Category: Life

Today is my Mom’s birthday. Happy birthday, Mom!

Thanks to a little help from Scott , the stylesheet issues in the photography sections have been resolved.

Now the question becomes Now that I have this thing, what do I do with it?

[insert political screed]

5:45am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
6:00am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
6:15am Alarm goes off. Contemplate ceiling. Hit snooze.
6:35am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
6:50am Alarm goes off. Get up. Go to bathroom. Crawl back into bed. Hit snooze.
7:10am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
7:25am Alarm goes off. Listen to Grieg on radio.
7:40am Get out of bed. Get in shower.
8:05am Walk to work.
8:50am Arrive at work, by way of cafe.
9:00am – 10:00am Read email, news, etc.
10:00am – 12:00pm work on studio website.
12:00pm – 12:30pm Lunch (Tuna on whole wheat, cheddar lettuce onion tomato, pickle on the side.
12:30pm – 1:00pm Walk down by river. Watch ducks. Contemplate chaos and entropy.
1:00pm – 2:00pm XSLT, baybee!
2:00pm – 5:00pm Discuss big client. Contemplate, in no particular order, ceiling, navel, suicide, homicide, money, the client, games, magic, Magic, this, that, the other, the Other, the “other”, The Others .
5:15pm Leave for home.
5:20pm Take cool pictures of praying mantis.
6:10pm Arrive at home.
6:30pm Cook dinner (New Orleans style wild rice).
7:00pm Buy cleaning supplies.
7:30pm Mop kitchen, bathroom, hallway. Contemplate homicide.
8:00pm – 10:00pm Play Serious Sam II.
10:00pm – End of Time Get stuck in infinitely recursive loop updating website about the events of my day.

Grace
Redemption
Serenity

Today is Sifu Day, a sort of Asia-wide Teacher Appreciation Day. My Kung Fu instructor, Master Ly, invited myself and the other assistant instructors over to his house for a small celebration. We lit incense in honor of his instructor, Sigong Chiu Chuk Kai, then meditated briefly, then Sifu Ly and his wife stuffed us full of the best home-cooked Chinese food on the continent.

Being a teacher on a day when I honor my teachers made me think about what it is, that makes a teacher…

A teacher imparts knowledge.
A teacher shows you a path, and lets you decide to walk it.
A teacher understands there are many paths up any mountain.
A teacher says “this is how I did it”
A teacher learns from his students as he teaches them.
A teacher criticizes students instructively, never as punishment.
A teacher takes responsibility for the ways his students use his knowledge.
A teacher will not hold your hand, but may help steady it.
A teacher rewards improvement with more instruction.

The greatest moment for a teacher is when his students take on students of their own.

Happy Sifu day, everyone!

Spent several hours on Sunday down at the Silver Leaf Renaissance Faire. I couldn’t bear the thought of dressing up in Renaissance Garbe this year so I did the tourist thing, armed with camera and money, and just wandered around staring at the sights. Just before I left I made an impulse purchase:

The axe was made by Christian Michaels Arms and Armour , makers of beautiful, high quality, expensive weapons.

In other news I went bowling for the first time in seven years (bachelor party) and discovered a disturbing event called “extreme bowling”.

In an effort to make bowling interesting to the younger generations it has been combined with a techno club atmosphere to make for an environment conducive to neither bowling nor dancing.

Picture, if you will, a bowling alley. Turn off the overhead lights. Turn on blinking runner lights along the lanes. Then turn on blacklights so the silly-putty colored bowling balls glow like miniature suns, difficult to look at. Now turn on the laser light show and spin stars and squares and mushrooms across the length and breadth of the bowling alley.

Then try to hit the pins. Unless you have the concentration of Musashi you will be lucky to break into the double digits.

I should have brought the axe.

Train of thought. Stream of consciousness. Randomness. Turbulence. Complexity. Dimension as metaphor for movement. Movement as metaphor for entropy. Entropy as metaphor for ennui. Pattern. Predictability. Ordered chaos. Chaotic order. Heirarchical programming. Holarchical philosophy. Genetic drift as metaphor for luck. Luck as metaphor for perception. Reptilian brain. Artificial evolution. Potential energy. Kinetic art. Faith in the scientific method. Magic (square/cube/tesseract). Width–height–depth–time–alternity. Zero one infinity. Infinite universe==infinite possibilities. Eternal universe==infinite repetition. Thought invalidates thought. If magic is to exist magic will create the conditions necessary for magic to exist. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Return to luck. Perception alters reality. Meditation increases perception. Magic is to the interior what mysticism is to the exterior. Bounded space and unbounded time? Bounded time and unbounded space? Branches forward, straight road back. Are we in space, on space, or of space? What is PI rotated on it’s side? What if we perceive things that don’t exist? Probability. Flow. Grace. Consciousness of streams. Language as degraded poetry. Poetry as elevated language. Chuang-Tzu’s butterfly. Kafka’s cockroach. Karma as metaphor for irresponsibility. Metaphor as metaphor for metaphor. Sleep as pipe dream.

This past Sunday I found myself at a small pond at one end of the Aquinas College campus. It was not yet noon, so the grass was damp and the small trees cast shadows long enough to sit in, away from the already too-hot sunshine.

The only visible movement was dozens of large dragonflies skimming the surface of the water, putting a serious dent in the local mosquito population and providing me with over an hour of entertainment. There were maybe five different species, some powdery blue, some iridescent green, red, brown, clear-winged, black-winged, and some with spots. The occasional brawl, sounding like a crinkling of cellophane, was the only sound.

After a while a woman and her six-ish year old son arrived. The boy had a fishing pole with him, maybe four feet long, with a big red-and-white bobber and a trout fly for bait. Now, this pond is lightly populated at the best of times, but what with the complete lack of rain in the last month, it is now at most two feet deep. The only surviving fish are minnows, three-inch bluegills, and twelve-pound carp.

Not really fly-fishing-type fish.

There was no way, other than accidentally snagging a carp half his size, that the kid would possibly catch anything. Carp are scavengers, and unless the kid had rubbed the trout fly in roadkill on the way to the pond, the carp would never even notice it. The kid was having fun, his mom was taking a break from her routine, and it was a beautiful day to just hang out and watch the fish.

So I was kind of surprised — and a little disappointed — when a police officer showed up on a bike and told the kid and his mom that there was no fishing allowed, and that they would have to leave. And he didn’t even help the kid retrieve his fly, which he had managed to cast into a tree.

After struggling to free the fly — and I offered to help, but they didn’t want any — mom and son packed it in and left. I felt kind of disappointed. The kid should have jumped in the water and tried wrestling one of the carp to shore. That would have showed that cop.

So I woke up just before 6am yesterday and haven’t been to sleep yet. Worst bout of insomnia yet. At 1am I picked up The Green Mile, and I finished it at 6am today. Then I tried to sleep again, then I went to work. I left work at noon, came home, tried to nap for an hour, couldn’t sleep, then went back to work. Now the time is 10:15, and I feel no more tired than I did at this time yesterday. I decided that the idea of missing a night’s sleep is a big part of the hell of actually missing a night’s sleep. And with that realization I woke up a lot.

Part of the problem was a thought that occurred to me at work yesterday: can we actually perceive the three physical dimensions, or are they metaphors we use to orient ourselves to the space we inhabit. After a night of something loosely resembling thought, I have to say the answer is {b}. There is no objective width/height/depth. These parameters exist only in relation to physical space. There is no platonic ideal of “3 dimensions”

That got me thinking about time, and the perception of the passing of time. Again, is that something we actually notice, or do we only notice its effect on the world around us? Again, I think we are only aware of the symptoms of passage through time: entropy, chaos, age, change, hunger, boredom… things and events which change, not through obvious physical intervention, but merely by existing for a while.

On a completely different note, for a mild spot of amusement, go here . Do a search on a word . Any word . (may take a while to load)

Sheesh! The stuff people throw away…

For the past three weeks the temperature has not dropped enough for dew to form on the grass or the windows of my car. I have even forgone one of the great pleasures of my life — walking to work. At night I sweat myself to sleep and wake up in the morning feeling like I spent the night running.

My apartment is in an old hardware store, built around the turn of the century. The walls are 18 inches of red brick. During the day they absorb sunlight, and at night they expel that light in the form of heat into my apartment. Thus my apartment as night is at least ten degrees hotter than the air outside.

Not long ago I commented that if I ever go into business for myself — building websites — that providing support of any kind for Netscape 4 would automatically raise my rates by 25%. Well, after discovering the breaking point for that browser, I have decided that, no matter the hit my business would take, I will do naught for NS4 other than create a redirect to the Mozilla upgrade page. To Hell with old browsers.

Damn, it’s hot out.