Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, I apologize for the dark and depressing nature of the last post. I’m in a slightly better mood today, and I admit that my darkest moods are definately over the top.

I’ve been working on cleaning my office.. it’s gone from complete disaster to just difficult to look at, which I guess I feel good about. (Formerly it was impossible to get to my chair, much less to the other side of the room. Now it’s just a mess to the extent that it’s emotionally crushing, but not to the extent that it’s a serious hazard to health.)

I also installed the UPS yesterday, so now even in a power failure I can continue computing. (except that the ethernet hubs aren’t on it – mental note to self, fix that.)

I also got the printer to end all printers the other day. I apologize if I’ve already gone on about this.. this thing weighs 62 lbs, is a color copier, fax machine, color laser printer, and oooh is the output pretty.. it’s nothing compared with some of the toys Scott has to play with, but still..

I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to do with it yet, but one thing I am going to do is print posters and stick them up on my walls.

http://www.sheer.us/pics/nathan/Natalie-Scan-Photo-2006.jpg
http://www.sheer.us/pics/nathan/Natalie-Scan-Photo-2006-2.jpg

Since I no longer believe it is ethical to create life without that life’s permission (and it’s basically impossible, as far as I can tell, to get permission prior to the creation) I’m not sure how I feel about N. – obviously I don’t want him/her to stop existing (unless he/she really, really chooses to) but I feel very guilty at this point for having created him/her – I guess when worrying about teenage pregnancy and whatnot I worried about the more pragmatic matters like how I would pay for half a kid and what the girl’s parents would do to me, but not the more existential things like how life is painful and how there are horrible things like cancer and natural disasters and how at the very best you’re going to get to die of old age with system after system going offline in incredibly painful ways and how no one should be bringing more people into this world to suffer thusly..

So, yeah, I feel guilty about N.

Bleh.

S.

Once again I am playing (mostly unsuccessfully) with mixing down multitrack audio.

So, live from Wayne’s World in Seattle, WA we have the Art Theives :

http://www.sheer.us/stuff/ArtTheives/

(I also was playing keys on Black Magic Woman)

So, like most of the network denziens of the year 2000, I use a wireless network. 802.11g, no WEP (I use application-level security when such things are appropriate). And, because I live in a lath-plaster house, I spend most of my time staring at signal level meters that show one bar at best.

Recently, I had reason to go to Fry’s electronics to pick up a high-gain antenna or three. I got one USB adapter with a 8dB antenna (it looks like a little microwave dish, it’s adorable) and a signal strength meter, and that’s kind of cool, and I got a 10dB omni and a 15dB ‘corner’ (i.e. 90 degree slice) antenna and put them up.

The results could best be described as ‘strange’.

With just the corner antenna operating, I get 5 out of 5 signal on my laptop in the room that previously would regularly disconnect because of poor signal quality. However, when I add the omni to the mix (my access point has two antenna connectors which go, as far as I can tell, to two seperate transcevers) the signal goes *down* to about three bars. As near as I can tell, I’m better off throughout the entire house, signal strength wise, with just the 15db corner.

This makes NO sense. There are even places in the *shadow* of the corner antenna that do better with just the corner than with the corner and the omni. It’s like the omni is 180 degrees out of phase or something…

Anyone have any ideas?

So, recently I found the email addresses of a bunch of my friends from the late eighties and early ninties, and emailed a bunch of them. Two of them replied to my first ‘ping’ style email, but attempts to build a further conversation were unsuccessful.

Now I can’t decide what to do… do I email them back and try to get a conversation started? Do I just accept that they’re not interested in being friends, either because they remember me as annoying (I probably am) or because they don’t remember me at all, or because they’re just busy and don’t really have time for emailed corrispondences..

I don’t know. One of these people was fantastically important in my life at one point (even though I was never as far as I know important in hers) and it kind of hurts that they wouldn’t even bother to trade a few mails with me. Okay, so it really hurts. But I know I’m being too sensitive, and that bothers me too..

So maybe I overreacted on the IRS thing a little.. it turns out they were just notifying me that they were going to drain all my bank accounts unless I set up a new payment plan with them because the old payment plan didn’t take into account that I wouldn’t be done paying it off by the end of 2005.

So I called them, and they were very nice and made arrangements to continue my payment plan and as long as I have everything paid off before next year, all will be okay.

S.

I haven’t seen the contents of the aforementioned mails from the IRS so I don’t *know* that they want to either audit me or jail me. I’m just reacting to my fears based on my complete inability to keep records straight.

So, I’m in Socal, and according to K. there are registered letters from the IRS. Given my sloppy (and often nonexistant) recordkeeping, and tendancy to guess at numbers I don’t actually know the value of, I’m sure that they’re a audit, and that I should expect at least a year of jail time.

I’d kill myself, but I hear the IRS actually has agents in the afterlife..

Okay. It’s been a long time (Reletively) since I’ve been whining about religion and my lack of ability to fit smoothly into the one I was given by my parents. So I thought I could get away with doing a little more of it. Again, I’m going to pick on Genesis.

Okay, so God creates Adam and Eve. Then he tells them not to eat the apple. How is it that God shares a language with Adam and Eve?. They’re freshly created – and as anyone who has dealt with human children knows, humans have to learn language, it doesn’t come programmed into us from the factory – and yet, they share a language with God and with each other. Seems to me a whole lot of stuff got left out of the story there. For that matter, exactly what language does Ze L-oh-rrr-dee speak? We know it’s not english, it’s probably not aramiac – it would be pushing credibility rather far to think that the supreme being in charge of everything happens to speak english when only a third of Earth does. Chances are it’s not a human language at all, is my thinking on the matter.

And yet, in the sermon on Genesis, when they’re talking about the wickedness of the humans who ate of the apple.. how dare they disobey God’s commands – like we’re not all *designed* to disobey authority (by all indications) – no one ever mentions the ludocracy of the language barrier. What, did God flash-load a entire language into Adam and Eve so he could talk to them? If so, how did he pick which language to load, and does he do this regularly?

I’m not saying there isn’t a God, or possibly several. I’m convinced that there is. I’m just pretty convinced that there isn’t much human literature on divinity that is anything other than pure guesswork and stories. But, hey, I could be wrong..

(p.s. it still annoys me.. Jesus wasn’t named Jesus! Stupid western culture can’t even get anyone’s bloody name right.)