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Welcome to my homepage. I became blind at birth from retinopathy of prematurity. I developed an early interest in computers and radio. I use Linux, MacOS, and iOS. I have an extra class amateur radio license. I practice Qigong daily. I consider myself a Taoist. I don't eat meat, and have a genetic sensitivity to gluten. For the rest, you'll have to read my articles.
An Evening at the Indian Restaurant
October 02, 2009We have an awesome Indian restaurant near us called Sher-E-Punjab. I love going there, and this time I went with two friends. We have to go more often. Join me for an evening at the Indian Restaurant. Until they make it possible to send the smells and tastes of this wonderful food over the Internet, you will have to make due by looking at their awesome menu.
One friend and I arrived together, and waited for the other. She quickly arrived, and we took our seats. One friend and I both love Indian food, and the other has just started getting into it. I knew what I wanted, and we quickly reached a consensus for appetizers. We got some vegetable samosas, and some garlic naan! Awesome! The garlic on the naan tasted so fresh. I don’t know about you, but I could eat samosas every day! We loved the sauces too! For the main course, we all got Dal, a buttery lentil soup. The two experienced eaters got spicy, the other regular, but even that tasted spicy. That came with basmati rice, and the naan never stopped flowing. For drinks, we got mango lassi, which tastes great and helps quell the spice when needed.
As we ate, we overheard the conversation at the table next to us. A
guy and a girl started throwing around all these heavy topics,
including relationships, 9/11, philosophy, artificial intelligence,
and religion. I didn’t listen to every word of course, but I couldn’t
help but overhear snatches of conversation, and so wanted to join
in. At one point, the girl said something to the effect that
Christians don’t know about science, because they believe that when
they get to Heaven, that God will teach them about science. My two
friends consider themselves born-again Christians, and took offense to
this. As the lone Discordian, I maintained a noble silence. I try to
consider all views. I know a Christian who worked as a nuclear
physicist, so obviously he knows about science, but I also understood
the girl’s position very well. One friend said: “Forgive them Lord,
for they know not what they say.” I thought: “They’d say the same
thing about you.” She’ll probably read this, and i wouldn’t have a
problem expressing this opinion, because I still respect her view. I see a place for both science and spirit, I believe we need a science of the spirit. Without science, spirituality degrades into blind faith and blundering extremism. Without Spirit, science degrades into the rationalization of evil, and the advancement of eugenics. I just listened and considered all these points, but I hope the couple at the table will come across this blog one day. You never know.
At around this point, the spices started kicking in. I said that I felt almost like I had a buzz. My friend who also loves Indian food remarked how good quality spices do that. I agreed, since Indian chefs use fresh spices, and have a whole special kitchen for this purpose. I remembered after I got into a car accident in San Fransisco. I took my prescribed Darvocet, then took a second before leaving, since I didn’t want the effect to wear off while out. While at the restaurant, I ate some spicy chili soup, and I felt so high! I remember just sitting there, bruised and beaten in a wheel chair with a cast and a collar brace, and just holding my spoon and zoning out, just holding my spoon and zoning out and smiling. “Are you feeling funny from the medicine?” Mom asked. I said yes, languishing in a high I could legally and socially acknowledge. Yes indeed, good quality spices definitely do give you a little buzz, and the raw Cacao I ingested before leaving now synergized and produced something quite exquisite
for its kind. We do not program computers with artificial intelligence, we program them with intelligent artificiality.
We slowly finished our meals feeling quite satiated, and got confused over the bill. We figured out that we each owed $22 for the meal. I pitched in $23, because “That is just how a Discordian does things.” I got the last word without contriving. At that point, my cab arrived, and I bid my friends good night, and came home.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my evening at the Indian restaurant. Who knows, maybe the people at the other table will find this post. It always makes me pause and think when I have such a random once in a lifetime encounter, people passing in time making an unknowing impression. I can’t wait to go back. I love Indian food.
I have TMJ.
September 30, 2009I’ve meant to do some blogging recently, but ended up working on Liberty Pulse. After working for around a month straight, I got burnt out on that project and had to take some time off. I celebrated the Equinox by watching the Lord of the Rings, and just tried to relax. Meanwhile, I’ve had construction work going on. I’ve had a lot going on.
Through all this, I’ve had a slight earache, with a weird draining sound in my ear. I sort of ignored it, hoping it would just take care of itself, but I mentioned it to my Mom a few times, and she suggested I see an ear doctor. I figured it couldn’t hurt, so went today.
First the good news: I have excellent blood pressure, at 117/70, thanks in part to Cacao surely! He looked in my ears, and didn’t see any problems. They also gave me some hearing tests, and they said I have excellent hearing, which I already knew.
Interestingly, I told him I had used peroxide to clean my ears, and he said to watch out. “If you put your finger in some peroxide, after a few minutes it will burn.” I tried it later and sure enough, after about thirty seconds it began to feel a little different, like a slight numb burning, and this slowly intensified over a few minutes. He considers a warm washcloth as the best way to clean out your ears. He said that following that, you can use a half and half mixture of peroxide and water.
Now the bad news: While looking in my mouth, he noticed that I clench my teeth, and told me that I have TMJ. I actually sort of knew this already. My jaw has clicked for a long time. Around age twelve or so, my dentist told me something similar, and recommended this football shaped thing I’d bite down on at nights, but we never followed it up, and he didn’t treat it like a big deal. I wonder if we should have. The doctor today didn’t seem too concerned, but did indicate his suspicion that it causes my ear pain. I’ve also had some neck pain that I couldn’t trace, and I suspect it also comes from TMJ. I thought it came from talking on the phone, typing, etc. and that may certainly contribute, but now things make more sense.
So what does this mean for me? It means I have to become more aware of my jaw muscles, and to try not to clench them. Searching turned up a bunch of suggested exercises, many links circle-jerking the user back to advertisements for ebooks. They may work, and represent worthy offers, but I didn’t feel like shelling out a bunch of money, at least not yet, though I’ll probably go to my dentist to get his opinion. Anyways, I did find two links: these simple exercises from EHow, and these three exercises and information from a chiropractic site. Now that I have become really aware, my jaw feels even more annoying and somewhat more painful, and I will begin trying these exercises and let you all know how it goes.
What else does it mean? It means I have to not hold the phone on my shoulder, like I do right now. It means I need to stand up more and avoid stressful situations instead of just enduring them and internalizing them with jaw tension. I call this blog Behind the Curtain for a reason! I write all of this in the hope that it will help some random searching soul.
I sure wish I had some MJ to help my TMJ! On that note, I haven’t had any for over six months, and I find it interesting that I’d notice the symptoms of TMJ now, as before now I indulged in our green friend pretty frequently. Perhaps the Good Herb helped keep my jaw relaxed. May the moralist dinosaurs who wish to keep it illegal kindly retreat to their rightful place in the twentieth century, and let the rest of us evolve! Prohibition does not work, whether drug or informational. I seem to have strayed from my original point of treating TMJ, which must at least mean that the Valerian has begun kicking in. That should at least help. Click click.
Learning Lisp, or Back from the Shadows Again
August 18, 2009Late last night, my life changed in three hours. A kid called in to Leo Laporte and asked what language he would recommend to a young person to get them started in programming. To my delight, he recommended Lisp. He said something to the effect of: “Don’t use C or C++, use a real man’s programming language, use Lisp.” This inspired me to get back into this wonderful language. It also dovetails nicely into something else about which I wanted to rant: why I don’t want to go back to college.
I first became exposed to Lisp while taking an artificial intelligence course for two semesters. I learned it strictly in that context, only using it to solve silly academic problems, never really grasping its potential. For me, a structured learning environment seems stifling. They didn’t even mention Emacs once. This seems highly illogical, given they practically wrote the entire thing in Lisp. Of course, it does use a specialized dialect, so perhaps that explains it, but nevertheless. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, since at the time I could only access their Linux system over a non-error-correcting modem over a noisy phone line – just awful!
It seems interesting to me that learning Lisp in such a setting and in such a context prevented me from continuing to use it. For one thing, it had a negative association. I love programming, but college just makes thing seem dry and uninteresting. This ties into the other reason, the context under which I learned it. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days trying to write a function to draw a weighted graph or something, I want to rock out and do something cool that I will actually use in my day-to-day life. Why else would I want to program? Of course, “they” will tell you in their snobby way that “You have to learn that life is hard, and that you can’t always do what you want.” I reply by saying that I became blind at birth, and figured that out at about age four. Don’t patronize me!
For these reasons, I sadly relegated Lisp to the back of my mind, assigning it to the dusty corner reserved for purely boring academic matters. Once I escaped without a degree, I continued on a fairly ordinary course for a weirdo Discordian programmer. I picked up Perl, and learned a bunch of other cool things, but I always felt something missing. C gives me a headache, Java remains rather inaccessible to the blind, Python seems like a waste of time (I don’t want to spend all my time counting stupid white space), and so on. I mainly concentrated on learning Linux, since it had since become quite accessible, thanks to Speakup. I love FORTH, but sadly it doesn’t get much use. I craved something powerful and trippy. Yet, I never considered Lisp – after all, I wanted to actually do real stuff.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the universe had begun gently nudging me in this direction for some time. Goddess works in mysterious ways. First, I got into Firesign Theatre. One of their albums, We’re All Bozos on this Bus, has a computer-generated character called Dr. Memory. The fact they wrote this in the early seventies fascinated me – obviously they had access to one of the early AI labs, and this turned out true.
Next, I got into Emacs, which I linked to above. I’ve really come to enjoy it, though I still need to tweak it more. I could spend a long time doing that, and I still have a lot to learn, but feel very impressed with it. Unlike most editors that you may know, the Emacs executable file actually contains a Lisp interpreter for a specific dialect, and most of the editor actually resides in Emacs Lisp source code. This seemed really cool, since it allows infinite customization – how many editors do you know that have an adventure game, an Eliza program, and Mayan calendar routines?
These three features have a special place in my heart. I’ve always loved text adventures and text games, growing up using the first computer usable by the blind, an Apple II/E. One day at around age seven, I ran a version of Eliza, written in Apple BASIC. Eliza acts like a psychotherapist, dissecting the user’s input, parsing it, and sometimes outputting it in a modified form, often with humorous and sometimes even insightful results. It inspired Dr. Memory referenced above, and as it would turn out, it would inspire me as well. I had just ran the program, leaving it in memory. I didn’t really know any commands, so my little kid curiosity just said to start typing in things. I typed in “LIST” figuring it would list something, and in this case it listed the source code to Eliza. It clicked in my head that this told the computer what to do, and I knew right then that I had to learn how to do this too.
So this brings us back full circle to the present. After hearing the recommendation to learn Lisp, I quickly found Practical Common Lisp. It’s opening letter to the reader joyfully allayed my concerns, and convinced me that I should give Lisp a second chance. I now learn it on my own time, for my own reasons, in my own way, at my own pace, with my own pleasant associations. I value the time I spent learning it in college, but I do far better learning things on my own, and I know I will enjoy it even more. I love Lisp!
Big Boom!
August 14, 2009I write this article under strange circumstances. On Sunday, we had a thunderstorm. It quickly escalated into a very severe storm, with wild lightning and mad thunder. With a crash, the power blinked off, and the phone went dead, and did not return. The net went with it. A hum filled the air, coming in through the open windows. A 12,000-volt power line had fallen to the ground. Sparks and arcs burst forth as the rain continued to fall, thunder and lightning continuing as well. The air resonated with the loud 60 hertz hum, and the awful sounds of the electricity sounded truly terrifying. I felt afraid to touch anything metal. From the depths of my past, Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” played in my head. I ran around the house to try to hear more, and returned to the computer room. The brutal sounds continued. I hoped my hair wouldn’t start standing on end. Visions of electric death filled my head, and I smelled some smoke.
This continued for fifteen or so minutes. Trucks then began to arrive. The transformer went off and on momentarily, but continued. Someone yelled: “Sir! Get back in your house!” I felt glad that I decided to stay inside and avoid the urge to check it out for myself. Trucks and people began working, the fire department and electric company had come. Finally, they shut off the transformer, but power remained on. Work continued long into the night and early morning. At some point, I did indeed lose my power, before getting it back again later. I still have no phone or Internet as I write this, and will have to wait to get online to publish this article.
Whenever I lose power for an extended time, I find myself having similar thoughts. These mainly revolve around how much we depend on electricity, and wondering what people did before we had it. These thoughts then become refined, and I begin reflecting on how electricity alters our behavior patterns. I also note how good it feels to not have an electric smog surrounding me, and wonder what I can do to experience this while experiencing electricity’s benefits.
As soon as the realization hits that power probably won’t return immediately, everything changes. All the devices that seem so futuristic immediately seem like useless relics. Walking through a room with computers feels like walking through a museum of ancient dust-covered non-functioning exhibits. Having electricity transforms the present into the future. Not having it transforms the present into the past. It amazes me how much humanity accomplished without it. Imagine getting on a boat in England as my ancestors did, setting sail for a far off land never to return, and with no way of communication. I can’t!
Along a similar vein, I can’t help but wonder what exactly people did without electricity, especially once the sun went down. Did religious leaders really need to tell their flocks to be fruitful and multiply? I’d think that after sunset, they wouldn’t have much else to do! Electricity makes it possible to do things at all hours of the day. You can listen to music, watch a television show, communicate, eat, work, anything you want. It also makes it less necessary to interact with others, and they probably did a lot more of that in the past as well. Battling and babbling with Verizon’s automated customer service computer demonstrated this point. Today, when I went to the bank to get some cash, I couldn’t use the ATM, and actually had to go inside and talk to a human to get it. Weird! Perhaps having electricity messes with our heads more than not having it.
How do we bring balance? I thought of meditation techniques, EMF balancing devices, things of that like, then an answer emerged from another angle, perhaps indicative of the effect. Do things that don’t require electricity. Good luck with that.
Verizon came out the next day to fix the problem. Their automated tests claimed that they could get a dial tone on my line, and could ping my router, both of which I doubted. “Tell them to actually call your number.” suggested my Mom. Whatever, they dispatched a technician. He determined that the outside box got fried, as well as the plug to my router. I told him of the tests, and he said: “I don’t see how that’s possible.” Don’t believe Verizon’s somewhat freaky automated service. It also weirded me out how the cell phone distorted its hold music to sound like satanic industrial music, or something. Anyways, he fixed the problems, and I returned online. I meant to publish this article sooner, but have gotten immersed in learning Emacs. I’ll have much more to write
about that, for sure.
Thumbs up to Taza!
July 17, 2009I celebrated my 32nd birthday on the 14th. My cousin gave me some Taza Chocolate. I unwrapped a hand-wrapped packet containing two elegant discs. I slowly ate a disc throughout the course of the evening, and felt quite fine – a real smooth buzz. I ordered a case upon returning home. First class!
Each disc contains organic cacao, organic cane sugar, and a particular flavor, such as chili powder, cinnamon, or salt and almonds. The disc breaks cleanly. Either break off a small piece, or grate some and combine it with hot (not boiling) water. The disc makes the most convenient form for the cacao enthusiast. Never go without.
Along with the convenience, the discs contain the highest quality cacao. Each kind of cacao has a different feel. Some have a more physical stimulation, with social overtones. Others have a more cerebral feel. Still others have a more spacey psychedelic feel, and these discs joyfully fall into this category. They will take you to Cloud Nine. I love these discs! Thumbs up to Taza!