This is actually a replacement for an entry that I started to write last night called "Ant Half-Step" when Morpheus claimed me for another night. Oh, and if you think of the matrix when I say that, you're very lame. You know that, right? :) The title is simply another(!) celebration of Russian Red Army Choir music. That, Klezmer, Ondo, and IndiaPop are like drinking honey. They all also are styles to which singing along is tough for me, as I don't know Hebrew, Hindi, or Russian, and my Yiddish is based solely on my German knowledge. Amusing, to want to learn a language just for musical reasons. I imagine it must happen a lot in Europe with English though -- there are bands with really really tough accents over there, speaking English, that we sometimes hear.

I've been working a lot the last few days -- for some reason, I've just been in a programming mood, my headaches haven't been as strong, and so I've been working insanely long hours. On monday, I left work at 23:15 after chatting with a colleague(!), also still at work. I wasn't at all sleepy in class on Tuesday, nor in the lab meeting today. I wish I could stay in this "zone" perpetually, but I know it'll eventually end. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts. I do wonder if it might have something to do with diet -- if it does, and if I could learn to reproduce it, ...

Last night, I also spoke with someone from work, and we were talking about the lab and our boss. When I step back and think about it, it's hard to believe how lucky I am to have the job where I am, working for who I do.

Was talking with a friend about windows virii. I have an idea for an amusing virus/worm -- no ideas on the carrier, but the payload might make 5 random alterations to the registry a day, flipping booleans, corrupting strings, and incrementing/decrementing integers. Perhaps it'd uninstall itself after X days too. That would be truly nasty...

Tonight PUSH meets again, to talk on the seperation of church and state. I'll try to dig up some material, hopefully others will too. Pity we haven't been around long enough to get someone from the ACLU come visit us.

Amusing task: Find a nationalist/racist you know, and find a list of claims that they'll make that their country/race does best (not a hard thing to do, as they generally like to brag). Then see if you can find something that's important to them that their country doesn't do well, and which countries do that thing well. It's a good sanity check, although preferable to someone who passes the test is someone who isn't nationalist/racist at all.. hehe.

I wrote a replacement for mp3deep and oggdeep (scripts that find all mp3/ogg files, respectively, under the current dir and randomly play them with mpg123 or ogg123) called smartdeep, which can do commandline viewers configurably, and thus can launch these things for many file. Pretty simple, but it's usually true that the simplest tweaks one can make to one's environment are the most useful... a new command, a monitoring app, etc. One tool, called iwlist, is quite useful on Linux, showing the current strength and other characteristics of all wireless networks in range. Nice, but much nicer with a wrapper script that opens it in its own xterm with a size predeterimined to be good, and that reruns it every two seconds. It's open on my laptop, along with another similar thing to watch battery strength and status, all the time. Sure, I could use some graphical tool, but text is more flexible -- I could easily tweak the output any way I like as it is now. That's one of the strengths of Unix. You don't get a desktop, you build it.

Dubin might be coming to visit soon, and I might also go to Athens next month for their Halloween festival and to visit a friend. Huzzah. I guess it's a bit depressing that a lot of my friends are going through rough times right now. Seperations from loved ones, addiction, failing definitively in life's ambition, failed romances, all that stuff. I just keep hearing about it, and it's sometimes a struggle not to get caught up in it. But, overall, I'm able to do so, because I'm doing pretty well for myself, and the things that are absent in my life are things that don't need to be a high priority.

A thought: Philosophy .. is there really very much that can be said, when one has chosen the path of strict materialism? Materialism, and its cousin moral relativism (or amoralism, depending if you go a different route) chop a deep gouge into the tree of philosophy, and what's left is an interesting question. We give up on a lot of the content that philosophy typically has, or radically transform its nature. We leave the old realm where we can talk about justice or morality in the abstract, and enter one where if we're going to use such concepts, we'd better scoop them out of the quicksand and put them on new ground before we use them. Their old body must be seperated from our intuitive notion of what they are, and be allowed to die, and then we judge whether they shall be resurrected. Sometimes new concepts that fill parts of the same 'space' arrive, and we have to decide if they keep the same name or not. So, reader, if you're a fellow materialist and moral relativist, what do you see when you look at your concepts of justice, fairness, and the like? I hope it has your fingerprints on it, and if it's pretty, show it to me.

(inner deist, you complain about the works of man, versus the work of deus, but I tell you, your deities have the handprints of man on them the most of all. Never more clearly was a concept the creation of raw human passion, faults and virtues. Bravo to you.)

A random fact: Spanish traditionally uses (used?) ! and ?, upside down, to start sentences when the end has the rightside up version.