As most activity has gone away here, I often don't remember what real username maps to what person. It's fine, that is how this social media thing evolved.

What I do know, is that I knew Ryan Ryttie, from slashdot. Today, I saw a post from his sister that he passed away (Link to Facebook is public). No, I do not know the circumstances.

I know he stopped using his original username here. Ryan was a friend, sure he had is daemons. but he was a friendly and authentic person.

I post this in a journal, for others that may still wander here and may have known him.

May Ryan rest in peace.

[Edit: Ryan was known as kesuki on slashdot]

Skye
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Skye died, February 14, 2016.

The first time I saw Skye, I came in and saw her in the cage she was later to die in, after being attacked (probably) by the other new bird, Jack.

That first time, Jack was in a box in another part of the room, a baby still. Skye was old enough to perch by herself in the cage Tracie would later put both Jack and her in, when she left, and at night.

The first time I saw Skye, I walked up to her and said hi, and looked at her, smiling.

She was wary at first, eyeing me carefully, a bit scared. Everything must have been so new to her; she had just been moved to a new house, seeing new people, new birds. She sat on a high perch in the cage, quietly, and looked at me carefully. What was I going to do to her?

I just looked back, smiling, talking in soft tones, greeting her, trying to make her feel welcome, loved.

Eventually, Skye turned her head and closed her eyes in a very feminine, very cute manner. In that instant I knew she was female, and a gentle, good bird. I fell in love with her, she was so sweet. She reminded me a little of Peach.

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I remember many other interactions with Skye, catching her and Jack to put them in that same cage together when I was leaving one day, for example.

Another memory that stands out is when I looked at her and promised to get, or build, a flight cage for her. She looked back at me for an instant with a very intelligent, knowing look in her eyes. I felt in that instant that she understood what I was saying, at least she could hear from my tone that I was promising her something she would like. And she was hopeful, expectant, but there was an element also that didn't trust me to go through with the promise.

And I didn't, not before she died.

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I feel such a sense of injustice, at Skye's death. I imagine her, attacked, mortally injured, lying in her little tent, licking her wounds, in pain, waiting to die.

She was so quiet, Tracie didn't even realize she was injured for a while after she finally came home and opened up the cage. Skye lay in her hanging tent, dying, not making a peep, resigned.

I listen to Kurt Cobain singing "Ain't it a Shame", over and over again. When he starts screaming, in the antepenultimate chorus, I cry. It is a shame.

I think Kurt felt the injustice and the pain that Skye felt, and even when he became rich and famous he couldn't forget it. It is not fair, for any to suffer. No amount of popularity or money could change that, for Kurt, I think. Nothing will take away the pain I feel, for Skye, for Peach, for Buddy, for all the birds I have known, for all the injustice I have experienced or heard about.

Charlie. Everytime I hear the song "Clap Hands! Here Comes Charlie" on the Swing Kings music station, I think of how I used to tell Charlie his name was in the song now playing, when it came on, while he was still with me.

The end of an era

I was in a box canyon with two female friends (not recognizable from real life). At the end of the canyon, I found a couple rooms that looked like they had been lived in. There was no roof but there was a bed, a table, some drawers or shelves, two rectangular living areas.

Exploring the box canyon further I encountered some people, a long-haired cool rock-star-looking dude and his friends. They accepted me into their group and I found myself unable to get back to my original friends. They showed me more living areas in the box canyon, with supplies so I had everything I wanted to survive. But I was uncomfortable.

Here I am remembering that one of the things that made me uncomfortable was that part of living amongst this group involved sticking a long tube into my throat. Day residue: I watched a Sonoran Desert movie before bed, which showed a hummingbird feeding its young by inserting its long, narrow beak into the young bird's throat and regurgitating. I think the scene in the dream was some representation of that visual experience.

I didn't want to stay in the new group. I wanted to find my old friends, go back to my old way of living. But I couldn't find a way out. I looked, but I couldn't find my friends again.

Immediate interpretation upon waking: I am afraid of being assimilated into the Tohono O'odham culture. The thought in my head on waking was that the new group of people in the dream were Tohono O'odham Indians and they had very strange practices wherein they became like intertwined puppets, and the tube-insertion was part of the intertwining. I didn't want to be like that.

More day residue: the previous day I had written a diary on k$5, an open letter to the Tohono O'odham Nation. And there was an event in the library (at which I wrote the diary) involving kids, including native kids. So the Tohono O'odham were on my mind, as was the hummingbird method of beak-insertion feeding.

Link: Upgrade to Windows 10 or not?

Thursday, July 9, 2015

The first time I saw Sunny, she popped out of Tracie's purse and looked at me with supreme confidence. Her feathers were slightly fluffed from being carried in the purse that morning after Tracie had picked her up from her previous home.

She was a yellow lovebird with blue tailfeathers, very pretty. She was curious. The other day I was holding the washing machine, so it wouldn't vibrate as it does excessively when it spins. Sunny was sitting on my shoulder, curiously inclining her head to see what I was doing. I explained to her I was trying to keep the machine from making so much noise, and showed her how when I put my hand on it, the noise lessened, and when I took it away, the vibrating sound got louder. I repeated these actions, of using my hand to dampen the vibrations and taking my hand away to let the vibrations sound unmuffled, several times, talking to her about what I was doing. She watched my hand, listened to me, looked at the machine. My impression was, she understood what I was trying to convey.

I was looking forward to developing more communication with her, to learn from her, to teach her, to sing with her, to have fun, to watch her have fun flying and chirping and swinging on a swing and running across the floor and taking baths and sitting on my shoulder and crawling in my pockets and nipping my toes.

I remember another time, Sunny had been running up to me as I stood watching TV or something, and biting my toes. I usually would yell and step away, and she would look pleased with herself. Once she caught me so much by surprise, I fell over onto the floor when I lifted my foot up to get it away from her beak, and lost my balance. I remember her sitting there motionless, looking very pleased with herself :) She had toppled me, many orders of magnitude bigger than her though I was.

I love you Sunny. I will remember you. I hope we meet again in other incarnations, and remember each other and learn more from each other and communicate with each other again.

I wish I could fix Sunny's body, heal her broken neck. I imagine a future where such fixes will be routine, and each mortal lives as long as they please.

Three letter ccTLD domains

Do you realize that XP was EOLed exactly one year ago?
I know many XP machines still chugging around peacefully without problems: No XPcalypse happened. This entirely fits my predictions.

XP was a (had become) a mature operating system. I abhor the fetish of "newer is better" that reigns in our industry.

Five years...

Update on the Debian kernel bug

I wonder if I should file a bug with the Debian kernel team

Sorry, forgot to cross-post here... If you follow me on any of the other social networks, you've undoubtedly seen it before:

What I think of Luxleaks

From https://class.coursera.org/money-002/forum/search?q=10.6+trillion#15-state-query=10.6+trillion:

Quoting from http://www.milkeninstitute.org... [milkeninstitute.org]:

The total value of housing units in the United
States amounts to $19.3 trillion, with $10.6 trillion
in mortgage debt and the remaining $8.7 trillion
representing equity in those units as of June 2008.

Of the approximately 80 million houses in the
United States, 27 million are paid off, while the
remaining 53 million have mortgages. Of those
households with mortgages, 5 million (or 9 percent)
were behind in their payments and roughly 3
percent were in foreclosure as of mid-2008.

So, say 10% of $10.6 trillion was at risk of default, or $1 trillion.

The notional amount of CDS
increased from less than $1 trillion in 2001 to slightly
more than $62 trillion in 2007, before declining to
$47 trillion on October 31, 2008.

So the derivative market inflated the real value of the mortgages by about a factor of 6, and then magnified the size of the possible default problem by a factor of 15.

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More figures: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2013/1/10/21236/5547

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November 9, 2014

Thoughts on the death of Peaches

I would like to run a bird rescue on a marijuana farm, powered with solar or other alternative energy sources.

I would take in abandoned or injured birds, care for them, tend to marijuana plants, and maybe experiment with robotics or solar energy or bots in a barn.

Why shouldn't the government create money to help me? Would I be contributing to the General Welfare?

I would give pot away. I don't want to sell anything.

Why is my dream so threatening that I must be marginalized, impoverished, scorned, targeted, teased, trolled, bullied, scammed, ripped off? Do you people just shrug and say "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"?

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Peach produced some chirps I'd never heard from her in the last few days. High, arcing, short chirps, as she attacked a bowl of seeds for what she knew must be one of the last times.

Three weeks ago, she produced bloody droppings. The emergency room vet seconded an internal tumor diagnosis by the regular vet. What can you do for an avian tumor? Nanotechnology, one day? Target all and only tumor cells, dissolve them or something?

She seemed to recover, no longer having bloody droppings. She ate well for a couple weeks, and chirped a lot, and asked to be carried around. I spent a lot of time with her perched on my shoulder.

Then she turned less active, and spent a lot of time sitting with her eyes closed, leaning against a wall or cage bar.

In her final hours she was having obvious difficulty breathing, and had stopped preening herself.

Peach has a very special and strong spirit. I believe we shall meet in other lives, and I tried ot get her to remember me so we might recognize each other again.

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I knew Peach for 16 years. She saw us go through a lot. We have lots of memories, some of which I've written about in diaries.

Don't blame them