Hunting The Muse

Hearing is Believing - I

Hearing is Believing - I have to say, this thing does sound pretty cool. Except for the advertising uses. I hate that vending machine idea.

This was really interesting to

This was really interesting to read -

Excerpts From Unabomber's Manifesto (washingtonpost.com) Consider for example . . . freedom of the press. . . . The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media. . . . Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it's more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of those readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.

If he had just been peaceful and waited a couple of years, he could have started a blog.

I've been finding lots of

I've been finding lots of throwaway comments about how Ayn Rand is all anti-democrat, super-republican, super-capitalist etc. Stuff like how someon bets that Randism has probably decreased as unemployment has increased, how people nod knowingly when they hear that Alan Greenspan is a devoted Rand follower, etc. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged yet, only The Foundation, but I guess I didn't quite see the connection between the characters/theme in The Foundation and the implied belief of these comments.

I remember thinking that the book had a lot to say about integrity. There were a lot of character journeys where people did things that were true to themselves and were ostracized for it, and kept doing those things that were true to themselves anyway. There was also a big feeling of "Choose Your Own Destiny", of making your own way, of creating your own future. I don't equate that with republicanism or lack of compassion for others. I think there are four main ingredients to "making your own future":

1. An open relationship with one's passions and fears
2. An ability to see solutions
3. An ability to put plans into action
4. Self-love

I think those are all worthy goals for anyone to try and attain. Do I think they are skills that can be learned? I think that statement is partially true. I think some of us are born with more blessings than others. I think some people need more assistance and more effort to become more skilled in some of these areas. For me personally, I think I am very good at #1 and #2 - I was born with #2 and have learned #1 - and I have a really tough time with #3.

The problem is that people create a relationship between two concepts:

• "making good",
• Judging against those who haven't.

There's no causal relationship between the two.

Imagine someone who feels deficient in one of these areas, and improves it through a motivation of desperation. From a place of tightness. They might end up fixing their vulnerability in their estimation, but they are then in turn more likely to hate or judge against someone who has the same weakness (I'm using the terminology as they would see it). So I think that is why many people believe that someone who has "made good" is by definition not compassionate of those who aren't in the same place. Because it is often true. But, it really doesn't necessarily follow. I don't think the challenge is to make good - I think it's to make good without being desperate about it. It's desperation, not success, that clouds love and compassion.

Anyway, like I said, I haven't read Atlas Shrugged yet. For all I know it might have 400 pages of moralizing about how some lazy paraplegic doesn't get off his ass to run a marathon. And I have to admit I remember some pretty weird stuff stuff in The Foundation about the protagonist having an affair with someone who really didn't have his interests at heart, and he knew that, and got involved with her anyway. I don't know what that has to do with integrity. So this isn't really a defense of Rand. :)

My niece emailed me today.

My niece emailed me today. That was cute. She said:

mbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbooooo9999999999999999999
9999999

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Places to avoid when finding

Places to avoid when finding a home to buy in Portland: Gang-related violence rises in North, Northeast Police have identified six locations, or "hot spots," that they are focusing on where much of the recent violence is occurring. They are: Northeast Alberta Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenue, North Albina Avenue from Killingsworth to Alberta streets, North Kerby Avenue and North Skidmore Street, Unthank Park, Northeast 17th Avenue between Alberta and Killingsworth streets, and North Congress Avenue and Prescott Street.

I just started to read

I just started to read Atlas Shrugged. We'll see how far I get before I get aggravated at all the neuroses of the characters.

hmm.... someone was just searching

hmm.... someone was just searching for my sister and came to this page. creeeepy. :)

I guess in hindsight

I guess in hindsight it's not so big a deal since it got taken care of. Basically what happened is I signed up by faxing Rackspace a form where I wrote in my friend's name. I had more questions on how to make sure it was working right, so I called, and they said it had to come from him. So I called him and he took care of it - called the people and said he referred me. Then I called and made sure it went through, and they said it did.

So they called me today and said it wouldn't work because the referrals are supposed to start FROM the other party, and it is supposed to be in place before the server is online. I didn't know either of these things, of course, and argued as such. They stuck to their guns for a long time, saying that doing it differently opened them up to fraud. I just kept saying that the way I did it didn't have anything unreasonable about it. They also said it was incompatible with the other promotion I signed up for, but I was never exactly given the choice. They said it was supposed to start with the other guy, but I said, "well, he can't exactly sign me up - there's a point where I have to call and say to do it." And I also said that if it wasn't supposed to work from me calling the guy to do it, then I should have been told about the referral program as a selling point.

Eventually, somehow, they actually started agreeing with me. I must have been ono top of my game. We were flat-out arguing with each other for a while at the beginning - I even said that it felt like bait&switch. He paused at that... when he finally caved, he took the tack of using it to give himself license to scold me by implying they were going to start looking at me as a problem customer, which was pretty creepy. I think I got him to backpedal from that by letting him know I really did understand the business concerns and was glad that they were doing the right thing, since I had plenty of people around Portland I could recommend to use Rackspace. Then he got really friendly.

What I think really happened is that he probably had someone over his shoulder that was telling him which way to go.

I hate those sorts of things because you really are at the corporation's mercy. And it isn't so much determined by how right you are as by how well you argue your point. I know people that complain about getting easily flustered, and I think that I don't - but in this case I was pretty close to the blustery panic point. I hate that. They didn't turn around until the last minute.

I paid off my iBook

I paid off my iBook today. Yay me! Once again I am debt free.

The rackspace situation is taken

The rackspace situation is taken care of - I'll blog more about it later. God, arguing is hard sometimes.

Rackspace is trying to screw

Rackspace is trying to screw me out of my money right now. I signed up for a linux box in their facilities for a hefty monthly fee to consolidate my ISP accounts and host some friends. During sign up I mentioned I was there because a friend (actually two) had raved about it. They said, "We have a referral program - $500 for each of you if you're above a certain monthly fee, otherwise $250 for each of you." It would have been $250 in my case. It went into my decision to subscribe.

So I signed up, confirmed how to do it, told my friend about it, who called them to say my name and mention the referral. I confirmed with my sales associate that it was in process.

Today they told me that my friend is actually signed up through a different "solutions program" (whatever that means) and that in those cases, I get no referral bonus - he still gets some, but not as much.

Any ideas on how to threaten them to get my money?

DNA/HHGG Infocom Adventure - "Kate",

DNA/HHGG Infocom Adventure - "Kate", who I don't really know but sounds cool enough, egged me on about this one. You can go play Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by following this link.

Kate, did I get it right? You are cool, right? I hate to go out on a limb here.

aaah! I have too much

aaah! I have too much to do!

One of the things that

One of the things that I often notice is how stupid televised debates are. Whether it's Hardball or The O'Reilly Factor or even Donahue, whenever you get people that have opposing viewpoints, they don't ever actually discuss their differences - they just lie and attack each other with illogical arguments that make no sense. Well, most of the time, anyway.

While I never took debate, I imagine that a lot of these techniques are taught in debate class - whether to recognize them in your opponent (which is good) or to actually use them against your opponent (argh!). A class I did take a long time ago, however, was Logic and Reasoning in my freshman year of college. We talked about all sorts of argument fallacies like ad hominem attacks (where you attack the person rather than their ideas), the straw man, the slippery slope, and one of my real pet peeves, the argument by analogy.

There just aren't many analogy-arguments that hold water. However, they are insanely popular. But when I was talking about this to a friend, I couldn't think of an example. But today I saw Minority Report. Minor spoilers follow.

In the previews it is established that there is a PreCrime Division in Minority Report. They know a murder is about to occur, and they arrest the perpetrator before it happens. There's a critic and they have a discussion that goes something like this:

"You're arresting someone for a crime they didn't commit."

"But they were GOING to commit it."

"But it's a paradox, isn't it? You kept it from occuring, which means it didn't happen, which means the prediction was wrong."

So, one of the characters takes a fragile ball, and rolls it towards the character across a counter. As it rolls off the edge, the critic catches it.

"Why did you catch it?"

"Because it was going to hit the ground."

"But it didn't hit the ground. Do you see? The fact that you stopped it from hitting the ground doesn't change the fact that it was very definitely going to. And you know it was going to."

I watched that scene and it worked for me. It really did feel like a good analogy. Of course, I was distracted by the drama of the movie. But later on I realized it was a perfect example of an analogy fallacy.

ceterus paribus is a latin term that means "other things being equal." That's the requirement one has to meet to structure a logical argument by analogy. This argument with the fragile ball equated the ball's path with destiny - perhaps that is fine. But it also equated the fragile ball with a person. It forced us to accept that the ball had every element in common with a human. And it doesn't.

The key difference I'm driving at here is "choice". Assuming for the sake of argument that there is destiny and future paths - we do know that an object, a ball, has no ability to choose its path. But regardless of whether we believe a person's path is predetermined, we don't know it for certain. The person might be able to choose.

So the person is not the same as the ball. The analogy does not work, and the argument falls apart. It was a fallacy, a flawed argument.

I love those because they are like puzzles. They are also really hard to recognize sometimes. Keep an eye out for 'em. :)

I tried to be productive

I tried to be productive today, I really did!!!

All right, here's a game

All right, here's a game that is seen as a modern classic in the IF world. Again, it's relatively short and there is no need to "save". The main thing to keep in mind for this game is that you can "talk to ". It's called Photopia, again by Adam Cadre, and it is similar to Rameses in that it's really more of a story than a game, although it does have some puzzles.

Posted by Curt at 02:29 PM

Yesterday ended up being a

Yesterday ended up being a health day, of all things. I was hanging out with my friend Tamara, who is a nutrition expert even though we rarely talk about that. She needed to go to Target, and while there I found that cool $9.99 hand blender that is just this vertical thing you can put into drinking glasses to mix things up. Harmony had recommended it to me so I bought it. Then I remembered how to make shakes, so when we hit the grocery store I bought some bananas and strawberries (a rarity for me since I don't like fruit; usually too sweet for me), some soy milk, and some vanilla yogurt. Then I went home and tried it out and they are awesome!

So as the day wore on I started asking more nutrition questions and she reminded me of all sorts of things, and I also got some refrigerated ground (milled) flax seed to mix into the shakes, and I'm thinking of getting some protein powder also. I usually hate breakfast because there isn't time and it makes my stomach feel rotten, but I think I may have found the perfect breakfast for me. With fruit every day now. Very cool.

I also got a new set of dishes and a very small crock pot. I was thinking of making my own veggie filler and then being able to make pot pies for myself.

Just had a correspondence with

Just had a correspondence with someone who practically went crazy trying to complete one of the IF games below, pretty funny. But she finished it and seemed pretty happy about it, so I think I'll occasionally put others up as well! Any suggestions?

I've been watching the new

I've been watching the new Donahue show off and on this week. It really is pretty cool. There's an article over at Salon where the author is practically giggling about it, but it still is pretty cool. A couple of highlights:

Day One - Phil shows a clip of congressmen on the capitol steps reciting the pledge of allegiance and shouting "UNDER GOD!!!!!" when they got to that point. Just about everyone I know thinks that gesture was pretty firmly on the ridiculous side of the spectrum. But over on the hill, everyone Staunchly Defends it. Dictate your version of reality loudly enough and maybe others will believe it, I guess. Anyway, Phil had Pat Robertson on. After the clip was finished playing, Phil said, "Now Patrick... I mean, come on. I mean, COME ON!!!" He was blustering a bit but it was almost like he was trying to will himself through all the haze of the manufactured puffed-up-edness - he just basically leaped out there. Pat could easily have immediately started railing on Phil about his lack of Patriotism et cetera... and he certainly did pause... but then... he caved! He agreed that it was grandstanding. That was a breath of fresh air to me - not that it was so-called "liberal" thought being aired on national television, but that it was actually acknowledged and that Donahue was able to make it acknowledged.

Donahue also showed a demonstration put on by a group of Israelis and Palestinians together arranging a bunch of coffins on the streets in washington dc, draped by the israeli and palestinian flags. They weren't sectioned off, they were all mixed together. Phil made the point that it wasn't covered anywhere in the new york times.

And finally, he had a big feature devoted to The Patriot Act. The next day, tricky Phil brought a guy on the show who had been in jail for 30 years when the FBI knew he was innocent. He brought on a republican senator to apologize for it and agree that he deserved restitution from the state of MA. and that it was a travesty. And then Phil started to subtly refer to the dangers of not having a working system of due process, and the risk of it happened again, and the senator said, "Phil, I saw your show yesterday, so I know where you're going with this..." and in my mind instantly gave Phil's show even more credibility. In the context of this man's case he was forced to say that the patriot act DOES mean we are giving up some civil liberties (it's more often I've heard them just flat-out deny that), and he also defended the act by mentioning the fact that it had a sunset clause in it five years out - each time someone says that it makes it more difficult for them to support doing away with the sunset clause.

In other words, it's good that the show is airing. Maybe it'll help center things more over time.

This is one of those

This is one of those annoying weeks where I feel like I have just a complete ton of stuff to do, and the days go by, and I haven't done any of them, and I'm not billing any work, and it just feels like life is frozen. Except for the fact that I know I've actually done a lot. Sometimes are todo list items just require a lot of prep work I guess - this abstract nebulous stuff that you can't quite put your finger on, but that you have to do anyway. So I've done a lot this week, I just can't tell any of you what any of it was.

So, I bought these great

So, I bought these great towels. They are this rich royal blue, one of my favorite colors in the color spectrum because it's the only shade of blue that somehow manages to make itself look like a WARM color, and I love these towels. I knew that when you buy towels you really should wash them first, so I did. Well, I guess maybe you need to wash them more than once, because I just stepped out of the shower and dried myself off with these freshly washed beautiful blue towels, and now I am a little bit blue.

All right, I'm not going

All right, I'm not going to tell you where I got the link, except to say this excerpt was written by someone named Ali Davis:

One of my favorite concepts in anthropology is that of the polite fiction. It's something nobody believes, but we all pretend to because it makes life so much easier. My favorite example was of a Pygmy couple. Pygmy divorce involves quite literally breaking up the home: the couple tears apart their house (it's easy - the houses are made of leaves) and once it's down, the union is dissolved. One anthropologist was watching a long-married couple have a fight. It escalated until the wife threatened to leave, and the husband yelled something along the lines of "Fine!" and there was nothing the wife could do but start tearing down the house. She began tearing the roof off, clearly miserable. The husband looked wretched too, but at this point neither could back down without losing face and by now the whole village was watching. Finally, the husband called out the Pygmy equivalent of "You're right, honey! The roof is dirty! It'll look much better once we get those leaves washed!" The two of them started carrying leaves down to the river, soon with the help of the whole village, and then washed and rebuilt the whole roof. When the anthropologist later discreetly asked how often one washes the roof, everyone looked at him like he was a complete doofus.

I saw "Shallow Hal" last

I saw "Shallow Hal" last week. It was probably the worst Farrelly Brothers movie I've seen. A shame because I like Gwyneth Paltrow and I really like Jack Black. The previews made it look like a series of fat jokes, and then I read some reviews that said, "It might seem like a series of fat jokes, but really, it's actually quite sweet!" It turns out that what they meant is that the movie was somehow deserving of praise because it set up every single fat joke it could think of and didn't follow through to the most tasteless punchline in EVERY case. So basically the whole movie was setting itself up with reduced expectations and then looking good in comparison. It's the cinematic equivalent to the compliment, "Wow, for a fat girl, you sure don't sweat much!" If you haven't seen it yet, skip it.

Another short and sweet IF

Another short and sweet IF game I enjoyed was 9:05 by Adam Cadre. In any of these "You are in a room..." games, there's a complex relationship between player, narrator, and player-character. In most games you're pressured to believe you are taking on the part of the PC reliably, but sometimes things aren't as they seem...

Cool, it seemed to work!

Cool, it seemed to work! Although if you're running Mozilla, I think you need to go download the MRJ Plugin to make java applets work in your browser. Future Mozilla installations should have it bundled in by default.

I figure it should be

I figure it should be possible to do this on my blog. One of the things I get drawn to once in a while is interactive fiction games. Like the old Infocom games, Zork, Enchanter, Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, etc. There's a huge community of "IF" fans now, and of people that write new games. Every once in a while I download a new game to play it.

If you have a browser that can load a java applet, you should be able to do this. The applet is named ZPlet and runs any of the hundreds of text adventure game files out there. Here's a game that I downloaded recently that I kind of like. It's a good intro to the medium because this particular one is pretty linear and doesn't actually allow the player to do too much - it only fakes the interactivity, which is part of the point of the plot (having to do with choices and free will). There are other games that allow you to do all sorts of things. This game is called Rameses. Click in the applet and start typing to play.

I think the applet is a bit buggy so you might want to type "restart" at the first prompt just to make sure you got everything. After that, the commands are usually 'verb noun'. You can also "talk to ", and examine things.

Stupid headline #21923242: WorldCom executive

Stupid headline #21923242: WorldCom executive didn't want SEC probe - I mean, come on. Who would?

Golly, look at that -

Golly, look at that - the blog got ignored for a couple of days. I got sick this weekend... stupid cold... I'm moving my banking stuff to Fidelity from my current mish-mash of Wells Fargo and Etrade... and I'm trying to land a couple of new clients since business has slowed down a tad. Other than that, not much to tell! Well, there is a bit more random thoughts I have saved up, but I haven't had the chance to blog them yet...

I got an ipod to

I got an ipod to go with my ibook. I got it for a really good deal which is nice enough, but man that ipod makes me sooo happy! I have discovered more good artists through it already - since the guy I bought it off of left his music on it. Once I want to push my own music over I will have to reformat it which feels fair, but in the meantime I'm enjoying what's on there. I also had a different mp3 jukebox lent to me recently and I discovered more good music. Right now I'm listening to John Mayer, and I also like Jonatha Brooke and Train and Great Big Sea and SOME of Vanessa Carlton...

Salon.com Technology | The new

Salon.com Technology | The new gilded age and its discontents - See, this is the kind of thing that gets me interested about globalization and all the protests against it, against the IMF, against the World Bank, etc. I've just always felt that the ratio of loud opinions/protests to easily available information as to WHY we should protest has been a little bit (a lot) on the high side. What I know is that I really agreed with a speech that Clinton gave shortly after he left office, where he talked about both the problems and opportunities of increased global interdependence. And I like what this guy says, too.

Deep thought/reminder of the day:

Deep thought/reminder of the day: There is a difference between an impulse and a habit.

Team to hold Arthur Andersen

Team to hold Arthur Andersen night - This is hysterical. This is the minor league baseball team that I went to go see on July 3rd. Tickets are only five bucks! It's great fun. We liked it so much that my friend says she wants season tickets. :)

Had my first brush

Had my first brush with going over an hours estimate today. I first estimated (informally) 30 hours for this project, and then we had some extra coordination time, which made me want to say 45 hours, although she could only agree to 40. Then as I was going through the inherited code base I found lots of problems and told her that for an extra 20 hours that could be categorized in the separate "maintenance" agreement she has with her client, I could rework some things and make it work better. Well, she approved 10. So that was 50 total. So I worked hard and kept on finding bugs that were small in the previous version of the application but would have been big bugs in the stuff I was writing, so I kept fixing them. My part of the project is done now, before bugfixing, and I'm at 51 hours.

Looks like it's working out okay though - I kept her posted as I was going and it looks like the extra hours will be approved.

So a client of mine

So a client of mine lent me his Archos Jukebox 6000, and it's just full of songs. I'm finding a few artists that I just love. Cibo Mato (I know Pete, you liked them a long time ago), Aimee Mann, Shelby Lynne. Great stuff.

I fell in love

I fell in love with Bjork when I heard her song "Birthday" when she was with the sugarcubes. To me, it was obvious it was about child molestation. When I shared that with a friend, she freaked out at me and thought I was crazy, because she thought it just a happy idealistic song about a small girl's friendship with a man. Flowers, smoking cigars, etc.

Took her two years to agree with me... and then I shared my thoughts about that song with another friend today and he thought I was crazy too. There's something disturbing, I realize, about realizing one of your favorite songs is about something so dark. But I just did a google search and at least I found one other person who agrees with me.

A conversation between me

A conversation between me and my non-techie friend:

Me: See what I'm working on - I inherited this code where he is just storing all the incoming variables into a hash and then he dynamically loops through to create the sql statement using bind variables but since he's looping through the hash you don't actually see what columns were passed in, and it just so happens that some of the variables actually have to be adjusted but since I can't see what's going on than when it creates the bind variables and then loops through the hash again to populate the bind variables with the hash values sometimes the wrong values are binded to the question marks and sometimes they don't get binded at alll which means that the wrong values or no values at all get written to the database!

Her: Well, what you should DO is bind the bind variables to the time variables and then use the hash box to bind the variables to the fuel injection and the carburator, and...

Me: Wow, you sound reallly smart! What's a hash box?

Her: It's the box where you store your hash! And then you bind the fuel injector to the hash box and connect the superdrive to the zip disk and connect it to the firewire serial port midi thing, and then it's all solved!

I just realized something kind

I just realized something kind of funny - I was browsing through the ads on match.com, and I realized that if someone described themselves as "Christian" I went ahead and demoted them down, UNLESS they described themselves as Catholics as well. Then I get interested again. Don't even try to analyze why, I won't admit your conclusions if they were true.

I guess my sister is

I guess my sister is reading my blog again! I guess that means I should get interesting again! Um, um... um...

streamer and OpenDJ are two

streamer and OpenDJ are two sites that seem very cool to me. Peer-to-peer radio streaming; shared bandwidth. Cool.

I haven't given a

I haven't given a health report in a little while, so here we are, up to date.

Actually, this really only has my income up to date, not my expenses. I haven't put in the iBook's expenses, nor the reduced health insurance expenses, which about average out. So next time the blue line might be a bit different. I'm trying my damndest to keep that first blue line below that black grid line (which is a big psychological barrier), but I might be going over it anyway.

Basically, the move socked me this month - the move was week 21, and then I just sort of sulked the next couple of weeks. Last week was solid, though, and this week should be busier still. And I also renegotiated my rates with the client that had been paying me the least, so hopefully this will all make a significant difference in my yellow line.

One interesting side effect of the graphs is that you can kind of tell what my year's projections are by the height of the graphs. Right now I'm still projected to turn a profit, albeit a slight one. I won't really be saving a lot for retirement this year (which doubly sucks since I've lost quite a bit of my retirement savings already...)