Below are the most recent 17 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, November 12th, 2009
jblindsight	12:15p	Charter for Compassion - TED  If, after reading this, you feel that you would like to add your name to the list of those affirming the Charter, you can go to the homepage of TED to do so.  CHARTER FOR COMPASSION The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect. It is also necessary in both public and private life to refrain consistently and empathically from inflicting pain. To act or speak violently out of spite, chauvinism or self-interest, to impoverish, exploit or deny basic rights to anybody, and to incite hatred by denigrating others — even our enemies — is a denial of our common humanity. We acknowledge that we have failed to live compassionately and that some have even increased the sum of human misery in the name of religion. We therefore call upon all men and women ~ to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings, even those regarded as enemies. We urgently need to make compassion a clear, luminous and dynamic force in our polarized world. Rooted in a principled determination to transcend selfishness, compassion can break down political, dogmatic, ideological and religious boundaries. Born of our deep interdependence, compassion is essential to human relationships and to a fulfilled humanity. It is the path to enlightenment, and indispensible to the creation of a just economy and a peaceful global community. Current Mood: thoughtful (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
jblindsight	3:03p	Veterans Day  I didn't know what to say to mark the day. Sometimes you don't need words, just a few kleenex. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/40324 Current Mood: grateful (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
the_s_guy	6:06a	Bottle of Djinn An interesting psychology experiment with potential applications for AI. Would YOU let the genie out of the bottle? Looking at the experimental data, I can *cautiously* say that while I might not be able to hold out against a genuine transhuman AI for extended periods, I could probably hold out for two hours against a simulated AI. However, this is because of a number of personal psychological factors and experiences which are not necessarily very common. Particularly with pre-preparation, I'm moderately good at compartmentalising interactions, using multiple layers of doublethink, simulating mental mazes, presenting incorrect mindset images, and switching off chunks of personality for short periods. It's not necessarily something I find myself doing all the time, and to be honest it's a bit irritating when the need arises, but it got me through a lot of boring managerial meetings over the years. I'm also not entirely sure that the experiment works when the Gatekeeper wants to keep the AI in the box purely because they're evil and enjoy poking it with a stick. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, November 9th, 2009
the_s_guy	11:28p	Only the sharpest eye, the keenest nose, the quickest ear and the fleetest toes In a burst of nostalgia, I went and looked up my very first email address, to see if someone else had picked that account name since my long-ago departure. Modulo the ISP I was with at the time being borged by another, it turns out that there is indeed someone else at oldaccountname@newISP. Good for them. I am mildly disappointed that there doesn't appear to be any mention of oldaccountname@oldISP anywhere on the net, particularly since a trawl of my own archives indicates that I held onto it until 1998, way past when I started using Usenet. Ah well. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
the_s_guy	9:08p	Science says: throw away your crutches and WALK! http://fwdmobility.com/Freedom_Leg_Off-Loading_Prosthetic.html (Comment on this)
the_s_guy	5:56p	My Cup runneth elsewhere - national stereotype month? Just a note about the recent Melbourne Cup. One of the things I really like about being self-employed is that there is no office Cup luncheon, no break in the work schedule, but because most clients I might have tend to be the sort of offices which do have these sort of things, I'm also unlikely to be called during Cup day and can choose to either get some solid uninterrupted hours of numbercrunching done, or go sit on the beach and destress It may sound near-unpatriotic as an Australian, but I honestly do not give a flying damn about some three-minute horse race on the other side of the country, and it irritates me no end that half the country seems to take it as an excuse to down tools for the better part of a day. Of course, I also have no interest in any other kind of sport I'm not personally playing, don't drink or surf, and barely swim, so I'm pretty much a failure as a national stereotype even before you get to horse racing. Hmm... what parts of the national image do I fit into? ... ... ...I like barbecues? Oh, and I guess I tan fairly easily, but that's mainly going from "geek pallor" to "only mistaken for a ghost some of the time". (And OK, yeah, I can crank up the accent until I sound like Paul Hogan with a lobotomy after six months stuck up the arse-end of FNQ, but it's not how I sound day to day.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
the_s_guy	2:30a	Didn't we get over this back in high school? Further irritation with the so-called sixty hours of paperwork and checkboxes and form-completion which took me forty minutes. I completed it to the satisfaction of the computer systems, but it took the better part of an hour to wring out of the human cross-checker the fact that she didn't want to approve it because the next level of auditors wouldn't believe I'd done it in that short time. In a world with justice, this would hardly be my problem, you would think. Either they'd revise their ideas of what was possible, or they'd revise the assorted paperwork to take longer even for people who had done this kind of thing a billion times before. But of course, this is bureacracy. So for the crime of being faster than expected, I had to provide a sufficient volume of physical paperwork - printouts, really - to show that I'd 'done the work'. Uh... isn't the fact that I completed all the online forms to the point where none of them can be pointed to as incorrect sufficient proof that I did the work? Considering 98% of it was mental in the first place? But no, apparently having a thick wodge of printouts - of anything, really - stored on file in the office will somehow give legitimacy to my amazing ability to remember what I wrote the last 99 times I did similar things. And just think - I could have avoided all this by simply starting each section of the online forms, filling them in, then letting the timer tick away on the penultimate page for anything up to seven hours each while I went and did other things, before clicking "Finish". The only difference would have been when I clicked that last button, yet somehow doing so would have excused me from having to print out and drop off a bunch of random hooey that no-one will ever look at. What a waste of time, brains, and trees all around. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 6th, 2009
jblindsight	8:31a	Jon Stewart as Glen Beck   Current Mood: bouncy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
the_s_guy	2:45p	AGAIN? Once again, for no apparent reason, Livejournal has spontaneously decided that I am Norwegian and has changed all my interface options to that language. I have no idea why it does this every couple of months. I have no idea why it's always Norwegian that it picks. It seems too bizarre and random (not to mention obvious) to be a hack job. Presumably, therefore, something is very wrong somewhere. Anyone else get something similar? (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
the_s_guy	9:11a	State of the S: Infodump Random "this is me" post for anyone who's browsed here and wondering what the deal is and why I switch back and forth between topics so much. Me: Mid-30s tech guy, currently based in Perth, Western Australia. Things I'm into, which may have led readers here via keywords: - Tech support. Specfically, improving helpdesks and service desks. From the user side, I can make them more responsive and accurate. From the tech side, I can improve training, equipment, and policies. From the management side, I can cut costs (often dramatically), boost ROI, improve the team's standing in the organisation, and stop it being dumped on by the other areas. Hire me! Or, if you're currently (or have been previously) part of an IT Support team, drop me a line; we'll swap anecdotes. - Automation. In particular: -- Automating civil construction. Houses are well understood, why are they still being built manually? I have the beginnings of some ideas about how to fix this, and have some engineers looking at them. Potential savings in the trillions, yay, but it'll be a long road. Bricks and mortar, robots and replicatability. -- Automating clothing production. We have factories which can build a car practically from raw materials; we have 3D printers and automated cutters and shapers. Why are most clothes - particularly cheap ones - still made by hand? Shouldn't you be able to get bodyscanned and have a custom wardrobe roll off the presses in a few hours? This one's all about design, fashion, and mechatronics. -- 3D printing and shaping in general. I want to see a RepRap which can bootstrap itself from parts to a full workshop. I want to be able to print USB-compatible circuitry, or at least something which can talk to a generic PC. - Toy design. Mostly transforming robots, having had a mild fascination with them for over twenty-five years. This includes 3D design and replication in plastic, materials knowledge, kitbashing, aesthetics etc. Multi-form designs are particularly interesting. And in the same vein: - Multiform design in general. This is anything from furniture which becomes other furniture or retracts into walls, to fold-up bikes and cars, to things which can compact down into a travel mode for use in RVs and motor homes. I even have a design for the World's Most Expandable RV floating around somewhere - it blows out to something like four thousand square feet of floorspace. - Cosplay, specifically armoured and robot cosplay. You know that transforming Bumblebee costume that was floating around YouTube a while back? Yeah, that kind of thing. I like the idea of both really complex stuff with built-in theatrical biomechatronics, and very simple, elegant designs. - Extremely mobile computing. Not just laptops with WiFi, but EyeTaps with augmented reality, long-life battery solutions and ultracapacitors. Which leads me to: - Electric vehicles. A trunk full of next-gen batteries and a roof full of solar cells. Not because I'm particularly green, but because I like the idea of a car I can refuel at home or by parking it in the sun. - Inventing stuff. As well as the various things mentioned above, I have entire folders of inventions sitting around, from the solidly commercially profitable to the pie-in-the-sky. Everything from telemarketing destroyers to control improvements for artificial limbs to MMORPG secondary profit markets to GPS interface improvers to a range of tech support tools. Give me your programmers, mechanical engineers, electronics wonks, product shapers and marketeers. - And on the silly end of the spectrum, my fictional engineering guilty pleasure at the moment is teleportation and multidimensional architecture. It's fun to think about all the things which would change in society and the global economy if spacefolding was cheaper than an airline seat, cheaper than oceanic shipping, cheaper than owning a car... (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
jblindsight	9:54p	Ivan Lins Lee Ritenaur Harlequin A recent CD with with covers by a variety of jazz artists (is Sting a jazz artist? )  Check it out.  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002DSBG82/ref=dm_sp_alb?ie=UTF8&qid=1257140665&sr=8-1 Current Mood: all jazzed up (Comment on this)
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
the_s_guy	6:56a	Sleep? Lately, sleep's been... not elusive, precisely. Perhaps 'mistimed' would be a better word. While I'm usually getting eight to twelve hours per nap, the scheduling of those hours has been rather more random than expected. Thus, I spent most of the daylight hours of the weekend either asleep or zipping through chores which needed shops to be open or were too noisy to be done when they might wake the neighbours. On the plus side, several things which had been put off for longer than desirable have been sorted out, including catching up on the laundry and dumping antkiller powder all over the anthills which have once again sprung up around the exterior of the house. Given that it's something like 90% paved, I have to wonder if there exists a near-permanent treatment capable of preventing both insects and weeds from coming up between the cracks. On the minus side, I've been finding myself sitting around in the wee hours wondering what to do after catching up on my normal news feeds. It just feels sort of like limbo - I don't feel much like reading, or working on my 3D project, or trawling old IRC channels, or writing emails that I probably really should. It's as if my brain's saying "Dude, you should be asleep, but you woke up early, so just sort of sit there in the corner like a zombie until the world catches up." It feels like airport time, when you're waiting for a connecting flight and can't really do anything (even sleep) except wait for the minutes and hours to drag on by. It just feels weird. Disjointed. It wouldn't be so bad if I was doing it on purpose, but accidentally operating at eight or sixteen hours out of sync with the local timezone is offputting. (Comment on this)
the_s_guy	5:08a	WHOA there fiddlefingers Wandering around a potential client's office the other day, I noticed that a bunch of their public-access systems were semi-hosed in various ways. Look at the first two, which have "Broken - IT Support has been notified" on a sheet of A4 taped across their screens. Remove the floppy disk from them. Boot. Oh look, it's working. Notify my contact in the office. Kudos for me, yay. Round two. Check another couple of PCs. Fuzzy screens. Check the resolutions - not set to native on the LCDs. In fact, the computers seem to think they have CRTs plugged in. Could alter the screen resolutions to the correct ones, but it needs an admin login. Given that I have physical access to the computer, this is potentially merely a momentary delay, but it suddenly strikes me that removing a floppy disk is one thing, but screwing around with registry settings and bypassing security (however slack) is not necessarily going to ingratiate me with the business and particularly with the tech division. Back WAY off. Settle for printing out a couple of tweaked screenshots showing where the problem lies and how to fix it. My contact can forward them to what passes for tech support around here (honestly, which phone monkey didn't get the office drone to check the floppy drive on the other machines?). More local kudos for me, rah. Make sure to keep my name definitely OFF the printouts so that the IT division won't be pissed at me later on. Riding high on a wave of apparent IT expertise, I flash a business card and wangle the name of a manager at HQ out of my contact. I phone and sweet-talk the manager into giving me the contact details of the actual IT manager (it's a small company). One more phone call later, and I'm invited to drop a business proposal on them for clearing up their IT service. And THAT'S how it's done. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some paperwork to write up. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
the_s_guy	11:13a	This week's cool stuff Wireless HMD running Linux: It's a complete computer - the antenna is WiFi, not pulling in video from another source (although it can do that too). It's only stereo VGA at the moment, though it does have tilt sensors and a compass. Throw in GPS and you could really have something. Tesla Roadster hits 500km on one charge (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
particle_man	3:05a	I finally figured it out I've finally figured out what bothers me so much about Bush and those that subscribe to his and Cheney's "torture is justified" view of America. I'm sitting here watching a bunch of ROTC rifle drills as well as watching the big boys of the USMC Silent Drill Platoon and the US Navy Presidential Ceremonial Honor Guard and it hit me. I've got friends and family that have served in all branches of the military and many their various support agencies. These people talk about the brotherhood and companionship of serving. They talk about the discipline and both the consequences for breaking rules and the rewards for following those rules. Bush and Co (and those that think what he did was all right) threw the rules that the rest of us live by and hold dear and completely tossed them out the window. For this they haven't gotten so much as a slap on the wrist. This goes completely against everything I was taught about how America works while growing up. I hold Obama partially responsible for this since he should be doing something about it but I hold congress just as responsible since it's largely their job to keep the president in check. I have no problem with the military. I support kicking the asses of countries that need their asses kicked (North Korea anyone?) but what I don't support is those that are entrusted with the leadership of that military taking it upon themselves to use that military to support their own or their parties agendas. Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Watching: Zombieland (Comment on this)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
jblindsight	9:53a	Dia de los Muertos - the gift of remembrance Hospice of San Luis is hosting a free Dia de los Muertos event on Tuesday, I got an invite from  Patty Mara, the artist who did the chakra hanging in my office. The Hospice site led me to a video from Arizona Public Media, with a touching explanation of what it means and why it can be healing for everyone (plus great visuals).  Here's the link to the video: http://tv.azpm.org/kuat/legacy-segment/825/ (6 Comments |Comment on this)
the_s_guy	2:03p	Why yes I did spend ten years as a paper-pusher, why do you ask? A potential corporate client wanted me to fill out some online paperwork before getting back to me. Not entirely without precedent. Oh well. *fill fill fill* *ring ring* "Hi, it's me, I'm done." "...what do you mean, done?" "Your paperwork. Done." "But it's been an hour!" "Sorry, I had to take a twenty-minute call from one of your managers in the middle of it." "But it's supposed to take sixty hours minimum!" "...really?" "You can't have done it right. Do it again! From the beginning!" "...uh, OK?" *one hour later, after having filled in everything again, including all the optional stuff that didn't really need filling out the first time, plus double-checking that their assessment system thinks I really have done everything...* *ring ring...* "Me again. Could you check that everything's completed to your satisfaction?" "Uh, it seems to be, but how could you..." "Good, good, anything else need to be done?" "Um, not really..." "Excellent! You have my number, call me whenever, we'll go for a coffee." ( Of course, there's a downside. ) (9 Comments |Comment on this)