a ba'b'ian journal

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  • December 31, 2009

Happy Seventh Day of Christmas!  Happy New Year's Eve!



Sleeping all through the night and staying up all day
is unnatural.  That's not what babies do.  Many cultures
do siestas.  We do it from being industrialized and
having a factory manufacturing economy that turned
into a commuting culture where people have to drive
a substantial distance to get to work.  The infocus
team except for me was a bunch of people working from
home.  I don't know if they were siesta types, though.
It seems doable for IT.  I would probably just work
less, though, left on my own.  One thing about
people sleeping, though, is that we do natural
keep to a schedule.  If you get on a schedule
of sleeping all night, you can well enough used
to that that it works somewhat well for you.


So the dream this time that woke me up was one
where I was trying to write a paper for something.
About ten pagers.  I was using a typewriter, but
then had some problems.  I didn't have a good
printer on my computer, only a dot-matrix,
but I decided to try to use a word-processor
and then get someone to print it.  Maybe Doug.
I did talk to Aimee about writing a book.
It's something she also was thinking of doing.



And at Bardog at lunch, we were getting up to go.
And I was standing there, and I didn't notice
that I was standing in the way of some guy
trying to get back in his seat.  I was just
focused on Aimee, and kind of oblivious to
everything else.  I can get that way, sometimes.




  • December 30, 2009

Happy Sixth Day of Christmas!




Lunch with Aimee.  I think I didn't have anything interesting
to say this time, but it was nice to see her.  I need to try
to do it again sooner.



So, one of the two DVD drives on my desktop appears to be
twice as fast as the other at reading in a disc.  I think
it's because the slower one is on the same cable and
connector as the disk drive it's using.  Just a guess,
but that might do it.  The drive might just be faster,
of course, but it's like right at twice a fast, so I
don't know.  And probably related, it takes twice as
long to write out a disc as it predicts it's going
to take.  Oh well.


So much to read and so many thing I think I'd want
to do.  I'm not so big on getting things done, though.
So if I were to do a project, I think I would want
to do a project that has more message passing in it,
such that there was more opportunity for different
levels of processing to interact with each other.
There is the sphinx speech recognition system in Java,
and I was thinking maybe looking at tinkering with that
to add that ability.  At least I should try to get it
working.  One issue I had when I looked at it last
time was that it required some kind of sound models
that didn't come with it, and I didn't know how to 
get them, so it wouldn't work right off.  I should
look into it again.  And there's the computer vision
stuff I wanted to work on, and that robot to try 
to get working.  Plus getting Copycat in Clojure.
So much to do.


I'm a little ahead of the pace to get through these
Sudoku.  I guess not by too much.  I've done 34,
so I'm a third through the easiest level, where
they have a hundred of those.  We'll see how it goes.





  • December 29, 2009

Happy Fifth Day of Christmas!


It might be too unreasonable to celebrate all twelve days
of Christmas.  Kids get most of that time off from school
in the winter.  Good time for a break.  We could probably
use more shopping.



So I had the dream again where I'm trying to go back to
school.  I think it was a bit enhanced by the omega-3,
which makes dreams more memorable and vivid.  I actually
went in to a local school to look it over, and try to
figure out what I want to study.  What kind of math.
Maybe some languages.  Writing.  I went to the library
and got some books.  All the math books were old classical,
I mean actual Greek.  And I looked for the counselors
to get advice, but they didn't seem right for me,
and I didn't talk to them.  It took a bit for me to realize
that I shouldn't really be in a high school.  But after I
woke up, I did realize that University can be a lot
like high school.  So if I really do want to do something
like that, I could just go back to school.  I could
branch out a little more and take some of those other
things I was thinking about.  Some music.  Writing.
Philosophy.  Some of the more obscure maths.  Languages.
Would take some time.  I should think about money, though.
I'm not sure there is a good way to try to make money
learning.  They say being a graduate student is being
a professional student.  But they really only pay you
for doing work for people, especially doing research
for people. I'm not sure I want to do research.  That
really does sound like work.  Some people do, though.
I could look more into it.  I have in the past gone
back to school during periods of unemployment.  Right
now this time, I decided it would be better to learn
to study on my own.  Academia might not be a bad place
to do it.  But I need to try to find the right people
to work with.  Stan at U of M might not be bad.  Seems
like Berkeley is more my kind of place, though.




It's taken a bit to find that Stanford really isn't
the place for me.  I wanted to go there a long time.
I lit bit too type-A yuppie for me.  Nice for ambitious
people kind of in a hurry.  Ones who can get a lot done.
The quarter system means they cover big bits of stuff
in short periods.  So you get pretty in depth surveys
of subjects.  But not so much taking your time.  Their
approach to AI looks kind of like a big search for
a short cut, and it seems to spring from that sort of
compressed way of treating subjects.  They are
mostly into symbolic stuff.  In that, you might
use the text "box" to try to mean what we think 
of as a box.  And there are now other sort of family
branches of AI, and they treat them as big isolated
bits.  Computer vision.  Machine learning.  So they
then just take the bits.  There's not anything for
trying to put everything together, which would
be more something I'd be into.  Stan actually puts
a lot of different pieces from different areas together.
I don't quit agree with the pieces Stan uses, but
that attitude about what to do, not to focus so tightly,
seems more the kind of thing I want.  And I think
it's not so odd that I picked up that attitude,
since I went to U of M.  It seems to kind of follow
a bit more from how that place operates.  You get
more time to be expansive when you look at material.
You're not cramming it into a quarter, you have
a whole semester for everything.  Unfortunately,
it seems like most classes have to be big surveys
of a subject.  Maybe that's just the nature of
what a class has to be.  But it seems like sometimes
I got stuff that seemed to have a little more depth.


I was trying to explain to Angela and Ian what Speech
Recognition is about.  One of the books I'm getting
for Christmas is about Speech Recognition.  Amazon
hasn't gotten it here in time.  I mentioned it to them,
because it was one of the more expensive things on
my list, but Freddie sprung for it.  Los for a textbook,
but high for a book in general.  But what is Speech
Recognition.  Turns out there are actually a lot
of different problems you have to solve in that problem.
One it just getting the sounds.  I told Ian sometimes
they use FFTs.  He's a physicist, so he knows about them.
But more often they use hidden markov models, and there
are some other sorts of acoustic models they might use.
That's just one simple problem at the acoustic level,
how to start processing the sound data.  I was then
trying to explain to Angela the weird concept
of temporal alignment.  Everything you say will
be at different speeds.  And you've got this sort
of template you want to match up to sound that people
are making.  But the speeds are all different, so
you're having to try to dynamically lines stuff up
while trying to figure out what it is you're lining
up at the same time.  There's actually an algorithm
just for trying to deal with that.  And then there's
something that Ian noticed.  He was using a google
something or other voice product.  You'll say something
into it, but at some point it will get confused and
start picking weird words that don't match.  Well,
on top of all the other levels, a lot of people
use a language model.  They keep track of pairs
and triples of words, and the probability of which
word comes after the next, so you'll get a kind of
chain of text, and ones it starts breaking, it
can really mess up.  At this point, computer programs
don't try to use a model of understanding what
people are talking about.  I'm not sure if it
would help them much, but it's definitely the
kind of thing that people also use to deal with
this very hard problem.  And calling it a hard
problem doesn't do it justice.  It's a hard problem
that can include a lot of hard smaller problems
when you break it down, which is the way people
often deal with hard problems.  And actually,
having isolate blocks for subproblems is not that
great.  It's clear that in people, all the levels
of the problem interact.  That's not so easy to
do with computer programs.  With those, we tend 
to like clear interfaces and interactions, especially
something flowing from one level to another.  Something
really tangled like this isn't natural or pretty.
People have just forced their solution to be clean,
but then it just doesn't work right, and breaks down
at times in ugly ways.
 

One thing that religion contributed to society is the idea
of taking breaks from work.  That's actually a pretty
big deal.  Without some reason, people would just
work every day.  Taking one day off a week was a big
step up.  And everybody off on the same day?  That
would probably be hard to do without some big
oganizing force with a lot of money to spread its
word around.  So now we have two day weekends.
That's a real bonus.  Give 'em an inch kind of thing,
I imagine.  And in Judaism, from what I gather,
there is also a notion of taking one year in seven
off, which doesn't sound too bad.  Saving up for
something like that has to be a good thing.  Seems
like I do a little more than that, but whatcha gonna do?



Do they even put cotton in aspirin bottles, anymore?
I was going to write about taking the cotton out,
and how after Andy Rooney wrote about it, I started
taking it out.  I used to put it back in.  What made
me think about it is that I just noticed a loaf of
white bread, and somebody put the little twisty back
one.  Must have been one of the California people.
I always just twist the bag, and tuck it underneath.
For me, the twisty is only for the initial packaging,
and I pitch it when I open it.  Just like the cotton
in aspirin.


And then there's Aimee.  I have always loved her.
I think it was immediate.  And she has always liked me,
though not "like" liked me, to use a turn of phrase
I heard Melissa use one time (though I think she
was lying at the time).  I just asked her about
lunch and she's up for it.  We had lunch months
ago and I haven't gotten around to doing it again.
And she wouldn't start anything I'm sure.  I'm 
not positive what it is.  We like talking to each
other.  Last time, she said I always make her think,
which to me doesn't really sound like such a good
thing, so I think I was a little bit put off.  And
my schedule is weird so lunch is maybe just a little
tough for me to do.  I don't see her as much as I'd
like, lets say.  But it really is love.  I have some
physical attraction for her that she doesn't share,
so for bits in there, I was a little to annoying
to her, I think.  But I do like talking with her.
Seems like it would be nice to have a fan.  And I
think I'm seeing that the physical means a little
more than I used to admit to myself.



So I'm reading a little more about Historical Linguistics.
Sound changes.  How different sounds from earlier languages,
and specifically Proto-Indo-European, changed to newer
languages.  I kind of like looking at proto-Indo-European,
and comparing different languages.  Actually learning
all the languages, not so much.




  • December 28, 2009

Happy Fourth Day of Christmas!



Well, they had a consensus that I should cut my fingernails.
So I just did, though I probably won't see them for a few
days.  But after achieving that they kind of wimped out
and said I should do what I want.  It bugged Angela,
so that she kept telling me to, and Ian agreed.  I said,
well Melissa hasn't ever bugged me about it, but I
didn't really know what she thought.  She they asked her
and she said that yes, she prefers short nail.  So
I guess they all agreed.



Angela says she really likes talking to me, and actually
wishes more people could get to talk to me.  OK.  Well,
she does really only see me when she's been drinking,
so maybe that biases it a bit, but she does seem to
like talking to me.  And bothe she and Ian said I should
be more open.  I was pretty closed up when she first starting
talking to me.



So I asked if she was working in the morning.  Mostly I
guess to see how late she was staying out.  But I guess 
I hadn't really thought it through.  She wasn't, and
asked me, and now I'm not doing anything, so would
I like to get together.  Hmm.  I wasn't really ready
for that.  I kind of made excuses, and she said I
should just say know.  But that's really bad karma.
Oops.  Seems to happen a lot.  And along those lines
I didn't tell Melissa I wanted to get together with
her some time.  But that's to be expected.


Man, Freddie gave me the "Mammoth Book of Sudoku".
It's got 1250 puzzles in it.  If I were to try to
finish it in a year, I would have to average 5 
a day.  That's a hardcore commitment.  I don't
know if I'm up for it. I think I'm already falling
behind.  Today, seems like I was playing Freecell
instead.  We'll see how it goes.  It's not the
really hard ones like in the last book.  It's got
a range.  It should be enough.  Probably more than enough.



I have so much to keep myself occupied now.  I probably
don't need to get any more books for a bit, though
there is one I'm thinking of--another one with interviews
of famous programmers, in this case language designers
talking about their languages.  I'll try to hold of
on that.  I think I'm going to get that keyboard
I've had on my list a long time.  I just haven't
managed to get my other one connected, or haven't
bothered to try hard enough.  Plus it's not such
a good one, and the key feel is not very good.
I should be playing the piano.  The guy that tuned
it wanted it to be played a lot to help work out the
moisture that's gotten in it.  But I'd like to be
able to get some stuff recorded.  Maybe I should
do a little of both.


It is nice the way Angela really appreciates talking
to me.  She said it's probably hard to find someone
as me.  I should make a bit more effort.


OK, so I did 5 Sudoku puzzles to keep on pace.  That
makes 20.  I'll see how it goes.



I'm looking at this weird new
york review of books article.  It's really too long for me.
But one of the things it says is that having a big
system of government social welfare works well
in countries with a homogeneous population,
where everyone is kind of the same.  They trust
and care about each other more.  Trust each
other not to try to take advantage.  But the
U.S. is quite different.  Lot's of little groups
that don't really like each other.  So the social
welfare thing is not so popular.  So "conservatism"
has a whole undercurrent of just racism, though
maybe more precisely, out-grouping.  That seems like
an interesting idea.  There's other stuff in the
article as well, but that's one I see on first glance.


It's nice to see your ideas go somewhere.  There was
a bet somewhere about the turing test being beaten
by 2029.  Kurweil and somebody else.  That particular
post has come up more than once on reddit.  Somewhere
a while back concerning it, I talked about how
you really wouldn't want a computer to lie and
try to fool someone that it was a person.  And when
this showed up again recently, I saw someone else
saying that.  I don't know that I was the first person
to point that out, but I've talked about it in a couple
of places, and I don't actually remember any one
before me mentioning it.  Seems kind of obvious
when I think about it.



I forgot to put the trash out by the curb.  Just didn't
think of it.  My mom's been doing it for a month, and
she gone.  Just not back to doing everything for myself.
Or something.  Kind of really a disrupted life right now.



Netflix seems a bit out of whack for me.  I'm only 
supposed to have one movie at a time, and they sent
me an extra because they had to ship something from
further out than the local place, but it hasn't
settled back to just one at a time.  I sent something
back Saturday, they got it today, but I received
something in the mail today.  Which must have already
been in the mail.  It's all computerized, I guess,
and I don't know if it's done well enough for them
to figure this out.  When I send one back, they send
another, so when two chains got started, they didn't
seem to figure out how to drop one of the chains.
Maybe they will.



Something occurs to me as I'm playing Sudoku.
One thing that I can get better at while I'm
playing is seeing which numbers are missing
in a particular group.  I had been thinking
that the best way is to run through the digits
sequential, and that I could do that faster
and more smoothly.  One way I was looking
at doing that was instead of sounding them
out in my head as "one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine"
I could use a faster version I have, "tanamaralachakafapa".
But I'm not doing that so much, and it isn't
very automatic if I don't keep it up.
But I think about it.  And it's something
that presumably I can learn to do unconscious;y,
to just see them, brain does its thing,
and the numbers pop up.  And if I think about 
how it might do it, I realize that it's possible
for the brain to check each digit being missing
all at the same time.  And along that route,
it turns out that as for actions that I
can consciously try to do.  It's much easier
for me to guess a missing number and see that
it's not there.  So much faster that I can guess
two or three numbers and check them a lot
faster than running through nine digits.
I seem to guess fairly well.  I suspect there
is some grouping that is going on under the
covers.  Not enough curvy letters or straight
letters, so maybe this number.  Anyway, there
is room for practice to help.  I noticed that
when I started, I was really rusty, and I
got better pretty quickly.  So my sudoku
intution is getting better.



We've got some thick bacon.  I've been eating
a bit of that.  Normally I don't eat bacon,
but this stuff, I think just because it is
thicker, I like better.  Seems like bacon
always seems insubstantial to me, and I prefer
sausage.







  • December 27, 2009

Happy Third Day of Christmas!


Colin asked for a couple of Bakugan for Christmas.
Specific ones, it seemed like.  Maxus Dragonoid
and Bakusteel.  I think Bakusteel is actually
a series in there, but Maxus Dragonoid appears
to be a specific object.  Bakugan is a whole
family of toys or a game with toys involved.
Something like Pokemon which he used to be into.
So some fad.  And since it's just a fad, it's something
he will just move on from.  But that's all he
said he wanted.  So it made it a bit hard to
get him anything, especially something that
will outlast this latest thing.  Freddie was
saying it wasn't so important to get the
specific ones.  I went with my mom to help
her buy some, but that was before they sent
the list of the exact ones he wanted.  She
just knew Bakugan, I think from when she
was there in the summer.  And he already had around
35 of them.  I even got some random ones.
He got several different ones.  But he did
get the Maxus Dragonoid.  And it actually
is pretty darn impressive.  Almost a transformer,
it's made of 7 little pieces that fit together,
each of which is it's own little thingie.
Those Japanese with their weird mechanical
objects.  Paper cranes?  What is that, exactly?
Anyway, it's the only thing he plays with.
He seems to like it.  Seems like it must be
a disappointing Christmas if you only get
one thing that you seem to like.  I guess it's
better than not getting anything you like at all.
Like maybe all you really want is real estate
and all you get are a bunch of stupid clothes and
toys and stuff.  I did get real estate one time.
Wasn't really the same, because it hadn't been my
big dream.  And I got a fixer-upper-car one time
when I thought I wanted that so I could learn
about fixing cars.  But it totally did not
work out.  Needed a little more work than I
was ready for.  And it turned out I just wasn't
that into fixing cars.  Live and learn.  What
I apparently do like is books.  That's just
about all I got this year, and exactly
the ones I wanted because it was all through
amazon's wishlist system.  And I really liked
it.  Just as a matter of getting things I
want, it seems like this was the best Christmas
for me ever.  And I've gotten some stuff.
Getting a go-cart was way up there.  I loved
that go-cart.  Played with it for many years.
Still miss it, sometimes.  My first car was a birthday
present, so it wasn't a christmas thing.  It seems like
I remember my brothers giving me big and significant
things for christmas, but I don't remember so much
any more.  There aren't that many objects that
have been all that important to me.


  I think Freddie's
kids have really gone a long way to not being material
at all.  The only thing Aaron asked for was Lego
Star Wars.  Last year, they wanted Wii games, and
they got a ton.  Maybe almost 20.  And that's so
many that you can't possibly enjoy them all.  So
you really could get the feeling that you just don't
need all that.  So this year they seemed not so into it.
Daniel finally came out with a great list.  Really long,
plenty of ideas as to what to get him.  Mostly hunting
related.  But really, he was happy just to get some money.
That's what my folks were doing, and seems like what
Edgar was going to do for them.  Nathan was a little
more clear.  He didn't really want anything, and had
a clear logical reason not to get stuff.  He has to
carry everything he's going to take with him in his
car to california, plus his dad is going, so that much
less space.  He doesn't need any stuff, but money he
sure could use.  Well, OK.  I got Daniel a hunting book.
Nathan some simpsons discs that will pack tightly, in a case
that I gave him before.  Aaron and Colin also have the
issue of packing stuff up.  Seems like all the Bakugan
that Colin got would fit in a shoebox.  Aaron got
a lot of Lego, and that's going to be a little bigger,
but quite manageable.  Last year they got some large stuff.
Their house is actually pretty small, and can't hold
all that much stuff, anyway. 


 Aaron wasn't really
all that excited about Christmas, anyway, before or after.
Colin, on the other hand, was junmping up and down.
He wanted to open presents the day he got here, and
was really running around and jumping up and down
at the end.  We took a long time to get around to
finally opening them up, too.  Maybe helping Colin
learn some patience.  And afterwards, Colin was
very quite.  He sat by himself quite a bit, just
playing with his dragonoid.  There's no way it
could live up to his excitement and expectation,
and maybe he was a little let down, but he was
still pretty happy.  Maybe he's just a happy kid.
Aaron maybe just a more gloomy kid.  It happens.
Things tend not to change your level of happiness
so much.  It is possible that Aaron is a bit
displaced as the older kid.  Colin gets on his
nerves a lot.  But that's little brothers.  I'm
sure Freddie gets it, having been there.
 

I got the kung fu TV series.  It's been a long
time since I watched any of it.  The first one
is the pilot where they explain it all.  But in
the second episode, Quai Chang Caine gets him
some pussy.  Seems like I remembered that happening,
but I didn't think it was right off.  Doesn't
sound like the kind of thing for a "priest",
but apparently the Shaolin people don't have
so much against it like western folk.  And 
I think it isn't a Buddhist thing so much
as a Chinese thing.





  • December 26, 2009

Happy Second Day of Christmas!


They've all gone to the farm.  By myself.  I was thinking
maybe about going out, but it's nice just to here peacefully.
I'll go out tomorrow anyway, so maybe stay here.


And I haven't gone to see my girls at the Pony all year.
I was thinking I might do that, but maybe I'll just
make it a solid year.  That's probably good, anyway.


They're working on synthehol. A synthetic substitute for alhocol with less
danger that you could recover from more easily, maybe with
something taken at the end.  They're looking at benzodiazapines,
things similar to Valium.  But I gather from reddit
that those things have nasty withdrawals.  Like one of the couple
of things that can kill you.





  • December 25, 2009

Happy Christmas!



Technically it's Christmas.  It's just after midnight.
They are mopping up.  Grace is washing dishes.  Mom is
cleaning there too.  I'm waiting for her to go to bed and
off to Bardog.  I was actually considering not going because
I spent all my spare cash.  But I went to the bank and
extracted some more so I could go.  Regular hours.  But
it's too late for Starbucks.


A radio station, WRVR, is playing commercial free christmas
music.  But at about 7, for a few minutes, they somehow
messed up their feed and were playing two songs at once.
One girl had a show that must have been programmed ahead,
and they didn't turn off the other feed.  Nathan was saying
there was probably no one at the station to fix it.
All set up in advance.  It was pretty intolerable, though
I actually stuck with it for a bit.  Then I turned it
off and played Christmas music on piano for a bit.
I do that.  Hopefully it's a little inspiring to the
kids who are taking lessons, though they haven't been
practicing like they are supposed to.  Rough to be
forced into it like that.  But what can you do.  When
I finished up, the radio station had recovered.  I was
playing from a fake book that doesn't have a very big
list of chrismas songs.  I have several other books.
I'll probably pull them out later.  The fake book
is the easiest to play from.  Just give me the chords
that I can play along.  Don't give me every note.
I don't sight read that well.  



Is she never going to go to bed?  Grr.



Well, if I had checked my phone, I would have seen
that Melissa wasn't working because it was too slow.
But I ran into Dr. Bill Baggett, which was kind of
nice.  I've seen him around here and there.  He friended
me on facebook.  And he lives on mud island, though
he mostly hangs out at other places downtown, so there
was a good chance that I would see him sometime.


I think using the amazon wishlist worked to get me
a lot more stuff.  A lot less clothes, at least.
Seems like a lot more stuff, at least specific things
that I asked for.  Maybe I've been hard to buy for.
A couple of nice kung fu books.  Some java books.
Assorted other books.  The kung fu TV series.
Some Abbot and Costello.  Big haul.


One different thing.  On Grace's present, I wrote,
"to Grace, from Aaron"  That was weird.  I think
Colin had come in, and said to him, "Hi Colin...
Aaron, no Colin"  So I was having some kind of
senior moment.  I was sitting on the ground, so looking
up at him, I didn't see his height right, or he looked
a little different from that persepective, or something.






  • December 24, 2009

Happy Christmas Eve!


My family sure can geek out.  There can be as many as
four people sitting here in the den each with his or
her (Grace maybe) computer surfing or something.
Though Grace has now started just hiding of by herself
in some other room somewhere.  My dad, Freddie, one
of the kids, and one will be playing Wii.  Grace might
get on the desktop, or maybe me.  My desktop and my laptop,
and Freddie brought two laptops.  I have yet to bring
in my other laptop when they're all busy, but there have been
opportunities.


They're all off at church.  I've been staying here.  They
have bugged me various amounts in the past, but one time,
my dad said he was actually a little bit happy to have
someone here so they can't break in and steal everything.
Today I think only Grace said something, and I said
that to her.  OK, that sounds good.


How about a reddit
 submission
about the true meaning of christmas.  Pagan celebration
from roman times.  Maybe saturnalia, I forget.  Sun god
or something, just after the soltice, so the days
are getting longer again.  Gift giving.  12 days.  Etc.
Jewish people didn't celebrate birthdays.  They would have
thought it kind of a pagan thing.







  • December 23, 2009

Happy Festivus!


Well, I still haven't started my Christmas shopping.
I'll just do it today,  It seems like I didn't have the
day before Christmas eve off last time, so I don't
feel as much pressure now.  I have all day, though
it will be rough.  And I didn't make DVD copies ahead
of time like I should have.  That could be rough if I
try to do that.


So some more of Grace not getting it.  They got some
stuff for Colin.  He wants some little faddish thing, 
Bakugan.  They have bunches of diffeent kinds.
Freddie was trying to at least keep Colin from peaking.
But Grace just brought down the thing they got to
Show it to Eddie, and then she just left it sitting here.
And Freddie confronted her about it.  She said Colin
picked it out.  So maybe it really wasn't that secret.
But still.  So much for the effort to keep a little mystery.



Of course, I'm not feeling that into it.  I have quite a bit 
of money pulled out, but maybe not quite as much as I possibly
could have.  And I don't have as many ideas about what to get
as I sometimes do.  Oh well.


I did find a site that lists all the twilight zone episodes
on the different disks.  So I should be able to see if
there are repeats on them after all.  I could just be
confusing ones that seem familiar from TV with ones I
have on DVD already.  But I have the web site with the
list.  It should be a straightforward thing to use a computer
to check a list for duplicates.  But I don't seem to
ge set up with the tools to just do it easily, it looks
like.  Sucking in web pages isn't necessarily that easy.
I'd want to just cut off the whitespace in the front of
each line, sort, and then duplicates will be adjacent,
which would be easy to check then.  A perl script could
possibly do it pretty easy.  Sounds like work, though.
Seems like a spreadsheet might be able to do a sort.
That's like the main tool that it seems like people use for
interactive programming types of things now.  Computers
are good at things thought out well in advance that
someone can program for you.  Still not so convenient for
ad hoc sorts of tasks.


Closer to getting a health care bill.  They had to cut stuff.
And the repubs aren't involved.  It seems like they say
they might have been involved if they there were some bits that 
they liked.  But almost certainly that talk like that is just
lies.  If they wanted to talk, it was only to keep it from
happening.  If they want to fix it, they can try later.
One signicant thing that got left out is making getting
insurance a requirement.  So some people just won't.
Medium poor people, like youngish adults, just will decide
not to want to pay into it.


One thing that really bugged me was that in the PBS news 
coverage, they were talking to senators, and they included
a Republican.  Why ask a Republican about it?  They decided
not to be involved.  And worse, they have already shown
they will just lie and lie about it no end to try to
scare people away from support.  The media has just played
into it all along.  And yet it still might happen, despite
their best efforts.  One lie he said was that Medicare
was going to be bankrupt in 2017.  Un huh.  Is that when
Jesus is coming back?  OK, he had a Southern accent, so
I'm a little biased.


OK, so we're getting the paper.  And the only thing I
look at is that I do the Su Doku puzzle which is in
a particular section.  My mom is reading the paper,
so I go to get that section from her and she 
decides she need to read it right then.  Ann Landers
or something.  And when she's done, she gives it to my dad.
oh well.  It has the comics in it.  Oh well.




  • December 21, 2009

That girl.  She said as we were saying goodbye, if I
don't see you. Merry Christmas.  She's working Christmas
Eve, regular hours, which is till 3.  So maybe I might
be able to go by.


Christmas pretty soon.  Not so into it.


_Million Dollar Baby_ did get me thinking about
how important it is to protect yourself in fighting.
Seems like I tend to really only think about the
offensive moves, but probably the defense is
more important, and a lot of this stuff I'm
studying must be about staying protected, but I'm
not focusing on it, and not paying attention to
it, so I need to look more at it.  When I look
at it, I do see quite a bunch of stuff--dodges,
evasions of different kinds, deflections.





  • December 20, 2009

Property rights are a restriction on freedom.  So some
people have to really mangle their concept of freedom
so that it doesn't appear to infringe on what they
believe are their god-given property rights.  And they
end up just not want to pay for things that they are
benefitting from.



I'm a pretty terrible manager.  And specifically 
project management.  I can't schedule at all.
My time management isn't very good.  I'm not
so good at getting things finished and wrapped
up.  I had a thing for Hilton, and I didn't think
through everything that they wanted done, so
I really mishandled it.  I basically didn't
get done properly, and then the time to do it
ran out, and they had to abandon it.  I think
I've been spoiled that I've always worked with
good management.  A lot of projects end up
not been used, but I haven't had to worry about
that.  Working for other people is probably
a good thing for me.  I might not get as much
as I might get, but it's much less risky.


My dad's hearing is not so good, so my mom has
to yell sometimes.  It's not so pleasant.  And
he can try to be "playful" sometimes.


Well, they were talking about how my dad is spending
quite a bit.  Gone through about half his savings.
He doesn't really want to end up with any money,
but there is the danger of running out before going.
My mom asked me if she was too stingy.  I said she
was not too stingy.  She has just the right amount
of stingyness.  Some how it got around that my
dad's mom was also kind of loose with money.  
She'd go out to eat at fancy places instead of
saving money for bills.   Hmm.  That seems familiar
somehow.


Went to Nathan's graduate at Southern Illinois Universty
Carbondale.  It's seemed close.  Not even as far as St. Louis.
It was a graduation.  On a basketball court.  Seems like
half of the people were graduate students.  There were some
twins that both got the same degree in forestry.  Both
with the same beard and pony tail.  Very odd-looking.
Somebody had a degree in German studies.  Nathan graduated
magna cum laude.  I only recently found that it's supposed
to be pronounced mangna. 





  • December 18, 2009

I'm sore.  I worked out a little too hard at kung fu.
I wanted to see if I had enough stuff to do a solid hour.
I was by myself, and normally with other people, we
alternate, so we have pretty good breaks while waiting,
but this time not so much.  I did actually sit and 
catch my breath a few times, but still it was a lot more
solid.  I included all the basic exercises, and even only
did those half the distance as normal (only one way across,
not across the room and back) but normally we only do one
set and not all the sets.  The Fanzi Quan was probably
the most vigorous bit, and I did all the exercises plus
several times on the form.  And both bagua circle forms.
Again, we usually only do one.  And the weapons form.
And I practiced what I know of the dragon form--I think
i have about three quarters--three times.  I did not
do the chi gung, but it is not really so vigorous.  I'm
doing all them, and about fifty minutes into it, my
back starts to complain.  Not really too bad, but just
enough to see that this has been a little too hard.
I still had a little bit left, but I kept to it.



Of course, I could be kidding myself in thinking I
don't care how things look.  I hand out with Melissa,
who is exceptionally beautiful and spends a lot of
time on her appearance.  And there are only a few
particular body types that I find really attractive.
That isn't everything to me, and it's a small
enough range that I've thought I have to not be
restricted to it.


I only recently found out that Pat Sajak's tie
always matches Vanna White's dress on _Wheel of Fortune_.
My mom told me about it.  Different.  And Vanna's
job is basically just to be pretty.  I like that.


Watched _Million Dollar Baby_.  Mom liked it.  Maybe
that biased me against it, but I thought it wasn't
great.  I think chickee was robbed a bit, as the
hit after the bell should have been grounds for
disqualification, but I don't really know the
league rules.  And it wouldn't really help her
to win I guess.  But she definitely shouldn't
have let her guard down with little miss break
the rules.  Falling on a chair was a pretty rough break.
Kind of thing that makes you think maybe it's just
a movie.  But freaky stuff like that does happen.
And wanting to die?  How about just telling people
you want off life support?  Doesn't seem so hard,
and you don't have to go all teary on us.  It
just didn't bother me.  Don't care.  Like that
stupid _English Patient_.  There must be people
who get some emotional thing out of this kind
of crap that I don't.  Maybe the fighting was
somewhat interesting.  I should train harder,
myself.  Also, he getting that good seems a
little odd, but there is some good stuff
that can be learned.  At least I want to believe
that.  I should break out one of my copies
of _How to be an ass-whipping boxer_.  I've
got more than one.  I guess by accident.
Of course, maybe there are no accidents.


Amazon has recommended QED from Feynman.  There
are a lot of different additions, I think, and
I think it was from trying to find it on the
web site for the local library that I saw a cover
that looks familiar.  I think I might have a
copy sitting around somewhere.  Might be easier
to go to the library than find it.  Or maybe
to buy it.  But that would be pretty silly.



I was trying to go through and maybe add some
last minute things to my amazon wishlist.  That's
about all I have for things to get me.  And probably
yesterday was the last day for them to get stuff
from there, anyway.  I was thinking maybe I
could look for some stuff that would be more easily
available locally.  For something from amazon,
there is a bit of a tendency to get obscure stuff.



OK.  Added some.  I am getting the feeling though
that I really dont need much.  Hopefully these are things
that I want.  I was thinking this was a list of things
I would get some time when I get around to it. I also
have an old list of things I wanted that I haven't
finished up with.  I should look for that.  I never
got a quad computer.  I guess I don't need one anymore.
I need to get a proper hunting pellet gun, so I can
shoot some squirrels.  Maybe I should break down 
and get that revolver.  I couldn't really decide
on what I wanted.  The best I saw was an S&W, but
it was only 5 shot.  That just seemed so few.
Maybe that's what I should do.  How many shots
do I really think I'll need?  Mostly I want something
for walking around in the woods, and being able
to shoot a deer if I come up to one, or a turkey
or something.  Or a snake.  Something with sufficient
snake loads available.  And to be a bit safer against
the mountain lion that's wandering around up there.
I did see a deer about 30 feet into the woods one
time and I had my .45, but the clearest shot was in the
back end, and it would have gotten pretty messy.


Everybody seems to be into just little things, though.
I think Freddie and I would be the only ones left
that could really just do big stuff, which we do
on occasion.  A TV maybe.  Something like that.




  • December 17, 2009

OK, it's kill and yank in emacsworld, so it's just ctrl-y
and ctrl-k, though ctrl-y is a line at a time, I believe,
and there are probably lots of other different k things
for doing other sorts of kills.


Ouch, so sitting cross-legged has finally started getting
rough on my knees, I guess.  I have to pull out the little
feet rest things on the barcalounger here if I'm going
to go a little longer.  I guess that's getting pretty
sad.  But maybe i can finally see how other people have
been feeling all this time.  I have always tended to
prefer the half-lotus, though I have always been
able to do a full lotus without real problem.  
But it just doesn't work for me for so long anymore.
And maybe I never really did it for the kind of lounging
time I've been doing lately.  And i guess, I'm more of
a lying in bed kind of person, anyway.


I've never really had a great desire to be with people.
One seems to be plenty.  And even that only a little
bit a week.  And one at a time certainly seems right
for me.  I'm getting Christmas cards.  Dani sent one.
She mentioned that she hasn't seen me for a while.
But she did send a card.  I should go out there,
but I just don't go for lunch so much any more.
And Mike and Meg sent a card.  They apparently have
a monkey.  Pray for Doji.  I thought they had a dog.
My mom tells me there dog died a while back.  I 
guess Mike must have talked about that.  But I don't
remember at all.  And I don't remember the dog,
if I was ever out there.  I think I must have been, but
maybe the dog was shut in the bedroom or something
because he could get a little bitey.  I don't really
see Mike so much any more.  At least I don't go out
to see him.  He came by here a while back.  And I haven't
gone out to see Doug for quite a while.  I think 
Melissa is really the only person I go to talk to,
and that's just a few hours a week, and she's working
then, anyway.  Still, that seems to be about enough
for me.  Seems like I probably should look for something
better, but that's not so easy.  And I'd like to reconnect
to some, but that doesn't seem to be working out for me.



So there's this guy Richard on the AGI list.  He's got
some deal that there is a "complex systems problem"
with trying to make an AI.  It seems a little
hard to pin simply exactly what he is supposed to mean,
at least enough to explain why he's wrong.  At one point,
I said at least he's easy enough to ignore.  But it
comes up again once in a while, and it's on again now.
I've been thinking of writing, but it such an irritating
and emotional thing.  He's got a fairly nice sort of plan.
He tries to model the human mind cognitively as close
as possible.  Sounds nice enough in itself.  But because
of this "cognitive systems problem" he asserts repeatedly
that his approach is the only one that can work.  Kind
of the way many Abrahamic descended religions say that
theirs is the one true god.  Worse than that, though
I'm guessing that that idea started the trend, even
other people who say they are follwing this one true
god, those other people are just wrong.  Annoying.



But Richard said something that gave me at least an
approach as to how to reply.  In trying to list
the properties that make a system complex, he said
the interactions of the parts have to be significantly
nonlinear.  OK.  There isn't any such thing as
significantly nonlinear.  Something is linear or
it isn't.  He must just be hedging the description
to hide what his real criterion must be.  That is,
he is subtle assume his conclusion.  He wants to
say that complex systems can't be design or analyzed
or something--that they have this problem he's
talking about.  So with this phrasing, he can just say if 
it can be done, the interactions weren't sufficiently
nonlinear.  He has actually done this several times
now.  The latest thing was some kind of statistical
system, Boltzman maybe something or other.  And
any large computer program has the very definition
of nonlinear interaction.  But somehow these are
not complex system to him, as the nonlinearities
aren't the significant aspect of them, or something.
His big example of the kind of thing he is talking
about is Conway's Game of Life, which has lots of
complicated behaviors that arise in a a non-obvious
way that you couldn't predict.  There are gliders, guns,
and so much stuff that you could have a little computer
and even an object that could replicate itself.  But
he doesn't so much mean a complex system as a mysterious
system.  Some complex systems may have some level
of mystery, but it is not a necessary trait of
a complex system.  Part of his assertion is that it
is.  And he says an intelligent system is a Richard-complex,
or I would say, just a mysterious system, so you
wouldn't be able to design one.  It must use some
of those unpredictable features.  So you couldn't
get one just by trying to put stuff together.  Your
best and only hope is to try to copy one that is
working, specifically ours.  Part of why he even tries
to make a claim like that is to explain why after
so many years of trying, we don't have a general AI, yet.
Maybe the problem is just harder than people thought,
and there were aspects of the problem that have been
ignored because getting people to handle them is so
much cheaper and easier than getting a computer to
handle them.   Another sort of argument against that
complex systems problem idea is that maybe the level of
difficulty is just different than how Richard has
decided it is.  It might be harder, and even Richard's
approach won't work, or it might be easier.  That's
how Ben has responded.  In general Richard has not
been convincing.  Ben said there wasn't a principled
proof.  But Richard appears to think he has given
one.  But I think he isn't a mathematician or computer
scientist.  I think his area is psychology, maybe.
So maybe he doesn't even have the same idea about
what a real proof is.  And the very area of complex
systems is rather weak.



OK, so I had this stuff to say.  But why bother?  It's
just too unpleasant and rather negative.  He's got
this research area, and that should be good enough.
He wants to be all one-true-god on people, and it
seems really the best thing to just ignore that.
Too emotional, like I said.  Honestly like talking
about religion.  Except it looks like there are
some noobs who are buying into it.  Should I care?
Anybody who gets suckered in deserves it, I guess.
Anyway, I'm writing about it here, and maybe that
will get it out of my system.  And move on.



The season for giving.  My mom is giving someone
a cookbook.  A copy of the better homes and gardens
cookbook.  The one with the red plain, though in
this case it's a pink plaid.  Something about breast
cancer.  It's her favorite kind of cookbook.
She has an old one that's older than me, and I
recently got a new version that is a tiny thick
paperback.  She's using that one right now to
make some kind of cake for a trifle.  Since it's
a paperback, it won't stay open on it's own,
and it's so thick it doesn't even stay open properly
with the big heavy metal thing, I think it's a garlic press,
sitting on it.  The better homes and garden's cookbock
she likes is in a ring binder, and this new one
she's giving is like that.  Almost any cookbook
you buy will be bound like a regular book, and that
really just doesn't work so well I guess.  Plus
the recipes can tend to be fancy or specific.
These are just really straightforward and easy.
I have tried giving my mom cookbooks.  They are
never really so good for her.  But they have the
problems I've mentioned.  And fancy cooking with
possibly expensive ingredients?  Not my mom's thing
at all.  So no more cookbooks.



But giving.  My mom was wanting to share something
that she likes.  But she only has pure objects.
I like stuff that can be copied.  Ideas and media.
So I'm a little bit more into sharing actual copies.
And where is the economy going?  Do we need to
forever keep making more stuff?  In order to
keep things movie, we have to invent a demand
for more and more things, but is that going
to go on forever?  There are some things that
are consumable, like maybe food, but surely
it would be possible to just get some stuff
and that would be enough.  Car, TV.  We've rigged
the system so that those things don't last forever,
and we need news ones every few years.  A little
sad, but it's a system that kind of works. And
to game the system, we let things shift so that
fashinably, you need get newer versions of things.
But if all the things are made, what will people
do?  There is the question of how people will
make money.  I presume it cost some amount to
eat and have a place to stay.  Possibly that's
a little inflated now in order to keep the system 
chugging, but OK.  And there's some notion
that if not everyone worked, society would
collapse.  That's just a notion, but people
seem to really think that.  Even now, only
a few farmers are needed to support everybody.
There are more than enough houses.  Seems like
I only spend money on entertainment, in various
ways.  And people can end up doing stuff for
entertainment, I guess.  Supposedly we moved
into a service economy from a manufacturing
economy.  Whatever that means.



  But even more
than just a way to distribute wealth, people
need employment to have meaning.  That's
a surprisingly big deal.  It's important
to have a sense that you aren't just wasting
your days.  I don't know if I'm getting that
feeling.  It seems like people who see me
just not working kind of have that feeling
about me.  And maybe it's kind of grinding
down on me.  Of course, if I had my druthers,
I could go into writing, and just coming
up with nifty ideas.  I do that for free now,
so I know there really isn't any money in it.
Computer programs are very profitable.
Coming up with a new idea for a program that
people want seems like a bit of a challenge in
the competitive sense that all the programmers 
everywhere in the whole world who are able to do it.
But OK, work for meaning.  Part of having to
work for employment is that to get money,
you have to do something for someone else.
It's quite possible to just spend your time
selfishly, doing stuff just for you that 
doesn't benefit anyone else.  And I'm
just sitting here, and my mom just found
several things for me to do--move an old
monitor to the curb, blow up the air 
mattress, put out christmas card holders from the box and
bring the box into the closet.
Nobody likes being bossed around.
  I do suppose I've been doing
stuff just for me with no benefit to others.
Reading is like that.  Maybe not writing as
much, but it certainly can be like that.



I'm just going to come off as a bit of a slob
because I just don't care how things look.



Freddie's wife Grace doesn't seem to quite have
gotten the whole give-giving thing.  Not as much
as us, I think.  I think Christmas is not such
a big Chinese thing, and not so much in her family.
Last year, she did want the teaching company classes
on medicine, and I got those, but she was all,
it's too expensive and just give whatever is
easy.  And I'm like, hey, you should get something
you want, not something I can give you because it
is easy.  What is that about?  Giving is something
I do for me?  For me, it's about trying to understand
the person, and sharing something I can find that
maybe I like and they might like.  And maybe something
that I think they might like, but wouldn't get for
themselves, like maybe they haven't seen it.
It can work if you don't really know them, and
how well can you really know someone else?
But then that's a failure in the personal
relationship.  One thing we do in this family
is give lists of things that we want.  That
can make it somewhat easier.  But now, some
of the people are starting to rebel, and
wanting to do something like one gift per
household.  Well, OK, if it's getting to be
painful.  And the grandfolks aren't doing
as well for money.  Maybe everyone is hurting.
And that can make it harder.  Also, everybody
tend to already have enough stuff.  That seems
like a good reason.  Don't buy it though.  It's
important to society to keep buying.  The system
will break down if people don't shop.  It is just
as bad as people not working.  Personally,
my Christmas budget is the same as ever.  It's
really one of the few things I really ever need
money for, and not working has never impacted it. 




  • December 15, 2009

Happy Ides of December!


I installed clojure box on tudor, my newer Dell laptop,
the dual-CPU I had to reinstall with Vista.  I don't
use it as much as my old laptop really.  It's in my
bedroom, and I guess I mostly sit in the den and
do stuff these days.  Especially since my mom is in town.
If she is going to be here, I might as well spend time
with her.  It seems like it would be kind of sad
to be in a house with someone, but always stay in
different rooms.  So I have coljure box, but the
emacs doesn't run the clojure right because java
hasn't even been installed yet.  That's pretty sad
for me.  If I were to really be using this laptop,
that would have to be just about the first thing I
would do.  So clearly I'm not.  And the sound
stutters.  I'm sure that's a big reason.  I'm sure
it's some driver thing, but I haven't figured it
out or gotten it working.  Seems like some page suggested
it would take redoing the disk drive settings, and
it talked about going into the bios and unistalling
and reinstalling the disk.  That sounds too risky
for me to even want to try.  Somethong that maybe it
would work, or maybe it would brick the thing, and
whoever was calling tech support would have to stop
calling after that.



I still haven't become a big emacs keyboard person.
Control-x control-whatsis.  I did just use control-c
return to get a paragraph tag for html.  But for copy
and pasting and marking, I'm using the mouse and the
icon buttons on the menu bar.  And the menus generally
have the key bindings listed so I can learn stuff,
but the thing on the menu for copy says "".
Apparently that actually just refers to the icon,
and there is some different function for the menu
version of the copy than the classic emacs yank
and pop or whatever it is.  I could look at the
tutorial again, I suppose.  And I could see what
I'm supposed to use to mark off text.  I used emacs
for a bit back in the early eighties on a classic
8088 IBM PC.  It was most useful because it
had a column mode which I needed for something.
But I pretty quickly moved on to qedit.  Bruce
is still using qedit.  In 2009.  A DOS based
screen editor.  People get pretty attached to their
tools.  Memorizing keystroke combinations.  I guess
that's just not me.  I could have been an emacs
person, I guess.  That might have fit me.  You
can write little scripts to customize it if you
are really into it.  And it integrates into
a lot of development environments.  Probably
a lot of them have emacs keybindings.  So it's
something that would move with you.  But I always
was an IDE person.  I think I was jbuilder for
a while, and lately it's been eclipse.  In microsoft
world it's visual studio.  It's a question of
what tool you sit in front of all day.  For a lot
of developers, it's an IDE.  But for some,
it will be emacs.  And even with an IDE, you might
have a separate editor for text.  I did that, and
mine was ultraedit.  That was nice because I could
edit remotely from ftp.  But like I've said, emacs
can do that, and I'm actually doing that now,
so it would have been a good choice.  But I kind
of like picking stuff to do from menus and buttons
instead of remembering key bindings.  So there's that.



Yeah, there was someone at Bardog who said he read my blog.
Actually, he first asked me didn't I have one.  It really
seemed a bit odd to me.  But he said he read it, and kind
of liked it.  I'm not really sure how he connected it to
me personally, though.  I still suspect he had me confused
with Paul, but you never know.



And I finally got the update for my iphone.  It added the
ability to send MMS messages, which you need to send
pictures to people.  Leanne took a picture of me, and wanted
me to send it to her and Asa, but we didn't see how to
do it.  She was convinced it was possible, somehow.
It did have a way to email pictures to people, but
there just wasn't a way to send pictures.  I found in
looking at it afterward that they didn't add that to iphones until
like September, though it's something that most phones
have been doing for a while.  I'm not sure what that's 
about.  And it could email them, like I said.  The
iphone has weird gaps in function.  I'm still not
so happy with no bluetooth keyboard, though I think
you can get it with a hack, something I don't want
to mess with.  I'm just about ready to get a little
netbook to deal with wanting to go places to write.
I said something about it to my brother Freddie
who was going shopping at Frye's, so maybe he found
some solution that's out there that I don't know about.
But I also said I needed an external drive, and that
would probably be easier to do.  Also, a netbook is
a personal commitment, because you need a subscription
for the connection.  And speaking of which, supposedly
AT&T is whining about iphone internet use is overloading
their network.  I guess I can really feel sad about their
troubles, but I think it's impressive that usage
is at a level high enough that the carrier could complain.
It seems like even the phone commercials for all
the iphone competitors now seem to concede that the
iphone is pretty much dominant.  Look at us!  We're
almost as good as the iphone!  And we don't cost as much!
I'm not sure how well that really is going to work for
them, but OK.  Actually, they like to say that their
better in some way.  Some feature or other that
they have that the iphone doesn't.  Or cheaper, or
in the case of Verizon, better coverage.  I guess.
I'm not sure if anyone really thinks that's an issue.
Can you hear me now?  But it's a really big business,
and lots of money that could be shifted around.
I don't know how the android phones are going to
do.  Googles stuff.  From what I hear, you have an
iphone, or a blackberry, or you don't mention it.


One feature that was new in the update is a voice
memo application.  So I have a handy dictaphone.
I really need to use that, because I always 
have stuff I think of and want to get down immediately.
But I'm not used to the dictation thing.  I've
liked the idea for a long time, but the act of
saying stuff out loud is just a lot different from
typing it out.  I think I may actually feel
more comfortable typing.  At least I've bever
actually used talking like that, which is a
bit odd considering my interest in speech recognition.
But I've let that kind of go.  Maybe I'll get
back to it.


I finished the main compiler section, and then
when I went to the Memphis Mensa Christmas party
on Saturday, I mentioned it to Brent.  And he
said his major in college was compilers.  This
was back in the 70s.  I think there was actually
a bit of theory that has been done since then,
but I guess he probably had most of it.  He
didn't go on to graduate school, though.
He thinks that there is a big mistake in
compilers, that there are a couple more different
classes of languages than they say.  Whatever.
He also wrote three papers for professors,
which they published, but since he didn't have
a degree, his name wasn't on them.  I don't
know abuut that.  But OK.







  • December 12, 2009

I read some article on reddit about some food some people
say to avoid.  It included canned tomatoes.  Something
about some coating on tin cans that can get leeched out
by acid, and tomatoes are very acidic.  And maybe an
hour after that, my mom suggested that we could use
canned tomatoes to make tacos, since we didn't have any
fresh ones.  But I wasn't so keen on the idea.  I
didn't realize though that she meant her own canned
tomatoes, which are in glass jars, and don't have
the problem they were talkking about. They actually
recommended using tomatoes in jars.  Oh well.
But that article ad some pretty iffy stuff, like
not using regular store potatoes and to only get
organic.  Something about how potatoes will absorb
everything bad.  And the reddit commentators were
talking about how maybe they said store potatoes
won't sprout, which is just wrong.


I finished the main section on compilers.  The last
bit was register allocation, and it was actually
pretty complicated.  It took two different sorts
of graph algorithms, with a lot of simplification
and modification in one of them.  I didn't go line
by line through the programs, but only tried to
get the main ideas.  I assume that even this was
only one example anyway, and there is a lot more that
could actually be done for this problem.  There
are additional topics in the book, and I didn't
think I was going to go through them, but now
I feel like just trying to get through them quick.
And it looks like they are not treated quite as
deeply and completely as the main stuff.  A
bit more like overviews.  So it won't be so bad.
But finally getting it done.  Must have been at
least a year I've been wanted to get through it.
This is just a java book on compilers.  There is
also the dragon book, which is a more definitive
textbook.  If I want to know more, I could look
through that. 



 One of the additional topics is on
functional programming.  So I get to see a little
more about what is going on with clojures and
stuff like that.  He introduces an odd notion
in order to deal with i/o in a pure functional
system.  In a purely function language, you
would not be allowed to have something like
a read function that returns a different value
for the same argumments, and read would probably
have no argument.  Or something like print which
has side affects.  So the argument will include
a continuation, and the result of the function
will be something special he's calling "answer",
like the complete result of the program.  I guess
I don't quite follow it yet.  I don't know how
it relates to monads from haskell.  Probably something
weird like that.




  • December 8, 2009

Melissa had some of the tenderloin which was the special.
And it was pretty pink.  And she didn't finish it off,
so they through some of it away.  That just hurts my
feelings when I saw it.  But I had always thought pork
needed to be well done, so it kind of seemed iffy to me.
But I did some googling, and it looks like thinking
has really changed on the issue.  There is a recommendation
of medium, which is 160 degrees.  Well done is 170.  But
the big recommendation I'm seeing now is just medium rare,
or 145 degrees.  That's enough to kill the trichinosis,
but trichinosis doesn't happen any more with how
they raise pigs.  The cases that happen now, maybe
as many as a dozen in a year, are from wild pigs
not properly done.  OK.  News to me.  Seems like I'm
going to have to get used to that.  I really only
make the really fatty roasts, and a higher temperature
for those will cook out more of the fat, and even
overcooked, it will still be pretty tender.  I
could a loin or something one time, and it was
terrible.  Way dried-out and tough.  Way too overcooked.
But probably even if I had done a better job with it,
I still think I would have preferred the fattier piece.



Hunter worked at Platinum, and he remembers me from there,
but I don't remember him.  That seems to keep happening to me.






  • December 7, 2009

Happy Infamy Day!


I brought my broadsword down to Bardog to show Hunter.
People seemed to like it.  Seemed like the girls kind
of liked it too.  Big swords?  OK.





  • December 6, 2009

It's an idea worth writing down.  From Lu Shengli's
book _Combat Techniques of Taiji, Xingyi, and Bagua_.
He sayd that in the external styles, a lot of people
get to a middle level of skill, but very few move on 
to a really high level of skill.  But in the internal
styles (taiji and friends are internal),  a lot of
students don't make it to a middle level skill, but
the ones who do have a good chance of making it
to a high level of skill.  Kind of a slow but steady
kind of system, while the external styles are seductively
quick to have some results, but not so good ultimately.
Kind of like the light and dark sides of the Force.
But a consequence is that you don't find so many
good external style masters as internal style masters.
So that's probably and issue with karate.


So it turns out that Hunter, who's working for Melissa
again (they were at Pearl's), is childhood friends with 
C.J. Bader Sensei and his kids.  And they fought a bit,
or something.  I studied Aikido with C.J. Sensei a while,
though I forget exactly.  It must have only been a few
months.  I think I did test for yellow belt.  I don't
even remember when it waw anymore, though.  Which is
pretty sad.  Ich, ni sam shi, go ruk.  I don't really
care for Japanese stuff.  I tried later under Gary Chase
Sensei, but that didn't work so well either.  I need
to go try Chris' buddies at USA Karate.  He said something
about Tuesday and Thursday, so I might go by afterwards.
Anyway, C.J. Sensei has some cajun restaurant somewhere
out in Tennesse.  Hunter talked about wanted to go out
and see him.  He also got me to promise I would go
see _Ninja Assassin_.  I checked the reviews and they
were terrible, and on my martial arts list, the
guy who talks about moveis a lot said to avoid it.
Oh well.






  • December 5, 2009

Whale, I have general thought that reincarnation
is not necessary for Buddhism.  I'm reading Vik again,
and he pretty much dismisses Buddhism because of
the reincarnation.  And I think about it.  With
reincarnation, eventually everyone should become
enlightened, so it makes it universal.  But without
it, only some people will be enlightened, so it
becomes and extremely marginal sort of pursuit.
Almost certainly, your effort will be unproductive,
so it really is quite grim without it.  And reincarnation
isn't true.  So the whole thing really does kind of
fall apart.  It's got a lot of recommendations about
being a good person, which are fairly good, but
it really kind of drops off into pointlessness.


And I finally picked up the compiler reading again.
I got a couple more bits of the picture, the tree
represesntation of the program and generating
code from pieces of the tree.  I'm not focusing
close enough to get all the details, and I'm
not actually trying to write a compiler, so
I won't really have a complete picture, but I
do have a better idea now of everything involved.


I downloaded the pieces to get clojure, slime, and
emacs working together, but I surely don't see how
it's supposed to be installed.  It was actually on
a page called "Clojure Box"  which actually says
it has the pieces all together already, but since
I already have stuff kind of installed, I didn't
want to just start over.  I probably have special
stuff situated for me and I don't want to lose it.
But I may have to use that.


OK, I broke down and installed the full clojure box.
The emacs remembers my link to this journal, so that's
good.  Maybe that was the only big thing I was worried
about.  Save me some trouble.  Now I just need to get
busy with some programming.




  • December 1, 2009

Happy Ides of December!



There's frost on the ground.  It's not officially
winter, I guess, but that's a pretty definite sign
that it has decided to start being cold


And the paper finally came on its own.  That's good.



Now I've got medicinal stuff to take twice a day.
That's just qualitatively different and I'm not
happy with it.  I think I'd rather exercise
regularly.



  • November 29, 2009

So what do you do when a service company isn't able
to do it's job?  We tried to subscribe to the paper,
but they just don't deliver it.  They are able
to make a special trip if we complain that morning,
so they have a procedure for that.  It's my folks
that want it, so they subscribed a couple weeks
ago when they were here, and called it in when
it didn't come, but I don't want it myself, and
I never called it in, and it hasn't been coming.
It came once in there, a couple days after they
left, but nothing since.  And on Friday, before
we came back, we called to make sure they would
be delivering it.  My mom talked to them.  Maybe
I should have, since I know the story.  Or maybe
my dad because he is better at managing things.
They said they would, but I knew that that wasn't
going to work.  It didn't seem like they had
actually done anything different.  Mainly, 
I had the feeling that the person on the phone
wasn't the right person to talk to.  She just wasn't
even in the right spot to get it done.  Seems like
when my dad talked, he managed to get an explanation
about what the problem was.  Something about
how the regular guy didn't have the right list
or something.  Of course, like I said, that
didn't actually quite fix the issue.  Also,
I didn't handle the situation either.  This
time when my mom called, they asked well,
couldn't we have complained?  And they made
an automated follow up call that I didn't 
answer.  Some time when I was asleep.  And
I hadn't checked for the paper then, so
I wouldn't have been able to answer whether
it had come or not, anyway.  Keep complaining
until it comes?  Doesn't seem like a good way
to get things done.  Not fun for me.  Not fun
for them.  We really don't want it everyday,
anyway.  Just maybe the weekend and Wednesday,
but they quit doing that.  I know it's getting
harder and harder for them.  Maybe a sign--
Don't forget us--we have a prescription, too!
A lot of the neighbors have them sitting out.
We'll see how it goes.


So, yeah, Thanksgiving at the folks on the farm.
Limited internet access.  I really only used my
phone.  I could have used my dad's computer, 
and in the past, that's what I did, but this
time I didn't.  Sitting around with my phone
was just friendlier, at least.  But no blogging.
I actually replied on the agi list a bit, which
I think is maybe my favorite list.  I let the
others slide really, and they just aren't as
important to me.  But I'm thinking, I may
need to finally get a solution for properly
typing on the internet.  It's disappointing that
the iphone does not allow a bluetooth keyboard,
but whatcha gonna do.  It is what it is, and
it's nice for that, but serious typing, not so much.
I may have to break down and get a netbook.
And the initial cost isn't such a big deal as the monthly.
It's probably something like $50/month.  On top
of the iphone, which is pretty outrageous, it
would almost be starting to get silly.


And I actually got up with my parents early in the
morning, which is kind of unusual.  I told them 
I'm not quite so regular.  They are big schedule
people, it seems like.  Though actually, my mom
has trouble sleeping.  Thanks Mom!  She will get
up in the morning more or less automatically, though,
and start the fire.  Then bring in wood.  And an endless
stream of chores and such.  Just one of those that
won't sit still.  It annoys my dad, somewhat.
And I guess I can see that.  He gets his time by himself
now.  My dad takes naps in the afternoon, which
my mom is not able to do.  I also can manage it,
which I guess is good for me.  I think on Friday,
Doug came by at around 2, and my Dad had gotten home.
They ate a bunch, and Doug talked about his trip
to see his North Carolina relatives, but my dad
was very quiet, while my mom was chatty.  I
think he was missing his nap.  I managed to stay
up till after dinner at 5, but after that,
I went to sleep, and slept till six thirty the
next morning.  But even after that, I napped from
about 1 'til 5.  So I'm not very regular.  Probably
not good.  And it doesn't fit in well with the
modern factory schedules.  But then, life is
suffering, isn't it?


Actually, no, life isn't suffering.  Sid was very
isolated and sheltered, so when he thought he
finally got exposed to the "real thing" he
simply overreacted.


Walking through the center of the farm, I saw
a couple of critters at the pond.  I think they
must have been beaver, though I didn't see them
that well, and they kind of looked like otter.
But there were also a couple of big birds
that I wasn't really sure about.  They looked
like storks, but my dad said they were probably
crane.  OK.  In the trailer, there was a mouse
sitting there.  Absolutely still, and I wasn't
sure if he was just frozen from being scared.
I didn't see him breathing, though.  He was sitting
so out in the open, I didn't really think he
might have died like that, but Mom said she
had put out poison.  So that was probably it.
I had been going out to see the cottage, but there was
a guy sitting in there, so I didn't go in.


I'm reading _The Story of Edgar Sawtelle_ for Aimee's
book meeting.  She said she thought it had interesting
stuff to talk about.  At maybe around page 170,
I kind of started seeing stuff.  It's like 600 pages,
so I still have some space to decide not to finish it,
but I'm about half way now, and it's moving along,
so I think I'll probably get through it.  So far,
it's mostly been about these guys who breed dogs.
But it went into talking about this guy's odd
style of breeding, which was supposed to be
kind of artistic, instead of a kind of specific
factory style of breeding that some more scientific
breeders were using, in order to get some known breed.
And he talked about trying to get to some next
dog species, moving even further away from wolves.
He also seems to want some kind of smart thinking
dog who can make decisions, more than just
obeying orders, and they mentioned a discussion
about whether that would even be possible, or
something that could be tested for.  I think
this is what Aimee was talking about, because she
and some of the other regulars are dog people.
It talks about that famous Japanese dog, Hachiko,
that kept waiting for this guy after he stopped
coming.  I guess I should bring my copy of
"Jurassic Bark" in Futurama.  But the book severely
annoyed me.  A ghost showed up.  Blech.




  • November 25, 2009

The biggest problem I see with encoding rules for an AI
is that it takes away big chunks of what intelligence
is out of the computer, and keeps them in the brains
of the programmer.  You've got the knowledge of
how to do whatever it is.  And you have the ability
to put that knowledge into something the computer
can use.  It could be actual computer instructions,
or some kind of data that then gets used by some
more basic program.  And that seems to be the common
conceptualization of what a computer based AI architecture
is going to be.  You've got your data, and you've got
your AI engine core that always just sits there interpreting
the data.  But I think this pretty much has to be wrong.
A real computer AI is going to have to be something that
generates programs--full straight to the metal instructions.
Personal bias, I guess.



I just watched Itamar's presentation for Singularity 2009.
Underwhelming.  I guess it didn't seem convincing to
me because he didn't really argue much for his assertion
that the architecture would work, and he seemed to be proposing
a completely new computing architecture from scratch that
he hadn't even specified.  It was big, bold, and out there.
But it appeared to have the same fundamental attitude about
AI--that you would have data, and a data-munging engine,
and this data-munging engine is just in hardware.  I
could easily be misdescribing it, and the data is sort
of distribute through the engine instead of in a kind
of RAM bank that you have in typical computers, I guess.
But something I did find interesting is that it at
least assumes that there won't be any programmer
trying to take over the functions I was talking
about--possessing the knowledge and making that
knowledge usable.  Those are the essential things
that the architecture does.  At least it is
acknowledge those as central functions of an
intelligent agent and doesn't try to leave them
in the human.



One of the biggest ways that most AI tends
to leave in the human is by using just plain text
as a sort of representation of knowledge.  The
thing about a big glob architecture like Itamar's
or Ben's is that there isn't going to even be
a text equivalent of what is going on.  And unfortunately
for my view that a computer based AI would be
something that generates programs, there might not
be a real program comparable to what is going
on when all that distributed knowledge is
interacting, but I guess that's something
I need to work out. One critical thing 
is that the operation of
an intelligent agent has to change based on
learning knew knowledge.  That kind of makes
it seem like the knowledge+engine architecture
I was talking about was really necessary, but
I guess I just don't buy it.




I think language understanding is critical
to intelligence.  The very idea that an intelligent
machine would figure out everything itself is
silly.  It must be able to use knowledge gained
by other people, and most knowledge that we 
have is transmitted and stored in language.
But I often get the feeling that people think
that language understanding can be handled
at different isolated levels.  In fact,
human language uses multiple levels.  It
uses the parallelism in the brain to use
information at all levels to constrain
what is going on, the processes of interpretation
understanding and generating things to say.
And specifically, grammar helps the process,
but it isn't really rules in the kind of
absolute boolean logic sense that computer
people always seem to take it.



The computer bias also seems to get folks
to think that intelligence is about getting
answers right.  That's just not the way it is.
Intelligence explores the space of ideas.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.  That's
just a problem I see creeping up in AI.




Message passing was the best lesson from Smalltalk,
but the computer language world adopted objects
instead.  We really need to get back to message
passing.  That's the kind of thing that would
enable all programs everywhere to work together,
and I think would be the biggest aid to getting
AI.   Better interactivity between people working,
and different modules which could add up to
some kind of intelligence.




  • November 20, 2009

I used saved games to get through rogue.  Mainly I learned
how to use saved games, and since I did, I decided to
go all the way to the end.  Because I had this great
game yesterday with several nice magic items and like
a +4 two handed sword and a strength of 26 when it starts
at 16, but I let it get messed up and I hadn't saved it.
I don't know if I'll get such a nice one again.  And
I don't know how much I'll even really want to keep playing.
But I learned what the final levels look like and what the
serious bad guys were like and some strategies for
dealing with things.  One thing that was pretty obvious
is that my character heals up on its own but the bad guys
don't, so I just trade hits, and I hang back and heal
up and keep hitting them till they're gone.  Seems a 
little unfair for them.  Oh well.  There's one critter,
the medusa, that is really tough though.  Its gaze
causes confusion, so you can't do anything.  But it
seems to not work in dark hallways and or just sometimes.
I'm not sure.  I got past them, at least.




  • November 16, 2009

Hmm.  That girl several times just bought people their
beers.  Maybe it was just that I noticed it.  I think
she must know that I like when she does that, and maybe
she is a little more conspicuous about it around me.
But then, she probably just does is a lot, and I
just happened to see her do it a few times this time.
They generally get a look of consternation.  And I've
certainly been there.  You want to pay.  And part of
that is that you are going to give her some kind
of tip, hopefully a nice tip which will impress her.
And then suddenly, frustration.  Foiled!  One time
a while back, I said "she's just mean like that".
And she said "whatever".  But it's sweet.  I guess.
Maybe confusing, and a little frustrating,  but
still pretty sweet.



So I was kind of disturbed.  There was a guy Bob,
who I'd seen around and was buds with all the
folk left--it mostly just employees left over.
He had been kicked out of some bowling alley
for "being too loud".  I think his joke may
have been a little rough, maybe too.  Anyway,
kicked out.  And moaning about it.  Or something.
I huess Ben kept ribbing him about it a bit.
And the at some point, Ben was poking Bob,
and he said "don't touch me!" so of course
I made little pokey gestures at him.
And he said to me, "who are you?"  Well,
i said I didn't touch him, and I hadn't.
It was just so unfriendly, like I'd never
seen him before, even though I've seen him around
probably dozens of times.  Not really friends,
I guess.  Just gave me an unpleasant feeling.


So there was this thing with Josh.  I wasn't
listening, but I was sitting right there.
It sounded like he said something like
he woke up and she was laughing.  And
I didn't hear was she was saying, but she
had some weird sort of gesture with her 
hands over on her head.  Kind of like maybe
hair standing up.  My guess was that maybe
he just looked funny with his hair standing
up.  But that's a pretty wild speculation
from only getting a tiny bit of info.
But what can you do.  It was likely something
else entirely, but I'll never know. 
How did effect me, though?  I guess it
contributed to a state of unease.


And speaking of unease.  My dad confronted
me about applying for unemployment benefits.
Something about I paid for it.  I just didn't
want to argue about it.  I have my own reasons,
and I think it's my business.  I appreciate
that he is just trying to help and it's
very simple to him.  Actually to most people
that I've talked to.  They all kind of don't
see any reason why I wouldn't apply.  Oh well.
I really don't feel a great need to explain,
but that doesn't seem very satisfying to them.






  • November 15, 2009

Got emacs ftp working on my laptop with vista.  Same deal,
I needed to get the better version of ftp installed right.
And in vista, to get some other directory in the path,
I had to edit the registry.  That doesn't seem right,
but I couldn't find a place in any of the admin screens
to do it.  And then I had to reboot for it to see it.
And they key I had to use was buried pretty far down there: 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment.
Painful, but once it's working I guess I can relax.



Raked a bunch of leaves.  My mom was out there doing some,
so it felt a little better pitching in.  She had only
wanted to do a little, maybe a couple of bags,
but we did seven.  For me, getting started is the
hardest part, so once I get going, I tend to
keep going.  And it's raking leaves in the middle of
November, so there's going to be a lot more falling
after this, but it's something.  Now maybe doing
a little a week will make a bigger difference, just
filling the regular can.



Watched _Food Inc._  It was based on _Omnivore's Dilemma_
and _Fast Food Nation_.  I didn't read the latter,
but I could see the stuff it had from the former.
It was nice to see the people involved.  And there
was the one farmer guy,  Joel Salatin from Polyface.
I thought it was strange that They left out all the 
stuff explaining his style of farming, but they
showed him killing chickens.  I saw it in
the deleted scenes though, and I could see them
deleting it, because it came across as a bit
flaky.  Something about allowing the chickens
expressing their chicken-ness.  Well, he could
have said letting the chickens act in a way
more natural for chickens, but he had to
go all Aristotelian.  And mom watched it, too.
She's been working on _Omnivore's Dilemma_.
And they kind of do farm stuff.  Not as
hardcore as this guy, though.  And then there
was the guy from Stoneyfield organic farms.
They sell yoghurt to Wal-mart.  But the people
there said they didn't go to Wal-mart.  OK.






  • November 13, 2009

Happy Friday the Thirteenth!  Happy Ides of November!




  • November 12, 2009

I got the internet on my desktop working.  Kind of a
weird one.  The router I'm using as a switch has
just gone too bad to use.  I knew it already had
a problem.  One of the plugs has been out for years
now.  And the one port just says it's disconnected
on the computer when I plug it in, but the lights
seem to come on.  The next one I tried seemed to
sort of work.  The computer thought it was connected
at least, but it wouldn't get an address from the
DHCP server.  SO I guess it is just bad.  But the
mac is plugged through it, and it works OK.  But
I guess it's just broken.  Luckily, I have another
router just sitting there.  This one is actually
a wi-fi one, but I think the radio doesn't work
anymore.  And it uses more power, which I'm not so happy
with.  But it is working now.  I'm just using it
as a switch, so maybe I should just get a switch,
but I think those things on their own are actually
more expensive than these cheap mass-produced routers.
And I need to throw this broken one away.  So I
need to try to get the midi working, I guess.


Went to the little memphis atheist book meeting
about _Infidel_.  Was kind of interesting.
One guy Dax got us to all go around and tell 
our stories about how we came to atheism.
He skipped going first, so I just passed
when according to the sitting order
going around the room it would have been
my turn.  He did go back and give his long
rambling story eventually.  Kind of gung-ho
social belief, since he was air force ROTC.
But read some philosophy, and Dennett' book
especially.  He knows it by the subtitle,
,eck if I can remember, let me look it up:
Ah yes, _Religion as a Natural Phenomenon_.
_Breaking the Spell_ is the main title.
Whatever.  Somewhere in there I reaffirmed
that I don't believe in respecting people's
beliefs.  The hostess Leslie said that was
important, but I just don't agree.  Everybody
but two of us out of the seven was married.
Just from that, I should try asking the little
girl out.  She's J though.  It wouldn't go
anywhere, but it could just be whatever it would
be.


Man, emacs has a ton of stuff for doing html.
I really don't use much markup, though.  Maybe
I'll change it round.  I don't even use the
most basic markup to underline titles.  I just
put underscores around them like quote marks,
which I think personally is a good way to
do things.  Call it an underscore quote.  If
it wanted to, it could figure out what I mean.
It colorizes things when I use quote marks.
But that's a programmer figuring things out,
not the computer.  And this is emacs, so I could
write something to handle it for me.  That's the
kind of thing I should aspire to if I'm going
to enter the whole emacs world.





  • November 9, 2009

I got emacs to edit over ftp.  It seems to be a matter
of using a better ftp client than what is in windows.
And that turned out a little more subtle than I thought.
I got a newer one, and I put it in the windows system32
directory in place of the old one that was there.  Or
so I thought.  Something, I still don't know what,
was going being me and changing it back to the original
program.  Seems like it should warn me or something about that.
It could be the virus protection or maybe the operating
system is maintaining mount points, or something.  Weird.
I had run the command to say it was a dumb unix host, and
that actually seemed to help.  It finally did a file
transfer, but came up blank, which was a different problem
that that client doesn't work right with larger files.
And I don't know if it saved the info that it was a dumb
unix host somewhere.   That may have been something.
To get the new ftp version to work I had to put it somewhere
else in the path that I control.  Unfortunately, it was like,
perl/bin.  But at least it works.  I was just about to give
on emacs completely too.  I tried it on my laptop that I had
to just upgrade to vista.  Even worse.  Seems to not
be able to handle the separate ftp process, and completely
freezes emacs when trying to load.  So I'll have to see
what that is some other time.


So what's that leave.  The internet on my desktop and
the midi set up to my mac.  And I need to get slime going.
but it's a nice step.


Melissa was sick.  I hope she gets better. I missed her
this time.  She sent me an email that she wasn't
going to be there.  She sent it at like 3:30 in the
morning, but I didn't notice it till 1 in the afternoon,
and sent her a get well soon message.  And then at
like 9:30, she says she went to the doctor and
is already getting better.  Which is good news.
She had said she would probably have to go to the
emergency room, which can be rough when you
don't have insurance.  Hopefully not too bad.
I don't know really.  I had already been sleeping,
but good news is not bad to wake up to.  Then
I went back to sleep, and she sent another
message that woke me up again.  But that's still
OK.  I was expecting I would probably get up again,
and this time I felt like it.


So the Memphis atheist group has a like book meeting.
But they put a limit of 10 people to sign up for
it because it's at someone's house, and it was full
when I first looked at it.  But someone pulled
out I guess, because I checked and there was a spot
open.  I've got a couple days now to read _Infidel_.
I don't seem to be in much of a mood to read stuff
now, though.  I also got the book _The New Atheism_
from Steve,  The author, Victor Stenger was in town,
and I saw him at one of the meetings.  I'm kind
of feeling like maybe writing something, and I
want to read this and then see if I feel like I
have anything to contribute.  One thing that already
seems interesting is that he's talking a bit about
some eastern stuff, and that ego realization stuff
that I've been kind of into.  If he says everything
I would want to say then fine, good.  If I have something
I want to add, then maybe I should think about it.
One thing though.  He talks about how a lot of these
authors are scientists.  Unfortunately, that's 
just not me, so maybe I won't have enough cred
to write something.  He also said that it's Sam
Harris that is the atheist that's also into the
eastern stuff.  I guess I'm going to have to dig
up some of that.  I may well have his stuff sitting
around, I don't remember.


So emacs passed a weird test, after almost breaking.
I just tried to save my work, but the ftp process
got messed up or something.  I didn't see exactly
what happened, but it was using maybe 60% cpu,
and the memory was climbing over 100 meg, which
there was no reason for.  I decided to kill the
ftp process, and then the remaining emacs was not
happy at maybe 98% cpu.  And somewhere in there,
I think I hit the save more than once.  and maybe
I hit the close.  But at some point, emacs came
back, did the save and closed.  If it had eaten
my stuff, that would have been pretty unforgivable,
and I might have just moved on,  but it jumped
on the grenade and I was OK.  Yay for emacs!
Yay for gnu!  I may have to send RMS a thank you note.


I watched through the third season of the new Doctor Who.
That's all they have available for streaming download.
I could get the disks for the fourth season, maybe,
but really it was all a little strange and silly.
I guess I'm really not that much for fiction and
stories like that.  The movies are also not so
great for me.  I just had _the Golden Compass_.
Some kind of allegory, I guess.  Whatever.  I
just didn't care.  I watched on dowload a documentary
_The Union_ about marijuana.  The title refers to
a complex system for cultivation and distribution
in British Columbia.  OK fine.  I think I saw
some spots where they were just wrong or being
deceptive about something or other.  I forget.
It was kind of interesting, though.  One thing
I like is the Penn and Teller stuff.  Maybe
I should stick to the documentaries and such.


OK, now I remember.  Somebody said hemp was the
strong natural fiber.  No.  Silk is a lot stronger,
and spider silk is even stronger than regular silk.
I don't know about plant fibers.  Maybe.  They
also talked in a sort of deceptive way about
the risk of schizophrenia for kids.  They stated
very clearly and precisely that there was evidence
that marijuana increases the risk of schizophrenia
in some kids who have a genetic predisposition for
it.  From what I've seen, these results are quite
solid.  But then they said well, there are some
results that dispute it.  Well, maybe, but that
doesn't really give a picture quite as clear
as the actual situation.  Because on the intp
list there is the little psych nurse who
has seen the stuff close up.  It's anecdotal,
sort of, but she's seen the kids messed up,
and just from that is really in favor
of the laws against.  Maybe an overreaction,
but that has definitely affected my feelings
about it.  Just be clear that there is a
juvenile psych risk.  And they said there
are a lot of kids in psych treatment for
pot.  Yeah, that's true.  But that's more
of a legal thing.  Are there medical benefits?
May well be.  It sure seems like the legal
status of having no benefit at all is
just wrong.  There's the stories that
the petrochemical people didn't want
to have compete with it. I don't know.
Maybe.  They completely left out how
hard the processing of hemp is, but some
of that is just that people haven't been
building the equipment needed.  And they
said you could eat the seeds.  Great.
you can eat acorns, too.  I wouldn't
advise it.


Mind a bit blown.  So I looked over the little
booklet they sent from M.U.S. about contributions
to the annual fund.  There's a big outlier in
the class of '82, three years before me.
The whole class donated $64k, where the average
looks to be in the high teens.  I look over it,
and there's one guy who donated at least $50k.
They bracket people into groups according to
how much they donate, so I know that figure is
right.  And the guy is Staley Cates.  I don't
have any recollection of him at all.  I google
him, and he's president of some investment
management company or something.  But Daern,
Mordenkainen, Tenser, Otto, Otiluke, Bigby, Gandalf,
Vecna...  


Penn & Teller did a thing on breasts.  Actually on
the "hysteria" against having them out in public.
And it's a showtime show, so they have a lot out
on their show.  It's part of their thing.  And Penn
talks about how they are always sexy.  One of the
people is trying to say there are different functions
and the feeding thing is different from the sexy one.
That's where he says they're still sexy.  And it's
kind of a shame, they really don't even go into
how they are clearly very decorative.  Specifically,
our cousins don't usually have the really big ones,
except when actually lactating.  And there's the
theory about needing that shape in the front,
instead of just in the back, because we're somewhat
built differently.  I don't know if they checked
out my favorite book on the subject, _Ishtar Rising_.
Oh well.  Maybe they'll come back to this one.
Also, they said it was a free speech issue.  They
seem a bit libertarian.  They didn't really go into
about how any speech act intended to harm is
not protect.  And that's what they whole indecent
exposure thing is about.  But in some contexts,
nakedness doesn't have that kind of malign intent.



  • November 5, 2009

Still haven't gotten emacs to edit over ftp.  I actually
found something in the operatings system to grab
over ftp, but it loaded it read only, and putting it
back would have been pretty awkward, so I don't feel
like using it.  I was holding off on writing because
I wanted to get that working.  Maybe eventually.
And I need to get the development environment under
emacs working, too.


I watched _Idiocracy_.  Didn't like it.  I generally
don't like Mike Judge's humor.  I just watched office
space, and it was the same kind of thing, but I kind
of let netflix's prediction affect my rating.  It
predicted like 4.2 so I gave it a 4 star.  Maybe
I should have given it a 3.  This rating stuff seems
a little hard to do.  Just a number?  I have different
moods.  I watch stuff for different reasons.  I
was only watching those because people talk about
them and quote them on reddit.  I gave idiocracy 2 stars.
They have descriptions for the ratings:  1 is hated it,
2 is didn't like it, 3 is liked it, 4 is really liked it,
and 5 is loved it.  But I've mostly been giving stuff
that I own 5 stars.  I spent money on it, didn't I?
And I don't know how well it's predictions are going
to go.  I assume it will try to correlate me with people
who rating things in similar ways.  Or maybe I can't expect
too much.  And there is a real limit on what is out there.



So I finally started just downloading stuff from Netflix
and watching it on computer.  I knew that could be
a dangerous waste because it's a little easy.  And I
have been spending a lot of time.  I've been watching
the new Doctor Who.  Over about 3 days I've watched
the first season and most of the second.  Or maybe it's
only 2 days.  And I watched one movie.  And I
watched a season of Penn & Teller's _Bullshit_.  That's
a fun series.  I figure I'm going to run out of stuff
pretty quick, but who knows.


And Doug told me about some PHP programming work.  I
haven't really done any PHP.  Doug has this belief
that I could just program in any old thing.  Would
be nice if other people felt like that.


I've been spending all this time just watching stuff.
It would be nice if I could find some way to exercise
at the same time.  There's that guy who does that.
But maybe not.  I think the kung fu is good, and
it takes a little more concentration, and it's
not a stand in place kind of thing.  I was by myself
tonight.  The teacher doesn't come in on Thursdays
anymore, so it's just whatever students show up.
I did all the forms I know, and it was about 50 minutes.
I actually skipped a little bit of some of the basic
exwercises, so I probably have about a good solid
hour of stuff I could be doing every day if I
was more serious.  And actually, it's gotten to
be so much that it's more than I want to do,
so I skip more often now instead of just doing
only part of it.  I guess I kind of feel bad if
I don't do all of it, so I skip it.  That, and
I'm not so into exercise, anyway.  I need to
get a little better system, maybe.  And it would
be good to through in some straightforward training,
like tunning and weights.  The way it goes now
is maybe a couple of minutes, and then a rest.
That's how it goes in class, at least.  But this
stuff is pretty strenuous, so I can see resting.


So a thing with the ratings.  You will probably only
rate something that you've seen, and if you decided
to see it, you must have thought you might have liked it.
So it's got this weird kind of bias.  Now, movie critics
and their ratings are quite different.  They get paid
to watch just about everything.  That's just got to
make it a different sort of thing.  And they must be
people who like movies in the first place.  That's
got to do something.  But they also must get tired
of watching the same old stuff all the time.  Probably
most people don't have exactly that problem, and can
tolerate the same sorts of stuff all the time.  I've 
got to wonder have people who watch horror movies.
I am totally avoiding that stuff.  We'll see how it goes.



  • November 2, 2009

Several little frustrations.  The midi transfer from
my keyboard through my stomp box to me mac doesn't
work.  I looked through the manual, and it seems like
it should work pretty automatically, and the mac
does see a midi channel, but nothing.  My desktop
third won't connect to the internet.  It got no
connection to the network even for a while, and 
it looks like that was something wrong in the router,
but now it doesn't get an address from DHCP, so I
don't know where exactly the problem is.  And the
ftp load on my windows emacs doesn't let me edit the
file. I was frustrated for quite a while because I
couldn't remember the password.  It's saved in
the programs I usually use, so I finally forgot
it.  I managed to use ethereal to capture the
network traffic and see what it was.  But it took
a while to think of it.  Now emacs looks like
it's making an ftp connection.  It actually has
a buffer of it's traffic on the ftp connection.
I see it changing to the directory, but I
don't see it even trying to transfer the file,
and the edit window is blank.  And an odd thing,
it tries to list a local directory with some
generated name, but I don't find that directory
on my computer.  And it's a different one each
time.  I don't know what that's about, but it
doesn't seem like that bit's work, and overall,
it isn't working.  With all those little things,
I'm feeling kind of frustrated. 


 And I've cut
back on all the little email groups I had been
looking at.  The mensa martial arts one kind
of annoyed me because some guy had this sort
of long post with his explanation of internal
and external martial arts.  But he said soft
was the same as internal and hard was the same
as external.  He said something about quantum
physics or other--I only sort of skimmed it
after that first bit really bugged me.  I
wrote a really grumpy email about it.  The
moderator sent me a private email that I
wasn't being respectful.  I actually don't
think I had anything personal in it, but it
reflected a pretty high degree of annoyance
with that post.  The difference between
internal and soft I illustrated with a very
simple example.  The style xingyi is a hard
internal style.  A simple fact that shows
they are different concepts.  So there
was a guy rambling on a pretty long time
for this email medium about something he
clearly just doesn't understand.  What
am I supposed to do?  He did also talk
about chi, which is another sort of tricky
area, and I didn't even want to go into that.
A few other people talked about that subject,
and one said it was like religion, in that
it's best to avoid it.  One guy talked about
how he went around debunking chi stuff.
Great, fine. 


 And this really is probably the friendliest
list I've seen, so my excessively negative
post really kind of didn't go along with
the vibe of the group.  This is a group
where he'll announce a new person,
and you'll get bunches of post saying,
"hi, welcome to the group!" and people
will talk about their styles and be supportive.
The newest person was not really training
formally especially, but she was a girl,
and a lot of the other girls came out
and said supportive things.



Anyway, so the moderator
said I was disrespectful and don't do it
again.  That just gave me an opportunity
to consider whether I really even wanted
to be on the list.  And I thought about
it, and I haven't really been getting
anything out of them, but just sort of
out of habit I've been following them.
Lately, the moderator has even just
been talking about the martial arts 
movies he's been watching.  It got me
to go join Netflix to see Jet Li's
_the One_.  Fine, I guess. 


 I decided
it would be better just to get rid
of this time waster, and I put it
one no mail.  I can look at them
online if I feel like, but they don't
sit on my email thing so I have to
go through all of them to clear them
out.  And I did the same thing to
the mensa atheist list.  It is quite
busy, and I usually don't get much
out of it.  And after having these
gone for maybe a week, I decided
to finally put the intp list on 
no mail.  So I've got quite a bit
more peace on my emails.  It is
a change though in my habits,
and it's a little emotionally jarring.
No big email lists.  No book I'm
working on.  So I'm kind of up in
the air. Well, I did the class on
discrete math, and now I'm doing number
theory.  That's something.




  • November 1, 2009

Happy All Saint's Day!  Happy Ides of November!


I watched the Beowulf movie.  I guess the main reason
I got it was because it had Angelina Jolie naked.
I guess it was her.  It was all kind of motion capture
animated, but that was what she looks like naked from
other stuff I've seen her in.  I never read the original
Beowulf, though I have a copy sitting somewhere that
has the old english.  They kind of "retold" the story
to give it sort of a modern feel to it.  And I
guess maybe a post-modern sort of relativism.  Heroes
have to be flawed, I guess.  But it made it sort
of stupid.  The king was Grendel's father?  How is
that supposed to make sense?  And the dragon is
Beowulf's? son?  And they add a thing where Beowulf
makes a deal with Grendel's mother such that he
would be king as long as she keeps some cup.  This
completely undercuts his heroism, and pretty much
destroys the whole thing.
 There was a making of short
film, and the director Zemeckis said he hated reading
the story in high school.  That really should be
a sign that maybe you shouldn't be the one making
the movie.  And so they found this screenplay that
like I said, changes the nature of the story.
But it had Angelina naked.  So that was something.



  • October 31, 2009

Happy Halloween!




  • October 30, 2009

Still reeling a bit.  Knuth.  A really great programmer.
Prolific.  Solid.  I read some of his literate programming,
the implementation of Adventure.  He uses gotos.  And
lots of pointer arithmetic.  It's so primitive.
I've spent so much time trying to stay away from
stuff like that, that I just can't quite get on board
with it.  The literate stuff didn't really seem to
quite make up for it.  So I don't know.  I should
read something else.  And it's all C.  I just don't know.


I finished watching the class on discrete math.  The
professor was just fun.  Almost corny, but he was
just too fun to really step over into being corny.
I was surprised at just how much stuff I didn't know
about, so I guess it was good.  And now I'm sure
there is a lot of other stuff too that I don't know
about.  I guess that happens.


I did download emacs.  I haven't set up stuff to
work with clojure yet, specifically a popular
environment called slime, and I haven't set
up whatever I need to use ftp to get to my journal.
But maybe I will pretty soon.  It looks a lot
better than I was thinking.  Lots of stuff on
the menus, which I guess was something I worried
about.  And I used the calculator already for
some of the discrete math stuff.  It has an rpn one.




  • October 24, 2009

Trippy.  I got the Blue Man Group video about the complex tour
on friday, put it back in the mail at the post office at
5:30pm, and they had it the next (this) morning, and they say
they are shipping my next one.  So that's a good response time.
I still haven't tried downloading anything.  Actually, the
one they are already shipping (Strangelove) was one of the
few I could download, so I was thinking I would try it as
a first one, but it's already too late.


Man, I suggested to Springs little writing meetup group to
do a group project for the New Atheism.  I think I heard about
a thing where they actually made a balloon out of lead.
Spring expressed that she wouldn't want to be involved in
anything militant.  And seemed to be trying to be nice about it.
But she spelled it "athiesm".  Well OK, Spring, clearly not
your thing.  Somebody else said not interested.  One guy
though wrote kind of a screed.  And by how freaking long
his post was, he must be a professional writer.  I've one
other guy write like that.  I think loggorhea is a good word
for that guy.  Anyway, maybe this guy was trying to be clear.
He said something about not trying to come off too strong.
But he was "strongly" opposed.  Could divide up a group like
that.  Speaking from "experience".  And what do I say?
Kind of pissed me off.  If you're not interested, you're
not interested.  Am I trying to force you to do something
you don't want to?  And he didn't want it to take away
from the general writing mentoring support stuff that the
group is for.  Fine.


Saw a couple of videos about a very common four chord progression
in pop music.  
One was pachelbel's canon, an old classic thing that had it.
And like I said, I've been watching blue man group.
I love the little geeky girl annette strean singing "I feel love"
I think some time I linked to the video version, but I haven't found it
yet.  I like fun happy love songs.







  • October 19, 2009

I just heard about 
a bra that
can store drinks.  Plus it makes your boobs look bigger.
And Christmas is coming up.  I may need to order a few.
Seriously.


And a mash-up of Carl Sagan and that crippled guy.



  • October 18, 2009

Sooj was in town.
I had been looking for it for months.  She doesn't get
to Memphis that much any more.  It was at some kind
of pagan.
I didn't really want to go see them.  Not my people,
and for religionists, I have to say on thinking about
it I think they are a step backwards from the cross worshippers.
I haven't seen sooj in a few years.  And I don't really
relate to her music.  It doesn't speak to me.  And I
was thinking it seems kind of self-indulgent, but probably
it speaks to the little group of pagans and their folklore
or whatever.  So I what was it about sooj?  I think maybe
I just thought was cute.  I like her body type.  Oh well.
So I decided not to go.


And I went to Brad's birthday party at Dan Mcguinness.
Super 5 played for a while. At one point, Transitt played
"Sweet Melissa" and I sent Melissa a text that they were
doing that.  Kimberly was there, and I got a hug at first.
We didn't really talk, though.  But she was blabbing on
and on with Vince.  And other folks.  I was going to
tell her I would like to dance with her when something
good came on.  But I didn't ever really talk to her.
And in there, she was yakking so much, I remembered how
much I don't like people who talk too much.  So probably
I let it slide.  Still.


So there were a lot of helium balloons.  I tied loops in
the string and tied some to various things.  I had one
on my glass for most of the time, with a slip knot from
the loop.  But a lot of the time, I was wondering how
you make a really simple knot like that onto chairs--
things with closed loops.  The slip-note I was thinking
of requires you to be able to slip the loop over the 
end of something, which you couldn't do on this thing
with the back of the chair.  So I wasn't sure what to
do.  I didn't want to tie the basic twisty half square knot
or whatever.  I want to learn more about knots.  One thing
I tried, I could see where the one piece of string didn't
have anything binding it.  But at some point I found
an extremely weak knot with just a little tuck under.
One little pull would undo it, but with the balloon pulling
on it, it held.  So I guess, knots can be interesting.
I guess I should get some string or something.


But I ended in a gloomy mood.  Kind of depressed, maybe.
I'm thinking I don't feel like going to see Melissa.
Last time I skipped, I really regretted it, but this
feels different.  Last time, it was because I had
gone out so much, I think, I just didn't feel like it.
This time, being a little depressed, I don't think
it would do as much, and the whole feeling awareness
things has changed it a bit.  Maybe I have to concede
that I might not want to go hang out this time.


Watching _Across the Universe_.  Yummy.  My second
Netflix item.  Took a whole week in between them.
That seems a little pitiful, so I'm not quite
so happy with it.  I still haven't donwloaded anything.
Maybe that will make a difference.  But the movie
is nice.  lots of Beatles' music.


The teaching company had like a two day sale on everything.
I noticed that they have something on discrete math.
I had also been looking at one on number theory.
So I decided to get those.  I've been indulging in
things like this lately.  But I've been looking at
this for a while.  And it gives me an excuse to
skip seeing Melissa once.


OK, after sleeping on it, I will probably go see Melissa.


So, an unexpected happy result.  My mom got some slightly
old donuts on sale.  And that's already been a few days.
But I put them in the microwave.  I think I actually
put them in there a little longer than was needed just 
to warm them up.  The microwave generally can make
stale things fresher because of how it interacts
with the water in the bread.  Being stale generally
means that the water has moved out of the starch, though
not necessarily completely out of the bread, and the
microwave, which heats up the water in preference
to the other molecules, manages to get it to go back.
But with these donuts, actually a cruller and a cake
donut, it didn't go back to being like a fresh donut.
It ended up crunchy.  I think for bread it tend to
not be so good as that just makes it too hard, but because
these have a lot of oil, it's kind of much softer, though
crunchy.  Kind of like a big potato chip.  It actually
seems a little better than the original to me.  It
especially improves the cake donuts.  Trippy. The microwave
may have dried them out, but it's possible that
it got stale enough to have dried out, too, but
the microwave gave it a mix of crispy and not stale.




  • October 15, 2009

Happy Ides of October!




  • October 14, 2009

OK, I'm reading _Coders at Work_.  It started kind
of slow, but has gotten very interesting, so I just
read a hundred pages into it.  I guess maybe the first
guy, a ocuple years younger than me, just didn't seem
to have much to say.  This last guy went on about
JavaScipt, the mostest-used, best language in the
whole world.  He talks about mash-ups, where people
take programs from different big groups and put them
together, and he had a neat idea I wanted to get down.
There's going to need to be something that can put
together programs like lego.  This is similar I think
to my belief that the proper place for an AI is to
control programs on a typical computer.  So there needs
to be a way to write instructions for it.  This guy's
idea is to use javascript, which can control a browser
at least.  I'll need to look at that.


 The second guy was some little punk kid.  Did Livejournal in college
or something.  Started programming when he was five.
Said something about getting 25 grand a month in click
through ads in maybe high school.  Great.  Perl or C
hacker or some such.  Whatever.  Hires people, though.
Makes money, I guess.  Hurrah for capitalism!


The first guy did some lisp.  Likes writing screensavers
for fun.  The third guy said he would have made reading
Knuth a hiring requirement, but couldn't get enough
people like that.  I think I read knuth when I was
maybe 15 or so.  Maybe I should review it.  And I
think he's worked out some newer volumns, so I should
get those.




  • October 13, 2009

Happy Tuesday the Thirteenth!



  • October 12, 2009

Happy Columbus Day!  Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!


So, Josh was sitting there.  I didn't say anything to him,
and he didn't say anything to me.  He didn't really seem
happy at all.  Melissa really seemed kind of unhappy,
but I think the latte picked her up.  She didn't get
one at all when she came in.  And Jeanne brought her
a second one.  It might have been the coffee, I don't
know if I helped.  And maybe just working makes her feel
good.  She just seemed so much better when I left
from when I got there.





  • October 9, 2009

I'm watching a Yale lecture on 
the Philosophy of Death.  He is arguing the
position that there is no soul.  And later will talk about
values of death, and maybe how living forever isn't so great.


I put in another sell order and the market went up.
That's nice, though I think I'm spending a little
too fast right now.  I say up.  It's at a yearly
high.


So Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.  OK.  Seeing
a lot of stuff about it.  People say he hasn't done
much.  OK.  One guy said he changed the tone of
U.S. foreign policy.  That seems right.  It sounds
to me like Norway likes where he's going and wants
him to stick with it.  Sounds good to me.  He called
for getting rid of all nuclear weapons.  He's reached
out to Muslims, and Iran, and North Korea.  He pulled
the "missile defense shield" out.  Sounds good.




  • October 8, 2009

I need to get the things down before I forget.  Dude
says that the beliefs that children and money make
you happy are "super-replicators".  Believing them
makes society work, so society gets people to believe
them.  Even if they aren't technically true.  But
some things, if you expect them to make you feel
a certain way, you will predict in the future and
actually remember in the past that the make you
feel that way, even if actually when it happens, you don't.



What else.  you see what you want to see.  You remember
the exceptional things the most, and especially you
remember how things turn out at the end more than
how it goes most of the time before the end.


ok, imagination add some details and leaves out others.
Our feelings about what we imagine are affected by
how we feel (meeting someone on a scary bridge or
grocery shopping while hungry).  And we forget
how well we rationalize after something happens.
He does recommend not using your imagination to
predict and to just ask people who are doing it, but
we don't want to because we think we are special
and unique snowflakes, which we're not.



OK, another dream where I'll wake up and have something
to think about so I won't go back to sleep.  Plus
it seemed like one of those more vivid ones, though
I think I missed my omega-3 which is what seemed to
do that.  Anyway, I was back with Holly.  Yummy.
She came to town, but it was someone else's house.
After a bit, was a little distant.  Still, was yummy.


I don't know if I was expecting Melissa to read my mind.
I sent her a text hoping she did well on her tests.
She had a midterm monday and a test on wednesday that
had been put off two weeks.  I was hoping she would
text with how she did, which she did last time I asked,
though that was when the test was delayed.  But I didn't
actually ask.  And I was hoping she would do it if she
wanted to.  I don't want to be too nosy.


And then there's Angela.  S. not E.  From college.  At
some point, just wouldn't talk to me.  I guess that happens.
But I don't know if she just didn't love me, or was just
trying really hard to keep from. or what.  Because she
wouldn't talk to me.  Makes it hard for me to understand.
But then, I was pretty foolish on several occasions.


Sp, back, back.  I think it was not so much about Holly
as these things with Melissa that have a couple of times
gone a away and come back recently.  But some about Holly.
I do want to be with her, though I seem to have some
problems with it.  Or there are some problems in there somewhere.


Wow, I ate way too many pork chops.


So I finished that book on happiness.  I kind of feel empty,
like I need something to do.  I've got other stuff
on the pile to read, but not much I have a great desire
to look at.  And maybe there's stuff I should do,
but I don't feel like it.  A deep sort of dissatisfaction.
And I've told Melissa that this kind of stuff happens
when you finish school.  You kind of wish you were
back in.  But the happiness book has some stuff that
helps explain it.  For one, you don't remember everything.
And especially, you most strongly remember the very end.
And that's going to be the nice feeling you have when
you're done.  You forget about the pain when you're doing it.
And he said childbirth is like that.  I guess.





  • October 7, 2009

I signed up for NetFlix.  And I'm looking over the movies.
It could be just from the dvd cover art.  But it looks
like page after page of moronic crap.  It's depressing.
But I have a couple of dozen things in my queue, so I
am find stuff at least that I think might be interesting.


And I signed up through the castles game so I could get
some extra team members.  It gives me access to one
more quest to run, and it's magic item which has a lot
of defensive power. I'm trying to get a lot of defensive
power so I will win more often when people attack.  Having
more team members helps with this.  I'll see how it goes.


But the grimmest thing could be how much time I might end
up wasting on all this stuff.  I have a lot that I could be 
watching.


So yes, it has happened before.  I think about how probably
I am repressing lust for Melissa, and it makes my feelings
stronger, and so I don't feel quite as strongly.  Just
like with a certain other person.  But I still love them,
just not quite so strongly.


Wow, a squat in Memphis got raided.  I heard about it
because of the anarchism subreddit, not because I
pay attention to local happenings.  I thought about
it because I went to Schnucks to pick up some pork
chops, unsatisfied with my recent schnitzel experiences.
The black checker and bag boy.  The bag boy asked me
about my iphone, if I had a lot of applications.  I
actually don't have any, but what comes with the phone.
But that's been fine.  Trish has mentioned one for
alerts for radar and stop-light cameras and traffic.
I don't know if I should go down there.  There's also
some collective near U of M, supposedly.




  • October 5, 2009

So, I have , like, a french braid.  Girls and their
little dress up games.  Leanne gave it to me.


I'm reading _Stumbling on Happiness_.  It seems to
have several insights.  People fill in more blanks
than is usedyl when imagining the future.  People
overestimate the impact of things, both good and bad.
The feeling of control is the main benefit to being
able to predict, while being able to make better
choices is very counterintuitively not very important
to happiness.  I'm skeptical about this conclusion, though.
It may not affect happiness as much as we think, but 
surely it has survival benefit.  People are supreme
predictors, and we are top-notch survivors.  But
some of the deal with happiness may simply be the long
term impact to happiness.  Nothing much really affects
it long term--we settle back to our personal set point.
We will adjust to anything.
So I'm not sure how a feeling of control would be any
different.  Except that learned helplessness is
an essential aspect of depression. Anyway, this need 
for control may be the thing that keeps me playing this
silly computer games I've been playing lately--  the
facebook stuff,  freecell, winrisk, even rogue.
Winrisk has sometimes been frustrasting because if I catch
a bad break, I can lose out and it's a bad feeling.
And the control may be the thing that makes geeks like
programming.


Also, he made a distinction among three types of happiness.
There's the feeling of happiness.  But somehow that doesn't
get it for some people, like philosophers especially.
If you were in some kind of simulation, but nothing was
really going on, even though you felt happy, some might
say you aren't really happy.  And there's the eternal
reward thing.  Somebody said you could only judge
if you are really happy when you die.  And there is
a greek word "eudaimonia" for this.  I guess I don't
have a great handle on it.  There's also a kind
of judgmental happiness.  Like when you say, "I feel
happy for you".  You think you should feel happy,
even if you don't really.


That was a different experience.  And different mainly
from having a counterintuitive result.  I decided to
follow my natural inclination to be antisocial, and
a I was very happy with the result.  I replied
maybe to the "Stammtisch Sud" of the German speaking
meetup.  So I go there, and there's a bunch of folks
I didn't recognize.  So I sat in a table next to
them instead of joining them.  And then maybe someone
came in, that I might have recognized from that group,
but didn't really know.  And I take some time, but
I finally order the first item, the wiener schnitzel
with fried potatoes and red cabbage.  And I'm just
looking at email and I think, were there any
people I might have wanted to sit with?  There were
three people that last time I think had been there
that I knew from outside that group.  Lana,  Robert
Paulson who I knew from Hilton, though only slightly,
and Dick Shaw.  And I look over, and Robert was with 
them.  But he was only a bit of an acquaintance
and I wasn't that interested.  And I figured I'd
be happy to be out of there when I was finished,
instead of having to sit around with them.  And
I really was.


But how about the food?  I could think of it as
I was mostly going to try out the food, and maybe
if I felt like it, joining the people.  I've
been craving pork chops lately.  Bad experience
with the stuff from Aldi's.  So this was a good
chance.  The wiener schnitzel was very good.
The potatoes and red cabbage were also very good.
But my first reaction was that it was a little
more peppery than I would like.  And it just
wasn't the way mom makes it.  They were really
thin.  The Aldi ones were really thin.  Maybe
there is some idea that they are supposed to be
thing.  My mom does try to get them thin.  But
I've had schnitzel in Germany.  They weren't
that thin.  So it wasn't like momma makes.  Mine
are not as good as momma's, but I like mine
better even than those.  That's work.  But
I guess that's what I should do.  Now I know.


I don't know what the show is.  I think the actress
is Jenna Elfman.  Girl wanting casual sex gets knocked up.
I switched over to it while house was on, a couple times.
Each time enough for one joke, maybe.  Hated both.
Maybe something about the slutty sensibility.


And the House episode had James Earl Jones.  I mean,
Darth Vader!  How could I not watch that?  Died
spitting blood.  Hard core.


So the Facebook castles game has become a little
different.  And disappointing.  So, with the gold
maximum of 2 billion gold, and now an hourly
income of a little over one billion.  I lose
money if I don't take care off the money
every two hours.  So I'm mostly just wasting
money.  That's annoying.


My rogue playing has gotten a lot worse than
it used to be, but I had a really good game
because I got a little treasure room, and
I got a ring of stealth.  That lets you
sneak past monsters.  But I didn't realize
that it makes you need more food, and I
starved.  Well, I was faint when there
was a troll around.  Bad luck.  So I
looked up a kind of cheat site to learn
all the secrets.  The rings using food
was something I could have used.  Oh well.
I hope I don't waste too much time on it.
Also, one thing I never knew.  Using the
bow while throwing the arrows helps it a
lot.  I've been throwing arrows without
the bow, and it seems to work fairly well,
so I'll try it with the bow now.  And I've
started a game and it seems to be quite a bit better.
Honestly, in most things I like the up front
bashing critters, but that leaves you open
to being hit, so I understand it's a bad
strategy in general.



  • October 4, 2009


in the immortal words of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, au revoir



  • October 3, 2009

Saw _Zombieland_ and _Capitalism: a Love Story_.  Meh.


A little sad.  I had two months to get health insurance
protected by HIPAA, that I couldn't be denied for previous
stuff.  But I didn't get around to it.  And in the last 
week or so, I thought about making some effort, but
kind of decided against it.  It was probably too
late as there was probably some fairly long
application process, and stuff would have to
be sent in.  Plus I hate the insurance companies.
And if you need stuff done, it's cheaper to go
overseas, anyway.  Also, I decided that my life
hasn't really been all that great, anyway.  And
I have like at least three things that could
kill me.  And the feds are working on some stuff,
and I want to see how that turns out.  It looks
like they will have something, though maybe not
a government run insurance for everyone.  But probably
they are going to make it so they can't deny you
for preexisting conditions.  They'll probably make
it expensive, though.  And they can't drop you
if you get sick.  I guess.  I'm not sure how it
will work out.  They are going to make it mandatory
in some sense, but they lowered the fine from something
pretty big, to something fairly small.  So a lot
of people will just stay out of it.  So it might
not do so much.  And insurance is a bet that you
will get sick.  I think it's a bad idea to bet
against yourself.  And there's always bankruptcy.


 


  • October 1, 2009

Happy Kalends of October!


We had a party for Blasphemy day yesterday.  Liz did.
And it was basically a U of M party at R.P. Tracks.
She has organized a little campus group of freethinkers
or something like that.  And they had an article about
them in the daily school newpaper.  Huh.  I didn't
realize it was daily, so I'm sure they need all the
stories they can get.  She had copies of the new 
testament, so I tore up the pages, little bit by bit,
taking some time with it.  And otherwise defiling it.
One guy burned some of it with a cigarette.  Liz's
little kid took some into the bathroom, and flushed a bit.
Not quite blasphemy, but close enough, I think.  They
took a vote, and I got the certificate recognizing
my eternal damnation.  So I've go that going for me.


Noel, Liz's little kid, talked about programming languages
he knows about.  He's in the fourth grade, so that sounds good.
Visual Basic, C++, and C#.  Though I think what he means
by programming is that he can use the M$ visual builder
tool to generate programs.  I'm not sure how much he knows
about writing actual code. I suspect not so much.  He did
mention using "msg *" on a command line to send messages
to a group.  There was another guy John he was talking with,
and they were talking about batch files and viruses.  
Didn't pay that much attention.  I said I was a Java person.
I think he asked, the coffee or the script.  I didn't hear
the coffee thing.  And it might have been coffee or language.
But I think more likely script.  And he seemed interested
in javascript, but seemed to wish he had access to is, or
something.  I said you could put it in a URL bar of a browser to get results,
if you need a handy calculater like "javascript:234*931;".
But it didn't look like he followed me.  He creates videos
and does animation things.  Good at using computer tools.
Liz of course is the proud mom, and thinks of him as very
smart.  A bit ADHD.  But when he took an IQ test, he
got in the bottom 25%, which was a puzzler.  The little
puzzle kinds.  Probably had never seen something like
that before.  Maybe doesn't think abstractly.  I don't know.





  • September 29, 2009

It made me really, really mad.  So Lana posts some picture
or something of a fat slobby looking guy, with a caption
about real men.  On girl says she was sad enough to be
with some guys like that.  And one girl said it was funny,
but there were a lot more pretty women than remotely
attractive men.  OK.  I guess I'm not capturing what
made me angry about it.  Something about how they laughed
at him, and I feel basically like him.  Maybe I'll
try to move on.


So, I think some of my feeling about this new grape
gatorade flavor is the dissappointment I felt when
they first changed it.  When they added the artificial
flavor, it had this aftertaste that really disappointed
me, and I was annoyed that I just gave it up.  But
it's in an 8-pack, so I didn't have to stop at just
one, and after getting over the memory of the initial
disappointment, I can appreciate it a little better.
I think it's not quite as good as the original, but
it still has most of the original flavor, and just
the little bit of synthetic aftertaste.  So I like
it a little better now than when I first tried it.
It's growing on me again, I guess.  




  • September 28, 2009

I guess I learned something.  I was feeling kind of
bad over the weekend worrying about Melissa.  She
had to do an interview with a foreigner and write
a ten page report about it, and as of Thursday night,
she didn't even have the interview done, and she
still had to work the two nights.   So I really
doubted she was going to be able to get it done.
But she did.  She had even more than just that to
do, too, but she stayed up two nights to get it all
done.  Had to set the alarm for every 45 minutes in
case she fell asleep.  Got it all done.  She seemed
to feel good about it, and I was very happy for her.
And I felt bad for doubting her.  And it's bad that
I felt bad during that time.  It should not have
bothered me so much, and it worked out well after all.
I don't know.


But of course, Melissa did not actually do an interview.
She made that part up.  Melissa is very sweet, but she
can be a very bad girl sometimes.  I don't know if I
even want to write about the bad things she says she's
done.  Anyway, she didn't do any specific interview,
but it was based on things a foreign friend of hers
has said in the past.  So that's pretty close.  I guess.
It would be perfectly reasonable to come clean with that
instead of making up a fiction about an interview.
But you do what you gotta do.


And I told Melissa about Carlos Castaneda.  He got a
Ph.D. in anthropology from UCLA based on one of his
books.  I think probably the first one, but I might
be wrong about it.  The stuff about Don Juan.  But
he almost certainly made all of it up.  Pretty impressive,
though.  So anthropology isn't always quite so much
about telling the actual literal truth.   Whatever that
means.


I told Melissa that there are some things that I like
and drink too much of.  I've been drinking the carnation
instant breakfast drink mixes lately.  They're rebranded
as breakfast essentials.  And my favorite drink was the
original grape gatorade.  They don't make it anymore.
They have a grape now, but it isn't the original.
The original was all natural flavoring, but now
they use artificial flavoring, which as an aftertaste
that I just really don't like.  She suggested I try
the Aldi's copy.  So I just went out and got it.
It's the same as the new gatorade grape, which is
just not the same. It has both artificial and natural
flavors.  So maybe they have some of whatever they
originally used.  But the artificial flavor simply
ruins it for me.  And it's easy to guess what happened.
The natural flavor is just slight more expensive,
so they stopped using it by itself, and mixed in
some cheaper stuff.  And I'm sure they didn't
notice any difference in sales, if there was any.
But they lost me.  I drank too much of it, anyway.
I must have gained ten pounds just from that.


And when I was at Aldi's I saw that they had some pork
schnitzel.  I like pork schnitzel, so I decided to
give it a try.  I was expecting it was already cooked,
but it wasn't.  OK, fine.  It said not recommended 
in microwave, and they weren't kidding.  I tried it
anyway.  I eat microwave cooked meat fairly often,
and I probably wouldn't recommend it, but for me it's
find.  Generally it's like boiling--it's not as flavorful,
because you get a lot from browning, but I think I 
must be fairly sensitive, because I like the very light
flavor of the meat.  This stuff though, was terrible.
Imagine boiling something that has breading.  So it
was soggy.  And I think this may be some kind of pressed
pork.  Ick.  It says to fry them in a pan.  I'm trying
that.  But if I wanted to do that, I could make them
myself from scratch.  I'm quite capable of doing that.
I've made them several time.  But I thought this might
be easier and I could at least give it a shot.  We'll
see.


Well, it was certainly better.  But really not so great.
I won't try it again.



  • September 26, 2009

OK, now I'm confused.  I was thinking about something
I might write here. I went to Aimee's book meeting,
and it was just me, Mike, and her.  But that would
be wrong according to my understanding of the
Latinized grammar that it seems like I learned.
It was just us at the party.  It was just we?
Maybe it's idiomatic.  There were just I, Mike, and she?
You would probably say just me, Mike and her were at
the meeting over "I, Mike and she were."  But even
that is wrong according to a rule about how you
are supposed to say I last.  "She, mike, and I were there"
actually seems right.  So how does 'it was just she, mike
and I'?  better but the vereb doesn't agree.  'There
were just she, Mike, and I' or maybe "They were just
she, Mike, and I'.  Maybe.  I think we can throw some
pramatics into that.  Say me first because obviously
I was there or I wouldn't be talking about it, and get
it out of the way first to deemphasize it.  And 'it
was just me' is such a common thing as to be a big
congealed phrase that you might run together.  An
idiom as it were.  As compared to the idiom 'as it were'.
Anyway, enough of that.


The book was _Accidental Guerilla_.  It was by a military
advisor, an expert in COIN or counterinsurgency.  He
has analyses of some of things happening in Iraq,
Afganistan, and a few other places.  Aimee had not finished
it, so it was going to be just Mike and me talking and 
Aimee would take a bunch of notes because they wanted something
for the newsletter.  And it turns out that when it's just
basically me talking with someone else, I can be quite gabby.
Plus I think it was a subject I guess was interested in, so
I was able to remember a lot, and go on and on.  But maybe
I got it out of my system, I don't so much feel like going  on and
on here.  


So there is a big difference between counterterrorism and
counterinsurgency.  In counterterrorism, you go after
the bad guys.  In counterinsurgency, you support and 
protect the population and get them on your side, and
fighting the bad guys is just sort of incidental.  Because
the kind of thing that happens is that you get a feedback loop
from fighting in people's home area, which makes them angry,
and then insurgent and terrorist forces get more support,
so you fight some more.  Most of the people fighting are
not the hardcore radicals trying to take over everything.
This guys uses the term "takfiri" for them.  Most of
the people are just locals who got caught up in it.
One thing he pointed out is that a choice that seemed
to make sense is actually very bad from the view
of counterinsurgency.  We keep troops isolated on
big bases and drive into areas for operations.  
To locals, this makes us look like foreign raiders,
which we are, and is very alienating.  The bad guys
often are just living right in there, and can come
out at night to intimidate people.  So you need people
sitting in there all the time.  He doesn't talk about
this, but in classical occupying armies, the soldiers
just take the food and stuff of the locals.  That's
actually something we could do different.  We would
certainly be able to pay for stuff, which might
make us seem a lot more welcome.  In addition to
the typical construction that would go on.  And
it doesn't have to be just military people.  And the
best is to use local people, anyway.


It at least was saying that we do have stuff we know
how to do handle the situation, though it wouldn't
be that easy or guarranteed.  And unfortunately it's
not like a regular war, like the first gulf war or
even one of the world wars.  It's more like the cold
war.  We're talking 20 or 50 years.  Yikes.


So that was Thursday night.  On Friday night, I saw them
sort of mention this in the news.  Though that could
be more because that was the first day I watched the news.
They used the term "CO-IN" for counterinsurgency.
Some guy has a report out on the situation.  McAllister, maybe?
And it was one of those, we could do it this way and it
might work, otherwise we should just give up.  There wasn't
an easy half-assed way.    


And I missed some reporting about the Dalai Lama.  The Memphis
mayor went to give him a fist bump.  I guess it was confusing,
and he thought it was kind of a violent sort of gesture.
Aimee said it made the national news.  Great.  The mayor
said it was something about flu germs.  Uh huh.


I went to Bardog after the meeting.  Leanne was kind of
sad because she just quit her job and her boyfriend was
out of town, so we were kind of affectionate.  She's
a sweetheart.  I think she mentioned seeing this blog.
Oh well.


And for a bit in there, there were a lot of people singing
along with the jukebox.  Some of the stuff I put on.  That
was nice.  And there was some stuff that Melissa liked
and I mentioned it to her.  Sometimes she dances a little
bit.  I think that's very pretty.  Just a tiny bit.  Maybe
a little more like swaying to the music.  Still pretty.
But I haven't really kept up with exactly what she likes.
This one was Willy Nelson "On the road again".  That was new
maybe she likes stuff she hasn't heard a million times as well.
She seemed to like "sweet child of mine" but that might
have just been when I first played. 


 Seems like everyone likes "paradise city"  I think I put it in, and it came up,
but that was actually from someone who had put it in before
me.  I suspect it was this girl I've kind of got my eye on.
A little taller than me.  Short black hair, but pale.  Always
has significant boobs sticking out.  That may be it.
I saw her playing a bunch of stuff at the anniversary party.
And she strikes me a possibly being another auditory person.
Visual people wear sort of fancy pretty clothes.  Hers
were just very simple.  Solid colors.  I think it was
maybe a black sleeveless top with jeans.  She was with some
little blonde who was one of those sort of obvious visual
people.  I guess.  I'm still not an expert, but it's starting
to jump out a little bit more.  Anyway, chicky hasn't
given me a second glance.  Actually, it's more like frowny
looks.  But like they say, la vie.


But Leanne can be treacherous.  She had her keys in her hand,
and said she would be right back and left.  Melissa had
to run and stop her from driving away.  She got her a cab,
though she was saying she really needed her truck in the morning.
Deal with that then.  I felt silly that she fooled me and
I bought it.  But I guess I'm not so used to people in
bars like Melissa is.


One thing that happened in Iraq.  At about the time of the surge,
Al-Qa'ida in Iraq pissed off the tribal people.  There was a
claim that the trigger was that they wanted some of the women
to marry, and the tribabl people just wouldn't go there.
No marrying outside for them.  But it was probably a bunch of
stuff.  So suddenly we had a lot more support from the locals.
It seems to me like we just got lucky.


I'm trying to find more about this report, and I found
an old
blog from McCallister.  It's COIN stuff.  Don't see this
report, though.  Maybe it is McChrystal.  Darn mick names
all sound the same.  OK, yeah, it's McChrystal.  It's
a classified report but it was leaked to Bob Woodward
at the Washington Post.


Aimee lent me a copy of the book they read last time,
_Shimmer_.  They had the author there.  Starting
off kind of with a bad attitude about it because she
talked about how it had something that a technical
person would see was impossible.  I think I see that,
but it might be something else.  Also, in the first
section the people are having a business meeting,
and they are askin, if you were food, what kind would
you be?  What do you mean if you were food?  We are
food.  People do get eaten.  Do you mean if you could be 
some other kind of food what would it be?  I don't
want to be a pie.
 

On the disc that has "One the Road Again" is Willie Nelson's
cover of Bridge Over Troubled Water,
which I've been watching on youtube.  I googled for the meaning.
I had heard heroin.  One site talks about 
a bunch of songs.  What is silver girl supposed to be?
Not a needle?  According to inteviews from Paul Simon,
his girlfriend was sad because she found some grey hairs.
Well OK.  Just a song about friendship.  One person mention's
a poster with a black couple where the guy said "like a bridge over
troubled water I will lay me down".  OK.


Wow, i just checked my account.  I've been spending a little
too much.  Haven't been keeping track.  Not so good.




  • September 22, 2009

Early, the bounter hunter in Firefly, said something like
"Man is by far stronger than woman, but only woman
can make a child.  Does that seem right to you?"  Actually,
Early, it does.  Women are too valuable because of that
to do much fighting, which is the kind of strength you
are talking about.  Better left to more expendable men,
so that's why selection pressure pushed that way.



  • September 21, 2009

I'm just feeling really angry right now.  Like chopping
stuff with my sword.  It seems like the trigger is this
guy Scotty the door guy at Bardog, and it was closing time
and he said to me, ten minutes, and then 5 minutes left.
Generally David and Melissa are cool with me staying around,
but I don't know.  If he wants me gone, I'm happy to leave,
but I wait till Melissa comes out and says goodbye.  And
I guess there was this sort of heavy feeling building
of feeling unwelcome, and it was irritating me for whatever
it was, fifteen minutes.  But that couldn't have been all
it was.  Before that, I had the beginnings of anger or something,
and that just kind of aggravated it, or kept it going or something.
I guess I wasn't sure it was anger exactly before.  Maybe.
Seeing Josh and Melissa kissing again.  But Josh spent a
while talking to Johny.  And then Josh left.  He didn't say
anything to me on the way out, but we haven't really been doing
that lately.  And Melissa was talking to Johny and they were
just laughing and laughing.  I was at the far end of the bar,
so I couldn't tell what it was.  So I walk over, and she leaves
before I got there and miss it.  And ask Johny what's going on or something.
Maybe he said something about he needs to pay attention, I don't
know exactly.  But if seeing Melissa and Josh kissing bothers
me so much, I guess I can take it as a sign that there are things
going on in my head that I'm not looking at so closely.  I've
looked at them before, but I guess I tend to just let them slip
back.


It was Bardog's big anniversary party.  They had a big alley party,
with a dunk tank and a band.  There was a meatball eating contest.
Your were supposed to eat 40.  It had been 30, but they upped it
on Wednesday.  Melissa had suggested I enter, but I thought against
it.  I can eat a lot, but I eat kind of slow.  And I was thinking
they were bigger than they were.  So I didn't enter, but I've been
kind of regretting it, and then being OK with it.  The kind of thinking
that can make you unhappy.  Several pukers.  Didn't know the winner.
Aldo said it was two and a half pounds.  That kind of made me think 
I could have done it.  But after that, they had some barbecue.
That was really good, so I'm kind of happier that I got to eat
that instead.  And as little as I ate, I kind of think probably
better not to have been in it.  It might have been about a plateful,
but not as much as the meatballs, I think.


There was a little girl who cut her hand.  There are two girls I
can't tell apart.  One is named Britney and she works the day shift.
I don't know if this was her.  Cut her hand, and was quite a bit
bloody.  She was washing it in the sink, and I was standing there,
and Dave asked me to stand with her to make sure she doesn't fall
over.  Some times people when they get hurt a bit and see blood,
they can get a little weak-kneed from being scared.  So I stood
with her a minute, and she talked about it a bit.  Sure.


But I guess on a positive note, the omega-3 seems to be making my
dreams very vivid.  I seem to remember very long ones.  I'm not
becoming lucid so much, but it has altered their character somewhat.





  • September 19, 2009

Yarrr, Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day!


I just listened to the commentary for the Season 12
episode "Trilogy of Error".  They are just so
proud of it, well at least the writer Matt Selman
is.  It's actually starting to seem infectious.
I liked it when I first saw it, but I only
saw the connection to _Run, Lola, Run_, but
I hadn't seen the movie _Go_  which was really
the main basis for it.  That might have added a little,
but the idea itself is neat.  I think it's great.
I actually think all of Season 12 is great, as
I have gone through it and watched them all maybe
four or 5 times now.  Has the series gotten better
since the beginning?  It would make sense.  You
become a lot better after 10 years of doing something.
South Park noticeably has gotten really better
in that time, though South Park is kind of limited
in just it's fairly childish nature.  The thing is,
people say that things went downhill since what, maybe
the 9th season.  One person I remember specifically mentioned
Ian Maxstone Graham as an unfunny guy who is at this
point a bigger producer.  And maybe that's it.  They
aren't going as much for pure comedy as interesting
story-telling, which is something that does get better.
I guess that's what I'm seeing improved in South Park, too.
So this year, they one the Emmy for the flowers for Algernon
story, I forget their title.  Homer gets smart, bonds with
Lisa, then goes back to being dumb.  It was also the movie
Charlie, which won an academy award, so it's a good story.
In that one, it's a medical experiment and there's a mouse
Algernon that it happens to, too.  And I read the book
as a kid and have it somewhere, but I don't really remember.
The deal is, he gets smart, becomes obnoxious, but falls
in love, and then you see the mouse lose it, and he 
loses it too.  It was good and heartfelt.  This one,
trilogy of error, isn't so emotional, but it's intellectually
interesting.  Melt Selman calls it a "chrysalis of genius".
Kind of a smarty show.  But I'm kind of a smarty, so I like it.
And the other super great one, the one with Lisa and the
substitute teacher, "Lisa's Substitute"-- it did not do so well at the table read
and probably it doesn't have as many jokes and isn't as funny,
but it's a warmer story and people really like it.  Maybe
manipulative.  Lisa loving something.  


I went to Borders and I was greeted.  A cute little blonde
girl said "hi. welcome to Borders"  And I think I tried
to smile a little and say thank you.  And I may have
mumbled howsitgoing, but she just said "wut?".  I guess
they need to try to add value above Amazon.  And halfway
to the back of the store by the helpdesk, another boron
smiled and said hi or something.  I don't know.  creepy.


And I get to the back, and there's this cute little
dark-haired pale girl shelving.  And some other boron
was visiting her and commented on how they stuck her
in the very back, shelving.  And I said,  "MMM, shelving"
but I was pretty far away and not really talking to them.
I was thinking of saying to her, "you probably always
wanted to be a librarian, but you got stuck working at
Borders"  but I didn't.  You probably could have guessed that.



But hovering in that area, I did find a book with that 
nifty calligraphic form of the word "zen" on the cover
that you sometimes see.  A pile of then sitting on the
floor under a little advertisings table.  I was intrigued
and took a closer look.  Zen and the art of making a living.
My first reaction was how most people now who write these
sort of zen inspired books really know jack shit about zen.
So I felt kind of sad about that.  But I reached down
and picked it up to at least look at it.  Seemed a bit
like _what color is your parachute?_  I've tried getting
that book several times.  Every year has a new addition,
so you can always get a new one.  But I don't really
ever do all the work in them.  Personal inventories.
And job hunting as 40 hour a week sales job.  That's
a nightmare job.  I'd rather be unemployed.  So maybe
I'll skip getting that one this time.  Bamboo slivers
and fingernails come to mind.  But this one, was worth
at least thumbing through.  And it seemed like it
was packed with poorly understood quotations of
oriental wisdom.  But it was about trying to find
the right sort of work.  And I probably should
be doing that, so I picked it up. 


I went there to get _The Accidental Guerilla_ for
Aimee's book meeting.  I probably won't go because
I'm getting more tied to the kung fu meeting on
Thursday, since I'm the one keeping the extra key,
but I'm torn.  I'm interested in this military stuff.
I'll try to read it and see how it goes.  I could
give the key up for a week.


So I got the kung fu book in.  Li Lao Shr told us
the name of the teacher who taught her the Fanzi Quan
form.  The story she gave was that he had this form,
and with the cultural revolution, he put it in a box,
but when they were bringing back more traditional
wushu again, he took it out of the box.  His name
was Wen Jingming. He died in 1985.  But he had
a book on a _Kaoshou Fanziquan_.  It's a form
of fanziquan supposedly developed by a guy who
went to prison, but couldn't do all the movements
because he had to wear cuffs, shackles.  I
wasn't sure if it was the form we were learning,
but when I got it, I could see that definitely
it was.  The hands tend to stay close together.
The kicks are not high--that's actually pretty
nice.  Capoeira is also supposed to be from
being shackled, but in that, you do a lot of
rolling around.



  • September 18, 2009

So, I had been stuck on the second to the last puzzle
in the sudoku book.  I left it alone for a few weeks.
So I got out of the habit.  But I went back to it.
Finished it up.  Then got the last one.  So I'm
done with it.  


So I found an ouchie in those facebook games.  It
looks like your money amount is a 32 bit integer,
so I can't get more that about two billion.  And
I just reached it.  I don't think it does anything
weird like turn negative or something.  I think
it just stays at the maximum.  But that's it.
So all that investment and growth I was playing
with.  Topped out.  Boo!  I guess it was fun enough
while it lasted.


I don't know if I've written about computers needing
to be able to ask for help.  I remember thinking about 
it.  It's a pretty obvious idea.  Some robot guys
have actually found a neat and easy way to do it.
They use the Mechanical Turk, an online web system where
you get people to do simple jobs for like a few pennies
each.  The job in this case is just to ask what is
this thing I'm looking at, a big problem for computers,
and they need someone to tell them to learn.


So a guy Itamar who I saw at the AGI convention is 
saying we could have AGI in a few years, not decades,
using information modeling from deep machine learning
(some subfield I'd never heard of) and reinforcement
learning.  I would be skeptical, though.  Still it's
an interesting claim.


Can't sleep.  Don't know what the deal is.  Going to
see Aimee for lunch at Bardog.  Missed her on Wednesday
because the emails didn't work right somehow.  Maybe
sent a reply to a wrong place.  So I was thinking 
How I would describe Aldo to her.  "Owner" doesn't
quite cut it.  Aldo dreamed it up and made it happen.
What's the word for that?  Now it's a place for him
to have fun and do stuff.  Resident?  Creator?
Something deva-like?  I'm thinking of the Hindu story
of how the universe is just a dream of one of their
gods.  I need to remember the name of that one.
Brahma, maybe?  He creates it by his dreaming.




  • September 15, 2009

I thought of something that might be a problem in AI.
People have a notion that when you learn things, you
always learn correct things.  Probably most of what
you think you learn is wrong, but we have a cultural
system that puts pressure on us to discard mistakes
that we have.  But we don't think of putting an AI
in an environment like that, with so much correction.
We just want it to be right all the time.





  • September 14, 2009

Argh.  I was writing a letter in a text editor.  That's
a little safer than doing it in a browser window edit box.
I thought.  And then my editor crashed.  I haven't lost
stuff like that for a long time.  I don't remember the
last time, but it could have been years.  Then again,
I've lost stuff like that in browser window edit boxes,
so I guess that counts, but it's been a while.  It seems
like it's just on that machine that it has trouble like
that, not the one I'm on now.  And I've been using this
editor, UltraEdit for maybe ten years.  But that may be
changing.  Maybe I'll switch to emacs.  It uses lisp,
and I'm trying to get back into lisp.  I used it a tiny amount
maybe 20 years ago, but it had some nice features then.
And in the original pragmatic programmers book, it recommended
mastering an editor to handle a lot of mechanical stuff
that a programmer needs to do.  I never master Ultraedit,
but I was trying to utilize it a bit better for that
kind of stuff.  Turns out that some of it's regular
expression stuff was actually a bit buggy, so it
didn't work as well as it might have.  But I really
prefer having all the options on menus, which is not
really how emacs works.  I think you're just supposed to know,
or call some documents up or something.  Not at all like menus.


Yesterday, president O was going to talk on 60 minutes.  And
I kind of wanted to see it.  But there was sports on like at
least three channels.  And then 60 minutes was delayed.
And I was getting more and more frustrated.  Plus the
Simpsons wasn't even going to come on.  So at one point
I decided I didn't want to see one second more of sports.
I didn't want to have to see it changing through channels.
I'm tired of the jocks.  I just had to turn it off.  I don't
care what I missed.  Not one more second.  Not going to turn it
on to see if 60 minutes had made it on lest I see any of
that moronic filth.  Of course, going
to Bardog, I was going to be subjected to it because they
would have it on there.  But I would have a little more
time to settle down, and it wasn't my choice, and there
would be other stuff going on, too, and other things to
look at.  Today they have tennis.  Blech.




  • September 13, 2009

Happy Sunday the Thirteenth!  Happy Ides of September!


And the pragmatic guy said that thing about how everything
that ever happened to you is stored in your memory.
Maybe, but maybe not.  That idea mainly comes from
one thing that happened one time when an epileptic
was having brain surgery.  They stimulated a spot
on his brain, and he relived some memory from a long
time ago.  It could have just been some glitch that
happened because he was epileptic.  I don't know
what other evidence there is for that idea.  Maybe
there has been some more.


I've been thinking of going to try to see Ashley for
the last several hours, but I'm not completely in
the mood.  I just haven't completely let the idea go,
though.  Probably won't.  I kind of felt like
going to see Melissa, but I didn't commit and send her a message,
so I didn't feel quite up for it.


The turkey is disappearing pretty fast.  One breast is gone.
One leg.  Most of a thigh.  Half of each wing.  I like
to eat the wing tips when they are crunchy.  I have this
big thing of gravy.  I may have to eat it like soup or
something.  I boiled the giblets, and was thinking
of just making gravy from that, but then I had a lot
of fluid at the bottom of the pan, so I used that too.
I think I really put too much water in pots when I
roast stuff.  I'm probably not supposed to do that
at all, because it doesn't brown it as much, and
you get a lot of flavor from that.  But that's just
how I've been cooking, I guess. Considering that
I cook stuff in the microwave, where it doesn't
get any browning at all, that's just something
I'm used to.  Really very bland.  But I'm kind
of sensitive to spices, too.  I never liked
red hots when I was a kid.  I mention that,
because there is a liquor that they push a
lot at Bardog, Fireball or something like that,
that is kind of flavored like that.  And I
did some of that, and really didn't like it.
Couldn't do it all at once, though I'm not sure
I ever can do shots like that.



  • September 12, 2009

So it turns out I own millions of acres somewhere. I
should sell it and make some money.  I'm not using it.


I'm cooking a turkey.  It's been in the freezer since
last Thanksgiving.  Where does the time go?  The old
roasting pan seems like it's got rust coming through
the black painted coating.  It kind of looks dirty maybe from last time,
but it seems more like it's rust.  The thing is older than
me.  Probably time to let it go.


I just watched a TED talk on happiness.
One of the reddit commentator's said it was life changing.
I don't know about that.  I didn't quite follow it all,
though.  But from what that guy said, I'm trying to
look at it harder.  The first time I was doing other
stuff, so maybe I wasn't concentrating on it so much.
Maybe there are too many things.  He talks about the
simulation in the prefrontal lobe.  And you can change
your views about the world and you synthesize happiness.
There is also an impact bias, where you always thing
things have a bigger impact than you think.  I can
definitely see that I do that.  My whole risk aversion
thinkg.  Not so good.  But all that stuff people get
and seem to thing is a big deal probably isn't such
a big deal either.  Important subject, though.
How to be happy.  Seems important.   When you
don't get what you want, you change what you
feel about what you wanted so that you like what
you have better and what you didn't like not so much.
He mentions Shakespeare saying how nothing is good
or bad but thinking makes it so, which is something
but not quite complete.
He goes with a quote from Adam Smith about how
some things may be better than others, but not
so much that it is worth don't something nasty
that you will regret (lie, cheat, steal...).
So you would expect crooks not to be so happy.
Then again, who is?


Wow, so my castles income is more than 60 million
gold per hour, and it seems kind of pointless now.
They changed the vampires game so that the investments
all have a P/E of 100, which is really pretty high,
and it has now fallen behind my kung fu pets thing.
where I think I've get about $6 million per hour.
So I'm about done.


So I guess the thing about that work was that if I
were to do all the stuff that they were asking for,
I would be getting ripping off, because we agreed
to fewer hours than it would take.  It would have been more
hours if that unexpected stuff wasn't included.
So I was procrastinating.


  And one thing about
getting into a procrastinating mode was that I
didn't reply to Aimee, who replied that she would
like to go to lunch, so when and where?  A couple
days of it was just shock and trying to recover, 
so I got started putting it off.  And then it
just kept going all week.


I think I see an implication of Gilbert's talk, though.
Keeping your options open will reduce your "synthetic happiness"
compared to making a decision and just sticking with it.
So P's are likely to be less happy in that respect.  Well,
keeping your options open after you have something, that is,
keeping open the possibility of changing you mind later.
I guess if you wait before, and then stick with it once
made, that's probably OK.  But probably there is some
issue with thinking it is a bigger deal than it is.




  • September 10, 2009

Finished _Pragmatic Thinking & Learning_.  Just decided
to power through to the end to be done with it.
Had lots of little recommendations.  Don't check your
email all the time.  Write mental map doodles.  Have something
with you all the time to take notes.  Make plans.  It finished up pretty
quick I guess.  I'm probably not going to do much with it.
And I don't what what I could have been thinking I would
get.  He did recommend meditating.  Fine.  Glad to
have it done.




  • September 8, 2009

So I'm trying to read _Pragmatic Thinking & Learning:
Refactor Your Wetware_.  And he's talking about
using oracles or ambiguous stuff to get you thinking.
And then he goes to the "sound of one hand clapping".
Ugh.  That just bothers me.  It's just an emotional
reaction, but what can I do?  Maybe I should send him
an email.



  • September 7, 2009

Argh, you gotta hate when Rocky spills over into your life.
So the bit with me is a thing I did several times.
Janet or somebody will get emotional.  There a bit where
she screams, and I'll yell, "what the fuck, bitch?"
Rocky is kind of nice in letting to just yell something
you might like to some time in real life but really probably
shouldn't.  But since then, there have been quite a few
times now where I just have this urge to just yell that.
And it's only been a couple of days.  Just now it was
Joss Wheadon in the commentary for the Firefly
episode "Objects in Space".  Something about
existentialism and how things can be overpoweringly real.
He talks about seeing it as a kid in Sartre's _Nausea_.
Things are never just partially real-- they are always
complete fully real, and it makes the guy feel "nauseous"
(OK, I don't want to get started on that one again).
But dude, that is so sophomoric.  And Joss admits he
is not intellectual and doesn't know much about philosophy
and he was a kid at the time he had his "existential epiphany".
But gee, man. 


So I didn't end up really saying much of anything.  It was
really busy.  They had to kick people out at three, and
they are usually done at 1.  I stayed around maybe twenty
minutes more, though, which didn't happen on Friday.  
David and another little girl Randi were hanging out, too.
I was thinking maybe asking how she felt about me coming
around, because I'm still not sure.  And I guess we didn't
get to talk much because she was so busy.  But when I was
out the door, and we were hanging out, she finally was
asking me how my week was looking, and really seemed to
linger a bit more than I was expecting.  But I really
felt good that she was talking to me.  I was happy,
though she wasn't really as happy as me.  And it was
that I just didn't want any more.  It was plenty for me.
And I guess that's what happens.  It's only after
it's gone that I want more.


So it was a reddit on some Terry Pratchett book.  The
little lies like the tooth fairy and Santa Claus get
you ready for the big lies, like god, justice, mercy, duty...




  • September 5, 2009

Went to Rocky Horror at the Orpheum.  I've forgotten
almost everything.  Two girls I saw there, I also saw
at Bardog.  Stephanie who was a bartender at Dan McGuinness,
and Carol who I've seen hanging out with Melissa.
Angela put her number in my phone so I could text
her stuff.  I told her to read something by John Schwartzwelder.
I also met her friend Julie.  Studied audio engineering,
but is going to get a masters in forensic psychology,
but will have to leave memphis for that.  Both Julie
and Angela worked at Jarrett's which is near me.
I'm not sure what the deal is, but David came in and
was kissing Julie.


So I think I've done about all I can do in Age of Castles.
I've become the cow.  My hourly income is now over 5 million
gold, so there is no other thing that's really worth doing
to get gold.  I can try to build upsome statistics, including
my defense, but that doesn't make much difference with only
the 6 people on my team, as that's a multiplier for it.  I may
start buying marketplaces just because it's easier buying
a lot of those.  When I came back tonight I had 44 million gold
sitting.  Maybe I should try getting a script to automatically
reinvest, so no money is sitting around to steal.


I keep thinking about it.  I go out on Sunday when it's empty and
I don't really see anyone except Melissa, but I go out on
Friday and I see and talk to several girls.  Most times when
I go out on busy nights it's crowded and I don't talk to
anybody, but sometimes I do.  Hmm.  Haven't really had any luck
in bars, though.  Just don't see the smart chicks there, generally.
I'm not too sure where they hide.  But it's something.  Probably
smart chicks all become doctors and lawyers, anyway.  It's the
most sensible thing.