-Triple-Diamond 1¢ game: 7,200 coins = $72 -Wheel of Fortune 25¢ game: 1,000 coins = $250 on the damn bonus spin.

Down to my last $20, I decided to hang out at the 1¢ slots, betting a measly 18¢ a pop. Over the next hour or so, the slots whittled down my 2,000 coins to a pathetic 200 coins. This was not without its ups-and-downs, though. At first, I kept telling myself that I would quit when I got down to $15. This actually took a while since the machine would intermittently give me 50-80 coins back. But when I hit $15, I decided to keep going, telling myself that I would stop at $10. Again, it was this slow game of attrition. At $5, I moved over to another machine. The slow trickle of coins lost continued. I found myself mulling over the miserable failures and disappointments in my life.

At this point, I decided, what the hell, might as well get it over with, and bet the maximum 180 coins.

This rocketed me back up to $20. From then on I went for broke and kept throwing down $1.80 per spin. I was getting tired and I just wanted to go up to my room and put my head down for sec. Down to my last two spins, the machine decides to spit out 7,200 coins. Not bad for a 1¢ machine.

I cashed in my $72 and decided to go back to the Wheel of Fortune machines. On the third spin or so, I hit the bonus spin, but I was only able to get a measly 25 coins. Eventually, I ended up putting another $20 in, only to lose it. But instead of quitting, I moved over to another machine in the same bank. On the third spin, I hit the bonus spin. 1,000 coins. Yeeah!

Exhausted and exhilarated, I headed back upstairs. But I’m too awake to actually go to sleep, so I decided I would blog.

Vegas has always been a weird place for me. My parents love this place, and I’ve probably been here almost every year of my life, up until 2002. I didn’t come back again until August 2006.

I’ve found that trips to Vegas tend to presage big changes in my life. So I always get a little paranoid and anxious.

I wouldn’t say that I’m happy, not by a long shot. But I’m in an emotional state where there is a lot of inertia. I still get lonely sometimes. Actually, a lot. But the torture of trying to overcome that inertia seems to outweigh the discomfort of being alone. I make do.

In the end, there are a lot of more basic things I need to sort out in my life anyway. Besides charting my destiny once I finish residency, I really need to work on how I live life. I have come to the reluctant realization that the way I live my life is completely unsustainable. I need to learn discipline. Some sort of flow and balance. The other thing is that my health is completely shot out to hell. I need to start exercising. If only to get my HDL back into normal range.

Unsurprisingly, inertia is probably literally one of the most fundamental phenomenon in nature. The current thinking in physics right now is that, just as there are electromagnetic fields and gravity fields, there is a field called the Higgs field, generated by a particle that has never been observed called the Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the God particle. There are some huge experiments attempting to find it. Not only will it explain why there is a difference in mass between the particles that mediate the four fundamental forces of nature, it will explain why mass exists at all. In Peter Higg’s theory, the reason why we need to exert energy to move things is because the Higgs field is resisting the acceleration. Somehow, we have come back to a theory where the aether (slightly reformulated, and modernized) may exist.

Don’t underestimate the power of inertia! It takes a ginormous amount of energy to start moving things around. Before you try and start a revolution, stop and think if you really want these things to move. And if you decide after lots of careful consideration that, yes, it’s a good idea, don’t stop until you’ve expended way more energy than you can possibly imagine. That’s how hard it is to make a change in destiny.

But it’s not impossible.

After switching from Linux to Mac OS X and after playing around with Ruby a little bit, and getting a feel for the philosophies of Objective C and SmallTalk, I guess I’m coming around to Andrew Tanenbaum’s thoughts about microkernels.

Still, I guess I drank the OOP kool-aid back when I was screwing around with Turbo Pascal in the early ‘90’s. The idea of objects that can respond to focused messages seems to herald the beginnings of machine intelligence. Objects, like neuronal circuits and endocrine feedback loops, tend to be black-boxes. We can begin with learning what kind of message/stimulus the object/neuronal circuit/endocrine feedback loop responds to, and what are its possible outputs. The details of internal processing, while worth elucidating at some point, probably do not give us as much insight into the workings of the system/human brain/human body (nor are they as lucrative for the pharmaceutical industry in terms of determining feasible drug targets.)

In other words, separate the interface from the implementation. The interface tends to be higher-yield, in terms of figuring things out, and learning how to do things, or learning how things work. The implementation is, as we say in the health-care industry, mostly scut-work.

There are more intuitive and less intuitive ways to do OOP. For example, I struggled mightily with C++, the last compiled language I ever worked with. Dynamic/interpreted languages are where its at these days, and Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby reign supreme (with the last the only one that was consciously developed as a true OOP language.)

The problem with dynamic/interpreted languages, similar to the problem with microkernels, is that they tend to have a lot of runtime overhead. But in these days of base systems running at nearly 3 GHz with around 2 GB of RAM, this overhead tends to be negligible. This argument used to fly when the average system ran at 50 MHz and had 8 MB of RAM, and this was the main reason why I believed that monolithic kernels were the only reasonable way to go on consumer level machines. But these days, most of our CPU cycles are wasted.

A similar issue plagued SmallTalk back in the Xerox PARC days. The system was state-of-the-art and blew everything else out of the water, but you had to have an extremely muscular machine that cost at least $10k minimum to run it.

What a strange and wonderful time and place Moore’s Law has brought us to.

Microkernels are probably going to be key for two different large scale paradigm shifts: (1) virtualization/hypervisors and (2) cloud computing/ubicomp.

Microkernels will make running multiple OSes on a single machine much easier, streamlining the path that Xen and Parallels are taking. And since microkernels engage de facto in distributed computing, not only will it be possible to utilize all four cores of your CPU, it will also be feasible to distribute tasks amongst your personal cloud of high-tech gadgets.

I remember watching (and eventually becoming nauseated by) the news coverage of the WTC attacks back in 2001 and thinking how Rudy G was totally posing for a presidential run. I’m actually surprised he managed to fuck it up so badly. He managed to piss away his position as front-runner, and he even turned 9/11 into a sad, pathetic joke.

I mean, if the uber-idiot W made it, how could a guy who (ostensibly) ran NYC go wrong?

Don’t get me wrong. Giuliani is a goddamn corrupt fascist thug. While he did clean up NYC big time, it wasn’t without grave human cost. But we all know that Rudy wouldn’t bat an eyelash when confronted with torture, and would think nothing about setting the Constitution on fire. So good riddance. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Maciej Stachowiak, who is on the Apple Safari development team, has no intention of breaking the web (seen on Daring Fireball)

The more I look at it, the more I see this as Microsoft’s problem. Webkit and Gecko developers shouldn’t be having to deal with this crap. Too bad if backward-compatibility breaks. The web is an ecosystem. Each website is a living organism that needs to grow, change, or die. The Way Back Machine is evidence of that.

As Maciej Stachowiak points out, version targeting will stifle cloud computing. The Nokia S60 Browser and the Google Android platform are built on top of Webkit, not to mention the iPhone and the iPod Touch, and it’s ridiculous to burden mobile devices with legacy crap.

What Microsoft probably needs to do is simply allow multiple versions of IE to exist on a Windows install. Browse intranet or local documents with IE6 or IE7. Browse the web with IE8. No meta tags or kludgy HTTP headers.

The MacBook Air is clearly not meant to be a primary machine. Understandably, there are many of us who *do* use a notebook computer as their only computer, and we are not going to be the target demographic. But there’s something to be said for a computer that only weighs 3 lbs. Face it. Minimalism is beautiful. Why do you think European sports cars sell so well?

Seriously, if you’re only going to be using the Air on-the-go, what the hell do you need all those other ports for? I mean, are there really people who need to be editing their digital movies while they’re sitting on the ground at JFK waiting for their delayed plane? And if you insist on having more ports, then you’re just going to have to get yourself a USB hub. (I’m surprised that Apple isn’t selling those, too.)

As for people who want to use the Air to do Powerpoint/Keynote presentations, all you need is the mini-DVI to VGA connector. And in reality, all the presentations I’ve done have had to be copied onto the machine actually hooked up to the projector because everyone is paranoid about disconnecting the wires, and nobody ever seems to be able to get things running again once they do.

One thing that would be cool, though, is if Apple supported target disk mode through USB like how they support it through Firewire.

In any case, if you have objections about the lack of ports on the MacBook Air, then it’s clearly not for you. You’d do better to wait for Apple to release this machine instead.

It is interesting to note that Apple was the first computer manufacturer to abandon the 3.5” floppy disk. They were extensively ridiculed and derided for it. And yet, who still uses those dusty relics of the 1990’s? You can’t even fit an entire mp3 on it. Some of my Excel and Powerpoint documents wouldn’t even fit, even after compression.

Does this mean that it’s only a matter of time before everyone gets rid of their extraneous ports?

Well, maybe. This article from 2005 is remarkably prescient about the prospect of Apple being the first to enter the realm of cloud computing and ubicomp. With nothing but wi-fi, Bluetooth, a solid-state 64Gb drive, and a multi-touch trackpad, you’ve got the entire world at your fingertips.

(For those of you moaning about the lack of dedicated [WWAN] hardware for the Mac, explain to me how this would be significantly different from connecting through your cel phone to access the net via GPRS or EDGE?)

I agree that Microsoft should have to deal with their own backward-compatibility quagmire without burdening web developers. The author brings up the IE-dependent components of Windows and other legacy, propietary software solutions (for example, the emergency department at one of the hospitals I work at uses an IE-dependent computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and charting system) and these are less trivial to upgrade to standards-compliance than a web site would be.

But why bother web developers with having to add kludges to their already standards-compliant code?

What Microsoft will probably need to do is continue to support two modes of operation: (1) legacy-brokenness and (2) standards-compliance. The default will have to be legacy-brokenness because, as the author of the article points out, it may not be trivial to add meta tags to legacy code. IE8 will probably have to continue relying on DOCTYPE declarations to figure out if it needs standards-compliant rendering.

While this may seem to be just as burdensome to web developers, at least it’s already a documented standard. And while it may seem to tacitly acknowledge IE6/IE7 as the de facto web standard, the browser scene is no longer hegemonically dominated by Microsoft, with the emergence of Firefox, Safari, and most importantly, web browsers that run on mobile phones. Anyone today who develops a site or webapp explicitly for IE6/IE7 is asking for a stream of angry phone calls about their site or webapp not rendering properly on the growing number of non-IE platforms.

I decided a long time ago that asking if I was happy was a pointless exercise. You either are, or you aren’t, and whatever the answer is, all you can count on is that things are bound to change.

Jeff Croft brings up version targeting again, and casts it in the old “The Right Thing™” and “Worse is Better” debate.

While I still think version targeting is a stupid idea, my opinion is certainly not going to stop Microsoft from putting it in IE8. I predict that they will. But from the developer’s stand-point, the issue is still the same: do you put up with Microsoft’s bugs and broken design? Or do you code for the masses, and avoid this sort of kludgery and stick to the standards? (Because if you’re coding specifically to IE6, then you’re screwing all the Firefox and Safari users out there, and while 15%—give or take—may not sound like that much, that’s going to be about 150 million computers (assuming an estimate of 1 billion computers by the end of 2008). Most businesses would not choose to ignore this many potential customers. Hell, I’m sure even Microsoft is keeping an eye open as that number continues to creep up.) In addition, you are also screwing people using IE7 and early adopters of the erstwhile IE8.

The key question is, will Gecko and Webkit support version targeting? My suspicion is no. As far as I can tell, neither engine has ever tried to emulate the brokenness of IE6. And why would they add such cruftiness to their code base anyway?

So I actually don’t think it’s going to be that big of deal. The only people who really need it are developers too lazy to fix their sites to be standards-compliant, and who are continuing to rely on IE6’s brokenness. So basically these sites will only run on IE6 and IE8 and nothing else, not even IE7. They certainly won’t run on your Symbian-based Nokia, your Blackberry, your iPhone, *or* on your PSP or Nintendo DS. Ridiculous.

Face it. IE6 is going to end up on the trash heap of obsolescence just like everything else has. But as long as you’ve got access to open source code repositories and a compiler, you’re always going to be able to view a web page in Firefox 2.0. So don’t worry about document obsolescence. Backward compatibility isn’t the holy-grail everyone makes it out to be. If you’re going to upgrade, do it right, get rid of the cruft, and don’t look back! If you’re not, stick with tried-and-true technology (that doesn’t have bugs—so IE6 doesn’t count.) No one, not even Microsoft, can make you upgrade.

ADDENDUM 2008 Jan 26 at 5:27 pm:

I really don’t understand the rationale for breaking the web with version targeting. Look, you can still read websites designed in 1996 in modern day browsers. It’s not pretty, but at least there’s some sort of content. But you’ll also notice that these sites have since revamped their markup. That’s the real solution to version number inflation: revise, revise, revise. You can be as forward thinking as you want to be in 2008, but once 2038 rolls around, when the world-wide web as we know it has ceased to exist, and all your data is floating around in holographic form around you, and everything including public toilets and washing machines has a kinetic or tactile interface that makes the Nintendo Wii or the iPhone look clunkier than the ENIAC, it’s gonna suck ass if you’re forced to downgrade your experience to IE6 because of some stupid version tag.

On the other hand, when 2038 rolls around, and you want to reminisce about the early 21st century, I’m sure you’ll have an emulator for the obsolescent x86 desktop experience for which you can still download and install moldy copies of ancient versions of Linux, and therefore, you can still experience the early 21st century blogosphere the way real geeks surfed the web and launch Firefox 2.0 on your virtual (and probably holographic) machine.

All without version targeting. How about that?

This elliptical rant about a failed taxonomy for computer users gets me thinking. We (as in, those of us who have been exposed to Western metaphysics) have noted the failure of taxonomic structures for a long time now. While it *is* sometimes useful to see things in terms of hierarchical relationships, this is likely a relic of our primate ancestry, and it is clearly a kludgy shortcut in terms of understanding the universe.

I would say that Linnaeus’ attempt at classifying all living things unravelled completely when the structure of DNA was finally elucidated, and when the mechanism of replication was proven. From this foundation, molecular biology was born. We quickly proved quite conclusively that Linnaeus’ classification system—based as it was mostly on macroscopic observations—was grossly inadequate for trying to figure out how species were actually related to each other. And while parent-child or parent cell-daughter cell relationships are easily modeled as hierarchies, the later part of the 20th century showed what an inadequate simplification this was with regards to the transfer of genetic material. (We even learned that the so-called Central Dogma of biology was not the whole story, in the horrific manner of the AIDS epidemic.)

But the taxonomic Tree of Life persists because it does partially model the universe at large, specifically, the fact that multicellular organisms come from other multicellular organisms. In theory, there is a line of descent that can be traced all the way back to the first primordial cell. (At least, this is the mainstream theory that I learned as an undergrad. There are at least some people who are thinking about the possibility of life arising multiple times, and then crossing to form hybrids. This is, for example, an alternate theory for why eukaryotes and prokaryotes are different. And, with regards to hybrids, consider the endosymbiotic theory in this light.)

Most other hierarchies are artificial constructs created by human beings. As I mentioned, this is likely a relic of a primate adaptation. Hierarchy is how we outsmarted the lions and cheetahs on the savannah. It allows us to weld together into a cohesive unit and coordinate action (which frequently precludes independent thought—hence the notion that ”a person is smart, but people are stupid.”)

But in a post-agricultural, post-industrial, and post-informational world, I would argue that the utility of hierarchy—in terms of organizing human behavior, and certainly in terms of organizing information—is greatly diminished in importance compared to 100,000 years ago.

The Beez points out that the Internet is in many ways an anti-hierarchy. Not completely, because it relies on the DNS hierarchy, but the idea is that every network on the Internet is co-eval. There is no head (excepting the DNS hierarchy, but that’s why you should learn the IP addresses of your favorite sites) that you can decapitate to make it all stop. Even if you took out several large server farms, a lot of net traffic would continue unimpeded, routing around the damage.

In one of the few actual scenarios in which the free market may have had a hand, Internet users chose the non-hierarchical HTTP protocol rather than the hierarchy-based Gopher protocol.

Information doesn’t obey hierarchies, plain and simple. Hyperlinks are the way to go. Having to navigate up and down a taxonomy is painful.

But this is really not that surprising. Despite our primate heritage, and despite the fact that the brain does appear to have something of an organizational hierarchy and structure, nuclei and ganglia function more like networks on the Internet. The “lower” parts of the brain (the brain stem, the midbrain, the pons) can preempt the “higher” parts of the brain (the cortex.) But if you train yourself (like a Shaolin monk, for example), you can actually get your cortex to manipulate your autonomous nervous system.

The non-hierarchical nature of the brain is most dramatically displayed when someone suffers a stroke. While massive strokes will permanently incapacitate and possibly kill you, a lot of stroke patients can regain function. This is not because we can regenerate the neurons that were destroyed by the stroke, but because the brain has quite a bit of plasticity, and it can compensate quite effectively for many types of injury.

But my argument is that perhaps the highly developed cortex of the human is an adaptation to the fact that information is not hierarchical. The machine language of our neuronal circuitry does not exist in binary trees. There are no unequivocal 1’s and 0’s in there. What we have, instead, are various, ill-defined regions in the brain that will light-up in response to various stimuli. These various regions are overlapping and often non-isolatable, and while they are probably attached to each other due to the similarity of these stimuli, there is certainly nothing like a hierarchy to organize them. This is probably the reason why most people have “Eureka” moments when they figure things out, instead of gradual, systematic realizations as their mind navigates up and down hierarchical structures of ideas.

This is not to say that hierarchies are not useful organizational tools. Given that most of us have a 7-item limit with regards to our short term memory, one of the most common ways to learn complicated processes is to chunk them into tree-like structures. Outlines, specifically. But we most always keep in mind that these are shortcuts, mnemonic devices, that are abstracted from the messy clusters of reality, more than one degree separated from actual reality (since the sensory regions of the brain process raw stimuli and transmit information that is already abstract by one level.) Slavish attention to hierarchy tends to lead to, at best, inefficiency, at worst, catastrophic failure.

Since hierarchies, while instinctual to primates, are not natural, the only way for an informational hierarchy to be successful is to be well-disseminated. Again, this is the reason why Linnaeus’s taxonomy is still extant—all biologists have been exposed to a version of it at some point in their education (although the particular taxonomy we now use is heavily modified by advances in unraveling genomes of the multitudes of species.)

So if you’re intent on crafting a taxonomy, you have to hope that (1) it actually at least partially models some degree of reality, (2) that people will be able to use it to make useful predictions, and (3) people will actually take the time to learn it because every other way is just too hard.

Ad hoc, one-off taxonomies are almost guaranteed to be useless, because they will never satisfy all three criteria off the bat. Give it a few hundred years, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll succeed just as well as Linnaeus did.

No, I’ve learned everything, and I’ve had to learn it on my own. Growing up we were taught that the Fire Nation was the greatest civilization in history. And somehow the war was somehow our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world. What an amazing lie that was. The people of the world are terrified by the Fire Nation. They don’t see our greatness, they hate us. And we deserve it. We have created an era of fear in the world. If we don’t want the world to destroy itself, we need to replace it with an era of peace and kindness.
— Prince Zuko from “Avatar: The Last Airbender” condemning U.S. foreign policy and the disasterous war in Iraq the Fire Nation’s war of imperialism.

They have some deep cartoons for 6-11 year olds these days.

At this moment, I’m right where I want to be.

But this, too, shall pass.

It finally occurred to me (or I just remembered) who I’m writing this for. Me.

Mostly because it amuses me, but also because it is comforting to look back these long, lonely years and realize that a lot of what matters hasn’t changed. And with regards to the few things I’ve been meaning to work on, I’ve actually progressed somewhat. I haven’t crossed any grand milestones, to be sure, but there is a narrative trend. It’s not all stagnation and decay in my soul. There is still a part of my soul that flows freely, even if it is more of a slow trickle than a raging torrent. (Why is it that I’ve become fixated on the idea that the soul is a liquid substance?)

I slept uneasily last night, half-dreaming/half-ruminating about things in the past that are irrevocable, immutable. On one hand, I want to figure out how to make it stop coming back to the present and continuing to damage my soul. I keep longing for things that cannot be. I keep getting wounded by actions whose echoes have long died away. On the other hand, I worry that if I seal the past off permanently, then I just won’t feel anything.

You know that life has not been the kindest to you when you have to contemplate what would be worse: to keep hurting, or to be completely numb.

And the reason why numbness scares me so much is because I think about people who suffer from leprosy, or more commonly, people who have uncontrolled diabetes. What happens is that because they can’t feel anything in their toes, they end up damaging them, bashing and cutting them up on accident, all without realizing it, and it gets all infected, and it never heals. And then you have to amputate. And I think that’s what happens if you let your soul go numb, too. You end up in all sorts of situations that end up scarring you, wounding you in ways you don’t realize, until you find putrescence where your soul used to be, and just exactly how do you amputate a soul?

And, to be frank, I’ve done the numbness thing, and it hasn’t really gotten me anywhere.

Which, I suppose, makes the choice clear. Better to go through life feeling things, even if most of what you feel is pain and suffering.

I’m still hoping for that flash of light, that fleeting moment of joy that’ll make it all worth it. I’m crossing my fingers.

Good times for a change.
See, the luck I’ve had
can make a good man
turn bad.
So please, please, please
let me, let me, let me,
let me get what I want
this time.

Haven’t had a dream in a long time.
See, the life I’ve had
can make a good man bad.
So for once in my life
let me get what I want.
Lord knows, it would be the first time.
Lord knows, it would be the first time.

There was a time not too long ago that I would’ve jumped at the chance for adventure.

What has happened to me?

In any case, I woke up this morning with this song in my head.

I wanna have the same last dream again,
the one where I wake up and I’m alive.
Just as the four walls close me within,
my eyes are opened up with pure sunlight.
I’m the first to know,
my dearest friends,
even if your hope has burned with time,
anything that’s dead shall be re-grown,
and your vicious pain, your warning sign,
you will be fine.

Hey, oh, here I am,
and here we go, life’s waiting to begin.

Any type of love - it will be shown,
like every single tree reach for the sky.
If you’re gonna fall,
I’ll let you know,
that I will pick you up
like you for I,
I felt this thing,
I can’t replace.
Where everyone was working for this goal.
Where all the children left without a trace,
only to come back, as pure as gold,
To recite this all.

Hey, oh, here I am,
and here we go, life’s waiting to begin.
Tonight,
hey, oh, here I am,
and here we go, life’s waiting to begin.
Tonight,
hey, oh, here I am,
and here we go, life’s waiting to begin.

I cannot live, I can’t breathe
unless you do this with me
I cannot live, I can’t breathe
unless you do this with me
I cannot live, I can’t breathe
unless you do this with me
I cannot live, I can’t breathe
unless you do this with me
I cannot live, I can’t breathe
unless you do this with me
I cannot live, I can’t breathe
unless you do this with me

Hey, oh, here I am (do this with me),
and here we go, life’s waiting to begin (do this with me).
Hey, oh, here I am (do this with me).
And here we go, life’s waiting to begin,
life’s waiting to begin.

Got bit in the ass with this bug when I migrated Mephisto to another host. Looks like you have to explicitly define what imaging package you have in config/initializers/custom.rb. :none will definitely work, but so far :rmagick hasn’t caused Mephisto to crap out either, although I have yet to upload an image. I don’t really have any experience with :imagescience.

As Microsoft develops Internet Explorer 8, the idea of version targeting comes to the fore. Two articles from A List Apart, one of the premier web design web sites, ignites a firestorm, with different camps backing backward-compatibility, standards-compliance, and progressive-enhancement. Version targeting is introduced by Aaron Gustafson, and is seconded (surprisingly!) by the standards guru himself, Eric Meyers.

What version targeting allows one to do is to explicitly set via a meta tag or via the HTTP header what sort of behavior one expects from the browser on the client side.

Now, granted, I am not a web-developing professional. I am a dilettante. I merely dabble.

But this seems like a pretty bad idea to me.

We survived the post-Netscape 4 era without doing any of this. Obviously, there was a lot of website breakage, and companies had to pay web designers a mint to get things to work correctly with IE5 and 6. And then Firefox broke loose, quickly followed by Safari. And in the meantime, the wireless revolution was happening. Lots of breakage, much of it not really even fixed yet. There are still lots of popular sites out there relying on browser sniffing. There are tons more relying on the incorrect behavior of IE6.

This is not just an anti-Microsoft screed. The whole point of the Internet (which the Web is only a subset of) is graceful degradation. The idea is that things should remain accessible no matter how crappy your connection is. This means that you should still be able to navigate using Netscape 4 or IE 2 or even Lynx. This means that sites should be available just the same at 56k as it is behind a fat broadband pipe or a T3 connection.

I mean, what, are you going to target the iPhone browser now? That seems extraordinarily stupid.

You would think that web designers would be all for continuous breakage of web sites, considering that it would keep them in business. By the same token, I can only imagine the nightmare of wading through literally millions of documents written in bad HTML 4 with no CSS and having to convert that all to XHTML 1 and CSS 2. The number of mythical man-hours is staggering.

But that was the whole point of splitting presentation from content. The idea is that as more features come to the fore, you throw away the stylesheet but keep the XMLized data. In theory, if you were truly forward-thinking, you could just edit that one CSS file and not even touch any of the content. (Though, granted, how many sites actually keep this clean of a separation between content and presentation? Certainly, it’s probably not so great if you’re coding in PHP.)

The other thing that changes the picture is that Microsoft is the guy who is late to the party. While lazy designers working for the corporate hive will take the shortcut and code directly to IE6, everyone else is looking at the specs, both designers and browser developers. You don’t need a license for Win XP or Vista to use Firefox or Konqueror (which uses the same engine that Safari uses) and if you are so inclined, you can even contribute to these projects, whether it’s by checking in patches, or whether it’s just by documenting just exactly what is broken. The Mozilla Foundation and the KDE Project, while monolithic in scope compared to most open source entities, are still a lot more nimble than Microsoft. And it shows. In the time it took Microsoft to come up with IE7, Mozilla has churned out several versions of the browser suite that became Seamonkey (now at version 1.1.7), as well as the stand-alone browser now known as Firefox (now at 2.0.0.11.) There are now multiple web-browsers that use the KHTML engine, including the aforementioned Konqueror (at version 3.5.8), Safari (at version 3.0.4), Shiira (at 2.2), and Sunrise (at 1.6.2), and also the [Webbrowser for the S60][0] (which runs on Nokia phones.)

Say what you will, but it was these entities that helped drive the world towards a standards-based web. If it were up to Microsoft, we’d all be dealing with IE6 idiosyncracies instead.

That said, what we say probably doesn’t matter a whole lot to Microsoft. But don’t let it become standard. Let them do what they want. Let the rest of the web continue down this quasi-anarchic path, with the mantra of graceful degradation leading the way. So what if the web doesn’t look like how the designers intended. That was the whole point. The reader determines what it looks like, not the author. How very post-modern indeed.

I’ve been rifling through my own blog entries and trying to index them. That’s one of the things that I liked about my old hacked-together system (see exiled by fate, foobar, lunacy, and congestive soul failure) that Blosxom lacked. And while Wordpress, Simplelog, and Mephisto all support excerpts, I haven’t really used them. (I suppose that’ll be the next project once I get through the several hundred entries I posted through Blosxom.)

It’s interesting how my mind can re-enter the conceptual framework I was in at the time I actually wrote these things. I can vaguely remember how I felt those particular days, even though a lot of these issues are quite moribund. Although I must admit, 2003 is a damn long time ago. Already I’m finding myself sifting through obsolescence, and trying to stop myself from commenting anachronistically.

I’m hoping that having seven years worth of blog posts on the Web (and in Google’s cache) won’t come back to bite me in the ass someday. I just wandered into an article about a pediatrician who got sued after his patient died, and the plaintiff’s lawyers used his blog against.

Who am I kidding. The blogosphere is going to be a gold mine for my enemies. That’s why I’ve got Plan B: fleeing to a country where they can’t extradite me from. (This is also the plan in the highly improbable instance that Mike Huckabee is actually elected president. Stranger and more fucked up things have happened in my lifetime so far, though.)

I woke up this morning with it still dark outside, and all my lights were on. I was uncertain whether it was still yesterday evening or whether the new day had in fact started. My sleep cycle is completely out of whack. I’m in a weird place in my brain right now, and I’m worried about whether or not I’m really going to ever snap out of it, or if this is the best it’s ever going to get, and I should just learn how to deal.

Damn.

Cartoons on Nickelodeon have always sparked my imagination since I was a little kid. From Dangermouse, to Belle and Sebastian, to the Seven Cities of Gold, I found myself transported to remote times and places.

So it’s not surprising that Nickelodeon hosts the show ”Avatar: The Last Airbender” Set in a fantasy realm divided up into the four classical elements (air, water, fire, earth), it follows the fated Avatar—who can manipulate all four elements—in his quest to re-establish balance in the world. It has echoes of the Deathgate Cycle by Tracy Weiss and Margaret Hickman (of Dragonlance fame) which also literally sunders the world into four elemental planes. And it has a taste of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea, which is itself borrows heavily from Taoist philosophy, and is also very interested in the maintenance of balance.

The creators of the show openly state that they were heavily influenced by such works of popular culture such as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.

The premise is that every generation, there is an Avatar born, who is the only person able to control more than one element, and whose task is to maintain balance in the world. There is a cyclic rotation as to which culture the Avatar is born into. The current Avatar is named Aang, a 12 year old boy born of the Air Nomads, who tries to run-away from his destiny, and ends up in suspended animation for 100 years. The Avatar before him was Roku, from the Fire Nation. (And it’s probably just coincidence, but Roku’s home and final resting place is forever known as Roku’s Island, which evokes the Isle of Roke in Earthsea. And Roku and Firelord Sozin’s battle against the volcano reminded me of Ursula K Le Guin’s short story “The Bones of the Earth” which depicts a similar battle pitting an impending earthquake against the mage Ogion and his master Heleth.)

After Roku is killed, the Firelord Sozin finds himself free to pursue his imperialistic ends. The Fire Nation commits genocide against the Air Nomads, in an unsuccessful bid to destroy the next Avatar. But with Aang locked up in ice, the Fire Nation is able to freely assail the Water Tribes and the Earth Kingdom.

Interestingly, Sozin’s rationale for warring against his neighbors is the notion of spreading the Fire Nation’s prosperity and wealth to the less fortunate cultures. Avatar: The Last Airbender strikes me as a bold allegory concerning American Imperialism, and Sozin’s rationale recalls W’s sophist arguments for invading Iraq: to spread Freedom™ and Democracy™. The fear evoked by the Fire Nation parallels how the U.S. has grown to be hated and feared in many corners of the world. The advanced industrialization and resultant pollution of the environment by the Fire Nation also speaks of American excess.

But the Fire Nation, like any imperial power in the history of humanity, is not made up of cookie-cutter nameless, featureless evildoers. Like any culture, it is replete not only with the diabolic and the divine, but also all the shades in between. The last Avatar, Roku, after all, was from the Fire Nation. The characters of Iroh and Zoku also depict the conflict inherent in persons who strive to do what is good and honorable, but who are enmeshed in an imperial endeavor. The children of the Fire Nation are not demonic imps intent on destroying the world, but just regular children who are constantly spoon-fed brain-killing propaganda about the greatness of the Fire Nation.

What is most interesting is that the goal of the protagonists is not to destroy the Fire Nation, but rather, to re-establish balance.

Implicit in this notion is that industrialization is not in of itself necessarily evil (in stark contrast to J.R.R. Tolkien’s apparent position.) The goal of the Way is not the occlusion of progress, but its moderation. The smooth ebb and flow of fortune is preferable to the boom-and-bust discontinuities inherent in capitalism. A smooth gradation in incomes and wealth is more ideal than the stark disparities between rich and poor in our society. And a balance of power, even if it means we are locked within the insanity of mutually assured destruction, is better than one nation wielding all the power.

Pretty deep shit for a cartoon targeting 6-11 year olds!

Since I’m only averaging about 500 hits per day, shared hosting should theoretically be sufficient for my purposes. Alas, Mephisto continually dies on Dreamhost, and since I couldn’t get my kludgery to work (mostly because I can’t seem to install the mysql gem on my local setup), I gave up completely and found a host that actually supports Rails.

Migrating was not exactly pain free, but hopefully my domain name will propagate completely by tomorrow or the next day. I’m not sure why Mephisto started failing to run on Dreamhost. My logs were not at all helpful.

Whatever. Hopefully, I’ll get a decent job starting this summer, and the webhosting fees will stop feeling so significant. Either that, or I’ve got to start using Adsense. And maybe I’ll end up migrating all my sites away from Dreamhost at this rate.

So I can’t seem to log-in to my blog currently. What I ended up doing was trying something that may have untoward side-effects. (Which reminds me, I should probably backup my database.)

What my local setup is: Mac Mini 1.25 GHz PPC (G4) with 1 GB RAM running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I’m using the pre-installed version of Ruby (1.8.2) I then installed Mongrel (1.1.3)

1. Checkout a fresh new copy of mephisto trunk (currently revision 3091 at this writing) to my hard drive:

   svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk mephisto

2. Freeze Rails to current release (2.0.2 at this writing)

   rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-2

3. Edit database.yml so that it matches my blog database on Dreamhost.

4. Start mongrel:

   mongrel_rails start -d -e production -B

5. Login at http://localhost:3000/admin

6. Blog away.

7. Cross my fingers that it doesn’t nuke my database, and that Mephisto is actually working on the remote side.

Loneliness is both painful to experience and potentially deadly. “It’s actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you,” he said.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

….

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

It’s 3 am. Usually not the best time for making plans and changing directions.

He experienced one of those “self” moments, one of those moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself >and think “Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?” He whimpered very slightly.
—Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

I like to think I take a progressive stance on several issues: for example, universal health care, women’s rights for choice, same sex marriage. I want us out of Iraq now. I want us to work on alternative fuels, and to add stricter regulations to the consumption of hydrocarbons. On the other hand, I’m all for a small government. Maybe Reagan successfully brainwashed me as a child. If I lived during the time of the foundation of the Republic (and I wasn’t a person-of-color), I might have been a Whig. I’m all for weak executives, paralyzed/gridlocked legislators, and strict constructionists. Let the people in power play their futile tug-of-wars. It will let the rest of us get down to business. To me, states’ rights are paramount, and local politics are key.

The company who is running this site is Dutch. I honestly didn’t think that Obama was more progressive than Edwards, but apparently it’s not just the media frenzy that makes me want to vote for my man Barack. According to this site, he actually best matches my political positions.

I wasn’t expecting this.

I’m sure I’ve heard this song before, but it felt like it was the first time as I drove away from the ocean and made my way onto the freeway.

I’ll wait for you until the heavens fall
I’ll wait for you until the end of the world
I’ll wait for you until I no longer breathe
I know that it’s not impossible
I’ll wait for you until you finish your fight
I’ll wait for you until the timing is right
I’ll wait for you until you knock on my door….

I stumbled upon this debate about the future of markets. Part of the problem is that “market” is so poorly defined. Instead of digging through centuries of capitalist tracts or recycling paleomarxism, my understanding of markets is that they are simply the mechanism by which transactions of resources, manufactured goods, or financial instruments take place. Anywhere there is supply and demand for a particular thing, that creates a market.

So markets are definitely not limited to a capitalist economy.

The issue at hand is not if* the current level of prosperity in the industrialized world can be maintained, but *how long it can be maintained. The vector of history makes it clear that economic expansion for the last 2,000 years or so has been driven primarily by territorial expansion, mercantilism, and colonialism. Ever since the first Roman legion set foot in the Middle East, through the post-Imperial Dark Age, through the European Renaissance, and onward through the age of exploration, the colonial era, and the independence movements, economic expansion has been based on the seizure of resources and territory from other cultures that do not necessarily subscribe to European/American norms of property rights and individual liberty.

The end of this expansion started with the independence movements, spawned the Great Depression, and sparked WWI and WWII. It became clear that territorial expansion under the aegis of nationalism was no longer a workable solution. But what transpired was that the two remaining superpowers, instead of integrating their client states into their empires, merely subjected them their economic and cultural hegemony. All the benefits of territorial expansion without the downside of a far-flung integrated empire. (As an aside, this seems to be one of the big reasons the Western Roman Empire collapsed: they stopped offering citizenship to the people they subjugated.)

The USSR, much like the Romans, ended up splintering into separate states, their economy a shambles. The capitalists would have us believe that this was purely a function of their restriction of markets, but a retrospective makes it clear that it was the demands of maintaining a quasi-empire that bankrupted them.

The superpower client-patron relationship still requires vast amounts of investment in military power, and the War in Afghanistan and in Iraq is starting to demonstrate to the capitalist world that they are getting diminishing returns.

The key innovation of the Western World, the U.S. in particular, and Manhattan and Hollywood most specifically, is the exportation of culture without needing to invest so much in military power. Newspapers, magazines, radio, movies, television, and now the Internet have broadcast Manhattan and Hollywood culture to the entire world (and, theoretically, into space) This form of cultural hegemony has expanded markets greatly without needing to expend as much energy in subjugating other people.

But the expansion cannot continue on indefinitely. Besides the fact that various cultures are resisting Western influence (fundamentalist Islam and communist China being huge players that make up to 50% of the world’s population.) In a nearly-completely globalized world, the profit from mercantilist/colonialist arbitrage is essentially nil. There is very little profit in taking Product X from one industrialized country to another industrialized country. We are left with peddling our wares to developing and undeveloped countries, and it just seems like a losing strategy to base our prosperity on peddling our wares to poor people who don’t even have enough money for clean water and food.

One of the problems with market capitalism is that it requires the involuntary participation of subjugated peoples in the rural hinterlands. They are forced by the metropolitan elite who control the mechanisms of government to cede property to multinational corporations and become displaced, and they are forced to surrender their environment to frequently rapacious mining and logging operations, and to the dumping of toxic waste.

As our target markets expand into these countries, we are forced to deal with the paradox of taking raw materials from these places and sending them back as consumer goods that these people probably don’t really need.

We frequently talk about markets as abstractions, willfully ignoring the fact that markets are human institutions. They are the resultant emergent behavior of the interactions of all buyers and sellers. We talk about market efficiency, and maybe in a physical sense, this is true (market capitalism extracts the most amount of useful work/energy from all economic systems we’ve ever tried), but the problem is that the wastage is not some abstract thermodynamic phenomenon. We’re talking about the wastage of environment, of human lives, of human hopes, dreams, and ambitions. I think it is willful deception to not realize that markets are composed of human beings. To treat market capitalism as some sort of objective machine smacks of outdated Modernist thinking, part and parcel of the same soulless Positivist Rationality that spawned fascism, the Holocaust, and communist totalitarianism.

And just as sticking food into a bomb calorimeter and calculating how much energy you extract does not predict how many calories the human body will actually extract when that food is ingested, calculating market efficiency by just the numbers and figures does not accurately predict the wastage effects. There are some forms of wastage that we wouldn’t want to visit upon other human beings, if we were actually aware of these effects.

The reason why social networking is interesting is precisely because the margins of profit, the margins of success, are shrinking significantly. Again, one of the most significant reasons is globalization. While this phenomenon may be beneficial to the consumer, it certainly can cause a lot of market instability. This is one of the places where markets are inefficient. When a particular demand arises, everyone wants to cash in. But when the demand levels off, companies by necessity are going to die. Hence, the traditional boom and bust cycle. Hence, the bubble bursts.

What social interaction does is that it earns you other capital that does not have an equivalency as currency. Specifically, what you have the potential of earning is trust. No amount of money can buy that sort of capital.

This is one of the things that is made manifest by the Information Revolution. Money is no longer the only currency that is important. Reputation also has bearing, and sometimes reputation is what spells the difference between success and failure.

I found an amusing site through del.icio.us called Twittertale “You kiss your momma with that mouth?”) that has filters set up to capture any Twitter post that contains expletives.

The post that amused me the most was this one:

Ha! Wil Wheaton twittered re: Rudy losing Iowa: “Kiss my ass, you fearmongering pile of authoritarian dogshit!!” —lirael

Since 2001, I’ve been struggling with a crisis of faith. I was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church as a baby, participated in the Eucharist, and was Confirmed. I went to a parochial elementary school and junior high. I went to a high school that is run by the Jesuits. In college, and in the beginning of med school, I participated in the Catholic Community.

I still believe that the person presented by the four Gospels known as Jesus Christ is someone worth emulating—someone who cares for the unwanted, the down-trodden, the outcast. Someone who is willing to face up to authority and to unflinchingly stand true to your beliefs, without arrogance, without false bravado.

I still keep the words from the sermon on the mount in my heart: blessed are the poor, blessed are the hunger, blessed are those who, in their quest for justice, are made to suffer at the hands of authority. Blessed are those who are merciful, blessed are those who strive to bring peace to the world.

But in 2001, evil and/or deluded people performed evil deeds in the name of God—Muslim and Christian alike—and in the religious communities around me, no one heeded my cry for understanding. I was treated to dirty looks, and shaking heads, as if I were the one who was crazy and deluded.

The Roman Catholic Church’s failure to express true contrition for the acts of perversion their representatives have done over the years was another blow to my faith. The continued ranting and raving of sick fucks like Pat Robertson for vengeance upon his enemies and the failure of other Christians to condemn him made me wonder what the point of believing was. The demented, idiotic leaders of this nation who are intent on turning our secular democracy into a Christian fascist theocracy, every bit as sick and twisted as the madness spewed by bin Laden, made me wonder if God even existed.

My religious education through the years has taught me that God does not make himself/herself manifest to human beings in flashy, ostentatious ways. In my mind, much of the Old Testament is allegorical, metaphorical, and reflects the incomplete thinking of less sophisticated people, or more likely, the imperfect translation of less sophisticated, more superstitious people. So while I don’t believe in the literal appearance of a burning bush, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to know the story of Moses, and to draw lessons from it. So I’m not expecting God to suddenly appear with the legions of heaven behind him. I’m not expecting him to show up in my dreams telling me that everything is OK. More than anything in the Scriptures, I think of what Galileo told the Inquisitors:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

God has already given us the answers. I’m not just talking about sacred scriptures. I’m talking about the totality of human experience. About our relationship to each other, and to the physical world. The difficult part is understanding it all. Faith is not about easy answers, or blind obedience. Faith is about trying to understand. Without doubt, there cannot be faith.

But in the end, I cannot completely be rid of my desire to believe that a massive, benign hyperintelligence exists somewhere in the great beyond. Call it wishful thinking. Call it madness. I know that what everyone says God is, isn’t. Or at least, it’s not the whole of the story. Each culture in the world has an idea of what their supreme deity is like, and I think the post-modern, pre-Singularity vision of what this might be has already been postulated in works of speculative fiction.

I think of Charlie Stross’s Eschaton, the massively distributed galactic AI that shows signs of near-omnipotence, near-omniscience, near-omnipresence. Or Philip K Dick’s VALIS: the vast active living intelligence/information system that has been keeping its eye over us since the beginning of civilization.

I’ll accept the idea that it’s all just wish-fulfillment. Really, it’s just a more sophisticated form of an imaginary friend. But the fact of the matter is that, just as we can never prove the existence of God, we can never prove his non-existence either. (And if you believe in the Singularity, then it follows that a being with properties of God has a possibility of existing. And if you believe in Eternal Inflation, then anything that is possible is inevitable.)

In the end, I think the most honest answer to the question of “Does God exist?” is “I don’t know.” Anything else is dogmatism, in my mind.

But these thoughts come up when I overhear someone ask, “Is Obama Muslim?” Google leads me to this blog post that records Obama’s thoughts on his religion, and what he means by faith. It is the best answer I’ve ever heard someone give to the public at large. It’s just too bad that many people are too simple, too stupid, too wrong-headed to even have a chance to understand what he’s saying.

The blogosphere is a-twitter with Barack’s unlooked-for win in Iowa last night. Obama may not be as progressive as Edwards, and on certain positions he is definitely to the right of where I stand, but symbolically speaking, he is ideal.

Bruce Sterling, one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk gives us a little snippet of Rolling Stone’s coverage of Barack’s victory.

Some choice quotes:

[The next president must be] a symbol of the best possible future for twenty-first-century multicultural America and an antidote to both the callous reactionary idiocy of the Bush administration and the shrewd but soulless corporatism of the Clinton machine.

[Iraq, New Orleans, and other debacles/scandals] exposed much of Congress and the Cabinet as a low-rent crime family hired to collect protection money for the likes of Halliburton and Pfizer.

Obama is a dynamic, handsome, virile presence, a stark contrast to the bloated hairy shitbags we usually elect to positions of power in this country. Moreover, he completely lacks that air of grasping, gutter-scraping ambition sickness that follows most presidential hopefuls around like a rain cloud.

(The last one is my favorite.)

I know that every politician clamors for change and rarely ever delivers, but it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a shittier job of running the country than W has. Even I could do better while doped up on Valium and drunk off my ass. (At least I’d know not to get involved in a fucking land war in Asia!)

Seriously, though. W has shown us how low our country can go. Unless we do something batshit crazy like elect Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, it’s hard to imagine doing much worse for the next four to eight years. I mean, seriously, eventually we’ll have depopulated so much of Iraq that the insurgents would have anyone to hide behind. And while places like the Eastern seaboard and parts of California are likely to be underwater in the next decade or so, it’s not going to under the next president’s watch. The immigration problem will work itself out because soon American citizens will be just as uneducated and as challenged by the English language as the average undocumented worker, making the pay differential negligible. Spanish-speaking America (Mexico, Central America, South America) is likely to experience a renaissance as the dollar continues its downward spiral, making it even less favorable to try to get to the U.S.

It almost doesn’t matter, really. If Obama gets elected president, it will repudiate the current thinking of the DLC, that mealy-mouthed, spine-less, slimy, scummy branch of the Democratic government that has been promising center-right, Republicanesque policies all these long years. It will show all those fucking racists out there what’s what. (And don’t pretend that there aren’t a lot of closet racists out there.) It will show the rest of the world that we aren’t all a bunch of ignorant fuckwits who are out to destroy the world.

C’mon. We all know that Obama has at least 15-30 IQ points over W. Even if he were to start another hopeless war somewhere, and lose yet another entire American city to climate change, things would still probably go better than anything monkey-boy and his feces-hurling minions could cook up.

But it would change American forever. It would be a big “fuck you” to all the reactionary elements of our society. We want an America that is ready for the future, not an America that is forever looking backwards to a pre-1960’s, pre-Social Security/Title XIX, pre-free speech, pre-civil rights movement, pre-New Deal, even pre-abolition era (Just remember Trent Lott’s not-so-long-ago affirmation of Strom Thurmond’s straight-up segregationist/regressivist platform, may the motherfucker burn in hell.)

Welcome, once and for all, to the 21st century.

Barack Obama takes Iowa.

I’ll admit it, though. Barack is still not far left enough for me. In terms of politics, I’m definitely closer to Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. But Barack’s message is powerful. Hope. And change. I wonder how Hillary is going to spin her third place showing. Maybe this will get her to finally give up the past, and to abandon her message of status quo ante W. We don’t want to just go back to the Pax Clintonis of the 1990s. What we want is a revolution.

I don’t really believe that it’s 2008. The number looks ludicrous. I’m disappointed that we don’t have regular shuttle service to Mars and Europa. That alien species haven’t tried to contact us. That we don’t have flying cars.

Even five years ago, did I foresee this Brave New World™? Cel phones, Blackberries, iPhones, iPod Touches. Apple running on Intel. Microsoft starting those long, slow, swirling rotations down the drain. (Oh, it’s going to happen. History says that it’s simply inevitable.)

Even five years ago, did I really think I would be where I am now, trusting in my own ability to actually make people feel better, even if it’s only for a little while? Am I really in that position where medical students and even interns might see me as some sort of role model? Is there any possible way that there is someone out there who sees me the same way I saw *my* senior residents? Fearless and indomitable, even in the face of blood and death?

I don’t know what exactly happened. The last six weeks have probably left me a little worn out. My ward month was not as brutal as I was expecting it to be (although I certainly wouldn’t call it a walk in the park.) And the last two weeks running the tiny little five-bed emergency department at the VA have left me exhausted, and weary of the respiratory season. (Which has just begun, really.)

Maybe it’s just the holidays. As time wears on, I find myself wanting to avoid them entirely. I’m not exactly at Grinch levels yet, but all December, I refused to turn on my radio. All the commercials reminded me of was the fact that I’m living paycheck-to-paycheck, and am not really sustaining myself. If not for my parents, I’m not sure what I would’ve done. Suffice to say that no one got any gifts from me this year.

I thought about maybe doing something fun for New Years, but I got sick (and I’m still probably sick right now.) Some damned virus has been going around, and I’ve been tight and wheezy and breaking out into sweats the past five days. I mean, it hasn’t been really enough to incapacitate me, but I did spend a great deal of the weekend just sleeping.

I have no illusions about New Year’s Eve. No wishes. No expectations.

There is a vast, congealing emptiness where my soul used to be. (It evaporated, see.)

My leg is really starting to kill me these days. The worst are the nights where I can’t find a comfortable position, and I just spend the evening writhing around in annoying discomfort. I’m beginning to wonder if I might actually have a fibular fracture. (I’ve met several people who have had these, without realizing that they had actually fractured it. Instead, they spent several weeks just walking around, wondering why their sprained ankle wasn’t getting any better.) If I was half my age, I’d be running around the track by now, without a care in the world, completely healed. Even as early as 31, the shadowy specter of age is started to show itself.

I think about the state of my health sometimes. I’m in seriously bad shape. The way things are going, it’s unclear I’m going to survive another 20 years. I really need to lose weight. But the idea is so monolithic, so monstrous, that I start feeling despair every time I think about it.

There have been moments of clarity, though. I mean, seriously, I’ve made it this far. Why stop now? What makes this particular goal any more difficult than the last 26 years of my life? Nothing, really. All it’s really taken is patience, and the willingness to suffer horribly. I mean, not like I’ve been in a Turkish prison, or interned at Guantanamo or anything, but I have a feeling that the sleep deprivation I’ve experienced is going to have a lasting and quite negative impact on my life.

At this moment, though, I feel completely adrift. I have no idea where my center is anymore. Where my baseline is. I’m just floating through this Higgs field, jiggling around in Brownian motion. Where am I going? Where have I come from? The more I think about it, the more I start wondering how much it really matters anyway.

The darkness has finally caught hold of me and finally bitten off a chunk of flesh. I’ve never been able to survive Winter without clawing my way out of it. Even here, in sunny Southern California, it makes no difference. The sun still rises late and sets early, and the night saps all my strength. Truth be told, 2007 has probably been the best year of my life, in terms of my mood, in terms of my accomplishments, in terms of my self-image. I survived the unit without killing too many people. I’ve done my last medicine ward month. I know what I enjoy doing.

The chasms are not as deep, but the peaks aren’t as high either. My mood has been steady, to be sure, and I know it’s the journey and not the destination, but every once in a while, I still find myself asking, why am I doing this again? Meaning life in general. Some days, I just want to be still. As still as a tree, unmoving, except in the wind, in tune with my natural surroundings. Feeling at peace, in harmony with the universe.

One of these days, I have really got to find my place in this world.

The underlying, repeating, melodic theme—four notes descending down the scale, the second and the third exactly the same, the last one barely audible at times—arrested my attention as I skidded to a stop at the end of the offramp from the 805, and I found myself mesmerized. I couldn’t really catch any of the lyrics, but reading them here, I find them disturbingly apt for my frame of mind.

When I’m at the pearly gates,
this’ll be on my videotape,
my videotape,
my videotape.

Mephistopheles is just beneath
and he’s reaching up to grab me.

This is one for the good days
and I have it all here
in red blue green,
in red blue green.

You are my center when I spin away
out of control on videotape,
on videotape,
videotape,
videotape,
videotape,
videotape,
videotape.

This is my way of saying goodbye
because I can’t do it face to face
so I’m talking to you before it’s too late.

No matter what happens now,
I shouldn’t be afraid,
because I know today has been the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.

Definitely my most favorite song from In Rainbows thus far. It’s a pretty fucking good album.

I suppose that dull, drear apathy is preferable to suicidal depression, but I keep thinking that there’s definitely something missing from my life. The apathy, I’m sure, is merely a symptom, and not the thing itself. (And I guess I’ve become some sort of expert about what things aren’t, although I’m still pretty sucky at telling what things are.)

Which just goes to prove the maxim that sometimes the best you can really do is numb the pain. You can’t make the pain go away without getting rid of the underlying cause.

I think that I’ve always had answer for what I wanted to do with my life. Sometimes it was simply because I was naive and ill-informed. Other times it’s because I knew that it was that socially-acceptable thing to say, and that our absurdly competitive society doesn’t look well upon ambition-less, lazy bastards.

These days, I’m drawing up a big, fat blank. A big numero zero. The veritable goose-egg.

The other day I was walking around (of all places, horror-of-horrors) Old Pasadena, and I was accosted by a Larouchean agitator, and she asked me what I thought about what was going on in the world, and I thought about it a bit. Frankly, it seems like the world is on the verge of catastrophe.

catastrophe 1540, “reversal of what is expected” (especially a fatal turning point in a drama), from Gk. katastrephein “to overturn,” from kata “down” + strephein “turn.” (from the Online Etymology Dictionary)

It’s not going to be something sudden, but it’s going to something irreversible. I feel like an era is ending. The center of power is shifting away from the U.S.

And while Barack preaches hope, I find it hard to see. I feel like the train has long left the station. We should’ve been having these conversations four years ago, should’ve been taking action to stop the juggernaut of the military-industrial complex. Instead, we’ve let them lead us into an inescapable quagmire that is destined to suck the marrow of our nation for decades, doomed to bankrupt us all.

The problem is that I feel like all the things I feel strongly about are wildly out of my control. What I need is a goal that is attainable, that has measurable milestones, and that would actually have a positive impact on the world at large.

Just a little wish, really. (Hah!)

From Zed Shaw’s rant as to why the Ruby on Rails community sucks:

This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college.

With Rails I get scrawny cock suckers with carpal tunnel syndrome talking to me like they’re gonna eat my young. Their feeble PHP infected minds can’t grasp advanced shit like objects or closures. When you combine stupid businesses with stupid people using a stupid framework based on a big fat fucking lie on a shitty platform you get the perfect storm of dumbfuck.

More quotes collated on [Tech Crunch][2]

[2]: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/01/zed-shaw-puts-the-smack-down-on-the-rails-community/ “Zed Shaw Puts the Smack Down on the Rails Community

If there are no endings, can there be beginnings?

The question foremost in my mind is: what do I want to do with my life? After 26 years of formal education, I am finally going to have to face the Real World™, and, despite everything I’ve been through, I still look at it with some apprehension.

You would think that my goals would be pretty concrete at this point, but the only real thing I’ve got on my plate is that I have a profession. Outside of that, everything is pretty much up for grabs and undefined. Where will I live? What—in exact terms—is my job going to be like? What other goals will I have?

I’ve tried to be optimistic these days. Truth be told, except for the fact that my cousin died almost a year ago, this year was actually pretty decent. I had some tough months, but nothing that was extremely excruciating. (At worst, it might’ve been moderately excruciating.) I suppose the things that I regret is that I’ve done rather poorly with keeping in touch with friends, and I’ve done rather badly with things outside of my professional life.

But, despite this attempt at optimism, I keep having this feeling that the world that I know is slowly collapsing around me. In 2002, I remember dancing on the second floor of John Barleycorn in Wrigleyville, drunk off my ass, thinking how I was living in decadence, as the Republic fell apart around me. I suppose it really isn’t a collapse. It’s more like melting. Like I’m living in a castle made out of ice, with the sun sitting directly overhead.

This year, we have the possibility of crossing a historic threshold: we’ll elect either a white woman, or a black man as President of the United States. Especially after reading Barack’s speeches, I want to be hopeful.

But I keep fearing the forces of reaction are going to fuck things up somehow. Like the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The dollar keeps falling. The repercussions of the subprime mortgage fiasco have yet to be completely felt.

And the whole American Dream™—the whole goal of capitalism—seems to be stale and crumbling. The whole idea of having a house, getting married, having 2 cars, having 2.5 children—seems awfully self-parodic and a little insane.

But where do you go next? What is the Right Thing™ to do?

If things had gone differently, I might’ve actually become a computer programmer. Although it’s questionable as to whether I would’ve survived such a decision.

So I’ve been looking at the landscape from afar.

Larry Wall discusses what’s coming up with Perl 6, and his thoughts about the course of evolution of computer languages. I never realized that Wall was a linguist, but it makes a lot of sense. Perl preserves a lot of the human language aspect of Lisp, and the way he looks at the goal of the compiler or interpreter is where my own thoughts are probably leading.

Zed Shaw burns the bridge behind him as he kicks the dust off his feet and says “fuck you” to the Rails Community. So I guess I wasn’t just imagining that Rails was unstable as hell, and almost unrunnable. Shaw hints that the future of Ruby frameworks is probably going to be Merb. Not that Rails is dead or anything, though.

It’s also not just me that thinks that PHP is not exactly elegant. But we all know that it’s usually not superior technology that dominates the industry. Hence, VHS vs Beta, Windows vs Mac OS, etc., etc.