A Huge [Dictionary] List.

June 17, 2003, 03:06 pm

I hung out with my parents at their cabin on Saturday and Sunday. I had a hard time sleeping, so I wrote down a list of all the things I was thinking of:

this paper (see other side)

I had picked up this paper to write my list on and it had “MYERS BUILDERS, LLC” written on it. I thought, “Where the hell did that come from? One of the contractors that my parents used?” Then I noticed that my Grampa's name was also at the top, so I guess they got it from him.

this pen (was it left here by my sister?)

To write my list, I needed a pen. I found this fancy blue, Uniball DELUX micro pen. I have no idea if my sister uses/likes these pens, but it seemed like she would and I thought maybe she left it here when she was visiting a few weeks ago.

confusing my mother's refrigerator with the sound of a computer (fans, harddrive spin)

I was walking in the dark – getting the paper and pen – and I heard a sound that was very familiar to me: the sound of computer fans and harddrives spinning. But I was mistaken, as it was my mother's refrigerator.

the spirit of the web

I think a lot about “the spirit of the web.” I've mentioned it before, but I think it's all about acessibility. (which I also think about a lot – not just web page accessibility, but the user interfaces of cars as well as written word accessibility.) It's also about empowering the user/reader to put information in easily accessible and readable formats. I think I could write a lot about this...

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

I have to conceed that, for all my bitching about William Gibson's self-serving attitude, I do enjoy reading his books. And I honestly think that Pattern Recognition is the best work he's done since Neuromancer. I am a little chafed that the main character's name is “Cayce” (to be pronounced Case – as in Case-the-main-character-from-Neuromancer), as well as the similarity between the anonymous footage released and the little boxes in Count Zero that turn out to be made by a machine (I suspect that the footage will also be machine made).

sneaking to the basement W.C.

I had to pee, but I didn't want to wake my parents up, so I snuck downstairs to use the bathroom. I was completely quiet, but it doesn't matter, because the act of flushing a toilet is loud throughout the whole house. Why bother sneaking around in the first place?

Bittersweet feelings toward “detend”

I was turning this reading lamp on and off a lot (I kept adding things to my list of things I was thinking of). The lamp's switch is a slider with detents for three discrete brightness settings. I like the word “detent”, but I think it's a bit cumbersome and awkward to say.

asking Em, “May I play with your BB gun?”

Yeah, my mom has a Red Rider BB gun and I played with it.

No, I did not “shoot [my] eye out.”

this cabin would be dangerous with DSL

If my parents' cabin had a fast Internet connection, I would be so tempted to hermit away there with just my computer and a pile of books and become a programming genius!

my longing for true engineer/programmer cred (relating to C/C++/Java)

One of the lies that I try to convince myself is that I could have hacked it at a real engineering school (as opposed to pussing out at the school of business). I guess those strongly-typed languages just seem more credible than scripting languages like PHP. One of these days, I really need to do some C or C++ development, just to prove to myself that I'm okay. (this is also related to wanting to hermit myself at my parents' cabin... just coccoon myself up and metamorphisis into a real programmer.)

cabin retreat brandishing my father's unused fish cleaning/flensing knife and my mother's BB gun

Left on my own for any significant period of time would likely make me paranoid (think “no work and no play makes jack a dull boy”). I would probably attempt to defend myself with my parents' weapons.

“flensing” and Vernor Vinge

I like the word “flensing” and am thankful that Vernor Vinge chose to feature that word so much in A Fire Upon the Deep.

A Wild Sheep Chase

The hermitting also reminded me of the end of A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. JB loaned me it and I liked it okay. At the end of the book, the main character is at this vacation house on a mountain that is inaccessable during the winter months due to snow. To keep himself in good physical and mental strength, he adheres to a strict regiment of cleaning, cooking, athletics, &c.

It's also similar to the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave Bowman behaves similarly – all alone since Frank Poole & the survey team have been murdered and HAL 9000 has been disconnected. Dave doesn't want the mission controllers to see him lose his grip.

the worthiness of “importing” my '97 diary

I kept a diary my senior year of highschool from August 3, 1997 until May 18, 1998. It's not that well written and pretty personal. Since I never talk about sexual things here, it would be a little weird for me to expose that. Plus, who would really care? Which leads me to...

Who is my blog audience?

When I write entries, I assume that my friends will read it. I don't think that my parents would read it. Sometimes I think that my not-yet-existent children would read it.

I'm interested in knowing what my parents were thinking when they were my age, but that information isn't really available to me. I do write my name and the date in every book I get. I stole my dad's copy of 2010: Oddyssey Two, given to him by my mother for Christmas. I liked thinking that my dad had read it sometime after that. I dunno. Just interesting to me. I like thinking that twenty years from now, if I have a teenage kid, they'll read books of mine (and hopefully like them) and think it's neat that I read them twenty years before.

But then I think about how I have a journal that my mom kept when she was pregnant with me. Despite it's brevity, I haven't even bothered to read it all. Also, my dad kept journals when he went to Africa twice and I've never read those. Will my kids care enough to read mine?

It's a bit different to compare theirs to mine: one, theirs is paper-based, one-of-a-kind, and handwritten making them, in my opinion, somewhat inaccessible. My not-yet-existent children could just search through my entries for things they're interested in, instead of just reading them incrementally.

Ponder sleeps in the closet >> I slept in the closet

My parents dog, Ponder, likes to sleep in their closet. When I lived at home, I put my bed in my walk-in closet (so that I could use the space in my room more effectively).

There was a little more, but I'm tired of typing this!