Goodbye, New Friend

My little Honda Civic that I bought in July just left me today. I sold it about 30 minutes ago. Even though I only had it for three months, I'm going to miss that car. It was a nice little car. I just was concerned about long-term issues, and it was a bit small, and we were not totally happy with all of our cars, so we bought a Mazda Protoge 5 and are selling off all of our other cars.

My Civic was the first to go.



It looks like I might be without a car for a bit, since that will leave us with just one car if the other two sell. But I'll eventually find a jalopy work horse somewhere to get me around town and to and from school. Right now, I guess I'm stuck with driving my wife's big ol' Accord...unless and until it sells. Which might very well be tomorrow.

Why is my car always the first to go? The next one I get better stick around a while!

Cross-dressing is Fun!

Now that I have your attention, let me assure you this entry has nothing to do with cross-dressing. I apologize if that is a disappointment.

Speaking of disappointments... How about this moron in the White House, eh? I can't stand the guy. Anyway, I'm sitting here in a motel in Grass Valley, enjoying some R&R (and looking for land), and last night I happened to catch David Letterman. In his monologue he cracked a joke about how, if Karl Rove leaves, then the president will no longer be able to perform effectively. I was laughing my ass off before the punch line was delivered, which was something like, "does this mean he has been functioning effectively up to this point?"

His agenda is clear. His incompetence is obvious. Why is this guy still in office? I guess all the immoral actions committed by the Bush administration just don't quite add up to one fleeting affair. I guess it's OK to piss on the environment, etch away at our civil rights, flush our national economy down the toilet, foster pro-war attitudes (how un-American is that?) and openly practice censorship while imposing personal moral beliefs on the general public (enough with this "axis of evil" shit), but until he drops his pants with someone who is not his wife, I guess he's an OK guy. I mean, how else can you translate the message? At least it seems like people are waking up to what is going on (I hope, anyway), as it was encouraging to see how many more people showed up to protest the war than to support it at the rally some time ago.

I don't care what anyone says, the reason for going to Iraq was obvious, and it had nothing to do with 9-11. But that is water under the bridge, I suppose. And I guess it is OK to hold the office of the president and lie your ass off...just as long as you don't get caught with another woman.

Hmm. I wonder what would happen if G.W. was caught cross-dressing?

Privacy and Other Invasions

So, for several weeks now, I have been getting a call from some automated system on a daily basis. Sometimes multiple times a day. Supposedly, it is from some guy named Alex who is trying to reach me (yeah, like he has a clue who I am) and offers absolutely no reason why he is trying to reach me, and gives me an 800 number to call him back on.

Yeah, like I'm going to do that.

The Caller ID on my phone lists the guy as "Illinois Call", calling from 847-281-3020. After doing a brief search for the number in Google, I came up with a couple references to other people being pestered in various ways from this number.

WTF?

You would think that after several weeks of calling with no return call, they would stop calling. But their automated dialer must be pretty stupid, because it doesn't even know to wait for my answering machine to stop talking before delivering its speach. For the longest time, I had never heard the first half of the message, because I was always pulling it off the answering machine...which has a pretty long greeting (with instructions as to which voice mail box to use whether the caller wants to talk to my wife or to me). But I decided to pick up the phone one day when I saw the number pop up on the Caller ID (yes, I screen my calls...for this very reason) and finally heard the whole message, though there was no more information in the first half than there was in the second half.

The next thing I want to try is to record and play back the "disconnected number" tones and see if their automated machine is smart enough to remove my number from their dialing list. Or, perhaps I'll just keep letting them waste their money on unanswered long-distance calls.

Anyway, on to more pleasant topics.

Halloween is coming! Halloween is coming! I am never prepared. I always want to do something on Halloween, but never seem to get around to it. Our lives are just too busy and distracted. But I am *really* feeling the itch for a change, since right now I just seem to be in a rut. But here it is, late in the month, Halloween is approaching, and I don't have a clue what to do. You would think that here in the San Francisco bay area, doing something for Halloween wouldn't be a problem. And it probably isn't. I'm just not very connected to any of the local scenes - I've never been very social - so it could turn out to be just another boring evening at home for Halloween (especially since it is on a Monday).

But who knows? I thought it would be fun to at least go somewhere in costume. My wife says she wants to, too, but she hadn't made any plans, yet. Perhaps I need to step up to the plate and make something happen. I hear there is supposed to be something like 250,000 people congregating on Castro Street in the city on Halloween night. I went down to check that out one year and it was pretty interesting - lots of very interesting costumes, and some very...interesting...people down there. But that's just too many people for me, and I have no creative talent when it comes to things like costumes, so I couldn't compete with what I saw down there.

But, anyway, I got online last night just for fun to look for costumes. There doesn't seem to be much out there. I guess if I'm going to go in costume, I want a complete, professional deal. I have always fantasized about being made up to look like some reptillian alien - a very realistic-looking one - and going up to people's houses and ringing their doorbells (as if I am trying to figure out what the thing is that I am poking at on the wall outside their door) and emitting some alien screaching scream when I see their face at the door, and running away. I just think if I saw something like that at my door, that would scare me a lot more than Frankenstein holding a candy bag.

As far as commercial costumes, there seems to be a lot more cool stuff for women than for men. I came across this very cool costume while I was perusing a web site:



I think that's one of the coolest costumes I have ever seen. I think if I was a woman, that's what I would wear this year. But it's $159! I thought it might look cool on my wife, so I showed it to her. But she just kind of frowned and asked, "why do you like that?" I'm thinking, shit, if she doesn't like it, maybe I'll just get it and wear it, myself.

Why not? It's Halloween, right?

I'd probably be too chicken to actually do it. But would a real man have the courage? Oh, the irony! Besides, it's $159. It may as well be $2,000 as far as that goes. It's kind of hard to buy things when you're broke. Oh, well. Maybe things will be different next year. Maybe I'll find a job AND a costume and actually do something for Halloween. But I haven't completely written off this year, yet -- there's still time to figure something out.

Speaking of Christmas (huh? What? Who said that?)... I was in Target the other day after my wife saw this hilarious inflatable green monster in front of someone's house (sorry, I don't have a picture) that she had to have and was told it could be found at Target. We couldn't find one. However, on the wall - on all the shelves on this wall - behind the Halloween products, were Christmas decorations. There was even an animatronic reindeer that kept swinging its head from side to side. And it had lights all over it. It wasn't too far from some Santa displays, among other things.

I guess Thankgiving is a non-holiday. But, GEEZ, you would think they could at least wait for Halloween to come and go! Christmas isn't until the end of December (dare I say, "for Christ's sake?"). I can't stand the Christmas season, and I just want to go away when it comes around. Christmas brings out the worst in people, not to mention the worst crowds. The only reason Christmas Day is any good is because then we can all collapse from the stress that leads up to the day and finally crash for 12 hours.

What a farce.

Anyway, Halloween is coming. Let's focus on that for a while! :-)

My Bloody Memory

I am posting this a day early since there appears to be some anticipation for the story. So, here goes...

Twenty five years ago, on October 14, 1980, I had a bad day. It was a day I will never forget, for I carry a "nice" little reminder around with me in the form of a scar. This scar is about 3-1/2 inches long on the inside of my arm, extending from my elbow out toward my hand.

So, what happened?

I thought you'd never ask. Well, it started out like any "normal" day in my younger years. I was attending DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix at the time, and it must have been a break between trimesters, because I was visiting home in Tucson. And a normal day in Tucson for me pretty much consisted of going over to see my friends Jerry, Dave and Mahlon (all brothers). Usually Dave and I would get together and start tinkering with odds and ends, talking about ideas, and then performing some unusual experiments of one sort or another.

Many of these experiments involved fire. I have a few rather...interesting...memories that could account for my basic fear of fire, but those are for another time. On this particular day, I came face-to-face with the explosive power of fire. Literally.

Dave and I were bored. But then, that's how these things usually started. Of all the things we could have done that day, we decided to make a short movie. I had my Super-8mm movie camera (real film in those days!), and Dave had an old line-control model airplane that he didn't want anymore, so we decided to take it out for its last flight. We were going to crash it and catch the event on film.
[This was before we began flying radio-controlled airplanes, and long before night flying was even a concept in our minds]

But then one of us decided that crashing it wasn't enough. Why not make it burn as well? Well, but then came the problem of how. How do we make the plane burst into flames after hitting the ground? After some contemplation, we decided that "burst" was the operative word here, and that it would be easier to just make the thing blow up when it hit the ground. If anything caught fire in the process, then that would be a bonus, but gosh, wouldn't it be cool just to see the thing explode into a million pieces?

Boys.

Our attention was then focused on what we would need in order to create the desired explosion. I had some old M-80s, but they were in my apartment in Phoenix at the time (wow - can you believe I still have those M-80s? I bet they're pretty unstable by now). But even if we had some firecrackers, how were we going to time the blast with the crash so the plane would explode on impact? Fuses take a few seconds to burn.

We needed something more immediate. Of course, Dave just happened to have most of what we needed on hand. The idea that emerged was to create a small pipe bomb that could be detonated with a rocket igniter. The rig would be connected to a weighted toggle switch that would close the circuit on impact and set off the bomb. Dave had some red dot shotgun powder on hand (from some previous experiments) and an empty CO2 cartridge (from some other previous experiments). All we needed was a rocket igniter.

A quick trip to the nearby hobby shop, and we were all set. All we had to do was make the bomb and install it on the plane. We filled the empty CO2 cartridge with red dot shotgun powder, inserted the rocket igniter, and used epoxy or JB Weld to seal it in place. We then took a toggle switch and fitted a small lead fishing weight over the lever and crimped it in place. This was the weighted switch. We mounted the switch to the fuselage so it stuck outside the airframe (with the "off" position toward the rear) and installed the explosive device under the wing.

When we were all ready, we loaded everything into the car [carefully] and drove on up to a nearby school yard. Mahlon (Dave's younger brother) and a friend of his came along, as well as a neighbor kid who lived across from Dave whom we referred to as "Jinx". There is a long history regarding his nickname (which he very appropriately earned in ways that seemed to defy physics), but again, that is a story for another time. Just the fact that he was with us on this day did not bode well with me. But we pressed on, anyway.

When we got to the school yard, Mahlon and his friend went off to play on the grounds while Dave and I went to work. Jinx was just there. I don't know what he was doing, but his sinister magic must have been stewing in the background, because it wasn't long before things started to go wrong.

Everything was ready to go. After making all the proper connections, all that was left to do was to start up the engine on the plane and do the deed. But Dave could not get the engine started. It just didn't want to run. He decided that the batteries he was using for the glow plug may be low, so he picked up a spare pack that he knew was charged. But still no luck. The glow plug tested good, but the engine simply wouldn't start. Then the batteries died. This had to be the work of Jinx, since Dave absolutely swore that those batteries were charged (and usually if he said he knew, then he knew). So he tried yet a third set of batteries.

Same scenario.

The engine would not start and the batteries were all coming up dead. This was an omen we should have listened to, but we were determined to catch an exploding airplane on film that day. We decided to set the plane on the ground and film it where it sat while we pulled a string to toggle the switch to blow the plane up. But there was still the problem with the batteries - how were we going to set off the bomb? Of course, there was a solution.

Dave had some jumper cables and an extension cord in his car and suggested we hook it up to his car battery. The next sequence of events should have occurred in a different order...a sane order...but we were so bent on capturing this footage that neither one of us stopped to think about what we were doing. We just needed power to the bomb.

Dave connected the jumper wires to his car battery. The extension cord was cut off on both ends to expose the wires, so I hooked up one end to the other end of the jumper cables. It was then my task to connect the other end of the extension cord to the bomb switch.

Do you see where we went wrong here?

To this day, I don't know why I didn't stop and say, "hey, Dave, how 'bout we connect your end last?" But my thoughts were simply focused on getting the wires connected and getting my face out of there, quickly. "Quickly" was the operative word here. There was a whole lot of haste going on after everything that had gone wrong up to this point. It was getting late and we would be losing the daylight, soon.

Instead of string, we had steel wire connected to the bomb switch. This was the wire that normally would have been used to control the airplane in flight. It was tied to the switch so that we could pull the detonator switch from a [relatively] safe distance. That was the idea. But during the process of connecting the battery wires to the detonator switch, I was nowhere near that safe distance. And I was scared.

Duh!

I laid down on my side next to the model airplane and reached up under the wing to attach the wires. I twisted the wires together - first the positive lead, then the negative. The circuit was hot, and I realized the bomb was live. I wanted to get away from there. Quickly.

So, quickly, I stood. No sooner than I was fully on my feet, I started running. Or, well, I took one quick step on my way toward a safe distance...and I tripped over something. It was the detonator switch wire (the trip wire, per se). I looked down at my foot and saw what I had tripped over, and my heart skipped a beat. I was thinking, "oh my god how lucky I am that it didn't work!" I thought maybe I kicked the wire clean off and the detonator switch had not actually toggled, so in my belief that I was now safe because it didn't work (perhaps believing it wouldn't work because Jinx was there), I turned to look at the plane to see if the switch was thrown.

As I leaned just a little bit forward, I noticed the switch was, indeed, thrown...just as the plane exploded in my face.

BOOM!

I still have a snapshot in my mind of that single moment in time. I can see the image of that plane coming apart. It is not like slow motion as many people describe when a traumatic event occurs, it is simply a snapshot as if I had taken a photograph at that very moment. The very next thing I knew, I was turned 180 degrees around, facing Dave and Jinx who were, at the time just before the explosion, sitting against the fence talking to each other.

The weirdest part of this experience was that I seemed to instantly know where I had been hit. Maybe I just don't remember the discovery period, but I knew my arm was ripped open (I couldn't exactly miss that), and I was also bleeding profusely from my face, just to the left of my nose. And of all days, I just happened to be wearing a white tee shirt, providing good contrast for the blood that was spattering all over it. I must have been a pretty sight.

My first instinct was to assess the extent of my injury. Since I had a hole in my arm, I was concerned about whether I would ever be able to use it again, so the first thing I did was move all my fingers. I was very relieved to discover that my hand still worked, but was still afraid that I could somehow wind up losing my arm. I then freaked out, thinking there was a piece of my arm missing, and I began yelling, "get me to a hospital, quick!" Dave looked up, and I cannot describe the look I saw on his face. It scared me, because I knew he was responding to what he saw of me. Jinx appeared to be unconscious, as he had rolled over on his face and was not moving. I thought he might be badly hurt or even dead and asked Dave, "is he OK?" As Dave leaned over to have a closer look, Jinx piped up and laughed, amused by his attempt at a practical joke to make us think he was hurt. Then he looked at me and suddenly I saw the same look on his face that I had seen on Dave's.

"The asshole is alright," I thought to myself and promptly forgot about him. I hated him now. "Get me to a hospital, quick!" I repeated. I was wandering around, looking for the missing piece of my arm, but could not find it (I found out later I wasn't missing anything - skin is just really stretchy and it had pulled back away from the wound). I then decided I was getting too excited and calmed myself down. I was bleeding pretty badly and was afraid I might bleed to death. While Dave was gathering everything up to throw in the trunk of his car, I asked where the camera was and told him to "film me!" I wanted to see what they saw, and I had a movie camera available, and I thought it could be my last performance.

"Film me!"

Dave realized that he had already locked the camera in the trunk...along with his car keys. Suddenly, the camera didn't seem to matter anymore. Here I was, standing there, bleeding to death in some school yard, and we had no way to get to the hospital with the keys in the trunk. Cell phones didn't exist, yet. Nobody knew where we were. And there wasn't a whole lot of traffic running past this lonely school yard. In fact, I walked out to try to get the only passing truck I saw to pull over, but the driver wanted nothing to do with me.

Thanks for the help, buddy!

But then the most bizarre thing happened. Jinx's mom drove by. Out of the blue. Just happened to be driving on that particular street for whatever reason. She had no idea we were there. But Jinx flagged her down and I climbed into the back seat. Well, actually, I climbed on top of the back seat, since the back seat was folded down. It was a station wagon, and there were two or three other siblings of Jinx scattered about the vehicle and I was expecting a whole variety of supernatural events to begin spontaneously occuring at any moment. It was bad enough that I had to sit cross-legged and with no seat belt on. Jinx's mom drove to the hospital like she was driving to the bakery to pick up some cupcakes. I was thinking, "step on it, lady, I'm dying here!" In fact, I almost said it. I didn't want to die in Jinx's car, and I didn't know if his mother was into Voodoo or something, so I kept my mouth shut.

Dave said I was turning white, and everybody in the car was very quiet or didn't want to look at me, and the mood was just very sullen. It was kind of pissing me off. I guess I wanted them to stop being so damn serious. I wanted to hear a joke, or something. I didn't like seeing people look at me like I was dead already. So I tried to break the ice by saying something like, "hey, there's a 7-11 - how about we just pull in there and I'll run in and ask if they have any Band-Aids." I was the only one who cracked a smile. Perhaps it was just too macabre, but I just felt like they should be the ones trying to cheer me up.

I didn't have the knowledge at the time - or I wasn't thinking straight - to put pressure on my wounded arm to help control the bleeding. Instead, I rode to the hospital holding my other hand under my arm to catch the dripping blood. By the time we got to hospital, there was so much blood pooled up on my pant legs and spattered on my shirt and dripping from my face that it looked like I was bleeding from everywhere. And I had a hand full of clotting blood. There was a nurse (or somebody) who put me in a wheelchair, and the first thing she said was to use my hand to put pressure on my arm. I held out my handfull of blood and asked, "what do I do with this?" She looked, rather dumbfoundedly, and then said, "just dump it!" (as if to say, "you idiot!"). I didn't blame her. I tried to dump it out of my hand, but by this time it was like jelly (or, perhaps, more like Crisco shortening) and it clinged to my hand. It took about three shakes to get the clump to drop off. That must have been a pretty site on the sidewalk leading into the emergency room, but at least it bought me an express ticket into the building ahead of all the other poor souls who were sitting in the waiting room.

By this time, I think I was more calm than anyone around me. They rushed me down the hallway into a room and got some towels and immediately got the bleeding under control, pressing down hard until the bleeding stopped. They had me sign a couple of forms, which I did my best to do with my right hand (the one that wasn't full of blood), and they stuck me with a few needles, but eventually things quieted down a bit. I became rather intrigued by what I could see inside my arm. I could see tendons moving back and forth when I moved my fingers, and I could see the muscle and the bones. And it just so happened I was in a teaching hospital (the same hospital I wound up working at for over 12 years) and there was a doctor there with some students who happened to be studying the arm at the time. The doctor asked if they could take a look, and I said, "sure!". After all, I was as interested as they were.

My only regret is that I didn't think to ask if they could take a picture of it. I would be curious to know if I would still consider it interesting, now.

A really pretty nurse was assigned to me, and she reported that my mother was there and wanted to see me. She asked if my mom was OK with the sight of blood, and I told her that she was squemish and should probably clean me up pretty good before letting my mother in. I think that's one of the few moments in my life that I had considered myself sly. ;-)

But what can I say - I was a boy. And, boy, was she pretty!

Anyway, I spent three days in the hospital after undergoing emergency reconstructive surgery. They removed a piece of metal from my face (a piece of the CO2 cartridge) that was about the size of a nickel and was embedded in the bone just to the left of my nose. There was an excellent microsurgeon there who patched it up so well that you can't even see it now. It helped, too, that it was right along the outline of my nose.

But I was lucky - very lucky. One inch up and to the left, I would have lost my left eye. And the piece that ripped my arm open, just missed the median nerve, which would have rendered my right hand useless if it were severed. All I lost was a bit of sensation along one side of my forearm, and whatever plans I had during the break from school. And I haven't had a single problem with my arm, since, as a result of the incident (until I broke my hand in March of this year, but that's another story). Dave told me later that he was struck in the leg by a couple small pieces. Jinx, of course, was completely unscathed - except, perhaps, by the embarrassment of his bad joke. I never saw the guy again. Thankfully.

Before returning to Phoenix, I went back to the school yard to have a look at the fateful site, thinking I might see some evidence of the event. But it had rained the whole time I was in the hospital, so there wasn't a trace of evidence that I had even been there...except for a couple of chips in the cement where the plane had blown up. My only memory of the plane is that one single snapshot that I have in my mind. Dave said it was completely destroyed. He had some of the pieces and he gave them to me. I kept them for a long time, but eventually threw them away.

But I still have the piece of metal that was removed from my face. And there is quite an interesting happenstance story about how I got it, but that, too, is another story for another time.

I haven't played with explosives, since. Maybe I'll dig up those old M-80s and set them off tomorrow night.

Happy 25 Years! I'm still alive!

Whose Web is it Anyway?

If you're anything like me, the following picture will make you cringe. I apologize in advance, though will not accept liability for any unexpected reaction you might have.



That's what I see outside my window right now. I suppose this spider is just hanging out for the Holidays. I like Halloween and all, but, really, it could have chosen somebody else's window to hang out on! At least it is outside. But it's still kinda creepy. It's the first thing I see when I turn to gaze out the window. Usually, it is the only thing I see, 'cause I can't seem to take my eyes off of it. If the thing was any larger, it would be a tarantula.

Do you think it's friendly?

If you're anything like me, you don't care - you just want it to go away. But since you're not me, I bet you're really glad that it's not in your window.

Lucky you.

Braindead

I am so tired today. Had kind of a rough few days. I got hired on a contract basis for two days where my wife works, to help with some user interface development and integration that they needed done in order to make their release deadline. Of course, it was successful. But Friday was a long day, and so was Monday, and today I can't even think. I've been poking around on the computer, not really doing anything. And I am starving, yet I continue to just sit here like a slug.

I have days where I simply have nothing to say. Nothing on my mind. Vapid. Arid. Nuttin' goin' awn. Today is one of those days (one o'dem days?).

I have an idea for a video blog that I want to implement - probably on my Computer Circus page. A little animated Flash thing...or something. I'm not sure how to do it, yet. But it would take a lot of time, so it probably won't happen. But just in case it does happen, I'm not revealing any secrets.

Anyway, we bought a Playstation 2 over the weekend. Not sure why. My wife wanted to do something different to help relieve stress and anxiety at the end of the day - something other than watch television. I hate television for the most part, though I wind up watching it, anyway. In a way, television is an addictive video game...although it is very passive. As we say here, it is valet parking for the mind.

So now we have a game console and no real idea what to do with it. There is a woman where Chris works who is into video games and we talked to her briefly yesterday, and I am discovering just how immersive the gaming community is. I knew video games are big (i.e. HUGE) business, and now I think I got a little insight as to why. People who are into games seem to be *really* into games. Apparently, there is a whole genre of RPG type games that are very popular, but typically played online via a computer rather than on a game console.

So, the question is now, how do we find games we might like, where can we go to try them out before we buy something (damn, they're expensive!), and is this going to be a mistake in the long run? I have other things I want to do with my life.

I think.

So, anyway, just to start the third paragraph in a row with "so," we now have two games. One is this ATV driving game that I played for a couple of hours and grew quickly bored with. Not my bag of marbles. And the other is Final Fantasy X. We haven't even put it in the drive, yet. One game I know I enjoy is Simpson's Road Rage, so I might try to find that, or try out Simpson's Hit & Run. I like games that aren't really games, where you are free to explore the environment or to drive an industructable vehicle around - something with no time limits or that resets every time you screw up or get killed. I'm not sure what genre that would be in, though.

OK, it is really time to eat now. I have said enough. I think I'm going to plop down in front of the dreaded television. Maybe Groundhog Day is on again.

Pointless Ponderings

Today I am haunted by oddball curiosities, wondering about things like...is it better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission? And, how is it we could run out of places to dump our garbage? Couldn't we just dig a deeper hole?

Not that I am an advocate for garbage. If I was, however, I think my operating system would be in it. Oh, wait, this isn't the Computer Circus, is it?

What great weather we're having today! For a change. I'm usually freezing my butt off up on this hill. Maybe I just need to dig a deeper hole.

The Price of Gas and Other Emissions

I went out to run some errands today. One of which was to get gas in my car. However, once I got to the gas station, I decided I wasn't about to fill the tank. $3/gallon?! This is insane. I can remember a time when I was very young, I was riding in the car and looked out the window and saw a gas station sign that read 23 cents. 23 cents!

Maybe you didn't hear me...

23 CENTS!

I can't remember the last time anything cost 23 cents. In fact, I couldn't even get the stamp machine at the post office to take any coins today - not even the $1 coins that it dispenses in change. However, once I got $8 in bills into the slot, it gave me 60 cents change all in nickles. So now I have a bunch of nickles to add to my loose change jar(s).

I counted the quarters in my loose change jar a few weeks ago. I need to take the jars to the bank so they can dump them in the sorting machine. I have over $170 just in quarters. But I'm afraid that if I take them in and get some bills back in change, that I'll wind up spending it on things like...gasoline.

I hate that.

So, now I am feeling like I can't even afford to drive to job interviews...which reminds me of an email that I received this morning. I will cut and paste it here:

No Email?????? .......... An unemployed man is desperate to support his family of a wife and three kids. He applies for a janitor's job at a large firm and easily passes an aptitude test.

The human resources manager tells him, "You will be hired at minimum wage of $5.35 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address so that we can get you in the loop. Our system will automatically e-mail you all the forms and advise you when to start and where to report on your first day."

Taken back, the man protests that he is poor and has neither a Computer nor an e-mail address. To this the manager replies, "You must understand that to a company like ours that means that you virtually do not exist. Without an e-mail address you can hardly expect to be employed by a high-tech firm. Good day."

Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having $10 in his wallet, he walks past a farmer's market and sees a stand selling 25 lb. crates of beautiful red tomatoes. He buys a crate, carries it to a busy corner and displays the tomatoes. In less than 2 hours he sells all the tomatoes and makes 100% profit.

Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 and arrives home that night with several bags of groceries for his family. During the night he decides to repeat the tomato business the next day.

By the end of the week he is getting up early every day and working into the night. He multiplies his profits quickly.

Early in the second week he acquires a cart to transport several boxes of tomatoes at a time, but before a month is up he sells the cart to buy a broken-down pickup truck.

At the end of a year he owns three old trucks. His two sons have left their neighborhood gangs to help him with the tomato business, his wife is buying the tomatoes, and his daughter is taking night courses at the community college so she can keep books for him.

By the end of the second year he has a dozen very nice used trucks and employs fifteen previously unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. He continues to work hard.

Time passes and at the end of the fifth year he owns a fleet of nice trucks and a warehouse that his wife supervises, plus two tomato farms that the boys manage.

The tomato company's payroll has put hundreds of homeless and jobless people to work. His daughter reports that the business grossed a million dollars.

Planning for the future, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. Then the adviser asks him for his e-mail address in order to send the final documents electronically.

When the man replies that he doesn't have time to mess with a computer and has no e-mail address, the insurance man is stunned, "What, you don't have e-mail? No computer! No Internet! Just think where you would be today if you'd had all of that five years ago!"

" Ha!" snorts the man. "If I'd had e-mail five years ago I would be sweeping floors at Microsoft and making $5.35 an hour."

Which brings us to the moral of the story:

Since you got this story by e-mail, you're probably closer to being a janitor than a millionaire.

Sadly, I received it also.

Well, that's it for now. I have to get to work on my mid-term Flash project (which is currently ill-defined...and due tomorrow). I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do. I am doing some work for Habitat for Humanity tomorrow morning, then I have a phone interview at 3:00 pm, then I have class at 6:30 pm. That gives me the rest of today to do my Flash mid-term project (since I have been spending the week working on JavaScript for my wife - which reminds me, they want to hire me on a contract basis to implement this code I already wrote for them - yes, it is a weird situation).

Enough parentheticals. Oh, I also got a software engineering job lead from a guy for whom I installed a garage door opener on Sunday. Oh, that reminds me - I still have to collect payment for the work I did for a woman on Saturday, helping her dig out her garage because her spastic landlord is kicking her out for no valid reason.

Alright, that really is all for now. It's kind of rambling gibberish, but then I guess I created this blog for this sort of outlet.

Enjoy the rest of your day while I hack away!

Time vs. Energy

I just had another thought in regard to my previous post. If you could accelerate mass to the speed of light, would it become energy? If time is stopped for something, what is it, then? It is never-changing. Static. Isn't energy like that? You can convert energy from one form to another, but it is never lost.

What *is* energy? What is matter, for that matter? I guess these are the questions that keep physicists busy their whole lives. Me? I just want to go eat something.

Space and Time for a New Blog

Welcome! I started this new blog to create some separation between my Computer Circus blog, and my personal life. Not that there is really a distinct line between the two, but there are times when I contemplate issues that are unrelated to computers and would like to comment on them.

Tonight, I have some strange thoughts keeping me awake. I got to thinking about magnetism and how peculiar it is. Here is this invisible force that, when brought into the vacinity of ferrous materials, will create a tension that draws the material into (or into alignment with) the magnetic field.

But my thoughts quickly veered off that path, despite all the attractive avenues on that horizon. Instead, I thought how cool it would be if there was such thing as a light magnet. I have recently gleaned a new perspective about light, based on something I've kind of always known. When a light source is present (like a light bulb), the emitted light spills out in all [unhindered] directions...essentially flooding the room. I got to thinking about that and realized, after all the years of simply considering the term as a cliche, that this is rather literal. The room is filled with light, and I am swimming through it! But the only light I can actually see is the light that happens to fall on my eyes.

Light is not like water, however - it doesn't just fill a room and sit there. It travels in straight lines (relative to the fabric of space-time in which it travels). But it can be reflected. This pretty much amazes me, since you might think that anything travelling over 186,000 MPH should just blast right through anything it encountered. But we don't even feel it, and it bounces off just about everything. Everything that is visible, anyway. And the truly amazing thing about this (to me), is that it doesn't bounce like a ball - it simply, and instantaneously, veers off in another direction, not slowing down.

Light can be bent by a strong gravitational field or by sending it through a lens. Or can it? It is my contention that, from the light's perspective, it *always* travels in a straight line. But as I said previously, a straight line relative to the fabric of space-time through which it travels. It just makes sense to me [now] that space-time, itself, is altered by matter or by gravitational fields. I also had a revelation about time this evening that I won't even attempt to explain that was based on another recent contention of mine that time simply doesn't exist. I think time is an emergent conception or perception that exists merely because of our ability to perceive it, and is simply a measure of the rate at which things change. That is a very general, simplistic statement, but it is also a tangent to my current thoughts.

Or is it?

What if there was such a thing as a light magnet? Turn on this magnet, and it attracts light. Well, the thing is, I think it would have to be something that alters the nature of the surrounding region of space-time in order for the path of the light to be altered, to essentially draw the light into it. If that's the case, then it would effect everything around it, not just light (like a black hole). But aside from the technical details about how such a device might work, wouldn't it be cool? I think it would be very interesting to observe the visual effect. You could essentially make whatever is near it disappear, but it would disappear in the center of a sperical visual distortion. The view from inside would be just as peculiar as the outside appearance, but I think it would be cool either way. Actually, the effect would vary with the strength of the device, and a very high setting could probably create the appearance of a "black hole" (and, technically, might actually *be* a black hole).

Anyway, to kind of finish off my thought about light vs. space-time, it would explain the nature of light passing through, say, a glass of water or a block of glass. When you look through a glass of water, the view is distorted, because the light passing through it not only bends, but it slows down, too. At least from our perspective. The peculiar thing is that it instantaneously slows down when it enters the water, and instantaneously speeds up again when it exits.

From our perspective.

I believe if you were able to ride on a beam of light as it passed through a glass of water, you would not notice any change in speed or direction at all. The water, itself, is an alternate state of space-time, and as the light enters this realm, it merely becomes goverened by the nature of that alternate pocket of space-time, and since everything is relative, there is no apparent or perceptive change in speed or direction from the light's point of view, rather everything else around it would appear to change. To me, that is the only thing that could explain how the light appears to slow down and speed up, instantaneously. It is simply crossing between different fabrics of space-time.

So you have to wonder... If light appears to slow down when entering water from our perspective, is there another perspective on this universe within which light appears to be travelling slower within our familiar pocket of space-time? I mean, is there another realm where, from our perspective, light my actually appear to travel much faster that the speed limit that we observe from here?

Hmmm.

Anyway, I wish I had written down some thoughts the other day, because I was thinking about time dialation and how, when a mass (say, a human) is accelerated to near the speed of light, relative time tends to slow down for that mass. If you could hop in a ship and travel close to the speed of light, you could ride to the nearest star and back, packing only a sack lunch, yet would return to Earth thousands of years later to find nothing familiar. Oh, I remember what I was thinking about that. It takes infinite energy to accelerate mass to the speed of light. I *think* Einstein theorized that if you could exceed the speed of light, you could travel back in time.

But this would require more than infinite energy. From our perspective, anyway. But in the context of time travel, with my contention that time does not exist, this now makes sense to me. Of course it would take infinite energy to accelerate mass to the speed of light, because that is what it would take to "stop time" for that mass. From my perspective, time is merely a perception of changing states...and the universe is constantly changing states, at a rate of whatever the smallest increment of change is (though I'm not convinced there is an increment, as I think it is infinitely fluid). And in order to go back in time, everything in the entire universe would have to be reset to that previous state.

Everything.

This means even the time traveller...which means, if someone were to travel back in time, that person would be totally unaware that they did so, as they would return to the exact state they were in at the time to which they returned. That's my theory, anyway. And I would think that if you had inifinite energy, you could stop time (i.e. freeze the universe), or reshape it, if there was some way to do so, to put every atomic particle and whatever else this universe is built on, back to a previous state. The problem is, once you got everything stopped, you'd kind of lose control over what you could do next.

It's just fun to think of this kind of stuff. It's fun to dream and fun to try to figure shit out, even if it is all subjective and theoretical.

But what if it's true?

And why is it light can't pass through objects that we classify as "opaque"? Is it because the nature of their particular space-time "pockets" does not allow light to pass through, or is there something else going on? What happens to light energy that is supposedly "absorbed"? Is that just a convenient way of explaining an observation, or does that energy actually get transformed into another form of energy? And why are only certain frequencies of light absorbed in some materials, giving them the appearance of what we see as color?

Ah, the wandering mind. Sometimes it is a curse. It's 2:15 a.m. and I'd really rather be sleeping right now. But then the thought of that bothers me, because then I start wondering what dreams are.