digitalsushi

and i am starting to get bored.

I quit facebook a few months ago.  It was sucking my soul up.

Today I redid some potted plants.  My little rex begonia, holiday cactus, and jade are still alive and well.  They have a plant light, which I affixed to a swing arm lamp.  It's getting dark around 7pm now -- I can barely see the sun.  The nights are a cool mist of pre-autumn air.  Living on the river facilitates.

Happy 10th birthday, LJ.  We met almost 7 years ago, when I was 23.  Ta,

I won't use my professor's name... Tonight was my final presentation for a class called "The Theory of Computation".  I went in, and started presenting, and within the first 60 seconds she had interrupted me, claiming she didn't understand what I was saying.  And so for the next 45 minutes, she interrupted me every half a minute, saying that my definitions were meaningless.  I'd say "In this rule, a Variable maps to a string in the language L consisting of either Terminals or Variables".  She'd cut me off and say "I don't know what map means."  Every other sentence.  At the end, she asked me to identify whether a^n b^n c^m for m,n >= 0 in integers was a context-free grammar.  At first I didn't think it was, but then I started to generate a context free grammar for it.  She interrupted me -- "Michael, clearly I don't have enough time to explain this to you such that you can understand it.  Let's just stop here.  Thanks for coming in."  argh.

Thank you for motivating me, Charles Mingus.

Mexico was fun. We were there for a week, Saturday through Saturday. When we got there, we were taken to the resort by taxi. Since the taxi didn't have the little access pass the resort gives you at sign-in, we had to go the back way through this really third-world neighborhood. The streets were all dirt and flooded, and every third puddle had a carrion smell that forced held breath.

The resort was nice enough. It was the off-season down there, so amid sparce occupancy, we dociled with no other USA folk and the rest, locals. The real star of the vacation was the Bar Lanai, a little restaurant built into a rear alcove of the resort. By the end of the week, the wait staff knew us on a first name basis. Their food was humble but delicious, and we ate most of our meals there. Javier was our friendliest waiter, but we liked the well groomed older gentleman and the taller fellow more, nameless to us.

The resort got only one television station, TBS. We ended up watching a lot of it, since we stayed in most of the days there. We ventured out a few of the days, but each one left us staying in the next. The first time we went out, we tried the main drag of Acapulco. It was fun, but a little stressful. We were constantly heckled by street vendors. The ocean beach with all the skyscraper resorts was nice; a little dirtier than we expected, but that was true of the entire city. Up on the street, the same proliferation of flooded intersections abounded. Construction was ubiquitous in Acapulco, perhaps due to tourism's off-season. We took some much needed downtime in a small mall to see a Spanish subtitled Batman. Hearing English was comforting after a half week of Spanish only.

Speaking of Spanish, it really comes back to you. Not just the grammer, either. Vocabulary pops back into your head, lost words reconnected.

I got braces exactly 20 years ago today. How else could you remember such a thing?

Well, I'm off to mexico. I'll be back in a week with photos. Bye!

I work with a bunch of little kids.

We have this mail server where I work. I happen to run most of it. My friend Nate, who left for a real job a while ago, set it up to do this fancy authentication thing, tying all our passwords together.

Sort of a tricky configuration, though. Takes a while to get your head around it. Don't quite have mine yet all the way there.

So there's all the kids on the team, who want to make this change to see if it fixes something. I haven't been paying attention to much, hindered with real work. I ask one of them to explain the situation to me.

He makes a little attempt. I start looking at the system while he's explaining it, and he gets anxious. Walks off. Unsubscribes from the list because he wanted more attention.

Sigh. I'm not long for this job. I see the light at the end of the tunnel and it's not faint anymore. It'll be nice to work with adults again.

Oh no! The 'L' key on my model m keyboard stopped working! I hope I can repair it! Egads!

Comcast finally got the 5 IP configuration correct on the cable modem last night. On my fourth call in, I had to trick the lady into giving me the correct setting:

"Can you tell me what I have on my account?"
"You have the Internet service and digital television."
"Ok, do I have any add ons?"
"Let me look... yes, it says you have the speed add-on."
"Do I have anything else?"
"Let me look again. Also, you have the 5 IP option."
"Is there an option to have only 2 IPs?"
"Nope. I'm sorry sir."
"Well, you used to have one."
"Hold on while I ask... yes sir, we do have that option. Would you like me to change your account to that?"
"Nope, I just wanted you to confirm it exists. Please inspect my modem and verify that it's not set to 2 IPs".

A minute later my internet connection went out. I panicked for a moment, but then it came back up with 5 IPs.

The jerk I got for the third call in started berating me over how I was making the Internet sluggish. I think I used the wrong approach with him, as I came off as technical. With the fourth call, I feigned network ignorance until it was too late, and she got my account properly configured. Or maybe the third guy was just a jerk. Either way, we have 5 IP addresses, at long last. Between an overbearing previous roommate who wouldn't share the account info for changes, and this, I've been waiting 8 months...

lost in an abyss of crap!

test

I posted all my books on half.com two nights ago that I didn't really want to keep.

The next morning, someone purchased an old UNIX Tape Backups manual.  Price?  5 dollars.

So half.com tacks on to my 5 dollar price what they think is fair for shipping.  I found out what they gave me tonight after I logged in, to mark it as shipped.  I spent 7.93 to ship the book.  They gave me 2.54.

5 + 2.54 = 7.54
 -                 7.93
----------------------
                 - 0.41

Awesome!

I've been thinking a lot about oil lately.

Some people have suggested that we're existing in a temporary moment in history, maybe a hundred or so years long, roughly.  And as quickly as it was built up, more quickly will it collapse.

If you know what a bell curve is, you know that it can be used as a graph.  As a plot of consumption through history, there is a nice bell curve shape to our use of oil:  at the beginning of the 20th century, automobiles garnered an ever increasing demand for oil, followed by most technologies being invented along side them.  Farms, airplanes, jets, the chemical industry at large, plastics, clothing -- all these things started demanding oil for cheap and plentiful manufacturing.  Fertilizer is all based on the consumption of oil.  Oil is used everywhere.

The average vegetable in the United States travels about 1,500 miles from where it's grown to where you eat it.  That's on average.  That means for every head of lettuce that only went 50 miles, there was another one that went 3,000.  Each year, each American uses about 1,000 gallons of gasoline just getting their food to their mouths.  This is obviously not just trips to the store, but rather the trips the food takes in the trunks and vans and planes.

There is so much energy in a drop of oil.  How much energy is there in a gallon of gasoline?

How long would it take you, if you put your SUV in neutral, to pull it 10 miles down the Interstate, by yourself?  If it was flat, maybe you could do it in a day.  If you had good boots and cool weather, and lots of water and good food, you might even finish.  Under the best circumstances, you would be very, very tired at the end of that day.  Perhaps you would burn upwards of 5 to 8 thousand calories performing such a grueling task.  Imagine how much work you performed.  Imagine how accomplished you would feel.  How tired you would feel.

In a simple gallon of gasoline, there is enough energy to push that SUV 10 miles in 6 minutes.  In just 360 seconds, the same amount of work can be extracted from the gasoline.  It's equivalent work.  Look at a physics book sometime.  I fully admit I'm too rusty to toss the math up here, but I challenge anyone to prove my method is incorrect.

There is so much energy in a drop of oil.  Millions of years worth of sunlight, all bottled up in a convenient drop.

And it's so cheap for us to extract -- we put a nozzle into the earth and suck some out, and we have practically free energy.  We can waste it as we please, because there's always more.

The problem that everyone knows, of course, is that there's not always more.  No one knows for sure how much there is left.  Alarmists want us to believe that oil is already drying up and we're already coming back down the bell curve.  The oil industries all claim that there is easily 100 years left of oil, even with huge economic, population, and technological growth.  The truth is assuredly somewhere in the middle.

The alarmists say that, even with all of our alternative energies combined, we won't be able to produce anywhere near as much energy as we glean from oil.

I hope that's true.

I hope we run out of cheap energy.

I'm not an anarchist, no.  Nor do I have a dystopian view of the future.

If we run out of cheap energy, the world may very well have to de-industrialize.  Our applications of technology will no longer be wanton.  Many forms of growth will be viewed no longer as progress, but decay. 

The fat, miserable consumer model of these United States will no longer be viable.  I'm trying not to be smug saying this; look at what many of us have become:  overweight, depressed.  We eat when there is no need.  And what we eat is mostly useless.  We sit in our chairs glued to media as a distraction.  If we're enjoying what we watch, I don't consider this in vain.  But so often we slump down at a TV or web browser, enjoying nothing of that we consume with our eyes.  As we sit, we eat junk food.  Empty calories.  We sit and watch and eat and die a little more inside.  We pop pills to feel good.  The trend continues.  I've definitely straddled in this group I am defining.  Anytime you say "I should do ____" with an empty overtone of becoming a better person, odds are you are in this group, too.

If we de-industrialize, each of us will find more purpose for existing.  Each hour of our time will have more meaning.  We'll have to unplug from our media and learn how to communicate as people again.  I'm not anti-technology, or anti-media... I just see them as overused at times.  And our waste is just too high.

I don't really have a conclusion.. just wanted to ramble for a bit.

Sometimes you just can't figure it out.  And you get frustrated.  And then you realize that not too much of anything really matters in the long term.  Not that this makes you feel a lot better, but at least you figure out you shouldn't stress out over a homework assignment.

I just spent 13 hours straight writing the world's most useless c++ program.  It's a measly three classes.  No special methods, no assignment, copy, or destructor methods.  Should have taken about 2 hours, maximum.  13 hours, 11am->midnight.  And now that's yet another day late, well, why bother staying up to work on it any further.  I figured out the big bug with less than an hour into it.  I had a choice -- turn it in, close to complete, with a few errors, nothing big, for a 93 maximum, or wait another day and polish it for an 85 maximum.

Well, I couldn't bring myself to turn in a crapshoot, so tomorrow I'll make the code as clean as I possibly can, and try to submit the cleanest code I've ever written.  I feel sorta lousy about this, but know I tried my hardest.  Next time, I'll have to try my hardest before it's due.

As I rode in the backseat of Caity's car, both up and down from Maine, I had a visual interpretation of my interests progressing along with time.

There's a three level model that technology evolves through which I was taught early in my undergrad. They are born into the first phase, and then, if useful, evolve into the middle phase, and eventually retire into the final phase:

Toy
Tool
Antique

As technologies are born, they enter into a Toy phase where they are not useful. They are really fun to play with but have no apparent use. This is where a lot of the things I have learned have accumulated over the years, and I finally see them moving into the second phase, where they are not fun.

In the Tool phase, these technologies are no longer fun, but are practical and serve their master in some way. I have lots of things that I know how to do that used to be fun, but no longer are. I long for the days where I could just sit here learning how they worked, but the truth of the matter is that I no longer find any facets that need much development. Not to say that I've truely mastered them as well as many, but it's enough to claim that I can use them faithfully and on their own, they are tools and no longer toys. Boring, trusty components that can solve problems.

The Antique phase is obvious: tools that have moved beyond their usefulness as new ones replace them. I don't have too many that have fallen into this category that come to mind immediately, however I am sure I could compile some examples if I was pressed to do so.

I had a visual interpreation of this as I was riding along in the car. I saw little things I have enjoyed ahead of me in time. As I progressed through time, those items remained static and moved beside me, and then beyond. Small arrowheads were attached from me to them as they scrolled, and I could see finally that there are things I should no longer be focused upon, no longer considering as a target for my attention. To do so further is simply a waste of time.