Never been one to let the carrier drop

I just had one of those epiphanies that would hav ebeen obvious to anyone but me.

The big difference between liberals and conservatives, at least right now, is which direction in time they are travelling. Liberals are travelling – or at least looking – towards the future, while conservatives are travelling – or at least looking – towards the past. It’s not ‘conservative’ in the sense of ‘conserve resources’. It’s conservative as in ‘change as little as possible’.

Which works just fine until you hit that oncoming train that you thought was the light at the end of the tunnel.

[Sheer tries to improve on his optimism some]

’nuff said.

Kayti doesn’t actually neccesarily think being adopted has caused a negative impact in her life. Other people are of the opinion that it has and have told her that and she has talked about it with me which set me to thinking and worrying and whatnot.

Kayti was adopted, and has talked about how being adopted might have negatively impacted her life. Sometimes I worry that my son, who was adopted because at 19 I didn’t really feel like I had either the emotional maturity or the financial stability to raise a child, will have had his life completely ruined by being adopted and will blame me and think that I didn’t love him.. but it was because I did love him that I gave him up for adoption. (Insofar as one can love a entitiy that one doesn’t know yet and in fact doesn’t exist, at least in this world, yet)

I don’t know. I wish I could be sure I had done the right thing. OF course it was partially up to the mother (who is on my friends list and might or might not come forward and comment about this)

Nathaniel, if you’re reading this ten years later and hating me, I’m sorry. I did what seemed to be the best thing to do at the time. That’s pretty much how I live my life, except when I do what definatley doesn’t seem to be the best thing to do at the time. Which I also do occasionally although I’m slowly learning not to.

Okay, so, I’m watching my CDs get ripped into OGG at a prodigious rate. I’ve decided to undertake, in between working on paying work, the herculean task of ripping my entire CD collection. Now, understand, I have a LOT of CDs. 500 would not be a underestimate. So this may take a while. On the other hand, when I’m done I’ll be able to listen to all those B-sides that I never listen to any more because since the whole mp3 thing happened I can’t be bothered to deal with physical media.

I’ve been thinking about how in the last ten years the internet has turned into the happy meme breeding ground – kind of a bizarre monument to humanity. You want a snapshot of the good, the bad, the ugly, of humanity and human emotion and thought, the internet definately gives you that. And it literally is a happy breeding ground for memes. I’m glad that I’ll have it to entertain me when I’ve gotten old.. if I don’t die first.

It seems hard to beleive that I Happened to be born just as the Net happened to be coming into widespread use. Unlikely in the extreme.. I feel almost as if I were directed here somehow. Yet another point on my ‘reasons I suspect there are higher and lower powers’ sheet.

I wonder what new memes the ‘net is breeding as we speak, and if it is improving humanity. Of course, back to my old evil-thinks-it’s-good-and-we’re-evil motif, I guess part of the problem is that different people define improving as different things. For example, I think complete irradication of all STDs and conception only by human volition would be a improvement, but lots of those right-wing-bible-belt types think that it would be completely evil because it would let people have sex with whoever they want and not have babies. ANything that feels good is a sin and must have a punishment associated with it! Ya!

I promise I’ll get off this religion kick soon enough. In the meantime, has anyone heard of a religion called the B’Nai or something similar? The infamous Christian On The Plane mentioned it to me as a religion that tried to synergize all of the world religions into one cohesive text, which sounds both fascinating and like something I’d be very into.

I’m heading towards a daylight schedule again, so perhaps I’ll be able to actually go to church or something. My parents always used to go to church for Christmas Eve, and I’m oddly tempted but don’t know how welcome I’d be at a completely unfamiliar church. On the other hand, there’s that line from Larry Niven’s Fallen Angels – ‘It’s God’s house, aina? All are welcome..’. Then again, that’s from Minnesota where everyone is all welcoming because another warm body means that much less heating oil needs to be burned.. 😉

Okay. Back to the happy meme breeding ground concept.. one of my possible views for the origins of free will is a combination of a programmable filter and a noise (i.e. true, cryptographically random noise) source. [side note: I’m beginning to entertian the idea that there is no such thing as a true random number generator]. The filter gets ever more complex as you load more data into it by having various experiences, reading, thinking, etc. The internet is a enormous source of data to shove into the filter, and what’s more, represents a chance for data to resonate back and forth between people, so the filters can grow more and more complex as a group as well as as individuals. A few great examples of meme breeding grounds are livejournal and everything2. (And for those of you who’ve never tried out everything2, you really should.

This whole free will thing is important to me for a couple of reasons:

1) I have never seen a computer show anything that even remotely resembles free will. On the other hand, they only have a couple of million transistors to our billions of neurons, so it may just be that it’s a emergant property that requires a more complex network than we can yet put togeather.
2) I’m writing a story about a computer virus that accidentally causes the internet to become a sentient individual with free will, and details some of the complexities of the authors of the virus interfacing with their creation, among other things

Anyway, that’s probably enough of my inane rambling for now.

I am so sold on this whole OGG low-bitrates is better than MP3 thing..

I recently had occasion to encode a boatload of voice samples to several codecs, including mp3, GSM, ADPCM and low-bitrate WAV. Much to my suprise, the codec that ended up being

a: The easiest to impliment on a windows CE handheld (code snippet below)
b: The best sounding with the smallest files

was OGG.

So now I’m ripping a bunch of CDs that I’ve been meaning to rip for oh, say, about 6 years now, and I’m ripping them to 160kbit OGG. Enyc will be pleased.

Code snippet (I wish I could credit everyone here, but I don’t even know who all worked on it – I modified code I found at PocketOgg is located, along with the static libs you need to link against, at sheer.us for anyone who wants to do a oggplayer. Note that this code becomes the controlling thread, so you’ll need to do some thread management – because I was using it inside my CEShell, a program I wrote to handle thread management, this wasn’t a problem for me. Anyway, I hope it’s useful to someone someday.

1) I’ve been really, really sick the last couple of days. Think chained-to-the-toilet, spewing-forth-from-all-orifices sick.
2) It’s occured to me recently that surely there are very few people who actually think they’re evil. I mean, presumably both Bush and Bin Laden think they’re the good guy, for example (while, as far as I can tell, neither of them is). Until fairly recently, I didn’t go around thinking I was awful, terrible, and bad. Actually, I’m not convinced I’m really *that* evil now. I just worry that other entities may have other opinions.
3) I had some really interesting thought, which I knew was worth writing here, but it got lost while I was typing the first two and glancing at a mistake on a web site Kayti found.
4) Kayti points out that I’m really obsessed with the Christian hell, as opposed to any other particular bad thing that could happen to me. I sort of associate Hell with having all sensory inputs fed the most unpleasent signals possible, alternating with all the bad memories or.. well, really, any diety inventive enough to come up with the source code for humanity could do all sorts of nasty things. She thinks I’m obsessed and I should get help. There’s something downright comic.. in a tragic sort of way.. about going to a shrink because you’re afraid God will send you to hell for picking the wrong religion of a myriad of them.

One of my more bizarre theories is that there are a bunch of gods – who somehow concatanate to make up one God – and each of them gets a chance to rescue your soul after you die (‘rescue’ as in move to another place/time). I’ve been playing with the idea that your soul is kind of like a identifier – a prime number assigned to only you, maybe – I don’t know. This is all just babble as I try to sort this out. Ignore me.

(And yes, Lara, I know that I shouldn’t be still worrying about these things. But having givin up recreational drug use, I need some way to waste large amounts of time.. ;-))

The areas I’m exploring are unknowable.. even God can’t know that *e *self isn’t running on some simulator somewhere. At some point, you just have to hope that the universe meets in the middle and love wins. I find the presense of anything as complex as humanity, or as amusing as the internet, as proof of that.

(catty comment about dubya and evil deleted)

So, I’m not feeling particularly too cheerful this christmas. My back hurts, I can’t seem to wrap my head around religion and I’ve this nagging fear that there’s this guy with a pitchfork and horns gonna do a lot of ass kicking when I die..

On the other hand, I made the Mushrooms of Goodness today ™. Unfortunately, I ran out of salid oil and had to use olive oil, and it’s olive oil that’s gone a tad stale so they taste a bit of stale olive oil, but they’re still tasty and they still make me feel somewhat better about life.

I’ve also been enjoying Buffy – we’re almost done with it, and I’ll miss it, but the good thing is I got to see Once More With Feeling again. Ah, such a good episode – take note, all television producers – make at least one episode that is a musical. Does the Simpsons have a musical episode? If so I must make a mental note to download it..

In other news: Prayer, apparently, is thinking words in the general direction of God. This either means that God is monitoring our thoughts all the time – a act of somewhat questionable morality – or can sense when something we’re thinking is directed heavenwords – I guess when you’re omnipotent, doing things like that isn’t a particularly big deal, but it seems quite the impressive stunt to me.

My dreams have been getting stranger lately.. one recently had quite a good, all original soundtrack, including trance and house music – and here’s the amazing bit – none of which I’d ever heard anywhere else before. So apparently I have a midi sequencer in my head just like Mozart. Or else some higher (or lower) entities are injecting messages there. Or some combination of the two.

I have enough hair for a ponytail. I guess this is good news.

Me and Kayti went to visit her family in Colorado, which went mostly without incident, and my family in South Carolina, which also went mostly without incident. (I don’t include my family pointing out that I’m fat, which is obviously true, that I’m unique, which sadly probably isn’t [they somehow manage to make unique into a insult, something I wouldn’t think was possible], or the ‘peace’ which my uncle gave me as I left which I’m just going to assume he meant literally, since trying to figure out if I should be offended for a satorical version is more effort than I care to put in.

My family on my dad’s side I think is thoroughly tired of having kids who wish it was still the 70s, and occasionally insist on acting as if it was. But, hey, from a free-love and peace-love-hope-lets-stop-the-war standpoint, the 70s were my kind of decade. Of course, from a fast networks and really nifty information bits and freedom to say whatever you want in a public, searchable forum, the year 2004 does me quite nicely.

Anyway, so let’s just say that the visit with my family went well, for a visit with my family. (I can rest fairly safely assured that they don’t read this, aside from my mom occasionally, because I suspect they’d really rather forget what I’m up to. I have this nagging feeling the opposite might be true as well. Might be the ‘support our troops’ bumper sticker and the american flags and whatnot.)

I read some of Al Franken’s latest book. Apparently it’s just as well that I’ve been completely ignoring the news and mailing lists and whatnot, because if I hadn’t been, I’d be having heart attacks about the horrible things Bush is doing. But I’m looking the other way and figuring it doesn’t concern me, which probably is another offense that will have the guy with the pitchfork and horns standing over me shortly after I die, but that’s neither here nor there.

Argh. There must be some literal biological difference between liberals and conservatives, just as there’s some literal biological difference between gays and straights that we haven’t found yet. (I’m so annoying, thinking gays are gays because the software made ’em that way, and that maybe it’s our world’s automatic reaction to overpopulation)

If anyone wants the recipie for the yummiest pickled mushrooms in the world, just ask.

Anyone for a game of kitten poker?

I really want to think I’m not evil. But I’ve broken people’s hearts through gross incompetence, I’ve no idea what I want, and my back hurts and I’m really inclined to drug it into submission and beyond. ANd I don’t particularly feel guilty about that. Why couldn’t the human software designer have included a ‘okay, acknowledged’ signal for pain?

I want to be happy.

I hear they make drugs for that too. Maybe I should try some happyzac..

Oh, and I’m writing a novel. I’ve got about ten pages so far, but it’s a start. And I will finish it, and I will publish it on my web site, and no one will read it, and I’ll get bloody depressed about that. And it will have always existed lurking somewhere in the digital equivilant of infinity anyway.

According to The Wikipedia, the HitchHiker’s Guide series sold 15 million copies. This worries me because there are 6.4 billion people on earth – which, even if each copy has been read 20 times (a generous estimate), only 4% of the inhabitants of earth have been exposed to Douglas Adams. This would seem to be a serious oversight.

[Interestingly enough, that 4% includes my mother]

As a side note, he died of a heart attack while working out. If this isn’t a good reason not to work out…

For those of you who don’t already know, I recently became the owner of a second-or-possibly-thirdhand enormous stuffed tiger named Khan. It’s always fun watching people react as they come into the living room and find him there, sitting on the couch. He’s a fairly realistic looking stuffed tiger (I thought he was life-sized, although I’ve been informed that real tigers are a bit bigger than he is.. still, he’s large enough