I just updated my mom's blog. I am a cherleader. Come visit my mom! rah rah rah!

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Mitch says that I should just hold my dog over the toilet when she has to go for a walk. Or train her to pee in the toilet on command. I tried training her to pee on command, but only half heartedly and it didn't work. One of my cats decided to use the toilet for a while, instead of the litter box. We didn't train her to do this, we just cleaned the litterbox infrequently. It lead to hosuemate arguments about who wasn't flushing. Since we didn't train her to use the toilet, we didn't train her to flush either. Then we moved and she stopped doing this trick.

Timananana says that she wants to be able to comment on my posts. I think this is a birlliant idea. I was all set to download slashdot code, when cola said that livejournal.com supports comments and is open source. cool. I don't have time to check it out until monday, but I'll definitely check it out.

I did not post yesturday because I went to see the San Francisco Opera. We bought season tickets and this was the second opera, Aidriane auf Naxos by Strauss. It's uh, very odd. It's a backstage opera for the first half, much like a backstage musical. the second half shows the opera that results from the first half. A bunch of cahracters from the first part don't appear in the second, so a bunch of people bow at intermission, which is highly unusual (I think. It's not like I've seen all that many operas). I notice that if you have a bunch of people on stage in the same range, it's hard to tell who is singing what. But that might be just because we have the second worst seats in the entire house. We have four seats next to the wall in the second to last row of the highest level.

My mom was doing well yesturday. I went early because of the opera. Margie, my mom's attendant, always tells me that mom is much better around 1:00, so I arrived around 1:00 and mom was much better. Her words made sence. She wasn't hallucinating (which she was on wednessday). She wasn't in pain or on pain medication. Pretty groovy.

it is time for me to go sit with my dying mother. i didn't go yesturday. there was no good reason. i used to do six days a week and take mondays off, but my wife complained that she went to work five days a week and had to sit with my mom the other two, and she wanted a break. so now i take sundays off, which is fine except now i have no time for myself at all. i have mornings. but i'm not a morning person and i certainly can't immerse myself in a project the way i'd like to. i'm definitely an afternoon person. it's not like "having a life" is important to me the way it is for some teenagers who want to have a life because their parents don't. Well, my mom has a life but just barely. the expiration date is on the horizon. every day i don't see her is a day that i don't see her.

one of her friends called up and told my mom's attendant that they all already thought of her as dead because she's doing so poorly. obviously, she's not yet dead. but goodness, i have a hard time being there too. how can i be angry at them neglecting her death bed wehn i use the same rationalizations? when i saw her on monday, she was surprised everytime i spoke because she would forget i was there or something, even tho i was right next to her and she was looking at me. or maybe my voice was frightening, since the temporal lobe deals with fear and her temporal lobe is full of tumor. it's easy to decide she must have forgotten i was there and therefore doesn't benefit from my visits and anyway i have music to write.

she's on oxygen because she breathes laboriously while sleeping and thus her sleep isn't restful. it's not prolonging her life. i haven't posted it yet to her blog because i don't know how to explain it in a way that won't frighten away all her friends. oxygen is a harbringer of death. it doesn't matter. they're all frightened away anyway.

Everyone you know is going to die, including yourself. you may be next, you may not. Some of these people will go suddenly, others will be sick like my mom. this is a good place to exercize the golden rule. You can say to yourself, "oh, i wouldn't want people to see me like that." how very vain of you to say so, but many do. yes, i'm sure you'd rather end your life surrounded by strangers and machines. or would you rather have someone you cared about holding your hand? i thought so.

Somebody on a mailing list i'm on just died of cancer. We were informed. folks were emailing out emssages to him that were passed along. People were saying things like, "don't die. you have a lot of music to write." i understand where that comes from, but he's going to die. piling on unfinished buisiness seems to be the wrong thing to do. so my mom's friends at the museum are thinking, "don't die, you have a lot of docent tours left to do." and when they figure out that she has zero docent tours left, well, maybe she's already dead. This isn't what life is about. and as an extenstion it certainly isn't what death is about. Yes, we all fear it and try to avoid it. Or at least, we ought to try to avoid it. but it's going to happen. which is a better thing to say to a dying person, "don't die! (it's scary!)" or "i'll miss you."? you know the answer to this. Now go see your sick friends while you still can. It's hard to talk to somebody with oxygen tubes, but it's harder to talk to a headstone.

Those are strong words, aren't they? But I still haven't left yet. Everytime I skip a day she's worse. She's worse anyway, but then she's 48 hours worse instead of 24 hours worse. There's a noticable difference. It's scary going to see her and knowing she'll be worse.

People have this idea about death, where dead people get to keep their memories. My mom's memory is clearly the result of some sort of tissue thing. Now it's gone. even if she spontaneously went into remission tommorrow, her memories wouldn't come back. And yet they're suppossed to be restored after all her tissue is destroyed. Furthermore, some folks expect her to gain additonal knowledge. Dead folks know what happened to Hoffa maybe? No. they're dead. People are the result of biological processes. when those processes cease, there's no more person. nobody will know after death why you're sorry you didn't come see them. They won't finally approve you. they won't do anything because they will be dead.

No wonder atheists are are sad at funerals.

i now only have 399 messages in my inbox. yay.

i got that stanford sndlib so i could perhaps add the ability to play sounds to jmax (maybe it would play sounds if it didn't think it was running on linux), but something is amiss with sndlib. if berkeley had written it, it would work.

baby

My friend is having a baby in February or so, which means all of her friends are busy debating what ought to be done with the baby. By that I mean exactly how this child ought to be raised. What should it be named? How shall it be housebroken, those sorts of things. She's the first in this clique to have a baby, so the rest of us are full of the opinions of childless people. One of the debates lately is cloth vs disposable diapers.

Those in the disposable diapers, let's-use-more-petroleum-products-and-fill-up-the-landfills camp point out that diaper services are wasteful water-wise and cleaning out your own diapers is a lot of work, which is messy and germy. therefore, after some thought, I have devised the non-wasteful diaper algorythm.

Ok, so your precious little darling is crying and smells yucky. You slip on some latex gloves (use natural latex if your a super green with a lot of money) and clean up your precious little darling and put on a new diaper. You then take the old diaper to the nearest bathroom and slosh it around in the toilet until it could reasonably be described as "rinsed." you think this is discusting, I know you do. you're thinking, "no you take it to the trash and are done with it." well, I'll admit it, I was raised on disposable diapers (I'm not proud) and my mom told me that it was necessary to remove the lining and flush it down the toilet since raw sewage does not belong in the trash. Was she correct? I dunno, but users of disposable have done these steps anyway. How much extra work is it really?

anyway, having sloshed the dirty diaper in the toilet, you then throw it in your handy bucket of soapy water along with anything else that's soiled from disper changing. this bucket has a tight fitting lid. You snap the lid back on. You take off the gloves. you go back to your life. you don't spend time thinking about the diapers until it is time to do laundry. then you grab the bucket with your hanper and head over to your washing machine. you have a washing machine because you are owning class. Sorry, I don't have such easy instructions for the non-owning classes. Owning class people get all the breaks.

Anyway, as a childless person, it is my impression that babies produce a lot of laundry. there's the crib liners to be washed, and the diapers and the baby clothes and the wipes and the endless towels and the five shirts of yours to have been thrown up on and all of your normal laundry and everything els ethe baby has gotten slime on. Babies are slimy. there's always something oozing out of one end or another. with that much slime, you've got a lot of laundry.

So start your first load of laundry. You have two of them. Just make one a small load. You want to wash the diapers seperately anyway. Ok, so you put more glvoes on after starting the first load and remove the dirty diapers from the bucket and put them in a large canning pot. you have the canning pot on top of a hotplate or other small stove which is on top of a heat-resistant tile, which is on top of your front loading dryer or your front loading washer. The large canning pot is filled with soapy water. You put the soiled diapers and wipes in it and put the lid on and bring it to a boil. Your other load of laundry is going at this time, so your time isn't really being wasted. After a couple of times, you'll know how long it takes for this boil, so you won't need to sit and watch it. It should boil for ten minutes, or fifteen if you really fear germs.

I know you're thinking about boiling poop. You want no part of this. That's because you, fellow childless one are thinking about boiling your own poop. This is baby poop we're talking about. They only eat milk. Their poop is different from ours. It won't smell that bad. And besides, it was oozed from your precious darling. anyway, once you know how long it takes to boil and you can be assured it won't boil over, you are free to leave during a lot of this process.

So you return to your boiling diapers and find that the first load of laundry is done! Yay! after ascertaining that your diapers have boiled adequately long, remove them from heat, or at least turn off the heat. Remove the lid. Start putting your cleaned clothes in the dryer. Now that you clothes are in the dryer, you have no excuse for further delay. Ok, so you have heat resistant tongs and you pull the contents out of the pot and add them to your front or top-loading washer. Or, if you have a top laoding washer, you have the option of starting the wash cycle and waiting for some water to get into it. Then dump the whole pot in. The cold water protects the washer from the hot water. It's just like brewing beer. Anyway, the diapers are in the washer. You add some natural laundry soap (do you want to subject your baby's behind to harsh detergents?) and you run the wash and then after the wash, they go in the dryer. they are clean, germ-free and ready for use. If you used tongs to move the diapers, you have a pot of hot wash water. You can dump it down the drain or you can use it as grey water. all the germs are dead from boiling, but you're still a cautious sort, so you pour it on your non-food producing plants. They love the fetilizer content and thrive. Really.

Up to this point you've used no harsh chemicals or bleach and your baby's behind and the enviroment have been protected. but now we get to the bucket of soapy water with the tight-fitting lid. Actually, we shoud have gottento it earlier, right after it was emptied. It needs to be returned to service. It must be cleaned and disinfected. At this point, bleach may be employed. One tablespoon of bleach to five gallons of water kills everything. That's not that much bleach. But since you're green, you can try oxygen bleach or iodine. It's just like brewing beer. The cleaned bucket is returned upstairs and filled with soapy water to await more dirty diapers.

See! It's easy! Not that much extra work a day. And us childless folks are anxious to help out those with new babies. We'll gladly sweep your floor while you deal with dirty cloth diapers. Well, some of us will be more useful than others wen it comes to helping. some of us may just provide invaluable advice. It's clear that the real strategy to employ to save the earth around diapers is diaper-use reduction. you won't find this in Dr. Spock. Well, maybe you will, I've never read him.

I read in an anthropology book that some groups of people train their infants to pee on command. That whole delay in potty training is about poop. Anyway, you probably can't train an infant to hold it when s/he has to go, but it you order them to pee frequently enough, you won't have to. just hold your kid over a sink, tiolet, bucket or your neighbor's patio and order them to pee. The tribe in question used a whistling command. Don't use the same whistle you use to call your dog. I have no idea how you would go about training your baby in this fashion, so it's left as an exercize for the reader.

But pee isn't the real problem here, it is? Well, it's no surprise when babies poop. They always do it right after eating. Maybe some other times too, but always after eating. Just perch them on a bucket or potty chair after feeding them and wait for them to go. you could cut your diaper use tremendously. The tribe I read about in my one anthropology class didn't use diapers at all and their babies slept in bed with them. they could anticipate when the bay had to go and put it in the right place. Doesn't that sound better than diapers? Keep them as backup, but make that baby go in more convient location and you won't have to boil poop nearly as often.

This is papublic service message broguth to you by Procrastination Productions

whee-hee i got jmax working. it has cool data types. but it doesn't make sound, so it's not quite perfect.

jmax

I am trying to compile jmax. I really like max. I really like GNU software. I want to run something like max under osx. It seemed like the thing to do.

IRCAM is not exactly devoting lots of resources towards the OSX version. Why should they? Anyone can run max on OS9, if they have OS9 and max, which is not GNU. Anyway, maybe there are liscencing issues, who knows. The thing is that the makefile for OSX is broken. Important things are missing. Somehow, I hosed installing two library files. I can't just re-make them because some sort of VERSION is missing. I have re-downloaded the source to recompile the missing libraries so I can manually install the missing files.

Additionally, jmax is convinced that it is running on a linux box, so it insists on looking for all the libraries under directories called i686-linux, instead of ppc-macosx. It's easy to create dynamic links, but you'd hope someone would notice this and fix it. Why not me? Because I'm a lousy release engineer.

Yesturday an error with the install command in one of the makefiles changed the permission of /usr/bin to 744 instead of 755. The funny thing is that none of the apple gui applications even flinched. Do gui applications (by gui, I mean aqua) even use regular unix libraries? (Yes, I know the libraries reside in /usr/lib, not /usr/bin.) I feel like my computer is some sort of Siamese twin.

I want to upgrade to the latest OS version, but more than $100 for an addition of 0.1 versions seems a bit steep. Why does Steve Jobs need to act like Steve Jobs? His personality is infecting Apple like it infected NeXTSTEP. People say that NeXTSTEP died because of insane pricing. They also had complete disregard for their customers. Well, Apple is now dabbling in insane pricing . . .. It's time for a non-interm CEO.

I'm such a nerd. noone with self-respect should have opinions on the CEOs of companies manufacturing luxury goods . . .

Miss Universe has been fired. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2278307.stm) Is nothing sacred in these troubled times?

gear review - caffeinated soap

it! works! great!!!!

no, seriously. The soap comes in groups of three bars. It is see-though and smells minty when moistened. It advertises 250 mg per "serving" with ten "servings" per bar. The bar is good for way more than ten showers, unless you wash very vigorously and stay in for a dern long time.

My wifey is a hardcore caffeine addict and notices nothing from the soap. I hardly ever drink coffee or even green tea, so I do feel a bit awakened after using it. I would avoid using this soap on extremely sensitive skin. (that's not a euphamism. I just mean that if you are already having an allergic reaction to laundry soap or something, don't go rubbing more weird stuff on it.)

My motivation for use is not to wake myself up, but rather because a single study seems to show that caffeine may help stop skin cancer. My grandmother lost her nose to skin cancer...

skin cancer link: http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/3947352.htm
(this also mentions brain cancer. my mom drank decaf. next time your doctor tells you to switch to decaf, you can bring this up.)

soap link: http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/caffeine/5a65.shtml

Sorry no pictures of this product in use. If you want to see me rubbing soap on my nose, one could be taken.