Flexistentialism Welcome Guest | Login or Register

I’m trying to convince my mother to get a website, I’m baiting her by showing her just how simple and fun it is to use Moveable Type to manage a blog.

Just a reminder, today is Buy Nothing Day, a protest against the rampant consumerism gripping America. The day after Thanksgiving, the day when we are supposed to give thanks for what we have, and how lucky we really are (if you are reading this on a computer, then you are probably one of the most wealthy people in the entire world, even if it doesn’t feel like it) for having the things that we have, everyone pours out of their houses to waste it all on things that we are just going to put into a landfill later anyway.

There has been a bit of a question as to whether the protest necessarily applies to things like food and beverages, which many people need to purchase during the day at work. I think that if you are able, it is best to simply not buy anything. However, the spirit of the protest is for people to be mindful of what they consume, and how it affects the world around them. If you need to buy lunch or coffee, I’d appreciate it if you took the time to buy from a local restraunt. If you drink coffee, try to find ‘Zapatista’ coffee, the proceeds from the sales of it go to support natives in South America trying to regain their freedom, its a pretty tasty coffee too.

Thats all, go about your lives, and enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend, if you participate in it.

For Thanksgiving this year, we visited my grandmother in the nursing home. It is a pretty nice place, and they have a few special dining rooms for visitors, which we occupied. Since my brother recently became vegan, and I’ve been vegetarian for years, we decided to try a Tofurky, which is a tofu and vegetable protein turkey substitute. It is a round ‘roast’ shape, with stuffing in the center. Simply surround with vegetables, and roast it in the oven. I was skeptical at first, as always. I do eat some ‘meat-like’ veggie products, but I’m not a huge fan, and I meet each new one with skepticism, based on some very unsatisfactory experiences I’ve had with them in the past. Well, the Tofurky was pretty good. Not much like turkey, but tasty in its own right.

I think I understand better the plight of the companies trying to make ‘meat-like’ veggie alternatives. There are many vegetarians who feel its a waste of time to try to imitate meat, and think its better to just find new delicious vegetarian flavors. However, there are others who feel that if there are familiar alternatives in the vegetarian world, that it can make people more comfortable switching. Its often said that ‘people don’t actually like meat, they just like the spices that we put on it,’ and that seems to be true in some sense, because I know some lifelong vegetarians who enjoy some of the ‘meat-like’ foods, because they like how they are spiced. However, a common problem I think I see with the meat-like products is that they have to give themselves silly names like ‘Tofurky’ or ‘Chik-n Patties’ or whatever, so that people will know what kind of meat they are imitating, but since its never going to taste exactly the same, people don’t like them. They take a bite of ‘Tofurky’, which, by its name, should taste just like turkey. Well, it doesn’t, and they get horribly disappointed, and reject the food. If Tofurky had a different name, something that didn’t claim to be meat-like, then I bet more people would like it, because they would be coming into it from the mindset of “Ah, a new food to try!” instead of “Hmm, this is supposed to be like turkey??” If I suspend my belief that Tofurky is supposed to taste just like turkey, then I enjoy it more, because its just another new food in my mind, and not just a shabby imitation. However, they couldn’t just go and rename it, because the point of it is to try to get people to try an alternative to turkey at Thanksgiving. How do you do that? Give them something that is similar to turkey! The only way they can get people to try it is by calling it something that is likely to make people not like it as much. Its a confusing and unfortunate situation.

My advice to anyone who is presented with the opportunity to try a Tofurky, or other meat-like veggie alternative, give it a try! You might like it. However, don’t necessarily think of it as a replacement to the meat, or a perfect imitation, because you are bound to be disappointed. Think of it as a whole new food, that is simply spiced similarly to foods you may already be familiar with. Maybe saying “Tofurky takes just like turkey” isn’t a good way to think of it, maybe, “If you like turkey, then you might find the seasonings and texture of a Tofurky pleasing to your pallate.” Anyway, remember that even if you want to have an alternative holiday meal, it doesn’t have to be a fake-meat product. Last Thanksgiving, Madalene and I had a Mediterranian Feast, with Falafel sandwiches, cous cous, homemade hummus and fresh pita bread, cucumbers, tahini dill sauce, tomatoes, etc. It was great, and happened to be almost totally vegan. We did use some feta cheese, but if you wanted it to be totally vegan, that is a trifle to drop. It was a refreshing change from the same foods every year.

Well, I made it to Colorado without incident, though I’m quite strung out from having driven all night. I’m currently posting from the wacky network of computers at my parent’s house. I set the network up years ago, and over time, new parts have come and gone, new computers get added, and settings change. They have DSL now also, whereas when I lived here, it wasn’t available in the area. Anyway, its odd to see what is basically a highly entropized and evolved version of a network I set up long ago. They still use the holes I drilled in the floor to pass cables from the first floor to the second.

Greg’s Power Mac 8500 is running happily, and he is quite excited to have a new computer around. Unfortunately, from its current location on the kitchen table, it can’t reach a network cable to the router, and is hence bound to disconnection, a fate worse than death for the moment, so we have just been playing ancient games on it, like Stunt Copter and Asterex, things dug out of piles of ancient mac floppy disks left over from when our IIsi was the most powerful computer in the house (wow, that sounds wierd to say.)

Posts will be sporadic through the week, but since the network here seems to work, I’ll post some.

I will be out of town from Tuesday evening until sometime on Sunday. I’m driving back to Colorado with Madalene to hang out with my parents, and her parents. We leave on Tuesday evening, around 5pm, and hopefully will drive straight through. I’m a bit of a night owl, so I should be able to make the last stretch OK. If not, we’ll just lay the seats down and sleep for a little while.

While in Colorado, I have a lot of things to do, and not much time. See my grandma, eat Tofurky with my newly vegan brother, maybe go skiing, try to see Matt LeFrenchy, set up a Mac for Greg, do homework, and study for my C exam on Monday. Hmm. It will be busy, but good. It would be helpful if I had an iBook, because then I could do my programming homework on the road. Sadly though, I don’t own an iBook (someday though.. Someday..).

I’m currently writing an interesting program for Dennis and Company. It is a program that calculates interesting Pitch Class Sets. Give it a Pitch Class Set, and it will output the inverse set, the complementary set, the Normal Form Set, and the Prime Set Class! Why is this useful you ask? Well, I honestly don’t know. But, Dennis assures me that for Music Composition folks, its useful. I’ll just take his word for it. I’ve been reading about the transformations, and generating algorithms in C to make the transformations. I barely understand ‘why’, but the ‘how’ I’ve got a solid handle on. However, it gets more complex, and I’m at the end of my ability to figure it out on my own, so after I get back into town, I have to convince Dennis to sit down with me and teach me more.

The application currently has no real name, its just sort of called ‘set theory’ at the moment. It also has no offical version number, or documentation, but I’d call it version 0.1alpha if I had to give it a number. Its not even close to being releasable software in any sense of the word.

In the meantime, however, you can download and compile the source code and try out the application. It will compile in most unix systems, including Mac OS X. It is command line only at the moment. You will need to have the developers tools installed if you are doing it on OS X. Otherwise, gcc will work fine, I’ve tested it with gcc 2.95 on a SunOS system, and gcc 3.1 on a Mac OS X.2.2 system. Its reasonably simple, and doesn’t require any weird libraries, so most other ANSI C compilers will probably make sense of it, but no guarantees. The software has no license at the moment, but consider it GPL (which is what it will be released as when finished). Basically, steal the code if you want, but anything you make using the code has to be GPL as well.

Here is the process: Download the source tarball here.

Go into the terminal, or open a shell, and go to the directory you downloaded it to.

Use the command ‘gunzip settheory.tar.gz’ to unzip the file. Now use the command ‘tar -xvf settheory.tar’ to untar the file. Now a directory was created called ‘settheory’ use ‘cd settheory’ to get into that directory.

Here is the tricky part. Use the command ‘gcc settheory.c -o settheory’ to compile the program. If it fails here, or says ‘command not found’ you may not have the developers tools or gcc installed. Too bad, you can email me about it if you need help (though honestly, its not worth it, the program doesn’t do anything useful at all, I’m only posting this to give myself something to do. And maybe it will give you someone to do for a few minutes.) If it worked, you’ll now have a file called ‘settheory’ in the folder. Use the command ’./settheory’ (yes, thats a period then a forward slash, then the word ‘settheory’) to run the program. Enter a pitch class set. A pitch class set is between 3 and 9 numbers, each between 0 and 11. They stand for musical notes, like C, C#, D, D#, and so on. Put spaces between the numbers, and when you are done, hit enter, and you will magically see various other numbers appear, which have mathematical and musical relation to the numbers you entered. Boring huh? If you answered no to that question, you a probably Dennis! Look at the source code too if you want. They are just text files, some have more explanation on why its doing what its doing.

Now that you just wasted a few minutes of your time, go back to whatever it was that you were doing before I distracted you. Have a nice day!

As you may or may not have noticed, my site was down for a good while yesterday and the day before. That might have something to do with a mighty DOS (Denial of Service) attack that was launched on UltraDNS. Check out the Slashdot story on it. But maybe it didn’t have anything to do with that at all. Though the problem was DNS related.

In better news, I’m currently posting with a program called Kung-Log that uses Moveable Type’s RML-XPC protocol to make posts remotely. Basically, its a standalone OS X application that lets you post. It gives nice options like selecting the blog, automatically inserting ‘currently playing’ info from iTunes, post preview, spell checking and more. Its pretty seamless, and its free too! So if you use Moveable Type and OS X, you should check out Kung-Log. (There is actually only one of you out there that uses both of those as far as I know, so, uh, Josh, you should try it out.)

Also application related, I found myself coding some C, and wanting to have a rectangular selection option in BBedit. For those of you who don’t know, rectangular selection (or ‘block’ selection) is where you can select text in a perfect rectangle. Instead of starting at a word, and wrapping around each line as you select downward, it remembers your exact position left and right as well. Its hard to describe, but pretty simple if you see it. It is totally useless for word processing, but for code, there are times when it is nice to grab a chunk out of the middle, and rectangular selections make that very easy. Anyway, I was disappointed that BBedit didn’t have that feature. But lo and behold, when I checked their site, they had just released BBEdit 7.0! Which includes, you guessed it, rectangular selections! I love it when developers pre-read my mind. BBEdit 7.0 also includes goodies like Quartz text smoothing, XHTML 1.1 support “Close Current Tag” tool, and more. BBEdit is the best OS X text editor known to man.

I had other stuff I really wanted to write about last night, but I seem to have forgotten it. Oh well, I suppose that means it wasn’t very important anyway, or that I’m just really forgetful. Maybe it will come to me later.

Interesting side note: While glancing up and down the post looking for spelling errors (which Kung-Log highlights!), I realized that I had to add the word ‘blog’ to the computer’s dictionary. Funny, huh?

Tonight I had the pleasure of seeing Dennis’s concert. Him and several other new composers had written music that was being premiered at the fabulous Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis. The cathedral is a massive structure, over 130 years old, with a mighty pipe organ, and an amazing acoustic presence. Dennis had two pieces, one was based on a set of four ‘glosses’ which are short poem-like additions added to ancient texts, usually written in the margins. Think of them as Irish haiku. They describe things like the wonders of nature, the meditative peacefulness of reading a book in the forest, the song of a bird, things like that. His second piece was theme and variations on a traditional Irish tune, written for flute, string bass (which Dennis played himself) and harp. The piece was beautiful, utilizing all the best parts of the various instruments, and even using some parts that you wouldn’t expect, rapping on the wood, tapping and clicking the keys, etc.

There were also fabulous organ pieces, wonderful choral works, piano pieces, and more. It was a great concert, set in a great hall, and a wonderful opprotunity for some new musicians to get their pieces performed. I feel confident that there is a new generation of composers and performers coming into their own that will please and astound everyone. Its great to be a part of their beginnings.

Today I ran some errands, trying to get the last of this scooter stuff taken care of. My first errand took me to a welding shop to get the final component to the crossbar lock for my shed assembled. The welding shop I chose turned out to be in the middle of the worst part of town I’ve ever been in. It was up on MLK Drive, and was scary to drive to. Every building along the street was in the worst state of repair it could be, and still be considered a ‘usable building.’ There were almost no windows, just plywood and metal grates covering what used to be windows. The ‘shops’ all had hand painted signs, and spraypaint covering the outside. There were heaps of trash on the sidewalks, and the streets were crumbled beyond recognition. It looked like a third world country. I kept the doors on the car locked, as I am just a soft, pink little boy, not cut out for the harshness of the ghetto. The welding shop itself was manned by a dyed-black hair oldish woman, and an incredibly filthy old man. The shop was also an auto mechanic shop, it seemed, as there were heaps upon heaps of oily black automotive parts lying around. There was also the worlds most beat up Camaro on the other side of the room, engine running and everything, coughing big gouts of smoke out the garage door, which had been propped up with a big piece of pipe. Everything was covered in years of grease, including the people, and the door knobs, and everything. The doors to the place didn’t work, and the original handset/locking system had been abandoned in favor of welding some big ass rods to the door, and putting a hasp on them. Broken refridgerators were heaped up in one corner, piles of oily rags lying around, an ancient Playboy centerfold, covered in grease, was pinned up over the desk (I use the term desk loosely, it was once a desk, I suppose, but now has become a trashed receptacle for piles of scrapmetal, with a small area cleared out for the occasional ‘desk’ work that one might need to do in a shop like this. As I described the details of the project to the man, he continued to shove fried chicken into his mouth. He didn’t eat like a human, he just pushed the drumstick into his mouth, and then bit down, and pulled it out, leaving most of the chicken in his mouth, and sending a shower of crumbs and little bits of gristle into his beard. He made no attempt to wipe himself off, nor check the shower of greasy crumbs erupting from his mouth. He wrote up a ‘work order’ of sorts, utilizing the tiny cleared out space on the desk, and told me he’d give me a call when it was done, and that it would cost about 10 bucks. I left him with the 6 foot steel rod I had come in with, and went on my way. We’ll see what he manages to come up with…

In an interesting turn of events, my little brother Greg has become a Vegan! He always used to make fun of my vegetarianism, but he understood the rational behind my explanations. Finally, he decided that it was the best thing, and switched. Of course, since he does not eat dairy or eggs, he now has a sort of ‘moral superiority’ over me that I once had over him. I suppose thats what happens as your siblings grow up, you have to struggle even harder to stay on top of them.

Finally, I’ve got my scooter! A red, black and silver 2002 SR50 Ditech. Its got a Gianelli NRX carbon fiber exhaust system, Mallossi variator, and a high performance 50cc fuel-injected two-stroke engine. It truly is the top of its class. It performs even better than my previous scooter, due to its fuel injected engine design. Its a blast to ride, of course! I’d take some pictures of it, but unfortunately, Madalene’s digital camera’s automatic lens cover broke, meaning we had to send it in to get fixed. So pictures are forthcoming. In the meantime, you can look at this picture of a scooter very similar to mine. Click image for larger version.

While Madalene was shopping on Amazon, she took this interesting screenshot. Apparently their automated system of suggesting related products to you has taken an interesting turn. Apparently they now differentiate customers based on whether or not they wear clothing. Customers who go naked get offered other products, you might think. I find it particularly amusing that the first entry is “Clean Underwear” which is clearly the staple of any clothing wearer’s wardrobe

One of the bathrooms here in the building where my C class is has the urinals right next to the door. The door closes slowly, but at the very end, falls and SLAMS loudly right behind you. I had just enough time to get in the door and get the zipper down when the door SLAMMED, scaring the piss out of me. Fortunately, since I was already ‘in position,’ that didn’t turn out to be a problem.
——
The inkblot test I tried in the previous post has a pretty good track record so far. The four people (including myself) that I’ve seen the results from have all been quite accurate, which is saying a lot for an online test. For “your unconscious mind is driven most by insert emotion here” I’ve seen Resistance (Josh), Love (me), Peace (Madalene), and Curiosity (Dustin). Curiosity fits Dustin quite well, see the report here. If you know him, you’ll see the connection. I suppose the big question is how many emotions does it have in its database? Sorting the entire english speaking/computer owning population into one of four catagories isn’t hard at all. Fitting them into one of 50 catagories, now that is a serious feat. How many emotions do you think the test has? Has anyone tested out the same as one of us? Do you think that people who test the same should date? Or are there ‘compatible types’ that should date each other? Do we care? I’m not sure about that last one, but assuming its a ‘yes,’ then we’ll probably have to sign up for the dating service stuff to find out, and I don’t really want to pay for that.

I took the Inkblot test that Josh found so eerie, and I suppose its accurate, though I’ll let you judge for yourself.

Hopefully the fact that I’m driven by love will give me high rankings in their associated dating service that you can sign up for.

To assist in the assembly of the shed, I bought a rubber mallet. Sheetmetal things often don’t like to fit just right, but a little tappy-tappy from a mallet usually brings things into the right position, and so far, the mallet has come to good use. However, when I purchased it, there was a sticker on the side saying “Bounce Resistant” to let people know that it wasn’t very bouncey, which is good, you don’t want it rebounding and jumping out of your hand. However, the other part of the sticker said “Try Me!” in big red letters. Now, in a store, do you really want people wacking stuff with a mallet in order to “try out” the bounce resistant features of the mallet? I didn’t care, because its not my store. I gave the steel rack that the hammers were on a solid THWACK, and true to the advertisement, the mallet bounced very little. So I did it again. Pretty satisfying, and again, very little bounce. I tried out a few other mallets similarly, eventually settling on the original 7 dollar “Try Me” mallet. I wish more things invited you to try them out in the store. Maybe a “Try Me” section for the nail guns or riding lawnmowers is in order…

Today has been a busy day. This morning I woke up, and trucked off to Home Depot, where I purchased a shed and various shed related paraphenalia. The whole process took over 3 hours at the Home Depot, because of mediocre service, and not being able to find anything. It took me fully 30 minutes to locate big auger-type screws for anchoring into soil. Then another 30 minutes to get someone to cut my plywood for me. Then countless minutes just wandering around finding individual items, and loading them onto my cart. There was also a nice snafu at the checkout line where the guy didn’t have the book with the SKU numbers for the plywood or the patio blocks I was using as a foundation. I had to run back to the items, and actually get the SKU right off the original display. It was a hassle. But finally, I got it all home, and began construction. Setting up the foundation was difficult. Lots of soil moving to get the concrete blocks in place, then more soil moving to level the blocks. They still aren’t totally level, but its only an 8X5 sheet metal shed, what the hell do you expect? Then, as darkness began to creep up, Madalene and I assembled the first part of the metal subfloor, and assembled the four walls. They are currently leaning up against the fence outside, for final assembly tommorow. If anyone wants to come help me tommorow morning (Billy or Dennis, I’m looking in your direction, wink wink), around 11ish, I will buy you beer, or some other beverage of your choice. I’m also hoping to go to the Motorcycle Show tommorow, and maybe go to the dealership to pick up my scooter, depending on how the shed comes together, though I may be forced to wait until Tuesday to actually get the scooter. I took a shower because I was so filthy, and now I’m nice and clean.