I've been working on cleaning up my website. I realized my mistake in applying my stylesheet, so it should now work in browsers other than Konqueror (thus, if you're using a recent browser, the date headings should be in blue and the times in red). I also updated the page about Robert, and separated the info about his predecessors onto separate pages.
I restarted Final Fantasy X. Like Final Fantasy IX, I suspect that it will take a tiny bit of an act of will to get through it, but I also think that it will be worth it. Between that and the episodes of Six Feet Under and Family Guy that I've been downloading, most of my free time has been used up. Indeed, I probably haven't been getting as much sleep as I should.
Now, a brief digression into politics. I know I don't usually cover such issues in my journal, but bear with me. I've noticed a disturbing analogy between the actions of the RIAA in regards to the filesharing "problem" and those of the US government in regards to Iraq. Specifically, in both cases the "attacker" has some sort of moral rationale (that the artists are being hurt by widespread piracy or that Saddam was a brutal dictator from whom the Iraqi people needed to be freed, respectively). Those moral arguments may or may not be valid, and may or may not convince people. What I find worth mentioning is that these moral arguments are irrelevant to the actual goals of the "attacking" organizations. The RIAA wants money out of those who listen to music, and doesn't particularly care how they get it or who they hurt in the process. Similary, the US government wants oil for the US economy, and doesn't particularly care whether the Iraqi people are benefitted by our intervention there.
I guess this is an argument against democracy. The people will inevitably be vulnerable to being misled by this kind of argument, at least assuming that they don't change drastically. Thus, they can't be trusted with this kind of decision. Of course, we could put the blame at numerous other points in the system; if any one of them failed, then these problems woul not arise. But frankly, I think the ultimate source of this type of problem is the reliance on public opinion in a world where people are anything but well-informed on the major issues that affect them.
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I wish that alcohol negated some (not all, but some) of the meta neurons, while leaving the others intact. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Meta is a function, not assigned to some specific neurons, but somehow distributed among the whole set, and alcohol works to dull all neurons equally. Thus, my tendency towards obsessive thought is undiminished by alcohol.
This post brought to you by the Power of Intoxication™.
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I spent most of Friday, the 4th of July, watching downloaded TV shows. In the evening, I drove up to my mom's house for dinner, and saw Teri, Carlos, Nicholas and Stephanie again for a while (they were stopping at my mom's house again in preparation to return to North Carolina). I didn't do anything patriotic—not even watch fireworks.
I was prepared for the rest of the weekend to be very boring, but at some point on Saturday either I called Charlie or he called me, and I decided to go visit him. Saturday evening I learned the definition of the term "drunk" first-hand. I had the following drinks (not necessarily in this order):
I only had half of the Long Island Iced Tea because at that point, I wasn't sure I would be able to finish it - I wasn't nauseous at all at any point, but I thought I might pass out. It was definitely enough for me to learn the difference between “drunk” and “buzzed”, though, and I didn't find being drunk to be an especially pleasant state, although being heavily buzzed could be.
The effects of alcohol are sort of similar to those of low blood sugar, although without the loss of energy (this is kind of hard to explain to anyone who's never had low blood sugar himself). It makes the mental distance between thinking of saying something and saying it smaller—ordinarily I think over the things I'm going to say quite a few times before saying them, but with alcohol sometimes I'll just say them. It doesn't really make me say anything out of character, though. It makes me attend even more to my own mind, mostly because I'm unable to drink in an unaware manner—the very fact that I'm drinking makes me notice the workings of my mind and overcompensate for any tendency to make decisions I might later regret. The biggest effect seems to be time dilation—the world seems to run faster relative to my mind the more I've had, and it seems to me that drunkenness is an extreme case of this in which things are going so much faster than I can think of them that I can't really respond very effectively.
This particular time, Charlie and I were arguing over whether it was possible for a person to perceive so much data at once that it would interfere in the mind and actually make one's total processing ability lower than doing only one thing at once. I was arguing the pro and Charlie the con. However, this particular argument isn't interesting in and of itself so much as it illustrates a pattern we have when arguing. Charlie will say that he doesn't understand what I'm saying (if he's being polite; if not, he'll say I'm talking nonsense) and eventually tire of arguing, still not having understood my point. In this particular case, it kept bothering me, so I worked to reformulate it in a way that he could understand, and eventually we got to the specific difference in axioms that was leading to the disagreement. However, often these arguments have no such resolution. I think this must irritate Charlie less than it does me (since I extremely rarely cut off an argument without each side seeing the other's point unless I think the person with whom I'm arguing is a complete fool and will never understand what I'm saying). In any case, people who refuse to talk to me or refuse to talk to me about a particular issue often greatly irritate me. It's probably happened more with my parents than with anyone else. I find this extremely frustrating because in my experience, I'm nearly always able to see eye-to-eye with someone eventually, but cutting off the discussion forecloses any possibility of gains on either of our sides.
At some point during or temporally near the argument, Charlie slipped and fell. He was okay, but his laptop wouldn't turn on. He had been thinking about returning it anyway due to a number of issues, and this acted as the catalyst. I offered to come up some weeknight that week with my laptop to desktop hard drive adaptor so that he could recover some data off of it before sending it in (I've found that OEMs are notorious for wiping your hard drive regardless of the actual source of your problems).
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It turned out that my sister wanted to use my car on Tuesday, and that my father was doing something Wednesday evening (meaning if I didn't want to wait around for him, I'd have to have my car with me), so Tuesday evening was the perfect time to visit Charlie. So that's what I did. All of Charlie's IDE cables have a blocked pin (this is supposed to be so that you can't insert the cable the wrong way), which was a problem because the adaptor didn't have any pins missing (obviously the key pin had to be dead, but it was physically present—probably cheaper to make that way). I told Charlie he could cut the pin off, but only if he was willing to pay for another adaptor if it ended up being the wrong pin. Well, it did, but the pin diagram I found online said that the pin he had cut off had no signal either, so I told him to cut the right one off.
When he hooked it up, though, his computer still couldn't recognize the hard drive. I took a look at it, compared it with the diagram, and noticed that it looked like the IDE cable was upside-down relative to the power cable. So I asked Charlie if he had already resigned himself to the possibility that he might have to buy another adaptor. When he said yes, I cut off yet another pin (this being the actual key pin), hooked it up correctly, and lo and behold—it worked. I guess we just got really lucky that neither of the erroneously clipped pins were essential.
At some point in the evening, I started talking to Laura. I kept talking with her until 3 in the morning. It was a very familiar pattern to me—always being the subservient “I don't care if you're dividing your attention even if I'm not” type of person sort of like I tried to be with Alison. The reason this disturbs me somewhat isn't that it's a lie; it's that I think it's true. Why am I always so subservient, even slave-like towards people? Even when dealing with those who would in almost anyone's eyes be considered my inferiors in social status, still my modus operandi is to cater to their every wish. I'm inclined to be terribly nice to people, and while this is probably an advantage in a lot of situations, it leaves me feeling like I'm almost worthless, which in turn perpetuates the situation.
I asked Charlie whether he thought I would be better served by being less subservient some time within the past week, and he said yes. I suppose I didn't even really need to ask to know what his answer would be.
But this has turned into a rant, and although I'm actually not complaining, merely trying to understand myself, I know that people who read this may not believe that at a subconscious level. People have an incredible ability to draw connotations out of things, but with this comes an inability to explain to them that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And Laura, if you're reading this, it actually doesn't have all that much to do with our conversation—that was just the starting point for a series of thoughts relating to issues I've had for a long time.
Anyway, since I went to bed so late and still had to get up for work in the morning, I only got roughly 3 hours of sleep that night. On the drive to work, mostly on the Northway, I had a miniature epiphany. I was trying to go as fast as I safely could, as were a number of people around me, and it occurred to me that no one, or almost no one, is deliberately being an asshole when driving. Well, on the Thruway some people are, but on the Northway, almost no one will follow too too close when they see that there's nowhere for you to go. They're really just trying to cut a few wasted minutes out of their days, and that's all.
Probably due in part to my tiredness, I made a mistake in the morning after sitting down with my cup of coffee and my muffin. I should have taken roughly 4 or 5 units of insulin to keep my blood sugar from getting too high, but my mind was in autopilot and I took 24 units instead. I noticed that I had done this only a few seconds later. At first I thought that it had probably been long-acting rather than short-acting insulin, since the reason I would have taken exactly 24 units is that that's my bedtime dose of Lantus. So I was prepared for my blood sugar to keep going down over the next 12 hours or so, and expected to skip a few shots of fast-acting insulin to make up for it.
However, I'm pretty sure now that it was actually fast-acting insulin (which starts working within half an hour and is almost totally gone in three). Because of this further mistake, it was probably half an hour later when I thought to test my blood sugar and got 37. (100 is normal; under 80 or so is starting to get low, and in the first couple of months after I got diabetes my blood sugar went into the 20s a couple of times.) I knew that because of the massive amount of insulin I had taken, combined with its speed, I could be in serious trouble. I immediately stood up and took the elevator down to the cafeteria, where I purchased two Mountain Dews and an iced tea. I brought them back to my desk and started drinking, going quickly but not too quickly and checking my blood sugar every 15 to 30 minutes.
Later I wondered whether I might have done the same thing (insulin overdose, or perhaps a double dose) before and not noticed those times. There have been times when my blood sugar seemed to just keep going down for no discernable reason, and regardless of my treating it, it was low again when I tested a few hours later. It's kind of disturbing to think that I could do such things.
Anyway, by the end of the day I had had a 16-ounce cup of coffee, 2 Mountain Dews, and a Code Red, which is quite a bit more caffeine than I get in a typical day. I didn't notice any extreme effects, though, just the usual slight jitteriness and so forth. Probably my lack of sleep made it less effective, although I've observed in the past that lack of sleep + caffeine doesn't feel the same at all as sleep + lack of caffeine.
I've found that many things are addictive, in the sense that when one is accustomed to them, one feels bad when one doesn't have them and requires large amounts of them to produce a noticable effect. This applies not only to drugs, but also to such things as sleep and food. Hence, it may not be altogether surprising that sex (or rather, the experience of an orgasm) would follow the same pattern.
However, let's assume for the moment that this is not the explanation, and try to see what other reason there might be for this particular pattern (which I can now assure you from personal experience does indeed exist). I think this could still be said to make sense. If you're in a period in which you can get sex, it makes sense that you would want to do so as much as possible (and for males, with as many different partners as possible—but that's a separate argument…), but if not, it would make no sense to be constantly thinking about sex. Better to worry about survival and hope for a chance to reproduce later.
Of course, the problem with evolutionary explanations like these is that they can be used to explain almost anything…
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Ug. I feel awful.
At one side of me is an issue which I don't and likely can't understand. It doesn't concern me at all, and I can't do anything about it, nor even gather information about it very effectively, but I can't stop thinking about it.
At the other is an issue in which no decision I can make is right. Anything I do will make me feel terrible for one reason or another, and there is no right answer. I've tried to push this issue under the rug, but I can't stop thinking about it either.
Then, of course, there are all of the “smaller” issues I ought to be thinking about—“smaller” in quotes because those are the things that are more likely to actually affect my life, but how much do I think about them? Barely at all.
I'm almost always jittery and mildly sleep-deprived. Don't misunderstand me and think that all of my complaints are psychological. They are probably in near-equal part physiological, the two sides playing into each other in a cycle out of which I don't know how to break.
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I will love you 'til the day that I die
Or when the stars fall from the sky
Or when the oceans all run dry
I know that the feeling won't subsideAnd in the morning when you wake
I will worship every step that you may take
Even though you make me cry
I will love you 'til the day that I die
'Til the Day, Blaze!
Friday, July 11, was Revco and Clyde's birthday. I went to the grocery store and bought them wet food (which they never normally get these days). I love my cats.
Other than that, I bought a bottle of Tanqueray gin and a small bottle of vermouth, and almost did something (unrelated) mildly foolish. Later I called Charlie. I was feeling trapped at home, and so even though it was about 21:00 when I called, I drove up to his house after I hung up. I love the feeling of driving a little fast, usually with some of the windows open, with some good driving music—Evanescence or the Matrix Reloaded score or Happy 2b Hardcore—pumped way up. It's so relaxing, as if it enables me to turn off certain parts of my mind in a way that few other things do.
While there, I was sitting on the couch holding my bottle of gin, and when I asked some question I no longer remember about martinis, Charlie asked if I wanted one. I did. I think that was all the alcohol I had that evening, though; at any rate, I didn't let myself get drunk.
On Monday my 4 weeks of not masturbating was up. Due to a comment Ed made slightly earlier in which he expressed worry that I might become psychologically dependent on drinking, I decided to start 4 weeks of not drinking on that same day. So far it hasn't been nearly as difficult, and I expect that it will probably stay that way; I wasn't actually psychologically dependent on alcohol, I think, although it may well be a legitimate concern that it could happen some day.
As you'll notice if you scroll to the bottom of this page (assuming you're viewing this through default.html), I improved my script so that it dynamically displays the last month's worth of entries, rather than displaying them statically. What this means is that before, it it were, say, July 19, it would show all the posts from July. Now, it would show all the posts from July plus all the ones in June on or after the 19th. This should also mean that as long as I make at least one entry per month, you should never see a blank page when visiting default.html. Hopefully the new system will be both less potentially confusing and more useful.
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The TMBG concert was awesome. Charlie met me at my mom's, and I drove us there. I hated the opening act when he started, but he sort of grew on me after I tuned my æsthetic to appreciate him. Charlie told me later that he didn't like him, though.
Then TMBG opened with O Fortuna (obviously not performed by them... :-), followed by probably the most random song I've ever heard in a concert. It went something like
Violin, lin, lin
Violin, lin, lin
Violin, lin, lin
Violin, lin, lin, ohPiece of dust, dust, dust
Piece of dust, dust, dust
Piece of dust, dust, dust
Piece of dust, dust, dust, ohOne quarter of Washington's head
Half of Washington's head
Three quarters of Washington's head
All of Washington's head, oh
(I think I might have missed a verse there. Oh well.)
The venue this time wasn't conducive to a conga line like it was at the CMU TMBG concert, but they did do one song in which they told people to clap their hands, stomp their feet, jump around, then mumble.
I still had songs from Happy 2b Hardcore stuck in my head throughout the whole concert, and heard fragments of it whenever there was musical silence (i.e. only speech going on). Fortunately it didn't interfere at all when they were actually playing.
In lieu of taking the energy to write a real review of the concert, here are some semi-formatted notes I took to help myself remember it (note, quotes are not exact, just the jist; also, these are not in order, although the encores are last):
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On Saturday evening, I was planning to go up to Delmar to stay with Betsy since my mother still won't let her spend a night home alone (a completely pointless rule given that she's going off to college in under a month now, and I also seem to remember my father allowing me to do the same when I was 16 or so). But my sister went on a day trip with a friend and ended up staying with her, so I didn't have to go to Delmar.
This ended up being fortunate, because Charlie called and after we talked for a while, he asked if I wanted to come up to visit. I wasn't quite sure whether it was worth the gas money (around $8), but when he offered to pay me $20 if I would bring him a gallon of milk, 2 loaves of white bread and a 12-pack of Mountain Dew, he tipped the scales solidly in favor of the visit. It wasn't all that long (I went back some time Sunday), but it was worthwhile.
On Monday evening, my father was going to a free Lunasa concert being put on by the city of Albany (I think). They're an Irish band with a somewhat more modern sound, and I went along with him. The concert was held in the convention center under the Egg, due to the chance of rain, which as it turned out was a wise decision. The concert was quite good, if not necessarily my favorite genre. My father bought me one of their CDs after it ended.
I hadn't planned on visiting Charlie again during the week, but when he told me that he would be going up to Maine for a week starting on Saturday, I asked him if it would be okay to come over Wednesday night. He said sure. We rented Secretary. While out in the car, my watch was destroyed due to hanging out of the door. We tried but were unable to locate the other piece which had broken off of it.
Back at Charlie's house, he and his brother played a drinking game, Beer Slut. I declined to participate due to my giving up alcohol for four weeks. Eventually they were joined by a friend of Zak's. I sat on the couch watching Secretary on Robert while Blazing Saddles played on the TV. Despite my description which might make my evening sound less than thrilling, it actually was fairly enjoyable.
I seem to be tired a lot lately. Some of it can be attributed to lack of sleep, but it seems to me like I shouldn't really need that much more sleep than I've been getting. Perhaps lack of adequate mental stimulation has something to do with it.
My car was in the garage on Friday for routine stuff—an oil change, belt change, water pump change, and to check whether anything else needed fixing (the transmission and brakes particularly). According to the mechanic, the car started up when he had it in pieces, but when he put it back together it wouldn't start, so I had to wait until Saturday to get it back.
On Saturday, I drove with my grandfather in his car half-way to Albany, where my dad met us and picked me up. He took us to the garage and paid the bill, and my car worked again. I went over to my mom's house, and eventually ended up taking my sister to Best Buy for her to get a scanner. On the way there, I realized that the clock, stereo and front light in my car weren't getting any power (in addition to the overhead light which hasn't worked since I got the car). Fortunately the headlights, locks, windows, etc. were okay, but the lack of music was really going to piss me off until I got it fixed.
At Best Buy Betsy and I found a combo scanner and printer for only $20 more than the cheapest scanner there, so we bought it. Betsy had needed a printer anyway, but Mom would pay for the scanner since the scanner at her house technically belonged to Betsy, but Mom wanted to keep it there.
When I got home, my father had the thought that maybe the problem with my car was only a blown fuse. We looked up which fuse controlled those devices, went into the fuse box and pulled it out, and sure enough, it was blown. My father went to the auto parts store and bought me a new one, and now everything works again.
Along with the attempted repairs to Laura, I've been building a computer for Betsy. That one seems to be working well, and to be a pretty nice machine. The total cost (including a genuine Windows XP Home license) came to just under $900, which I don't think is too bad. It should be less likely to break than an OEM computer, too, since I tried to pick good parts. Of course, if it does break it will be a bit more of a pain to fix it (and, more importantly, will be My Problem), so I hope it doesn't.
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Whoa, journal. It's easy to lose track of these days, although the real reason I haven't updated in over a week now is that Laura's broken. There was a pretty nasty thunderstorm some day last week, and when I came home, she wouldn't boot. I ordered some new hardware (specifically, a new motherboard and CPU), put them in, and she still wouldn't boot. I had that order rushed—same-day order and 2nd-day shipping, the works—but when things still wouldn't work, I decided to calm down and do things the slow, more likely to be reliable (i.e. not buying the cheapest junk I can find) and unfortunately more expensive way. This means Laura will have a pretty nice upgrade when I'm through; it also means I will have blown a pretty substantial amount of money. Fortunately I don't actually have to start paying back my loans until December, so I have a little while to accumulate some rainy-day funds and / or capital. (In the Marxian sense, computers are considered capital—they're the means of production. No, I'm not a Marxist.)
On Monday morning I felt absolutely terrible. I had a nasty headache, was slightly nauseous, was a bit out of it mentally and had a lot of trouble keeping my eyes open. I did go to work, though. I thought I was sick, but the more I think about it, the more I believe that it was at least partially due to my eating almost nothing on Sunday. I had only one meal, and that was a stir-fry which probably didn't have that many calories. On Monday I had no breakfast, but had a big lunch, and after that is when it started to clear up. Tuesday I had four meals, although some of them were a bit small, so that should make up for Sunday (to the extent that that needs to happen) and hopefully I can get back on a normal eating pattern now, or at least a healthy one.
This seems to be a really bad time for me in terms of things breaking: my watch, my car, my computer, my body. This happened once before. I had a slight feeling of dèja vu from starting to write about it, so I looked it up, and it was the last week of 2001. In any case, it doesn't disturb me terribly, but I really hope it doesn't get much more expensive than it already is.
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I know I've made this point before, but I just need to reiterate the effect that music has on my life. It makes me unsure whether I'd be happier deaf or blind (the decision would be pretty clear-cut otherwise). It often creates my mood rather than merely reflecting it. Music composition is the one ability of which I can think which I desire greatly to possess but which it seems I will be forever condemned to lack. As I said recently, "I have a feeling that any computer program good enough to enable me to compose a piece of music I really like would probably be doing so much of the work for me that just about anyone could compose a piece I would really like with it".
As I was driving up to my mom's house this morning (to leave the car there for Betsy to use), I was skipping around to my favorite songs on the Happy 2b Hardcore series. As the last song, I decided on Excitement. Because it isn't really showy or multi-layered, I reminded myself mentally that I really like it, and not to let any other factors affect me. And I cried. I broke out into tears and had to slow down to be sure I wouldn't hit anything.
I'll be fine as long as I have my music.
It occurred to me recently while meandering around the web how different online communities seem to reinvent the concept of reputation in some form or another. (Note that I'm talking specifically about reputation enforced in some technical manner. Obviously people still have reputation with one another, but I'm not addressing that.) Most protocols and communities have something vaguely along these lines (I realize these examples are sort of broad-ranging, but bear with me while I try to make a point):
Now, granted, there are big differences between these. In particular, the big three categories seem to be those that are dedicated to blocking spam / abuse (AIM warnings, Usenet moderation), those which allow you to have a trusted group of friends (ICQ visible lists, LiveJournal friends lists) and generalized, "global" reputation (Slashdot karma, Xanga eprops). However, I think they are all manifestations of one basic concept—who you are and what your past contributions have been should have some effect on how important your communications are considered.
All of this makes me think of a novel I read online, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. I don't mean to imply agreement with everything it says, but I do think it's worth a read. Of course, my time may be less valuable to me than yours is to you.
In any case, the major difference between the “whuffie” in Down and Out and the various online reputation systems I mentioned above, as well as others, is that the systems we currently have are completely uncentralized and unrelated to one another. In some ways this is a good thing—a good contributor to one community website might be a bad fit to another, and it would be unfair to give someone who was abusive just once a bad rap everywhere for good. Nevertheless, people are unlikely to continue solving these three basic problems—exclude abusers, allow a trusted group of friends, and globally rate everyone on a broad scale—in a totally disconnected manner. When these systems do start to get tied together is when things get really interesting. How do we account for differences of taste—or will people simply homogenize everything? (It's ironic how the Internet gives us the power both to express incredible diversity and to easily ignore alternative viewpoints.) Will people become accepting of the fact that others have faults and disregard old incidents or less severe ones?
I am assuming, of course, that people will be persuaded to take this kind of thing seriously at all. I think that they will, once the tools are in place (and I think that the tools are in large part already being put in place for unrelated reasons), but I could be wrong.
My grandparents were out on the street when my grandfather tripped over the curb and pulled my grandmother down with him. He banged up his face pretty badly, and she broke her arm. They're both going to be okay, though.
It's empty. Once I decided to make it happen, it really wasn't that hard. Most of what was in it was things I either had a hard time filing, meant to act on, or that I simply hadn't gotten around to sorting. Of course, I doubt I'll be able to keep it empty, since I tend to use my inbox as a list of things I really ought to do which I generally never get around to doing.
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Kenn Hamm
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Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:44 2008