It's grey.

It's raining.

I spent the entire paid part of the morning troubleshooting a bad Internet connection in a Linux virtual machine, and failing to solve it.

I spent the unpaid part dealing with insurance.  My choices are:  insurance I can't afford, insurance that doesn't let me use my current doctors, or effectively lie to them, plus pay $900 up front and I can afford it and use my current doctors. 

Life sucks and I'm gonna eat worms.

So, as y'all know, I have that survey up over on SurveyMoneky.  The last question is "if you'd like to hear more about this, please put your email here...no obligation...no spam...blah blah blah."

Now, I thought it was pretty clear that question was optional, but it's true that I didn't put the big "(OPTIONAL:)" label on it that I had done with a few of the others.  I've been very pleasantly surprised at how many people provided their email, but I'm not too surprised that have a dozen people just wrote "No" (or, more forcefully:  "NO").

But, what about the guy who wrote "good"? 

*blink*

So, I just posted a test batch of survey requests on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.  Wow.  It was up for something like 3 minutes before I had my first half dozen responses.  It's been up now for 15 or 20 and I'm almost done with the 20 requests that I posted.  From those 20, I've got 2 people who are interested in signing up for the service if and when it launches.

How much did all of this cost?  $0.70  Acquiring customers for $0.35 each?  Oh yeah.  The future is now, baby.


The second holy god was dinner tonight.  Spinach and feta chicken sausages with Beemster cheese (a form of Gouda), sauteed mushrooms, and scrumptious 7-grain bread.  Oh, my mouth and belly are so happy.


Which of these is more "holy god" worthy?  Tough call.  Probably the first, but only by a whisker.

I'm watching an episode of Stargate SG-1 (S03E10 "Forever in a Day", for the SG geeks), and one character (Teal'c) just said to another "Is there not some form of human ritual in which I may ask your forgiveness?"

You know, that's actually a pretty good question. Western culture is terrible about forgiveness--by which I mean "letting go of the negative feelings you have towards another who has wronged you." We have lots of words for the various shadings of "anger", but very few for "forgiveness." 

Here is the list of synonyms for "anger" from http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/anger:  Annoyance, crankiness, crotchetiness, displeasure, exasperation, fury, grumpiness, ire, irritation, mad, peevishness, petulance, pique, rage, vexation, and others. (*)

Here is the list of synonyms for "forgiveness" from http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/forgiveness absolution, exculpation, exoneration, purgation. (*)  (Note that only one of these, "absolution", is actually in common usage, while the others are far more rarely encountered.)


More interestingly, we have no rituals pertaining directly to forgiveness, despite the fact that society is built on rituals.  We have rituals for saying hello (shaking hands) and goodbye (waving), for celebrating someone's birth, death, passage into adulthood, for settling conflicts (everything from how to speak appropriately during an argument up to how to have a lawsuit).  We have established rituals for saying to someone "I want to spend the rest of my life with you", but no established way of saying "please let me make this up to you" beyond the simple words "I'm sorry"...which pretty much never cut it when you've actually screwed up.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were something like all those science fiction "warrior people" have (e.g. Klingons, Jaffa, etc)?  You know, a few rounds of running in circles while people smack you with sticks and then (after the bruises heal), you're good to go and you and the person you wronged are back on a good footing?


(*) There were plenty of other suggested "synonyms", but they were really just related words, not actual versions of the same concept.

I just sat down to really examine what I want to change about my life, so I started making a list of life goals that I want to work towards.  The first one I came up with was "sound body, sound mind".  Figured I'd assess the easy one first, so I went and stood in front of the full-length mirrors and just looked at myself for a minute to see what I wanted to change.

My endurance and wind are sub-par.  Ok, I need to work on that.  Running the stairs, highstepping, other aerobic work.  The kind of stuff I hate.  That will be difficult; have to figure out a program and a set of motivational rules.  Strength is decent, if not fantastic.  A little strength work would be good, but not as important.  Pity--those things are more fun.  Flexibility, acceptable but could stand some work.  Easy enough, if sometimes boring.  On the up side, yoga and Pilates may each count for both the flexibility and the strength work.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with my outsides.  I'm not a movie star but I like the way my face looks.   My teeth are a bit dingy but generally look ok.  I've got a bit of a spare tire but it's not bad--if I do the endurance work, that will help reduce it and the strength work will build muscle that will make it easier to keep off.  I've got good hair which OH MY HOLY GOD, WHERE DID THAT BALD SPOT COME FROM?


Seriously.  I've got an almost-entirely bald a very thin spot the size of my palm on the top rear of my head.  Apparently, I sunburned the hell out of it while camping, too.    Huh, I'm not even 40 yet.  Dad is 65 and he still has all his hair.  My paternal grandfather was balding, but I think it passes down the maternal line.  Not sure about Mom's father--in the one picture of him that I remember, he was old but I think still had all his hair.

UPDATE:  Changed "an almost entirely bald" to "a very thin" after discussion with avivasedai .  When she heard me say "meh, it's not that big a deal--I expect I've got a good few years before it becomes an issue and, absolute worst case, I shave my head" she nearly had heart failure.  So, because I don't want and (unintentional) death on my conscience, I figured I'd amend this post.

Happy now?  ;P

Worked out again this morning; yup, burpees absolutely suck. That plus a bunch of other stuff left me all wore-out and happy. I know my workouts would make a personal trainer or a DI laugh himself sick, but I'm pushing my own limits, not getting hurt, and feel good afterwards. I just really need to make this a daily thing.

There was a brief rainshower in the morning, but right now the sun is working hard to burn off these clouds, and it looks beautiful out--the air washed clean and lit up, the street below me purring quietly to itself.

I finally got rid of the printer that has been sitting on my return for ages...it wasn't working and I'd been telling myself "yeah, I'll fix that" for months. I dumped it and got a new printer at Staples which is slightly smaller. Also had a delicious brunch at Hollywood Diner, and picked up a tasty salad at West End for later on.

Yup, a nice day. Feeling good about the world.

I live on the 15th floor of an apartment complex...which is really the fourteenth floor, due to the building contractor's acute triskaidekaphobia.  Out my windows the Manhattan skyline spills away.  To the left, the buildings are lower and I can see a long way.  To the right, there are several other buildings as tall or taller  than mine; they loom up like stolid bodyguards clustering around the one or two squat buildings between them.  Framed right between them, at the top of the image, is a giant water tower that looks like the nosecone of a rocket.  Blue sky and cumulus loft above that.

Out the left window, a craine is swinging back and forth.  Thanks to the miracles of perspective, the crane (when upright) is taller than the giant skyscraper in the background.  I just watched it swing through 90 degrees of arc from about 315 to 45.  I wonder what they're doing with it?


The original sight that caused me to write this, however, was a plastic grocery bag.  It was caught on a rising thermal near the building closest to me out the right window.  I watched it soar higher and higher, inflated by the rising air and tumbling as it went.  When it got several stories higher than my window, it tumbled away and out of frame to the left.

I have had this conversation innumerable times over the years, and I still don't get it:

Me: "This paragraph of the contract is really excessive. If you read it literally, it says that I cannot $X." (Where $X is some very reasonable activity like buying groceries.)

Other person (usually potential employer): "Oh, that's just boilerplate, don't worry about it."

I'm always somewhat dumbstruck by this comment. I'm not sure how to take it; is the person saying:

1) The contract doesn't say quite what I mean, but I couldn't be bothered to modify it so that it did?

2) What the lawyers write into a contract isn't really important; all that matters is that we have a sample of your signature under some words. Most of us senior people here at $COMPANY haven't even read the contract.

3) Even though you are giving your signed word to obey the terms of this contract, you don't need to feel that you are actually bound by it.

4) Yes, what it literally says is quite excessive, but it would not be interpreted that way in a courtroom.


To me, the whole POINT of a contract is that it provides a permanent record that spells out very clearly what two parties expect of one another. The only reason to have a contract is so that both parties know that they have the same understanding, and so that there is something to refer back to if there are questions later. If the contract doesn't say what you really mean, why would you sign it? If it's so murky that you can't understand it, why would you sign it? If you haven't read it, and therefore don't know that it represents your intent, why would you sign it?

More importantly, why would **I** sign it under those conditions?


When I had my first group of lawyers draw up the Wotan contractor contract, I kept telling them that I wanted it written in plain English. I sent it back for six or seven drafts because they kept f&(*^ing it up with legalese that said things other than what I wanted it to say. Finally I just took what they had produced, made the modifications I wanted without further review, and went with it. My contract was four pages long and I thought it was excessive, but most employment contracts are a lot longer than that.

I don't vote in federal elections.

Ah, I can hear the cries now: "But Dave, it's every citizen's duty to vote!" I've heard this enough that I figured I'd just put this up here so I could just point to it in the future.

( Read it if you care...er, dare. )