I've come to terms with mortality, I think. But when you think you see the effects of time it's tough to accept. I'm kind of perversely lucky in that I've never been in really good shape, so I'm more able to make actual improvements in my body over time, without the glory days to have fallen from.

I guess I shouldn't have too much trouble dealing with this, at least not for a long while. I can see that it's really a subset of my general mortality fears, or at least secondary to them. It is kind of funny that it's not just eternal life we crave, but eternal youth. (Isn't there a myth about the guy who asks for eternal life, but forgets to ask for the youth. and just gets older and older and more horrible and decrepit?) Understanding that I'm physically different as I approach my late 20s than I was in my early 20s, and that, aside from the efforts I'm making now (yey stairmaster) it will always be more or less downhill-- it's tough.

And I mentioned this to Mo, and she says she says "Aw crap, we're gonna get old someday" and I tell her that she'll be beautiful when she's old, and I believe that she will be even if she isn't, but still, it reminds me of the powerlessness we sometimes have to make the world a good enough place for the people we love. That's another really hard truth to accept.

Link of the Moment
Science Says Women Dig Fast Cars in Wired News
Hooray for Science!
Luckily Mo seems ok with my Honda Civic Hatchback. Though I have memories of at least one commencement-era romantic interest impressed that I was getting my life together enough to get a car, have a job.

Followup
Heh, you know what? If yesterday's wrinkle thing really became an issue, I could always get a facelift! I don't think I ever would, but it's nice when there's a solution to a 'big life problem' waiting in the wings, even if you'd never want to use it...

Ahh, cleared out my inbox in Pine. That always makes life feel a little less chaotic.

Moving

"For Lovers Only"
Informative Salon article on sexual lubricants. "I just don't understand how people can think they're having good sex without using a lubricant." --sex therapist Marty Klein

Quote of the Moment
I, Hatchet Jack, being of sound mind and broke legs, do leaveth my rifle to the next thing who finds it, Lord hope he be a white man. It is a good rifle, and killeth the bear that killeth me. Anyway, I am dead. Sincerley, Hatchet Jack.
--From "Jeremiah Johnson", via the IMDB

It's also funny that they've started labeling common keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-N, etc., with captions. It feels like I'm back on my Commodore 64 with all the graphical shortcuts. Even odder is that the symbol they decided to use for Ctrl, a circle with 3 lines cutting through it, looks a lot like the Netscape ship steering wheel as it appears on the taskbar.

Actually, I really wish I could have an ergonomic keyboard without the stupid numberpad. It's just a space hogging unused piece of electrocrap.

Link of the Moment
This is pretty scary: Ouchy the Clown. He even does meetings! (via CamWorld).

Ramble
Having an odd little e-mail discussion with this one guy, who wrote me about my mortality pages. I guess he disagrees with the idea of matter being the 'ultimate reality', he thinks that some consciousness is what everything is based on, that The Matrix is a good metaphor for What's Really Going On. I dunno, we'll see what turns up.

Hey, my company starts up at the Arsenal Office Campus today. Should be an interesting place to work. I don't know if I should walk it or drive it. I feel lame driving it, but if I walk it I might get the impression that that's enough exercise for the day, when really I'm not even breaking a sweat.

Link of the Moment
Got the Valentine Edition of the loveblender up yesterday. It took a bit longer than I expected (well, I also had to wait for Mo to download some sun java tutorial files. She seems to be getting the core ideas pretty quickly.

Joke of the Moment
>> Please give me the top ten uses for silk scarves.
>> I need to know for a report I am writing. Well,
>> that and Zixia is arriving in 10 days.
>
>TOP TEN USES FOR SCARVES:
>
>1. Dance of a thousand scarves (Highlights package)

I must have missed that issue when I was last at the dentist.

SILK SCARF STRIPPERY AND FOREPLAY WITH GOOFUS AND GALLANT:

GOOFUS just whips all the scarves off while dancing and gets instantly naked.	GALLANT teases and hints with the scarves, leaving those he dances for increasingly aroused.
GOOFUS binds the wrists of his victims to his bedpost with silk scarves, just before stabbing them with an icepick.	GALLANT blindfolds his partner in the kitchen, and seductively shoves strawberries, bananas, and other food products down their throats.

--Dean Lenort via alt.humor.best-of-usenet via alt.religion.kibology

Quote of the Moment
"There's something ironic about you having a machine named 'Placid'"
--John Trussell at work, where most of our PCs are named after bodies of water.

Statistics
I made up a program to analyze the logs on kisrael.com, in general it works on one day at a time. It came up with the following: for 05/Feb/2001:
frontpage: 43 hits 31 unique ip
overall: 2359 hits 67 unique ip
(the kisrael.com frontpage got loaded 43 times, from 31 unique IPs (roughly meaning that many desktops), and over all 2359 pages got loaded, from 67 different IPs)

Anyway, I realized I could run the same script on the loveblender log:
for 05/Feb/2001:
frontpage: 2789 hits 2009 unique ip
overall: 42174 hits 3387 unique ip

That's a lot of unique users!

The cartoon is from doodles I used to at school. It took me a while to realize I had given him the same name as Don Marquis' cockroach poet.

Link of the Moment
a short and happy life is a great semi-daily-updated website. K.Thor Jensen puts together something that's worth the daily click, pop-culture flotsam and jetsam, personal essays, multipanel cartoons he's done, music from his old two person band. One game he's developed is to masquerade as a_m_b_e_r_4_e_v_e_r, a 14 year old girl, on various chatrooms, trolling for people looking for cybersex then turning the tables on them in various ways. This one made me laugh out loud. Also, a long time ago I featured I Am The Stupidest Man Alive as the love blender feature selection.

Typo of the Moment
kirkli: good day, sinshine.
--me to Lee on AOL-IM

Morocan Mint Tea
In a smallish glass, put the leaves from about four stems of mint and pat them down ("garden fresh mint" said the package- it should smell fresh and the leaves should be rough.) Pour boiling water over the leaves. Stir in two teaspoons of sugar. Keep stirring to ensure the leaves don't scold. Let simmer to taste. Drink and enjoy.

Tealuxe smells great, much better than any coffeehouse. I'm not sure why, but it reminded me of the smell of this one old romantic interest's dormroom. Might've been my imagination.

Links of the Moment
Scary funny made-up consumer goods: Unnovations
(via the Cruel Site of the Day)

Even scarier than that-- bizarre real things people are selling on E-bay at Disturbing Auctions. Both sites are really funny.
(via CamWorld)

Joke of the Moment
"It is ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the eighties, we should by now have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music."
--Joachim Lous translation of current Swedish joke, via rec.humor.funny

Techie Link of the Moment
Interesting suck.com article on WAP, and why it sucks. WAP is the underlying protocol that you use when you use "wireless internet" on your cellphone. Although the protocol itself isn't too too bad (except for an odd 1492 character limit in how much a server can send in one gulp), it's associated with WML, a terrible HTML-like language, and also having to use the cellphone keypad to laboriously tap in letters.

Quotes of the Moment
"As we say in the trade, nothing bad happens to a writer, everything is material."
"Enjoy your life, my dear; it is the only one you'll have on this earth, and it's a good earth."
--Garrison Keillor writing as Mr. Blue.
He is one of the wisest writers I've ever read. Taken together these quotes seem kind of cheesy, but in the context of his advice column they really work.

If you don't know about Richard Feynman, you might be scientifically literate, and you might be culturally literate, but you're not literate in scientific culture, and you should at least check out this site. Feynman has taught a lot of people what science is and how it should be done (from his groundbreaking work in particle physics to his speculative musings on nanotechnology ("There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom!") to his integrity on the committee investigating the explosion of the Challenger) --and also how life outside of science should be lived, how we can do interesting things in fields we're not 'experts' in, like how Feynman become a drummer for a ballet troop without knowing anything about music except how it sounds, or his love for the mysterious remote country of Tuva.

This quote is interesting in the way it relates meme theory and mortality-- how our ideas can live on beyond us, and passing on those memes might be more important than passing on our genes. (Speaking of which, random note: Mo worked with Feynman's son.)

Tax Code of the Moment
Mo found the following gem from the 2000 Massachusetts Resident Income Tax Form 1:

• Embezzled or other income from illegal activities is taxable and should be reported on Schedule X, line 5.

He also doesn't realize that the quest for elegance, for trying to shoehorn a complex problem into an 'elegant' solution, sometimes results in the worst kind of ugly. (When you're in love with your beautiful hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.)

Quote of the Moment
"While some look at what is and ask 'why?' and others look at what could be ask 'why not?' I look at my coffee table and ask 'where are my sunglasses?'"
--Paul Mather, subatomic humor (now a bit defunct)

Quote of the Other Moment
"Selling out is the new integrity."

Game of the Moment
Came home sick. Really felt unwell. Spent too much time unlocking every screen in Yoshi's Story, a way-too-cute platformer for the N64.

Television of the Moment
Right now I'm watching "Behind the Music" on Weird Al Yankovic. Weird Al's interesting, he's very down to earth when interviewed "for real", very different from his "wacky persona". (You can see this on the "Ask Al" section of his official website) I don't listen to him much any more, or at all come to think of it, but I still have a fond place in my musical heart for him. I think he's the "gateway drug" who has allowed a lot of young geeks get out of pretentious not-really-understood jazz and classical and into popular music.

2 pounds whole pecans 1/2 stick (2 ounces) unsalted butter 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 tablespoon honey 1/2 cup chopped fresh rosemary 2 teaspoons salt

Quote of the Moment
I don't pretend to understand the mysteries of relationships, but it seems to me that lust and passion and sex are how many men and women manage to fend off the natural shocks of matrimony and all that proximity and the inevitable bruises and the sagging heart.
--Mr. Blue

Link of the Moment
On the blender board of the loveblender Gala came up with the idea of having everyone submit their top 3 picks from the last year, this is the result.

When I was a kid I used to think that the original song was "deep". (Then again, I used to think "throw your teacher overboard / and listen to her scream -- Aaaaah!" was the best ending for it.) And in a way "life is but a dream" isn't as trivial as many people assume it is, but I had to modify the sentiment slightly to represent my current worldview. And my original draft of this version ended "consciousness is just the story that we tell ourselves" which is more interesting but doesn't scan so well.

Alternative Version
Row row row your boat
gently down the stream
of consciousness
which ain't all that it might seem

Link of the Moment
Many movies use this one stock scream sound effect, kind of an "aiiiiii!" It's called a "Wilhelm" after a character in one of the first films it showed up in (in the 1950s, although it was probably taken from Loony Tune cartoons before that.) It's shown up in all of the Star Wars flicks, even though often it doesn't quite fit. One guy has compiled a Series of Video Clips featuring this yell, it's kind of amusing.

I'm kind of a mixed case. I feel like I'm a selfmade person, more or less, though I have to remind myself I had a really good upbringing-- despite having parents living on minister's wages. On the other hand, there's a bit of property in the family trust, with me ending up sole direct heir of my maternal grandparents. But despite this middle ground I seem to occupy, I have to remember by view is skewed just by the happy job market I've stumbled into. Without that, I might be more counting on an eventual windfall.

Rant of the Moment
So I go to the United State Postal Service Website to find the nearest Post Office. Great, they have a link "Locate Post Offices". I enter the info for work, and get back an address. I have a bit of a trouble tracking down the address it serves up-- or rather, I find the building, but it seems to all belong to an HMO. I hunt around back. Turns out the address is just that of a mail distribution center. Gee, Thanks USPS, I really wanted to see all the grimy mailtrucks getting loaded with huge sacks of mail. I'm so happy you had a search engine that could oblige me on that. They really need a checkbox labeled "only show me post offices I might actually want to visit even if I'm not an employee or a homicidally irate patron." (Though I'm suddenly reminded of the mailguy job I had freshman year for Lewis Dorm at Tufts.)

Jerks of the Moment
If you own a domain, Network Services will now selling its database to marketers. Oh goody. I'm I keep my personal home information out of date. Great quotes:

"On your mark, get set, go! The VeriSign/Network Solutions domain registration database is available for the first time ever. Approximately 6 million unique customers, sliced and diced for you to target prospects ..."
"... You can target based on their status in the dot com lifecycle: Is their web site live, is it secure or e-commerce enabled? We'll even tell you about their host switching behavior ..."

Joke of the Moment
"What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake."
--from here, among other places.

Played Nintendo with my cousins Ivan and Kayla yesterday. It's funny to think that someday I'll be an old guy, and still playing videogames. Then again, my mom was a pretty decent player at Atari when I was growing up... I could beat her at games in general, but the games she really got into, she was untouchable-- 2600 Ms. Pac Man, Burger Time, Pengo, Missile Command....

Speaking of Missile Command, we decided to bomb Iraq. Kind of scary on the face of it, especially with the whole Israeli/Arab thing being at a low point anyway, though I'm not sure if it's worse that Clinton's missile-ing an aspirin factory when the whole Monica thing was getting underway.

More Republican Madness
On Reagan's birthday, the anti-tax firebrand Grover Norquist was busy promoting his latest Reagan-related project. (His last one was the successful effort to rename Washington National Airport Ronald Reagan National Airport. It used to be unusual, except in places like Stalingrad and Ciudad Trujillo, for important localities to be named after living politicians.) Norquist wants to replace the portrait of Alexander Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill with a portrait of Ronald Reagan. "Hamilton was a great American," Norquist jauntily told the Times. "But it's time to move on."
--Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker

The movie takes place in an old asylum, and one of the motifs is the use of Electroshock therapy. Watching the film reminded me of this one passage from Prozac Highway, a book I've been reading off and on. Much of the book is in the form of e-mail from participants in a mental illness support mailing list.

Spoken like a woman who's never worked night-shift. But the next one's bad. I went down to the drop-in centre and got in a fight about shock treatment with this old guy. He was saying how great it was and how it had really helped him. He had this voice, this voice you get to recognize. I told him, "Man, they have fucked up your brain. I can hear the damage when you talk." And he looked at me and said, "I've had a hundred shock treatments, I have to believe it was for something." I felt so fucking bad. What am I doing, rubbing this guy's face in it just to make my point.

Funny Dirty Link of the Moment
Ok, you have to be a bit of a geek to get this one. It's from a site for Adult Interactive Fiction. (Interactive Fiction is an old form of computer game, Zork and Adventure being the most famous examples, where the computer describes where your character is in words, and you type in what you want the character to do. I once reviewed an innovative piece of Interactive Fiction that describes the genre a bit more.) Anyway, This is the page that I find so funny. It's a set of instructions on what to type in to win one of the adult games. (I believe 'g' is the command for 'aGain', i.e. repeat the last command.) Without the supporting descriptions, it's just randomly lewd and goofy.

Link of the Moment
Cat's Eye Technologies has a lot of demented mini-languages. Befunge is particularly mind-brutalizing. FORTRAN meets the old game Lemmings-- your code pointer travels through a 2D grid, kind of like an old Atari videogame.

Exchange of the Moment
"She could suck the chrome right off a trailer hitch."
"Uh- I don't think the quality of that kind of activity should be rated in PSI."

Anxiety of the Moment
Despite the wonder of these sunglasses, I feel a little down. I'm reading Prozac Highway, a very realistic story about a performance artist struggling with depression, connecting with a support group e-mailing list. Sometimes between my anxiety attacks and just feeling blue (and reading about it sets up some sympathetic vibrations I imagine) I wonder if I have some minor level of mental illness. Very minor, and I'm able to use rationality as a kind of med. Sometimes I think I'd like to talk to some kind of psychiatrist, not because I really think I need the help, I just need someone to say "yeah, you do have a touch of it (whatever condition 'it' is), but you're coping ok." Someone who will be impressed with my mortality guide as a form of coping.

I guess today had a couple of weird things.

• First I saw a copy of "Worth" magazine that talked about all this longevity technologies. The idea that there might be some new things on the horizon, but I might miss out on them, is depressing. I'm able to convince myself that mortality's ok, but it's one thing to think it (an important thing) and another to really feel it deepdown. I'm getting there though. (Sometimes it seems dangerous to to be able to cope with mortality. If I ever got really depressed, I've lost some of my instinctual dread of taking my own life. Note to loved ones: I have no such plans! Don't worry.)
• After taking the photos for the Rollens pic, comparing them to some pix from high school, I wonder if I am balding after all, and if I should do something about that. Oy. I've always had thin hair and a far back hairline, so it's hard to know for certain, but I've probably just been in some level of denial all this time.
• My computer's acting up.
• I feel like I'm not getting stuff done.
• The month is kind of slipping by. Not too bad. I have this journal and another diary journal, so I can track the time. I know what happened the first 20 days of this month! Groundhog day was a long time ago! Still, it's one thing to know that and one thing to really live it flat out.
• I'm worried about how long of this 'blog journal my 8meg Palm pilot's going to be able to hold. Which was one of the main reasons why I let myself get the dang thing!

Sheesh. Way to make new law court.

And this is before Bush makes any new Supreme Court appointments! Maybe Congress will be so ticked off at its power being cut that they'll be less likely to approve a hyperconservative state's righter.

Game of the Moment
My online pal and role-model Ranjit was on a team that just got another game published at the shockwave site: It's called Loop and it's really beautiful in its simplicity. Draw lines around butterflies, that's it. Plus nicely stylized graphics (Think the Hungry Caterpillar) and good music. Its play mechanic is a bit like the old Vector game Quantum, but Ranjit says they independently came up with the line drawing idea. Not that it matters so much, it's still a good and innovative game.

Art Quote of the Moment
"Sorry Rob. I don't think 'Being a Dork' qualifies as being a performance piece. And bringing in your laundry hoping someone will do it for you is not a multimedia installation."

Virtual Candy
A little bit late for Valentine's Day, it's the Make Your Own Candy Heart. A chance to see how creative you can be with a maximum of 4 letters each on 2 lines. I guess Mo and I are lucky to have such short names...(via Cruel Site)

Rant of the Moment
VisualCafe. Visual Source Safe. Visual C++. Visual Interdev. What the hell? Were the previous versions designed for the blind, or what? It makes it harder for me to find the right icon when all I can see on the task bar are buttons captioned "Visua...", I have to rely on the damn icon, and it slows me down. Dang that's irritating.

"Mr. President," said a reporter with the BBC, "you have a meeting with Prime Minster Blair tomorrow -- "

"Correct," Bush said.

"There are some concerns in this country about the European plan for what they call a rapid-reaction force, their own military capability. What will you tell Prime Minister Blair about the American attitude to this rapid-reaction force?"

Again, Bush didn't answer the question; it must not have been on his cheat sheets. "I, first, look forward to the visit," Bush said. "I'm anxious to meet the prime minister. We've had a couple of good conversations on the telephone. I'm thankful that he's coming across the -- actually coming down from Canada -- but coming across to see, to visit us. Laura and I are looking to having a private dinner with he and Mrs. Blair Friday night. We'll be having a press availability after our meeting, and -- "

"I know, but I think a lot of people would like to -- "

"Well, why don't we wait until after he and I visit," Bush said, "so I don't have to give the same answer twice."

"But just on the whole outline of the question of the European defense capability -- "

"You bet," said the president. "I understand; you're trying to get me to tell you the answer twice. Britain and the United States have got a special relationship; we'll keep it that way. I look forward to talking to the prime minister about the importance of NATO. It is -- anyway, let me visit with him first. I promise to call upon you tomorrow."

An informal poll of White House reporters indicated that 100 percent were confident Bush had absolutely no idea what the BBC reporter was talking about.
--from Salon.com's Bush's Opening Night

Yet Another 'Priceless' Parody
NEW BONG: $50
COCAINE HABIT: $300
FINDING OUT THAT THE GOOD-OLD-BOY NETWORK CAN STILL RIG AN ELECTION IN THE DEEP SOUTH: PRICELESS
from this image on CamWorld

Quote of the Moment
"His code is 'write only'. It might work, but you have no chance of understanding or modifying it, you might as well burn it to CD."

Club Quote of the Other Moment
"Yeesh, you can really see where they dyed those black jeans, under the blacklight."
"Well, yeah, but it kind of fits with the 80s theme, as long as it's not coffee or pee stains I think I'm doing ok."

Link of the Moment
There's a surprisingly straightforward fart FAQ Here. I like its direct style.

I remember when I was in third grade or so, I got into an argument about how to spell "fart"-- I was convinced there was a U in there, "faurt", that it was some kind of French word or something.

Randomness of the Moment
"I praythee, Lorde, bequest me with thine finest crab rangoone, and ye olde beef with greenerie vegetables and tremendouse fine spice"
--Hypothetic D&Der ordering Chinese.

Peterman who I wrote this to (the one who always orders for Spicy Beef and Broccoli) pointed out that all RPGers aren't of the SCA variety. Still, I amused myself writing it.

Adult Quote of the Moment
Mallory collapsed off of her and lay blowing like a beached cetacean in the foetid air. His muscles felt like rubber, and he'd half-sweated the whisky off with the sheer work of it. He felt utterly wonderful. He felt quite willing to die. If the tout arrived and shot him dead on the spot he would somehow have welcomed it, welcomed the opportunity never to come back from that plateau of sensibility, the opportunity never to be Edward Mallory again, but only a splendid creature drowned in cunt and tea-rose
--Gibson/Sterling, from The Difference Engine

Movie Quote of the Moment
"You know what you are? You're God's answer to Job, y'know? You would have ended all argument between them. I mean, He would have pointed to you and said, y'know, 'I do a lot of terrible things, but I can still make one of these.' You know? And then Job would have said, 'Eh. Yeah, well, you win.'"
--Woody Allen, Manhattan, (via the IMDB)

Link of the Moment
Salon.com has an interesting article on the post-dot-com slackers, taking it easy after all the sound and fury of the late 90s. I know Mo and I both are a little bit more nervous in general. I think the non-techies are getting it worse than the engineers, but still it's not the job bonanza that it has been.

Anyway, today I got beneath the lowest weight I hit last time I was on a diet plan, in August of 1999. I think my attitude is better this time (based on the comments I write in my weight log) so hopefully I've found something more sustainable. That's the thing that quote doesn't cover, that you have to make a permanent life change of carrot consumption and mile running.

Link of the Moment
Fun web toy: The No.1 Song in the UK or USA for any date in the past 50 years. Hope the song for your birthday was better than mine.
Thanks Brooke -- check out her website Her linkpage (under 'a discovery') has some neat stuff, and I'm not just talking about the link back to here.

Other Links of the Moment
dieselsweeties.com is a very neat cartoon that I got to via biscuit theater on Yip Yop... also worth a click. Brooke grooves on the elf heads, but I like the cartoons.

Diesel Sweeties has a small cast of characters. Clango and Maura are the main characters, and they explore all the nuances of sweet sweet robot/human lovin'. I also like Indy Rock Pete.