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# Mon Jan 14 18:52:45 EST 2002
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I was in bed, staring at my ceiling over this past weekend. It's a popcorn ceiling. I.e., the texture is created by spraying pellets of crumbly material onto the surface. It's supposed to hide flaws behind the texture. Funny enough, I noticed a face peering back at me. It was small, perhaps 1/2" from top-of-head to end-of-chin, but looked convincingly real. Of course, my first thoughts were about the "Face on Mars". I thought it would be hilarious to put this on my site. Alas, by the time I located my camera I was unable to find the face again. Anywho, it started me on a quest to locate other faces in natural objects. Look for it soon :D.

This got me to thinking about order and randomness. It's a peculiar human response to try to impose order upon the chaotic. Looking at clouds we see dragons and clowns. One could argue that there is an order to the congregation of vapors, but Gleickian (!?) theories notwithstanding, there be no dragons there. The only reason I mention this is because I'd just watched a discourse on some public television channel between atheists and um, theists about the role of religion in government. Then I wondered if people believe in gods because of this need to impose order upon the random? Is there a reason to exist if there is no God? Would human life be too utterly dark if there was not a "higher purpose"? Time to re-read my old philsophy texts, it seems. Hmm, is that what Marlowe was talking about?

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# Mon Jan 21 09:01:49 EST 2002
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Lisa and I had our baby! Chandi Tzu-Chen Lowe was born on January 18, 2002 at 10:45AM on Friday morning. Please look here for the pictures.

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# Wed Jan 30 17:47:42 EST 2002
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It's scary that I'm a parent. Fathers should be responsible folks, calm and reassured. I've been known to purchase computer parts in lieu of groceries. Skip lunch for three weeks to buy a new video card? It made perfect sense to me. This got me to thinking -- if I truly had some sort of computer addiction would I notice it? I've heard that denial of a problem is often a symptom of substance abuse and though I've always had a great deal of difficulty equating chronic shopping to the terrible sadness of substance addiction, the financial (and health) problems could be similar. I save my lunch money for a video card. It seems an easy tradeoff. As for the website, I added the baby pictures and slightly modified the kernel pages. I also finished the HTML frontend to the library database. It could form the basis for a database tutorial providing that I can work out the cgi security issues (i.e., there's no security).

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# Sat Feb 9 23:25:02 EST 2002
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Synched up the kernel PDF and Postscript documents. I started doing it in vi/TeX but dropped back into LyX to finish everything up. If you haven't used LyX or TeX before, it's worth trying out. Once you get past the idea that the computer is doing the hard work of formatting, and not you, then you'll wonder why WYSIWYG word processors ever caught on. I also upgraded my laptop and one of the workstations to Mandrake 8.1. The workstation install on an Athlon 950 went well. There were some initial problems with some missing symlinks in the /dev directory, but these were quickly straightened out. The laptop was another matter. It actually crashed on me when I played around with a USB digital camera. A kernel rebuild and several updates later the machine seems to be very stable.

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# Tue Feb 12 20:44:01 EST 2002
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There was a time when I would (literally) jump for joy if I received electronics as a present. Things have changed. Yesterday we were elated to receive a package of baby wipes. "Yes! Baby wipes!" we said. We came close to giving each other high-fives.

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# Mon Feb 18 13:25:46 EST 2002
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Saw an interesting television program about Dante's Inferno. Odd, that centuries of literature and art could be so influenced by a single work of literature. A phrase here, a choice of words there, and millions now have an image of hellfire and brimstone. In a roundabout sort of way it brought me back to English literature. Why was it always so gloomy? Someone had suggested that the lack of sunlight, the seemingly eternal gray skies and cold winds, had a profound effect on the mindset of generations of authors. I suppose the proof lies too within all those cheerful stories by dead Russian authors. Gloom, doom and cold winters. And nothing but potatoes to accompany the soggy dumplings... And there's another curious twist; in many stories the mere (?) ability to persevere is somehow ennobling. Are cockroaches thus magnificent creatures? Is Job a saint or a sucker?

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# Sun Feb 24 18:11:58 EST 2002
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Excuse this rant, this intrusion into your world... Today was a dark day. Not since high school have I felt such blackness and such sickening vertigo as if I peered into the inky dark of a silent abyss. I look at faces, even in bright sunlight, and see death's head skulls grinning back. The Worm feasts, yet as the smiling hosts wander about in vacuous oblivion. I know this mood as a precursor to even darker darks. Why now, of all times. Perhaps I long to wear my old, black overcoat and brood in the corner of the shithole restaurant on A1A like so long ago. Yes, brood with my fellow angst-ridden children of suburbia, none of which had seen anything darker than the evening news. Brood and drop names of dead philosophers and hope that someone would overhear our whispers... "Goethe, he said.." "Dostoevsky didn't believe..." "...like something from Camus" Enough of this..

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# Sun Feb 25 13:39:00 EST 2002
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There it is now, a cockroach on my pristine linoleum. The guests arrive and politely ignore it, this cockroach in the middle of my floor. Were I clear it away it would surely draw more attention so I've let it sit and twitch its antennae. My guests look everywhere else but at my little friend. They remark on the hideous folk art from Key West and the mass-produced totem from Maui. The unnumbered lithograph in my living room fascinates them, as does the bottle of Italian olive oil. The roach twiches and regards them but their necks are uncomfortably twisted to inspect my wallpaper. It begins to affront me, their feigned ignorance of my cockroach. "Come to the study," I say, knowing that the beast lies in their path. They step by it, necks stiff. "A moment... Forgive me, honored guests, I've dropped my keys upon the floor. Do be a friend and pick it up for me." Deft indeed! The guest stoops but the plastic grapes on my refridgerator holds her attention...

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# Mon Mar 4 15:26:58 EST 2002
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Worked some trigonometry problems over the weekend. I made it a goal to prove a chapter's worth of identities. Alas, only five of about 40 in the chapter were finished. There was a point where it became utterly confusing -- perhaps exacerbated by my mis-remembering some formulas -- until the long dark attic light flickered on and most everything fell into place. This minor victory was refreshing and renewed my enthusiasm to tackle calculus, an ogre which I had thought already vanquished. Spent some time trying to get my HP 318 digital camera to work with Linux. It's not working yet, but I didn't try all that hard. With Linux support I would recommend this camera in a heartbeat. Outdoors, the picture quality is better than I expected. The downside is that the automatic brightness can cause problems if the light source is wrong. I'll put together a writeup soon about how to get it working with Linux.

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# Sat Apr 13 15:47:26 EDT 2002
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Lots of stuff since the last update. I saw and participated in a Beowulf demonstration given by our local LUG. A few of my machines became test subjects, and after it was all done, I went home with a working three node cluster. This soon turned into a 5-bode cluster when I brought the other machines online. This April 11 I gave a short presentation on using the Gimp. Notes are still quite proteal so forgive the sawdust and incompleteness. I've also started updating *all* my workstations to use Mandrake 8.2. I'm very pleased with it, especially how well the mix of hardware was detected. MDK8.2 finally allowed me to zap all my Windows installations, since the only thing I'd really been using it for was to upload images from my HP318 camera and HP2100C scanner. No, direct uploads via the USB cable still don't work correctly, but the compact flash readers (both USB and PCMCIA versions) solve this. I've attached the scanner to my brother's machine so he can deal with the Windows nastiness. Finally, I've found a solution to the mathematics web pages -- apparently there's a TeX plugin to apache that will let me use TeX sources directly without having to do a bunch of image manipulations to create jpegs of equations. This simplifies the creation immeasurably. And to close this entry with some vain ramblings:

I'll admit to a certain amount of incredulity when all the stories of sleepless nights and zombiefied parents poured in. "Sure, just because *your* children are screeching nightmares doesn't mean ours will be that way." OK, $200 worth of diapers later, days (literally) without sleep, strange discolorations on my pillow, and an aching back from carrying around our 16 lb bundle of joy and I will admit that you parents were right. I'll concede that the advertisements showing new parents with smiles and disposable income is the stuff of illusion or deceptive marketing tactics. I don't care if you laugh at our naivete in believing that 3,000 baby wipes will last throughout infancy. I'll concede anything you want. Just tell me how to mute this bundle of joy during the night. Tell me how 4oz of baby formula translates to that mountain of... well, you know. Tell me how this creature that weighs less than my laptop can make that noise for so long without stopping for a breath. Tell me why she chooses the moment after her diapers are changed to do what she could have done ten seconds before.

I once got excited about receiving electronics as a present. You know what does it for me now? Diaper wipes. Bibs. Bounty Paper Towels. Sad.

Haha, just kidding. She's the sweetest thing -- sleeps at night, smiles a lot during the day. All you single folks should take her for a day just to share the joy that we have. Really. Please?

Just as a side note: I once read that the human baby cries at a pitch at which the adult human ear is most responsive. I.e., of the infinite variety of sounds that a baby could make, it makes the one most impossible to ignore. Isn't that nice?

People have mentioned that it's impossible to look at the beatific smile of an infant without believing in God or angels. They're right. I'm convinced now that Someone has looked at my records and seeks redress for the contents therein. Either that, or He is a joker making a point about how absurd it all is.

Seriously though, this weekend I was holding her against my chest because her crying seemed to be of slightly lower volume when held thusly. I looked into her tiny eyes, eyes that looked back at me with a sense of knowing, and I thought about how all my concerns about stock options and deadlines seemed somehow insignificant. Imagine that this little life actually looked up to me! She was too tiny and too young to voice her thoughts, but I felt the connection, the warmth...of warm liquid running down my front... Crap.

Yeah, that too.

She smiled at me then.

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# Wed Apr 24 12:50:01 EDT 2002
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Not a lot of updates, but I was in a writing mood. I've started working diligently on the mathematics pages again, this time with a conviction to do the entire thing in TeX. This has multiple advantages; the obvious being that equations are trivial to create both for the Postscript document and for the web using latex2html. While researching the guide, I realized that there's not another need for a GnuPLOT or Octave tutorial since there are already excellent guides in existence (and much better than I could do). So I'm trying to approach it as a student would. I.e., I take a problem solving approach to learning the tools. This is somewhat in keeping with the rest of the site, anyway.

As I was researching some statistics information I came across an interesting figure about the number of folks on Death Row and the apparently elevated levels of testosterone in their systems. It would have been just another fact had it not been for the odd coincidence that *exactly* as I was reading this, a documentary on the Discovery channel happened to discuss inmates on Death Row, and umm, the apparently elevated levels of testosterone in their systems. Whoa! And I wanted was some information on the S and R statistics languages! Anywho, it got me to thinking about capital punishment and adherence to laws. Remember that guy who accepted a death penalty for corrupting the youth? He sipped a glass of hemlock, if I recall, and took a long nap. Or did they nail him up somewhere? This is not so startling until you consider that the condemned had the opportunity to escape but decided against it. He decided that it was somehow more [noble/human/enlightened] to stay and die to protest a law that may have been immoral. So was he wiser or more spiritual than the person that flees the law and fights it from elsewhere? How should seemingly immoral laws be fought? I once heard this explained thusly: life deals you a hand of cards; play with what you've got. The problem with this is that the deck is stacked, and there's no opportunity to quite the game without relinquishing everything. Or is there? Bleaahhh. Too much coffee too late at night.

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# Thu May 16 16:13:35 EDT 2002
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One thing I've always hated about keeping journals was the tendency to just write for the sake of making an entry. The entries then degenerated into a recap of daily events or thoughtless musings about nothing in particular. Hmmm. But I do keep a log for other reasons -- much of my life would be a blank otherwise. I can't remember much of school or work or how I felt in different circumstances; so maybe by logging the events I will at least know the raw events.

I was thinking about this today because the trailers for The Matrix sequel have been released. The original story reminded me of two other movies, Dark City and BladeRunner. In all, characters had memories implanted or removed, but still retained the essence of their personality/soul. They suggest that identity is distinct from memories and perhaps from actions. I'm not certain that I can agree with this as doing so could lead to the conclusion that a person's actions do not define that person. In a practical society this would lead to chaos. Ahh, but the current justice system believes that "mitigating circumstances" could absolve the killer or the rapist. "You're a generally good person, so we'll let you go." Push this idea a little further and even supremely "evil" acts become merely a thing of circumstance, with no assignation of good or evil possible. Every murder and every rape, every suicide bombing or every mortar attack on children, would be little capsules of circumstance, as karmically neutral as little bugs trapped in amber.

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# Thu Jun 20 14:29:55 EDT 2002
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I was reading "The House at Pooh Corner" a couple nights ago. Ostensibly, I was doing it for the sake of my daughter who seems to enjoy the book. Well, at least the taste of it. Synopsis: With a stroke of good intention, the Bear of Little Brain decides to build a house for a frostbitten donkey. The Bear and Pig find a stash of wood in the forest and use it to build the house near the edge of the wood. Meanwhile, the frostbitten donkey is lamenting to the rabbit that *just moments ago* he had built himself a new house only to discover that it had disappeared during the night. The twist, of course, is that the Bear and Pig used the wood from one house to build another.

That's it really. I was hoping to tie in some Sisyphusian reference, perhaps a dollop of Sartre and Gogol, but there's nothing there. The Emperor is naked, after all.

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# Mon Jul 1 16:58:33 EDT 2002
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Arrgghh -- Lots of downtime in the past week for several reasons: My ISP was doing a scheduled update, power went out, and my ISP's upstream provider had some trouble with a migration. The power outage was interesting. I woke up at around 7:00AM to a loud humming noise. Things seemed brighter too than should be for a Friday morning. Look over at the power pole about two houses over and see a really, really, REALLY bright light. My guess is that a bird became a filament... The power actually stayed on for several seconds before everything went down. Then promptly came back up again. It was cool to hear eight machines simultaneously rebooting and crunching back to life. Then the power went down again and stayed that way for almost eight hours. On Saturday a scheduled maintenance by my ISP's upstream went awry and required a rollback. Oh well. The outages did give me the chance to update various software, however.

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# Sun Aug 18 23:25:58 EDT 2002
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Another long period without much activity. I started a new math guide a few weeks ago and have been working on it slowly, ever so slowly since then. Since there are already many good manuals for the applications I cover I needed to do something else than show how to use each feature. I thought it would be interesting to write the guide for the typical college student; i.e., it would show how to solve typical problems and exercises from the textbooks. At the rate I'm adding pages the section should be complete by the end of the decade. Oh well.

A few days ago I was driving to work when I realized that I'd forgotten to bring along my CD case. After figuring out how to change from CD to the tuner, I switched on the radio to try to find something interesting. Remember the Springsteen song about "57 channels and nothing on"? I must have tried six stations and they all were painful to hear. Or boring. Or obnoxious. I guess this means that I'm old. It sure seems that radio was a lot more interesting when I was young. And I laughed so much louder then, when I was young.

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# Mon Nov 18 10:24:56 EST 2002
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Wow, three months since the last update... I just finished doing a Linux printing presentation this past Thursday. Thanks to Mandrake Linux for providing CDs full of Mandrake Linux 9.0. Unfortunately, they arrived a day late because of the US postal service, but they will be put to good use at an upcoming meeting.

Well, time for more vain and pretentious ramblings. I was reading to my daughter the other day; mostly portions from books on hand, including some physics texts and biographies. After a few minutes of fidgeting she got bored and decided that a plastic bottle cap was infinitely more interesting that anything by Thomas Kuhn. I switched to something from Feynman but the bottle cap again emerged victorious in the contest for her attentions. Hmmm. So I picked up a little stuffed animal and propped it on the pillow and began reading to it instead. Moments later, she dropped the bottle cap and became very much interested in what I was saying. Hmmm, again. It got me to thinking about motivations for our actions. How much of what we do is for the benefit of others? I'm probably reading a little too much into her behaviour (after all, she's only 10 mos.), but it certainly seemed that she wanted me to concentrate on her and not some stuffed monkey. Sometimes I like to turn up the volume on my stereo, roll down the windows, and have strains of Figaro belt out across the highway. Are my reasons, on a deeper level, actually just vanity or a desire for attention? I seem to recall reading something about this in a philosophy or psychology course. Maybe it's because loud music increases the heartbeat, gives a thrill; combine this with the perception of increased speed when the windows are down and maybe my actions are not so vain? Any psychologists want to comment/psychoanalyze me? :)

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# Thu Jan 16 16:50:11 EST 2003
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Two months since the last update... Bleah. So much for resolutions. We've recently moved so the website was down for several days. Thanks to the couple folks who actually offered to host the site in case I was having ISP problems. It gave me one of those, "All's right with the world" feelings (at least until I turned the news on).

I added some simple backups scripts (backup.sh and remote.sh) that I use for my network. They're not very useful except for my distinct setup, but maybe someone can use them as a starting point for their own environment. On another note, my brother has started learning to play electric guitar. Ahh, memories. Many years ago I convinced myself that with enough practice I could be a rock star. But I can't sing, don't have any leather pants, and um, can't really play, either. Not to mention my choice in wardrobe tends towards pocket protectors and really cool fashion accessories such as the TI-85 or Palm III. I mean that. I really once thought that carrying my calculator in my front shirt pocket was appealing to members of the opposite sex. Of course I've learned since then and don't do such foolish things anymore. Instead I sport several Zebra F-301s now. No doubt its clean lines and elegant polished steel and black plastic housing will be enticing to all.

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# Tue Jan 28 23:29:53 EST 2003
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I added a page on POV-Ray Meshes. It was an interesting little sub-project to get this done. The larger goal was to model a falling body using POV-Ray's mathematics but I got sidetracked by trying to import DXF objects into POV. Oh, well. I seem to be side-stepping the main goal of the site -- a mathematics application tutorial. The same thing occurs in my daily life. There's a door that needs painting, a window that needs replacing, a hole in a wall that needs patching, etc.. Other things, perhaps more interesting, invariably take precedence and these necessary tasks don't ever get done. In fact, I should be taking care of them rather than working on my site. But it *is* after midnight now so at least I have an excuse for the moment. Happy New Year.

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# Fri Jan 31 11:31:36 EST 2003
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About five blocks from me, as I write this, someone has kidnapped a postal worker and is holding her hostage inside the postal vehicle. The media is swarming around, helicopters, vans, etc.. Being in a bizarre mood today (perhaps exacerbated by lots of allergy medication and not enough coffee) I wondered what was going through the mind of the kidnapper. Was he just like me, but caught up in circumstance, Fate's marionette in a little dance? Free willed but captive in a an unwakeable dream, he knows what he must do but cannot.

Why this odd notion? I happened to catch a portion of Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? the other day. It prompted me to pick up The Odyssey and in a roundabout sort of way, brought me to the initial chapters of Boorstin's The Creators. Boorstin happened to be discussing whether Homer was real or some amalgamation of countless bards and travelling minstrels. Some ragged threads I followed, and soon found myself reading about a man pushing a rock up a hill but not having much success at it. It reminded me of American Beauty and its sense of grim fatality. Ruminations. Too much d'Holbach maybe.

And what of my thoughts? Are they determined (!) entirely by environment; did the sip of cafe con leche last week contribute to a particular chemistry in my brain that's just now causing this long-winded entry? Does it matter? Hume's not paying my mortgage, after all.

Anyhoo, I added a few more GNUPlot/POV-Ray graphs. I've been working on making the triangle mesh program more efficient. It's one of those problems that someone else has undoubtedly solved, but it's interesting nonetheless.

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# Sat Feb 1 11:39:24 EST 2003
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I just heard about Columbia. I remember Challenger clearly. I'm in shock now and profoundly sad. I was just working on a shuttle ray-trace as part of a tutorial. For me, the space program has always symbolized the pure, wonderful idea that mankind can triumph over everything. I've always seen scientists as the true heroes of our age.

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# Thu Feb 6 23:15:58 EST 2003
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Just some random thoughts that happened to pass through my head on the way to the dustbin: I just read an interesting article in Time Magazine about the mind and its effect on the body's health. The article started with a reference to Descartes Cogito and proceeded to explain how our mental attitude can not only appear to prevent certain physical ailments from occurring, but help in fixing them if they do exist. Descartes, Descartes. What exactly is consciousness? How does a chemical soup lead to awareness? A dusty memory of an argument about a "conscious book" that "thinks" when someone follows the instructions on which page to view enters the scene. Reductio ad absurdum? Something from Penrose flutters by, but it's been too long since...Forget this.

I find myself in quite an odd mood tonight. Columbia's contrail still is etched into my waking thoughts. I see the faces of those seven souls and somehow wonder if this incredible sadness is symptomatic of a deeper sorrow. This year began with two funerals in one day; remarkable, yes, but moreso since I've never attended one before. I don't know how to deal with death, having never been forced to in 32 years. Oh, I've tried to give comfort to those who have -- a dear friend once lost a sister and I gave an eloquent, moving talk about God and Fate and and end to suffering. But for all my words I could not alter the reality of my own disbelief. Infinite coldness and inifinite solitude.

So what of Columbia? I've taken solace in the belief that mankind, through science can reach for inifinity and grasp it. We can, through science burn away superstitions and racism and hatred and violence. I think of Galileo's last words, whether apocryphal or not, and picture him standing against a thousand closed, illogical minds -- a beacon in the inky dark.

Watching Columbia die was like watching Hope herself pass away. A dramatic statement? Perhaps. But this is how I felt, how I feel now. And this all pales next to the sadness that the families must feel...

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# Thu Feb 13 22:10:12 EST 2003
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I once worked at a job that required long commutes across Alligator Alley from South to Central Florida. Every Monday and Friday I would drive about 200 miles from home to whichever office I happened to be assigned. On one of those trips I caught a Florida thunderstorm at its birth in darkness and fury. If you've never experienced an Everglades storm it's quite difficult to describe but exactly how I imagine some primordial landscape must have looked -- violent and leaden, lightnings and water, lots of water hurtling from the skies. My wipers were dashing back and forth but did nothing to improve visibility. I didn't dare try to pull off to the side of the road because, frankly, I couldn't tell where the road ended and the canal began. I remember feeling this incredible sense of solitude; it seemed that the rest of the world had disappeared and only I, in a rented sedan, were left.

Sitting here now, I think that so violent too must have been the World Birth, not some pristine and structured affair but utter Chaos. This curious thought came about after watching Signs last week. I was thinking about fate and luck, wondering for my own sake if either could be rationalized into digestible nuggets for my comprehension. If existence sprang from Chaos can there exist a guiding principle? Fate? Destiny? Perhaps there are 'pockets' of Order within the system, like finding a stretch of recognizable numbers within the digits of pi or seeing a face in a cloud. Ultimately random, of course, but with a semblance of order imposed upon it, a gilded mask hammered to fit an incomprehensible chaos because our minds deal better with the familiar. Is God thus an incarnation of our desire for order?

OK, shut up already.

No real news this week. I was adding some content to the mathematics guide and stumbled across a beautiful history of limits and the calculus. I wonder how Newton and Leibniz felt when they started to see, to realize how infinitely beautiful was their creation.

That's it. I'm shutting up for now.

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# Sun Feb 16 18:17:30 EST 2003
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Caffeine, prince of alkaloids, molecule most divine
Infuse me with your synthetic energy, with brilliant chemical life Rescue
me from dark oblivion, send Hypnos away, the Lethean waters dry In this
thirty-second hour of waking, drive weariness from my eye.

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# Wed Feb 19 12:56:28 EST 2003
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Strange how smells can evoke memory. I was sitting here contemplating my oatmeal (well, not really, but it seemed a good intro) and I thought about apples. Apple-cinnamon oatmeal, actually, but you get the idea. Apples remind me of sunshine on a pool deck, the sting of chlorinated water in my nostrils, a glass of Coke that's just not doing anything for my thirst, a plate of sliced apples sitting before me. Funny that the memory is so indistinct, as if the camera was unfocused, gauzed over.

I had occasion, several years ago, to visit my old school building. With the lens of childhood and faulty memory removed, the building seemed tiny, no more than a little brick box with squeaky doors. I suppose it was the geometry of proportions that made the small rooms, to a small child, seem immense. Perhaps also it had grown in my recollection.

I remember days spent on a Florida beach racing to scribble little nothings in the sand before the waves erased them. You could never finish a word before the first wave would wash over the beginning. Memory is like this. The present is always distinct, colorful, the past blurs and fades. We can take snapshots of the moments, whether through photographs or journal entries, but you can never recreate the state of mind exactly. So we're left with unfocused Polaroids starting to fade, two ticket stubs from a U2 concert, a seashell from Key West, and hazy, hazy memories of summers long gone.

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# Thu Feb 20 00:28:46 EST 2003
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Meet my invisible friend, Godfrey. You can't see him, hear him, or otherwise determine that he actually exists. He's a phantom, a story made up to frighten little children into saying their "pleases" and "thank you's". Yet, he is reputed to have connections, lots of power, lots of influence, but never uses it (though there are stories told about the times he did). I've heard that he could have stopped a particularly gruesome massacre in Nicaragua a few years ago but balked because of a philosophical difference (the victims must want to be saved). In spite of this, he has a reputation for being a good guy. Whether Godfrey can or will influence the world is of no consequence. You must recognize his existence or he will be sorely pissed come Tuesday. Then he's seeking payback. Fuck Godfrey.

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# Thu Feb 20 10:02:18 EST 2003
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Within the space of a few weeks I'd once touched Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico waters. It seemed a cool thing to do; a gesture to become a part of that mystic continuum by, umm, touching water. Yeah, pretty ridiculous in hindsight. Anyhoo, I think we've gotten it all wrong. The ancients had it right -- they worshipped fire and water, air, the Sun. These gods are real, are not weak in their power. Want to chat with a god? Forget whispers by the bedside but stand instead in the middle of storm, on the beach, at midnight.

I have this little container of metal shards on my desk. The shards are magnetized, in various shapes, and are meant as some sort of mental diversion (as if I needed those). If one shard is moved it carries along the others with it. One piece cannot be moved without affecting the others. I suppose I could insert some cute little nonsense about the inter-connectedness of it all, how one life is inexplicably linked to another. But looking at these little shards, random shards, the only thing that comes to mind is how accidental, how arbitrary are the shapes and orientations of the little pieces of metal.

So the Water God and the Sun God and the Fire God fit better in my world. They are capricious entities, as arbitrary and accidental as little bits of metal in a plastic container, and about as deep. There are no illusions with primal gods -- it would make as much sense to ask my coffeepot "why" as pose the same thing to these gods.

Blah blah blah.

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# Thu Feb 20 23:17:14 EST 2003
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More random threads: My uncle wrote under the pen name of Zeno. All of his books are long since out-of-print but I have a few copies that have survived. The original Zeno lived about 2,500 years ago and is remembered best for his paradoxes. One in particular said something to the effect that if an object moves from one point to another, it must first travel half the distance. Before it can do that, it must first travel a fourth of the distance, and so on. The object must thus pass through an infinite number of halfway points and this (he thought) was impossible in a finite time. A little algebra can show that this ain't so. This little diversion soon led to the Riemann Hypothesis. It's trivial to explain, but this problem has baffled thousands of mathematicians for thousands of years. This, in turn, led to Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes and this is what I'm trying to explore...

Like Zeno's paradox, Euclid's proof shows that some problems are very easily explained when viewed from a different vantage point. Zeno did not have the luxury of algebra so a trivial problem became a lynchpin of his philsophy. Euclid's proof is similarly enchanting. Once explained it seems so incredibly obvious that it's seems amazing it needed discovering at all.

Anyhoo, this little exploration started as I was trying to introduce the section on limits for my math guide. It's not my intention to teach limits, but it was interesting enough to include somewhere.

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# Sat Feb 22 12:51:21 EST 2003
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More pseudo-intellectual bombast for your ridicule:

My parents tell me that when I was two years old, I nearly drowned. On a beach in Jamaica I'd wandered off into the water, stupid and smiling, and was only a few feet from a dropoff. Someone snatched me away before my smiling head disappeared beneath the waves. I don't remember it at all.

I've seen a lot of water in the three decades since. I've canoed up the murky Loxahatchee, snorkeled the impossible blueness within the Molokini crater, dipped my feet into a forest spring somewhere in Georgia. But behind it all there's a near imperceptible fear of the water. I'm not a great swimmer; after thirty seconds under the water I'll become edgy, almost panicky. After swimming a hundred yards I'll begin to hold my breath, a positive feedback ensues and I breathe less and get more worried that I won't make it back to shore. I've heard that forgotten terrors -- a near-drowning on a beach in Jamaica -- can cause such later phobias.

But is this true? Someone suggested that the reason I don't drink alcohol is because I hate losing control. Water may, on some strange, metaphysical level, represent my subconscious, the non-thinking portion of my psyche. Sinking into the water would be equivalent to losing control. Hmmm.

I imagine that we associate water with the subconscious because some primordial gene from the first proteal earth-walker that slogged itself from the brine, choking and sputtering in the violent air, is still influencing our thoughts. I could also imagine that it is some Jungian thing. Perhaps fear of water is really just fear of the impermanence of our human constructs. Our machines, our structures, our art -- all the symbols of our rage against the Void -- will eventually descend back into the Void. The realization terrifies.

Maybe it's more (or less) than this. I can't help thinking of water as some impossible and indomitable force, like Fate, that cares not a whit about our petty aspirations and hopes and dreams...and lives.

I warned about the bombast.

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# Mon Feb 24 10:53:24 EST 2003
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Fragments from the attic: SOHCAHTOA. "Soak whose toe?" All Students Take Calculus. "You're kidding, right?" Nietzsche. "Bless you." It's not hard. "Your personal problem." Espressos at midnight. Reverse means backward. That's not a wallet. Mickey Mouse is scary. Con leche at noon. Voicesvoicesvoices... Dancing in the spectral light, high on caffeine, near dark Atlantic waters. Singing in the rain. Caramel macchiato always. Whywhywhywhywhywhwywhy....2em,iwnfy.

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# Mon Mar 3 11:52:17 EST 2003
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Pain is the ultimate opiate. There's nothing like physical pain to dull the emotions; it appeals to our baser instincts, clarifies, and most wonderfully of all, sends Mnemosyne scurrying. It's difficult to think about much else while your lungs are aching, your thighs, shoulders, back and fingers (!!) are burning with pain and demanding oxygen. Pain is assuredly the other carnal pleasure.

It's so easy to fall into the addiction, the trap of this wonderful pain.

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# Tue Mar 4 08:29:52 EST 2003
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Lately I've been feeling...numb. Detached. Disconnected. Numb. I was reading Pablo Neruda's "Thinking, Tangling Shadows" this morning, hoping to evoke a memory of a time, a place. Hokey and cheesy, yes? For whatever reason, it caused me to recall a few lines from Dylan (Bob, not Thomas) that went:

Then she opened up a book of poems And handed it to me Written by an Italian poet From the thirteenth century. And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burnin' coal Pourin' off of every page Like it was written in my soul from me to you,

I'd been introduced to Neruda's works by the same person who once chastised me for thinking too much. Forget the why, ignore the how, and experience with full senses all that is occurring in the now. Feel, don't think, the sting of raindrops on bare skin, the squish of mud between toes on a riverbank... But in the back of my mind I realized that his work was somehow alien to me -- too sensual, too provocative. I found beauty in the interplay of words, the glorious images, the ideas that suffused every stanza, but the feeling remained inscrutable.

So these words, at least to others more receptive, could evoke an entire mood and frame of mind. What did it do for me? It occurred to me that a poem is a distillation of said frame of mind. And then some bits of lecture from an information theory class -- something about information and the minimum data required to tranfer it -- came to mind. Hmmm. I'm hopeless.

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# Tue Mar 11 11:33:08 EST 2003
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One of my wife's photographs depicts a multitude of boats -- canoes and rowboats -- moored on a Guyanese riverbank beneath threatening skies. Not a person is visible. It always makes me think of some old fisherman sitting in some wooden, tin-roofed shack lamenting the cold reality that there would be no fishing trip today; and though he doesn't voice it, some part of him realizes that those daily excursions are respites from the squalor, the burdensome reality of his existence.

I was thinking about art recently. Is there some sublime beauty in a thing, some innate statement about life in the thing itself, which exists beyond the viewer? I imagine that Van Gogh or Da Vinci often scribbled into a notepad for nothing other than their own amusement, perhaps to explore a concept. These nothings were never meant for other eyes but now grace many walls, museums, and galleries.

Oh, art has this vague illusion of permanence, but seems to be as transitory as a dream. Yet, this photograph has frozen this little river scene. Perhaps the river bank is now a beach resort, but it endures and my writing about it perpetuates it somehow.

I suppose it's no different from my work. I'd hope it would have some vague illusion of profundity, but there's nothing there after all.

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# Wed Mar 12 20:59:14 EST 2003
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There's a page on the web somewhere that generates some high-fallutin' sounding text. The sentences are all grammatically correct, the references (apparently) sound, but it's completely meaningless. Here's a snippet:

	In a sense, Bataille suggests the use of neotextual rationalism
	to challenge the status quo. Baudrillard's essay on modernism
	states that language is used to marginalize the Other.

As a joke, I'd once given a full page of this gibberish to someone for their learned criticism. To be kind, I suppose that I could say that his response surprised me. But it didn't. He complimented me, asked for deeper explanations of particular points, even suggested refinements. Did he want to spare my feelings and not offend me?

I imagine that I could walk around with a cockroach on my nose and most people would feign ignorance, look the other way, try with all possible device to ignore the reality of a massive cockroach sitting on my nose. Maybe it's the civil thing to do, the expected behaviour of polite society. Then some kid walks up, "Mister, there's a cockroach on your nose," or, "Look, Mum! The King's in his skivvies!" and suddenly the sham is revealed.

OK, too much Camus, too much Conrad, too much coffee recently. Not nearly enough sleep, too. Sleep is sometimes a welcome oblivion. Hmmm. Just this moment thought about Gothicism as a response to the Void... I really want to explore that further but no time now. And web searches are bringing up chatter about vampires, voyeurs, and black nail polish...

In other news, I've recently installed a Gentoo Linux machine. Works really well so far, though I'm a little disappointed in how long it took for everything to build (almost four days of compiling on a 500MhZ AMD K6-2). I've also been preparing for an upcoming presentation on the RPM Package Manager. Look for the notes soon and drop by to heckle if you'd like. Oh yeah, I suckered someone into paying me for some ramblings about science, math, and computers. Woohoo!

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# Tue Mar 25 09:51:50 EST 2003
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So I was trying to get a grasp on Nothingness, and I've succeeded in grasping nothing. It certainly seems that much of our writing and art is created(!) in response or in abhorrence of Nothing. You know -- the Abyss, the Void. Imagine the artist who had dedicated his life to duplicating a scene. Along comes the first cameras that can indeed duplicate that scene with far better accuracy that is possible with the human hand. The artist may condemn the new technology as soulless and without merit or even destroy his canvases in protest. Then perhaps he realizes that duplicating an image is not art... The idea spreads and artists, en masse, begin sketching their scenes and trying to capture -- if not the mirror likeness -- the essence. Maybe they distill the fine lines into rough dollops of pigment. These rough impressions may then cede to some blocky geometric colors. The colors cede to Satin Black and Mars White. And then someone eventually puts up a blank canvas at MoMA and is hailed a genius. But there's Nothing there.

What happens when all that we had considered as uniquely human facilities -- painting, playing chess, *thinking* -- can be done better by our machines? Maybe we turn inward or embrace some Eastern philosophy that embraces the Void? Maybe we surrender?

Blah blah blah.

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# Thu Apr 3 16:57:55 EST 2003
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I sprained my ankle practicing katas yesterday. The pain was delicious for a while, then became a nuisance. When I was a kid I had once broken the same leg. It has long since healed, but every once in a while there's a dull throbbing that reminds me of the pain of those first few moments. Weird, pain is. Some textbooks have mentioned that people don't remember pain; they may think they do, but the mind/brain shuts down in moments of intense pain to prevent itself from going mad later. I dunno. I remember that burning, shredding sensation when I received that beautiful spiral fracture along my lower tibia. I remember that memorable, knife-in-the-side tickle when someone hit me in the ribs with a baseball bat. I remember the impossible to describe pins-and-needles ache after being kicked in the back and side and that beautiful nausea when I tried to take a deep breath. Oh yeah, I remember pain. I remember so many things. Sometimes I wish I could forget.

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# Fri Apr 25 10:39:07 EDT 2003
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It happened. After serving millions of pages over the past five years, the hard drive on my trusty Dell Optiplex Pentium 100 finally decided to retire. It was a good box, acquired from a computer surplus fair for $100, and had worked with maybe three days of downtime in those five years (and those three days were because I moved to a different house). But I will rebuild it.

I feel like that hard drive sometimes. I want to give up, give in. I wonder how others fight the appeal of just saying. "Screw it!" I long to scratch myself with abandon, howl at the moon, chant guttural syllables in rank obeisance to the moon at midnight, in a loincloth, while eating my oatmeal without a spoon. Wild man with wild hair, wild eyes glinting, scaring good children with my wild laughter...

Maybe the entire appeal of science and mathematics is that they are so utterly unlike those primal callings. I'd thought that we each possess some Jeckyll/Hyde duality, each vying for a moment in the spotlight but now I'm not so certain. Perhaps one is just a mask, a convenient facade for existing within a society. Maybe our true nature is entirely more animal, more given to running naked through the trees than to recognizing a Fibonacci series within a Bach concerto.

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# Wed Apr 30 08:46:53 EDT 2003
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There are times when I cannot sleep. I fuss and fidget, trying in futile attempt to calm my mind, think of nothing, and drift into the dark, sweet oblivion. But it never works. Don't know what it is really, if it was indeed a single thing that kept me awake. I know that often a sense of dire urgency takes me -- things need to get done because time is running away -- and any other thought becomes irrelevant. So I've spent many nights and pre-dawn mornings typing away, hoping to get things on paper (well, in magnetic patterns on a bit of rust at least).

It also crossed my mind that maybe my bed wasn't comfortable. But then I've slept in the oddest of places too. There have been the usual floors, living room furniture, vehicles, tents and failing that, sleeping bags. But I've also slumbered on conveyor belts, in the rafters of a tiki hut, and in more than a few warehouses. Oh, there were also the squalid little places purporting to be motels or hotels. These were always miserable, full of odd smells and suspicious stains, shouts and midnight sirens. Here's a hint: Don't stay in Pt. Charlotte. I mean that.

I suppose there's also a latent horror in these visits to the Other Side. Our literature is filled with this notion that sleep is really a miniature death, little nightly excursions into shadow lands where return is not always guaranteed. I suppose that idea has kept a few 19th Century English writers sipping their coffee and pondering over their curious volumes, at least until they, or their culture, learned to embrace the night.

Whatever the reason I can't say. It's now my 26th hour of waking and I still can't sleep. Bleah. Somebody shoot me with a tranqulizer dart, please.

(An aside: So, Child of Light, you have an eternity and a day now to contemplate the stars. What is it like to finally peer upon the back of Orion's head? Will you tap him on the shoulder, run away as the slow warrior turns? Oh to see his face as he finds you gone, your laughter disappearing between the stars as comets scatter in your wake...)

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# Fri May 9 09:08:45 EDT 2003
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Weird days, weirder nights. A parade of nightmares danced through my mind; no circus elephants in pink tutus, but instead snakes and succubi, a man with no eyes, and walls that wouldn't stay in place. I'd read once that dreams were the mind's way of purging the daily events and organizing memories. It was in a scientific journal, but there was an air of shamanism about the entire article. I dunno. I was amazed once to hear that someone else had "experienced" a similar dream of walking through high school in nothing but underwear. So maybe dreams are more than just a data re-organization -- maybe some ancient ancestor, dozing off after a day of hunting mammoth, fell asleep under the stars and also dreamed of forgetting his locker combination.

No news of consequence. I'd since given the RPM usage presentation (look for notes shortly) and attended a Linux vs. Windows debate at a local college. OK, maybe the notes won't appear too soon since I have a habit of putting these things off. I wish there was some easy formula to learn all these systems and get these notes written; y'know, like adding an 'a' to the end of each word in order to speak Latin? You hearing me, Jude?

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# Sat Jun 14 13:28:06 EDT 2003
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Some incoherent ramblings on a Saturday afternoon... Don't, I promised myself, ever write for the sake of writing. Have something to say, then commit it. Not the case now... Remember that poor old man sentenced to push a rock up a hill for all eternity? He's still there, as far as anyone knows, preventing moss from growing on that big rock. I was thinking about this as I mowed my lawn this past week. It seems that I could mow it and, by the time the job was done, I'd need to start over again because it had grown up behind me. Maybe the old man is either an idealist or an idiot; his dogged perseverence either something noble beyond my comprehension -- like the marathon runner who continues yet as his shins start bleeding and his heart starts failing, or something insanely stupid (like the marathon runner passing in and out of consciousness but determined to continue). A matter of perspective, I s'pose.

I did the "Installation and Introduction to Linux" talk a couple times. Seemed to have gone well, but didn't cover half of what I'd planned. Oh well. Oh, and the site was down for a week because of DSL problems. Lastly, it finally eclipsed 20,000 hits for the month thanks to a post on Slashdot. Yayy! I feel I should celebrate somehow. Full moon tonight, too. I should howl at it.

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# Mon Jun 16 01:19:43 EDT 2003
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Added links to the outlines for "Installation and Intro to Linux" and "Using the RPM Package Manager". Worked some more on the math pages and enlisted the aid of someone with much better math skills. Hopefully this will get them completed....

A house a few doors down from mine was robbed earlier in the week. The thieves cleaned out the place. I've had some minor things stolen -- minor in a monetary sense -- and the worst is not the replacement cost but the sense of powerlessness and victimization; and, of course, the loss of personal items. Losing mementos is always difficult; it's as if you've lost a part of your childhood or your self. Weird, I know. I've never been one to care much about things themselves, but almost everything I own carries some memory of particular times or places. For example, I have a fairly decent Waterman pen. It's not a collectible by any stretch, perhaps worth about $25 on Ebay, but it is significant because I used it to sign the paperwork on my first car loan. It reminds me of that elation and oppression of a first real car. A thing associated with the ownership of a thing. Pitiful, no? Where am I going with this? I dunno. This has been a year of loss for me, staggering loss, and nights of solitude tend to make this realization more keen. We go through our lives, accreting experience, a few objects, and hopefully some knowledge. But the more we accrete, the more complicated everything becomes. We can't go back. We will never see that same decoder ring again, never have another Snoopy lunch box with the same dented corner. Never again experience life with the same innocence we did before... And I'm sitting here listening to some music from my past, trying to recall for just one last time the disintegrating memories of people and places. But it's not enough. It will never be enough. Somebody slap me please.

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# Thu Jul 3 10:28:11 EDT 2003
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DMH. offers the following insightful message:
"Practice relentlessly without ever 'trying'. After much practice, the action - whatever it is - just happens. The point is the doing rather than the accomplishment, and the joy of encountering the unexpected, the unintended, on the way." -A. Cairns

The only thing I know about Zen Buddhism is what I've read in books, and that's mostly from a book called "Long Quiet Highway" by Natalie Goldberg, which is really more of an autobiography, but since she's been practicing Zen for a zillion years, she writes about how she got into it & about her teacher & she describes some of what her experience was like.

This morning on the subway, I ran across a passage in "Zen & the Art..." about peace of mind & quality of the machine, something about how you can tell the quality of the machine by the peace of mind it brings you. If you are anxious about the machine, you are not maintaining it.

So, my thing (the story of my life?) is that "maintaining the machine" is the thing I have the most trouble with. I feel like I'm faking it all the time, but the day to day stuff, the organizing, cleaning, clearing things out, maintaining, keeping track, planning, etc., is the stuff that gives me the most trouble. I'm better with the big problems & find the "administrative tasks" the most difficult things. This would make me an absentee professor if I were a professor. I want to be clearer with all this.

Anyway, the quote above is from an essay about Zen & acting. I think that it sums up what I know about the philosophy behind Zen, but I think it's really more physical, really about sitting. And, like you say, it cannot be learned from a book...anymore than reading a book about how to play the guitar will teach you to play the guitar.

I want to look into it more.

--d Quite interesting thought. There's a passage in "Heart of Darkness" about an administrator who "originated nothing." He existed as steward of a bureaucracy and nothing more, sort of a accessory to the machine that would only be missed for being gone. Having worked in some massive bureaucracies (and having done some work with some government organizations), this administrator always a chilling, almost hideous effect on me. Pushing paper, signing forms to request forms (I've done that), the whole confusion of maintenance just seemed overwhelming. So paperwork sucks. It really sucks. Now that I'm running my own business I'm inundated in the forty days and nights sort of way with tax forms, proposals, requests for payment, more forms requests (*), etc.. . And this is not an answer, but I do realize that there's a certain peace in the process itself. Maybe it's the "infinity in a grain of sand" or just the calm from the mind-numbing boredom, but the process itself can be worthwhile. Sort of the "book of shipman's knots" mentioned in HoD, but on a different scale.

A story comes to mind: A Zen master was instructing two students in the ways of archery. He points to a target so far away that it was almost impossible to see. He instructs the first student to fire an arrow and pierce the target. The first student says that he could not do so because he could barely see the target, much less hit it. He doesn't attempt the shot. The second student takes the bow and volunteers. He lets an arrow fly and it hits perfectly. Thinking that he would be congratulated, he is instead scolded. He is somewhat angry so asks the Zen master to see if he himself could hit the target. The zen master takes the bow, pulls, sights. Then he puts the bow down without firing. That is the lesson.

I've always interpreted that as the process itself is more desirable than the goal. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's more that if you know the process is true then you are guaranteed of the result, so the final steps are superfluous. E.g., imagine playing a game of computer solitaire and then realizing that you know the game is solvable. Do you continue to play or just stop, content with your realization?

Also, very interesting was the blurb about "peace of mind & quality of the machine." For some of the system administration work I do, this is a literal truth. There are many, many chances to do a half-assed job, but the resultant anxiety is not worth it. Even if the machines don't fail, I will still lose sleep because I realize that they *might*.

This all seems contrary to the passage about fixing the machine with a bit of scrounged aluminum. I.e., the end result was somehow more desirable than the process. Or maybe I'm misremembering. Have you hit that scene yet?

DMH replies:

In the part about the aluminum, he was talking about his friend John & trying to figure out why John refuses to become involved in the process of motorcycle maintenance. John has something wrong with his motorcycle, maybe with his handlebar, and Robert says he knows the exact part that John needs. John asks him where he can get the part. Thinking he's being clever & that his friend will appreciate it, he takes a soda can & cuts it up & says that the cut up can will do the trick. This angers his friend because he thinks Robert is making fun of him...or, rather, Robert spends a lot of time analyzing why this angers John & comes to the conclusion that he thinks John is more concerned with what something means, rather than its underlying form. The soda can, with its underlying form (being a very thin piece of aluminum), would work perfectly. But, John can't get past the thought of fixing his bike with a soda can. It's an expensive machine, maybe a BMW, and, to phrase it in my words, "Fixin' it with a $.25 can of soda? That just ain't right." Robert concludes that he should have cut the can secretly, peeled off the soda can label, and pretended that he happened to have that exact part in his motorcycle repair kit. This would have met John's need*.

I like your story about the archery. Maybe that's the right interpretation, that the process is more important & the instructor felt the student had missed the point because he didn't have to shoot the arrow 500,000 times in order to hit the target. But, (not to argue with a Zen "master") isn't that being concerned with the results? Didn't the student shoot the arrow correctly anyway? If the student hit the target on the first try, wouldn't it be beneficial for the student to have to keep firing arrows in order to learn the process, to let go of the "good feeling" (ego) he got from hitting it? I think maybe this is the same thing as one thing Sandy Meisner said about acting, that it is counter-productive if a beginning actor gets praise early on because he will keep trying to "act the same way" to get the praise again, not knowing what it is he did because he has no deeply rooted process, and he will never grow or learn, and he will be come stiff.

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# Fri Aug 15 14:01:05 EDT 2003
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I've been reading John Allen Paulos' A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper in between passages from Dumbing Down: Essays on the Strip Mining of American Culture. Of the former I'll say that it reinforces the idea we've suspected all along -- there is no news. No spoon, no anything, really. Just a daily rehash of all that there ever was. Maybe the more jaded among us can find something insanely reassuring in knowing that the world is indeed going to hell and that there will always be a newspaper to tell us so. I've taken the requisite statistics courses and done by share of numerical hocus pocus (hoci poci?), but Paulos' book really, *really* enlightened. As for Dumbing Down? Hmmm. Don't know what to say about it. There's a none too subtle sense of elitism in the book, as if the arts, science, mathematics existed only for the perusal of intellectual superiors. Not that I don't appreciate knowledge and the *human* pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but this book seemed to imply that certain insights are not for the common folk. Normally I'd say that this pursuit was "noble", perhaps "divine", but those words themselves imply that common humanity itself was somehow imperfect.
So after I'd finished lumbering through these rarefied volumes, I picked up another dog-eared Calvin and Hobbes collection. In one of those startling coincidences, the first page I turned to had Calvin remarking about his snowman creation, "One look at the tortured countenance of this figure confirms that the artist had drunk deeply from the cup of life. This work shall endure and inspire future generations." The last panel depicts his snow art melting under the morning sun. Yeah, look on my works, ye mighty. OK, yawn, another entry on the ephemeral stuff of life. Blah blah blah. But I can't help it really. Events conspire to set me in this frame of mind and I am thusly framed.
A friend of mine had once had his car stolen. The thieves had stripped just about everything from the vehicle -- radio, tires, spark plugs (!). They did leave a few coins in the ashtray and an audio tape. And maybe I'll be attributing some significance to something cosmically insignificant, but the fact that there was something left, however miniscule, was comforting. Here are the eggs unbroken, y'know?
OK, to bring this ramble all together: There's not a lot of hope that existence has any meaning whatsoever. Trends, art, knowledge, even notions of some higher purpose disappear not unlike how our screams get lost in the ear-shattering roar of the Void. Yet the fact that we can still light our candles in the crushing darkness is perhaps what makes us human.
Yeah, ok. Anyway, time to get back to work.
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# Tue Sep 9 00:10:22 EDT 2003
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I'd like to try a little experiment. I was reading Beyond Numeracy today when I came across a chapter on how interconnected everyone is. Between two random people there very likely exist other connections: my dentist may know the uncle of the friend of one of my aunts in England; my friend's brother may be married to the cousin of a former classmate. Startling coincidences can exist between two people and I'd like to test it out if you will. Paulos mentioned the procedure for the experiment and it's fairly simple:

Think of a random acquaintance, preferably one you have not seen in a few years. Send five of your friends a letter with instructions to forward the email to the five people who are most likely to know the long-lost acquaintance. In the email leave a "trail" to show who received the email and when. Try to forward the message only to those who will likely take part in the experiment. Should the long-lost acquaintance receive the message they can respond to the originator. The game has ended.

The first person I'd like to contact is John Allen Paulos himself :D. I'll send out the five emails in a few moments with the instructions on this page.

It would also be interesting to do the reverse. I.e., a connection may exist between two people but how quickly can others be found? In the simplest case of mutual friends it would just another one intervening person. In more elaborate cases maybe dozens of "nodes" would need to be visited before the target is reached.

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# Fri Oct 3 10:42:18 EDT 2003
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Time for an update. Pretense, steel, and suchlike...
I've been considering moving much of my content over to digitalhermit.org and keeping the .com for business related stuff. I'd need a new server, or at least one with bigger hard drive space. Remarkably, the little 233MhZ box is doing quite well serving pages so I am loathe to relinquish it. Yet there's much that I want to add -- some hideous artwork and poetry, reams of Conrad-esque tributes (or outright derivations), and some particularly bad photography. So yeah, Digital Hermit is feeling a mite long in the tooth and wants to explore that vibrant, creative side... or dreary, barnacle-infested underbelly as the case may be.

Recently I've been teaching some Linux coursework at a local technical school. Cool stuff. Notes will be online presently. If anyone is interested in putting together a dead-tree manual for similar courses, please get in touch.

Got a new(er) laptop recently -- an IBM Thinkpad T22. Still getting the OS installed but from a Knoppix boot it appears to be completely Linux supported. I'll still hang on to the older laptops -- a Toshiba Satellite, Dell Inspiron, and another Thinkpad -- because I can't throw hardware away. Got lots of old Macs, many more older PCs, some Atari equipment, maybe still some Amiga stuff. Many of the machines are actually functional and on the network. At last count eighteen machines were a power-on from being back in service. I.e., they were connected, had a TCP/IP aware OS, and could boot.

Too much stuff.

Too much rain, too. I took a drive with my brother up to Orlando recently and braved another Florida downpour. At one point the combination of mists thrown up from the back of cars ahead and the deluge from the gray carpet above brought to mind the cloud scene in Apocalypse Now, except with less visibility and more mist. But it was relaxing in an odd sort of way, as if we were in a bubble of existence moving through Nothing. Maybe this impression tells of a sub-conscious revolt against the clutter that is my life. Too much stuff.

Somewhere Wordsworth's worthwhile words will echo agreement, but not here and not today. Simplify, simplify goes the mantra but the clutter is (partially) what fascinates me. I love the gadgetry and doodads, maybe not for their usefulness but for what they speak about us. Take "digital assistants" for example. Please. Har har. I've gone through several -- from some clunky Newtons to Palm Pilots -- and not a one has done a thing to improve my organization skills. Note taking? Bah! A Zebra 301 with a stack of index cards in my shirt pocket has served better for those infrequent splashes of inspiration than any PDA ever has. (Heh, I said "Bah!")

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# Fri Oct 31 12:03:01 EST 2003
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Found a way to double my productivity. Parallel processing, sharing the workload, and all that.

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# Tue Nov 4 15:42:59 EST 2003
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Been reading about solar flares recently and it put me in an Apocalyptic frame of mind. Brought to mind some nonsense I wrote way back: In the turmoil and the torrent of the storm
Shiva descended upon the dread deluged earth
As pale Set laughed and sent his dark dominion forth.

Men fell to bended knee, sent prayers to the sky
And as the fires fell they met their gods,
All ten thousand vices they had deified.

One alone among the masses, a messenger without eyes,
Knew, he alone knew, and knelt upon the mountain and cried
For days till those below pointed and called out,
"Harbinger of Death!" and the crucified him there, on the mount
But upside down in grim mockery of a fabled lunatic.
Under his head was laid a kindle of twigs and sticks;
He was disrobed, his shaggy head was shorn;
In his mouth was placed and apple and round his feet a crown of thorns.
A fire was ignited and twined around the blind man who groaned
For days, as Death was busy elsewhere to visit this man alone.

Far away on a dim and distant summit an ancient Titan was unchained.
His links, his shackles exploded and fell like rain
Upon a metropolis below, and by will or fate, who is to say,
Demolished a blood-beaked vulture and returned the beast to Hell.

The Titan laughed, for this indeed he had not foreseen, not once
In any vision, and he spoke one word, one word alone with violence
And all kings shuddered to hear its echo over Earth and Sea.

The heavens were broken, baptized in the blood
Of the legions of lovely demons from below.

One woman died giving birth.
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# Wed Nov 19 10:45:27 EST 2003
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If I had a dog I would name him Errol
Train him to read, to fetch the Herald
I could then say, my left eye winking
"Here's my dog, Errol, versed in small things,"
In doggerel verse, of all things.

Yes, I am truly sorry. Some things seem funnier after 18 hours of waking.

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# Thu Dec 18 20:09:53 EST 2003
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I upgraded the look of the site over the weekend. Besides the (IMHO) better aesthetics, it makes it much easier to manage and hopefully easier to navigate. All the old links should still function normally. The new additions include:
* Newer version of the kernel rebuild guide
* Rweb Online Statistics
* PHPNav Navigation bar
* Various document updates (RPM, ray tracing, etc.)

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# Mon Dec 29 20:22:43 EST 2003
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Listening to Natalie Merchant's "Stockton Gala Days"... Strange that music can put you in a certain frame of mind. Or maybe I was in that frame of mind already and chose appropriate music. Hmm. Maybe that's why I was reading Endymion for Lord knows what. Every holiday begins with dreams of getting so much *stuff* done, what with all the free time I'll have. I had hoped to finish at least one book on my reading list but it was not to be. Instead, I read The Accidental Asian and a bunch of short stories from Points of View. But there is a thread, it seems. All these works are short and suitable for my recent concentration problems. Normally I could sit for hours and work on just one thing, whether it was an essay or a story or just documentation. Recently I've been distracted, following too many tangents, and as a consequence, unable to get anything meaningful accomplished.
Anyway...
We had another blackout recently. The neighbors tree fell onto a power line and sent the entire block into darkness. Power was out for several hours. An Asplundh truck arrived with men wielding chainsaws and cellphones. I offered them coffee but they laughed and told me they had Cuban coffee. One shot, not much more than a thimbleful, was equivalent to one cup of American coffee (or rather, Colombian coffee made the American way). I wanted to tell him that I don't drink from the steenkin' tiny paper cups. I drink my Cuban coffee by the mugful (seriously!). Strange, but I almost felt insulted that they turned down my coffee. Heh! I'm a coffee snob. :D Not that I don't appreciate coffee for caffeine's sake. There's much to be said for the heightened awareness from a few cups of instant coffee. What's there to say? It should be called Tolstoy. Why? Because it reminds me of Russian winter nights: cold, black and bitter.
(Here you go, luv, espresso and a cinammon twist for you, cappucino for me. Do you still favor that toxic absinthe and mocha drink? I'll quaff one for you later. Say hello to Cassiopeia for me.)

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# Mon Jan 5 08:52:25 EST 2004
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Preparing for an upcoming presentation on Linux troubleshooting. I had hoped to have my new Opteron and Athlon XP2800 (Barton core) ready in time, but the parts haven't even arrived yet. The new machines will bring to fourteen the number of physical machines on the network, and this is after consolidating a couple test machines into one.
I've also been working on a Linux based cluster solution for a recent customer. It works pretty sweetly. Look for notes and a HOWTO over the next month. The only missing component would be a Linux based load balancer -- one that will choose an IP address from nodes in the farm and then send web requests to the node. I was thinking of ways to do this with dynamic IPTABLES rulesets but haven't quite figured it out yet.
Also been fussing with getting Maxima to build and compile under RedHat9. The sticking component has been GNU gcl which just refuses to build cleanly. An updated version has been released a few days ago but it's still broken on my setup. In the end I switched to CMUCL and everything just worked.
As for other happenings -- my daughter will be two years old in two weeks. She's been a good kid, certainly not as stressful as I had been told. In recent weeks I've had to discipline her, however. She threw a tantrum when I refused her ice cream one morning. "It's too early," I'd said as she pulled me to the refridgerator. Then a stern, "No!" I almost gave in when she gave a good performance as a cold and hungry Olivia Twist. More ice cream, please? It still boggles my mind that I'm a parent. In recent days she has insisted on relating with great passion the events of her day... Well, as much as she can remember anyway. She uses her hands to describe the "Fall of the House of Lego". "Build block. Me build block.... Bam!"
The other day I found a beautiful tribute to Jackson Pollack on a kitchen cabinet. The reds were bold, only slightly less intense than the purples. Now who could have done that? I brought her to the masterpiece and asked, "Chandi, who drew this on the door?" She looked at me for a moment then said with amazing earnestness, "Mommy drew door."
Ahh, deception. It seems clear it will be a battle. I've got old age and wiliness on my side. She has those pouty cheeks and innocent eyes. And that banshee like scream when she doesn't get what she wants. Anyhoo, I'd better stop now and go get her ice cream.

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# Tue Mar 9 02:46:49 EST 2004
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Some drama in the drudgery...
A few days ago I was in the middle of putting together a contract when the doorbell rang. I grabbed a shirt and some um, pants, dressed, ran my fingers through my hair and hurried to answer (the state of undress is one of the perks of working from home). I expected UPS or FedEx. Instead, a guy with a bored half-smile greeted me. Well, technically I greeted him but who's counting.
"Hullo, yes?" said I.
"You look like a nice guy. You want to help others."
Sh*t.
"Umm, now's not a really good time."
But he starts his spiel. He's a student at some local school of which I'd never heard. He needs a sponsor to complete his studies so that he can help others as a counselor. Then he thrusts a laminated printout into my hands.
A quick glance and I realize that it is printed on a low quality ink or bubble jet. There are spelling errors. The graphics are garish. They've misspelled "Sheridan" and did I mention the graphics? The page, purporting to be an official sponsorship document, looks obviously altered by someone new to digital editing.
"...only $200 to sponsor me."
"No thanks. Not interested."
"All you have to do is listen to what I have to say."
"Appreciate it, but no thanks," I repeat.
"Thanks, ass****, for blowing me off," says he.
Eh? "What did you say?"
He says something that sounds like "vacuum" or "fun cool" or "far queue." You get the idea. Then I blew up. I figured he was about 180lbs, maybe a little less. But I'm 200lbs, maybe a little more. I step onto the porch in front of him. Up to this time I was partially hidden by the door and my voice tends to be of low volume and maybe too polite at times. All these together perhaps gave my visitor the impression that I was the stereotypical small-framed, submissive Asian.
"What the f*** did you just say?" I -- heh heh -- bellow.
He steps back, starts to turn and gives me a "You're number one!" salute. I move closer. He stumbles a moment as he leaves the porch onto the cement walkway. I follow, spewing invective and telling him to stop. He's moving pretty quickly now, down the walkway, into the street. I follow him just to the edge of my property...
Biggest thrill in months.

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# Wed Jan 21 09:47:09 EST 2004
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Fragments... I was in Little Rock once on a cold, cold day. Business trip. No time to see the sights but I tried anyway. I got as far as the corner before turning back. The sidewalks were frozen and every step was treacherous. It was an emergency trip and though I'd packed the warmest clothes I could find, the frigid 75 degree South Florida winters somehow didn't quite prepare me. My toes were freezing. My teeth were clenched so tightly that my jaw began to hurt. My ears were numb. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought. They'll find me in the morning frozen into the sidewalk. Turns out it was one of the coldest months on record...
In New Orleans once, visiting friends. I'd checked the weather forecast before leaving the Ft. Lauderdale airport and heard of temperatures in the low-60's. No problem. The day after my arrival was one of the coldest days on record. Low-60s? Hah! Try low 40s.
In Queens... I was an "enthusiastic" kid. I peered through the window and saw snowflakes wafting lazily to the ground. Jumped out of bed and pulled on my boots and hat then rushed outside to play. Played. Played some more. My, it's getting cold. Better head back inside. Door is covered with snow. Can't budge the door. Dig. Dig some more. After much hammering and screaming manage to get my father to come to the door. He asks me if it's cold outside. Yes, it is. This was 1978.

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# Mon Feb 2 11:31:18 EST 2004
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Just finished re-reading Lord of the Flies a few moments ago. Before that, I was listening to U2's Boy album. One of the tracks is "Shadows and Tall Trees", which happens to have been named for a chapter in Golding's book. Previous to listening to U2 I was trying to figure out the chords to Cat Stevens' "Wild World" and had been visiting various lyric sites around the net. I got from Cat Stevens to U2 because "An Cat Dubh", a track on Boy, appeared on a search results screen. How did I get to "Wild World"? I was actually looking for "Wild Life" by the Talking Heads. Nothing unusual in that, but it struck me as funny that I'd gone from the Talking Heads to a head on a stake.
If you look hard enough there are always coincidences. One of the chapters in Lord of the Flies is "A View to a Death" which is not far removed from "A View to a Kill" by 80s pop group Duran Duran. It would normally end there because I don't know a thing about Duran Duran, having never listened to them. But yesterday I happened to be wasting my life away in front of the television when this quasi-reality show on a music channel began. The host was attempting to re-unite the members of an 80s rock band. One of their hits was a song called "Too Shy", which by startling coincidence, was one of the most annoying songs I had ever heard. Not that the song is that horrible, but I remember it playing over and over and over again on the radio during the formative portion of my musical education (har har). For twenty years I believed that "Too Shy" was one of Duran Duran's hits.
I'm just kidding. There's no coincidence there. The connections are less substantive than that puff of moisture when a soap bubble bursts on a Florida summer day. "Nothing beside remains"... That from Shelley's "Ozymandias" which happens to be about a broken piece of statue in the desert. Hmmm.. If you think about it, the collapse of Shelley's titan is not that different from the disintegration of "civilization" in Golding's book. Who am I kidding. It's falling apart. Things fall apart. Yeats? Or was it Keats? And Keats did write (I think), "When I have fears that I may cease to be..." which is somewhat related to the disintegration of being...
Lord, talk about a load of hogwash.

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# Sat Feb 14 20:44:46 EST 2004
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I'm in the middle of reading Mark Buchanan's Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks. Well, not quite in the middle yet, but I'm making headway. Nexus relates to some earlier reading on the six degrees of separation between (theoretically) everyone in the world. There was an interesting section about Mark Granovetter's contributions; namely, the weak links are crucial to establishing a robust network. Contrary to earlier thoughts, it is not the strong links -- those between well connected nodes (people) in the graph -- but those links to acquaintances (friends of friends, co-workers) that create the tenuous but far-reaching and necessary links.

For over a year I hadn't picked up a brush or a piece of charcoal. There was a time when I sketched regularly; my drawing pad was always with me and I'd try to capture everyone that walked by. So yesterday I was becoming one with the sofa (and this scares me in ways I cannot describe) when the artist realized that he wanted to sketch again. It sort of prompted me to pull out my old pencils and newsprint... I did. Then nothing. I couldn't think of a thing to draw. Normally I would have forced myself to sketch a chair or some random piece of furniture just to get myself in the flow. Problem is that my living room is so spartan -- clinical almost -- that even this didn't work.

So I had this very real fear that the sliver of creativity I'd once had has now dried up completely. I suppose that's what prompted me to pick up my old acoustic guitar and strum a few chords. Still nothing. I tried hacking out Tom Waits' "Hold On" but it just wasn't clicking. Oh well. Thus endeth my dreams of rock stardom (for now at least). There's a clip floating around on the Internet showing an Asian student auditioning for a spot on this show called American Idol. It's sort of a Star Search clone where the winner gets a recording contract. Anyhoo, someone sent me an AVI of this Asian student singing and dancing and made some horrible jokes about the uncanny resemblance. Har har. And no, you can 't have the clip. But if you googled for my name and "singer" you may find a review or two :D

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# Thu Feb 26 04:46:27 EST 2004
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I haven't seen the movie Passion of Christ yet, but at some point do intend to do so... But for completely different reasons than religion though (and those who know me personally probably know my religious beliefs).

From all the reviews it seemed to me that a huge part of this movie is being missed completely. The story for me seems to be about pain. Not just tis-but-a-flesh-wound pain, but that soul-searing please-if-there-is-god-let-me-die pain. I've always thought that pain connects you to life. It's like this lens that brings reality into an almost sublime clarity. Not that I've experienced much pain; I've had a couple broken bones, bruised ribs and suchlike, but nothing that a couple aspirin didn't fix. Those folks who have suffered -- and I don't care a whit about their religion or their spirituality -- have a pass in my mind.

I remember hearing about a student in the jungles of Malaysia. He was on some sort of nature trip with his class when he stumbled upon a nest of wasps or bees. The news report said that he screamed for hours after the bees attacked. After that he just got quiet until he died. Wow.

(So you'd think that I'd enjoy those places of concentrated pain -- hospitals. Truth is that since 12 yrs old, I've always had a very difficult time even walking through the door. Maybe they'll mistake me for someone else and replace my brain with with a Abby Normal's... Maybe I'll catch something from that guy coughing up bits of spleen...)

Anyhoo, the topic of pain just fascinates me. But right now I'm about an hour from sunrise and I'm too beat to think of anything witty...

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# Sat Mar 20 11:01:15 EST 2004
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Last night, about 3AM, I was listening to Tom Waits' "The Earth Died Screaming" from the 12 Monkeys soundtrack. It's one of those perfect songs, IMHO. It was late, so headphones were in order. I was tired, not enough to descend into the Erebian black, but enough so that my eyes were shut and I was still. (Oh, and I had this vague sense of urgency, a creeping notion that time was running out, but then I always, always feel that way.)
It was like some super immersive video... In that bordertown between waking and sleeping, my brain built images from Waits' junkyard chanting. I saw landscapes from every post-Apocalyptic nightmare vision, heard the dry rattle and felt the dry air perfumed with smoke and dust and diesel. And the screaming of the Earth -- still deafening, still distinct above the roar of colossal machines -- echoed in my head...
(Don't get me wrong: It's not the machines, not technology itself, but the sense of onslaught, of machines with no other purpose but to build more machines... But that's a rant in itself.)
As for more practical things: I finished the second part of the troubleshooting presentation. Notes are in the Linux section. Started experimenting with Security Enhanced Linux in preparation for some future work. Cleaned and restored an older Macintosh to functionality. Started a quickie guide to Linux for Solaris users.
And to the non-practical: Planted lots of flowers in my yard. My daughter likes picking flowers and all that we had were weeds. Odd, but I felt a twinge of - I dunno - horror that the only bits of color she had were the miniature little buds on the dandelions and various non-grass bits of vegetation poking up through my lawn. What kind of hideous parent am I that my daughter must resort to picking weeds?!?! I felt as if she was saying, "It's OK, Daddy. I *like* weeds." Maybe she was trying to soothe me in the same way a parent would gush over unrecognizable streaks of crayon or thank you *sincerely* when you buy a $1.99 wire ring at the local drugstore because you're a kid and you don't have enough money to buy them the coffee table that they liked.
There was thunder, there was lightning, and then the stars went out
And the moon fell from the sky, it rained mackerel, it rained trout
And the great day of wrath has come, and here's mud in your big red eye
And the poker's in the fire, and the locusts take the sky
(from Tom Wait's "The Earth Died Screaming")

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# Thu Mar 25 22:48:20 EST 2004
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I was thinking about Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy earlier today. In particular, the Guide's entry for the Earth managed to kick off a few tangents. For those who have not read the book, HHGTTG tells the story of an earthling who travels around the Universe after the Earth is destroyed in a cosmic fiasco. One of the earthling's companions is an alien, Ford Prefect, who was tooling around London to research the Guide's entry for Earth. In short, Prefect revises the entry from "Harmless" to "Mostly harmless." The joke, of course, is that the Earth -- known by earthlings for Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, Key West, lemon meringue pie, espressos, Mozart and Van Gogh, among a few other things -- could be aptly summed up with two little words.
This got me to thinking about our real histories and collections of facts. I was reading a biography of Frida Kahlo recently. It recounted her suffering and the main events in her life, and even mentioned some personal details about her relationships. I suppose the author dropped in these tidbits to humanize this figure. Alas, I still don't *know* Kahlo. And I want to. I want to know what was passing through her mind when she conceived "Raices" ("Roots"). What frame of mind brought on "What the Water Gave Me"? Was she thinking of death when she birthed "Thinking of Death"? It's not as if a person were some sort of fractal art. We cannot re-create the person from a few random facts about her life. Her creations may offer a glimpse into her mind; maybe a self-portrait is indeed a crystallization of her thoughts at the time, a little snapshot of her mind's state. I doubt it.
I re-read a collection of Van Gogh's personal writings a few months ago. This collection of letters offered that glimpse into his mind, and I tried to put myself into his shoes as it were. But they wouldn't fit. For the most part, he was not in the same frame of mind when he wrote those letters as he was when "Starry Night" erupted onto his canvas. It's the "Starry Night" frame of mind that I want to know. Peering into that work (or a digital copy, as the case may be) I can almost grasp what he was thinking (and this speaks of his genius), but that's not good enough.
I have a rememberance sheet in front of me. The name on the page doesn't matter. It's very pretty, done tastefully in Chancery Italic on good vellum bond. There's a trite (in my vulgar opinion) little poem, some words about God, and near the bottom a sentence: "She liked dancing." And I suppose if some distant relation read that phrase he would picture some child of summer prancing about in the June blossoms. But would it be a lie? Maybe she hated dancing. Maybe it was something she did, something she was very good at, but also something she despised. It would be akin to someone putting down, "He liked computers" on my rememberance. Though I don't despise computers, they do not define me. Nor does a guitar or a calculus book, charcoal pencils or coffee. But I suppose "She liked screaming" would be too much reality for the spectators to her life. So instead we get a pretty lie, some revisionist history, and a few people can go to bed without feeling too badly about themselves. So sit back, grab a beer, read the RSS feed but ignore the article. Everything is all right. Sorry to have disturbed you.

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# Thu Apr 1 21:58:54 EST 2004
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I thought about putting up some cool April Fool's Day page. Maybe I'd write that the new kernel instructions required copying NTOSKRNL.EXE to your /boot partition. But then I realized that though such a thought would amuse me to no end, it would be at best enigmatic and at worst undecipherable to everyone else.
Well, this March the website got over 200,000 hits. At about 5 hits per page, it worked out to be a little less than 35,000 unique visitors over the month. The vast majority view one page then exit. About 5% browse the rest of the site. I mention it because I got the renewal notice from my registrar today and it prompted me to peek at the server logs. About three years ago I had maybe 20,000 hits for the year. Now 200,000 for the month. I know this sounds vain and pretentious, but I really do get a kick from reading the logs. Lots of feedback recently too. Most are kernel related (which I really do appreciate) and a good amount about the Linux stuff in general, the *hidden* sections, and comments on, ummm, these comments. I'm really amazed by the letters that start out, "Please excuse my poor English" and then proceed to grammatically perfect English.
And other things... I've had some drastic changes in my professional life recently. I've been adjusting to it over the past week. In five days I think I've slept twenty-two hours total so at this point am in a somewhat fuzzy numbness. Too edgy to sleep, however.
Started working on a page of links to friends and associates. This too was prompted by the book I'm reading (see last note). The Internet was built on these links and links to external pages was unfairly sparse. More importantly, there are some amazing people out there whose paths have crossed mine. Most recently:

• A high school swim champion and brilliant physics student
• A prize-winning mountain biker
• A former computer engineer from the Golden Age
• An English teacher
• A Wiccan
• An aspiring photographer with infectious fire for art
• ...

So many fascinating stories they've told and I fear that they will never be archived. That would be a tremendous loss to future generations who want to know more about the turn-of-century than a blurb in a dusty history book could ever say. The biggest problem is that these folks are the absolutely most humble people I've met. They mention these things with almost an air of embarassment. Oh well. I wish they would send me a short bio and a bitmap so that I could use it to create an entirely new section. (And that's an obvious hint).

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# Sun Apr 4 03:47:19 EST 2004
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I went browsing through the local super-mega-mondo-bookstore today. Amidst the 50% Off stickered volumes in the books-by-the-pound aisle, I found treasure. One, a collection from Charles Bukowski; two, a guide to knots and splices. The latter was particularly interesting because it brought to mind the passage in _Heart of Darkness_ wherein Marlowe happens across a book of shipman's knots. And in the former I found "hug the dark" and was amazed...
It starts off:

turmoil is the god
madness is the god
permanent living peace is
permanent living death.
agony can kill
or
agony can sustain life
but peace is always horrifying
peace is the worst thing

And the words resonated... no, exploded. Comfort kills. Comfort breeds sloppiness, softness. I resolve to be hungry, uncomfortable. Each moment will be agony, whether by pushing the limits of my physical endurance or by pushing my mental faculties farther than ever...
But Lord, I am so tired right now and that bed is so damned inviting...

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# Wed Apr 7 20:33:02 EDT 2004
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Whew. What a tremendous fortnight (I've always wanted to use fortnight in a sentence). Finished reading Nexus a few nights ago. Started on Gregory Chaitin's Unknowable. Yup, Chaitin of the Kolomogorov-Chaitin complexity.
In another weird coincidence, some of the work I'm doing now is peripherally related to KC complexity (well, quite peripheral to be honest) but not quite so tangential that I'd feel bad about doing it during business hours.
Anyhoo, I've always found it interesting how, once something is pointed out, you seem to notice it everywhere. You may go about your business for years, never paying attention to an idea, a word, a song. Then someone comes along and tells you an interesting fact about it, the thing becomes somehow relevant to you, and then you start noticing it everywhere. A friend of mine recently pointed out that Arthur C. Clarke wrote about communications satellites in 1945. Interesting little tidbit of perhaps limited use. I filed it away somewhere between "dogs shouldn't eat chocolate" and "Shakespeare never used the word 'sneeze'". But then, for the next couple days, this little bit of information kept on appearing -- while researching DARPA, while reading about Star Trek, while reading an old, old magazine article that my daughter pulled off the shelf...
Back to KC complexity. I was reading about SSL communications which brought me to zero knowledge protocols. This led to a paper about hashing algorithms, then to random number generators. Now "random number generator" in a computer sense is somewhat deceptive. Computers, though their macro-level behaviour would indicate otherwise, are entirely predictable; there is no randomness about them. In other words, if you ask a computer to add two numbers it will give you the same answer no matter how many times you ask (whether or not the answer is correct is an entirely different matter). Now a big question, believe it or not, is how to determine if a string of letters and numbers is random. You can do things such as statistically analyze the alphanumeric characters. In a random system you'd expect that, over time, no single character would appear significantly more often than another. But then you could have each letter appear the same number of times and it would pass this test. So you need some other metric. Well, one interesting approach is to measure how much "information" is stored in a particular string of characters.
For example, the number pi can be calculated to millions of digits. A statistical analysis may show that the frequency of each digit is essentially even. You could conceivably calculate pi to enough digits that it would fill terabytes of storage. The amazing thing is that there is very little information in pi. A program can be constructed, in a few dozen lines, that would calculate infinite digits. The important idea is that a truly random string of characters cannot be described in fewer lines (or bits of data) than it would to just send the string.
Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity deals with precisely this idea.
So here I was, reading a book that I'd started over a month ago (Nexus). Several passages mentioned complex systems; which, in short, deals with systems that though they are composed of simple rules, are essentially unpredictable because of the interactions between these systems. I understood this once, many years ago. Feeling badly that this was no longer the case, I pulled down Dynamics of Complex Systems (Yaneer Bar-Yam) from my shelf and started reading sections relating to algorithmic complexity. And there was KCc. Cool.

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# Sat Apr 10 04:30:25 EDT 2004
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Got the first submissions in for the Project. Yay! But now my life seems so dull in comparison. No..., that's not fair. It's not only dull in comparison, it's just dull. I should buy a sports car, that oughta liven things up. Or maybe get a faster computer, one with dual Firewire, 2G RAM, 4 SATA 80G units in a RAID configuration, dual 3.0GhZ CPUs, 128M graphics card. I'd be able to render 1600x1200 complex scenes in seconds, calculate 16-variable ODEs in minutes, simulate regional weather patterns...
I lied about the dull. Last week I found out that I work at the same company as Jeremy Andrews, the guy who runs kerneltrap.org. Next week, I'll get a chance to meet John "Maddog" Hall. I'm still pretty amazed that, though the Linux community is no longer tiny, it still retains a local user group feel. Developers who have written code in use in millions of machines still send back personal responses to emails. Except for one notable exception, all these "names" that have visited our local user group have been humble and incredibly friendly.
But the coolest thing? I was trying to figure out how to inject a custom DNS packet into my network when my daughter, up to this point playing with Lego, asked me for a drink.
"Daddy, Me want juice."
"No, Stinky. It's 'I would like some juice, please.'"
She thought for a moment before redoing her plea.
"I would like some juice."
I raised my finger. "What do you say?"
A moment passed, then "Please." She smiled impishly with her head tilted to the side.
"OK, good girl. Go to the kitchen and get a juice."
"OK," she said, then scampered away. Moments later she returned with one of those plastic juice bags. She can remove the straw but hasn't figured out how to insert it into the bag (heck, even I sometimes miss it).
"Oh no!" I said in mock sadness, "There's no juice for Daddy." I pouted.
"It's okay, Daddy. You can have my juice." And she handed me the drink. She even placed her tiny hand on my shoulder as I knelt in front of her. "You drink." And she moved the (still unopened) drink to my mouth.
Amazing.