Never been one to let the carrier drop

Sunday, Day 16, clocking in, wow am I sore today..

Well, that was a fun and adventure filled day. Installed MediaWiki on EvTech. We’ll see if it becomes filled with useful information or spam. At any rate it’s somewhere for me to keep my notes. For all I know John Lussermeyer has set up a wonderful EV wiki. Or someone. In which case I’m sure someone will get around to telling me sooner or later.

I’m *exhausted* from cleaning for hours.. I cleaned up the studio a noticable amount, and the living room some and the bedroom some and the hall some..

And now I sleep.

I’m thinking about making this year porn-free as well. Not that I’m really looking at porn – in fact, at this point, the procedure to get at my porn collection is about six commands long, because I wanted it in a encrypted volume so that no one would have to deal with it in the case of my untimely demise*. (I like strange porn – no, nothing illegal – and I wouldn’t want for example my parents to have to deal with my tastes in porn as they were cleaning out my ‘puter after my death). I can’t remember the last time I looked at porn on the computer, but it was probably >1 month ago. However, a friend of mine is going porn-free and I thought, well..

Kayti has some interesting points about porn. The problem with porn isn’t the receiver, it’s the transmitter. People making porn could be in one of several buckets:
a: It could be something that was shot just for one person, and after the relationship broke up the person broke trust and put it on the ‘net, for any number of reasons. I know people who have done this for revenge. Or the person could have just inadvertantly put it on the net.. for a couple of days many years ago, there were naked pictures of me and Vinnie on the net because I forgot they were in a ‘roll’ I put up publicly. My long term solution for this has been to be MUCH more careful, and no similar incidents have occured since then that I’m aware of.
b: It could be commercial porn, in which case you don’t know how well the actors are treated and how happy they are with their jobs. They might be getting shot in return for drugs they’re addicted to, or coerced in any number of other ways. Or they might be happy, well ajusted, well paid talent. But there’s no way to know, so by supporting commercial porn (even by looking at it, even if you don’t pay for it) you could be supporting the hurting of people.
c: It could be amatuar porn made by someone who deliberately wanted to make amatuar porn and is made happy by it – like, it’s their hobby. If so, then all is good and well and look and enjoy.

Problem is, I see no way to differentiate just by looking between these buckets. Well shot amatuar porn looks like professional porn, and amatuar porn for one person looks like amatuar porn for the world generally.

In the meantime there’s also the issue of me looking at porn and closing out the rest of the world while I do it, and all the ‘classic’ reasons why people don’t like porn. And there is such a thing, I’ve been told, as porn addiction.

So, I’m considering strongly making this a porn-free year. That’s not hard to impliment, since I’m not looking at porn right now. And I feel like it might make Kayti happy.

* = (I know that planning for death when your <30 is kind of silly, but what can I say.. a lot of my friends have died / made the Jump, and my recent behavior with nitrous made death seem a possible end.) In the matter of planning for death, I need to prepare a living will and a dead will. I don't plan on doing these all official-like and through lawyers, instead I'll go with the theory that I'm dead, so if you all ignore my wishes, so what? The living will is mostly just to make sure that you all don't bankrupt anyone trying to keep me going, and you all don't prolong my life 20 years but leave me in misery.

Once someone truly learns to use their imagination, no jail can hold them, no job can grind them down, no religion can convince them they are bad and evil and should be ashamed, and the words ‘bad choices’ stop having any sting at all. Imagination is Power. Imagination is Freedom.

Mine has gotten a major upgrade lately: My visualization skills have been amped up considerably. They appear on kind of a third visual channel, so perhaps this is what people mean when they talk about a ‘third eye’. Or perhaps not.

I’m hoping that if I exercise my viz skills, they will grow. Not saying I’m going to make a major practice of this.. I’ve still so many other skills to exercise.. but, I begged and begged for lucid dreaming and I feel like I’m getting a software upgrade that will permit me to do it.

I’m also unreasonably proud of myself for having not used in a dream last night.

A reminder, today’s meeting is at 5p instead of 6p.

Another reminder, dude is gonna be in the studio from 6p to 8p, might not be a bad idea to spend a hour down there before the meeting cleaning shit up.

This is day 15.

Another fun day. Tomorrow I’ve got a guy from $12_STEP_PROGRAM I don’t know coming into the studio to lay down some rap tracks. I’m going to have a fun time pretending I know what I’m doing, considering I’ve never recorded rap before in my life. But he says he already has the instrumental backing, he just wants a place to record the vocals, and theoretically at least I’m equipped to do that. I guess I’ll just fake it till it works. Anyway, I’m not charging him so really, how bad can it be when it’s free? So sez me.

Also got band practice tomorrow, then might be going with Tory Sunday to something for Jeremy et al. It’ll be good to go somewhere with Tory again, it’s been a long time. Kayti might be going too.

Feeling a bit overhwhelmed with all the mental health professionals that are currently a part of my life. E-mailed a lawyer about the accident, asking if he’d represent me. No-reply-at-all. Well, Jeffrey Serage says he knows someone, so perhaps I’ll try his contact if I don’t hear from the lawyer in a few days.

I might also try resending the mail from gmail just in case sheer.us is blackholed somewhere for some reason.

Mental note to self: check on Qwest and Blarg bills.

Anyway, clocking out for the day. Day 14 – 2 weeks. One day at a time.. deep breath.. one day at a time..

I was reading a long-ago entry where I was baggin’ on DJs spinning with CD players. Some of the best DJs I know DJ with CD players.

Dude, whatever equipment gets ya there, whatever words get you there, whatever operating system gets you there, whatever religion gets you there, whatever mantra gets you there, whatever car gets you there, whatever boat gets you there, whatever house gets you there, whatever lover gets you there, whatever friends get you there, whatever doctors get you there, whatever drugs get you there, whatever beliefs get you there, whatever hopes get you there, whatever dreams get you there, whatever habits get you there, whatever truths get you there..

The important thing.. is to be there.

I think they misquoted Ford. I think what he said was, ‘we’ll ship ’em black.. and then they’ll paint ’em whatever color they like’.

Love ya all,

Sheer

For any of you who had problem with www.wshr.org, there’s now a Java based version at www.wshr.us.

It may take me a while to get my act togeather enough to keep music always queued up.

Eventually maybe I’ll get a live365 bridge.

I forgot to clock in this morning, which means I’ve already fixed some safetymate visual problems, read some on FDS, and done a little project for myself.

Okay, so I’m going to mention my little project for myself.

For a long time I’ve run, off and on, a streaming radio station. Sometimes I broadcast other people’s works, sometimes I broadcast my own, and sometimes I broadcast me live

However, it was a icecast stream, and explaining how to open it in six different audio players every time I wanted anyone to tune in was driving me to distraction.

Recently, I did some work for my friend Eben where I set up a mp3 player subsystem for her radio station so she could sell back issues. You can see this at QMs RadioAlchymy site if you’re curious. But, using technology that she brought to my attention, I’ve built a web site with a flash embedded player, so when you open it, assuming you have Flash installed, it just works.

Combined with getting darkice working so I could broadcast MP3 from my linux boxen, this little project now means that I can broadcast on the web from my li’l PC, and you all can tune it in whenever you like.

So check it out, if you’re so inspired.

I also plan to do some scheduled live/jam broadcasts, and broadcast some more Mischief Committee meetings. I will post dates and times just as soon as I know waht the dates and times are to post.

Anyway, I guess I’ve built it up enough, here’s the URL: http://www.wshr.org

I’ve got a lot of hoops to jump through before I’ll even recognize my life as mine.

I got up this morning way too early.. turns out i forgot to take my drugs last night. Well, so, there’s a direct penalty for forgetting my drugs. Will definately be more careful in the future.

OTOH, I did get some things done.

I wrote to Natalie, something I’ve been putting off for decades, it feels like sometimes. Just kind of a hi, this is who I am, this is my address, feel free to ask questions kind of letter. The front of one page, handwritten. Given how horrible my handwriting is I don’t know why I handwrote it, except that it just felt cold to write a letter like that via computer. Future ones will probably be typed.

I asked my mom to mail me my old IBM selectric clone. I forsee filling out many forms in my future and there’s nothing quite like a typewriter for that. Plus it will bring back old memories.

I have homes for all the computers in my house that are sitting on shelves. Now I just have to repair them and mix & match & make them run, and then send them on to their homes.

I am soooo tired..

I faxed the hospital and told them to send my records to my shrink. I called the attorney that Brett reccomended and explained my situation, and got a referral to someone in the Seattle area. I wrote the attorney in Seattle a two-page email roughly explaining my situation.

This weekend I am working on Saturday, and then on Sunday I have to tackle the taxes, a taxing subject to be sure.

I also got a embedded mp3 player compiled in laszlo to work in the safetymate html app. That should ensure audio in virtually all browsers that have any chance of running flash.

I also worked a little bit on MoodMan. Eventually I hope it will be this uber software package that actually predicts what my mood will be tomorrow. But for now, I’m still even working on the UI. My base concept is this:

Three sliders. One for happy/sad, one for calm/afraid, and one for energetic/exhausted. Software logs any time any of the sliders gets moved with a timestamp, and also has a text box for typing some comments about the change just made which logs those comments with a timestamp. Simple easy php & mysql & laz working togeather. Put it on my active desktop. Whenever I feel something emotional, grab the sliders and slide them around. Then graph the results and try to make some sense of them, plus compare them against the LJ language heuristics to determine if the latter are actually measuring anything meaningful.

Day 13 draws to a close. Sheer, signing off.