Craziness

The Backpack

2009-10-23T06:25:00.000-07:00

So, since I still have access to Phil's blog, and he doesn't seem to be actively blogging, I thought I might share the "incident" in the Colorado mountains this summer, which many of you, no doubt, have already heard.

As the story begins, Karen was living in Crestone, a "small village at the foot of the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Range, in the northern part of the San Luis Valley" according to Wikipedia. In mid-June Kim and Bill, Dawn and JT, Pat and Janelle, Phillip and I, all headed toward the little town with a thirst for adventure. Little did we know how much we would find.

Apon finally reaching the log cabin, after turning right after the first stop sign and right again on the road past the second dirt pile (Karen's very accurate directions), we found that the place was empty except for some pizza and quiche. Assuming that these would keep better in the fridge I placed them inside and we all headed for bed (it was a really long day at the airport, plus a 4 hour drive from Denver). Just as we were all (at this point we had only Kim and Bill, Doc and Janelle) hitting the sac, in stumbled Karen. While nervously waiting for our arrival she had prepared lots of food, and when she had run out of food to cook she headed down to the bar where people proceeded to buy her drinks until she was quite wobbly. On her walk back to the cabin in fact, she had fallen into a ditch and gotten herself quite wet and dirty, something Janelle was so worried about that she made her change clothes.

So, since we were near the mountains, what would be the logical thing to do? Hike right? We'll that's what we did anyway. We put in two days of successful hiking, though in neither case did we reach a summit. On the third day Karen was determined to get to the lake, however. At this point Phil had arrived and we decided to hike the Willow Lake trail. Karen had climbed the trail before and was confident that the lake was an obtainable goal. At about 11am we headed for the trail head with Pat, Janelle, Phil, Karen and I. By 2pm we had made our way up to the waterfall, a very defining point in the trail (this is of importance later). We sat down on a large rock near the falls and had a small lunch. The sky was looking overcast, however, and Doc and Janelle decided that it would be better to head back down the trail in order to avoid a mountain storm. (they did not walk down the trail together mind you, just left to walk down at the same time) With the adults out of the way Karen was sure the climb would go much faster. The estimated time and the actual time were much different, however. Karen, while trying to avoid some snow, was almost killed in a rock slide. Though, thankfully only her shoe was taken. We were able to recover the shoe under a pile of snow, only after removing a large boulder under which we thought it might lie. (So the truth is, her life was not in that much danger, but had she been walking the trail alone and broken her leg or such a matter, this could easily become life-threatening)

During the entire climb up the mountain Phil and I were taking pictures of the beautiful scenery and meandering along as Karen tried to hurry us. Eventually we made it to the lake and got some pictures of both it and a sheep that was in close proximity. The pictures were pretty awesome, and I was looking forward to sharing them with lots of people (another important point of the story). Well, when we reached the lake I gave Phil his camera (I had been using his Nikon) and I started back down the trail about 5pm. (Actually, I was very upset with myself for giving Phil his camera about 3/4 of the way down the trail because I saw a black bear that was within 150 yards of me. SO exciting!)This, I felt, would give me sufficient time to get down the mountain at my pace. Karen and Phil were goofing around, but I figured they would soon catch up, based on the fact that the day before I had traveled slowly down the mountain only to be overtaken by them in short time. Yet they never passed me this time. Apparently they spent another hour near the top of the mountain just fooling around. That's all fine and good, except, unlike Karen, Phil does not like to run down trails. Thus, when Karen started down the mountain at 6pm Phil did not follow right behind her. He decided instead to find his own trails and head toward the side of cliffs. At the time no one knew what he was doing.

So, as it began to get dark Karen and I had gotten down to the trail head, but Phil was nowhere to be found. Janelle went into the woods in hopes of keeping him from heading down a wrong path, and Karen ran on back to the cabin. So, I sat at the trail head for an hour before I was tired of waiting. By the time I got back it was 9pm. When I walked through the door everyone said, oh they're back, but I informed them that wasn't the case. This got everyone a little worried and Karen and JT set out to hike up the trail with headlamps in order to try and find Phil. They hiked about 1/3 of the trail before turning back with no sign of him.

The next morning everyone woke before 6am and Karen headed back out to hike the trail. In the mean time we called the search and rescue team because we were concerned for Phil's saftey. Everyone we talked to had suggested it. So, we gave them descriptions and I told them of his last known location. Meanwhile Karen got to an area we termed "the meadow" before she found some campers to question. In fact, they had seen a man with no backpack walking through the meadow early that morning. Phil had been carrying a backpack though, so Karen was unsure if it was him. She decided to try walking back out through the meadow though, because it was possible that this mysterious hiker was Phil. As it turned out, it had been. Just as the rest of our party headed out to start hiking up the mountain, Phil was found walking down a road in "the Baca." He was worn and dreary, but he didn't think we should have worried.

The search and rescue team got a few statements from Phil so they could fill out a report. They wanted his license, but as it turned out he couldn't give it to them because it had been in his bookbag which he dropped off the side of a cliff. Hearing this I was very concerned, somewhat about Phil's saftey (I mean if the bookbag fell off, could Phil have fallen off too?), but mostly about the camera's which were in the bookbag (Phil was safe, why worry about the past). First, would we ever be able to recover the backpack and it's contents, and second, would there be anything worth recovering. So, the search team told us there was likely to be storms in the mountain that afternoon, so we might want to wait until the next day to make a recovery mission. (THE NEXT DAY!!, if it was going to rain that was all the more reason to try to make a recovery that day, the cameras would surely be ruined if they were allowed to be drenched!) However, we couldn't start right out on the search because we needed Phil, and he needed some sleep, because 2 hours of sleep under a fallen tree does not a rested man make. (By the way, the reason that Phil was then not able to make it down the mountain the day before was because he began searching for his pack and it got dark before he could find it.)

So, all of this happened before 9am, and then Phil got some sleep. When he woke up it was around 1:30. We talked about the options, did he know where he dropped the backpack?, did he think he could find it?, etc. He was fairly confident that he had marked the location well in his mind, so Karen, Phil and I started up the trail to find the missing pack at 2:30. About 5 minutes into our hike Karen got a call from Chesterfield, a friend that wanted to go on a hike with her. Phil and I told her to invite him along because he could help us search, and that he did. So, while Karen waited for Chesterfield, Phil and I started up the mountain, knowing we would hike slower. As we neared the waterfall Karen had caught up and Phil was thinking that the bookbag's location might be near at hand. "I think I dropped it on the left side of the waterfall," said Phil. So we searched, and silly me, I said "I found it," only to discover I had not. So we searched in this area for 20 minutes before Phil decided it didn't seem like the right location and he decided it was likely on the other side of the falls. "There are lots of waterfalls," he said. Which was true, but this one was much larger than the others, there should have been little question as to what side of this waterfall it was on. So, to the other side we went. We found a rocky area that Phil seemed to remember and we questioned why he would have been that far from the trail, but he insisted that he was following "trails" and that the one that he was following had lead him toward this rocky cliff face. We then proceeded to get as close to the edge of these cliffs as we dared in order to look down and see if we might spot a blue backpack. Thinking on this, we would never have been able to find a backpack from this height, except that Pat had made Philip take his sweatshirt before he left and Phil had put it in the outer pocket of the pack. Therefore, when Chesterfield said, "I see a white shirt down there," I thought to myself, could it possibly be? "Phil," I asked, "could that sweatshirt have fallen out of your pack?" When he said yes we decided to follow the lead. We knew the pack was somewhere down below and now we had a starting point for a search. However, it was not as easy as jumping off the cliff down to the sweatshirt's location, we had to find a way to get down 40-60 feet without killing ourselves.

This was the most time consuming part of our experience, and in my opinion, the most fun. We crossed over the large river several times as our options of travel on one side would become limited. Then we shimmied down rock faces and over fallen trees, jumped over boulders and worked our way toward the shirt. Finally we got to the location that we had seen from above. Chesterfield was willing to walk up into the cavernous area and found both the sweatshirt and a backback, as well as another item that had fallen out of the pack (which at this point I don't remember). So our first task was to check the cameras (though I think Phil cared more about some other items that were in the pack), and to our surprise, they were fully functional. We even took a picture of our triumphant recovery.

The last thing we had to do was make it back down off the mountain, which actually required that we travel back upwards because we had traversed downward to locate the pack. We were finally able to locate the trail before dusk which made me very happy because even though we had brought head lamps in case we were on the mountain at night, I really didn't want to travel on the mountainside without a trail in the dark. So, we all got back with the treasure we were searching for and now have an exciting tale to recall of our Crestone experience.

Cleaning my car

2008-02-13T20:57:00.000-08:00

I've spent quite a bit of time living out of my car - and working construction for a good part of that time.

The last time Karen rode with me, she complained about the smell, which I didn't really notice - probably desensitized to it or something. But it seemed to be making her nauseous or something. And I recently lent the car to some friends who put 2 or 3 air fresheners in there... though I still didn't notice much of a smell.

So I decided to really clean out the car. Right now, it's sitting in the driveway with no seats, no gear selector, several interior panels removed, etc. I've pretty much gutted the interior. I'm going to thoroughly clean all the upholstery and interior panels and run the carpeting through the laundry.

I still haven't decided if I'm going to try to get inside the A/C system and clean that out as well.

Google Page Creator

2008-02-11T12:25:00.000-08:00

The goog's page creator is pretty cool. It's still pretty young, so there are a lot of features lacking, but I bet Google will make it more and more awesome as it ages... The Google people are smart/cool like that.

Oh, here's my page: http://qpmarl.googlepages.com

I'm going to move my tech blog over to this page and set it up as individual articles instead of blog posts. Then I'll probably delete my tech blog and maybe freeze qpmarl.blogspot.com and just update this blog, Craziness.

I can draw.

2008-02-04T18:01:00.001-08:00

I pretty much just learned how to draw overnight.

Here's a pic I've been practicing on. I started with a photo and started painting in black and white overtop of it. As I've been playing around with it, my skillz have improved - in just a few hours.

gettin paid

2007-12-23T19:48:00.000-08:00

well, the whitewater company doesn't really want to pay me to watch the Bed&Breakfast - probably 'cause they lose a lot of money here in the off season. People still come by, but not very many or very often.

So I may not be able to afford to stay up here very long - may have to go get a real job in Tacoma or Everett or somewheres.

Water slides, no more

2007-12-15T14:44:00.000-08:00

The water slide installer I was working for doesn't have any work until mid January and probably won't be getting jobs on any regular basis after that, so I quit.

I'm going to start working for Tom's whitewater rafting company instead - hopefully. I've talked to them and it sounds good, but it's not definite yet.

Ramble

2007-12-08T22:29:00.000-08:00

This is a ramble - like a rant, but not angry.

K - for anyone who doesn't already know this, my family is totally crazy. My dad just built a new vet clinic and moved the computer from his home office to the new clinic. A while ago, he'd suggested that I set up my mom's computer to fetch his email. So my mom decided that I would set up one of the old computers I had stuffed in a closet in place of my dad's displaced laptop because "he doesn't share well". She didn't tell me this straight away of course. Here's how she broke it to me:

"Can you come with me this afternoon to get a computer desk?" It turns out that someone has an old crappy one they're selling for $25.
"What do you need a computer desk for? Don't you have some kind of table you could use? You have a laptop. You don't need a 'computer' desk for a laptop. Any old table will do." But to keep her from getting upset and because I didn't have anything better to do, I went with her to get the desk.
On the way she mentioned something about me setting up some computer - first I'd heard of it. With a little persistent questioning, it eventually became clear to me that she intended that I'd set up one of the old junk computers in the closet for my dad to check his email. And this is why she wanted the computer desk - so I'd have some place to set up the old behemoth desktop.
So I venture into the aforementioned closet to see what I've got in there that might be half decent for email and maybe a little web browsing with some modern web browsing software (Firefox). I have a 500 MHz PIII IBM something or other that Tim was using for a packet sniffer at one time. This is the fastest thing in there and not too bad - I know it would run windows XP and Firefox, but I have something more open source in mind.
First I gotta fiddle with the hardware to see if I can even get it to boot. I had to put the fan/LED/speaker/button module back in because I'd taken it out a while ago to use the fan for something else. And I had to solder a few of the fan's wires back together. And I have no idea what became of the power button itself. So I yanked a button out of another old computer, but it's the wrong size to fit in the button housing, so I have it hanging out the floppy bay opening, dangling on the wires. Before I rigged up this switch, I'd test started the PC a few times by touching the bared power switch wires. I had to guess which ones they were because it's not using the standard colors or plugs and I have two pairs of bare wires - the other is from one of the front panel LEDs which I used for something else. But I guessed right the first time and now I have a real switch rigged up. I'd considered just leaving the bare wires hanging out, but other people might want to start this puppy up and might not understand or be comfortable with the touch the 2 bare wires method.
I'd envisioned a multiheaded setup, but the only extra video card that would fit appears to be shot and one of the two monitors may be shot (the thing was always questionable). So I'm stuck with a single monitor for now. The mobo, cpu, ram, and hdd all appear to be operational. I threw in an old DVD writer drive (it was the first DVD writer I ever bought).
It's already got some linux distro installed on it, but I've long since forgotten the login password and it's got some router/firewall setup junk in there that I'd rather not mess around with. So I've wiped the hdd and am currently installing a brand new linux disro (gentoo in case you care (PS. gentoo is for ricers)) It's a good thing I put that DVD drive in there because I didn't want to hunt down my blank CDs - while my blank DVDs were quite handy. So I burned the 64MB minimal install disc image to a DVD. The gentoo installation process generally takes a few days -especially if I compile everything on the 500 MHz PIII with 256 meggaram. I might do a distcc and compile everything on my Core 2 lappy if the distcc ain't too tricky to setup - I've never distcc'd before.
Way back when I was still figuring out what monitor/video card combo would work, my dad came in and asked what I was doing. I told him I was setting up a computer for him to check his email. He said he could check his email just fine at the clinic and he'd never use this one. So I said, "well, hell, I got this thing out and running, and now we got this computer desk that shouldn't stand empty - so I may as well get it all setup. I'll use it from time to time if nobody else will."

Convention

2007-11-14T19:19:00.000-08:00

So the closest thing I have to a job involves installing water slides. The guy who allegedly pays me said I should go to this IAAPA (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) convention in Orlando. I have family in Orlando (A sister, brother-in-law, 4 yo nice, and 2 yo nephew/godson). So I thought "Yeah. Convention sounds pretty cool. And I can see my fams." He offered to pay for my hotel room (not plane tickets) and get me a free (to me) pass to the convention. So I took him up on it. The convention is pretty good. Pretty much what you'd expect from an amusement park convention. Lots of ride demos, game demos, food vendor demos (including a never ending supply of free samples). Displays for pamphlet printers, guest photo systems/printers and merchandise, bench, trash can, ride seat, railing, etc manufacturers.

Lots of kids running around playing on the inflatable play structures, with the arcade games, etc. Lots of adults playing the arcade games, etc.

Lots of foreign water slide knock-off companies stealing patented designs from the US and Canadian water slide companies. A Russian company had 2 reps there - neither spoke much English, but they had an interpreter who didn't speak very comprehensible English or understand the Russian's products or business very well.

So it's pretty cool. Get to spend some time with my fams anyhow.

Humanity i love you

2007-11-04T16:30:00.000-08:00

Here's some ee cummings for you. I just started reading some of his poetry. I like it.

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
sucess than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush your pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually commitings
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
lifer in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
always making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you

meme tag (a reason to update my blog thanks to John)

2007-11-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

John has tagged me with a meme. PZ Myers started this on Pharyngula a while ago.

Here are the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".

You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My Ancestors:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is The Anterior Commissure
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Laelaps
My great-great-great-grandparent is Quintessence of Dust
My great-great-grandparent is An Evangelical Dialogue On Evolution
My great-grandparent is Exploring Our Matrix
My grandparent is Sporadic Maunderings
My parent is Signs of Insanity

The Questions (and Answers):

1. The best scary movie in children's movies is:

The Never Ending Story. The wolf always scared me. Especially in the scene just before they kill it - when it jumps out.

2. The best song that moves me inexplicably in 80s pop is:

Against All Odds by Phil Collins. People like to trash talk Phil Collins. I think he might have been a musical genius. Anyhow, the song can just about make me cry. I don't know why.

3. The best adventure movie in Historical Fiction is:

The Patriot with Mel Gibson. I would have said Road Warrior, but that's not Historical Fiction and I don't have enough changes left to change that. The Patriot will do. It has Mel in it and it wasn't bad.

4. The best book appealing to both children and adults in Fantasy is:

Nothing hard about this one. It's A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. I've read a few comparisons between this book and Harry Potter (Ged goes to a school for wizards). But there is no comparison. Earthsea is a true work of art. Too bad the Sci-Fi channel had to make that piece of crap allegedly based on it. I recommend this book to everyone.

5. The most fantastic melody of all time is found in:

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album. You can listen to just one track, but it's best to experience the album as a single piece - or two pieces if you consider the gap between sides on the LP. I don't know which part, specifically, contains the best melody.

6. The best Coming of age movie in Comedy is:

Rushmore directed by Wes Anderson and written by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. I believe that Wes Anderson is one of the few film makers still making films that are worth watching. hmm. more on this thought in a future post?

So now I tag Becca.

Tiddlywiki

2007-10-21T16:44:00.000-07:00

I tried out a tiddlywiki for blogging purposes. But it was no good. It was a simple setup which stored all the code and content in a single html file. I imagine that it would take a long time to load if there were a lot of content in there. I also couldn't get the look of the page just right.

I had started writing about Augmented Reality, but pretty much scrapped the idea. If I ever find a blog hosting service with a concept of micro content, I may give it a try.

I might right a regular, old blog post about Augmented Reality some day.

Goofy stuff with my wifi

2007-10-21T16:31:00.000-07:00

So I got a new laptop a while ago. And I installed linux on it. And to my dismay, the wifi didn't work in linux. I got the right drivers and everything, but the laptop has a software kill switch - activated by a hotkey instead of a physical on/off switch. The kill switch defaults to off and try as I might, I could not get it to work in linux.

But I have a pcmcia wifi card, so I stuck that in there and installed the drivers for it. I've used it on my old laptop and I know it works. But it doesn't seem to work in the new laptop. I have no idea why. But with it installed, the killswitch for the internal card does work - it's pretty goofy since the pcmcia card uses totally different drivers.

So I'm not sure if it's the other drivers, the card itself, or both that are making the killswitch work. I suspect that the other drivers have some code to handle software kill switches, see the killswitch and handle it independently of the wifi card itself. So if I'm lucky, I can remove the pc card but keep the drivers and the internal card should work.

For anyone who's interested, the internal card is an intel proset wireless 3945 using the ipw3945 drivers. The pc card is a linksys something or other using the madwifi drivers. So if you have an intel card with a software kill switch and can't get the switch to work, try installing the madwifi drivers. The laptop is an HP Compaq 6510b.

non linear blogging

2007-10-02T04:54:00.000-07:00

I may abandon blogspot and blogger. They're much to... linear. I've played with some tiddlywiki stuff in the past and thought it would be cool to be able to compose blog entries like that. (If you don't know what tiddlywiki is, just google it - duh.)

So I found this place, tiddlyspot.com for more tiddly blogging. I'm going to try it out. I'll post the link to my page when I get it all setup and all.

A very dark shade of ruby

2007-09-16T02:38:00.000-07:00

Officially, Guinness Draught is a very dark shade of ruby. I told John this - he said, "OK" sceptically. I said, "you have to hold it up to the light to see it". He said, "whenever I've held it up to light, it just looked black. Maybe if you had a really bright light, you could see it."

So, I got a pic. If you are extremely observant, you'll notice that the sun is slightly to the East. Yes, it is still morning. And yes, I am drinking a beer.

Guinness page on Wikipedia

Texas, Floore's, Mexican Coca-Cola, and Tsingtao

2007-09-16T01:29:00.000-07:00

Texas must have more jerks on the road than any other state. And the Texas Highway system seems to be designed to amplify road rage and maximize congestion - it's the same in every major city in Texas.

Other than that, my current visit to Texas hasn't been to bad. The job's going well. I found some live music at Floore's Country Store. And I got a new laptop.

The Floore's website says "Willie Nelson Every Sat. Night" But it's a blatant lie. I looked at the Calendar and he didn't play this Sat. night. He doesn't play there until Oct. 11th. But I did see a pretty good local artist. Sheila Marshal. She has a website - you can manage to find it yourself (I'm sure) if you're interested.

There's a Mexican restaurant near my job site called Tiago's Cabo Grill. I ate there for lunch today because Tiago is the name of the coke head in City of God. And Tiago was pretty cool, I thought. The restaurant was pretty cool too. The have an awesome salsa. I't very dark and very good. The other salsa they brought (they brought 2 flavors) tasted like it had banana or something in it, which makes sense since "Cabo" would imply a tropical theme. The food was pretty good and they had Mexican Coca-Cola. I inquired. It's just Coca-Cola imported from Mexico. "They use pure cane sugar." So I tried it. It was pretty good. Definitely better than domestic Coca-Cola. I've known for many years that Canadian Coca-Cola tastes much better than American Coca-Cola - I've always assumed that it's because they use a better water source, but now I think it may be a recipe thing like cane sugar. The Mexican stuff tasted similar to the Canadian, but I think the Canadian is still the best. I can't even drink American Coca-Cola any more - may as well be drinking pure corn syrup. gross.

On my first night here, I noticed a Mongolian grill called HuHot near the hotel. I like Mongolian grills and told Jonathan that we should eat there some night. We went to, but then couldn't find it again. Later I found it. Last night I went there by myself. The food was good - as is expected from a Mongolian grill. I don't know how a Mongolian grill could not have good food. And I had a Tsingtao - a Chinese beer brewed in Qingdao (which is just another spelling of Tsingtao, but on the label, they spell it one way to name the beer and the other way to name the city). It's a pretty good beer. I told Karen about it and she asked if it was a rice beer. I don't think so - it tastes like a regular grain beer. It's my beer of choice at Chinese places now.

just to pass the time

2007-08-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

I was on my way from Pennsylvania to Arizona for a job, but was delayed because I was reading. I'd picked up a book that I'd been wanting to read for a while. And one morning, after waking up in my car and showering at a truck stop (state parks are cheaper if you can find one with showers - but you gotta supply your own soap and towel), I ordered breakfast and really got into the book. I did not want to stop reading, but realized that it was getting close to noon and I was still at the same truck stop where I'd spent the night.

I had to get back on the road, but I couldn't stop reading. So - I decided to read while I was driving. Dangerous? Yes. But driving is mostly subconscious and nothing much ever happens on the highway. I know people who watch movies while driving, and I've done so myself. I figure reading is less dangerous because when something is happening on the road that requires the driver's attention, the flow of the book stops. A movie keeps going, battling the road for the driver's attention.

I keep the book at the top of the steering wheel, gripped between the thumb and index finger of each hand while the other 3 fingers of each hand grip the wheel. I can now focus on the book with the road filling my peripheral vision. Painted lines are almost a necessity and when they are non-existent or obscured, I must forgo reading until there are lines again or there is something I trust my subconscious to use in tracking the lane. Cars and other obstacles ahead are readily identified in the peripheral vision by the subconscious.

I read the rest of the way to Phoenix. It's quite an experience. I did, once, fail to notice some orange barrels and clipped one with my mirror, cracking a bit of it off. No big deal, I've hit barrels with mirrors when I had nothing visually distracting to blame for it.

Reading really helps pass the time on a boring drive. I read much slower than I would if I didn't have the distraction of driving, but comprehension and retention seem to be higher - perhaps as a result of the slowed pace. I'll have to do more research to explore this.

I read from somewhere in Missouri to Phoenix, worked for a week, and read from Phoenix to Green River, WY. So far, all my reading-while-driving was on fairly monotonous four lane highways. I got used to reading while passing big trucks, but would have to put the book down for heavy traffic, construction, and other annoyances. The more practice I got, the better I got at reading through these annoyances. After Green River, I left the interstate to take two lane highways through Wyoming to Greybull. This would be a new challenge for my reading-while-driving skill. I've finished the first book and am now picking up another which I am not sure will hold my attention well enough to put up with the hassle of reading while driving.

But, the book turns out to be very good. And the two lane highways of Wyoming are no match for my reading-while-driving skills. This may not work so well in other states where the roads are not so straight and boring. Occasionally I have to put the book on hold where the road gets a bit more curvy through some mountain passes or traffic slows through a little town.

Through one town, I do not have to put the book down at all because there are no stop lights and the car ahead of me, through my peripheral vision, serves as a guide to my driving subconsciousness. Also, I manage to pass a car on the two lane highway with no more than a few quick glances up from the page. Although I am distracted enough that I have to re-read a sentence and may as well have focused on the car I was passing instead of the book.

By now, I am able to concentrate mostly on the book without swerving even when the road makes a gentle to moderate curve. However, I still prefer the safety of rumble strips to alert me if I do start to wander out of my lane.

The more I practice, the more my subconscious is able to handle without drawing my conscious focus away from the book.

I may have to install a reading light directly above my head because the angle of the dome light requires that I hold the book awkwardly to allow for total illumination of the page, making reading after dark a bit of a pain.

I keep track of the distance to my next turn and keep an eye on my odometer so that I know when I'm getting close and can put the book down to watch for the turn. I have not made a wrong turn so far. I must also remember to keep an eye on the fuel level. Though my car is equipped with a low fuel warning light, it makes no audible indication of low fuel. The fuel gauge and warning light and, in fact, all the gauges are obscured by the book while reading. I frequently lift the book to check the gauges.

This exercise has shown a practical benefit. In the past, I have found it awkward to read a map while driving and would often swerve while trying to rapidly locate something on the map without breaking my focus from the road for long. And if the atlas is turned to the wrong page, it's hopeless. Now I can study the map in detail or find the right page while driving without swerving.

random prose

2007-08-21T22:38:00.000-07:00

And that's just what she wanted. To sink deep down into darkness.

Dudeism

2007-07-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

John sent me the link. He could have blogged it himself, but he knows I'm a bigger Labowski fan. I was a Dudeist before I knew such a thing existed.

2 weeks in WA, part 2

2007-07-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

It turns out that I have to be back in Texas sooner than anticipated, so I won't get quite two weeks in WA. That's ok. I'm having fun. A local bar had a deal last night: all drinks are $1.75. So we had some fun last night.

I got some more pictures. I put 62 of them up on flickr today.

This is Leavenworth, WA. The photo links to the Leavenworth set.

This is in Cashmere, WA. The photo links to the Cashmere set.

"Ants aren't smart. Ant colonies are"

2007-07-20T15:22:00.000-07:00

I'm reading this article in the library (paper copy, not on the tubes). The quote I used for the title reminds me of this one: "A person is smart, but people [collectively] are dumb" - kinda the opposite of ants.

2 weeks in Washington (state)

2007-07-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

So I went down to Austin, TX to do a job last week. When I got there, it was evident that they weren't really ready for us yet. My boss wanted to just go ahead and build all the slides (2 indoor, and 2 outdoor) and let the rest of the crews figure out how to work around them - they'd really get in the way of other crews trying to do their thing.

We got the outdoor slides 90% completed and were about to start on the indoor when the general contractor called us off and offered to buy round trip plane tickets for everyone so we could go home and come back two weeks later.

And since I don't have a home, per se, I decided to head out to the Seattle area and maybe get in a little rafting with Tom. I plan to get a ton of pictures and just generally have a lot of fun.

I haven't got to the river yet, but here are a few pictures around the Olympia, WA area. The woodsy ones are from Priest Point Park

from the plane on the way there

Priest Point Park

One of Kevin and Trina's cats

I can't help but wonder where I'm bound

2007-07-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

I was driving to Texas for work, listening to an mp3 cd I burned a long time ago. It had the song "I can't help but wonder where I'm bound" (written by Tom Paxton) sung by Nancy Griffith. I've heard it many times before, but the following verse stood out.

If you see me passing by
And you sit and you wonder why
And if you wish that you were a rambling too
Nail your shoes to the kitchen floor
Lace them up and bat the door
Thank your stars for the roof that over you

That's about what I feel like sometimes.

I want to get a photo to post on flickr along with this verse. I'm not sure exactly what I'll do for the photo yet.

here's some other guy singin it on youtube.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k-6gQSmKqYc

Jar Spider

2007-06-28T15:41:00.000-07:00

My cousin Peter caught these spiders and is keeping them in a jar. The one's pretty big - not huge, but pretty big. Peter aspires to be the next Crocodile Hunter. Maybe I can get some pictures of him with a snake or something.

Yelloh

2007-06-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

I stopped at Target to print some photos. There was an old lady taking her sweet time on the kodak kiosk - there's always an old lady taking her sweet old time at the kodak kiosk. At least she was not scanning. They need to have a separate machine for scanning. One for digital media and one for scanning.

When I was waiting for the old lady (and subsequently the young lady who snuck in line ahead of me), I heard a kid saying something to his mom about something being "cheaper in the States". So I figured they were Canadian, though I didn't notice a very strong accent. So I asked him.

"Are you from Canada?"
"yeah"
"cool. You're not driving a yellow truck are you?"
"yeah"
"Oh. I parked behind you. I saw the Ontario plates"
"Yeah. When you come up to Canada, your dollar is worth less than ours now. It's only worth 99 cents"

That's cool. Hooray for the great American Economy!

Turns out the kid was wrong though. Technically the USD is still a bit higher than the CAD. But with what the money changers take for themselves, they'd have received less USD than CAD when they exchanged.

PS. I took the pics in on my mp3er which doubles as a flash drive. instead of a built-in usb plug, it has a dongle. I had it on the neck strap and was listning to music as I entered the store (unfortunately, you can't listen and access the drive by usb at the same time). While I was waiting for the old lady, I was checking out the radios they had on display - as they are just around the corner from the photo center (and this is how the young lady got in line ahead of me). Some of the radios have a usb port for playing mp3s from flash drives and such. And seeing as I had a flash drive with me, I tried them out. I just pulled the dongle's usb end out of my pocket - the other end was already connected to the mp3er which was in my shirt (with the dongle hanging out the bottom front of my shirt). Then I inserted the usb plug and played some Postal Service on the display stereos. One of them was quite nice and also had some auxilary inputs that would be good for hooking up to a pc (much better than those crappy pc speakers). If I had a home to keep it in, I might get one like that.

Bikin Bum

2007-06-07T12:30:00.000-07:00

I saw this guy while I was driving through Montana. I decided to stop and give him some money. He gave me a flier (a photocopied page of the Livingston [Montana] Enterprise with an article about him), and signed it "Bikin Bum" in all caps. It looks like there should be another I to make it "bikini bum".

But he was cool. He told me about his troubles getting a new chain for his bike in Montana. The bike shop guy gave him a chain that was too small, insisting that it was not too small, and apparently over charged him for it. He was making do with the too-small chain, but said it wasn't working right. I figure the bike shop guy was probably a conservative and intentionally making things hard for the guy - that's just not cool.

Maggie and Jonas

2007-06-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

So I got to hang out with my sister's family when we were all together in Wyoming. Her kids are pretty cool. Maggie is 4 and Jonas is 1.5.

Shell Falls

2007-06-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

My family got together at my parents' place near Shell, WY. It's the first time in at least 4 years that both my parents and all 5 siblings have been together. (I'll post some pictures of Marie's kids and the rest of the family later)

So I headed up to Shell Falls one evening with my camera (whoops, no tripod).

Shell Creek is pretty high with the spring snow melt running down the mountains. I got a few good shot.

A Sharp Shot (1/30s)

A Soft Shot (1.8s)

go to my flickr page to see more, including a panorama I stitched from 8 individual photos
http://www.flickr.com/photos/qpmarl/sets/72157600306528560/

Arizona

2007-06-03T12:59:00.000-07:00

I spent a little over a week working in Arizona. It was hot. We tried to work nights. It sucked.

A place like The Mandolin.

2007-05-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

I hate Starbucks. In MN, we have Caribou Coffee, which is pretty much the same thing. It's not anything specific to Starbucks that I dislike. It's the trend of mass produced individuality. I like places like The Mandolin in Tacoma, WA. The Mandolin is genuinely cool. There are real coffee shops all over the country. But out of ignorance, people go to Starbucks and similar places that attempt to mimic the individuality of a real coffee house.

The Mandolin has live music, a book club, and other community activities. It's a really cool place to hang out.

I need to find a place like that in the Twin Cities. I'm sure they exist. I just have to find them. A place with live music would be best.

Stupid CompUSA

2007-05-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Sarah wanted me to build her a computer. We've been talking about this for a while now. She has an old one from which we will salvage as much as possible.

We were going to build one in PA when we got together at Rob's wedding. But it didn't happen for various reasons.

I'm now working in Minneapolis, so I said I could see about taking a day off to head up to Duluth where she lives. Today is Saturday - as good a day to take off as any. I figure I'll head over to CompUSA, pick up a motherboard, processor, RAM, and whatever else the budget will allow. I took my time and arrived at CompUSA at around 5 pm only to find out that they're closing the store (I guess they're closing all Minnesota locations). They're having a huge clearance sale, but all the good stuff is already gone. They had one processor, a small selection of RAM, and no motherboards whatsoever.

I bought the processor, a stick of RAM, and a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium.

I should have just stole Vista, but I think Sarah wants a legit license and all that.

The processor I could have got for the same price on the irrnet. The RAM was over priced even with the clearance sale discount and after doing some mo-bo shopping, I don't think they make a motherboard that will use the DDR RAM with the Athlon socket AM2 processor. That's OK though. I can stick the ram in my desktop and get some DDR2 for Sarah.

Now we just need to get a motherboard (and RAM - get 'em at the same time), but all the stores that sell motherboards close at 5 on Saturday. I think I'll just have her order it and call me to come put it all together when it gets there.

Stabbing

2007-04-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

I stabbed myself in the leg just above the kneecap with the small screwdriver on my leatherman. I'd include a picture, but there's not much of a surface wound and I don't have a camera.

Now my knee is kinda stiff.

I'm going back

2007-03-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

It's been 8 months since I quit building water slides. But it looks like I'm going back to it.

They always go back.

ebay and paypal

2007-02-12T18:30:00.000-08:00

I bought a Canon lens on ebay. But I can't seem to pay for it. I paid for another item with paypal just fine.

I click on the "pay now" link for the item in ebay
This takes me to a form in which I choose my method of payment. The two options are paypal and chech/money order. since check/money order is a pain in the ass, I choose paypal. I have a paypal account, this should be no problem.
This takes me to a form asking me to verify my shipping address, in order to do so, I must add a credit card to my paypal account. I fill out the form, but it tells me that my address can't be verified, I have to do some garbage to activate it (paypal charges the card $1.95 and adds a 4 digit number to the transaction description which will appear on my statement. I must enter this 4 digit number in my paypal account to activate the card). I did all that.
Now I go to the "pay now" link, select paypal, and it takes me to the same add a credit card form. I enter the info and it gives me the error "this card is already added" and gives me the form again. Piece of junk.

How to ride a Roller Coaster

2007-02-09T20:45:00.000-08:00

_{This post is dedicated to Kevin because he said that he does not care for rollercoasters and I think that's a shame._{Many people believe that enjoyment of a roller coaster has to do with being scared to death. This is not true. The thrill of a coaster is the speed, the sense of flying, the upside down loop - looking out at the people on the ground. If you are scared to death, you will not be paying attention, you will not really enjoy yourself.

A coaster should be experienced with a sense of total calm. You are perfectly safe - safer on the coaster than in the car on the way to the amusement park. The biggest danger, by far, is related to heart failure on account of being frightened. Don't be frightened.

Keep your eyes open, you don't want to miss anything. When the big loops come up, don't worry about being upside down - just look out at the other rides, people on the ground, or anything but the back of your eyelids. You also can't allow panic to make you loose focus.

When you can experience a coaster with utter calm, keep your eyes open, and pay attention, it will be a whole lot of fun. People riding for the scare will say "I already rode that one" and avoid riding multiple times. Those fully experiencing the ride will want to ride over and over.

Of course some rides still provoke a bit of a scary rush, it becomes a challenge to maintain calm - and the scare is fun too.

Last time I was at Cedar Point, the other guys I was with did not think it was worth riding the Top Thrill Dragster a second time - they were a bunch of losers and I need to go with some real coaster fans. I may have been the only person on the ride with my arms up.}}

Historical Lunatic

2007-01-24T00:31:00.000-08:00

This was going around a while ago, but I just got to it now - so here's my result.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

gmplayer, sony mp3er, and other rantings

2007-01-18T23:10:00.000-08:00

I been usin' good old mplayer for a long time now. I've mostly used the cli version, but recently installed the gui version, gmplayer, in windows. In the cli version, you can adjust the a/v sync with the +/- keys. In the gui version, it appeared at first that these keys do nothing because there is no indication that anything is happening. The adjustment per key press is small enough that you don't notice the change. But in fact, they do work in the gmplayer and the player decides that you want the same adjustment for every file you ever play so it saves them to the config. But there is no easy way to see what the a/v compensation is or get it back to zero. There is a slider bar in the gui config interface, but it also has no zero mark or any other kind of indicators. And it tells you that you have to restart the player for the changes to take effect. So I may remove it and stick to the cli version - the only problem is that anyone else who uses my computer will have trouble figuring out how to use it.

Don't buy a sony flash based mp3 player. They force you to use their proprietary software to transfer music. It's crap. I think I'm going to sell mine for 1/2 the price I paid for it just to get rid of it - that is if I can't somehow get my money back from Sony (doubtful). All of the Sony CD mp3 players that I've used were pretty good - you could just burn a bunch of mp3s to a CD and it would play them - I just throw away the software CD they come with. I like Sony hardware - it seems pretty well made and such, but their software and firmware is total garbage.

Wireless networking - a wonderful convenience and a real pain-in-the-ass. Give me a cat5/5e/6
any day. I have an increasing suspicion that wireless networking has never worked, but thus far they've been able to fool people into believing that it does.

"Make a Picture"

2006-12-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

ever changing world forms a perfect scene
it's fleeting - lasts but for an instant
camera shutter snaps
the scene is gone forever, but the image remains
mechanically captured by the camera - imperfect
only the idea of the scene really
maybe better - idealized, altered for aesthetics
the scene the image conveys maybe never existed

or maybe there is no camera
only the mind captures the scene
the mind of an artist can recreate
or selfishly horde
the mind is a better camera
its perception is fluid
molded by artist into the ideal
it takes shape in words or music, paint or clay

the artist abandons it
not knowing its value
leaves it as an orphan to the world
and moves on to the next creation
the artist lives for the act,
not for the result

the artist defies labels
the truly original gets bad reviews
the critic can not label the unique
in frustration, he decides he hates it
later, once labeled, it is appreciated
the artist does not seek favor
and cares not for reviews
"critics can bite me"

Phone Book

2006-12-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

Put all your phone books in the recycling bin and tell the phone company to stop sending them - you have the internet (you're on it now). You can find any numbers/addresses you need on the internet. So you don't need any more paper phone books wasting paper.

^{Waste of Paper}

Plus, the internet's faster - you probably have the computer on most of the time anyway and anybody who still doesn't have some sort of "high speed" internet needs to get out of the stone age. Once you are familiar with the routine of online white/yellow pages, you may find that it is actually faster than thumbing through the yellow pages.

Blogger Beta is great...

2006-12-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

I like the new blogger (is it still beta, I don't even know). It uses google accounts for login. So I'm already logged in if I'm logged into Gmail. But out of habit, I still hit the Sign out button on the blogger page when I'm done blogging. Then it logs me out of everything google. They should at least have a confirmation dialog - "This will log you out of your Google Account - are you sure?" or something.

Some New Links in the Sidebar

2006-12-11T21:03:00.000-08:00

I've updated the sidebar links. I won't duplicate the links here, you can check them out in the sidebar. over there. right there ---->

I've kept one lucid dreaming link and the wetware hacking link. The first new one is Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. The rest are all about ESB (Electrical Stimulation of the Brain)

Pissin' me off

2006-12-08T01:40:00.000-08:00

About the only time I get really irritable is when I've been up driving all night and am still on the road the next morning.

7:30 am - I'm trying to put some gas in my car. My check card is not working because the stripe is too worn out for the pump's temperamental reader. So I hit the "Pay Inside" button. And the pump says "Please Wait". There's a sign on there that says "Prepay after dark" - well, Ok, it's still dark, but I would not consider 7:30 am to be "after dark" by this time, most normal people would consider it to be a new day and in fact would have already begun their day. So I waited because it said "Please wait". But it never did anything and I'm wondering if the clerks consider it to be "after dark". So I start all over - hang up the hose, hit "pay inside" and stare at the "Please wait" screen which shows a little clock with the minute hand seeming to move up and down on the left side of the clock while the hour hand remains fixed on the 6. And I consider beating the hell out of the gas pump - I have been thinking that I should carry a sledge hammer in my car at all times. After I go through the "pay inside" routine a third time, a clerk comes on the intercom and tells me that I do in fact have to prepay. Well, they should say "prepay between dusk and dawn" or maybe replace the "Please wait" screen with a "prepay in effect" screen. The very term "wait" tends to convey the idea that something is going to happen eventually.

Other than that, the trip went pretty well and I made good time.

printer spiders linux

2006-12-02T23:11:00.000-08:00

Uncle Dave was here before Thanksgiving. He wanted to print a Sudoku puzzle that he'd been working on in Excel. I said I had a printer and we could dig it out and hook it up to his computer. We did so, but it refused to print - it had the right drivers and all, but the light wouldn't stop flashing and the head went wild when the thing started up - I mean it would slam home so hard that the printer would jump sideways a few inches.

He finished the puzzle in Excel and we both forgot about the printer - until today. I plugged it into my computer with its fancy new Debian GNU/Linux OS. The computer recognized the printer and configured it in a flash - no 45 Mb printer driver downloads (yeah, that's the actual size of the hefty windows driver for the same printer - I'm sure that about 2 megs of that are driver and the rest HP software crap). But it exhibited the exact same behavior as earlier.

Then I took a look inside the thing. There was crud everywhere in there - it looked like someone used the insides for a place mat for a two year old eating spaghetti. And there was crud all over the encoder strip (the plastic strip with a million little black lines that is used by the print head to keep track of its position). That explains the slamming home issue and probably most of the rest of the funny business too.

So I took the top of the shell off - 4 screws - and proceeded to clean all the crud out of the thing. The the source of the crud became apparent. There were mouse droppings and some mouse collected junk in there. Fortunately the mice did not chew on any of the printer internals. However, while cleaning the plastic strip, some of the encoder lines came off with the crud - that's not good. But it was much better than it was to begin with - not sure what a few missing lines will do, but I decided to fire it up and find out.

Well, it does print now. But those missing lines cause it to loose a bit of ground on every pass - so it creeps closer and closer to one side on each pass. The result is a skewed print - still serviceable in a pinch, but pretty funny looking - I'd post a picture, but I'm too lazy to take one - maybe later.

I have spiders crawling all around my room. Every few minutes I see one dart across the floor from one pile of clothes to another. I like spiders. I think of them as my pets. They keep the mosquitoes and flies down in here.

I really like Linux and open source software in general. When I get bored I like to install some new flavor of Linux on one of my computers. I liked the latest Debian testing release (codenamed "Etch") so much when I installed it on my desktop that I've also installed it on my laptop.

One feature that I really like is smart command line completion. Command line completion has been around for a long time. But in all my experience with it up to now, it used some simple logic to determine if the word it is completing is supposed to be a command or a not-a-command, which is assumed to be a file name. I have not explored the new smart functionality fully as of yet, but it knows about file types, and commands that take other commands as arguments.

the which command takes another command as an argument and tells you the location of the file that would be executed if you were going to execute the second command. The old completion would try to match files in the current directory, the new completion tries to match commands - smart.

some commands only make sense with certain file types. mplayer plays video and audio files - it wouldn't make sense to pass it any other type of file. previously, completion was only semi-usefull. I have ripped some of my dvds to my desktop harddrive which is accessible to my laptop (better screen for movies) through nfs. I have ripped the subtitles with the movies and the subtitle files have the same name as the movie files, but with different extensions (there are 2 files for the subtitles for each movie). Previously, the completion would go up to the extension and stop because it does not know which file is which. If I wanted to watch Return Of The Jedi, a dvd which I own and am therefore entitled to copy/rip for personal reasons¹, I would type mplayer je and then hit the tab key for completion and the completion would fill in the filename up to jedi. leaving the extension off because there are 3 files with that name and it would have no idea which one I want. The new smart completion however, would fill in the full filename jedi.avi because it knows that it would make no sense to pass either of the other two as arguments to mplayer. sweet. I'd been trying to figure out how to get the subtitles to work with with filenames different from the movie for this very reason - now I don't have to. sweet.

^{1. Actually, I don't have this particular movie on my harddrive right now - I did, but had a harddrive crash and lost all the movies on it. And I can't rip it again because the dvd is scratched and won't play or rip correctly. I think I can get it resurfaced, but it reminds me why it should be legal and not unnecessarily difficult to copy/rip movies. The main reason that I rip movies is so that I don't have to load a dvd every time I want to watch a movie - and the dvds themselves can remain protected in their cases. The only reason that Jedi is scratched is that I lent the movie to someone a while ago. Never lend your movies out - they will get scratched. Stupid crash-happy harddrives. Stupid DRM.}

the x86_64/firefox/adobe flash fiasco

2006-12-01T21:18:00.000-08:00

lots of freakin web pages use flash. I'd prefer if they didn't, but they do. Some extremely poorly designed pages use nothing but flash for no practical reason. homestarrunner.com uses mostly flash, but it makes sense for a page centered around a flash cartoon.

adobe acquired macromedia or something, so now it's the adobe flash player. And adobe seems to be doing a much better job with the development - they have a flash player 9 beta for linux - it works pretty well. But not on 64 bit web browsers. They say they're working on a 64 bit version and that it's pretty hard because they have to rewrite a bunch of stuff to get it to work.

So in order to view flash on my athlon 64, I have to have a 32 bit version of the browser installed in a 64 bit operating system. No big deal, but now I got two versions of the browser (firefox) installed as I installed the 64 bit version before attempting the 32 bit install. They're both the same "version", just that one is compiled to 64 bit binary and the other to 32 bit binary. This is a bit more complicated than it sounds though because all the libraries and stuff that they use has to be compiled in the same format as the browser - so I have 64 and 32 bit versions of a bunch of libraries as well.

Now I just have to decide if I'll use the 32 bit version all the time or just when I want to watch some flash stuff - not very often since most of the flash I am routinely subjected to are advertisements. I'm not sure yet if there is a noticeable benefit to running the 64 bit version - speed wise.

The 32 bit version loads pretty fast and works pretty well, so I may just end up using it all the time for simplicity.

"burning" a dvd

2006-12-01T21:01:00.000-08:00

I made a bad dvd - actually it wasn't my fault, I think it was a defective disc.
anyhow, since I've never seen a dvd in the microwave, I decided to try it with this coaster.
it was pretty cool.

dvd's sandwitch the foil layer between two layers of plastic - unlike cd's which just have one layer of plastic and the foil on top. This makes dvd's more resistant to scratches in the foil which can not be repaired. it also traps most of the bad smell. if you've ever put a cd in the microwave, you know what I mean by "the bad smell". if you haven't ever done so - go do it now. you must have some junk cd or dvd "coasters" lying about. get to it.

after taking these pictures, I was able to pry the plastic layers apart. most of the foil remained on the top layer and the purple pigment is all in the bottom layer. layers here refer to the top and bottom layers of plastic, this is just a "single layer" disc - but all dvd's (except for very, very cheap ones) have 2 layers of plastic which has nothing to do with "dual-layer" discs.

so it's a bit cooler than a microwaved cd. of course I didn't photograph the lightning - I'll see about doing that with my next one. - if I can get the stupid autofocus to focus on the dvd and not the perforated microwave screen.

One Regret

2006-11-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

If I were on my death bed today and someone asked me what my one largest regret was, this might be my answer.

I wish I had spent more time on stilts.

Well, I know that's kinda weird - it came to me this morning as I was half asleep, half awake. So don't read too much into it.

I think that I'll start working on a pair of stilts tomorrow.

Another Silly Wizard Post

2006-11-18T17:20:00.000-08:00

Silly Wizard is a mix of crazy Scottish jigs and the more sorrowful songs as well. They're almost too hard to explain¹.

^{1) Especially with a 23 word limit. But, as Philip tells you, they're really good. I was reading up about them so I'd be more informed. The band started in 1971, they started touring in 1972, and they broke up 17 years later. Many members changed during that time, and the first album they recorded was never released. I think it would be really neat to hear that album. They became fairly popular by the time they stopped, especially compared to the 30 people they played to when they started. Anyways, it might be cheating to write all this stuff in footnotes. Phil just said they didn't count for the number of words so I figured I could write lots then.}

Silly Wizard

2006-11-17T22:21:00.000-08:00

I was not going to do a post exclusively about Silly Wizard, but John pointed out an error on my previous page. They are Scottish, not Irish. I may post more about them later, but cannot now because of a situation which I am not at liberty to reveal at this time. I can say, however, that I would just as soon acquire a Scottish accent as an Irish one.

I can talk about Scotland and Ireland. These lands were both heavily raided by the Viking back in the day. This raiding naturally involved a lot of rape. Also, the Norsemen would sometimes move in permanently. I have read of genetic studies of the amount of Scandinavian ancestry among various European peoples. The Scots and the Irish have a lot of Scandinavian blood.

Anyhow, their accents sound very similar to me. And this is all I had to go on for Silly Wizard because until my recent research, all I knew of them was from the music itself. Maybe there are some clues in the lyrics of their origin, but I was not keen to it.

ALL CAPS AND BOLD

2006-11-17T21:57:00.000-08:00

John linked the same page because of this guy's poor grammar and obvious scam. I'm not one to criticize the grammar or spelling of others, but I have to point out one thing.

Using all caps is really annoying. Using bold face is really annoying. Just one instance of both at the same time is distracting enough to make the rest of the passage hard to read - because the eyes are drawn to the bold caps and one must concentrate to read anything else.

This guy uses bold caps 23 times in one "paragraph"¹ - by my count². I forced myself to read the first part of the passage, but was still unable to make much sense of it. Trying to read further makes my brain hurt. I'm not sure if it's the concentration required to keep my eyes from darting to the nearest bold cap "universal energy" or the effort wasted in trying to make sense of the nonsense.

Also, someone should tell the people who write this junk that using bold caps is a sure sign that the author is a crank and the product is a sham. I don't know if they ever read any actual scientific publications, but the real ones never use bold caps. Only cranks use bold caps.

Using fake contractions in my posts might be fun, but I cannot bring myself to use boldc'ps myself even for demonstration purposes.

^{1. I must use quotations around the word "paragraph" here because I believe that, by definition, a paragraph must contain at least one sentence.

2. I did not double check my count.}

Third time's a charm

2006-11-16T18:45:00.000-08:00

"It used to be that you could tell when someone was talking to the mothership. now they might just be on their cell phone." -John

I don't get "won't"

2006-11-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

what's with the word "won't". I understand contractions - they're not all that complicated. You combine two words and drop out a letter or two to be replaced with a '.

I am = I'm
Is not = Isn't
Am not = amn't (actually I just made this one up, if you use it, someone will probably make fun of you - it's really ain't - but that ain't a word according to my elementary school playground. Incidentally, I don't get "ain't" for the same reason that I don't get "won't", but at least "ain't" is refuted on school playgrounds)
will not = won't

WTF? shouldn't that be "willn't" you don't say "I wo not do that" "wo" is not a word and definitely not a synonym of "will".

So I try to avoid using the word "won't" in all my writing. Actually, I tend to use contractions less in writing than in speaking (though obviously not on the craziness blog - probably because I'm trying to write it as I would actually say it which I don't usually do when writing).

So now I'm going to talk more about my headphones from the previous post - I can do that because this is my blog.
These are some nice $150 DJ headphones - This is not a feckin advertisement, so I willn't reveal the brand, but they have a pretty high reputation for consumer electronics. The headphones are awesome. I've never heard sound as clear from anything else. I've listened to songs on these puppies and had epiphanic moments because I could actually hear the words of the song clearly and finally knew what they were really saying. It's awesome. Also, the bass out of these things is incredible - it's more than enough for my taste, though they certainly don't have enough power to make your whole body vibrate - if you're into that sort of bass, which I amn't

Oh - about Silly Wizard: These guys make me want to acquire an Irish accent (Irishacc'nt)

Be sure to tune into craziness next week for modular origami pictures - only on cue pee crazy dot blog spot dot com.

You learn something new every day

2006-11-16T17:33:00.000-08:00

I just learned something new about my motherboard (an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe - a very nice Athlon64 socket 939 board, though I have not taken advantage of the SLI capability and probably never will).

This motherboard features an integrated surround sound audio card (ATI IXP150 AC'97). It's not spectacular, but it is surround sound. I've played around with the thing a bit, but I've never connected more than 2 speakers to it. But my case does have front panel audio jacks which connect to an internal connector on the motherboard - these front panel jacks only support stereo output. I have my speakers plugged into the rear jacks.

I rarely use the front jack, but I wanted to test out my $150 headphones because I left them too close to the heater and melted the hard plastic earpiece cover and I wanted to make sure that nothing inside was damaged (it's not, they still sound awesome and I don't care about the purely cosmetic damage).

I was playing some Silly Wizard (If I was a Blackbird - one of my all time most favorite songs) and on a whim picked up the headphones and plugged them into the front jack. I could hear the sound coming out of the headphones before putting them on, but I was surprised that the speakers went silent. I did not know that the audio output was designed this way - I just thought that the stereo output was duplicated to the internal connectors for the front panel, it's not, it's switched so that using it mutes the rear stereo jack. cool.

useless keyboard

2006-11-15T19:28:00.000-08:00

Of course the only thing that I use that MS "Natural" keyboard for is hitting the enter key at boot¹. You'll notice that I haven't switched it to colemak². It does have the colemak layout installed.

I'm going to go fix the boot loader now.

^{1. I have to hit the enter key because there's something wrong with my boot loader. I could fix the problem in about 5 seconds, but I'm too lazy (I keep forgetting to until I have to boot again). Also, I wouldn't ever have to shutdown except that the fans are a bit distracting when I'm trying to sleep.
2. I thought about switching the keys to the colemak layout, but it would be kinda hard because they have some funny sized keys because of the "Natural" shape. So I'd have to scrape off the letters and repaint them - at least a few of them. I'm just not up for that.}

Speakerectomy

2006-11-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

My first speakerectomy on a non-computer. Now it does not beep. Ever. It retains full function other than beeping - the patient survived the operation.

It was not a full speakerectomy as I actually just disconnected one lead from the speaker leaving the speaker intact. So speaker function could be restored with a speakerectomy reversal, though I do not know why anyone would ever want to do that - especially with the patient in question.

Disha Washa

2006-11-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

Yup, keyboards are dishwasher safe. It's all clean now and the keys aren't so stiff - but this keyboard pretty much sucked when it was brand new. People need to learn to not buy into this sort of gimmick.

By the way, I did not put the entire keyboard in the dishwasher, just the top 1/2 of the shell with all the keys in there. I removed all the electronics and the rubber membrane with all the rubber nipples on it¹. But I did run the dishwasher at the high temp on the "pots and pans" setting with heated dry. And it didn't melt any of the plastic components. And all the keys stayed in place. I was half expecting to be digging melted keys from under the rack.

^{1. Never seen this membrane? Well, what are you waiting for? Take your keyboard apart right now. No, seriously¹. All you need is a screwdriver with a Philip's Head #1² for the tiny screws inside. You'll also probably have to remove a metal plate inside to get to the membrane. If you're really unlucky then it will not be a membrane, but a bunch of little rubber nipples that are a real pain to get back in because there are like 105 of them and they don't like to stay in place when you re-assemble the keyboard.

^{1. I do not recommend that you attempt to disassemble a laptop keyboard. Please stick to external keyboards only - also avoid external laptop-like keyboards like they small gyration wireless keyboard. The only way to access the membranes on the laptop keyboard is to take all the keys off one-by-one. It's a real pain to put back together. I've done it several times as you can see on my colemak post in which I rearrange the keys. But you are more likely to break something if you attempt to remove the keys improperly. A laptop keyboard is just a stamped metal plate with 4 tabs sticking up for each key. 3 stacked sheets of plastic contain the circuitry and "switches" and the rubber membrane provides the interface between the keys and the switches. The keys are held on with two little plastic 'U's which interlock with each other, the key, and the 4 tabs on the sheet which protrude through holes in the plastic and rubber. The rubber also serves to keep the keys up. You can type on just the membrane having removed all the hard plastic keys, but the nipples tend to move sideways as easily as down, so you "miss" a lot. Every laptop keyboard I've ever seen is made this way. Most other keyboards aren't much better, they just have a plastic shell that keeps all the keys in place somehow - I've seen a few different ways - instead of having the keys attached to the metal plate.

2. Every keyboard I've ever seen (except laptop keyboards of course) is held together with philips head screws, never those annoying triangular head screws you find on chinese made toys from fast food restaurants¹, or the slightly less annoying tiny star head screws you find on hard drives that are too small for the smallest bit in a normal set of star head bits.

^{1. Why do they bother using those triangle head screws? Are they afraid that someone's going to take one apart to discover the top-secret internals of the cheap chinese toy? Are they afraid that a toddler is going to get hold of a screw driver, take the toy apart, and choke on the components? Are they afraid that someone might fix the thing if it breaks?

Disclaimer: I do not endorse disassembling your keyboard or putting it in the dishwasher. I am not responsible if you injure yourself or damage your keyboard.}}}

I don't think those are supposed to go in there

2006-11-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

Are Keyboards dishwasher safe?

Touchpad

2006-11-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

i been usin a laptop and its touchpad for so long that i tend to reach for the touchpad rather than the mouse even when i have a mouse plugged in. in fact, the only difference that makes any difference to me anymore is the scroll wheel. if my touchpad had scroll wheel and middle button functionality then i wouldn't need a mouse at all ever - except when using my desktop of course. though i did have an old touchpad from a piece of crap laptop that i was thinking of connecting to a ps/2 connector so that it could be used from a desktop. i still think it would be a pretty cool thing to do.

Identify

2006-11-05T19:33:00.000-08:00

Sorry my recent posts haven't been that crazy - guess I just don't have much drama in my life right now to stir things up in my brain.

I'll try to make up for that in this post.

Ever look at yourself in the mirror or in a picture and wonder "who is this person?" I don't mean "Who am I?" a self-identity thing, but more like "I do not recognize this person."

I just did that with the picture I took of myself for my picasa page. I don't look at myself in the mirror a whole lot or take a million pictures of myself all the time like some guys I know. I may go for several days without really looking at myself. So I was looking at the picture, post-processing it for upload to picasa (I did no touch up except to desaturate and adjust a slight overexposure). Then I was looking at it and trying to imagine that I was looking at a complete stranger. It wasn't very hard. I could easily disassociate from the person in the photograph. I was like "Who is that guy? I don't know and I don't care what happens to him. And I'm sure he doesn't care what happens to me."

Music Player Daemon

2006-11-05T05:04:00.000-08:00

so i got two computers setup in my room - my laptop and my desktop. why? because i can. i use synergy¹ to control both computers with one keyboard and one mouse. this is pretty convenient. i have like 3 each of keyboards and mice in the room, but not having to set one down and pick the other up is nice. i use nfs to access the desktop's much larger hard drive from the laptop. i like to do most interactive work on the laptop because the screen is a lot better². but the speakers³ on the desktop are better. so, i found the mpd program⁴.

i was just looking for a sound player to replace the crappy xmms which has been a mainstay the linux community for years, but was recently black listed by the gentoo maintainers because of > 30 bugs or something. i found some really good players, but what go my attention was mpd, the music player daemon⁵. the player itself runs in the background with no gui or any such thing. gui clients can connect to it. the upshot of this is that i can now control the player from my laptop, but the desktop does all the actual work of playing the music. the files are stored on the desktop, decoded on the desktop, and play from the desktop speakers.

this software allows for some pretty cool setups. you could build a dedicated music server connected to some really nice speakers that would be accessible to anyone on the network. you could probably hack a slu2 (can you add audio output to these - i suppose you could) or other network storage device or any of a number of embedded devices. this thing's job would be to play music and nothing else. it could contain its own storage on which to hold all the music or access it from another server through nfs or smb⁶

^{1. synergy - you can google it if you haven't been paying attention to me in the last 2 years. I have blogged it a couple of times.

2. the desktop has a really crappy 14" monitor that I got from Good Will for 6.99. I know exactly how much it was because the price is still written on top in black crayon. I think I got it in Orlando or Atlanta.

3. they're just some crappy computer speakers, but they're way better than the crappy built-in laptop speakers. I can't easily connect external speakers to the laptop because the first thing I did when I bought it was to break the headphone jack. I have a usb soundcard that works with my laptop, but it's a pain in the butt to use it and switch back and forth. plus I don't like having all kinds of wires and things coming out of my laptop - that's how the headphone jack got broken in the first place.

4. mpd - google it

5. a daemon is a program that runs in the background (server) and usually allows other programs (clients) to connect to it. It's a pretty common design and the unix/linux/open-source community employs it frequently. clients can generally connect from a local machine or a networked machine.

6. wtf is smb you ask? it's the windows file sharing protocol. the open source software to access it is called samba. yes, you can access it from linux or pretty much any other os because samba is open source and can be made to run on pretty much any os. i don't bother with it myself because i don't use any windows systems and windows file sharing has always been a real pain in the ass. i've tried to get file sharing working between two win xp computers with no success - then seen an mcse attempt the same on the same systems with no success. windows just sucks like that. i got nfs working, no problem, and i got an ftp server running, no problem. i can't say that these setups are exactly easy, but they're at least possible which is more than i can say for smb. i think the two computers were running two different versions of xp and i firmly believe that in that particular situation it was simply not possible to get file sharing to work.}

A Rollercoaster for Astronauts

2006-11-05T04:39:00.000-08:00

They're puttin a rollercoaster on the space shuttle launch pad. lol.

The most annoying thing in the world

2006-11-04T23:12:00.000-08:00

My dad has this wireless thermometer designed to display the outside temperature from up to 3 sensors as well as the inside temperature as read by the receiver.

That's all great - you can see how cold it is, Yeah!

It also keeps track of the day's coldest point and such. Again, that's great.

However, the designers must have thought that the fact that the current temp is the lowest so far is the most important information in the world and that the family will be running to the thermometer all day to see just how cold it is. The stupid thing beeps every time it reads a temperature lower than any of the day's previous readings. This beep is one of those beeps designed to really get your attention - it's extremely annoying. And when the temperature is dropping - like at night, when you're trying to get to sleep or watch a movie or something - or like the entire season of autumn, the thing is continuously beeping at random intervals.

There is no way to disable the beep - except to change to a channel with no thermometer attached. I don't know how my dad's got the thing set up, but there are 3 channels and only 2 of them display a temp. So when it's on the 3rd channel it doesn't beep, but it doesn't show a temp either. This is fine as far as I'm concerned - If I cared how cold it was, I'd just step outside, say "Yeah, it's cold", and then go back inside. I don't really give a crap about "highs" and "lows" or any of that weatherman junk. But my dad is always checking on the temp. So when I got the display set to channel 3 so that it doesn't beep, he has to switch it to one of the other channels to see how cold it is. And he always leaves it on one of the other channels.

My Current Bonsai

2006-10-28T22:04:00.001-07:00

My Current Bonsai, originally uploaded by qpmarl42.

my meager bonsai collection

Bonsai and a Chair

2006-10-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I've written about my current bonsai trees, but I will in this post.

But first, I would like to comment on a chair that I just made - out of an old car seat and some scrap lumber.

I cannot take credit for this idea. John did the same thing quite some time ago - with the match to my chair in fact. He got the driver's seat and I got the passenger seat. I know it's the passenger seat because it has the little foot lever which allows the back seat passenger to get out after the front seat passenger has forgotten about him.

Car seats are great¹. They're quite comfortable - think about it. On a road trip, you may find yourself sitting in a car seat for several hours straight. And while are likely to experience some discomfort as a result of being in the same position for so long, it is nothing like the discomfort you might experience from sitting in many other types of seats for so long.

The seat is out of a totaled Toyota Tercel. As with everything from Toyota, the seats are quite well designed and, as mentioned, comfortable. The car in question was the victim of a tragic accident. It survived the accident, living for some time afterwards as a field hoopie. But this life on the edge of the law lead to its eventual downfall.

Before receiving the death sentence, the car agreed to donate it's parts. The engine is sitting in a shop somewhere. The grill has been used for wall art. The seats have been used for computer chairs. Though at first, they were used unmodified - just taken out of the car and set down on the carpet. This is fine if you don't care about ruining the carpet - or sitting nearly on the floor - or falling backwards a lot.

The chairs were first used at the family farm in PA. When my parents sold the farm and moved to WY, I somehow convinced them that the chairs should go as well. Then the chairs survived another move from one corner of WY to the opposite corner - Greybull.

John lived in Greybull for a while. And while he did, he built a base on the driver's side Tercel seat for use as a computer chair. He attached a small table for the mouse. He retained the recline function, but I don't know if he retained the slide function. He took it with him when he moved.

Then I moved into Greybull. John took his car seat chair, but there was the other seat, so I decided to build a base for that one. I wanted to retain both recline and slide functions, so I had to design the base so that it doesn't get in the way of the seat components as they move. Recline is easy, but slide is a little more complicated. Also, the base must hold itself square because the seat rails can slide independently of each other.

The thing is made entirely from scrap - with the exception of the screws that hold it all together. I used wood decking screws with a wood block on each side of the seat's bolt holes to hold it onto the seat. I should take these out and replace them with 1/2 inch nuts and bolts - or maybe 3/8 inch lag screws or something. The original bolts that held it to the car floor were 1/2 inch or bigger, so there's a pretty big hole there and my current fastening job does not seem very secure - though it feels pretty solid.

Next I may make a mouse table. Though my desktop's case is just the right height - and I was using it long before building the car seat chair.

The chair is scratching the floor - I'll have to put some felt or something on there.

Now about the bonsai. The word "bonsai" literally means "potted" and could refer to any plant, but its use is almost always restricted to potted trees. I have tried to keep bonsai for nearly 6 years on/off. I've actually managed to keep a few trees alive in pots. And then killed most of them.

I started a maple bonsai from nursery stock - it died when I left it in Wyoming and nobody watered it. I bought a small juniper bonsai at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. It was doing quite well until I left it in the dash of my car one day and cooked it.

I've re-used the pots from both of these trees. The maple's pot was a rather large training pot². The juniper's pot was a rather small simple clay pot to which I have epoxied a neodymium magnet so that I can travel with the tree on my car's dash - to which another magnet has been epoxied.

In the large pot I have planted a common sagebrush which I dug up from my parents' back yard. It seems to be doing well, but I'd like to see it thicken up a bit. I chose this plant in reaction to the death of the maple. "Let them try to kill this one by not watering it."

In the smaller pot I have planted some type of evergreen - I think it's a spruce. I dug it up in the wild. It's quite small and is also doing quite well, but it will be a while before it's much to look at - if it survives that long.

The sagebrush is great because these things look seasoned and old anyhow. The spruce looks like a twig.

^{1. This does not hold true for all cars, but it does hold true for the cars that I choose to own. I will not even consider purchasing any car that does not have good seats - among other things.

2. A training pot is for new bonsai created from nursery stock or wild plants. It is larger than most bonsai pots to allow the tree to grow a denser root mass before trimming the roots and planting in a more traditional pot. A tree that is grown to be bonsai from a seed probably doesn't need a training pot - just progressively larger bonsai pots as it grows.}

Random thoughts for Wed, 10/25

2006-10-25T18:23:00.000-07:00

I guess I gotta start putting a date in the title 'cause I can't have 50 posts with the title "random thoughts"

My mom made some burgers for dinner today. Wild elk burger - there's none better.

Skipping ahead several minutes, in order to give you a taste of my family's perspective on elk burger - I was frying up an elk patty on the stove and my dad said "Why'd you make it so small". I said, "so it'll fit on the dinner roll." (My mom had dinner rolls ready AFTER dinner - her one burger and cottage cheese dinner). And then I pointed out that it's as big a patty as you'd expect if you went into any restaurant and ordered a standard burger - it was close to 1/4 pound if not more.

Back to my mom's burger - I took a bite out of it and commented on the rareness of the meat. She gave a characteristically vague answer. I like my burgers pink in the middle, but this thing was like steak tartar wrapped with a thin layer of cooked meat. So I ate it.

While frying my second burger, I was watching the pan and its contents and noticing the changes as they cooked. And I started thinking about heat, which got me thinking about thermal conductivity and such, including insulation, which got me thinking of asbestos. And asbestos brought me to the following story. (and I may have already written a post about this long ago)

I was with a relative, sitting at dinner at the house of some family friends. I think they were serving spaghetti. They set the table. I took notice of an item on the table and began a conversation about it. It was a hot pad - the kind that you set hot things on to keep them from burning the table. And I noticed that it was made of asbestos. I am no expert on asbestos, but it was fairly obvious because it said "Asbestos" in large, impossible to miss letters and the thing looked like it was straight out of the 50's. None of them seemed to have any idea what asbestos is or why it might be notable to have an asbestos pot holder on their dinner table. Well, I figured that it's safe enough as long as it is not cut it or otherwise damaged it in some way that might release asbestos fibers into the air.

It's freakin freezing in here.

Limits on Panoramas

2006-10-25T17:36:00.000-07:00

I'm making ever larger panoramas. I made one of the walk from the front door to my parking space. It's all red stone with grass growing between it. I'll say a bit more about it on my picasa page when I upload it. And I've made a few of the mountains with my camera's zoom maxed out (optical only, not the useless digital zoom).

The mountain one that I'm working on now is composed of 59 images. in 3 rows - though the top two rows are much shorter than the lower row which is all mountains. The top two rows are mostly clouds, but the clouds were changing too fast and my stitching software is having a hard time finding corresponding points in the overlaps. So this reveals the first set of limits - changing weather conditions and a slow camera. If I could take pictures faster, the weather wouldn't be so much of a problem.

Another limit is my own patience - which is responsible for the incomplete second and third row (from the bottom) in the zoomed mountain stitch. Of course most of the missing parts would be all clear blue sky, so I might paint them back in. But I was shooting a tree in our yard with my camera zoomed in and gave up 1/2 way through as it was taking far too long and it was just an experimental shoot - not something I'd care to frame and hang on the wall.

And then there's always the limit of the computer hardware to handle very large stitches. Though the stitching software takes a 59 image and, though it takes a little while, churns along without complaint. It did complain about the lack of matching points in the all cloud pictures though.

A little free association

2006-10-19T19:56:00.000-07:00

I had a really good idea for a post, but completely forgot it, so I'm going to try a little free association. I'm just going to put my brain in gear and let my fingers put it down on paper (so to speak). I'm going to try to edit it as little as possible - I'll fix typo's but probably leave spelling mistakes and stuff. And maybe my original post idea will pop up somewheres.

I been doin panorama scenes with a photo stitching program and my Kodak 6?0 camera. I think it's 670 zoom or something - anyhow it's a pretty good consumer level camera - it doesn't have some features that consumers generally want, but I like the results I get with it - for its price range. I need to learn more about photography. I'd like to become a professional photographer some day. I don't think I need to go to school for this - just absorb as much information as I can by talking to other people, reading, and by doing it - you know, trying different things.

I'm planning to go to Hawaii in November - as most of my family knows by now. I've been planning to take a lot of pictures while I'm there. The place I'll be staying is off the power grid, but uses solar energy to power the few things they need electricity for. They have a computer to get on the internet and stuff, but must limit their time on it because of the limited electricity availability. So I'm planning to stock up on batteries for my camera. I got a 2 gig camera card. I'll have my laptop with me. I might keep the pictures on the card until it's full, then transfer them to the laptop, using the computer for nothing else so as to conserve its battery charge. I plan to take my bicycle - I'll make a cover for it to take it on the airplane. And I should be able to take my bike into town once in a while - with my computer and camera (of course). To charge it and maybe get some internet access somewhere that I can take my time - chat and so forth.

Photo stitching came to me at a very convenient time. I will have enough time in Wyoming to play with it and get good at it so that I can get some really good shots in Hawaii.

No. I am not at all concerned with the recent earthquake in Hawaii. I am not afraid of earthquakes. So long as the place wants me, there is little that will keep me from going.

My motivation for going to Hawaii is quite extensive. It's something I've been thinking about for probably more than a year now - what was the date of my post titled "Yup, they have a webpage" or something like that. that's how long I've been thinking about it.

I almost gave up the idea earlier this summer. I was working in Kentucky on a water park. My biggest goal right now is to become a commercial diver (deep sea and the like - it's technically not SCUBA though it uses some similar equipment). While working in Kentucky, I was overcome by the desire to pursue this goal - and other lesser, but still very significant goals. This desire was mostly subconscious and I didn't really understand it at the time. It was making me crazy (er... crazier) - if you could have observed me at this time (and if you already knew me), you would likely be shocked at my very uncharacteristic behavior. Not that my behavior was really "bad" just very different for me. And I was very at ease about it. I did not know what was causing it or how or why. Now I believe that it was a combination of many factors which were all converging in that one period. It's over now, but the change is done. I am set on a course to reach my goals. But the need to pursue diving was so strong that I did not want to take the time to go to Hawaii first - and after diving school, it would be very impractical to go because I'd have loans to pay off and I'd have to work to do so. So I was resigned to the fact that I would not get to live in Hawaii for any significant length of time.

At the peak of my craziness, I quit my job, borrowed my (ex)boss's car, went to a water park with some former coworkers (had the time of my life there), returned my boss's car, drove a friend's camero to a car dealership and bought a car, and then went back to the water park. The job, building water slides, was definitely the best job I've had so far. And I stayed at it far longer than any job I'd ever had. I think my record before the water slides was 4 months - when I was at the Air Force Base in Alaska. I may have worked at the machine shop longer than that though - but it definitely wasn't more than 6 months. I built water slides for something like 20 months. There were lots of people doing it who didn't like it for various reasons. Some people quit. Some people quit, then came back, then quit again. I did not agree with any of their reasons for leaving and I did not leave for any of the same reasons. Instead of my reasons for leaving, I'm going to discuss the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. Within 3 months of starting the job, I was already feeling the urge to move on. It would have come sooner except that this job was totally unlike any I'd had before - living in hotels, eating in restaurants 2 or 3 meals a day, building waterslides (the work itself is quite unique). A big reason that I did not leave sooner was the travel. I have the wanderlust, the need to travel, absolutely no connection to any particular geographic location and no want of one. I need change - I quickly get bored and start becoming depressed with prolonged routine. When I'm on the move, I feel alive - life is good, worth living, exciting! The job provided that, if not at the pace that I would like - and work left little time for anything else, but work was rewarding, often exciting, often fun. I liked it. Also, I liked the people I worked for and with - my boss, his brother and their family(ies), and my other coworkers. Some people were irritated by the workings of the company - pay schedules and the like, but none of that bothered me as long as I got paid none of the other stuff mattered - though I could sympathize with those who were irritated by it. Some people experienced a great deal of stress in their personal lives because of our work schedules and being away from family for extended periods - there was one divorce and threats of at least two others, but being absolutely single I did not experience such problems - though it did contribute to less serious family problems for me - but it was often also an escape from some such problems. So I stayed longer than many of my coworkers. I hated to quit, but could see no alternative. Due to my mental state, my performance was really starting to slide and my motivation was nearly non existant. If I did not quit, it would rapidly get worse. I had to will myself to hold onto some degree of sanity long enough to complete the Kentucky job, of which I was in charge. My boss became concerned with the progress of the job and came down for a few days - I felt terrible for making him have to do that. And I felt terrible for quitting, but I saw no alternative.

So now I'm working, temporarily, for a guy in Wyoming doing some stick-framing construction. My boss left for a few days. He left me in charge of the crew. Why me? I don't want to be in charge of anybody but me. It's not my fault that none of the others are very compitent. I don't think that I am. So I'm just trying not to mess it up too bad. Fortunately I only have one day left of this. I told my boss, before I even started working for him, that I am leaving in November. My second day on the job he was trying to talk me out of it.

My typing with the Colemak layout is getting faster. I really like it. I still have to work on a few keys - like ":/;". And my fingers need more practice on all the rest, but my speed is now tolerable - still making too many mistakes though. I would fail high school word processing with this many mistakes.

I need to get some better photography equipment - a professional digital camera (Nikon's look good), a professional tripod with panorama head, dual camera head, various lenses and lense filters, etc. A fisheye lense would be nice - they have up to 180 deg field of view - could stitch some 360 deg spherical projection scenes with one of those.

If I won the lottery (impossible since I don't play), I would probably spend a large chunk of it on camera and computer equipment. If someone handed me a million dollars and said I had to spend it on camera equipment, I could easily do it.

I may be going down to the Gros Ventre (Grow-Vaunt) this weekend with my dad. He's going down to try to find an elk rack that he left down there - I'm hoping for some decent weather so I can shoot some panoramas.

Well, I'm quite tired now. I don't think that my original post idea came up. I'd like to keep going in hopes that it will, but don't think that my brain is functioning well enough anymore. Sorry about the long spiel in there.

My phone service has been cancelled because I didn't pay the bill last month - I am not sure if it is worth re-activating it or not. If the early termination fee is less than $150, then I think that I am going to go that route because it would be cheaper in the long run since I probably won't be using the phone much in Hawaii.

maybe next time I do this I'll go into another long spiel about my reasons for wanting to go to Hawaii - besides the everyday desire to visit Hawaii that everyone must have. My real reasons actually have nothing to do with "Hawaii".

picture taking

2006-10-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

There are some really good views around where I work, so I took my camera with me today. Long story short, when I left thismorning there were no pictures on the camera card; when I got home, there were 95. It should supply me with stitching material for quite a while.

Here 'Tis

2006-10-17T22:43:00.000-07:00

This is the image that I was talking about in the previous post. The limits of this page layout do not do it justice - the limits of most computer monitors do not do it justice. It should be printed at high resolution on paper 4 ft high and 38 ft long. But since that's not practical, here it is at 500x209 split and stacked so it fits on the monitor better. I should have split it in thirds instead of half for 500 px wide viewing, but I didn't - oh well.

The original image is roughly 19800 pixels wide and 2400 pixels high. It's over 300 Mb uncompressed - most of the 700/900 Mb used by the gimp as stated in the previous post were undo storage (I think). turning down the undo levels or disabling it all together should speed up processing considerably.

I plan on getting a flickr pro account sometime soon - and then I'll upload some big ones to flickr. Until then I'm going to work on getting shots of some better scenes and do some more experimenting with photostitching - there are lots of possibilities that I haven't tried yet

I'm going to need more RAM

2006-10-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

So I got into photo stitching - making panoramas (360 deg cylindrical projection, etc) .

I took 11 shots of the scenery from the hill behind my parents' house. I loaded all 11 images (6 megapixels each) into some stitching software and let it go to town. I had to fiddle with some control points - though the software is very good at auto setting them. And I didn't like the way the images were blended because even after fixing the control points, there were places that didn't quite match up - the software just blends them in the middle of the overlap. So I saved the output to a layered TIFF file in order to manually blend the images. TIFF is a lossless compression so it doesn't generate very small files like JPEG. The layered TIFF is over 500 Mb. When opened for editing, the gimp reports that the image is consuming over 700 Mb. After blending the seams, it's taking up over 900 Mb.

The Gimp is a very cool application. It uses it's own disk cache and tile caches large images, so the only hard limit on how large an image you can edit is the amount of free space on the drive where it is storing the cache. However, long before reaching this limit, unless you have very little free space, you would find that editing very large images becomes impossibly slow - there's no way around this other than increasing the RAM size.

So I need to get more RAM. I believe that PC systems top out at 4 Gigs (linux systems may be able to overcome this, but I'm not sure), but I don't think this is enough - what do I do when I have a 20 something megapixel camera and attempt stitches with 50 or more photos? Resize before stitching? I think not!

I must build the ultimate photo stitching computer.

card reader

2006-10-16T17:26:00.000-07:00

Do they make a wireless keyboard with an SD card reader built-in? They should. I'd get one - if it was also a high quality keyboard.

sore

2006-10-14T01:04:00.000-07:00

My arms and wrists are a bit sore from typing a lot - but I am getting faster with Colemak

funny fingers

2006-10-11T18:17:00.000-07:00

So I'm learning a new keymap. Of course I expect a transition phase when my typing speed will be very slow as I retrain my brain to use the new keymap. I am still in this phase, but I am pleased with my progress.

But my fingers (or rather, my brain acting through my fingers) have been displaying some rather strange behavior.

I learned the entire keymap the night that I decided to learn Colemak - conciously that is. If I concentrate, I know where the keys are. From now on I will use "learn" to mean the subconcious learning of the key or key pattern which is necessary for typing with any practical speed.

Since my decision to learn Colemak, nearly everything I've typed has been in Colemak - every email, every blog post, every chat session. Only a few shell commands entered on my desktop before switching it to Colemak were typed in QWERTY. I am using KTouch ( a KDE typing tutor) to learn the new keymap.

As expected, my fingers want to go to the QWERTY key positions. This gets worse when trying to go faster and relying more on the subconcious. Familiar key sequences are particularly difficult. I have to hit the brakes pretty hard on my fingers or they will try to enter the sequence as an atomic unit without consisering the individual keys - in QWERTY of course.

One kinda strange phenomenon is that adding new keys confuses learned keys. The home keys T and N are learned pretty fast as are S and E. With these 4, I can cruise through the lesson extremely fast with very few mistakes. Going further, not only are the new keys more difficult, but the first 4 get confused quite a bit as well - this perpetuates through all the lessons which each add 2 keys. This isn't all that surprising though as I seem to remember the same sort of thing when I was learning to type for the first time.

Interrestingly, I picked up a few sequences in Colemak rather quickly - before even gaining any reasonable proficiency with the individual keys. These include "the" and "keymap" - the latter is quite surprising because I really suck with "K", but not too surprising because I've used it a lot in those blog posts and chat sessions I've been typing.

I expect my fingers to go for the QWERTY positions, but what's surprising is that they've been going for seemingly random keys - even when the right key is in the same place as in QWERTY. It seems that they know that the familiar position is not right, but aren't sure what is, so they just take a shot in the dark.

Perhaps the funniest thing is the feeling of surprise after hitting the correct key. The finger goes for a key and the brain shouts "Noooo..." 'cause it thinks the key is not the right one, but it's too late, the fingers were moving too fast to get the message in time. The key is pressed and - surprise - it was the right one after all. By the time this process completes, the fingers are a few characters past the one that caused the surprise. It usually happens a few times in rapid succession perhaps self-perpetuating.

It's an interesting experiment anyhow.

Join the club

2006-10-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

Hey North Korea, welcome to the club.

remapping the keyboard

2006-10-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

I switched from qwerty to the colemak keymap. Here are some pictures.

The keymap is handled by the operating system and doesn't reqire any physical change to the keyboard, but I've set it as the default keymap on my laptop, so I decided to switch the keys around to match it.

There are a few issues - my laptop keyboard has the numpad embedded in the alpha-numeric keys, accessible with numlock - switching the keys around mixes up the numpad keys. This doesn't really matter to me though because I don't ever use the embedded numpad - it's a pain in the neck.

Another issue is the home keys - now they're T and N. They don't have the little nubs that let you know that your hands are in the proper position. It hasn't affected me much yet, but I was thinking of gluing something onto T and N to fix this. I probably won't.

Colemak is less than a year old - it was just released in January.

here's an account of one user's switch

Gender Roles

2006-10-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

Recently, and for a class I don't really enjoy, I created a paper about the effects of toys on gender. My paper really wasn' t that great but some of the things I realized about toys were frightening. While most toys in their general states aren' t that harmful, society establishes gender in children through the toys they allow a boy or girl to play with. There are some toys, like Barbie, that are horrible from any aspect. I mean why would anybody let their child play with a doll whose head pops off in order to fit the clothing on? And talk about the clothing, where is it anyway? There are some toys that could be beneficial to children of both sexes, but are they acceptable for both? Why, of course not. We wouldn't want little Jane to think that playing with Legos is acceptable. Even the ones that they make for girls aren't something girls would want to play with. According to Karen "they weren't cool, I hated that my mom bought them for me." (Or something to that nature) She like any "normal" child wanted to play with the regular ones. The fact that our society says that it's bad for a girl to play with toys like Legos is extremely sad and shows how out of wack our whole country is. Dolls also express to our girls that makeup and scanky clothing is the way to go, which is another thing that needs fixed. Why do we want to show every inch of skin to the general public? Don't we want to leave anything to the imagination? These childhood toys really screw with our minds. The action figures we give little boys aren't any better for them. They promote boys to be tough and ruthless in their pursuit of happiness. They also impel them to steal and plunder which impedes their sense of right and wrong. This is exemplified through todays adults who's consciences have been so degraded that they don't feel it is wrong to cheat and steal, such as in the case of the Enron fiasco. The toys that we let our children play with today really are the tools that set up the gender roles of tomorrow. So why do we let society our continue in this nasty direction?
I guess you might have guessed it was from a women's studies class.

Heathy Tortillas

2006-10-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

Whole wheat tortillas are awesome - they're healthy and taste good (if you don't think so then it's probably because your taste buds are accustomed to unhealthy white flour stuff and stuff).

The Ezekiel 4:9 tortillas are especially healthy 'cause they're made from sprouted grains (google search it).

But these whole wheat tortillas have a drawback - they're kinda hard and break easily. I found that if I let the Ezekiel tortillas soak up a little water then they get softer and hold together better.

My brother suggested heating them as well, so I was thinking maybe heating them in a frying pan with a little water in it (no oil or anything else and not too much heat).

I haven't tried this yet 'cause it was just a few minutes ago that we were discussing it and I've already eaten dinner tonight - I'll try it tomorrow and write about it afterwards. All I have are regular whole wheat tortillas though - no Ezekiels

The eternal battle between phones and email

2006-10-03T18:51:00.000-07:00

So today I was chatting with Philip, and I'm pretty sure his phone rang, because out of the blue he decided to tell me that "Telephones should be outlawed. They're so intrusive." Of course I agreed because I hate the things too. If you lived with me you'd know that I hate picking up the phone, probably because my dad doesn't like phones either and I tend to have the same feelings as him on most issues. O right, back to the phone thing. Anyways, we decided that it is like early 1900's technology and is very intrusive. Email, chatting, and pretty much any other form of communication is much more friendly. Email is like, "hey, you got some messages from some people" and you're like "cool, I'll take a look at that when I'm ready." Telephones are like "hey, you! someone wants to talk to you! Now!" and you're like "ALRIGHT! I'm coming, hold your horses." And you have to stop whetever you're doing to answer the phone. Cell phones are like 100^100¹⁰⁰ times worse because you can't escape them, I suppose you could if you really tried hard, but I guess it would defeat the purpose of having it in the first place. This is probably one reason why I don't own one, that and I guess I don't want to pay for it either. Anyways, phones=bad. I guess this is all I have for my first post on Philip's blog. I hope you weren't too bored.

Socially Retarded

2006-09-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

I've known for quite a while that I'm pretty retarded when it comes to social situations/behaviors. I don't know how to interact with other people - I don't know common social etiquette.

I like most people and I prefer to generally give people the benefit of the doubt. But I think that I come off as a jerk a lot when I'm just not sure how I'm supposed to act or what to say - so I don't do or say anything and I avoid looking directly at people.

Sometimes I'm in a good mood - my self-confidence is up or something and I'm able to interact somewhat normally with people (strangers, etc) in social situations. But I'll still get paranoid about doing or saying the wrong thing.

This doesn't happen so much with relatives and friends I've known for a long time, but I often act rather distant even with these people.

I've been in Wyoming for a few weeks now and I don't get any reception with my cell phone. I knew that people were likely trying to call me, but I didn't check my messages until today and it seems that a few people are a bit concerned about me. I still haven't called them back. I'm not trying to avoid them, I'm just not good at keeping in touch with people I guess.

It's normal for me to go for months without speaking to members of my immediate family - not because we are at odds or anything, just because none of us are very good at keeping in touch.

I guess my advice to these people is to email me - I check my email pretty much every day and I find it easier to communicate through email than over the phone.

The Nature of Software revisited

2006-09-25T19:58:00.000-07:00

This is what I'm talking about. It's a1988 paper by Edsger Dijkstra - kind of a revolutionary in the field of software design. This paper was so revolutionary that it has mostly been ignored by universities and businesses involved in software development. But it says part of what I was trying to say in the earlier post.

Yes - I did read the entire thing. No - I did not read it before writing the earlier post.

Here's the Wikipedia article about the paper

2006-09-18T23:09:00.000-07:00

"Water Lilies" by Phil Marley

I think that this is the best picture I've ever taken - I'll have to get some prints of it.

The Nature of Software

2006-09-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

The nature of computer software is quite unique. It is not directly analogous to anything in the realm of human understanding. People try to equate it with physical objects - "software is like the engine of a car", or with other forms of information - "software is like literature".

It's quite dissimilar to a car's engine - the computer processor would more closely fit that analogy.

Software is not a physical object - it can very easily and very cheaply be copied, stored, and exchanged - it is essentially pure information.

But it is unlike other forms of information in its purpose and use. It is not like literature because its primary purpose is not to be read by people it is not purely linear like a book - it's not read from beginning to end. In this way it also differs from music and video. Although in this category of information it is quite similar to sheet music which is a set of instructions for a musician or group of musicians to produce a piece of music - but is still linear.

Software is its own animal altogether and in order to understand it properly, we need to see it as such rather than simplifying it with improper analogies.

16 penny nail in the brain

2006-09-15T16:18:00.000-07:00

We're using pneumatic nail guns to frame this house that I'm helping to build (I got a job building a couple of houses). And it got me thinking about what would happen if I took a nail in the head - it's really easy for a nail to become a projectile when the gun double shoots, hitting the edge of a board or glances off a knot. My boss did this (the double shot on the edge one) while he was showing me how he wanted a wall put together and the trajectory of the nail ran very near to his truck. I made a joke about checking his tires and we kept working - but I try to stay out of the ballistic path of all nail guns. I did have my hand punctured by a 16 penny framing nail in this manner (the glanced off a knot one). That was about 6 years ago, but you never forget a thing like that.

So throughout the last few days I've been contemplating the possibility of taking a 16 penny nail to the head. It's unlikely that it would kill you, but it would most likely cause some brain damage. So I've been thinking about the possiblility of living with brain damage. And I realized that it probably wouldn't be that bad - maybe some memory loss, the loss of some motor skill, or the loss of some verbal skill - I'd manage. Initially there'd be some pain involved, but this would heal. I have no lasting effects from the nail in my hand and it didn't hurt very much. I didn't even use any of the pain killers that the doctor prescribed. At first I didn't feel it at all - I was looking around to see where the nail had gone because I could see that it wasn't in the board. I saw it in my hand before I felt it. I imagine that getting one in the head wouldn't be any worse than getting hit in the head with an airsoft gun or something.

What would be really bad would be cutting myself with a circular saw - taking a thumb off or something.

Military time.

2006-09-14T18:13:00.000-07:00

I have a cheap casio digital watch that looks like it's from the 80's or something. I have a laptop computer running the Gentoo distro of the GNU/Linux operating system.

Skip the indented parts

I set the watch by the time on my cell phone and it doesn't drift much - so I trust that it is pretty accurate. The time on the laptop was off by about 20 minutes - I'm not sure why, but I think that it might have something to do with thermal overload and the processor's method of handling this (throttling back to reduce power usage and heat output) which the OS might not be configured to handle correctly. Linux doesn't use the hardware clock while it is running - it reads from it at boot and then keeps track of the time on its own - then it (optionally) resets the hardware clock at shutdown. If the processor clockrate changes and linux isn't fully aware of this then the time could potentially get messed up. I think this might be what happened.

Or I might have simply set the clock to the wrong time when I reset it to MST because I was guessing.

So I had to fix the time. The linux date command, which sets the time and date, takes the time in military time format.

I glanced at my watch to see what time it is - it's 7:10. Now to convert this to military time... hmm add 12... it's 19:10 - I had to do this all in my head and, being a bit distracted and stressed from work and all, it took me a second.

date 0914191006

that's the command I then issued the format is MMDDhhmmYY (month day hour minute year)

Two minutes later, I glanced at my watch - it had been set to military time! I had subconsciously converted from military time to normal time only to have to convert back for the date command.

My watch has a button on the side closer to my hand that switches from military time to normal time - I'm always hitting this button accidentally, so I've developed the ability to convert to normal time subconsciously. I guess I haven't developed the ability to perform the referse conversion subconsciously

My brain is fried

2006-09-13T20:09:00.000-07:00

I was working in the sun all day today and didn't have enough water. My brain is totally fried.

I'm using two computers with one mouse/keyboard (by way of synergy) - and I keep getting confused over which computer is performing a particular task (chatting, forum reading/posting, playing music, etc). I keep moving to the wrong screen for a thing.

I'm also trying to switch firefox tabs on the window manager's task bar

- I need to get some water, food, and sleep.

Frightened by the **AA

2006-09-11T16:19:00.000-07:00

Here's a blog for just about anybody who uses his/her computer to view/listen to any sort of digital media or is connected to the internet in any way. Those bastards might come after you - they don't care if you've actually illegally obtained any digital media - they just want to scare you into paying them off.

nerd test

2006-09-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry - I didn't try to max it out - really. I only cheated a little.

Who did you exploit today?

2006-07-27T10:03:00.000-07:00

The Sinusoidal nature of my sanity

2006-07-17T10:48:00.000-07:00

I think that my sanity might be plotted as a sine wave. Only it may be getting progressively worse (or better if you enjoy craziness - and I enjoy mine very much).

I picked up a hitchhiker on my way from Minnesota to Ohio. He was only going as far as Madison. I told him that I could drop him off there, but I had to go through Lacrosse on the way - Lacross is maybe 1.5 hours out of the way from where I picked him up. English is not his strong suit. When I told him I had to go through Lacross he smiled and nodded and said something that sounded like "OK". But I don't think that he understood what I was saying in the least because when I turned off of Eastbound 94 onto Westbound 90 he started getting fidgety and asked to get out right there. Oh well. I was going to offer to buy him dinner in Lacross.

Today I'll be picking up two complete strangers and driving with them from Cleveland to Philadelphia. I hope I don't freak them out too much. I was cleaning out my car for the trip and thought that the sight of my climbing rope in the trunk might give them the wrong impression - so I left it out.

English Muffins

2006-06-19T13:57:00.000-07:00

What is it about an English muffin? What magical power does it posses which, when combined with plenty of butter, a sausage patty, a fried egg, and a slice of cheese makes it so irresistible. It is the most delicious invention of mankind.

I may have to wait a while longer.

2006-06-05T13:42:00.000-07:00

Women are silly. Never before have I felt that my life was in a state that would be conductive to any meaningful relationship with a woman. I am a nomad - this creates difficulty when it comes to developing any sort of long term relationship. On top of that, my financial situation has usually been less than impressive - mostly because of the difficulty in maintaining a steady income with my nomadic tendencies. This doesn't bother me of courese - I've rarely had trouble keeping myself from starving to death, but it seems to trouble other people.

Now, my life is at a turning point and, though I am not there yet, for the first time in my life I can see myself reaching the point where I could have a meaningful relationship with a woman. And so I have started trying to find a woman with whom to have such a relationship. My plan is to start getting to know someone so that when I am fully ready to "settle down" I'll be well on my way. The problem is that I have to go to Jamaica for a month and after that I'll be traveling all over the country for most of the summer and after that I'll be going to school in Seattle for 7 months. I don't get much past "I have to leave on Friday" and all of a sudden the girl doesn't want to have anything to do with me.

So maybe I'll just have to wait until my life has actually settled down so that I don't have to say that I'm leaving at the end of the week and will be gone for a month and then I might not be around much after that either.

Get rid of those crazy kids.

2006-06-05T13:32:00.000-07:00

Manilow scares away troublesome kids

Crazy/Sane and Angela's Ashes update

2006-06-01T17:54:00.000-07:00

I'll cover Angela's Ashes first. I can recommend this book even though I haven't finished it yet. Braddock was concerned that the ending might suck and so I can't recommend it. However, this is not the type of book that requires any specific type of ending. It is not a novel, not a story. It's a memoir. If the book ended abruptly in my current spot (about 1/2 way through), I'd still recommend it and read it again sometime (not really "read" because I'm listening to the audiobook, but you know what I mean). Each chapter is like a short story in the life of the author - it can't possibly be disappointing.

Now a bit on Craziness (Insanity) vs Sanity. I suppose that most people believe themselves to be sane - and most of them are wrong. They want to be "sane" (what they believe "sane" to be) and they try very hard to be so. But most people are, in fact, quite insane. The only way to be truly sane is to be a little crazy. I'm not sure exactly what I mean by this, but I believe that it has two aspects. First, you must go through a period of craziness - letting go of your perceived sanity in order to attain true sanity. And second, you must be willing to be perceived as insane by others who falsely believe themselves to be sane.

I have to stop there because they're trying to close up the cafe in which I am composing this post.

Waterpark Lifeguards

2006-05-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

Ok, I do have one bit of recent craziness to relate. This has to do with my friend and former co-worker Josh and the Waterpark of America.

Josh quit his job a few days before I got back from Kentucky which is when I told my boss that I don't want to be on the road building waterslides anymore.

After giving my notice, I borrowed a car from my boss and stopped to see Josh on my way home. I talked Josh into coming up to The Cities to ride the slides at the Waterpark of America (Great Lodge). It was a spontaneous decision and I didn't even know for sure that the place was open yet. I talked to someone who said he'd seen an ad for it so he thought that it was open. Another former co-worker (Rob) was hanging around, so he went with us too. We got there and found out that it was opening day. The best ride there is the Flowrider (it's a standing wave that you can surf on), but that really has nothing to do with this story. We went back a week or so later when I returned my boss's car and got a ride back to The Cities with Josh in his Camaro(Rob had gone home so it was just Josh and me)

They have a lot of hot and semi-hot lifeguards. So I was encouraging Josh to talk to them, get their names, you know. Here's how the scenario would go:

Josh would find a cute lifeguard and start talking to (flirting with) her. I'd talk and flirt too, but I'm not really interested in picking up any lifeguards. I'd have to keep encouraging him because he's pretty shy and stuff. We'd talk a bit, ride the slide, come back to the top and talk some more. As we're heading back up, I'd say "find out her name" or "how old is she" - stuff like that. They change stations frequently, so we'd have to find her again. We played it cool and didn't just keep riding the same slides over and over, we'd give it some time, go around the park, etc, and then find her again. This is how the encounters would always end:

Me: some question about the lifeguard
Josh: No, it's over.
Me: What, why?
Josh: She's only 17 (or maybe not quite 17)
Me: So. Tell her that she can tell her parents that you're 17 (or something like that)

But Josh is too honorable for such deceit.

So anyway, we had fun meeting them and getting to know them and it was a good character building/learning experience for both of us.

sane for a while

2006-05-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I haven't been getting too crazy lately. I'm quitting my job - I just have to go on one last trip to Jamaica and then I'm done. And I bought a car. And I bought and installed a cd player (plays mp3 cds) and 4 new speakers (the old ones were total junk). After Jamaica, I'll be driving around the country visiting family and hanging out at the lake. I'm ripping the audiobook Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt and burning it to an mp3 cd for on the road listening. it's like 12 hours long. I haven't listened to much of it yet, but based on what I have heard, it's really good and I recommend it to everyone.

Psychologically Stranded

2006-05-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

I've observed that most people are trapped - afraid to leave the familiar in search of the new and exciting. It's all in the mind.

People talk of leaving the crappy little towns where they grew up in search of the great wide world out there. But when it comes down to it, they are afraid to abandon the familiar.

Vacationing is one thing - you leave "home" temporarily and always have the security of knowing that you will return. When people are gone on vacation for an extended period, they become more anxious to return "home".

If one does manage to take the leap, they will usually exchange the security of one place for another. The new home becomes the secure place and they are now trapped in this new place.

I do not suffer from this condition. I've been travelling the country for the past eight years, rarely staying in one place for more than a few months. At this point, I don't have any geographic location that I consider "home". I guess that I consider "home" to be wherever I happen to be - or I have several homes with family throughout the country where I am always welcome to stay.

Even as a child, I do not remember ever being overly homesick. I would sometimes find it odd that other children would get homesick, throwing fits and such.

Though I do not suffer from this very common condition, I am searching within myself for other mental bonds from which I need to break free in order to reach my full potential. They are numerous and subtle.

I am going crazy

2006-05-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

This town is weird. I don't really know if it's the town or if it's me. Maybe I'm going crazy. But one thing's for sure: I am going through some major mental changes - my desires, determination, modivation, superstitions, prejudices, and general outlook on life are all changing.

I've been behaving differently. I've been seeing things differently. I am more determined than ever to achieve my life goals. I get hyperactive. I haven't had much of an appetite. I got up pretty early yesterday instead of sleeping as long as possible.

I must be going crazy.

Don't be too concerned for me. I believe that it's all good. I like it.

Limes and Habaneros

2006-05-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

Limes are cool. They're a little harder to eat than lemons. Get the ones with a little thicker skin. Don't eat the ones with the thin, hard skin - these ones almost made me puke.

Habanero sauce is cool. You can drink it straight out of the bottle. Or, if those observing the scene are concerned about cooties, you can use a shot glass or small dish to drink it from. If the sauce is a bit too thick to drink in this manner (it kind of stays in the glass and slowly flows out) you can use a straw to slurp it up. I was drinking a semi-thick green habanero sauce and it looked pretty cool coating the inside of the straw.

Seperately, both limes and habanero are cool. But I do not recommend that you ingest them both in one meal. In fact, my stomach is still tormenting me over it. It feels like I just got punched in the gut.

On an interesting side note, I have experienced the psychological aspects of the hiccups. Even a modest amount of pepper sauce will give me the hiccups. But if I tell someone that I will get the hiccups by drinking it, then I can down like an entire shot of it and not get them. I need to find a way to overcome this problem.

Women are Crazy

2006-05-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, I was scolded by a 44 year old woman for not seducing her daughter's friend.

Single (uh... duh!)

2006-04-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

Alright I'll admit it. I occationally read the personals on Craigslist - just for fun. I don't expect to meet the woman of my dreams over the internet or anything like that - in fact, I think that's kinda weird and one example of how out of touch people are these days that they need to get on the internet to meet people. I read them because they can be funny.

Just now, I was reading a post from a chick - she gave a short description of herself and specified "single"... Isn't that sort of assumed when you write a personals ad? Of course they sometimes are not single and such must be specified - maybe they're married and just looking for a little fun on the side or something.

Front Desk Girl

2006-04-11T19:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I've been in a lot of hotels in a lot of places in the last year or so. Occasionally there'll be a decently hot chick behind the front desk. But I've never really paid much attention to them (except to take a moment to appreciate the beauty of the feminine form).

Right now, I'm in some podunk town in Kentucky.¹ The front desk girl here is pretty hot - and she's a pretty big flirt. I'm sure that nothing will happen.² I think she's married and I know she has kids. And I can't be messing around with girls when I'm on the road - I'm just not that kind of guy.³

^{1. This is a dry county - I didn't even know that such a thing still existed. It would be possible to get arrested for bootlegging here.

2. Nothing will happen because I won't let anything happen.

3. Not meaning that I don't want to mess around with girls - but I have personal convictions against one night stands and such.}

Dream Snippets

2006-03-30T15:53:00.000-08:00

I'll be doing something (in the waking world, rather than a dream) and it will remind me of something that I've done before, but it'll take me a second to realize that the memory is not something that happened in real life, but in a dream - and sometimes I'm not entirely sure whether it was a dream or real.