Last weekend, my dad didn't need the car, so I borrowed it to visit Charlie. He had to go home first, which meant quite a lot of driving, but I didn't really mind, although I am starting to see why people object so much to driving a lot, or at least one possible reason they might, and also why they speed. Although I don't mind driving that much, it is very hard to do much else at the same time except listen to music, meaning it's largely wasted time. And I did the math - speeding by 10 miles per hour or so really does save a very significant amount of time off a drive of an hour or two, especially when such drives are done on a regular basis. Of course, I don't know if this is much of a time-waster in the grand scheme of things. I'm always amazed when I think about just how much time I waste.
At Charlie's I watched The Negotiator, which was a very good movie. I showed him the first 5 episodes of Excel Saga from the DVD I had recently received, and left the rest on his hard drive, along with all of Cowboy Bebop (which I still haven't started myself). I was able to do this because I had brought Laura, along with tons of other stuff - I didn't think it was worth unpacking in Catskill, given the amount of time it would have added, and he happened to have an extra monitor, so it worked out nicely. Other than that we drank a lot of Diet Mountain Dew, I slept quite a bit (all the time Charlie was asleep, which was about six hours a night, plus while he was at work on Saturday). We had an interesting "philosophical" / psychological discussion outdoors on his porch for several hours at night - it was kind of cold, but I found it quite comfortable until my toes started to freeze. We also watched the Fox Sunday night shows that I had recorded the previous week. When I went home, I managed to forget my CD case (it was almost inevitable I would forget something, since I had so much stuff with me).
Monday nothing really happened. I was planning to go to Connecticut for New Years, but Ken (who was going to be driving his family as well as me) came down with a cold (likely the same one that's been making the rounds), so they didn't go. So on Tuesday I decided to go to Saratoga First Night. It was okay, and the fireworks were nice. I wish I had realized that Charlie was home, though (I assumed he wouldn't be), since we were parked literally two blocks from where he lives. I sort of thought about how this could be a sign that I should get a cell phone, but if I am going to get one then I want to use it, and I'm still not sure I would... and they're not that cheap. I can't remember what I did New Year's Day at all. I must have done something... I suppose this is reminding me why I should make more frequent entries. I did talk to Charlie on the phone for a bit. Thursday and Friday were again mostly dead days, although I think I started watching more Excel Saga Friday evening.
Today I finished Excel Saga. The last few episodes were very odd--for episodes of Excel Saga, that is--except for the very last one, which was actually more of a return to "normalcy" in the insane world of Excel, and extremely funny as well. I liked the series a lot, and I'm sad not to have any more episodes to watch. This is going to quickly veer off into a different entry, so I'll stop now, and write that later if I feel like it.
Well, I guess I'll get a few journal-type things out of the way before going on my rant, if I do so. This morning, I went to breakfast at the Mayflower with my dad. Later, I went out shopping. First I went to Price Chopper, where the parking situation was atrocious, but I managed. Then I went to Radio Shack to buy an adaptor so that I could plug my VCR's sound into Laura, but I saw a wireless adaptor (with an integrated 4-port 10/100 switch) for $50. Apparently it was on clearance, since the model was discontinued and Radio Shack is now stocking a Microsoft 802.11b access point (scary thought, that - I wouldn't buy one of their networking products even if it were the only thing available, due to fear of incompatibility). Unable to resist the impulse buy, I purchased it. I'm now typing on Robert, ssh'd into Laura from in front of the TV in my grandparents house (King of the Hill is on now) with an SSID of "NILMOP".
I've also discovered (to my slight chagrin) that I sort of like watching football. I watched a bit of two games today, first Pittsburgh and Cleveland and then San Francisco and the Giants. They were both exciting come-from-behind victories, first for the Steelers and then SF. I mean, I'm probably not going to make a habit of it or anything, but perhaps when the games run over into Fox's Sunday night schedule (as they seem to do so often) I'll actually watch instead of merely waiting for them to end.
Well, I suppose I'll start my rant. It feels like over the vacation, my mind has had so little external stimulus that it's looped in upon itself, producing some thoughts which are interesting but ultimately not very fruitful. I watch my anime, I read webpages, I kill time in hundreds of different ways. I feel terribly lonely at times, but I'm starting to fully realize that my usage of the term "lonely" is much different than the way most people use it. Specifically, my "loneliness" often isn't alleviated by the presence of other people (in fact, they often cause or aggravate it). The obvious suggestion is that if I were going out with someone, I wouldn't feel it when I was with her. My experience with that type of situation is too little to really be sure - the one relationship I've been in involved so little face-to-face time that I don't really have any basis.
One thought among many has started to occupy some of my thought. This paragraph may make me sound a little odd - it's nothing bad, but... something that I've wanted for a long time is to live forever, or at least much, much longer than most humans do. Originally it was sort of a combined desire and belief that it would happen one way or another with not much basis. When I learned about nanotechnology, it seemed that the obvious way for things to happen would be for my brain cells to be gradually replaced by nanites (or even just new brain cells). Since I had the idea, I've thought of this as a way that would actually preserve my identity. (My definition of my personal identity is very complex and hard to codify - unfortunately, I think it may fall into the "I know it when I see it" category.)
However, lately I've been thinking that it's probably best to attempt to externalize as much about myself as possible - specifically, to get it onto computers, since they're by far the most capable information-manipulating device of which I know with the possible exception of human brains. This poses several problems. First, currently it's almost certainly impossible for me to create an "active" version of myself - or frankly, anything intelligent enough with which it would be worth my bothering to have a conversation. In fact, I somewhat doubt that current computers even have the raw resources to accomplish that. But if I go for a "passive" representation (such as this website, which is probably as close as I've come so far to achieving this task), then I'm faced with the almost insurmountable task of sorting the information, since it won't sort itself. Imposing a rigid hierarchy on this quantity of information is nearly impossible. Even manual tagging probably wouldn't be good enough. What I'd really need - at a minimum - is something that can take a tidbit of information (about a paragraph at a time, more or less) - and automatically categorize and file it. I'm not totally sure whether this is beyond the hardware capability of current computers. I am sure that I've never yet seen a piece of software that's up to the task (all the "mind-mapping" tools I've looked at screenshots for and read documentation about have kind of sucked) and that I don't know exactly how to go about writing it.
An idea occurs to me - something along the lines of a Wiki might be just capable enough to work, for now. I'm sure it would need enough customization that it'd probably be easier and better to just do it myself. It seems like all of these things should be simple, but the devil is in the details, I'm afraid.
Damn, it's way too easy to avoid writing these things. What did I do at home? Can't remember very well... Tuesday I stayed at my mom's house. I worked up until Thursday, then went to Charlie's Thursday evening, and stayed there until Friday. We talked about a bunch of stuff, most interestingly a hare-brained scheme of mine which I probably won't implement and don't want to explain here. On Friday I wasn't terribly lucid since I was functioning largely based on caffeine rather than sleep. I think at the moment I may have gotten myself mildly addicted to caffeine. I've been drinking too much Mountain Dew (at Charlie's) and coffee, strangely enough, elsewhere, and earlier this night found myself ridiculously tired until Mark went and got me an Amp. Of course, I could have just gone to bed then, but I really didn't feel like it...
Friday evening I went back to my dad's house, stopping for about an hour at my mom's. She got me this cool candy that looks like amber and has an actual cricket and a larva in it; I doubt I'm going to eat it, but it looks neat. On Saturday I intended to leave by 11:00 at the latest, but slept too late (and was still really tired when I got up), so we didn't end up leaving until noon, but got in at just about 9:00, despite going on a 20-mile detour at one point by accident. I drove the last 320 or so miles, including into Pittsburgh for the first time. Sunday morning my dad and I went grocery shopping, then to Panera.
Today (well, yesterday I guess; Monday in any case) was my first day of classes. All my classes that have met so far (that's all of the ones I'm enrolled in except Networks) seem okay, but I'm kind of worried this semester may turn out to be a lot of work when I really don't feel like it. Oh well. It doesn't look like I'm going to get into Prof. Covey's class since I'm 17th on the waitlist and the course only has 20 slots total or something, although I suppose it isn't totally impossible. That's too bad; I should have realized I'd want to take it on my actual OLR day, when I probably could have easily gotten in. Having a class with Ed (and afer which both of us have an hour free) is cool, as is the tiny excerpt of my (admittedly potentially very offensive) story that Ed printed in Pravda?. I wish he'd printed the whole thing; I'll have to try harder next time, or something. The KGB meeting was good. Ed came over afterwards and I showed him the first episode of Excel Saga, after which we discussed the scheme mentioned above. Oh yeah, Mitch is back! I ran into him on the way to Databases, to which he was also going. I didn't think he'd be back until after I had graduated. Also, James is living with Mark now, and Jeff visited today. Ten people (including me) played Taboo. I was okay at guessing, but pretty poor at getting other people to guess.
Sheesh, I lose so much by waiting a week to write this stuff (of course, writing it when tired probably doesn't help either). I wonder how much of it was garbage and how much I'd actually care about later.
OMFG OMFG I can't believe I'm actually doing this.
Okay, I'm not really spazzing out right at this particular moment, but I've felt like doing so enough times recently that it's worth acting like it just for a bit. Umm, let me vaguely try to go in chronological order. Classes are good. Ed and I have an hour after Linear Algebra during which neither of us have class, which is very cool; I both need and want to draw on his time quite a bit this semester.
Actually, classes are good in and of themselves, but they eat my time. It looks like programming is going to eat a lot of my time later this semester, which could be very bad. I couldn't get into Preston Covey's class this time since I stupidly failed to realize I should sign up for it until much after my OLR time. God, I wish I could study for another year at CMU. On the other hand, I had enough credits to graduate a semester early. Now probably is the right time to get out, I just really really don't want to deal with finding a job. Actually, I don't want to deal with anything "important". I want an infinite amount of "leisure" time in which to think and make progress. (Hey, as long as I'm being extravagant, I might as well be stupidly extravagant, right?)
Big decision. Part of me wants to hide it. Fight that part, no point, only your parents would care, although of course they're in the small group who reads my site... fine. On Friday I made the decision to invite Thomas here to CMU, to stay with me, to offer to pay for his bus ticket and food. It wasn't hard to get in touch with him as I had feared it might be (he was relatively soon on AIM) and it wasn't hard to get him to accept. And both Ed and Charlie, with whom I had earlier discussed it, had started out negative on the idea but changed their minds by the end of the discussion. He leaves tomorrow 9:45pm from Atlanta, arrives in Pittsburgh 3:00pm Wednesday. Should I go back through this paragraph and fix the grammar? I'm leaning towards "no".
He had the (I admit, very bright, and I'm almost ashamed it didn't even occur to me) idea to email Laura giving her a head's-up, and she had a very unexpected reaction: she was totally mature and sane about the whole thing. As Ed said in his Livejournal (although not referring to the particular people), he (and I) should have given both of them more credit. Thomas was definitely a little freaked out when he realized Laura went where I was (earlier, he read "CMU" and thought "UPenn"), and he did go out and buy a digital video camera (which he's been considering for a while).
Thomas now thinks I'm somewhat paranoid, which is possibly true, although I also think he's somewhat incautious. We've been talking a lot over the past few days.
Last night I watched There's Something About Mary since Fox had it on instead of their normal Sunday lineup. Decent movie.
Today I hung out with Ed for around 9 straight hours, including the KGB meeting. Laura didn't show up there, which was disappointing, but the meeting was very amusing anyway. Ed received a corset and was modeling it for everyone when Dr. Vogel popped his head in the door (being an honorary member and all), which I think was probably the high point. We didn't actually end up doing any Linear at all, I guess largely because Ed has already done most of it. Heh. I remember back when I used to have at least a little bit of a work ethic... although not for long. And even Ed is lazy a lot of the time... it seems like all the smartest people I meet are also lazy. I showed him a few new episodes of Futurama, we talked, we ate two meals together, I had him watch Thomas' video journal entry, etc.
I have to put myself into Thomas' world, or perhaps more accurately into his head. I have to retain enough of myself to function in my own life.
Favorite song du jour is definitely Futari no Gomen ne by the Excel Girls, since I discovered it a few hours ago. Extremely fast happy song. LJ's idea of "current music" is a good one. I really should have some software to manage my journal instead of doing it nearly 100% by hand.
This is way way way way way too cool. This may be the coolest thing I've ever done.
Thomas is here. He's currently taking a nap on my floor. He arrived fine (although a teeny bit later than I expected). My parents both kind of freaked out over my last journal entry, but I was able to get my father to understand, at least to some extent. Thomas' parents and Thomas himself also think the whole situation is "weird", and in particular, Thomas doesn't see what I gain out of it. I find it difficult to articulate that myself, but I don't really doubt it, anyway.
Thomas met me in the University Center, where I introduced him to Ed, and then we went back to my room. For the first day or so he seemed very uncomfortable, because (in his words, more or less) the circumstances were reminding him too much of the fact that he's a bum. He seems to have leveled out a bit, although I wonder if Laura's latest LiveJournal entry (in which she makes the announcement that she's decided not to see him after all) won't have a negative effect on him again. He just woke up while I was writing this and read it.
The fact that I hadn't really planned many activities has also been a bad thing. We watched One Hour Photo together (which we both decided wasn't that great), he tried to watch an episode of Excel Saga but couldn't make out what they were saying, he watched The Count of Monte Cristo, and I watched a new episode of Futurama I'd downloaded which I'd never seen before, and he seemed to like it, so he started going through those. There's definitely plenty of media here to keep him occupied, which I feel is at least marginally productive - more so than doing nothing at all, in any case.
Thomas followed me to class yesterday and today, and in fact, we haven't been away from each other for more than a few minutes since he arrived (this partially necessitated by the fact that I have only one keycard, partly by the desire to have some sort of a plan). Thomas and I made a pact to each write a short story of about 35 pages, for which I have a concept, but an event listing is due tomorrow; I hope I'll be able to finish it. I also suspect that Thomas either doesn't think the pact is in effect yet or at the least hasn't actually started writing yet, perhaps not even thinking about it.
Thomas showed me how to play Hold 'Em. We played with penny increments and then with nickel increments when it became apparent that there weren't enough pennies. It's a fun game. I started out excessively cautious and he took huge advantage of that, but then I became much more bold and he didn't adapt very quickly to that. Towards the end he tightened up a bit, so he was winning the last few hands, but I didn't want to play for too long. We played for pennies first, then nickels, no betting limit.
I'm writing these things sort of as they come to me, not in chronological order. Just thought I should mention that.
Last night I was reading through Thomas' list of things to do and saw "play piano" on it, so I asked if he wanted to play piano, saying that there was one downstairs if so. He did, and we went down for maybe half an hour or so. Afterwards I asked him how long he thought it would take to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata flawlessly from beginning to end, but he said he didn't know.
Thomas makes skepticism into an art. He questions just about everything I say. This can sometimes be mildly frustrating, especially when it seems like he's doing it just to be cooler than the person he's questioning. It certainly does make me carefully think through what I'm going to say, though.
He's been working on his next video journal entry, taking footage for it and so on. He wants one of the Asian girls who live next door to help him out with a couple of shots (basically designed to make him look pathetic, as are many of the other shots; a large part of his goal this entry seems to be to make people pity him), but as he says, it'd likely be a million years before he'd actually ask. I can't imagine how Thomas has had sex with as many girls as he has. He seems painfully shy, quite possibly even more shy than I am.
My father called to see how things were going, and I had him talk to Thomas for a minute - that is, I offered, and since it would have been even more rude of my father to refuse when I asked then to accept, he did. I did it to break some of the tension I think the whole situation has created; I didn't think Thomas would care very much, and I figured my father would be slightly more at ease overall.
On Thursday Thomas and I went to the grocery store. He was wondering whether he was getting too much food given that he might not be here for that long. I think he assumed that my desire to have him here would quite quickly change into annoyance at his presence, and in that I think he was mistaken, although I suppose only time will tell.
I think that Thomas, and probably a lot of other people as well, misinterpreted my previous entry to mean that I thought Thomas' visit would be like a continuous orgasm or something. Come on, get real, people. The effects of this are much subtler and more spread-out than that. But I wouldn't say I'm disappointed at all. I think things are moving along just fine, and I don't see anything stopping that at this point except Thomas deciding he doesn't like the environment here and wants to leave, which I hope he doesn't do.
The gain in traffic to my site since Thomas linked to me has been huge. It's really made me wonder. Of a lot of people who read his journal entry (Thomas let me look at his webserver logs), I think more than half went to this page, and almost half of those went on to at least one other page on the site. I've acquired a few more visitors I can identify; Ed and Laura have both checked my site several times since then (although certainly not because of it).
There are also some people who I appear to have acquired as regulars at least temporarily who I can't identify: a few at GATech and a few I know almost nothing about at all. True, some people just don't check Thomas' website every few hours and are still following the link to my site from there, but a fair number of the visitors I'm getting now don't have referers from Thomas' site, which most likely means they're going straight to this one.
What this makes me wonder is this: did these people check out other journal entries and/or other parts of this site and decide I was an interesting person, worth reading about, or are they only reading this text right now because Thomas is here and they want to follow what he's up to? I know that this website isn't very good, but still my ego wants to hear that people really want to read about me. So, I'm implementing a very rudimentary "survey" to let you tell me. Below you'll find three links. The webpages they point to aren't very interesting, but nevertheless, please click on the one that describes you. This won't reveal any information about you you haven't already given to my webserver, and I'd appreciate it.
Of course, you're more than welcome to send me email about your reasons for reading my site, and I'd even prefer that you do so, if you feel like making the effort. I just made the above links to give you a very easy way to give me some information which interests me, without telling me who you are if you don't wish to do so.
On Saturday evening was the floor poker game. Thomas lost all $10 he put into poker chips. I put in $5 and cashed out with $4 after a couple of hours. I almost went broke once, then won big a couple of times and had over $10, then frittered it away for most of the rest of the game. We always play 5 card draw when there are a bunch of people.
After that I actually told him about the cigars I had bought (I had been being a wuss about it previously) and he initially thought it was a bad idea, but then changed his mind, but wanted to make it special, so we went up on the roof (which is considered a Bad Thing by the Powers That Be, apparently). Thomas didn't really like the cigar that much, but I did. He was still glad he came 'cause being on the roof was kinda cool. We talked about consciousness and stuff and I think he was convinced my ideas were fuzzy, but it was really more of an "attempt-to-make-the-other-guy-look-bad" argument than a "prove-the-other-guy-wrong" one, and I think at the end I won, cause he was still depressed.
Then when we went down to try to get back in we were stuck outside for a few minutes since the window through which we'd gone out had been closed and we couldn't really open it from there. We ended up having to wait until James opened it. He was pissed because I had left the window slightly open and Mark, who'd been sleeping next to it, had gotten very cold and moved to the quad, but I overestimated how pissed he was. I wrote him a note and taped it to his door (since he had disappeared for a few minutes) saying I was really sorry, but he tore it down when he came back and said that since we'd been friends for 4 years it was no big deal.
On Sunday, I woke up from a dream in which Ed was pissed at me for taking too much time away from his studies, and a bunch of other people including Mitch were also pissed at me, I think for similar reasons although in a more indirect way. First Ed told me about it, then Mitch and some other guys tried to "get me" (don't remember exactly how). Fortunately I realized after waking up that Ed is good at juggling his time and doesn't really have that problem, and the other shit was just whack.
I still had cigar taste in my mouth, and I kind of liked it. The guy was right, the $4.50 ones were worth it, even if the light on mine went out before it was totally done and I couldn't get it to light again.
All the above was written in ICQ messages, but has been edited for grammar and so forth. And now for something not completely different:
I'm going to try writing on PDA (the transitional name for my PDA until I come up with a real one) to see if it's too annoying to tolerate, although I think I'll add in the HTML tags later. Yesterday I was somewhat disturbed by the possibility that Thomas would go to the KGB meeting and spent quite a bit of time worrying about that, but he decided not to go, although he later declared that that decision had been a mistake. The meeting was enjoyable enough, and although Laura seemed somewhat displeased, I managed to get a pretty good picture of her.
After the meeting Ed came back to my room with me, and we picked up Thomas, heading to a part of CFA that apparently isn't used for much any more. Exploring it was quite an experience, and as Thomas commented, it would be a great place to lose one's virginity. It was very psychadelic, wandering around looking at areas that seemed so disused, wondering when someone had last set foot there (never mind that it was probably fairly recently).
After that we went to the steam tunnels, for my and Thomas' although very apparently not Ed's first time. We explored pretty much everywhere the main tunnel went. Ed thought it would be cool to go in the one that goes under the UC as well, but he didn't have a key to the Scotch and Soda thingie. We eventually ended up getting in anyway by climbing on top of a door. An area under the UC was humorously marked "lock this area, there are things in here which need to be locked'' - humorously because, although it was locked, there was such a huge space between the door and its frame (both made of chain link fence) that we were easily able to fit through. There was also a neat set of windows which look into the pool. That was about it for the night; after that we went back to my room and I acted pissy towards Charlie for a while.
Okay, back on Laura now, where I'm piecing all of this together. Today Thomas went to Laura's intro psych. class. He wouldn't have even seen her if the teacher hadn't said her name out loud in response to a question she asked after class. The experience apparently induced a fairly high level of gut-level anxiety in him, but he says it didn't make him happy. I really think things would have been much better for both of them if Laura hadn't backed out of meeting with Thomas, and Ed tried to convince her of this as well, but apparently all of her other friends are opposed to the idea. People are so imperfectly rational. But I don't take that as an excuse. I strive to be as fully rational as I can.
This evening I played Magic some at Thomas' suggestion (I still have some of my cards left, and fortunately had them with me at CMU). It's still a fun game, and it irritates me how everyone around me stopped playing it. Oh well. I somehow managed to get my Linear Algebra homework done (now I just have to be sure to get to class to turn it in). Thomas went downstairs and played piano a bit more, and I joined him while writing the bits of this entry I wrote on PDA.
I think I make another entry to cover a different topic.
Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Wed Jan 29 15:33:30 2003