This will probably be my last post for awhile. If you like, you can venture over to my Livejournal to see what I'm doing. Until then, ciao.

DelaMorte: we kill out of indifference . . . out of love sometimes . . . But never out of hate. Now I don't know who's dead or alive. I'm sick of killing. So I'm leaving the game, brother. DelaMorte, DelAmore, bids you farewell, and is on his way.

Death: Where to?

DelaMorte: Better get out of here. Even the statues are talking.

Death: Where do you think you're going, if you haven't yet understood the difference, between Life, and Me?

--- Cemetery Man

Gentoo continues compiling. CS Capstone is on hold, until further notice, or my termination at the hands of my advisor. Math Capstone continues unabated, progress degrading only as consciousness itself is reduced to its finest particles in a swirling haze of caffeine and keyboard clicks. I'm sick of playing the game, Fairest, so for now, I relent. Again, with the relenting. So much to explain, and, for what it's worth, maybe I'll never be able to. Letters never sent.

I want to hold and kiss you in Paris,
I want to hold your hand in Rome
I want to run naked in a rainstorm
Make love, in a train, cross-country,
You put this in me
So now what, so now what?
Wating,
Needing,
Waiting
For you to justify my love

Hoping,
Praying
For you to justify my love

I want to know you
Not like that
I don't wanna be your mother
I don't wanna be your sister either
I just wanna be your lover
I wanna be your baby
Kiss me,
That's right,
kiss me . . .
--- Justify My Love, Madonna and Lenny Kravitz
(As covered by Front Line Assembly and Delerium)

As I sweat blood (see previous entry), I've been watching the progress of Gentoo Linux (PPC) on my Titanium Powerbook. For those of you who didn't know, yes, I succumbed to purchase the only laptop on Earth that could possibly appease the car mentality in everybody (and by everybody I mean me, and by me, I mean not Ian. BTW - I found your distribution, Ian!)

Yes, yes, car mentality - 1. Ooh Shiny, 2. Vector Processor, and 3. Self-optimizing Linux Distribution. I'm sorry - I'm only a man!

The gentoo penguin is renowned among ornithologists for being the fastest of all penguins.

Speaking of men, and women, yeah, that's funny, idn't it? Yup. Sure is. &lt whistles in the dark &gt

What there is to be shrunken, is first stretched out
What there is to be weakened, is first made strong
What there will be withdrawn, is first bestowed
What there will be thrown over, is first raised up
. . .
Try to wash off blood with blood -
Think no evil

Do without doing
Know without knowing
Get without getting
Go without going . . .
--- Blood, KMFDM

Capstones are doing this to me. It's really my fault, I guess. I'm trying to be Zen about my eventual annihilation at my own keyboard, by my own hands, sentence by sentence. If I had only made the decision to choose a different advisor, then maybe it would have all been different.

A long day when you write three things down in your journal, and you don't remember most of them by 9 at night. I know I said several important things, but I can't remember what they are in exact detail. (But the nice thing is I get to read them again and remember)

Today in combinatorics we had a beauty contest - for proofs of Turon's theorem. That is to say, which proof was most elegant and aesthetically pleasing. It's one of the weirdest arguments you'll ever get into with somebody else saying things like "well, I like the way Peter's proof wore the inductive hypothesis, but it was just clunky on Gitch's proof." Like an inductive hypothesis is a mink, or something. Yeah, I'm already tired - if you couldn't tell already.

I don't think I have the ability to be mad at somebody for something right away. Hell, I didn't stop talking to Kale (who is, for the record, the only person I've ever told I would never speak to again until they cleaned up their act) for more than three years. Lately, well, I don't know. I do what I do - and some people handle that, and others don't.

There are few people who will seek me out if they haven't seen me lately. I'm here - that's where I'll be, if you ever decide that you miss me. The workload right now, whether or not I'm doing it at any given moment, feels like a giant load of something heavy above my head - so I'm afraid to move too much, or say too much, no matter how badly I want to talk to somebody, or how much I wish they missed me.

Sometimes, I get really annoyed when people start griping about logic. Logic is fallible, and can be misapplied in dozens of ways. It's a stupid way to live your life- that's why we're human. If we were only logic, we'd be machines, but we have emotions, and reasoning that extends beyond the bounds of logic. Hint: What does the set of all x such that x is not in S look like? Some people blow this off as a bullshit paradox, but it has serious problems. Is the opposite of falsehood always true? Is the negation of a truthful statement always false? As a hacker, you learn to think in shades of grey, not black and white. It's the system's job to behave in black and white, and the hacker's to see the world as shades of grey. It doesn't matter if you're hacking Wittgenstein or a Linux box - it's the same principle.

Language sucks for communication - but we still want to do it anyway - why is this a problem? When you pour a cup of milk in a bowl, did you pour exactly a cup of milk? No? Does it matter? NO? Well, there you go.

I'm just tired and grumpy, and sick of hearing people blather about logic and language and the failings of human reasoning, and wanting everything to be perfect. The world is not perfect, nor does it have that potential - it can be better than bad, and most of the time it downright sucks for everybody involved - and trying to make it perfect doesn't do anybody any good, because it's too much to chew on at once. Logic is a tool - if you live by logic, logic lives by you, and it leaves room for precious little else. Think of memes - think of Zen. But most importantly, think outside the binary operations. That's what consciousness is - that's why G&#246del's Incompleteness Theorem only applies to machines, and not to humans. Free. Your. Mind.

If you want to bring a centipede to a crashing halt, ask it in which order it moves its legs.

You don't need a lid on a basket of crabs. If one tries to climb out the others will pull it back down.

Don't be so proud. You are not an intelligence until you pass the Turing test.

The great mass of men lead lives of quiet domestication.

The blind man looking in the mirror cannot see he has no eyes. So what?

--- Selected Sayings of Solomon Short (aka Robert Heinlein)

You know, it's like Burger Time, only in stunning, like-like color. With laundry. Or something

This next part is for the mostly non-Slashdot crowd out there, who are used to LiveJournal and know me in real life. For the most part, I write stupid things about my stupid life, and people refuse to suspend their disbelief long enough to participate in my grand experiment. This isn't a journal, or a diary - it's a place to talk to me without me being there. Talk to me with only words - I can't even see a silly little avatar to tell me who you are. And if you don't have a Slashdot Id, everything will be posted under Anonymous Coward until you make one. It shouldn't take too long to think of even the lamest thing to say - I mean, it's not like I intend this to be the Vienna Circle or anything (not even the Warren Ellis forum, for crying out loud). I mean, have you seen the articles on the front page? There are people out there who aren't even talking about ANYTHING! The biggest reason I started this is because I don't see people enough, because I have work to do. Lots of it. And even if I wanted to see everybody in person, I couldn't. All I want you to do is talk to me. The written medium is different - it's for different things. Sign posts if you want to. Keep me guessing. Pharsh.

For those of you who hate the computer stuff, (which is my main reason for bitching on Any Given Day &trademark ), notice the new feature I've hand-coded in the sample paragraph below:

&lt AGAIN WITH THE COMPUTER STUFF &gt Speaking of bad graphics, Slivey was trying to play some games on the new laptop (T-PBook with YellowDawg on it), and you know what? 8-bit graphics at resolutions greater than 800x600 look REALLY BAD. He was playing (x)kTaipei (or MahJongh, sorry if my inability to spell the game I grew up thinking was "Taipei" is wrong), and he kept failing because he couldn't tell the difference between any of the tiles. So, here's a prayer to the ATI Mobility 6 xfree86 driver developers for divine inspiration and a steady hand. &lt END COMPUTER STUFF &gt

Come to think of it, I'm not doing laundry tonight. I'm doing it tomorrow, when I don't have to sleep. I can sleep on a bed with no sheets again - it's actually okay if you just wear a bathrobe and stuff.

This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.

Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.

Reality can be useful.
--- Selected Sayings of Solomon Short (aka Robert Heinlein)

Remember - when your body tells you to stay awake some more, that 3:00 in the morning isn't too late, that's when you swat it to the ground. Just swat it to the ground. I saw the following quote in the discussion about robots cheering up the elderly - I think it's funny, but it's also disturbingly close to the mindset of some of the people who work at the nursing home in my hometown:

"Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use."

-Homer Simpson

Now I have to eat, finish writing exercises, and combinatorics homework. Yippy skippy.

PS - (for bonus points) - When somebody asks you to fill in the song lyric for " Who loves you? And who do you love? WHO LOVES YOU? AND WHO DO YOU LOVE? &lt insert something here &gt", the answer is "The Messiah, The Messiah" .

"should not be confused with jumping to conclusions." As Operation Archangel comes to a close, with the first drafts barely done, sources internal to the D.O.C. ("Device Optimized for Calculation") of the N.I.C.K ("Networked Individuals Calibrated for Killing") task force report a solidly losing battle on both the Mathematics front and the Computer Science Front. Since this is a battle of minds versus abstract fields of study, there are no photographs per se, at this point. Content yourself with text.

That is all from the capstone front. We now return you to your regularly scheduled domestic news reports as our coverage of Operation:PleaseDon'tFuckThisUp,Doc (O:PDFTUD) continues.

Occasionally, I wonder what it would be like if my name really were Doc. What my life would be like, all of these people not knowing my true name (not even me). Wait, that's like it is, right now. Shit.

Sometimes, I wonder if people think that I withdraw from everybody else because I seek a higher solitude -- I wonder how many people realize that most of the time, I'm just really scared, or disgusted, or I want to talk to somebody alone, and not with 30 people around. But there's also a trend of geeks and gamers to make tight work bonds (within small groups) and bonds of solitude (not really any tighter than that, I suppose), with no means to pull them away from their respective Fortresses of Solitude. They're like Superman when they're in there, I swear. Which is also why I want to lure them into my own den, I suppose - because like most geeks, my computer is Earth's yellow sun, and it gives me my power, or something.

It's fruit.

We have observed a tendency in the test subject to maintain irregular working patterns of sleep, while still not managing to accomplish that much, actually. I am beginning to believe that his methods are . . . unsound.

From The Filthy Critic: (The Time Machine)

Rather than really get to think about the question, we are hurtled 800,000 years into the future, a time when the art of storytelling has died and actors parade through corny-looking sets in search of narrative and big explosions.

Linked Haiku on Windows Buffer Overflows

More Filthy Critic:(LotR:tFotR)

FILTHY: We don't have time to go into every detail.

JIMMY: Speak for yourself, I'm immortal. I have all the time in the world. I'll be dancing on your grave.

&lt hilarity ensues, conversation changes pace &gt

JIMMY: Ireland is a land full of myth and wonder. And giant killer-robot factories.

Not funny, but kindof - REALLY fast Internet Worms