Never been one to let the carrier drop

1) Charge digital camera batteries
2) Clean out car
3) Insert seats in car
4) Investigate possibility of bringing keyboard. Weigh PITA against possible entertainment value
5) Go to bank (before 5p)
6) solder voltage regulators into MK3s and install CPUs..

To pack:

Radio charger
Radios (CB, 2 meter, FRS)
AVR programmer board
Megas
Video camera
video charger
Keyboard (?) and PC speakers (!)
Clothes
Food [hit TJs for those Thai bowls!]
Water

1) Las Vegas, NV
You have got to be kidding me.

2) Honolulu, Hawaii
Too touristy

3) Little Rock, Arkansas
WHAT?

4) Albuquerque, New Mexico
They must mean some Albuquerque I’ve never been to..

5) Sacramento, CA
Okay, this one I can kind of see

6) Portland, Oregon
Hmm…

7) Las Cruces, New Mexico
I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of this one..

8) New Orleans, Louisiana
I imagine some of my friends find this amusing.

9) San Diego, CA
Again, I can see this..

10) Hartford, Connecticut
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever been there..

And.. apparently it didn’t quite make the top ten..

11) Orange County, CA

I don’t think I trust this report. Anything that didn’t list OC at all but listed Las Vegas? If it wasn’t for defcon, I would never go to Las Vegas – frankly, the place scares me..

It amazes me how many people who used to be regular talker users now use livejournals instead. I guess it proves that we weren’t really listening to each other or something – except that we all comment on each other’s journals. 😉 So maybe it’s more like we find non-realtime a more conveniant way to interact. Which I guess it is.

A old friend told me that my journal was too dull looking, and that I needed a icon. Problem is I can’t think of anything that iconofies me.. ah well. I’m holding a contest, the winner gets something or other, what should sheer use as his LJ icon?

Well, I’m still here. I realize I haven’t had much to say of late – that’s because I’ve been in a strange sort of mental stasis. I guess I was avoiding actually thinking in the hopes that if I stopped, my life would go away. Or something.

I’m again working on the software for the mk3 boards, after quite a while of slacking. And qm.sheer.us has gained a average of one feature a day – at the current rate, in another year or so it might actually be pretty good.

Met with what may become my band the other day. Kind of a unusual situation – we all played every instrument.. [as in, I did one song on guitar, one song on drums, and a few songs on keys.. ] – I liked the vibe, and both the guitarist and the drummer seemed smart and leftward-inclined.

Speaking of leftward-inclined, I got a call from the guitarist from my *old* band [old here meaning when I was 18 or so].. I’m starting to think northern virginia poisens people’s minds. First Leeper, and now him – The quote I like the most is ‘I hate to think what would have happened if Gore had been president for Sept. 11th – he probably wouldn’t have done anything’.

Um, exactly.

So, let’s see.. which is better – killing a bunch of innocent people through disrupting aid efforts while completely failing to kill your target, or doing nothing.

Hrm. That’s not a very hard one, now is it?

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In other news, I note with some amusement that all of my doomsaying of past years is finally coming around, and the stock market is falling like a rock. Whups, I guess it wasn’t just the dot coms after all. In fact, as it turns out, some of the non-dot-coms were bigger con jobs than the dot coms.

I find george bush talking about financial accountability and responsability rather comic, though – I mean, here we have a guy who would almost certainly be doing time for a long list of things if the public ever found out a list of his crimes.

Anyway..

Quote from a story on MSN:

U.S. President George W. Bush said last week Washington would use all tools at its disposal to topple Saddam. He has branded Iraq part of an “axis of evil” supporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Sometimes..

WE MAKE THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.

WE DO.

Not Saddam, who may have some unsavory habits but probably couldn’t make a intertial guidence system with all the resources at his disposal..

Hell, he couldn’t even buy the silicon needed. Last I looked, his people can’t even buy antibiotics. And I don’t think there’s that much uranium in iraq.

We’re evil.

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Actually, maybe everyone’s evil. Wasn’t taht the tenant of some of the early christians? Mankind is fundamentally evil? Seems likely that it’s true.

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Last night, i dreamed I was in military school.

Not a particularly pleasant dream. I spent most of it running from the boss man, who was.. hrm.. a typical military asshole?

I was trying to tell him – and the students – why their entire way of thinking and existance was wrong. Unfortunately, the conversation wasn’t going so well, and so I was trying to escape the school..

I really wonder what this dream would ‘mean’, if I were one of those people who was inclined to assign meanings to dreams.

something must be wrong with the world.

[Link courtesy of

Not only do I have friends, but a suprising number of my friends also use the livejournal system. I should figure out what percentage of them are paying users – would be funny if LiveJournal had trouble running as a nonprofit because it kept making too much money.

My ‘friends’ page

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Ran into someone on the net today who told me that I was someone named ‘Mark’ in my past life who died in Berkeley, CA of a drug overdose in 1970.

Actually, I think i’ll just cut & paste the commentary. Names have been changed to protect the not-so-innocent

—————————————–

X tells you ‘Yes. But your name was Mark, and you died of a drug
overdose in 1970 in Berkley, CA.’
X tells you ‘And you’re the reincarnation of him.’
X tells you ‘Hope that doesn’t ruin your day.’
You emote ‘Sheer chuckles. Not at all. But I would like to hear more..’ to
X
-> You tell X ‘Actually, dying from a drug overdose in berkeley doesn’t
sound like a bad way to go.. I’m guessing it wasn’t acid, though, that
usually doesn’t kill you. And I won’t touch the hard stuff..’
-> X tells you ‘Oh sure – you loved Sugar Crisp cereal, and you
kinda liked math and sci-fi cartoons, and after Sputnik you decided to go
into engineering. You also told your friends in college that you’d commit
suicide rather than go into the military if you were drafted.’
X tells you ‘Your dad was a high school science teacher, and your mom
was a nurse.’

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Now, what’s strange about this is that this person did not know me, approached me completely out of the blue and volunteered this information. I am, of course, inclined to take it with a grain or six of salt.. but.. still, it’s interesting. Probably just because I can see myself loving suger crisps and commiting suicide rather than going to shoot at innocent people.

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I wonder if the people who played ‘Born in the USA’ and ‘Keep on rocking in the free world’ for our 4th of July gathering of 20,000 people at the park realized that they were playing protest songs. I have to assume they did.. which I find very encouraging.

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I keep making progress on the mk3 software in fits and starts. It’s not that it’s a horribly complex problem – it’s just that there are so many little nitpicking peices involved. Today I wrote a more advanced serial debugger for the ‘wedge’, one that will let me look up variables and whatnot.

I also had a interesting idea last night.. instead of making a hard disk recording system that’s one big mondo computer, maybe we should try making one out of a network of microcontrollers..

but then, I always wanted stereo equipment to plug togeather with ethernet. Would be sooo much easier to deal with, you could have infinate inputs, outputs, and routings..

Ah well.

Shouts out to my newest reader! Thanks for joining, we’ll try not to bore you too much, but I am, let’s face it, a pretty boring person. 😉