mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

Nov 2003

Before I forget, I just want to jot down what I dreamt last night. The first part involved walking around Downtown L.A. with my sister. We came across the site of the Angel's Flight, the former funicular that was decommissioned after it derailed and fatally ran over someone. We decided to hike up the steps, except that instead of landing us in the California Plaza, it took us to this summit with a spectacular (but completely unreal) view. Of course I tried to bust out my digital camera to take a magnificent picture of the sunset, and the snow capped mountains to the north. Interestingly, when we continued onward, we came across this atrium with a revolving totem pole made up of religious figures, including, I think, Fr. Junipero Serra, and, likely, Jesus Christ. I tried to take a picture of it, but it was impossible because it kept rotating. Also, the top of Angel's Flight happened to house a light-rail station (in my dream, at least. No such thing exists in real life.) Nine lines converged at this stop, three red, three yellow, two green, and a blue line. Ah. If only L.A. really did have a practical train system.

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i love the '80's

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semantic relativism

Taxonomy is a boundary object.

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Can I tell you, when Panther (MacOSX 10.3) was released, I moseyed on over to the Apple Store at the Glendale Galleria and played around with Exposé For those who haven't heard, Exposé is Apple's innovative desktop management solution. With a touch of a button, all your windows get scaled down and artfully tiled so that you can see all your apps. It may not sound like much, but, seriously, go to your nearby Apple Store or other Apple retail vendor, and play with the new OSX. (Alternatively, just check out the Quicktime demo of Exposéon apple.com.) The first time I hit F9, I think I almost orgasmed (yeah, yeah, I know, too much information.) It's soo cool.

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coldplay "clocks (royksopp trembling heart remix)"

I tell you, I am obsessed with this song. A couple of weekends ago, while roaming around South Bay (in the Bay Area, as opposed to in SoCal—OK, these links are pointless and I clearly have too much spare time) I decided to visit the Great Mall in Milpitas and ended up, of course, at the Gap. They were playing this particular mix of "Clocks" by Coldplay, and I have been trying to hunt it down ever since.

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As B can attest, I am no good with glass coffee tables.

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situation normal — who cares if it's all fucked up?

I think I can't drink alcohol any more. It really does act as a depressant on me. Not always immediately, but definitely in the aftermath.

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jesus h christ in a chicken basket

The unedited audio from Neil Armstrong's landing on the moon.

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karmic debt consolidation

While amusing, and even a little practical, I was a little disappointed by this parodic educational fact-page about massive debt. I was expecting the Buddhist equivalent of Catholic indulgences, the kind of place that people like Hitler and George W Bush could go to in order to broker a less debasing next-cycle of life, and still be assured of paying their karmic debt to the universe.

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bread and circuses

Oh man. I'd like to see you top that, Rupert Murdoch. Can there finally be network that sinks to depths lower than Fox? Sky TV tricks six men into fondling and cuddling with Miriam, who is a pre-op transsexual.

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the fall just kills me

My mind is so devoid of anything interesting right now, it depresses me. Lying down for a bit, I felt like I was spinning.

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the fall just kills me - part 2

I am trying not to blog about other people's drama in order to compensate for my own lack of anything to blog about, but, yeah, someone else's drama momentarily intruded upon my own. This resulted in the smoking of two cigarettes and much projectile vomiting (not on my part, for once.)

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So I am back in Chicago. It's not as cold as I feared (although it's still pretty fucking cold.) I'm glad I haven't been here the whole time. For me, summer only ended about a week ago.

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so much cheese it'll make you poop

To B: yes I'm still updating this blog, as sorry as it is. Before I make any excuses:

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The Veritable Calm Before the Storm

ok, i'm at the hospital, and i've been too lazy to figure out how to get wikieditish]1 to work on my main blog, and i'm tired of trying to screw around with Mindterm and trying to run SSH from a web browser, so here i am.

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This phrase looks like it might be from one of those Demotivator posters:

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blog from anywhere

As I have noted previously, I have no inclination to try and install wikieditish since it relies on trapping URLs that don't exist. I learned early on in my travails with Blosxom that if you don't generate a 404 error, this will cause some spiders to get trapped in recursion.

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Perhaps I was doomed from the start. I remember driving to high school and passing by Berkeley Ave. every single weekday as I headed south on Glendale Blvd. And even earlier than that, I had been using GEOS for the Commodore 64. (This here is geek history—the Commodore 64 is probably the computer that most Gen X hackers grew up on, perhaps alongside the Apple IIc. GEOS was a GUI for the Commodore 64. Can you believe it? A GUI on a machine that only had 64KB of RAM.) The creator of this awesome piece of software was originally called, you guessed it, Berkeley Software Design. In retrospect, hilariously, I recall that the decorative fonts were all named after either buildings on the UC Campus, or streets. So they had fonts like Telegraph and Dwinelle, Durant and Evans, Barrows, Bancroft, Wheeler, LeConte. And the system font? BSD. (After the software company, not the venerable Berkeley Software Distribution version of UNIX.)

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fiction and so called reality

Since I sped right through Tehanu, I decided to keep going on to The Other Wind, and again, I am astounded by the faint echoes of things that I once knew, or had been told, once upon a time, in that imaginary place that was my childhood. My mind tries to reach for symmetry, for congruity, understanding that within every story, however fantastic, there is a bit of reality, that a story is a lie we use to tell the truth.

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le guin, dick, and the matrix

I just remembered what else I meant to write.

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the smiths "last night i dreamt that somebody loved me"

Last night I really did dream. It was kind of depressing in a familiar sort of way, and I was not surprised when I woke alone. But what struck me wasn't the sex (although there was that in the dream), but holding her in my arms, trusting each other.

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Yes, your eyes are not deceived. It is in fact 3am Central Standard Time, and I am come from a rescue, though I knew it not until it was accomplished. The smell of drear smoke hangs onto me. (I think to myself, where is the rhyme, the reason.... But that is neither here nor there.) It has been a while since I went out onto the streets, had a few drinks, smoked a few cigarettes, an awkward moment, the meaning of my presence not registering until it is told to me baldly to my face, and, if I were someone else, if I were not who I was (and, I wonder idly, why is the subjunctive mood going out of favor in the English language?) I might suppose that I have but to wait, I have but to set my own terms, and they will come to me willingly.

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Sunday calls can be bad, because since the day is often uneventful, you have to keep admitting through the night. Of course, this is when five people decide to walk into the ER complaining of chest pain, who end up having abnormal EKGs, and now you're admitting five people at 5 in the morning.

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earthsea continued

I searched Google for the idea I threw around earlier, of how Austronesians sailed to Easter Island and maybe even to the west coast of South America and found it in the Valley News, among other places.

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plumbing the depths of code

I've mentioned the fact that the twin pillars of the new economy, information technology and biotechnology, both deal mostly with information, specifically code, whether the binary digits of silicon, gallium, and arsenic, or the trinary codons of DNA.

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I forgot to mention another parallel between "The Creation of Ea" (the Earthsea Creation Story) and "Malakas at Maganda" (a Filipino Creation story). While the Immanent Grove figures prominently in the Earthsea Cycle, the grove of bamboo serves as the birthplace of humanity in "Malakas at Maganda."

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