$disanpoter

4 things that made this past hour bearable

minor borges moment ; minor someone thought my thoughts better than me moment ; this chat exchange [edited for typos] about that minor borges moment:

me: did you see the pointers one?
friend: oh yeah ive read em all at least twice

gonna make a montage poster

for my room

 

me: dork

not that i don't approve

 

friend: you're just jealous you didnt think of it first

 

me: i can only reference that object that might potentially admit to such a condition

 

friend: last i heard you were a deep copy of that object

 

me: i can't one up that. it's not possible

 

friend: could go last resort options < your mom jokes >

 

me: last i heard you were a deep copy of a bastard child of a your_mom_joke object?

 

friend: oh snap... its on now

at least my implementation doesnt leak memory

im not sure what the hell that's implying but yeah take that

 

me: your implementation's so jank it leaks your mom's memory

 

friend: i leaked memory into your mom and corrupted her process

me: i had a comeback involving mother, bored, short and jump

but then [in fact, i got distracted by work]

 

friend: hahhahahahaha

and the fact that when it this was over i was no longer suffering from low-blood sugar and had miraculously managed to get work done at the same time.

howsit

it's odd having occassional readers here. this used to be essentially a publically accessible but virtually unknown place for me to record my thoughts and feelings about the things that happened in my life. now i find myself turning away from here as a place to explore my more private thoughts, especially those i have some uncertainties about. this is not a bad thing. in fact, this morning, i merely find myself appreciating the organic way in which, contrary to the typical exhibitionary drive of blogdom, maintaining this blog is enforcing boundaries between what i want to keep private, what i want to keep relatively close, and what i want to share.

for one thing, i find it interesting to see the ways the need for these boundaries and for negotiating between them can affect my writing style. I think i'm more attuned to this this morning in part because of the contemplations i left out of my last post on the events of last week and in part because of the concrete and authoratative language i've had the pleasure of employing in the instructions to the user interfaces i'm working on. some posts are like lattice works, the unweildiness of the syntax growing in direct proportion to my impulse to control how much of my own feelings i reveal. it's not a particularly brilliant or unexpected observation, but its thought-provoking nonetheless.

more so though, sitting with myself after posting last night was an eye-opening experience. i realized there were reflections i very much wanted to put some expression to, numerous discrete events from the past week, both minor and more significant, that were valuable to me but in a way that is oddly personally - oddly because there's nothing about them i would necessarily hide, but because i don't feel the need to share them to validate them or to prove to myself that i am okay with the lack of certainty and omniscience they involve. it's hard to explain - and plus, it's new this being okay with imbalance and uncertainty - but here's an example: lately i haven't been depending on my friends assessments of behavioral interactions i relate to them to either confirm or moderate my assessment of the situation. this while scary, is a good thing for me. but last night, instead of trying to mitigate this by placing greater confidence in my own reasons and assessments, i kept returning to the idea that i simply can't know. however much a given situation appears to me to be a certain way, it's possible - even probable at times - that it feels entirely differently to other people involved. there are always times when one is confident that they can judge someone's enjoyment or displeasure, but really, there are just as many times when these aspects are not apparant. it's not that this is such a new concept for me, but usually this inspires a desire to take decided steps to push away or completely cut out the people in my life i feel such reservations over. that instead, last night i simply lingered on how much i had enjoyed the company of just about everyone i spent time with last week, from the people i'd just met to the good friends i hadn't seen in weeks, today seems huge to me.

you are here

one of the rare set of books i never finished (of which there are at most 10 thanks to the irritating fact that these will continue to bother me until i do*) is The Bug. you would (and i did) think this would be a uniquely well suited book for me, being about computer programmers and their pursuit of unsolvable things, but it's not. it did manage to infiltrate my MO in one lasting way, though. the protagonist had developed a habit of leaving himself notes in the code starting with "you are here," and i have since found myself oddly inspired to act similarly. there is something just - as in les mots justes - about the break from first person that it places between the work of one day and that of the next, the shift it perspective it encourages separating the coder from the coded.

and of course with the instructions that follow, there is also something calming about these notes to self. the return to the lone coder the voice of a guide. even when it is your own voice telling you where you are going from a time only very briefly in the past, it sparks confidence that the steps are indeed going forward, if only on a rather meaningless path towards a minor cron job or import protocol.

but more than that, it recalls the trope of guide and guided throughout history in all its manifestations and it recalls the traditions of imperative syntaxes in narratives that i've grown up reading - and because i can leave these "you are here" messages dangling there for myself to find later, and upon finding them feel the direction falling back into my life, i feel a more subtle or saturated understanding of how and why those kinds of statements can so effectively move us forward.

it's kind of like the self-fulfilling nature of future tense statements... anyway

word. love

so i'm supposed to be writing my personal statement for grad school but instead i'm going to write about how f-ing brilliant jason mraz is. no i'm not. but i will. i will after i get this personal statement done. until then you should all sit your selves down and listening to "geek in the pink"  with its deliberate incorporation of old school beats and instrumentation and it's juxtaposition of hip with hopelessly unhip. it's witty and bawdy and flippant. it's great. sigh.

even better than inventables

instructibles!  i found this site searching for how to polish silver without harsh and toxic chemicals. it reminds me of the wikiDIY  idea on meta wiki except that it's all orange-cream styled and makes me happy. :} that's all. just thought i'd share.

Das granolischer hip

i remember i once called someone 'colorado hip' with the effect of offending them, which was unfortnuate, because i happened to find this person quite attractive  being, as he was, a quick and scrappy casual kind of guy. if only our activities had overlapped more, i might even remember his name. anyway, i'm feeling fairly granola-hip today with my new tanned leather flip-flops on. Chancey advised my of the fashionlessness of my current ensemble - dark grey socks and sandals, beneath my corduroys and a linen button down shirt - all of which, amazingly, having vertical stripes - but i happen to think the dark grey and warm medium brown go well together. They have a pleasant 'rustic' feel and they very nearly achieve an appearance of a smaller narrow foot for me. what's not to like?

i'm off to the rhc, where i will proceed to flop my person on the couch, slip off the flip-flops, and fold my footsies on under the toasty warmth of my own fairly ample fanny.

Programmer's Desktop

It was a bit nippy at 70 degrees (not so much for the temperature as for the impossible to locate (apparently/incidentally neither unlocatable nor unplaceable are real words) draft in my apartment this afternoon so I put on a duraflame log. It yielded much comfortable warmth before collapsing forward suddenly into a heap of flaming ash at the front edge of my hearth, causing wave upon wave of smoke to escape the draw of the chimney and permeate my livitchen / kichingroom with a visibly grey haze. Fortunately, I'd been diligent earlier about spritzing the Caush [?] whenever he tried to climb the screen so neither of the kittens were nearby. So that was a bit of an event.

Meanwhile, I've been returning to the thoughts i was working out at Random House regarding more flexible information architectures [this space left intentionally to represent the long winded extrapolation on exactly what needs such architectures would respond to]...gotta run...

would you kindly unplug me?

I'm sitting in the RHC at the moment. i was just a moment ago accosting a grad student with a book called "Sold America" to see if perhaps she'd be interested in borrowing some of my books, since i 'just happen' to have some similar ones - 'Selling Mrs Consumer" and "Consuming Kids." Then, during this exchange, i overheard a fellow RHC patron ask another "can you unplug me?"

he was, of course, referring to the power supply cord to his laptop - three connectors removed from his person and yet in the contemporary vernacular a completely legitimate use of the accusative pronominal form. sorry. didn't mean to get all obfuscative on your collective asses, but ... well, temptation abounds in word play.

anyway. it just pinged my brain in a couple places (oh - and there's another interesting aberration, using ping to get someone's attention. byron pinged me via email - as in that was the subject of an email he sent when i didn't respond in quite the timely fashion - and i had just similarly sent a semantic ping to someone who wasn't responding in a chat. maybe that's a techie thing though...), but returning to my brain, hearing the expression raised my interest first on the linguistic level and then on the popCulture/popPsychological level.

On the one hand it's interesting that we can use such an extreme grammatical variation without feeling some sense of thought-incompleteness - consider: "can you unplug that cord for me?" ; "can you unplug the cord to my laptop" ; or even "can you please unplug my laptop?" versus "can you unplug me?" All the others indicate ownership secondarily, accurately representing the object of the requested action as something close to the physical object of the action. (we are not actually unplugged in this request; the power cord is. and even though this request came from a guy; it was clear he wasn't talking about having the other party wrap her hand 'round and tug at anything attached to his body)

i can't explain it well, but it's not just an odd extension of what constitutes one's person semantically; it's correspondingly odd syntactically for having reduced what generally requires either an additional modifier attached to the action's objects to a structure that has no object modifiers. it's completely reductive; there is no lingering reference to the original object under question. and it's not really as usual as it might seem. when i tried to think of other cases, none was so dramatic in substituting owner for object. like "hit me up..." or "hit me" there is usually some kind of object class being given to the user -erm i mean the speaker... - another card, another beer, another (actually those are the only two i can think of) - but it's still ending directly with the user in a way that is not the case when the substituted object is a possession of technological form. these two, for instance would be rendered explicitly along the lines of "hand me another beer," "give me another card." For both the implicit and explicit varieties the case is the same here. It's the genitive case which in english can drop the preposition when placed be for the direct object (ie give me ___ vs give ___ to me). The same cannot be said for unplug me. aha. i've figured it out. in fact, this aberration represents the expansion of this rule to 'for.'  So y'all - if you think of any idioms with implied 'to's and 'for's (not to be confused with 'two by fours'), comment them will ya? muchos danke

thats all. i just think it's amusing, and yet telling, that we've come to so lackadaisically  refer to our possessions as legitimate extensions of our selves.

a tyranny of lines

we have been duped by time. it has asserted in our minds the dominance of the sequential, the consequential, the linear. We write in lines, our speech doesn't double back on itself and our thoughts too, hamstrung by the means we have at our disposal to express them, we experience as linear. But our world is not linear. It is not cartesian; it is fully multi-dimensional, and it is frustrating to me that is a source of frustration for me that it requires such a steely grasp on our minds simply to begin to perceive it in the way it really is and to be able to contemplate that our own experiences of it are beyond our comprehension.

Perhaps all that is a load of crap I can't hope to substantiate. it seems to me that we already know that we do not think linearly, yet, we so often perceive our thought processes as such. We may perceive branches in the the thought process that takes us to a given conclusion but we don't see them occurring sequentially – or at least, if one begins with the observation that languages develop words of distinction for variations that are immediately relevant to the speakers of the language, then we certainly failed to develop sounder methods for expressing correspondence and synchronicity among events.

What's my point. I don't know what my point is. My point is linearity of expression is limiting us. My point is we would not be alive if our brains processed things linearly and we should try to tap that ability for our conscious minds as well as our autonomic systems. My point is if we try can we develop non-linear forms of communication. Can we have computers that are not strings of 0s and 1s or are we imprisoned not only in time but its aftereffect, that no matter how fast a neuron travels, it still is traveling in time across space, that no matter how sophisticated our object oriented programming languages and visual programming languages grow, they still must descend into a realm of tyrannical linearity before fulfilling their tasks.

I want to know. 

gainfully unemployed

this is what i appear to be this week. i have income, but am not working. it's a lovely state full of sweet smells and flights of fancy, but it's not going to last, and it's going to get old even sooner. the phrase, however, is amusing in the fact that it actually exists as a real condition of existence.

anyway. i'm feeling a bit spastic today. why? partly because i was going to spend today working on my story and cleaning my apartment but am instead spending it working on a try-out project, which entertaining though it may be is not part of my original task list and has thus expanded my task list beyond my available time.

i've take a break from my project now for about a half hour. I've been playing backgammon with some stranger over the microsoft game zone network. i'm not convinced this is a good scenario for me to engage in. I find myself always assigning intentions and moods to my opponents. Some of this is warranted: a player, whoever they may be, who takes your piece at nearly every opportunity even when the risks fall mostly to them is an aggressive player; one who will not take a peice unless they can do so with absolute security is a defensive player. Where it starts getting unhealthy for me is when more interactive actions come into play. Resignations that are not accepted despite when the game is absolutely lost. In this last game, I decided I needed to get through the match quickly to get back to work (which I'm clearly doing...), so I did something I usually refrain from - i doubled the odds when I had a clear advantage. My opponent accepted. In the next round, I double the odds again, though the odds were matched, with the idea that if I won, the match would be completed. Completeness is important. It's a gesture of good sportmanship. After this, I did obtain a clear lead for a while, then my opponent pulled ahead with two consecutive rolls of double-6s. I sent the message "nice roll" to which I received no response. At this point we were both safely on our own side of the board. From that point on, the game was extremely close. before the last three rolls, we both had two pieces at 5 and two at 4. My opponent rolled 4,5 leaving 2 pieces to my 4. I rolled double-5s and won the match.

As I completed my move, fully intending to close with "Good Game," I saw that my opponent had already left me a message:
"You're welcome"
My "Good Game" went through
Opponent responded "It was luck"
Flabbergasted at this use of stock phrases to execute a spectacular display of poor sportsmanship, I hesitated only momentarily before responding
"No"
and leaving.