Category Archives: LiveJournal Imports

Sialia Sialis

Bluebird
by Charles Bukowski

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

The Truth

Twiin: we had a pretty fucked up childhood, eh?
Josh “The brain” Lazer: yup
Josh “The brain” Lazer: we turned out pretty good
Twiin: pretty impressive
Twiin: …or is it?! BLASDFASHA!!!
Josh “The brain” Lazer: WOO WOO WOO WOO

halfway to fifty

I’m about to head out for my traditional birthday coffee. Leslie’s hanging in the living room, Zanne’s on the computer, and Charles and Yann are playing old arcade games on the XBox. X-Men, to be specific.

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes. I wish I had been feeling up to throwing a birthday party, but it just wasn’t in me this year. (My birthday snuck up on me, actually. I got one of those ‘free stuff on your birthday’ emails from a site I’m a member of, and I thought that I the site must have my address confused with another account.)

I think I’ll have to make up for it with a bash this summer, after things finish settling down here at The Geekhaus.

Thanks again, everyone. I must go drink coffee now.

I HAVE NO SHAME

Whenever I’m upset about the world, and where things are going, I can always find solace in Nine Inch Nails. Laugh at my gothic tragicness if you must, fools, but you’re the ones missing out. Leaving Hope is a brilliant, beautiful piece of work. My love is an unashamed love.

NIN.com has undergone renovations recently, including a fantastic low-tech redesign (read: I wish I had thought of it first), a near-complete discography, studio updates, and a suprisingly candid question and answer section.

What I’ve read about the new album is promising, if only because there seems to be a very real sense of direction with this work. Also, there are a lot of wires involved. And a cat.

…

I spent some time today pouring over various text-analysis papers and theories, trying to determine what the best solution was to my spam problem. It is a very large problem, and I fear that the best solution is to change my email address.

However, I did learn a lot about Apple’s mail.app functions, and how it handles spam.

I’m currently using a combination of methods to defeat The Spam, but mostly I’m using a form of bayesian filtering. Bayesian filtering works as such: Every word (or string) in every email is assigned a score, based on the probability of that word being used in spam mail. The score is totalled, and if it is larger than a predefined value, then the message is tagged as spam.

What mail.app does is this: The occurance of each word (or string) is counted, and stored in a table. Each message is assigned a point in N-dimensional space, where each axis is a word (or string) and an email’s position within the axis is how often a given string appears in an email. You can then do dimensionality reduction on this space, collapsing dimensions which are noisy, useless, or redundant.

By eliminating dimensions in this way, you can bypass a lot of spam trickery. Putting unique words in spam (amoral legendary chrysolite, anyone?) doesn’t help the message’s chances of passing through the filter, etc., etc. Just throw away the bigger common null subspace in the word matrices, do a little massaging, and, voila! Latent semantic analysis!

(Or, if you prefer: Magic!)

…

GMail appears to have (accidentally, I assume) upped my storage limit to one terabyte from one gigabyte. If anyone had any 1000000MB files they needed to email me, now’s the time.

LF: Roommate in Geekhaus / House of Khan – June 1st

This is a two-story house a 3-min walk away from Billings Bridge, which has 97 service until after 2AM. The 1 and 111 routes are a block away, and the 5 literally stops on the front door.

There’s a convenience store right across the street, and within a 2-minute walk there’s a Blockbuster, Market Fresh, and everything else you need in a mini mall.

The house itself was renovated last year, and is two stories, with the upstairs having a separate entrance. Downstairs there is myself, Leslie, and Suzanne, and living upstairs there’s a wicked guy who makes his own chainmail, and another geek with spindles of PS/DC games and a Juno-106.

We have the full digital cable package, rogers high speed internet PLUS 4-meg uncapped DSL, and about 250GB of shared apps/movies/games/mp3s on our PC network. There is also a gas fireplace, and the house is not physically attached to any others, if you’re concerned about noise.

The location used to be a cafe, so there’s a massive wooden cafe-style deck on the front porch, with a barbeque. We have a HUGE lot/backyard. Before it was fenced in, there’d be a half-dozen schoolbuses and mack trucks parked there every night.

This is a liberal and GLB-friendly environment, and we are looking for an intelligent, financially stable roommate who wants more than another place to crash or a place for his friends to party all the time.

Rent is 450 a month, including phone/cable/both internet connections/heat/hydro/etc. First and last is not required. Interested parties can contact Jairus or Leslie at 249-0287.

(Forgive the X-Posting)

Rapest coming. Don’t get Rapesd.

…and just for shits and giggles, here are some choice excerpts from the Taguba Report, in regards to torture of Iraqi by the US military. To my American Friends: This report has been classified as TOP SECRET. Reading this LJ entry could indeed be punishable by jail time.

Us Canadians, though, don’t have to worry so much.

6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:

a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.

d. (U) Mr. Adel L. Nakhla, a US civilian contract translator was questioned about several detainees accused of rape. He observed (sic): “They (detainees) were all naked, a bunch of people from MI, the MP were there that night and the inmates were ordered by SGT Granier and SGT Frederick ordered the guys while questioning them to admit what they did. They made them do strange exercises by sliding on their stomach, jump up and down, throw water on them and made them some wet, called them all kinds of names such as “gays” do they like to make love to guys, then they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by insuring that the bottom guys penis will touch the guy on tops butt.”

33. (S/NF) The various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees “ghost detainees.” On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of “ghost detainees” (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law. (Annex 53)

humbug

I would like to learn a new trade, I think. I love the web, and I love computers, but I think I’d like to do something that isn’t web design, or tech support.

I’ve been thinking for a few years about taking some audio-related courses. While the workplace may have sucked, I did some really interesting work when I was at Sony. I would enjoy being a full-time sound guy. I’ve also been following the technology of video/lighting for a number of years, and I think it’s pretty fascinating. I’d love to get into that field, but it strikes me as a very tough industry to break into.

But, all of this seems to involve schooling, training, money. I’ve managed to avoid racking up tens of thousands of dollars in school debts so far, and I’m not sure that I’d like to start now. To be honest, I doubt I’d be able to get a student loan. Credit doesn’t like me, for some reason. Never had any, don’t think I ever will. Not sure why, really, it doesn’t make sense to me that I would’ve been rejected for a Canadian Tire or a Zellers card when I was making 40K a year after taxes. It happened, though.

Stranger still: Years ago, when I walked into my bank (TD) to get my daily withdrawl limit increased, carrying a letter from my CEO (and a former VP of TD) stating that I was expected to make over 90K that year, they refused to raise my daily ATM limit over 200$ a day. No overdraft, no credit card, no nothing. From $50 a day to $200 a day, take it or leave it.

…

Maybe I smell funny.