A step forward.

Since we moved into the new house, I haven’t had much opportunity to try and get things in my workspace / room / office organized. When there was energy to move things around, I worked on the public spaces. Hey, it’s only my room, right?
Today I spent some time cleaning up my workspace, prepping to do more work on it (new lights, chair arrangements, etc). It’s much tidier now, and I can look at it and go “RIght. New light there, new monitor there… and…”
But while it’s clean, here’s what it looks like. Since I work fulltime at home, I spend anywhere from 8 hours to ‘all my waking time, save trips to eat and use the loo’ in that spot.

Little bunny foo foo…

Many many moons ago my friend Cathy turned me on to Roman Dirge’s ‘Lenore’ comics. In one particular strip, Lenore is singing the bunny foo foo song.
Well, some bright light went and made a shockwave video of it. Note, it makes little sense unless you have the sound on, and in fact, it loses something in the translation, but it’s still gruesome and cute.
Apparently this is just one of an entire series of vids. I think I’ll wait until I’m truly catatonic before watching more. The killer bear picture is very cute though.

My Wishlist

So now that I’m done with “The convention I was stressing about” (I’ll be heading back to Boston tomorrow), it’s back into the long term contract I picked up a few months ago. A lot of very cool Java coding that’s abstract, fascinating, intense, and occasionally screamingly frustrating.

But it also means I get to think about other things, all of which will cost money, which is workable, but it’s not like we have bottomless pockets just waiting to be plumbed.

So, my wishlist… projects, ideas, things I want to to, stuff in the works, etc.

Continue reading “My Wishlist”

Overheard on Mythbusters

I get to watch a little TV when travelling – it’s a great ‘run away!’ space for me where I can avoid all the chaos that are conventions. Every once in a while I get to watch something that just leaves me cracking up everytime I play it over in my head.
While watching Mythbusters the other night (a great show no matter how you slice it), the topic was “Free Energy”. The boys decided to test several ‘free energy‘ offerings on the internet, and see if they actually work or not. Needless to say, all of the various offerings failed miserably in their tests.
In the “summary” part, where Jamie and Adam are ‘discussing’ the results of the tests (usually rather woodenly and obviously pre-scripted), Jamie (the more taciturn of the two) asks Adam (who is far more animated) “So Adam, does the all this talk about Free Energy make you feel all warm and fuzzy now?” And Adam, in a very matter of fact tone, replies “Sure Jamie. In fact, it reminds me much of things like the Easter Bunny and Santa clause, because it’s A FANTASY!!!” (the last line delivered in a loud voice directly into the camera.)
This show is definately one of the good ‘uns on TV nowadays.

Brunching Shuttlecocks and Household Hints

From the same folks who brought you the geek hierarchy (a truly masterful project – be sure to look at the super-huge unabridged version), heres’ some handy household hints. One I found particularly amusing:

Keep Computers From Taking Over The World
First, take note of the year. Before 1974, you must confront the computer with a paradox such as “I’m lying right now” or ask it to compose a love poem. Between 1974 and 1987, you should guess the ridiculously obvious backdoor password. After 1987 you should upload a virus to it using your Apple

Myers-Briggs – or a facsimile thereof.

Every once in a while I run this test just to see if I’m drifting around. I think I’ve changed a lot in the last 10 years, at least since I first took this test, but to me things seem to be on the level. Maybe I’m just more aware of myself than I used to be.

Catya, who has a background in these things, points out that this test represents how I perceive myself, rather than who I am as defined by an external metric. Understood, but it’s still interesting nonetheless.

this online version is as good as any that I’ve seen, and resulted in me as INTP. In the 4 categories(Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) the strengths of each came to 22 50 1 11 (those are percentages).

Summarized:

  • slightly expressed introvert
  • moderately expressed intuitive personality
  • slightly expressed thinking personality
  • slightly expressed perceiving personality

There’s a great link to Keirsey’s summary of the iNTp category. “Rational Idealist Artisan Guardian”. Say what you want about these things, but this summary IMHO speaks pretty well to me:

Of the four aspects of strategic analysis and definition, it is the structural engineering role — architechtonics — that reaches the highest development in these Rationals, and it is for this reason they are aptly called the “Architects.” Their major interest is in figuring out structure, build, configuration — the spatiality of things.
 
As the engineering capabilities the Architects increase so does their desire to let others know about whatever has come of their engineering efforts. So they tend to take up an informative role in their social exchanges. On the other hand they have less and less desire, if they ever had any, to direct the activities of others. Only when forced to by circumstance do they allow themselves to take charge of activities, and they exit the role as soon as they can without injuring the enterprise.
 
The Architects’ distant goal is always to rearrange the environment somehow, to shape, to construct, to devise, whether it be buildings, institutions, enterprises, or theories. They look upon the world — natural and civil — as little more than raw material to be reshaped according to their design, as a formless stone for their hammer and chisel.

Update 8/16/2005 6:30am – fixed some bad HTML in the post. Sorry!

Discovery of the day.

Did you know that PUPILS spelled backwards is SLIPUP ? These and others are the results of my ongoing addiction with TextTwist. I run it on my Kyocera 7135 palm phone, and have figured out the wiggly ways to keep a game going between stops and other life interruptions.
I was just amused at that palindrome.

Juggler Ho!

Hobbit nabbed a great picture of me passing clubs with Phil and (unfortunately I can’t remember his name – Jim? He’s the fellow on the right) while we were at Baitcon last weekend.
This is probably the most juggling I’ve done in the last year or two, and Phil and Jim were great passers. We didn’t, unfortunately, have 9 of the same clubs, which really does throw off balance when trying to do smooth patterns, but we made due on our own. My arms were really tired after a good 45 minutes of this, but it was great shaking the dust out of the ol’ hands.

Carl Sagan spells it out

Pursuant to my last post, I have to share this quote from T. H. Mitchells essay on the nature of of the judeo-christian definition of ‘god’…
This is from Carl Sagan’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” [p5-6] :

We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep, with no note explaining who it is, where it came from, what hereditary cargo of attributes and disabilities it might be carrying, or who it’s antecedents might be. We long to see the orphan’s file. Repeatedly, in many cultures, we invent reassuring fantasies about our parents–about how much they loved us, about how heroic and larger than life they were. As orphans do, we sometimes blamed ourselves for having been abandoned. It must have been our fault. We were too sinful, perhaps, or morally incorrigible. Insecure, we clung to these stories, imposing the strictest penalties on any who dared to doubt them. It was better than nothing, better than admitting our ignorance of our own origins, better than acknowledging that we had been left naked and helpless, a foundling on a doorstep. As the infant is said to feel it is the center of its Universe, so we were once sure, not just of our central position, but that the Universe was made for us. This old, comfortable conceit, this safe view of the world has been crumbling for 5 centuries. The more we understood of how the world is put together, the less we needed to invoke a God or gods, and the more remote in time and causality any divine intervention had to be. The cost of coming of age is giving up the security blanket. Adolescence is a roller coaster ride.

Just beautiful.

The Super Secret Mitchell Facts

I like to take the time to poke fun at establishments, and the ever twisted maze of the religion loosely referred to as “Christianity” is such an easy target, it’s sometimes hard to wonder where to start. It’s a never ending pile of suppositions, assumptions, and dogma stacked on folk tales and nomadic story-telling, which should be trivial to tear apart.
Well, someone has. Again 🙂 I give you the Super Secret Mitchell Facts.
T.H. Miller has taken years, slowly detailing all the inconsistencies in Christian dogma. All the holes in the stories and the paper-thin structures that hold this world-wide self-delusion together. A really good example of his detailed analysis is his essay on the nature of the judeo-christian god, and he speculates on why is it human beings feel the urge to create a mythical being in their lives for guidance.
I stumbled upon his works after subscribing to the excellent community Convert_Me, an intelligent forum for folks to discuss religion in an framework that is pre-disposed to “If you want to argue seriously about a belief structure, this is the place to do it.”

Ah got the music in me.

About a month ago I posted a message to craigslist basically asking if anyone in the metro boston area was interested in taking in an inexperienced bass player. I was tired of just noodling around, and I felt that a bass guitar is best played in a group. It’s a support instrument, not a lead (except in very rare cases), and therefore needs others to play against / with. I was really not moving ahead in my playing, and I decided it was time to seek out other players.
My posting (now expired) was pretty self-effacing. I’ve never played in a band before, and aside from some noodling around in various folk circles, never really played the ‘supporting bass’ position in anything serious.
I got 3 replies to the posting. One was someone looking for a sort of glam-metal bassist. Pass, thanks. The second was from a sort of pop-C&W-folksie group in Weston. I got together with them last week, and while we played well, and did some interesting bits, it didn’t grab me much.
Late last week I heard from another group. These guys were a bunch of geeks who had formed a blues band in their company, and over the years had gigged to a bunch of parties and local bars and the like, but had slowed down over the last year. Now they wanted to get going again, and needed a bass player.
Well gosh. A local geek band that plays the blues. I could get into that.
So I did. Last night I went down to Franklin and played for about 3 hours in my first full blues band. We had lead guitar, rhythm guitar, keyboards, drums, a -kick-ass- vocalist, and moi on bass.
I was EXTREMELY nervous going into the whole thing. This really was my first decent sized band, and the music being played, while more along the lines of what I like, was far more complicated than a simple root-note bassline. But, I had practiced my blues scales, downloaded all the tabs and tracks for what was on the set list, ran through each of them a few times, so I think I was ready.
And I was. We went through 6-7 tracks (sometimes repeating several times to work on various pieces). Each time we went through, my lines got clearer, and the piece sounded better. I worked well with the drummer (in small bands, the bass player has to be in sync with the drummer – we hold the beat and the rhythm that the other musicians are working around, and if -we’re- not in sync, the whole piece sounds clumsy). Fortunately, the drummer and I clicked well, and he commented at the end of the set “We havne’t had a bass player for so long, I got jaded – now I have to be careful what I’m doing because there’s another rhythm piece in. But it sounded alright.”
In the end, I was exhausted, but the band was upbeat and happy with how things came together. There’s some great talent there. I didn’t flub it, I didn’t stand there looking doofy during bits I didn’t know (only happened once where I dropped out – during “Wind Called Mary” by Jimi Hendrix. Complex little piece.) The lead guitarist came over and shook my hand at the end of the set “It was a real pleasure playing with you. You’re coming back, right?”). Wow.
We played a lot of your standard barroom blues. Mustang Sally, Proud Mary, etc. The lead singer has a great voice.
They liked me. They liked the sound, the band worked well together, and we’re gonna do more. Next practice is Wednesday night.
I think I’m in a band.

RadioParadise punches it dead on today…

Trying to get back in the groove after weeks of intenseness related to selling our house, and working back in my office, Radio Paradise chimes in with Compared to What performed by Les McCann.
This song is over 30 years old, but the lyrics ring mighty true today…

The President, he’s got his war
Folks don’t know just what it’s for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason
We’re chicken-feathers, all without one gut (God damn it!)
Tryin’ to make it real — compared to what? (Sock it to me, now)

Make sure you check out the RP Forums about this track.