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Thu Apr 12 08:31:52 EDT 2007
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.
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Fri Dec 29 03:39:28 EST 2006
One of the towns (subdivision, city) near me is called Davie. Its main
claim-to-infamy, besides some notorious sex scandals, is that the city
tries to be a modern Western town. There are hitching posts outside
cellphone stores, faux dilapidated storefronts, cider barrels, those
swinging half doors on several restaurants... They also have folks
riding horses and country music festivals where people can dance.
The dancing is interesting... People seem to genuinely have fun; though
watching grown men who never once milked a cow or shoveled bullcrap
sporting cowboy hats, silver belt buckles and yelling "Yeehaw!" (really!)
does look bizarre to some folks. The dancers sometimes stand in place,
hands on hips, and do this RiverDance looking jig. Other times they
swing around each other like cogs in a machine. A dancer may start with
one partner and end up with a random (maybe??) stranger.
Sometimes I wonder if the dancers work out ahead of time who they'll
end up with at the end of the dance. I remember as a kid figuring out
where to stand so the Engine Number 9 on the Chicago Line would stop. Do
the more experienced dancers scan the hall and think, "I do NOT want to
end up with that weird looking Asian dude!" and position themselves
accordingly?
It's interesting how the meetups occur. People will meet in the middle
of the floor for a few seconds, smile as they spin around, then move to
the next partner. In some dances there's a possibility you could meet the
same partner after a few revolutions, but probably not likely. If someone
were drunk on too much Christmas eggnog (or at least in that heady torpor
from too little sleep), then they might say that the dance is some metaphor
for life and the seemingly happenstance meetings between dancers is like
the happenstance meetings with people in the Real World. We meet them
briefly, dance for a while, then part ways. Maybe we'll intersect again,
but likely not. Perhaps after the Dance is over we can sip lemonade on
the balcony while looking at the stars...but we can't count on that. So
Dance like it's the last...
2EM-See you on the balcony one day...
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Fri Oct 20 22:09:44 EDT 2006
Battlestar Galactica is awesome. It's so good that I actually broke down
and built a MythTV box just so I won't miss an episode.
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Tue Jul 11 20:28:54 EDT 2006
Sometime around 1985, listening to Dark Side of the Moon. I have the
two Emerson speakers ("room sized") sitting a foot apart, leaning on each other.
Me? I'm laying on the floor with my head between the speakers, eyes closed,
a towel draped over all to prevent any light from entering. At some point the
song merges into the static at the end of the tape because the "matter of fact
it's all dark" is barely audible on the low-end speakers. Sometime around 1986,
browsing in a music store that stood a few blocks from my high school, finding
Piper at the Gates of Dawn in a clearance rack (FOOLS!). Elation. I wore
that tape out over the next year.
The black and green scarecrow is sadder than me
But now he's resigned to his fate
'Cause life's not unkind - he doesn't mind.
He stood in a field where barley grows.
- Syd Barret
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Mon Jun 19 14:21:53 EDT 2006
Been experimenting with video editing software recently (not on Linux, alas).
This past month we put together a short Star Trek spoof and played around with
chroma keying, sound editing, and all the fun, consumer-space toys. OK, so none
of the video editing was done on Linux, but it was everywhere else. The sound
was cleaned and edited in Audacity and Ardour, the chroma key background images
were done with Gimp, a Samba server held all the files (and this was a real
timesaver), background tracks were converted with Mplayer. For the actual video
edit we used Pinnacle Studio 10. It's easy to use, but gosh, seems like beta
release software because of all the crashes. I think it crashed 15 times over the
course of 3 days of editing (maybe 20 hours total). Windows didn't crash during
this time, but there were several updates that required reboots. One of these
occurred at night and forced a reboot which wiped out some documents I'd neglected
to save since I HAD NOT PLANNED TO REBOOT. Bleah.
Speaking of video, I've been trying to catch up on films that I've always planned
to watch but could never find the time or motivation. If I were talking classes
the motivation would be a passing grade but out of class it's usually just some
way to pass the time. But I gotta do the time. Gotta watch the clips, rewind the
good and the bad parts and dissect what makes them good or bad. Gotta see how
the camera is placed, where the closeups occur, how the breaks happen. And you
know what? Even some really horrible films have a good scene or two. Maybe a bad
film is missing a story, or characters, or interesting camera angles, or dialogue..
but there's usually something that's done right. Anyhoo, just spent 28 hours straight
watching "Requiem for a Dream", "Raging Bull", "LOTR: Return of the King",
"Big Fish", "Life is Beautiful", "Kill Bill 2" and a few others. Paused and rewound
innumerable times, took notes, listened to the commentary. And it was actually fun.
In other events, I wrote some more really horrible prose. It read beautifully at
3AM but was hideous and embarrassing the morning after. There's a joke about
relationships in there somewhere... Well not what you'd think. The joke is that
the prose was so horrible that words that were never meant to have a relationship
somehow found themselves paired together on that page. The lesson is that this
particular dorky wannabe writer shouldn't write about things alien to him...
like nightclubs, or pick up lines, or gritty, I've-killed-many-men-before type
dialogue. Yeah, it was pretty hideous. Yup. Hideous. Very much so.
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Sat Mar 25 22:55:00 EST 2006
Just finished reading an article about how movie house concession vendors
are hard hit from the slump in attendance over the past few years. And
if my movie going habits are anything like the rest of the country's, then
I could understand why attendance is poor. Though I may have delusions to
the contrary, I am distressingly average when it comes to taste... no
scratch that ... preferences in movies and music. And there's part
of the problem. A few weeks ago there was a sale at a large video rental
chain. Pre-owned movies were available at 3 for $20. Sounded like a great
deal. So, with $20 in hand (or pocket, actually) I went browsing the aisles.
And I browsed. And browsed. I could not find three movies that had any
particular appeal to me. I ended up filling the quota but after watching
them, it seemed like $20 wasted. Imagine if I'd gone to the theatre and
spent three hours and $30 instead?
Of course the argument is that it's not only the movie, but the movie going
experience. You get to hang out with your friends, relax, maybe enjoy a coffee
after the movie. This would be true except for the (literally) screaming
kids (i.e., under 30 year olds), stale popcorn, and uncomfortable seating at
my last experience. For the record, it was for "Serenity", a movie which I
later purchased on DVD.
What's the solution? Maybe the first step is in recognizing the problem.
It's not piracy. It's not competition from video games or the cost of tickets.
The movies are just so thoroughly *boring* that no one wants to bother. And
I don't mean that they lack guns or lasers or special effects. They lack story,
lack memorable characters. I get the distinct impression that the movie
was sold to some Hollywood producer based on a single sentence.
Anyhoo, been preparing for an upcoming talk on Xen virtualization with Linux.
And been playing with SELinux. And FC5. Lots of fun.
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Sat Feb 25 03:52:28 EST 2006
Completely wide awake.
Been geeking out on Neverwinter Nights and Battlestar Galactica, building PCs,
reinstalling OSes for the heck of it, writing really bad prose.
When I was a kid I'd once read a book about how some people could move things
with their minds. You just have to really concentrate, really *believe* that
you could do it. Being young, I believed it. Fully. Completely. And I tried
for hours to make a pen shift or a marble roll. I pulled a feather from my
pillow (yes, I had a pillow with actual feathers) and tried that, thinking
it would be easier to start with something light. Of course it never moved.
Every few days I would try again with the same results.
Dunno why I'm mentioning it except that I've been thinking about belief,
religion, disillusionment. It's true in a purely psychological sense that if
you believe something, then it's true. I.e., your perception is your reality.
Your mind will rationalize experience to fit within the context of your
reality paradigm.
Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe that idea is just some misinterpretation of a
concept in one of my college psychology texts. Maybe it was an idea used to
illustrate a point such as, "back in the day, people believed that flies
spontaneously generated from decaying matter."
So an idea gets into my head. It's a simple idea that seems perfectly logical. And
therein lies the trap. In our busy lives we do not have the time or *rigor* to
investigate everything we read. Perfectly simple ideas can be perfectly wrong.
And that's part of my fear. I've been somewhat complacent in my "knowledge". No,
scratch that... I've been arrogant in my perceived knowledge.
I know a little math, can construct elaborate arguments about some dead Russian
authors, can explain how an operating system scheduler works. But it may be all so
much blather. Alice just jumped through the looking glass into a post-Godelian
nightmare. There's nothing here, nothing there. Turning in that widening gyre...
Tomorrow when I read this after my fifth cup of coffee I'll cringe.
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Thu Feb 23 10:02:35 EST 2006
She stood there looking at the sunlight play upon the water. A billion
reflected little suns danced upon the waters. This is the stuff you remember,
she thought.
That night she stood upon the same beach and watched the companion moon glitter
upon the crests of the receding tide. It was important that he shared this
moment with her. In a moment of decision she darted back to the car and found
him tapping away at his keyboard. She opened the door and tugged on his arm,
attempting to pull him away from the pallid glow of the laptop.
She wanted to tell him about this need for immediacy but she worried about
his reactions. When the world is dust at your feet, she wanted to say, and the
bright, brilliant stars have cartwheeled into oblivion into a darkening sky,
and all that you hold dear has disintegrated into the component bits of matter,
a plasma of atoms and quarks blended into a cosmic soup of riotous energy,
and all is gone -- it won't be the scraggly lines of computer code or the
storage capacity of the array that will matter, but these memories of salt
air and cold wind, the rough sand, the taste of my lips, my warmth against
yours as we stand on the Edge of the World... but she didn't say those words
and instead all that she wanted to say, desired to say, escaped as a simple,
"You gotta see this."
So he resisted. After all, there was an innate beauty in the code that he was
on the verge of completing. He'd pushed the correct values into the proper
registers, computed the necessary offset for the data buffer, aligned the
memory segments to the correct boundaries. It would work on the next run he
was certain. He initiated the execution sequence and awaited the successful
output. In a moment the seemingly random datafile would transform into a
recognizable sequence of digits. But it didn't. He saw that there was an
undocumented sequence of bytes that shifted the segment. He'd only need to dump
the memory and examine it to determine what it did... would only take a minute.
"Hon," she said, desperation masked by her soft voice. She respected his zeal
and knew that her own passions mirrored his, though expressed in different
ways. But this was important. "I think you should see this."
It's not that she lacked the words to express herself. Words unstrung were
not pearls, she knew. They would not stand by themselves as beautiful or
inspired. She could construct necklaces of words, strung together so that
the sentence glittered as a thing of beauty.
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Wed Dec 21 00:25:35 EST 2005
All I want for Christmas is my two front speakers...
(Apologies to JJ)
Oh Santa won't you buy me a Ferrari GT
My friends all drive beamers and my ride's not elite
Worked hard for the Fields Top Nine and the Janus High Yield
So Santa won't you buy me a Ferrari GT
The Spirit of Christmas has been exorcised. It's gone. It screamed
as it left. It shrieked. It wailed for its mother (Father?).
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Wed Dec 21 00:05:03 EST 2005
Sadie sometimes calls
she asks her Ma where her sister went
and why the door is always closed
there's a stopwatch on the nightstand
and a songbook on the floor
Daddy's listening to the stock report
he's telling Sadie to shut the door
But Sadie's always wondering
Sadie wants to know
why she mustn't dance the minuet
and why the door is always closed
there's a seashell on the window sill
and a picture of the shore
Daddy's talking about the president
he's telling Sadie to shut the door
But Sadie's always wandering
Sadie wants to know
Why she must not sing aloud
and why the door is always closed
She mustn't touch the teddy bears
She mustn't move the chair
She mustn't wind the music box
She mustn't even stare
But Sadie's always wondering
Sadie wants to know
Sadie's such a curious kid
Sadie's got to know
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Mon Nov 14 19:00:27 EST 2005
It took two weeks and a day to get power back after Wilma's little romp. Now I'm
back.
Went to the Renaissance Festival this past weekend. It seemed a heckuva lot smaller
than I remembered it to be. No tromping through Vizcaya this time; instead it was in
a local park (Toppekeegee Yugnee). Not usually a problem except that Wilma had shaken
off lots of branches from the trees and it looked particulary decrepit. I did buy a
sword however, and swung it around a few times when I got home. And ummm, yeah, I
did pretend to be Corwin of Amber hacking my way up the mountain...
Speaking of Wilma, I'd have video except that the idiotic Windows machine has failed
*again*. It's definitely not the hardware, just some corruption in the Media Player
application. It's already taken four hours of troubleshooting time and it looks like
it'll be another four to reinstall. Having already shelled out $100 to buy the piece
of garbage that is Windows XP Home, I'm furious. P*ssed. Mad as hell. Monopolists
suck.
On a better note, I've been having lots of fun with MythTV on a Fedora Core 4 box. It
works well and in all honesty is a lot more professional looking than I'd imagined.
The thing with Open Source and Free Software is that they may do the job admirably,
but tended to look rather bland and utilitarian. No so with MythTV. I'm putting
together some notes and whatnot for a later presentation...
And... been playing with OpenLDAP. Not exactly hilarity, but interesting.
Who am I kidding? The fact that I got some insane thrill out getting a live video to
play across my network is probably grounds for being committed. If I was wealthy
they could call me eccentric.
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Mon Nov 1 20:42:08 EST 2005
Well, I had a lot of fun with Wilma...
After seven days without power I decided to power up my web/mail server on a 400W
inverter powered by my car. I ran power cables, plugged up the server, router,
switch and a monitor. I tried first to bring the server up by itself. However, I
couldn't ssh into the machine from a laptop plugged into the switch. Durn. I'd need
to power on the monitor. Tried that... and immediately everything rebooted (the
inverter couldn't do the monitor and server). So the next twenty minutes was spent
trying to blindly bring up the server with just the flashing light of the HD light
to guide me.
Normally this is a matter of getting e2fsck to check /dev/hda1, hda2, etc.. No such
luck. All the partitions were LVM volumes and I didn't know any of the names. So I
had to blindly grep for ext3 in /etc/fstab, cut the device field to pipe it via
xargs to e2fsck. And somehow, somehow, it fscked properly. And it finally came
online.
How's that for a car powered pc.
Anyhoo -- I have about 30 minutes of video as Wilma passed by. There's not a lot --
mostly what I could catch from my front porch -- and it's not even the worst of the
storm. We lost tiles, trees, fencing.
And there's always a silver lining. For the first time in five years I've met all my
neighbors. My daughter played basketball with some similar-aged kids from down the
block. I watched Mars rise on a cloudless night. I drank hot tea (courtesy of a
propane stove) on my lawn.
But it's starting to warm up again.. Not the 100+ heat index dog breath sweaty
stickiness of Katrina's passing, but getting there. And my roof is leaking.
Gotta love Florida.
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Thu Oct 20 21:28:38 EDT 2005
Whooohoooo!! The film we worked on will be at the Ft. Lauderdale Film festaival on
October 28. Link is here.
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Wed Sep 28 01:31:12 EDT 2005
experimenting with stream of consciousness and remembered how difficult they are to
read for anyone but the author and it doesn't matter anyway I'm thinking about
Voyager 1 being the first HUMAN object to cross into interstellar space, the sun a
distant memory, and the infinite dark or somewhat dark ahead and nothing nothing
nothing but memory and the incredible solitude just crushes me to the point that I'm
having trouble breathing because I can't comprehend these incredible gulfs of space.
sometimes sometimes I wish that there was another person who wouldn't mind listening
to my rambles about God and science and opera and Bob Dylan and prime sieves and
discrete cosine transforms and U2 and how a sunset of Maui just pierces your soul and
how coffee is not about the caffeine but that midnight clarity and why Munch and
Warhol and Conrad just GET IT and why Amelie and Apocalypse Now are sibling films and
understand why someone could sit for an hour watching a rock do nothing or sit for
night and watch a baby sleep or put a naked palm on an open flame just to feel the
pain because pain connects you to the soul or to life or to God or why clowns are
evil and Mickey Mouse is the Devil because there's nothing so distressing as the
almost audible click of minds snapping shut because they don't understand you not
because you're particularly smart but because they've been conditioned to mock those
that aren't exactly like everyone else. And I hate that I'm starting to laugh at
scatalogical humor because it's expected of me.
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Sun Sep 18 04:36:38 EDT 2005
Not awake, not asleep. Satriani's "Ice 9" a soundtrack to my dreams. The house
surrounded by brown water. Violent sky. Somewhere a dog barking. Is this Apocalypse?
Why can't I walk? Don't go outside 'cos the sun'll kill ya. Bring a gun. Someone who
shouldn't be there, is. "K-, I'm scared," she says. So it was a dream was a a dream
was a dream and this nightmare is real and the barking dog and distant screams and
staccato gunshot bursts are real and the email was a dream. Then light. More light
streaming through the curtain in the dream and then not in a dream. Drift back in for
a moment then out again.
Weird dream.
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Mon Aug 29 21:07:31 EDT 2005
Katrina barely noticed us, situated as we were on the very periphery of her vision.
That glance was enough to knock out our power for three days.
She dallied for a while in parts further south then took a swim in the Gulf. The
warm waters must have roused her from that Florida malaise because she emerged from
the water a lot fiestier than she went in.
Some random thoughts:
It's the oddest thing to regard a storm from within the "safety" of your home. We
heard the banshee-like howling, watched the palm trees bend over, felt the air shift
whenever a particularly strong gust arrived. At the point my daughter said, "I'm
scared," I realized that there was also some part of me that felt the same
way.
I went outside once, just to say that I did, during a particularly violent portion.
It was an exhilarating feeling to have the rain sting my palms and to hear that wind
roaring in my ears. Humbling too.
I'd be cat food if I lived in any other time. Without air condititioning, hot water,
refridgerator, and a computer I'm useless.
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Wed Aug 24 23:23:38 EDT 2005
Practice and practice... I've done years of practice: math problems, penmanship,
scales up and down a fretboard, katas. The idea was that endless repetitiion would
lead to mastery. Do something often enough and it becomes automatic. The brain learns
the patterns, reinforces the synaptic pathways that trigger an action, and the lesson
can be completed almost without thinking.
One of the practice exercises in a fiction course I took some years ago was to take
an object or a sentence and construct a story around it. The empty soda can on a
street corner may tell of a man that waited for a bus; the bus arrived and he got on,
his journey to LA begun. He was perhaps a guitar player or an actor. He leaves behind
a job in the steel mill.
Today I received an email that a set of car keys and a pair of sunglasses were found
in the ladies restroom on the third floor. No doubt a woman left these in haste after
realizing that she would no longer need them. She adjusted her makeup, called her
parents to let them know everything was fine, then dropped the keys and glasses next
to the sink. She was last seen hurrying out of the office building to an awaiting
black car whose driver could have been a man or woman. The car sped off, heading
west, and was never seen again.
I was grabbing a coffee earlier this morning and spotted a flyer for a new nightclub
on the beach...
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Mon Aug 15 22:05:18 EDT 2005
Whew... Lots has happened since the last entry... Where to begin?
My local car club had the annual
Summer Gathering. Met lots of interesting folks, talked about cars, and drove around
a lot. We convoyed to South Beach, wilted in the heat, ate gelato at a friend's shop,
and lots of similar stuff. That was fun.
Then I was lucky enough to take part in the 48 Hour
Film Contest. I played a minor part -- ran some errands, hit the actors in the
head a few times with the boom mic, pointed a gun at some guy trying to dump a body.
It was a heckuva lot of fun and an incredible amount of work. In 48 hours, most of
the crew got by with only a few hours sleep. On Friday night the team received the
genre; we got "spy/detective." By 3AM Saturday morning, the script was written. By
6AM most everyone was up in preparation for a 7AM start. And it started at 7AM and
didn't end until somewhere around 6AM the next day. After the drive home it was close
to 8AM when I finally dozed off. Then by Noon we were heading back to the shooting
location to clean up.
Took a drive up to Orlando to visit my sister. On the way back we saw a car that had
overturned. Another 5 miles further and we saw ambulances, fire trucks, squad cards,
and similar utility vehicles heading the other way. More on this later...
Read lots of stuff, including War of the Worlds, The Filmmaker's
Handbook, portions of Being and Nothingness, Hecht's Doubt. Saw
some interesting movies, most notably Napoleon Dynamite and finally understand
the "Vote for Pedro" t-shirts I've noticed around the coffee shops.
And sleep is as elusive as ever. It's apparently quite difficult for those who can
sleep to understand how aggravating this is. There's an almost palpable sense of
urgency that precludes me from slithering into that good night for a few hours.
Better sleep through chemicals? Nah...
"And he avoided closing his eyes because that would bring dreams that were always
too real. In them he could discern the hints of incense and cinnamon from her
perfume, feel the piercing pleasure/pain of her fingernails on his shoulder, hear her
inhalations and exhalations. At one point he'd opened his eyes but remained in that
dream state. The realms merged and she was there again, sipping coffee cross-legged
on the bed, reading about comets and stardust. For moments he wondered if it had
really happened -- the empty pill bottle, the empty wine bottle, the note scribbled
on a cocktail napkin..."
Comment
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Wed Jun 22 21:49:43 EDT 2005
Those who know me know that I enjoy washing cars... not just my cars, but really any
car. I enjoy washing off the dirt, drying, then following up with a terry cloth towel
to get all the crevices where water hides. I enjoy applying wax, polishing it away,
watching the sun glint of the shiny paint. It's calming, in an almost meditative way,
to vacuum up crumbs and bits of detritus that less patient folks would leave. People
ask me why I never have my car cleaned by the crew at work. I tell them it's partly
because I don't (hmm, how can I delicately say this) trust anyone else, and
partly because the 6AM car wash on a Saturday morning is the biggest thrill for me
outside of spending time with my daughter.
There's nothing like a freshly *detailed* car sparkling in the morning sun and
knowing that you made it that way...
I'm lucky in that I can park on the same side of the building closest to my office...
er, cubicle. It's a short hop up a flight of stairs, quite convenient. All the better
to enter quietly in the morning, and more importantly, leave quietly in the
evening.
All well and good, you say, but why this vain and pretentious ramble?
This month I won a company award.
The two prizes? A parking spot near the front entrance and... a car wash.
I'm starting to hear that cosmic laughter growing louder and louder.
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Tue Jun 7 22:11:20 EDT 2005
Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson....
Upgraded the entire web/mail infrastructure over the weekend. There were/are some
migration glitches, but for the most part things are working (except for comments,
which once again are broken).
Got a new camera. Did some filming. Rewrote a portion of the script that almost
worked in prose, but was unworkable on camera:
"Screwing with my head is one thing, a mindfuck is something else. But this
goes beyond that. It was fucking brain rape, you sick little fuck," she screamed.
Kevin sat back down. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Stall, he thought.
Just stall the bitch. He tapped the butt a few times, moistened his lips, reached
into his pocket again for a lighter.
Anyway...
Built another PC to handle some of the editing tasks. It's another AMD 3000XP with 1G
RAM, and a low-end Nvidia card. Drives are 7200RPM 160G units, JBOD giving me close
to half a terabyte (unformatted).
Peered into the abyss for a while, and it peered back.
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Wed May 25 20:15:41 EDT 2005
Shortcuts p*ss me off. Not the shortcut through some scenic meadow, but the
shortcuts of the lazy. Half-assed jobs irritate me. Those folks who cheated in
high school and college, cheated throughout their lives because it was easier
than studying, irritate me. That slack jawed moron that once offered a partnership
in his new business with the words, "that computer shit that you do," irritates me.
And I irritate myself. I despise my pudgy softness, my recent (two year long)
inability to concentrate, my damned laziness. I despise the fact that I've parceled
off pieces of my soul to stoke some hideous financial machine. I've traded dignity
for dollars, and surrendered my ideals for an IRA. I despise that I whine when others
are far worse off. I despise my hesitation to commit this entry because others might
think I'm unstable.
And worst of all, I can't sleep. I start to dread midnight, because 1AM follows so
soon. And I dread 1AM because that means only three more hours to try to sleep.
Because if I don't fall asleep by 4AM, then I might as well stay up until 6AM. And
it's a totally unproductive waking state. I'm too tired, physically and mentally, to
read or code or write or study, but I just can't fall asleep.
Comment
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Mon May 16 21:02:52 EDT 2005
I've been doing some research on the effects of a mild sugar intake on toddlers and
adolescents. My results were not unexpected but startling nonetheless . Here are the before and
after video of
my experiment. It is not for the squeamish parent.
Comment
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Thu Mar 24 20:50:07 EST 2005
We had one of those glorious Florida spring days this week. A deep cerulean
ceiling hung above, cloudless and vast. The air itself possessed a distinct
clarity, a crispness, such as one would expect in some remote virgin tract or
mountain valley. No wonder that every culture has attempted to subsume this
event into their belief systems; phoenix and serpent and messiah alike, all
reborn from the winter blight...
Previous to this, a cold and withering gray rain had arrived. From the office
windows I'd seen it roll in. Now I have no problems affirming the Might of
Nature. I've seen Her in violent fury, swathed in hurricane winds and a cloak
of rain -- not that gentle stinging rain of a summer thunderstorm, but that
horizontal rain, the pelting of marbles type rain, the dangerous rain. Yet
watching those clouds massing about our arrogant little enclave on the edge of
the Everglades, I felt small. Threatened. It was an uneasy feeling, and at one
point some ancient neocortical cells fired and I felt the odd coldness on the
back of my neck.
Speaking of which, I've always found it interesting how that base animal brain
influences and dictates our conscious thoughts. It reminds me of the opening in
the sci-fi horror film, Pitch Black. It too was a story of contrasts... from the
blinding white landscapes scorched by the dual suns to the unseen terrors crawling
and flapping within the utter darkness. And though that terrible sun is a killer,
it's those flapping things that terrify us. In the light we can put faces to
the demons. We can prod the proverbial carcass, study, dissect the beasts if
only with big guns and sharp knives. In the dark we've lost a sense, perhaps
the greatest sense. Yea, for no matter what some may say about the equivalence
of our senses, I'm certainly not about to start feeling around with *my* fingers
for that slimy, ravenous thing hiding in the lightless interior of my starship.
I suppose that's why I so thoroughly enjoy science fiction. For good or bad, it has a way of
stripping away the niceties of traditional prose and confronting the reader with
the raw ideas. Want to debate the merits of environmental policy? Forget pretty
Arthurian analogies and veiled references to Mother Nature as some tea-drinking,
sandal wearing artiste... Nah, tangle with Her and it's Damnation Alley time and
it's not some Horseman with a big sword but poisoned rivers, metal-eating rain, dead
forests and mile after mile of parching sand...
And right now it's red pill/blue pill time.
Does either one scare you?
Comment
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Mon Mar 14 04:02:13 EST 2005
Can't sleep. Added some overdue content on Linux LVM. Some
minor cleanups of some backend code. Fixed lots of other minor website issues. This
is getting to be a fulltime job.
Speaking of which, I've been waging war against that mass of weeds that I call my
lawn. It's quite apparent that the lawn is winning. Today I found several
lettuce-like looking things scattered about. In little over three days they'd sprung
up, complete with near invisible miniature spikes that penetrate bare palms quite
easily. Ask me how I know.
I've heard that there's a certain virtue in this short of physical labor. The
repetition, the caustic sun, the sweat the blood -- all apparently contribute to a
certain meditative state that is somehow enlightening. After all, there's not much
thinking involved. Not to say that my usual grind is all that edifying; it's
just that an IT job is filled with distractions and peculiar little problems that
though routine, require enough mental effort that Socratic excursions are nigh
impossible.
Then again, I have spent some time in dusty warehouses counting little plastic
widgets into little plastic bags, counting the bags into boxes, and the boxes into
racks. I'd recount other experiences in those hellhole summer jobs of my youth, but
frankly and thankfully, my mind refuses. Maybe I lacked the mental rigor, but there
were no Melvillean (that a word?) escapes, no journeys of the mind. The rote, the
sheer dullness of that sordid little building, just withered the mind away.
Tired now. (Or is that Bored now?).
(So, Child of Light, I get it now. Acquired a telescope recently and took a peek.
Just as a I remembered it. Wave back once in a while, eh?)
Comment
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Sun Jan 30 15:41:27 EST 2005
So earlier this week I was getting ready for work. For Christmas I'd received a
shirt, and I decided to break it in finally. After a few moments spent scrounging up
a scissors I started removing all the tags. My daughter watched as I did this.
I wasn't the brightest of kids. I remember playing for hours with a piece of L-shaped
stick that vaguely resembled a pistol. I pretended that pencil nubs were rockets. At
one point I had tied the fabric from a broken umbrella about my neck and became
Batman. I was a dorky kid.
Anyhoo, my daughter likes stickers. She places them everywhere: on walls, on the
refridgerator, on the back of my pant leg as I leave for work... Remembering this,
and noticing that one of the tags on my new shirt was made of shiny foil, I snipped
it off and with much fanfare presented it to my daughter.
"Heyyy, Chandi, guess what Daddy got for you!"
"What?" she asked, infected with my excitement.
"Are you ready?" said I.
"Yes!"
And I gave her the pretty little tag, all golden and shiny. I'm such a good daddy, I
thought. She took the tag in her hand. She stared at it. She turned it over. She
stared at it some more. Then...
"But Daddy, this is garbage," she said. Then she looked at me in much the same way
one looks at experimental comedy. I could just imagine her saying to herself, "Oh no, Daddy's
crazy!"
That's me, dorky dad.
Comment
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Sat Jan 22 22:03:35 EST 2005
Added some gallery pictures. Fixed the comments. This is a bogus entry to
test aforementioned comment system.
Comment
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Fri Jan 14 16:49:01 EST 2005
There's no delete key for my brain. I wish there were. There's
this whole "nature versus nurture" argument that who we are is
shaped more by genetics than by experience. I dunno. I had some
time these past few weeks to contemplate stuff. Thinking,
grasping at shadowy memories...Johnny Mnemonic and Dark City on
the brain...
Everything is a blur. It went by so fast, these 34 odd years.
Somethings I remember:
Being beaten with an electrical cord, welts and blood. Playing
cops and robbers near the little library in North Miami Beach.
Fishing off Haulover pier. Driving fast, really fast, on a
North Carolina street, leaves scattering in my wake. Buying
cafe con leche from a girl in a window. That party in Atlanta...
Blasting Concierto de Aranjuez on a long stretch of highway, giving
the CD to a girl who liked the music. Running... Catching that
football during the company picnic. Getting hit in the face by a
football during that school picnic, having A. tend to the cuts..
Firing that .270 and watching everyone turn to look. Listening
to E. sing "Ruby Tuesday" a cappella.
Comment
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Fri Jan 14 03:36:11 EST 2005
I suppose I should update this...
Christmas just came and went. It was fleeting, probably the least hyped Christmas
in my memory. I didn't set foot inside a mall, didn't join the million consumers
in the Christmas rush.
So I was mulling something...something... wanting to write my own story of hope and
loss. Then the news started trickling in. Five thousand dead. Seven thousand. Twenty.
Thirty five. I'm looking at various news sites now and seeing numbers of 100,000
dead. Perspective kicked me like an assmule.
Sometimes we get numb to the world. Unless something affects you personally it's
difficult to care about the latest statistics on the 11:00 o'clock news. We (I?) have
lost the ability to muster sympathy or outrage at the latest numbers. After all,
they're just numbers. A fire in Topeka. Homicide in L.A. A mudslide in California. A
suicide in North Miami. A tsunami in Indonesia.
So I bought myself a car this December. Twin-turbo V6, 320HP DOHC...
The living room was gutted and the family is homeless. Father of two was killed
during a robbery. The corner of a house was destroyed.
It does 0 to 60 in 5.5 seconds. With full-time all-wheel-drive and a 6-speed manual
transmission, it responds like an extension of the driver.
She studied karate and astronomy. She could sing, dance and play the piano.
Leather seats, premium Infinity sound system, 6-disc CD changer.
He lost his wife and three young daughters.
Electronically controlled suspension and adjustable spoiler.
170,000 dead.
Sunroof.
Comment
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Mon Nov 15 20:50:06 EST 2004
Saw Steve Wozniak speak at a local college this past weekend. He's one of my heroes
and someone I have consciously emulated throughout my life and career. It's not
every day that one gets to meet an icon. Few will disagree that Wozniak started
the personal computer revolution....
Technology seems to be about stretches of incremental progress interspersed with
head-wrenching forward lurches. Sometimes it is not so much the brilliance of one
person, but the Muse bestowing an honor upon some lucky individual. Serendipitous
discovery pushes science forward perhaps more often than dogged determination or
even genius. It's as if the world was primed for a Newton or Leibniz, a Darwin or
Wallace and the shock is not that two individuals discovered something revolutionary
within relative moments of each other, but that the entire world did not perform
a collective slap on the forehead and exclaim, "Aha!"
But we know it's not so simple. Sure, at the time that Wozniak started tinkering
with transistors and those early micro-processors, there was already a buzz. Things,
wonderful things, were percolating, getting ready to explode. And you could argue
that if it wasn't Wozniak, then maybe Galkowski or Ng or Jackson or any one of the
hundreds of geeky young science students would have realized the potential of a
personal computer and spent days and nights fashioning one from bits and pieces
salvaged from neighborhood garages. But they didn't. And if not for Wozniak, maybe
the computer revolution would have taken another decade or two. After all, the world
had gotten by without computers for millenia.
As IT folks the idea that technology is something wondrous, the equivalent of
Guttenberg's inky little machine for our modern era, is sometimes lost because we
are daily bombarded by New Stuff. It's so easy to become dispassionate about the
latest silicon wonders; they've become tools and adjuncts to our Professions. But
imagine that, from your easy chair in front of the TV, you can communicate with
a farmer in New Delhi or a goatherd in Katmandu! Imagine that you can conceive
a notion, a thought, maybe a novel approach to understanding NP completeness
or an insight into Deconstructionist Dynamics in the writings of Dr. Seuss and
within moments share it with the world. The personal computer -- technology --
made this possible. And Woz ushered in the personal computer revolution.
In other happenings: Took a class at UofM this past week and spoke with some
engineering students. Gawd they looked young! Students seemed a heckuva a lot
older when I was in school. Bah. Excuse me a moment while I adjust my rocking
chair and flip the vinyl.
Broke the comments system on the website. Embedded HTML in the comments area was
killing the box anyway, so it's all for the better. A lot of folks have provided
fixes and error-corrections to the kernel pages. I'll update them soon but I
wanted to thank everyone for their feedback.
And I wrote a long winded political piece (my first) about Jeffersonian ideals,
democracy, education, science and doing the right thing.
Did more cleanups on the packet analysis guide. Not ready yet, though.
Finished reading Foucault's _The Order of Things_ and Larson's "There's a Hair in
my Dirt." They are roughly comparable.
Started learning about internal combustion engines and turbos. Pictures to come
soon.
Comment
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Thu Sep 23 22:00:07 EDT 2004
I once promised myself that I would never let work -- or rather, the day to day
process of economic survival -- get in the way of learning or growth, be it
mental or spiritual (or physical for that matter). But it's hard. There's a certain
mental exhaustion that I feel at the end of the workday. I get home and I want to
listen to music or read short, easily digestible blandness rather than crack open
something challenging. In my defense, these past couple months have been stressful:
new job, a couple (two, three, four!) hurricanes, three intermediate level technical
presentations, an admissions process, insurance stuff....
One of the presentations was for my local Linux LUG. It purported to cover basic
packet analysis (TCP/IP, sniffers, net protocols, etc.). Notes will appear shortly.
Spent a spattering of nights wide-eyed and unable to sleep. Oddly enough, these were
on the weekends (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). And I tend not to drink coffee on these
days so I know my usual 1/2 gallon infusion of Colombian Supreme didn't play a part.
After thinking about it for a while I realized that on days that were stressful I
slept like a rock. On the weekends, without said mind-numbing process of survival,
my head was probably filled with lots of other thoughts and these things happen to
keep me awake. Or not. Who knows.
Chatted briefly with an old-timer outside a local convenience store. I'd held open
the door for him as I was leaving. He'd said thank you, I replied with a polite,
"Oh, you're welcome." That would have been the end of that except that he went on
to say that young people aren't so polite nowadays, always in a rush. So I felt
badly about not staying for a moment to, I dunno, remark on the weather or disprove
his statement. Maybe the old guy could impart some sage advice... Now I didn't go
into the conversation thinking that; the old man looked dirty. His hair wasn't
combed, he shirt had some holes. I really didn't want to stop and talk. But in one
of those bizarre decisions (perhaps aided by the college-aged, umm, *person* that
had just pulled up) I decided to chat for a while. So I agreed that, yes, we're in
far too much of a rush and we need to spend more time smelling the roses.
In a fairy-tale world, the old man would have been some Campbellian Guide,
a Gandalf or a Vergil or a Yoda. He would say things like, "Passion is the essence
of reason," or "look within to understand the world." But no. He quickly turned
the conversation into a rant against technology; computers and faxes and cellphones
were items of oppression, stealing jobs, causing cancer, in general accelerating
the coming of the Apocalypse. I couldn't get a word in, couldn't escape without
appearing rude. And I was too damned polite to interrupt his rant. So I stood there
like an idiot, nodding like an idiot, agreeing like an idiot, until close to ten
minutes had passed.
So note to self: Age does not equate with wisdom. Not all old folks are kindly.
de mortuis nil nisi bonum is foolish because evil folks that die are just
dead evil folks and are not magically transformed, Darth Vader like, into kindly old
folks.
Comment
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Wed Jul 28 21:33:10 EDT 2004
Ch-ch-changes. Time has changed me and I can't "strace time" (geek joke). More
upheaval in my professional life recently, but all for the better. Learning lots and
lots - AIX, Oracle, how to make coffee in a blender. Heard from some old friends and
made some new ones. Said "seeya later" to some others...
This was tough. I know that I'll see most of them again, but I realize that your
circle of friends tends to mirror your circle of co-workers. Well, sometimes. What I
mean is that the folks you see on a daily basis tend to be the ones you confide in,
the ones you call your friends. Certainly lifelong relationships and friendships have
been formed at work or school, but distance can rend some bonds.
Some random letters: 2EM.IWNFYAWALY.KLL.
Comment
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Fri Jul 2 15:57:46 EDT 2004
Mistah Kurtz, he dead.
Comment
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Wed Jun 9 23:02:29 EDT 2004
Server was down for most of today; the CPU fan on the AMD K6-2/500 finally gave out.
My contingency plan was to launch the VMWare hosted backup server, which I did. Only
problem was that I'd forgotten to synchronize for the past, umm, two months. Oh well.
Luckily I had a spare Athlon 900 in which to park the drive until I could resurrect
the primary. Since the server is hosted on a DSL line the K6-2/500 is more than
adequate for the load. The only noticeable slowdown is on the R-Web pages, but these
are rarely used anyway (maybe 5 hits a day).
And I got the K6-2 going. I had to replace the fan and the fried CPU, plus one stick
of memory seems to have died. Such is life.
Comment
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Mon Jun 7 18:48:20 EDT 2004
Introspection time...
I caught myself whining about this little pain in my side (a slightly pulled
muscle). Well, not before lamenting that I can't swing an axe without
falling apart. Then I remembered... He's got it much worse. He lives with
the pain and the nausea, Cyclopean knowledge, and the constant whining of
otherwise healthy individuals moaning about the equivalent of a hangnail...
I knew a girl once -- pregnant at fifteen, a single parent at 19 -- who never
cried, never complained about anything but that her cooking wasn't the best
I'd ever had.
Today I said something like, "Man, it sucks that I'm not supposed to drink *as
much* coffee."
I resolve to keep my mouth shut and people think me a fool than to open it and
leave no doubt...
Comment
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Sat May 8 03:18:08 EDT 2004
I was thinking about my lawn earlier today. That's not true. It is more
a collection of weeds and sinister looking vegetation than it is a lawn,
really. At times I think that if I did not hack it back ("mow" is too
polite a word for the job) I would awake one morning to some motile
Martian jungle. Bradbury would be proud.
Speaking of which, I'm quite convinced that life exists, or has existed,
on our dusty red neighbor. I'm convinced that life exists there because
Nature is so damned insiduous. Grass grows in the oddest of places: in
marginal cracks; inside a neglected cinder block; in the minute compost
of a few leaves on a window ledge. Grass even ekes out an existence
in the hairline fissures of the brickwork on my back patio. And Mars,
dust and infernal climate notwithstanding, can't be much worse than
a Florida summer. God speed to our mechanical adventurers, Spirit and
Opportunity. I know that they'll find something there that will shock us,
kick us. Nature finds a way.
I suppose that, depending on your point-of-view, this can be either
warmly reassuring or somewhat horrifying. Reassuring? We plod on. Through
adversity and bad weather, we plod on. Yet as the stars wink out in the
Final Dark, I picture life, maybe not humanity, plodding on... or oozing
on. Oozing on down the road. Sorry.
But horrifying you say?
Think about it.... Our entire value system, from our arts to our sciences
to our concepts of "purpose", is predicated upon this urge to resist
Nature. We like neat lawns, trimmed hedges, pruned treelines. We comb our
hair, our beards, clip our fingernails. Hell, we raise the "disciplined"
and "rigorous" amongst us to glittering pedestals.
But there's this gnawing suspicion that it's all a ruse, a devilish facade
to mask the rotting core beneath. And the thing is, once this mask is
revealed to us, keeping it in place becomes even more horrifying than the
reality. I imagine some B-movie monster hiding inside the body of a dead
man, animating it in some grotesque fashion. He rides the train, speaks in
the boardroom, sits amicably at some late-night lounge with his buddies
from college. Then his nose falls off. Or his ear. His friends stare,
aghast. His drinking buddy vomits. Children scream and run away. Well,
they shouldn't be in a lounge anyway, but you get the idea. Then the
monster tries to stick the ear back on. He squishes the nose back into
place. Maybe it falls off again. (And perhaps that odd Russian, Nikolai,
sits in the corner scribbling furiously onto a bit of napkin.) "All
better now!" the monster intones, but we *know* better. We *know*.
So what do we do? We can't put back the nose, as it were. Listening to
tales of good people doing bad things, very bad things, in some remote
desert hell -- another proving ground for the soul -- only underscores
that our interiors are pretty fucking brutal. We're monsters all. Golding
and Conrad knew. They saw the maw, the Void, and they wrote about it. I
suspect that Warhol knew too, and he mocked it, held the Emptiness up to
the world and wept as we bowed down to it. (And Child of Light, as you
wink at the Archer, do you remember if you knew too?)
Well, don't want to end on a bitter note. Maybe I can spin it as an excuse
to disregard the lawn for another week. Sh*t. It's late and I'm bitter,
goddammit. The best and brightest have moved on and only folks like me
remain. God help us.
Comment
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Fri Apr 23 05:37:35 EDT 2004
Finished Chaitin's Unknowable and started on Exile and the Kingdom.
Why? It was next to it on the shelf... Out of place, actually, since I'm not at the
point of alphabetizing my library. The Chaitin book was good, but not quite what
I expected. There were code examples in Lisp, which was interesting in many ways, but
perhaps it was too practical. Oh well.
I got the latest revision of the
Kernel-Build-HOWTO on the TLDP site. For a brief moment I felt a twinge of
doubt as I put the GFDL license on it. I'd no longer own the document; the
community would. But it was time. It was too difficult to host and the documentation
project is entirely in line with my views anyway. The first revision was merely a
single page outline of the 2.2 and 2.4 kernel build steps. Created for a user
group presentation several years ago, it has since grown to over 25 pages. And
putting it up there has already improved it. It has been edited and modified. Some
gross language errors have been highlighted. This itself was eye-opening: Passages
that I thought were abundantly clear were embarrassing once the errors were pointed
out...
What else? Started listening to some interesting music from the Ukraine. It sounds
really, really cool (female singer, sort of an Edie Brickell breathiness with
Bjork'ish emotion). Problem is that I have absolutely no idea what any of the
songs are about. I could well be listening to the Ukrainian equivalent of [FAMOUS
TEENAGE POP STAR] without knowing it. Maybe a Ukranian-speaker will pull up next
to my car and get a big laugh from seeing a bespectacled, laptop-lugging, button
down shirt and tie wearing, 33-year-old bobbing his head to "ooh honey I wanna
dance wanna prance baby baby sugar me with your lovin' my sweetness".
Speaking of which, I still sometimes change the music in my car as I approach a
traffic light because I'm worried that others will look at me weird if Waits' "Buzz
Fledderjohn" or Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" starts croaking out. I know that I shouldn't
care. I know that the opinion of some random pre-teen, teen, or early tween is
probably not too relevant to my life except for my making it so.... But man, I don't
need anyone to reinforce the fact that I have absolutely no sense of pop culture.
Anyhoo, a neat little vanity I've seen is a real-time listing of your current MP3
playlist. As you load songs into your player it automatically updates a web page so
that others can know what you're listening to and gauge your coolness because they're
so hip and trendy...
So, ummm, here's what I'm listening to *right now*:
- Chantal Kreviazuk - Tanpopo
- Chantal Kreviazuk - Leaving on a Jet Plane
- Cranberries - Linger
- Smiths - Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now
- Tragically Hip - Cordelia
- Tragically Hip - Little Bones
- Hepburn - I Quit (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Soundtrack)
- Satriani - Satch Boogie (Surfing_With_The_Alien)
- 10000 Maniacs - Daktari
- 10000 Maniacs - My Mother The War
- U2 - The Fly
- U2 - So Cruel
- U2 - In a Little While
Comment
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Sun Apr 18 12:21:53 EDT 2004
Testing out a new comment system. I hate doing this on the live site...
It appears to be working fine, but there are still some glitches to work
out.
Comment
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Sun Apr 18 08:23:36 EDT 2004
Heh. With the new drives in place, I now have 1.2 terabytes of aggregate
storage space on my network. I know the hard-core geeks will laugh and tell
me about their multi-terabyte SAN and NAS setups -- maybe they stream DivX
from it -- but I'm still grinning. I remember my first 5M hard drive and
how I stared slack-jawed at how quickly it booted.
Gawd. I just peeked over at a hardware site to see how quickly I could add
another tera. 320G drives are under $300. Dang. A terabyte isn't as
impressive anymore...
Did some cleanup on the interim kernel rebuild document. Updated the
acknowledgements page. Received some more bios and blurbs for the new page.
But no pictures. So far this month the site has received about 250,000
hits (about 38,000 unique IPs) so I'll need to move it to a hosting
facility soon. Started real work on a packet analysis and TCP/IP guide.
Started a short intro to ordered fields. Recovered from a power outage
and a chassis fan failure. Started testing Fedora Core 2 Test2. Started
preparing my consulting documentation for public view. Whew.
Comment
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Fri Apr 16 19:45:18 EDT 2004
I'm in the middle of reading How to Make an Action Movie for $99
that my friend Chris has loaned me.
It reads easily and so far has imparted some wisdoms and pointers without
seeming like a textbook. I'm still hacking out my script, fixing some
obvious and not-so-obvious errors. The most difficult part is realizing
that not all the the ideas translated well to film. For that matter,
many of the ideas don't read that well either. It's not like technical
documentation; the HOWTOs and FAQ sheets on the site are more akin to
digging machines or a sawhorse. They're meant, above all else, to be
practical (though not necessarily clinical) and as such, I don't have any
emotional attachment to them.
But not so with the script. I've bled for it. Agonized over it. Wept over
it (OK, it involved onions and a paring knife but that's besides the
point). I know that little bits of me are sprinkled throughout the story.
(And maybe there's a trap lurking in this idea. I imagine that it's more
rigorous to not litter a work with your personality. Maybe the work itself
should stand, by itself, as some sublime object d'art. There are
ideas that kick me and these ideas should stand separate from the person
that originated them. Hmmm. Is this Dawkins' concept of a meme?) I can see
some parallels in a lawyer defending a guilty client, an actor taking a 'bad guy'
role, a person taking an unpopular position precisely (and only) because it
is unpopular. That is, feelings remain isolated from the *work*.
In other happenings: built an Athlon XP 2500+ machine (1 Gig RAM, 80G HD).
It's fast. Ludicrous speed fast. It churns through POVRay scene files in
seconds, laughs at some complex matrix manipulations, and I'm almost certain
that I can hear it breathing Darth Vader-like as it sits there. Its twin
should arrive soon. I will name them "Holmes" and "Moriarty"; or perhaps "KITT"
and "KARR". "Lore" and "Data"? I've also been spec'ing a new laptop. Still
bouncing between a ThinkPad and a PowerBook. Wish I could get both. But
doing that would require selling *both* kidneys... Oh well.
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Sun Apr 11 22:17:13 EDT 2004
Several months ago we'd gone to see Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor at a
local theatre. We were in the fourth row, between a friendly couple from Canada and
an unsmiling lady from...well, I don't know since we didn't speak. I was thinking
about this recently because the sci-fi B-movie The Fifth Element is
showing in the other room. One of the highlights is a rendition of Lucia's "mad scene"
that oddly enough, didn't seem out of place.
On the one hand, I felt a terrible empathy for Lucia. Circumstance (Fate, Destiny?)
had conspired to push her over the edge. I felt that I wanted to comfort her in the
way you'd console a child who had lost her bike. Of course it wasn't just an
object that she'd lost. Her lover was gone (or so she thought). But what really
kicks me is that sense of the Omniscient Viewer who knows that Oedipus is about
to dash his eyes out for all the wrong reasons and yet, the OV is unable to do a
thing about it. (And I can't help imagining some ancient venue, Schopenhauer sitting
content in the balcony while the audience screams, "Don't do it, OJ!")
On the other hand, there's a certain repulsion and revulsion at those whose grasp
on reality has loosened. I had always thought that I could (heh) think my way out of
madness. I.e., by doing a dissociated introspection (which is of course impossible) I could
realize that my actions and thoughts were out-of-touch with reality or "normalcy" and
thus change them. In fact, I was once so convinced of this that I wanted to test it.
I would deprive myself of sleep for a week, knowing that sleep deprivation would lead
to a form of psychosis. If I could think my way out of psychosis then I'd know that
reason triumphed. I got into the third day before someone told me that permanent
damage could result. This scared me enough that I went to sleep within an hour...
So I have Aida playing now. It's appropriate in a bizarre sort of way, don't
you think? I end with something from Blade Runner, which is unlike The Fifth
Element in so many ways...
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness
at Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like
tears in rain. Time to die."
Archived Entries
In the BBS days I used the name "Dworkin" from Roger Zelazny's Amber novels.
"Digital Hermit" was an extension of this alias. Later studies in philosophy
and religions (Buddhism, solipsism, and a host of other isms) made the nom de
keyboard seem more and more appropriate.
This site is intended mainly to share information with the web community at
large and partially as an extended resume for prospective employers. As may be
apparent from the links, my hobbies and interests include mathematics, science,
Linux, literature, music and film. There is an incredible amount of overlap between
these seemingly disparate subjects and the discovery of these inter-relationships
is always fascinating.
Because of commitments to my current employer,
Royal Caribbean Cruises, I am not
currently available for consulting. However, I do enjoy participating with
community Linux projects (i.e., GPL licensed) and will be happy to assist on a
volunteer basis.
This page was originally written in vi. Since then it has grown more and more complex that
better navigation tools were required. The ideal solution turned out to be
PHPNav. It was easy to configure,
required no external database, and allowed me to keep my old links and page locations.
|
