Sleep and its relation to wakefulness

I haven't touched my writing since I started having difficulty sleeping. I actually have entire pieces written and sitting there, waiting to be sent off to the editor, pieces I don't even remember writing, and now I'm not sure what to do. Not that I'm extolling the virtues of my own work, but the pieces I've had published are still enough of a shock to me that I get chills reading them. This is stuff I wrote. Surely, somebody who has written a few thousand words, had it edited, re-structured, then copyedited, then formatted it for publication would remember just how disturbing something was the first time, right?

But it seems that either I'm deliberately forgetting it, or I'm deliberately writing something that is so disturbing to me that I'm unable to step back from it, or something else is at work. Because really, we become desensitized to everything, don't we? The more we subject ourselves to pain, the less it bothers us. The more we taste that really super-sour candy, the less sour it becomes. The same is true of very spicy foods. Sex. Speed. So what's going on?

The only correlation I can make here is that when I look at the dates on all these files sitting in subversion, they all stack up very nicely with the last time I actually slept. That's rather frightening. Is my lack of sleep (going on almost three months here) so corrupting my memory that I don't remember the things I spent maybe a month writing? Is it also eroding my will to write, or be productive, or even perhaps to interface with the rest of society? It lines up too perfectly. It's like there's a snapped matchstick or something, right at the week I lost the ability to sleep, and the break is so final, that nothing is written after, not even little post-it's of ideas that I have been so good about leaving myself the last few years. Just nothing. And before that date, I hardly remember anything I've written.

Enough to send chills down a given spine. Eeks.

You can't touch this.

Getting a clearance is sort of part of the routine when you live in the Metro DC area. If you can't get a clearance (for whatever reason), it's sort of like trying to get a line of credit with a low FICO score. It's just impossible. Today, I'm finishing up paperwork for a defense contractor, but on contract to a civilian organization, and the contractor (who I work for, as opposed to the primary, which is the government) has noticed that my name is misspelled on my passport. Now, I've been using that passport for some time now. I've gotten numerous clearances with it. All I was trying to do today is fill out my I-9, my withholdings, and so on. But no dice.

I'm not sure there's anyone here to be sore at. I mean, in theory the people that said "no" today were just being vigilant, which is what they're supposed to be doing. On the other, it's obviously a federal identification document, the person in the picture is obviously me, and the risk associated here with my coming onboard with a misspelled name is, well, I don't think it even merits a "marginal" threat to anyone, let alone the company I work for or the Fed/Civ organization I'd be working for.

These are the people that want to x-ray my helmet when I get in to the office. Oh well. The good news is, it is so damn nice to get out on the bike. I was sitting there on 395S at about 9,000rpm, and it had been raining all day when it strikes me: wow, this is a total blast. Now, the road was wet, I didn't have my winter or water gear on. In fact, it had been so muggy this morning I didn't even bring my jacket in. It was just YT with flannel and poly lined rip-stop khakis and a polo shirt. The whole ride took mammoth concentration as cagers were more or less always trying to kill me, but even they didn't seem to be hell bent on it today. So for the occasional few seconds on my roughly 37 minute ride home (5.7 miles!) it would be me, the bike, sunlight splashed liberally all over the sparkling road, and the wail of pistons flying up and down in the engine, just inches from my head. I'm having a hard time being angry at anyone with all the time I've had on the bike of late. Even in the rain. I suppose that says something. I should get somebody to make an eeg or something that I could fit on the bike so they would know what sort of state I'm in on the bike, so they could make a pill out of it. Boy, I've never thought I've ever had a problem with a prescription drug, but if I had sixty Motorcycle Zen pills... Yeah. I'd be a junkie. Sigh.

Owch!

Got beat to hell by the bike today. Must ride more, more often, harder and smarter. Looking for intermediate level skills dvd's... I've heard the MSF advanced course is lame, so don't really want to do that.

For anyone keeping track, it looks like between $wife and I we're doing maybe 7500 miles across both bikes in a year, with about 5000 of that basically me being a stubborn ass. I will ride you in the snow!

One of the reasons I'm so sore today is the hammer is just so, so, so heavy. My obliques and abdomen, and my lumbar spine are just completely out of whack, and my knee started showing signs of failing again. Riding wasn't like this when I rode every day, religiously. Granted, you can't ride your bike when you're in the hospital, or if you're having neurological issues.... but I really don't like feeling like an amateur when I get back on the bike.

Loads of fun, though. Even though I drove to and from work in absolutely hideous traffic, there were a few moments where it was just me and the bike and the scream of that motor as it wound up to 13k. I can't stay mad at it long. Besides which, it was my fault all along, wasn't it?


(...getting back on the ankle lifts on three axes, doing tiny little crunch-type exercises for the obliques and abdomen...)

promed to save the day..

First, how was directionality of infection established?  Was the worker sick when he came in contact with pigs?  If so, what lapse in biosecurity allowed a sick human worker to even be on a swine farm as standard biosecurity practices on progressive or up to date swine farms would screen such an individual out and prevent him or her from coming into contact with pigs?  Has the worker tested positive for the novel influenza A H1N1 virus?  What is the prevalence of the new virus in the swine herd and finally, but most importantly, what quarantine and traceback procedures are in place to make sure that the swine herd does not infect other swine farms?  Finally, although we know animal diagnostic laboratories have never seen this virus before in pigs, what surveillance efforts are being made to look at previous swine serum banks or test apparently healthy swine herds on a population basis to actively ensure swine populations are free of this novel influenza A H1N1 virus.

(emphasis mine) I've been saying that what I've read makes it looks like H3N1, although details are so sketchy and the signal to noise ratio is ... boy, I don't know what the data-appropriate term is for a "whiteout" condition (that is, when there is so much data flowing it's impossible to watch anything meaningfully within a length of time that allows you to react in a time appropriate for the data you observe). At any rate, a bit-out it is. And none of the people talking, except a very few, are making any sense about this ... pandemic. I really don't think it's that big a deal, unless we start seeing this thing with a mutation that works (extra point if you can name the enzymes it needs to do this). If we do wind up with an H3N1 or H1N1 that is bidirectional from pigs to people, we'll be in Pretty Deep Shit... speaking of, where's PETA?).

I wish people would just shut their respective yaps and listen. There are a few things you need to concentrate on:

• don't go to work if you're sick.
• if you are sick, don't go to work. if it gets worse, go to the hospital. you'll be fine.
• wash your hands, idiot.

 please consider the internet to be read-only for a while.

Need to get back out on the bike

Grunt. It's been too long. I can't keep doing this five-days-between-rides thing, or I'm not fit enough to get back on the bike and ride like I want to. I'm either brilliant (aw, shucks), or seriously deluded, clearly. I've managed to convince myself that the bike is good physical therapy. And, for that matter, my orthopede. That's, well, kind of shocking. But you know what they about putting proofs... (I wonder if anyone's made an interface for the Nike+Run thingie that works on automobiles or bikes...)

Whilst atop my pile of bit detritus, watching the interwebs roll by, I come across this:

"It's not a simple matter. All these pigs won't be killed like you're pushing a remote-control button," he was quoted as saying by the state-owned Al-Ahram daily [see also item 2 below]. Mr Amin said that a farmer at an undisclosed location had been nabbed with 300 pigs as he tried to smuggle them to freedom on Wednesday. Armed police are stationed outside some of Cairo's pig sties to prevent such attempts.

"nabbed with 300 pigs"? I mean, ???!!. And now the "armed" police are guarding pig farms? I don't suppose there will be a "save the swine" mujahedeen corrective action" to counter this new anti-mulsim froth. Let's also not pretend for a moment this has anything to do with H1N1 (although, if you ask me, this is starting to look more like A/H3N1 all the time. I'd love it if someone could clear that up for me...) because it is positively clear that this is spreading via human-human contacts. Only a fool (or someone entirely without understanding of how the influenza, or indeed all kinds of virus) would behave this way.

I don't suppose any of this has anything to do with a particular religions and their feelings on pork?

Old flames

So, just the other day, I found myself driving the Z. This was very strange for me. First off, the car doesn't have a motor. Second, I've had that car since I was a kid, and its very smell evokes a lot of what I guess you could call emotional baggage. I mean, I remember where I was living, and the people I knew back in California, the time my (then girlfriend) wife actually managed to get the car bump started with me, I mean, all kinds of stuff just flooded back to me, and it was just a strange feeling. I wouldn't go as far as to call it "good" or "cathartic", which are two words I think someone familiar with me or the project would expect, but at least now, I know what I've got coming to me. It's not just a car, and getting into the car and taking it out for a spin is going to involve all the stuff I've collected and either stored or not dealt with and properly expunged, and all the stuff I wind up storing &c in the process of getting it back into self-propelled status. For those still scratching their heads, the Z was being winched, and I was steering (instead of pushing). But, the day we had the Z out on the winch, I got to talk to two former Z owners, both of whom had owned multiple Z's and ZX's over the years (none of this silly post-96 Z business) and verily swooned when talking about them. One woman, a complete stranger, didn't just tell me she loved the cars, but she instructed me to get it back on the road, I mean, seriously was telling me I must do it. I think she sort of misunderstands what it takes to go from a car that's a big hulk with no engine or transmission to one which is, er, habitable for brief periods. Hell, I know at least one person who would tell me right now that I don't understand that. Maybe I don't. We shall see.

And then, of course, the only other love in my life, at least wheels-wise, the Hammer. We went and got it finally – finally! – put back together, and we had ourselves a small outing. Boy, I got the hell beat out of me. I'm sore, even with the fentanyl, but I've been thinking that the best way to get better, muscle-and-soft-tissue (yeah, that phrase, "subjective soft tissue damage", again) wise, is to just get back to riding, working, walking, etc. I thought to myself as I was leaning into turns and weaving the bike around (it has been some weeks since I rode, I think, so it was gently – no thrashing it involved), gosh, I really do have to stretch and flex these very goddamn muscles which hurt so much when I ride. So, gladly, I think I'm right in that respect. This means, hopefully, that a dosage of steady employment coupled with time on the bike, will bolster that injured muscle/soft tissue I've got going on in my lower back (the aforementioned broken ribs were accompanied, naturally, with soft tissue damage – I tried to explain the pain to a physician, and I said, have you ever looked at, for example, a rack of ribs at the grocer? Have you noticed that there is meat on the bones? So, if you were to, you know, break that bone, you might, possibly, damage some of that tissue. I was kind of disgusted that I had to explain this to somebody who appends "medical doctor" to their name, but there you have it.). How funny it is, that motorcycle seats do not have bolsters, then. The rider, in effect, is his or her own bolster. Those muscles which are coddled and swathed in beautiful fabrics in your cock-waving M3 are beaten with a mallet on a motorcycle. Hm. Maybe there's more to that motorcycle-macho thing than I thought. On the other hand, riding a standard or upright bike is a lot easier to do than your average sportbike. Thoughts abound.

It's kind of odd, to think how much these beasts, my little projects of internal combustion, adrenaline, and potential (and realized!) injury are associated with so much emotion and feeling. They're not the cold lumps of metal and plastic they appear to be. I can't say they are if they make me feel the way they do. They, both of them, really are, in a way I can't exactly describe (and I guess have failed to), like lovers.

death on a cracker

You've heard of "death by chocolate." This is sort of like that. It's a dessert, or an appetizer, or even an amuse-bouche. Any cracker will do, but the payload is the important part, so err on the side of mild. A saltine is a pretty simple and easy to obtain cracker, but water crackers hold up a little better, and thinly sliced pieces of pan-toasted (in the same manner you make croutons) bread from a baguette is probably the best choice.

Cheese should be something with flavor, and a fairly dry cheese, although it must have some oil. I wouldn't go as dry as parmesan, or romano, but a combination of the two  might work if it were ground or in thin (very thin) slices. Gouda is wonderful, but an aged, not smoked or fresh gouda. The various bleu cheeses are a bad idea, although gorgonzola is a good choice. Basically, something with a flavor that can stand up to the next ingredient, which is sort of like the nuclear weapon of the culinary arsenal. We get a cheese stocked locally that has peppadew in it, but is otherwise a traditional jack cheese. I have no idea what a peppadew is, but that link gives you an idea of the other possible characteristic of the cheese: don't be afraid to go down the road of cheese with added ingredients. Improvise. You'll have to.

The third ingredient is a habanero pepper. I get about six crackers per pepper. I slice the pepper thinly, and horizontally (across the middle, rather than from the stem down) so they form a ring that I can place on the cracker. I place cheese atop the pepper (I use Red Savinas because I grow them myself; you may find this entirely intolerable and prefer something more like a scotch bonnet, or if you simply haven't the stones, a jalapeno or poblano).

This is the magic. You then nuke it. Give it fifteen seconds or so in the microwave, and make sure that the cheese and the pepper are still firmly joined — this may require some re-arranging — and then another fifteen. Leave them to cool, because you don't want them to get your hands oily.

Precautions. First, working with habaneros, especially of the Savina or other super-hot strains is best done with gloves. This prevents getting their ... treasures in places you wouldn't expect, like under your fingernails, in your eyes, on other sensitive mucosal surfaces of your body (you would not believe how often you touch such surfaces in a given day if you started keeping track; this is another reason people should wash their hands more and learn how to use hand lotion). Second, good grief, they're spicy. The original recipe is the Leary Biscuit. Basically, by heating the cheese, we create a bit of a solvent, which takes the pepper's oily bits (which is where the spicy stuff is, thankfully), and places it into solution. The cracker serves as a substrate and something to pick it up with (otherwise, really, this would be fondue, right? — not that habanero fondue is a bad idea, really…). As with preparation, take care not to get the cheese and oils on your hands.

In general, they are delicious. It's a terrific dish for a summer day with a nice, solid beer (a very hoppy something or other, or something sweeter like a belgian double bock, or a lambic ale maybe) that can "take the heat," as it were. The cheese means that you get to taste all of the pepper, the pepper means you get to experience the heat for, depending on the pepper, even up to a few hours. It kind of sticks to your lips, which is the fun part. You'll be sitting there an hour later, grinning like a fool, reaching for a beer, thinking, man, were those tasty. But you probably won't want another serving for a while.

Enjoy. I figured I'd write this down and submit it to the vast interwebnal peanut galle(r)y for mass consumption because there's no reason potheads should have sole use of the Leary Biscuit as a vehicle for delivering the goodness of plants.

Cheers.

Obscenity on the interwebs.

short: "soft" censorship, and the categorization of the obscene and genre, again. perhaps ad nauseum.

I am really quite upset that Google has seen fit to "warn" users that Becky's weblog is obscene. I have commented at stupendous length about this in the past. Becky is amazingly insightful and has a talent I admire greatly. She reads at least as much as I do (which is to say, a lot), and is able to provide links to both sources and videos to complement or bolster her expressed opinion.

Becky, I think, is also a lesbian. I'm not sure, because I've never really read her site because of her sexuality, I've read it because of its political commentary. I've read it because of her very insightful commentary on the Libertarian party, which I'd desperately love to be a part of but just can't see making any progress or, really, doing anything useful whatsoever. I continue to read it because, despite the incredibly busy layout of her weblog (which is her prerogative; I've heard people tell me the colors on my site "make their eyes bleed." fortunately, I think most of the regular readers herein are of the RSS variety, rather than "direct hit" variety), it is a very good read.

So, from time to time, I think because she is, you know, an adult, and has, you know, a healthy sexuality and libido, makes sexual comments or posts a picture of a naked person on her site. This is obscene? No, folks, this is not obscene, nor does it need a warning unless we assume that the readers of the entire blogspot.com domain are too fucking stupid to realize that sometimes people who have smart thoughts about things like, oh, our president, might also sometimes think about things like, oh, maybe the shape of somebody's ass.

I am really, desperately disappointed with the person at Google who was short-sighted enough to classify her site as worthy of a big warning banner. I'm not going to go as far as to say I know a lot of people at Google, and I know that their politics run in a certain direction and that direction is counter to Becky's, and that might possibly have something to do with it, because I really don't think it went that far. I think what happened is somebody (probably several somebodies) "flagged" the site, and some mindless automaton at Google looked at the website and saw nipples. Or half-covered (gasp! that's even worse!) nipples. Or mentioned possible sexual combinations of, I dunno, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (like I said, I don't read her site for the occasional sexual commentary/banter/whatever). It makes me ill.

I say the very same things, only perhaps a little more heterosexually (and again, I am not even quite sure what Becky would classify herself as, sexually), and maybe I make more comments about unix, microcontrollers, and the department of defense than she does. But I've posted pictures of futanari, and of guro (for fucks sake!) and semen-on-chicks, and the lot, and I've done it for the same reasons she has. Because, really, somebody has to point out that this is no more chaste a society than it is a secular one, and none of these debates are free of sexual bias than they are of any other bias.

I think what has happened, and this is the part that makes me oh-so-angry with Google, is that this "warning" as been erected specifically because Becky is a woman, and women are not supposed to have pictures of naked or close-to-naked women on their website. If her template were purple script (as in Chancery, not "font") on an ivory background and she talked about politics while occasionally pining after various female celebrities, we wouldn't be discussing (and the discussion I think is happening elsewhere; I realize this is a monologue and rant) this at all. That part, people, makes me really angry. Of all the enlightened organizations in the world, Google, with its "20% time" and continual innovation, its information-must-be-free mantra, and so on, has no fucking business calling her website obscene (sorry, pdf, but it's the crux of the matter, the definition of the word, and Becky is no stranger to Potter Stewart-ism).

I'll say it again. It really, really saddens me that somebody has made this judgment; that a judgment was made at all. I wish I could think of something to do, to help point out how horribly absurd this all is, but I'm afraid this is the best I can do. If any of you would like to point out, on your own, or email Google, you're welcome to. However, Google has something of a reputation for being a big old juggernaut, way too busy to answer or consider individual letters. (I guess with the exception of weblogs flagged obscene, and even then, only the flagging, not un-flagging-thereof).


And, sadly, this isn't the first time this has happened to her. What the fuck is wrong with the internet? The very people that make these decisions are the same people that read William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson and think the internet is some vast wild west, and that people are homesteading on blogger, that this is their own private island of expression and public thought. Yet, they're letting their own prudish, egocentric biases into the network like a bunch of frightened children or dithering, borderline-senile senators. Good god, people. Grow the fuck up.

pipe dreams

I find myself thinking, the more I read about the UAVs and UGVs and UUVs being developed, that the skills I've developed working with microcontrollers is really rather portable to both the civilian market and the defense/intel market. The civil sector hasn't quite figured out how useful they are, but things like UAVs are great for aerial surveying, and civil security agencies ("mall cops") haven't figured out how useful things like hover-and-stare capabilities and micro-uav's are. Then there are throw-bots and the like.

At any rate, I'm not sure I really want to do that, but I am really starting to enjoy working with C again, and seeing represented in hardware and software the ideas I'm trying to implement. You know, having a diode or voltage regulator instead of an assert() or whatever.

Anyways. I should probably spend less time reading trade rags and more time relaxing on the weekends.

A form letter

Dear (name of project owner),

I see that you have created (name of project) and submitted it to the multiverse for debian and ubuntu consumption, as well as released the source under the GPL. I thank you and admire you for your dedication to open source software. I am writing, however, to explain that I think you may have missed the point, or might be duplicating efforts.

For example, the use of (previously extant package) with the (some kind of flag or behavior) feature enables the same behavior your new application, (name of project), provides. While I understand that you may not have been aware of (previously extant package), please understand that these problems have often been solved, and the amount of effort you expended in writing (name of project) could have been spent in bettering the functionality of (previously extant package) or by contributing to another project that needs developers.

Furthermore, the repositories are so cluttered now with redundant software packages and varying colors of the same piece of software that I feel (name of project) serves to degrade the performance of packaging systems, slow down the mirror servers, the packaging software itself, and possibly lead new users, such as yourself, down the wrong path.

I humbly request that you remove (name of project) from the package list and instead offer your support and any unique functionality in your project to (previously extant package). This will benefit everyone in the long term, and I hope my above explanation of using (previously extant package) with the (flag or other behavior) feature is more than sufficient to meet your needs.

I also want to thank you again for your time and effort with Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, and the Open Source movement in general. You're a real credit to your generation. The next step in your career towards mastery of Unix and Linux should be to not only become familiar with the tools and software that exists already, but to teach other new users like yourself how to use them. I hope this message has helped you down that path.

Best Regards,

Alex