This weekend seemed like a good candidate for one of those "Lost Connections" personals section in the lonely supersection of the newspaper (I've never understood what that section was for - given that the content is almost universally "Saw you in elevator, you smiled, talked about birds, left", isn't writing to the newspaper about that like emotionally spitting into the wind? (in that one get's one's hopes up that said other person actually reads that section of the newspaper, which as far as I know, nobody does)) - pretty much every plan I made fell through. Things turned out ok near the end though.

Coding things I've been playing with:

• Coding thing for work is done, thank goodness. As always, I hope that's the last thing I write using the Tk graphics toolkit (ugly widgets, irritating geometry managers, ...)
• I did some nice cleanup/refactoring in my blog software. I seem to have fallen out of touch with the few others who had it installed on their sites though..
• Learned how to yank audio out of flash files, spent a bit of time playing with opensource projects like Gnash that aim to produce an opensource player, determined that they're all poor, started to dig through the code to fix things but eventually lost interest. It's disappointing that most projects on Savannah (FSF's equivalent to SourceForge) are still CVS centric and subversion is hardly mentioned on their site. Their mailing lists suggest that they do a good amount of custom development to glue cvs and other parts of their software management system (bug-tracker, etc) into each other, which is kind of exciting - if this can popularised as a normal set for software development, that would probably help the industry... something like the following in a neat package (modified with appropriate interconnects) would be fantastic (I know Sourceforge source is available - it would be neat to see other ways these parts could be glued together):
• Version control - Subversion+ViewSVN
• Bug tracking - Something like bugzilla?
• Forums - Probably something custom, integration with bug tracking would be nice
• IRC/IM/Email Bots - Integrate with everything else, provide easy interfaces to most or all information in the other parts through non-web means
• Wiki - MediaWiki?
• Mailing lists - Mailman?
• Automated build/testing - Tinderbox
• Distribution - Something glued to some of the above that makes publishing a tinderbox build easy
• Other web stuff - like bounty management, KLOC counters, calendars, etc

I've been in a very reflective mood, prone to reflecting on the course of life, difficulties of communication, expectations people have of each other, etc. I've grown aware that there's a disconnect between the part of me that manages a conversation and the part of me that feeds information from my thoughts to that part - that unless I'm careful I can easily think that I've said far more than I have because only one of my threads of reasoning is said rather than all of them - I think I think in a more parallel way than I can speak. I wish there were a way to hook additional mouths (or hands for keyboards) up for richer communication, that if I wanted to talk about background or reasoning for a fact or judgement, I could just make another thread of conversation to do so while continuing the first, that argument maps could be explored/built that way. Talking to people about matters feels incredibly lossy, and simulating it linearly is so tedious.. I don't think letting that stop me from conversations is healthy though.. and the ease of confusion as to which of the threads of thought I actually said is pretty worrying. It feels like losing track of reality, which is perhaps a form of insanity? It'd be all too easy to accidentally drop the English grammar and slip into raw output.. meh. Terminal: confused, switch to uncooked mode. I imagine having an IRCd devoted to two-person conversation where each person is automatically in all channels on the server and channels are created and destroyed as useful for conversation, all conversation logged for easy reference by both people.. that'd be a big step towards what I'm thinking about. Hierarchies or other ways of visualising the relationship of channels to each other might be nice too - imagine: each channel - standard naming convention or relation exists for subchannels for amusing, possibly-random associations, humour, explanations, word definitions, etc.. alternative: usenet-or-email-like organisations.. none of this solves the issue of speed/tedium in serialising rapid parallel thinking into serial form, but at least the richness of representation would be better...

OLPC should arrive soon. End of present job should also arrive soon. Still no future planned...

A little bit more news...

• More on CIA director Hayden's troubles regarding torture. Bush is taking heat for dishonest war propoganda too...
• Latin America's Bank of the South (which I may have commented on before) opened for business. This may be Chávez's way to push socialism and Latin American solidarity to clients, which doesn't seem bad on its face (as the reforms the World Bank requires for its clients are often used to permit outside "investors" to own resources in said client countries rather than being based off of an urge to help humanity). I am concerned (still) that Chávez's social movement may not be the kind of socialism that I'd like to see thrive (being too distant from from both Marxist roots and political liberalism), and seeing that model spread throughout Latin America is a mixed blessing...
• Yugoslavian conflicts may soon turn harsh again.
• Interesting political moves in Israel centred around Channukah.
• Daimler's small european cars to come to the United States. Cool if it ends up happening..
• The United States is having trouble finding interested countries in Africa for military collaboration (their programme being called "Africom"). It may be memory of the US backing Iraq so heavily and then invading and occupying them that makes them reluctant to provide the US a foothold..
• I sometimes wonder how history will judge BushJr - it's hard to step back for the full perspective, but I have the impression that he does stand out as being unlike most other presidents the US has had..

Also, the people in Sakura (sushi place in SqHill) now know my name (was greeted with it when I walked in the door Saturday), and Margaret (of Margaret's Fine Imports) introduced me to some awesome Green Tea mints when I stopped by. My desire for fondue is now high despite little appetite in general.