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?

just finished listening to 1984 by george orwell - fucking depressing. the last 1/3 of the book is just the dude's ordeal - i felt like i was just being pounded by it over the head, just wanted to get thru it, one part nearly put tears in my eyes. i would say the book is interesting up to the point when he is taken. after that i would advise to use whatever substance or technique to detach oneself from one's feelings to continue. maybe i'm just a pussy. i get down easily. i dont wanna work. i dont wanna do anything. nothing productive. its cold out there. fucking benzino is still not talking - i stopped talking to him too. but its tense. that sucks. all i wanna do is to get stoned. or do whatever that captures my attention without requiring me to do anything. movies. stories. tripping. reading. my head seems to be hurting often now. my psoriasis is flaring like its going out of fashion. i hate christmas. when i first heard someone uttering this phrase i was outraged. now i'm a full convert. the only thing one can count on is change. i dont know how phx is putting up with me.

just doing a little light morning reading on crowd psychology... :D
i dont know how it all pans out in the end yet, but i found it interesting how they go thru the theories that gained and lost popularity, and i started thinking about how that seems to be the case in many areas of science: they have a theory, then they find too many exceptions, so they come up with a better 'story' for it, and so it goes, until hopefully the theory is accurate enough. that may well work in some cases. but this crowd thing got me thinking - what if a hybrid theory is needed? like the backbone of a crowd are people of similar beliefs who come together to act in a certain way, together, and then the rest are followers - easily influenced 'sheeple'... :D
like in a concrete construction - you have a steel frame to provide a degree of flexibility, and the concrete encasing it to provide the rigidity - at a low cost. as much as some would like to have it, people are not all the same, there's a variety of individuals within a crowd, and perhaps thats a key strength of a mob - versatility - not just pure strength in numbers. maybe there are more kinds of people in a crowd, if no 2 people are alike, which might make a crowd even stronger, more versatile, more decentralised - i'm thinking kevlar. or the interweb. :)
i donno, maybe its too early in the morning. maybe i should just stick to wire pulling. but i like this multi-prongage idea.

feeling pretty shitty lately. i dont think that gingko shit is good for me. sometimes it makes me feel a bit dizzy, slow and stupid - kinda like a stone, but without the pleasure. i should read up on it and probably quit it. maybe my moods have been rubbing off at work, because benzino has been having some hardcore hissy fits. i can tell he's pissed off, but he just wont talk. i think he's been hanging out with girls way too much. i think he said most of his friends are girls - no benefits tho. i donno.
totally losing grip on the work situation. benzino is now de facto running the site, and i'm the helper. except i'm also like a consultant. i like that part of it. i could chalk most of it up to seasonal affective disorder or something, and the recent cold temperatures. the closing in of christmas. the crappy situation on my account. the unfinished side jobs, people calling about new ones. i dont wanna do anything but listen to my stories and watch movies. and boogie. she's so cute. but sometimes she drives us up the wall. most often me.
i just wanna be a spectator for a while. an extended while. get stoned and enjoy. go to sleep when i burn out.
looks like i'm actually gonna have to read some books. count zero and monalisa overdrive are apparently not available in audio format. it might look weird for people to see me there, just sitting at the site. maybe if i went and read it on my coffee breaks at the starbucks...
pattern recognition was really cool. now i just started listening to virtual light, but its somehow different. i think i should do some kinda course that would improve my information extraction from spoken word. i really wanted to use the word 'aural' though... :)
that and speed reading. if i could speed up my reading speed, maybe reading books would be a more plausible activity for my tight schedule. as i perceive it.
i should go. my parents are waiting for me. i said i could install an outside outlet for their christmas lights. this is gonna be interesting.

i'm trying out a new drug - gingko biloba - see if that expands my horizons... :)

"...dude, its like totally not a drug, man, its an herb, and like the man says: "whats from the earth is of the greatest worth.""

driving up from oregon was fucking fucktarded - slow spots everywhere, humble folks without temptation ( which i kept thinking was "homophobes without temptation" until benzino corrected me), then the snow and sleet, trucks passing my slow ass, spraying the goddam sleet all over the windshield so i couldnt see anything, then accidents and jack-knifed semi's turning the I-5 into a friggin' parking lot back-to-back-to friggin' back, so we didnt get home till 2 am or so. even on the way down there was a few serious bog-downs, one of which turned out to be a friggin' burning minivan on the side of the highway! the heat was very noticeable even thru the closed windows. kinda reminded me of the treasure island show they used to have in vegas - really surprising how much you felt the heat of the explosions from such a distance. too bad they killed it.

listening to another story by william gibson - "pattern recognition". still having the same problem with the density of information sometimes - the dude packs so much info into a phrase, i cant do anything else while listening to it. well, i do anyways, cause i mostly listen while driving, but i often regret it because i miss stuff at times and have to rewind if i can. was happy to hear that the main character dislikes those square-toed shoes - i dont like them either! was happy for a moment in knowing that i'm not alone in this, until it dawned on me that, after all, it is a fictitious character. hrrumpf...
it was cool to find out that gibson lives around these parts. wonder if i'll ever run into him while doing a service call. might already have, before i knew who it was... i also just found out the other day that tom selleck - the dude that played magnum - also apparently lives around these parts! i was also surprised to find that apparently he is NOT gay.

i was really miffed today at the apparent disappeareance (hehe :D) of free wifi at coffee places around where i worked. i had to drive down a back alley to where i thought there used to be a weak signal as barely detected from a little coffee place before, opened my laptop, and found a weak-ass connection - free! kept my fingers crossed that the battery would last long enough for me to go to hotmail, login, attach my time sheet and email it to my office so i could get paid tomorrow! :O to my relief, it showed that it went thru... :)
felt like a bit of a back-alley techno-cowboy though - what a rush! :)

ok - gats ta git to sleep. shower first.

i think intelligence is the ability to solve new problems. hmm, maybe its more like intelligence can be measured by the ability to solve new problems. of course an intelligence may choose not to solve problems, therefore scoring poorly on our little test. maybe intelligence is too clumped a concept. i think it should be mostly about learning and applying new knowledge. making guesses. guesses that have a good chance of being correct. i've noticed that iq tests seem to often include questions on "classical" knowledge. knowledge of facts. knowledge and understanding of the pythagorean theorem. i'd level the field by giving the test takers new rules to solve problems with.

i like the idea that the internet, being the massively interconnected network that it is, with memory, might one day just spontaneously achieve consciousness. but it must have been something mark pesce might have said, that got me thinking that it might actually never happen spontaneously.
do we know any other intelligence than human? well, animals have intelligence - which we can see by observing them as they try to solve some kind of problem - like get to food. but then you see your dog barking at his own reflection, and your illusions of ur pooch's intelligence get rudely shattered. nevertheless - there's some intelligence there. but we're looking for conscious, sentient intelligence, arent we. if we're looking to create an intelligence that we could "hang out" with, then maybe we should try following the path we took to get here. who knows how life started, but maybe we could start at some kind of "thing" that would somehow react to stimuli. i guess we might be aiming at something like having a child - something in the end autonomous, that we could co-operate with, and be proud of its achievements. autonomy would be a life of its own. it would pursue its own goals. if we're looking at the internet achieving conscious intelligence that we could relate to, it would need goals. at least something to fear, something to work away from and something to work towards, a reward, a pleasure. a fear could be the threat of ceasing to exist, and a pleasure would be something that would be a plus towards survival. and perhaps as a strategy to ensure survival in face of changing conditions of life, environments - an interest in things "different", an exploring streak. and ensure the exploring streak is different in strength in the different representatives of the species, so that if curiosity kills one cat, it wont kill them all. i guess we could wait until something we do with the web unexpectedly gives it a purpose, a vector, or construct something like that on purpose. but maybe the web itself should be viewed more like the environment rather than the entity. i mean, there are people who personify the earth, but i dont know. well, if the earth gets wired enough with the net, it will be like its nervous sytem. its kinda like terence mckenna's idea, which i think he'd developed on someone else's - that the earth is like an embryo, still evolving, and the net is its nervous sytem, made out of the raw materials of the earth. that kind of scenario i could kinda see... and when the net is configured to manage itself, and figure out for itself how to solve its problems, thats when things might start looking interesting. until it figures out that we're a pest that needs to be gotten rid of. hopefully we're viewed as at least maintenance bugs, and just our population and exploits need to be curtailed a bit. but i cant see the net itself being configured to manage itself. it would be a maintenance program. actually, probably every part of the net would get its own, proprietary kind. it would be like multiple personalities. in the end they'd probably duke it out leaving a single one. unless they're created in a "flock", to have to cooperate with one another. but over time the different individuals of the flock might become integrated parts of the flock itself as an individual, for the sake of efficiency. i guess we'll have to see. we should probably run simulations of all these scenarios in isolated sytems, that the programs inside it would think that was the world. and we'd see from the outcome which programs are worthy. hehe - an eerily familiar scenario - i knew god was testing us! but for what purpose? what are we gonna be worthy of? or not...