I’ve always been a big movie buff.  In fact, I find myself saying, “did you ever see…” way to much to be honest.  But I hadn’t realized how much books really affect me more then movies do until I read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.  There’s one part in the book where who goes to this Indian jail and he’s there for months and beaten and tortured and he doesn’t even know why he was arrested.  The series of chapters is so painful to read and just made my heart sink into tragedy.  Especially since this book is based on the true life of the author.  In the midst of all this mood altering text, I realized how deeper a connection i felt with the book then I ever had any movie (apart from Fight Club perhaps).

In a movie, no matter how brutal the scenes get, you know it’s going to end with in 2 to 3 hours.  If you’ve already looked up the movie length, then you know exactly how long that block of experience will be for you.  A book however is much more self paced and if you’re a slow reader like me, you have no idea how long he’s going to be in this situation and how long it’s going to take you to get to the end of the book.  It’s a much more real life experience cause you never know how long events in life will take either when you’re going through hard times.  I had a similar experience when I read Seabiscuit.  So much horrible stuff was happening to that jockey, I just couldn’t finish the book.  Once his leg got ripped up, I put the book down and never picked it up again.  I didn’t realize it then, because I had given up, but by making myself push through the horrible trials of this author, I emerged a stronger person vicariously through the story.

Okay, i know yesterday I said I wasn’t going to spend all that money on a camera I would just lose.  Well my lust for toys and the birthday spirit got the best of me.  I went out and spent WAY too much money on camera stuff.  I got another Olympus waterproof camera to replace the one I lost (this one’s good up to 33ft!) and this time got a floaty strap for it so I won’t lose it again.  But the mother of the purchases was the Canon Rebel T1i with kit lense and a telephoto lense both with image stabilization.  Ooohh, it’s snazzy.  I can’t even impart to you the amount of things I can learn from this camera.  I shall absorb the manual in mere days and will be a photographer officianado in no time.  Exciting.  Oh and the messenger bag strapped camera case is really handy too.

I still have not purchased a a nice DSLR and based on what happened last weekend at the river, I probably shouldn’t.  For starters, I have had two cameras: a water proof one and another one.  Both cameras have issues.  One has spots and speckles on it, probably from taking it to the beach or desert or something; the other has a black fade coming up from the bottom, probably from where water got into the photo sensor (water proof my ass).  So already, I’ve broken my cameras but am still using them cause I’ve had them for what a year, maybe a bit longer.  This last weekend, we went to float the river (the Guadalupe).  I brought my water proof camera and was taking some awesome shots.  The water was pretty low for the most part and you had to pull your butt up over the rapids to keep from scraping your ass.  Good times, good abs work out too 

Anyway, at one point, I was rearranging my bag o stuff, when I accidentally set my camera down on my stomach and leaned to one side.  Bloop.  There it went without any sort of floaty or anything attached to it of course.  I figured I could just jump in for it and swim to the shallow bottom.  Although the entirety of the trip thus far had been shallow water, somehow I drop my camera in the deepest part of the river.  It was atleast 30 feet deep, maybe deeper.  I didn’t make it to the bottom on the first two tries and then took a deep breath and went all teh way down, running my hands along the slime of the seaweed carpeted bottom.  Beer can, beer can, beer can, gatorade bottle, beer can.  No camera.  I went down one more time, but still nothing.  So my camera was lost, which is not so big a loss to me as the pictures which were in it; thankfully however it was only of that day and no other pics were lost.

I got over it quickly and had a great time tubing.  Spokes, my roommate, was more upset about the sunglasses he lost.  He had just gotten them the day before and it was his birthday.

In short, I lose and break cameras ALOT!  A $200 camera I can get over, especially if I’ve had it for a year or so, but a $1000 camera with who knows how expensive lenses?!  To lose that, oh man, that would suck.  So I’m still not sure a DSLR is for me, that being said however, I’ve just thought of a fantastic idea.  Perhaps I’ll purchase one while I’m in Australia.  Even though it’s an import, it might be cheaper there.

I was in New York the weekend of this post date, well New Jersey really and visited my friend Mala. We went to a burlesque show with her friend Michelle, a transgendered he/she who I think does finance (doesn’t everyone in New York do finance?) We not only had a lot of fun, but saw some … interesting show performances. It was a graduation of sorts for students who had taken the burlesque class taught by Joe Boobs and the World Famous Bob, who was a tall, huge breasted girl that hosted the show. She also told a really long, but entertaining story about her post high school years living out of a car and crashing her soon to be gay friend’s prom night.

Burlesque is not all about boobies, although it’s a big part yes, but in a proper burlesque show you never see nips, there are always pasties on underneath. The show is more about the art form and colors and costumes and music and dance. You don’t have to be hot, you can just get up there at the age of 60 and shake what’s dangling to your toes which some middle agers did while in rain coats. That was the show. Although being hot does help. Highlights of the show were Ginger Brown, a beautiful black girl who sang and danced through the audience while removing gloves and corsettes and the like. She was very talented and I was quite impressed. Nikita, a sexy, slender girl who wore a huge feather train removed the train piece by fluffy piece while dancing around a chair. And Rosie wore a sequenced red dress likened to Jessica Rabbit and heated up the stage with her dance.

Unfortunately, we had to leave the show early cause there was a burlesque party going on across town we wanted to attend. That’s the reason we got all dolled up before hand. I wore my pin stripe suit from Thailand and Mala gave me a fedora which worked perfectly. So good in fact, she actually gave it to me afterwards. Mala was stunning in her white pearls and black dress with feathered hair of course. And Michelle wore a sequence dress. We passed around the silk scarf all night, it just makes everyone look good.

A fun weekend to say the least.

Took me all of last week, but I finally finished the workbench, my very first real wood working project.  All said and done, it took me about 12 hours to complete.  Now, armed with the order of a working space, I shall conquer the next project, the beer pong table.

Here’s the bench from start to finish.

This is what my work place looked like before the workbench.

After cutting the wood, I laminated the boards together with wood screws and drilled shank holes for the bolts.  After that, it was a matter of fitting the pieces together.

The joints fit together by bolts.  This 1 inch diameter hole was drilled and then I had to chisel one side flat to make a pocket hole.  This was so the nut would fit flush against the wood… or flushISH anyway

It was a b*tch trying to get those nuts lined up into the hole to screw the bolt into.

And wala!  The finished frame!

After that, I screwed the plywood table top on and cut it to size then cut another piece and laminated them together.  I was so glad to get those huge pieces of wood out of the way of the trash cans.

Then I cut the shelf to the proper size, drilled in some shelf cleats and set it in.  I sanded everything down and began the finish.

Inspecting the first coat, I sanded it down again.  The second sanding seem to rub some of the first coat off for some reason so I ended up with sort of a rustic finish after the second coat.  But as I say with everything I do, “eh, s’good enough.”

Ta da!  the finished bench.  I added 9 inches to the legs that the design didn’t call for cause I like the taller work table and it’s the perfect height for me.  Notice how all my tools are now nicely organized and there’s even a place for scrap wood.

This week, I’m putting the foosball table back together, cleaning it off and making the garage into a mancave!

Many many people spend thousands of dollars on mind expanding drugs to get a high.  I never understood this when I was young, but now i know that my brain is already expanded to the degree they wish upon themselves.  All I must do is go explore different corners of it.  I have been outcast in the past as behaving strangely while not under the influence; had I been under the influence of something, all would’ve been well and accepted, but since I wasn’t, I was tripped up socially instead of pyschologically.  That pissed me off because I hate hypocracy and such a truth flirts with it.

These thoughts were brought on by watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas first thing in the morning.  It’s a degenerate movie, a punch which it makes no attempts to pull, and I found myself reaching beyond to those places in my brain and it’s quite stress releiving.  It opened up thoughts like, “Why do I need a slap in teh face every once in a while?”  and the subsequent answer came in a self monologue after which I was lucky enough to get to a keyboard quick enough:

“Is it possible to arrange everything into some cohesive order?
yes.
however, the human brain lacks the perceptive ability to observe and categorize every aspect of reality into some whole; so that the resulting equation would produce a reality which was precise and accurate and exact.  Therefore, it is impossible for me to order the world even though my mind wants nothing more then to do so, ergo what we perceive as chaos is really just unperceivable orderings, but we need chaos to balance the universal awareness in our brains.  This is why I need a helping of chaos to slap me in the face every once in a while; to remind me that order is not what it’s all about, not what the human experience is all about.  Nature has its own order, the human mind exists seperately from that, and as a part of it.  The cell cannot know the make up of the body, nor can the human know the make up of the psycho-social organism of the combined soul that it lives in.

Long story short, slap me in the face every once in a while.  Really.”

Robot wars are coming.  The times when autonomous robots take over human functions on the battle field is coming near.  I predict to see it in my lifetime.  More and more human controlled robots are being used everyday on the battle field, including smart missles, rolling drones, and flying attack planes.  Among the manufacturers of these robotic killing machines is IRobot.  That’s right, the same folks who make that cute little vacuuming bot called Roomba.  But how will robots know what to do when the humans are taken out of the loop and robots start to make their own decisions about who to kill and when?

Ronald Arkin, a professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, is in the first stages of developing an ethical governor to guide these robots in their actions.  His book on the subject, “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots,” comes out this month.  Arkin believes robots may have a better chance of making the right decision on the battlefield ethically since they have no ingrained right to self defense and no fear.  He goes on to say that translating the rules of war into code is much easier then AI in many ways since the rules of war have been used for over 150 years.

“We tell soldiers what is right and wrong,” said Arkin. “We don’t allow soldiers to develop ethics on their own.”

In my part, I agree with the coding aspect of this.  However, we’re still a great distance from autonomous ‘terminators’ roaming the battle field due to our lack of perceptive recognition.  If a man has a stick in his hand, a human being can tell the difference between that and a gun.  A machine however might not be able to.  Visual acuity is still very lacking in cameras and even the best foto sensor is no where near the rods and cones of our retina on clarity.  That being said, as research advances, robots could surpass us in function in that they can see spectrums of color our eyes cannot.  In the example I gave you, instead of using RGB to see the stick, they could look at it with an infrared camera and find no heat signature.  If it were a gun, it would be eminating heat if it had been recently fired.

There are still millions of questions to consider before humans are taken out of the picture, but these days its definitely a matter of when and how that will occur and not if.

Further considertion:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/18/robots-ethics-war.html

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/06/19/robot-gun-weapon.html

If anyone out there in the Austin area is without home, there is a room available at my place: here’s all the details:

$450 for bedroom 10×10: upstairs with shared bath and nice closet. Room available immediately.

The house at Poppy Seed Ln is in a nice neighborhood and has 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, a downstairs living room and an upstairs den. We have a 60in screen tv, a foosball table, and wireless internet.

plus $75 a month FOR ALL UTILITIES, that includes internet, phone, satellite, electricity, water, and trash.

It has washer/dryer, dishwasher, A/C, garage, fridge, satellite, internet, stove, and backyard with stone patio. It is furnished in the common areas.

If you’re interested, please call Zach at 323-481-9033 or email me. Accepting applicants of either gender. Looking for young professionals to create a good atmosphere in the house.

You can also go to the craiglist ad and check out the pics.

It’s been a heck of a week of family reunion goodness. We played some badmiton.

There’s a pig my Dad has delightfully named Bacon which continues to terrorize his flower beds.  So we have to go out there every few hours or so and shoot it with the bebe gun and some sling shots.  If we end up killing, it’s bacon tonight!

Katrina, my neice, then came with Joshua and Vaiva on Monday.  I had to work in Waco on Tues and Wed, which I ended up being glad about.  Katrina had been sick and we found out was severely constipated.  So for the first few nights, she cried the entire night.  I didn’t get much sleep that first night, then I was off to the hotel in blessed quiet slumber.  Finally, on Thursday, she dropped a deuce the size of my fist; it was rock hard.  I have no idea how such a terd could come out of such a small ass.

Now that she felt better, we put her to work mowing the grass.

Good times!

In a dream that is.  This is actually a dream my mom had, but I thought it was hilarious and sounded like something I would actually do.  I found a cure for sadness, I was able to make anyone happy.  All I did was take a jar of pickles, take out a big handful and smear them into someone’s face and everyone in the room would laugh; and I’d say, “See, it works!”

All this time, all I’ve needed was pickles…