Voder-Vocoder

Today is hippy christmas. I should go downtown, wander around, and look for good junk. For those not in the know, leases for students in downtown Madison traditionally run from August 15 to August 14. Consequently, everyone is homeless for 24 hours. Another consequence is that there a lot of abandned junk on the street. I don’t really need any junk, but I might find a few gems.

I had some odd dreams last night. The first involved a couple of somewhat evil time travelers showing up in my apartment. They roughed my up, then I demanded that they tell me something cool so that I’d know that they were from the future. They told me about an undiscovered island near Myanmar. Supposedly there was somemthing cool there. (Very old-school sci-fi, huh?)

The second phase of my dreaming was odd. I go over to help a friend move and he asks if I’m moving. Then I suddenly realize that my lease is up today. I have to go home and pack my things! But then I remember that I renewed my lease. Then suddenly I’m back in my three bedroom apartment on Vilas Ave. One roommate has already moved out and taken off for Africa, and the other is waiting until the last minute to move out. But I’ve renewed the lease, and I have to find two new roomates. Luckilly the apartment has been transformed into a rather large house with hardwood floors.

For some reason Jenn is in town on business and she stays with me since I have a unused room. The Vilas House (which only exists in my dream) had a couple of large empty rooms and a kitchen on the first floor. The front room had a single couch a TV. Jenn mostly sat on the couch and played video games while she was around; I did not talk to her much.

The second floor had two bedrooms, and a large open space with a balcony overlooking a room on the first floor. There was a third floor, which consisted of that twisty room that Jill had lived in.

Then people started showing up. At first there were a couple of aquantences I knew who were in town for a wedding. I let them sleep in the empty dining room because that had nowhere else to go.

Then a large number of people I didn’t know who were in town for a church convention showed up. They had heard that I had space for people to crash. I said that they could sleep on the floor, but they didn’t like that option. So they eventually left. I thought about building bunk beds and starting a flophouse, but I decided that was a bad idea. This house was meant for cooler things.

HST is a bit of a pessimist about things, huh?

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.

—Hunter S. Thompson

Then there’s this essay-in-progress: Robots in 2015. Marshall Brain predicts that better robots (ATM-like waiters, AI, self-checkout lanes, robotic shelf sockers, and RFID tags) will cause massive layoffs in the service industry. This will lead to the end of the world as we know it.

The simple fact is: we as a global society are going to have to learn to evolve quickly. We are going to have to learn to sit up and pay attention to the world.

What we need:

1. Direct Democracy: we badly need a proof of concept on this one. Problems: how to prevent massive deficits and bread & circuses? How do we protect basic civil rights? how do we keep corporate oligarchies from running things? How does one maintain a dialog that noone is left out of?
2. Ways to educate the lower class out of the low end jobs that will shortly cease to exist for them. Have we ever been successfull at this? Is this a manageable goal?
3. An economy that works when there is nothing to export and no jobs for 50% of the populations. Real wages per hour worked will have to go up even while prices fall; that way we can all take turns at the jobs that do exist. In other words: shorter work weeks, long periods of unemplyment, and long vacations. Two weeks of vacation a year at Epic was bullshit. That’s why I quit. Eighteen month vacation is more like it.

By the way, any of my friends who want to use this space to blog are welcome. One caveat, though: I’m not hosting any static files.

I’m also going to streamline [s]ome of the back-engine of the site, too. Stop using cookies+ecmascript to do the stylesheet changes, instead just specify a few alternate stylesheets. I’ve already moved the blog submission form to a htaccess-controlled directory.

Here’s my rss feed. It seems to be working. I don’t know if anyone else would even want to use it, but I will probably use this data to make a blog summary page.

I’m making a few changes to the blog form on this site. The eventual goal is to make a RSS feed. To do that I’ve got to first make some changes in my data structures.

This fall I’ll probably be taking math 741 (Abstract Algebra – finite groups and noncommutative rings) and 744 (Algebraic Graph Theory). These classes will kick my ass.

Dan Simmons (of Hyperion fame) has written his take on the Iliad. I did not buy the book when I saw it in the store, because I’ve been wasting too much money recently anyway, but I put it on hold at the public library.

I always wanted to write a modern retelling of the Iliad, either a novel or a rock opera, but both would be out of reach of my skill.

The new motherboard and processor arived today, and I finished rebuilding my computer. It was an involved process that required me to take everything apart and put it all back together, repartition my hard drive (I had been wanting to do that for a while), and reinstall my OS. It seems to be working fine. I’d take a photo, but it all looks just like it did before the upgrade.

I’m down at the terrace at 1am, doing a bit of studying for the gre. I was suprised at how many people were here at midnight, when the place was closed. But by now everyone has gone. I’ve got my wireless internet and am as productive as I would be anywhere. I don’t see anywhere I can steal power from. Too bad.

It’s a beatiful night. Again I remember why I live in Madison.

• Date/Time Standards
• Paper Standards

Here’s your basic shish-kabob, using my favorite general-purpose meat: chicken.

1. Take your chicken breasts out of the freezer. Cut each breast into aprroximately six equal-sized chunks. Marinate in a lot of black pepper, lemon pepper, some random herbs from your garden, and the chicken’s own juices.
2. Wait 24 hours.
3. Cut up a several bell peppers of different colors into 8-12 large pieces. (Remember that non-green bell peppers are more expensive, so you don’t have to buy more than one token pepper of each color.)
4. Cut an onion up into little pieces.
5. Also have little tomatoes and mushrooms.
6. Invite your guests to build thier own kabobs. Audience paricipation makes everything more fun. Differenciate your kabobs by having different items on the ends.
7. Grill over hot charcoals until meat is nolonger raw and veggies are well burnt. Don’t forget to rotate and flip.
8. Enjoy.

I’ve decided to do a few upgrades on my two year old computer. For some reason my old mobo would balk if I put in more than 256MB of RAM.

So I began by buying a new motherboard+processor+RAM: an Athlon XP 2200+ and a ASUS A7N8X. I’ll stick that in my old case and keep my old drives in that case. I’ll probably end up giving it a new name. Possibly lensman.

Then I’ll put my old mobo+processor (still called dalek) in a new case in my living room. Just to keep things simple I’ll run Knoppix on that machine so that I don’t have to worry about hard drives. Then I can play music off of a nfs mounted drive from lensman.