Category Archives: slice of life

Friday

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I was writing a long gray entry again, but stopped.  It was a long day at the office, files kept coming in during the day and I had to do files for two of my coworkers who were absent. I was home a couple hours later than usual. And there has been the whole work week, with a little less sleep than I should have each night.  Yes, my day is starting to slide again. I have been able to hold it constant for a while, using the Holosync Dive for half an hour or sometimes more in the morning, but lately it is sliding again.  Well, enough about that.  I don’t feel like writing an essay tonight, let that be enough.

In other news, Linux (the freeee operating system) is progressing slowly but surely.  Last year, getting flash content (such as YouTube) to run in Opera under Linux was still hit & miss for me.  This time, I still had to look it up online, but it only took half a minute or so to actually get it to work.  So now I can play my brute in my browser window, although Tsaiko’s brute still flattens me in a moment.

It took me considerably more time to get the ICE (NMT) wireless broadband to work under Xubuntu Linux. I am not sure why, but I never got that to work before, which is why I bought the Vista laptop in the beginning of 2008. Now another Vista machine has been Linuxified. No more worrying about worms, virii, keyloggers and identity theft, all the usual stuff that Windows users have hanging over their neck day by day.  (Of course, I still have to not be a complete bumpkin that clicks on any mail claiming to be from my bank or Ebay politely asking me to enter my data again to avoid my account being closed.  Seriously, some people need to not use computers, or talk to strangers, alone.) Although the computer was more than strong enough to run Vista, so I won’t have that benefit (Linux runs better on older or weaker machines).

Oh, and another glass jar recycled! Wheee!  Just twenty or so left.

One jar a day

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di090415

You’re next, Mr Paradiso!

Today I took another glass jar to town with me, it fit just snugly in my bag. I put in the glass container on my way to work.  When I came home from work, I took the spent fluorescent tubes to the supermarket.  (Yesterday it was the fluorescent bulbs, known here as saving bulbs since they use much less energy and last longer.  Well, supposedly they last longer. I don’t see much difference myself – I have changed most of them during these three years I’ve lived here, which is perhaps twice the life of ordinary incandescent bulbs.)

My point today – as if I had not made it before – is that I try to do this each workday.  Perhaps not both of them, but at least get something out of the house every day (not counting the ordinary trash).  Hopefully it will become second nature eventually.  My first nature is to drag things to the cave.  Thinking back to the home where I grew up, there is no doubt that I am descended from packrats.  Actually, now that I live in a house that is vaguely similar to the type of house I grew up in (albeit newer), the similarity is striking.  A living room that is halfway presentable, and several other rooms absolutely stacked with all kinds of objects, but mostly those related to learning somehow.  Yes, I have grown up to become my parents, only fewer in number.

More immediately, however, the inspiration for the (work-)daily activity probably comes from the book Integral Life Practice.  It is quite insistent that one practice each of the four core modules every day – even if only for one minute! It actually has various 5-minute and 1-minute exercises scattered throughout.  If you are busy – or, more likely, if you make yourself busy because you really don’t like one of the modules (such as body, in my case) – you can still not with any shred of dignity or integrity claim that you don’t have 1 minute free over the course of 24 hours.

Michael Mackenzie at Project Meditation says much the same thing.  If you can’t meditate more than 5 minutes, then meditate 5 minutes.  It is far better to do so every day than to start skipping days.  And Bill Harris at Centerpointe Research Institute compares using their product (Holosync) to brushing one’s teeth.  (Although I certainly would not brush my teeth continually for half an hour, much less the whole hour recommended for Holosync.  I can see what he means though.)

So that is what I do now to deal with something that is contrary to my nature.  One jar at a time, or a few light bulbs, or an old CD.  It may be only five minutes, pitiful or ridiculous depending on your view.  But if I don’t forget it and don’t fall out of the practice,  sooner or later I should become a changed person.  And even if not, there will be hundreds fewer objects in the house than it would otherwise have been, if I live here another year.

Pigsty Project progress

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di090414

This CD (Pomme Fritz) is on its way to where it belongs – the garbage heap.  Perhaps it will make future archeologists ashamed of their ancestry.

Today I returned to work after the Holy Week, or nearly a week at least. So the big question is, did I remember the Pigsty Project that I started the last workday before Easter? Yes and no.  I did not consciously remember the project, which consists of trowing away something each day when I return from work (not counting the usual garbage). Even so, I did remember to take the burnt-out fluorescent bulbs to the shop.  This is special garbage that is not allowed to throw along with the usual landfill stuff, but I recently found that the nearest supermarket accepts it.  (They also sell them, so I think that is fair.)  I had told myself to not stop at the supermarket on my way home from work, since I would go there anyway with the bulbs.

For good measure, I carried an empty glass jar with me to the city this morning and put it in a special container for glass garbage.  Yes, we do an insane amount of manual sorting here. I think I read that in America they use machines to sort the garbage. Perhaps it was just in one particular place? This would probably be smarter here too, since I bet normal humans throw a lot of dubious stuff in the main garbage. After all, since nobody sees them, it is OK.   If humans did not operate on that principle, STDs would have been extinct millennia ago.  So they do.

The first day of the Pigsty Project, I ripped and threw away an old techno CD which I cannot imagine ever regretting. Over the next days, even though I did not go to work, I ripped a few more of them. In the process, I also discovered that there was a reason I had bought many of my hundreds of  CDs:  They usually contain one good song.  Although not good enough for me to have played in 10-15-20 years.  I don’t miss them because I have forgotten them, not because they are bad.  (Although some are.  My tastes have changed. Also, I bought some because of their cool covers, which I mistakenly believed corresponded to the music.)

But generally it is true:  When I am about to throw something away, then I realize how good it is. I hope I did mention the stack of New Scientist on my phone table?  I have been making my way through one of them over the past days. That’s the unread ones, I threw away those I had read already.  Since I live in Norway, I don’t think the used book store wants them.  They are not glossy or anything.  (The store takes National Geographic even when in English. But you don’t get much glossier than National Geographic, and there are occasionally pictures of tribal people without clothes, if memory serves. Always a selling point, even here in Norway.)

Anyway, I seem to be on track. Albeit a very slow track.

(I also dragged another 1TB hard disk to the house, but that’s another story… sort of.)

Fat chance

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Today I had a chance to test a hypothesis. Based on one data point, I’d say the hypothesis failed. Hypothesis: Brainwave entrainment may counteract fat poisoning.

Regular readers will know that I get fat poisoning if I eat more than a few grams of fat in a single meal (about six hours). I start feeling cold regardless of the temperature in the room, a cold that comes from inside. (A thermometer, when I can be still long enough, confirms that my body temperature usually is lower than normal, not higher, so it is not fever shaking.) I start shivering and then shaking. My body goes stiffer than usual, so intense exercise to heat me up is out of the question – it would tear my muscles as it is basically the opposite of warming up. Finally come the worst symptoms, fear and diarrhea as the muscles in my digestive tract join in the dance to keep me warm. Queasiness, gut pain, violent bowel movements and in extreme cases the beginning of a rectal prolapse. Not a pretty sight, but you can see it many places on the Internet if you are curious. The final symptom is irresistible drowsiness and deep sleep, regardless of the time of day.

Since some of the symptoms are neurological, I have wondered if brainwave entrainment could have an effect. So when I got the first symptoms, this came to mind. I also put up the heat in the bathroom to max, it has a radiating space heater. Walking in place in front of the heater, I played an alpha wave entrainment track with my eyes closed for about 20 minutes. Luckily it was only a small attack. I had not expected one at all, since I haven’t eaten all that much fat. I have eaten more rice chocolate than usual lately – usually I only eat one 1-2 wafers of thin mint dark chocolate a day, exactly because even a small bite of chocolate takes a big bite out of my fat ration. A lot of the tastes we enjoy through the day are fat soluble, so I tend to be very protective of my fat rations.

On the bright side, I did not feel serious fear. But this is explained by the fact that I did not have colon spasms. This again probably comes from the heat and activity that I set in early, and the fact that it was a very small attack. So the total attempt at treating the attack was a success. But the brainwave entrainment part was not: There was no noticeable different in my body’s reactions either as I began entrainment or after 8 minute, the time at which entrainment should normally be complete.

So at best entrainment may be attempted to minimize the risk of panic, but not the things that would cause the panic in the first place.

Perhaps a better idea would be to get the brain to look for less fat in the first place?  Although I have become pretty good at this, I could still do fine with half the fat I now eat.  We need only very small amounts of fat in our diet, less than 10% of our daily energy expenditure. Even I eat more than double that, and most people in the western world double that again.  (Fat is twice as rich in energy as either sugar, starches or proteins. It is also very compact, so we tend to grossly under-estimate it in our diet.)

The Pigsty Project

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di090407

New Scientist clutter creep.

I have been thinking back to how my old apartment looked the last years I lived there. It is not that bad here, but the lack of storage rooms (these are still used by the landlord) made it necessary to crowd a couple rooms (bedroom and home office) with ugly stuff like bags and boxes full of various objects. And then there is the clutter creep of popular science magazines, the occasional new CD from Japan, and a couple new computers each year. As the clutter creep advances, it will become harder to keep things reasonably clean, and eventually to find things.

Thinking about this on my way home from work, I came up with what I call the Pigsty Project. Despite the name, the purpose is to reduce the pigsty rating of my home. It is a very modest approach, because grand plans never even start, when I am involved.

Basically, each workday as I return from work, I will throw something away. (Unless I have already done so in the morning, but that is probably not likely, since I am barely conscious in the morning.) It need not be a big thing. It is the fact that there are 200 workdays a year I plan to capitalize on.

Today, I threw away a stack of New Scientist from last year. As I looked on them, each had at least one really interesting article that I just knew I wanted to read again someday. Unfortunately, I also knew that there are only 7 days in a week, and none of them is named Someday. Decades of observing and journaling my life has taught me that no matter how much I love a scientific article, I am not going to read it again – even over the course of a decade or more – until I have to throw it away.

This is consistent with the behavior I observed for many years in my workplace: When given new written information, filing it in a binder served as an alternative to reading it. When given information over e-mail, the procedure was expanded to printing out the mail and putting it in a binder instead of reading it. The binder was never opened again, except to put in more pages. Then when it was full, it was left to gather dust.

I am sorry, New Scientist. But that’s the way it goes. At least I stopped subscribing after one year, and will probably continue that way until they offer online-only subscriptions like The Economist does, where I can access the archives for an acceptable monthly sum without having trees killed and laid on my doorstep as by a vegetarian cat.

One other thing I did today, to prepare for the future, was make a new folder on my almost empty D: drive, named “My old CDs”. So yeah, one of the alternatives I can do when I come home from work is to rip one of the CDs from the plastic bags that have stood around since I moved, and before that stood around for years in the Chaos Node. Each day, unless I find something else worthy of killing, one of the oldest CDs will be ripped to MP3 or some such (FLAC would probably be overkill) and then the physical CD and cover destroyed.

Actually it would probably make more sense to drop it on a bench in the city (instead of destroying it), but that would be piracy, yes?

Now it just remains to remember it each day. Lacking any other enforcement, I can only trust the Invisible Hand to click on me each day as I return from work and select “Unclutter” from the menu. It seems like something the Invisible Hand would happily do. Perhaps even gleefully…

Small slice of life

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Used the Holosync Dive again this morning. It sure seemed to help me wake up and stay awake  for much of the workday.  Used the short 10Hz LifeFlow track in the afternoon and was very drowsy for a while afterwards. It certainly seems like these two have opposite effects on me, whether it is because of placebo or the different frequencies they strive to impose on my brain. 

Evidently Easter is drawing near. We are severely understaffed at work this week. Incidentally, this type of staff (the type we are at work) is called STAB in Norwegian. I can certainly sympathize with that on a day like today.  Still, we made it through all the files and even got most of the questions answered, although Staffman was still at work when I left just before 5 PM.

(The kind of staff you lean on physically instead of organizationally, or fight balrogs with, is called “stav”. It just does not have the same ring to it in English. But I think it is pretty obvious that they are all related.)

My popularity robot catgirl is ridiculously overpowered.  But that’s in Sims 2.  I wonder if I shall live to have my own robot catgirl with slightly more IQ than the average human.  Probably not.  Perhaps if I spend more time on the exercise bike or meditating, instead of playing Sims 2.  But then again, perhaps not.  And perhaps it doesn’t matter.

There went my Sunday

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di090405

Marrying a magical robot catgirl makes a lot more sense once you’re a vegetable. But that was my sims’ Sunday. How about mine?

I think I slept more than nine hours this night. And that does not include the half hour I was up in the morning before I crawled back to bed. It seems to me that the new MindFlow meditation actually makes me more sleepy, instead of less sleepy as Holosync did. Or perhaps that’s just my mind playing tricks on me.

(There are reasons why I would suspect those different effects — the two of them try to provoke very different waves in the brain. But I won’t describe that again today.)

I have a bottle of soda standing beside my bed these nights. (Well, technically it is a mattress rather than a bed, but it serves as a bed for me.) Each morning when I wake up, I am so dry that they cannot even swallow unless I drink something first. I could of course use a bottle of water, which is healthier and practically free. But what’s the fun in that? Lukewarm water is just disgusting, but soda is always soda.

Having already slept so long that I had lunch for breakfast, I soon made my pasta dinner for lucnh. (Hey, it is Sunday, why not?) While I was making food, the landlord’s grandmother was doing something garden-related outside. She is in her 80es now, but arrived with a bike and worked for a good while.  She probably has the utmost contempt for my yard skills, and rightly so. Even the road and parking space could need some serious raking after the ravages of the over-eager snow plow. And dry leaves keep piling up on the lawns.

The good news is that as long as the grandmother (and former owner) can still garden here, it is higly unlikely that the house will be sold. I could still be replaced with a better tenant, of course, if the place gets too ugly, inside or out. This reminds me that I really should get rid of more stuff.  Like the issues of New Scientist that I did not find time to read last year. (I did not renew the subscription, at least.) Or the crate of comic books I brought with me from the old apartment, when I had given to the second-hand store the hundreds and hundreds of comic books I was not absolutely sure I would want to read again and again.  Or in other words, I only brought with me those I knew for certain that I would read.  Of course I have not even opened them.

If I don’t read comic books on a Sunday, what do I do?  I have continued to play my Sims 2 “Build a City” project, but it requires only a fraction of my attention.  Today I have started blogging it, which is a lot more work. Pictures to scale and cut and upload… and uploading anything is a trial in itself.  Even though I have a broadband connection, uploading is hit and miss.  Now this is ADSL, not true broadband – it is much broader for download than for upload. This surely fit most people, since they consume a lot more than they produce when it comes to the Internet. But it is worse than just that.  Even the current upload speed should easily be enough for my needs, but both pictures and even text often time out.  I have to disable the firewall again, and even then it is not a sure thing. It could be a Dreamhost problem, I suppose.

In any case, the new site for the Sims 2 challenge is up finally.  You can find it here, not that I think I have any shared readers between the Chaos Node and my sims imperium. Still, I mention it because it took its sweet time getting started. Hopefully future updates will take less time, now that I have a site for it and have found a form I like.

Oh! And I discovered a new online roleplaying game, Ether Saga Online. It is one of those Asian free-to-play games, less detailed and lifelike than EurAmerican MMORPGs like City of Heroes or World of Warcraft. On the bright side, these Asian games run on cheap or old computers. And as I said, they are free.  This one certainly looks Asian in every way, but it is in English and both of the servers are in the USA.

Unfortunately, there is not at all time to even try the game, much as I would have loved to.  I don’t even have time to play the games I already have!  But this must be a wonderful time to be a NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) and a Hikikomori (someone who never leaves their room).  Speaking of which, the founder of my Sims 2 city is a former NEET and Hikikomori, and references to otaku culture pop up repeatedly in the story.

Well, that should be plenty for one day!

Out of sync and shape

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di090403 I have reason to believe that the word “headdesk” did not exist until the coming of  computer networks…

This morning I decided to skip the Holosync session. After all, I had slept 7 hours, slightly more than I usually did before I even started these experiments. Besides, I was planning to do a 40-minute LifeFlow 10 today, the first of these. The demos have tended to make me more sleepy rather than less, but that would be a concern for the afternoon when I did that brainwave entrainment.

But already on the commute bus to work I became very sleepy and napped for much of the way.  This is something that rarely ever happened even before I started syncing in the morning.  Perhaps if I slept only half the night or if I got up very early. But I was actually half an hour late (thank you, large intestine) and had slept for 7 hours.  Huh.  At work I became sleepy again after lunch, although 10 minutes of focused counting meditation cleared that up.  Still, later in the workday I became sleepy AGAIN and napped for 10-15 minutes.   Either the brain does get used to the morning sync or it has a really good placebo effect!

Still haven’t gotten along to testing the “industrial strength” version of LifeFlow as of 20:10 (8:10 PM DST). This is because of the Linux laptop.  I have used it almost exclusively to play music at work for a good while now, but I can do that with the Vista laptop.  It just isn’t as easy with iTunes as it is with Amarok, the KDE music player. Well, that probably does not tell you much unless you came here by searching for Amarok, KDE, or “Linux music” – and I sincerely hope this entry is many pages down on any of those searches!

Anyway, I don’t play much music anymore. It happens, but it has diminished greatly of late, and more so now that I can directly hack into my brainwaves with low-frequency sound effects. Between this and the speeches of the “researchers” in this area, my “recently played” list looks nothing like its old self.  So I took the old HP pavilion ze5600 with me home finally.

This ties in with my rant about Norton antivirus, last seen in my March 27 entry.   With my relationship to  Symantec back to enemy level (I know it’s been there once before) there is only a firewall between me and an Internet raging with worms.  Unlike viruses, which passively drift along with stuff you download (mail included), worms are actively trying to get into your computer and infect it through any one of the many thousand ports that opens you to the Internet.  The obvious solution is to have a firewall, which closes all these ports (think of them as small holes that worms may worm their way through).  My router does indeed have a great firewall, but… it gets in the way of downloading Japanese cartoons.

I have had neither the time nor the inclination lately to watch such “anime” as it is called.  But this is things that have come and gone in the past, although the fad seems to be slightly weaker each time it returns.  It seems like a reasonable goal to at least complete the series I have begun.  Besides, while it may be technically illegal, I still see it as a valuable cultural exchange that I should encourage. After all, it is not like you could rent these in your video store – or indeed any video store in the western world.  Some of them are even hard to find in Japan anymore.

Anyway, the short of it is that someone needs to run BitTorrent without a firewall, and if that someone is me, the worms don’t die.  This is where Linux comes in.   The small laptop has Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows, which means worms won’t work on it.  The two operating systems may do many of the same things, but they are very different inside.  Worms are all written for Windows, except possibly one or two for Mac.  Linux has simply too many different variants to be worth writing a worm for. It is not that it is impossible, perhaps not even harder than for Windows, but you will only infect a few machines, and then they change again.   So, by putting my Linux laptop on the network, I can download and upload anime without getting worms.

Of course, first I had to get the machine home. It is just a laptop, and I carried it in a suitable box along with cables and such.  It was not really heavy, but it still felt heavy after I had carried it long enough.  (I walk about 15 minutes from work to the bus station, and around 10 minutes from the bus stop home.)  My arms are ridiculously weaker than my legs now after I have not trained with the bow since I moved here, or years anyway.  I really should starting carrying a box with a laptop to work and back every day, except it would look kind of weird in the long run.

Connecting the laptop to the Internet was a snap, literally. I just snapped into place the network cable that I had once used for the Dell laptop.  (Unfortunately I never managed to get the Dell to run Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and then it kind of died. Or at least its screen did.)

Connecting to the home network, however, was surprisingly difficult.  I know I have done it before with an earlier laptop.  And the Ubuntu installation on Trine the tri-core computer accesses the network without a second thought.  But the laptop simply could not open the network named “ITLAND”, although it managed to see that it was there.  (It also saw a network named “WORKGROUP” that is the default Windows network, I believe, but that I thought I had removed.  This cannot be opened either.

I manage to set up access to one shared folder by using another alternative (Linux is big on alternatives). I used the choice “Connect to server” and gave the internal IP adress for the computer where my anime is stored, and the folder name on the network.  So I got around it that way.  I was also able to connect to part of the network for a while by running the network wizard on the Windows XP machine again with the same network name as originally and no other changes.  But it faded after a while, for unknown reasons.  I will probably continue to hack on it from time to time, but the temporary solution is good enough for what I wanted to do right away,  get more episodes of Astro Fighter Sunred, an old parody on the Japanese version of super heroes.

Why do I have to hack and rig these things anyway?  I should be able to rent the anime I want to see directly from the Japanese company that holds the copyright, and stream it directly to my computer using safe, reliable components of the world’s leading operating system.  There should be no need to hack, fudge, jury-rig or improvise, rely on the kindness of strangers and tiptoe on the shady side of the law.  Come the revolution, this is all going to change! But for now, Linux is the most revolutionary we have. And it gets the job done, with a little help from the Google.

Short update

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Did not get enough sleep last night after all. Stomach acted up, almost certainly because I ate a burger for lunch the day before.  Even one of these a month is too much.  I haven’t gotten any fat poisoning yet, altough that would typically not be until late this night or tomorrow.  Actually it is already late this night.  But I hardly ate any more fat the rest of the day, apart from some Opera mints (chocolate filled mint drops).  I estimated that it would be just barely little enough fat to not trigger an attack, and was pleasantly surprised by how long it stayed in the stomach. The slower, the better in this case.

Anyway, got only little more than 5 hours sleep.  But did get an hour of Holosync done in the morning so that should go a long way to make up for it.  I have no personal experience of bliss or joy using Holosync, but it is hard to deny that it does seem to replace sleep quite efficiently, possibly even be better than sleep when used in moderation. (One hour a day.)

Have continued testing LifeFlow. Still no quivering with pleasure, despite my excellent headphones. Unfortunately it does not substitute for sleep at the level I am testing. Quite possibly the opposite.  I feel sleepier after using it than before.

Actually, I am sleepy right now.

Short update

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Looks like my next fad may indeed be gaming. I started a new “Build a City” challenge  in Sims 2. (Rules here.) This fiendishly complex challenge makes your first sim start all alone with no regular jobs, having to survive on gardening, fishing, selling paintings or novels etc. The goal is to build a thriving city by fulfilling various criteria for getting more people to move to the area, unlocking various careers, shops and nearby neighborhoods.

I was inspired to this one by reading the Build a City challenge of an online friend of mine, at http://j68-birka.livejournal.com/ . Mine is more tongue-in-cheek, with a city called Copycat and a founder named Nekomimi Eien (roughly translated, CatEars Forever). There will be robots. There will be catgirls. There will be catgirl robots. Or perhaps I’ll think of something else if I wake up tomorrow.
The weather is really nice now, but it’s still spring and I come home from work not long before sunset. The night comes later for each passing day though, and the snow is melting AGAIN.

The LifeFlow folks sent me another email. Just in case it wasn’t an automatic mailer, I sent a reply. It is a tough time being a skeptic, even a partial skeptic such as I. Life must be really interesting for the people who think brainwave hacking can cause them to leave their bodies, attract beautiful women and get threatened by the IRS. All this without necessarily believing in higher powers ( not counting IRS).