mahiwaga

I'm not really all that mysterious

2007

Jan 2007 Feb 2007 Mar 2007 Apr 2007 May 2007 Jun 2007 Jul 2007 Aug 2007 Sep 2007 Oct 2007 Nov 2007 Dec 2007

Jan

insomnia continues

So I need to go to sleep now if I want to have any hope of waking up in time for work tomorrow. I mean, I really shouldn’t bitch or moan, considering that I had both Monday and Tuesday off. I’m basically pretty much done with the week, really, and I get the weekend off.

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I find myself asking this question right now, and it’s tearing the already tattered remnants of my soul to microscopic shreds:

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I just don’t know anymore.

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Feb

generalized malaise and fatigue

Oh man, now I’m sick. Fevers. Chills. The whole nine yards. It’s probably viral, so all I can do is wait it out. Meanwhile, I’ve been sleeping about 16 hours a day. I’ve still been going to work, so that means that as soon as I get home, I crash out, only to wake up again and drag myself out of bed to go back to work. Fun times.

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a summary of the year thus far

A lot of random little things have happened in the past month and a half that have really sent my brain reeling. In some ways, it feels like Christmas was just a little while ago, when I was wallowing in an irrational, meaningless episode of depression, and ever since it’s been an emotional rollercoaster.

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head in the clouds

I suppose I’m still in a phase of mental regression. For the past five weeks or so, ever since my cousin died and I went on vacation, I’ve found myself trying to recreate my childhood. Playing video games. Obsessing about fantasy worlds. Re-exploring Middle Earth. Even screwing around with emulators, trying to play old-school cRPGs from way-back-when. The Bard’s Tale. The Shard of Spring. Final Fantasy I.

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another moment of synchronicity

As I headed south on the 805, “Sit Down, Stand Up (Snakes and Ladders)” by Radiohead started playing on my iPod, and when it got to the part that goes “the raindrops, the raindrops, the raindrops, the raindrops…” it actually started sprinkling, and it stopped exactly when the song did.

a hundred million things

Two days off in a row is a rare boon, almost a vacation, considering the breakneck schedule I’ve been running on as of late, averaging about 80 hours a week. The downside is that I have to work 12 days in a row, which basically just really sucks. Around day 10 I start getting extremely cranky, and by day 11 I’m ready to bite people. But I can’t do anything about it except call in sick, which is, at times, tempting.

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Mar

torque, dust, and mist

In contrast to The Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth, where magic remains mysterious and arcane and it is never explained and dissected, there seems to be a tendency to technologize—or at least scientify—magic in more recent works of fantasy. In various worlds, magic is seen as a substance, a commodity, that can be altered, stored, and redistributed.

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magic and faerie

The evolution of Tolkien’s synthesized mythology of Middle Earth is well documented by his son Christopher Tolkien, who eventually published J.R.R. Tolkien’s notes and various drafts, some of which eventually became incorporated into The Silmarillion

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Sir Arthur C. Clarke

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stillness on the move

shifting, sliding,
caught in indecision
trapped in a winding labyrinth
running round circles
fleeing from fate
this moment laden with uncertainty
a drop of rain falling into an infinite sea
roiling and raging
a faint ripple
erased by the unending restless waves

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the battle of thermopylae

Stacy Taylor, the host of the KLSD morning radio show, broke down the movie ”300” for me. I was all psyched to watch it, having thoroughly enjoyed ”Sin City” but (1) my dad and my brother watched it without me and (2) Taylor’s deconstruction of it kind of took the wind out of my sails.

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clarity (like mud)

It is not entirely clear to me what I had hoped to accomplish tonight, except maybe getting a little tipsy and perhaps even filling my heart with unquenchable longing.

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and everything grows still before the tempest

Maybe things are not so still, though I wish it were so. I can feel Time swirling all around me, and I’m just trying to keep my head above the water, wanting to just stay still, but knowing that I’m going to keep moving whether I want to or not.

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I think it’s just a matter of time before reality decides to bite me in the ass. I’ve been skating by these past few weeks, trying to desperately catch up on some direly needed sleep, and failing to do so. Tomorrow I am once again on call, and I know for a fact that I’m never going to shake this damned cold. And sadly, my next full weekend off isn’t for another week and a half.

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the road of dreams

There was a portentuous sense of destiny this evening, despite the dead part of my soul realizing that it meant nothing. All my aspirations have ended in dust. It makes little sense that this would be any different now.

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a decade’s worth of bittersweet memories

I ended up watching two out of the five bands playing at Lolopop, which featured Filipino American musicians. The one that drew me (and the only one I recognized) was Julie Plug which I blithely described to Andy as a girl-fronted alterna-pop band (which was apparently the fad in the late ‘90’s) I first heard about them in the waning years of my college career, introduced by Manny. Their first CD ”Starmaker” rapidly spread virally amongst my friends and there are quite a few memories attached to some of their songs (in particular ”Sometime in June”) We watched a couple of shows, the last of which was in SF in 1998 after we all graduated.

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the color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey

Mostly I’m tired. This can, of course, be attributed to the fact that I was on call last night, although it’s not like I did much of anything except maybe sleep.

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treacherous conniving always beats a frank show of force (a discussion of duty and honor)

By various convolutions, I am led to the old, laughable screed by Kim du Toit entitled ”The pussification of the western male” written way back in 2003. I find what he says so ridiculous that I have a hard time believing that this guy is serious.

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one step closer to singularity

I’m starting to find MySpace increasingly tedious because of the sheer amount of comment spam and the number of fembots constantly requesting me as a friend. That and none of the people on my friend’s list ever respond to any of my messages, but that is another rant entirely.

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motivation and the lack thereof

I just can’t seem to get out of bed these days. Luckily I don’t have to be in at work until 1 p.m., but still. I went to sleep at 11:30 p.m. last night and didn’t wake up until 10 a.m.

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on the classification of nerds

Courtesy of my cousin J™

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effluvia from my leaking mind

Lately I’ve been once again been able to remember what I’ve been dreaming. For the longest time I’ve been having dreamless nights, which, while not very interesting, were probably for the best. I remember from clinical neuroscience that most of our dreams are violent and/or depressing, and this one was no exception. For some reason I was really pissed with my brother. I can’t recall the reason in the dream at all, but the sense of hurt and anger was quite vivid.

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the lesser of two evils?

What my psychiatrist noted is that maybe this whole unrelenting fatigue thing is simply the fact that I’d managed to vanquish most of my anxiety and now lack the impetus of fear to keep me awake and toiling. Seriously, I’m not having any more visceral symptoms of anxiety and my depression is much better controlled.

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ground zero: the death star

The problem with conspiracy theories is that you can pretty much twist any piece of data to support your claim, and anyone who disagrees with you clearly is part of the conspiracy as well.

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lord of the rings by squaresoft

I don’t know how I find these random things, but I stumbled upon Chris Hazard and Ky Kimport’s take on what a Tolkien RPG would look like in the hands of Squaresoft.

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you don’t need no stinkin’ rights

Wow. Just, wow.

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Apr

the slow diffusion of information across fields

Joanne brings up a disturbing story concerning [May Yuen]¹, a Chinese American who joined the Army, who ended up killing herself.

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euphemisms and ridiculous tangents

None of my own inner demons have anything directly to do with Nic’s blog post about how nice guys finish last, but the opening quote reminded me of the dead-end lifestyle I’ve been leading for the last decade or so.

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windows: trapped in the 1970s

I stumbled upon this blog entry on The Old New Thing which discusses the 8.3 filename convention on MS-DOS and Windows up to and including XP, which limits a filename to 8 characters with a 3 character extension.

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the old dilemma: legacy support vs the bleeding edge

OK, so maybe I’m just a touch melodramatic when I say that Windows’ reliance on the 8.3 naming convention makes me sad. And, yes, I do subscribe to the ”worse is better” school of software design, so I agree that you shouldn’t futz around and break something that already works pretty well 95% of the time.

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great is the fall of gondolin

I’m still slowly working my way through

The Lost Tales

by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by his son Christopher. I found the story of the destruction of the great, hidden city of the Elves wonderfully moving—the story in

The Lost Tales

presents much more detail than the version in

The Silmarillion

and there are some interesting concepts that Tolkien later removed.

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the children of húrin and the curse of the golden flower

I just occurred to me the superficial similarities between the story of Túrin Turambar and the movie ”The Curse of the Golden Flower”. The most obvious similarity is the incest (Crown Prince Wan isn’t just porking his sister, he’s also doing his stepmother!) but the idea of curses and of gold also resonates. In the movie, the golden chrysanthemum becomes the doomed standard of Prince Jai, while in the story, the golden hoard of Glaurung becomes a curse to Thingol, king of Doriath.

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On Slashdot, there is a post about Apple’s deal with EMI to release non-DRM’ed music in AAC format may change how music is distributed on-line. While the conclusions drawn by this article may be suspect, I think there are aspects that are worth considering.

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blogging code of conduct

In the wake of the debacle amongst the “A” listers in which a prominent female blogger is threatened with sexual abuse and death, I find that even the MSM (that’s mainstream media, not men having sex with men) ended up writing about it, specifically wondering whether or not we need a blogging code of conduct. Darleene muses about who would even enforce such a thing, but interestingly, we already have a code of conduct.

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erratum or mere sophistry

Randomly, I saw this diagram of a serotenergic neuron. Rageboy wonders about the similarities between LSD and SSRIs.

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we don't need no stinkin' crash cart

Uh, can you really be a hospital if you can’t perform a resuscitation? Or at least attempt one?

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empires don’t crumble, they just fade away

The big internet meme today seems to be that Microsoft is dead, and to claim that a multibillion dollar company that is still making enormous profits is dead is no mean feat.

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robot chicken: office fighter

Oh, I wasted my life.

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blogger’s code of conduct

Tim O’Reilly’s post about a blogger’s code of conduct has generated much discussion across the blogosphere and has actually been picked up by the MSM outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times.

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mika “happy ending”

This is one of the happiest songs I’ve ever heard about such a depressing topic:

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i don’t really like fava beans

from my cousin J™

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problems with sleep-onset

I stupidly drank some Vietnamese iced coffee about 3 hours ago, and I’m wired and jittery and all over the place. I have to wake up in less than 6 hours to get ready for work.

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The Old New Thing discusses the different macros you have to set in order to ensure library compatibility in Windows.

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blogger's code of conduct continued

Tim O’Reilly replies to his critics regarding his proposed blogger’s code of conduct.

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time machine for sale

(From my cousin <a href=http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=168884724&blogID=252744646&Mytoken=81CA045D-AC19-40AE-9094629B0A9D31E23647227" title="myspace">J™)

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no beats. no rhymes. just words.

There is a song in here somewhere
caught in the convolutions of my heart
the tortuous paths, the cliffdrops, the lonely summits
the bitter abysses, this vast desert of ruin
This wasteland of decay

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the trap of world building

Despite the fact that I’ve been trapped in a world-building exercise for the past 18 years, I completely agree with M John Harrison’s assessment that world-building is unnecessary in order to tell a good story, and that world-building is the pinnacle of uselessness: you are creating a literal description of a world that doesn’t even exist.

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It comes to nothing
in the first few trickling seconds of this new day
(cuz don’t you know that time is a river, you go with the flow)

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april is the cruelest month

I worry that my capacity to empathize with sadness and tragedy has been destroyed. Most the time at work, I’m forced to put on a mien of detachment and objectivity. If I took everything bad that happens at work to heart, I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit a long time ago. Or I’d have committed suicide.

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thoughts unbidden

Too late, I cry, remembering time past, running through shadows
echoes of ten thousand lives criss-crossing, folding, twisting, bending
In their wake, I am forsaken
Amidst the jetsam and flotsam of plans gone awry
(and still somehow I made it to land,
even now I make plans and grand schemes
to sail forth from this benighted isle

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It’s been a long while since I’ve had to work seven days in a row. In of itself, that kind of schedule makes me cranky. Add to it the fact that this included two overnight calls, and that’s approximately 120 hours of work. Fun times.

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even snoop dogg knows…

…that there is such a thing as context.

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the color of your skin

I am dismayed by this post about a brown-skinned professor who gets detained by the authorities simply because he leaves a bag full of discarded manuscripts to be recycled.

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If you haven’t yet read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, you should get cracking. The Golden Compass is coming out at the end of the year!

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he ruined it with midichlorians

Courtesy of my cousin J™

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“sometime” is “never”

I saw it for a second
caught glancingly in the corner of my eye
The four walls that enclose time
The four walls closing in
Behind the wheel
I pondered singularities
accepted my singularity
how you can be certain about certain things
though all of time is yet uncertain
This is my life
ending by hours, minutes, and seconds
this damnable ever-ticking clock
counting down through these years of loneliness
my fate, my doom
a curse upon my soul
unbroken, unbreakable

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May

My oldest friend whom I’ve known since we were in third grade is getting married to a wonderful woman sometime in 2008, and I can’t help but marvel. It seems like it was just last week we were playing Wing Commander II and listening to the Cure, the Smiths, Soft Cell, and Front 242, or walking up that godforsaken hill while playing some weird word game. There were all those hours spent in front of the Commodore 64 and the 8-bit Nintendo. There was Robotech. Voltron. Bastketball in my backyard. Junior high football. Watching movies at the AMC in Burbank. I could stop and reminisce for hours on end, and my memories may be astray. But it all goes by so fast.

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early morning awakening

I’m not quite certain what compelled me to get out of bed at 4:45 a.m. I didn’t even set my alarm. Supposedly, early morning awakening is one of the cardinal signs of depression. Meaning I still haven’t beat this disease.

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the colors of time

I’m starting to make this an April/May tradition. Take the quiz.

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definition of insanity

Listening to: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by St. Etienne

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they can always hurt you more

(quoth the Fatman: the 8th law from The House of God)

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mika “any other world”

In any other world
you could tell the difference
and let it all unfurl
into broken remnants.
Smile like you mean it
and let yourself let go.

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How is it that I did almost essentially nothing today, and yet by early evening I’m already exhausted?

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like the weather

So maybe it wasn’t as hot as I thought it was. The record high in San Diego for May 8th was 81°F in 1941. Today’s high was supposedly 86°F.

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the fire above hollywood

I’m enthralled by the ongoing drama about the fire in Griffith Park. It is apparently continuing to spread, now encompassing 300 acres, and forcing evacuations of residences.

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the fire continues

jozjozjoz is also blogging about the Griffith Park fire and points me to laughingsquid’s surreal pictures.

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holding on to a thin strand of hope

I suppose if that’s all the medications accomplish, I’m still getting somewhere. For the first time in a long, long time, I actually believe that there’s a good chance that my life will get better. I’m actually looking forward to the future.

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containment of the griffith park fire

So it looks like the Griffith Park fire is 75% contained as of 6 hours ago, although they still expect at least another day of fire-fighting before full containment. The blaze has consumed more than 800 acres, which is about 20% of the park’s total land area.

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the witching hour

It’s 1:30 a.m. and I just woke up about half an hour ago. Ever since I finished up my last call month for this year, I’ve just been exhausted. I suppose I have about a month of sleep to catch up on. But this makes my sleep schedule completely screwed up.

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griffith park fire: flickr stream

People posted a lot of awesome pictures of the fire on Flickr. What is it about fire that fascinated me so?

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The Griffith Park fire is now mostly contained although there is still work to be done, but now Catalina is on fire.

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happiness, the continuing elusiveness of

Now I realize that happiness in of itself is a rather empty goal, reserved for victims of unusual strokes, the congenitally mentally incapacitated, and the clinically deranged. You lesion a few tracts in your brain, and you can be permanently happy until your dying day, singing “zippy-de-doo-da” out of your asshole, your face guaranteed to freeze with a rictus grin. I can see it now, a corpse grinning maniacally in his/here casket.

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Well that was unsatisfying.

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The question is: what the fuck were you expecting?

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Well, here I am, moderately hung-over, not only listening to an owl hooting continously, but someone also decided to blast some rock en español. At freaking 6 a.m. So now I am awake, and I can’t get back to sleep. Wonderful.

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returning to normality (normal for me, at least)

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. — Tricia McMillan AKA Trillian from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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the parable of the cave

I have come to realize that the living room of my apartment resembles a terrorist command center. I have three computers and four LCD screens, seven speakers plus a subwoofer, a TV, and a receiver as well as all the requisite cables and hubs and what not in here, because (1) I couldn’t fit it all in my room anyway and (2) the first rule of sleep hygiene is to only use the bedroom for sleeping.

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Is this aching in my belly anxiety or dysentery? One wonders.

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journey "don't stop believin'"

I woke up at 3 a.m. for no good reason and couldn’t get back to sleep.

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Reminiscing about distant journeys
lost in the murky mist of my fading memories
down that Mother Road, and the paths of generations past
to the south side and the lake shore
and back again
to the mountain pass and to the Sea
the years wash upon the sands, wave after wave

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I’m feeling sick to my stomach for some reason. I don’t know. I don’t know.

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glen campbell “wichita lineman”

Driving back from Harrah’s on the Rincon tribal lands, my iPod suddenly popped up ”Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard” by the KLF. (The KLF?!?) This immediately took me back to my childhood, when I couldn’t go to sleep without the radio on, and the station I would listen was the easy listening station. It used to be called KJOI 99, but now I think it’s Star 98.7. Crazy.

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the fray “fall away”

I am now reduced to merely posting song lyrics.

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there is clearly something wrong with me

Man, that was an incredible waste. Three hours down the drain just to get a stupid RSS widget to work in MySpace. I wish that Myspace would just let me crosspost to their blog engine, but noooo.

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alphaville “forever young”

Did you know that Tiffany did a cover of Alphaville’s song? Weirdness.

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phil collins “take me home”

Maybe I’m just being morbid. Maybe it’s because I just finished working in the ICU and watched plenty of people die and signed plenty of death certificates. Maybe it’s because I had dinner with (among others) someone who works for the medical examiner. Nothing like talking about people who died in sudden, unexpected, and often gruesome ways while having Japanese food. Maybe it’s because the track before this one was “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, which has the classic line “the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had,” a song that was resurrected by Gary Jules and the movie “Donnie Darko.”

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You know what would be an excellent Turing test?

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crossing my fingers

The last time my sister graduated, I was seriously in love with S. While in the back of my head I suppose I always knew it wasn’t going to work, I had been doing a good job ignoring that particular fact. Naturally, when I got back to Chicago, everything went to hell, and I went into a patented downward spiral.

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back in san diego

Woot! I like flying back from the East Coast. It makes you feel like there’s so much time in the day because of the time zone difference.

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still moblogging

Hmm. The timestamps are kind of screwed up. This app i’m using is posting in Greenwich mean time or something. Or I wonder if it’s the blog engine. Good thing they’re both Open Source. Of course that means I’m gonna be pissing away a few more hours of my life screwing around with code.

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Oh yeah. Blogging on my cell phone. Booyah!

I have no mouth and I must scream

Suffice it to say that I am extremely pissed off right now. What a god damned fucking waste. It’s true what they say. In times of crisis, you find out quickly who actually gives a shit about you, and who is just using you for the sake of convenience. Some people really only know how to manipulate people as objects and have no interest in what you think or feel. C’est la vie. You live and learn.

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…and as Homer Simpson warns, this is the first step to failure.

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spiral despair
rif(f)ling through the trash
rummaging through the detritus
perimeters, delimiters,
we rage through time and distance
the memories well up untold
unbidden

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mistake. really.

so what this allows is drunken blogging. Perfect.

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car blogging? Unwise. Probably dangerous.

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something like home. I am so lost.

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In my dreams, evil is always man-shaped
the cockroaches and the worms
fill me with loathing
but they do not fill me with despair
hatred
disgust

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the promise of salvation

Could I have saved her—?
And thereby have saved myself?
Knowing what I know
doing what I do
and all I’m good for
is letting people slip through my fingers

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not-so-graceful degradation

cry for stillness
listen, that rhythm, that beat
crashing and burning
spinning and turning
we’re dancing, we’re diving
we’re dreaming, we’re scheming

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the trials and tribulations of a single week

How much changes in a single week. Anticipation has lately been more enjoyable than the real thing. My fault as usual.

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in transit (how to move your wordpress blog)

On the off chance that you actually cared, I’ve changed this blog’s URL. You will find the latest drek escaping from my vacuous soul at http://disorderedthoughtprocesses.com, and for once the domain name actually matches the title. This will be a transparent process, thanks to the beauty that is the Apache Web Server, and thanks to the beauty of Wordpress itself.

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in love (with a machine)

I’m seriously digging on The Hype Machine, a mp3 blog aggregator. Sure, there are probably less painful ways to try and find your favorite track currently being played by ~~the Evil Empire~~ Clear Channel, but for more of the underground, completely whacked-out stuff, you gotta check it.

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I have this agonizing sense of dysequilibrium.

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It’s definitely summer now.

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summer in the city (a flashback moment)

There are certain parts of the year that seem to get me down. That perception may simply be apophenia. A meaningless confluence of stimuli that cause me to believe there is some sort of pattern. Like listening for voices on blank cassette tapes. Or seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a scrap of tree bark.

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I just finished watching ”Sand Pebbles” which stars Steve McQueen, and it’s a brilliant, intricately subtle anti-war movie that has excruciatingly painful relevance to the present day absurdity of the continued occupation of Iraq by the U.S. “Sand Pebbles” chronicles the tribulations of Jake Holman, an engineer in the U.S. Navy assigned to a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze. The setting is China during the tumultous revolutionary era, as Chiang Kai-shek attempts to oust the warlords whom the western powers support. The specter of Soviet involvement looms large, and so the U.S. characteristically sticks its nose into something that they probably shouldn’t have. Getting involved in other nations’ civil wars seems to be a pretty bad idea if you ask me.

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continued imbalance

isang pagkakataon lang… one chance only
minsan sa buhay… once in a lifetime

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years, then decades

You turned me inside out and you showed me what life was about only you, the only one who stole my heart away

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not exactly rocket science

Now I think Apple is doing the right thing by offering DRM-free music. Although, frankly, the DRMed stuff is not all that hard to crack. Just burn it to CD then re-encode it with the Apple Lossless codec. No loss of quality necessary. (I wouldn’t recommend re-encoding to mp3 or AAC unless you don’t care and/or don’t notice the drop in quality.) Hard drive space is cheap, anyway. My 30 GB 5G iPod cost me less than my (sadly, broken) 20 GB 2G iPod. And if you don’t want to waste a CD-R, I’m sure there are other hacks out there for removing the DRM.

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the sun still shines, the sun still sets

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disinformation (itunes 7.2 and itms)

At the risk of sounding like a raving, gibbering Apple fanboy, I’ve got to ask, what’s up with all the FUD? First there is the paranoia about Apple tracking you through your DRM-less $1.29 downloads, and now there’s this big deal about no longer being able to convert DRMed AACs to DRM-less MP3s (discovered via boingboing.net.)

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afraid of apple

Wow. This story has actually hit the mainstream media. The BBC notes that people are paranoid about all that personal information embedded in the DRM-free songs offered on the iTunes Music Store.

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Jun

fucking with my circadian clock

It’s past 4:30 a.m. and I really, really, really should go to sleep.

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My cousin J™ [1][2] loves this crap:

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A generalized sense of madness

I can tell you, working nights is not particularly conducive to mental well-being. Especially when nearly everyone you meet is somewhat insane as it is, and a good number of them are just completely crazy.

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from phoenicia to austronesia?

(revised from ”The meaning of syllables”)

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(revised from ”Cultural Origin of Dualism?”)

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on gods and spirits

(revised from ”Re: response to victor & malaki)

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Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa ang amoy sa bulok at mabahong isda — Jose Rizal (Anyone who doesn’t know how to love their own language is worse than the smell of a rotten, stinky fish)

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Your Personality Is

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enneagram simplified

From J™:

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this was unexpected (following j™'s via-trails)

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oh blessed sleep

So now my sleep-wake cycle is completely fucked. It was probably a poor idea to have that Frappucino with an extra shot of espresso.

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the middle part

(inspired by a comment to a blog post by someone whom I’ve been blog-stalking on MySpace)

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endings (a conversation continued)

June. Before the solstice and the fading of the sunlight. The beginning of summer is always the ending of another year. Another epoch. As usual, I am always facing the brink of time alone, each time finding myself further and further from civilization. (A voice cries out in the wilderness.) The exile has never ended. I’ve lost any hope of finding a distant shore. Like The Flying Dutchman denied from mooring at any port, I am forced to sail on, sail on.

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radiohead "lucky"

(Listen to it on the Hype Machine: Radiohead “Lucky” (acoustic))

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the future is now

I once had a dream about blogging, being irritated with the emergency department, and the planet Pluto. Somehow these elements randomly came together tonight for no particular reason, and I got this eerie feeling that somehow I can dream about the future. This isn’t the first time this has occurred, and it’s not just some déjà vu weirdness. Unfortunately, my dreams about the future are never useful.

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I don’t know how this managed to elude me for so long, and I don’t really know what prompted me to look this up. Somehow I had stumbled upon the word kairos, which up to now I had merely thought of as the high-school retreat that my high school, along with many Catholic high schools, has seniors participate in. At my school, it wasn’t mandatory, so I never went. I hear that it can be quite life-changing and that it’s very touchy-feely. There insider motto is “Live the Fourth.” Since the Kairos retreat is three days long, I have been told that “the Fourth” means the fourth day, which basically means that one’s life should be lived as an extension of the Kairos experience.

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lord of the universe?

I also wonder where exactly my last name comes from. It’s a really unique name, and pretty much anyone who has it is almost certainly related to me somehow.

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attraction/repulsion

I really haven't gotten the model thing to work for me. I like how I attract unstable people. Yay!

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little thoughts

This week is starting to really get to me. I only have to work for two more nights before I get a weekend.

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more myspace bulletins/quizzes from j™

Which forgotten animated heroine are you?

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The New York Times published an article about how eldest children tend to be ever-so-slightly more “intelligent” than their younger sibs. (Found on Newsvine.)

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solstice (my voluminous blogroll)

I literally skim through 400+ RSS feeds a day. I kind of wonder where my limit is. The point where it starts to feel onerous, and that I’ll never ever get any real work done.

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How will I die?

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It’s 5 a.m. and I’m actually at work, where I am allowed to sleep. Unfortunately, I’m all keyed-up and can’t seem to sit still. Hurry up and wait, indeed.

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by the pricking of my thumbs

So I thought about the story of Snow White, how her mom pricks her finger on a sewing needle, and when she sees a drop of blood upon the white cloth she is sewing, she thinks of naming a daughter Snow White. So she gives birth, and then dies.

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where does he get those wonderful toys?

Again, more quizzes from J™.

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Bush and Cheney’s disdain for the rule of law—to the point of disobeying their own laws—has been flitting around in my consciousness for the past couple of days. On one hand, it’s not surprising at all. Ever since the election of 2000, W and his cronies have been breaking laws and have tried to consolidate the supreme power of the executive branch. From W’s usurpation of the presidency, to the illegal war in Iraq, the abolition of habeas corpus, the institution of torture, and W’s unlawful signing statements, these bastards have far exceeded Nixon’s violations. But Devilstower on The Daily Kos puts it into chilling perspective.

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backward compatibility

I don’t know if it’s because I have just a touch of risk-seeking behavior, but the concept of backward compatibility was never a compelling reason for me to expect that people would deliberately sabotage innovation. And yet, witness the gutted shell that is Vista, which is lacking interesting features like WinFS and Monad/Powershell (although this is eventually going to be released), features that would actually make me want to explore this brave new OS. (And these are only the most infamous of the scrapped features, to boot.)

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baffling (how i learned to stop worrying and love the gui and high-level languages)

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a developer. The extent of my hacking history lies in the good old 8-bit days when I was hand-coding machine language programs into BASIC DATA statements. I learned, of all things, Pascal (which happened to be the programming language tested on the AP Computer Science test) and tried to muck around with C and C++, but eventually gave up with that and ended up learning Perl instead.

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trolling the board

A few small gems that made me laugh out loud that I found while looking for potential admits on tonight’s emergency department board:

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Quizzes. Not from J™. Unfortunately I don’t remember the source.

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at least i'm not that guy

Wow. This sounds bad.

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oh my adrenal glands

I feel utterly tired and spent. I have spent the last two weeks living an unnatural existence, forced to try to sleep during the day and stay awake at night. I can almost imagine my adrenal glands screaming, trying to pump out enough cortisol and epinephrine to keep me from crashing. After my last shift tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up sleeping until Monday.

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the etymology of "gorked" and its cognates

Gorked is a word we like to throw around the emergency department and the hospital wards from time to time. In our general usage of the term, it basically means someone who is non-responsive, generally comatose (as opposed to mere altered mental status/delirium.) In some ways, it has an iatrogenic connotation to it, as it is sometimes used to describe patients who are inadvertantly rendered unresponsive due to excessive dosing of medication (although the more common terminology for this condition is snowed) or unresponsive because of a bad clinical outcome, such as massive stroke, brain hemorrhage, post-code brain (so called because this is what tends to happen when they call a code blue [cardiac and/or respiratory arrest emergency] and it takes more than 8 minutes to get you back, meaning that there is bigtime hypoxic-ischemic brain injury—no oxygen or bloodflow to the brain), or post-bypass brain (which is usually a lot more subtle, and usually has psychiatric qualities to it, but occasionally, someone who gets a coronary artery bypass graft—abbreviated as CABG and affectionately pronounced like “cabbage”—gets gorked.)

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if i were a dame

Found on Gura’s Blog:

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better lucky than good

The Fool is an auspicious card, depicting potential.

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July cometh. A new year starts.

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Jul

rss promiscuity and why nofollow is cool

I find myself commenting a lot on how stupid Digg is. Not the concept itself, which is basically Slashdot evolved and on steroids. The problem is that the average posters are morons.

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where are they now?

My sister informs me of the fates of a couple of child actresses from the Shelly Long movie ”Troop Beverly Hills“ [IMDb][Wikipedia]

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future megalopolises

Or megalopoleis for the pendantic.

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I would say that it’s a sense of foreboding, but I don’t want it to all negative like that.

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Not so still, perhaps. But just as hopeless.

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small frustrations

unexpected traffic. Sunlight fading. Visions remote, receding, flashing quickly through my field of vision. Hoping to get lost in familiar territory.

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I find it interesting that I searched for the word insensate and Google’s adsense popped up the following:

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Maybe I just need to get into a rhythm. Usually I look forward to the summertime, never mind that I rarely get time off anyway. But I just feel, I dunno, bleh.

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all we need is time

in the fog of indecision
the clarity of the dawn
in the anxious disappointment of missed chances
the cold, hard certainty of inescapable destiny
in the silence of defeat
the distant roar of victory

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the sea, and distant tidings of sorrow

The Internet is a convoluted web, and I still marvel at the deftly woven connections between strangers, and I wonder how one can be touched by someone who you never knew, at least not in “real” life.

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what's right vs what works

I seem to revisit this topic from time to time. Usually in the context of trying to struggling through someone else’s code.

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the epitome of pathetic

OK, folks, I think I’ve reached a new low here. I opened a tin can of beans with a hammer and a screwdriver. Supper of champions.

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random epiphanies

Now I’m not one of those sad-sacks who comfort themselves with the idea that “everything happens for a reason.” Lots of things happen for no good reason. Irrationality rules the day most of the time, and if everything in the universe were really premeditated, then God would have to be a psychopath, no question.

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fear of success

Oddly, my horoscope gets it right:

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ok computer: 10 year anniversary

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Jagged Edge
undiscernable
molecular thickness
shimmering with quantum uncertainty

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faded memories half a lifetime away
did I dare, did I dream?
Can I pay that price?
Turn the inside of my soul to the fire
let this aching pain tear at my heart
like some rabid dog gone amok
like piranhas shredding through living flesh

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I swear. Who dreams of particle accelerators?

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archetypes dying in media res

Because of the release of Deathly Hallows today, I had to catch up and read Half-Blood Prince. One of the reasons why I had decided to put off reading it was because everyone had ruined the “big surprise,” which was the death of Albus Dumbledore.

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“If she means so much to you,” said Dumbledore, “surely Lord Voldemort will spare her? Could you not ask for mercy for the mother, in exchange for the son?”

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severus snape: the man, the myth, the legend (massive spoiler!)

“You never saw Snape cast a Patronus, did you, Riddle?”

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drag-and-drop goodness

Now, granted, I’m no impartial observer. I’ve hated Windows since the 1998 iteration, and haven’t looked back. I used Linux as my primary OS from 1999 to 2002, then finally ended up buying an iBook and switching to Mac OS X (which was at version 10.1 at the time.) So I am confused by the outrage generated by drag-and-drop “installation” that is the method that Apple recommends to all developers. The article itself discusses the rationale for these guidelines, which I won’t regurgitate, but which I will refer to.

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pathetic and yet heartbreakingly brilliant (spoilers!)

I can’t seem to get over Snape’s forlorn and hopeless devotion to Lily. On one hand, it’s really sad and pathetic. On the other hand, it’s heart-wrenchingly awesome.

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oh, and btw, a change

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve once again changed blogging engines. This change differs from previous migrations in that I actually imported my old posts. Of course, I haven’t sifted through the old posts yet, and I’m pretty sure a lot of them are pretty broken. I can’t believe I wrote 400+ posts in the past year and a half. Can you imagine if I actually dedicated this time to writing a novel or a book of poems instead?

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The though was "betrayal"
or maybe it was "onus"
The unpayable debt, the blood price
(And if I paid it, would I be free?)
My memories are of Atlas lifting the world on
his shoulders
Sisyphus rolling up the Stone.
The karyatid crushed beneath the load…

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migrating from wordpress to typo 4.1.1 (trunk) on dreamhost

This is just a quick outline of the steps I took, which I hope to fill in as time goes on.

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returning to earthsea/of wizards and warlocks

I’m still ruminating about the end of the Harry Potter saga. The mainstream media’s reaction has always interested me. They continue to be bemused by the idea of a novel taking the world by storm, and infiltrating popular culture. Never mind the fact that people were writing “Frodo Lives!” on subway walls 40 years ago, or the fact that The Lord of the Rings trilogy was extraordinarily successful, and, as far as wizards go, Gandalf the Grey is as well-known as Merlin, and is arguably the favorite and most-beloved of wizards amongst nerds and geeks world-wide.

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severus and lily

I don't think you can really call it love, but still…

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magic: earthsea, middle-earth, et al.

I think The Earthsea Cycle will always have a place in my heart. The three key fantasy novels/series that I am heavily influenced by are The Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, and The Earthsea Cycle. And because of the accidents of time and space, I think I will never escape the popular culture influences of “Star Wars” or of the Harry Potter series. Not that the latter two don’t have any merits. It’s just that I simply don’t consider them to be in the same class as the first three.

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Like the Sound of the Waves on the Sea

My soul→seethes, burns
roils,
This vanity this self-deceit
stripped of all meaning
The noise of the teeming crowd
as wounding as the dead silence

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scattered thoughts (spoilers!)

It’s ironic, really. While I have thoroughly enjoyed the Harry Potter series for the past 7 years (I was gifted the first three books in 2000), I never really held it in high regard, especially in terms of literary merit. To me, it was the fantasy equivalent of a romance novel: lots of fun to read, but not something you would read again. As I’ve mentioned before, the only books that I’ve managed to read more than once have been The Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, and The Wizard of Earthsea. (Actually, digging around in my memory, there are a few more: some of Madeline L’Engle’s books, in particular A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters; and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ~~trilogy~~ series by Douglas Adams.)

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"el regalo" by peter s beagle/why I dig earthsea

Actually, one of my favorite “there are wizards among us” stories is entitled “El Regalo” (The Gift) by Peter S Beagle (of The Last Unicorn fame.) Part of his anthology The Line Between, Beagle chronicles the misadventures of a 15 year old Korean American girl named Angie and her 8½ year old brother named Marvyn, both of whom come to discover that they have magical powers. In this tantalizing tidbit that is just calling to be expanded to a full length novel, they find themselves pitted against an ancient, malevolent sorceror only known as El Viejo, The Old Man.

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if there were no revolution

It occurs to me that July is pretty much over, and August is close at hand. This summer is flying by, and I kind of feel like I’m having to hang on tightly, lest I end up falling on my ass.

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imagining the aftermath of war

While I’m sure that W+Co would love to have the war in the Middle East metastasize and essentially last forever, there is such a thing as finite resources, and either the occupation of Iraq will end soon, or we will find ourselves sending an significant chunk of an entire generation to their needless deaths, and throwing away taxpayer money to the point where our infrastructure will start to suffer. (I imagine that Hurricane Katrina is only a foreshadowing. And keep in mind that we have yet to institute any actualy measures that would keep us safe from terrorist attacks.)

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ch… ch… changes

Just a quick status report: I’ve been struggling mightily with Ruby on Rails, the web application framework du jour, and I finally managed to get a working copy of Mephisto, yet another blog engine. While Typo was OK, I unfortunately discovered that AJAXy-goodness wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be when I couldn’t easily customize my blog. While the idea of drag-and-drop widgets is cool, it’s also slow as hell, and I just didn’t have the patience to wait for the refreshes, particularly when in some cases, I could just write the requisite HTML in the same time.

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Aug

the sorting hat

Or perhaps in Slytherin
You’ll make your real friends,
These cunning folk use any means
To achieve their ends.

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this type of hero

How much of your destiny is truly predetermined? How much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy? (There are technical terms for these things, I think, except I can’t remember them. Confirmation bias? Forer effect?)

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getting mephisto (trunk) to work on dreamhost

I found all of this rather confusing, since I’m pretty sure I downloaded the same version of Mephisto to my local machine as well as to my Dreamhost account. But I got things running on my local machine with no problem, but had to struggle for a couple of days to get it to work on Dreamhost (with Ruby 1.8.5 and Rails 1.2.3 as of this writing.)

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bloc party "pioneers"

The video is awesome.

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wordpress → typo → mephisto

Now, bear in mind, there are decent scripts lurking in vendor/plugins/mephisto_converters that will do a reasonable conversion from either Wordpress→Mephisto or Typo→Mephisto. The problem that comes up, however, is the dichotomy between categories and tags. While I was still using Wordpress (which only offers categories and does not offer tags), I was basically using categories as tags. I never really did get into the whole semantic partitioning between categories vs. tags and find that tags alone satisfy my organizational mindset (meaning, complete chaos, but I digress.

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mika "happy ending" revisited

Wow. This puts a different spin on ”Happy Ending” by Mika.

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vaguely troublesome

Some inchoate misgivings haunt me this early morning. My confidence is at once bolstered and yet shaken.

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i'm not sure why i didn't do this earlier

So the experiment here is to see if I can just hack Blosxom and make it read XML files instead of the standard text files it reads.

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The Sci-Fi Channel had like six back-to-back episodes of the show “Andromeda”, whose concept was originally conceived by Gene Roddenberry (the creator of the original “Star Trek.”) What made me stop was that Nia Peeples[wikipedia][myspace] was a guest character on a particular episode. It turns out that Lexa Doig[wikipedia][IMDb] is a main character (in fact, the title character.) Why am I not aware of these things?

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Hoping that when I find myself face-to-face with an ICBM with a neutron bomb payload, I won't have to say the same thing

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jacking a macbook (immersion/submersion)

So my sister is out of the country for another month and a half, and she purposefully left her computer at my parents’ house, so I’ve started using it. It’s a MacBook with an Intel Core Duo running at 1.83 GHz with 1 GB of RAM, literally twice as fast as my iBook G4 with 1.28 GB of RAM, and it’s pretty sweet.

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My sister has hooked me to HBO original serieses (er, yeah, I know that’s not a real word.) She has been obsessed with ”Entourage” which has now grown on me.

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cocoa vs carbon (an on-going debate)

Even six and a half years after the debut of Mac OS X, this programming API debate continues to draw ~~flames~~ passionate cries of outrage from both camps: the classic Mac OS developers versus the NeXTish developers. [Carbon viewpoint][Cocoa rebuttal] And while Apple does officially intend for Carbon and Cocoa to be both native, first-class APIs, I always got the feeling that the ultimate target was Cocoa. This is unsurprising, considering that Cocoa, derived from NEXTSTEP, is therefore sort of Steve Jobs’ baby.

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one for the road (another shitload of scattered thoughts)

I really can’t articulate why I just don’t feel right. There is a part of me that is sure that I’ve always felt like this, and it’s kind of silly to question the matter now.

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kablog revisited

In addition to stealing my sister’s MacBook, I’ve also taken her old phone, and so I’ve installed a blogging client on it, which I am testing right now against Mephisto.

blogging clients (the good, the bad, and the ugly)

So far, I’ve tried three desktop blogging clients for Mac OS X: Journler, MarsEdit, and Ecto.

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<meta>Still playing with ecto right now. I can’t figure out the timestamps and it’s kind of driving me nuts. Whatever. I’ll let Mephisto figure it out. But ecto is starting to grow on me. I may very well be shelling out $17.95.</meta>

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the flossy flossy

Interesting. You may have heard the song ”Glamorous” by Fergie. The chorus has been driving me crazy:

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Odd, the synchronicity of this post from someone who is going to be a father. (P.S., the asking of highly detailed, extremely specific questions is not a sign that someone is going to be a good father. In fact, it is extremely annoying to the average health care provider, whether midwife, nurse, or physician, and for some reason, the information they have never seems to comport with either the reasonable guidelines suggested by the American Academy of Pediatrics, or the reasonable guidelines afforded by what is traditionally called “common sense.” One could even go as far to say that such nit-picking and attention to often irrelevant detail is a sign that things may go very badly, and that this individual may very well stifle all things that are good about being a child. The specific details of feeding regimens—except in regards to what will allow your baby not to choke to death from aspirating milk—are pretty pointless, since the correct answer to the question of “When should I feed my baby?” is “When he/she is hungry” and believe me, they’ll tell you when they’re hungry, and the correct answer to “What should I feed my baby?” is “Milk” for the first six months of life. There is a raging debate as to whether you should use breast milk or formula, and the data has a lot of good things to say about breast milk, but if, for whatever reason, this is not going to be an option, I would not let your baby starve to death because someone tells you that formula is evil. Bottom line: you’re doing fine, in my opinion.¹

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atm (against the mainstream)

In an [article in the Chicago Sun-Times][1], Steven Pinker brings up some ideas that are often met with knee-jerk reactions. (The terms “sexist,” “racist,” and “fascist” seem to pop up in the brain for some reason.)

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if I were an evil supervillain

…I would be Apocalypse

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I’ve been trying to cross-post some of my blog posts on MySpace. Why do I bother, you may ask? Frankly, it’s probably because, deep down inside, I’m a narcissist and an exhibitionist, and I want to expose myself to as large a population as possible, and fact of the matter is, everyone and their mom seems to be on MySpace.

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back to the beginning

Mephisto broke for some reason. It may have been the plugin that I was experimenting with. But even when I took it out again, it stayed broken. I kept getting the dreaded 500 error. So I did a clean re-install. The blog itself is now still accessible (although I moved it to chaosanddisorder.net.) But I can’t get into the admin page.

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So apparently it was all Dreamhost’s fault. Both Mephisto and Movable Type are working at reasonable speeds. I still stand by the notion that Dreamhost really can’t handle Ruby on Rails very well. I’m looking into switching to (or at least adding on) a different shared host. Site5 looks promising.

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D’oh! Another thing I realized is that I just nuked my Mephisto database. The only thing still sitting on the server are some random archives and the index, and luckily, the Atom feed. I have my Wordpress install backed up, and my database for Typo is still around, so the only thing I’m probably missing are a few posts between the last time I used Typo and the oldest entry I posted from Mephisto that is still in the Atom file. Hopefully I can import all this stuff without too much headache.

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that heat, that heat, that heat

Pardon my French, but it’s hotter than a motherfucker out there. This wouldn’t be a big deal at all if I actually had air-conditioning. I’m actually contemplating the idea of renting a hotel room just so I can turn the thermostat to 55 degrees and chill. Literally.

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like a whelk in a supernova (scattered thoughts continue)

Well. It’s hot. What can I say. I’ve spent the entire day floating from cafe to cafe because I couldn’t stand being inside my air-conditionless apartment. (I really dug Influx Cafe, and they even have free wi-fi!) After that I even headed over to Fry’s (after almost getting into an accident after a guy popped a tire on the freeway and nearly rammed me as he headed to the shoulder) and contemplated buying a portable air-conditioner. But seeing as how I don’t have $399, I ended up leaving empty-handed.

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Looks like fellow Angeleno and California Golden Bear Marié Digby is making it big time.

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trying to convert atom to something MT can read

I contemplated the idea of simpling writing an XSL stylesheet to convert Atom to WXR because this is one of the formats that MT can import. But unfortunately there is no codified spec for WXR, so I have no idea which elements I can safely ignore. And I don’t want to comb through the WXR-to-MT plugin to figure out what MT is actually reading (although I may end up doing this anyway.)

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on the road again

The weather has cooled down wonderfully, but it’s still like an oven inside my apartment. I give up. I’m going to go to my parents’ house in L.A. and bask in air-conditioned glory. Sure, I have to go to work on Sunday, making this a short trip, but whatever.

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perl script for converting atom to MT import format

Ideally, this should probably be a plugin that uses the MT API, but this little bit of kludgery seems to do the trick. Be forewarned, I used a lot of perl modules that may be non-standard.

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The problem I’m having with Movable Type is I don’t like how the permalinks work. Since using Blosxom, I’ve grown accustomed to permalinks of the type such as http://domain.name/yyyy/mm/dd/slug, which happens to be the default format of Wordpress and Mephisto. (This was actually one of the reasons I wasn’t fond of Typo, because of the it inserts the word article between the domain name and the year. I found this unnecessarily crufty.)

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mephisto on Mac OS X

Currently, I am actually running a copy of Mephisto on my sister’s MacBook. Navigating the interface seems marginally faster than interacting with a remote copy on Dreamhost, but that could all be placebo effect. The main reason I wanted to do this is because I didn’t want to have to SSH into my shell account on Dreamhost for troubleshooting purposes. To be fair, it seems like they’ve taken care of their networking issues and the massive amounts of latency is now gone, but still.

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there and back again

So after much toil and trouble, I managed to migrate back from MT4 to Mephisto. I really wasn’t into the way MT4 handles archives. Of the blog engines I’ve tried so far, there are only really three that allow me to have permalinks the way I like them (domain.name/yyyy/mm/dd/slug). These are (1) Blosxom, (2) Wordpress, and (3) Mephisto. Granted, Blosxom doesn’t do this out of the box. (Actually, Blosxom doesn’t do much of anything at all out of the box) I probably would’ve stuck to Typo if I could’ve figured out how to get rid of articles from the permalink. Oh well.

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harry potter and the lord of the rings

This idea was stolen shamelessly from this page that satirically insinuates that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a thinly-veiled rewrite of The Lord the Rings. Being the Middle-Earth ~~loser~~ otaku that I am, I had to adjust a few plot points:

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rails grief/bot hammering

Not sure this made any difference, but I reverted down to r7357 for Edge Rails because r7358 kept running into MySQL out of memory errors.

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never what you expect

So, yes, now it's Simplelog, yet another blog engine running on Ruby on Rails. I guess I'll be sticking to the stable distribution right now, although it doesn't look like the codebase has really been touched in the past 6 months.

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summer is beginning to give up its fight

Transplants from the Midwest and the East Coast laugh at Southern Californians whenever we mention the idea of seasons. But I grew up in L.A., and I've lived the past three years in San Diego, and I swear to you there are seasons down here.

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haunted by something that never was

I find it ironic when I think of who exactly got me to start reading the Harry Potter series in the first place. But that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

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total eclipse of the heart

For some strange reason, I wake up at 1:45 a.m. My eyes are gooey and difficult to open because I fell asleep with my contacts in. I gaze outside my windowsill, and there's the full moon gleaming down upon me, and I remember that today, there's supposed to be a lunar eclipse.

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it's never enough (successfully migrating from mephisto to simplelog)

When you get down to it, Mephisto has all the things I want in a blog engine. Non-crufty permalinks. (Only Wordpress formats its permalinks similarly, although you can easily get this from Blosxom.) A clean interface (Simplelog is probably the only one that is as clean.) A templating system that doesn't utilize nested angle-brackets (something that every single templating system out there has a problem with, except for Liquid, XSLT, and Erubis.) A templating system that strives to separate business logic from presentation (this is something I hate about PHP, and it's the thing that drove me away from Wordpress and which keeps me away, despite the fact that it has been the easiest blog engine to deal with so far. This is the thing that I love about XSLT despite its obtuse, arcane syntax. This is what I fear about Erb, because it makes it so easy to insert Ruby into your templates, leading to the potential of a PHP-like mess. Granted, Ruby is a much cleaner language than PHP, but still.)

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i am seriously dying

I just wanted to say that there is a beautiful girl sitting across the room from me and it just reminds me how fucking hopeless I am. Hahaha.

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migrating from mephisto to simplelog

So I managed to teach myself how to use Rails a little, mainly, how to utilize the magic that is ActiveRecord (which unfortunately probably took me at least 48 hours of sustained effort spread out over the last six days.) ActiveRecord makes me almost forget that I'm dealing with a SQL database. I don't have know any arcane syntax. I just have to know Ruby, which is an extremely Zen-like thing to know. (I know it's a stereotype, but, damn, you've got to hand it to the Japanese.) OK, I'm oversimplifying. I haven't really gotten the hang of join tables, but its nothing that convoluted kludgery can't get around.

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clinical definition of blogorrhea? (damn Lord Byron)

I don't know why. I've been once again obsessed with the sad and sorry life of Severus Snape, and how he lost the only woman he loved, and how his life was effectively ended after she was murdered.

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I learned a valuable lesson from a fallen priest back in high school. At the time, I didn't know his crimes, and the lesson loses no value because of them. (He was eventually accused and proven to have molested several children.)

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nelly furtado "all good things (come to an end)"

I’ve been obsessed with song lately. I’m not sure why. It’s pretty catchy, though. Very “Dust in the Wind”-like, or maybe “Sound of Silence”-ish.

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dream academy "please, please, please let me get what i want"

Dum spiro, spero

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judybats "being simple"

…and I want to be good, but good is being simple. Simple is forgetting. I simply can’t forget….

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accidentally clicking on photo booth. the free wi-fi cafe tour.

Whoops!

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mark ronson featuring daniel merriweather "stop me"

Mark Ronson covers the Smiths.

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chief complaint: indecisiveness, avoidant behavior

Despite religiously taking my medications, I’m still not quite all that functional. I mean, I suppose the good things are that I’m not having any problems at work, and I’m not sleeping sixteen hours a day anymore.

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september already?!?!

WTF?

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Sep

Damn it, the heat is practically melting my brain. It’s been near 100 degrees all weekend, and as humid as a tropical rainforest. Which means that by the time I get home it’s like 120 degrees inside my apartment and disgustingly moist.

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hot. continued.

The expected high temperature today is supposedly 90°F but the humidity is up to 60% and I’m already going out of my mind. It’s time to find a place with A/C to hang out.

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whispers of the gods

On panspermia and ancient aliens (at least in science fiction.)

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meta: the snow queen

I haven’t been this affected by the death of a character ever since Gandalf fell into the abyss in Moria.

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Can you still be human when you’ve purposefully amputated your capacity to love? When you’ve decided to never feel another goddamn thing again, and there is nothing in your heart but dark emptiness?

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creation from nothing (quantum mechanics)

To be loved, you must love…
But those who have so little, the ones who need it the most…
are the least likely to give it…

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faith (and the lack thereof)

When was the last time anyone believed in you?
Outside of the trappings of your profession
without the aegis of your Oath?

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every thought is second-guessed
every impulse examined
every sliver of hope is processed
every emotion filtered

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“will you come with me?”
and she would say “yes”
just that
and I would know

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even starlight fades

the fragrance of her hair haunts me
the way her eyes sparkle when she smiles
the sound of her laughter
the curve of her face
the quiet grace of her every move

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massive attack "teardrop"

I first heard this song one fevered night that I was driving to L.A. the long way around, up I-15, somewhere between Escondido and Temecula. Mix Master Mike was DJ’ing Spin Psycle.

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tortured?
you’re damned right my soul is tortured
twisted and wracked beyond even my darkest imaginings
fraught with pain and blood and death (though it is the vomit, the piss, and the shit that gets to me the most
and worse yet, the stench of bacteria feeding on still-live flesh
I have nightmares about resistant Staph aureus and Pseudomonas more than any of my other fears combined)

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Last night I dreamt that someone confessed her feelings for me—not that it mattered even in my dream, since she was married and had kids. And she kissed me, leaving me literally floored. It was too late, much too much too late, but to know that all my heartache, all my suffering had not been completely in vain was something of a comfort to me. Even though nothing could change, that bit of knowledge consoled me.

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why this dream now,
disinterring the past
I thought I had buried it deep
buried it well

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commentary for the day

That last post was actually quite painful. Who knew that sifting through six years of blog posts could evoke such bathos?

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the flaming lips "do you realize?"

The Flaming Lips • Do You Realize??

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rivermaya "himala"

It was 1997 when I first heard this song, on the island of Tablas, in the province of Romblon, awaiting a plane to take us back to Manila.

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The last 10 years of unbearable loneliness have finally gotten to me, I think.

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Jocelyn Enriquez, Amber, and Ultra Naté "If You Could Read My Mind"

Nine years ago, driving down to San Diego to watch “Dogeaters” at the Mandeville Center on the UCSD campus.

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mindtrace (i'm getting better)

Maybe this story of fighter planes with nukes accidentally left on board flying over the U.S. was the genesis of one of the dreams I had the other day.

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trying to achieve escape velocity (retrospective: 10 years ago)

I’m not really sure what triggered this strange mood of mine. My mind wanders back to the end of my college days, unearthing a lot of bittersweet memories. (And do I even have any memories that just have the sweet and not the bitter?)

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even farther back

1995: Deep wounds. Ugly scars. And then: new, unfounded hopes and unfulfillable wishes. I learn a secret that, in the end, fucks me up bad, but which I am bound by honor to keep. (And would the outcome really have changed if I had betrayed it? Except for the damnation of my soul?)

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Before I find myself dragged back down into the pit of self-pity as I reminisce rather mawkishly, I thought I would share some mashups that I thought were particularly clever.

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the downward spiral

How did I get here?

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arcade fire "no cars go"

I left work this morning singing that line: “Between the click of the light and the start of the dream.” Orion gleamed through the clouds. The crescent moon was rising, and Venus also glittered in the east like a jewel, heralding the rising sun in less than an hour.

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My mood is better now.

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Not sure why, but my brain feels like its full right now. There are like 100,000 thoughts spinning through this absurd skein of neurons wound up tighter than you could cinch a piece of string around Kate Moss’s waist, and I’m just paralyzed.

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I guess there is no recovering from this. Even 10 years out.

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the coming of cold iron

I never watched the original version of “3:10 to Yuma” but I suspect it probably didn’t have the nuances of the remake starring Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. The plot is relatively straight-forward. Ben Wade, the infamous leader of a band of outlaws that have robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad twenty-two times, finally gets caught. Meanwhile, Dan Evans, a veteran of the Civil War who lost his leg, and a rancher who is being forced off his land by the Southern Pacific Railroad, decides to take the job to bring Ben Wade to justice, by escorting him to the prison train that stops in the town of Contention. Of course, Wade’s band of outlaws does all they can to save their boss.

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hope springs eternal

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mindtrace (a full review)

But if I dissect out the past few weeks, I guess I’ve been asking for it. It’s like jumping up-and-down on an unstable bridge.

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Let the starlight guide my path
bear witness to my salvation
my redemption

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Or self-fulfilling prophecy, depending on how you look at it, I suppose. It all depends on who exactly reads my blog, I suppose.

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basic concepts in wound healing

One of the things we learn as children about wounds is that you should never pick at your scabs. This is guaranteed to prevent healing of the wound, and can actually promote scarring to the point of disfigurement.

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Is “ephemerality” even a real word?

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Septembers have also been traditionally the month that I would start re-reading The Lord of the Rings. There is always something poignant about the ending of summer. It reminds me that it’s time to move on, and to fly towards the shadows of the unknown.

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Today came without much fanfare or glee. I am quite happy that I have the day off, though. This week I’ve been working rather fucked-up hours, and it’s begun having a toll on me. I’m not a big fan of leaving work and finding the sun rising up to meet me. I still have to work another shift with similar hours tomorrow, but thankfully I have the weekend off as well.

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Now that I’ve found a blog engine that I’m relatively happy with, I’m thinking about folding all of my old entries into it. Not sure exactly what that will accomplish except that it will be easier to search for certain topics, but I’m sure that I’ll waste at least a few hours trying to figure it out.

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they might be giants "older"

A humorous paen to aging and mortality.

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trust not to hope
hope will have you believing in things
that have no hope of coming true
and despair is not the absence of hope
no, despair is hope so thin and frail and fragile
hope so deadly, so fell, so fraught with peril
a thread of hope so sharp, so razor-thin
cutting deeply, jaggedly, viciously

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hulogdahon (a prelude)

Summer’s beginning to give up her fight…

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hulogdahon (failure to disentangle)

It’s been a strange ride. Friday, against my better judgement, I went to the Beer Festival. Hilariously, I ran into a bunch of people from my residency class. I didn’t know whether to be disturbed or to be comforted that there were at least six or seven physicians at that place.

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hulogdahon (the heart of the matter)

So S (of whom I’ve written a few things here and there) got married on Saturday. Strangely, it didn’t seem like it had been all that long since she first hooked up with her now husband, but four years is a pretty long time.

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hulogdahon (a brief and fitful storm)

I’ve never been sore from crying before. I mean, literally sore. My recti abdominalis hurt the next morning.

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recent mistakes and bad ideas

It was probably poor planning to drink coffee at 9 p.m. and expect to be able to sleep.

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back to our regularly scheduled program

While I’m technically not on a ward month now, I’m spending about 11 hours a day in the hospital. Which is not as bad as it sounds, I guess. I dig working on the wards a lot better than working in the ED, frankly.

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For no good reason I woke up at 4:30 a.m. today without any prompting from my alarm clock.

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last thoughts of the day

My mind has been everywhere today. I suppose one of the good things about getting older is that there is a wider field for my brain to wander. I could probably keep myself usefully amused for several days just letting my thoughts meander.

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my mind is on overdrive

The problem I have with overly optimistic philosophies is that it seems to discount the seriousness of human suffering. I mean, seriously, try getting someone who, after 10 grueling years of intensive chemo, followed by an equally grueling course of bone marrow transplant complicated by graft-vs-host disease, just had a relapse of leukemia—try getting them to watch “The Secret” and see how perverse and even insulting that is.

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julia roberts already made that movie

I feel like a lot of loose ends are being tied up in my life lately. I don’t know whether to be relieved, or to be sad. Or whether to be wary of the future. Every time life comes to one of these pauses, one of these lacunae, it seems that everything goes to shit.

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september fades

This song is by Pedro Gil, whom I ended up watching a few months ago.

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karma is not a linear function

My interpretation of a mathematical theory of karma:

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pain cycle start

is it sharp?
is it burning?
is it constant?
is it intermittent?

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the roots "complexity"

This song seems curiously apt with regards to the thoughts flowing through my head in the last 48 hours or so. This song actually reminds me of those days when the evil resident was raping my soul and somehow it ties everything together and closes the loop.

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hooverphonic "eden"

I really find this song haunting. And fitting, as the memories of this last summer and the summers gone before blow away upon the wind of smoke.

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…left in 2007. Where does the time go?

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Oct

movement while staying still

I have yet to determine when the ideal time to have my last cup of coffee is. I feel like if I don’t have it before 6 p.m., I’m totally going to fall asleep, but if I have it at 7 p.m., then I’m going to be awake all night.

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el camino escondido del dios

in that space unrecognizable,
scotomata perforating your visual fields
the mind fills in the gaps
elides the ragged, raging ends of
punctured, gaping reality
all is well with the world
as far your aching mind is concerned
ignore something long enough and
trust me
it will eventually go away
and all bleeding stops eventually

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el camino real (un poco y poco)

Autumn on this desert shore
sputters and drifts, stutters and stammers
skipping/scratching/scuffing/grooving
and it’s DJ G O D in da house, muthafucka

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active stillness revisited

Oh her blog, S. (not S) posts this quote from T.S. Eliot:

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desperate housewives derides philippine medical degrees

Not sure if you’ve come across the latest outrage du jour. Apparently, Teri Hatcher’s character in ”Desperate Housewives” thinks her gynecologist is a quack because he just diagnosed her with being perimenopausal, and she demands to know whether or not he graduated from a medical school in the Philippines.

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aqualung "black hole"

I swear my iPod is becoming sentient. Somehow it always manages to pick the right song at the right moment.

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obviousman strikes again

Truism #31415: No one likes being called an asshole. Especially when they deserve it.

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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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interweaving patterns everywhere

You can always find a bit of synchronicity if you look hard enough. Also known as the Forer Effect.

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writhing with frustration
aching with desire
wrestling with indecision
still as a mountain top looming over the City

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Even a nuclear bomb up my ass
might fail to move my sad sack, bloated body off of this chair
stuck stupid and slack-jawed, gaping at this screen
(to filter through reality
like stripped shorn pantyhouse in front of a sewage drain
leaving the cigarette butts and used condoms to wallow
in that sepulcher of corrugated metal and chemical despair
letting the fecophilic micro-organisms,
the rich culture medium of turd
float out in the cold of the unforgiving sea)

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fall from grace

I forget what exactly I typed into Google, but somehow I ended up at this archived discussion about the motif of static history in stereotypical fantasy. It’s true, Western Civilization seems to be obsessed with the idea that things were better in the past, and things really suck now. Tolkien called this idea ”The Long Defeat,” specifically referring to the Fall of the Noldor, from a state of Valinorean grace to becoming refugees fleeing Middle-Earth furtively in the night.

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even the environment pushes back

The Lord of the Rings vis-a-vis the Cold War and the War on Terror

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synchronicity: two is only a coincidence

I find it funny that I’ve never heard of Michelle Monaghan before, and all of the sudden this weekend I’ve watched two movies she stars in: ”The Heartbreak Kid” and ”Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang”

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Neil Gaiman brings up the linguistic phenomenon of infixation, which is extremely rare in English, but is part and parcel of Austronesian languages.

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visions and revisions

Gary the Tolkien Geek has been reposting blog posts that analyze the text of

The Lord of the Rings

, so I haven’t tried to reread the thing itself. (Despite the fact that I’ve read the book multiple times, it’s absurd the things that I’ve managed to miss: for example, the insinuation that Eärendil’s ship Vingelot may be a spaceship or the fact that the place name Nargothrond actually occurs in the text.

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Where have I been? What have I seen?

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unsung heroics part I unsung heroics part II

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michelle malkin: a disgrace to all filipinos everywhere

I have to ask you, Michelle:

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corruption and the developing world

There is this punk on the Alibata Yahoo Group that I find myself arguing with whenever I participate in a discussion. Calling himself Malachi, he uses tactics that are reminiscent of the average troll. But for some reason, people never call him out for it.

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rehab (even amy winehouse had to go)

OK, I’m not talking about my drug problems. I’m talking about the terrible shape my body is in.

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Inspired by a random blog post.

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hypochondriosis

You would think that being a trained medical professional would make me immune to supratentorial disorders.

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there and back again

So like the absent-minded fool that I am, I left my psychotropic medications in L.A. Because of the terrible, terrible withdrawal side effects, I was compelled to pick them up after finishing work.

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again with the indecision

Right now I can feel my plasma glucose levels slipping. My liver seems to have exhausted all of its supply of glycogen or something, too.

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back. way back.

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comings and goings

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you came from.
—Unknown

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lone wolves: a misnomer

A biography about Charles Schulz’s biography was recently released, and the blogosphere has had a field day analyzing it. While the Amazon reviewers are apparently disgusted by the dirt that Michaelis dishes up, other readers have found it wonderful to discover/have it confirmed that the creator of such a well-known cultural phenomenon as Peanuts was all too human.

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In Southern California, autumn does not bring the changing of the leaves, nor the bluster of the cold. Rather, it brings fire and ash, as the Santa Ana winds dry out all the brush, leaving behind powder-keg conditions. All it takes is a stray spark, or the mindless malice of an arsonist, and literally all hell breaks loose.

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the cry of the wind

Kevin Drum is incredulous about Joan Didion’s description of the Santa Ana winds. While it is probably a little over the top, there is a change in the atmosphere when those blasts of moisture-stripping wind barrel through the canyons and passes, howling and shrieking, and making your house shudder every once in a while.

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Leave it to San Diego politicians to turn a natural disaster like the fires that are currently running rampant throughtout San Diego County into a partisan issue.

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the time for pointing fingers, I guess

Me and a colleague speculated over why San Diego County can’t seem to protect their citizens from something as regularly cyclic and expected as wildfires. Everyone knows the drill come October. The Santa Anas come blowing in. The brush dries out. Eventually something is going to catch fire, and the fire is going to spread. Fast.

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san diego politicians make me sick

While Governor Schwarzenegger, Mayor Jerry Sanders, and Representative Duncan Hunter continue to fellate each other about what a good job they’re doing, I’d like to point out that the evacuation effort actually underscores the fact that the victims of Hurricane Katrina were grossly mistreated and neglected.

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duncan hunter is a cunt

But you knew that already.

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It’s quite possible that my adrenal glands have finally given up. The wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage of the wild fires has worn me down. I don’t remember being this wired since the destruction of the WTC or maybe not even since the L.A. riots.

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last thoughts for the day

As I try to clear my head from the fires, S. gets me thinking.

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After grabbing some grub and buying more toilet paper, I noticed for the first time the unnatural, diffuse glow that seems to envelop all of San Diego. The sky is this bizarre faded and yet deep blue, like the color of the light filtering through an aquarium, maybe, or maybe more like a TV screen that’s on but without any input coming in, not even static. Or maybe more like an overexposed picture, and just as grainy.

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I don’t know why, but suddenly I had the urge to try yet another blog engine, even though I haven’t really hacked into SimpleLog’s internals and given customization a chance, which was the whole point of using it.

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priestly duties

It has been about six months since the last time I had to give The Talk™. It’s not something I’m particularly good at, although I’m better than I used to be. In the end, it’s about getting to the point: your loved one is dying, and everything we’re doing to her/him is only prolonging suffering. Will you give us permission to stop these things, and focus on making her/him comfortable?

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on silmarils and arkenstones

Still reading The History of the Hobbit by John D. Rateliff. There have been loony theories around the Internet which ponder whether the Arkenstone from The Hobbit is in fact a Silmaril.

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Anil Dash objects to the subtle mockery that Apple throws towards Windows, and I do see his point. It’s yet another sign of “immaturity”, in the same vein of the shit-talking found in the Mac vc PC ads.

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As I shot down the I-5 listening to my iPod, this song came up, bringing up memories from my first year in college, way back in 1994-1995

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It still remains to be seen if the U.S. can be salvaged from the claws of totalitarianism, but I remember the dark days of the botched 2000 election, when the Supreme Court stripped the people of their sovereignty and selected the guy who didn’t win the election, and I remember the cynical use of the destruction of the WTC as an excuse to foment war in Iraq.

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flashback: the unit

Love is watching someone die.

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some reasons why san diego sucks goat dick

The more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems that I’m going to end up staying here in S.D. While the weather is nice and I have some connections that would make it easier to find a job out here, I think I’m just sick and tired of most of the people here.

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Nov

asymmetric warfare (mozilla vs microsoft)

The argument about ECMAScript 4 (the proposed next iteration of Javascript) could very well become quite interesting, although, realistically, this probably won’t be happening for a few years.

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On the way home, I took a different route today. I absentmindedly stayed in the right-hand lanes on the Santa Ana Fwy. going north, and ended up getting shunted onto the Santa Monica Fwy. heading west.

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the continuing evolution of google

The transformation of the Matrix (also known as Google) is at hand.

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hoping it isn't too late

As I drove through the hidden streets of L.A. yesterday, on the final leg of my trip back home from S.D., I found myself haunted by this song by Ben Folds, who sings a requiem to the late Elliot Smith:

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revisiting crisis theory

I was actually first introduced to Marxist crisis theory while reading a fantasy novel, Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. My simplistic one-liner about crisis theory is that it predicts that increasing prosperity actually diminishes the ability of labor to produce the same amount of profit, inevitably leading to a clash between capital and labor. But mathematically speaking, what this means is that the normal progression of a capitalist economy starts off high, but steadily declines, eventually approaching 0 asymptotically (although never actually reaching zero). There is probably a critical point where crisis occurs, and wealth becomes redistributed in some manner (usually violently.) This restarts the engine of capital expansion, which again inevitably declines.

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terrorism, drugs, and the prison system

Just finished watching “The American Gangster” with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, which documents the rise and fall of the drug lord Frank Lucas in the late ‘60’s to the mid ‘70’s, concomitant with the Vietnam War era. (The New York Magazine has an article about him.)

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the jig is up (the desktop is dead, long live the web appliance)

Well, ain’t this a kick in Microsoft’s pants?

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seven years of wandering the desert

Of note, yesterday marks the 7th anniversary of my blogging endeavors. Why is it that I always watch druggie movies in November?

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hasta la vista, baby!

More news about the Internet appliance cum computer: the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe sports a mini-OS called Splashtop, similar to the Phoenix Hyperspace Mini OS which I mentioned previously. The writer seems to be missing the bigger picture, which is that your primary OS resides on the Web. (Specifically, Google OS)

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yet another reason why San Diego sucks

Today is the last day of the Stacy Taylor Show, the only local progressive AM talk show on the air here. They are being evicted by their corporate task masters, the evil empire known as Clear Channel. They give me yet another reason to continue pirating music, to bring these motherfuckers down.

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backwards compatibility with ms-dos

Yikes! Programming for Windows definitely has some harrowing pitfalls.

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emo elvish poetry

Adding a few new feeds to Google Reader has caused it to dredge up a bunch of old entries, but I find this rather pretty:

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Not sure where exactly this entire weekend went. My mind feels like it’s been liquified, and I’m not sure if I’m coming down with something, if I’ve grown allergic to my parents’ dog and my sister’s dog, if I’m suffering from really severe caffeine withdrawal, or if I’m quite possibly losing my mind.

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incomplete, unfulfilled

trip me up with the frailty of life
the inevitability of mortality
even at this height, I can see the deep darkness
of that impending horizon where no stars shine
and night is eternal

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not a djinni in the lamp

Wow. I find the governor of Georgia’s attempt to ask for rain extraordinarily presumptious. What gives us the right to ask God for anything, really? I am reminded by a scene out of the Bible where the priests of Baal have a theological contest with the prophet Elijah.

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from there to here, from then to now

Seven years is slightly less than ¼ of my life so far, and exactly ¼ the number of years of memories I have tucked away somewhere in the eternal labyrinth of mushy grey stuff hidden away in my skull. (I remember my first memory quite distinctly. It is rather mundane and extraordinarily unremarkable, but I know it is the first. Me and my dad were driving south on Alvarado St. in Echo Park, past the Safeway just before Reservoir St. Why this sticks to me, I don’t know.)

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The round corners of the menu bar in Mac OS seem to be an artifact from the early 1980’s, when the 9 inch CRT of the original Mac 128k had rounded bezels.

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tired and weak but thankful

Is this just pure sleep deprivation? Is this dehydration? Am I just hungry? Or maybe this is the characteristic post-post-call torpor? Paranoid thoughts about the H5N1 virus flit briefly through my brain, but the probabilities are pretty slim.

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false etymologies

I have a thing for trying to discover the underlying etymologies of proper names. It becomes a fun game to generate names in imaginary languages that have similar meanings to names in real languages.

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grains of sand in an hourglass

Come December, and the end of the year is nigh
and though the air is dry and warm
the sky glimmers, shimmers with cloudy gray
and the waning sunlight casts long shadows
upon the cold blue sea

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a theory of miracles

I thought to myself this morning:

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coping with existence

Not sure what exactly changed this evening, after I gave up with lying in bed, weary, defeated. Maybe it was the odd impulse to write this line on a random scrap of paper:

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Dec

facing the unknown

will it be just like falling asleep
without waking
an eternal night
without sun’s dawning
no stars, no moon
just the silence
and the void?

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amazon and itms

Robert Scoble seems to be spinning this as an attack on Apple, but as an iPod owner, what this means is that I now have two places where I can legitimately buy songs in digital format (and even more if more artists get with it and go the way of Radiohead.) Looks like a win-win to me.

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unfinished
unending

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retrospect/chronologic

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multicellular computing

A phrase that seems to be cropping up more and more to describe Web 2.0 and the evolution towards Web 3.0 is ”software above the level of a single device.”

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always struggling with inertia

Am I growing set in my ways? Or is it just that I really hate this time of year, and the night feels like a smothering weight crushing me into the ground?

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Of course, I suppose I really should’ve searched Google before trying to coin a phrase. Other people have already used the analogy of the mechanisms of life to the mechanisms of computer programming and information technology.

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versioning metaphor

Still reading stuff about multicellular computing.

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still chasing starlight/the relationship of music and spacetime

I think it might’ve been Sirius, the dog star, in the southern sky that lit my way tonight, like a beacon, brighter than the ambient glow of the urban sprawl before me, but I only have a faint grasp of celestialography, so I could be wrong.

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the longest road

Just when you thought it couldn’t get lonelier. Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any more difficult than it already is. There will be no resting on any laurels. The road ahead climbs up steeply, into the forbidding vault of the heavens.

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when degrees of freedom
fail
just one
a single loss
enough to imprison
caged
still

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where is everything?

Coding—even in Ruby—is not exactly plug-and-play, but it's a whole hell of a lot easier than it used to be, I guess.

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six degrees from robin hood to j.r.r. tolkien

Wikipedia has basically become the path of least resistance these days, and if I want to find information on anything, it tends to become my first stop. Which is sometimes unfortunate, because sometimes the primary sources aren't exactly transparent. There are very few well-documented Wikipedia articles, and the ones that are well-documented have way too many references, leaving me with no idea how to stratify the authoritativeness of each reference. I can understand the reluctance to perform this stratification: it's a lot of work, and the tendency is to leave the burden—perhaps quite rightly—on the reader, but failing to do this makes Wikipedia far less useful than it could be.

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scattered thoughts on code complexity and natural language

Steve Yegge's rants about programming are always really interesting. I'm all about the big picture, and I like how he can properly abstract his arguments so that it makes sense to a non-specialist. Very few technically competent people (whatever the field) are actually able to do this, and if they could, it would certainly make cross-discipline interaction a lot easier.

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documented higher risk of mortality

It's official. I have hypertension, which is more simply known as high blood pressure.

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switching back from simplelog to mephisto

In case you didn't notice, I also switched my blog engine again. Now that Rails 2.0 is out, I thought I'd give Mephisto (from svn) another spin, and it seems to be working relatively well, much better than when I last tried it, although I still get the occasional 500 error.

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misunderstanding modern medicine

I have finally found a synonym for my embryonic philosophy tha I've been calling "The Art of Not Wanting." Akin to Hindu and Buddhist ideals (where desire brings about suffering),voluntary simplicity is a lifestyle that eschews the excesses of the modern and post-modern era. It has significant bearing on the contemporary environmentalist movement as well as with its intersection with Neomarxism.

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The words come bubbling up all of the sudden

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truth, truthiness, and authentic fiction

In the Western model of education, there is an operational distinction between physics and metaphysics. The former gets you grants from the Department of Defense, and opens doors to working at NASA or JPL. You get to work with nuclear reactors and supercolliders and fusion bombs and Einstein-Bose condensates. The latter is stereotyped as the demesne of hippies trapped in the 1960s and undergrads who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Generally, the discipline is called philosophy and not metaphysics, but a rose is a rose. You know you're pretty marginal when even the social science and humanities people look at you with that "What the hell do you do?" look in their eyes.

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Dreamhost, htaccess, and routes.rb

I have never been able to get my .htaccess file to properly redirect requests from different blog engines. For example, Simplelog tacks on either /archives/ or /past/ to its URLs, and Typo tacks on /articles/ to its posts. That's one of the things I like about Mephisto: it doesn't add what I feel are superfluous tokens to the URLs. (Although I am still trying to figure out how to get rid of /archives/ from the monthly posts.)

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simplelog to mephisto

migrating from Simplelog to Mephisto

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I feel extremely saddened with thinking about Benazir Bhutto's assassination, casting a shadow on the end of the year. News of her death rocketed across the blogosphere at near light speed.

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oh no, not again

I won't disagree with the notion that Western Imperialism has caused much evil (the plight of the Pakistani in the wake of Benazir Bhutto's assassination is yet another piece of evidence in that regard) but this monologue from Shakespeare still sends chills down my spine

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I read Barack Obama's speech and felt like I had to post it (originally on Politico.com):

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recapitulation of the ontogeny of computer languages

Steve Yegge's rant about huge code bases and how Java exacerbates the problem is definitely circulating the internets. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror chimes in and agrees wholeheartedly.

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I dig this quote:

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pinanggalingan/paroroonan

In six months, my plan for the future will officially run out.

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teaching a computer to read your mind

The crux of the eternal static versus dynamic typing debate is just how much are you willing to let the computer (or more accurately, the language implementers) decide what you mean. Those who favor static typing tend to favor explicit direction over implicit intuitive understanding, and strictly-defined categories and hierarchies rather than free-for-all tag webs and interconnections. The static typist immediately recognizes that the computer (specifically, the compiler or the interpreter) is a non-intelligent entity that must be told exactly what to do, or else you're liable to saw your own foot off. The dynamic typist, while not delusional about just how intelligent the computer is, is willing to have a little more faith in the language implementers, believing that they will do the Right Thing™ with the input that is fed to them.

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