Damn McCain is evil

The more I watch, the more I will piss on his grave given the chance...

Kid toys (kids as excuse for nerd toys)

The kid has some cool toys. This
solstice I got him an electric guitar.
A small one. He learns piano from my
wife on an old Kurzweil that I repaired;
inside was a 68000 which amused me,
as I had once taught 68K assembly language
at UCI. He has a plasma globe --in college
they were museum things.

I'm fascinated by how quickly things change.
The kid will take DVD players, calculators,
computers, wireless phones, videocameras,
etc for granted. I'm not a "singularity"
fanatic, but change does accelerate, however
this neither means that we can't appreciate
the future, that robots will take over,
that we'll download our minds, or any other
uncritically suggested crap that is out there.

As an engineer, I can keep things working
well past when others would have tossed
them. I have Win95 300 Mhz machines,
and its 2005; but I run a web server off
it, on an alternate port because Cox blocks
incoming port 80. I have no WiFi
but a cat-5 cable runs down the hallway.
Only recently did I get a cell phone,
for peace of mind when driving; I owned
an illegal jammer for years before that.
I carry more storage on my keyfob, for
moving music around, than my entire
comp sci department had!

I thought I was the last white man in
SoCal not to have a phone, but a few at
work don't. Yet they are very skilled
engineers. I only recently got a DVD
player, $50 bucks. When CD players die,
I salvage lasers and motors from them.
I recently scrapped a scanner; and made
a light saber out of the CCFL and things
around the house for my kid.

He's currently watching a Rammstein movie,
which I KaZaa'd and moved to his unnetworked
machine via 100 MB Zip disks.

How many 5 year olds have played with
green laser pointers?

Or have played with rainbows made by
prisms salvaged from binoculars?

When he was young he got his head
stuck in the center of a 14" disk
platter I had once taken to Lytle
Creek and shot up --one platter with
black powder round ball, the other
with modern ammo. Fortunately I extracted
him from this twisted halo; can you imagine
the explanation to the fire dept or
ER room of a 3 year old with a shot-up
disk platter stuck on his neck?

Enough. BTW, these posts are brought
to you by Guiness. And all are true.

My Menagerie

I collect eccentrics. Brilliant
eccentrics. I'll have to detail
them quasianonymously later. In my
current job I work with very smart
people, which is the most important
thing, besides liking what you do.
Being able to learn from friends
is so cool.

They include a Caltech physics major
who lives like an ascetic because he
doesn't want to work any more;
Los Alamos first generation kids
now working in infosec;
Harvard hyperactives whose ex-wife
was into polyamory; a
PhD biologist who put himself through
school selling cannabis, later his
career slipped from depression,
then he got MS and couldn't read
(but could write, talk, and listen;
I set up a Stephen-Hawkings-like
text to speech for him) and later
fried his brain on cyanide during
an unsuccessful suicide attempt
(I've seen his MRI scans);
a Brit PhD cell biologist, who really
wants to be a botanist, and once
fed some of his carnivorous plants
his own blood (and introduced me
to kif, ie tobac & grass mixes);
and my current coterie at work.

Like soldiers, I have immense loyalty
to my friends at work, even if I doubt
the intelligence of the execs.

BTW, I could make sense of the MRI
scans because I've been fascinated
with neuroscience, pharmacology, etc.
The major theme being: how does matter
think? My longstanding interests in
AI, computational perception, and
computer hardware are also corrollaries.

I remember as a kid loving to take
things apart. Being fascinated how
metal projections and grooves in some
appliance implemented *logic*.

Gotta go.

The Twisted Underbelly of Irvine California

Irvine has a wealthy, educated population,
about 150 Kpeople. Its largest employer
is the University. Broadcom is here.
Western Digital. Taco Hell :-)

It strives to be Disneyland-clean and
wholesome. Here's some wacky facts.

Irvine's former Mayor, Christina Shea,
chewed out the police for busting her
daughter for having methamphetamine.
The elder Shea is quite thin, talkative,
and has ranted about Irvine being a romantic
place. Since speed makes you hump like
rabbits, I find this ironic.

Irvine had an Egyptian guy who kept a
girl as child-slave in his garage. She
didn't go to school. Apparently this is
common in Egypt, but someone forgot to
clue the dude in.

Sometime after 9/11 (TM), an Egyptian
from Irvine tried to shoot up el-al
at LAX.

Last year a schizo grocery bagger decapitated
a few colleages at the Albertson's across
the street. I recognized his picture in
the paper ---he'd bagged my groceries
before, with my 5 year old in the wagon.
He obsessed on Highlander and brought
a samuri sword to work one day. Off his
meds, obviously.

The Albertson's baggers may come from
some kind of rehab program. There's
a chick whose face is blue from tattoos,
and down her throat, and she wears gloves, which means her hands are too. Once we were in her line, and my kid asked about it. "Decoration" as a concept comes in remarkably handy at times.

My favorite Irvine Weirdness:
A Mormon gynecologist, Larry C Ford,
was accused of trying to assasinate
a business partner (who survived).
When the police questioned him, he
blew his head off with a shotgun.
Turned out he had C-4 (plastic explosive,
RDX composition), a full-auto machine
gun, ammo, buried in his back yard.
He had various biowarfare germs in his
garage 'fridge. He turned out to have
ties to a south african chemwar scientist.
The houses around his were evacuated, the
residents put in posh hotels, while various
Agencies dug up his yard. Mormon gynos
with C-4 and SA connections, gotta love it.
I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.

Oh, another thing: Orange county is the
mountain-lion vs. human capital of the
US. Last year a lion ate one mountain biker, got into a tug of war with another
mountain biker over a mountain biker who
survived. They've mangled kids in
Casper's Park a few years ago. Last year
some dude, alone, had a lion jump into
the hiking trail and check him out.
The dude had a pistol and a cell phone
that didn't work. Lions don't recognize
pistols and move fast. The guy backed
up until he got reception and was coptered
out.

So when my kid "lion-bait" and I go hiking,
we see signs not only for
* poison oak
* hazardous terrain
* rattlesnakes
but also
* mountain lions
and also, in some places,
* unexploded ordnance
because some now-populated areas were
used for bombing practice during WWII.

Disneyland with teeth, eh?

Over and out.

Welcome to Irvine

So I finally get around to adding something.
I'll be writing about life in Irvine,
California. Its in Orange County. And
I'll be writing about my life: I'm
an engineer, got a wife kid & cat. I've
got a Master's degree and a bachelors in
computer science and also in cognitive
science. I'm fairly eccentric though
over the years I've moderate how much
of this is exposed. Ie, mastered social
camoflage a bit better. I'm an atheist
and these days quite religious about it;
I've stopped and removed religious symbols
(those T-shaped roman
torture devices) from state-owned
property when people set up shrines
roadside. I leave the rest of the shrine
to a poor driver.

One night I even removed an unauthorized
pro-Iraq "war" memorial erected at the
local library/park grounds. Erecting
such a thing is vandalism, and I was
cleaning up Irvine. Heh. Of course,
that was a thousand military corpses ago,
you remember, back when the mission was
accomplished, before the government endorsed
torture (ie personal terrorism),
though it was well on the way to shredding
the Bill of Rights.

I'm a libertarian by the way. Reformed
Objectivist. A sleeper cell for the
Constitution.

Fascinated with tech, and tech's impact
on society; and with hard science, including
geology, meterology, the former a hobby.
And physics and bio; the former a hobby,
I suppose, since I play with Geiger counters
and other rad-related things, high voltage,
the usual stuff. My 5-year old has played
with metal you can melt in hot water, that
kind of thing.

A cypherpunk, which is a nice cross between
libertarian and comp-sci technologist.
I've even been paid a few times to do crypto,
both hardware (alas, neither of 2 projects
went to silicon) and software (actually
coming to a photocopier at a Kinko's near you).
I have a few patents in the works, owned by
my employers. One involves hashing, and
amusingly I had a chunk o' hash at the time.
I've been into cannabinoids for about half
my life, smoking daily, though I haven't
in over a year now. Mostly I imbibe
ethanol now.

Most people confuse pharmacology with
culture, you know. If you drink bourbon
you must like Sinatra; if you drink
Coors you must like 'Merkin football;
if you toke you must be a hippie.
Well, I do like Hendrix etc and recognize
that the 60's was a Renaissance, but I
just lost out on being old enough for
the 60s and so synthesized my own eclectic culture. I tripped with engineers
in college & grad school; toked while
reading engineering stuff (as well as the
usual listening to music, hiking, etc.),
and regard pharms as tools, power tools
in some cases.

Now I drink beer, sometimes wine, rarely
stronger, and smoke cigarette tobacco from
a pipe. Concentrated EtOH I can consume
to amnesic levels, not good, neither is
being hung over.

Beer was once a way to preserve the surplus
of grain that evolving agriculture produced.
Liquid bread. Few realize this now.

Ok, enough now. For next time: Irvine,
the Disneyland of Suburbia, and its twisted
underbelly.