Current Music: Einherjer (Dragons of the North) - Forever Empire

Blah blah breaking rules. I am being lazy about setting up an ikiwiki based weblog, but that's just because I am digging deep into the guts of McCLIM to fix the two remaining issues with my almost-but-not-quite-perfect gadget based dialog patches I wrote months ago... maybe.

Brains One / Brains Two. Curse all of you who did not come to see us in Chapel Hill.

p.s. feeding trolls is bad for you ;-) I am a terrible person.

Current Music: Nevermore (Dreaming Neon Black) - 02: Beyond Within

You are all retarded.

And the great birds said "No, we do not hate little lambs; rather we love them for they have the tastiest meat."…

Current Music: OSI (Office of Strategic Influence - Limited Edition (Disc 1)) - 07: shutDOWN

A paragragraph inside the lj-raw

Current Music: Metallica (Master Of Puppets) - : Disposable Heroes

Thanks to mpnolan there is now a fancy syndication account for my website updates as ulorg_updates. You can friend it, or just read the RSS feed directly. The URL of the feed will remain static, but I'll probably make a few tweaks to the content. Any suggestions on improving the format are welcome.

I'll be adding a page soon with an updated description of the software I'm using to manage my site (muse, darcs, and two small Llisp programs to generate my book list and rss feed).

I'm trying to decide on a new weblogging engine to use at journal.unknownlamer.org (yeah writing my own is more effort than it is worth), but that is a bit lower priority now since I don't journal all that often and now have a tolerable feed of updates to my main site. I'm leaning a bit toward pybloxsom so that I can publish via muse; after I decide on a weblog and set it up I'm going to finish my journal dumping script (at least livejournal still has a decent xmlrpc interface). Naturally I'll post an update here once I've done this.

Ah, so close to ditching livejournal... it's such a shame that they gradually betrayed every one of their principles after being purchased by SixApart.

If anyone reading this has a paid account, could you perchance add a syndication account for http://unknownlamer.org/darcsweb/browse?r=unknownlamer.org;a=rss as ulorg_rawfeed for me? I want to see how my raw darcs changes feed looks before spending time writing a script to make a nicer rss feed.

I'm thinking about just setting up a static archive of my livejournal and perhaps using pybloxsom with muse to publish my sporadic journal-style updates and instead waste my time putting things on my site instead. As such having a readable feed of my site updates would be nice.

Current Music: Zyklon (World OV Worms) - : Worm World

Since livejournal will be showing ads on my journal to anonymous browsers I am now exporting my journal and writing an importer script for some other engine. Probably nuclblog.

My next post will say where it is... But basically fuck livejournal. They no longer support free software and are now violating their pledge to never display ads on journals; they got away with making it opt-in for people who wanted paid account features without money, but now that they are forcing it upon everyone... never does not have an expiration date.

Hopefully someone has already written an ATOM client for Emacs...

Current Music: Tiamat (Wildhoney) - 04: 25th Floor

A few weeks ago I decided to abandon social networking (read: facebook) because it really was nothing more than a waste of time. Since then I've been wasting my time in a more productive matter by updating my personal website because it'll never stop being 1998 for me.

I added a page for my cat, a bit on homebrewing (which I get to do again soonish), a minimal code projects page, began to automagically generate my book list (from a simple database), and yanked some old backgrounds and Window Maker themes from my pre-muse website.

I've also managed to figure out CFFI well enough to begin binding libavcodec.

I still need to regularly practice piano, do some vocal work, and finish my mcclim patches... Now that the almighty Internet is very boring and provides nothing for me to despairingly reload checking for updates that are not there, I find it a bit easier to do things.

I potentially have a client for a programming project now, and a maybe workable startup too.

Current Music: Iced Earth (Burnt Offerings) - 04: Brainwashed

Apart from the ascetic ideal, man, the human animal, had no meaning so far. His existence on earth contained no goal; "why man at all?"—was a question without an answer; the will for man and earth was lacking; behind every great human destiny there sounded as a refrain a yet greater "in vain!" This is precisely what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that man was surrounded by a fearful void—he did not know how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He also suffered otherwise, he was in the main a sickly animal: but his problem was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, "why do I suffer?"

Man, the bravest of animals and one of the most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering a such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far—and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all; the ascetic ideal was in every sense the "faute de mieux" par excellence so far. In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism. This interpretation—there is no doubt of it—brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt.

But this notwithstanding—man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer like a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense—the "sense-less"—he could now will something; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved.

We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself—all this means—let us dare to grasp it—a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will! … And, to repeat in conclusion what I said at the beginning: man would rather will nothingness than not will.—

And now On the Genealogy of Morals is finished! Next up is Ecce Homo followed by perhaps some dry (but short) English "philosophy" (oh, I am a funny man) and The Island of Doctor Moreau before jumping in on either the Discourses of Epictetus or the Rhetoric of Aristotle and perhaps a re-reading of The Divine Comedy.

Tags: nietzsche, reading
Current Music: Opeth (My Arms, Your Hearse) - 06: Demon of the Fall

I now know how to replace derailer cables. It was very exciting. It was a bit perplexing at first: I stared at the partially disassembled shifter unit and wondered how to remove the cable... because I am very dumb. After it dawned upon me I fixed up the bike in twenty minutes and another fifteen of futzing with shift index settings and whatnot because of the new cable tension.

Much fancier panniers.

Tags: bicycle
Current Music: Mithotyn (King of the Distant Forest) - 01: King of the Distant Forest

Mmmm equipment failure. It split while I was riding wearing shorts for the first time ever too. Fun!

Now I have a replacement cable and some new bike tools... time to test my mechanical skills.

Tags: bicycle, failure
Current Music: Porcupine Tree (Stupid Dream) - 01: Even Less

The last few months have been dull.

I setup a neat MAME/MESS thing and can now play some old arcade and console games. After configuring this all, getting two broken xbox pads, breaking one permanently with solder (and then desoldering braid ... goodbye board parts while attempting to fix my solder spill), and then making things work OK for two player I lost interest as is the way with such things and so wasted a large bit of time. 'Tis what I do.

I mostly have clisp working on EABI ARM/OpenEmbedded. Now generating a package is a huge PITA because of the hairy clisp build process and utter lack of documentation for bitbake. Eventually.

bpt and I are in a startupish now. I need to hack some stuff up for that this week.

I managed to somehow break my laptop, take it apart entirely, discover that the power switch was shorted, and then curse at myself very loudly for not figuring this out before. Of course the only reason I found this was out because of tapping at the power button angrily and noticing that it kept turning on after a random number of taps and turning itself off again after five seconds...the time it takes for the machine to be forcibly shutoff with the power button. My wireless seemingly broke because of this so I tried to take the top off again to fix the antenna cable and managed to break part of the keyboard frame in the process. Turns out I just needed to upgrade the card firmware to work with my shiny new kernel. Now my laptop is held together with electrical tape.

I need to setup some magic bbdb scoring stuff so that I can use email again. Once I do this I will abandon realtime electronic communication.

I have failed yet again to make anything more than a halfhearted attempt at practicing keyboard. I did manage to fetch my fancy 76 key keyboard (with weighted keys even) and drum machine from Maryland and set them up at least. Of course I've been telling myself I needed to pick piano back up for five years now. Imagine if I had been capable of making myself do things five years ago (or ever).

I picked up a copy of Kahlil Gibran's Sand and Foam printed in 1943 from a nice old bookshop. Now I have four old and properly bound copies of his works and one in a modern paperback-in-a-hardcase. I intend to burn the latter in a ritual against the modern publishing industry and their hatred of everything I love. I managed to score what looks to be a decent translation of Epictetus's Discourses and Enchiridion from the 50s as well. Hardcover books are nice and I think I shall no longer purchase softcover books. The only issue comes with the Kierkegaard collection because the hardcover versions have been out of print since the 80s leading to problems solvable only by giving old men in smelly bookshops a few hundred bucks. Ok, maybe that is the problem with everything I like to read. My bank account finds this disagreeable, but it is a vain thing and has no interest in beauty.

I finally got back on track with reading stuff and am a few pages from the end of The Genealogy of Morals and then have Ecco Homo to read before either Discourses or Rhetoric. The latter would let me be a jerk when calling a certain popular politician a dirty lying rhetoritician, and the former would be better to quiet my mind and help me reembrace the philosophy of despairing lies so that I remain functional. Doomed either way I suppose.

I can do five and three quarters of a chinup now. And again with a half an hour break between. And four a third time. I tried to pull myself onto a high ledge and failed utterly though so I am still not functional.

Misery etc.

Goodbye for another two months.

Current Music: Green Carnation (Journey to the End of the Night) - 04: Under Eternal Stars