Well in the ongoing saga w/ Google, now my page isn't coming up at all. This is total suckiness, and I'm really perplexed as to what the reason is. After about 3 days, the new site was coming up as the 2nd result when you googled my name (the old site was still the number 1 search result, even though it no longer existed). I had no reason to think matters would do anything but improve. Yet, now my site is like, totally invisible to Google. What's the deal? I seriously don't get it. there must've been something magic about being hosted in a .edu domain or something.

Google is so much more than a search engine. It's like an on-line concierge service. With their plan to digitize huge portions of several libraries and make it available and searchable online, Google is once again making a reality something that I (and likely a lot of people) have long wished for. Just the other day I remarked to a friend in an email about how I had once wished Google had a dictionary feature, and upon closer inspection, discovered that they already had it.

With all the good things they keep doing, I can't help but wonder where and when we'll discover Google's dark side. Will it be found in the insidious text-based ads, that sometimes appear in inappropriate ways? Does it lurk behind the conspiracy-theorists' fear that gmail can never be deleted? Or is it in my coworker's theory that one day Micro$oft will buy out Google and nothing will seem clean and pure anymore?

On a more personal level, I am waiting to see how long Google will take to find my new web page. I recently migrated the page to new servers, and to my dismay, my old hosting service (through the university where I went to college) has removed the forwarding page I had put in place, despite the fact that I'm still paying for this month's service. Currently google still finds the old page, which of course, no longer exists. I'm intrigued to see how long it will take for the page to attain to its former position as the primary result from googling my name. I can only assume that, because it has all the same material as the first site, it will eventually reclaim its former grandeur, when Google's spiders finally find it.

I think it's funny that if you type "slash" into the Mozilla Firefox address bar and hit enter (like, for example, if you were about to go to slashdot, but your hand got lazy on the tab-completion) you go to Slash's official fan site. I would tell you the URL, but it never showed up in the address bar. I'm not sure what mechanism is at work here, but I suspect it might somehow be related to what happens when you Google search and hit the "I feel lucky" button.

Best interview I've read in a long time-

Neal Stephenson interview on /.

An unexpected thought occurred to me this morning. I am pretty sure the post man is stealing my Victoria's Secret catalogs. What leads me to this conclusion?

Well, I recently moved and registered my change of address with the Post Office. I've been receiving bills and quite a bit of junk mail forwarded from the old address. Victoria's Secret has been sending me up to three catalogs a week for the past several years. I buy just enough things from them to ensure that I will probably remain on their mailing list for the rest of my life.

Yet, I just realized that since the move, the seemingly endless stream of glossy pages filled with ridiculously slender, famously lovely, and frequently scantily clad women has dried up. Where have all the catalogs been going? You do the math.

Just an announcement, I'll be playing my guitar and singing at

-------------------------------------
La Tazza Fresca @ 37th and Guadelupe
10 PM Sat October 15, 2004
-------------------------------------

Ok, so I've made the startling discovery that I am an abnormally good conductor of electricity. (Yes, i know- it's shocking!) (Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

I came to this conclusion after my new PowerBook G4 (it's so CUUUUTE!!!) shocked me last night. It was a new experience in that mostly I don't get shocked by direct current. So that was a little different. I was rather taken aback by it, and rather disappointed (tonight I'm calling up Apple tech support).

Anyways, so this episode got me thinking- I seem to be shocked by a ridiculous amount of things. Like this one time, I got a brilliant idea. I wanted to play my guitar down by the lake. (This is when I lived at home, with my parents. It was also in my pre-acoustic days.) So I dragged my amp down by the shore and plugged it into a loooooooooong extension cord. Since it was summertime, naturally I was barefoot. Apparently the ground was slightly moist. Suffice it to say, within the space of about ten minutes, I had managed to get shocked by 1. the amplifier, 2. my effects pedal, and 3. (the crowning moment) the guitar itself. I'm pretty sure my guitar has shocked me on at least one other occasion, too.

My old car, a '97 Geo Prizm, used to shock me every time I got out of it. On one occasion, it shocked me so hard, there was an arc of blue light about a centimeter across. My arm was sore for a good half hour after that. I'm pretty sure it's not normal to get shocked that badly.

I've been shocked by a lamp (that was... just stupid...), shocked by a dog's "Invisible Fence" collar (I had to test it out on myself before I would subject my dog to it), and zapped by touching various metal objects. I suppose it's only a matter of time before I'm struck by lightening.

Perhaps this is some kind of karma-like payback for all those times when I was little, on Tuesday nights after the book study, when I would shuffle around downstairs on the carpet in my socks. There was a nail that stuck out of the wooden paneling on the wall in one place, maybe a quarter of an inch. The goal was always to see who could generate the biggest spark.

I wonder if my bizarre ability to conduct current might be related by my ridiculous propensity to break things, usually simply by using them. It's amazing I can get my computer to work at all.

sometimes i think i was born in a slightly different dimension from everybody else in the world- i can see the normal people and interact with them, but i'm not really part of their world, and everything I try to do or say gets distorted, the effects of my efforts altered by the slight shift between my world and the regular world, sort of like the way light refracts on the surface of water.

Well, as most of my readers are likely aware (both of you, even), I got a gmail account. I finally had to give up on hotmail because the quantities of spam were getting out of hand; and I was too lazy to retool my filters.

Anyways, this morning I had a brief discussion w/ my office mate that I found humorous, because he is against gmail, but not because it's another method by which google is achieving World Domination. (He agreed w/ me that Google is a benevolent dictator, and at least better than Microsoft.) His complaints with gmail are summed up here:

http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/

Since I've never considered email to be a form of communication that offers anything in the way of privacy (unless encryption is used, and even then I have some doubts... which i won't go into detail about here) and i was surprised to learn we supposedly have ANY rights at all w/ regards to the gov't reading our email, none of these things particularly bothered me. As far as I'm concerned, the gigabyte of storage is a boon. I really really hate the way Lotus Notes (which i'm forced to use at work) deletes my email after a coupla months; i can't tell you how many times I've gone back to look for an email about an issue that resurfaced, only to find the email had "expired" and been automatically deleted. As far as email goes, i would really prefer to never have to delete any of it, ever.

I could say more on this but i have to get to work.

Ok, just have to make this quick post because I just discovered something cool. If you sent flowers using ftd.com, you can get NorthWest WorldPerks. I used it to send flowers to Inga-Lill, in Sweden (aside: isn't it cool that I can send flowers to SWEDEN? it's SWEDEN!!!), and I got 740 miles out of it!! how cool is that?!?

So, henceforth, no more 1800flowers.com- for me, it'll be FTD.

On a related sidenote, I have enough miles now for a free round-trip ticket (within the domestic States, Canada and Alaska). I think i'll prolly use it to go to Toronto and visit my people up there. You know, so as to get the most out of it. Or maybe i'll just save it for a time when i want to make a last-minute trip and the ticket would be really expensive. hmmm...

Well, I'm at work so I don't have time for a real post. I just wanted to post a link while it was on my mind to a site my brother told me about in a voicemail from last night (when my phone was concealed deep inside of my bag, and apparently its ring could not be heard over the sounds of AFI playing on the stereo as I spent like an hour and a half in the bathroom highlighting my hair. It proved a worthy exercise, since doing it myself only cost me about 11 bucks, as opposed to spending at least as much time (if not more) had I gone and paid somebody $80 to do it. but I digress...). it's this site about camera phone art, a method of digital art of which i have to consider myself something of a pioneer, if an amateur one at that. i've never been much of an early adopter, but i was the first person I knew to get a camera phone, and i continue to encourage others to pursue this media for creative expression. So, without further ado, here is the link:

http://www.sentonline.com

You can submit your own camera-phone images (so far i've sent in 2- maybe you'll get to see one of them. Also, my brother, JP, sent it the picture he took a few weeks back of a dude walking his parrots. i sent in a pic i took of the inside of the Guggenheim museum in NYC, and an image of my friend Brad sprawled artistically in some bushes.)

have a ball.

ok, so i've only got 2 mins left. i'm using this crappy terminal at the hostel in NYC where i'm staying. this is pretty interesting so far. everyone was like :"this hostel is gonna be crap" but it's ok so far. today i'll prolly head to some of the museums and hang out, then meet up w/ jer again at some point and prolly go out or something. i have no idea what's going on in this town yet.
but i have only like a minute left now so i have to submit soon.
i'll try to blog again, but tmw i'm going to the special assembly day w/ melody, b/c i'llm iss mine this wknd.

ok gotta go more later bye

Ok, even though I'm exhaustedly tired, I still haven't fallen asleep, even after lying in bed for 45 minutes or something. This is unheard-of. I normally fall asleep nearly instantaneously. Tonight I was so tired because of doing too much over the weekend (as usual). Since i really need to get up early and work out (particularly to make up for today's slackage- when my alarm went off this morning at 6, i immediately reset it for 7:30, proceeded to go back to sleep, hit snooze 3 times after it went off again, then lay in bed for half hour listening to NPR before I finally managed to muster the mental stamina required to drag my sorry self out of bed.)

Speaking of being "exhaustedly tired," lately I've noticed myself adverbingly verbing adjective nouns. (If you could successfully parse that, there's something wrong with you). No, seriously. It's mostly just turning words (especially adjectives) into adverbs inappropriately that I keep catching myself doing. I routinely drop phrases like "gorgeously beautiful," "boringly long" and "bizarrely weird" into everyday conversation. I think the effect I'm subconsciously going for is extreme emphasis (or perhaps unnecessary redundancy) (heh... this could get out of hand...) or maybe even long-winded, overly-explicit, wordy verbosity... (oops went off on a tangent again with the overly dramatic irony... sorry i really WILL try to keep it under control). I've always had a penchant for hyperbole (in fact, I remember my Dad once saying that about me when I was about 9 or 10 years old... scarily, I knew exactly what he meant) and lately it seems to be manifesting itself via these weirdly strange phrases.

Heh.. thus far, this entire blog entry has been almost entirely content-free (I say "almost" because I think the anecdote about my dad's comment counts as content). I would really like to just get on with it and go to sleep, but apparently that's not happening. I think it's because I have too many things on my mind. I'm mentally planning next weekend's trip to NYC, thinking about my options for when my lease runs out in a few months, plotting my next hostile takeover (well, not really- i just wanted to say "hostile takeover"), scheming ways to get out of having to work 40 hours a week (my latest "plan" is to move into freelance technical writing... bear in mind, this is all going to be moot when i get discovered at the next Open Mic i play and my rock star career takes off)...

Somehow I just don't have the ability to "turn off" my thought process. Well, maybe getting the words out there will help. I have decided to try blogging in these kinds of circumstances, rather than just writing in my journal, because most of this stuff isn't particularly private, some of it might be amusing to SOMEone, and let's face it- typing is not going to cramp up my hand the way putting pen to paper will.

I've been listening to all sorts of interesting music lately, so probably my next blog entry will be about that. I'm going to try to start sticking to at least some semblance of a theme in future blog entries, for the sake of polishing my writing skills (such as they are). Heh... but since i said "I'm going to ...start" that means I can put it off until the NEXT entry. I have no obligation to stick to a theme in THIS one. THerefore, I will wrap up today's thoughts by sharing a version of a haiku I composed earlier in the day, which I extemporaneously delivered to a colleague via my company's internal instant messaging program (Sucky-time,, oops i mean "Sametime"):

Peanut m & m's
I want to eat them right now.
Please give them to me.

###

Ok, i just had to drop this short note. Travelers beware: you know how they say your credit card always gets you the best exchange rate? Well, when I was in England, I saw at least one Bureau de Change that was advertising a Pound for a buck 70. Which didn't really seem that great to me. BUT check this out- I just looked at my on-line statement and w/ the help of my handy-dandy scientific calculator, discovered that my Visa was getting an exchange of about $1.82 per pound. What's the deal here?!? If anyone knows, feel free to let me know. Because I find it slightly irritating.

This is but one thing that has irritated me of late; but right now i don't have time for a lengthy post. I also plan to blog later about the rest of my trip. I didn't end up having very much net access after the first coupla days; in fact, the entire time i was in Sweden i couldn't seem to get on-line.

Interesting sidenote about Sweden- at least 3 people I met there told me "Sweden is very modern and almost everyone here has a computer... but I don't have one." That and the fact that i couldn't find a single lousy Internet cafe over there led me to the conclusion that Sweden is obviously living in the Stone Age. The stereotype is true- they really dont have computers there. (hee hee luckily NO ONE in sweden has Net access, so I don't have to worry about provoking a barrage of hate mail). I have to hand it to them, though- the Swedes have a fabulous sense of style. Everything over there is cool-looking.

More info later.

yeah this is hilarious. i've actually been on-line every day of this trip so far. ok, so i forgot where i left of yesterday. i was thinking i might finish the story. i have been wandering around London for coming up on 3 days now. The funny thing is, what feels the most disconcerting is not the fact that i'm surrounded by foreigners (literally- i think for every londoner here, there are at least 6 visitors- and even the people who live here don't seem to actually be FROM here, or even from England), the different feel of London compared to North american cities, the fact that practically every building you see is archaic-looking... nor is it the bizarre layout of the city or the fact that 90% of the streets are 1-way, none of them intersect at right angles, and none of them run in a cardinal direction. none of these things are what's throwing me off... no, the single most disconcerting thing is-

*drum roll, please...*

...not having my phone.

it has just been really, really weird not having my phone. this morning i was afraid i wouldn't even wake up on time to check out of the hostel because my phone doesn't work at all here. so i have no alarm clock. (this is a FYI for future travelers to Europe- if your watch doesn't have an alarm, make sure you bring some form of travel alarm clock. my iPod has one, apparently, but the battery died on that after the 7-hour plane ride here, and i was unable to recharge it because my adapter wouldn't fit under the shelf where the outlet was in my room. i used the outlet in the bathroom to charge my camera battery, but there was no way i was gonna leave the iPod out in a public place like that. on a related sidenote, the universal power adapter worked quite well- i was impressed, considering the 6-10 bucks i spent on it.)

anyways so back to the phone thing... yeah. it's just felt really strange being out of touch. i hadn't realized how attached i am to the thing. it's like another limb or something, and now that it's gone, i'm having those phantom limb twinges or something. i keep wanting to take it out of my pocket and play w/ it. i miss being able to take pictures of weird happenings and pix-msg them to my brother. or when i'm bored waiting in line or something, being able to randomly txt-msg my friend Brad or someone.

it's kinda cool, though, too. it's like, right now, nobody can call me. i am just totally out of touch. no one can deliver bad news, or tell me to go do something, either. i am just floating about, completely on my own. like yesterday wandering about. wherever my feet felt like taking me. it was especially nice yesterday because the weather was actually NICE for ONCE! it was sunny. today the BBC said it was gonna be sunny, or mixed at least, but it's icky- rainy and gray. and bizarrely cold, for may. i guess this is normal though.

well i'm about to drift off on some existential tangent, and the British Museum is opening in 25 minutes (which i reckon to be about the time it will take me to walk there from where i am...) so i'll sign off for now.
stay tuned.

ok, i only have 6 minutes left so this post will of necessity be short. today was a great time; i really was just hanging loose with no strict plans or anything. i slept until noon, which helped out a lot with the jet lag. but i tried to go to the \london bethel and it was closed. pretty disappointing considering with all the transportation time it probably ended up taking the better part of 2 hours to take a totally pointless journey. oh well, now i know where it is, at least. so next time hopefully it will be open and i can visit.

i thought at first it would suck being all alone today, but it proved to be really fun because i just wandered around and went any place that looked interesting. i saw a lot of stuff. ok i'm down to 4 minujtes. and i need to allow this slow connection time for my post to go through.

a very very brief synopsis:

yesterday- saw tower of london and found teh guard/tour-guide very entertaining. had good indian food for dinner. looked in vain for live music. the live music scene in london apparently sucks. but then i might just be spoiled by living in austin.

today- slept until noon, attempted in vain to visit bethel, rode the tube a lot, went all over Soho, Trafalgar Square, went to Waterloo station then walked back over the Thames via this funky pedestrian bridge, wandered all over the place... saw Westminster Abbey and the parliament buildings (including the tower w/ "Big Ben"), saw a bunch of churches, hmmm.... accidentally got all the way over to oxford street
shoot no time...

well here i am in \london typing on this craaaaazy uk keyboard. man, this keyboard is messing with my head. it's been a whirl, i have to say. i dont really know how many hours its been since i left Austin. i got up at like 6\;30 or 7 in the morning on Friday, and here it is around 10pm GMT, Saturday.

when i first arrived in london, i was kinda thrown by it. well, first off the guy in customs got suspicious because at first he thought i didn't have a return ticket home. i don't remember what he asked if i had, but it didn't sound like \'ticket\' to me. nevertheless, he finally became convinced that i wasn't a threat to the great nation of great britain, and decided to let me in. i had struck up an acquaintanceship w/ the girl who rode next to me on the plane from DTW, and we had decided to hang out a bit for the day. she only had a day in \london, en route to \Rome for 3 weeks of backpacking across europe.
i'd had a good dinner at \outback w/ \jp, the folks, Ta and \jakes. no, the slashes are not intentional. they are the result of someone accidentally putting a slash where the shift key is supposed to be. this crazy keyboard doesnt even HAVE a shift key- all it h as are these silly keys with a \up arrow on them. i would have capitalized \'up\' but... yeah, you know...

anyways i was so sad when we were driving away from jakes and ta. i miss them so much.
i was hanging out in the macnamara terminal for a while, watching the cool fountain before we finally got on a \huge plane \(again, supposed to be capitalized\0). a9fad lkajdf' ERRRRRR!!!!!! thjis is annoying.\ anywaysk the plane was huge.

oh yeah i forgot to mention on the way from AUstin to dtw, i already froze up the new i\pod mini, before i had listened to 2 whole songs w/ it. so much for Apple. like so much brilliant cocktail conversation, it looked good on the outside, shiny and intriguing, even intelligent, but without any real substance. oh well lluckily a tip from my friend and long-time i\pod enthusiast Vince set me straight on how to reset the dumb thing. actually, i was very close. if i'd kept screwing around long enough, i woudl have undoubtedly found the right key combination to reset it. so the day was saved there.

um... where was i? i am not good at telling stories in chronological order, am i? well, finally the custom's guy let me through (yay i now have a grand total of 2 count them TWO stamps in my passport\0) and we took the Gatwick Express train into Victoria station. from inside the train, England didn't look any different, really, from the States or Canada. it was kind of seedy for the most part. perhaps a bit gloomier. i don't think the sun so much as peeked out to say hi.

But then after i parted ways w/ my new friend (having agreed to meet at the Tower of \london at 3\), got some quid at the ATM (it makes me feel hip, like a \londoner, to say \'quid\' instead of pounds\), after i'd bought my weekend metro pass, (actually they don't call it teh metro, but all the other europeans do, apparently) and hystericially had left it in the thing (there's this gate where you go through, and the ticket pops up and you have to grab it before you go through the gate, but i was thinking teh ticket would come out on the other side of the gate, so i got through somehow, but ended up standing on the other side for like 5 minutes shouting \'will you please give me that ticket!?" it was so close and yet so far! i couldn't reach it! probably like 40 ppl went through the gate before finally a lady got my ticket for me. i was moderately proud of myself for not panicking), and then taken my first subway ride through \london, destination \piccadilly circus (of course the actual riding of the tubes went totally smoothly, as it always does in every city in which i've ever ridden the subways), having emerged into the brightly overcast London street, i was stricken by the newness of it all.

This was a city with a different feel- truly different. i've been to quite a few cities in north america, and of course each has its own flavor, but there was never such a sense of the unfamiliar. Here i was, a quaint provincial, making my way in one of the major cosmopolitan centers of the world, a city which had BEEN a major center of trade, culture, politics and power for centuries. i didn't try to hide my american accent. i proudly held out my StreetWise: \london map and attempted in vain to orient myself. finally i gave up and started wandering around until eventually i found my hostel.i think i actually asked directions to the street. ironically (as usual) it was the street i had just come off of. had i walked another 30 feet or so, i would have run right into the place.

The place is kind of ghetto, i'll admit, but hey it has 24-hour internet access for just a pound an hour. not bad. and it has 24-hour reception service. amazingly enough, i even managed to phone home a little bit ago, although of course the line was busy. i left a message for the 'rents on the cell phone. hopefully they'll actually check it. i have the worst time with international calls. i dunno why, i just do. phones just don't like me. but i might as well start calling since this lousy 5-pound phone card has like 180 minutes on it. supposedly. we'll see how many minutes i actually get out of it.

ok i'm seriously rambling now. this is what lack of sleep does to you. i don't know if i've used up 26 minutes or have 26 minutes left. i really have absolutley no sense of the passage of time, the meaning of time, what time it is, etc. all i know is i'm tired. i think i'll go to bed now...

(fun exercise\; reread teh above with a fake british accent. yes, now you're getting into the spirit of it. i keep having to remind myself that this is how these peopel really talk and they're not just goofing around with me. oh yeah, and JP- if you're reading this, you would have got the biggest kick out of the way these guard dudes at the Tower of \london marched. it took me back to my favorite python sketch of all-time, the \ministry of \silly walks. i decided that jp and i are coming back here together. ok i really should end this parenthetical note, now that i've gone off on a jimongous tangent. [yes, i invented that word])

signing off,

~L

Well, it's a quarter to ten and I'm still here at work. I've been here since 8:30 am. This is starting to feel just like school, only at school there was the Cafe. Here there is only loneliness... and the darkness outside the windows.

This process I follow has become more than just a ritual- it's actually a way of life. You break the kernel, you rebuild it. You scp it to your victim. Bosboot to build a boot image. sync; sync; reboot. You wait for the machine to boot up- hopefully you haven't broken it so badly that it won't start. ever hopeful, you run the test program, once again crashing the kernel. You grind your teeth, restart the machine, and this time drop immediately into the kernel debugger and start setting breakpoints. Bang head against wall. Repeat. This time you'll set breakpoints in the debugger BEFORE running the test program, if you're smart.

it seems like things must be getting kinda bad when i start putting printf's into the kernel. There is no universe in which this is a good sign.

*sigh*

I don't have time for a real post, but I didn't want to lose track of this link:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html because the article was so interesting and provocative.

BTW, i noticed on the blogger main page that the blogger kids are coming down to Austin! and they're going to Club DeVille, which IMO is a great place, with "great" being in the sense of "a dark, very low-key, cozy if somewhat seedy and borderline shady bar that i just knew i had to go to the first time i saw the tacky crown-shaped sign w/ its blinking lights out front of a place that doesn't even look like a bar, but looks more like a ramshackle old cottage, and my suspicions that it was a cool place were confirmed when i stepped in and Wilco playing through the sound system from mp3s off the laptop of the dude who worked there" and btw aren't run-on sentences great?

Anyways, of course I"ll be going to see Octopus Project that night, but not until later on. So i'll have to go down there beforehand, check it out and see if i can score a free blogger t-shirt for my brother or something. i'll update as more info becomes available, and i'll also put some info about SXSW.

oh yeah, speaking of which:
An essay on surviving SXSW

Ok, this is a quote direct of a web guide to Oslo, Norway, that i just found TOO amusing not to blog:

"For moments of great need and despair: Here is the Toilet Guide to Relief:

Deichmanske public library, Henrik Ibsens gt. 1, toilets on each side of the information counter.
Glasmagasinet, Stortorget, 3rd floor, nice and quite clean. Free.
Justisen, Møllergata 15, toilets in the backyard. Free.
Oslo Central Station, near the lockers. Very clean, but there is a NOK 5 fee.
Paléet, Karl Johans gate 37-43, up the stairs and behind the café. Free. "

Here's a handy link I stumbled upon when I was trying to find the meaning of the term "savoir-faire." Check out this handy Foreign Phrase Dictionary:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001619.html