Never been one to let the carrier drop

My muttered comment as I crawl out of bed (entirely too early) and check my mail.. ‘maybe the spammers have taken christmas off’.

ha ha ha.

I’m so funny.

I’ve never _seen_ so much spam. My anti-spam system caught 83 peices today, and (horrors) six slipped through to my inbox. Not counting the wotch.com semi-spam which I’ve decided I like enough to put on t he whitelist.

Blah.

Yeesh, people, it’s christmas, take a break.

On the other hand, the peer-to-peer nets are humming. My download is almost half of my upload. 😉

[For those of you who don’t keep track, for whatever reason my line stays 100% in use in upload, but only about 30% in use in download for whatever bandwidth cap I sset. I theorize that this is because WinMX users are a bunch of leeches.]

I just hit the ‘latest 50 posts’ or something like that button on the front page of LJ. It’s interesting.. a random slice of a bunch of people’s lives, scrolling across your screen. It seemed almost like I could sort the people into types.. I mean, each of them a distinct and no doubt facinating individual, with loves and hates and thoughts and fears and all those things, but also they somehow all seemed to blur togeather into a great mass of humanity as well.

Peace out, people.

I did see many posts in otehr languages, which made me happy. I really love the journaling thing. I want to write a journal-spider that creates database tables that one can write all sorts of interesting queries on based on the global at-large journal world. but then, I also want to write a program that just evolves, and IS, and is connected to the net. Something that uses perl and eval and genetic algorythms to be as alive as code ever can be.

just like I’d like to build a robot. And I’d like to get a album out. And I’d like to clean the basement. And I’d like to mail off this stupid PC that’s been done for weeks and is sitting behind me gathering dust and being tripped over. I had a IM from Greg today.. probably wants to know where the hell his computer is. Can’t blame him.

Mostly, I want to be DONE with parking meters for a while.

My new years resolutions are as follows:

1) Buy less stuff. Specifically, buy less new stuff which is made in china by a bunch of slaves. Used stuff is okay IMHO.
2) Make more friends.
3) Save more money. I want to have a full year’s operating capitol banked in case of emergancy, _out_ of the stock market. Maybe even in gold or some other hard resource. [and no, I don’t think music gear counts]

If anyone is looking for last minute presents for me, a subscription to Home Power and/or Funny Times would be appriciated.

Some time in the future I will read this journal.. assuming it doesn’t get lost somehow.. and see it through the eyes of me ten years older. How odd that will be? Some day, assuming that M. chooses to reveal it to him, my son will read my words and see whatever echoes of me he cares to see.. (probably in between hating me for giving him up for adoption, but such is life.. ).

Remember that it’s not neccesarily true that the old are wiser than the young. There is wisdom in both, and shortsightedness in both. In the middle there is also wisdom and shortsightedness.

And the young deserve a vote just as much as the old. By young, I mean ten-year-olds if they were willing to go to the polls. Six year olds. two year olds.

Sometimes it seems to me that the young deserve more of a vote. After all, they have to live with the aftermath longer, in every decision we make.

I haven’t smoked weed for many weeks. Just haven’t felt like it. [and, I haven’t smoked tobacco in a couple of months now. But that was a choice, I have indeed felt like it, sometimes it kind of .. eats into me in a odd way. Definately a addictive drug.]

Drugs. Drags. Chemicals. Thoughts.

What will me at 80 think of me at 27? Sometimes I wish I’d started this journal earlier.. in order to capture my life over my life.

The amazing thing about LJ is how it will enable us ALL to capture our life over our life. It’s a amazing thing.

Now to figure out how to make it last millenia, would be the next logical step. To send it winging through the stars, saying we, too, in all our minutia ,were here.

LJers for eternaty.

It’s a neat idea, really. Once your words are spoken, they are etched in time. Of course, then the trick becomes finding the good ones. There are already so many LJs that I couldn’t even begint o read a tenth of them. Some of them quite poignent and good, some of them quite interesting stories. Others, like mine, quite dull. 😉

We are what we are.

S.

Darkness falls on winter lands
Time’s arrow again disbands
We also serve who lie in wait
Hour after hour, taught carefully to hate

Men will clash in fire for oil
Black gold rain nuclear fire on earth’s soil
In seven years the wells run dry
In seven years fire streaks across the sky

For men were never bred to share
While we dream of love, our leaders hatred bear
While we reach for peace, they build machines of war
while we search for hope, they close freedom’s door

All for money do the “good men” die
All for nothing do we to our children lie
The cycle burns on, another war
In another hundred thousand years again eagles will soar

How many times have we played this role
How many cycles only gods could know
How much hatred must man invent
How many more fights for ‘The President’?

You’re Turkey!
You have a good deal of history behind you, both good and
bad, but through it all, you’ve become a leader among your friends.  You
have an uncanny ability to make friends with people who hate each other, though
sometimes you just hate them instead.  Surprisingly fickle, you keep a
good balance in your life between religion and humanism, but most people think
you’re fanatical anyway.  You’re Istanbul, you’re
Constantinople.
Take
the Country Quiz at the Blue Pyramid

—————————————————————————

Time keeps on slipping.. into the future like water, dreams wandering off and running away where you can’t look nor see nor find nor taste nor smell. I awaken from dreams more vivid each day, not sure which is sleep. Hallucinate reality, is there any difference between a hallucination of reality and what’s really real? What if my whole life is one large dream running on a very large computer somewhere? Not the matrix. Not the reality. Something huge and complex and shifting this way comes, and I beg for a root console, for a instruction manual that I can page through, for rules I can understand.

Programming windows opens new doors of perception?

I miss acid. But I’m too afraid of it to return. It’s not addiction.. not like nicotine was, before I decided to leave it behind. It’s more.. beauty. Amp up your pattern recognition tenfold. And yet, who would I trip with?

The fear. Weed brings out what is already there – except sometimes it doesn’t and is a truly good experience. I feel so small. So useless. So insignificant. So much like people would choose to not know me.

And yet.. ego. I am good at some things. I know this because people tell me.

I’m not under the influence of anything right now, for those of you who might think otherwise. Just pausing for a minute.

Wlell, back to the parking meters.

First of all, a story that will be giving me chills for weeks: http://www.livejournal.com/community/ljers4eternity/23038.html#cutid1

Second of all, I discovered this story while reading through a community devoted to LJers who have died. Which is a interesting thought.. apparently LJs time out these days, so you won’t be able to read about my thoughts and works forever, which is perhaps a good thing and perhaps just as well.. but if you could, then LJs would make a neat permanent archive..

Third of all, while reading through that community, I discovered a whole lot of people pissed off because of a journal-person who had maintained a fake charicter in order to kill it off. That person’s journal was also deleted.. (after s/he got 1000+ comments and outpourings of greif..)

Look, first of all, I’m getting tired of reading about how people’s LJs are deleted because they perform some infraction of the more or less nonexistant and/or loosely defined T.o.S. – to be honest, I’m starting to have a hard time trusting LJ – but second of all, there’s absolutely no reason that journal should have been deleted. At least it should have been left as a testiment to a brilliant snow job. It must have been astonishingly good fiction in order to garner 1000 comments on the last page – my journal will be lucky to get ten!

And, really, maintaining a fictinal LJ seems just as reasonable as maintaining a factual one. A journal’s just a notebook.. scribble anything you want. Doesn’t have to be the story of your life.. could be the story of someone else’s. Could be the story of the life you didn’t manage to have, walter mitty style. What’s the problem here?

Personally, I think it’s deplorable that Flash/Flashman’s journal was deleted. It’s even more deplorable that a admin of some BB that the charicter was on saw fit to abuse their admin privs to publish IP address information (http://www.livejournal.com/users/bubba_ray/37574.html) about the charicter. Look, it’s the net, fiction is out there, no journal was promised as fact.

Of course, I have a strange view of fact and fiction and death of fictional charicters anyway. Let’s just say that I am upset when fictinal charicters die as well.

Fact? Fiction? Who knows the difference?

Not george bush, that’s for sure.

54% feminine.

Hmm. As with all things, I sit squarely on the line between genders. Which isn’t a bad place to be particularly.

I survived my extended family.. even enjoyed being around a couple of them. [I discovered that the children of my favorite great-uncle are just as cool as he was – I guess that’s not suprising. I still miss him sometimes.. ]

(For those of you who don’t know me personally, every year my extended family on my dad’s side has a holiday called ‘Thanksmas’. I’ve avoided it for years and years, very carefully – since my extended family on my dad’s side don’t have a lot to reccomend them. And they were mostly just as bad as I remembered – of course, they still don’t think much of me either. They were glad to see me anyway, though, even though they think I’m a commie left-wing pinko longhaired freak.. 😉 My favorite quote from the visit: “Jonathan, you know you’re a little too late to be a hippie, right?”. No, no one told me that peace and love and weed had gone out of style.. 😉

Anyway, so, I went to south carolina and back, and more-or-less survived the experience – my first time there in 13 years, it’s amazing how much their house had shrunk. Perspective is a interesting thing. I also remembered Clemson, SC as being a huge city.. heh heh heh…

And now I’m back at work on the parking meters that just don’t quit. P. wants to borrow the living room for a party on friday, so I also have to drag the piles of boxes, packing material, computer components, and old mail out of it, which should be interesting and time consuming.

In other news, I figured out how to control my lights via MIDI and audio, and have been having all sorts of fun with them. I need to get one more tree to set up the two more I-scans, and perhaps pick up one more laser.. (if only the blues weren’t $3000). Still, they look really, really sweet.

And I’ve collected a ton of samples.. some of which are truly priceless. I’ve also been editing some of the recordings me + ron made, and have one pretty close to presentable..

S.

You are ‘Christmas Time is Here, by Golly!’, by Tom
Lehrer. Hmm, you really don’t like Christmas,
do you? From the moment they start playing
carols in the shops in October to the
appearance of the first Easter Eggs in the
shops on New Years Eve, the rampant hypocrisy
of the Christmas spirit sets your teeth on
edge. You know just how many family fights
start over Christmas dinner, how many people
are injured in the Boxing Day sales, and how
few people actually find Christmas even
remotely merry. You liked Scrooge far better
before those ghosts got to him, and you are
only doing this quiz because you are bored at
work and anything is better than listening to
everyone else discuss their Christmas shopping.
Still, it is two days off work, which does
count for something… Enjoy the break.

What Christmas Carol are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

How cheerful. 😉

I bought myself a AudioTron. I’m not entirely sure why, otehr than it was cheap on e-bay.

While the MP3-player is okay, the interface is not nearly as handy as a computer. But, there is another side to the audiotron.. a far cooler side.

A few seconds after I plugged it into my LAN, it detected a list of radio statins. 147 of them. Right now I’m listening to psytrance.. it’s been going for a hour, at 128kbit quality, and there have been no ads.

How cool is that?

S.

(whose head is killing him)

Go to google.

Type in ‘miserable failure’. Hit ‘I’m feeling lucky’.

S.