Woot back to civilization. Driving on the wrong side of the road rules.
Can't wait to get home and code, though.

OK finished the book. Despite a couple of surprises,my previous stucf
mostly stands. :) If anything, disappointed by the endings lack of 
ambition...

So after recently finishing "The Confusion" (see below), waiting for the
final book in that series, I picked up in the airport "The Da Vinci Code".
About 2/3 through it, and it's probably not good style to review a book
while not having finished it, but maybe it'll be interesting to see how
my opinion changes when I finish it. Basically, compared to Stephenson's
books, it just seems a bit shallow in its characters and story. The ideas
that Brown presets are definitely interesting and keep me reading to find
out what will come next, but it's all quite plausable and lacks (for me,
someone who has never really bought into Christianity) the mind-altering
madness of Snow Crash, for example (which TDVC seems to have some parallels
with). I miss the epic nature of Quicksilver/Confusion that was so large
in scope. And they took me a long time to read. But they were a pain to
bring on airplanes (large, hardback, 1000 page books, heh. I didn't want
to wait for paperback). I'll probably update tomorrow or the next day,
at this rate, with how my review changes...

Meanwhile, my friend Dave Newton (no, not the manager of Ride, heh),
sent me this link.  Outstanding, and good too. Goes good with what my other 
good friend Dave (Biderman this time) sent me, this mp3.

Anyway...

It has been an interesting weekend. 

Too much drinking for me, indeed, but feeling ok. 

Friday night's conversations tended to that of jewelery making
and politics, and taxes (estate, brackets, why we need them, bla bla bla).

But last night, due to the nature of meeting people you have 
multiple potential connections with (if that's not too obfuscated), 
I met someone who works for (and probably started or something) a 
company that I was familiar with, one that really has pissed me 
(and many people like me) off in the past. This is all a very 
drunken party context, but we had a conversation that dragged on, 
him with his fifth of tequila and me with a small glass of scotch. 

(keeping names out of this -- sir, you know who you are, and if 
you wish to rebutt and let it be known who you are, I will gladly
give venue. mostly I'm just venting feelings here, so don't take
it personally. we just disagree on shit. oh, and I would also
like to apologize to my new neighbor who had to hear most of this
and was probably a buzzkill)

At the time the conversation was a little bit amusing, but in 
retrospect I get pissed off thinking about certain elements. Namely: 
This company I speak of is one that is very patent-centric so we had 
much differences on the subject of patents. One line he used multiple
times in defending his stance (no doubt he had used it many times 
before, likely with more success):

"when you go and invent something, you'll understand" 
"you'll want to protect the things you invent, you won't want people to STEAL it from you". 

I don't know how to write my response to this, having tried writing a 
big paragraph that just made me dizzy. So here are some thoughts:

1) The patent that this company was biggest on enforcing (as far as I
could tell) was one that they didn't actually invent, they BOUGHT. So 
yeah, they have to get return on investment. Fair enough.

2) I don't really consider myself to having invented anything, but I
do realize that I could have patented things that I had developed. No
doubt. SO DONT FUCKING TELL ME I'LL UNDERSTAND IF I EVER INVENT SOMETHING.

3) Maybe I'm not enough of a capitalist, or maybe I'm too much of one,
but I think that  if you come up with some new idea, in this age, I think 
the way to exploit it is by building it, not patenting it and preventing 
other people from building it. 

4) Worrying about protecting patents and having other people STEAL them 
from you seems wrong. I mean, why make shit if you're just going to be
freaking out about what other people might be doing..

5) It seems to me that having an idea or technology that is unpatented
will encourage more improvement on the underlying idea/technology, as
well as competition and incentive for improvement (his response was 
something to the effect of "and we have the best of breed technology",
and I'm like "best of breed because you'll sue anybody who competes?".)
If Intel had a completely valid all-encompassing patent on
the microprocessor and anything like it, that doesn't seem like it
would be healthy, nor does it seem like we'd be where we are today.

6) As someone who really enjoys writing code and making things, I feel
like it's art. Being able to sit down, make something that's completely
new to me from scratch, and infringe on a patent owned by a huge multi-
national corporation, that hoards patents as a leveraging tool for
other huge multi-national corporations, who patent as much as possible,
just sems like a really bad situation. I mean, it's been said before,
but it's fucked up. Very.

That is about all. Maybe more later.

(edit: we did manage to agree on one thing, that a certain other company
that we both had experiences with sucked).

Also: I'm finding that "A Perfect Circle - 13th Step" is a quite good album.

Seems my last update had me bumped from Nullsoft to misc on Webdog. 
Bastards! JK I love you Webdog. Sort of.

Got my AVR starter kit, the STK500. I must say, I'm having a blast with it.
Their development tools are pretty good, and the hardware itself rocks.
(mmm 1 cycle instructions, and running at decent clock rates).

Enjoying getting back to the basics, writing (err, cut&pasting anyway) 
serial code that works by setting the state of the serial line to high and
low, and more. Had some frustrating time with a bad serial cable, but got 
that sorted out. Now the hard part, which I know little about, will be 
making a simple custom board for the footswitches. Basically this 
microcontroller will read a number of switches and knobs, and detect events 
on them, and send serial messages to the host computer (which will be running 
Jesusonic) notifying it what the user has done. All super simple, but should 
work good. anyway, there will always be room for second gen, of having a 
little LED or LCD display on the footboard...

A kind reader pointed out to me that I made a similar mistake as
Bill Gates did in his book, in saying "factor large primes". I had
the luxury of a head injury at the time (as the passage was keen
to point out), so that's my excuse. What I meant to say on June 17th, 
was "factor large numbers into their prime factors" rather than "factor 
large prime numbers". Thank you, sir (I don't know your name, but I can
say 'mr dkl tessellated who is uberpedantic'), and I'm pleased to know
that I already had the ability to factor large primes, in constant time,
err well logarithmic time, actually, since each digit takes time to write
out...
[edit: or I suppose, saying "factor large numbers into their prime
factors is redundant, I could just say "factor large numbers"]

In other news, just finished reading (last night) The Confusion by Neal
Stephenson. So good. I can't wait for the third book in the series.
I LOVE YOU NEAL. YOU RULE. CAN I BUY YOU A CHOCOLATE TREAT?  :) 

Now I gotta decide what to read next, until September.

In the mean time, ordered an Amtel AVR starter kit. mmm.

Oh the irony, that on Webdog, I'm the only one (of Nullsoft) who's updated 
his .plan this year, and I don't even work there anymore! HAHA.

Installed debian onto an old Vaio 505LS I had lying around.
Had to take the drive out to install onto it, they sure bury them in
these things! The big Fujitsu I have is easy to remove the drive...
Anyway, definitely missing Windows less and less, though still some.
Making XMMS use the winamp base skin helped, haha.

My light head injury seems to be getting better, still sore as shit.
Been making new Jesusonic effects and improving the old ones more. 
Still a lot of work to do on the hardware side. Gotta start designing
a good floorboard, perhaps using a microcontroller to communicate with
the main board via serial... and have to find a good way to do a small
LCD to one of these small via boards...

Christophe and I made this mp3, testing out some new Jesusonic effects,
and otherwise playing around.

Ah fun today dealing with the bank for a small business account. The 
account person there liked the company name a lot, though. Though she
did misspell it at one point leaving out one of the o's. Ha ha. Oops.

Thinking about canceling my Hiptop service since I never use it, and
it gets very little signal at home (whereas my phone gets plenty).


--

Oww, completely slammed my head into a doorway. Ouch. That'll take
the bounce out of my step...

Maybe this will temporarily disable part of my brain and let me learn
how to factor large primes using my mind. Or to play the guitar better.
Or vaporize a yak at 300 yards, err, something like that. Doubt it,
probably will just give me a sore neck and bump on the head for a
few days. Belh.

And it looks like we have fleas in our carpet. And the ALSA drivers
for the recent 686B VIA chipsets can't record (But can play back) 
properly. Bitch. Moan. Here I go.

It pisses me off when I hear people say shit like "man, if I ever
get a lot of money I'm going to move it all into some tax free 
country blablabla".. I mean, if you get that money living in a 
society that enables you to make that money, don't you think it's
your duty to pay tax? And if that society as any good, with a large
amount of money, you shouldn't have any trouble making it grow,
WHILE paying taxes. Or do the tax-free muni bonds. Then you're 
investing in your state. Anyway...

Did this a couple days ago, combined a jam from a few weeks ago with 
a pd sample.

happened to fit pretty close, heh.

bleh. drama.

Mostly moved, lots of unpacking to do though.
I need to get a couple of these.

I'd be willing to buy them. Anybody have any ideas who I should talk to?
(update later, got em, thanks)

I bowled a 161 last night!

In unrelated news, my brother Brennan's bitchlog is something I read
a fair amount, cause I agree with a lot of what he has to say. Wish
I could do more to help shit, too.. http://badmofo.org/hl. Fritz really
wants to help too. What can we do?

I've been saying this for a long time, well over a year now.

Heading to E3 tomorrow for a night.. should be lame as usual.
Not really lame, just doesnt interest me that much.
So been spending all my time on this: www.jesusonic.com
It's getting to be very rad and usable. Now if I could just find
a cheap 24 bit USB audio adapter, ideally USB-powered...

All the working in linux has been fun. Making your own tiny bootable
system is groovy. Had to debug the kernel initialization process
for that (now obsolete) Gateway Connected Touch Pad to get it to
boot properly into text mode. Whee I should release the kernel patch,
ha ha. I'm actually pretty impressed with the performance of the 400mhz
Crusoe processor. Not bad for the floating point code that we're running.
The sound on that thing is terrible though, and I couldn't get the ALSA
drivers for it to work, so I'm using a Creative MP3+ USB device for it,
which actually works pretty good (though it's sadly only 16 bit).

Anyway, it's all exciting for me, and addicting. mmm.

So I'm finding that my Fujitsu laptop is like a hard drive oven.
It looks as if my new disk in it may have failed-- it's only been
in there for a year or so (edit: since last august), and the last one failed.. 
In all fairness this one is a Hitachi (*cough*IBM*cough*) Travelstar, so 
where the fault lies, I don't know. I'm trying to recover my ntfs partition,
and it's being a real pain. Might just do a fresh install, but if
the drive is what's failing, I should wait til I get a new one.
But if the laptop is killing the drives, maybe it's time for a new
laptop.. :/ spent all day dealing with this shit, makes me hate 
computers. oh well, anyway, I'm not losing any data thankfully 
(hooray for backing up non-replaceable data. oops I forgot to back
up WINNT\, oh well (it's a pain to backup anyway) ). 
Having said that, if it wasn't for the heat, I would completely love
this laptop. But it gets soo hot. bleh who needs laptops anyway, they
just break all the time.

Saw DJ Shadow / Quannum World 2004 on Saturday. It was actually
slightly annoying. When Shadow was playing his stuff it was great,
when it was some other (more hiphop stuff) it was good, but there
was WAY WAY too much of the "how are you doing bay area...that's 
not a big enough cheer, please try again" and shit. Sure, it's cool
to have bands do that once in a while, but every 5 fucking minutes?
I mean, YOU HAVE OUR MONEY. PLAY SOME GODDAMN MUSIC. THANK YOU, I
will end my rant here, because it would just be more of the same.

For a long time I've been contemplating (and discussing with friends)
moving all of my software development over to open platforms. It's 
something I really want to do, but unfortunately I haven't yet been
able to bring myself to it. Partly because I know win32 so well, and
partly because a lot of the apps I'm used to using aren't available on
other platforms. And the other part is that the userbases are so much
smaller, and while I don't really care about the commercial implications
of that, it does mean I can't take shit over to friends' houses and try
it out (though maybe Knoppix is a good way to mitigate around that). But 
I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to ready.  It just seems like 
the right thing to be doing, especially given the way win32 is headed.

That being said, if Microsoft wasn't trying to forge ahead and I could just
use win2k and the win2k-era APIs, and have good hardware support for it, 
I'd probably be more inclined not to switch. 

something I made real quick, the real interesting part is how bad the guitar sounds.