Never been one to let the carrier drop

It would appear that once again, Kucinich is right down the middle for me. Unfortunately, that probably means he’s still unelectable.

At the risk of sounding like a arrogant asshole, I’m beginning to suspect I’m too good for this planet.. and I’m not very good.

This data is from Curious’s post, just formatted in a way I can grok better.

1) MSN movies got, I think, everything just about completely backwards. All the movies they hated I liked. Does this mean I’m atypical, or the reviewer is..

2) I’m temporarily in a cash crunch. It’s not a scary cash crunch (I’ve had far worse in the past two years), but it’s a little unnerving nonetheless. I’ve started to play the ‘no interest’ game of buying things on credit cards and then paying them off within 30 days.. we’ll see if it works out for me, or if I just end up with another stack of max’d credit cards.

3) After many faithful years of service, the Sceptre my parents gave me as a birthday present is being relegated to the garage to use as a monitor for the workbench, replaced by a 21″ diagonal Viewsonic LCD. It’s soooo pretty – and cost a pretty penny less than the sceptre did, too. Finally, more pixels – which, when doing Flex development, I really need – even having a desktop driving the sceptre and a 17″ laptop driving it’s own display wasn’t enough. I’m a li-itle bit worried about how well it’s going to work with my favorite video games, since it’s not 4:3, but hopefully it’ll be okay. If not, I think this graphics card supports multiple displays.. but unfortunately, my desk doesn’t. I suppose I could move the DJ mixer over to the far wall or something..

4) I continue to work on my proficiency with the XL-7. I’m seriously thinking of a WSHR broadcast, but I need to figure out a good time for all 3 of my listeners. Perhaps I will post a announcement in news on brig..

I was sad that no one took me up on my “pay it forward” response to Coriander, offering gifts to three people. I was thinking it was because my informational-in-nature gifts are perhaps not the most sought after chunks of data on the ‘net.

Kayti thinks that there were mitigating circumstances, and thusly we have a bet.

I have agreed to  double the potential gifts to six if six people (including her, so five others) will admit that they did want a gift from me, but didn’t post because they had already made the “pay it forward” offer in response to someone else, or refuse to post to live-journal as themselves, or didn’t want to commit with coming up with three gifts of their own, for any other reason that has nothing to do with not wanting a gift from me.

If six people including Kayti come forward saying that they want gifts from me now that the need to pay them forward is lifted, I will indeed make and give these gifts, which will again be informational in nature — stories or music or such-like — and send them to the email addresses these six people provide at some time during the next twelve months.   Send your requests as comments on my wordpress, on LJ, or as email.  You have two weeks from the timestamp on this post.

The Five Love Languages

My primary love language is probably
Physical Touch
with a secondary love language being
Words of Affirmation.

Complete set of results

Information

Unhappiness in relationships, according to Dr. Gary Chapman, is often due to the fact that we speak different love languages. Sometimes we don’t understand our partner’s requirements, or even our own. We all have a “love tank” that needs to be filled in order for us to express love to others, but there are different means by which our tank can be filled, and there are different ways that we can express love to others.

Take the quiz

So, recently I’ve been playing with this theory.. okay, so I play with it repeatedly and excessively, but recently I’ve been taking it to new heights..

I think I’m my own worst enemy.

Time and time again, I see places where I could have achived far more than I did, but I failed because I sabotoged myself. I mean, we start out with some of the more obvious things, like assuming that anyone in the ‘real world’ (as opposed to the network one) that tried to pick me up when I was single was actively hostile towards me, intending to make fun of me, use me as a foil for some really nefarious plot, or worse..

then we look further, to all the progress I could have made on the battery management project (and still can..) if I wouldn’t keep losing momentum right before a key/breakthrough point..

Then we look at my constant belief that I will be fired from any and/or all of my jobs at any time..

Well, okay, so that’s more expecting awful things to happen.. but sometimes it seems like I (inadvertently or not) go out of my way to make bad things happen, and I don’t want to.. I also don’t want to be so negative about everything.. recently, I was complaining about a rebate not being honored because one of the requisite pieces of paper wasn’t included because it wasn’t given to us at the store, and I mused aloud about whether the Sprint employees got bonuses for every rebate that couldn’t be collected because of missing paperwork, and a friend asked me if I got paid extra for every paranoid theory I came up with.

Well, maybe.

But, really, I find it really frustrating when people have nothing good to say about anything, and yet, I’m one of those people who never has anything good to say about anything. And I don’t like it, but I don’t really know how to change. Just once, I wish I could spend a few hours honestly – not self-kiddingly or because I thought it would protect me from the wrath of some higher power – looking at my life and appriceating the beauty, and the good spots, etc. I mean, I have wonderful toys, I have friends to play with (admittedly, I don’t see them very often, but..) there’s a good chance someday soon I’ll have a dog, or a cat, or both.. I’m even slowly getting my life to where it doesn’t bowl me over whenever I look at it funny.. but still, like Mr. Tanner, I only see the flaws.

I don’t want to be so negative any more.

[stolen from Cori]

Pay It Forward: I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment here on my blog. I don’t know what that gift will be yet, but you will receive it within 365 days. The only thing you have to do in return is “pay it forward” by making a similar agreement on your blog.

[And you have to let me know an address where I can mail your gift and/or drop it off. Since your gift will likely be informational (i.e. a poem, song, story, or some custom software) rather than tangible, you should probably give me a email address.]

So, for the last six months or so, I’ve had pretty much nonstop bad dreams. They occasionally have good elements, but there aren’t any that you could call unilaterally good. I had hoped that changing the sleeping medication I used would fix it, but while the nightmares are less intense on the new drug, they’re certainly not gone.

My next experiment, which will not make me popular with anyone, is probably not going to be using any sleeping drugs at all.

I feel kind of like people assume that I’m lazy because I don’t get up at 8 AM with everyone else. My responses to this are varied.. from questioning why it would matter whether or not I was lazy – I mean, honestly, of all the things one can be, is lazy really that bad? .. to resentment, because I know lots of people who put less energy into  life than I do, but think they’re better than me because their biology happens to happily coexist with following the sun in a ‘normal’ phase.

Anyway.. that’s not what I came here to talk to you about today.

A longtime dream of mine has been to get airplay for some of my music. A friend recently asked me why I wanted to make other people listen to my music.. to make them happy? Self-aggrandizement? Something else?

And I have to admit I have no idea. Until fairly recently, I didn’t even think any of it was that good. So why would I want to force my mediocre talents on the world? And I don’t really have a answer for that. ‘Because I just do’ doesn’t raelly seem like a rational argument even to me.

In other news, I’ve been carrying on a email conversation – which I plan to someday publish, because I think it’d make interesting reading to some people – with a card-carrying republican. One of e’s comments is that people don’t value things that they don’t earn – that we couldn’t have a unlimited-resource universe in which everybody has everything they want because they wouldn’t value it. He also insists that if people didn’t have to work for a living, no one would. [I don’t think that’s true – people *like* working. They just don’t like working in pointless and/or useless jobs, and they don’t like living in fear of being evicted/starving/whatnot the day they stop working].

I’ve been thinking.. do I think that I would value the things I have less if I had not worked for them? I can’t think of any good way to answer that question short of winning the lottery (either metaphorically or literally), although it occurs to me that there are some things I have that I didn’t work for, and it’s true that I don’t value them as much as some.. things like intelligence, and life.. 😉

(not that I’d want to be unintelligent.. I considered the possibility, and decided it probably wasn’t what I wanted. What I really want is to be happy without hurting anyone else. Thus far I haven’t found a workable path, but I remain cautiously optimistic.)

(One could probably make a case that the mental effort I’ve put into designing the perfect universe over the last few years isn’t likely to increase my happiness, since clearly the universe we live in is a long way from perfect. Ironically, I think that it may get that way by trying to average perfection for all users, when apparently users fall into a number of diametrically opposed categories)

Actually, as long as I’m ruminating on that topic, I’ve been thinking.. one of the great evils is thinking that you should be able to force others to live by what you consider to be right and wrong. I will grant that there are some exceptions.. i.e. no one should be allowed to kill, or steal something that doesn’t already belong to us all. (You will note that I don’t really believe that digital media can be owned, any more than the number 2 can be. Look elsewhere in this blog for more on that topic than you’d ever want to learn, and yes, I know that not everyone agrees with me, and a lot of those who don’t own guns. I point to this as one more inperfection in the current universe. ;P)

Hm. That whole paragraph kind of fell apart. Let me try this again. I don’t think that you should be able to tell me that X is wrong, where X is a action that doesn’t hinder your freedom in any way.

I was reading the wikipedia article on Radio Caroline – for those of you who aren’t familiar, you might want to take a gander. This is how far governments will go to try and squash people who are breaking rules that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I think governments would be far, far better if they didn’t have unilateral ability to spend tax dollars however they wished. One can imagine a democracy in which individuals were required to put a certain amount of money towarads the common good, but were given a lot of flexibility in how the money would be spent. Combined with a somewhat expanded Bill of Rights and a design that deliberately left the federal portion of the government majorly underfunded, this could go a long way towards improving the current situation.

Anyway, before I went off on that tangent, I was going off on the tangent that in general, to become a police officer, fed, what have you, you have to start out with the basic mentality that you should be allowed to tell other people what to do. This seems like the basic root from which abuse of power would rapidly grow. Now, I know there are (at least reletively) good cops out there.. in fact, I’ve probably met more good cops than bad cops – so perhaps I’m oversimplifying the whole situation. I think the cop I hate is the hypothetical one who has not thus far materialized to bust me for any number of crimes that I’ve knowingly committed.

Interestingly, though, I haven’t believed that any of them were wrong when committing them, and I still don’t believe that any of them are wrong. I wonder, if I ever do something that I know is wrong, will a bad cop show up to bust me? Just how reactive is the universe to our thoughts about it, anyway?

(For those of you who wonder, no, I haven’t been indulging in recreational.. anything.. for quite some time. So this level of strange is just naturally me. I can see how you would worry, though.)

I’m feeling a little poked at.

I’ve been on Ebay buying supplies for a rave that needs to be held a considerable distance from the generators – (I’m kicking the 220 from the gennies up to 440, sending it down 10AWG wire, and dropping it back down to CT’d 220 – i.e. 110 – at the far end. I’m currently guessing about 2000′ of wire, and we’re sending 5kW.. I’m starting to feel like the power company over here.. )

Anyway, ‘my ebay’ has a picture of a locomotive and a banner ‘Grown up? Sell it.’. Ouch.  I will admit that I probably should spend less time playing with trains and more time working on my EV project – but I doubt if anyone would label either of them a ‘grown up’ thing to do.

(What I’m  supposed to do, they tell me, is have children. The problems with this are many, and I won’t enumerate them here only because I don’t have time, but look for a future article entitled ‘why I don’t want children’. We recently added a new item to the list: the presence of babies causes me to have panic attacks. I knew that I was frightened by them, and made very uncomfortable by their presence, and hated to look at them – but I had no idea that when seated next to one that kept groping me on a airplane, this would proceed to full-blown inability to breathe and desire to shrink as far away from the child in question as possible. Luckily the mother decided to move after seeing my reaction… I dislike thinking about the possibilities if she hadn’t.)

Lately I’ve been trading emails with a conservative that I decided to harass after reading a discussion page of a article they had worked on quite a bit on the wikipedia. (I was impressed with their skills in argument, and also found myself agreeing with most of what they said.) We obviously have quite a few differences, but the discussions have still been interesting. They wrote a wonderful Craigslist article (I understand that many of you won’t find it wonderful, but I do: http://raleigh.craigslist.org/rnr/394590164.html).

I need to find some religion that I can start feeling positive about. I’ve about had it with my own negativity.

My work is going well. I’m actually very slightly ahead of where I thought I’d be on my software dev project. My ‘day job’ is doing interesting things I don’t fully understand – I was their open source sysadmin, and now the database engines have all been moved to AIX and career admins hired to care and feed them.. which is why I’m posting blog entries at work. I’ve sent a list of the things I think they might want me to work on, and heard nothing other than ‘Don’t worry, hang in there, we’ll find something for you to do’. It seems pretty clear that they aren’t firing me outright, and I will admit that if the dev project I’m working on gets funded to where they can afford to pay me what my day job does – or even 20% less – I’d be happy to just work for them, as it’s more interesting work – but I do worry idly. Partially I’m worried that I will end up unemployed right before I get all my debts paid off (by best estimate, this will happen around December, so if I can just get $COMPANY to hang in there another 4 months…)

I really like the idea of not owing anyone anything. I’m trying to decide, though.. I’ve been watching E-Bay for a blue Honda Insight with a manual transmission, air conditioning, and <100,000 on the clock – nothing has showed up yet, but if one does, I’ll be tempted to pause my debt-reducing operations while I purchase it.. alternately, I could get my current car’s air conditioning fixed.

Oh, that reminds me.. (goes off to do some stuff)

We discovered that the U.K. edition of Harry Potter 7 has different artwork and is much better bound, more compact, and in all ways superior. So we tried to buy a copy in Oxford while we were ice skating, but we ended up leaving it in a café. I was sad about this at the time, but it led to us buying a copy at Kings Cross station, which just felt way too appropriate. I’m actually somewhat thrilled to have a copy of a Harry Potter book that was purchased at Kings Cross.

My favorite photos from the trip:

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35435&g2_navId=x508adc0b – cow!

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35666&g2_navId=x508adc0b – castle!

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35774&g2_navId=x508adc0b – church

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35801&g2_navId=x508adc0b – huge – magic roundabout, around two ways – a pentagram of tiny roundabouts making one huge one