some sweet-ass sites out there. i surfed instead of getting onto the comp problem and happened upon http://fusionanomaly.net/networks.html
fusionanomaly seems like a wicked web of pages about a great variety of subjects, with many hyperlinked words, pictures, etc that refer you to pages on the subject of the hyperlinked (i hope i'm using the appropriate word here) word/pic/whatev that u clicked on that took u there. i may not be explaining it very well, so just go there and check it out for urself.
in the process of writing this wee entry i actually started working on the comp problem. my friend's HD is fooked - first i figured out that the floppy drive wasnt working b/c the ribbon cable was plugged into it with the wrong connector - i was supposed to use the one with the few wires in the middle twisted around, not the straight-thru. so the maxtor HD utility said it fixed whatev was wrong but each time i tried to start the comp i got the same prob. and every time it would find a prob and say it fixed it and every time it wouldnt boot up. so the HD is toast. now i'm checking my HD. i have 3 HD's on my comp - the maxtor one is the one that failed - whichever time in a row. the short test of the maxtor utility prog detects a problem, the full on one doesnt. plus my chip recently started overheating sometimes. right now i got my gf's fan sitting in front of the comp, i took the housing walls off, and the beeping stopped. my bro told me to just raise the warning temperature in BIOS to like 60 C. its at 56 right now i believe. he says he's got his chip running at 80 C. i donno - its not really solving the prob. when i have time i'm gonna have to give that comp a good dusting. talked to my buddy's gf yesterday and she swears by her mac. e-mac i believe. never got a virus. her comp crashed once in the last year and change. all she had to do was to turn it off and back on. never happened again. its quiet. takes up no space. looks cool. got it for a grand and they threw in the printer. it came with speakers - she just recommends maybe getting a base speaker. i rarely use my comp speakers - if anything i use the headphones. she uses firefox mozilla so she never gets popups. got some email prog that brings in emails from 5 diff email accts she's got out there. i'm gonna go over to her place soon and check it out for myslef. i think it would be worth it - save on all the hassle, AND have a cool looking comp :)
realistically, i use (or used to use) my comp to strictly check email, surf the net, do my banking, download songs, some anime, but not much, play music. i dont really have the time to play games. no patience to learn to play very involved ones. sometimes i rem with nostalgia the duke nukem, doom, warcraft II, starcraft, myst but dont even have time to play those again. so if i get a mac and have the time one day, i'm sure i can play those oldies thru a win emulator or whatever they use.
but we'll see.
man, i noticed that sometimes i can bog down a bit into chat typing mode with my abbrev's... :D

friggin' simon posford rules. his "music name" (check out the eloquence! not) is hallucinogen. i wonder if he uses psychedelics, or if its just a clever name. and if he does then what, how much, how often, when, with what intent, how. a lot of stuff is "fun", but i'm kinda shying away from simply frivolous use of "stuff". i dont know that many smot pokers who speak of pot addiction. i guess it depends what u consider an addiction. luckily the stuff doesnt kill, but for me, very frequent use has started to encroach on my life in ways i hadn't thought it would, or even could. i did hear about the adverse effect on memory. but didnt realize it could unbalance my moods. when i wasnt smoking that is. when i found what i like about it, i couldnt believe more ppl didnt smoke it. when coming up, it was relaxing as hell, a bit euphoric, my worries were put in perspective, i didnt mind doing my chores, the amazing ideas and trains of thought that occured to me while doing some mechanical, thoughtless activity like driving home in traffic or showering - really cool ideas and realisations. plus, everything seemed so much cooler - going for a walk was awesome! but shortly after, when it leveled off, i'd start feeling tired and sleepy - so that was not a good thing in the middle of the day. and my memory just wasnt as good even when i was completely down. and adversities really brought me down - thats just nasty. me and a friend both really like pot, but we both think we do it too much and it occurred to us that it would be really cool to bring it to the same level as our alcohol use. we'd drink like once in a blue moon. smoking once in a blue moon like that would mean that we'd still be able to enjoy all the good things that pot brought to our lives, without its negative effects. ppl should be more educated about the "stuff" available out there. alcohol was prohibited in north america for a while too. it came back. it has a good side and a negative one. i'd still vote for the legalisation of marijuana - but coupled with EDUCATION.
i havent yet seen any negative effects of mushrooms or acid. i wonder if its because i havent done it enough times to get the full picture. it took 3 years to come to my conclusion about pot. then there's also the factor of everyone being different. i work with a guy who has one shot of alcohol or a beer, and he turns red right away and gets buzzed. thats quite a low tolerance. cheap for him to get drunk tho - when he does drink. i'm like that with pot. a friend dubbed me a "one toke wonder". i wonder if it would have sounded better if he stuck with the original expression of "one hit wonder" :) either way - to me the song "smoke two joints" is just unreal. but i know there are ppl like that.
i'm just raaaambling... :)
so back to simon posford = hallucinogen. some really cool trax. i love his style. what he does is magic. one of his more recent trax includes a sample from what seems like an interview with some 60's acid advocate:
"There is an area of the mind which can be called unsane, beyond sanity. And yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity." i think the dude later goes on to say that acid helps to bring us close to the unsanity region. but that kinda sounds like quite dated pop-psychology talk. what is sanity?

anywho - a few hours have passed, i went to dictionary.com for a good deffinition of sanity - that window is still frozen - no sanity deffinition. but i managed to get my own comp running- for some reason my old installation of windows now works, so thats kinda cool for the moment. about the sanity circle - i guess more or less what i was trying to get at was that ppl seem to like paraphrases - i suppose its a way to try and understand something unknown. when u deal with the unknown further, u come to know it for its own unique qualities.
paraphrases and cryptic sayings. something about these being key factors in the success of Jesus, Confucius, Shakespeare, etc. but the sanity thing - i dont know - i think the word "sane" has its roots in the meaning "healthy" - its just that it now is used of mental health. we say that someone who is mentally healthy is normal. normal as in conforms to the "norm" - what seems to be thecase for most ppl. but evolution is a history of change, of taking the risk to deviate from the norm. ppl who are insane are just ppl who are different than the norm in the mental health department. for now - the norm is the way to go - works in favor of millions of ppl surviving. but as genetic mutations, different ideas and different environments keep throwing up "different" models, or variations on the "norm", one day we might see that a certain "model" of human seems to be better and is becoming the new norm. or environmental pressures change in favor of a till-then minority - the norm will get forced out of existence and the new norm will fill the void. there - what a nutshell! :D
ok - i'm going :)

it is becoming apparent to me that i dont "like" to "create" or "produce", and am most at ease observing. such a lifestyle is doomed to fail. extinction. i mean, i work for a living but i dont really like it most of the time. one has to contribute to the world, the society one lives in - otherwise one's just a parasite. hehe - isnt one :)
i like to listen, read, watch, look, accompany, but rarely if ever do i actually "generate" anything. seems like i just respond to stimuli - a friggin' glorified cuckaroach. right now i'm supposed to be fixing a comp for a friend of my rents' - and it involves having to learn and troubleshoot and figure out just why the bloody thing wont work. this could be viewed as an exciting prospect - exploring, learning and all that jazz. but i got some internal brakes firmly on. i think it was easier to "just do it" when i smoked pot. i think i'm more productive when i smoke pot. then i dont seem to mind nearly as much getting into unfamiliar territory or whatever adversities. or doing something i dont really feel like doing or dont like. seems like i'd rather talk about it instead of just doing it.

i'm really starting to get annoyed with blogger - the layout keeps getting messed up for no apparent reason and its just so cumbersome when it comes to pics. i almost had a coronary yesterday, trying to put my pic in my profile. first i had to download/install "hello", then upload my pic - but that was ok. i rem'd my gf saying something about having to actually post a pic and then open it, copy the addy from the bar and then insert that in the pic url space in the profile editor. then it turned out that my pic was by far too big. as in gi-normous: a wild science-ficionesque size of 1.2 megs or something, compared to the until-then undisclosed top limit of 50 kb. 50 kb? i envisioned having to reduce the quality of the pic until the pixelization (or is it pixelation?) made it impossible to tell whether it was a pic of a weather balloon or a kettle. THEN i had to resort to using my gf's pic software "mgi photo suite" - which had severe problems with the adjustments i wanted to make AND save. but i managed. then the friggin' "hello" crapped out and just kept going to a settings screen and after that it was invariably to an error page. i loogged out and back in - same thing.
but in the end i got an under 50kb pic that doesnt look like a tea pot and my gf somehow managed to get that pic onto my blog, and i really shouldnt bitch nearly as much because her comp at least works :)
i'm not sure i like my tendency to just use blogger for venting these days. i'd rather contribute to a positive world. almost 3 weeks no pot! :D

yet another day as an ant. how bad does this get? i guess i could still lose my job and have to move back to my parents' AGAIN and get some terminal disease.
my gf just got pissed off at me for not coming to bed with her. life sucks. shouldnt things be on the up now that i'm not smoking? its only 10:24 for fux sakes.

2 weeks no pot

thats right - 14 days :)
i like pot, but there's a time and place for it. without me realising it, it'd invaded my life and i kept turning to it for feeling good - but it was impairing me in some ways and finally i decided that i needed to level out emotionally *without* being adversly affected in terms of memory, sexual performance, concentration and comprehension. it may soom odd to some that a shroom trip helped me crystallise these thoughts and finally the decision :)
true - i've been turning to beer for a sort of consolation a bit, but even that's pretty much gone now,so thats awrite :)
if i'm having this much trouble with pot then i'm thankful i never got into anything hardcore :)
i'm sorta toying now with the idea of trying to get somewhere deeper with psychadelics, some sort of understanding, revelation, illumination..? and i still havent really hallucinated yet... :(
sometimes i wonder whether its all bullshit, but then i remember my friend alek's amazing, if frightening, mushroom experience. so it is possible. but perhaps not for everybody :(
but no more unexamined, purely recreational substances :)
but so often, like this evening, i find myself a bit low: i passed yet another day like an ant: went to work, did my stupid work for chump change, under supervisors who are less knowledgeable/intelligent than me, drove home, did some chores, tried rushing off to help parents' friends with their comp problem, got stuck in traffic, wasted a bunch of time, didnt solve the problem, bothered my brother in edmonton with a friggin' free tech support phone call, ended up taking their comp with me to hopefully fix it home, got back home, did chores to only slightly diminish the depressing backlog of shit that still needs to get done and needed to get done for a while now, and then the gf wants to go to sleep... i havent LIVED today yet! i refuse to live out my life doing stuff i dont like or barely tolerate! i'm here for me! it's got to be worthwhile!
so at least i messed with the blog for a bit. oh, did i mention my comp died? good thing my gf's got one of her own - that way we're not *totally* cut off from the world. real life kinda sucks. or maybe i'm going about it all wrong. maybe i'm too pessimistic. how do i get more optimistic?
still gotta shower before hitting the sack...

so, my new year's resolution was to quit the pot - well more like reeeeally minimise it - to like once or twice a month. so far its been a week and i guess i'm doing awrite - although i've been having a beer or 2 almost every day - phx is not too happy about that - we'll see how things develop. sometimes i feel like life is shit and there's no fucken way i wanna go thru it sober - its just too shitty. i dont know a single truly happy individual who has to support themselves. ok maybe there's my friend montoyo - but he's finding it really hard to quit pot. so i guess thats taking away from his happiness. life is a constant struggle. i guess that s one way it can be seen. i dont wanna believe that point of view tho. i dont want it to be all that there is to it. i try to see it in other, more positive ways. i need to be happier, or else its not worth it. who am i gonna suffer thru life for? but it seems like to get to a point where i might be happier i must first fight an uphill battle against myself - my nature, my character/personality. i have to work hard to get to a hopefully better existence. i've sorta been trying but can i actually do it? i know i should just do it - but its so unbelievably hard! i m trying and i'm hitting my head against a brick wall. i dont wanna work hard at some stupid shit - and there's no way of living any kinda lifestyle without doing just that. but i gotta keep on trying.