June 2005 Archives
This is from an Amazon search I was performing while trying to find a replacement clip for my cordless phone. It would appear that A9 is more capable of searching Amazon.com than Amazon.com's bult-in search utility.
Tonight I was spinning away at the wheel when after completing my 3rd piece I realized something: I don't have nearly enough bats. Why is it that I have my bats in such short supply? I guess I should find an additional method for temporary storage of wet pieces (or finally give in to what my mind has been telling me all along and go for the 5 pack of square bats). I feel so inadequate because of my limited resources availible for temporarily storing my work, and also the lack of a decent place to let my pieces dry, although I suppose my shelf unit in the basement would be a good place, who knows. Well... as you can probably guess, there are pots to announce, so head on over to http://www.disturbingthoughts.net/gallery/index.php?folder=/Ceramics/20050620/ and check them out.
Now its time for me to go to bed if I actually want to not be dead in the morning, peace out my mud bruthas'. (ok, where the hell did THAT come from? LOL)
How old do people think I am? Yesterday one of my aunts asked me when I was going to start dating and have a family. What the fuck is wrong with people in my family? Just being over 20 is not a good reason to get someone pregnant and start that type of thing. Also, who the hell is she to actually give advice on starting a family? She just "seperated" from her third husband! I also think its funny that she and others in my family actually assume that I am straight. I have not shown that level of interest in females to actually give anyone the idea that I am straight, nor have I given anyone any indication that I may have interests in males either. Shouldn't a person's sex life being personal to that personal and not the business of their entire extended family?
I really don't think im ready for a family yet, if ever, and I really think that my demented family needs to let me live my life as I wish, not how they would "prefer".
The inevitable finally happened tonight, about 15 minutes ago I managed to kill my Kensington WebRacer touchpad pointing device (kinda like a mouse, but much cooler). Unforunately I can no longer find decent touchpads anywhere, so thus I am doomed to find a replacement that isn't a touchpad. Up until a few days ago I was still thinking of rejoining the rest of the world with their regular mice, but I am now rethinking that... I just looked on Amazon with a hope in my heart that I would find just one Kensington WebRacer availible, but no luck, however, a very nice subsitute did cross my path. A Kensington Trackball! At this moment I am giving it very real consideration as it is a very nice piece of hardware that meets my reasons for not wanting a "typical" mouse. I am giving the brand itself a lot of consideration because of the duration that the WebRacer had lasted, almost 5 years. The WebRacer's "dieing issue" is the primary left button, which refuses to click. The redundant nature of the WebRacer eliminates the need for an IMMEDIATE replacement, but it does certainly put pressure on me to prepare to move on, especially since I had the spare left button, it requires my thumb to bend (yes people, I use my thumb to left click and pinky to right click while using the index to move the cursor).
I have been accused of being a packrat when it comes to my hardware, with the way I feel at this moment I understand why I am. While the thought of removing the WebRacer from active duty doesn't cause me any pain, I can barely stand the thought of throwing it out, it has been with me through so many things over the years, sort of like an old friend.
The end of my computing era with the desktop touchpad is upon me, I shall now move on... or try to at least.
Recently I decided to stop adding more individual card readers to my growing collection wired gadgets, and go for an "all in one" reader. As I sit here looking at this thing in my hand, I realize that while it resembles a floppy in its size and shape, there is a large amount of history that has been lost between the floppy and this device. A floppy disk was a fairly standard method for file exchange/transport. Now that the need for large capacity storage has come about so quickly, it would appear that any hope of ever getting back to anything "standardized" is fading fast. For most uses there is no advantage to using one type of card over another. I can see why CompactFlash is no longer used for digital cameras that much, but there is still a great amount of similarity between all of the medias availible. My old digital camera will write an image in about 5 seconds, this is due to limitations with both the media and the camera, but my new camera will write an image in less time than it takes you to blink, but still slower than the ability of its media, which has theoretical limits of 9 MB/s for reading and 10 MB/s for writing.
With the new device I purchased to consolidate all of my mess into a single form I find only a few disappointments. The first major disappointment is that each media has its own way of being inserted because of the design for handling multiple media types per bay. The next thing that bothers me is that the bays aren't recessed far enough, because all of my cards stick out really far and this would require me to leave my computer's case door open when the media is in the bay because of a lack of clearance.
Ive been wanting to blog about a few things recently, but havent gotten to due to sleep issues, this includes now, when I have just taken melatonin, but we shall see for future dates:
Chris introduced me to this song last night, I love it, and it fits with my overall internal feelings lately.
--
"The Wall"
by Kansas
It's woven in a fantasy
I can't beleive the things I've seen
The path that I have chosen now
Has led me to a wall
And with each passing day
I feel a little more like something dear was lost
It rises now before me
A dark and silent barrier between
All I am
And all that I would ever want to be
It's just a travesty
Towering
Marking off the boundaries my spirit
Would erase
To pass beyond is what I seek
I fear that I may be too weak
And those of you who've seen it through
To glimpse the other side
The promise land is waiting
Like a maiden that is soon to be a bride
The moment is a masterpeice
The weight of indecision's in the air
Standing there
The symbol and the sum of all that's me
It's just a travesty
Towering
Blocking out the light and blinding me
I want to see
Gold and diamonds cast a spell
It's not for me, I know it well
The riches that I seek
Are waiting on the other side
There's more than I can can measure
In the treasures of the love that I can find
And though it's always been with me
I must tear down the wall and let it be
All I am
And all that I was ever meant to be
In harmony
Shining through
And smiling back at all who wait to cross
There is no loss
Oh
Lastely I have been making a lot of discoveries internally about myself. These discoveries are mostly things that need action to be taken for them to be of any value. One area in which this needs to be sought out with vigor is my general activity of life, the mandatories. I currently have no real set pattern for eating, sleeping, hobbies, cleaning, or anything like that. I would really like to learn to sleep on a pattern that resembles that of the sun (not the sun in antarctica), and for healthy digestion I should be eating 2 - 3 well thought out meals each day at normal times. My hobbies are things I really enjoy, but they have been moving around a lot from what thjey used to be, I used to be highly into programming and stuff like that, now I would rather stick my hands in a vat of clay and make something. This hobby transition wouldn't be such an issue, but I seem to be stuck to my keyboard more than I want to be. My thoughts when I am in my room is that I need to be there waiting in case someone wants/needs to talk to me and if I don't think about other things before I land there, they don't get done. I wish I could break away from my electronic leash more than I do. My time with Chris is very valueble to me, and somehow in his presence I manage to handle my electronic life a lot better. While he is around I might check my email once, twice at the most, but I am not sitting around waiting for messages, I am with him for those times, not with my computers. I guess I need to learn to be with myself and actually be able to do things for myself. Part of my issue I think links to the way I was trained from birth. I have always been taught to be in my designated location, get permission to go anywhere else, and ALWAYS be predictable. I am used to being in this mindset, and I fear living life as a result. I really want to learn to live, but at current I can't seem to do it alone and I'm glad to have a best friend beside me to help me learn what I missed out on. Chris is so full of life and isn't scared of most adventures. This brings me to my next topic, cleaning. I have noticed lately that there has been a transistion that I was not aware of before... my parents no longer clean for me and I never was informed that they had stopped. I guess its the type of thing that has never crossed my mind before, I am an adult and should be taking care of things like that myself. One of the biggest problems in my life if that I never was transistioned to being an adult, I missed that whole teenager stage of things. I went from everything being done for me to things being not done for me and me being dropped on my ass. Somewhere in there I think my parents were supposed to encourage me to do things on my own, while still reminding me about them. As a result I have a lot of "independant" stuff to learn yet.
I am making changes in my life, although some of them are slow, it is still progress and I want it to continue. Somewhere over the years I have changed and somehow manage to keep doing so. Whether I go from being a scholarly kind of guy to a stormtrooper (thanks Ryan), or a programmer to a potter, or a yes-man to a philosopher, or a nerd to a jock, I do not know, all I know is that it is my life and I need to learn to live it the best I can.
June 05, 2005
May 22, 2004
Corporate Re-Sizing...
The National Science Foundation announced the following study results on corporate
America's recreation preferences:
1. Sport of choice for maintenance level employees: bowling.
2. Sport of choice for front line workers: football.
3. Sport of choice for supervisors: baseball.
4. Sport of choice for middle management: tennis.
5. Sport of choice for corporate officers: golf.
CONCLUSION: The higher you are in the corporate structure, the smaller your balls.
Lately i've been digging in the RFC archives for my pleasure and im finding that the series itself has no real standard upon which it was built, it is a giant document collection of anything that might be relevant to the Internet.
Some of my favorites from the recent adventure are:
RFC-1855: Really straight-forward specification of Internet rules of kindness, but I find that this document is really too verbose and "standard-like" to be useful to the modern Internet user, especially since most of the newbies are so stupid.
RFC-822: Old government document, but is really a cool into to SMTP. I find it helpful when diagnosing weird things happening in email transactions. The most unfortunate thing about this document is that it hasn't been obsoleted by a post-DNS document.
RFC-2150: This document says it is for those with limited knowledge of the Internet. Would anyone with limited knowledge of the Internet know how to get this document? The document makes a strong delcaration about the Internet opinion towards 'The Arts'. Im really suprised that this document isn't really more prevailant than it is. I love the fact that this document does welcome artists of all varieties to The Network.
Those three are the most interesting that ive read in the past week, but there are about 3000 more to read and try to find good in. I am finding that these documents are really becoming over-complicated, even though they never were meant to be.
