huge bust in my city - 100 perps arrested, literally tonnes of drugs and drug-making materials and $2 million seized, along with ... 17 guns - this must be canada :D
but... another bust will not solve anything. a void was created in the supply side of the drug market, and it will be quickly and eagerly filled. prohibition didn't work with alcohol, neither will it work with drugs of any sort. the only viable course of action i see is the legalization and government regulation of all products people want to buy - including drugs. the population needs to be educated and reminded of the effects of all consumer products, whether they cause cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, asthma, or what have you. the government should regulate drugs like they do all legal drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, and in addition taxed accordingly to offset their cost to society - like projected costs to the healthcare system, and services that help cope with addiction (already in place in the gambling industry.)
its not the addicts who are the real victims here, either - nobody forced them to get hooked on anything - they're just a product of bad circumstances, lousy character and "unfortunate" genetic makeup. the real victims are their families, friends and every one of us who's ever had to suffer our cars and homes being broken into, our things and money stolen, all who've ever been assaulted for money, and every one of us who gets constantly harassed for "spare change".
i dont pity the bums - i fucking hate them. they're vermin. a lot of the dealers are scumbags too - thats why regulation is needed - the substances would be pure, the quality would be standardized, the prices of drugs lower, and... no more shady dealers.

i've been promissing myself that i'd put up a post about this or that for a while now - so i'll do it now - just before going to bed. btw - holly shizznit - its almost a quarter to 1 am!!!

i just farted a midget fart, and after i "cought wind" of it, i said something like "man, i need a filter". Phx didnt hear what i'd said, so i said louder "i dont think i'd pass aircare!" she giggled :)

and i just got an emergency page - some dude freaked out b/c their condo alarm was going off in the middle of the night, and he didnt know how to turn it off. they'd managed to chop the siren wires before i called them back, though. so i encouraged him to chop some more, since he sounded concerned that it might start going off again :)
a few nights ago the pager went off and i actually had to go downtown at 2 am because no card-readers were working at one of the highrises at this one project. people werent able to get into their building and up to their floor, unless the concierge was escorting them with his keys. of course, it turned out to be a loose wire - how cliche. but i'm supposed to get $300 for emergency service, so hopefully i actually get to see this money. if not, i'm throwing the fucken pager away - the boss can go look for it.

and in BIG NEWS - WE'RE GONNA HAVE A BABY BOY!!! :D
so thats gonna be cool - have one of each. so much for my aunt's prediction that i'll have two girls and my brother just one boy.

still havent fixed my car - but i'm working like crazy now, so i dont have the time. i dont think i've posted about the car, but my wheel basically fell off - good thing i was basically standing still. one of the ball joints tore apart. it turns out that crappy ball joints caused a recall in those cars. i believe the dealer said they checked out every recall and performed it on this car, but maybe i should check on that particular one - would they fix the car for free? i guess its worth checking. if i ever get any time from work. i've got 3 projects, and all of a sudden i find out that all 3 of them will need to be completed by the end of november. that's not looking very promising now, maybe mid-december - certainly before christmas, at least i hope so. i knew one of them was happening this year. i thought another son after it, but the 3rd one i was counting on not finishing until spring or summer. so i asked and asked for more guys, and the bosses kept brushing me off, until i told my boss that occupancy is in a month and we got fuck-all done for access control runs. that finally seems to have gotten through to him, because i started getting more and more guys. all of a sudden i had to switch from physically working to just running around, trying to plan and make sure that i know what needs to be done, what can be done, how many guys i'll need for that, find something else to do for the rest of them, make sure we have enough materials and tools - which we never do, and just do a lot of babysitting and hand-holding, because the morons i keep getting just hardly know how to do anything. but if i plans things well enough, at least something will get done. so thats a different kinda stress. now i'm there when they're all there, and i'm there after they've gone, to clean up, organise, and try to plan what can be done soon. keeping the other 2 sites in mind and trying to prioritise between all. i never got any training on managing anything, so its pretty hard. i guess i'm learning, but i hate this sink-or-swim shit. and since i'm on salary, all i can do is to hope that all this overtime will convert into time off for christmas - but i'm kinda skeptical that the projects will be done in time. i just want it to be over. and then every now and then the boss or the receptioninst, having some stupid little service or project for someone to do ask "Tom, how busy are you?" to which i answer "extremely". but there's still some things that no one else can really do very well, like service at a project that no one else has ever been to but me and 2 guys who no longer work for the company. i dont know who's gonna be servicing that when i quit. maybe they could sub it out to me - i'd get a bigger cut of the service monies, i'd say a bit over half would be good.

anywho - there's work to do and phx is having a tough time being 6 months pregnant, so i better quit fucking around on the comp and go help. i'll probably write again when the kids go to school :D

i've just seen 2 friends who have got chem related bachelor degrees, and one of them is working as a driving test guy, while the other is working at his dad's machine shop. BUT: the road test guy has a higher wage than me - he just started, i've been doing my thing for 7 years, and have the responsibility of carrying through the low-voltage installation on 3 construction sites, with 6 guys under me (though that number will dwindle to probably 2 or 3 once these projects come to a close). the other guy is basically his own boss since his dad doesnt seem to get involved too much with the shop, and buddy just pays himself, pretty much. he doesnt wanna go to work for somebody else anymore. i need to start working for myself. but i dont wanna work hard - let other people do that. i need to seriously startr pursuing my interests with the goal of probably eventually picking out one of them to pursue all the way - it will be one that will guarantee great income, one i will be good at, and one i will like a lot. for a while i've been thinking about translation - i've sorta gotten started on that already - just gotta keep it going. another one would be automation/robotics. then there was the t-shirt/clothing idea. i need to pursue these in parallel to hash out which one will be best. if i cant pursue them all at the same time, i'll have to time-share them - a week or 2 each, in constant rotation.
another friend of mine is working sorta part-time for a great company - he's getting an engineering degree, and when he's got the time, he lets them know and they throw some work his way if they go any. i'm pretty sure they're paying him $40/hr as a contractor or consultant, since he's not actually able to work for them full time at the moment. $40/hr is almost twice what i make. yet there's this girl i know who works for a cancer research institute for something like $8.50/hr - but she's a total humanitarian, so i guess her personal income at the moment is not her greatest priority right now - she's in it for the long run, wants to help, and hopes she'll start getting paid well eventually.

howcome i seem to mostly post when i'm tired and/or depressed and/or bitching.
i guess its a rhetorical question, since there's no question mark at the end.
and i just went to dictionary.com and found out that rhetoric doesnt really mean what i thought it meant. i thought it meant speach/speaking, probably public, "spieling". oh well.

been listening to the last harry potter on my mp3 player - havent caught up to the point i've read to, and its pissing me off.
i called around to see who would like to chill out with me and phx and boogie this evening - one couple showed up.
it sucks that i used to be pretty close with my buddy voider, but now it takes like 2 hours just to melt the ice and start having a nice flow of fun. and by then his wife gets tired of not getting whats going on and they go home.
life sucks for quite a few people, it seems - did things ever use to be different? or more precisely - better?
i cant imagine a way that i could direct my life to be truly happy - there always seem to be drawbacks. maybe i'm aiming too high.
i'm really tired, but i wanted to do something enjoyable before succumbing to sleep.
and last but not least - everything sucks, and i want a device installed in my brain that would make me happy and glad all the time.
bla bla bla...

fully back

so i'm fully back - work is still crazy, rains like a motherfucker, i'm depressed and tired and wishing for a toke while getting nothing done, and phx works her ass off and finally gets depressed too - life officially sucks again - fucking wonderful. its just all bullshit - happiness is some abstract concept, almost within arms reach when fucked up on something, anything. fuck everything.

time flies

wow - so much has happened since my last post...
...we started getting hints that phx might be pregnant again, we went to toronto to visit phx' family, then we went to niagara falls and got thoroughly soaked by mischievous winds, flew to germany, got one of our bags lost by an arrogant LTU check-in lady, visited phx' family in germany, went to the town where they make jagermeister - very cool town, went to poland for 3 weddings, got sick, got followed by rain everywhere we went, spazzed out time and again at the horrible roads and drivers in poland, and the lack of clothes dryers, decided that the european union has no idea what they're getting themselves into accepting poland into their ranks, because poland is evidently a 3rd world country, trying to get into the 2nd world. we ended up spending more time on the road than sightseeing, and forget about relaxing. then we drove back to berlin, flew to dusseldorf, and got separated by LTU which wouldnt allow me to fly back to canada because they didnt think my canadian citizenship card was proof enough that i'd be allowed back into canada. their single nice employee helped me get in touch with the canadian consulate, and i got an emergency passport about 3 hours after phx and boogie flew off to canada. i got a cheap hotel, a delish doner kebab, check out enchanting dusseldorf by night, and flew off back home next day. an eternity later i was greeted by the very pretty vancouver airport, and a retardedly long wait to get past the customs booths, followed by a nearly as retarded wait at immigration, where nothing was moving, where i was just supposed to drop off my stupid emergency passport, followed by another retarded wait to get out of the carousel area - the vancouver airport may look pretty, but has an unworkeable system of getting travelers through. next time i may fly to seattle. i've come to hate travelling though.
finally past all the waiting, i was greeted by phx and boogie with a flower - i was very glad to see them :)
in a couple of days we went to a carepoint walk-in clinic - this chain seems to hire mostly 'doctors' who are unprofessional enough to have their own successful practice, where one of their 'dudes' confirmed that phx is pregnant, and proceeded to prescribe her antibiotics which she'd just told him she allergic to.
i went back to work, which is still a clusterfuck, and my right front tire fell off - i'll be retiring my car, i think. then we went to visit phx' parents, enjoyed some great mother-in-law cooking, and saw the abomination that is 'stomp the yard' or whatever - which i give a rating of 5 beers to get through. it was like the fast and the furious of dancing, but worse.
found out dopefiend is in vancouver, visiting uncle weed, and hope they have some sort of meet-up with the fans before dopefiend goes back to london.

and i'm late for work again.

Halina 9000

got an e-mail forward from my cousin in spain about how ikea's got this automated assistant on their website - anna - which you can ask ikea-related questions in natural language. the email suggested to ask her some non-ikea-related questions though, and see what she says. i gotta say - the creators did a good job! :D to find out who the creators are, just ask anna "who's your daddy?"
i finally found out where the name "ikea" came from. but when asked if she's just a big database of answers she said she'd rather not discuss this delicate topic right now. of course she doesnt always get the question right, but her answers are often ingenious, despite of, or because of constraining directives like political correctness and insisting on talking about ikea-related stuff. hehe, i practically got bitched out after asking the polish anna some downright lewd questions. she told me that if i wanna talk about stuff like that, i'm in the wrong place. then she suggested to call one of those phone lines where someone would be more than happy to continue talking with me on that subject. and another time she almost put me to shame by reprimanding me about using highly inappropriate language in front of a lady. totally sweet :)
anna didnt know what a Turing test was, but i did find out from her that her creators review difficult questions from people, so i took the opportunity to congratulate these "creators" on a job well done. i wonder how long its gonna take before too many people muck around with anna before ikea pulls her plug as a waste of resources. but if they dont - could she ironically become the first AI, if she runs for long enough..?

heroes

we dont have cable - or time - so i'm not up to speed with whats happening on tv these days. i've been hearing about this "heroes series", just that its pretty cool, and i've had the first 12 episodes for a while. phx and boogie just went to k-town, so i thought i'd take a look at some of the footage thats been sitting around, accumulating dust.
i gotta say - heroes is a whole other level of primetime tv. it just keeps undulating, the separate story lines are starting to coalesce, a new reality is starting to emerge, solidify, its rules are becoming more pronounced and coherent. and is that a shmoozy attempt to ensnare geekdom - probably the core target audience for the show in the first place, anyways - into an awed army of loyal fandom? or is it an originally unintended, but brilliant money-maker of a side effect?
although sometimes it does seem to be moving a bit too sluggishly. i mean, a bit of suspense is alright, but come on.
awrite - back to it :)

spring is here, and summer is surely just around the corner :)
we've been having some truly summery days recently, and i'm totally hyped about the prospect of going for little picnics with Phx and Boogie on the various beaches around town, and even in the park across the street :D
i love it when i get up in the morning and already the sunshine is trying to burst in through the blinds :)

congrats to romek + monika on the arrival of their first baby!!! :D
just yesterday i was putzing around the pad, and i thunk: "i wonder if monika gave birth yet. she'd be overdue by now."
a few short hours later on, as i'm doing something or another that requires my undivided attention and both hands, the phone rings. ugh! dammit. so by the time i get to it it's just stopped ringing. now who was it... romek! oh, i think i know what this call is about! :D
so i call him right back, he answers, "hello", "hello", he's like "how are you", i'm like "good, good, and how are you", to which he answers "i'm very good!" son-of-a-bitch :)
finally i'm like "well, out with it!" so he finally says "i have a son!" awrite! he should have followed with "so did you see the game last night?"
we went to the store and picked out a card. there was one that said in the front "Children are gifts from God" or something like that. i thought it would be funny if inside we wrote something like "...too bad you're a bunch of fucken heathens! well, congrats anyway :)"
phx didnt think it was that funny, but it kept me giggling for the next few minutes. i gotta start printing my own brand of cards :)

started a new blog - port-a-potty art

its been eons since i last posted here.
i was lying on the bed, because i just felt too tired and bleah to sort thru the excess of shirts in our closet. phx and boogie came too, and we all started drifting off to sleep. and then one of our neighbours started pressure-washing the concrete pad in front of his place. and phx said: "that guy doesnt do anything but smoke pot and pressure-wash his sidewalk".
that slowly got some thoughts in me rolling. i wondered how active he would be if he didnt smoke pot. but then i remembered that i tended to get onto doing stuff i normally didnt feel like doing, after having a toke. so maybe it worked like that for this guy too. or maybe i'm just different.
then i started wondering why that would be - why something like that would affect me in that way. sometimes having a slight consistent pain or being sick just got me on working at what had to be done. all these things seem to just take some kind of edge off for me, and i dont terribly mind getting onto doing something i'd normally not want to do. how does that work?
then i started thinking that maybe our brains have a couple different centers that work independently towards their own goals, but what the body ultimately does is either some kind of average of the different agendas that these brain centers are pushing, or these stimuli get all submitted to some kind of editor, which then decides what to do out of all these choices. but maybe something happens during the editor's development that skewes his tendencies one way or another.
or maybe the process is more automated than that, and the brain centers simply submit a request together with some kind of a priority value, and then its not so much a conscious "choice", but rather a kind of an average or a sum total i mentioned earlier. and either because of nurture or nature, or a combination of both, some centers tend to output higher priority values than others.
likely it would be a combination of approaches - for simpler things, the process would be automated, and we'd be only dimly aware of it. for processes with which "conscious" mucking might jeopardize the body - the process would be completely automated and we'd not be aware of it at all. so what processes are we conscious of? is it the ones that deal with the outside world? unless they're boring, then they'd get demoted to the automated department, and awareness would be rerouted from it to more "interesting" things. awareness... attention? conscious attention. what is consciousness? being able to operate with ideas? whats an idea? something which can be described to a degree with language? hmm, phx just told boogie that i'm the next ernest hummingbird :)
but i think awareness, which is probably the same thing as consciousness, is possible without language. language just institutionalizes awareness. you can operate with ideas without language to a limited degree. but to do that you need memory. awareness probably doesnt exist if all ur doing is reacting to stimuli as they come. but if u can compare an experience to a previous experience...
this "comparing" might happen at an even deeper level of automation in the form of the evolutionary process: a mutation that gives an advantage to an organism when dealing with a situation as compared to its peers will give the organism better chances of survival and procreation. over time this type of organism should become the norm. its kind of like learning, but for a species. hardwired biological memory.
but when individual members of the species can learn to deal with situations in a better way, that catapults the learning process for the species hugely. then the members of the species learn to share this knowledge, so that mistakes dont have to be made over and over again, but the learning process can be picked up and continued by the next individual. add parallel processing by sharing information between many individuals at once and testing many new paths of progress from that point, and the species becomes a supercomputer. too bad we often think of ourselves as completely separate individuals and dont feel that connection to everybody else.

steal this interview

the most recent installment of the viking youth power hour is a previously unreleased interview with abbie hoffman, conducted during the course of the chicago 7 trials, with a bunch of commentary by the then 16 year old aspiring journalist tommy laporte, and the viking drunks. towards the end of the show i could swear you can hear some of them snorting right at the table. again.
all i knew about abbie hoffman up until hearing this show was from "steal this movie", and like the extra features on the dvd. i've never read "steal this book". i gotta say that actually hearing the actual dude was... disappointing. he didnt sound like the leader of a concerted anti-establishment effort i thought he was - he sounded like a rebel looking for a cause, or someone who sorta felt what was going on, but didnt stop long enough to think it thru, so a lot of his thinking and acting seems to me now, was done on the fly. who knows, maybe he was bigger than that - maybe he wanted to appear more "wild" in this particular interview than he was, maybe he didnt care about how he appeared thru this interview at all, possibly also because of the trauma of being on trial, and on such a scale. but even the dude that interviewed him was confirming my present feeling about him: that the dude was more of a force of nature than a logically thought out activist.
during the course of the of the interview he argued against any notions of impartiality and objectivism - he wanted people personally involved in the situation - the political situation in the states at the time - he wanted people to feel. hmm, maybe he wasnt so much against objectivism, but against apathy. anywho - gotta go to work.

i think the weekend was pretty good - went for a nice walk, in very windy weather; finally bought a nuker, but the stupid, no-name Danby piece of shit doesnt work - something wrong with the keypad, have to return it to fucking walmart; got a service van from work, but it smells, and its only for a month; finally cleaned out my car and installed the car seat in it, until phx' car is fixed. so i guess my car tips the balance :)
oh, actually i took some stuff out to value village and our storage unit, so we have a tiny bit more space now. and we looked at closet organizers - a titillating experience - and figured out (mostly) what we're gonna use. and i changed out 2 ligtbulbs, but only 1 was burnt out, but the result is brighter. but the stupid nuker pissed me off.

finished listening to "a scanner darkly" by philip k dick - wild ride, but somewhat somber. especially when in the epilogue the author divulges that some of the characters were based on some friends of his, then talks about how he and people he hung out with during the 60's all did a lot of drugs, then started realising how it was fucking them up, and how reluctant they were to stop. he concludes with a list of his friends that ended up committing suicide, and/or suffering irreversible brain/nervous sytem damage.
now i'm listening to "the man in the high castle" - so far its pretty cool.

bought a Saltskär bafroom cabinet at ikea - i thaught it had a cool pattern on the glass, so it wasnt all frosted, but kinda looked like, i donno - cool. for some reason i thought a few times what the pattern looked like - and i was drifting somewhere around the idea of broken up ice like on a river or lake, but still covered with snow. i mounted the damn thing, later had a shower, and as i dried myself off glancing at it, it finally dawned on me that it must be a city map! there's a few places in sweden named Saltskär, but most of them have no roads, and none of them seem to match up with this map. yes, i looked obsessively. for 2 days. not much of an obsession i guess. but i still wonder. maybe i should just give up and follow phx' advice and just email the designers and get it right from the source.

jumping on the bandwagon

...then again, i just watched blade runner, and i'm guessing it was the first time i watched it straight, because i think i finally got it, and liked it, and found out where this sound byte from one of paul oakenfold's albums is (just before the "piledriver" i think), and it turns out the movie was based on philip k dick's "do androids dream of electric sheep?"

and in other news, i'm thinking that if humanity survives long enough, with enough ppl living at once, we'll end up having all the possible human conditions occurring somewhere around the world, at once. if its possible - it will eventually happen. no matter if its right or wrong. nature doesnt have a moral code. so we can look forward to wellbeing increasing together with suffering. there will be more crime, because there will be more people. but there will also be more people living well. but then there's economy. depleting resources. that'll tip the balances in favor of suffering.

bah, its 4:20. am. i should really get to sleep.

phx and boogie went to kelowna to chill with gran and grampa, and i stayed at home. kinda weird - this appartment suddenly empty. felt lonely. but then i plunged into trying to fix whatever is wrong with the friggin' talon - battery got charged ok, car started ok, got it into the underground garage, cant say i feel like i found the source of the problem, why the abs seemed to be on, but not full on, until it drained the battery. maybe the nicked wires i found, dried and insulated? but it just doesnt feel like that was it. then by chance i discovered that the pin on which the alternator pivots has all but fallen out! i fucked around for hours, but couldnt get a new nut on there properly. i'll have to drain the oil, take off the filter, and then maybe i'll get enough space to get at it enough to just tighten it a little bit, so that i can hopefully safely get to my parents' place, where i can comfortably work on it, with the tools and good lighting there. our building's strata doesnt allow any kind of car work in the garage. i wonder if they'll slap me with a fine. it could happen, like the guy on the 2nd floor that installed laminate flooring in his suite - had to take it all off and pay a fine. our police state starts with our police strata :)
i worked until midnight last night. today i dont wanna go back there, hence this entry, but i gotta go. its felt like my life is too busy for a while now.
listening to some robert anton wilson and philip k dick - may both of whom rest in peace. the viking youth talked a bunch about them, so i wrote the names down and d/l'd what was available. ray kurzweil too - pretty sweet. watched a short bio on philip k dick last night - seems like he was just a crazy dude! there's a group of people out there who enjoy the creations of crazy people. you could probably easily extend that family to most artists. "most" - me and my weird preoccupation with always allowing for exceptions , alternatives, and exactitude. hehe - or exactness :) sometimes. to communicate as exactly as possible what i mean. or someone else. translation is like a riddle or a puzzle. i love it when i am able to use a saying or proverb, or any phrase that is not a straight-forward statement, to convey exactly the idea behind another such statement in another language, especially when the two statements use different subject matters to illustrate the point they're trying to get accross. now thats a convoluted tangent if i've ever seen one :D

i've recently been listening thru the viking youth podcasts - these guys are cool.

apparently in iran an unmarried woman will be punished with 100 lashes if she 'allows' herself to be raped, while a married woman will be stoned to death. was this mohammed's idea?

its fucking cold out there, and i got a shitload of stuff to do today. i dont really wanna do any of it.

why are there so few good books available in audio book format?