Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
i guess i should avoid blanket statements like " i hate weekends ", but there's certain things i dont like about weekends. on my 2 days off we still end up getting up early because of the kids. and there's shit to do thats piled up because we keep thinking we're gonna have time to get shit done on the weekend.
this is a post about nothing - so retarded. i'm just fucking grumpy. again. i need prozac. or some good weed. maybe both.
got a Blackberry Pearl as a hand-me-down from a guy whose place i'll sorta be taking at the new job. looks pretty cool so far. see if i can install the software for it without having the comp explode :)
this is a post about nothing - so retarded. i'm just fucking grumpy. again. i need prozac. or some good weed. maybe both.
got a Blackberry Pearl as a hand-me-down from a guy whose place i'll sorta be taking at the new job. looks pretty cool so far. see if i can install the software for it without having the comp explode :)
Monday, February 25, 2008
another one gone...
Just sold my Talon. always feels weird when they take away your car. but it had to go. it was getting on in years, and more and more things started getting buggered up in it. i was getting into deeper and deeper mechanics territory, and while every time it was a learning experience, every time was also a bit of an ordeal - not knowing, needing to read up and look at websites and forums, buying parts, buying tools i didnt know existed, and it always took sooooo looooooong. these 2 guys put a new arm in right there on the spot in like 15 minutes. it took me hours and hours to get all the shit off. mind you, it always seems harder to take shit apart in a car - shit is seized up, cant see a screw or bolt thats still holding it all together...
that was the first "good" car i bought with my own money. actually, it was the first one i bought with my own money, period. the previous one was bought with student loan money.
this car went with me to San Francisco, then almost to LA, then to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, back home, then to Toronto... and then back again :) well, there were little excursions to Niagara Falls, Windsor, Detroit. got quite a few speeding tickets with it, including one that might still make me wanted in California :)
when i bought it in 2001, it had about 60K on it. 7 years later - it has 235K
fastest i've ever gone in it was 215 kms/hr (133 mi/hr for you 'mericans) - 215 was also its nominal horsepower.
...
i wrote the above like a month or 2 ago, then just saved it - to be edited and added to later. well, that never happened, and i'm not sure what i was thinking of adding to it, so here it goes.
that was the first "good" car i bought with my own money. actually, it was the first one i bought with my own money, period. the previous one was bought with student loan money.
this car went with me to San Francisco, then almost to LA, then to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, back home, then to Toronto... and then back again :) well, there were little excursions to Niagara Falls, Windsor, Detroit. got quite a few speeding tickets with it, including one that might still make me wanted in California :)
when i bought it in 2001, it had about 60K on it. 7 years later - it has 235K
fastest i've ever gone in it was 215 kms/hr (133 mi/hr for you 'mericans) - 215 was also its nominal horsepower.
...
i wrote the above like a month or 2 ago, then just saved it - to be edited and added to later. well, that never happened, and i'm not sure what i was thinking of adding to it, so here it goes.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
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..?
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..?
Sunday, October 09, 2005
a friend of mine is trying to force me to take some action towards bettering my future. he wants me to get my life on track. he wants me to figure out what it is exactly that i think i want - do i want riches and dont care what i do? do i want my work to do something for me in a non-materialistic way? what would i like to do for a living? how much money do i want to be making? when to retire by?
so i guess i want to be able to do whatever i want. i want freedom, independence. for work, i'd like to do something that i'd be excited to get onto. i now know that i dont want to be wet and/or cold at work, but i dont mind the fresh air and mobility. i'd like to be able to do my work from anywhere in the world, and/or travel a lot to see how ppl live in different places, check out the achievements of cultures and individuals everywhere. i'm thinking translator, architect, designer?
i've worked in security for 4 years. i know a bit of stuff, some of the finer points interest me. i've recently realised i like drilling into metal, screwing bolts and nuts, threading - but somewhat precision work. i guess i like details. one thing thats keeping me in security is that i now have a bit of experience and so get paid ok. thats 2 things. i guess i could get into it. but would i be good? would it be fulfilling? maybe, but i'd never know if languages might have done much more for me.
so maybe i should continue within security, trying to learn as much as possible, but keep eyes open for more learning opportunities, better working conditions. but i'd like to get to a place i guess, where i'd work more freelance, do cool little projects that would be rewarding, learning experiences, and very profitable, so that I could then re-route a lot of time to going back to school (after some self study first, maybe), and really exploring all the aspects of language/communication, and then being able to narrow down my interests and doing more and more interesting stuff. and if i like it better than security then i can change fields.
another thing i wanted to play with is t-shirt design and producing, maybe even a wider variety of clothes. maybe i could do this sorta on the side of security. see if it flourishes.
or maybe some different types of design.
i dont think working on my car could ever turn into more than a hobby, but i'd deffinitely like to learn more about this hobby and become more proficient at it. it would also be cool to build remote controlled and AI robots. i like electronic gadgets and would like to work more with them, get more experimental, create.
so i guess i want to be able to do whatever i want. i want freedom, independence. for work, i'd like to do something that i'd be excited to get onto. i now know that i dont want to be wet and/or cold at work, but i dont mind the fresh air and mobility. i'd like to be able to do my work from anywhere in the world, and/or travel a lot to see how ppl live in different places, check out the achievements of cultures and individuals everywhere. i'm thinking translator, architect, designer?
i've worked in security for 4 years. i know a bit of stuff, some of the finer points interest me. i've recently realised i like drilling into metal, screwing bolts and nuts, threading - but somewhat precision work. i guess i like details. one thing thats keeping me in security is that i now have a bit of experience and so get paid ok. thats 2 things. i guess i could get into it. but would i be good? would it be fulfilling? maybe, but i'd never know if languages might have done much more for me.
so maybe i should continue within security, trying to learn as much as possible, but keep eyes open for more learning opportunities, better working conditions. but i'd like to get to a place i guess, where i'd work more freelance, do cool little projects that would be rewarding, learning experiences, and very profitable, so that I could then re-route a lot of time to going back to school (after some self study first, maybe), and really exploring all the aspects of language/communication, and then being able to narrow down my interests and doing more and more interesting stuff. and if i like it better than security then i can change fields.
another thing i wanted to play with is t-shirt design and producing, maybe even a wider variety of clothes. maybe i could do this sorta on the side of security. see if it flourishes.
or maybe some different types of design.
i dont think working on my car could ever turn into more than a hobby, but i'd deffinitely like to learn more about this hobby and become more proficient at it. it would also be cool to build remote controlled and AI robots. i like electronic gadgets and would like to work more with them, get more experimental, create.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
i'm tired and feel like puking. i want to shut off the wants of the world around me. i want my way. pot or alcohol dont deal with the problems that make me feel like this, but they can ease the symptoms so soothingly...
i always forget that i probably only need a few minutes with a distraction, not focusing so much on my disomfort, and i'm much better :)
thats my theory on how pot and alcohol do their magic - they "dilute" the chemicals in the brain that let me think, making me a little less efficient, because less focused, and/or perhaps its the screening process - thoughts which are not driven by a high priority impulse are not weeded out as efficiently anymore - i get distracted, derailed from an obsessive train of thought. the priority loses its priority. tension dissipates. the realisation seeps thru that life can be beautiful.
i wonder if everybody is downer-driven. things have to be at the very least bi-polar - we must be motivated by bad things to avoid those bad things, and by good things to seek more of those good things. pretty blind process. i think we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to free will. the brain is just a convenient mutation of the nervous system. a complication of it, a turbo-charger on an engine inevitably bound for self-destruction. we'll just get there faster. we're a pest colony thats just too greedy for its own good. we keep inventing ways of taking more. and the less there is to take, the more aggressive it'll get. a healthy degree of aggresion in the individual will be more and more often the ticket. i wonder if society will wind tighter and tighter, the more docile portion of the population continuously being fucked out of existence. the ratio of competition versus co-operation will keep growing... but on the other hand, i wonder if we're actually heading in completely the opposite direction. the solitary, ultra-aggressive alpha-male is every now and then beaten by one who has a different trait, or set of traits to make up for his somewhat more mediocre aggression - smarts of some sort, charisma, pheromones, killer smile - whatever it is that makes other people like him. he harnesses the power of many "lesser" individuals - he's the politician. i guess there has to be some kinda balance between the push and the pull, the stick and the carrot - kiss babies, kill the competition. but nothing is static. things keep moving around and changing - until a new way of being for a system is found. all the different ways that people on earth can and have lived circumscribe the limits of how the human can live, as limited by the environment. and we have an impact on our environment - like any self-respecting life form would :)
but even that environment has limits on how much it can be changed, and although we can probably reach this limit - i dont think we would survive it. Terence McKenna pulled out from somewhere this theory that the earth is like some sort of embryo or otherwise a somewhat alive in a fringy sense "organism", and part of its "growing" or "becoming" (conscious or not) was the ocurrence of life-supporting if not outright life-spawning conditions, where all the life that has sprouted up since, is but a subsystem, not unlike all the friendly bacteria we have living inside our bodies, doing whatever it is they do, with the end result of us functioning well. its symbiosis at best. u lose some of them or have an imbalance - u might get diarrhea for a bit. but one of you survives, while their population is decimated. or maybe this is not nearly the end of the road yet. maybe all the flora and fauna is but the base of a huge pyramid-like support system for us... so we can make something really worthwhile and produce and network enough electronics and gather enough data, until we have wrought an "artificial" super-intelligence out of the earth's minerals. we've been messing around with what the earth is made of forever - working the earth, farming, mining, refining, building, shaping - that was just practice. we're starting to get better at it, so we can do finer work with it, until we build the earth a brain out of itself, out of its minerals. we might not recognize it for what it is until its too late. look at the internet. are we just blindly performing our function? here we are, thinking we're the shizznit. in the meantime we're a horde of blind slaves pushing huge rocks around, not realising we're being made to build a pyramid.
time for beddy - its 12:48
i always forget that i probably only need a few minutes with a distraction, not focusing so much on my disomfort, and i'm much better :)
thats my theory on how pot and alcohol do their magic - they "dilute" the chemicals in the brain that let me think, making me a little less efficient, because less focused, and/or perhaps its the screening process - thoughts which are not driven by a high priority impulse are not weeded out as efficiently anymore - i get distracted, derailed from an obsessive train of thought. the priority loses its priority. tension dissipates. the realisation seeps thru that life can be beautiful.
i wonder if everybody is downer-driven. things have to be at the very least bi-polar - we must be motivated by bad things to avoid those bad things, and by good things to seek more of those good things. pretty blind process. i think we give ourselves too much credit when it comes to free will. the brain is just a convenient mutation of the nervous system. a complication of it, a turbo-charger on an engine inevitably bound for self-destruction. we'll just get there faster. we're a pest colony thats just too greedy for its own good. we keep inventing ways of taking more. and the less there is to take, the more aggressive it'll get. a healthy degree of aggresion in the individual will be more and more often the ticket. i wonder if society will wind tighter and tighter, the more docile portion of the population continuously being fucked out of existence. the ratio of competition versus co-operation will keep growing... but on the other hand, i wonder if we're actually heading in completely the opposite direction. the solitary, ultra-aggressive alpha-male is every now and then beaten by one who has a different trait, or set of traits to make up for his somewhat more mediocre aggression - smarts of some sort, charisma, pheromones, killer smile - whatever it is that makes other people like him. he harnesses the power of many "lesser" individuals - he's the politician. i guess there has to be some kinda balance between the push and the pull, the stick and the carrot - kiss babies, kill the competition. but nothing is static. things keep moving around and changing - until a new way of being for a system is found. all the different ways that people on earth can and have lived circumscribe the limits of how the human can live, as limited by the environment. and we have an impact on our environment - like any self-respecting life form would :)
but even that environment has limits on how much it can be changed, and although we can probably reach this limit - i dont think we would survive it. Terence McKenna pulled out from somewhere this theory that the earth is like some sort of embryo or otherwise a somewhat alive in a fringy sense "organism", and part of its "growing" or "becoming" (conscious or not) was the ocurrence of life-supporting if not outright life-spawning conditions, where all the life that has sprouted up since, is but a subsystem, not unlike all the friendly bacteria we have living inside our bodies, doing whatever it is they do, with the end result of us functioning well. its symbiosis at best. u lose some of them or have an imbalance - u might get diarrhea for a bit. but one of you survives, while their population is decimated. or maybe this is not nearly the end of the road yet. maybe all the flora and fauna is but the base of a huge pyramid-like support system for us... so we can make something really worthwhile and produce and network enough electronics and gather enough data, until we have wrought an "artificial" super-intelligence out of the earth's minerals. we've been messing around with what the earth is made of forever - working the earth, farming, mining, refining, building, shaping - that was just practice. we're starting to get better at it, so we can do finer work with it, until we build the earth a brain out of itself, out of its minerals. we might not recognize it for what it is until its too late. look at the internet. are we just blindly performing our function? here we are, thinking we're the shizznit. in the meantime we're a horde of blind slaves pushing huge rocks around, not realising we're being made to build a pyramid.
time for beddy - its 12:48
Saturday, January 29, 2005
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 :)
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 :)
Saturday, January 22, 2005
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
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
Tuesday, January 23, 2001
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