and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Like Saddam or Bush.

I'm not saying those guys shouldn't be loved, ever, by anyone.. I mean, their momma's had to love them - right? They didn't really get a choice, I'd imagine, and for their sake I hope they died before the noticed how rotten their little children were. I dunno, is Bushes mom still al.. whooops, guess I shoulda known that one myself huh?

Really, though, Barbara.. for a Republican she wasn't all that bad. I mean I never really dug on Nancy that much and this current bimbo of a first lady is certainly no treat but I remember when I was younger they'd show Barbara on tv reading childrens books to grade schoolers sometime.

Do they even do that anymore?

I dunno. Maybe I'm getting too old. Maybe I don't really understand the culture of the kids these days.. Bush seems like a whacko to me and I'm only 26. Just think how bad things are going to be in a few years when the President will have grown up playing Castle Wolfenstein on his daddy's old 386. Imagine.. and it's not even that far off. Those older kids who knew what was going on back then, they gotta be pushing 30 to 35 and, well, it's only a matter of time before we elect a President who knows what the hell up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-a-b-start means.

I should be writing a paper about now - it's due at the end of the week - but I'm not. I'm procrastinating and writing to all you good folk out there on the innernector.

One of the things that never used to get my goat at all was computer virii and you know they still don't really bother me too much except for the way they have indirectly changed my life. For one, it's impossible to step up to a computer these days and not get bogged down by antivirus software popping up in your face every two seconds, or www browsers warning you of illicit content or that you're leaving a secure site, or bulletins that your computer is going to gang rape you while you sleep. Personally I wish they'd all just shut up and get it over with. I won't scream.

It might be doubly annoying for me since I pretty much refuse to run any of this crap. The worst of all is when the Parents call (I know I know, I should be gracious they brought me into this world yadda yadda yadda but come on people). At first it's just a small problem that I can fix over the phone they tell me but by the time I'm done listening to their saga it has become clear that someone's been a little too click-happy with their porn sites. I really get a kick out of listening to them insist that they never clicked yes to install anything, that they didn't surf any questionable sites, that they don't even know what goat porn is. Right ma.

I wouldn't call myself a serious Internet veteran or anything but I've been around long enough to know a few things: everything is reversible, don't let things escalate, and ultimately, you're gonna buy a new computer every few years anyway and have to move all your data so what's a few OS re-installs a day gonna hurt yah?

Seriously though, I've never really had any problems. I haven't really avoided the darker corners of the innernector either. It blows my mind that people can be so adept at fucking their computers full of porn and online casino spyware and adware.

Maybe this is what my professors feel like when I ask them what an integral is.

Ultimately I don't really have any problems with spyware or adware - as long as it's on someone else's computer. It's when I have to use the computer that it truly begins to make my blood boil. It's not even so much my inconvienence but the fact that these people have been living with - continue to live with - this excrutiating experience of the internet, as if it's just the way things gotta be.

Amazing. No wonder hitler had such luck with.

People do the darndest things.

So today, in an attempt to be a good samaritan, I cleaned out my pals computer. I actually built it for him back in the day and within a few weeks of it's birth it was full of junk. He's married, too, and catholic, so not the sort to be searching around for kiddie porn in the wee hours of the night, but somehow he manages. Somehow he gets more crap on his computer than the side of a barn in a shitstorm. I mucked around for almost two hours watching status bars tick by, uninstalls creep along, and virus checkers scan away, and in the end I don't even have much to show for it. What this hunk of bolts really needs is a clean reinstall or a date with a long chain attached to a sailboat, if you get my drift. But I do it anyway, probably for the fifth or sixth time, because I do. I do these things. This is what I do. I do. I do it again. And then, cause I do these things, I do it one more time.

Time - this life we lead - moments of our lives - these things are precious. And I use them to clean porn off my friends computer.

I should be writing a mobile robotics term paper on sensor network topology inference using Expectation Maximization and a first-order Monte Carlo Markov Chain but I'm writing about wasting time cleaning porn instead.

In the end it's all the same I guess. Good will on earth. Peace towards men. Solving world hunger. Cleaning out the porn. Someone's gotta do it and if they don't it'll never get done. I think there is a morsel of, uhh.. something.. wisdom, maybe.. somewhere in those few sentences.

Hmm.. nah, nevermind. I went back and checked. I got nothin.

And again I have to question the little things. How much time will I waste in my entire lifetime typing two spaces after a period instead of one because I arose from a dying culture of typewriters and early computers where spacing wasn't handle robustly? How much time will we waste killing eachother in the deserts for an inferior and ultimately doomed form of energy? How often will we question God, create a new one, and fight our neighbours to prove we're right? Who will stop it all?

sidenote: i still don't know what i think of tabbed browsing

People like the strangest thing, in the end. I like blogger an awful lot and I can tell you one of the reasons I love it so much is that, despite the fact it can't seem to keep a cookie to save it's life, I happened to use a simple password when I signed up - my try-this-one-first password, in fact - and it's just so damn nice when you go to a site and get your password right the first time. I've trained myself to always have three derivatives since it is common for sites/programs/servers to give you three chances to get it right. That means I get to try each of my three passwords. I actually have a few more, what with the weird requirments some passwords have - "only alphanumeric" or "at least one non-alphanumeric" or "at least one letter and at least one number" - bullocks.. passwords will never be truly secure, so what's the point? I just sent some money to some guy I don't know, might never meet, and I don't even know what the money was for. My roommate asked me to send it in lieu of rent, since he owed some cash I guess. I am in the U.S... I sent it in Canadian dollars. Over the web. To a hotmail email account. Cash from my bank account even though I wasn't even at my bank's website, even though I never contacted my bank in any way shape or form about this transaction. Just, in the end, cause I said so. Or someone that sounded enough like me said so... or rather, someone that typed enough like me typed so. Or, well... clicked.

It just took me four tries to get into my CafePress store that no one buys anything from but they were gracious enough to give me an extra try - or someone who was pretending to me at least.. heck, I dunno.. maybe they weren't even pretending to me at all. Maybe they were just bored and typing in random letters and numbers.

Anyhow, CafePress let's you publish books. In fact, you could grab any old PDF (well, presumably not copyrighted material, but who knows..) right this instant and go on over to www.CafePress.com and sign-up and before you'd know it you'd be published. It didn't really occur to me how impressive this was until just now, when I read tony's post about it. I mean, self-publishing.. rad man, I know that's cool. Tubular even. But then he pointed out that there was a certain flexibility that hadn't occurred to me before: one-off printing. Which is to say, when you make a typo in your book and notice it when you get your first copy you can go right back online to CafePress and re-upload a newer-faster-better-quicker version of your book and Voila!, it is done. No longer are you stuck with piles of old copies. No longer are you forced to stare at piles of copies of your book that never ended up selling at the renessaince fair (bummer, sorry about that). No longer are you forced, even, to convince someone to waste their time publishing a run for you. And all for pretty cheap money.

Tony is selling his book for $19.08. An arbitrary number, maybe, but if I did my calculations correctly it's costing him somewhere in the range of $17 maybe? Not entirely positive.. but the bottom line is that this is affordable publishing. 210 pages is nothing to scoff at and $20.. well.. these days it just might be. It's like the world has opened up, a scism has appeared, and into it we are throwing the remnants of a stiff and formal corporate society only to whip out our new, trendy, pliable, plastic, amazingly affordable.. corporate society.

Still though.. yah gotta figure it's some sorta step up, doncha?

I should be writing about the excessive number of matlab simulations I have run in the last month or so - probably a good years worth of computing, between the 10 or so machines that I chewed up at the computer lab - but I don't really have the resolve, right this minute, to do much about it. Sometimes you eat the mobile robotics, sometimes it eats you.

The other day, while writing a post, I threw in a paragraph about hitler. It wasn't overtly offensive, it wasn't pro-anti-semetism (I just wanted to prefix an anti prefix with pro..).. it wasn't anything, really, but for a brief moment I stopped - mid sentence - and looked at what I was writing. I thought about the people I knew who read my site. I thought about the people who I don't know who read the site. I thought, for some strange reason, about Greenland. Does anyone else ever think about Greenland? Anyhow, I can't really put my finger on it but I decided it was probably a good idea not to include the paragraph. I slowly deleted it the way a professional etch-a-sketch artist erases his canvas and I had to wonder the whole time I was doing - who am I doing this for.

So today I threw in that little bit about hitler. Not just because I wanted to make up for the other day - the comment did actually just pop into my head, I just chose to accept it - but somehow maybe today I'm a little closer to the no fear, will it , write it attitude I'd like to have all the time.

As one english teacher once told me "Write, write, write like you mean it, like you feel it but most of all just write always all the time write"..

I wonder if he knows what a blog is.