Ahh... back from the conference. Gave away tons of my resume. Forgot my camera. My watch's battery died. And I had a great time. That's the summary. Now, in detail...

I left on Sunday, drove to my parents home, and slept for a few hours, and then my father and I went to the conference. Yeah, he came again this year. Given that I can't afford to go myself (yet), I need to be funded somehow, so the conference was at least partially a vacation with my dad. It was okay, I guess, but it was stifling, and it made me feel bad the (many) times I insisted that he not hang around me so I could make friends and (hopefully) move towards finding a job. That's been the same problem the (now 3) times I've gone to the conference. And as usual, his temper did it's occasional acting up. Oh well.

Enjoyed a talk about code maintenance, learned that XML is quite wordy and perhaps too complex to be useful, and quite a lot of other stuff. Had indian food twice, and italian and seafood once each. I learned that Chicken Tikki Marsala (an indian dish) is quite good. Talked with a lot of potential employers. I also met a guy who takes cool pictures. He's at Supersnail.com, and took some pictures of me with my resume and my laptop. They should be going up soonish.

I apparently have been lax in telling people I was going to be gone for a week -- Charles thinks that I've been deliberately avoiding him, Tim Llewellyn (old friend from Brecksville) came here and missed me, and Darkgod thinks I've been avoiding him because I wasn't happy with some changes he made to the tree. Hopefully I'll get all this straightened out soon.

My iggies look great -- Jason fed them more than I normally do, and they're nice and fat. Wally was kind of needy for the first hour I was back (it's been 2 hours now), but is calming down now. He apparently gets lonely easily.

I guess I'll order some food or something, and then go to bed -- the 5 hours of flying and 2 hours of driving really have exhausted me. Been thinking about lots of philosophy stuff on the car drive. I'll probably have some things to write soon -- going to start a project of governmental design based on value engineering.

Oh, I also saw a rather large number of attractive Germans at the conference. They all seemed quite intelligent, very aware (in a hard-to-describe sense), and had cool accents. One of them, Bridget, had purple hair, a face that somewhat reminded me of Martha's (except bigger), and was pretty cool. But.. I was rather attracted to her, and so I was too shy to talk much to her. Well, she was Austrian, actually. Wondering about the ancestral relation between the Prussians and the Polish, considering the similarity of facial structure.

Worrying about finding a job. Got back from Insomnia last night after working on my website as well as updating the Mozilla FAQ for the first time in a long time. Haven't been able to get to sleep yet. Wally found a way out of my apartment -- the upstairs window's screen is now broken. I now have precisely one month left. And that month must include making living arrangements for wherever I'll be. Things are not looking good. Largely, I'm worried about rental issues -- I don't want to commit to living in Columbus by the rental arrangement I make, yet if I don't commit I may run into problems with finding a place that accepts pets. Ideally, I'd know lots of people in Columbus and manage to room with them in order to get a loose rental policy. But... I don't. Darn. Also, I run into a similar problem with regards to a job -- if I get a menial job, it still likely requires making some degree of commitment. And I really really don't want to get a menial job.

Just now, upgraded vim on holly, so I can now ssh from other boxen and run my netdiary program. Huzzah. I'm writing this from my laptop, lying down on the floor. Well, I've managed to finally become sleepy. Today, I need to pay rent, call back the place that was looking to have a second interview for me last week, and pester some other groups about a job. Perhaps I should start looking around for an apartment too.

Interesting further developments on the job/residence limbo that I'm floating in. Firstly, in the last few days I've been talking with some Redhat people, and I may be able to find a job at Redhat doing technical writing. If I can get that job, provided it pays enough, I'll take it. Well, it won't pay the relocation costs, so I'll probably talk to my parents regarding if it is acceptable to relocate myself. Secondly, should I be forced to stay in Columbus (for a time or for a while), I might have a place to stay. Tonight, at Insomnia, I saw again someone I met when visiting August's home some time ago. This person, Jeff, lives in a place with a very large vacant space in the basement. I took a look, and it looks like I could have all my stuff neatly fit down there, even with my hammock. It's an incredibly nice living place, with much cheaper rent to boot. I'll probably discuss this with my parents tomorrow/today, and provided I can get the landlord to accept my pets.

Interesting oddities -- Jeff is another

person who was Martha's bf for a time between times she was dating Ryan, her high-school boyfriend. And Jason was there at Insomnia too, 

. We three were discussing our considerable similarities for a bit. It's odd that the subject still pains me. Apparently, I still am rather in love with her, despite not having seen her for about two years. This might be a downside if I end up living with Jeff and the other guy who lives there

Just got back from Insomnia. Have been doing lots of work on my Qur'an critical reading. Was going to watch some BlackAdder with Jason tonight, but I guess I haven't managed to get in contact with him. Listened to people talking at Insomnia about philosophy. Although it's unrelated to what they were talking about, I've been wandering about some things myself. What exactly would it take for the brain to be able to easily think about more than one thing at once? Or does it? Maybe it does, but only one 'task' at a time is allowed to store memories, so we never become aware of the other 'tasks'. Reminds me of a discussion I had with Jeff when we were at Insomnia a little before the last entry -- he said that people attempting suicide generally are being irrational because they're not understanding that things generally get better. I said that that style of thinking is a fallacy, and is kind of a reverse-time-dilated version of the sunk cost phonomena. I think that regarding plans for the future, the only proper way to let it enter into one's judgement is the joy one can achieve now at thinking of a happy future, and if it is incapable of making the balance of joy and sorrow positive then it is rational to kill oneself. It was an interesting discussion. There's another philosophy guy I frequently see at insomnia, and I don't recall his name. He often has interesting ideas, but doesn't seem to have much of an understanding in information theory, leading him to several problematic stances. However, like all good philosophers, and most good conversationalists, he's open to argumentsfrom the other side. He also has a friend (who is female) who is also interested in philosophy. It's odd -- I haven't come across many female philosophers. It's sad to watch the effects of gender socialization in this country. I really wonder how many possibly great philosophers have been lost over these things. Oh well.

Just got back from a very brief trip to Insomnia. I spilled tea on my laptop. It did boot after I wiped it off (I didn't let it boot all the way, just enough to open the CD door so I could clean inside), and currently I have it open (off) leaned up against a fan blowing into it and the battery removed. I think the tea primarily got into the keyboard. Hopefully it'll be ok. Was all keen to be doing more work on MoLD, still trying to decide if I want to redesign it or not. Certain interfaces have gotten too complex, and I think I can possibly do a better job now that I'm familiar with what I want. If I do that, I'll consider the current design to be a prototype. Spoke to Jeff's roomate today (whose parents are the landlords), but he's going on vacation, and won't be back until the end of next week, at which time I'll meet him and we'll see if we'd be good housemates. Charles has a show that he'd like me to go to tomorrow. Hopefully I'll enjoy it. It looks like the Redhat job won't work out -- they have an internal applicant.

Micropoetry - when a small part of a poem, taken out of context, is more interesting or beautiful than the poem taken as a whole. It probably would be insulting to the author usually to have this pointed out. Follow my reasoning as to why, and you'll understand part of the ugly face of humanity. But there exists no beautiful cousin, so how does it still seem ugly? Can a delusion form the basis for an opposite? Perhaps conceptually -- does such a pairing have any special characteristics? Is it pure historical accident that the opposite is a delusion, or is the opposite inconsistant or otherwise broken?

The shattered glass of a certain style of objective morality -- imprisonment. You're in a large building, with people you don't like maintaining it, and you having legitimately gained access to it (invitation by a friendly inhabitant). You're in a part that has an exit, and an unfriendly person is in the process of locking up the exit. There are other exits to the building, but you cannot see them. You don't know if the other exits are being locked or not, and so don't know if you are being imprisoned -- being imprisoned might grant the recourse of, in the scope of said type of morality, using coercion to prevent the locking of the exit, in order to avoid imprisonment. The alternative, to go find another exit, may give time for the person to leave via an exit you lack access to (e.g. using keys they have), and perhaps all the other exits are already locked. But, perhaps there are other exits available. A dilemma. An alternative moral idea -- the actor uses judgement, and bears the responsibility for the result (i.e. if there are other open exits and no attempt found nor chance to imprison, then the act is judged wrong, otherwise, judged right). Situations of uncertainty fit well with this 'on your own head if wrong' doctrine.

Just did some code changes to my netdiary software. Substantial code cleanups, and they're beautiful too. Here's the relevant part of the old code:

my @files = readdir(SUMDIR); # read all the files closedir(SUMDIR);

     {
     if($filelistLINK =~ /summary/i){next fit;} # skip index
     if($filelistLINK =~ /\./) {next fit;} # Skip '.' and '..'
     parsefile($filelistLINK); # Actually parse a file
     }

     sort {$b <=> $a}  # a numerically sorted list
     grep !/^\./,      # Skipping . and ..
     grep !/^summary/, # and skipping the summary file
     readdir(SUMDIR);  # from all the files

     {
     parsefile($filelistLINK);
     }

For some odd reason, the way those function calls nest creates a strange image in my mind, like an ordinary program would be like

-------------------------------

But that part is more like
                ^
---------------/ \---

And I can imagine rewriting it to pull that loop even higher, as fewer portions between statements exist and things nest further. For some reason, I'm getting thoughts that perhaps with sufficient thought, the entire program could be written going up rather than going across, although that might look ugly (both in metaphor and in the actual code). Maybe that's what LISP and similar languages would normally look like.

I've started packing. And finished, for now, having run out of boxes. Have been listening to russian red army choral music while doing so, and am in a fairly good mood.

Also, have been watching someone who has irritated me become unhappy that they did so. In the angband community, they have an IRC channel, #angband. I used to be a regular there. Unlike the old IRC networks I'm used to, the network this one is on uses channel services, and so everyone is opped. Well, except me, as I'm a traditionalist, and it offends my sensibilities to have everyone opped. I liked IRC best when maybe one or two people had ops. The way things seem to work nowadays is that the channel services routinely op and de-op people according to some kind of pecking order, and so people routinely kick other people for laughs or when they're irritated. As I don't like playing games with channel services, and refuse ops, I am, by power, the weakest person on the channel. Anyhow, there was an incident where we were looking for bots to dispense information to people. I brought a bot that I had written some time back as a curiosity to the channel, and started enchancing it, with the suggestions of other ppl on the channel. This other bloke then brought infobot (a well-known but uglily-written IRC bot software) into the channel, and demanded that I remove Pbot. I refused, he kicked me and pbot out, and so since then I've been in my own channel, #mold, and have my IRC client set to ignore him. As I'm involved in one of the more popular angband variants (PernAngband) and am also developing my own roguelike (MoLD), I have several ppl from #angband who hang out in there with me, and it's a convenient (and quieter) place to talk about Pernband development than #angband. Apparently, this person is now unhappy at what they've done. I suppose I'm glad that they're no longer strongly standing behind their position, but I really don't think that the underlying problem of the way channel services work there is going to be fixed.

In some ways, this reminds me of de Raadt and the origin of OpenBSD from the NetBSD project. I love those who take their ball and leave when mistreated, and the birth of OpenBSD strikes me as an act of incredible beauty. Too many people love the mild and the mediocre; I love the Stallmans, the de Raadts, those who have a beautiful anger for good cause, and whose anger drives them to greatness. Hmm. I suppose I really have drifted to another topic :)

Anyhow, I guess I'll go get a nice big cup of water and perhaps get ready to head off to Insomnia.

Woke up bummed again about the job situation. Will go eat gumbo, and get a copy of the sunday paper for the job section. It's amazing and irritating that I haven't found a job after all this time. Although, in a sense all I really care about is my philosophy, and could make do without much else. I could take a menial job for the rest of my life, perhaps, and just have my projects to keep me happy. Of course, it wouldn't be ideal.

It's strange, I appear to be having mood swings right now. A moment ago, I was filled with dissatisfaction and perhaps anger, and now I feel content and peaceful as I normally do. It might be that it's instead some part of my mental conditioning or something similar. I really don't know, and being me, I lack any outside perspective to judge it. Maybe it's just because I woke up a few minutes ago. Oh well.

Anyhow, off I go. I've missed the times gumbo was available a lot recently because of the oddities of when I'm asleep, and I love gumbo, so I'd best acquire an inner momentum to leave. If only I could do the same for my apartment.

In a moderately good mood -- someone called me regarding my resume today, and with any luck I might get a computer job from them. Ran into Lorie and Jeff at Insomnia last night, caught up a bit with stuff that's going on in that circle of people. I've been having still more neckaches. I've been thinking about, when I have my bible/qur'an readings further along, making a pamphlet for people encountering preachers on the oval. The format will be a multiple choice quiz on biblical morality pointing out all the areas where even the modern conservatives would find the bible advocating things they would abhor. Example:

As a chosen of Yahweh, you have some visiting guests whom a mob outside wants to rape. Do you:

a) Toss the guests outside and save yourself
b) Offer the mob your daughters in exchange for your guests' safety
c) Fight the mob, hoping that your god will save you

I saw Charles today, perhaps for the last time. We went out, saw a movie, and it was good. It was about a chess guy and the interesting life he had. On the way back, I pointed out that he wasn't suggesting the most direct way, and he got very angry after I refused to submit on that point -- I knew that it was not obvious that my simpler route was more efficient, but it was, and mathematically demonstratable too. We were going to hear a radio program at his place, with him on it, and another guy stopped by. And... while we were waiting, he kept on rationalizing his participation in the affair Juliet was having with him (she has a bf, as previously mentioned). I've been recently quite on edge with Charles, and I think it's mainly that I don't respect him as a good person anymore, and what I had left was purely momentum and familiarity. Charles generally tends to keep on a particular topic in a conversation, and since this one was his complicated (and, I think, unethical) relationship with Juliet (who is being immoral), it finally wore through the remains of my reserve of liking for him, and I became angry, asking him to change the subject. He suggested that I leave, and I did, saying I would not speak with him until the Juliet thing was over. But.. perhaps I wouldn't even should it be over. I am very angry with him for what he has done, and I really don't think I want to be friends with someone who would do that. I suppose that's all I have to say -- I'm quite upset, and probably will relax for a bit and then go to Insomnia to program or write some philosophy.