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The Hubble Space Telescope, one of our greatest space programs, just turned 13 years old! It had a difficult childhood, but is now one of the most valuable telescopes we have. In honor of the goodness that is brought to us by optics, I have given my glasses a good cleaning. Thanks, optics! Thanks Hubble!

Madalene and I briefly visited a graduate student organized event on campus that featured beer, Indian food, a DJ, and free tickets to a premier of a movie Madalene wants to see. The beer cooler was looking mighty lonely, since there were two kegs that were getting all the love. So I drank a beer from the cooler. Then we had to go grocery shopping, so I grabbed a second beer for later. We shopped, and I picked up pita bread and a tub of scallion hummus. I also have a little habit eating a single olive from their olive bar every time I go to the store.

So I get home, eat some hummus, drink that other beer, and approach Madalene for a hug. Instantly she shrinks away, moving as far from me as possible. Thats when I realized that I had been drinking beer, eating onion and garlic hummus and that olive. I don’t smell nice at all. So I understand her reluctance to approach me. Nothing left to do but drown my sorrows in more hummus. So yummy…

There has been worldwide uprising against the war in Iraq. Each opposer of the war fights it in their own way, and I thank everyone who takes the extra time and energy to make their impression. Today I’d like to give special props to someone who can make an impression in an amazing way, Saul Williams.

Saul Williams is a legend of hip hop, and an amazing poet. In concert with “Coldcut”:http://www.ninjatune.net/ninja/artist.php?id=3, “DJ Spooky”:http://www.egs.edu/djspooky.html, DJ Goo, “Ninja Tunes”:http://www.ninjatune.com and No Man’s Land Radio, he has released a single entitled “Not in My Name”, which will be available on CD and vinyl shortly.

The album contains four excellent songs of protest, as well as remixes by DJ Spooky, Coldcut and DJ Goo. Don’t miss the live No Man’s Land track! You can also download the entire single, as well as live radio presentations, in mp3 form on the website “NotInOurNameMusic.com”:http://www.notinournamemusic.com and I highly recommend that everyone go download these tracks, as they are a powerful form of expression, and are suitable for blasting loudly and proudly. The track “Pledge of Resistance” comes in an acapella form, suitable for remixing and DJ sets (DJs should get this on vinyl as soon as it comes out), as well as mixes by Coldcut, DJ Spooky and DJ Goo. All very good.

So thanks to everyone who stands up against war, and a special thanks today to Saul Williams and crew for creating and freely giving this album to the world.

For all the love I have for Chimera, sometimes I think I really shouldn’t be using beta software. Why? Because I just lost many many pages of fine writing about this weekend when it crashed, just before I was about to hit that post button. Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn, Damn!

Here is a terrible synopsis of the original post, because I’m too damn tired and frustrated to type it back in again.

Friday. Had beer with Billy at Ciceros. Watched Vampire Hunter D at a midnight showing at the Tivoli. The beer was tasty, and the movie was very good. Check it out.

Saturday. Saw an old friend who is out living the dream by dancing in a chicken costume. Saw BMX bikes. Played Age of Empires.

Sunday. Went Bowling For Bloggers with the STL Blogger crew. It was a blast. I played an ok game, then a bad game, then a pretty good game, but that still wasn’t good enough to beat Angeline. Ate pizza. Wrote a few C programs. Typed this up. Got frustrated when it got lost. Did this crappy synopsis. I’ll write more later.

In response to this post by Josh, I must make some points about our contrasting choice of lifestyles.

He notes that he lost his razor even though he keeps a ‘clean ship’ and organizes his belongings. I contend that this is why he lost it. People lose things always. Its human nature. If you have a perfectly organized system, and one thing is lost, the organization is now totally invalid, because the reality of the room doesn’t match your preconception. Where do you look? Where do you even start looking? If its not where its supposed to be, you are out of places to look, and now you have to just paw around blindly.

My method is to keep my areas in a state of dynamic, quasi-ordered chaos. Not filthy, by any stretch, but things are scattered around, or in little piles. Sometimes I have to look around for a minute to find something, but I almost never actually lose things. The reason is that I’m accustomed to hunting for things. Years of living in this state has given me a very keen awareness of my habits concerning placement of objects. There are places I set things down, nooks and crannies to search, drawers I commonly use, etc. If I don’t remember exactly where something is, I just make a standard and efficent sweep through the house, and invariably turn up the missing object.

Keep an organized house, and you can find your things for now, but learn to hunt, and you’ll never be lacking!

Or maybe I’m just rationalizing my disorganization by desperately groping for logical connections. I hope you find your razor Josh!

Sometimes I’ll be reading a good blog or two, and I’ll read a good post, and be very satisfied. But then, 20 minutes later, I visit the site again, expecting to be entertained with another dynamic, thoughtful post. But no! They haven’t updated it yet! Maybe that post is the ONLY one that they will make that day! Horror! Why aren’t they posting MORE? They should get help! Hire a ghostwriter or two. Then they could have updates every hour. They would just have to review the outlines daily, and then give them to the writing team, who would write the entries. If they were on a roll, they could write all the entries for that week in one day, and then a script could just post one each hour. That way you wouldn’t have to staff writers in the middle of the night. That would be great.

Except that it would totally violate the POINT of the blog, that it is personal! Its the words of a real person about real stuff, not just outlined, proofread, edited tripe written to simply fill up a space with words.

Oh well, I’ll just have to survive…

Today I bought (or more accurately, agreed to buy, money hasn’t changed hands yet) a Honda Aero 125 scooter! Its a 1984 (the only year it was sold in the US), and has a 125cc two-stroke engine. Its very ugly however, and is certainly no replacement for my dear, dear SR50. However, it is a scooter, and its better than no scooter. And its only 300$! I’m buying it from my coworker, she bought it so she could learn to ride two-wheeled vehicles, and now has a motorcycle, so she’s selling the scooter. I’ll post pictures when I get it!

My other scooter, as many of you know, was stolen in April. It was recovered, but damaged. I didn’t have comprehensive insurance on it (because I hadn’t lived in anywhere that is so freakishly crime-ridden before), so the damage wasn’t covered. They caught the guy, but its STILL waiting to go to trial.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had finally saved up the 1400$ dollars to get it fixed. I took it into the shop, and said “Make my beloved scooter good as new!”

Then, a few days later, I got a call from the manager of the shop, “Well, uh, we had a break-in at the shop last night, and a bunch of bikes were stolen, including your scooter.” Made me very unhappy. Well, they are responsible for it, but I still don’t know how much I’m going to get for reimbursement, and I don’t know if that will be enough to replace the scooter right away. So in the mean time, at least I’ll have a Honda. I’ll still be trying to get my Aprilia replaced, but the Honda will at least give me something to drive around on, and will make me less annoyed at not having a scooter.

They sure look goofy though. But $300, damn, how could I say no?

A lot of blogs I’ve read recently have a common theme of being used to passive aggressively attack people who the author is close to. They often use nicknames for the person, so as not to ‘identify’ them, but it becomes obvious very fast who the person is. I’m going to make a conscious attempt to not passive aggressively attack people in my blog, and I might make the offhanded suggestion that honesty and upfrontedness is generally a better problem solving technique than stewing in one’s own online juices while typing bitterly about someone in their lives.

Many non-bloggers who I talk to seem to have a fear of blogging based on their thought that they don’t want ‘just anyone’ out on the Internet to read about their personal life. They would only feel comfortable talking about personal things with people who they are close to, not just random people from ‘who knows where’. But bloggers themselves seem to have the opposite concern. John Doe off in Whatsitsville, Virginia can read about the most personal aspects of their life, but god forbid their ex-girlfriend, coworker, roommate, mother, etc, reads the site!

Its interesting how you can pour your heart out to a perfect stranger, but can be afraid to talk to the people who are the most important in your life.

I had a pretty good day today, despite having to go into work incredibly early. This is a welcome change from the string of rather unpleasant days at work recently. I’m polishing up my resume, it might be about time for a ‘career change.’

I bought a nice framed print of Salvador Dali’s “The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus”. It was $59.99 at an art sale at the medical school, and was supporting some benefit or something. I just wanted the painting.

It was painted after his main surreal period, and represents more universal ideals, in this case, discovery. While I don’t happen to believe that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America (how do you discover something that is already supporting multiple civilizations consisting of millions of people?), and I think that too much emphasis is put on the part he played in the development of the New World, I still like this painting.

At the time of the painting, some historians were suggesting that Columbus was actually from Catalonia, not Italy. Dali, being a Catalan himself, felt an obvious connection. The painting is very passionate, and is emphatic in displaying how strongly things such as religion played in Columbus’s interaction with the New World.

It is a real salute to the spirit of discovery, and a very nice painting. I’m pleased to have gotten it.

What is Ko’s obsession with cake? How can it be explained? Is there something unsavory in his cake? Did he have a particularly good or bad cake experience that has changed his life? He wrote a sonnet about cake. I wrote a sonnet about Little Debbie brand Snack Cakes when I was in high school, it was published in the school writing publication. If I find it, I’ll post it, and dedicate it to Ko.

Josh made this fabulous statement today. It exposes a humorously grim reality of computer based communication, where we are simultaneously freed by, and mocked by our interface. Colorful bubbles or not, I still like to talk to people, but sometimes it makes an awfully goofy impression. Its like having a clown running around blowing balloon animals and honking an air horn while you are trying to have a serious intellectual debate with someone.

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In a totally unrelated incident, the computer lab computer I’m working on at the moment has a broken ‘forward arrow’ key, and its driving me absolutely batty, time to switch computers.

Order a shit-load of Silly Putty. You can get the shit straight from Dow Chemical, in the big huge blocks that they sell directly to the toy company.

How? Easy.

Unfortunately, the minimum order seems to be 100 pounds, which is about 800$ worth of Silly Putty. I’ve already got my mother in Colorado (who is quite a toy fan herself) to commit to 50$ worth of putty. Will in Broomfield and his buddy Chris have also pledged support. I think I can get Billy in on it, and maybe Josh too.. I’ll have to work on Josh a bit though, I’m not sure if he is a big putty man or not…

Hey STL Bloggers, do you want to get in on a huge putty buy? Think 8$ a pound, and then imagine how COOL it would be to have 10 pounds of that stuff!!! Think about it! And then comment here to pledge your support!

Putty for all!

Hey hey, I’m working on a way to let the STL Bloggers automatically ping the page with updates automatically using Moveable Type. The process is more complex than I originally surmised, so I put my codin’ hat on, and am mucking around for the solution, which I think I’ve found, I just need to iron out. I’ll have instructions and/or a patch up soon, but right now its far to late to be messing around in perl.

Does anyone even use moveable type? Or is everyone on devblog? I’m very happy with Moveable Type, I highly recommend it, but devblog seems to be showing definate signs of coolness. In any event, I want to automatically ping the STL blogger site, and I’m determined to do so. Yeah.

I found out that I’ve had an average of 57 unique visitors per day through September. Wow. Thanks people! Thats not many hits, in the long run, but I was under the impression that just my mother an two or three of my friends checked out the site, but I guess its more. Sweet.

I’m currently recovering from numerous small injuries. Mostly plaguing the right side of my body.

Skydiving a while back, I pulled my shoulder as part of a not-so-ideal deployment. BTW, its a myth that skydiving injuries happen while landing. Landing is the easy part. Its deployment where you really get jerked around. Anyway, it wasn’t really getting better for about a week. Partly because I was still using it pretty heavily at work. I was trying not to favor it, but I ended up using it a lot. But now its finally getting better, and is almost totally fixed.

At Shwagstock, I ran into a fencepost at night, bruising my right calf. I was running along, with my headlight on, but instead of looking where I was going, I was looking over at Billy and Stacy. Then I ran into the post, and landed head over heels. No blood, but I got a wicked bruise. Its getting better now though.

Then, oddly, I got a lot of canker sores in my mouth all at once. Three of them, to be precise. Then, while being very careful while eating not to disturb them, I gave my cheek a vicious biting. Then later, I bit my tounge. That means 5 painful mouth injuries. Finally today eating isn’t painful, which means that the little injuries are healing themselves happily.

So anyway, I’m pretty much better now, but I was a sad state of affairs with all those little minor injuries.

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Also, this post by Josh is hilarious. His writing really lends a new look to everyday activities.

Now in an amazing odd-ness, you can get your body turned into gem quality diamonds! When you die, simply send your body to LifeGem, and have them collect the carbon from your remains, and manufacture real diamonds!

I’m not sure what I think about it yet… Is it sweet? Or weird? Does it spit in the face of Buddhist teachings of impermanence? Or is it a desperate attempt to circumvent impermanence, which is saddly doomed to fail? Is that heroic? Or tragic?

You can also get your pets made into diamonds.