I’ve been trying to take a decent picture of Weird since I’ve been here. He has cursed my camera in some way, such that it either won’t take the good picture, or the battery dies, or else I get just in the right spot to get a pic of him sprawled out on the bed, or the brick patio outside, and he moves before I can snap it.

He’s screwing with me.

For the longest time I’ve wanted to form a punk band called Failure Mode Analysis.

At this moment in time, I want to form a band called Singleton and the Gang Of Four, the world’s only object-oriented rock band. All lyrics in pattern language.

I wanted to comment on the whole usenet/martial arts thing, but it’s 7:48 and I haven’t slept all night.

My mind has been going full bore since about 10pm. And by ‘bore,’ I mean diameter, not interest level.

The two funnest things I learned in the past few hours have been extremely geeky, but here they are, with linkage to something about them:

How to implement class interfaces separately from class heirarchy in C++ This is very easy to do in REALbasic, Java, and Objective-C, and it turns out that C++ isn’t that bad with it, either. I investigated this because I’ve been poking around the Mozilla Gecko API (I chose this link because it has a cool diagram of the Component and Service Managers interact, that looks like a diagram of a synapse), and I thought, ‘Geez, is this all to get around C++’s lack of an @interface keyword? It turns out it’s not; nsISupport is just there to be a PITA.

Cocoa’s First Repsonder abstraction is a lot like REALbasic’s EnableMenuItems event, except that any type of object can be in the response chain, as long as it advertises itself as being able to respond.

I also managed, in my sleep-deprived state, to see through space and time to the ultimate truth about existence and meaning, but it wasn’t as interesting as how to define C++ classes independent of heirarchy. Woop.

I recently got complimented for some things I said on usenet by some folks I respect.

‘Doing’ the political usenet is like going for fast food: Disgusting and satisfying all at once. It’s like being in an angry violent mob that’s really a satire of an angry violent mob, except there are a handful of people who really are angry and violent. Sometimes I question whether it’s worth it to have the thick skin required for such rhetoric.

But the value of it is in learning about that thick skin, and seeing how some people wear their thick skin like armor 24/7, and really understanding how restrictive that is.

Now, the question is: Do I need this information in order to empathize, or do I need this information in order to know how to better throw them to the ground? Or both? I try to keep an aikido approach to this kind of stuff. Maybe it’s best for some people to get gently lead to the floor. And it’s always best to not get caught up in how violently one is being lead to the floor, oneself, but instead concentrate on what one can learn.

If you follow my meaning. I should probably drink some more wine and go to bed.

Or not.

I spend a lot of time doing usenet, and so I know and relate to the people I frequently converse with. This is the same as the way you’d know your favorite writer through their writings. You learn more specifics through usenet; some people let a few details slip through. But mostly you get to infer things like class and education and gender. There are always surprises in those regards.

But the point here is that I’m trying to figure out if I get along with who I get along with on usenet because it’s usenet. That is, would they be insufferable in real life, for whatever reason.

I’ve been considering having a usenet gathering for the very select few. This is a Big Deal for me, because I hate being around other people, in general.

How to make Safari quit deleting your home directory:

Send an email to Don Melton, Safari Engineering Manager.

Tell him what happened.

Get a bugfix (v51) within four hours.

Sometimes I love the internet.

How to make Safari delete your home directory:

Start a download. Like, some big file on a faraway server.

This part is easiest if you’re using a dialup connection: Close the browser window after it sends a request to the server, but before it starts the transfer.

Look at the Downloads window. There will be an icon for your home directory and it will say you are downloading your home directory.

Press the cancel button. Since Safari deletes cancelled transfers, it will dutifully begin to delete your home directory.

Watch the beachball spin. Listen as the hard drive in your computer clicks and whirrs innocently.

Realize what’s going on. Say something like OH FUCK! Hit command-option-escape. Navigate the ensuing dialog faster than you thought humanly possible…

I managed to save some stuff, but my music and pictures are gone gone gone.

A few blogs back, I mentioned Apple’s new web browser, called Safari.

DON’T USE IT.

It can very easily destroy your home directory.

Don’t ask me how I know this.

There’s a thought experiment that’s been making the rounds. I first read it in Adbusters magazine, but since then I’ve seen a bunch of references to it.

It’s called the Zen TV Experiment. Sit and watch TV for 30 minutes without turning it on. What, qualitatively, is different between watching a turned-off TV and watching one that’s turned on?

I can answer that question, for I have watched a Tony Robbins ‘Get The Edge’ info-mercial all the way through. The answer is: If it would be a waste of time to watch a blank screen, then it’s a waste of time to watch ‘Get The Edge.’

The Mechanics Of Destruction

MP3s of found-sound music made with symbolic objects. A track made with a big mac meal, a track made of samples from Hollywood movies, so forth.

It’s 5am. I just did usenet compulsively for 3 hours. I bet I wrote a bunch of stupid stuff.

I’m feeling better. The dizziness is mostly gone. Just the occasional weirdness when I turn around too fast or look up from reading.

Now I can finally put some energy into getting a new muffler for the car. The old one fell right the hell off a while back, before the inner ear thing started.

In fact, it was waaaay back before Christmas. I was just driving along and there was this horrible noise, and people in the cars around me were looking at the back of my car.

Honda has genius engineers. The muffler is held in place by what amounts to big thick rubber bands. The pipe had broken just at the joint going into the muffler. As it swung down, my car ran over it, but it was still held in place by these rubber bands. So it scraped along the pavement, horribly.

After I’d pulled the car off the road, all I had to do was pull the rubber bands off their mounting posts and the muffler was free. I barely got my hands dirty.