predator/losing_it.txt

I stashed an unfinished copy of this file in the directory where you find this
file now. Go read it all again. Much has been added. 


File: losing_it.txt
Content: off we go into the first months of the rest of my life.


Life's going on. Fuck, january is nearly over.

Randwick seems to be a place I return to a lot, and when I go there I see
a lot of people I know, generally by accident. I dropped in and saw old
Mary again, but she didn't have much time to talk since she was off to
dinner in the retirement hole (l and m are close on the keyboard but
that's not a typo). I bumped into my old protein biochemistry lecturer
Gary King on the footpath, and we had a bit of a yack about information
theory, he's heard of Stormo's work but Schneider is much better, I said.
I hadda chat to Graham so I know what I'll be doing for work this Feb, but
it's sub-optimally configured, there's a 3hour hole in the middle of the
daily schedule, for which I don't get paid. He's been trying to get me
interested in a phd for aaages and I told him a while ago about my uh,
foreshortening but he's still trying to get me interested in an
immunological approach to fraud detection. I read someone's hons thesis
about this, and although it was interesting of itself the error count
(from the biologist's perspective), and the crude nature of the project
when generally compared to what is actually implemented in living
organisms made it a somewhat annoying read. Anyway, fuck it, other things
interest me. How much information does a molecule contain? Quantify that
for the general case, and suddenly you know what's the *real*
computational load required to run life. It's all a computer, implemented
chemically, but saying that's silly until there's math to support it.


I went to see Dave Goldstein, the staff specialist out at Prince of Wales,
recommended to me by Paul. His office waiting room is populated by people
who look like they're dying, either exhibiting that grey pallor of the
metabolically broken, or are totally devoid of hair... eyelashes,
eyebrows, the works.  There are posters on the wall about a wig library
for these people whose hair has fallen out entirely. I asked him why he
got into oncology and he mentioned it was 'cos his dad was killed by brain
cancer. Um. Yeah. I asked for that. I guess if he has any baggage it's the
right sort. He reckons chemokines such as he is able to administer
(interleukin, interferon, inter-galactic-hyperdrive, inter-yer-arm) apart
from being as expensive as hell are gonna make me very, very sick, for
very likely bugger-all benefit, and if I do decide to take 'em it should
be when I'm full of lumps. If I'm slugged out in bed for six months,
that's very likely to be a total loss unless I'm full of something
aggressive which would wipe me out in less than six months. It cures about
three percent of people.

There's some vaccine stuff going on in Brissie and Melbourne, which might
make use of the chunk o' kidney tumor I kept on ice, but I'd have to go
down there and check it out. There's also some experimental (read: failure
prone) vaccine stuff going on with POW in July, and I've volunteered to be
a guinea pig for that. It's a vaccine which works by provoking an immune
reaction to your own angiogenesis signalling proteins, which I imagine
might prove something of a problem since I can see it inhibiting healing
and regrowth which requires microvascularisation to work properly. Trust
your mechanic? Uh, no.

Bill The Lump was still palpable. I asked if someone'd suck some of Bill
out and slap it on a slide and he said he could arrange it in a few
seconds. Cool. Finally. I went upstairs to the lab services level.

The FNAB (fine needle aspirate biopsy) happened in a small room just up
the corridor from where I'd spent a year doing honours in pathology in
Bill Rawlinson's virus research student torture chamberrrr, uh, yeah,
laboratory.

A chap with more k's and z's in his surname than is normal for anyone of
non-Polish origin gently aimed a 25 gague needle at Bill and sunk it into
my neck, which didn't feel pleasant but didn't feel too bad either.

Withdrawing the plunger to create a vacuum, and moving the tip around to
grab as many cells as possible, he used the syringe to suck some of the
guts out of the node. He removed the needle, slapped the contents of the
syringe barrel on a slide, stained it, took it to the next room and gawked
at it through a binocular stereomicroscope, and came back to tell me it
had abnormal cells in it. Well, duh. He wanted more tissue so went in
again with a 23 gague needle (fine, but noticable, like a REALLY BIG
mozzie) and sucked out some more of the lymph node's guts. It'll take 'em
a couple of days to get it characterised properly. He's encouraged that
it's smaller. I'm not fooled.

I feel sort of ashamed to say I was shanghaid on the Newtown footpath by a
bunch of very smooth (what did Joss call 'em? Chuggers?) spruikers,
looking for donations for the World Wildlife Fund. Fuck, signing up was a
painful process, but by the time I'd filled in the form I'd come to the
conclusion that I'd been had - I was prepared to cough 'em bux for a year,
but there was no `end date' on the form. Anywhere. I felt like a prick
when i walked into the bank the next day and closed the bank account to
which they had monthly auto withdrawl authority, and started another one,
but fuck 'em, if enviro charities are gonna be greedy, they can fuck off.
I notice you *can* tell these people you're not gonna live long enough to
see any benefit to the environment from your donation and they won't care.
Maybe my susceptibility to these people is some sort of diagnostic clue
that I am not really convinced I'm dying, but maybe not. Rather like the
paired facts that I'm a pill-popping freak but I just don't have any
resistance left against the gustatory attractions of the humble tim-tam.


Next day I did most of the fiddly renov bits in the sibling's kitchen and
it's starting to look fit for human habitation again. Amazingly, before I
did the second coat of paint under the benchtop, there was already
something-or-other splattered on the freshly painted wall, 'cos she
doesn't aim at anything, like, say, the garbage bag, when disposing of her
garbage. The new pine (I choose the knotty plank because it has more
character) shelves are cut and mounted, the oven top has a new circuit
breaker, we're ready for the next coat. The usual filth is already piling
up in the sink.

I also fixed her bedroom light, which she broke while trying to change the
bulb, which is diagnostic of (why is there no character on keyboards for
biting one's tongue?) ... well, a certain level of mechanical ineptitude.
I replaced it with something made entirely of metal so she'll have a
harder time trying to destroy it.

In the arvo I was trawling the 'Clan list. Lots of people are bitchin'
about how the Port Kembla copper smelter is suddenly submerged in a thick
soup of security dweebs (driving teensy little security cars and
pretending they're V8's) after last week's mass expedition. I thought that
I should go check out a storm drain near Guildford, discovered by Stray,
and mentioned enthusiastically by someone-or-other who had explored it. Of
course it pissed rain just before I left.

It's off Duck River. Fuck River is the cognomen a tedious drain which Melb
clan found on their first northern foray into Sydney, and the poor
reputation of the drain so named has discouraged any exploration on the
banks of the homophonic Duck River of which it is a minor tributary. We
did not, by the way, see any ducks.

It had rained heavily in the late arvo, everything was damp, the flow was
up. Siolo and Stray arrived. Access was via the outlet, which is a massive
concrete-walled sediment pond, in the middle of the only remnant of clay
plains paperbark swamp forest anywhere in the entire Sydney basin - the
rest has been flattened over the last two centuries so people can have
sports fields for important stuff like soccer training. Getting in was a
little bit hard core; after walking through the reeds which were all blown
flat by the flood surge, we had to pass through a sump and while walking
in we were all submerged up to our nipples in fresh, clean, cold rainwater
- exhilarating after a hot sticky day. We climbed out dripping with drain
juice into an unusually huge pipe, about three metres diam, with almost no
graffiti on it (the local bomber crews and tag artists are presumably
dissuaded by the swim). It has a couple of funky rooms, some shape
changes, and comes out at a mega-security fence with air-tube vibration
sensors tied to it, in the other end of the tiny little remnant of
paperbark forest for which this drain is the hydraulic linkage. So we went
back down the drain and came out where we got in. I think Siolo got some
shots of me with my shirt off up to my armpits in drain outlet pondwater.
He tells me Fishie's had the Cave Clan logo tattooed on his arm. Wow.

Fortunately for you, reading this rant, some of my days disappear in a
haze of mundanity so trivial it isn't worth the effort of recording. The
'net's full of enough crap as it is. So you miss a tedious thursday. I
think I got up a tree with a circular saw and discovered I preferred my
machete anyway. Whoopee.


Leakage. Arr. Dontcha hate it when the oncologist sends a report to yer
referring doctor, which happens to be yer dad, and it contains details
you'd prefer yer dad didn't know, like, how when you admit frankly to yer
oncologist that you `have a regular partner' and it ends up in the summary
notes sent to yer dad in the post later on? I've gone to some effort to
keep my carnal involvements right the hell off their radar. The phrasing
is awkward.... there _is_ a person to whom I am known carnally on an
semi-frequent basis, but I don't `have' them, I don't own or control them
or anything like that, and she's happily shagging other people too with my
blessing - this is hardly a regular partner, in that sense. But a small
slice of my private life is revealed to dad nevertheless, that I'd prefer
he didn't know. The amusing irony of this is that he knows who this person
is in rather greater detail than I do, in some respects. Dad's her
gynaecologist.


Friday night was kind of amusing. Spectacular lightning crackled over
Sydney, feral megajoules crash-burning their own electricity grid into the
black sky with miles of galvanotactic varicosities, pissing short photons
which lingered momentarily on our scotopic retinas like evaporating
graffiti. I watched it from the windowsill as it flash-froze the passing
cars to the road in its random blue strobelight. To the backdrop of this
lightshow I discovered my load of cannabis cookies have passed their
get-stoned-by date, but this didn't matter especially since the atmosphere
was quite pleasant anyway. Willow said it was gonna be a non-clan
gathering and most of the Sydney Clan turned up (including Fishie and his
VERY BIG tattoo). People ripped .mp3s off the Kazaa peer network, drank
wine, bitched about their lives in mundane, non-drain space. We staggered
out into the drizzle at about 3am. Two small, poorly vented rooms, and
arrrr shit why must people smoke? It makes my eyes hurt, and makes me
smell bad.



Here's a three layer headfuck. See if you figure it out before I reveal
it.


I slept on the couch at Wolfie's new place, where I discovered an
identical copy of the hi-fi I hauled out of the dumpster. Maybe there's a
manual for the hi-fi somewhere in the place, I am still fucked if I can
drive that equaliser thingo without some instructions. Just at the mo, I
dunno if the people who live there quite trust me. They had chained their
two bicycles together, to the building's plumbing, by some steel cable and
a combination lock to which they'd forgotten the combination.  They asked
me to break the lock to free their bicycles. After a few minutes trying to
do so with their inadeqate tools (eg, screwdriver with easily breakable
end) I looked at the lock and remembered my first childhood encounter with
one of these things which would have been when I was oh, six. I wonder if
... I thought to myself. I remember its combination, too. 2136.

Confident in what I remembered of the lock design, I straightened my arms,
gripped the opposite ends of the lock in each hand, tightened my fingers
hard, stiffened my wrists, and parted my elbows which flexed the device
hard enough to snap its spindle. Pretty good for a limp-wristed computer
geek. I'm not superman, by any means. I exploited a classic design
stupidity where by adding more theoretical security, the system is made
physically weaker. This is more common than one thinks.  In engineering,
it is the use of a beam so heavy that it can't hold up its own weight. In
cyptography, it is the use of a cyptographic algorithm which by its very
complexity renders the machine on which it is executed subtly broken. In
locksmithing, it's usually a tradeoff in convenience for security. Having
to carry keys is the price you pay for the inability to remember numbers.

These combination locks come in two kinds: four digit (10000 combinations)
and five digit (100000 combinations). Although by adding one more rotor
(ring with ten digits on it), they've increased the time it'd take someone
to go through the combinations by a factor of ten, it was the additional
length of the lock body with the additional rotor on it which made it long
enough for me to have enough lock to manually grab in order to exert a
torque sufficient to snap it. And yeah, like anyone's gonna try and pick
through 10e5 combinations let alone 10e6. Worse, if you look at the
combination mechanism from the outside it looks heavier and tougher than
the cable to which it is swaged, but the combination mechanism exacts a
toll in cross-sectional integrity greater than the benefit gained by
having a combination lock at all. A cylinder lock is not dependant on the
physical toughness of its decoding mechanism, whereas a combination lock
is.

End headfuck.

Are you getting an idea how my head works? The explanatory paragraphs I
write, like those above, are the very convincing, logically espoused,
cover-up for the truth, which is in this case, : if they'd gone to the
effort of building the lock out of something other than a pisspoor
subspecies of metalliferous Taiwanese dogshit I'da had no chance busting
it with my bare hands.

How can I rely on what I think in a mind which only occasionally catches
itself pulling the wool over its own eyes?

I can't, but I've spotted it this time. The whole lock paragraph is a
diversion, to the quiet thought that while I lay on the couch at Wolfie's
place completely aware that I'd much rather be curled up on her mattress
enveloped in her waste heat, I wouldn't let myself feel bad for not being
there. But I wanted to be there and wanted to feel bad for not being
there. I was sorta just frozen in the neutral zone. What's going on...
what planet am I on at the moment?

It's worse. The logic, the vocab, are a veneer of rationality over what I
suspect is a lot more churning than I'm ready to let escape into my
keyboard. I should be writing out of the other side of my animal, the side
which laughs and gets cranky and everything else from depressed to horny
to elated. But they don't write well. Or I don't write them well, or
something like that. Or they want to say things I don't want to hear.
Wolfie's got a lot of stuff on her plate at the moment from her last
relationship anyway, and I'm sort of torn between further involvement with
her, and staying outta there, and its partly 'cos I don't think she needs
the baggage I'm starting to sling around with me about being on the brink
of carking it. It's an unfair card to play on people, but it's an unfair
card to be holding, too. I'm bored of this irksome mortality. I don't want
to be dead until I'm actually dead.

Speaking of bringing that about it turns out I can save the azide for
another task. There's a great patch of ricinis communis on the railway
siding not four km from here. The seeds are full of a 70kDa two-part
albumin protein notorious for its ability to bind irreversibly to
ribosomes and thence block peptide synthesis. The dosages are tiny, ng's
per kilo, much better than electron transport chain inhibitors. I just
don't know how fast it acts. Big proteins take a while to diffuse, I
suspect.


Sat 24


I was on King St, and I bumped into Lini, a woman with whom I was in a
relationship for about five months a couple of years ago. Her hair had
changed. Her *eyes* had changed (on closer inspection this was due to some
wierdo contact lenses she's wearing... yeah, like someone half Japanese
and half Chinese is gonna have green eyes). I haven't seen her since she
left the country to go to France ostensibly to study but she ended up
wandering around most of Eastern Europe. It turns out she's been back
since October but never looked me up. She got engaged to someone she met
in September 2002 while she was in the loop with me. She said I hadn't
changed a bit. I'm wondering, is there something about my personality
which means I'm finding myself to be frequently a last-shag before
marriage, or is it demographic, or statistical? I'm glad she's out there
doing whatever she's doing.

------

Why, you might be asking yourself, was this file called losing_it.txt ?

I think it's 'cos I'm letting go, which might be another way of saying I
think I'm losin' my grip. I can't decide if, in the light of my
carb-hungry tumor load, my chowing into a bowl of pasta is diagnostic that
I haven't quite accepted my mortality, or that I have accepted it and, a
metabolic kamikai pilot, I am pushing the throttle forward, diving
downwards faster, waiting to be claimed by the ascending angry plumbous
rain or the indifferent, frozen hydrous wastes stretching in every
direction. Provoke it or not, it'll kill me.

My immanent eschaton is distracting me, eating my brain. It follows me
into the shower, into women's bedrooms, out onto the highway, it goes with
me to dinner and I swallow it with breakfast. Broken bits of poetic stuff
are falling into my stream of awareness, and I'm not even motivated to
flesh out any sort of rhyming structure or metre or even polish 'em up
like I used to.

if i seem diverted
it's not quite knowing why
that i persist in living
now i'm condemned to die

i don't know why you hold me
nor why i'm holding you;  
seek a place to hide 
from blank despair is what i do.

grasp me, clench me, anchor me,
convince me that you know;
hold me gently if i come, 
and tightly when i go.


But... whooah. Weepy emotionality aside, it really does focus one's
attention on how cool it is to be alive when the alternative is just
around the corner.


It's saturday

I just did something rude. Dad mentioned that Frank and Trev, who invited
me out to dinner with them on the 30th, rang up and at some point in the
conversation they had, Dad decided he'd come along. I mentioned if this
was the case, I would not go. The deal was, Frank, Trev, Me, chat. I am
not gonna sit there and politely spectate as these three guys, dear as
they are to me in various ways, chat about the same stuff they've talked
about in my absence for the last thirty years and anyway dad will not be
able to not tell me to mind my language when talking to his workmates of
the last three decades, which he couldn't help doing if he was there. No
bait'n'switch, thanks. So I told dad, who said ok, he won't go. I love the
guy dearly but not when he's in a setting which makes him behave overly
parentally in public.


Sun 25th. I saw the final Lord of the Rings flick today, which aside from
everything else blew my head off simply by being so cinematographically
vast and varied as to exceed my understanding of how they could possibly
make such a work and do it so well. Dad liked it but he didn't see the 2nd
one in the series, so he didn't understand it.

I notice on the 'Clan list people are talking about how 10 people did the
Big Crawl In to the Big Day Out through the drainage in Homebush, and saw
the show for the nth year in a row without paying a cent. Aphex Twin was
muddy but apparently Peaches was OK. Cool 8-)
 
I have cleaned out the back work shed, as a consequence of my recognition
that many of the things in it were things I had acquired for use in my
forseeable lifespan, a parameter which has now changed, so I've flung a
lot of stuff. This has the happy upshot that there's more room in the tiny
outbuilding. Some of the stuff has now been installed as I had intended to
do for ages but never got around to it - an aluminium vent grille in the
door and a half-horsepower (about 370 watts) centrifigal blower I
scavenged from a roadside in Arncliffe in 1997 are gonna stop the place
from being so damned hot and stuffy in summer, and will have the handy
additional property of pulling solder fumes, oversprayed paint, solvent
vapours and such away from me as I work. The blower is quiet but moves
some serious air. Red jarrah sawdust and aluminium shavings made an
interesting mix of colours on the cement floor. I put a new power cord on
the 1967 10MHz valve-driven Tektronics storage CRO I own, since the old
cord had *depolymerised* And I found some interesting jars I thought I'd
lost, which were interesting for their chemical contents rather than their
actual pattern. Now, what betanitrostyrene was this, exactly?


Monday. Austrafuckinalia day.

Yeah, hooray. Why we don't call this Dependance Day and reschedule it to
July 4th in recognition of our current status as an economic fiefdom of
the United States eludes me. Every indigenous fuckin' culture which ever
appeared here, be it derived from rockchoppin' pom convicts or the brown
people who they took the country from a couple of centuries ago is now
mostly supplanted by mass-produced asinine crap which either arrives in
shipping containers or is electromagnetically sprayed upon us by various
geostationary satellites around the clock. I was going through my top
drawer a couple of days ago to get sufficient ID for this new bank account
I wanted to create, and found my passport. It's gonna expire ten days
before I turn 33. I wondered momentarily if I should burn it. I am ashamed
to be a citizen of this soulless, vapid, excuse for a nation, and would
similarly be ashamed to present evidence of same anywhere else in the
world. I don't think I'll be fucked renewing it. Looks like I'm staying
home to die.
  
I decided to free myself from the ridiculous circumstance of being in a
monogamous relationship with someone who won't shag me. She invited me
around today, on the day she was moving house, and I knew it was gonna
involve a bit of hefting furniture, and I did it, 'cos it's just a
friendly thing to do - moving's a stress. The expected pattern has
remained the same. No, she's not going to Newcastle or Brissie yet, maybe
she's staying in Sydney (read, maybe she'll still get around to shagging
me) for a few weeks yet. Arrr, no girl, you go where you like, it's just
not fair to offer me something you're not prepared to share with me and
then deny me the right to seek it elsewhere... and she knew other women
were keen for a go at me, since when I told her this was the case (it
sounds like a bold, egotistical and possibly even false claim but I'm just
giving you the facts ma'am) she kind of tossed it back at me later as a
justification for her not offering to shag me.

Lets get down to some meaty technicalities: after about the fifth time
we'd been naked in the sack and we still hadn't shagged, I mentioned to
her quietly that I had no idea what the hell I was doing there at all,
given the predicate under which I was even in the building, and mentioned
my frustration about the whole situation. She asked me not to leave, and
yeah we did subsequently, technically, fuck. Technically is the right
word, too. But her fellating me until I'm hard, jumping on for a while
then jumping off without anyone even getting off was a dispiriting,
loveless, perfunctory waste of an opportunity to actually share our carnal
talents (and everybody has them) - I've had more uplifting moments with my
left hand. I'm faintly annoyed with myself for submitting to this leash
for so long (Hmm, Jan 02-27). Non-shagging aside, I can't say I'm gonna
miss someone who wouldn't really reveal themselves to me to _begin_ with,
but I do feel like I've missed an opportunity to get to know her... I
asked her a couple of years ago `What's your story?' and she answered `You
don't want to know.' Oh-kay. She filled me in with some of that background
stuff she said I didn't want to know, and I shook my head, wondering why
she didn't tell me earlier, it would have helped me understand her, a LOT.

As is, I can see she's just living a busy life and isn't gonna have time
for a bloke, but why didn't she know that? If she keeps this up a lot of
blokes are gonna be pissed off at her. She said she'd invite me to her
going-away party and I don't think I'll bother going. I'll be workin' in
Feb anyway. As I was about to leave she asked me if I wanted to see the
Lord of the Rings. She was a bit stroppy when I told her I saw it
yesterday with my dad. We had a date, she said. We had never set a date,
and I didn't feel especially inclined to tell her I wasn't gonna wait till
the flick was no longer being screened for us to actually get around to
point our eyeballs at it, so this somewhat bitter comment didn't make it
out of my gob. Thankfully. I'm not _that_ cut up about it. She's got her
reasons and I'm sure they're good ones from where she sits. I deleted her
SMSs which had accumulated in my fone, including such false advertising
as:

Eat my food, 
lick my dog
see you soon and
we'll fuck like hogs.

So I don't even have her number now. This is the nanosecond emotional
brutality of the digital age.

And I can't email her anything by way of an explanation.

I think this decision fell today because of two other things. The person
with whom I have shared shags for most of last year returns tomorrow and
someone else has asked to shag me the following night. Goodie good. Would
it be fair to phrase it this way - I'm dying for a root?


Tues 27th. STUCCO's server's shat itself, grr. Wonder why? One of the
residents was logged into it and it died while he was foolin' with it. I
checked it out later, I think it has acquired a dodgy network card (MAC
addresses are never FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF and they have to be plugged into a
cable before they can drop a few thousand packets a second). I initially
brought around a standby machine prepared long ago for speedy replacement
in the event of precisely this eventuality, dropped it there for install
later. I caught up with the recently-returned-from-Amerikkka cookie
manufacturer at the Fish Cafe. I came back later and discovered somethin'
else happened in the STUCCO server, and although I swapped out the mobo,
the previous drive wouldn't completely boot, if froze somewhere after
freeing kernel memory. So I went back to the Ice Cream factory and, while
the two replacement machines I'd set up were installing themselves on the
geek desk, danced a carnal welcome-back dance with the Cookie Manufacturer
as rain fell on the colourbond roof. I stagggered back to STUCCO with
pre-installed hardware, a grin of contentment and hair which obviously
looked like I'd fucked in it, and had their router/gateway running again
by 2am. I slept on He-Pad's futon, woke up, drove down to a coffee shop on
Abercrombie street with Adam Smith, and en-route was lane-changed into by
a 4wd who didn't give a fuck as I thumped my gloved fist on their rear
left window. Sydney's getting insane. I think it's time to carry a hammer
in the handlebar cabling.

I scored a nice pair of steel-capped boots, some aluminium chequerplate
and a (suspect) pentium-II mobo from the Mekanarchy garbage pile, and in
the evening went off with the mysterious South American of previous rants,
for dinner and what turned into a shag with a lot of
leather-against-leather noises in the front seat of her car. Beforehand,
as we strode through Newtown looking for a place to eat we bumped into
she-who-refused-to-shag-me and had a short chat. I think she-who-refused
knew more than enough to put one and one together. I might be a slut but
I'm not a liar. The South American sent me a rather complementary SMS
later but maybe this just means she needs to get out more.


---------


THurs 29. Degs.

I finally got around to screwing some wood to the side of dad's gynae
table, but it turns out it needs more offset to mount the examination
light, so I'll have to come back later. With that out of my hair I did the
long drive north to Normanhurst. It's been a couple of years since I
annoyed Dave and Leoni. Leoni's amidst a phd and is also turning around
the direction of a centuries-old girls educational institution of which
she has been headmistress for ten years. Dave's been a sick boy again, he
and I would have compared hernia scars but his is looking too ugly, he
said. He had made his usual excellent loaf of bread, and cooked great nosh
(I mashed up some olives, anchovies, garlic, and other stuff in a heavy
mortar-and-pestle prior to his sticking it in the chook which we all ate
together later). I also heard momentarily over the 'phone from Lou, who's
in some teeny island somewhere, as far as I can tell, metamorphosising
into a WarOnDwugz footsoldier for the UN. I am wondering what to say to
her these days, operating in a framework where she knows half the
neurotransmitters in her own head are illegal under various drug synthesis
analogues laws, and she uses those same neurotransmitters to know this
fact.

"The rich kid becomes a junkie. The poor kid an advertiser.
 What a tragic waste of potential - bein' a junkie's not so good either."
 TISM - `Greg! The stop sign!'

I find it irksome that dear old Dave's now officially living in a house a
couple of hundred miles down the coast, because in order to dodge some
ludicrous land tax bill he technically has to be a resident there. What of
a tax system which treats its fair citizens so poorly? Michael Egan, NSW
tax commissioner, you are a low prick.

Blah blah, so what have you been doing... they asked. I'm tired of
delivering the news, hearing a strange silence and looking at the pained
expression on yet another face.

I think it's the first time we didn't say grace. Either they've woken up
to my atheism, or more likely they've dropped the custom just 'cos they've
figured out it doesn't matter.

It's been a strange conversation I've had with Leoni over the years. She's
another deeply spiritual person and we've been chipping away at the
epistemological edges at the rate of about one hour of conversation per
annum which leaves a lot of time to think about it inbetweentimes. I had
to think about it a bit when she asked the question, `So how are you going
to come to terms with this?' and I said `Um.........' with a long pause
before I said anything. As usual I didn't come out with the truth and say
that This is cancer, There are no terms, There is no negotiation; it's
blunt and the truth, but arr, fuckin' needlessly melodramatic. I think the
pause happened because I was looking for terms she'd understand. I can't
even remember what sort of dribble I mumbled, something about the direct
jump to the acceptance stage, the tendancy I have to occasionally
experience depression for a little while then go back to acceptance.
Probably some other stuff. She and Dave appear to be convinced that they
don't go away when they die. I explained to them that there just isn't the
bandwidth to get a the information contained in a human personality out of
its braincase... we speak at what, a few tens of bits per seconds? The
real allocation of data carrying capacity hangs off the front of the male
pelve, say, 5ml, with 300x10e6 wrigglers each bearing 1.6x10e9 base pairs,
at two bits per base pair on average, is about 9x10^17 bits transferred
from one human to another in the carnal act. Nature provides MASSIVE
bandwidth for reproduction, and doesn't allocate even a squirt worth of
bandwidth to provide an escape hatch for the personality that appears in
yer brain after a few years of life. Don't they get it? Ya die, ya rot.
That's it.

She does know, though, that I won't go bitching to some god about it. I
was more straight-up with Dave about how I'm gonna come to terms with it.
I reminded him of a cartoon I like, where there's this huge oaken desk,
strewn with sheets of A4 paper. The walls, the floor, everywhere is
covered with sheets of A4 paper. At the desk sits an old guy with a big
rubber stamp, and he's stamping everything in arm's reach with a sort of
uncaring grim determination. The stamp has already stamped all the visible
sheets of paper in the room. In big red capital letters, the stamp says

                       FUCK
                        IT



Intriguing that she's as interested in The Matrix as I am. I've always
thought about it in a computation/emulation sense... peel everything back
and there's just mathematics and physics, the data transformation language
and its implementation which the universe runs on, respectively. She'd
never heard of the CellTicks in Hans Moravec's book. Has never read Go"del
Escher Bach (though they have it in their house). And has no idea about
the investigations which have gone into wether or not there's anything to
the anthropic cosmological principle as a diagnostic indicator that the
universe we know, configured as it is, exhibits any kind of design.
 
Dave's discovered the hilarious hillbilly AC/DC cover band Hayseed Dixie
and is sending me a copy of their cd. Reciprocally I've cooked two copies
of AC/DC's Back In Black, probably accadacca's thumpinest album.... one
for Dave and one for Dad who is sick of listening to other surgeon's poncy
classical stuff being played in the theatre while he operates. I'm not
sure I'd like my uterus chopped out to the strains of `You Shook Me All
Night Long' but I guess that's why anaesthetic was developed. I tested the
burnt copies

(generated thusly: 
cdparanoia -B /dev/cdrom 
cdrecord -audio -v dev=0,6,0 speed=4 track* 
eject )

on the dumpster-dived stereo, and yeaah, rockin', I think I might have
driven it harder than it really wanted, since at 0dB, clipping indicator
lit, internal-organ damage volume, the cooling fan vent holes emit air
with the distinctly burnt smell of charring printed circuit boards.

"How long till it blows?" -Hicks to Ripley, Aliens

It was never a hit but "Shake A Leg" is a driving, ballsy piece of music,
well suited as background to say, a poll tax riot spread across several
blocks, and is not to be trifled with under heavy amplification. I
recommend listening to it with earplugs, so you don't hurt your ears with
blistering treble hiss but still get the required internal organ jiggling
from the drum and bass. It also helps if the actual cd player is in
another room since the vibes mess up the laser tracking.


Yeah, fuck the record companies. Like Sony needs another twenty bucks. But
they're gonna get 'em... dad's lost his copy of High Voltage.


Fri. Feb 30.

It rained in the arvo, and I eventually made it down to Sans Souci, which
is largely un-navigable now. Is there something about people south of the
Georges River which means they can't negotiate T intersections
intelligently? Nope, it's the signage doesn't let 'em. No Right Turn, No
Left Turn, No Stopping, No Standing, All Lanes Must Turn Left, signs like
this stood everywhere I looked, arrr, why doesn't the RTA print a generic
All Right, Fuck Off sign and save a shitload of sheet aluminium? Maybe
nobody here drives cars or they abandoned them all on the roadside when
they realised that obeying the signage to get drive anywhere entailed road
infringement fines greater than the nett value of the vehicles they owned.
I met Trev, and he drove in his merc (which he doesn't much care for if
his driving's anything to go by) down to Cronulla to a restaurant called
the Naked Grape. Frank showed up a bit late but did indeed show up. Good
nosh, good chatting to the old guys, who as a result of being gynos for
longer than I've been alive are full of good stories, most of them only
peripherally related to their job. They split my bill, bless 'em.  Trev
went for a piss before we left and a guy standing at the urinal next to
him asked him if he was a doctor; when Trev said yes, the fellow mentioned
that Trev had delivered him 20 years previously.

I went back to Trev's for additional chat and to peruse the antiques he
has accumulated over a lifetime. He's a man of rare depth and many
dimensions. He's been quite astute in what he acquires... there's working
clocks 300 years old, ceramics from the Ming Dynasty, furniture so old the
insects which have bored into it are long extinct, watches hand-made with
components so small the women who made them ruined their eyesight after a
few years, rah rah. We had a good yack about these things, and he's _very_
knowledgable about this stuff. I think he considers himself temporary
custodian of these very old things, but also accumulates them as tax
dodges - and good luck to him. I wonder if his success in accumulating
these beautiful, and incidentally monetarily valuable things gnaws at him,
or that some people envy his success in so doing. He laughed a
delightfully satisfied and contented laugh when I told him the best tax
dodge is to not waste hours earning anything taxable in the first place,
which is why I've spent so many hours in unpaid employ for my own
amusement.

He is nonetheless not clued into some important things. He reckons we
don't know the atomic structures of things like Coenzyme A (it was deduced
in 1950) and has no idea about a lot of important biochem and cellular
metabolism. Never heard of G-coupled protein receptors (which are what
make hormones act so powerfully). He's convinced that the bible's
completely accurate and believable and plausible since it happens to
include some anatomical correct descriptions of say, why Goliath (a
pituitary giant) copped a stone in the side of the head : the big dude
used his peripheral vision to see since his pituitary tumor buggered the
nerves which made his central vision work. Hence the side of his head was
exposed and copped the projectile. Great... a wave of accuracy in an ocean
of lies does not a sea of truth make. Did it never occur to him that the
boring bits which would act as controls for this sort of story got left
out of this book? Does it never occur to him that nobody from his very own
trade was there to certify wether Mary was really a virgin - and how, post
partum, could you ever tell anyway? I had to clue him into some serious
fuckups in genetic engineering before he got a clue about why it might not
be a good idea to mess with the stability of the genomes of the plants
underpinning say, the entirety of western agriculture. We chatted about
everything, ranging from epistemology to the geological processes which
led to the formation of the phenocrysts in his granite tabletop.

I stayed so long chatting about stuff with Trev that it was nearly
midnight by the time I left. Natch it pissed rain. So I didn't ride to
Newtown so who knows what R's got up to. I hope she wasn't abandoned to
the uncaring smoky winds of Zanzibar. Her blog suggests not.

The weekend was sort of boring. Both the mobos I scavenged were
deadie-dead-dead (well, a non-fixable CMOS checksum error on one, the
others are totally silent). The flautist is not, I think, quite ready to
let me go, by which I mean, I'm gone and she doesn't realise it yet...
she's dropped off her broken cd stacker to see if I can fix it. I'm gonna
do it 'cos I've never had a chance to play with one before, but I think
she thinks it's just another possibly handy service to extract from pred.
Well, it is, but I'm not feeling used. Yet.

Joe Tainter's book "The Collapse of Complex Civilisations" which I have
finally got into heavily, is a bloody good book. Confirms many things I
suspected (like, why there's a neverending proliferation of roadsigns and
the ratio of bureaucrats to people who *do* stuff continually increases)
and suggests several things I didn't. I'm glad I'm dying. Don't read it if
you're not.

Arr shit, work tomorrow, enrolment insanity. Today, Feb 1, I lubed the
bike chain, chopped some tree bits around the place (dad's massacred the
ironbark suckers again but it fortunately refuses to die) and Andy
mentioned conway's / was full. Amongst other things I went to chop some
spam out of

/home/predator/Maildir/spam/new

and discovered a prolonged, churlish spew from diode, from an address
other than his normal one which I blacklisted... the spam detection
heuristics caught it anyway. Don'tcha hate must-have-the-last-wordists? I
think my spamfilter might be better than I realise.... he mentions several
times in the email that he thinks maybe my telling him to fuck off is a
result of a brain tumor changing my thinking. Maybe he can't cop the fact
that it isn't a pile of feral kidney cells which wrote the both-barrels
email I sent him, and I was in full control of my faculties when I
decided, despite my having known him for ten years, to garn geffugged. If
I was inclined to change my decision before I read this stuff, I'm not
much inclined to now. For a dude in his late 40s he's capable of some
remarkably childish sniping. Sad. Oh well.

Is it chutzpah to ask him to return to me my (purchased hardcover) copy of
"Free Software, Free Society" by Stallman? The book is published under the
GNU general documentation license... so technically, nobody *can* own it.

------------



Back to the grind.


It's Feb 4. Work sux not because it's work but because of all the stupid
risky wasteful overhead associated with doing it, like being stuck in
traffic for an hour, on a motorbike, in the rain on the way to work. The
schedule is stupid, almost not worth doing.. there's a 2.5hr hole in the
middle of it, and say an hour each way travel time, I'm spending about as
much time on the road as I am doing the work. The enrollment system has
been broken for oh, eight years, and will never be fixed because it's a
creeping horror of code mish-mash which nobody wants to attempt to repair
for fear of making it worse and it interoperates with other systems which
would also have to be adapted to changes made to it if it were fixed.
Because of this brokenness there is generated a time-wasteful paper trail
roughly three times the size it needs to be, which assumes one needs to do
it on paper at all, which one does not.

The aircon's fucked up, again, so in a room with 25 students (all
dissipating about 100 watts of metabolic waste heat) and 25 computers say,
all dissipating about 250 watts for monitors and 100 watts for the actual
machines themselves, we have 2500 watts of human and 8750 watts of machine
waste heat, there's about 10kWatt keeping the place a-swelter. It's
February and not cold at all yet, and humid 'cos of the rain. So every
morning I come in and unscrew the screws from the only two windows in the
room to get something resembling breathable air into the place, and every
night after I leave, a 'droid from Security screws 'em shut again. With
new screws, since I deliberately keep the ones they added the night
before. And I teach in my old purple SJC Rowing singlet.

There's some good infrastructure, tho, the overhead VGA projector means I
don't have to write on the whiteboard. Much better when I tie the
projector screen to a heavy object, however, since it prefers to scroll up
into its tube when let go. When the machine in front of me (which I use to
feed screens full of code fresh off my fingertips onto the projector
screen) crashes since it's running WinXP, I really get the shits. I hadda
revert to the never-crashes whiteboard technology after I'd slapped in a
load of weirdo hypertext link code which nobody had ever seen used before,
to call things like news feeds and so on. What year was this again?

Actually in the later half of the week I've reverted to using Knoppix3.2
GNU/Linux which doesn't crash, ever. So I've burnt some Knoppix3.2 (a
bootable, runs in RAM, German gnu/Linux distribution) cdroms which I will
give to the students tomorrow (students cannot resist free stuff) so they
have a really good distro' to get acclimatised to as an alternative to
GatesEmpireSoft. It's kind of fun watching people's eyes open when I show
'em how to write code. Most if not all of these people have never coded
anything in their life so some of the concepts are pretty alien and the
persnicketty, error-intolerant nature of the 'pootas scares 'em. In my
morning class I am the only blonde in the room and some of the kids (they
*are*, some barely into their twenties, reeking of the innocence which
comes from sheltered upbringings) have unpronouncable names from places in
Asia I'm only aware of dimly. Bright young things all, just 'poota
illiterate. The students approach these semiconductor wonders unaware that
they, themselves, are fundamentally alike as far as thermodynamics is
concerned, except the meat of which they are made, in which they live and
think and feel, is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the
silicon in front of them, and has a development lifecycle measured in the
aeons.


Stacks

The days are full (I mark the roll and tell anyone they can leave any time
they like, I'm not a gaoler!) and at night I've been working on the Sansui
CD stacker belonging to The Flautist. Here's the deal: it's jammed, not
working, not ejecting the 10 CDs trapped inside it either. The rig cost
about three hundred bux. It contains ten CDs, which are priced at $30 x 10
plus the time/effort of locating the replacements if you lose your
existing copies, so it's about $600 worth of exposure she has entrusted to
my hands... plus the emotional loss if you lose your *music*. It is a
fascinating bit of engineering but I had to unscrew, unbolt, desolder,
prise apart, unfold, unhook several layers of stuff to get the cartridge
out (rescuing 9 cds) and peel off several other layers of metalwork and
circuitboard logic to rescue the last CD - a job that also required a
certain amount of fuckin'about with alligator clips and hookup wires and
DC power supplies to momentarily brute-force the motors which operated the
transport gearing, enough to get the freakin' thing to relinquish its grip
on the last disc.

It took about three hours to strip it down. I rebuilt it in about two
hours (no parts lost, broken, etc either) and returned it all to her and
she reckons it works but I told her not to trust it: use copies of the CDs
that are important to you, don't leave 10 CDs in it all the time, minimise
your exposure I sent in an SMS to a new SMS she sent me. I do this stuff
well and I taught myself. Would I charge the usual $70 an hour to do this
stuff? Hmmmm. Maybe. I don't want to see the insides of it again if it
breaks after I warned her not to trust it.

Dark Izzy was updating the ink job on the Flautist's leg when I went to
fix Mekanarchy's router after they changed DSL providers - a task made
much harder since David the mega-body piercer deconfigured a lot of the
DHCP and rc.local settings, and TPG as usual were not forthcoming about
the system settings in an unambiguous manner.


Plotting

I more closely observed the devastation where dad had done a sly, brutal
prune on the suckers coming up from the stump of the termite-stricken
hardwood tree in the front yard. He can be a bastard at times, it was such
a nice bushy regrowth. He's legally compelled to have it, too, since he
planted nothing to replace the original tree.

Later, dad and the dog were in bed so I jumped on. The dog likes to roll
over, legs akimbo, guts skyward, so I can scratch its stomach, but I can
get it to lick dad on command, which he hates. I was about to do this when
mum walked in and sat on the end of the bed, and mentioned that we ought
to buy a family plot down at the cemetary at Woronora - real estate in
Sydney is shitfully costly and I'm all for minimising the rent on a patch
with no water, electricity or net connection. I told 'em I didn't much
give a shit if they buried me as an atheist in the catholic section - I
reckon all corpses are atheists anyway, despite what the signs say (and I
bet people of every denomination claim membership of all the corpses in
the entire paddock) - but I figure if they could tolerate being in their
place while I was alive I'll tolerate being dead with 'em. Weird... I'll
decompose with a family biologically unrelated to me, a godless heathen
interred in hallowed earth.

This'd sort of fuck up the no-cost, suicide-in-the-bush, animals scatter
my nutrients scenario, and waste additional resources digging a big hole,
carving a stupid chunk of rock (I'd prefer 316 stainless steel anyway)
with my name followed by a meaninglessly pretentious epitaph, putting me
in a box, all that crap I really don't want. And I'll need some cash to
help pay for the hole... so... where's that?



Stuporannuation

Some years ago the federal government made superannuation compulsory. Ever
wonder why? 'Cos people knew they were being rorted by the superannuation
companies, the tax system and inflation. Cash, in your hand, now, is much
more valuable than an entry in a database which says someone owes you the
same money in thirty years. The super companies profit on the value
differential between the money you pay them and the same quantity of less
valuable money they pay you back in forty years, plus and the difference
in the interest they are paid on the investments they make with your
money, and the slice of that which they pass on to you. As if interest is
gonna cover tax and inflation... naaaah. Ask any pensioner living on a
daily tin of Chicken and Liver Chumpy in fifty bux a week worth of
boarding house.

Dream on. And by the time you, dear reader, want to get yours out in say,
2030, there's not gonna be a functional civilisation left to spend it in
since cheap hydrocarbon fuels will be long gone by then, along with the
agricultural system we built to run on them. Long term, the laws of
thermodynamics and the quirks of terran kerogenesis dictates what
economists call a bear market, by which I take them to mean, Ursus
middendorffi, as in gutted, hung up to cure in the smokehouse, and
stuffed by a professional taxidermist.


During the considerable hole in my schedule today I went up to the
Chancellery to talk to whoever it is who runs the UNSW superannuation
scheme to which I have been an unwilling contributor for as long as I've
been a tutor at the uni. It turns out I have a couple of grand in there.
It also turns out to be nearly impossible to extract, as you might expect.

UniSuper is one tiny portion of an industry which is a systematic racket.
I used to work in a bicycle shop in the city and when I got the shits with
the crappy returns delivered by the Retail Employees Superannuation Trust
several years ago I was sacked for venturing the opinion that one would be
better putting it in a regular savings account. Nothing's changed.

How is it that I chuck in a couple of hundred bucks on 15/10/2001 and by
29/03/2002 three quarters of that is gone? Or that between May 1, 2002 and
18 September the same year, the fund has actually lost fifty bucks, so the
previous contribution is totally gone?

According to www.apra.gov.au, to obtain my cash, I have to either prove
financial hardship by being on social security for 26 weeks before I can
get it (I'm dying but I am not incapacitated so that'd rule me out even if
I wanted social security payments, which I don't), or I can get at it on
compassionate grounds, which aren't (this is why they call them
compassionate) - you can only get it out if two doctors (one a specialist)
are prepared to independantly sign off on pieces of paper saying that I
need expensive treatment not covered by the public health system. So I can
only get the bux out to spend them on an attempt to prolong my misery,
instead of getting 'em out to actually enjoy 'em before I die. And the
claim form asks me to quantify all my other assets... vehicle, shares,
bank accounts, houses, rah rah.. presumably to help them decide if I
should sell all these things and become completely depauperate first
before they'll let me raid my super.

As you'd expect, the fact that I'm *dying* doesn't matter half a rodent's
fuck to APRA. And they have a damn lot of cheek to place, on the bottom of
a form which demands to know your financial situation in Orwellian detail,
the following question and follow it with six blank lines:


Please give a brief reason why you satisfy the grounds for early release
of your superannuation benefits



I wonder what I should write here for perusal by uncaring, bored
clock-punching 'droids in a Canberran office tower. Several candidates:

1) I'm dying, it's my money, I wanna spend it before I am dead. Fuckhead.

2) See the "your superannuation benefits" in the question? This
   implies correctly that they're my dollars. If they are my dollars, I
   should not need to show you any reason why I want them. If they are
   in fact not my dollars, I should not fill in this form.

3) My superannuation fund throws my money in the toilet and it is silly to
   let them continue this. See attached.

4) By the time these sequestered funds of mine are nominally released in
   about 2030, they won't be worth the cost of the postage required to
   send me a check for them in the post. Collapse in energy supply causes
   massive hyperinflation. See Germany, 1933, and others, for
   expectable financial sequelae. 

5) It is incalculably unwise to make angry by pointlessly withholding from
   him what is his, a dying but able-bodied man with field experience in
   locksmithing, electronic security systems, and the application of
   explosives to buildings and safes for demolition purposes. Do you feel lucky?
   

But since I don't think these would get me anywhere, I'm gonna leave it
blank. This question does not deserve the dignity of response intrinsic to
even a well-sculpted string of profanities.

It is noticable that the government (did I mention parliamentarians get
all their super paid in from the public purse and it's not taxed?) taxes
the sum at 21.5% on the way out even if the rest of my income is below the
tax free threshold. At that rate I might as well just not ever show up on
Mondays. Or if I was to go to work for forty years, not show up for eight
of them at all. Do the math. The magnitude of this rort beggars my
imagination, and I'm capable of some pretty heavy imagination: in
Australia alone there's about $540 billion (that is, $540,000,000,000) in
managed superannuation funds. Assuming the tax rate stays the same (yeah
right - it never gets *smaller* does it?) they govt gets about oh, $115
billion in tax when all of that gets withdrawn.

An annual one percent inflation robs the public of approximately five
gigabucks of purchasing power per annum. As such the 'super companies are
therefore paying off their retiring/retired superannuants out of the
contributions of those people who are still working. These people who are
still working are gonna get reamed in the long term and they won't even
know why. What an absolute scam!

Mine's not a huge pile, but, fuck it, it's *MY* money. I earned it _so_ I
could spend it on stuff, not die leaving it in the care of bunch o'
corporate shareholders and no-life fucks in the insurance industry. Who
the fuck do they think they are, keeping it from me when I'm dying?
Arseholes. I could get really cranky about this... only the extremely
stupid stand between the dying and their cash. If someone swiped half a
grand off you in the hotel carpark they'd get a couple of years in the
slam for robbery. In comparison, it appears it has been legislated that by
superannuation, not only we are robbed but also that we pay the robbers to
rob us. Crime pays, and pays very well.

Copious whinging aside, looking at it another way: my strategy has turned
out to be correct: minimise my exposure to the greedy shits at the ATO by
earning as little taxable income as possible. Most people'd piss their
pants in visceral ecstasy if they were only losing a few hundred bux to
superannuation tax. Most lose tens if not hundreds of k$, which for most
people slaving away their whole lives earning normal incomes is roughly
equivalent to financial arse-rape with a Saturn V rocket. So
strategically, even if they refuse to relinquish any of it to me (because,
say, they decide I'm not really dead), it'll turn out to be only a small
fistful of hours from my life down flung the toilet earning the money of
mine which they have. I win by recognising the parasitisation and refusing
to feed it. You only own what nobody knows you have.


It's the night of Thursday Feb 5 and as I absently feel my neck I think,
in a somewhat paranoid manner, that perhaps Bill is stirring again. Yes,
indeed he is. I'd estimate he's about 10mm on his largest axis. Arrr,
shit. The problem with having a convenient diagnostic metastasis is that
my emotional state goes up and down as it grows and recedes.




---------

Feb 7th

I've been working on a kilowatt-hour meter setup for catalyst since we
never know how much juice we use running the servers (we make an estimate
- not a measurement). I scavenged most of it from the squats I used to
live in at Broadway in 2001 after the South Sydney Council cut our
electrickery off. Stutterin' Jus' Hewitson scored a hundred dollars worth
of residual current cutout device in a power point he scavenged from a
dumpster, so that's gonna be incorporated to prevent people getting zapped
working on live equipment, plus two other power sockets and a circuit
breaker. It's nearly done, but there's a lot of metalwork to finish yet.
There's already LC noise filtering on the active rail. I'll solder in some
spike-suppression MOVs later.



The novocastrian purple death faerie didn't show up on saturday arvo but
melburnian R did... albiet the best part of an hour late. It was good
chatting to her. We went for a stroll around the Newtown cemetary (which
has the highest concentration of empty alcoholic beverage cans, used
condom packaging, nitrous oxide bulbs and abandoned bongs of any cemetary
I have visited - and the locals fuck on the tombstones) and thought about
epitaphs (she thought of a good one - `so that's what's under here').

Cluckiness has her. She's making some waffly arguments about doing
everything that a body can do, in much the same way as one might argue
that one should do all the things one's really good tool could do, with
the tool in question, being preggers is something she wants to experience.
I think deep down she's rationalising. I mean, I can theoretically do
ballet dancing with my body but I don't think it's a good idea.

So she's on the hunt for some DNA (and associated encapsulation/delivery
system) to start a rugrat and I clued into the fact that she was asking me
about it, in part because she'd be interested in *mine*. 

But I am a sample of one - with no pedigree and no history I cannot know
what genetic damage I harbour. Anyway I (and 90% of the populus in cities)
carry a teratogenic virus, CMV-3, to which I think the rugrat-in-process
better not exposed if possible.  I'm declining for a number of reasons. In
no particular order, the world's crawling with about six billion excess
humans already.

Neonates born now will grow up (or not) amidst the Hydrocarbon Depletion
Collapse which is not gonna be fun to live in, I suspect to the extent
that they will curse us for ever conceiving them.  Being dead would make
me the kind of absent father a kid would grow up to hate, I suspect. And,
this is the age of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and RFLP (restriction
fragment length polymorphism) paternity testing, and the legal system
tends to suck child support out of biological fathers of children
regardless of the contractual circumstances of their conception. She wants
anonymous code but cannot get it by asking the donors, and the donors with
worthwhile quality of code live in bodies with brains of sufficient depth
and calibre to know it they walk on dangerous ground and will not donate.

This discussion reactivated an old thought process: that the GNU GPL
should apply to the genomes of organisms. A neonate has to be considered
in the light of what it actually is, which happens to be a collaborative
biological software development project. With no known living relatives,
I'm freeware, pretty much, but I cannot donate my code under the GNU
copyleft, since hers would have to be copylefted too, on account of it
occurring consequently in the diploid rugrat which the GPL would also
cover. How would the Ashkenazi tribe to which she belongs take to the
discovery that their precious genetic material (with its unfortunate
tendancy for Guillaine-Barr and Tay-Sachs disease) was suddenly GPL'd ?
And of *course* I cannot guarantee my genetic material's fitness for
merchantability or any particular purpose - who knows what nucleotidyl
errors lurk in my Sertoli's cells?

In any case, there'd not even be any fun from the point of view of the
code transmission event since R, so she sez, isn't into penetrative
shagging any more, and she's trying to find partners who are spontaneously
into bondage and domination, but her search is not helped by telling
people that she's into bondage and domination and pain, which ruins the
spontaneity - they have to know it in advance, and cannot learn it just to
get her off as if she's some kind of technical problem in need of a
solution. Now, I'm into occasional, tactically applied mains electricity
(stepped down, of course) and can tie knots well enough that I can and do
entrust my life to them, and have a shed full o' tools capable of
inflicting anything from mild irritation up to mortal injury. She asked me
some months ago at Nomes' if I was up for a shag, and I was (for a while).
But the offer has ended. I'm getting the feeling that I'm being jerked
around again, or maybe it's that my head has changed, and my perception of
women has altered. There's no rule that says that they have to shag me, or
even live up to their offers to shag me, just 'cos I'm dying. But much is
going on in R's head at the mo... it's
like her Fallopian tubes have reached up through her peritoneum, grabbed
her by the carotids and threatened her with death if they're not somehow
filled with a pile of foreign nuclear material (and I don't mean soviet
plutonium). The clock is ticking, she knows. So it is for all of us.



----------

Sunday 8 Feb.

Time of the signs.

On the outside of the buildings where dad has his offices were attached
two large (2m x 1m... they make a great BWONNNNG noise when they flex)
sheet aluminium signs, which advertised to the world that his partner
practised there (the other two advertised that dad has his practise
there). Since Frank has retired now there's no point having the signs any
more so Frank wanted 'em removed. So I removed 'em, and had to abseil off
the roof and down the side of the building to do it, in stinking heat and
searing glare, with dad directing pedestrians away from the footpath under
my work area. The signwriters painted the screws in, so I had to hammer
them off with a chisel, which took a long time. Once the things were
detached I belayed 'em down clamped hard in vise grips, which were tied to
slings tied to me with a harness and figure-8. For two hours of work I
pull $300. Cookin' cashflow. And Frank will love me for gouging him that
hard, since he paid nearly six times that much for the hire of a cherry
picker to install the signs but a short year ago. Frank's a mate, so he
gets Mates Rates. If he pays cash. Michael Carmody's retirement fund
deserves none of my cash.


Fuck, i'm busy, packing in a LOT while I'm on the way out.


--------


Monday 9th was a good day but the evening was better. The day was stinking
hot, I went home, got out of my sweatty dweeb clothes and into my usual
utilitarian rags, then went to Cinque where the Purple Death Faerie did
indeed show up. She's six foot of piercings, hair extensions and 2nd year
architecture student cool. She was not especially worried about Kev, which
was good to know.

By the time we'd finished chatting it was raining, a hot, steaming mist
floated up off the King St bitumen. We walked to the graveyard at St Lukes
and sat up the back of the dark cemetary and chatted some more. Screams of
DIE, DIE, DIE came from a woman (we found out later her name was Lockie)
sitting on the back door of the church. We walked over and enquired why
she was yelling this out and she said "Anger Management".  We freaked out
a couple of normals (we all yelled "DIE, DIE, DIE" at them and they looked
oddly at us and walked hurriedly away). Then in accordance with local
custom the Purple Death Faerie and I went back to the rear of the cemetary
and after decorating each other with various bitemarks, shagged
enthusiastically on a worn sandstone slab as the rain fell upon us in the
spooky shadows, to the accompanyment of fruit bats fighting in the trees
and the sound of several of the beads in her hair falling off and
scattering across the slab. If there is a god, I am going to hell, and I
am looking forward to meeting all the other people who have shagged on
this rock. We rode back to her student accom in the light drizzle, and to
my amazement she fitted ALL THAT HAIR into my spare 'cycle helmet.

--------------
Feb 13.

A week of tutoring and driving, lemming-like, my motorcycle back and
forth, but a tiny drop in the hydrocarbon-powered, daily metallic tide
which rushes into the CBD before 9am and rushes out again at 4:30. The
roads are jammed with cars, almost all of them 75% empty of passengers.
And why do I suffer this idiocy instead of driving in an hour late (30km
in is a fair drive, I'm not gonna ride that on the treadly). Oh, I dunno.
The money, partly. But I think the students enjoy my ranting about the
evils of governments, censorship and that corporations are trying to turn
the internet into television, like they've never heard anyone lecturing at
uni express an opinion before. One of my students has a 'blog (I deduced
it from the content of her first assignment) and she (almost an
optometrist, we hadda long chat about optic nerve bandwidth, rhodopsin
alleles, UV absorption in lens crystallin, Nepali myopia epidemiology, and
a few other things, hence I spent a couple of minutes looking at it) wrote
that she enjoyed the chat and liked that I knew a lot about a lot of
stuff. Wow. I'm not gonna own up to having read it.

---------
From predator@cat.org.au Sat Feb 14 00:06:38 2004
Date: Fri 13 Feb 2004 00:12:04 +1100 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: predator@cat.org.au
Subject: MS has perfected the art of the fucking annoying error message.

I was forced to use Puke XP today to mark 50 HTML files from the students,
and I have seen the following error message at least two hundred times, 6
times whilst quoting the message. I do not have the Windows Explorer
browser open.... maybe that's that they call their OS now, tho. Just
Mozilla open, and it works.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Windows Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are
sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something the
information you were working on might be lost. PLEASE TELL MICROSOFT ABOUT
THIS PROBLEM. We have created an error report that you can send to help us
improve Windows Explorer. We will treat this report as confidential and
anonymous. To see what data this error report contains CLICK HERE

[Send error report] [Dont send]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Natch this comes up right in the middle of the fucking screen right on top
of whatever you're trying to do. It wont go away unless you click one of
the buttons. If you click the SEND ERROR REPORT button another window
comes up which also asks you to click it. This cycle repeats about twice a
minute.

ARRR! FUCK! FUCK! BLOODY BLOODY FUCKING FUCK!!! BILL GATES DIE, DIE, DIIIE
- how is it that fuckhead is still walking around alive? Make an OS which,
if it must have errors, doesn't annoy the shit out of me in the process of
reporting them! FUUUCKWIT! This is NOT EASE OF USE. And like you'd trust
MS to treat anything as confidential or anonymous. Ha. Ha Ha HAHAH!
<megalomaniacal laugh> Suuuure.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's also a spunky woman in her mid-20's, with an amazing grin and a
much better tan than I have (she is Indian... brown hair, brown eyes,
brown-flecked corneas, even brown *gingivae* - does she have *any* pink
bits?). She's in one of the tutorials which i don't run, which is good,
because I'd compromise my academic impartiality if we got involved, which
I'd like to, since we've chatted a bit and I think we find each other
interesting. She gives me _those_ furtive glances. And she has a very
suggestive name. Her first name is homophonic with Zyn. Meaningless to an
atheist, but most inviting, I think. Her second name is Amurthalingam. I
dunno what Amurtha stands for but I know what a lingam is. She *gives* me
one. We've decided to go guzzle some burnt arabica nut juice somewhere
this weekend and blab about stuff.

I dropped in at Harrigans on the way home from Uni. Christine hasnt aged a
day, her youngest daughter'd be 21, and is becoming like her older sis
Tash. Their kitchen is different, they've remodelled the living
room. Greg's still cycling. Nick's startin' a PhD. Wow. Model citizens,
for certain kinds of citizenries, I think.

Diode dropped in my copy of Free Software, Free Society. Good.

I've finished the CAT power meter / circuit breaker / noise filter / spike
suppressor / residual current device mains feed board, but am yet to test
it cos I don't wanna trip the house out (and still have to solder the MOVs
in but that'll take two minutes, it's a no-thinker). I put it aside and
configured my long black pants with several pieces of stainless braided
hose, for tomorrow night at Vortex. I want to convince myself that I look
as if the Borg have assimilated my leg, and after I dance around in this
crap for a few hours it will certainly feel like they have. Ow!

Sitting in front of a uni poota for two weeks let me read about carbonic
anhydrase IX as a prognostic marker for tumor survival. It's expressed a
lot in most of the tumors which kill the people who host 'em. I wonder...
does it express this stuff in reaction to local pH? Which is something
HCO3+ would buffer, you stick on a proton using this enzyme and create CO2
and H2O. 


Ok, this file is far too fuckin' long. I'm gonna freeze this one and start
the next. It'll be at conway.cat.org.au/~predator/ides.txt cos it's 
Fri 13th. WHo gives a shit what the filename is so long as you
can find what you're looking for?

I know it sucks to copy'n'paste. The HTML for a link to the next file is

<A HREF="http://conway.cat.org.au/~predator/ides.txt"> ides.txt </a>

Click away.

<predator>

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------