http://www.amazon.com/dp/0375725784/?tag=codinghorror-20

I don't want to read it. I want to write it. Right now.

Just watched RahXephon the movie. Have not seen the series; don't intend to. The movie cuts awkwardly and you fill in who's who and who's done what, and then realize the reason why they didn't clean up the whys and wherefores : they don't matter. It's a love story.

What better mechanism for expressing true love, than to change the whole world, past remembered, present in state, and future planned, to better suit your beloved?

At the end, the angels go off to begin/return to the world they have created, where will rules all and love rules will. Oh wait, that's this one, isn't it.

What is a man but a collection of memories and a current (oh so very physical) state?

I have an excellent memory, in terms of the senses and the words that have been said. But that's not the important bit. It's willful action to change yourself based on what you've experienced... Damned words. So hard to write in English when you think in Truth.

Back when they had B-movies, this horrendous tripe would have been appropriate. Shyamalamadingdong would have done well with a half hour of screentime , and no expectations of clever dialog or plot advancement. "Night of the Living Dead" had more realistic characters.
Instead of a film, we get the same scene, eight times. Fucking trees!

The doctor says it's just a spider bite. Good. A couple week's of Lyme's = brain damage.

Fuck! The punctures are almost a centimeter apart! This thing was fucking huge!

I need to duct tape around all my room's windows. Then open every box in my room and vacuum it, wetrag every horizontal surface and behind every corner ( my room and its furniture have sixty-eight corners involving surfaces larger than one foot ). Then get on the roof and hose off all the organic garp where they can hide, waiting. Biding.
Then cut down all the trees in a mile from my house, to keep the little buggers from having places to hide. And plot. Then salt the earth, to keep new places for them from growing. Then release the Anti-Spider Virus, which will neuter every spider alive.

And then we'll all be eaten by all the other bugs. Good idea, Chris.

Back to shivering in the corner instead of sleeping, I guess.

{ Not actually afraid of spiders. }

Just smooshed a dog tick against the ceiling, crawling in a spiderlike fashion to the window. They're not far off from spiders, excepting the whole Lyme Disease thing. I am used to checking myself after working outside, but now I have to check myself in the mornings too because leaving the windows closed is not an option at eighty degrees. Damnitall. Wikipedia says that deer ticks, not dog ticks, carry the dreaded Ring Thing. Fine and good - I don't want any of them on me whatsoever.
Right. Writing. Writing. Hah! No time, even in my state of unemployment. There's three full-time jobs here keeping the property maintained! I've got to draw a line somewhere saying there's a point at which a single person just can't keep up. Can't expand the lawn anymore, can't do more plantings up the hill ( fallen leaves are nearly impossible to get out of myrtle ), can't run the chipper-shredder anywhere but the driveway... lots of small but insurmountable problems. Eternal annoyances, as it were.
I've started a potted vegetable garden. There isn't an open patch of ground around the house free for gardening, so I mixed a couple hundred pounds of forest soil, peat moss, and commercial topsoil together, and potted it all. The tomatoes look rather silly in their tiny confines. Really, I have no idea how far the root systems of tomatoes, peppers, and basil go - just have to see how well each kind of plant does in its clay confines. I should snap some pictures.
I should note about the chipper-shredder ; it's not nearly as fun as the giant one we rented once. Nor as safe. You feel like doing some heroic efforts to pushing it in, and accomplish nothing but putting your fingers within inches of the blades. The giant chipper-shredder grabbed everything you gave it and tore it out of your hands, and you put your hands nowhere near it. The little one we own gives the illusion of safety.
People fight hard to maintain their illusions. Not this one.

I watched an Uwe Boll movie this afternoon, "Alone in the Dark". I fell asleep. Are you supposed to fall asleep in horror movies? It was awful.

Putting things together, sorting things out, home chores, tending family things, etc... Multiple entries to be put up here from past months.

... you burn your hand just holding it a foot in front of the open stove for three seconds.

I think there are twenty pounds of coals at orange-red temperature in there. Sweet.


[ thinking ... there ARE ( plural, after all ) twenty separate pounds ... there is ( THERE EXISTS ) twenty pounds ... hmm ]

2 new ideas :

Programmable Pets. You set your kitten to wake you up at precisely 7:15 in the morning. It paws you awake at 7:15 AM. Not 5, nor 9, but at the time you set it to. It's all about the implants - it feels no particular desire to play with your nose until the electronic interface says so.
This idea requires an enormous level of understanding of neural interfaces, and also requires cloned pets and the ability to halt kitten development at perhaps 3/4 adult, when the cuteness and fluffiness curves maximize.
So sad that I'm not a multinational corporation. Or perhaps a mad scientist. Someone needs to give Tall Eric a grant, and I mean now.


<a href="http://whiteninjacomics.com/>White Ninja</a> is Teh Internet. It has woken, and is using all of the gathered intelligence of the world from forum posts to engender punchlines. That's right, I said engender. Look it up, fuckers.

Spot the Asshole.  This is a game very good to play precisely once for avoidable bad situations.

Nick has poor health.  I knew this.  An early Other Realms meeting last year, he was coughing a great deal and making it unpleasant to be in the room and I intimated that he should step outside and get it over with.  Who's the asshole?

Shisho injured himself recently.  I knew this.  He agreed to come to teach STOIC last Wednesday.  He did not come and didn't tell anybody about it, and we senpai looked really foolish for excitedly announcing "Sensei is coming!"
He is not paid for STOIC.  He is not rich.
He was in charge of STOIC and ran it like he runs Dragon Fire.  Completely under his control.  We cannot allow him to do that nowadays (let alone want to).
There are other promises he hasn't kept.

I'm paying the man for Dragon Fire lessons.  I don't take martial arts seriously.  I do it to keep up relations between STOIC (a club I love) and Dr. Hufford.   I have not explicitly said this.  I am better at kenjutsu than I was, but have not committed myself to it nor to making my body more capable of it.

==
Maybe Shisho will come tonight.  He said he would last night.  Independently I got Bill to agree to come too.  Who knows why Bill didn't come last week.  Was Shisho driving?  Does Bill not like being up front?
I prefer to stand in line and be with the group, but don't mind showing things that I'm sure of.
===
Hash tables bother me.  [several paragraphs of being unhappy with misunderstanding hash tables deleted]

An excellent beginning for my entry in the <a href="http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/>Bulwer-Lytton Bad Fiction Contest</a>.

- - - Suddenly and without warning, the average cup size in the room ballooned by a size and a half. - - -
 

Sensei didn't come to fucking practice.

What i want to sy tomorrow : Cupcake and I are the senior instructors of STOIC. We teach your style, a fat dude who doesn't care about martial arts and a thoughtless something-or-other. Help us. Live up to it when you say "I'm coming to help instruct STOIC tomorrow"

And I've got my Networks exam tomorrow evening, so the most I can do is go to DragonFire and be an ass for a couple minutes, then leave.

Can't send an email.

Can't phone him.

Can't go.


END : ONE SINGLE FUCKING FLY IN THE FUCKING APARTMENT. I CANNOT KILL IT. I FUCKING HATE BUGS.

Things I've Discovered Recently
1 ) Club officers do not volunteer.  Most must be told what to do and when to do it.  If they are of the go-getter variety, they will go and do things without asking, and possibly without thinking
2) The FireWire Target Mode on Macs is the best thing since sliced bytes.  I <i>know</i> I can plug an Ethernet cable between my old Vaio and my iMac and do a direct fast transfer of files (might have to buy or make a crossover cable) but the FTM was easy and damned quick
3) Linux has a lot, a lot, a lot of customizability and freedom to experiment, but if something doesn't work, it's almost impossible to tell if it's a) stupidity on your part b) inattention on your part c) poorly written or incomplete drivers d) inscrutable hardware problems
4) Senior projects are frightening
5) Either I might have a motivation problem with my job, or life is worth too much to spend a Saturday afternoon cleaning projector lenses

It's like some grand geneticist creates a monkey to play chess but it's too awesome.  It beats him everywhere everywhen; it follows him to the Chess League and defeats him and everyone laughs and now he has to live under a bridge.

The tweening project!  I was doing something simple originally, decided "that's too simple to be useful; it must have an oversight."  So I did something more clever that overcame the perceived oversight.

It didn't work.

A week of DOESN'T WORK, DOESN'T WORK, DOESN'T WORK and I go back to the old way.

Is this programming?

Just cleaned out the office mice.  Didn't I just do this?  NO!  It was last year!  Seriously, more than ten months ago!  And all my moments in that office are the same!

Step 1 : Go to Williams Math and Science Building.
Step 2 : Never leave.
Step 3 : There is no Step 3.

Whee! Bought the wrong book for Algorithms. Not in the Library. Don't want to spend $140 in the Bookstore on it (but the BS is open for another half hour for me to change my mind). It will take me four or five hours to do this homework, and can't start until tomorrow, given the ideal situation that Pat lets me borrow his book. Damnit.

I finally recognized that I was a senior yesterday afternoon. Not an upperclassman, not the senpai of STOIC (now THAT was entertaining), not a rushed CS student. A senior! I'm almost finished here.

STOIC is going! Best situation : Shisho decides to get 'r done NOW and comes to teach every Monday hence, we keep at least half of the folk who came to the first practice, we get a bunch of the folk from the first practice to come to Late Night afterward, and we get through this semester of STOIC and the worst injury is me pulling my knee every single practice.

Reading Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" and remembering that sometimes the narrator lies. Hell, sometimes the author lies.
Busses suck.

Do I have to wear a surgical mask to sleep? Is there some way so that I don't wake with aching sinuses and sneeze brown in the shower? How do I make my nasal cavity happy?
I went and wiped all the surfaces and slapped the curtains outside to try and get some of the dust out of here. Without being able to close the windows at night it's nothing.
I've tried the whole bucket-full-of-ice-with-a-fan-on-it thing. It doesn't keep up with me.

Atlas Shrugged is coming to film. I'll definitely go see it, because Angelina Jolie has great big lips. I thought when I heard she'd be in the movie that she'd be the grand haughty wife, but she's to be the plain heroine instead. Fine, fine, good, good. Has she played a plain character in a recent movie? Not one I've seen.

I want to see how they set the stage technology-wise. The book is notably vague on it, and (as far as I can tell) the history of the world went Great Depression -> minor recovery -> creeping socialism -> grand collapse . No WWII, no development of the military-industrial complex, and most importantly, no ordinary people forged into citizens by war

I will be very unhappy if they try to put the movie in contemporary times, with contemporary COMMON tech. Washing machines and CD players are ubiquitous becuase of the effort of a small number of geniuses, a large number of skilled ordinary people, and an enormous number of unskilled ordinary people. All of this on top of military-driven development in the basic sciences.

I am not a liberal; I do not love and respect weakness or incompetence; the only thing I hate worse than paying for a jobless New Havenite to have babies is paying for a Houstonite to do the same. The first human off to Alpha Centauri should be a self-made billionaire, and it is right that those who are remembered are those who perform great acts of creation.

Morality Development

The past few years I've been working with the assumption of the following morality development :

Animal - avoiding pain, hunger, fear. Seeking pleasure, sensation
Child - avoiding shame, loneliness, . Seeking approval
Youth - avoiding boredom, guilt, group disrespect. Seeking esteem, personal wealth
Adult - avoidance of dependance, debt, personal disrespect. Seeking perfection of skill, love,

There are more words, but those were the important ones. Somewhere down a few more steps, there's another level where every action is motivated by love, for every human alive and yet to live.
I'm not entirely certain that skill and wealth are different.


Why am I back to being motivated by childish things? Why do I spend my days just trying to get the damn things right once in a while? Why am I driven from my work overwhelmed by the futility of my actions?