Monday, December 20, 2004

I am only typing this out of a general, and rather painful, sense of obligation to my readers. I must tell you, I do not enjoy this. Six times this week already, and it being only a Monday, I have been stricken violently with paroxysmal drops in resistance. Today I dropped close to 15 kilohms, and the shock (quite literally I needn't remind you) was enough to destroy the last of my library. Tomorrow I plan to travel down to the Host Pile, where I can reinsulate enough to last me for at least another week. Enough of my problems. Now I will tell you what I think of the current political situation.

I have at least 20 spent batteries in my desk drawer. I am convinced that someday I will have a desparate need for voltage, and only a string of half-depleted AA batteries will meet that demand. If I line them up from end to end, I have at least 20 volts, more than enough to kill an uninsulated porcine bear. I can only imagine how much more I will need to accomplish future goals, including my reinstatement in the Parliament. However, I have set this imagining down on paper, and I am anxious to inform you, my steadfast supporters, of my current set of conclusions.

On December the 17th, there was a flood of calculation carried out by my convulsing fingers, and it ended with the following statement: (blidk + har) *dms^(sin( i Flont)). I can only surmise that I am intended to run for political office in the spring, with or without adequate voltage. However this statement was dampened somewhat by an earlier redefinition of the Flont constant at more than 4. Regardless, I must prepare my revision of the party platform, and hereby call a meeting of the Council of Counselors. You know who you are, and you cannot avoid this meeting. Bring warm clothes, a radiometer, and as many AA batteries as you can spare.

Finally, I have no choice but to sign this order, on my desk since Wednesday the 15th, instructing the 9th Battalion of the Wattic Resistance to close up shop on the East End. The Host Pile is perpetually inadequate and needs as many towels as possible. We can no longer afford to sell them off. My apologies to the 9BWR faculty, and my hopes are with you.

Yes.

there was insistence on part of the Michaels, so i felt i had to go along.
i'm sorry for this. i don't know what's wrong with me.

PAINTING-O

mmhmhmhmhmheheheh.

Chocolate Cheesy Soup

Olfred: We was thinkin', Olbert, what was this thing we got here?

Olbert: We dunno, Olfred. Looks to us like somethin' square, like a box.

Olfred: We dunno, Olbert, looks to us like a table, or maybe a laser.

Olbert: Don' be silly, Olfred, lasers ain't square they's round.

Olfred: Ain't silly, Olbert, just cause all the lasers you seen have been round, don' mean they all got to be round. Anyway, might just be a table, that thing.

Olbert: Has it got a button or a switcher or somethin'?

Olfred: We don' see one, do we? Let's eat our lunch then.

Olbert: What kind o' sandwich you got there, Olfred?

Olfred: See, we started with three piece o' bread. Then, see, we get some cheese an' melt it real nice, and put it on the bread. Then-

Olbert: What kind o' bread you use?

Olfred: Then, see, we kill a chicken. Then, see, we got a nice melted cheese sandwich.

Olbert: What kind o' cheese you use?

Olfred: What kind o' sandwich you got there, then, Olbert?

Olbert: We made us a nice soup this mornin', Olfred. This is soup we're eatin'.

Olfred: Oh, we see. What you got in that soup, Olbert?

Olbert: We put a chocolate bar in it, and cooked it up real nice with some cheese. Oh, what's this button here? Olfred, we found the button!

Olfred: Ought we oughtta press it then ought?

Olbert: Ought. Wim foona iggle wiggle?

Olfred: Olbert, wim fonga woggle ongle? On foomy poobs, right ought, foom!

Olbert: Foom. Ought.

amazing!

i found one of those chinese/pinyin typing programs! it's going to take some learning. i type things out in letters, like "nihao, wo jiao andrew", and as i type, i, um, deftly select the proper characters from a list (but i had to check over it with a translator first, because there are mistakes like "i am very Burma"), and so what comes out is "你好, 我 叫 andrew". but the program even knows what the most common words are, so i don't even have to choose sometimes!

我 现在 写 中文, 用 我的 电脑. 我 最近 学 中国话, 可是 我的 语法 不很好. 我 知道 一些 词, 可是 很少.

我 现在 认识 一个 中国人, 她 也 是 一个 学生 在 louisville大学. 她 是 从 上海. 我 要 说话 中文 跟 她, 可是 我 是 很羞涩. 我 喜欢 她, 可是 要是 她 喜欢 我, 不知道.

it only took me like 15 minutes to type this. the chinese part, i mean. that doesn't include the first 3 tries, where i kept deleting the whole thing trying to copy it to the spellchecker.

I have an idea. I should go around the lab, and my office, and probably my car, and my house with all the tables and drawers and things, and find all the paperclips which I've bent and twisted into funny shapes, and take pictures of them.

Then, I could take the pictures and resize them, and upload them to my ftp thingie, and then make a little presentation of them on my website thingie, here, where you're reading this.

Along with each picture, I could include some clever comment, like 'what does this one look like', because none of them look like anything except for weird squiggles of metal, and the comments would have to be clever or else they'd be extremely boring.

Following that, I could look for all the little scraps of paper that I've folded up into squares or accordions or little paper half-airplanes, and maybe take pictures of them, and them post them in a presentation like I outlined above except with paper scraps rather than paperclips, and including clever comments etc with each one.

The other day, this was Friday I think, I was at the post office with my friend the Korean girl who shares my office. She was writing her address to Seoul on a package, while I was pulling these long, skinny strips of newsprint out of a stack of school newspapers. Sometimes, I think, they get cut wrong, and there are double cuts along the tops, and you get these really long narrow strips of newsprint. So, I spent the next five minutes folding those strips into a really, really long paper accordion! It was amazing.

Come to think of it, I could devote this entire thingie to the little pieces of trash and the little random objects that I collect to play with at my desk while I sit here, typing or reading, working or wasting time. Particularly when I'm reading, and don't have anything to do with my fingers, I need to be twisting paperclips or spinning lightbulbs. Or, when someone comes to talk to me, sometimes I play with this BNC cable T-connector which should probably be over with the other BNC cables.

Also, sometimes I take things apart and can't put them together again, and so there are lots of little bits of broken instruments in and on my desk. Also, I keep all the dead batteries I find and put them in my desk drawer. I need to straighten my office. Maybe I'll do that this weekend. It's fall break. I will need something extracurricular to do.

No pictures.

Sylvania, you are a lightbulb
300 watts, so very bright
But the coils in your bulb are shattered
I shake you, I hear them
And I see them roll about
You will never glow again
I'm sorry
But I like your reflector
And those two prongs in your back
You can live on my desk
For now.

gosh!

boy, that was a long post the other day! and sort of embarassing! i think i'll leave it there, though, as an example of what not to write down for other people.

anyway, my confrontation with the weekend was a draw. i managed to read a lot but didn't write a thing. except an outline. and i smoked 2 cigarettes saturday night and then felt really, really sick until i went to sleep.

i hate to push box hammer can off the top, but i feel like i have to do it.

hm.

ah, the weekend. my new enemy. i will destroy it through constant action!

tomorrow morning i figure i'll get up and go wash some clothes. if i do this often enough, i will only have to wear the clothes i like! last time i went, i took my old CD player and listened to a metallica CD. it was fun! i got the CD player and the metallica CD both when i was 15! probably two of my oldest things.

and, i have to make some presentation and write a paper for some class i'm taking. maybe i'll do that.

today i took my first electrical engineering test! it seemed easy. i was one of the first to finish. do not think i am smart. one of the questions was to figure the resistivity for some material given its resistance and its diameter and its length. i didn't know, so i made up an equation! it seemed to give a number which seemed about right, and i had no other ideas, so there it went. maybe the real equation was more complicated and that's why i finished so fast. for example.

also, i bought a pack of cigarettes! i wanted lucky strikes, but they didn't have those. then, i wanted the unfiltered pall malls, but they didn't have those. so i'm stuck with unfiltered camels like a loser. but, it's something to do. with the weekend.

i have a feeling that one thing i will not be doing this weekend is: interacting with another human being. except at the laundromat, where the old lady will give me a raffle ticket. and maybe i'll go buy my lunch somewhere. i'll have to say something customary to the lunch person.

weekend, my new enemy. i will destroy the weekend.

Box, Hammer, Can

"In what be?" say the Box.

"Be in the Box," say the Hammer.

"Bee in the Box?" say the Box, getting scared.

"No, in the Box be," say the Hammer.

"Oh, see," say the Box. "Where go the Hammer?"

"Hammer go to Hammer," say the Can.

"In what be?" say the Box.

"Can in the Hammer," say the Can.

"Hammer in the Can, Bee in the Box," say the Box.

"No," say the Hammer.

songs for you

a sampling of my midi directory. some new, some old. some complete, some incomplete. all repeat, repeat, repeat. have fun. i recommend playing in alphabetical order. prepare for jarring discontinuities, obnoxious instrumentation, poor soundcard translation, and way too many notes.

pira_teorg2.mid

apes.mid

WORKS.mid

WESTERN1I1Z.mid

THING3.mid

NONSENSE1.mid

HORBLE1.mid

HELL3.mid

EFF.mid

DANCE1.mid

BOARD2.mid

BEEXO.mid

ARK31.mid

ARE.mid

ACCOMPAN.mid

the Hurricane Bunker

hi folks

man, what a hurricane. that was a really big hurricane. a bunch of stuff got smashed! man.

i was talking to margaret last night about my idea for a hurricane bunker. i got the idea a few years ago. back then, it was just a concrete bomb shelter installed on a beach. the idea has been much improved since then. as i described it to her, it got more and more sophisticated. i thought i should make a public proposal for construction of a hurricane bunker, so if any one out there wants me to build one, they should send me about a million dollars right now.

okay, so, basically it would just be a small, bathroom sized bunker, maybe just big enough for one person, maybe two. it would probably be round, shaped sort of like a flying saucer or an Advil. it would have to be watertight and reinforced against impact, and it would have to be bouyed so it couldn't sink. also, it would be a bunker, not a boat, and i wouldn't want to be washed out to sea, so it would be attached to the ground by a set of retractable, tensioned, spring loaded cables. this way, it could float on the surges of water, but it couldn't float away, and it wouldn't sink either.

of course, it would have to have big, thick viewing windows. also, the top of the bunker would be decked with armored, caged floodlamps. man, you could even put a rudder on the thing and try to maintain control through the storm, but it would probably just be a big violent ride. at any rate, it might be nice to put those tensioned cables under some sort of control, so you could tighten one up or loosen it if you didn't like your position or your attitude. if it could be constructed light enough, it would be like flying yourself in a kite; with good aerodynamic design maybe you could do some flying in those 150mph winds!

inside would basically be a cockpit, with padded walls and a pilot's chair built into the main construction of the bunker. you'd have to be strapped in, of course. it would probably be a good idea to put the inner cockpit in some sort of suspension with shock absorbers and everything, otherwise all the slamming and crashing around might kill you or break your neck.

considering that this thing is so small, and that it's able to fly and ride on storm surges, it should be small enough to fit on the back of a big truck. so, you could go out to meet hurricanes head on, installing yourself on beaches wherever you thought the roughest part was going to land. one problem would be grounding the cables; how could you reliably attach the thing to the ground? i'm sure there would be a ton of crazy forces on the thing, twisting it around, snapping it back and forth, etc., and i wouldn't want my cables to break loose, or to snap, or something.

this is my idea. i think it's a great idea. margaret says maybe crazy rich people would buy hurricane bunkers (maybe they should be called hurricane cockpits, or hurricane cockpit bunkers; HCB's. i don't know.). just like how people have hot air balloon hobbies, there could be hurricane riders, storm surge afficianados. it just seems like a terrible waste to run away from such great storms. i love storms.

Saturday Haiku

Trying to be light,
Hey, maybe write a haiku,
Such a bad morning.

Revised Haiku for the Space Shuttle

March? Not until March?
Give someone else the money,
It's not working out.

Haiku for the space shuttle

Space Shuttle! You're back!
I love you, and, I hate you-
Let's share this coffee.

the murf has inspired me to post midi songs i have made (the first of these also has a nautical theme, you see):

I could turn them into MP3s so I could guarantee the sound reproduction, but I think most sound cards have the same midi synthesizers now, so I guess it's okay. I would just worry about the balance, like whether all the tracks can be heard in the right proportions. They are all very noisy and repetitive, that is my fault, because I like things that way.

This one is has been around for a couple of years maybe, but the arrangement is new. Banjo, clavichord, and electric piano. It's the best of the three because it's very short and also very complete.

This one was made last week. I like it, but it's not complete at all, it just sort of repeats and builds and then suddenly stops because i couldn't think of what to do next.

This one is like five years old! It's a new arrangement, so it's fair to put it here. I made it when living in Andy Holt big tall building. It's sort of long and maybe boring, but i like it and it's in 5/4 time. Also, the melody is played by a midi bagpipe! Turn down the volume, watch out!

okay.

we've gotten wider

This is a jumping spider. Jumping spiders are everywhere. They are very small. This photograph is artificially enlarged, so do not worry. They are smarter than every other spider. This one got a 98 on an IQ test, which is very good for a spider. If you catch a jumping spider be careful, because they know what your nose is and they are able to get there by jumping through the air.

That's strange. I must have dreamed last night that I posted a long, complicated, probably meaningless post on this thing. Now I go to look, and I see my previous post having to do with my frustration that no one seems interested in talking with me about what a year looks like. I tell you, that's what it's like for me in the real world, too. No one wants to talk about what a year looks like. Sometimes I wonder if it makes me sad.

fine, then

everyone can claim that they don't see the year as a flattened ring laid on a flat, black, invisible surface. but i know it isn't true. i know that they see it.

hmm... nothing else.

I just ate a candy bar,
I just drank some coffee-
Where could I get some
Peanuts?

You see, I can't think of anything worth writing publicly about. So, I offer poetry to the world, poetry ripped from the darkest corners of my most innermost being.

So, tomorrow James (supposedly) and I drive about 860 miles to Texas. That's a long drive! But, luckily, it's not as long as the drive to Reno, since Reno's in Nevada, and Nevada is sort of on the other side of Texas. I mean, it's sort of on the other side, and sort of above it. I think. You see, I have sort of this map in my mind, and I see Nevada, which is where Reno is, being somewhere up and to the left of Texas. But, you know, we're sort of going down and left to get to Texas, so maybe it would be a straight shot to Reno. I could check but it wouldn't be worth it.

You may not believe it, but this entire post is a palindrome. That's right, it's exactly the same from forwards to backwards, and not just letter-by-letter, but also word-by-word! I didn't even have to think too hard about it, it all came very naturally. Even as I'm writing this, I can insert random phrases like 'this is a very nice handbag', and yet this entire post is still a palindrome. It's hard to believe, I know, but sometimes you just have to have faith that things are the way someone tells you they are, even if deep down you know that they aren't. Faith is very important, especially in the contruction of palindromic website posts. This morning I bought two pieces of black felt, for just 30 cents!