a ba'b'ian journal

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  • December 31, 2008
Happy Seventh Day of Christmas! Happy New Years Eve!

Now I have a cold. Actually, the new gout medication says it reduces my immune response. Oh well.

I'm not sure what it was, but at some point, I starting thinking about Melissa's ass. Generally I don't think of Melissa sexually at all. Which seems a little odd. In fact, what it is is that I just repress the sexual feelings or thoughts I might have for her, and what comes out is just other feelings that she is sweet and nice, and that I believe that I love her and want to be nice to her. But this out in the open thought of her physically like that got me to realize how important those repressed feelings really are. So, with them out in the open, all the other feelings I thought I had don't seem as big a deal. And I know about this, or at least I have some understanding or expectation that it is true because the same thing happened with my feelings for Wynne. There was a lot of stuff I just repressed. So I don't know how my feelings are going to go after this. Maybe I'll cut back on the time I waste hanging out with her. Part of the problem with sexual feelings is that that's just something that isn't going to happen with her, so it's just sad and frustrating to think about. Much better to feel like I love her in some more pure and refined way, like a friend. Though maybe that is just a lie I'm telling myself.

Shadowcon coming up.

  • December 30, 2008
Happy Sixth Day of Christmas!

  • December 29, 2008
Happy Fifth Day of Christmas!

Somebody played had to be at least a half hour of Iron Maiden. Could have been longer, because it looked like at least one song got played more than once. I don't think I had ever heard any of them before. I was not pleased. People were leaving at some point during all that, but it was close to closing. And it was really loud, so I couldn't really talk much to Melissa because I would not have heard what she said. Even still, while this noise was going on, I did try to ask what the problem was why Josh wasn't going. I really didn't get much, other than something came up. Maybe a week or two before. And I didn't know where he worked. *Noise* *noise* *noise* for a year *noise* *noise*. OK, I appreciate your angst and all, but there is no need to bring everyone down with it. Yet again, the girls liked "Dancing Queen".

Andrea, who used to sing with super 5, was in there. I saw he start talking to a guy sitting next to her. And I saw her introduce herself to him. And sure enough they left together at close. I think I saw dude talking to some chick and they went out for a bit, but he came back. I tried to say hi to her.

So, it was pretty silly of me that I was hoping that there was some trouble with Melissa and Josh. But what're you gonna do?

When I showed up there, there was a little four-eyed brunette that was parked across the street. She was walking a little ahead of me, and I was wondering if she was going to Bardog. Then, crossing Front, she didn't wait for the light to change and the walk sign to show up, just ignored it and move on. Now, there was no traffic, so I suppose it's reasonable, but even so, I have generally been waiting, just to be a good citizen. Actually, there were a couple women a little bit apart and they both did that. Now, women walking downtown at night are at a bit of risk, I guess, so it's probably best to hurry. Still, I found it grating. I slowed down a bit, so I was further behind four-eyes, no longer close enough to ask, but sure enough, she went in to Bardog. And it's possible that I had seen her in there. I was hoping to catch her name, or maybe talk, but it's probaby just as well. So, at close, actually hanging at a bit after, when she was leaving she was saying someone took her smokes. She wanted some whatever the hell brand, and David said he could give her some of his, but she wanted hers. He was saying he didn't know who did it, and as she was going out the door, I said, it was me. After she was gone I said I'll tell you why--because we came in at the same time, she was parked across the street. Didn't wait for the walk signal to cross the street. What was that called? Jaywalking? Whatever. If you don't respect the law, expect people to steal from you. You don't obey the law, you lose your smokes.

  • December 28, 2008
Happy Fourth Day of Christmas!

So, Melissa is going to New York with Randy instead of Josh. I heard her say that a couple of times, but I didn't quite get the reason. I should find out what's up with that. And she was especially radiant last night. Her hair was different. A bit fuller with some curls, but a little bit wild. I asked her what she did, maybe curled it? and she said it was because it poured rain down on her. Well OK! She said she had gotten a lot of compliments. And she was just so excited about going on her trip. Sometimes things going on with her bring her down a bit, but last night she was just golden and shiny.

And there was a babe, Shawna who was picking up a shift for James. And I had gotten him a grande cappucino. I walked in there, not really sure now about this extra that I have. Melissa this time came over and gave me a hug when she got her Venti Non-fat Vanilla Latte. She hasn't always done that, but maybe she's just busy sometimes. And then said Shawna would love a coffee. Yay! Awkwardness averted. Shawna did express appreciation. A couple of times. I asked her what her real Starbucks preference was. White Chocolate Mocha. Seemed like there were a few others. And sometimes Chai. I said I was a Chai person. She lives in midtown, and one time went to the Poplar and Highland, and they were out of Chai. How do you run out of Chai?

Paul came in. He's always quiet. And he was sitting at the bar for a bit, then after that he went over to stand in his spot by the rail over the stairs. I see him go over there sometimes, but I had thought that it was just that there weren't any chairs. I guess he just likes that spot.

I was playing tunes on the jukebox. one time, I put in $5, which gave me 18 credits, but I left it with 7 plays left. It plays for a bit, then some Bozo goes over. Clearly a bit clueless, because he puts a dollar in. Dude. Then starts typing in choices. The next song takes a while to come up. I think he managed to whine a bit in that time or something. Then he said, "hey, that's not what I put in". Grr. Dumbass. And it was "Fat Bottomed Girls", which, I don't know. I only found that they had it on Thursday. it's on a "hidden" disk 80 that some of the waittresses put it. It doesn't have the songs listed in the slot, but they let me see the list. track 18 is "Bohemian Rhapsody" and track 6 is FBG. Sometimes I just need a little Night Opera. But when we heard it before, Melissa said she hates Meatloaf and Queen. So I felt bad to inflict it on her, but what're you gonna do? I think some other people like it too. So then Mr. the Clown goes and uses up all the rest of the credits. Clearly he thought his dollar got him 10 credits. Oh well. The rich get richer and the stupid get stupider. But one thing about putting in songs is seeing the crowd response. It really looks like girls like the ABBA song "Dancing Queen". I put that in sometimes. I need to find some more girl anthems like that that get women singing. It's very pretty.

My thighs are sore. I guess bouncing women up and down is hard work.

  • December 27, 2008
Happy Third Day of Christmas!

So I think I was being tested, but I don't know how I did. I had some money so I could go see jennifer and camille. But I go shopping at walmart, buying a little more than I expected, so I got rid of one of the Cs. I saw jennifer first, and got a pretty good double set. But they called her on stage at the end, and instead of doing more, we decided for her to go on. But she told me to wait for her and not cheat on her. So she's on stage and camille finds me. I told her jennifer said I shouldn't cheat on her while she's on stage. And camille was kind of unhappy, but said for me to save her a dance. After her 5 songs on stage, jennifer needed some water, and told me to stay right there, point to the steps, and I was, but dude told me I couldn't stand there because the girls needed the rails to get up the steps. OK. And I told jennifer about camille, and she said she was probably pissed. I don't know. jennifer said she had gone through some awful stuff. the r word. and she had her ovary removed from cancer. She seemed a little fragile, but I think we had fun. And I had been worried because she had said they were going to change the law, and she wouldn't work there after that. But I asked her this time and she said they wouldn't. I was going to try to get her number if I wasn't going to be able to see her again, but i didn't because it sounded ok. So I go out by the bar and sit. And wait for camille. And jennifer sits with me, in case I wanted another dance with her. But I'm holding out. We don't see her. So jennifer leaves me to wait. And I get up, and I see her in the corner with someone, and she notices me. Then someone else comes over and asks me for a dance. I say I'm waiting for someone. Who? Camille. She told her to come over and ask me for a dance. And she hasn't had one. I don't say it, but I only had the money left for Camille. So I had to say no. Plus, don't get a dance out of pity. And they'll promise to be great, but it just isn't a good start. So I'm waiting some more, and I think Camille gave the dude a dance and got done. I was waiting in a different spot on the other side. And I watch Camille go right over to where I was. I thought I saw someone give her a big hug. So I figure I missed out again. But I go over, and Camille sees me and says she was looking for me. Did I was to go sit down? Which i didn't quite get. Or was I ready for a dance. Yes please. Camille was quite pleasant. I think she's put on just a little bit more weight, but that was somehow nice. Not too much. Seemed a little bit more solid, or maybe more real. And she confirmed that she did send her friend over to me, and she said I was for someone, who? it was you! So I don't know. I didn't get the dance from the friend like she wanted, but I did what I wanted, which was to be with her. I don't know how the score for that plays out in a girls brain.

So Aaron was looking at their stack of games. It's like 15. He said it was too many. Yeah, well, what're you gonna do?

Melissa was going to get her Christmas money from working on Sunday. And then they had their Christmas party on Sunday and she didn't get to work. So they didn't even give presents, just stocking stuff. Her parents knew she didn't have any money.

So, there's a Futurama episode, "Jurassic Bark". They find a fossil of Fry's dog, and they work on getting it revived. Very emotional. Bender gets jealous. Fry does go on about him. They were very close, and he knew him from a puppy for maybe a year. But when he finds that the dog was 15 when he died, he realizes that he's had a full life, and is able to let go, and doesn't bring him back. But then they switch to his life. He spends all of it just hanging out in front of the pizza parlor waiting for Fry to come back. I've never seen such devotion in a droid before. But dogs might have that kind of devotion. It's stupid, though. They should move on. I tend to be like that. Holding on much too long. Obsession. It's not really love in itself, but one of the things that hovers around it.

Some real writing. Harlan Ellison. I think I was looking at some reddit about guy shooting some dad talking at the movies Harlan talks about something like that in section 2. on Violence.

. Man,so one of the bartenders at Bardog, David, got mugged. Some guys were following him, asking if he had a cell phone. Then stuck a gun in his face. Took his money, and then smacked him a bit with the gun. Took the cash and threw down the wallet. He went in bleeding. Melissa had mentioned it. At least he didn't get shot. So I'm wondering when my turn will be and what I'll do. I need to quite carrying so much stuff in my wallet. Seems like they always have guns now. I think it would be good to take pictures anytime you wee someone suspicious. that may have been the thing with the cell phone. I need to figure out how to quickly send people pictures.

  • December 26, 2008
Happy Second Day of Christmas!

Man, only now do I think of taking a picture. Went to see Melissa. She had a little christmas dress, red with the fur trim. I'm not sure what it was, maybe the extra skin aroud the shoulders and legs, but it made her look extra gorgeous, even for her. One of the waittresses was talking about watching her come in. I think she impressed a lot of people.

And the cute little waitress Jeanie flirted with me a little bit. I was hanging out after close, and she gave me a hug from the side as I was sitting, so I had to stand up and give her a proper hug back. She is sweet, but also really young. I think it's sad if she had to go home alone, so I should really she if she would want to hang out.

OK, that was amazing. I passed Hamp and Jenny in the hall, and Jenny said nice new shirt. I'm wearing a shirt I got for Christmas. Asked how she new, she said she never saw me wear it before. I thanked her for noticing. That's just very impressive.

On second thought, though, I don't think a picture could possibly have captured it, so it's just as well. Something about the realness and texture of her skin. A picture would just spoil it, or miss it, or something.

  • December 25, 2008
Merry Christmas! Happy Newtonmas!

Got bunches of stuff. Ate too much.

  • December 24, 2008
Happy Christmas Eve!

  • December 23, 2008
So I had a dream that I have fairly often. I'm in school again. I think I always felt that high school was unfinished, so I feel like I need to go do it again. And then I remember that I should be working. This time I was thinking about whether I wanted to do it. Like it was reasonable to take a break and redo high school. I'm not sure what that's about. Since they are cutting my hours, and am thinking about taking some classes. Or at least studying some things. I guess that kind of relates.

  • December 21, 2008
I recently watched the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man". There's a big where they have the aliens hooked up to a lie detector and they are asking them their reasons for helping people out. And I had always figured they had just faked out the lie detector, which would be reasonable enough. But this time I noticed that he had worded his answer in a weaselly way such that it actually wasn't a lie. He said something like "I hope that people will believe me when I say that we have only the best of intentions." Sure. I would hope that too. It was just a subtlety in the writing that that series is really good for.

Sometimes you know you should do something and yet you don't. I've been kind of busy this weekend with my brother and his kids around the house, so I decided I wouldn't go see Melissa till Sunday. And on Saturday she said probably she wouldn't be working Sunday because they might be having their Christmas party. And I was thinking if I wanted to go see her, I needed to go then. But I didn't and then sure, they have their party tonight. Oh well. I guess it means I have a little more money for Christmas, though I wanted to give her some. But I would have liked to see her.

  • December 19, 2008
It feels like"The Lottery Ticket. I sent her an email. No reply.

  • December 17, 2008
I'm not sure why it showed up today but one of my google widgets popped up an article about Carlos. For what it's worth.

Hmm, and someone has a girl android.

  • December 15, 2008
Happy Ides of December!
  • December 14, 2008
I was chatting pretty nicely with this little girl Whitney at the Mensa Christmas party. She said she hangs out the the P & H cafe on Madison. Actually I was saying I hang out at Bardog downtown. It's my "Cheers"--it fulfills my meager social need to be around people I know, so I don't get to so many mensa things any more. And she said that at that place, she there are always at least four people that she knows. And she said that just knowing the bartender doesn't make it a Cheers. I don't know, maybe, but at Bardog, the owner Aldo has been making it a point that the bartenders all get to know the names of the customers, and if they are just sitting around quiet, to engage them in conversation and get them talking and having a better time. An Melissa is a little bt of a quiter person, more introverted, so it isn't so natural for her, but anybody can get better. So it's a pretty friendly place, and it's uually pretty busy, so there are lots of people. A lot of cuties, too. I was talking to Also last night and he told me I should say nice things about Bardog in my blog. The food is really amazingly good, too. The have several chefs and get especially good quality meat. I've heard them talk about the butcher that they use.

I'm talking to Whitney. She's a nurse, and had to go into work at 11 so she couldn't drink anything. She was hoping they would call and not have her come in, but they didn't call. I noticed she preened a couple of times, playing with her hair, and she was smiling quite a bit, which is a nice sign. She mentioned her ten year old and I'm pretty sure she is married, but she was telling me all about a little friend she had just rescued at Memphis State. He had broken up with her, and she was all crying while working late on some project at the Helmsman (the school paper). So whitney was going to bring her a pot of coffee, but didn't have and grounds, only some beans. So she had grind the coffee and make it. Walking on the Memphis State campus at 1 in the morning with a big thing of coffee, she was thinking it had to be the stupidest thing she had ever done. She got out at 5. And they had only been together for a month. I said it soounded like he had made the right decision. But Whitney showed me a picture of her on her phone, I guess to show how cute she was. And she said she was very "nice". And then I kind of went off on how nice isn't really all that great of a characteristic, if that's the best thing you can say about a person. And personally, I don't even think it is a good thing in general. It's not something I particularly value. I think that really didn't do so much for whatever we might have had going. And I talked a bit about the programming stuff at FedEx, working with all the Ph.D.s. She said I had lost her. But while I was talking about that, Marilyn came over and was talking and she kept scootching over. Whitney was sitting kind of tucked in a doorway with a bookcase next to it And there were people on the other side of Marilyn and as she was scootching over, she ending up such that I was completely squeezed out. It was just Whitney talking to Marilyn, and I had to just move on. We had name tags, but I didn't get Whitney's last name, though it was just sitting there. Oh well. The P&H cafe is in midtown. I hate midtown.

I guess maybe it says I'm not so into meeting women right now. Or maybe I just have bad habits I should get over.

Aw.

  • December 13, 2008
Happy Saturday the Thirteenth!

I thought it was bad karma. Instead of going to see Melissa, I went out to see Super 5 at Doc Watsons. And I was sitting in the back kind of in the corner by the wall. But there was this table in line of site to the main bar. When I sat down there was a brunette and guy sitting opposite this tall blonde. She seemed quite cute, and she was by herself, but I'm not one to go over. And some bit into it, some big guy sits with him, with a bit of a thinning spot in his hair, and I saw the blonde introducing herself to him and shaking hands. I don't know if they had invited him over from somewhere or what. Because a little further into it, the brunette (I caught her name, Sissy) comes over to me and asks me to join them at the table. And I said no, but thanks. Like I said, bad karma. I think she said I look like some guy on SNL. I don't know who they mean (after the linguistics class, I think I'm going to drop saying "whom"). She was trying real hard, but I just didn't feel like it. And I got up a little after that, and sat pretty close to the band, and hung out with Chris during the break. So I wasn't sitting in their area any more. And it couldn't have been more than a couple hours later, but the new dude and the blonde seemed to be getting kind of lovey-dovey, and they even smooched a bit. And then at the end of super 5's last set, I'm still sitting up front, which was next to the exit, and the blonde comes up to me and starts talking. I forget what all was guiding it all. She mentioned the SNL thing again and asks me if I act. The group over there was from the Germantown High School Theater staff. Well, I'm not a very good actor. I didn't go into the plays I've been in. And she was trying to say something about how ability isn't everything. But I said I have two nephews that went to Germantown. Nathan and Daniel. She actually taught Nathan in senior English. Well, that's something. I'll have to tell him. And she asked my name. And my age. She said it was her age, though I don't know what that means. But increasing the bad karma, I didn't ask her name. Maybe I'll get it from Nathan. She said we should go out. A little stronger than that, she predicted we would go out by the end of the year. But she was pretty drunk. So I don't know. I think it must have been clear that I liked her. I said I was a geek, but she said she was a geek too. She loves diagramming sentences. She must be one of those NF types that understand people better than us NT types. But I have over the years come to have a much greater affection for the NFs, though they are still a little bit alien to me. I really would like to see her, now, but I didn't get her name. I tried Germantown HS site, but they don't have pictures of the teachers, grr. So there's nothing I can do now. I have to wait if anything will happen. And probably not. Bad karma, like I said. Super 5 did at one point play "Hot for teacher", and they must be the connection.

  • December 12, 2008
Happy Twelve Twelve! Happy Friday the Twelfth!

  • December 11, 2008
I've been thinking, for at least a year, of taking up a new language to do development. And to freshen up my skills a bit and to get ready for programming on multicore computers, which are going to be much more important in the future. For a bit I was looking at Erlang, which was written to be inherently parallel-- there can be thousands of little units working together an they work by sending messages, which is safer than the way a more traditional language would work, which is by sharing variables in memory which might change. If you share these values between different processors in a multiprocessor system, you could get mistakes when you look at it before a particular sequence is finished. The classic example is in transfering money between two accounts. First you take the money from the one and then add it to the other. But if you were to check both accounts in the middle of doing that bit, it would look like the money was missing, and you would have the wrong total. Anyway, Erlang has an even more nifty feature in since it's passing messages between different processes, it doesn't really care if the processes are on two different cores on one computer or two different computers altogether, so it can be made very reliable--by having lots of redundant computers. It is used by ericsson for phone switching networks, so reliability is its most important feature. They don't ever have to turn the system off for problems, it never goes down at all. It has a very unusual feature that they can even change to a new version of the code without turning off and restarting, it just switches while it is running. I learned enough about it to see what they did to manage that. It was kind of neat, but it didn't completely come for free. They had to do things in a particular way to support it. It kind of seemed like if you really had to do it, you probably would be able to do that in any system, though the support might not be so easy. The thing is, you would seldom really want or need to do it. So I looked at Erlang for a good bit, but I just decided I didn't really need those features and didn't want to get stuck having to do things that way just for them. I looked a little more at lisp. Some book on advanced lisp. I know some lisp, but I haven't really done much, and haven't become the kind of master of the language that it was describing. I've been a Java person for ten years now. I think I really fell in love with it, and it made me like programming again because the libraries that it came with gave you tools to do many, many things without having to do the kind of writing from scratch that you often had to do before that. It seems like Doug is still stuck on writing things from scratch and isn't so much for using libraries, though he of course has to to some extent. Anyway, if I'm going to use the libraries in Java that I'm familiar with, There is a fancy functional language called Scala that I have thought about, but haven't especially tried to get into. Functional languages seem like they will almost certainly have to be used to make proper use of the parallel computers that I was talking about. But one fairly new contender is clojure, and now I'm thinking I'm going to try use clojure. It is basically a version of lisp that works with the Java system. One thing I heard about Scala is that you could just include the one zip file, and that was all you need to be able to add it to your system. I've been looking if it's the same with clojure, and I haven't seen anyone saying it, but it looks like it's basically the same. And it's a lisp. So I already know something about it, though I am not a master. And if I become a mater of clojure, it would be like become a master of lisp, which is a much wider and more valuable thing. One of the questions is what exactly did I want to do this other development in? Well, it was the AI sorts of things that I wanted to work in. And it happens that a lot of AI stuff is already done in lisp. In particular there is a program called Copycat. One of the first things I would have wanted to do in whatever new language I was going to work with was to get Copycat translated to the new language. But it's already written in a dialect that is close to clojure, so it's a much simpler task. I say I want to get Copycat translated, because after that, I want to write some stuff that uses Copycat as a basis. Kind of like building a framework, which is something that they really discourage, but people seem to want to do anyway.

Well, I should also mention the other language alternative. All the things having to do with Microsoft and .net. The big contender is C#, which is a lot like Java, but they started it a little later so they included provisions for some fancy new features that Java wasn't set up to have. And Microsoft is not afraid to let a language become a bloated monstrosity. They also always intended their .net platform to have multiple languages, which is something the Java system has only lately been doing. There is a functional .net system, F# which is based on a family of languages that I have briefly looked at, ML--I read through a book, practical OCaml, which is another language in that family. Pattern matching is a bigger thing in those areas (Erlang has that, too). And I mention this microsoft stuff because at work they encouraged me to study .net, but I said no.

  • December 10, 2008
Well, that was interesting. Jenny with the Mystery Method Corporation sent me an email for me to update the link I have to their site. I looked at it, and my link is already dead. It was a link into their site for a particular seminar that has long since past, so it's gone. I'm not even sure if it would have properly worked then. Anyway, they are changing their name to Love Systems so the link will change. and gosh, this weekend they are going to have their seminar on picking up hired guns, like bartenders. I wish I would have seen it before--I would have wanted to go to it, but now it's a little late to set up. Plus, they are saying they are going to quit having it. I know it's just one of their little tricks they use to manipulate people-- they use some term like time-limiting or something to describe it. And one of the instructors is the Don, who is the guy I wanted to study under. Oh well. I'm still not particularly sold on the system. For what it's worth.

  • December 9, 2008
Well it was a strange dream. Kind of a bit of a nightmare, and I just get the feeling I was trying to consider and make sense of things, using weird dream symbolism. But the stuff that was happening on a literal level was exceptionally weird. It's fading of course, and now I only have a weird outline. There was a mountain lion loose and roaming around. And though I was scared to, I went up and got it on a lease and took it to a house to stay. I different house from mine. And somehow, the lion had learned to talk. And then learned to act like a woman (OK so I get mountain lion=cougar, I just read an article where someone was talking with her mom who said she knew about cougars from one of her soaps). And we got, um, close. But it was getting to be a bit like I was scared to leave. And there was someone else, a girl, who wanted to, um, play. And I was thinking, the mountain line would get mad and literally kill me if she found out. And I thought she was inevitable and she certainly would, but I decided to be with this girl, and to go over to my own house and be free of the mountain lion, and give her up. But then she came over to my place, and was pissed and all, what is this about? But I said I didn't want to be with her any more. We're breaking up, and it's hard. And the rest of it was me trying to make sure she didn't get upset and wild again, but she ended up pretty calm. I think some of it was from a story Chris was telling me about his recent breakup. Actually two different breakups in succession, with girls that basically sounded pretty wild and crazy. And some of it was about me. And thinking about maybe how I sometimes scare these women that I get obsessed with. And aside from the cougar image, it is also the tiger symbol from _Life of Pi_. Great book. The tiger there is an extended symbol for the internal animal violence that we all have inside us, which we can use religion to help us get past.

  • December 8, 2008
Dang, this is a freakish feeling. I guess I am starting from a fairly disappointed mood. You can probably guess what that involves. But I'm listening to the director's commentary on Wall-E. I loved the movie. I think I didn't watch it a second time, I forget, but it didn't seems so good when I watched it last night. I kind of did other stuff at the same time so maybe I was distracted and that took a bit away from it. But now I'm listening to the director, and he just sounds like a complete useless pinhead. A true F type, but without the kind of redeeming qualities that they usually get because they actually live in the world and have to think. By F I mean a person whose entire world is just the feelings about the world, and not really anything substantive in it. Hence useless. A fantasy story tell. Sure it can be nice and fun and all, but it's the kind of thing that can if I'm in a bad mood grate on me for complete uselessness. Cirque-du-Soleil did that to me. I was just annoyed by it's wasted uselessness. So the guy was explaining how he really had no intention to preach about the environment. He just wanted a story about a robot abandoned and stuck with centuries of drudgery and eventually wishing there was more, and dreaming for love. So the environmental thing was just incidental to having that personal story. Somehow that just sickened me. You want to talk about some feeling so you're force to think about something but really the thought is not important. I don't know. Just seems annoying. And listening to him talk, I get the feeling that it worked out because he had good people working for him. And yet, I have to listen to _his_ commentary. Ugh.

So I wanted to try to just let it go without writing about it. I guess it wouldn't hurt to try to makes sense of it. So I'm hanging out with Melissa. And I had been thinking of asking about it. I say, I don't have cable, so it would be nice if you asked me over to watch movies with y'all. And I got the whole talking martian look, like I was sprouting a new head. She asked, I don't have cable? And it was a look of not been comfortable at all, but not wanting to express anything. So she kind of went off and talked to some other folks at the other end of the bar for a while. OK. She had done this thing that she does. She said that she was too tired to make it all the way home, so she stayed at a friends house. Hmm. Man. Yeah, I'm just waiting on a friend.

So, it's toward the end. the scene in the escape pod with the plant in the boot. Dude mentions that the boot was Jim Reardon's idea. I know Jim from Simspons commentaries, and one of them mentioned him working on Wall-E. Honestly, I was wanting to hear him talk about it, not this Andrew Stanton guy. And when I said I thought it only worked because of good people working for him, it was Jim in particular that I was thinking of.

So, one of the mensa mail lists has gotten a thread on coasters. The idea is that there is some tendency in mensa members to just coast, expecting their high intelligence to let them get by without much work. fair enough. And there was a link to an article about that. It's getting late and I haven't finished it, so I'm saving it here.

  • December 7, 2008
Happy Infamy Day!

  • December 1, 2008
Happy December! Happy Calends!

  • November 28, 2008
I've heard that dogs have their vocal cords set up in a different way from us, such that they can bark on and on without ever hurting them, where it would mess us up pretty quick. But listening to some women just yak and yak and yak and yak and yak, I'm not so sure about that.

  • November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Turkey Day!

  • November 26, 2008
What does "Hi" mean? "I hereby acknowledge your existence as a valuable person."

  • November 24, 2008
Man, finally finished the darn Sudoku calendar. 11 months late, but still got through it. a lot of them were tough. towards the end, on the hardest ones, i could get any simple logic to predict the next one, so wher I had narrowed it to two, i picked one to try to get a contradiction following from that, or just getting the answer. just to get it done. guessing with backtracking is just too darn efficient. searching through rules and different combinations is hard, and i just tend not to be methodical. you get a feeling of what to try and where to look, so you do seem to improve in searching. i just didn't quite master it. and i would still make mistakes. on the last one, level 3 of 4, i made some mistake somewhere and had to start over from scratch, though when you do that, you have the trace of the one's you've done, and you can try those easily first. And I thought I could see where I had put one down wrong with no proper justification, but it ended up being the right one. so i don't know where I went wrong. anyway, I'm just glad it's done.

  • November 13, 2008
Happy Ides of November! Happy Thursday the Thirteenth!

  • November 11, 2008
Happy Eleven Eleven! Happy Armistice Day! Happy Veterans' Day!

OK, so Melissa said when she was in San Fransisco, she went to the nude beach. But it was cold and nobody was there. She did get a picture of herself with her pants pulled down next to the sign, just to be silly. Yummy :)

  • November 9, 2008
So, Dr. McWhorter just had a lecture with a quick history of English that just seems quite different. And hearing it, I thought about Wynne, who was into English-- majored in it though she went on to medical school and actually went to go study in England. I might have liked to go tell her about it, but she wouldn't want to hear from me. Anyway, he has a kind of perspective that languages continually change making it just the same original language. So English is proto-Indo-European, that encountered, of all things, a Semitic language and changed pretty profoundsly. and got as much as a quarter of its words from that, The sounds changed (Grimm's law), and it dropped a lot of the endings, and it added a feature where past tense came from vowel changes (like sink, sank, sunk--that's something that happened in Semitic, but not so much other European langugaes). This would be the change to (Old) Germanic, which happened around Denmark or Scandinavia. Then they picked up and moved to the big island. It was learned poorly by adult Vikings, who dropped a lot of the cruft that accumulates from languages. No more genders. Case endings gone except the possessive and he/him. The word order changes from subject object verb to subject verb object. After that, it picked up a lot of vocabulary from other languages to make up for dropping things, like Norman French, Latin, and Greek (which is part of the typical history of English that everybody gives).

Woof, so I went to see Melissa on Sunday only. That's actually pretty reduced because I've been going at least twice, mostly. And she said she was thinking I was just hanging out with the folks. I told her that they left Thursday, so it seemed like it was taking her a bit to wrap her head around why, and I didn't explain that I had a bit of a change in feelings. In there, she asked me what I was doing, and I talked about watching this class and I forget what else. I didn't really consider that she was asking why didn't I come see her. And she was wearing long sleaves, but something low cut. I had texted her at about 4 that I was coming, and she did seem happy about it. And it was a struggle this time to get her her Starbucks. I had to park two or three blocks away. I think it was COGIC. This has only been the second time, and for some reason both times when I went in, she wasn't behind the bar, she was out on the floor saving customers, which made it more natural for her to give me a hug when I handed it over to her. I gotta say it's really nice to be hugged by Melissa. OK, so I'm leaving, and yet another hug. And she's asking when I will come see her again. And she says maybe Thursday? Golly. She wants to see little ole me on Thursday? That's also pretty nice. I don't really know when it'll be, but soon. It had a slightly darker tone, though. She lost a bundle going down to the casino with David after work, (at 5:30 in the morning). And she told a story about how she was waiting for a chair at the big slot machine, and as she was getting her money out, some girl sat right down in her spot. And then on her 3rd spin, the girl won a million dollar jackpot. Augh! that's a pretty tough one. OK, so I don't quite feel like she just wants the money, but it's a thought that at least entered my head this time. And I guess it's only natural. She must have gotten past the point of being used to it to expecting it. That happens. You will get used to anything. Still, it feels nice to be wanted, whatever the reason.

[I pulled this out of an email to the INTP list]: I just saw Lakoff explaining what "haleth insurance" is about. "Health Insurance" is another regressive issue-framing word game. The function of insurance is to make money by restricting health care. That's what they do. They try to deny health care as much as they can. If you try to get a system of "health insurance" instead of health care, then you are trying to get a system of people trying to make the most money by restricting care. It is a broken idea that people need to move past. Plus, when you have insurance, a third of the money anyway is in that system of people trying to do all that regulation and control stuff. So you would save a lot of money just getting rid of that.

regressives have this deep, visceral, hatred of anyone getting anything for free. The Lakoff (_Political Mind_) that I'm reading right now is going more into it. It's a moral thing for them. It is immoral to give people things for nothing. It makes them lazy. It is just inherently bad. So the whole thing rankles. They got this strategy to kill Social Security--spend way too much on the military so the government can't afford it anymore. But I digress.

Now, if you are going to have a complete national system of health care, you will of necessity have to restrict access. Some people will try to take advantage. But it is simply a better thing for the motive not to be profit, but to maximize medical benefit. That's a completely different thing. I'm not sure if libertarizombies can appreciate it, but it is. Maximizing money doesn't make everything better--different topic, though.

Anyway, people can't get past the idea of giving some people stuff for free. Health care is an even nastier case of this. Take Joe who pays for his own healthcare. Because of the nature of healthcare, and how important it is not to have sick people around, Joe's health care for him would be cheaper if some of the other people around got a free ride. But people hate that. Joe would rather just pay the extra cost rather than have the other person get it for free. Cussedness of human nature. But lets take a different area so we can see that this can be true. Imagine having to pay for your own police protection (it's kind of a libertarian notion, I guess). There's going to be more problems, and wild bad guys roaming around, because some people just aren't going to spend enough on theirs. So the cost to Joe is just going to be higher because he wasn't willing to let other people get their police protection for free based in part on money he pays in.

  • November 9, 2008
Why does milk go sour? The pasteurization that they do on it is not complete, so there are still live germs in it. It is possible to fully pasteurize it, and they do it in Europe. There, you can buy milk in boxes on the shelf not refrigerated, and it lasts a long time. . But that significantly changes the taste.

  • November 8, 2008
Wow. Sometimes you come across something and you just have to pause and put it in your blog. I'm listening to Dr. McWhorter talk about language again. And he said we have a word processing problem. It has become too easy to write things. Books have gotten longer and longer. And he mentions that Clinton's autobiography just came out, and it's four hundred thousand pages long. Yay!

Kiss a wookie, kick a 'droid. Fly the Falcon through an asteroid.

A very unimportant person.

So, it looks like they cured someone of AIDS. That's just trippy. It is not really a practical solution, but it's hopeful. And they weren't trying to cure the AIDS, it was just incidental to the other treatment. It was a person with leukemia, and they gave them a bone marrow transplant. But they went specifically to a donor that had the known genetic immunity to AIDS. The bone marrow is involved with making the blood cells affected by the disease, and afterwards, the person stopped aids medication and hasn't had the disease any more, for some fairly long period of time. It's not really practical as a cure. A bone marrow transplant? that can kill you on it's own. The genetic immunity is very rare, maybe 1% of Europeans, but that's still a lot of people, though a lot less than the number of people with AIDS in the world. And I think you still have to match up the donors. But possibly they can look at cultivating huge amounts of the cell cultures, and maybe they can do more fancy gene therapies along these lines. And maybe it's not a fluke and wouldn't always work. But it's darn hopeful and promising.

  • November 5, 2008
So Obama won. That's a relief.

Don't forget about lymph. It requires moving around to work.

I finally brought Melissa her Starbucks, a venti non-fat vanilla latte. And she gave me a hug right then. So I got two--one on first seeing her, and one on leaving. But that's so subservient, that maybe that's what it was. I kind of feel a little different now. Add that to how she was talking about Ashley, who had been dating two guys, that one relationship was hard enough. So discouragement. She had a particularly radiant smile this time. Not for me, so much. And maybe I just have other droopinesses going on with me. Seems like there was something else. I often send a little thank you text right after. Didn't get a reply this time, though she's been having phone issues, so you never know with that. So, she dvdr records some vampire showm, and was talking about it with some guy, Tom, a screenwriter who has redwine with the steak and tomatoes. I talked about how I had a dvdr, but it won't keep the program. She told me to take it back. I'm not good about that. I'm not sure if I've ever taken anything back. So maybe that made me feel bad.

  • November 2, 2008
Quote from Trey Parker--"You know, when people ask if I believe in God and Jesus, I say yes, and I believe in Luke Skywalker and I believe in Santa Claus." This was in the commentary about the imaginationland trilogy, which is about the power of story.

  • October 31, 2008
Happy Halloween!

I have a bit of a cold. I didn't go to the book discussion at Aimee's last night. They were talking about _Frankenstein_. And so I didn't get to go see Melissa afterward. Sadness.

So, googling bardog, I found the blog of a regular who goes there, Paul. A pretty serious blog. I think he does websites, too.

Wow, so it's 9:15. I've had one kid come by. One. None of the neighbors has their' lights on, so I can see us getting passed by. It was a cute little girl, maybe seven. She had a car at the curb and her mom was out with her. Winged something with pink. Maybe a faerie princess or something. I don't know. I don't know little girl stuff. But it was nice. Somebody's little angel.

I think boys like the idea of extorting people. Threats of violence. It's such a visceral guys thing. But thats not a girls perspective at all. I think they like gifts of food. I've written elsewhere that little gifts of food are part of a basic courtship ritual that also hits at an amazingly primal level. I'm thinking of a theory or story I heard about one time how it was part of a basic courtship system that was involved with women no longer having a distinct time of being in heat, and being always receptive. So they got, um, fed more often. And probably more than anything else, a guy demonstrated his ability to provide.

  • October 28, 2008
Wants are infinite. That's in the sense of want meaning not to have. There are an infinite, that is unending, number of things you don't have. But of course, part of the idea of wanting is to desire. You don't desire everything that you don't have. But when you get stuff, just having it isn't enough to keep you happy. Happiness is funny that way. You can get used to anything. It is more the change in things that makes you happy. So you have to keep getting stuff. And if you keep getting the same stuff, then you get used to that. So maybe you have to get more stuff, or maybe different stuff. Maybe better stuff. Just trying to keep happiness going is a tricky thing. Well, OK, you have a certain level of happiness that you kind of stay at. But if you want to be a little bit happier, that's the kind of thing that takes that extra work and is hard to maintain. I suppose that some people who work so hard, don't have so much of the other things going for them to make them happy. The consumerism in Amreica, and some of the puritanism of the culture does serve to keep down a bit of the happiness, so people work to get and make the more stuff. Somehow, relationships are good for helping you to be happy. And the don't have quite the same issues with just getting tired of getting more of the same stuff has. I suppose in relationships, the kinds of things you get, stroking of various kinds, is often kind of new stuff.

  • October 19, 2008
Kind of powered through to the end of _Happiness Hypothesis_. There was only 50 pages left but it was getting kind of slow going. I guess I have other things going on. In the last chapter, he considers the question "What is the meaning of life?" Kind of an interesting analysis, too. He was a philosophy major, then went into psychology in grad school, because philosophy in general had lost the human element and was all into logic and word analysis. And for psychology it was pretty darn philosophical-- moral psychology, if you can imagine such a thing. Anyway, the meaning of life. He first tries to understand what the question is trying to ask, and comes up basically with "Tell me something to help enlighten me about life." OK, fine. He also distinguishes two subquestions. What is the meaning of a whole life in general, and how can I find a meaning in my life. It's interesting to divide the question like that because religions generally can say that God did everything for a reason, so god had a reason for creating life in general, and your life in particular. But you got to understand that Haidt is an atheist. And evolution and science basically say that there really wasn't a reason or purpose for life to happen. It just happened because of various material causes, not really for a reason. So, honestly, some religious people do have real concern over evolution because it does really challenge their understand of life. But Haidt manages to find a kind of atheist out in his second part of the question. It is still possible to find meaning within your life. This is the basis of existentialism, though he doesn't talk about that. But he does go and talk about work, and how you can have work that kind of gives you meaning. I'm not sure I quite get it all, but a lot of it was about how being part of a group can be meaningful.

So went to the big party at Dan McGuinness. It was Brad's (of Super 5) 38th birthday, and also Julian's (of Transitt) 25th. I got to sleep at about 8 before that for a party nap. I forget what all I was doing. I had gone to see Religulous. Thought it was boring basically, and not very funny, but wasn't really so bad that I wish I hadn't seen it (which does happen). Seems like I was posting to email lists. Anyway, so waking up at around 10:30, I'm thinking maybe I won't go. I couldn't think of anyone there that I might want to see. But then I remembered Kimberly. I really want to dance with her some time. She's so vibrant. But she never has anyone to dance with, though she does and really likes to. I didn't of course, but of all things, Chris did. I think I've heard him specifically say he doesn't dance. And I said it was sweet of him to, and he said something about doing it to get laid. I don't know. I saw him hanging out with some dark haired girl for quite a while. I don't know what happened to her. And last I had heard he was with a little blonde, Ashley. I didn't ask about her. And kind of in the middle, he was hanging out around the bar, and he pointed ouot this little red-head he called "really hot". It took me a bit before I even got a look at her, and I saw what he meant. And it was like, she was standing there with three guys hovering around her. Kind of pale, short red hair. Young, I guess. Dressed up quite a bit for the place in something of a professional looking blue dress. I don't know. At the end of the night she was sitting at the bar with just the one guy. Something about her voice kind of turned me off, but she was quite cute. Anyway, Kimmie. I don't know what she likes to be called. I think I asked her one time how she was doing, and I think she said she was pissed. Like drunk. For some reason, she decided to bet Brad she could drink more Jaegers, or go one to one, or something. Ended up three behind. But Brad was quite heavily into it, and Kimberly was pretty close to being sick. She does seem to have a crush on Brad. I tried to find her myspace page. It seems like I remember one that must have been hers under "kimba" but the references I thought were there are gone. I don't know if you can remake yourself like that there, or what. Maybe it's just renamed, or I don't remember correctly. Could have been someone else. But anyway, I think her buddy, kind of a big girl whose name I didn't get, took her home. So it didn't look good for Chris. Oh well. His best hook is his guitar playing, and he didn't do so much of that after I got there. Kind of a big acoustic jam. They seem to have fun with those. Perusing the myspace, I see that Brad wants to be a screenwriter. Seems like I got called a writer by mistake one time.

  • October 18, 2008
So, yes, a journal can be a person's notes as he tries to understand something. A blog, though, unfortunately, is generally something more occasional. You have something you want to write about. I say "journal" because that really kind of implies daily, and a little bit more disciplined. A blog is generally extermely casual, and there isn't even necessarily anybody who reads it. It's public in a weird sense of the internet, but just for the person. I don't know. These days blogs also usually imply the big blog engines that also have comments and communities and things, which personally, I don't do. I think that's because generally a blogger is generally a more sociable person than I. But that's fine.

So, I'm proposing that there is a lot that is mental that is not intelligent. That suggests to me now that there might be a science of intelligence. I say that because I am watching this thing on linguistics, and I get interesting glimpses of how it is really a science, and not just a kind of general study. It's a science because there are attempts to have theories that can be proved wrong, and some are proved wrong. Now, the context for me, of course, is this AGI stuff, where there are just lots of ideas about how to go about things, and there aren't so many ways of just showing that things are wrong. The particular thing I have in mind is the one guy who is proposing mathematics as an AI complete domain, and insists that language is not because language is just a communication protocol. Seeing the intricacies of linguistics, that just seems to me crazy talk. But if you want to have a science of intelligence, it needs to be solidly distinguished from general psychology and from computer science.

  • October 17, 2008
Two things. Theres a theory that depression is adaptive for losers in a social dominance hierarchy. And the ed past tense suffix was a grammaticalization of the word did. Shorter like gonna.

The style of the previous item is curt because I thought of them when my computer was already off, but to get them down, I typed them on my small phone keyboard. I need to at least keep my bluetooth keyboard handy so I can type spontaneously like that. I key it in my car in case I feel like writing in a starbucks or borders or sitting with Melissa or something.

I just looked over an intriguing document. It had left it last night to look at later and I picked it up this morning. It was a document describing contributions to M.U.S. organized in various ways. Generally I don't even look at it, but this year, I had donated something (finally) so I looked over it. They arrange donors in categories based on how much was given, so you can tell within some fraction how much they donated, and the significant of course whether they donated at all. Plus for some you can see what they are doing. A doctor in my class, Owen Tabor gave some amount more than $5000. It seems like I talked to him somewhat recently. I've been thinking I need to go to one of the things, and maybe I'll talk to him. And there was always the possibility of giving a chapel speech. I need to come up with some outlines or something and submit a proposal. Since I'm pretending to be a philosophical blogger, it seems like I should be able to come up with something. I've given an AI talk a couple of times, so that might be a little more natural for me, but I would want to inject a bit of found wisdom, maybe something about understanding people. I remember Cliff came back the year after he graduated and talked. I wonder if he has an outline or something.

Dang, Buffet is buying stocks. Of course, he had been full in bonds when I was in stocks, so it's a little late for me. But recently I've tried to buy more, though it was still fairly high. And unfortunately, this paycheck is going to have to go to expenses. And I already lost a bunch. But at least I can keep buying when I get money in with some confidence.

Ah, that was different using the big sword in the form. It was really heavy, and I did have trouble just holding it up after a bit, especially the second time. But I got a much better sense of the use of internal power that it cultivates. The little wooden one moves too fast to interact with body balance, but with the heavy one, the moves and turns really make sense. And hopefully my arm will get stronger.

  • October 16, 2008
Having language as the main part of intelligence and intelligence just being a guide for the rest of or unintelligent selves, can mean that some of the rider of the elephant in a sense can be completely external. We can let other people be in control. and an agi can do that as well.

d player. American quality. Hit it and it works.

I know no one likes me, why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?

I got the bagua broadsword. It's big. standing on the ground, it comes up to my shoulder. You really do get the feeling that it is, like they say about some of moves in the form, for killing horses.

OK, so I'm not planning to go see Melissa on Friday night (tomorrow). My reasoning is sure, there was a bit of feeling unwelcome, but there is a birthday party for Brad of Super 4 on Saturday night, and I don't want to go out late every night. I'll go Sunday. But if Melissa sends me a text, I'll probably go. I feel just somewhat inclined to not go. I might go see a movie. Or maybe the Mensa meeting, which is at Swanky's, a pretty good Mexican place. Come in early. I've got lots of reading I want to do. Sure.

Can we do this naked? That's a nice thing to be asked.

Guys like looks. Girls like talking.

  • October 15, 2008
Happy Ides of October!

Talk about writing to find meaning. So I have dreams that wake me up, and I can't get back to sleep. And not so much for being scared as for having something to think about. When I saw Melissa on Sunday, I decided to try something new. Haidt suggested that touching for little children is something they need to feel secure. He talked about the experiment with the moneys with the cloth fake surrogate mother who would go cling to it even if it was fed by a tube coming off a wire surrogate mother. So, contrary to what psychology had thought, it is _not_ attachment to the breast. And he said that it was unconditional love between the two. Anyway, so I decided to pet Melissa a little more, just kind of patting her shoulder and back. Didn't even touch skin, just on her shirt, and in retrospect, I should have had just a bit of skin contact, which makes a big difference. And I don't remember her bristling, exactly, but she didn't really seem to like it, or come to get more. She has pets, so she knows how they will come up to you if they want petting, but are sometimes finicky or particular. So at this point, I don't know what she feels about my doing that. But anyway, the dream. I forget what all was happening up to that point, but for some reason, I reached down and gave the ass of her jeans a squeeze, and she just gave me this hard, deeply disapproving look, like "what do you think your doing? I don't think of you that way" I guess it's just something that I'm afraid but expect would happen. But right now, I'm trying to find meaning. Well, this kind of thing has to be natural and developed, and not a surprise. And I don't know have my touching played out for Melissa. It might have been a little unexpected. And I think it was more from her kind of non-reaction that I had the overall feeling of being unwelcome, at least in addition to the thing with Dmitry. And I was doing this when I went to stand next to him. Maybe a little bit of it also, was that I was trying to get comforted by Melissa, like the baby monkey. Hmm. For Haidt, this discussion was in the context of trying to explain relationships, and he was talking about how even adult relationships are built on this sort of basic attachment mechanism between infant to adult. And there are actually two separate pieces, the attachment and going to parent that the baby does, and the caregiving that the parent feels and does. In all this, there is thrown the whole mating thing, which is a compeletely separate bit of functionality, but it uses some similar chemistry. I forget all. I don't know for sure how all the different pieces are working in me in this situation.

I've been wanting to write a port to the AGI list, about how not everything that the brain does is intelligence. Using the analogy Haidt uses of the rider and the elephant. It's important to AGI as maybe some things they have to develop are part of the elephant, but they want to use intelligent methods for them. One intriguing bit is that the elephant does learn, but it's learning about what is good and bad to do in a situation or what things attract and repel it. But I haven't been able to sit down and write it. So I'm at least trying here to get down the idea, before I forget, and maybe I can think about it some more and say something better thought through.

So, my portfolio went down 33%. I just realize the harsh bit, that to get backto where it was, it has to go up 50%. So, I've heard that psychologically, bad things are like 5 times more powerful than good things. There's that, and it's a reason not to pay attention to the short term ups and downs. But just mathematically, looking at percent change, the way up is a much longer road than the way down.

I think we could probably do OK with Johny McCain. My Dad is a supporter, though my mom is voting for Obama. She was for Hillary, but they didn't quite turn her off. I think my Dad must have felt bad enough when they supported her that he was already ready to look elsewhere. Anyway, Johny just seems at least better than little Bush. Little Bush was always pretty clearly a criminal liar and sociopath. It seems like he got support because there just are people who think lies are a good thing. Religious people especially can be like that, but just emotional people in general really think that making people feel good is just a better thing than really sticking to any real facts. Of course, that just personally makes me freaking pissed, but it's the way it is.

So, now that the lectures are getting into historical linguistics, I'm seeing that my personally interest in languages really is about historical linguistics. I kind of what to study Latin, Greek, Proto-IndoEuropean, Sanskrit, and then the Later Romance languages (like French Spanish and Italian), and maybe German just to get a historical perspective. And not so much actually really learning languages enough to properly use them. Because, really, who do I need to talk to? And I put this in contrast to Holly, who actually does speak Italian and French, and bits of other things. Her German is better than mine, though I think to her she barely has any, but that's only because she really knows what it's like to really know another language, and mines only a tiny, wimpy smattering. But something John McWhorter said. There was an old linguist in the 1700s, Rask or something, who the story goes spoke 25 languages. John said he really doubts that. It depends on what you mean by speak. Because with language it's a matter of use it or lose it. So the question for me, if I want to seriously learn one after all, is what language do I really want to use? I have these two little ones that I pretend I want to learn, Latin and Greek. And that would be about reading. Actually, I asked a German professor about studying, and he suggested I take the summer class on reading German, because with reading, you have only one (I think he said) skill instead of several to learn. And now my understanding those is better. For speaking, you have to be able to come up with the sounds, come up with the morphemes, and put the morphemes together (lets call it syntax), and use the pragmatics in a way consistent with how they do in a particular language, because that's actually different between languages. Meanings is only one of several areas. And the abilities of generating are also different from the ones of recognizing them. I also could explain that John talked about the concept of morpheme, which I think is really interesting. It's kind of a little word part unit, but it includes the idea that ends, like s in English for the plural, that mark different things. In other languages, the endings might mark tense or case but in Enlgish we might just use additional words, like auxilliaries like 'have' or 'will' or instead of the dative ending, maybe 'to'. And there are prefixes for 'not' and various things, like German will add 'auf' but English will have prepositions. Anyway, hearing the sounds of language, too is a different skill. Just getting individual sounds. And then being able to tell where different words are broken up in the stream is surprisingly hard. In writing, quite a bit of that is simplified. So for reading, you start at a different level in the thinking process. But like he said, it's a matter of how much you use it. Also, you gotta remember that one of my interests in learning about this kind of thing is to understand all the parts enough to be able to get a computer to be able to handle them, and it just so happens that computers are absolutely great at 100% precisely remember things that it has been told how to do. One of the problems, or course, is that language is incredibly muddy. Amazingly so. Real language has errors that pop up at all levels, and it uses the sort of redundant information at the different levels to constrain the different things going on. Computers in programs are almost never intended to deal with that kind of situation. Very deliberately, they handle situations and data where everything has an absolutely correct value, and is right there. There is no juggling and managing of constraints to get a nice, and provisional approximation. There are a few bits and styles of programming that even deal with handling and dealing with constraints, but even those are logical, true/false constraints. It seems like some of the AGI guys seem just a little concerned about just getting a system with enough constraint knowledge manipulating power, and that's really all the problem of AGI is. Anyway, we'll see.

I guess a way of putting what I am trying to say is that people think of intelligence as something in complete control of a mental system. But it is my conjecture that intelligence is only something that intervense at time in the workings of an intelligent system in order to deliberate and apply additional new knowledge.

Going back to the analogy of elephant and rider, I notice that it had to be an aspect of the elephant that it learns good and bad things. This is necessary for an unintelligent process to benefit from an intelligent overseer. And in this analogy, the intelligence can be external. In fact, computers right now server that function, and not even just AI, though specialized AIs do that too. Also, with this type of evaluating how much you like or dislike something, a system of evaluating constraints with gradients is just more receptive and open to the control and modification by an intelligence as rider.

  • October 13, 2008
It seems like an opportunity for reflection. I just left Bardog, feeling unwelcome. Melissa had to get me out of there. She did it by asking if I wanted a cup. So I just downed the rest. She had opened a new can, so the mug was full. And it's not a problem from me to down a full glass like that, though she was saying it would give her a headache. It's not her fault that she has to get me to leave, I'm sure that's the bosses rule. But that makes me feel not quite so welcome. But that simply added on to the thing before. I had my leg up on the next barstool. No place to rest your feet on the bar, so you can only rest them on the bar on the stool, but that's got your knees bent, and right now I have a touch of gout in my left knee so it's sort of stiff, and I needed to have it straightened out a bit. And I thought I had my feet sticking out, because I don't like having my feet on seats anymore than anyone else like it. But the cook or chef, or whatever he is, Dmitry, was saying something about having my feet on the stool. I didn't hear him, and Melissa tried to pass it on, "your feet" and he said, it's not a sofa. OK, so I get up, and stand over there next to all of them. Standing would do. He asked me if I was tired and needed to go home. And I was trying to even gauge if there was reason to discuss anything. He was tired, and maybe cranky. I guess he could use something to yell about. And he cares about the bar. But I end up not saying anything. They were drinking bloody marys. Super hot. Chris was saying how he was addicted. I had just read something about how it does actually make you release natural painkillers, so they do have a slight drug effect, and I said that to Melissa standing there. But overall, I got the feeling of not being welcome. The idea of the place is that it is a neighborhood bar. Most of them live down there. And I guess it's just feeling a bit cliquish. So my first reaction is that maybe I'll think about skipping a week going down there. I hate to do that to Melissa, so I don't know. I guess I need to think about it.

I have to admit, I've not been in as happy a mood lately as before. Work frustration, and working on the weekend. I need to try to catch up, but I left problems hanging around.

  • October 12, 2008
People emphasize the negative over the positive. Mentioned that in Pretty woman, which was on the screen when I was out at bardog on Friday.

Speed laws and drug law make cops seem like bad guys keeping us from doing what we want. But they are really good guys keeping us safe. They are really bad guys out there.

I was driving and really wanted to dictate some stuff. Seems like phones shoud be able to do that. But then i thought you really should be able to call your computer for that. Computers really should work better with people talking to them over phones. Thats a business i want to get into.

And a fun thing id like to get into is computer singing.

Went out to the farm over the weekend. The house is practically done. The kitchen looks like the kitchen of a real house, not some simple cabin. Nice white cabinets.

On Friday, actually a bunch of hugs. LeAnne was there, and pretty toasted, so we hugged a bunch. She drank absinthe and puked. Actually mentioned putting it in my blog. And there was some girl who recognized me, and I guess just felt like hugging.

So, something Haidt in _the Happiness Hypothesis_ refers to briefly is some results of someone about the benefits of writing in recovering from a trauma. He had people write about the thing 15 minutes a day for 4 days. The benefit was not from venting the emotions, it was from developing an understanding of it. The first day was not enough, because that is only about things already figured out. It's continuing to think about it and figuring more things out that is valuable. So I guess a reall benefit of blogging is finding meanings for things.

  • September 30, 2008
Wow, so putting money in the stock market, I'm now down 20%. If I had just put in in a mattress and not touched it, I'd have $10,000 dollars more. If I had put it in something safe that bears interest, I would have made something. I think the best things I was seeing were 4%. I don't know, it's harder to calculate since it's been going in over a period of time, and I've already forgotten how long it's been. The calculus class actually talks about how to do this exact problem, with an approximation of continuous investment, like daily, instead of bimonnthly, or whatever it's been. Inconsistent. And with computers, I could run something. I don't know, it's kind of sad that I don't think well enough mathematically to just work it out. Plus I wasn't managing it all sensibly. Just lazily, with I suppose some misplaced confidence in the value of staying in the market. A guess approximation I'm using only has the conservative gain of 2000. So net loss of 12000. One thing that I expected to be important in all this is that when you are in the market, you psychologically think about how well you are doing compared to everyone else. So you share the pain. And it's all been an experiment and learning experience. If I had just kept in in cash, I would have spent it. If I had kept it in something making money, I would have taken stuff out and spent it. Having the value go down makes me think I should hold and not sell, though possibly that doesn't make total sense. I could have gotten out. It just swung 8% in one day. If I had gotten out the day before that, and then put it all back in, whatever it does, it would have been a net 8% gain. But you can't work with hindsight like that. It just works on you psychologically.

So I'm wondering what's going on with Melissa. She made an effort to be special nice to me. I think she must have felt a bit stronger feelings for me. So she does the physical action of getting me an saving cans of lemonade. She had to tell people about it, and it was work. I didn't act anywhere appreciative enough at the time. And I think I made her feel a bit silly and awkward. And then, like I said, I yakked about stuff she didn't care about, which has the effect of making her see I'm not really someone she's interested in. So I blew her feelings. But it always happens that the more you know someone, the more you find things you don't like. If you're lucky, by that time you've formed enough attachments and connections that those are not enough to completely turn you off. But Melissa and I don't have any of that yet. It was even such that I actually felt a little less attracted to Melissa, though from my angle it was a bit of a different mechanism. You tend to lost interest in people that seem to like you too much. Anyway, interacting with Melissa has always been a learning experience and I won't let go. Hopefully not in the sense of clinging. I do cling too much. But I try to be as faithful as I can be. I mean, we aren't even friends, so I can't help but give her space. And that's actually another thing that touched me. There was a waittress, Ayanna, and she told me that Melissa had said that she had a friend who never drank. She was wondering what I was having (it was a sprite and cranberry) and was thinking it was a shirly temple. Somebody on Sunday had one of those. Maybe I should try it. I looked it up and it's ginger ale or sprite and Grenadine and OJ. I've never had Grenadine. I looked it up and it said pomegranate and cherry. I asked Melissa and she said it was just cherry, though it was originally supposed to be pomegranate, and she just used cherry syrup. OK, so I'm smitten, but that's not news. And feelings. So complicated.

  • September 29, 2008
Gosh, so hanging out with Melissa, I think I really bored her talking about a bunch of stuff that I've been reading about. We just felt distant. But she had brought some lemonade in cans in, just for me. That was just so sweet, I guess it made me feel like talking. But the talking was bad. Oh well.

  • September 22, 2008
Happy first day of Fall!

  • September 20, 2008
I ate the okra that was leftover. I used to just hate okra, but I think this batch just must better than usual And it wasn't fancy or spiced up or anyhing. Maybe that was good. I don't really like spicy stuff. I guess I just like the bland stuff. I mean, I eat plain microwaved chicken with either a microwave potato, plain rice, sometimes plain white bread, or crackers. Salty crackers is probably about as exciting I can get. So I'm boring. And clearly not just with the food. My writing is pretty boring. I don't really care for new things. Or risky stuff. Lots of people do. I think they get a bit of pleasure out of scary stuff. And it seems like from their perspective, I must just be timid. At least that's the sort of judgement about myself I seem to inherit when I try to understand and accept their value system. But I'm not so sure. I kind of suspect that it's just that emotionally I don't really get any kick from that stuff. It's more about emotional reaction. I don't have good associations with that feeling of newness or strange scariness. Maybe I just haven't had the good experiences that people have had where they have learned these associations. I think I've heard people talk about the excitement of meeting new people. Never had that. It seems like that must come because it turned out something good, let's say pleasurable, came out from it. For me, not so much.

So I went to see Melissa at the new place she is at, Bardog Tavern. I guess I was probably in trouble when she was able to wear something that showed a lot more skin. And really, she payed what seemed to me a whole lot of attention, standing with me for little breaks and chatting about how things are going with her. The whole evening though, I was really horribly withdrawn and didn't talk much. Just pitiful. Boring. One little four-eyed girl just flirted with me stunning. Kind of squeezing in beside me, and actually brushing up against me. The place was packed wall to wall, so she had an excuse. But me? Did nothing with it. From what I'm reading, women are mostly attracted verbally, and I had nothing. At least I get it now. But, sweet little Melissa. The staff actually drank a bit. I swear alcohol just makes that girl act sweeter.

  • September 18, 2008
Wow. So Stanford is putting some of its computer classes on line for free. This includes the robotics class that I took. I guess I don't really lose anything if they start to give away something I paid for. And taking for credit forced me to do work that I would not have done otherwise. Staying up late and missing sleep. I ended up not doing so well on the final, but I had at least learned a bit, I think. And now there are a couple more things that I'd like to do. The machine learning one, I think.

Jonathan Haidt. A social psychologist. with main area of moral psychology. I just read an essay on liberal vs. conservative morality by him. It was from the atheist mensa list, but I passed it along to the humanist list. And then I got his book _The Happiness Hypothesis_. Started on it. It's in the pile now of ones I've started. And now somewhere a ted lecture from him popped up, and I'm listening to it.

So, not so good on the broadsword form Tuesday. I was doing it too fast.

There was a little girl I've seen at a couple of meetups. And a couple of weeks ago, I asked her if she'd like to go talk some time. And she said sure. She sounded up for it. Tuesday I sent an email asking her to lunch on Thursday. She could have said yes. She have said no. She said not now, not ever. Ouch. I guess it was actually a little more complicated than that, but that was close. And I'm not real happy with women right now.

  • September 15, 2008
So, I charged up my ipod, and the first song that came on was "The Great Gig in the Sky". Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright died today. How did it know?

  • September 12, 2008
Trouble sleeping. I guess that's to be expected. My mom has trouble sleeping, and I'm not sure about my dad, but I know he sometimes gets up at 4, and he does the whole nap thing. So I suspect I have inherited sleep issues. A schedule would work. Today, though, they again had little last minute things at work, and I was really needing to get out early and take a nap before kung fu, but I only got maybe 20 minutes. Still, on the super restricted sleep diet, you are supposed to go four hours and then take a 20 minute nap, so you end up with 2 hours a dau, and it's supposed to work well for some people. Your brain adjusts to going immediately into the most restful REM sleep, or whatever it is. The transition period is supposed to be terrible. And I suspect that there is a flaw in it that only people for whom it really works will be able to follow the plan and make it to the stage where it works. That is, it can only work for some people. Neil Strauss, the jounralist who studied pickup artists and wrote _The Game_ describes trying it. And while he was trying to do it, he came up with a technique for getting two girls to make out together, to set up the mythical menage a trois. So dude, while already clearly an overachiever, was still burning some pretty freakin' high octane while he was doing it. So a micro nap for me before kung fu, and then it really worked me up. I guess excersize can do that. And I hit a couple of glasses of chocolate milk. I've largely cut out the caffeine, so I'm extra sensitive. I'm sure that's a factor. But I was really tired today because I only got 6 or 7 last night. Stayed up because of the Memphis Atheist meetup. It was pretty horrible, though. I said almost nothing. Less than usually. Too many strangers, I think. I don't like strangers. It makes me quiet. And that was especially bad because I mostly went to see this one little girl, another Melissa, and then I was a sad sorry person. Pretty obviously turned her off. And I had emailed her about doing lunch some time, and she sounded really up for it. I did say thee that I'm not so good in groups and one on one is better. But still, not good to be with someone and have nothing to say. A couple of weeks ago, we sat pretty far apart, but she did catch my eye. This time sitting across, and nothing. Maybe there just isn't much chemistry, but chemistry can be worked on a surprising amount. If it's not too late.

So I saw an article in reddit about how the more you get to know someone, the less you like them. You always find things you don't like. one of the comments does point out that there is a logical problem with one conclusion about something that seemed to counter this, studies about how you like better people you know in that you will only try to get to know people better when you know you like them, but I think it does make sense. And it really seems to make a difference if you, um, have some fun to establish a connection, at least some kind of attachment.

The broadsword form is really coming along. I'm starting to be able to put some real power into swinging the sword, so it makes a nice *swish*. And it's not simply from swinging it with effort, it really does involve getting the body movement and footwork coordinated properly to build up the speed. Which is I think what internal power is about to a big extent.

And then there is the really bored girl having sex.

  • September 11, 2008
Happy 9-11!

  • September 2, 2008
Went to see Super Five at TJ Mulligans Trinity. I saw Kimberly the blonde brickhouse. Jenny seemed to be with Brad. Matt. Danny sat in for Chris. Madison is Vince's 9nth grde daughter, does taekwondo, is dyslexic. Kimberly has a great smile. I think it's a shame she didn't have anyone to dance with. Next time I see her, I need to ask her to dance. I think she's one of Brad's myspace friends.

Would you believe, my interent connection is out. Augh! The withdrawals! I'm getting the shakes. I've got the phone, though, and it has a bit of an internet connection. And I've broken out my bluetooth keyboard so I can sit here and type at the borders. Got to relax, though. I'm all tense. Maybe its because I'm sitting at a table instead of one of the good slouchy chairs, and maybe it's because of barbie over there. OK, barbie just left And I guess typing at the keyboard, maybe I might scrunch my shoulders. The level is probably a little higher than it reall should be. Not so bad. No speed records, here. But dang, no interent. And the netcharts server went down in the evening, so i was getting constant messages. I waited till morning to go out and deal with it. Too much! I sat in the parking lot at the office. I looked for other places. Mcdonalds seemed to be doing things through at&t. Starbucks is doing things through tmobile. I think i have something for them becaue of the olpc, but i never got it going. I may need to. I've got to catch up on the feud with keith on the mensa atheist list. Argh.

Man I don't know what dude was thinking. I thought clone wars wars good. Not as good as the original stuff, but better than the new, first, three. Sure, ani is a dick-weed. That's been established. Ahsoka has his bad attitude. Now he gets to see how it feels. Well i'll like it. And i thought sticky was cute. I didn't wtch it at first because the reviws were so bad And maybe it lowered my expectations. But honestly, i really did like it. Maybe just a Romp, but that's what I wanted. Adventure. The bravery of the clones. Serious professional soldiers. Dying. The chaos of war.

Relax. So, I'm sitting in borders. They didn't have change for a hunderd. I think someone gave them something large and took all their tweinties. For maybe a three dollar drink, I think ami said. Super tall hot blonde chick is sitting at the table to my right. There weren't any tables, but one by the door, but I ordered, and this one opened up. I coulod look over when she was further awy but sitting about eight feet away, not so much. Did walk past and got this amazingj look down. But there were these too little chicks. Seemed like they might have been, um, together. Skinny little four-eyes, and some crew cut almost mohawk girl. Foureyes, was looking at some books on add she should read, in addition to the one she gave her already. And there was a gift card 4I gave her. I don't know, seemed really gf and gf. But I thought 4I was cute. Maybe it was the bra strap showing. She got me to hover a bit inpsychology where she was looking, and I chanced upon some stuff by Robert Greene. The thing that stood out for me first was _War_. The study of war is in a sense definitve for the study of martial arts. Martial meaning war. Overall, large battle strategy and war history, maybe not so much, but I have seen treatments on generalship for single combat. I've read one thing on war strategy, not really my area. I'm not so big on the history, but I why not? It good to expand. It looks like it's mosstly based on Sun Tzu, but I guess using more recent examples. And then I saw that he has another book on Seduction. Well, hey, I've been reading about that lately. What a coincidink! So I guess I commited. And he has a book on power. I guess he's doing machievelli. Might as well get the set. They are only 18 bucks each. That's pretty reasonable. And, would you believe sports illustrated has a thing on just chicks in body paint? And it looks like it's all their regular supermodels. OK, I can support that.

a couple of little emotional turns. I went to the little Thai place to check it, out, Bangkok Alley, I think. I actually asked Doug to come along, and he's only recently found that he really likes Thai food. It was fine, and I paid for it. Standing out in the parking lot, Doug was thanking me on it being good, and it hitting the spot. And I suddenly had an odd feeling of liking having done something nice for someone else, and how it can be nice in itself, without really having any motive or trying to get something out of it. So there was that.

The other one was when I was getting some gas at Exxon. I go in to pay--I've been paying cash mostly--and I see this woman whom I jut find attractive. Kind of thin, maybe about my age. She's facing away at first, and she turns around, and I smile at her, and she says in a friendly, kind of flirty way, "hi sugar!" Now, I don't know for sure that her hubby wasn't behind me, but it seemed directed at me. And the car she was in was next to mine, so she talked about how cute it was, Really just flirting, I guess, but I really just felt some kind of chemistry with her. A brief passing, but it was kind of neat. It does seem like lately I noticed that there are just some women I feel chemistry with. I don't ever follow through and do anything about it, which I guess is, wimpy, and maybe it can just be the kind of flirting that makes people feel attractive, which is nice.

  • August 28, 2008
i read something interesting about perfect pitch. They created a test for it that doesn't require you to have musical training, which was something they used to need to tell if you had it. Perfect pitch is the ability to recognize a note absolutely, not relative to some other pitch. And it turns out it happens quite often in non-musicians. I didn't see how much. And it turns out that most animals use perfect pitch. They knew about it from birds, because they recognize tunes, but if you transponse the tune (move it to a higher or lower key), they can't recognize it any more. So they are thinking that it's relative pitch, which most people use, that actually takes more mental work. It also makes me wonder if people with absolute or perfect pitch always also have relative pitch or have maybe sometimes have just learned to fake it with their absolute pitch. Since these are usually real musicians, I'm guessing they usually have both. I wouldn't be surprise if non-musicians with perfect pitch might have trouble with some music because they are bad at the relative pitch, and sometimes they can't deal with transposed songs.

I've been posting to other lists. And I'm not getting replies to my actual posts, but I'm seeing how my contributions are affecting the conversations. It's kind of neat.

  • August 23, 2008
So, I went out to Dan McGuinness to see Super 5. It was almost 1 when I got there. They were on a breakd, so I hung out with Vince and Michael a bit (the bass player and drummer). I do notice I didn't really have much to contribute. It was jam packed with people. There was a blonde with a cute body who seemed to like the I will survive at the end. I guess she hasn't always been treated so well. She and and a friend were hanging out with some guy, but it seemed like they left alone, which I thought was kind of sad. One incident stands out, just a bit of a moment. I was walking through the crowd, and I passed right next to this table where I noticed a few girls, I think it was four of them. And I paused for a couple of seconds, and looked fairly deeply at this little four eyed girl in the middle. I looked at her for maybe a second or too. And one other girl said "Hey dude!" and maybe one other said something like that. And I turned away and smiled and moved on.

So, I've decided not to take biochemistry. It didn't really fit with the plans I think I have, and I really would not have done anything with it. And the tipping point was Firday morning, when I started getting up at about 6:30 and thought if I can't make it into work by 8, then it may be too hard to have an 8 oclock class. Messing with sleep can be pretty uncomfortable. And I didn't make it in till after 9. I play on the computer too much in the morning. And it's just reading stuff. I need to play with programs or something. And I had been thinking about auditing the compilers class from Stanford. I've still got a month, and somehow I find it really nice to have a person standing up and explaining. I've got several teaching company class videos, and there's something I like about it. It could be just the qualia of people, which I've noticed I miss sometimes. In california, I used to go to Mensa meetings, just for that, the sensations of being around people, though I never really talked to them or anything. But I looked a little more at the Stanford class, and it's based on lex and yacc or bison. Those are standard compiler tools, sure, but I had just looked up the MIT class, and it's based on Java. That's really much better for me, and it would be tools I would actually use. I ordered the textbook that does compiler stuff with Java. Maybe that will be good for me.

  • August 15, 2008
Happy Ides of August!

I went to see Melissa. It sounds like Pearl's is imploding. The got rid of LeAnne and a bunch of other people. Melissa has been offered a place at Bardog Tavern when it opens in a few weeks. Head bartender, shift 8-3. So I've been trying to cut back, but I guess it's easy to lapse. And maybe bartenders aren't usually so friendly.

  • August 9, 2008
That was way too frustrating! The last bit was getting this blutooth keyboard working again. It needed to have some sort of passcode entered and didnt really explain what it meant. But the evening didnt start so well. I felt like going out. I first tried to go by the verizon store to get a car charger for qrack, but it had closed ten minutes before. I tried the Thai place and it is closed on sunday. I went by dan mcguinness and saw tiffany She was really bored. And i tried to tip her my usually amount, and she ran out after me and said she couldnt take it. And i caved and gave her less. But grr, i hate when they do that. I can understand that they feel bad and all. And maybe they can come to terms with it. So i go over to borders. I did find some cool stuff. A pretty funny book on philosophy. Plato and a platypus walk into a bar That's the title. I had thumbed through the last time a was in and put it on the list. But i didn't have any small bills to put for it with, and i didnt want to break a c. The trouble with German food is that no matter how much you eat, an hour later you're hungry for power. But somehow sitting in the bookstore, i was to inhibitted to properly laugh at all this stuff. Plus, um, front this month proclaims that it is britain's funniest magazine. OK. That is something i like about it. And kevin smiths book about his boring life. There's a psychology today i've been seeing with a hot chick on the cover and stuff about taboos and backup partners. Im intrigued so im giving it a shot. I still haven't decided if im going to take biochemistry. Tiffany is still taking general ed stuff at southwest. Argh. I need to be doing ai programming. I need to be getting on with things.

So I didn't go see melissa. She tested and said she would be working a party, so i wouldn't have been able to even go sit with her till that was done, but i thought i would just go by later, then i took a nap and slept too late. Missed my chance. I guess. On firday, i didnt go, but at about one i felt like going out, so i checked out where super five was playing, and it was doc watsons. I didnt know where that was, but when i looked it up, it was a place that i had been to, maybe it used to have some other name, or maybe i didnt pay attention. I went, and i saw a guy fromcbc, i think his name is matt, and he sees me and says andy, and i think i said matt, but i dont even know if it's right. I see him at roys quite a bit. It was sad and cold, but what could i do. I got in in the middle of their last song. I talked a bit with vince and chris. Chris told me about his mugging. I wrtoe about that in an email to the mensa martial arts group. He talked about what he would do now. And some kind of gun disarming move they teach. I think it was a kote gashi and i tried it and did it with the wrong hand and messed it up. My aikido is so weak. Whatever. A hot chick with like a whip

  • August 8, 2008
Happy eight eight oh eight!

  • August 5, 2008
Happy Birthday, Melissa!

So, clicking between channels, I say this thing on PBS. I didn't see what it was called, but it was several guys kind of pretending to be the Beatles. Doing their songs and they looked and sounded kind of like them. And they were even doing some of their shtick. But it was just a bit off, and I just thought it was irritating. I couldn't get into it I only looked in for a couple minutes. It was a weird feeling. I guess it hit my aversion to lies and fakery. Plus the guy doing Paul was playing right-handed. Surely he could have learned to play left-handed, if he knew he was going to play Sir Paul.

  • August 3, 2008
Cellular South, Argh! They have a commercial, or maybe it's several commercial. They are using _Dear Prudence_. But, in the version they have, in the spots where the should be saying "Dear Prudence" they just leave it out. I love that song. And they just mutilate it. It's really annoying me. At least enough to write about it. I was pretty mad when they used _revolution_ in the car commercial, but at least it was still the same song. Now it's like they are erasing the important part of this piece of art. Mona Lisa without the smile. Grr.

  • August 1, 2008
Happy Kalends of August!

Last weekend I went to see the _X-files_ movie. To me, the story was unimportant. I was just happey to see big moving pictures of Gillian Anderson. I found it oddly disturbing to see her in bed with that Muldur dude, but that's life. Yummy, yummy, yummy. I've seen a picture of her without the pancake make-up. I love the freckles.

  • July 25, 2008
Well, that was just pitiful. Melissa texted me to ask if I was coming, and I said yes. I doubt I would ever really be able to say no to her. I just wouldn't want to. And she was thinking she would be by herself, which was why she reached out, but it ended up pretty busy, actually. The most pitiful thing was that two really pretty girls sat down right next to me, but I didn't say anything to them. And they wanted to smoke, so they went outside after just a few minutes. But not saying anything. Just pitiful. And I didn't say anything to Melissa about wanting to cut back or the dating book I was reading, how it suggested that I was just hiding at the bar, about as bad as staying home. I'm not sure that's right, though. I mean, two cute girls sat down right next to me, and there were plenty passing through. I guess I don't have what it takes. Maybe a seminar wouldn't be too bad.

And I went to see Jennifer at the Pony. She was saying that if the law changes next year like they are playing, she'll just quit. Something about keeping distance, and she wouldn't have any fun. I need to get her phone number before that. I'm still unhappy that I lost Alexis. I need to make some kind of effort with Jennifer, though she doesn't do as much for me. More than anybody else I've seen there, though.

  • July 22, 2008
So, yesterday I filled out the online form to be readmitted to U of M. And I finished reading chapter 1 of the biochemistry book. It ended up not being too bad. I'm still a little shaky on the stereochemistry. It was nice that Doug was kind of encouraging, so I felt like moving a little closer to taking it. We'll have to see though. One weird thing, Chapter 2 is about water. I mean, water? I guess there are a lot of properties and effects involved with the interaction of different chemicals with water, but that seems like a pretty strange subject for a chapter.

  • July 20, 2008
I watched the Batman movie. It was OK. I guess it was good, but it didn't really seem to have anything in it that I cared about at all. I looked back and I didn't think so much of the first one, and really, I didn't think so much of this. I remember some time concluding that I need to stick to comedies, and this sort of affirms that. And maybe I'm a little depressed.

One thing, though. I went out to see the showing at 10:20, but three screens were sold out and I had to wait for the 11:40. So I went over to the Fox and Hound. Saw some mixed martial arts fights. There was one between one guy 6'0" and a guy 6'8". The littler guy was more agressive, and it was over in half a minute from a choke sbumission. But I'm waiting there and I check my phone, and there's a message from Melissa asking if I've seen the Batman movie yet. She tried the midnight one, but it was sold out. I sent her a pretty long message about wantng to see the Thursday night but it was sold out, and waiting for the one I saw. But I don't know. I'm trying to cut back going to see her, but if she writes me, I would probably go see her.

I read a little in the biochemistry book, but I didn't get too far. Maybe I'm not that into it. I looked at the problems at the end of the chapter and they just seemed like work. Maybe I'm just getting too lazy. I'm more into just reading than doing any kind of work. There are so many computer things I need to be doing. I finished up _Dating for Dummies_ and _Martial Mechanics_. Just kind of powered through them to be done with them and forget about them.

I finished the Teaching Company class on _Philosophy of Mind_. What were some of the things in it? I remember compatibilism, the idea that Free Will is compatible with determinism because free will just means that your actions follow your desires. People get confused because they think determinism would mean that you would be coerced into doing things, which aren't according to your "will", but really, free will just means that you want to do something, and you do that, instead of something forcing you to do something else. I'm not sure what else there was. Must have been other stuff. He talked about Functionalism as the best answer to the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is how there seem to be two different kinds of things in the world--stuff, like bats and trees and cars, and mental things, like thoughst and how things feel. Descartes approach of dualism said that there are just two separate types of things. Functionalism would say there is only one type of stuff, but mental things is an aspect of how that stuff acts. The example is a hand and a fist. When you open a fist, it goes away. And it isn't made of different stuff from your hand, but it isn't identical to your hand, because the fist can dissappear while your hand is still there. When he is talking about AI, he talks about GOFAI--good old fashioned AI, which is symbolic-- and connectionism. But I don't think connectionism is as promising as one might think from how prominently he talks about it. He mentions movies and fiction a surprising amount, like _Blade Runner_. It was alright.

  • July 19, 2008
I'm roasting the other pork roast. The last one was about 8 pounds and this is a little bigger, just about 9 pounds. I didn't eat the last one all at once, I froze half and finished it a couple of weeks later. But even when eating way too much meat, I was losing weight. Mostly because I was eating less of other stuff. I hope it goes ok this time. I'm down to about 195, though it fluctuates. I think I've got some momentum, but I did just bounce back up a little. But while I'm roasting it, a bunch of flies have come in. I don't know where they have come from, but I've killed about half a dozen in the last hour. It's a big enough house, and there certainly could be cracks in walls somewhere, or at least some kind of path to the outside. Flies certainly can smell cooking meat. I think it probably smells like rotting meat to them, which they like. I'm out of bread. I'm out of crackers. I'm out of chicken legs. The roast is all I'll have to eat until I go to the store, and I'm trying to hold off on that as long as possible. It's already been quite a while since I went.

  • July 15, 2008
Happy Ides of July!

Oh, that was bad. I've got some honey that my dad wants me to eat or drink, or whatever. I've found a way of using honey that I like. I make honey lemonade. It works pretty well so I can have sugar water in small doses--as opposed to making half a gallon of kool-aid and drinking that down altogether, as I am wont. There's no wonder I got up to 205. I'm down to about 197, though it is a bit of a plateau and I don't know if I'll go back up, down, or what. My dad has his own honey in little squeeze bottles, but this is someone elses, and its in a glass jar. But it's totally crystallized, plus it has some wax comb on top. I've decided I really don't like wax in my honey. And I have to get it out with a spoon, and I need to take a fresh one, so I've got a bunch of dirty spoons sitting around. So I've dose this with the little plastic squeeze bottles when the honey gets to the bottom, and it's too thick. Put it in the microwave to heat it up, and it runs better. And it should get the sugar to dissolve. Since this is a pretty big jar, I had to put it in for a while. Now, microwaves don't heat evenly--they can't always pentrate too far under the surface, so I was figuring it might carmelize a bit on the outside. I've got McGee's _On Food and Cooking_ so I can learn more about carmelizing, but I glanced at the appendix on basic chemistry, and he did mention that some things don't change phases-- they break down first-- and sugar is like that, it may melt (or maybe it won't I'm not sure yet), but before boiling (or melting whichever it is) it will break down or carmelize. maybe it's oils that smoke instead of boiling. So the honey is heating in the microwave. And it doesn't seem too bad. It's not all liquid, but it's pretty hot, and I stir it, and it all becomes a clear liquid. And I make a little lemonade, and put some ice in. Can you guess what I got wrong? The wax was melted too. I was think I would have wax at the top at some point in the process. Maybe after it cools. But now I had lemonade with little bit's of wax floating in it. And I put a spoon in the honey to scoop some out. It was pretty hot, then trying to rinse the "honey", I end up with a spoon coated in wax. Grr.

I did go get the biochemistry textbook. A hundred and thirty freaking dollars. I have to calm down a bit vefore deciding whether to take the class.

  • July 14, 2008
Happy Bastille Day!

  • July 13, 2008
Happy Sunday the 13th!

I'm sitting around kind of bummed out at the thought of not going to see Melissa any more. Plus my wrist hurts. But why should it be so bad? Well she is nice, but I think it may have just been too much pretend. I do have a history of just pretending that things might happen that keeps me from the more scary work of trying new things to get stuff to happen. That dating book does say not to hide at home, but also talks about hanging out in the bar can really be the same thing. It didn't really seem to have all that much useful to tell me about going out there, and I've gotten to the point just before where it's describing the actual, and those haven't been as much as a problem for me, so I've put it down and I'm looking at other stuff. But I'm kind of torn as to whether I can even quit doing to see Melissa, or even whether I should. It's gotten a little easy. But the bad experience gave me a bit of a wedge, so we'll see.

I've started on the new Teaching Company class on the Philosophy of Mind. There was one by Searle from a long time ago. This is similar, but it isn't pure Searle. I have another class on Buddhism, but that's audio. This one is video, so it kind of fits in the spot I have in my life for watching Simpon's DVDs.

Looking harder at taking Biochemistry. I looked up the class online. I went by Tiger bookstore looking for the textbook, and I did not see it in the Chemistry section, but there was one in the biology section, and I thought they must be different classes, because the textbook seemed so much more like biology than chemistry. And I was thinkong the course number was 4300 something, and I think the biology one said 4500 something maybe so I was confused. But I think they must be the same class. I also got a book, McGee's _On Food and Cooking_ which Don Knuth recommended. It's got a lot of biochemistry. It seems like a basic useful kind of life background knowledge to have. So I'm a little more psyched to take it. Plus, of course the dating book recommended taking classes. Maybe I should go for the adult ed where I might see people more my age, but hey. I do have books on dating young women, too.

  • July 12, 2008
I should write about it and move on. I was thinking I needed to not write, and just hold it in my brain, where it will have more effect, but hey. So I haven't been having such a good week, but as i was drving, I was thinking how even a bad week for me is superfantasticus compared to the stuff going on with Melissa. And I go down there, and there is a really big party downstairs. OK, so they rented the space and I maybe I shouldn't have invaded their space, but they were just about done, and it was just me. I ordered some food, and had it at the bar. The manager dude asks why I'm sitting there, since it's their family thing. I saw I'm hanging out with Melissa, Whatever. And it's a buffet, and they say to dump the rest, so Melissa grabs a little plate of it. And manager dude Dave yells at her. And she gets across to me that it is "really inappropriate" for me to have been down there, so I hang out upstairs for about 20 minutes while they clear out. But it's a harsh 20 minutes. A twenty minutes of thinking about how they didn't want me there. Something to remember there have been times I've gone there and been disappointed, but that was just because Melissa was busy and maybe I didn't get as much attention as I'd liked. But never actually unpleasant like this. So I don't think I've had anything bad to keep me away, other than just the thought that I might have been wasting my time. Now I have.

And I brought up taking biochemistry maybe in the fall. Melissa was talking about how it was harsh, though it sounded like that was for her. I should have said something how it wasw probably more because she never got any sleep while taking it that she didn't do so well. Otherwise she was a straight-A student. And I barely manage to get it in, but I asked her if she would help me out if I had trouble, and she was nice about it, but she basically said no way. And she said that she couldn't explain biochemistry, and she did mention the tutor that she had, who was good. But you know how it is. And Josh was sitting there. Josh asked me why I would be taking it. I tried to explain that I'm interested in chemistry, and I've studied bioinformatics, and also biochemistry is one of the possible pathways to nanotechnology, which is also one of my interests. I still may do it. i need to go get the textbook and look at it. But it won't be an opportunity to hang out with Melissa. Maybe if I take Biochem 2 in the Spring when she does. But I shouldn't think that way. The most significant thing about the class for me is that it is at 8:00, so I could reasonably take it before work. That's a big deal. But I don't know if I'm going to be going down to Pearl's as much any more.

  • July 10, 2008
I have been looking forward to going to see Melissa. It's Thursday, and I was thinking that I would go after kung fu class. And I often wimp out, and logically I was thinking about how I always end up staying up later, so I don't have an excuse not to go down there. But I got home, drank probably half a gallon of water, and rinsed myself off. I weighed myself, and even with the extra water, I was still just under 200 lbs. I think I was that this morning when I skipped breakfast, too. But in any case it seemed like I have gotten a little momentum to losing a little weight, and I now had a reason not to go out and eat. But the big thing was that I saw my gut in the mirror, and I was kind of disgusted and really just didn't want to eat anything. And I was kind of tired, so I lay down a bit. That's the kind of thing that happens. I'll be tired, especially since I haven't eaten. Then I will decide not to go, and eat something, and suddenly have energy. So I should have just gone. And I did eat something. I finished up some leftover barbecue that really needed to be eaten. I was from the fourth, so it was almost a week old. And it wasn't very much, so I don't feel too guilty. But I also got a chance to start on _Dating for Dummies_. I finally dug it out of its box, which was a lot harder than it should have been. I must have missed it the first time I checked the box it was in, and it was a couple of layers down. The process to look for books involves moving and lifting some pretty heavy boxes. And, like I said, I had to go through them twice to find it, because I missed it the first time. Generally I have an idea which box something might be in, but I missed slightly with this one. Anyway, I think I may be ready to read it now because I have a bit more understanding about myself. For me, the trouble with dating isn't simply that it's scary. Maybe it is to me to some extent, but there are just things about dating that I don't like, not the least of which is the people. Anyway, I'm a litle bit clearer, so I'll see how it goes. Already, she has made some anthropological claims that I disagree with. Like how dating is different in that women didn't use to choose mates or that marriages were always either rapes (I mean, just grabbing them) or aranged. That's just crap. Courtship is ancient. In some theories, it was an important part of human evolution. We'll see. Also, in a mensa email list, they gave personality type percentages, and I forget which group it was, exactly, but there were like 24% INTP (there were 33% INTJs, which I don't care for so much). That's a huge increase from the general population, where it is like 1%. So there are places where I might have a lot more luck with the whole approach of getting to know bunches of people. Dating may still all be an E or J thing, so I'm still wary.

  • July 1, 2008
Happy Kalends of July!

  • June 28, 2008
That was completely pitiful. So I'm at the bar at Pearl's, and there's this cute girl sitting a little ways away. Maybe a little over-weight but really cute, and dressed to show off her cleavage, show she "has the cab sign out". And then she comes and sits next to me. And starts talking to me. Said her friends were trying to get her to talk to people. I don't know, I was lame. And while she was sitting there, another cute girl comes between us, and brushes against me a bit--naturally with the part that sticks out the most. It was an accident, of couse, and she was apologizing profusely--she didn't mean to crowd me. And I said she could get as close as she wants. And then she just was apologizing more profusely. Maybe too creepy? I don't know. I'm just sitting there trying to eat. It was really full. Lots of girls dancing. And yet again I wimped out and didn't dance with any of them. Seemed like they could have used a guy to dance with. So I don't know. Maybe I'm not ready, or not into it. I really need to lose a few pounds. I think I've decided that the seminar in two weeks is too soon. There's one in New York in a month and a half. I should shoot for that. I'm not sure I'm ready for the windy apple, but it would give me an opportunity to go there.

I watched Wall*E. It was really good. But I can see why Ebert gave it three and a half stars, not four. It had some factual sorts of things that didn't make sense and took me out of the story, and I know that bothers him sometimes as well. And it seemed a little manipulative. But it was sweet and heartfelt, and had deep and disturbing sorts of social commentary. It could easily be the best movie of the year, but movies in general have been getting pretty weak.

  • June 27, 2008
I'm thinking of going to a dating seminar. Specifically, the Mystery Method seminar in Chicago on the July 11 weekend. And it's led by a guy they're "the Don", who seems like about the best fit for me. He's a mensan, and a bit older, though not as old as me. I'm not sure the whole thing is right for me, though. I read a bit about dating coaches. One girl writing about them is saying they wanted her to spend 15 hours a week. Man, that's sounding like work. And that's also the kind of time these pickup people are talking about you need to spend. And then I thought about my other hobby, the kung fu. I only spned, maybe 4 hours per week on it, possibly more if I do spend a good bit of time, but then only maybe 5 hours. Not very much. Doing it for a year I guess makes a difference, but you get out what you put in, and I don't put in very much. And they were saying 15 hours because that's about how much you should spend on a job search. Dating is a similar thing, since you're looking for that important situation that you will spend a lot of time in. But who does that? I never spent enough time looking for a job, which is why I haven't worked much, I guess. I just stumble onto things and get lucky sometimes. So, maybe I don't really have the interest or commitment. But I'm curious to learn some skills I guess.

And the little girl in the article said she didn't like a lot of things about dating, but I think my problem is a lot worse. I don't like a lot of things about dating, but I also don't like stupid people, and to me, almost everybody is really, really, stupid. Mensa is supposedly the top 2% in IQ, but even a lot of them don't seem particular great, and I have to try to appreciate other things about them, like how nice some of them are. And I guess, the IQ is not enough, really, so that's part of the thing with even Mensans. They also need knowledge about things that I'm interested in. But generally Mensas are pretty good, I just throw it out as a case how I probably would have trouble with just Jane Doe. *sigh*. So I don't know.

  • June 25, 2008
I just finished rereading Buscaglia's _Love_. He idealizes it the way NFs do. But for him, "growing" in love was a way of life. And it isn't about learning more, like it might be for me and the NTs, ir is about doing and becoming better in doing than in knowing. Always being natural. So "growing" is possibly the best word to describe it. One of the things I had trouble with is that he claims very strongly that there are no kinds of love--there is only love. Now, I, as an analytic rational, just know that this is wrong. In Greek, there are even three different words that come across as love in English. And I know that there are many distinct things that contribute to the complex thing we can call love. But, we rationals are basically by nature not as good with all this feeling stuff life the idealists, the NFs like Leo. So I (or maybe we) really need to just suck it up and listen to what they have to say. One thing is that it has to be done, not thought about. And he is talking about loving all men. I'm also introverted, and I'm not into loving lots of people the way Leo was. So at best, I try to focus on one person. I really need to expand. Leo also emphasizes not having expectations or requirements. I think this is just his idealization again, but, yet again, I need to trust that he's really the expert, not me, even though I believe I know what I'm talking about.

So what does this really have to do with anything with me? Well, for one, I'm trying to look at how I'm hanging out with Melissa. Now, it's just work for her. But as a service person, her job itself is a bit of the practice of love. And I have to admit, I like hanging out because she does make me feel loved. But I did just find out how limited it is. Over the course of about a year and a half, I asked her to go do something with me maybe four times, and it never happened. And I asked a couple more times in desparation recently, but nothing. And it's the summer, and when school is out, she always gets closer to her boyfriend, though during school it seems like they get distant. It seems like the past couple of thanksgivings she spent with Randy (an old friend of hers) and to me it doesn't seem like any kind of real relationship if you don't spend at least this holiday together. But whatever. So she isn't available to me, or at least not interested, romantically. I thought I had conceded that a long time ago, but I guess I still cling to a bit of hope in that, but that's not the biggest thing, I think. It had been my decision that despite not going there, I would take this as an opportunity to just bask in loving someone, and it doesn't hurt that it's someone really beautiful. So I go see her, and I'm happy to be there, and she indulges me--she actually gives me a bit of her quiet time on her smoking breaks. A couple times, though, lately, she has kind of gone off early with Josh (her BF) and I haven't gotten the time she also gives me as she is cleaning up at the end of her shift. Two weeks ago, I went down twice, and she left for fathers day at about 10. Last week I decided to take a break.

And I've been thinking and reading about love--and sex. I've got a book on _love+sex with robots_, and another bonk, which is just about sex. The most interesting thing from _bonk_ so far is that they have figured out the main predictor of how easily a woman will have orgasms. It's the distance from the edge of the vagina to the clitoris. Closer is better. An inch is a pretty good dividing point. About the width of a thumb, actually. in the robots one, they mention real-dolls. I looked at their site. It's probably not for me, though. I like freckles. And narrower shoulders. The biggest one seemed almost right, but maybe it was a little big. And I guess, I like pleasing more than to just be pleased, so it would probably just be a boring thing for me, anyway.

But then I read the Buscaglia. A real teacher of love. So that's what I've been thinking about. I'll probably go hang out with Melissa again. But I need to expand out an see some more people.

Mand, what woke me up was that I in some dream, some guy said something about going to hell, maybe me, and I got angry and said, don't you know hell doesn't really exist? It's just a story told to children to make them act nice.

And I get on line. I check out a porn site I have bookmarked, funberry.com. And it has been replaced by some sort of christian teaser message. Kind of trippy, really. And if chritianity weren't a big money-making scheme, in addition to whatever good things it may do, I'd be a little less troubled by it. The mafia does good things, too.

  • June 15, 2008
I don't know what the deal is. I don't eat steak very often, but it seems like often when I do, I also end up watching the _Lisa the Vegetarian_ Simpson's episode.

  • June 14, 2008
Wow! I went to sleep at 6pm and got up at 7am. I was thinking I would go see, well, you know, but I just was tired, and wasn't feeling quite so up to it.

I've been commenting on the reddit page about Eliezer Yudkowsky's blog stuff about quantum mechanics. I'm trying to read more about Quantum mech, since it was brought up in Lana's philsophy meetup group. I had seen a page explaining it in a way better for computer and math people.

So I was talking to a guy Charles about martial arts at Pearl's. He had some lady friend who studied Wing Chun. We were talking about how tough women can be. And he said they were built to take a pounding. Heh.

  • June 13, 2008
Happy Friday the Thirteenth!

I went to go see Melissa on a Thursday night, which is unusual. My parents come into town, and we usually have dinner together, but they came too late for me to have dinner before going to kung fu, so i hadn't eaten anything. Melissa understood this story to me I was hungry, and I was starting to get a headache from not eating, but to me, I was more trying to give a reason for coming to see her. Should I need a reason. I felt a bit of distance, but she was sweet and tried to talk about how the benefit on Friday went well. I didn't talk about how beautiful I thought she looked, or the silly reasons I had for not sitting with her, or how a few things recently made me feel that we weren't as close as I thought, not really friends. But I guess that's OK. I got there at about a quarter till 10, and the bar was full (though all the table were empty). We got out of there a little before 12, and it was earlier for her because her boyfriend Josh came by to pick her up, and this time they rushed to get done. I think Randy was going to let her go as soon as they got done with the money not to hold them up. i ended up talking to Josh about martial arts. He's interested in studying Aikido. Kenny talked about how he used to wrestle in high school. All fights end up on the ground. Josh actually said that's been his experience(!). I don't know, man, I've never really gotten into a fight. I don't think the other guy would look very pretty if I did. I guess I don't know. I was hoping to persuade Melissa to accept some help, but couldn't with the boyfriend around.

Anyway, it wasn't even midnight. So I went to the Pony. It's kind of losing its charm, but Camille was nice.

  • June 11, 2008
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy--Shakespeare wrote it, so it must be true. A comment on the limits of human knowledge.

So I'm driving in to work. And A guy has pulled into the lane in front of me from a side street. Not completely blocking it, but about halfway so I can't stay completely in the lane to get past. Now, as on-coming traffic, I started with the right of way, but since he was in the way, he had the right togo on and get out of the way, so in that situation, he did actually have the right of way at the time. But he just sat there. And I didn't slow down or anything. Whatever he did, I wasn't going to hit him, but maybe he didn't know that or trust me or something, so he just kind of froze like a bunny, I guess. Oh well. I don't know if I was obligated to slow down. I was obligated to yield and not hit him, but I decided to just quickly change over lanes halfway, which was really not the right legal move, I suppose. Live and learn. No signaling, either. I'm still not sure if not signalling is really illegal. What if I just don't feel very communicative?

  • June 9, 2008
Went to the benefit for Nicki Krueger at TJ Mulligans 64. It was supposed to start at 6 but I got there at around 6:30 and they hadn't started, and few people had gotten there yet. I had felt like eating tater tots, and I didn't see them on the menu, but I got some chicken tenders, and the guy asked if I wanted fries, tater tots, or onion rings. Bonus! I kept wishing I was just doing my form. It gave me time to think about _Kung Fu Panda_. They did start playing at about 8. It was three bands I like, Transitt, Super 5, and Mudflap King. They were collecting at the door, but I didn't feel up to conspicuous donation, so I gave them a 20. But they had a bucket, so i put a c-note in early. I ended up putting in three. This was a benefit because Nicki's family had their house burn down and lost everything. Has to be rough. They ended up with 945 in the bucket and 800 at the door. So they did pretty well. Melissa showed up at about 10. She was wearing something sleeveless and low-cut, and just managed to get a lot more beautiful. I got a hug, and she was talking, so I moved on. And she was with her boyfriend, Josh. I just heard that they have been cool on occasion, but I that's how it goes, and I guess I'm glad she has someone. I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but we aren't really friends, so I didn't go sit with them. And then at some point, I was walking around and she came over to talk. After I left her before, I must have gone outside, because she said she followed me out, but then I was gone. I had come in a different door from the one I went out. And she was thinking maybe I had left without saying good-bye. She said Randy hadn't come over and said hi, and she didn't go over to him either. She was saying I should come over and sit with them, but I had a really nice seat where I could see the cool guitar playing, so I didn't join them. She said something like she didn't know why I didn't come join them. Oh well. I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but there you go. And quite a bit later, I got up, and someone took my stupid chair. I talked a little to Randy, and asked him if he had said hi to Melissa, and he said no. There are some people he just doesn't choose to spend time with. And I said, well, she could have come over to say hi to him, too. I did go over there, and sit with them. I was on the other side of Josh from her, so I could at least try to be friendly to him. They left shortly after that, though. I could have sat next to Melissa I guess on the side away from Josh. It was a chair by the wall, though. I like to sit where I can rest my head on a wall. Oh well. I stayed around till they were closing up. I though I was sitting by myself, but Courtney sat next to me, and then after that, Nicki. Nicki was crying a lot. I think it was all too much for her. She and Courtney were dancing a lot, and seemed to be having a good time. And I noticed Courtney doing some thing, scratching her boob or something. The inside left. By reaching into her cleavage. Kind of trippy with the cleavage hanging out like that. Did I mention she was cute? But I didn't have the guts to dance with any of them. But that's how it usually goes. I don't really know them, anyway. Melissa asked me if I would come see her this week. I said probably.

Well, I posted it to the mensa martial arts email list, be let me stick it here:
I just saw Kung Fu Panda. I thought it was fun. Really pretty good, but it wimped out a bit, I suppose. And truly it had very little to do with kung fu. Archetypal coming of age kinds of stuff like in Star Wars. Lot's of star power, and good acting. Maybe a touch of the American Zen food. It had a theme about there not being any secrets, and I've seen that pop up on occasion in martial arts. I have a book on tai chi called _there are no secrets_ that I started and haven't gotten through, so maybe I'll finish it. It seems like there are actually some secrets, but they aren't as big a deal as one might think.

I also saw the trailer for Star Wars: the clone wars. An animated romp that really sounds like the kind of thing people were looking for in a Star Wars movie.

someone thanked me for the review, and just tonight I wrote again:
That was sort of a quick impression review, but I thought about it a little more, and found something more I wanted to say. I said it wimped out, and I didn't want to go further because it would be talking about the ending, and it's somewhat rude to spoil the end, but I thought it was a bad ending and on further thought, I believe it is not bad to spoil a bad ending. And I found the ending to be really amazingly good, but it just slightly failed at the end. Part of the genre is to have a big fight at the end between the good guy and the bad guy, so that should be expected. The good ending I'll contrast it with is the one from Kung Fu Hustle. That, I'm thinking more and more, has to be one of my favorite movies, and it ends with not just a defeat of the bad guy, but a humbling of the bad guy, and the good guy offering friendship to the bad guy and touching him. In the fight at the end, the good guy fights with an incredible love for kung fu, and with no anger or hatred or vengeance or anything, in contrast with almost all the other characters in the movie. It was looking like two kung fu brothers fighting, and I was thinking maybe the bad guy would accept it, but it takes the conventional ending. I think they had to do that, because in our culture now, it has become a good thing for bad guys to die. i think that is horrible. That's what I didn't like about the latest Star Wars--the Jedi started killing people. That just isn't the way I had come to admire. I real martial master has no need to kill. Anyway, I'm thinking I will probably need to go see it again.

  • June 7, 2008
getting really frustrated. Melissa admits she's being stubborn. and it isn't me personally, she won't borrow money from her parents, either. I like to think I'm being persistent--which is when you stick with something you know is good. Stubborn is when you stick with something you know is bad. And she keeps saying she has stuff going on, but won't say anything more. So has has closed down, which is also frustrating. I can only guess it's boyfriend stuff, because she doesn't not talk to me about that stuff. And I guess that's fair, because I'm no longer being so caring and sympathetic.

  • June 6, 2008
Happy D-Day!

I've been playing call of duty 3. Finally. Got my wii going. That was one of the main games I wanted for it, but the controller by itself is too unsteady to really play, but with the gun stock attachment that I got for christmas, it is quite playable.

So I found how to get a google satellite map of the house at the farm Google still doesn't recognize the new name of the road that we are using--Babian's Way, but they know about clark road, so I can use that. Unfortunately, I don't know the exact house number for clark road, as opposed to 109 Babian's way, which is the address we use. I can also get the cottage by the lake. Google maps is pretty darn cool. I can show the house in memphis, but it's obscured by trees.

So I thought of something I need to try. Some time when I'm dreaming, I need to shoot force lightning like the Sith in star wars. Now that would be cool. Flying is no problem. You can develop any kind of ability you want when you're dreaming, especially with the lucid stuff. I need to get into shooting the force lightning.

  • June 4, 2008
Churchill gave the we shall fight on the beaches...we shall never surrender speech this day in 1940. I was at Pearl's, and I wasn't very hungry, but I wanted something (actually potato soup, but that was a Mulligans or McGuinness thing) so Melissa suggested the shrimp and grits. It was good, but it was a little much for me. So I thought of that speech, and looked it up on my phone to consider. I told Melissa I wouldn't let a little bowl like this defeat me. I believe she thinks I'm crazy. Which is true. She's been having some trouble, and won't even see me to talk about helping her out. Kind of makes me mad. And maybe I think she's being stupid. Which is not attractive at all. And yesterday I went by Mulligans 64 and had a bowl of potato soup. Cute bartender named Courtney.

So Louie in the Ba Gua class mentioned that being in the Zone and "Flow" are the same as the tao, which is what you are going for with lots of practice on forms.

  • May 26, 2008
Happy Memorial Day! And yesterday was Towel Day, but I forgot.

So, just as I was about to go outside and mow the lawn, it started raining. Oh well.

I ended up doing the yard. It didn't rain long, and it was dry by the evening. Did other chores--washing clothes and dishes and shopping. Seems like two days for a weekend doesn't give me enough time to recover emotional and build up a desire to do things. three is pretty good.

  • May 25, 2008
I've started cooking rice in a slightly different way. I don't add the water at first. I heat the rice dry for a little bit. Not in oil or with onions or anything, like you would for a risotto or pilaf, which was my inpriation. Just to toast it a little. But it raises the temperatur of the pot, and maybe the rice above waters boiling point. Have to constantly toss the rice around to keep from burning what's at the bottom. And if there was oil or anything else the rice would stick to the bottom and you couldn't shake it around properly. One time I tried to use the rice pot that was sitting in the sink, and because it was wet, it had this problem and didn't work--rice stuck in the bottom, so I couldn't do it long enough. What it does is to heat everything up and store heat, so you can pour in hot water, and it will immediately be boiling. No waiting at all for it to come to a boil, which is nice. Because waiting for it to boil, or more specifically going away while waiting for it to boil, it can bubble up. Also, I keep the lid on when cooking it, so I always risk it bubbling up. My mom just doesn't cover it, but I like to. You can turn the heat down immediately, since it's already boiling. This time, I wasn't lucky, and it did bubble and boil over a little bit, because it was still so hot. But generally, it works ok pretty well, and I think it goes a litte faster. And I always put in a bouillon cube for some flavor, but I've been doing that for a while.

I got through July in the Sudoku calendar. That took a while. I haven't been playing so much lately. But a couple times I did the hardest level without writing done the possibles, so I think I'm getting better. But this last fairly easy one, I had to. So I'm not super consistent.

  • May 22, 2008
watched the Indiana Jones movie. Kingdom of the crystal skull. Wasn't that great. Too silly. What's her face was nice.

How about them oil prices? You could have bought at $100 and made 30%.

  • May 16, 2008
If you can't fly, then run.
If you can't run, then walk.
If you can't walk, then crawl.
But whatever you do, keep moving.
--a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Similarly, Dean Karnazes said: "Run when you can,walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up"
And on Firefly they added: "And if you can't crawl, find someone to carry you."

  • May 15, 2008
Happy Ides of May!

I've started playing darts, and I have already improved noticeably in a couple of days. I'm sure I won't continue to improve steadily, but that was interesting. And it wasn't from doing it more, it seemed more that sleeping on it helped, and practicing each day.

OK, maybe not drumming. I don't know if you can study massage anywhere. I just got some material on massage therapy for fibromyalgia. Don't sound too bad. Melissa had a thing one time where she got a massage and it messed her up for a few days. Thye probably just overdid it. Have to go extra slow for that.

  • May 14, 2008
And there are so many drummers out there.

I remember people thinking that we wouldn't read any more. Or write. But now the kids text all the time. Good old fashioned reading and writing. And posting on the little social sites. I don't do that so much. Writing is more than encoded speech. It has nice features on it's own. Quiet is private when you're jammed together with folks. It isn't going away. I was a speech rec believer, but text has some staying power.

  • May 13, 2008
Happy Tuesday the Thirteenth!

I'm glad I didn't call. She said she stayed in bed from Saturday night to Monday afternoon when she had to go to work. That girl!

So I tried getting into the second chapter of Neil's book. I should quit. I think to a lot of people, maybe he might come across as pretty smart--he talks about reading "the great books"-- but to me he sounds thick as a brick. I don't really care for travelling or motorcycles. It's not my kind of thing, really, but I wanted to give it a shot. I do sort of have a preconception that drummers are stupid. This hasn't dispelled it. So I'm no longer so psyched about playing. It is kind of a mindless thing, anyway. What I need to do is develop a computer program that can properly sing.

Well, hmm. Neil is an ENTP, which is pretty close to me. But it seems quite far. The whole risk-taking thing. I'm just not into it.

  • May 11, 2008
Happy Mother's Day!

So, I decided to come to Starbucks. Went out to Borders to pick up something by Neil Peart, I"m hoping it inspires me to pick up the drums. And more specifically, I'd heard that he was a pretty smart and interesting guy, somewhat intellectual. I just want to see if drummers can be the kind of person I would want to be. I get the feeling they are kind of dumb and brutish--animal as it were. I"m thinking again of taking up the drums. I had thought about it last year, but I was just getting into the kung fu, and I decided it would probably be too much effort. I can only put so much into things. And it"s probably never going to be too likely that i'll stick with it. But it"s the same thing with the kung fu, and that's been a year now.

Augh, And I'm wishing I could just go see Melissa. She hasn't responded to my last two text messages, but last night I went by, and she seemed to say something about her messages being full. I went by about midnight and missed tom dick and harry playing. She hadn't been sleeping and i wanted to know how she was doing. And I found out that she had gotten a couple of hours after massively medicating. She was in some kind of real tortured, fitful pain when she lay down. . Is it being too intrusive to want to know how she is? I guess.

OK, so I didnt eat anything, and came in late, but I wanted to give Melissa something for being there. And this time, she wouldn"t accept it. Grr. She used to try that. And Chip from Mudflap Kings did the same thing. Made me feel bad. Hmm. Maybe it's not so good of me. It could be me trying to look important. And it could look bad. I have her number, I could call. *sigh*

I needed to get out. I was pissed. I put the DVR on a UPS, but it didn't go a whole day without being reset. So it must not be the power. The thing is just broken. I guess.

So, Neil Peart. My impression so far: Ugh. Me daughter die, ay? Me wife sad. She want to die. She broke heart. She get cancer. She die. Me live. Me ride bike. Me get radar detector. Me go fast. Cop take.

Shoot. So I wanted to go see TJ Mulligans 64. And I was thinking of shooting a practice rack of pool. I've been thinking of taking that up. Again, maybe? I don't know. I tell people we used to have a pool table at my house. It's conversation, I guess. I haven't played in a long time. I don't know if I ever got consistent. So I'm in there. They have two tables, and a couple of old hacks are playing at the other, and I check, and I haven't brought in enough quarters, so I sit back. And the guy playing at the other table, plays a couple of the cuties. Maybe they were with them, I don't know. One girl seemed to at least know what she was doing-- but had no cue accuracy, so couldn't make anything. and I think the other, maybe named Stephanie, in the little cowboy boots (they were singing that they were made for walking), had no clue. Did get the other one to help pick shots. Anyway, they finish off the game with the guy, and they play each other. I guess. Never finished it I think at some point, the guy came over and started clearing. So I was shut out of the table. And they were pointing over to me. Actually, I was sitting at the bar watching, and there was a group of the hombres, and one kind of gestured that I should go over. Man. But actually closer than the pool table, there were some folks playing darts. Someone brought in his set. And I'm thinking, well, that's actually a martial art. Maybe I should take it up. And I know a good bit about poisons. Sounds like a hobby. I wonder if you could kill a squirrel with a dart. Buggers are quick. Might not be able to toss it fast enough.

I just heard of something interesting. Skype has an API to for doing VOIP. I've wanted to do some speech recognition, processing stuff again. It sounds like a good platform. I really needed something with access to the sound stream data, and it probably has that. There's a guy on the AGI list, Stephen Reed, who wants to hook something like that up with the Sphinx recognizer, and some other system, with his text based ai system (texai). We'll see how that goes for him.

  • May 10, 2008
It made me laugh out loud. I got a battery backup uninterruptible power supply (welcome to the 90s) so my digital recorder wouldn't reset all the time. And as a bit of a nice side effect, now my desktop is on interruptible. I've actually never had a problem from that (I guess I've been lucky) but now I got it. It's kind of nice that with laptops you get that reliability automatically, although in windows world, it ends up more likely that the computer will freeze up, or your editor program will freeze up, or this actually happened to me, you'll be doing something in a browser window, and another browser window will crash all your browser instances. Darn crappy software standards. Anyway, it said on the box, lightning protection, guarranteed(?!) Now, surge protection in general means protection, not from lightning, but from smaller elelctrical surges that can happen from, say, big electric motors switching on and off, or other kinds of things like that. But, problems with lightning are so rare that they can perfectly reasonably have a guarantee to protect against it. Not that it will protect against it, or survive it in itself, but kind of like an insurance thing where they will pay you for damages if one of those rare things does actually happen, where lightning hits your transformer or something. And it wasn't you just being stupid and using it outside in a thunderstorm. I doubt any of these places has even ever had a claim brought to them. It would be kind of interesting to see. Now, the battery backup thing is actually slightly more electrically isolated. And I suppose it's possibly that the "surge protector" has something to reduce overvoltage issues. But protection from lighting? It just makes me laugh. Kenny at Pearl's yesterday was saying how he lived on a farm as a kid, and he saw a cow hit by lightning. It basically exploded. Poor Melissa is such a sweethearted animal lover, she probably really didn't need to here that. Or about the time a cow had it's horn frozen to the ground and rancher had to chainsaw its head off. Fun kid, that Kenny.

Yay! and my Wii works again! At Best Buy, in addition to the UPS, I also got their little wireless IR sensor bar. And I only wanted a wired one, so I didn't think to get theirs, though I saw that they had one. And I get it, and it has a plug to used it as a wired one. Grr! I had order a cheap one online (with horrible messed up chinese docs) and it didn't work. And then I took so long to try this. So much gaming time lost. I tried stuff out, and I was really rusty. And maybe the quiet sudoku playing is getting to me, but I feel kind of overstimulated. Now I just feel like sitting quietly. Actually, that's what I do at Pearl's. Hmm. And I just found out that Melissa hates to just sits still. Some folks are just fidgety. That's totally not me. And when I found that out about her, it just showed me that we totally couldn't work, but I can't help still being smitten. But the fidgety girls are always so thin--it's part of the deal-- and everybody likes thin. Man I used to be thin. Grr. I don't know if I used to be fidgety. Brains themselves can use a lot of energy, if you use them a lot. I don't know.

  • May 5, 2008
¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo!

I got through June in my Sudoku calendar. Halfway through the year. I'm not using any external stuff to help, no "cheating", but several times now I've resorted to a kind of guessing, which I'm not so happy with. I think it would have been better to use the strategy search thing to maybe learn something instead of doing that. My mom actually solve a blank belt level puzzle, though she did use the solution when she got stuck on the last square. Still, I think it's pretty impressive, based on how hard they can be. Trial and error can be an effective approach.

I started on three books. None of them was very interesting, which I guess is why there were three of them. I got a bunch in the mail, including several books on coding. _Beautiful Code_ was the coding book I started. I also tried Neil deGrasse Tyson's _Death by Black Hole..._ It mentions the question about a tree falling in the forest making a sound or not, but he dismissed it as a stupid question. Plus the chapter didn't seem to say anyhing, so I put it aside. One of the atheist mailing lists wanted to discuss it, and they talked about it at their book meeting. We'll see if I read any more. And there was _Omnivore's Dilemma_, which I mentioned before. So I spent a lot of time on the Sudoku, instead.

  • May 3, 2008
So, there are about 230 Google hits for "octo-lavo". It's a type of vegetarianism. I'm guessing it's a type of vegetarianism where because you don't get enough protein, your body has started to digest your brain. I think I've mentioned it before, and I'm glad the idea is still going strong. It literally means "eight-washing" and I think that kind of obsessive compulsion itself would indicate some level of brain damage. But I have to concede that it's probably more a matter of people getting confused by the term "ovo-lacto" which is a different type of vegetarianism that includes eggs and dairy products. But a mistake like that I think does also indicate some level of impairment, so I think my analysis stands. And a nifty thing about this most recent Googling is that it now comes up with a lot of pictures of the octo-lavos. Mostly skinny looking women. More corroboration, I believe.

I was thinking of the octo-lavos because I started on _Omnivore's Dilemma_ for Aimee's book group. I think that's another misuse of language. They mentioned that the origin of the title term comes from some professor thirty years ago, so I wouldn't be surprised at the mistakes. Ah the glorious, spacey 70s! "Dilemma" of course implies having two choices-- that's what the "di-" in the word means. Unless you broaden what you are trying to say to just mean a difficult choice, in which case, of course, "dilemma" is no longer really the correct word. So I'm not starting off with a good feeling about the book. But who cares? Why stick to what words actually mean. Which is why I can embrace the term "octo-lavo" vegetarian. Dude does mention the ovo-lactos, though, which is why I thought of their sisters from the special bus.

  • May 1, 2008
Happy May Day!

  • April 29, 2008
Your zombie dictator demanded ritual cannabilism. Doesn't that sound a little crazy to you?

I finally finished the book of 180 Sudoku puzzles. The last section of about 30 was actually moderately challenging, I guess is why it took longer than I was thinking.

OK, so what could the ritual cannibalism mean? Well if you look at it as Jesus was one of the few enlightened folk who see themselves not as the smaller self confined in this body, but just the same as (I almost said part of, but that's wrong) the greater self that includes all things, then it makes sense. And it this sense of God that they are really getting at. And it isn't a God that created everything back in the past and occasionally tips things over or whatever. It's a god who is constantly doing everything at all times even now. But, the thing is, that's either true or it's not. And maybe it's only true as an explanation you work with and makes sense to you. Even in the sense of true as in useful working theory, it could still be false. Because what does it get you? For some people it's helpful to have an imaginary firend that's controlling things, because it lets them be optimistic about stuff. It turns out that optimism is useful in itself. There's that whole death not being such a scary bad thing, but I think that value is a bit overstated, and really not all that good. It really seems like people pretend that their loved ones going to a better plaes comforts them, but for what I've seen, they are really pretty devastated, and it's more something that supports them in their denial, and makes it a much more serious psychological problem. A lot of it is crazyiness.

  • April 27, 2008
Hmm. So Aimee said she might come by Pearl's after going to the roller derby. But she didn't. And she didn't send a message or anything. Today I sent her a text asking how it went and said Melissa knew somebody that did the roller derby thing, and maybe would like to go sometime. I guess that was a little sad that I was mentioning her in the message, but oh well. Now I'm finding that I'm a little angry that Aimee just skipped without anything. I need to take a hint. But I need to get over it too, and not be petulant. Maybe. I think she's cute. I have general liked talking to her. She said she'd like to talk some time. But she seems to have that thing about not really being into telling the whole truth, in order to spare people's feelings, a thing that just irks me. Part of being a sweet person, I suppose. I'm just trying to think of what the right reaction is. Don't be a doormat. Be tough and firm. And don't chase. Be the prize.

  • April 25, 2008
A day of Shiva. On the way to work, a bird who was actually a little forward and to the right, decided to dart in front of my car, and I hit him. I could see him fluttering on the ground. There was a death recently in the family of someone from work. My car was munched. A big branch from a tree fell on the house and put a hole through the roof, so rain came in. We just noticed today, though it must have been there for a while. Somebody just told me their relationship was having trouble. Just kind of some freakish stuff. Nothing super big (well, the death wasn't good, but i hadn't even actually met the person). But still, for a person who follows the signs, it's rather uncanny. And when i switched on the iPod this morning, the first song that came up was the first track on _Oh Brother Where Art Though_--"Lonesome Valley". If you know the song, you know what I mean. Right now it's the Beatles' "Run For Your life".

  • April 23, 2008
I just saw on reddit something about a computer program to help with memory (supermemo). I think my brother Freddie told me about it, and he's using it to practice language and learn Chinese, and also to help teach his kid. It uses the known fact that we forget in a sort of exponential decay, so it gives flash cards in a pattern with exponentially decaying probability based on how you have been remembering.

It made me think about how I keep reading the AGI list. And I really get kind of discouraged, because they really don't come up with a lot of insight. So here is the latest thing I'm thinking. They keep wanting computers to think like people, but do not focus on finding out how it might be possible to translate. how people think about things to how computers think about things. For one, If a computer can learn how to do things, it needs to be able to write the specialized program that can do it, the way a person can. People do chunking, where they take some complicated set of motions or things to do, and in a sense make them a kind of "instinctive" pattern where they do it automatically without thinking. Computer programs are kind of like that at a completely different level--a different level in the sense that in a person there is always some room to break it open and change out a step or recognize that something is going awry and fix it. Computers get extremely locked down. There used to be a notion of "interrupt" where a computer could be disrupted and something else would go on, but that's hard to program, and it is avoided in a real program. But it could be a mechanism to make a computer program more intelligent-- interrupt it when it isn't doing so well and offer possible improvements to the compiled code. That is in a sense what programmers do when they revise code. So it looks like I'm basically proposing that the proper role for an intelligence on a computer is to be a programmer. Computers do their own kind of thinking, and it should be a goal of people to find out how to translate our ways of thinking to how a computer does think, instead of trying to figure out some magically essence of how people think and getting some program to do that. There might not be an essence (a simple thing we try to call intelligence).

We use huge thought processes involving billions of neurons--this involves huge amounts of simple mechanisms. And what kinds of things do these simple mechanisms do? The evaulate patterns. And they make judgements about what kind of actions are good in different situations, and boil them together kind of competitively (that is, in parallel all working at the same time to find what they think of is the best answer based on how they have been configured at the time) to come up with a decision about what next to do. The final pipe is very narrow--we can't do very much at one time, but if we have lot's of bits of brain, we can consider a lot of possibilities. And the bits of brain, if they are limited about what they can think about, and think about a lot of things independently, and they don't have to bother the rest of the bits of the brain until they come up with something really good, and then the shouting can get louder and louder until the whole brain gets involved, and maybe we eventually decide to do something. And another thing that people can do, is to come up with words and descriptions to shout, and we can shout these to ourselves inside in what is called "thinking" or deliberation, which is already a big step above the unconscious processes that happen in the bits of brain. And thinking in words is part of the even huger system that lets us pass part of the thinking mechanism on to other people, so the thoughts can bounce around with them, and maybe bounce back. It is a narrow and specialized pipe, but quite general and something we have been highly adapted to, on top of our underlying system. And it turned out that we found a nifty external systme of writing where we could put these wirds streams down.

Anyway, I need to contrast how computers think. Computers have an incredibly narrow final pipe, and actually, it's just one narrow pipe from start to finish. But it's incredibly fast, and absolutely exact. Everything is remembered without error, and all the evaluations are done now simply without error, but with a precision of at least a part in a million or billion or whatever you need, such that in a sort of vague sense, it could exactly emulate anything that may be going in any of the simple evaluators in our heads, exactly, tirelessly, and without error. If we have some condition and known situation and context that a computer can be told about, it can me made to make the exact decision and take the action that we tell it. Programming is a lot about describing the situations and the decisions to be made in those situations. The basic example of computers is doing arithmetic, which is really the fundamental kind of operation in a computer. It can handle a simple situation where you have two numbers, and you want to add them and it can give the result--right now.

A person to do this kind of problem will need to break it down into digits, and add the digits that correspond in a certain way, and combine them back to give one number, and in fact, a computer does kind of break it down in a way similar to this. In people's mechanism there is a lot of baggage, like we understand big numbers and small numbers, and as we're thinking, we can sometimes tell when we're going awry, and we don't often really need to go through the long mechanical process of adding numbers, so it doesn't too often become an especially natural thing, the way some actions become chunked and automatic. We have to keep thinking about it quite a bit. Some people become great calculators, and it's very automatic and natural and easy for them. I'm guessing they lose some of the baggage we have about it, whatever it is, hearing the sounds of the numbers or seeing the digits or whatever really slows people down. I don't know.

So what makes a computer different in how it thinks? It is never also being distracted by other items in it's environnent. It only focuses on things that have already been decided are relevant. In a person's world, it is never known for sure what is relevant, because other things can come out and suddenly become important. But computers have tremendous focus. Just the stuff it's looking at. Deal with those. And that kind of thing makes computers stupid, because they don't know to, and can't consider other things that may suddenly be relevant in what could be a new situation. And they don't really look at so many different aspects and bits of information in a situation, scene or context, and just disregard the ones that are not so important. At least that's not how we tend to program. We make sure they are only looking at what's important. Not so much searching through big piles of stuff for what it's looking for, though, in one important but distinct sense it does that. There is a huge pile of storage, that it can look through one at a time, or address any particular bit according to an exact location. Locations in the real world are not exact in this way. It seems like the word "location" might confuse a person because of the unusual analogy. It is kind of like a bin in that it is numbered with a counting number, instead of having a position measured by a ruler. But there is nothing in the world comparable to having billions of bins where you can get to each one at the exact same speed. No physical understanding can correspond, so maybe it isn't such a good thing even to try to explain how a computer thinks in its way. But lets just say it's one at a time, in a kind of narrow sense, but it can do so many million of these things in a second, that it can come to be close to what people do with doing a million little different brain things at same time, all combining together to do a few big things from a huge bag of possibilities each second.

One of the things people on the AGI list try to say is that thinking is somehow probabilitic--that its evaluation is about combining and evaluating the probabilities and making predictions from those. I would say that it may end up something like that in the brain because of how many little evaluators are operation. Computers might be able to do something valuable and useful along those lines in some approach, but it still isn't translating don't to the basic natural operation of the computer. And as I think about it, it might also be useful to translate to some kind of probabilitic evaluation at some middle level to handle some of the generality and exception and interrupt handling, but it would still be best to have a way to compile down to basic machine code when possible, and that should stay as an ultimate goal.

I wanted to get around to talking about how the kinds of date we think about it situations where we can have rules of thumbs about what my be important features to look at and try to maniplute and act on, but it might not work. heuristics. Computers are not so good about trying things that might not work and then reacting to the results. Because we might file away a result as something that might be used in a different situation later, but for a computer we have something we want done, and anything new or different is wrong, and we just want it avoided, or at least thrown away if we get the wrong thing. People have endless failuers that we can profit from later. Computers not so much.

Doing some of the bagua sword movements, I'm getting a better sense of the whipping motion that is one of the forms of the internal power that they talk about. And from what I remember in aikido sword training, that's the kind of thing they were going for there, too. Not so much that you would use a sword, but that you would get a sense of a particular kind of power you develop from a proper whipping movement technique.

Ooo! a site to restore the pledge! Aw, that's tricky! it uses a style in the replublican think tank mode of manipulating the wording to guide the discussion. Saying it's a restoration to take out "God" from the pledge. I think it's interesting. The rhetoric here is that adding "under God" in 1954 to the pledge made it a prayer establishing a kind of generic cult of state religion. Hmm.

  • April 22, 2008
Happy Earth Day!

  • April 17, 2008
Boo! Somebody ripped the bumper trim off my car with his pickup. It was in the parking lot at the kung fu school. Somebody saw it and told us about it. It came off, and they got out and set it back on. One of the students who was a lawyer was out interviewing people and getting contact info and statements. the cell phone numbers helped. And the computer store guy checked their records and got their name and number (we're pretty sure, I don't know if it's positive. Filed a police report. Bartlett police were there in a couple of minutes, but we needed Memphis, so I had to wait for them. I don't think it will really be a big deal, but sometimes that trim isn't so cheap, and it was a pretty big piece. The little lawyer was really mad at them, but I'm not really so mad. They made a mistake, it happens. What could they really do?

  • April 16, 2008
Wow, finally finished a book that has been sitting in my stack for many months, if not a year. Steve Pinker's _Stuff of Thought_. He has a bit where he talks about Stevism, how so many people at a certain time were named Steve. And he has a section about indirect speech and three different kinds of face that people try to maintain, let me see if I can get it, communality (kind of like a brotherhood or fraternal idea), authority, and equality matching. When instead of just asking for the salt, you say, I could use the salt, you are trying not to seem bossy or above the other person. And when trying to change a relationship, you need to be indirect and say, would you like to come see my etchings. Something about how relationships have to be natural, and not ordered around and decided rationally.

  • April 15, 2008
Happy Tax Day!

  • April 6, 2008
I don't know what it is about my answering machine. That's at least the second year that ants have had a little swarm under my answering machine. It's in spring and rainy. I think it's their time to swarm. But I'm not sure why they sit under my answering machine. Maybe it's warm. I think by now it must have some kind of weird ant pheromone. A little windex took care of them. Wrong place wrong time for them.

Been a little off this weekend. Oh well. I'm a little into June now in my Sudoku calendar. I decided to swtich to my book I got for Christmas for a bit. They had a section of 40 puzzles with only 6 numbers instead of 9. went through those just today. And I did 10 of the regular ones, but this is a pretty easy book. there are 180 in all. Don't know how long it will take, but probably not too long. I think Melissa kind of makes me feel cared about, and I felt kind of rejected. I guess. People do have moods. And I didn't exercise so much and I slept a lot. So maybe a combination of things.

  • April 5, 2008
Ah, missed MLKj death day. oh well. Hope it was good for you. they had folks in town. Hillary, McCain. Brian Williams got Obama on the video from Indiana, and said, hey there's people that thought you'd be here and they're asking about you, why aren't you hear. and dude said, well there's people all over the country remembering MLKj and celebrating his life. I thought I could do that best here in Indiana and later in South Dakota. WTF? yeah, there you go. there's an honest person. OK, put him on the spot, but dude.

Pearl's was super dead. And Tom Dick and Harry were playing. Melissa sent me a text that said they were her favorite local band. I was eating, and Melissa said she wanted a fillet. She hasn't been eating much this week, and she wasn't sure she could finish it. Then she checked the price, and it was too much. Maybe she would split it with Randy (she did). But I said she has been buying me didn't, I've been thinking I'd like to buy her dinner some time. And she said no. I've taken care of her. Well, great. Maybe it was only for this time, but I did ask her and she said no. I was wimpy about it, though. I was thinking I would try to explain that I was just trying to bring it up and maybe do it some other time, but I did not get around to that. Talked about other things. And she didn't really care much about them either. And I did finally tell her I liked the way the light from the computer screen played on her face. But that clearly made her uncomfortable. So that's the kind of thing that puts me in the mind to just let it go.

I did talk about it, because Melissa squatted down, and I ended up just sitting on the ground because I couldn't keep in a squat. I just this week realized that I have been doing many of the moves in my form wrong. They are squats, but instead of squatting to get lower, I have been bending over. And this week, I've been trying to do them correctly as squats, but it's been tough. One time my knees really complained. I need to just do some squats to build up. I've gained some weight, and my leg strength hasn't really kept up. I'm liking the broadsword form, though. Unfortunately, in class, I swung a little wild and ripped a hole in a little painting on paper that is hanging in the class. I really felt bad about it. And Li Lao Shr gave me some tape to fix it, and I didn't do much to try to straighten out the paper before putting it on, I just stuck it on quick, so I did a poor job with that, too. Feeling bad about that afterward, too. It was a really jagged rip. And then I look, and there's a little notch out of the tip of my wooden sword. I must have stuck it into the wall. Rough. I really did feel bad, but with time, it's gotten better. I watched Louie do the form on Thursday, and I noticed that he doesn't stick his hand out so far the way I'm doing. A mistake I'm making, I guess.

So, at about 10, I texted Aimee about coming to Pearl's. She wrote back that she was in Alabama with her folks, and that we should plan something. Hmm. Plan? Maybe that's what I'm missing. No plan.

And when I left it was only 1:30 so I was thinking of going to a strip club, but it was still the same. Somehow being with Melissa was enough and I didn't really feel like going to see any other girls.

  • April 3, 2008
Some people just like to be alone a lot. Things aren't set up super well for them. OK, us. But we like to be with other people sometimes, just not all the time. And I think the extroverts, who are the majority, just can't fathom it. And they set up thing where you are around people all the time, and they think it's great, and they don't know that not everyone is happy with it. One big example would be church. Some people must just think it's the greatest thing to get together with a bunch of other people. And they probably just have this natural tendency to think that people who don't like that are just bad in some way. And of course, maybe for other reasons they think people that don't go to church are bad, but that's got to be one of the factors. And introverts maybe will try to be nice and put up the effort to go, and you can see how they're making an effort, so that counts for something for them. And then there's the whole marriage and family thing. If you just want to be by yourself a lot of the time, that's just going to be constantly irritating.

And I think some of that, that I just want to be by myself a lot, is why I haven't really tried to be with Melissa so much. It's nice to see her at Pearl's sometimes. I also get the feeling that she wants to be alone a lot, too. She has said she tested as an introvert and does like to have time alone. But what is it about being alone, or what is it about being with other people that can be a drain. Melissa seemed to show me some of that. Melissa was trying to count out her money, and then she needed Randy to get her some paperclips, and he was kind of fussy about it, but he eventually did, and then he kind of hovered about, and she just had to tell him to go away because he was kind of bothering her and getting in her space. But I was just sitting right next to her. So Randy asks why I get to be in her personal space, and she said I wasn't all, and she used the yakking hand gesture.

And the other person I'm thinking of is Holly. She just likes to be by herself. But not absolutely always. She likes to be with other people sometimes, just not all the time, and if you get into a relationship, they just want it to be all the time. Or maybe it's her. I know she made me want to be with her all the time. She's really very lovable. But I wish things could work out in a way that was good with her, that she could still be with us and have the space she needs. I don't know. She was thinking about coming to visit, but had some stuff at work that made it harder. I would like to go see her, but it is kind of her turn. I miss Holly :( That's life, though. Maybe I should take her to Paris. I want to go sometime. It'd be nice to go with someone who speaks French. And the name Babian is actually French. I think there's quite a few of them out there in Frenchland, wherever that is.

I've finished April in my Sudoku calendar. Just a little behind the plan, I guess. I felt I needed to stop and do something else, so I'm writing. It turns out the puzzle I ripped out and gave to the kid was one from May, so now I only have three to do in May. But I guess they can wait.

I've joined the Mensa Martial arts SIG. And I joined up, and the moderator wrote a message for everyone to welcome me, and there were a bunch of emails welcoming me. I don't think I've ever seen a group be that friendly. I guess it was nice. I told them the story about how BK Frantzis thinks O Sensei studied BaGua in China, and one of the guys replied that it is widely thought that he did study in China. And from what I gather, as such a martial arts person, he certainly would have looked into whatever he could find. He was really seriously into it. Being Japanese, though, of course he wouldn't be able to say anything.

  • April 1, 2008
Happy April Fool's Day!

So, I just couldn't do the Sudoku puzzles at the con very well. I was thinking it was too distracting. I was working on a green one (second easiest) and it took forever, and later I noticed that I had made some mistakes in the hints I was writing down. And I just could not finish the hardest ones. And at home, with no TV on, they fell into place like usual. So those little distractions from concentration make a difference. I am seeing that just having the TV on makes a significant difference, but I kind of like it because it makes it a little harder, and I'm doing something else at the same time.

So I didn't lose anything significant like last year (my firefly discs), but people did grab more than I wanted. There was a zombie couple who offered an ultraman tape for a cup of m&ms, with the con suite out of food, but since they were nice, I just gave it to them. Then guber-dude must have seen them, because he asked, are you giving them away, and I always get people asking me if they are free, so I said sure, so he just grabbed the whole smurfing cup, and I was too surprised to react with anything, though I was thinking later how I needed to yell or something. So I go get another cup and fill it up, And then I go off to do something, and I come back, and one of the cups is gone, but they've left one, and someone took the whole bag! Shoot! So much for leaving it on the table to make it easier to refill them. And they were like the big four pound bags. Really kind of got me down. Pigs. I actually bitched to one of the con people. Telling someone made me feel better. And I got out another cup. But took the new, now last, bag off the table. And I watched a little closer, and I don't think I went off. And there was a mousy older lady sitting at a couple tables over. She must have seen it all go down. Never heard her say anything. It's hard to let the meanness not get you down, but I'm sure they all thought it was fine. If it's sitting out on the table, I must want them to take it. Sure, that makes sense, doesn't it? And people took my current mensa bulletin and newsletter. They got the one that has the list of all the sigs I might join. The only one I would have wanted to keep. I guess I could have kept it off. And if they might have expressed some interest in why they wanted it, I probably would have been fine and given it to them. But just grabbing when I'm not there, just seems like something I don't want to encourage. And maybe it was ust them trying to feel like they were getting away with something. The kind of thing the emotion of anger was made to deal with--cheaters.

There will be simple things that I want to do, and think about doing, and then I don't do them. Generally involving other people. And I've generally thought that I'm just being chicken, but I think there is more to it. Maybe I'm not all that into it, just not super up for it. Enough that if there is a little resistance it will be enough to stop me. And maybe at the time it seems like the other person won't really be into it. Like I was thinking of showing Linda my bagua form. But she was always rushing around. And i think of asking Melissa if she wants to do something, but it has never worked out before, and she doesn't really seem that into it.

  • March 31, 2008
So Steven Seagal was at Pearl's. He and his posse got the downstairs to themselves. He did have to come in the door and walk to the stairs. When he was leaving, he seemed to be hanging around, and maybe he sat for a picture.

  • March 29, 2008
Happy Birthday to me! It's my 41st

Wow, Melissa even gave me a little cake. Brownie with ice cream and two candles. She did share some. She later said it was bad luck to eat it by yourself. There were two spoons with it. And three cute girls I didn't know told me happy birthday. I think they were lesbians, because it was mostly a lesbian crowd, but it was still nice. One gave me a hug. But still, I had wanted to tell Melissa she was beautiful, and I didn't. We have gotten a little bit tired, I think. And I wanted to ask if she wanted to do something sometine when she wasn't working, but again I didn't. She did pay for my dinner. And she told me that she and one of her friends, I think he was gay, went out a couple days ago and ran up a $160 bar tab. And other people also bought them drinks too. So she does go out some times. And drinks heavily. So I really need to be a part of that some time. Maybe. *sigh*

  • March 26, 2008
I have gotten to April in my little Sudoku calendar. Quite a few of the puzzles in April are already done, so there are only 17 left in April. May already has all but 4 done. I've got MidSouthCon this weekend, and it seems like I will take it as a chance to do more Sudoku. Maybe I can get through May. That's a little ambitious, so maybe not. Even with that, I was able to finish the _Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment_ by Isabel Losada. There was a picture of her at the end. She's cute, or at least has a nice big smile. But the book was quite fluffy. Funny in bits. She goes to a bunch of New-Agey seminars. Seemed to have little to do with enlightenment, more self-help kinds of things. Expanding the ego, I guess. And she has a chapter on a seminar on tantric sex. Didn't sound like there was any actual sex going on, though.

  • March 21, 2008
Happy Good Friday!

  • March 20, 2008
Happy first day of Spring!

  • March 19, 2008
It was too much. I knew it was too much and I ate it anyway.

Read Obama's speech. Wasn't super impressed. I sat in the little deli and watched all the neatly divided groups. So much in-grouping.

Started on the sword exercises, but my wrist is terrible.

I went out on St. Patrick's Day. I took a nap, but then checked out where super 5 was playing, and they were at Mulligan's Trinity, where I've hung out in the past. They and Mudflap kings. And I was talking to Jason, the drummer for Mudflaps kings. He had joked before about not playing for very long, and I had not realized, and it gave me some hope. But this time I asked him, and he said he'd been playing drums since he was five. Hopes dashed.

  • March 17, 2008
Happy St. Patrick's Day!

  • March 15, 2008
Happy Ides of March!

  • 3.14.2008
Happy Pi Day!

Animals don't have an ability to learn from direct instruction. They don't have a way of of thinking that a person is trying to get them to do something that is good for them. They can learn, though. They can copy. Somehow you can train animals. Dogs want to please people, and they might be submissive enough to do what you want. I don't know. I'm just still trying to get the thing with apes not understanding pointing. That's just weird. Because they can copy things they see other people doing, and they can use tools and figure stuff out. But they don't seem to be able to teach or understand the idea of being taught. Maybe, I don't know, I'm not an expert. But maybe there are some special sorts of emotional and cognitive abilities involve. Could just be a trusting nature plus a special kind of theory of mind or understanding of motivations and an inclination to know that people might want to help.

I forgot to say 'Happy Thursday the Thirteenth'. Sorry. Happy Friday the Fourteenth!

  • March 12, 2008
I did 5 Sudoku puzzles today to get me through January, and most of February is already done from last year. only 2 days towards the end were not. So pretty soon, maybe this weekend, I will be caught up to the actual date.

So there was this big project I was working on. I even spent a good bit of the weekend on it, and that's kind of stressful for me not to get a break. It turns out I was mostly just making a small mistake and not seeing it, otherwise I would have been a lot farther along. It did still have a lot of complicated bits, but it was more that I had gotten stuck on something. And then I find out they don't want it after all this year. Maybe next year. One of the sad things was that although I did go see Melissa on Saturday, I had to leave early, and she said she understood, but she seemed kind of disappointed. It's bad karma to disappoint cute girls.

I made a video from the bagua class. They had the film, but I took the raw DVD and made copies. But it turned out they had used a DVD recorder that had not finalized the disk, and I had a lot of trouble dealing with it and that was time I really needed to be working on the stuff for work. I thought it would be quick and easy, but once I started, I didn't really want to give it up, so I could at least have something accomplished. And then there was something sort of wrong with the sound. I don't know exactly, but I had to adjust the setting on the player to get the sound. When I listened on the PC, it was only in one ear, so maybe it was something to do with that. Several hours to do, and it was only a 10 minute video. I ended up installing several things, including some stuff I got for christmas. One of them didn't work on w2000, so I had to put it on my laptop.

  • February 29, 2008
Happy Leap Day!

They need to redo _Jurassic Park_ and put feathers on the Tyrannosaurus. They had feathers. A whole bunch of dinosaurs had feathers. Not all of them, but a lot of the mean ones did. Like the raptors. Most of the meat eaters. There are still some folks who are holding out the possibility that birds branched off earlier, but there is a lot of evidence now. And a lot of dinosaur fossils with feathers. If you think of it, it makes a lot of sense to have skin covered with something like feathers or fur. There are always bugs trying to nibble at your skin. Especially back then. Bugs were bigger and meaner back then. And you did have UV radiation which could damage skin. And feathers insulate. Over millions of years, sometimes it would get colder than other times. They had cold periods sometimes, too. Overall it was warmer, but not always.

  • February 28, 2008
I think an important thing to ask is how enlightenment can even be a good thing. Well, it frees up your actions if they often get tied down by selfish greedy habits, or by fearful, timid habits or by overthinking. At least in the Chinese, Taoist influence on the Buddhist tradition. The Chinese already had a mystical tradition of letting things happen naturally without pushing. This (Taoism) is a completely different source of enlightenment tradition and notions than the Hindu/Buddhist, but it is really going towards the same thing. It really seems weird, though, because in the Indian (Hindu/Buddhist) mindset, the whole practice and searching process is about discipline and control, but I'm pretty sure it's intended to be pointless discipline and control that you eventual come to realize actually _is_ pointless and empty because your trying hard and do something is the same as you just doing it, and the goal is your just doing it. Although really, it's just about getting to the point where it's just a doing it, where you forget about yourself, in the sense of being in the zone, or the notion of "flow" that what's his name Polish dude was talking about. So the good thing about enlighenment for life is that you are always, or at least more often, in the zone. One of the deeper things, though from this book I was looking at was that dude said he wasn't enlightened all the time. I get that. Even after you start to understand what it's about, after you have really seen the light, as it were, you can still slip into old thoughts and habits. But those stick to you less and less and drop away. If you keep at it, I guess. Those habits can really stick with you, though, and maybe you'll just want to stay with them instead of just staying in the zone.

That was a little bit of a weird dream experience. I was living in kind of a college dorm like at CBY, and I had a bed that was kind of square shaped, maybe a queen-sized. And I've been wanting to have a big enough mattress that I could walk a circle on and do the bagua form. Part of the bagua form is that your balance is low and provisional, keeping mostly on the back leg so you could handle uneven or unsteady ground by adjusting. You don't stay planted, the power is from dynamically adjusting and being very sensitive and quick to adjust. So in the dream, I was just walking the circle on the matress, until I was just thinking about the dynamic balance and while thinking and walking, just realized I was asleep and woke up. I also was wanting to reattance things here in my room so I really have enough room to properly walk in a circle. I have a desk, but I just realized yesterday that I'm not using it as a desk, I'm using it as a shelf, so I should really just get some proper shelves.

And an example of how maybe you might think enlightenment is not a good thing. There is a Zen idea of how part of life should be: when tired sleep, when hungry, eat. Well, this just doesn't fit with how life works. You need to go to work, and work hours are particular times during the day, and the times you have to eat that will be convenient are before work (or maybe just in the morning --there is a cafeteria open till 9:30 at hilton for breakfast) at lunch time, and after work. So you eat on a schedule and that works pretty well, mostly, but it isn't the naturalness that the Zen people are going for, and it is actually that rigid, routinized, zombie, empty mindless life that they are really reacting against. And when I say in the zone, I don't mean like habitually and unconscious, but a little more free and spontaneous and focused.

Goodbye, Bill Buckley!

A big part of writing is having something to say. So you need to do something that gives you something to say, or at least think about things. I don't know if I capture it. I don't do much.

  • February 27, 2008
Yay! So, now I have digital reception here in my room. Actually, I have the dvr I was looking for. I actually saw the one I wanted online at walmart for $200 (magnovox H2080MW8), and did the lookup for what store had it, and the superwalmart I usually go to said they didn't have it. The had on way on the other side of town, and I was thinking maybe I'd go over there, but it was a long way and I didn't feel like it. After work today, though, I thought I'd try the one I go to, and maybe they'd have something similar. And then they ended up having it. Typical computers, never really knowing what's going on. And I have it hooked up so that my VCR feeds into it if I ever need to transfer anything over. I've program the beginning of dave, conan and jim lehrer, and the simpsons. that should get me. It looks like it doesn't actually want to copy DVDs to the hard disk drive. That's a bummer. I was kind of expecting to be able to do that. Oh well. We'll see how it goes. It does have video inputs on the front. Maybe I'll find a way to output from the computer to the recorder. OK, figured out how to copy to the HDD, great.

  • February 24, 2008
This weekend, I wanted to read more of the conference papaers for the agi conference, but the ones I read just kind of seemed sad, so I didn't read so many. Sad because they really seemed not to be very promising, and often missing the point. One had some fancy looking math in it, maybe probabilities or something, but it didn't seem to really go anywhere, and didn't not particularly seem to relate to any problem of intelligence.

So I ended up mostly playing Sudoku. Kind of obsessively playing Sudoku. I've got a calendar of puzzles, from last year, actually, but I didn't end up doing them every day last year. The puzzles actually are quite hard. Much harder than the ones in the paper, although they have four different levels of difficulty from the easiest to the hardest, for that set. The hardest ones in that set often get to a point where there is no logical rule that I know that will let me put down the next number. Sometimes when that happens, I will use a computer program on a website that has some expert's collection of logical rules to see something I didn't know before. And a lot of times, it will just be things I didn't notice, though sometimes it will require some kind of reasoning I hadn't thought of. The calendar actually started in September 2006 and goes to December 2007, and There were stretches where I had done them all. I did all of February. The occasional white belt. But this time I was going to get through them all, in order. On Friday I was in the middle of December 2006. I mean about on the 15th. By Sunday night, I was to January 2007. And It's kind of funny, because you do a black belt one, and these are really hard and can take a couple of hours with quite a bit of just kind of staring, darting around looking for patterns, but I'll find something and shoot forward, and with the momentum, the next one is an easier one, so might as well do it. I ended up doing a few in January, too.

But I also needed to be reading those conference papers, and I had a book on falsely thinking you're enlightened to look at. Plus, for some reason, I was moving my other DVD player, and it totally did not want to work. The picture was all red when I used the rgb cables. I actually had to go out of the house to get an s-video cable. I totally didn't want to go anywhere.

And I went to see Melissa and the Tigers game. You might have guessed that I went to see Melissa. Randy said see you next week. I think I've gotten into a rut. An easier habit that makes it harder to move to a better situation. And, like, Melissa seemed to like having some one keeping her company, but I'm really afraid that I kind of let her slow down and take it easy when she should have just been rushing to get out of there. Seems like everything was done by onem but we ended up leaving at 5. She had to handle the money and clean. I don't know. Something clearly was wrong. Randy was really needing to get out of there, because he had to be back at maybe it was 11. And Melissa was in constant pain. Her back was hurting. I don't know if it would have helped to massage her back a little. Seems like I always thing of a reason not to offer. But at least I did keep her company. And I need a little attention, sometimes. Not that much, I guess.

It works pretty nice for me, but like I say, it's a rut. Things could be better, but I just keep going this way. And yet, playing Sudoku, I'm mysteriously getting better. I am better at seraching for things. The easier ones don't have any rules I don't know, but they often have things that are just harder to find. So I find myself getting better kind of mysteriously. I'm thinking intelligence maybe isn't really something, we just keep trying to understand how we are better than (other) animals, and we just see how we act in a way we call smarter and guess that there is some kind of essence of smartness or intelligence. We have it, they don't. As opposed to we just have more than them. Because there seems to be a qualitative difference. But you can teach apes to count, and to understand words. And they use tools all by themselves. One thing they don't have a lot of is patience. And self control. And their aggression is such that they don't even have an expectation that other people might be trying to help them. It was a weird thing that they couldn't understand pointing. I thing would be hidden, and someone would be pointing. to give them a clue, and they never would get it. They could copy sometimes. If a person was helping an ape, another ape might help. But if one ape was trying to get something hidden, they wouldn't think to help. Maybe, I forget how all the experiments worked. They might try to do the same thing. Surely they think to cooperate. Lions will cooperate in a hunt. Dogs and wolves cooperate. But the combination happened in us. Apes, because they were in trees, could grab things, which was needed for tools. Cooperation happens in some animals, but apes not so much, I guess, except us. In this combination, an ability to communicate becomes more important and valuable, and it took several differnt levels of development (whole species) to get to us. Our lineage kept adding more and more capacity once it started in the combination we have. One thing about us is that we are somewhat less aggressive and impulsive. And actually physically a bit weaker. So we have to cooperate, and act smarter. And there is a lot of knowledge that is involved with understanding something. And it can involve things with certain labels tending to act in different ways. But only sometimes. The example I've been thinking of is a bird. Say you've got a bird. How are you further going to decide if it might fly? If you got the bird from a grocery store, probably it is already dead, and it won't fly. Maybe it's a chicken or a turkey. Even when it was alive, it wouldn't fly. But maybe a duck would. Unless it was asleep. Or dead, again. Or maybe it was a wooden duck. Or a rubber duckie. Or it might just be a baby. Or sick. Or it could have a broken wing. Toy birds don't fly, either. Do birds in pictures fly when they are in the picture? Does a bird in a picture of a flying bird fly? Why is a mouse when it spins? The higher, the farther.

  • February 23, 2008
Aw, so the University of Memphis Tigers (ranked #1) lost to the the University of Tennessee Vols (ranked #2). It was close, and could have gone either way. And Memphis still has a better record, 26-1 vs 25-2. That's the breaks though. I was at Pearl's watching it. Lot's of tigers in there. Downstairs they had a bunch of orange folk, though. There were a couple of older regulars in orange hanging out. And afterwards, there was this one kind of short young guy in an orange shirt. I just wanted to through him down the stairs. I am studying a martial art, after all. LeAnne, Randy, and Melissa all said the Vols fans were obnoxious. I was telling LeAnne that those hillbilllies don't know any better.

And when it rains, it pours. I left the DVD player here in the den on all, night, which I often do. I turn the TV and I thought it was always fine, but I guess not. This morning it no longer works. It sounds like maybe it doesn't spin any more. And it has electromechanical parts, so I should have thought that maybe it might wear out. Seems like DVD players these days are also not made to last forever the way VCRs used to be. The Japanese learned their lesson. I've already lost one before. I've got one it the other room I should move in here. But it's a multi-disc one, and I had it special in my room because it helped if I was just too lazy to change out discs. But maybe I could just get a DVR with a big disc and keep copies of things that I would normally just leave in there. That's the ticket. And I want to get one to receive digital signals, which would mean I would be able to watch digital channels on that old TV. And finally I would have an ability to record stuff. My VCR is actually no longer able to record. So it's really something I need to finally do, I guess. And maybe having the multidisc DVD in here would be good. I tend to keep watching the Simpsons, but I'm finding that while I'm going through one (there are about 6 episodes on a disc, I'll take that one out and watch something else, but I'll have to keep that one on the side and put it back in. So, maybe like I used to say, there are no problems, only opportunities.

  • February 22, 2008
Happy Birthday, George Washington!

I saw a video on why some flames are yellow. I thought I understood a lot about fire, but I guess I didn't know this. And the reason isn't temperature of the flame, though I think flames can be different colors depending on the temperature. Flames are yellow because the reaction at the top is not complete, and there is carbon soot sitting in the flame. The soot is being heated very hot, and it is from that that we get the yellow color. At the bottom edge, there is a little bit that's blue where the reaction is complete enough that there isn't any left over unreacted carbon, but inside there is not enough oxygen getting to it. In propane torches which burn blue, there are little vent holes tha mix in are, so they get enough oxygen. Dude in the video covers it up, and they get an impure flame that leaves a lot of soot.

And then there was the Nova episode about the apes. They can learn quite a bit, but they are more aggressive than people, and they don't have any expectation that someone else might be trying to help them out and trying to teach them something. And they don't tend to try to teach, either. One of the subtle but big advantages of people.

  • February 21, 2008
Yay! I've been working at this job at Hilton for two years today.

  • February 17, 2008
Argh. I'm almost done with season seven of _Voyager_. I had to pause to vent. Now instead of just inventing techno-sounding nonsense, they are just using actually words incorrectly. One episode said something about "anti-matter radiation". Now, anti-matter is something that's real. There is known physics relating to it. There is no special type of anti-matter radiation. It does create radiation when it is annihilated on contact with regular matter, and that radiation is called gamma radiation. And they used it again, but thye have been saying the doctor's is at risk of "decompiling", presumably mean something like unravelling. Unfortunately, that's not what decompiling means. It's a real word and it means to take compiled code and process it to get it to some version of source code. Nothing particularly destructive, I guess, and certainly not what they seem to be talking about. It's frustrating. Right now I'm just trying to tough it out and finish this stuff so I'll be done.

OK. I finally got the bluetooth keyboard working. I needed to run something on the phone to activate it.

  • February 16, 2008
So I'm watching Star Trek Voyager, the seventh season, and there's and episode where Tom asks B'lana to marry him, and a couple scenes later, they are off on what must be their honeymoon, because the delta flyer is trailing strings of something, cans or shoes or whatever, and the old driving off to the honeymoon tradition. Seems like they all tried to do something like that for Tark and Meg. But there was no wedding at all. And it seems like such a different idea to me. You say you're married, so you're married. It seems like the wedding is really the deal. A friend of mine was saying she almost got married, but it was more that she wanted the wedding, and the whole social acceptance, normalcy thing. Plus the not growing old alone. I think I'm not into the marriage thing, though one person really made me think I wanted it. But this concept of a marriage without a wedding seems intriguing. Something to think about. Plus there's the tax penalty. Didn't there used to be a tax benefit from being married? Seems like they reversed it at some point. I don't know. Anyway, I think I'm going to try to be a little better at not talking about other people's problems that they share with me. Except to say that Melissa really is pitiful.

  • February 14, 2008
Happy Valentine's Day!

  • February 13, 2008
Happy Ides of February! Happy Wednesday the Thirteenth!

  • February 12, 2008
Happy Darwin Day!

  • February 7, 2008
Happy Chinese New Year!

Two much weird stuff today that I don't even want to write about. We didn't have bagua class because of the New Years. So I went to Pearl's, and they were all sorry for because Melissa wasn't there. Am I that pitiful? I hung out with Leanne instead. She use to work at the titty bars. She said there were 9 trannies working there. And she never even wasn't into shacking up until Hunter there. Anyway, this weird stuff was better to unload on Leanne.

  • February 6, 2008
Wow, it was super fat tuesday, but there were tornadoes. I went to the bagua class, but it was closed. and the boys were getting together, but they bailed. I don't know if it really got bad, though. Oh well.

Fundies, or 'mentalists, see great evils and like to fight against them. makes them feel good, even if the evils really aren't that bad. Alcohol, drugs, terrorists, poor people, and once upon a time, the darkies.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has died. He was a guru to the Beatles, and started the Trancendental Meiditation stuff. Lennon got pissed at him for some sort of sexual advances on Mia Farrow or something, I don't know the story. "Sexy Sadie" was supposed to have something to do with it. Paul has said he hadn't really done anything. Anyway. I don't really know that much about him.

I found some Banquet frozen fried chicken in Kroger again. Yay! so much for trying to lose weight, though.

I slept for 13 hours Monday night. Then last night only 5 or 6. Felt like getting up and writing, which I think was better than just sleeping. And it seems like the average of the past two nights really is a bigger deal than just the single amount in the night before. so that's an average of about 9 hours, which ought to be ok. I actually don't feel so bad. Even though I slept that so much, I still felt tired yesterday. We'll see how it goes.

  • February 5, 2008
Happy Super Fat Tuesday!

  • February 4, 2008
Part of the human condition is to have trouble sleeping sometimes. Everybody has trouble sleeping, sometimes. One could even say that sleeping through the night probably isn't even very natural, since a lot of cultures are on the siesta, where everyone takes a nap in the middle of the day. When I do that, I know I feel a lot better. I guess they don't describe getting up in the middle of the night, but I guess that must be something they do. Also, the problems often get worse as people get older. There used to be a thing where they thought older people needed less sleep. But that was because they simply found out how much sleep older people get, and they get less, but I heard that it just turned out that older people have more problems sleeping. Kind of a statistical thing.

And what's the deal that universally, people are less happy in middle age than other ages? Saw it on reddit. Did they just forget about teenagers?

I saw something on reddit that in Japan, it is a noticeable problem for guys that can't come inside vaginas. I forget, maybe the whores are noticing it? Something about too much spanking such that the feeling involved isn't associated with what being in a vagina feels like. Could be porn related, too. Also, a while back, there was one about how starting late was associated with problems. That wouldn't necessarily be causal, as I would think people who don't care as much would be likely to start later. I think I remember reading that maybe 1 or 2% of people just don't care about sex at all, so I'm sure there is variation. But, it kind of matches also that maybe if you start late, you might not be used to the feeling. I know personally that oral doesn't do anything for me, and it seemed like it was more that I don't really associate the feeling with coming. Hmm. I hate to get personal about this stuff. Maybe it's funny because I ramble on endlessly about Melissa, but I think that's a little more universal, and honestly, not so specific to me, though it is just what I'm feeling. And I guess, while I'm on the subject, there was a detailed article about sex for guy virgins. Maybe a little too much information. I guess the thing I noticed that was mentioned was that sometimes guys can have trouble coming, just as sometimes guys come too fast. I don't know if any of that stuff could help that problem up before. And there was another on kissing. One of the things I did tonight was again watch that video I have on getting a woman off for a long time. *sigh* I also got my 300GB SATA hard drive installed, and made a clone of all my old stuff. It's nice to have a back up and more space. Maybe I'll look at getting a better system as well. I won't be able to play the latest Call of Duty. And I realized my stereo needs new speakers. But I've also been trying to save up a lot of money this year.

Go Tigers!

  • February 3, 2008
We used to smile together a lot more. But maybe she was just too stressed out and I was just scared. Husband actually left threatening (gonna kill you) messages on her cell phone, and she filed a police report. Can't wake up in time for her 8:00 class. And then working a big party all by herself, and then the kitchen messes up the food and the groom and groomsmen yell at her. Helplessness is the worst. Things go wrong and they are out of your control. Randy asked if she needed anything, and she said a gun to shoot herself with. That's a person who has gone over the edge. I tried to just be there for her. But I couldn't smile with her anymore. And I notice that, because Super 5 (well super 3/5) and when she was hugging Chris, she had this great smile. But with me, not so much. It looked like she was already getting better and was going to make it OK. But instead of going to see her the next day, I just stayed home, watching voyager and went to bed early. I don't know if it was too much drama, but enough for me to want to hold off a bit. Damsel in distress, maybe?

So, I'm watching Star Trek Voyager. And I just have to admit that there is nothing scientific here at all. It is not science fiction. It is space opera. That's a category that Cliff suggested one time. The setting is space. They try to have sort of technical sounding mumbo jumbo. They were dealing with a singularity, and Neelix was explaining to Kes that the event horizon was an energy field surrounding it. Jesus Hairy Crumb. And I could think, well, Neeliz is a chipmunk, and sure he could get it wrong like that, but lawd have mercy, people. And now I'm trying to think, was it always like this? Did the original Star Treks with Gene ever have any real science in them? I don't know. Man. In the one where Data goes on trial to see if he has any rights, that was dealing with real science sorts of social questions. How should we treat an AI? They actually did sort of deal with that question again in Voyager when the doctor goes crazy, but it is a freakish-fantastic artsy feelly thing there, and not realistic or scientific or anything valuable like with Data. Brannon Braga is a pin-head, for one. This question about the ethics of AI is something that might come up at the AGI conference in a month.

And what is the deal with "bio-neural gel-packs"? OK, I can see them as more efficient, but only more efficient in the sense of low-power. But that might even be questionable to a comparable current similar technology. It would be stunningly slower. There's a scene where they heat them up in order to cure some kind of infection. Clearly they would have roasted them. The thing was just stupid.

Huh. I just watched a little special feature on the first season DVS by Andre Bormanis trying to explain some of the real science that they tried to get involved with. Sounded very lame. But at least maybe I could be a little sympathetic. I don't know. Seemed like there was one bit that almost made me think there was some attempt in there at being science fiction. That they explorer other types of life forms that weren't so conventional. He said "non-corporeal". Now, "non-corporeal" to me is already moving into fantasy to me, so it's not such a super positive bit. But they were talking at least about a big physical alien type. Then he went into the time-travel paradox stuff. I guess it's a personal bias, but I have always thought time-travel stuff was just stupid. Never liked it. Makes no sense. Has no relevance to anything. Why bother? To me, it's like watching the teletubbies. Definitely was a space opera.

  • February 1, 2008
Happy February!

So I was reading Aldous Huxley's _the Perennial Philosophy_, and just a little way into it, page 20 something, he starts talking about esp and PK. There was a time back then when people were thinking that there was some real, scientifically verifiable, "supernatural" kinds of things like that. Now it's discredited, of course, but they though it might be real back then. Classic Star Trek actually had bits of this too. But I was reading this and I had to put it down. I'm not sure if I can finish it now. Since that was brought up so early, i can't help but think it must be important to the rest of it, so now I don't really have a good feeling about it. So many other things to read, too. I'm registered for the AGI conference at the beginning of March, and all the conference papers are online and I need to look over them. Artificial General Intelligence. Now what is called AI has sort of moved away from general intelligence, though that used to really be one of the basic goals. This conference is in Memphis. Stan Franklin is one of the hosts, but also Ben Goertzel who does the agi email list and a few others. I'm looking over the conference site, and I see that the "outreach director, Natasha Vita-More owns the domain natasha.cc. A vanity site, sure. Some people are really into themselves. I saw one recently that just seemed really embarassing. So I guess this isn't so bad. And some of these transhumanists really are pretty into themselves.

  • January 26, 2008
That was kind of different. I just watched a Voyager episode called "Disease". The big subplot kind of told a story about how romantic love is like a disease, making you kind of stupid, but open to behaving in some ways that can be good. Bold as love, as dude said. And ensign Kim is getting over it, and it pushed him to do extra work, which made seven think it was not just a disease like she had first thought.

Didn't go see Melissa. Slept instead. And some of the atheists were going to trolley night, and Aimee was going too with a friend. But others of the atheists were going out to dinner somewhere else, and they were carpooling from a plaace out here, and I would have wanted to stay downtown, anyway. So I was kind of torn, and just ended up sleeping. But then I got up and watched Star Trek Voyager. I guess I could use a break from people. I've been tired all week.

So the teacher taught me the tournament form. On Tuesday it was just me, so she gave me a little extra time. The moves were moves from the traditional form, there were just four additional transitions and a different beginning, so there really wasn't that much different. She said it was more interesting, and it really does seem a little more interesting. The movement with the front kick is in it. But doing the drills with the old timer, I don't quite actually have the front kick down, because it involves leaning back, and I haven't really been doing it that way. I guess I'm still learning. And doing I did the form with them. In one of the forms, I completely got lost and couldn't recover. We were going at their speed, which was pretty fast, and I could do the movement by myself, but trying to watch them, I got out of synch, and lost my place, and then just drew a complete blank. It was really terrible, I thought. And they were trying to tell me what to do. Louie was saying the kick block. I hadn't really been thinking of the move as a kick block, and only afterwards did that make sense. And the teacher was showing me the movement, but that just totally didn't sink in. They were just standing waiting around. I could barely remember which move we were even on, which I guess was the big problem. Oh well.

So Super Chris is big into the karate. I think he was saying his friend owned USA Karate, and when I them play on Saturday, he said he had had a good class on Thursday. And as they were playing, there was some kickboxing match on the screen, and we were watching it. He was talking about the vicious kicks dude was getting into the other guy's inner thigh. Maybe some time I'll go visit one of those classes.

  • January 19, 2008
Learned a couple of things hanging out with Melissa. Well, maybe three. My pool playing sucks. I won once, and lost twice. I'm not consistent. I was saying I was rusty, but I think I never developed consistency. Sometimes I can make very good, smooth, shots, but generally I don't put in the effort to do that. They got pool tables down there. One of the games I lost was with the owner, Ray. I bit of a shark, maybe. Seems like he almost cleared it all, and cut back to make the game interesting.

Anyway, thing two. It looks like the caffeine from the Dr Pepper is aggravating the gout. I'm just noticing it, but it seems like it's been happening often lately. I really drink too much of it, I guess.

And then thing three. I've been telling myself that I love Melissa, but it's more complicated than I suspected. It is much more that I want to sleep with her than I was admitting to myself. I was able to tell much better this time because Josh was hanging out. And this time, Melissa admitted that she had not been staying at her house because her husband is in town. And Melissa never actually said she was staying with Josh, but it's clear she has been. Somehow, I think I was pretending that they weren't quite so together. And some of it was because Melissa has kept from coming out and talking about it. I'm thinking probably because I don't want to hear about it. So in denying the lust, I convince myself there is more "plain love". I did this with Wynne quite a bit. And thinking about this in the open really relieves the feelings. It is a striking sort of experience. Brains are funny sometimes.

So, they have a really fancy coffee maker at work. They looked it up and it's supposed to cost $5000. Something they are doing at the Hampton's maybe. And I was talking to Brian about it. I'm guessing hotels are losing out on restaurant business because people go out to Starbucks instead of staying at the hotel. So they can surely spring for something like that. And Brian was saying that it looked like it ran Linux, so I needed to go check it out. It has hoppers on top with whole beans, so it grinds them fresh. And it has a suction tube, which they stick into a milk jug. Most of the drinks are milk drinks, like latte and capucino, and mocha latte. Another hopper is chocolate powder. Simple setup for some fancy sorts of drinks. I tried to get hot chocolate, but it had run out of milk. It had a little sign explaining the different coffee drinks. Espresso is hot water squeezed through finely ground coffee at high pressure. Very concentrated. I actually got an espresso shot one time without knowing what that meant. Was only a couple ounces. A latte is a shot of espresso, and is 2/3 milk. A cappucino is roughly that whipped. And I was telling Hunter and Melissa about this. What was significant to me was that Melissa's drink is (venti) non-fat vanilla latte. She said she drinks maybe three a day. And it hit me that it's mostly milk. She drinks a bunch of milk every day. She probably could actually live off that. From what she said she eats she sounded like she was starving. A week ago, she had a brownie, and I asked her when was the last time she ate, and she said probably the day before. So I was starting to get worried. And I think there is still cause. She said that this week, with all the stress from the beginning of school, and being out of her house, she ended up in the emergency room and they put her on oxygen or some breathing machine. And while I was sitting with her last night, there were a couple of minutes where she was obviously having trouble breathing. I actually suddenly felt deeply scared for her. It was really odd. And then I totally chickened out again. I was thinking I was going to go get Kenny to get her some Starbucks, and not tell her it was from me. Man. Actually, it was Kenny that I managed to beat at pool. I lost to Ray and Hunter. And I found I'm just no good at competition. Got me all worked up.

So, there is some kind of going away party for some girl, Carrie, at Dan McGuinness tonight. Military, being shipped overseas. Super 5 playing. Melissa said she would try to show up if she gets off early enough. And I said I would go. And later, Melissa mentioned it again, so maybe I should. We'll see.

Man, at the end of the evening, Melissa looked dog tired. Could barely keep her eyes open. She actually started hallucinating. No way she was going to even be able to drive, and she said she might call a cab, but I said I would drive her if she wanted. And thinking about it as time went on, I think that wasn't a serious offer so much as something to get her doing something about it. She finally lay her head on the bar for a few minutes and slept a little bit. That actually seemed to bring her back to level where I thought she would at least survive the drive home. She seemed tired, but at least not quite so dangerous. I really don't know about that girl.

So, I think I just don't like dating. I don't like making plans. I don't really like going out. I like just staying in mostly and hanging out. Maybe to a limited extent hanging out in a bar, but not so much. It seems like the Js, the kind of folk that are into the whole planning thing, actually do like that stuff. It's just not me, though. And part of the thing with dating is the expectation that it probably won't work out. That's just horribleness piled on top of unpleasantness. There's a simpsons commentary where they were talking about a dating service. This was one where they got a huge number of dates. More than you could ever want. And then people just stopped caring. Stopped trying to dress nice or look good or anything. I haven't quite seen that, but I'm starting to have that sort of feeling about dating in general.

And then there were the sad things that Melissa talked about, that have been haunting her. And it was right about that time that she was having trouble breathing, so it could have been about the stress. She talked about this week the guy who dropped the four babies off the bridge, in front of the mother. Hideously. It had really been bothering her this week. And the other thing that was almost as bad. Some guy was at her house, and pulled up the video of the guy having his head cut off. Why make her watch that? I was sitting at the side of the bar with the cash register, but I had to walk to the other side where there's any opening for them to get in and out and give her a hug. She seemed a little confused as to what I wanted, but dang, she really sounded like she needed a hug. Or maybe I needed a hug. I don't know. People can be crazy terrible, sometimes, and now with all the media, everybody has to hear about it. Darn, people are almost always good, but you get those wacky, nasty crazy people, and that's what sticks out in your memory.

It's people who do good, not God.

The thing is, it does make me feel good to hang out with Melissa, and I like the attention. She seems to like the attention, too. To her, though, it must just be about being friends. Everybody needs friends. She hasn't done anything wrong, and I would hate to just cut her off coldly. I don't know. We'll see.

  • January 16, 2008
Man, I'm playing a lot of Sudoku. I don't know if it's too much. I guess there are better things I could be doing with my time. The programming, I guess, and maybe even reading is better. But it's kind of mentally active. Just watching the Simpsons, which is the other vegetative thing I do, is a lot worse. So it's a step up. And I tend to do the Sudoku while watching the Simpsons. But I've found that there are different levels of difficulty, and different types of performance improvement that I can try for. One thing about staying engaging in an activity is that it lets you have small increasing challenges. It's boring if it's too easy, and frustrating if it's too hard. Programming on a big project wouldn't have the same level of reinforcement and achievement, and reading only has the achievement of learning things (which is something, though). That's for the kind of non-fiction stuff I read, not fiction. I don't know about fiction. Different kind of thing. Anyway, the Sudoku. There are puzzles wich I can do without writing down the candidates or possibilities. I can find a definite next square always. But in the harder puzzles, about the only way to solve it is to write down all the possibles, and then use the logic to whittle away the possiblilities, like going from three possible numbers to two, and then eventually something will let it go to one. I've got a big set, in a calendar from mike, that has really hard ones like this. And there are different levels of logic rules I might need to use. Sometimes I still have to break down and use a computer, because I am not a master of some of the harder rules I might need. And I have found that there were some rules I didn't even know at all, but I'm getting better. There's learning how to use the harder rules, but there is also just getting better at searching with some of the easier rules. And then there is just practicing enough not to make clear mistakes. I'm doing them pretty steadily now, but when I stopped for a while and started up again, I did see that I made mistakes more often. One thing I don't do is just try things that I'm not sure of, and then maybe fix them later. My mom does them like that. So she is better at adjusting them later. And then i saw that it's not a skill that I've developed. And with all of this, there is just trying to be faster. I kind of like doing the easier ones just for this. I guess it's a time-waster, but I do it in the morning waking up, and it seems to kind of get me going. I think it's maybe a little better than just sucking in mass-consumption gossip and news.

So, the gout hit the knee, and has really messed up my bagua. It seems like it has gotten mostly better, but my knee is still weak or something. And maybe from having to walk funny, maybe the muscles are now weaker or something, and it seems like the old injury hurts. During the day and normal walking I thought I was ok, but after the warm up exercises, I'm clearly not back, and it impacts my form. Bagua does a lot of walking with lowered weight and bent knees, and a lot of turning, so it is pretty hard on the knees. The coach is really senstitve about it, and is trying to get me to go easy. And they gave me some of herbal patch things which I'm finally trying. I seriously didn't think it would take so long to get better, but one of the other student was saying that it takes longer at my age. Grr. Plus, since I haven't been practicing as much, I'm getting more rusty. Double grr.

  • January 14, 2008
I ♥ Summer. Summer Glau. She was River on Firefly, and now she's a little terminatrix. Really cute. And limber.

  • January 10, 2008
Happy Birthday, Donald Knuth!

  • January 7, 2008
Another year. Well isn't that spatial?

I spent hardly any time at ShadowCon. I totally missed Firday, and then I went in on Saturday at about 7, and that was during feast, but I had eaten. Nothing much else was going on so I left to go to Pearl's. I came back around 2, and there was a little belly dancing, but I didn't drum, and I didn't even bring my drum in from the car. Maybe if I had been there earlier. I did see Roy, and Linda, the cute little red-haired writer. I'll see her at MidSouthCon. at least i made an appearance.

But wow, hanging out with Melissa again. I decided not to get her her Starbucks, since it's so Super Chris's thing. And Super Chris showed up. It seems to make her so happy. I think it's nice. I tried the char-broiled oysters. with butter and cheese. yummy. and some raw ones for constrast. I wasn't positive on the deal, but I think Randy was getting out early, and suggested to Melissa to go see a midnight movie _I am Legend_. And Melissa ask me to go. How was I going to say no to Melissa? I was planning to go back to the bellydancing, but I figured they'd still be at it, anyway. And I didn't really know them, so it really wasn't that big a thing. So I finally saw Melissa outside of work. I liked it. She didn't seem quite so happy, but it was kind of a depressing sort of movie. And my being there might have been weird for her, but I felt really comfortable or happy or something sitting next to her. And no Josh. I'm not sure what's up with that. i didn't ask to hang out with her after. Randy left kind of quick. I don't know that i should have. It was only two, so she could have gone drinking somewhere. I hate that I might again have been dissappointing, but there were bellydancers maybe waiting. And a funny sort of thing. Her foot fell asleep, so she was sort of hobbling. I tried to help her walk a bit maybe, but she didn't really seem to be quite into that. It's no fun having trouble walking.