The UT football crowd of about 100,000, in 100+ degree temperatures, generated a psychic hum that made me feel like part of a vast, spooked herd. A new scoreboard called "Godzillatron" allowed corporate logos to outblaze the sun. My head was, yes, adorned with an orange hat, sporting a silouette of none other than the white horned beast itself. I was a stranger in a strange land...

OU Sucks!!!!

i wandered into an antique store on burnet where a fresh shipment of mexican 50's movie posters had arrived. i also picked up my retro 50's chair from copenhagen saturday.

Went to the "Rumble on Red River" tonight, a badly promoted, badly planned boxing event. You can sort of see the empty seats in the picture. All of the fights were mismatches. The best example of this was the last semi-main event pitting "King" James Johnson, Jr., against Billy David Thompson. The guys threw jabs for about 1.5 minutes, then Johnson connected a few times, and Thompson, intending to show that he was tough enough to take punches, exposed his jaw and made a "bring it on" gesture. Johnson immediately connected with a right, Thompson went down, and the small crowd erupted with derisive hoots and laughter. The title fight was also one round, ending in a KO.

The highlight was meeting Ernestine, who was displaced by Katrina and who could only shake her head and laugh at how bad the fights were, compared to the fights she went to regularly in N.O. We were in a row of empty seats quite close to the ring, in adjacent seats. When katrina hit she was stranded at the New Orleans convention center for four days, and went straight to the Austin convention center after being evacuated. I offered to get her a beer, and she said she couldn't take the "watered down" stuff. I said "I'm getting a Shiner Bock, it's not watery." She dug a five out of her pocket and I got us two. She had not had Shiner yet, and admitted it was OK. It was funny talking to her, almost everying she's tried to enjoy here: music, food, sports, hasn't held a candle to where she used to live. Even when she caught the Rebirth Brass Band at SXSW, the stage was too small to hold all of the musicians. She said she was taping the taylor vs. wright fight being shown on HBO tonight. It was a small miracle anybody showed up for the Red River Rumble.

I didn't think Fox could surprise me anymore, but they just aired a spot for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and their "We Call It Life" pro-CO2 ad campaign. CO2, it seems, is being unfairly maligned by the liberal establishment, and citizens must be mobilized to put an end to senate hearings that might result in CO2 being categorized as a pollutant. It's not a pollutant! This little girl cannot possibly be exhaling pollutants!

The CEI website has similarly nauseating supporting material, but I found the bio for their Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, Myron Ebell, the most telling; They list WITH PRIDE the fact that Greenpeace and other activist groups labeled him a bad guy. It epitomizes the awfulness of modern American Politics: issues are not fought on the basis of ideas and facts, but on who can assemble a better blacklist. Greenpeace blacklists Ebell, thereby allowing Ebell to blacklist Greenpeace and pander to his conservative base. Americans on either side of political spectrum can be cowed into an "in group" more easily than they can be persuaded by information.

I buy the argument I heard on Nova. Unless drastic action is taken in the next 10 years, global warming will become irreversible. We currently can choose between keeping the only climate civilization has ever known, or force our children to adapt to a new climate with unknown consequences. My trust goes to scientists (and even politicans) who explain an inconvenient truth when it arises, not to Institutes that launch ad campaigns to snuff the life out of reasoned public discourse.

Wild Thing

Stayed late at work today, but time is meaningless when you are wrapping up a problem. On Monday I was told that the software I've been working on for the last two months has to compile on older system software. (I was told to roll back my gcc version a notch.) Things broke. It was depressing. I got to work with a programmer I didn't know well who maintains the test computer running the older system software. The problem centered around an unrecognized system "accessor function", __ctype_b_loc. Which still reminds me of Tone Loc, but deals with the concept of locales, allowing the rest of the world to enter yuan symbols, umlauts, and upside down exclamation marks into the computer. Everybody I talked to seemed united around the idea of the gcc compiler version being the only thing to dictate the presence or lack of functions such as __ctype_b_loc. But there was a whole other side to the problem. The compiler version (gcc) and the system C libraries (glibc) can be updated or rolled back independently of one another. Even after I was told to roll back my gcc, I was still testing my code on a non-standards complaint version of glibc. That took 8 hours to figure out. Sitting there like a solemn chimpanzee in my cube, making people wonder if I was slowly dying. I wrote a very short patch file that makes the old system software deliver its ctype lookup tables in the manner of its newer replacement. I hacked linux. I got a "clever" from the programmer who helped me get started, perhaps the most nurturing comment I've received since starting the job. Then I realized that after all the quiet hours, I also learned the way to TEST for the correct version of glibc. It is a good addition to my skill set.

Last week I solved the problem of depth soundings coming out the system like swiss cheese, several layers of partially complete depth grids rather than one grid that contains everything. And a few weeks before that I fixed a bug caused by small rounding errors in the float datatype.

I am keeping my job.

Today was my biannual bout with stomach flu, or food poisoning. I don't know which. It was painful and ran its course exactly like it has before. I ate cold pizza and fresh cocktail tomatoes. The last time I ate a cold pork chop and a peach. Learn from my stupidity. Heat up anything that is conventionally eaten hot, and rinse produce thoroughly. I wonder if pesticides have something to do with it. Both times I ate very fresh produce; perhaps pesticides lowered my resistence to bacteria.

It's like huge fingers pinching your intestines for four hours. I don't want to experience it again.

I watched the movie Thumbsucker last night, speaking of poor hygeine. The DVD packaging leads one to think of a nutty, independent film along the lines of Napoleon Dynamite. It's a sentimental coming of age story with a linear plot and a happy ending. The Polyphonic Spree guy ...let's see IMDB... TimDeLaughter did the sountrack and I think in ten years the film will make people grateful for the present. More realistic than a John Hughes film, but so crowded with big name actors that you sort of wish somebody like Anthony Michael Hall or Pedro might stroll into a scene. Keanu Reeves is poorly cast as an existentialist orthodontist. The casting by ...let's see IMDB... Jeanne McCarthy made me think "hair fetish" and "big budget". The writing is just OK, maybe more thanks to the novel than the screenwriters. I liked The Squid and the Whale better.

In the thick of SXSW. Last night Claire and I saw Mogwai (left), Belle and Sebastian (below Mogwai). Tonight it was Morrissey and Goldfrapp. (My picture of Morrissey was so blurry there is no point posting it.) Goldfrapp was very cool. Early 80s disco with driving beats and heavily synthesized voices. "Crystalline voices" as their website puts it. I'm thinking glam-sex decadence is where it's at.

Home Sweet Home

Time alone at home can be such a delicious yet somehow incomplete thing. The Christmas holidays played themselves out, I got to see so many things, the west texas mountains, trendy chicago restaurants, a beautiful, real christmas tree in my mother's livingroom, my loved ones.

I cooked carne guisada tonight, drank a few Sierra Nevada celebration ales, marked down at HEB because the holidays are over, celebrations are over, and beer bottles with poinsetta leaves on them are over. My iPod is playing the best shuffle I could ask for, as I ran around snapping these photos Pee Wee King and his Gulf Coast Playboys played the Tennessee Waltz.

I realize I look fat and I resolve to lose enough weight to erase the sagging layer around my jowls. I went out for a walk tonight and met my across the street neighbor, Jay, he is an engineer for Verizon and an avid bass fisherman. He invited me out. I have tackle. I've been carrying fishing tackle around with me for, like, a decade, five or six moves, finally I may get to use it.

I'm just so fucking happy to have my own house.

I got a job, Engineering Scientist Associate, at UT. I'd probably be remiss to post the exact department on my blog. If you are one of the three people who reads this blog, and you want to know, please e-mail me and I'll tell you. Actually, two people already know, so Greg, if you want to know, e-mail me.

I am excited about this. I was worried I'd get a job that would force me to forget most of what I studied: physics, math, digital signal processing. This job will give me opportunities to maintain and build upon my academic foundation. My three year, unrequited love affair with the wave equation can continue; the job involves acoustics. On Tuesday I spent my coop bookstore rebate on a book called "fundamentals of physical acoustics." First chapter, the wave equation. It's easy enough to see that functions with an x-ct (position minus speedconstant times time) parameter shift right on the x axis as you increase t. A pulse glides right on the x axis like a wave, or a lightbike from "Tron." The wave equation is a partial, second order differential equation that, when you plug in tron-bike equations and differentiate like a good calc II student, works. Admittedly, I am still baffled by how mathematicians derived the wave equation. When I really get it--and I must--I will post a long blog entry or pdf document to explain. It has been too long in coming.

More to the point people, CLOSURE. In my Morita pepper blog entry I hinted that I feel that my life is almost too complicated to explain, but here are the lowlights, in sequential order: demeaning office jobs, lost my father to cancer, worked for a three-person multimedia start-up and the boss committed suicide, i made a serious go of it as a tech writer and got laid off, i went back to school and worked my way up from the lowest-level EE courses, selling my condo in the process. A decade of suspense. Of course, I am leaving many things out, many good things, and I am not so naive to assume that everything will be better here on out, but I think at some point you can safely say that you paid some dues.

Currently reading a fascinating book, Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence." He invented the Palm Pilot and went on to study neuroscience. His book attempts to explain the human mind as if it were an operating system. 50 years ago, a lot of his analogies and suppositions would have seemed trivial. Such as, intelligence is being able to infer from a siren that a fire truck is coming, we don't have to actually ID the truck visually. Big deal. But the point he makes is that our ability to predict outcomes is distinctively human, possible due to our large neocortex, the "new rind" around our more primitive inner brain. The upshot of computers and AI might not be that we eventually write intelligent computer programs, but that by writing computer programs we become able to appreciate the aspects of intelligence that are not "computational." Hawkins and his pals are out to build neocortex-like systems. I think this has fascinating implications for the field I am getting into. I would bet money that the kinds of systems I will be working on rely on instantaneous detection and recognition of patterns in the environment, and that the idea of recognizing patterns by correlating with stored "memories" of prior patterns has not been tried. I hope I'll be able to blog about it.

On the difference between pushing and merely leaning in to something.

I jog west, at a leisurely pace, by the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue. It's just after 7PM, dark, the trail is almost empty. Two guys pass me. The first one is thin and moving fast, the other looks like a butterball. I decide to keep pace with him, to see if he is really that fast or simply sprinting a 1 mile dash. We wind over hills, under Lamar, into the dark trees on the north edge of zilker, up and over a few hills. As we approach the footbridge near Robert E. Lee I realize the butterball is deceptively fast. He is not kicking his knees up so much as floating over earth with a quick scissor movement of the legs. I start breathing heavy. My feet make noisy, almost angry sounds on the planks of the footbridge as I chase him. I stay about 20 feet behind him for about a mile. We run up a tall hill, then down into a small arroyo, then up where the Zilker Zephyr mini train tracks cross. I am going much faster than usual. Up the hill, my feet seem to make tight, solid contact, and I think "I HAVE to be gaining ground on him." Perhaps one or two feet of gained ground, that's it. By the time we get to the Mopac bridge I go all out and pass him. I break my imaginary finish line at the north end of the bridge. He claps me on the shoulder a few seconds later, says "keep pushing" and floats into the street and up the hill towards Enfield. I shout "thank you, man" without hesitating. It was inspiring.

I noticed from the neck up he looked tough. (sure, sure) I'll have to start wearing a watch and report how fast I am actually running the 4.5 mile Mopac-to-Congress loop. I run .5 mile warm up on a track, and started doing .5 miles of sprint, cool-down. I'd like to get up into the 7-12 mile range and possibly do a half-marathon.

My fingertips are burning. A few hours ago I was cooking with Morita peppers, which are simply roasted red jalapenos that you buy in a little celophane bag. They add a powerful, smoky aroma to stews. Lately I've been on a guisada kick but this might be my cue to try something else. Pain! I did the dishes, thinking it would wash off the hot but it simply aggravated it.

Watched a very strange movie tonight on TCM, The Devil-Doll starring Lionel Barrymore. His character, Paul Lavond, is a fugitive who teams up with the widow of a mad scientist in order to make miniature dolls out of his enemies. For most of the movie he hobbles around in a dress, in disguise as an old woman, talking in an absurd falsetto. When his last standing enemy confesses to the police and exonerates him, the lab and the widow conveniently explode, freeing him to make amends with his long lost daughter. In the most powerful scene in the movie he sees his daughter out of costume but chooses to lie to her that her father is actually dead. The practical reason he does this is unclear to me, but from an emotional level, you sense that he has done SO much weird shit that he can't possibly explain himself to the people he loves. message: We can become such weird creatures that it becomes impossible to explain ourselves, or to love. Yet the movie ends with him saying "this is the best day of my life." Such a movie would never be made today. Yet it expresses something real.

Robotic Fish.

"here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is...the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succesion moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."

-- Joan Didion, The New York Times Magazine, September 25, 2005

I recently read Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, about the rich and deliberately obscured history of non-religious moral leadership in this country. And interviewed her last Saturday, which was terrific. I have Rob Brezsny, the syndicated astrologist, coming on in two weeks. So all of this freethinking has led me to question my own religious beliefs.

I recently discovered that when really pressed to the wall, I become a good Catholic. I apologize, sincerely, to some sort of deity, for my sins, and vow to do better. I don't know if this is human nature or whether by being baptised Catholic 33 years ago, a very subtle element was added to my personality. I suppose I could find out by studying rituals of contrition, repentance, in other religions.

But what Didion seems to be saying is that it's all window dressing. Only people add meaning to life.

a perk of my new gold's gym membership is a free personal training session. a trainer named chris analyzed my walk, posture, and squat, and concluded that I had overpronation of the shoulders, one leg longer than the other, and really tight (in a bad way) legs. He had me lay on the ground and proceeded to roll a foam rolling pin over the backs of my legs. a quick and painful way to stretch out and untangle the hamstrings. when all was said and done he sketched a pyramid for me and said that I needed to spend three weeks doing stretches--the bottom tier of the pyramid, a place without weights or machines, rolling around on a big pink ball, similar to rehab. at the side of the pyramid he wrote "886." What is 886 I asked. After some hemming and hawing, he admitted that it was the cost (in dollars) of the pyramid, or at least the cost to lead me up it. i had no idea the hour we were spending was a sales pitch, the first time I enrolled at Gold's I took the free training and the guy basically gave me a cruddy workout routine and said good luck. so until 886 i was really liking all that chris was saying.

he has me believing that the reason I have had problems breaking my 4-mile running limit, is not my aerobic capacity but the fact that a large percentage of my muscles are simply too knotted up to contribute to the effort. he also denigrated my previous workout routine, so the next time i go back, i am not sure what to do with myself that he would approve of. I am thinking I'll try the free yoga classes they offer, and keep running 3 days a week. if i ever get a job, i might spend the 886. chris seemed to be saying that in 6 weeks he could utterly transform me physically, from a hunched over, knotted me into a pressed, svelte me who can easily run 10ks. for the time being, though, i will keep trying to train myself.

Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana has declared today a day of prayer. Wouldn't it have been nice for her to declare a "day of pragmatic thinking." Or "a day during which we perform our thoughtful contingency plan." Or even "a day of selfless behavior." But a day of PRAYER. As if the south needs that. We might as well have a press conference with Joyce Meyer, who seems to have more resources at her disposal.

I had taken beautiful movie of Lobo settling into bed, but alas, SBC Yahoo! does not let me post it.

I've been summoned for jury duty! Something to finally blog about. People, grab your cutlery and tuck in that napkin, because I am going to be adjudicating.

The most coherent arguments I've heard in favor of staying the course in Iraq have been from Bill Kristol. He describes the aftermath of a pullout as follows:

"Since Iraqi troops won't be as capable as American ones, the situation will deteriorate. Then the insurgency could become a full-fledged guerrilla war, inviting a civil war--and we would be faced with a choice between complete and ignominious withdrawal or a recommitment of troops."

Ignominous, "Marked by shame or disgrace"

This scenario should at least be on the minds of the people in Crawford. The first image that leaps to mind is officially endorsed massacres of minority groups in Iraq.
Years and years of sunnis and shiites with RPG launchers skittering about on our television sets. Murders we won't see and won't feel.

I do support a pull-out. What Kristol assumes is that the "ignominious" outcome has not already been reached. His idea of shame is just as valid as Cindy Sheehan's. Our government has acted shamefully, from the top (Bush) to the bottom (Abu Ghraib). And currently, the same idiots who convinced us to go into Iraq (Kristol) are using the same doom-scenario technique to prod us en masse towards escalation. No.

Nobody understood what makes Iraq tick THEN, and I'll be damned if I go along with more pundits telling me they think they understand Iraq NOW. There is no serious analysis going on. I suppose what must be next for Anti-War supporters is to formulate a credible withdrawal plan. Doing the homework of explaining how a horrible civil war might NOT happen, or at least explaining why we are still OK allowing Iraq to go to hell...but wait it has gone to hell.

Erin Collier, the Austin Chronicle's marketing director, was my guest today on Writing on the Air. She brought six or seven different jars/tubs of salsa for me to try, and a bag of chips. We agreed that she'd come on only this week, after I had posted a blurb in the Chron announcing I'd be playing readings from Billy Collins and Denise Levertov. So the show was a weird mix of Erin and I making silly comments about hot sauce and then playing austere, serious poetry. Billy Collins, not too austere, but Levertov's "Life at War" dealing with "burned human flesh in Vietnam" was austere. It seemed to work. Ironically, Erin was one my most lively, funny guests, and she isn't a writer, which means I either need to find better guests or do a different type of show. Maybe the "feed Graham show."