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

Tags: kahlil gibran, old books

Nor can any consummate bliss without being Generated
On Earth; of those whose Emanations weave the loves
Of Beulah for Jerusalem & Shiloh. in immortal Golgonooza
Concentering in the majestic form of Erin in eternal tears
Viewing the Winding Worm on the Desarts of Great Tartary
Viewing Los in his shudderings, pouring balm on his sorrows
So dread is Los's fury. that none dare him to approach
Without becoming his Children in the Furnaces of affliction

Jerusalem is finished after far too long.

Now to finish my CLIM gadget stuff (I finally figured out the input context stuff for text-field gadgets and now I just need to clean up and integrate my code into the mcclim source tree).

Tags: blake, jerusalem
Current Music: Mercyful Fate (9) - 03: Sold My Soul

Today I was able to fix the sheet disowning problems I was having after modifying gadgets in accepting-values; the problem turned out to be because of incremental redisplay creating a new gadget every time the value changed. Naturally these new gadgets had no parent hence the problem with disowning them. Now my code for gadget based dialogues in McCLIM works! All that is left to do is cleaning up the code (splitting some functions that use typecase into generics and whatnot). The nice part is that the dialog code is pretty simple compared to what other toolkits would force me to write

(define-hello-command (com-foo :name t) ()
  (let ((foo nil)
        (bar nil)
        (baz nil))
    (accepting-values (*standard-input* :align-prompts :right)
      (setf foo (accept 'integer
                        :view '(slider-view
                                :width 400
                                :show-value-p t
                                :min-value -100 :max-value 100
                                :orientation :horizontal
                                :number-of-quanta 200)
                        :default 4
                        :query-identifier 'foo))
      (setf bar (cons (accept '(subset foo bar baz quux)
                              :default '(foo baz)
                              :view '(list-pane-view :width 100)
                              :query-identifier 'bar)
                      (accept '(member eins zwei drei vier fünf)
                              :default 'zwei
                              :view '(option-pane-view :width 100)
                              :prompt "Deutsch macht Spaß"
                              :query-identifier 'bar-1)))
      (setf baz (accept 'boolean
                        :view 'toggle-button-view :query-identifier 'baz)))
    (format t "RETURNED ~A ~A ~A~%" foo bar baz)))

I looked at the Franz CLIM userguide (which is the de facto CLIM 2.2 specification according to the McCLIM manual), and have decided to put in the extra few hours of work to implement a few related features from CLIM 2.2 since they make it much easier to use gadget based dialogues by setting a default view for frames and such. After implementing the stream view and frame view stuff I'll be able to get rid of most of the manual :view arguments in calls to accept within a dialogue.

While attempting to get a prettier screen shot I managed to find a bug in the pixie clx look that prevented sliders from calling the value changed callback. Hopefully I fixed it correctly and my patch will be accepted.

All of this just so that I could have nice drop down boxes and still use presentations in my D&D tools program.

I still have to finish getting Elephant working with clisp, hacking ffcall to work on EABI ARM, and writing a touchscreen style frame mixin for CLIM to get this running on my Freerunner whenever it magically appears. I should probably hack together some CFFI based bindings for dbus too so I can access the built in phone framework stuff. Epic tasks ahead, but worthwhile to have Emacs level hackability on a PDA/Phone.

Tags: clim, common lisp, lisp, mcclim
Current Music: Meshuggah (Destroy Erase Improve) - 08: Terminal Illusions

Hey look some gadgets inside of an accepting-values.

It doesn't quite work for some gadgets (wierd errors occur when disowning them during the output record destruction), but I've gotten McCLIM's accepting-values machinery to more or less work with things other than textual-dialog-view. I couldn't have done this on my own; Paul Werkowski posted some code to implement the LispWork's CLIM accept-values-pane which provided a decent base to work from.

With another few hours of work I ought to have something working enough to clean up and try to submit to the McCLIM devel list!

Tags: clim, common lisp, lisp, mcclim

$4. In store credit. From trading in really shitty scifi novels.

Tags: books, tolkien
Current Music: Blind Guardian (Nightfall in Middle Earth) - 06: The Curse of Feanor

So it seems that no one sees things I share on facebook depsite them being declared interesting, and no one cares about what I write here because I ramble incessantly about very boring things. And so here I present to you a series of things I think are neat to placate Sir Thomas of the House of Square Burgers.

Trees!

• A depressing map of the destruction of Old Growth forest in North America. We pretty much have none left.
• A real life hobbit hole

William Blake Is Really Neat

• Europe: Spiderwebs! This is one of my favorite Blake plates.

  Between the clouds of Urizen the flames of Orc roll heavy
  Around the limbs of Albions Guardian, his flesh consuming.
  Howlings & hissings. shrieks & groans. & voices of despair
  Arise around him in the cloudy Heavens of Albion, Furious

• Jerusalem: Fancy Moons

  I know thy deceit & thy revenges, and unless thou desist
  I will certainly create an eternal Hell for thee. Listen!
  Be attentive: be obedient! Lo the Furnaces are ready to recieve thee.
  I will break thee into shivers: & melt thee in the furnaces of death
  I will cast thee into forms of abhorrence & torment if thou
  Desist not from thine own will, & obey not my stern command:
  I am closd up from my children! my Emanation is dividing
  And thou my Spectre art divided against me. But mark
  I will compell thee to assist me in my terrible labours. To beat
  These hypocritic Selfhoods on the Anvils of bitter Death
  I am inspired! I act not for myself: for Albions sake
  I now am what I am! a horror and an astonishment
  Shuddring the heavens to look upon me: Behold what cruelties
  Are practised in Babel & Shinar, & have approachd to Zions Hill

• Jerusalem: Chariot of Death If I were ever to get something inked upon my body it would be this neat fiery chariot.

  And these the Four in whom the twenty-four appear'd four-fold:
  Verulam. London. York. Edinburgh. mourning one towards another
  Alas! The time will come, when a mans worst enemies
  Shall be those of his own house and family: in a Religion
  Of Generation, to destroy by Sin and Atonement, happy Jerusalem.
  The Bride and Wife of the Lamb. O God thou art Not an Avenger!

Speaking of Philosophy

• Conversations of the Taoist Master Fu Hsiang. From the man who brought us the neat Qi programming language comes a rather nice set of Taoist discourses. Our resident nihilist taoist friend Tony approves.

  In order to arrive at a state where good and evil are allowed to exist, a state of separation between me and others must have come into being. This is the proper meaning of the Fall. The fruit of the Forbidden Tree is the awareness of separation and the formation of the ego self. From this separation arises the possibilities of treachery, deceit, lies on one hand and acts of altruism, and the overcoming of self-interest on the other.

Philosophers and Scientists Are Cool

• Kierkegaard I find this most amusing.
• Magnificient Beard! NEVER
• The best LJ userpic of all time
• The answer to despair
• The Truth
• Doooooom
• Cats cats cats

I suppose that is all. Good day.

Tags: comics, deforestation, kierkegaard, trees, william blake
Current Music: Mithotyn (Gathered Around the Oaken Table) - 10: Guided by History

O what is Life & what is Man. O what is Death? Wherefore
Are you my Children. natives in the Grave to where I go
Or are you born to feed the hungry ravenings of Destruction
To be the sport of Accident! to waste in Wrath & Love, a weary
Life. in brooding cares & anxious labours, that prove but chaff.

A few days ago I resolved to finally finish Jerusalem. As it had been ages since I last picked it up I naturally had to begin again, but this was not too bad as I had gotten sidetracked after a mere six plates. I have now finished the first chapter and am a few plates into the second (30 out of 100). It has so far proven to be the most comprehensible of Blake's epics, but this may just be because I've spent the last couple of years on and off immersed in his system and mostly understand the meaning behind the interplay of the four Zoas and his mythological history.

I've filled my head with utterly useless knowledge. Look at me I can read some obscure Romantic poet's insanity. At least it is pretty.

I've also started in on the Poetic Edda (Prose and Heroic Lays) albeit in an old translation from good old project gutenberg. Norse Mythology is neat, and slowly viking metal is making a tad bit more sense. Yet more useless knowledge.

I still need to finish On the Genealogy of Morals; I finished the first essay but two more still remain to be reread. After Jerusalem I shall resume reading it methinks.

After many months of being lame and not bothering to look for an Indian shop, I managed to find one and have procured some green cardamom pods. Finally my old chai spice blend can be rebalanced to remove the overpowering ginger via the addition of 30g of Cardamom and 20g of true cinnamon (yeah that was a bitch to find, but dear god is it so much better than evil cassia that mccormick and friends pretend is cinnamon). I should have a bit of strong and malty Assam tea early next week, and then I can once again make delicious chai!

I realized that I lack any decent honey at the moment, and so I googled about for farmer's markets in the region (thousands of bees swarming everywhere pollinating plants and making tasty honey). There appears to be a year round one that is rather large in Raleigh that I was unaware of as I am very lame, and so tomorrow I shall rectify this as the weather shall be nice and 30 miles of biking sounds like a nice idea (it would be a mere 26, but I must run through the middle of Cary to grab me some mead for rituals relating to the New Moon). If they lack honey (it is a bit early, and who knows maybe all of the local bees died or something) at least I can maybe get something else. And of course, the adventure of dodging asshats in cars trying to kill me.

My poor bike is a bit sad at the moment. The suspension is in serious need of an overhaul, and so I have finally invested in a grease gun and a few tubes of grease (everyone loves the Internet). I looked up the service manual for my fork, and it seems that I was supposed to be injecting grease into it every couple of months given the frequency I ride, and it has kind of gone almost two years of near daily riding without any servicing. Now it goes up and down when I brake hard which is very ungood. The overhaul at least is not so hard: I must merely remove the spring, degrease the inside of the fork, replace the spring and regrease the whole thing, and adjust the travel. Maybe an hour of work.

Alas, the hubs are also dragging! They too should have been repacked and given some love every six months. Now I have to get a cone wrench, bearing grease, and some bearings. The sucky part is that this is one the trickiest bits of bike maintenance. At the same time I'll gain a useful skill. It'll be nice to have lower rolling resistance as well (if I do things properly it'll be like having a new bike).

I should probably rerun all of my cabling as well, but I am lazy and that can be put off for a few more months. I do need to stop being lazy about my front fender though; perhaps on my adventure tomorrow I can go by the hardware store and pick up hose clamp and pray that the stays fit on the clamp screws (no braze ons? Time to hack up a solution).

I was poking about on last.fm looking for shows to go to, and lo! A beautiful sight passed before mine eyes! Paganfest is coming to Raleigh so now I get to see awesome pagan metal bands and not have to somehow get myself to northern Virginia to do so. After nearly two years of not being able to go to shows I finally get a good spring of shows: Sabbat, Eluveitie and Tyr, and Symphony X. Quite the series of shows indeed.

Around Golgonooza lies the land of death eternal! a Land
Of pain and misery and despair and ever brooding melancholy;
In all the Twenty-seven Heavens, numberd from Adam to Luther;
From the blue Mundane Shell. reaching to the Vegetative Earth.

Tags: bicycle, blake, metal, tea
Current Music: Symphony X (Paradise Lost) - 01: Oculus ex Inferni

PRAYER

Father in heaven! Teach us to pray rightly so that our hearts may open up to you in prayer and supplication and hide no furtive desire that we know is not acceptable to you, nor any secret fear that you will deny us anything that will truly be for our good, so that the laboring thoughts, the restless mind, the fearful heart may find rest in and through that alone in which and through which it can be found—by always joyfully thanking you as we gladly confess that in relation to you we are always in the wrong. Amen.

If I should speak in a different way, I would remind you of a wisdom you have certainly frequently heard, a wisdom that knows how to explain everything easily enough without doing an injustice either to God or to human beings. A human being is a frail creature, it says; it would be unreasonable of God to require the impossible of him. One does what one can, and if one is ever somewhat negligent, God will never forget that we are weak and imperfect creatures. Shall I admire more the sublime conceptions of the nature of the Godhead that this ingenuity makes manifest or the profound insight into the human heart, the probing consciousness that scrutinizes itself and now comes to the easy, cozy conclusion: One does what one can? Was it such an easy matter for you, my listener, to determine how much that is: what one can? Were you never in such danger that you almost desperately exerted yourself and yet so infinitely wished to be able to do more, and perhaps someone else looked at you with a skeptical and imploring look, whether it was not possible that you could do more? Or were you never anxious about yourself, so anxious that it seemed to you as if there were no sin so black, no selfishness so loathsome, that it could not infiltrate you and like a foreign power gain control of you? Did you not sense this anxiety? For if you did not sense it, then do not open your mouth to answer, for then you cannot reply to what is being asked; but if you did sense it, then, my listener, I ask you: Did you find rest in those words, "One does what one can"?

Or were you never anxious about others? Did you not see them wavering in life, those you were accustomed to look up to in trust and confidence? And did you not then hear a soft voice whisper to you: If not even those people can accomplish the great things, what then is life but bad troubles, and faith but a snare that wrenches us out into the infinite, where we really are unable to live—far better, then, to forget, to abandon every requirement; did you not hear this voice? For if you did not hear it, then do not open your mouth to answer, for you cannot reply to what is being asked about; but if you did hear it, my listener, I ask you: was it to your comfort that you said "One does what one can"? Was not the real reason for your unrest that you did not know for sure how much one can do, that it seems to you to be so infinitely much at one moment, and at the next moment so very little? Was not your anxiety so painful because you could not penetrate your consciousness, because the more earnestly, the more fervently you wished to act, the more dreadful became the duplexity in which you found yourself: that you might not have done what you could, or that you might actually have done what you could but no one came to your assistance?

So every more earnest doubt, every deeper care is not calmed by the words: One does what one can. If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong? Or is he a different person when he judges his act than when he acts? Is doubt to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accompany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it? Or would we prefer continually to be in the right in the way irrational creatures are? Then we have only the choice between being nothing in relation to God or having to begin all over again every moment in eternal torment, yet without being able to begin, for if we are able to decide definitely whether we are in the right at the present moment, then this question must be decided definitely with regard to the previous moment, and so on further and further back.

Doubt is again set in motion, care again aroused; let us try to calm it by deliberating on:

THE UPBUILDING THAT LIES IN THE THOUGHT THAT IN RELATION TO GOD WE ARE ALWAYS IN THE WRONG

To be in the wrong—can any more painful feeling than this be imagined? And do we not see that people would rather suffer everything than admit that they are in the wrong? To be sure, we do not sanction such stubbornness, either in ourselves or in others. We think the wiser and better way to act is to admit that we are in the wrong if we actually are in the wrong; we then say that the pain that accompanies the admission will be like a bitter medicine that will heal, but we do not conceal that it is a pain to be in the wrong, a pain to admit it. We suffer the pain because we know that it is to our good; we trust that sometime we shall succeed in making a more energetic resistance and may reach the point of really being in the wrong only in very rare instances. This point of view is very natural and very obvious to everyone. Thus there is something upbuilding in being in the wrong, provided that we, in admitting it, build ourselves up by the prospect that it will more and more rarely be the case. And yet we did not want to calm doubt by this point of view but rather by reflecting on the upbuilding in the thought that we are always in the wrong. But if that first point of view, which provided the hope that in time one would never be in the wrong, is upbuilding, how then can the opposite point of view also be upbuilding—the view that wants to teach us that we are always, in the future as well as in the past, are in the wrong?

Your life brings you into a multiplicity of relationships with other people. Some of them love justice and righteousness; others do not seem to want to practice them—they do you wrong. Your soul is not hardened to the suffering they inflict upon you in this way, but you search and examine yourself; you convince yourself that you are in the right, and you rest calm and strong in this conviction. However much they outrage me, you say, they still will not be able to deprive me of this peace—that I know I am in the right and that I suffer wrong. In this view there is a satisfaction, a joy, that presumably every one of us has tasted, and when you continue to suffer wrong, you are built up by the thought that you are in the right. This point of view is so natural, so understandable, so frequently tested in life, and yet it is not with this that we want to calm doubt and to heal care but by deliberating upon the upbuilding that lies in the thought that we are always in the wrong. Can the opposite point of view, then, have the same effect?

Your life brings you into a multiplicity of relationships with other people. To some you are drawn by a more fervent love than to others. Now, if such a person who is the object of your love were to do you a wrong, is it not true that it would pain you, that you would scrupulously examine everything but that you would then say: I know for sure that I am in the right; this thought will calm me? Ah, if you loved him, then it would not calm you; you would investigate everything. You would be unable to perceive anything else except that he is in the wrong, and yet this certainty would trouble you. You would wish that you might be in the wrong; you would try to find something that could speak in his defense, and if you did not find it, you would find rest only in the thought that you were in the wrong. Or if you were assigned the responsibility for such a person's welfare, you would do everything that was in your power, and when the other person nevertheless paid no attention to it and only caused you trouble, is it not true that you would make an accounting and say: I know I have done right by him?—Oh, no! If you loved him, this thought would only alarm you; you would reach for every probability, and if you found none, you would tear up the accounting in order to help you forget it, and you would strive to build yourself up with the thought that you were in the wrong.

It is painful, then, to be in the wrong and all the more painful the more often one is in the wrong; it is upbuilding to be in the wrong, and all the more upbuilding the more often one is in the wrong. This is indeed a contradiction! How can this be explained except by saying that in the one case you are forced to acknowledge what in the second case you wish to acknowledge? But is not the acknowledgement nevertheless the same; does one's wishing or not wishing have any influence on it? How can this be explained except by saying that in the one case you loved, in the other you did not—in other words, in the one case you were in an infinite relationship with a person, in the other case a finite relationship? Therefore, wishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an expression of a finite relationship! Hence it is upbuilding to always be in the wrong—because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!

Tags: either/or, kierkegaard
Current Music: Einherjer (Dragons of the North) - 02: Dreamstorm