silveradept | A day well spent

Well, I decided I was going to go watch the Fremont Philharmonic put on a show today, managing to fulfill a promise I made to myself some months ago when I visited western Washington. As things are, I thoroughly enjoyed the Puss in Boots show that the Fremont Players and the Philharmonic put on, and so if they can get me an instrument, I’m going to play trombone for the Fremont Phil. This makes my already limited social life time even more so, I suspect, and it does mean doing some driving, but I’ll share some gas costs and car space with

przxqgl, so hopefully it won’t drain finances that much more than usual. Why I agreed to do something like this, that’s so very far out of my way, well, it’s a playing gig, and hearing the music they put on, well, it’s excellent music as it is, and then beyond that, I heard how much they could use a trombone player to make their sound even better. Rehearsals won’t start until after the new year, and I’m probably going to have to shuffle around my cooking ideas so that I bring along some extra food to work that I can scarf before heading out to the rehearsal/performance sites. Ah, well. New job, new location, new life. I don’t really regret it, even though I’m sure it seems insane to do.

What’s worrying me more is making sure that I adhere to my budget, as I don’t have much for wiggle room outside of it. I kind of hate how my brain translates “budget responsibly” into “if you spend anything outside of absolute necessities and bills, you’ll fall apart and become financially destitute”. I know it’s not true, but it’s a problem nonetheless. I’m not sure completely how much all of my monthly loan payments will be, and I’ve already got some things planned for vacation time and such, and so I know that I can’t be carefree about money. I need to relax and tell the bean counter that the occasional item is not going to break the budget, because the budget is built to have some wiggle in it. I just wish that my books would reflect that.

Anyway, enough of my personal frets and worries. If all I’m worried about is money, I can manage that. I can. Really.

Doctor Football wins again, keeping his march alive, and besting one of the two armies of New York. Two more victories and he’ll have opened the way into immortality. Remarkably, the nadir of futility that they face next, the aquatic Dolphins of Miami, broke their own streak and were able to turn back Baltimore’s offensive and claim a victory for themselves. Perhaps with this energy, they’ll be able to halt Doctor Football. It’s not likely, though. If Doctor Football gets by Miami, he’ll have only one troop in New York, and he’ll have to climb on the shoulders of the Giants to achieve his goal. Will the Michigan Man falter or stumble, or will all in Doctor Football’s path be defeated? Well, we’ll see.

Adam Freeman, in the New York Times Opinion column for today, demonstrates just how much meaning a comma can have, especially when applied in odd clauses and cases like the Second Amendment. The placement of punctuation really does matter. in other matters of law where hairs may be razorbladed, a federal judge in Vermont has ruled that a person charged of a crime is not legally required to surrender encryption passphrases. The person in question was arrested when officials noticed child pornography on his computer. However, when it came time to try him for the matter, the drive on which the materials potentially rested had re-encrypted itself. The evidence unpresented itself.

In worldwide news, there’s a pretty graphic going around that maps the world by oil reserves. Which is cute, but doesn’t really mean anything, unless some sort of interpretation id applied to it. The most common one seems to be that this map determines how the United States applies foreign policy with regard to the Middle East - not doing much to piss off those who supply well, unless we have a reason to invade and knock them over. Contrasting this idea with the material set out in Addicted To War, though, some balance would have to be struck between ensuring appropriate supplies of things and in pumping up the military to levels beyond what anyone else does (and still forcing schools to have bake sales to pay for necessary supplies).

Austin Cline, one of The General’s trusted subordinates, notes that if we generate a place where laws do not have meaning, we should expect people to behave lawlessly. The case of rape in the Green Zone is one that we’ve seen. So is Blackwater. What other ones have we not seen?

It has to take some nuts to do it (and apparently, everybody down at the South Pole has a big set of them, to go from the 200 degree sauna out naked into the -100 degree Antarctic cold), but the guys and girls in Antarctica need Internet connectivity. Meet the IT manager at the South Pole.

Back on North America, Dive Into Mark has a rather pessimistic progression that it calls The Future of Reading, a “play” in six acts, all composed of a statement from a fictional story and a statement regarding the way Amazon’s Kindle and/or electronic books have been. Each of the “acts” describes a way that some item fundamental to the spread of books and reading evaporates because of the material described, including, apparently, Newspeak-like rewriting of the past and the introduction of thoughtcrime, both through Kindle’s ability to update and to remember/send what a person does with their Kindle.

And onward into the news of the weird. Advice for gentlemen - know what's on the other side of the fence if you decide to piss through it, lest the dog have a nip at your penis. Additional advice - don't go burglarizing houses, as you might end up naked and in the same danger as the urinating gentleman above.

Science gives us a winning idea that may drop people off the organ transplant waiting list, if successful and wide-ranging in application - a weakened heart was repaired using tissue sheets grown from thigh cells. It also gives us the possibility where robots are able to feel something akin to pain and react to it. While the voice needs some work, the technology of sensing and reacting to pain or pressure could be a very interesting development for prosthetics. Or for A.I.

Other scientists are predicting people will leave real life for virtual life in great numbers, and that everyone will have some form of a virtual life within ten years. Between escaping reality and taking refuge from the slings and arrows of it, a large number of people are going to go into the virtual world and enjoy themselves there. I still don’t really feel I can afford the access fees for any of them, so I’m just sitting outside, still wondering quite what the appeal is.

We knew there had to be at least one morbid listing from 2007 - AOL has pictures of forty-seven famous people who dies this year. I’m getting older - I knew a lot of those names.

Through

ldragoon, I was linked into a digital copy of Vitamin, a manga drawn about a young girl whose school experience becomes bullying hell. I’m wondering how much of that story is exaggeration, though. After the first few incidents, then the real damage is in the psyche of the person being bullied - it doesn’t help that each time she has a chance to bounce back, she gets cruelly smacked back down again. If nothing else, it pretty realistically shows how the world collapses around someone when the negativity doesn’t let up and the person being bullied doesn’t find or have the superhuman will/strength to bring about the end of the bullying.

If you can get past the awful web design and absolutely mismatched colors, the idea of Learning to Love You More has possibilities. The assignments are pretty random, then the people get a directive on how to prove they achieved the assignment’s goals, and then people participating post pictures or text of the completed objects. The assignments could lead to some very interesting opportunities or ways of injecting some weird into other people’s lives.

But as not to end on a down note, Happy Cephalopodmas! Enjoy the kitsch. Even if you can’t afford any of it.