Posted 2/1/2003 07:04:47 PM
another year
another party
more change in the guise of the same
life moves us from
unknown to unknown
in the simple play of knowing and being known.

Posted 2/1/2003 09:30:32 AM

Posted 2/1/2003 12:34:44 AM
Things I want to do at Minicorp before I die

Migrate everything from Oracle to PostgreSQL and claim the cost-savings bonus. (Employees get 5% of all major cost savings they deliver, so if I replace a million bucks of Oracle licensing with a big fat freeware zero...)

Posted 1/31/2003 11:56:19 PM

Posted 1/31/2003 11:00:47 PM
current: S.A.R. Mix

Posted 1/31/2003 10:29:29 PM
America's dangerous new style of war

It is ironic that at the moment the United States, by virtue of its military prowess, can most afford to set the highest standard in armed conflict, it is backing away from time-honored laws that impose the constraints of humanity upon slaughter.

Posted 1/31/2003 10:03:35 PM
Small Ritual's Network/Church via jonny.baker

Posted 1/31/2003 09:38:12 PM
coolest thing about the new Zwan?

stickers.

why in an age of digital downloads would one buy CDs? the romance. there is a certain ceremony around the anticipation, the purchase, the unwrapping, the first smell of the liner notes and the small surprises... it is not the commoditized music that sells--it is the experience of the absence, the acquisition, the muse's mediation through vinyl, through tape, through laser-read polymer.

settle down drones out of the PC speakers at the moment...

Posted 1/31/2003 09:26:32 PM
Wow. Shannon of Arabia is her own cousin 4 times removed...

Posted 1/31/2003 01:12:36 PM
after a long respite i must again
sing the praises of VMWare.

Posted 1/31/2003 08:20:35 AM
Quantum Teleportation? via /.

Employing a facet of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away...

We need a TCP/IP-like mechanism that routes atom transport around failures.
This is a long way off...

Posted 1/31/2003 03:07:04 AM
someone just woke me up slamming on my doorbell.
she had the wrong house.

Posted 1/30/2003 07:56:57 PM
If I could go back in time I'd want to meet Snoopy. -Mal

Posted 1/30/2003 04:48:18 PM
Mr Mandela... referring to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, declared that "if there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America".

Delivering a speech in Johannesburg, Mr Mandela asked: "Why is the US behaving so arrogantly?" He went on to accuse Tony Blair of acting like "the foreign minister of the United States". He suggested the countries were acting in such as way "because the secretary general of the UN [Kofi Annan] is now a black man. They [the US and Britain] never did that when secretary generals were white".

even if one disagrees with Nelson Mandela the moral obligation for America to respond remains. the brute facts of racism and genocide in the recent past of this nation will not go away by ignoring them. these actions cast a long shadow--especially when they are seen as precursor to the ongoing imperial American hegmony.

Posted 1/30/2003 10:17:50 AM
Not that long ago, biotech companies patenting genetic discoveries could go bulk shopping at the US Patent and Trademark Office... Those were the good old days.

Posted 1/30/2003 05:53:03 AM

AOLTW came to mind this morning. Another in the long line of American corporate failures--mergers that stripped value from investors rather than creating it.

Over the last year AOLTW built to $26B in debt as it lost $100B along with both of its titans--Case and Turner.

Train wreck.

Posted 1/29/2003 06:38:59 PM
my one wish for the world:

stop lying

yeah, i know, it will hurt you and other people in the short run.
long term it will make you *be* a better person.

the question of the lie brings up many, many rabbit trails.
living without lying is not being a whiney sap or an abrasive fuck all the time.
there is a discretion that truthful authenticity moves through that separates
truth-telling from both self-centered insecurity and loud opinion domination.

the way of truth-telling is a more primordial approach to the truth question than
the way of truth deducing. this is the way of parrhesia--the embodiment of truth as the prerequisite for truth.

more on this later.

Posted 1/29/2003 10:10:15 AM
i told myself that i would not publish any of these entries until i had something less-depressing to say. really, i am not that depressed (that is like someone else saying that they are happy). i guess that this not-that-depressed confession is less-depresing enough to publish.

Posted 1/29/2003 10:08:52 AM
in giving up there are two ways; the way of life and the way of otherwise.

Posted 1/28/2003 09:42:32 PM
mornings at work are depressing. mornings were once my most creative periods. now they are consumed in meaningless minutia. i sound like i am complaining. honestly, i am not. i am really quite thankful for this position. there are some good things about it. i am simply being honest about my perspective on "work" in general. i am secure in my identity and have enough going on in my life to fill all of the available time in the few years that remain. i don't need work for an identity or a peer-group or any of the other things people use work for. i whore myself out for money. it is that simple. i would prefer not to. there seems to be little choice in the matter.

Posted 1/28/2003 11:30:00 AM

%20

Posted 1/28/2003 10:56:52 AM
i want to see a 2 hour documentary on Slammer/Sapphire. wow.
it was all over in under a minute.

Posted 1/28/2003 10:55:58 AM
in the cascading flush of meme-waves patient zero is anonymously singular for an infinitesimal moment if at all. the entangled interconnection of multiple realities may in fact preclude any meaningful designation of start and end. the theoretically infinite interdependencies and their cascading effects are the sum and substance of all we will be and know for all time in all space. outside of absolute time/space, not merely our representational experience of time/space, is a whole other matter--a matter that is forever in our stories and never in our actualities.

Posted 1/28/2003 09:41:04 AM
3336
Dan
Hughes
__________
i am officially a number 9 hours of my waking day.
this is why people choose to be homeless, addicted or dead.

Posted 1/28/2003 08:38:36 AM
i'm going nuts from the chatter.
if i hear any more about the suburban-child-sports-draft-insomnia-modeling-dilemna st. john's will be required.

Posted 1/28/2003 05:57:16 AM
Sometimes you just want to think you’re gonna be ok; that your schizo life really is kismet’s arrow; that the summation will be greater than the discretely actual.

To this the universe speaks its one word: all this and more.

Posted 1/28/2003 05:57:03 AM
Giving up is no studied pursuit, no retreat of happenstance, no pubescent act of reverse identity affirmation. Giving up isn’t one of those things you just choose to do. Eventually, it chooses you. Anyone who says that they are giving up is not; anyone who talks at length about how they do not care does.

You don't need to try harder to care less. You just need to stop lying. Ironically, at that moment, you care more than you ever have before.

Posted 1/27/2003 10:06:14 PM
yeah, so, when you give up it sucks.
not because you know it sucks right away.
it sucks because you don't.

you know when you are not giving up.
it hurts with satisfaction.
it depresses with authenticity.
it pounds inside your head.
it drives you to create and weep and shake.

the problem with giving up is that you don't know it sucks right away.
your days are filled with trivial madness
cloaked in the fascination of the shiny and new.
when these can no longer be collected at a rapid enough pace
this perpetual distraction of momentary obsessions
finds its solace in the numbing
chemical embrace
whose chief end is a fratricidal
erasure of the soul's last gasps under the
pillow that suffocates the madness of creation.

)in giving up there are two ways; the way of life and the way of otherwise.(

Posted 1/27/2003 09:44:29 PM
have you ever done anything that you otherwise would never have done in an effort to motivate yourself to do something you never really wanted to do?

Posted 1/27/2003 09:42:56 PM
i was telling Al the other day, "Al, this is all like coming out of amnesia."

{i wonder now if it is not more like trading one amnesia for another. an exchange in the economy of chosen forgettings.}

Posted 1/26/2003 09:54:33 AM

i woke up this morning with pants on. allow me to add a mid-stream preface to this by saying that, no, i am not on drugs nor did i have more than one drink last night. so again, i woke up this morning with pants on--despite having gone to bed without pants on.

as i slowly awoke this morning i lay, as is my custom, and watched the evidence of a new day through the ceiling level windows that show me the sky and the season through the trees whose tops are my morning companions. in these indiscernible moments between sleep and full waking cognition i realized that my ash grey Banana Republic pants were on. granted, i did go out in them last night. they are a bit snug, though, so upon retiring i took them off. this morning they were not only on, but were in fact zipped and buttoned. now, these pants were bought at the height of my heroin-look period brought on by the emotional train wreck of a relational separation and the coincidental fascination with protein diets whose end happened to overlap that time period. that being the case, the pants are, in fact, a size or two small on my current, less than runway, physique and would never have been zipped or buttoned if slept in.

"how did this happen," i thought to myself still awash in the last vestiges of sleep's twilight. i went through the standard options: alien experimental abduction, a glitch in the matrix, a mistaken memory with regard to taking the pants off and the like.

i think that i am settling for explanation number two. it is the most reassuring.

Posted 1/26/2003 08:38:18 AM

Alex, of Golublog fame, has a wit and candor that makes him enchanting to read even when he is doing nothing more than investing his normal Chicagoan life with the mystery of a feigned subtext pulled from a video game, film or Levinas.

His recent post on The Peace of Chen was a great way to begin this fine Sunday morning.

My fascination with Alex stems from something beyond his vast vocabulary, his self-deprecating humor and his engagement with the newer continental thinkers (I believe, if my memory serves me, that I was introduced to Golublog through a long post regarding Derrida in AKMA's comments one Sunday morning); it stems from these traits and practices being rooted in the practical idiosyncrasies of anthropology and his Jewish heritage.

The latter being a major point. I have been saying for years among my compatriots in the Abrahamic faiths that I wanted to find some "postmodern" Jewish friends (for lack of a better descriptor). The perspective and laughter that Alex brings me is fitting the bill at the moment.

One other thing, Alex wrote a novel during the National Novel Writing Month last year. He is slowly releasing it to the web here: Small Ensembles.