cj 🇺🇸🇨🇭 @cj@mastodon.technology

Also I won the millimeter wave lottery. It had double-detected that I had something in the groin area. I got a free TSA pat down at 5am. Bleh.

Goodbye Arkansas, hello North Carolina.

Going to try to volunteer for #ActivityPub at FOSDEM 2019. Even if I can't volunteer, I'm hoping to attend. Hope to see some of y'all there.

During my trans-atlantic flight a few days ago, discovered that the person who programmed the in-flight entertainment left a test string! And forgot to remove it before shipping lol.

How to tell the difference between Mastodon vs Wooly Mammoth: stick your head in their mouth and look at their molar.

Final flight is delayed. Going on hour 20 of being awake from 5 hours of sleep. Starting to get the spins from being awake so long. Send sleep, thanks.

In the Atlanta airport, already had fried food. So it begins.

On the trans-atlantic flight my free media center's sound was broken, so I finally got to watch the first half of Serial Experiments Lain

Heading back to the US for the first time in a year. Forgot about the extra special airport "security" it takes to get on a plane to the US. Sitting and enjoying the free theater.

No.

I need podcast suggestions for cross-ocean flights. Already listened to Serial and was excellent.

<rant>I can't listen to music. I still hate the cloud + music combination that are iTunes and Play Music. (Songbird was the pinnacle for OCD audiophiles like myself). And Android makes it impossible to hand-curate files I transfer to it. I have 10k songs and I need more than basic "title"/"artist"/"album" views so the cloud is unusable.</rant>

Getting distracted by making the #golang code generation more maintainable. At this rate v1 of #ActivityPub go-fed will come out approximately never.

https://github.com/go-fed/activity/commit/eb0922358825138946417e5f9fbfb860b57cef4d

As an English-speaker learning German, Mark Twain's satire and roasting of the German language is pretty funny:
https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html

Also, I learned of the mobile game Subterfuge (which is a pun). But it is a Diplomacy-like game where you and 7-9 other folks have to leverage more than just game mechanics, your social wit, to win.

Playing Diplomacy still, England has secured its future as not-first-eliminated. That honor goes to Turkey and Germany, if everything continues to pan out the rest of 1904.

Today is the day I pot the baby avocado tree.

Anyway, thanks for letting me have a late night philosophical ramble. This is the kind of stuff I get in a certain melancholy mood for.

Back to my cold logical software engineering. :)

This is why I also love being alone, reading books and seriously listening to music. I get to live lives I could otherwise never live, in private. It's the ultimate form of intimacy. I learn a new human perspective, a new lens through which to view my cold logical ideologies. A chance to reform myself, and be the only human who has ever experienced my life. And that is powerful: the author/musician will never know just how much my world has changed, and then what agency I have exerted back on the world.

I guess that's why the Dao De Jing was a book I connected with. It's about the dual nature of things: "good in evil; evil in good" being the famous one. There is no "pure" logical ideology that can only be viewed in exactly one perception; these perceptions are provided by humans; so by human nature all concepts embody themselves and their opposite.

This is why I am wary of people who think that their ideology is "the one true correct one", even if it is one I also hold to.

Am I just destined to be me and live the life I am living? Or do I have a sense of agency that is not constrained by the universe and cannot be predicted by perfect knowledge of physical processes?

I've always been a fierce defender of free will. Mainly b/c to survive as a kid, I had to fake-it-to-make-it and spend my time at home alone zoning out in a kind of meditation. To build up the discipline and a force of will. It's why buried in me is a jerk: I survived b/c of me, I will keep surviving b/c of me.