natowelch

child-free
car-free
debt-free
god-free

loyal to a fault
lazy to a tee

self sufficient
self contained
self effacing
self catalyzing

amaterialist
not the hottest hedonist
friends first


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I reserve the right to have folks I don't like (or that don't like me) on my "friends" list. Being on my friends list doesn't make you my friend, it means I want to read your journal. In corollary, not being on my friends list does not mean you aren't my friend. Don't ask to be "unfriended", and don't ask me to unfriend anyone else. Also note that I have no control over those I am a "friend of", as being on someone else's friends list may simply mean that they also, just want to read my journal. I thoroughly reject the spoon-fed semantics suggested by Livejournal's architects in favor the actual (quite) useful functionality they offer. Finding other uses for technologies aside from that originally intended by the authors is called hacking. I like that.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I have been wondering, in my cloister, what value people have.

I think I have a candidate. A theory; a hypothesis.

People are for laughter.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

If Facebook were a Facebook user, you'd unfriend them.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Now that I've had more time to take in Facebook, I'm not real impressed with it.

It seems like it's broken too often, unreliable, and flaky. I'm not real happy with how Facebook decides what's worthy of your attention, and suggests stuff to poke you into generating activity data for them to exploit. Like they do when they insensitively suggest you interact with people who've died. Tacky. If Facebook was a Facebook user, you'd unfriend them.

The news feeds are sorted and filtered in sporadic, incomprehensible ways; I don't get why I have two feeds on the site that are as different from each other as from the data I get through the Open Stream API.

At least I have all my data. Facebook is a pipe network, not a storage medium.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I imagined some novel (to me) scenario twists on the whole zombie craze - suitable for movies, games, whatever.

* smart zombies - a variant on "fast" zombies, where the afflicted don't lose their intellects. They remain afflicted by an overwhelming urge to devour the living, but that's only when they smell them nearby. Heroic acts of willpower may allow them to refrain for long enough to get far enough out of range to regain their wits, with which they plot how to hide from the living as they attempt to survive the less disciplined.

Eventually, as the living reckon with, and, ultimately, get the infestation under control, the "smart" zombies will be confronted with bio-warfare-equipped military forces (or militias?) who will be bewildered by lucid zombies actively negotiating to be spared, rehabilitated ("treated"?) respected, and re-integrated into society - perhaps only to have their bodies decay and give out on their own. The primitive physical struggle we all pine for, which is probably what makes the zombie scenario so appealing, becomes the old, familiar, complicated, subtle, social struggle we all wanted to escape with the zombie scenario in the first place.

Not having a human being degenerate into a faceless, soulless, hapless devourer seems to take away one of the core quandaries of the zombie zeitgeist: can you shoot your own mother after she goes? But that's only at first glance. I think having them remain lucid (if super-motivated) actually amplifies the quandary.

I could even see this as a Team Fortress Mod. Heh.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I am really, really, really, enjoying this life.

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I noticed my LJ friends list has really gotten sparse lately.

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Burning Man demands copyright enforcement standing on all photographs taken at the event because people go to Burning Man to do things they wish to be unaccountable for. Quite the example for the default world, eh?

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Those who aim at nothing win instantly! No scratching required!

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

As you learn to let go of all the things you thought you needed, a wonderful thing happens:

They all become gifts.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

A variation on the previous stir fry recipe:

Take out lentils, cucumbers, and curry.

add mushrooms, chicken soup mix, and chickpeas, soaked overnight, boiled for one hour, and drained, and a little bit of chili powder.

I may have overdone the chili powder, but it's pretty good.

Of the cumin, turmeric, coriander, and chili powder [[http://bloodykitty.livejournal.com BloodyKitty]] sent me months ago, the first three are definitely gone, while the chili powder has remained practically untouched. I'm not a big fan, but I might as well check it out.

It's certainly more colorful with the chickpeas. Or should I call the GARBANZO BEANS! *sproing!* *bing!*

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Chick peas and fresh bacon bits.

Bacon is among the most parsimonious of meats. By slicing thin, one maximizes the surface area of the food, and therefore the taste and texture one experiences while eating, while simultaneously minimizing contact with its deleterious effects on both the body and production environments.

I often say "reducing counts", but I wonder if the ethical objection to meat can really accept such an argument. However much or little of the factory-farmed animal you eat, it suffers the same. Ethical responsibility is not diluted when shared between more consumers. Losing your life feels no better when you lose it in a smaller group.

I suspect that the environmental argument against meat is more amenable to this strategy. Less pollution is decidedly better than less in far more circumstances.

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Cultured meat - "vat-grown", if you will - would theoretically satisfy the ethical argument of vegetarianism by virtue of the fact that, though an animal (part), it does not suffer. It's not sentient. The nerves don't transmit anywhere.

Would that make it a plant?

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Whenever you drain a can of chick peas, does anyone else get the INSTANT URGE to just grab a bunch and MOW? Something about that protein-y smell just activates my appetite.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

My life appears to be lived at the bottom of an unending barrage of interesting projects.

I feel the impulse, once more, to compile lists of things I want to do, make, create, build. Most of this will probably actually consist of SLASHING projects off that I don't want to do sooner rather than later. I don't need make work - I need make time.

Hm. "Making Time" sounds like a tempting blog title.

It sounds like dumping hardware projects for lack of funds is an excellent excuse. But given I just spent a wad of cash on stuff at a fabric sale, and it isn't enough for what I'm envisioning, I may be in for a penny, in for a pound. For that one, anyway.

What's more, as soon as I'd sidelined the RepRap, people I'd told about it sounded interested in splitting the cost. Ha.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

it appears my fortnight of butting my head up against dbmail, ecryptfs, mysql, and sqlite is nearing its end.

My error in attempting to migrate from the Mysql to the SQLite database backend for dbmail became apparent as I began to import three months of mail archives dumped into mbox files through the dbmail IMAP4 server from the old mysql backend. It's somewhere on the order of 15,000-20,000 emails (I get a LOT of email). Once I got up and over ten thousand, the performance slowed down a lot. Even inserting new mail using fetchmail took a second or two per message. Some filtering and de-duping functions just plain stopped working, since they would always time out before completing.

So, it was back to Mysql. I now have most of the mail I've received since I deprecated the Mysql database dumped to mboxes and being transferred back via IMAP4 importation to the Mysql backend... and it's WAY faster, thank goodness.

To get here, though, I had to find a solution to my encryption problem, which is what drove me away from mysql in the first place. Well, no, not really. What drove me away was the fact that it's really not possible to encrypt SOME of a mysql database if it is required to be stored using the innodb storage engine. I had been trying to encrypt just the dbmail database, in its own folder. What was really called for was to just scrap the whole piecemeal and encrypt all of /var/lib/mysql wholesale.

At first, I was trying to do what I had been doing with the sqlite database, and symlink /var/lib/mysql to /home/nato/mysql . That would place the entire database space inside my encrypted home directory. Unfortunately, mysql would not, for reasons I did not investiagate throughly.

Instead, I just used the existing ecryptfs utilities to create a separate excryptfs encrypted file system just for the mysql database. That seemed to work great. All I had to do was tweak one file to make the mountpoint /var/lib/mysql .

So, now, I am celebrating, because my mail is now fast and usable once more. I can hardly believe it. It's been a depressing two weeks.

But, I win. Again. Through perseverance and patience. What a relief!

Now, on to that Google Wave preview I received from Jeff! It's a little slow, interface wise, but I'm digging it so far.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

My eureka moment this morning came in the form of a visualization of the mind in a manner similar to a circuit diagram. Nothing too novel, but inspiring from a drawing perspective. I have it here drawn in pen on a piece of paper, but it will take more time to get up to speed with digital tools. Maybe I should use a flowcharting tool.

Nonetheless, a written description will do for now:

First, a square. Inside the square is a person's body; outside is the environment. Divide the the space inside the square into four corners along two conceptual axes.

First, divide the body along the horizontal axis. On the left is the sub- or unconscious, consciousness to the left. Consciousness being the fuzzy thing that it is, it may be edifying to ditch the label entirely. One may substitute "I" on the right, and "brain" on the left. This was inspired by the confrontation I've had recently with the appearance of the brain being just as mysterious and unknown as the outside world. "We" are occasionally unable to explain our selves - our perceptions and our impulses - to ourselves, and to others. On those occasions, "we" do not seem to actually reside within the brain that we have always been most intimately located near. A key definition to self-identification seems to be self-awareness, self knowledge.

This is a little strange to me because of the common illusion that it is ignorance that provides us with agency. Ignorance is what we have about things external to us - like the environment, or with powerful impulses and sensations. It's the fact that I know what I want, and what I will decide, given whatever specific hypothetical circumstances, that grants me agency. I am not afraid of determinism. Being a machine changes does not change my experience of or interaction with the world one wit. It all adds up to normality. "Weep not for me, for I am machine - and no mere machine at that." A warm, sensitive, human machine - just like everyone else.

Now move to the vertical axis. As I've hinted already, on top we have sensation - input of signals from the environment into the body. on the bottom, we have motivation - signal outflow from the body into the environment. The senses serve as the gateway of input signals - light, heat, sound, etc., into the body. They flow into the body square on the top left - the subconscious/sensation corner. Signal ultimately flows out on the lower right - the conscious/motivation corner.

In order to travel from the first corner to the latter, signals have to cross one axis at a time. Sensation signals that cross the horizontal axis into motivation first are translated from stimulus to response subconsciously. They become instinctive impulses. Those impulses then pass across the other vertical axis into consciousness before being able to express themselves in bodily action.

Or, alternatively, the subconscious sensation signal could cross the vertical axis first, passing into consciousness, before being translated into motivational action by conscious processes. This is a familiar, transparent process, since it's done by the same conscious, self-aware, mind everyone has.

Of course, signals can exit the body without traversing the conscious mind (reflexes), so I would imagine strictly conscious sensation would be plausible too. It might be good to account for this by tilting the square into a diamond, and allowing for sensory and active gateways from the other two corners, as well. Perhaps our use of science, technology, and strict, formal, mathematical reasoning is what can allow us to bypass our subconscious, traditional senses - and their inherent sensory biases (such as those which produce optical or cognitive illusions of which we have been customarily unaware) - and receive signals directly within the conscious mind.

So here's the newest thought that inspired the diagram: There are two distinct signal filters in the mind. The subconscious filters our conscious sensation (attention), and the conscious filters our subconscious motivation (ethics). The filters are constructed to receive signals and eliminate some based on specific criteria, allowing only others to continue on.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I spent all night last night and all day today importing several months worth of email from the mysql backend of dbmail into the sqlite backend of dbmail using Claws-mail to import mbox files over IMAP. I have been unable to use fetchmail to load new mail, and unable to browse existing mail. the dbmail-lmtp daemon that receives it from fatchmail sporadically complains that "the (sqlite) database is locked". shouldn't this be able to do two things at once? I didn't have this problem with MySQL.

To make matters worse, the IMAP performance of jsut browsing mail has slowed intolerably. Apparently, sqlite3 can't handle a GB database of email messages as well as Mysql can.

*wince*

I guess it's time to figure out how to migrate back to Mysql.

I also recall never seeing the corruption/header mangling problem on the Mysql backend either. I've even developed a theory about how it happens. It always only pops up when there are single quotes in the message header, and the symptom is that the header message block, as stored in the database is missing it's trailing characters. sometimes they're just missing the ending carriage returns; sometimes they're actually missing trailing characters on the final header line as well.

Could it be that dbmail is properly escaping single quotes in preparation for insertion into the database, by adding backslash characters as customary, but the forgetting to account for the extra length those escaping characters add to the header string? If the escaped string isn't the same length, but the length isn't updated, it might be chopping off the characters at the string's end by mistake.

When I finally get my email back to where I want (if ever), I may file a bug report with dbmail. but fuck this.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I'd like to state for the record that Scribd is an obstructionist asshole.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

So I saw this ad today...

"Nobody expects NATO! Our chief weapons are peace and security... and..."

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

The sensation of total control of your universe is indistinguishable from the commitment to total acceptance of it.

Accept how things are for long enough, and they become desirable.
Desire how things are for long enough, and one acts to make them so.

And when one acts to make something exactly what it is, one succeeds. Permanently.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

My attitude is changing once more.

For September and October, I was on an enormous productive streak. I think that ended on Halloween. While it's easy to blame the activities of that night, I wouldn't call it a slam dunk.

I took a sudden nap this evening. I am poorly motivated. I caught a tinge of being overwhelmed by all the projects I've been anticipating in weeks past.

I don't mourn it by any means. I still have some relative luxury of indolence. It might seem to be little more than a hibernation instinct following on the heels of ancestral harvest-time energy boost.

I lost a few pounds at my last weigh-in. It's not spectacular, but it may perhaps be a steadier, slow progress.

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Happy is he who upon deconstructing the illusions of the world, concludes, not that nothing is real, but that everything is.

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I'm still very much in the hermit mode. I don't think I have a whole lot to offer a mate; the big difference lately is that I'm finally having trouble seeing what a mate would have to offer me. I guess I'll just have to learn to give away things, instead of looking for deals. :)

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I have had some interested parties inquire about splitting the cost of a RepRap, rather than having me put it off another year. That might work, but I still have my divorce and a 2 month rent buffer to populate before I start thinking about that.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Before I change my mind, I want to do something impulsive, and tell the world.

I'm experimenting, and have been for a couple of years already, with the fabrication of sex toys. For me.

There. I said it. I don't think it will make much of a difference.

Now, to see how long I can go leaving this post public.

Deal with it, Mom.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Doubt is at once more powerful, and more wonderful, than faith.

It is doubt that has raised our castles into the sky, by eroding away all the soft, inviting quicksand of our muddy thinking from the bedrock of undeniable, incontrovertible, immutable truth.