artifacts

I Love My Name, But...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:54:07 GMT

me: ugh.. it would be nice if there existed a nickname/diminutive for my
name that wasn't douchey.

me: honestly even sparky [an old nickname from when I was a teenager] is better than chuck or chas

c: Chas isn't douche-y. and Sparky is really stupid. Unless we're talking about that sardonic penguin.

me: chas is douchey if you use it as "what i go by". Here, say these out loud:
"oh, i'm chas. nice to meet you."
"hey chas, did you get that email I sent you last week?"
"chas, don't forget to get some milk while you're out"
"well chas, I'm really attracted to you, too"

pretty much all it works for is "upes, fucked up, chas!" and "hey
chas, let's go grab a beer!"

Ok, so.. anyone have an opinion on this?

When You Don't Know What To Do, Run Around In Circles

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:39:50 GMT

I can't sleep. I'm wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide awake. My sleep schedule is completely fucked. So what will I do? I'm going to start running again. Right now. Bye!

Tech Support Cheat Sheet (please print for your records)

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:59:55 GMT

Sad. :(

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 09:02:14 GMT

*sigh*

Kipling On The Brain

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:52:15 GMT

If...

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

Radio Controlled Pirate Ship

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:43:49 GMT

Arrrrrrrrrgh!!!

Sorry I haven't been keeping tabs.. still living with Ellen, that's going really awesome. Kids are having trouble adjusting - first Anthony more than Sophia, now he's doing quite well but Sophia is having trouble. Ex is still jobless and really struggling, but I've been working at CD Baby for the last 7 months, and that's going pretty well too. We're moving from PHP/MySQL/Apache to a .NET/C#/Microsoft Enterprise environment, but at least we're getting to use this chance to create a new and better system. Portland is way better than Eugene.. still not the Bay Area, but probably the best I'm going to do outside of it.

Don't be a stranger! Find me on IM sometime and say hi!

Someday When I Write My Own Programming Language...

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:51:59 GMT

I'll make the modulo operator (%) return an array with two values: the usual remainder and the quotient. So, "17 % 3" would return "array( 2, 5 )". Otherwise, you have to do something like:

q = 0;
r = 0;

r = 17 % 3;
q = (17 - r) / 3;

Mind you, it's trivial. Still, it's an extra, unnecessary step and seeing as how the division calculation must have been done in the first place to get the remainder.

Oh, and I work at CD Baby now. Yay!

P-Town!

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:24:34 GMT

I'm moving to Portland! More later...

Ayuh!

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:43:59 GMT

Sacrifice

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:34:48 GMT

Let us be clear on what a sacrifice is: when you make a sacrifice, you choose unselfishly to give up something for yourself for the benefit of others. You choose this although you know what you have to lose, and you know you will never get it back in any way or shape or form. When you bring up a sacrifice – no matter how big or small – in the context of discussing who does what for whom, favors, decency, expectations, etc, you are in a single stroke turning a noble deed into an underhanded manipulation. If you want to sacrifice something for me, I can’t stop you, but do so knowing I may never know about or understand your sacrifice. Don’t make sacrifices you can’t carry, they tend to last longer than your initial decision to make them. I know I’m not perfect in this regard either, but I’m trying. Really, I am.

New Cell Phone, I Need Your Number!

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 19:22:51 GMT

Yeah so my cell phone died, I have a new cell now but no numbers to put in it. My number hasn't changed, but I need yours. Sooooo I'll set comment screening to on etc.. heck might as well post your address if you're not feeling too lazy.. might as well get everything in here at once.

Apologies To Mr. Bierce

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:39:54 GMT

Devil's Dictionary addendum #364:
Ray Bradbury (person) : The resulting author of a literary genetics crossover between pulp science-fiction and South American magical realism. Probably just a little insane, to boot.

LiveJournal Changes

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:25:17 GMT

Ok they have me a little worried. I don't know about you, but tonight I'm gonna go through and archive everything I want to keep locally on my various accounts. Maybe it's just time to move on to a new venue? I dunno...

Artificial Pain

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:49:02 GMT

I caught myself meditating today on artificial intelligence and pain, and whether pain was "real" or not. I was thinking about those new systems that the military is using for recruiting and some airlines is using to streamline web customer support.

Part of constructing an AI is designing it how to learn and adapt, and training it. To start with, a good AI will have a somewhat arbitrary set of weights assigned to help it interpret data and stimulae (this is good, this is bad), as well as feedback to help decide if it made a good or bad choice.

How does this translate? At what point do we say an AI is sentient, and at what point do we call that feedback "pain"?

I could see how it would happen - one day, an AI analyst is working with an AI, when suddenly the machine informs the analyst, "It hurts." The analyst discovers that the AI has come to associate a wrong choice with pain. Is it feeling pain like we do?

The first thing I think is, "no, of course not, we feel biological pain". But think about it, what IS pain exactly? It's just feedback, electrical impulses managed by a chemical network that turns on and off switches in the brain. It's no more or less real than the electrical impulses that flow through a circuit board. We hurt physically because our body tells us we need to, and chemical unbalances aside, we hurt emotionally when we process/interpret negative data.

Can you imagine how painful it must be, therefore, to be an AI? In my mental excursion, I imagine the AI informing the programmer analyst how to adjust its own program so that it can learn in a gentler, less painful way...

Movie Review: Tekkon Kinkreet

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:57:20 GMT

I've been on a bit of an anime kick lately - perhaps more than usual. So when I was at the public library recently, this movie caught my eye by sheer chance. Really, I don't even know why I took it home, especially since the style of character drawing is not the sort I usually take to - the faces are round bubbles with tiny eyes and huge mouths, the bodies look like sacks of potatoes with kind of spindly, point sticks for arms and legs. The main characters' names - Black and White - caught my eye however, and I decided it was worth a quick look. I could put it on, get some work done, and let it slide into the background if it sucked.

What ended up happening, of course, is that by the time the movie got going, I was actually pretty drawn into it. Though it played haphazardly with my sense of disbelief (as anime will tend to do - nature of the beast), I found the abstract departures of reality to masterfully add depth and perspective to the storytelling, which is what drives this piece.

Two young orphans, Black and White, are one set of vying rulers of the debauched, ruinous Treasure Town. As a troublesome duo, they have become as much an accepted institution in the city as the local cops and Yakuza. While these institutions go about their sibling spars, they are all forced to explore themselves and each other as the city is besieged by Change. Beyond the obvious asian/Zen Yin-Yang theme is a very human portrayal, a shamanic view of a difficult world. There is no absolute black-and-white dichotomy, per se, but an adventure into the heart by way of fire.

Along with Tokyo Godfathers, this is probably one of the greatest movies you will never hear of unless you are either tuned into the anime scene, or you happened to stumble upon it as I did. I beseech you to give this movie a chance - it's worth your time and your dollar.

(Taiyo Matsumoto, Michael Arias)

An Offering

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:31:33 GMT

I offer forth a couple definitions. Tell me what you think.

"Learning" is the natural setting of logic/data paths through experience and observation.
"Faith" is the result of manually setting logic/data paths without necessarily regarding experience or observation.

What It's Good For (HUH!)

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:10:40 GMT

My college education, particularly my smattering of computer science courses, permits me access to geek humor such as this. I am so stoked I am an educated nerd!

For FW, In Case You Haven't Seen It

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:09:43 GMT

ayuh.

New Year, For Once

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:27:56 GMT

I begin this year with a lot of news:

- new life
- new house
- new love
- new(ish) job
- new hope
- new dislike of Windows

That's right folks, I'm leaving Windows. My plan is (barring some major Vista overhaul, or some new Windows OS that is absolutely unbelievable in a good way for once) to be using Windows only in a virtual setting on some other OS, preferrably as a background service that permits me to run Windows programs from another OS's desktop.

Right now I'm experimenting with Fedora 8 in this capacity - I've been using Fedora (and occasionally OSX) for actual server stuff for years now, and occasionally I've toyed with the idea of using them as my daily work OS. Now it's time to take the dive. It's no longer a question of if, but when, and which virtual machine software I'll use to get me there.

Also, my project partner from last year and I are hurriedly finishing up work on the laser harp in time for it to be presented in the main gallery on campus next week. We're going to put up a site for it, so you'll finally get to see some pics, production and finished and in use and everything. It's pretty exciting because I guess the video the professor took of all the projects from last year's class got passed around the department, and everyone's in a tizzy about it. At least that's what I heard...

My Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This...

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 17:07:13 GMT

Add this link to your bookmarks. You will need it sometime, inevitably, when you accidentally delete the partition on that hard drive, or your digital camera memory hiccups and loses that really awesome picture you took. This will someday save something important to you, so bookmark it and remember it. And of course, it's opensource, so it's free!

Oh And I'm Not Doing It, You Can't Make Me

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:54:58 GMT

But if I did do the D&D meme, I'd be a level 4 Stephen Colbert wielding a rubber chicken, and with any luck, the South Carolina ticket.

Just so you know.

Keepin' It Real...

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:36:50 GMT

1) I found a place, 2 br townhouse, pretty nice looking. I move mid January, no more roomies (however awesome they might be!).
2) Finally registered my car, 7 months late.
3) Got my new Dell and it's working as it should.
4) Got a new set of those kickass headphones someone ripped off in NY, and for half what I paid last time.
5) Got enough money to pay bills and buy presents (I think).
6) Got health and dental insurance starting January for the kids and me.
7) Getting along with the ex pretty nicely, waiting to get a judgment finished written up so we can file and make it legit.
8) Not at all least, still utterly in love, and utterly loved. Still totally amazed by it all, but wtf why the hell not?

Awwwhhh yeah, peace out.

Oh and Stellaspike? Find me on googletalk or messenger when you get a chance, 'k? I think I may have something you'd like...

"If I were you, I'd run!"

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:44:16 GMT

"If you were me, you'd be good looking."

What If The Lorax Became An Eco-Terrorist?

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 04:47:57 GMT

Can you imagine that scary shit? Popping out of tree stumps and getting the swamee-swans to tear out your eyes? He'd be all like, "I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees! Now I'll take your axe-hacker and hack you if you please!"

Frightening!

Huh Wuh? Me? Art?

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 10:43:38 GMT

So last night I was out at Jameson's (downtown bar) with Ellen & co., and this lady whom I did not recognize comes up to me and is like, "OMYGOD YUOR ART TOTALLY ROXURS!!!!" My mind raced, and I had to ask her name, but I was pretty sure she was someone I had taken Metal Sculpture with in Winter (it was). It was kind of funny because it hadn't occurred to me that, besides the Laser Harp (which everyone was pretty awed by, it seemed), anyone really thought much of the other stuff I had been doing. Personally though, while I loved the laser harp, "italian soda" (you can see it on modernkraft.com) had kinda felt like a triumph for me. I felt connected through it to modernist painters, and though it was based on an actual subject, I had kinda channeled my admiration for Mondrian, Miro and Kandinsky, and knew that nobody but me would likely make this connection.

Anyway, the woman was specifically raving about "italian soda", and saying how she and the professor (possibly my favorite professor my whole time at UO) had had an excited discussion about how they felt I really "got it" about art, etc etc etc. She demanded to know if I was still doing art (I haven't been, but really want to be) in a way that was like, "tell me you're not and I'll gut you". Anyway, I'll take this as inspiration to find some way of getting space and time to continue doing metal work. There's so much I've been wanting to do, but no obvious way to do it. Clearly I just haven't been applying myself to finding a solution to "how". Then what was also cool was that she knew the other folks we were hanging out with, even though there was no real good reason that I could see for her to know them.

So uhh yeah, if March rolls around and I'm still no farther along with the making art, could someone please kick my ass?