Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, today two different people I care about told me that they disliked one of my favorite – possibly my most favorite – peices of all the music I have written/recorded. Within fifteen minutes of each other. And they both waxed eloquent about why exactly they hated it – it was for very different reasons, too.

I was crushed. I wanted to curl up in a little ball and cry. And I don’t see why this should bother me so much – I mean, surely there is a lot of variety in people’s tastes, and surely just because something is my favorite, doesn’t mean that other people have to like it as well. But it was still very upsetting. I think it probably wouldn’t have been so bad if it had just been one or the other – but both.. in such a short time span..

Well, my trip to the east coast had many wonderful and many terrible moments.

I got to see Scott, Cori, and Woody, along with his new boyfriend, and play a wonderful send-up of Monopoly called Gayopoly. (It has some interesting stratigic changes – for example, the boys go one way around the board while the girls go the other way). I lost horribly, Kayti and Cori were the winners. But it was fun and funny. Also got to have a wonderfully tasty meal called a ‘Garbage Plate’.

Also got to see my daughter, and I think that me and her adoptive mother are now on much better terms. It turned out that a lot of the things that I was worried about with that visit I needn’t have worried about, and a lot of the things that I thought were going to be the worst were mostly misunderstandings. So I will likely be seeing her again. I’m also planning on mailing her a mix CD soonish, as she’s got quite a love of Brittney and J-Lo and even though I’m sure she will hate it, I’d like to at least expose her to what I was listening to when I was her age.

The Galapagos were beautiful. Sadly, due to lack of sleep and a series of miscommunications, a family fued broke out and has now been magnified (at least in one case) to the kind of epic proportions that make it seem likely that certain members will never speak to each other again. Also sadly, it’s at least somewhat my fault. I don’t know what to do about it, other than to try not to make such mistakes in the future.

I’m planning on putting up my and Kayti’s photos at galapagos.sheer.us. I’m working on it right now.

After the Galapagos, I tried to contact my old friend Jessica but failed, saw my brother (well, in spirit anyway) Tavian, my good friend JL, a old, old friend from the IETF circuit Jennifer, and met a friend of Kayti’s from Philly. All good times.

Then I got some really disturbing email, and did some really stupid things. The end.

Well, the problem with my internet, that I Ranted and Grred and in general was a daily thorn in Cox’s side about, is now resolved.

The resolution isn’t due to anything Cox did.. it’s due to a relay on my UPS.

I had noticed that my UPS often made clicking noises, but I hadn’t really thought much of it until I got a isolation transformer to try and solve a hum problem in my nearfield monitors. It happened to have a voltmeter on the front, and I happened to leave it plugged in long after it was determined that it didn’t solve the hum problem. And I noticed that every click corrisponded to a 15 volt dip in the line voltage that only lasted a tenth of a second or so, and was followed by a 15 volt spike. (or so)

At some point today, I got annoyed enough about this (because each line voltage dip also made a slight humming noise in my new monitors) that I gave the power company a call. I kind of figured they’d blow me off, since they are after all delivering power to me, but no.. they promised they’d send a tech out tonight.

I had to go out to go shopping, but when I got back, the power to the house had clearly been interrupted, and it no longer fluctuates at all.

And, mysteriously, my internet connection no longer has 900ms ping times to the default gateway, and is now capable of moving many megabits with aboslutely no trouble at all.

Could these two things be connected? Well, consider this – the cable modem does NOT have a switchmode power supply, and any common mode noise getting into the cable modem’s power might very well find its way out the RF jack..

I feel really bad that I harrassed Cox so mercilessly. Although – any of their techs that came out could have stuck a voltmeter on the line and seen the noise in question. But, it is probably generally true that their problems don’t turn out to be power-supply related, so I really can’t blame them for not being able to diagnose this one.

Sometimes I think I should break my journal up into three or four little journellets, so that people could just subscribe to the ones that were aligned with the topics they were interested in.

Topics my journal breaks down into neatly:

1) Religion/metaphysics
2) Weird devices I am building/studying
3) Computer science related thoughts
4) “my life” stuff..
5) Music

Maybe there’s a easy way to do this sort of thing through the LJ interface? Hmmm.. might be that new field at the bottom marked tags?

I found another Oceanlab song I’ve never heard.

I love them so much..

Can anyone suggest any other groups that are similar to OceanLab?

There’s a new Emmit Swimming album!

I can’t wait to get my claws on it. I’m thinking about buying it via iTunes…

God, if you’re reading this and Christianity really was the best you could do in authoring a religion, then I’m really sorry that I can’t agree with it. Feel free to put yourself in my shoes for a few milliseconds to figure out why.

And, if you’re going to condemn me to eternal suffering for disagreeing with you, then shame on you..

Okay. I’ve come to terms with it. Religion was written to control us, by people who were not superior to us. It takes advantage of several inherent weaknesses in our instinct-set.. (humans don’t have very good security on what we believe, or even what DNA fragments we’ll copy.. I guess we were written before uberparanoia was necessary.)

I can now hate Christianity in peace. (Which doesn’t mean that I hate all, or even any, Christians. I just hate the informational virus that nearly drove me mad and brought much negative emotion into my life. I think that’s a reasonable thing to do.)

The sad thing is it was almost good. If Jesus could have had the nerve to disavow what had gone before as not a sample of the behavior of a superior life form..

.. then they just would have edited his words out when they wrote the book anyway.

I don’t know who this ‘they” is. Presumably they were good men acting for the best of reasons – I mean, aren’t we all? 😉 – but nonetheless ..

So, the next challenge is, given the lack of a bible, how do I write one? I suppose everyone really has to author their own sooner or later.

I’ve started by trying to isolate what root concepts strike me as good and bad. Perhaps I should be starting by rejecting the concept of good and bad altogeather, but I can’t do so because it’s inherently in my nature to see rightness in some things and wrongness in others.

Today I was talking with a coworker about security, and how to properly treat credit card numbers and systems, and I felt a bit of that old adreniline rush – the feeling you get when you first get in, or first get a tricky bit of code to run..

Damn it, I AM a white hat. Why does the idea of digitally breaking and entering give me such a rush? Clearly I don’t do it any more, clearly I won’t ever do it again except with the explicit permission of the owners of the systems involved. And yet.. the other day I had fantasies of taking over the cable network.

What is wrong with me?

As most of you know, I have a long standing hate/hate relationship with TV.

However, because Kayti likes it, and because there’s only one TV station that can be received with a antenna in our neck of the woods, I subscribed to Cox digital cable. (It was $7 more than basic analog, and offered perks such as HDTV programming.. they upsold me nicely)

It also comes with plain old analog cable, so I cabled up Kayti’s TV set to it and mostly forgot it.. the box with the HDTV/digital tuner has just been sitting in the living room with five million other boxes.

Until tonight – when circumstances made it desirable to be able to record cable while away. I unpacked the HDTV tuner and cabled it up to my PC via a USB HDTV tuner widget, and turned it on.. and..

Holy COW that’s a lot of channels.

I spotted about six movies I might like to watch in the first page of the program guide. Even the public access channel was running something interesting.. footage of a blues concert at Fashon Island..

My hatred of TV kind of got kicked in the teeth. Granted, there are still all those annoying commercials – but, in the age of the DVR, no one needs to actually *watch* those.. (why do you *think* I hooked it up to my computer? ;-))

Now if only I could figure out what channel MTV is on..