Never been one to let the carrier drop

X10

Why do I hate them?

I used to love X10’s products. They did a lot of nifty things.. basically, moved data over the power line. They had little remote control widgets that would turn things on and off. In general, the system just worked – except for their SCR light switches of the in wall variety, which for whatever reason would invariably burn out in a mode where they had trouble turning off. [Very annoying]

But then, they started the ads.

You know the ads.

You’ve seen the ads.

Buy a X10 and spy on [insert sexy female in your life here], any time you want, from anywhere in the world.

Yah.

That’s a fucking brilliant idea. Why didn’t I think of that?

Who cares about the morality, or lack therof, of the action. Who cares about the possible side effects, such as the idea that no where in the world will be not on live video.

Okay, so the nudity taboo will go. That will be nice.

It’ll do really interesting things to child-parent relations. Nothing I particularly want to think about. You’re supposed to be able to keep parts of your life secret from your parents as a child – otherwise, you could only do things your parents would approve of, and the species would never grow socially.

But wait a second. Do we really want to go here?

Then there’s the question – what do you do?

Well, you can click the ‘don’t ever fuck with me again’ link. I like that option.. but it’s not enough.

The problem is, I’m against censorship. I beleive that data wants to be free, and I beleive in open source. I beleive in a honest media, run by the people.

But do I believe you should be able to – probebly legally – run a concealed video camera anywhere you like?

How long, as Lee Hart points out, before the evidence of a camera like this is admissable in court?

Video cameras are already everywhere we go – look around you, you’ll be quite amazed at the security cams. Only a matter of time before people network them and put face recognition on them – within the realm of today’s technology. How far do we want to go? 1984? Ask yourself if you trust the government not to abuse this kind of technology?

Okay, back to my original point.

X10 is encouraging pedophiles to buy them.

Fucking brilliant.

How many people will be _made_ into pedophiles by repeated exposure to x10 ads? I mean, I probebly have fifty random bizarre fetishes ‘latent’ – show me the images enough, and they’ll develop. That’s how humans _work_. If the advertising agency didn’t know this, they wouldn’t be paying what they are for ads

Brilliant. Now we have to ask a few questions here.

First, what does this say about the companies that paid for the ads?

Second, what does this say about X10? The people who work there? When did we leave the world where companies tried to behave ethically?

Listening to Bill Hicks and Capitol Steps. Rolling on the floor laughing.

S.

Did last night’s journal even make sense? I’m afraid to go back and look. You can always tell which journal entries are made on friday nights – they’re the ones that are only vuagely coherent and sound like they are written by a alian.

Finally got ‘ping’ to work. Woo freakin woo! Now just have to get windows to actually receive answer. But you can see it on the scope.. the ‘ping’ packet comes in and the ‘pingack’ packet goes out. beautiful. Flippin’ beautiful.

Hopefully I haven’t scared away my one reader. Hi, reader 😉

I’d write about why religion is a virus, but at the moment I don’t seem to have the energy. It’s such a insidious one, though, that I still say ‘thank god’ – well, I guess I do, sometimes, beleive in god. Just not in chrisianity. So that’s okay. But anyway..

I don’t have the energy right now. I’m trying to decide between taking a bath and just vegging here for a while.

Tomorrow should be fun. Going to see the lord of the rings. Good movie? bad movie? we’ll see..

Watched ‘Bread and Roses’ tonight – movie about labor union for janitors. Good flick. Kind of sad – hard to tell if it’s true-to-life or not. But good movie, none the less. P. also liked.

tomorrow, write about snow crash, religion, viruses, and god. [hey, it’s my freaken’ journal, I can write what I like. Save ideas that are being massaged so they can be massaged some more. ;-)]

At some point, I faced the conclusion that I don’t have the same model body as the rest of you.

In school, they called this ADD and tried to give me a stimulant to help me behave. This worked, from a outside point of view, but at the cost of massively distorting the way my mind worked. Not in ways i liked.

You see, ADD in my case basically adds up to having two processers and a interrupt scheme.

Most people have a single viewable workspace within their brain.. you’re thinking one thing, and you’re only thinking that thing. When you play the piano, you think about all of the notes, not half of them in one processer and half in the other. This coherence is probebly a nice feature most of the time.

But, every once in a while, mother nature chuckles, spins the dice, and decides not to include it. Instead of one processer, you have two – each half as powerful. One better at creative work, the other better at logic solving – almost like one has less noise immunity than the other.

To switch processers, I switch eyes. This isn’t something I can describe, but I can decide which eye to view the world out of. Probebly a bizarre side effect of vision training. Probebly not what the people training me intended. 😉

However, when I do a eye-select, something else happens as well. I can’t describe this, exactly, because it isn’t really describable – I still have access to all the same knowlege and memories, but I see them in a fundamentally different way. This defies description.

I suspect there are two nearly-fully-developed personalities inside me, and they fight for control of the ‘wheel’ that is me. I’m not normally aware of this, although I did become very vividly aware of it once when I didn’t sleep for seven days and then used certain hallucinagenics. Allow me to spell this out – I do NOT recommend the use of any recreational drugs while one is sleep deprived. When sleep-depped, you’ve already suffering from not enough gain on your neural net. Add some other chemicals playing with the levels, and you’ve got a recipe for the mental ward.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this because recently I’ve had a few discussions with people about feminism. I’m not against feminism – I beleive that females are not being treated equally in this country, and they should be [I’d really like to see a black, gay female president next. Brenda? She’s just outrageous enough to make a good president, and she’d be quite a refreshing change from the rather horrid men that we’ve had of late]

Anyway, one of the subjects of discussion has been why females excel at different academic subjects than males [i.e. why algebra makes sense to me and the tax forms make sense to my significant other]

I think it’s because all people have the duality I’ve described to a certain extent, and females are encouraged to spend more time using their ‘creative’ [noisy] processer while males are encouraged to spend more time using their ‘logical’ [clean] processer.

A word about the noisy and clean part – it seems obvious that in order for a new idea to occur, noise must be present. If you’re not grokking this, try making a computer generate a truly random number. You’ll figure it out sooner or later. 😉

Anyway, if this unlikely theory were true [and I admit that this, like many of my theories, is unlikely] it would bear out what I’ve always insisted, that females have the same mental capacities.. in the same areas.. as males. Look at Drachen, my ex-SO [who decided to become male, which I think may be the ultimate statement in how badly we repress females without being aware of it], as concrete proof that females can master technical skills with the same facility as males. Sometimes more. 😉

Okay, so given that, why don’t they? Well, I suspect a lot of it is sociological.. a lot of communciations humans do are nonverbal, and for the most part unmeasurable by modern instruments. Or at least unmeasured. Fathers spend more time passing design skills on to sons than daughters. Mothers spend more time passing on cooking skills to daughters than sons. Cooking is a inherently creative activity, by the way, and if you think it’s easy, you haven’t tried it in a while.

I firmly beleive that our brains, mostly unused capacity and with automatic self-wiring of new neural nets, will do whatever we ask them to. However hard you push yourself, especially when you’re a child but throughout your entire life, is how far your brain will go. Ask it to do more, you get more from it. Sit in front of the TV and veg, and you get less.

Anyway, if ANY of that makes sense tomorrow I’ll be impressed.

Jammed some tonight.. even did some of those blues riffs that Dave & I were working on togeather. Got to get him back and get the recorder set up.

Proteus has a dropout in the right channel on the ‘phones, but [thank god] line out is still okay. But a little bit of hum in something or other. Must ferrit out. Everything needs cleaned and reseated.. there are just soo many dammmnn wiiiireeessss!

[thank god for lightpipe. I want consumer gear with lightpipe. damn it, I know how to build this stuff, someone hire me to make miricles! ;-)]

I’m pretty happy with the mk3 regbus. Sent data to a actual PC and back! woo hoo! Also wrote ‘ping’ though I haven’t yet debugged it. [always fun to debug assembly]. Next have to write win32 app that will send messages. Starting out with console app – we’ll go pretty after we get everything working.

Still need to do a serious noise test with the boards powered off the batteries. Rich has a charger for me, but I have to go out to the islands to get it, which is like a 3 hour round trip. Annoying.

On the other hand, getting out of the house might do me good.

Felt kind of sick this morning, but eccanacia & orange juice have perked me right up.

As usual, need to sleep now.

It’s interesting.. I’m torn between feeling like I’m writing for a audiance and feeling like no one at all is listening. Was listening to Indigo Girls earlier today.. Virginia Woolfe.. that song still rings true. And speaks to the purpose of this web site. I hope they stay in business. I really should get a paid account, I guess, to help sponser them. But I don’t have a job, you know.. 😉

Eureka. Well, okay, so that’s a little bit of overkill, but I’m feeling pretty good about today’s mk3 progress. Collisions work. Timeouts work. Transmission and reception work.

Yes, I’m building the seven layer model, one layer at a time. I’m feeling pretty damn guruish. I’ve made it past layer one [the hardware] and layer two [MAC, etc]. Let’s see if I can survive layer 3 [line protocol, though OSI calls it something else. I swear OSI is the most confusing system I’ve ever seen – there are _much_ better ways to describe what happens on a network than they use]

Anyway, today was a very good day on the bench.. found a few potential glitches in the network circuit, made them be unglitched [I had too large a bleed resistor on the tank cap, and needed a resistor before the diode as well as the one after it – the new schematic is at evtech.org

Listening to Southern Cross [Crosby, Stills, Nash, Et Al, but I’m listening to Jimmy Buffet do it live. May the powers that be bless peer-to-peer, because it is here and it is NOT going away.

[Notice to the powers that be: Try hard enough to shut us down and we will build our own internet out of microwave links. And don’t doubt me, because I’ll be the first to publish designs. Freedom is coming and you can’t stop it, so better get ready!]

[Notice to those who think of downloading from Grokster as ‘stealing’: We will pay the artists what the labels pay the artists now. It will work out. We’re simply voting that we don’t like music labels, that’s all.. ]

[look, I want to be a professional musician and I _love_ Grokster/Napster/et al. Finally, we can transmit for free what we want the world to hear.]

I need more time. I have so many things that need built, but limited finances before I must find a job. I’ve still got a few months of ‘hang time’, though. And there’s always the hope that the control board for the PFC-20 will do well.

Listening to George Michael’s ‘Freedom’. Great song.

Really hope Dave comes over again. Must put basement back togeather. Must also get more sleep. Lack of sleep = bad idea. But there’s so much to do.

Well, a lot of things on my mind but I doubt if many of them will make it out to paper. I guess this is my first journal entry – so I ought to try to be a little bit interesting. But I probebly won’t be..

Watched Moulin Rouge tonight. Wonderful movie. The juxtiposition of modern songs into the 19th century whorehouse and theatre never failed to get a laugh. Such a bright, happy movie, but so tragic a ending.

It was definately a kindness for the writers to warn us ahead of time that the heroine was going to die. Although it still rather did yank one’s emotions around. Very Le Misish of the author. What is it with the french and sad endings?

Still, I like it when hollywood throws us a sad ending from time to time. Makes you appriciate the happy ones more.

The mk3 project continues to roll along – finally got a entire packet to spray out – then promptly broke things again by re-enabling timeout0. Shit.

[I’m thinking that maybe the blanking packet isn’t resetting the timer. Or maybe none of the packets are resetting the timer. But I’m also thinking that right now I’m so tired I don’t care.

The collision detection code definately works. [It works so well it keeps detecting collisions when there aren’t any. Well, okay, so this is mostly my fault]

I have this cryptic message on my whiteboard – ‘Surface charge after light tap w/ reg = diffusion!’. Something I wrote while I was rather under the influence, I’m afraid, so it may take me a while to figure out exactly what I was getting at. But I’m sure it was brilliant – or something..

Still intruiged by Farnsworth’s work on fusion. Need to get around to doing more research on this, but Farnsworth made [no joke] a small fusion reactor in a vac tube. [see fusor.net]. Of course, he never achived overunity, and many have said overunity isn’t possible – but it is clear from the hundreds of people working on it that you can in fact make your own fusion reactor in your backyard. Now tell me _that’s_ not a mad scientist project.

I have this funny vision of firing a fusor with high frequency high voltage AC [50kV @ 10khz or something like that] and setting up some kind of resonant reaction. But obviously, more research needed. So what else is new.

Bush continues to find new and exotic ways to annoy me. Some day we will have a president I can live with .. but don’t hold your breath.

I’d really like to see a female take the reins for a while, just to see how one would do – thus far, in 200 years we’ve had 0 female presidents. It’s not that I’ve got anything against men, but frankly, not that many of the male presidents we’ve had have done a very good job.

I do enjoy watching people’s reactions when I tell them I’m on Osama’s side. [Not that I really am, of course – killing that many innocent people is deplorable, and the guy’s got a lot of other undesirable attributes – but, really, it appears that the only way to get the US’s attention is by knocking down a building or two. Actually, erase and correct, apparently even knocking down a building or two isn’t enough to get our attention. Else we would have learned something from the Unibomber – or at the very least, learned something from this latest debacle]

One does have to ask why we didn’t blow up Utah.

Seriously, this whole war on terrorism makes me just _sick_. There was a ad on the Oscars ‘If you buy illegal drugs, you helped fund terrorism’. No, if you pay taxes you help fund terrorism. Remember who trained Osama?

[For those of you who haven’t yet checked out bob harris’s commentary on this whole debacle, there’s a link to it off my homepage, go, read, be enlightened]

Okay, moving onward.. the electric vehicle continues to do it’s thing – it’s kind of funny, it’s getting to where I just expect that when I get in it, it will take me wherever I’m going. So far [knock on wood] it hasn’t broken down once. But I do need to do a bunch of little things on it – not the least of which is replacing the springs.

A friend came over the other day and jammed with me.. ahh, that felt good. Been entirely too long. Hopefully he’ll drop by again later this month and we’ll do a little recording, lay a few tracks down and commit them to mp3. Good stuff.

I guess that’s about all I have to say for now, I despritely need sleep and I don’t think I could say anything interesting or cool if my life depended on it – just not a interesting or cool guy. 😉

hasta.