Update: 01/27/08: I knew that it couldn't be this easy. I was all ready to start feeling good about the City of Santa Ana, for finally taking action to protect people's rights to quiet enjoyment of their properties. Then the following occurred: Working inside one of my units this morning, in the process of collecting a bunch of stuff to relocate, I heard a vehicle pull up outside and then stop. After a couple minutes, I made my way to the front, moving all the boxes in the way and op...
All day long today, working indoors doing web design and related computer work in Irvine, OC, I have felt as though I had a cold. My throat is scratchy, my nose stuffed up, and I'm coughing constantly, my stomach feels queezy and there is a dry, metallic taste in my mouth. When I left work just 30 minutes or so ago, it felt more like 7:30 PM than 5 PM. Everyone was driving with their lights on. The sun was still high in the sky, a lurid red-orange ball that you could stare directly into...
October 08, 2008 So, to wrap this up, I got several thousand more dollars from the QME evaluation. I don't know if all the prep, bringing my friend as a witness, etc., helped, but it probably didn't hurt. The process overall did not seem very objective, and the award, as always with Workman's Comp, covered a small fraction of the actual damage, disability, pain and suffering - but I did get further medical as needed. However, for those others in my position, this e...
I awoke in the middle of the night last night suddenly understanding why the incest taboo is such a driving force. Of course, we all know the biological, genetic reason. Closely related people share a LOT of bad genes that would be masked in 99.9% of the cases of mating with a random stranger by the corresponding functional gene from the other partner. Thus, mating with your sister is a BAD idea - at least if you're planning on having kids with only one head, or a functioning brain. How...
Ocober 21st, 2007: nothing fromt the Post Awful...October 15th, 2007: Nothing from the Post Awful, surprise, surprise. October 12, 2007: Finally got a notice from DHL of a package, and, sure enough, there were the 2 tickets. Mr. Curtis says that he actually mailed them September 18th. Nothing on my end. I went to the Post Awful today for a discussion about missing mail, this not being the only one in the past year, although the missing letters are few and far between. The postal em...
A few minutes later... Whoa! See below. More interesting glitches... When I started checking my Yahoo groups, I noticed that all the new messages in several of them stopped yesterday, which is VERY unusual. The kind of high-level hack that would be required to stop me from getting any contact thru yahoo central would seem to require authorization on the highest levels there as well. Wonder if next the feds will break down my door in the middle of the night? Maybe I shouldn't have made ...
Update: July 17th, 2007. Last week Evryx ran a couple of contests, both here and in Japan, to promote use of their image recognition system. The local Pulitzer Prize Winning "Orange County (OC) Register" gave the company a whole page of free coverage in their business section, so it wasn't for lack of people knowing about it. The results of the promo, according to the Register: Four (4) people entered the contest in the OC, which has a population of several million. 2 Million (!) peo...
Some notes from an ongoing novel: Had I only listened to Mom. "Don't take chances. Go with the crowd. Stick your head up and it will get chopped off." Live and learn. Or, in my case, "Die and forget," perhaps. It started with the font wars. You recall when fonts broke free of simple 2D shapes of a single color. Oh, yes, of course there were early foreshadowings, like the color fonts on the old Amiga system, and, yes, I know, people crafted commercial color fonts for a little whil...
Some notes from an ongoing novel:Had I only listened to Mom. "Don't take chances. Go with the crowd. Stick your head up and it will get chopped off." Live and learn. Or, in my case, "Die and forget," perhaps. It started with the font wars. You recall when fonts broke free of simple 2D shapes of a single color. Oh, yes, of course there were early foreshadowings, like the color fonts on the old Amiga system, and, yes, I know, people crafted commercial color fonts for a little while, s...
When I post, I usually am writing from memory. Occasionally I get details wrong, and am happy (if chagrinned) to be corrected. When I have the time, I try to include as many references and links as possible to assist the reader in checking my story. Then there are the people who simply don't want certain things said, certain subjects examined, or who are simply trolls, such as the Mensa weenies who quibble over the slightest detain, triumphant in their debate forum ability to bring any d...
Update: 08/29/09 The Tustin libary just opened its new branch last week, with something on the order of 75 computers for adult use, plus the wifi. The head manager of the library had assured me, several months prior, that bandwidth and access would not be a problem anymore. (ROFL) I predicted that within two months the bandwidth problem would be back and they would have lines waiting for access, and I stated the argument for that prediction. It didn'...
Here's the crux of the issue: We know that the universe operates by strict causality. Miracles and other alleged exceptions, such as the Heisenburg Uncertainty Priciple, quantum mechanics, etc. simply extend causality to the "Spiritual" realm, or add additional facets such as extra dimensions whose workings may lie beyond our immediate ability to know. In the case of the Uncertainty Principle, it's not that there isn't strict causality, it's just that we are limited by the nature of our ...
I'm mirroring this, BTW, from the "Return to Reason" objectivist site, as I keep having the sad experience of losing files that I don't put in multiple locations... I'd like to first focus upon a real anomoly in the objectivist experience: "The Fountainhead" vs. "Atlas Shrugged" (TF vs. AS) Now please don't assume that I'm taking some kind of trivial stance here. I have read both works many times (starting in 1960 with AS), altho not recently, and in my last reading of them in th...
Some people think that I'm crazy. I nurture this impression to some degree, mostly for amusement value. Or perhaps they are right, in which case I likely wouldn't know, would I? Q. If I were crazy, then would it be better to convince people that I was trying to act crazy? After all, many truly crazy people can maintain a show of sanity day by day, until they lose it or their crazy plans finally bear fruit. At the recent LOSCON 2006 , I was not actually on any of the panels (been the...
So, what exactly does it mean that Warren Buffet has decided to give $10 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? What does charity actually accomplish, if anything? First, note that the world of goods and services exists as a kind of continuous auction. There is a limited supply of just about anything and everything at any point in time. We either produce, trade or steal to get pieces of that limited supply. When we produce, we add to the supply. When we trade, we effectively ...