A nod, and the would-be hero stopped, stood still. The normal chaos, hierarchy, patterns in the mind all slowed.. memory present, but no decision-making, no interesting processes.. what little thought there was... a memory or impression, of the top of his hand over a pyramid shape, soft plastic, a gentle slope. Cradling that odd angle with his hand.

Perhaps a focus on the motion of fluids while stirring a bowl of soup, the intricate folds and flow near the wooden spoon..

I'm presently listening to Daler Mehndi's "Dil Te Churiyan".. it's very addictive, and there's an amusing music video that comes with it. It seems that one of the consistant themes in Daler Mehndi's videos is that he's convincing an initially reluctant woman that he's cool. I do wonder if I would like his music more or less if I understood the words... I also wonder if there are any people like him in American popular music -- could his videos fly with a western audience? Could his style of music appeal to people here?

Someone I used to know, but now lives far away, recently wrote something that really grabbed me... he's someone who I really feel has lived a parallel life to mine, the similarities are really kind of funny. Oddly, I never really seemed to get close to him -- perhaps too much similarity, people who normally play the same role in social groups, these things make for parallel threads in the fabric of society..

At work, I finally have a breakthrough in the R to Auton bridge -- I now have the C side keeping things on its own, and can pass data from R to C. I was thrown off by the way .C() appeared to work on a function I grabbed from a sample C function called showArgs(), but it actually wasn't, the objects were just being passed back and the R side of the code was displaying them. Nothing like printf() debugging.. Heh. The way I'm cooking these things up, I want to be using .External() ... and the sample function was actually slightly wrong, at least for the version of R I'm using. Anyhow, once I get some simple data passed back from C into R, all the tricky, experimental work in the project will be done, and the actual (relatively dull) implementation will be ready to be cooked.

Yeah, they got Saddam. So what? It doesn't change anything -- it was a stupid 'adventure' for BushJr (pbuh), who should've listened to his dad. BushSr at least had the brains to understand that occupying the country was a dumb idea, although his adventure wasn't too bright either. I doubt there were any of the specially nasty weapons (but hey, a weapon's a weapon) in Iraq, I think BushJr knew this and lied (his instructions to be dishonest to his ppl don't help things), and in any case I don't think Iraq ever posed a threat to the United States in either gulf war. Saddam's abuses of power arn't anything special for nonwestern states, and such abuses certainly don't stop the U.S. from continuing to deal with and support other such countries, especially when oil money is involved.

I think, for the first time in a long time, I'm going to have a decent amount of this month's paycheck, beyond the amount I automagically have doing so, to deposit for saving. That's pretty amazing, considering all the car mess I've had to deal with, but yeah, I'm happy. All the long-term ugliness left over from the O'Reilly trip, the aborted vacation, car problems, and other stuff is gone. I have a small cash buffer against emergency now... mmm safe..

Came across this news-ish blog. Amusing.

This article, by Berners-Lee, one of the pioneers of the web, suggests that websites be designed so that documents never disappear. I really am at two minds on the issue -- on the anti-side, I'm reminded by the advice of the extreme programming camp (and some other camps too) that to think too far ahead is too limiting and time-consuming for software (let's extend it to webpages), where having flexible, simple, easily implemented ideas is more important. On the other hand, I do think it's awfully inconvenient that so much of the web is continually disappearing, or worse, becoming obsolete or incorrect without being marked as such. Is Archive.org a solution, or a red herring? I really don't know.

A friend sent me a sad story. I sent her here for something else.

This is an interesting political-regional framework. A fun quote: Democratic consultant James Carville once described Pennsylvania as consisting of Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west, and "Alabama in the middle."

Reality TV for you.. A few of the other victims of the holocaust get mention..

Some farming politics..

And something I've always suspected: Powerpoint makes you dumb. That's not my title -- it's the actual NYT article title :)

When I visit Israel/Palestine, I'll probably try to stop by here.

I grabbed the rest of my music from my home system onto my laptop last night.. I suspect torgo's going to die soon, so it's time to start doing more backups... I can't quite put my finger on why it's going to die, it's just an intuition.. but my computer intuition is damned good..