Category Archives: meta

Quick note

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A human life moves like waves, sometimes it is higher and sometimes lower. Mine is a bit lower than recently now, although I am probably still very happy by human standards.

I don’t have the energy to finish my entries with such a quality as they deserve, though.  Second half of last week and Monday I went to work much earlier than usual. Between the long workdays and not getting enough sleep, I start getting infections here and there:  Eyes, gums, neck.  I still have not adjusted to eating small enough dinner to go to bed early without getting acid reflux.  I am getting closer though.

That’s it, basically. I have a number of entries that I feel could be improved on before posting.  Whether I actually do that or come up with something else if I get back to my normal energy level, remains to be seen.  There is hardly a day that I don’t find something new that should be said.  Perhaps it is a kind of hubris to want to say it well.  One day I will be gone, and I have no idea which day that is.  Before that I ought to say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

But for now, I need sleep, so I can serve the world at work again.

Excuses, excuses

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Worked late today, we had a huge job with the stuff I actually can do, wasn’t home until around 22 (10PM).  There is another cold snap and I can’t even keep one room warm without blowing a fuse. The home office is the warmest place in the house, I think, and I’m typing this wearing my thick winter jacket.

I’ve tried to catch up a bit with my Sims 3 project, the Adoptacy.  But I seriously don’t have time for both my sims’ life and my own, as it turns out.  Much less the new beta test I am invited to (for another game).  I’d want to read more of the Happy Science books (still on second read of The Philosophy of Progress) and write some stuff of my own.  But I need to go to bed. Two hours awake at home is not much to write home about.  So I won’t.

I still haven’t put back on the weight I lost during the move.  It is not that much, I can live without it for the rest of my days if necessary, but I notice I am already more hungry than I used to.  If I eat, however, I can’t go to sleep for a while due to acid reflux.  (The medical condition, not the excellent but oh so short-lived web comic.)

This morning I dreamed about repairing the holes in the butt of a pair of jeans, only the jeans belonged to a woman I don’t know in real life – we were in yet another world, I guess – and, more importantly, she was wearing them at the time.  I don’t think this has any deeper meaning.  Earlier last week I sewed one of my old but good trousers that had ripped open in the crotch – why does it always have to be the crotch, it is not like it’s under extreme pressure or something – and the next day it ripped open right beside where I had sewn. Like millimeters away.  It’s one of the few trousers that really fits me too, even though it has lost a button and has a hole in at least one pocket.  (I lost a house key once I was wearing this one a few months ago.)

Can haz sleep nao plz?

Blog move & WordPress white screen

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No, I haven’t crossed the river yet. Rather, this is the view from my new kitchen window.

Not dead yet, but I can see how you might wonder. Sometime last night the blog just up and disappeared. When you – or I – tried to look at it, only a white page came up, without even a source code.

This is because my entire Chaosnode.net was moved from one internal server to another in the Dreamhost server farm. They probably have good reasons for this, but it broke WordPress in a couple places. Actually they documented this and much more in their wiki, which they linked to in the emails they sent me before and after the move. But because it took some hours before it broke visibly, I did not read that wiki entry until after I had tried pretty much everything else I could think of.

Basically, there is a change in the internal file structure that supports my site. In the past, there was an invisible folder between the root level and my site. Â Instead of /home/chaosnod/chaosnode.net, it said /home/.calliopey/chaosnod etc. I don’t know or care what calliopey was (obviously it was somehow named after the mythical Calliope) and your server may vary. In any case, WordPress had thoughtfully included this path in a php file, likewise in the upload folder path.

So this is all very technical but the point is, when I fixed this, everything was intact. Also, I now have a backup of the whole blog folder on my removable hard disk. So something good came of it, although I lost a couple hours of my precious lifetime that I might otherwise have spent writing fiction about a high school chess player. An imaginary high school chess player, obviously, with no similarity whatsoever to any high school chess players you may have read about in the news over the last couple years. Actually it is more inspired by Japanese sports anime.

Happy new year – not that a single day passes that is not brand new. At least I learned something new today!

Meta about Happy Science

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di090907

This screenshot from the animated movie “The Laws of Eternity” actually describes pretty well how it feels for me: An endless cascade of bright chain reactions.  The picture is of the Sixth Dimension, which I suspect you may hear more about.

I know you folks must be more than fed up with me talking about this Japanese sect already. And probably more than a little worried about me, if you know me at all but don’t know me really really well.

But for me it has been a fantastic experience, and still is.  It has set off such a chain reaction of ideas and impressions, it just seems to go on and on.  So many things that I have seen from one side or two sides before, and suddenly see from yet another side.  Tying together things in new ways.  Even when I disagree, it makes me look at the things I am convinced of, with new eyes.  Not just what I believe, but why I believe it. Or not, as the case may sometimes be.

A big part of it is that Happy Science is actually quite down to earth.  Sure there are the occasional reference to Atlantis and Mu, and a pretty complex hierarchy of dimensions in the spirit world.  But the latter is just as easily seen as spiritual distinctions in this life. Like me, Okawa seems convinced that the next life starts in this life.  I would actually say that this life is the only life I can remember, so I hesitate to speak with any authority about the next.  But in this life, there are certainly many heavens and quite a few hells as well, inside people’s hearts.  So I don’t really think of these things as abstract or theological.  I think of them as everyday and psychological, rather.

This month has been a huge adventure for me.  I still don’t know exactly what will come of it, but being so full of ideas and associations is something I haven’t felt in a long time.  And I have had quite a lot of input over the last few years, from the right-wing mysticism of Robert Godwin to the high-tech mysticism of Holosync and LifeFlow, not to mention Spiral Dynamics and Integral theory and practice.  It really is as if there is this huge puzzle that I have seen in outline but now there are more pieces coming together than I have time to put into place before I forget them again.

I have written a number of entires that I have for various reasons not published, usually because I felt that I could not quite complete them.  And there are others that are still in my head, and some that I am not sure whether I have written or not – I would have to read through the last month plus files on my hard disk to say for sure.

I wish I could convey my excitement – and I mean that in a good way, this time – but I’m not very good at that.  So you’ll just have to take my word for it. And I, in the meantime, will try to write something else in between. Now and then.

Quick update

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Regular readers may have noticed that the dating of the recent entries has been out of order.  There are reasons for this. Basically, there have been “seeds” for entries on certain days, but they have not been finished until days later.

Tonight I am almost certainly brewing on some kind of virus infection.  Despite no mowing today (for a change), my pulse has been far above normal for most of the evening, around 95 when sitting (!), the same as I normally have when walking leisurely around.  (This is the opposite of what I wrote about some days ago.) It has slowed down a bit now that I approach midnight, but it still well over normal.

The heat does not exactly help. I am not made for heat.  I can put on more clothes if I am cold, to a certain point, but I cannot take of my skin when it is this hot.  The nights are worst, because I can’t keep wet while I sleep.  Perhaps if I had a waterbed. ^_^

Excuse

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Some days I start writing a long entry and then I don’t finish it.  In general, the grander the original idea, the less likely it is to reach these pages. Either it takes too much time and I wake up the next day thinking of something entirely different, or it just does not live up to my grand vision and is quietly stowed away.

I have a small graveyard of such half-finished (or almost-finished) essays. There are similar places on older machines, for it has been that way for years.  Almost certainly I refer to some of them as if I had actually posted them, because it is much easier to remember that I was working on them than whether or not I actually uploaded them.  Hopefully the new system with categories and tags will make it easier to find out whether or not I have posted them – if I am in doubt at all, even when wrong.

The Net is slow!

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For some time now, my Internet access has been slowing down.  This is perfectly normal in the USA, of course, but I live in Norway. And it is not only American web sites, although those are bad enough.  But lately, even my Scandinavian net bank has been so slow as to be unusable in the evening.  I managed to queue up some bills tonight, but it took a long time of fervent button mashing. I was not amused. 

Using Traceroute, I found that there was a bottleneck – well, more like a corked bottle – at the beginning and end of Telia.net.  Telia is the Swedish near-monopoly on telephone, much as Telenor is in Norway, formerly a government agency until knowledge of the American way of life made people yearn for freedom here in Scandinavia as well.  But evidently we have not yearned enough, or at least the Swedes haven’t.  Guess they are a bit insulated from the western winds, lying on the other side of the Norwegian mountains…

It looks like my ISP, NextGenTel, uses Telia for all Internet traffic that leaves the country, even temporarily.  And of course that includes my journal. The more text there is, the less chance of getting it uploaded.  I hope something is done about this soon.  

I would hate to have to go back to Telenor, which had downtimes of a week or more, and lied like toddlers when I called them about the problems, completely stupidly made up fake explanations at the moment. You could call two times in the same day and get two completely different stories about why the Net was not working. It was painfully obvious that they were paid to lie rather than actually find out what was wrong.  It will, I believe, be a very chilly day in the idyllic Norwegian small town of Hell, before I go back to Telenor. 

The wireless broadbank I use in the city is fine, though. I may have to upload things from there, or take my portable home.  Or perhaps it has to do with the time of day?  Perhaps Telia’s lines are completely clogged with BitTorrent traffic… or hate mail after a kangaroo court meted out draconic punishment to the four young men who run Pirate Bay.  Or perhaps it is the Swedish Internet censorship – mandated by a recent law that lets the government read all mail that passes through the country – that slows down the Net too…

Anyway, that’s my excuse for today!

Chaos Node: The End of an Era

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Dying dinosaurs (from Seto no Hanayome)

I have my doubts about this, you know.  The original Chaos Node has always been handcoded – well, except a few experiments with using MS Word to generate the code, and it was unwieldy and bloated.  I used to put every tag in by hand; the most advanced technology I used was search & replace for the dates.  Every page was stored on my harddisk – and backed up from time to time – as well as on the website.

This is not so strange: The oldest entries are from November 1998, but the journal started in late spring or early summer that year. I just did not think of giving the files unique names until late fall.  Actually, I did not think they would be worth reading after more than a week.  I was probably more right about that than I like to think.  But these days, storage space is exploding, faster and faster, much like real space out there.  So why not keep them all.

The Chaos Node actually started quite a bit before that, but it was a mostly static page with a couple sub-pages, listing my interests and favorite comics and such.  The daily journal came in 1998 as I said.  By then I was already used to coding HTML by hand, having learned it from a girly girl magazine back when HTML was still considered a boy thing. The habit of adding a picture each day has its own history.  While reading a computer magazine (actually named Komputer, I believe) I came across the new phenomenon of webcams.  One of these was installed in New Zealand, in the home of a girl named Debra.  When technical difficulties stopped her from being able to run the webcam day and night for a while, she posted a picture each day instead.  That was the inspiration for my “JPG Diary”, as I called it. At the time, we Norwegians paid per minute for being connected to the Internet, so I would not have been able to afford running a webcam even if anyone had been curious enough to watch it.  I could easily afford uploading a picture each day – although eventually my storage space on my homepage ran full, and I had to move my journal.

Even after I learned there were other journals, mine was unique in at least one way:  I had color codes for different types of entries, so different types of readers could avoid those that did not interest them.  (Or even scared them, I suppose.) This was all before the blog was invented even as a concept, and my color codes were the primitive seed of what one day became tags and categories.  I have long wished to be able to use more than one label for one entry, since many of them moved from one category to another while I wrote.  For me there is no clear line between my personal life and the world, or between religion and science.  All things are connected, to put it mildly. So being able to tag my entries with better descriptions will be very welcome.

In other ways too the world moved on while I stayed behind.  The whole “blogosphere” exploded into being. Where there had only been a few thousand journals in the world, there are now millions and millions of blogs.   This means that once again, I am unlikely to be read by people who don’t know me – unless I have some really unique phrase to google.  I hope it will be possible to subscribe to my journal more easily now with RSS, although I am still not sure how that works.  If it is not enabled automatically, it may take some time before I find out.

Not least it should be easier to comment now.  While I love getting email, I am aware some people want to be seen by the other readers as well, not just by me.  Of course, some of these people are spammers. But rest assured that as long as I live and am able to use eyes and hands, spam won’t live long here.  We shall see exactly how strict I will have to be, after this journal has been discovered by the spammers.

Oh, and there will probably be less pictures eventually.  I have this strange feeling that there won’t be many complaints over that…