. a child playing in the shallows by the shore. the hierarchy/dominance behavior does sound innate, and that's somewhat interesting. otherwise it seems like it really is insignificant. underwhelming. perhaps mashing them into paste would be more appropriate, if they are going to be so gooey inside.

• January 15, 2007

It was nice having another 3 day weekend. I did a small amount of work though, and worrying about that is always a pain. Interrupts my enjoyment. So I started working on it at noon, instead of later during the day. Probably would have been better to do it on Friday or Saturday or Sunday, I guess. I suppose I was still recovering. Seems like it's been stressful lately, and I used up some of my Sunday last weekend. But last weekend was also Shadowcom. Didn't do very much, as usual, but I did some more drumming for the belly dancers and that got going at like 1 in the morning. I guess that's all I get out of these things. One of the drummer guys really liked my drum. And it was mostly girls sitting in the audience laughing and having fun. That was nice, too.

I've had a bit of a cold. seems like I'm doing a bit better today with lots of rest. I roasted a turkey today, so I had a lot to eat. I think you're supposed to eat when you're sick. And I had dipped back under 200 lbs, which is good. Actually, the scale I use which is 3 lbs off said 196. It went up a pound though, so I didn't go out and get a steak at Dan McGuinness. So it's been a few weeks since I've seen Melissa. Hmm. I think I just prefer fantasies to real relationships. Maybe. Or it's enough that I don't take a risk towards anything real.

I've started a couple of classes at Stanford. I'm taking robotics and auditing computer vision. I haven't been spending as much time studying as I should have, though. That's what I needed to do this weekend, but instead I've been watching Voyager and Star Trek:Next Gen DVDs. I've got half a dozen books, though. I don't know if I'll get into. They are only for a couple of months. Quarters are really short. With my login, I get access to the lectures of all the other classes, so I really wanted (or thought I wanted) to look at some more of the lectures. Again, just watched Star Trek. So I don't know. maybe I'm not all that into it right now.

Hi speed blank DVDs are much better