Never been one to let the carrier drop

Because I’m determined to do 365 days clean & sober, ‘for real this time’.. (I made a promise with *. That’s probably one I don’t want to try breaking. * can, well, maybe help take away my fear that I’ll lose my home.).. I’m going to count down the days on my livejournal. Each day I will contact one of my RL friends, if possible meeting them in person. This will help me reestablish my time sense and other neural connections, and help me heal in ways that are nontechnical. Maybe not even describable. Who knows. I hurt myself badly this time.

I am officially on drugs. Or perhaps that should be on official drugs.

After a visit to a shrink, I’ve been prescribed a circadian rhythm regulator (which may explain why I’m awake at 9:30a) and a mood stabalizer. We’ll see if either or both improve things over the long run.

So ignore my excessively dramatic and annoying journal entries of recent.

S.

The problem we have in building a honest and reliable voting network is that we’ve got a couple of opposing goals.

First of all, we’d really like to be able to test that every single vote arrived in it’s appropriate bucket, and no single user voted more than once. These things would seem, on the surface, to require some form of good authentication and user-tagging.

But on the other hand, we really want users to feel free to vote their concience, without worrying that other people might find out what they’ve voted. This would seem to require a completely anonymous system.

Then there’s the matter of tallying the votes. Ideally, we would like each vote to be sent several places for tallying, rather than tallied at one place, and the results of the tallies compared.

I really think that, especially given that this is new technology that will by its very nature be buggy, and in some sense at least the fate of the world rests on the results of this system (one could argue that that’s true of any system because everything is so interconnected, but I think in this case it’s more true than in most) we need the ability to verify our votes after they have been posted. This will require us to have some way to authenticate ourselves to the network – I’m thinking something like a ATM card, issued to every voter, with their name and SSN encoded on it. It could probably even just be a magstripe on a conventional ID like a drivers license.

Anyway, some completely anonymous (as far as any outside snoop could see) token should be either assigned to or generated out of the name and SSN, and attached to the ‘envalope’ of the ballot. That way the user could go home and with their web browser, hit up www.whatdidIvote.gov and verify that their vote was in fact sitting there, and had been counted.

Also, because this is completely new technology, I think it’s important that it be open-source. The open-source community would probably rally around a project to build a voting machine network that was honest using nothing but PCs, and because it was open-source it would be possible to verify that it had not been coded to favor any particular canidate in any way.

[At the moment, the situation we have is that the vice president of the u.s. has stock in the government-favored electronic voting machine company Diebold.. if anyone knows of something that smells more of conflict-of-interest than that, please don’t tell me about it because I’m really afraid to know]

Bleh. Must go shower. More later.

I’m trying to document positive things that I’m doing, mostly just to give me some hope that the future is going to look brighter than the past

1) Psychologist
2) Psychiatrist
3) Cleaning house
4) Installed and using calandering system on Gateway
5) Couples counselling
6) Oxygen
7) Filing system and organizers for office (though still much to do in that realm)

Right now I’m feeling really sad and broken and things with Kayti are not feeling like they’re going well..

brassrat.net is fixed. It wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought it would be – I faxed them my license last night, today they emailed me with my username and password, and me and enyc made a few changes here and there and we’re back on the net. Happy happy.

S.

We tear each other up, wanting each other to be something different or to do something different or to become someone different or to be new and improved in this or that or the other way.

Why can’t we love each other just the way we are?

I forsee much running around in circles tomorrow.

Hammernode, who have been doing primary DNS for brassrat.net for just about forever, have folded up shop. I don’t remember the username and password that the account is registered under, and I have to change the authoritive nameservers because right now, they point to localhost. (Ha. ha. ha. ha.). Oh, and the email address that I would use to get new information from them – currently registered @ brassrat.net. WHo’s bright idea was that? Oh, right, mine..

I have a dns server set up on sheer.us, so creating the zone isn’t that difficult, but I have to fax a photo ID before they’ll send me my username and password.

Amazingly, while normally this would be leaving me feeling crushed and depressed and stressed out, right now I find that I’m just not that worried about it. So the domain will be down for a day. It won’t be the end of the world.

I think I’m finally recovering from dot com madness.

Now, to figure out how to like myself.

(occasionally I wonder if I should transfer brassrat.net to Phoebe, since she’s the one who’s family was the origins of the name. THe problem is that I’m not sure she’s got a authorative nameserver to park it at, a webserver to host it on, or a mail server to deal with traffic on it. Or all that much interest in dealing with any of these things. But, at this point I have to concede that if she’s ready to deal with the technical challenges involved with the name and she wants it, it’s really more hers than mine)

I’ll have to come up with a new name for my consulting business at that point, though.

I had a interesting dream last night – I was flying with my boss in a 8-seater overwing of some sort – we were flying over a bridge, although not a suspension bridge, and waves were crashing over the road surface of it – we were flying barely 500 feet up, and I kept feeling as if a wave was going to grab us at any time. Then one did, crashed over us and we were being pulled to the side and into a spin, and then my boss was trying to pull us out of the spin and was pulling like a 4G turn, and I kept yelling about how a overwing wasn’t going to handle a 4G turn and then the tail broke off (not the whole tail. I think the rudder was still there – but the li’l bits that stick out with the elevators were gone. I don’t think this is a very realistic failure mode for a overwing pulling too many Gs but it was a dream, what do you want?)

The next sequence was a remarkably realistic crash landing near a airport in which the plane ended underwater but still intact, my boss finding the black box (yah, I know, a 8 seater with a black box..) and the emergancy radio and then a skip to me in a airport trying to find a commercial flight somewhere and all was bedlam and no flights were going anywhere and I ended up on a bus to somewhere in europe.

And things kept getting weirder from there although not, thankfully, scarier.

The thing is, I am wondering if this dream means I have a subconcious fear of flying – I don’t think I’m afraid of flying – I’ve been thinking of buying a little two-seater ultralight if I ever get out of debt.. (fully enclosed and with instrumentation, but a top speed of about 120 and a operational ceiling of < 8k feet - apparently the license test for them isn't much harder than a driver's license test and they're easier to land than a hang glider). Now I'm wondering if I secretly fear flying - or else fear it in small aircraft - and just don't know about it. I've been up several times with my boss in a little Cessna trainer, and it seemed quite fun at the time. Ah, the inner workings of the subconcious mind, always interesting to get a glimpse at.

The bootloader I published does not include the header files, and includes code for setting the internal osc against a 32khz crystal. If you don’t need the latter, be sure to strip it out. If you do need the former, email me at sheer dash panic at sheer dot us