Category: Uncategorized

Sitting here eating eggs and homemade corned beef hash from the leftover meat from last week’s Reubens and watching it rain, I’m reminded of one of my own corny but original sayings: “April showers bring May flowers, and Mayflowers bring pilgrims.”

I don’t want to beat dead horses, but it occurred to me this morning that you might not have checked out Jan Toorop’s work, and I wanted to stress again that this is my favorite image. This guy, Johannes, was sitting around in 1893 smoking opium and drew that thing on a piece of paper and enriched my life for 10 years, a hundred years in the future.

Wow.

And a huge Asparagus Pee thank you to my dear wife, The Lady Janet, for including this in her wonderful Europe Trip scrapbook so I could scan it this morning.

So I got home early after troubleshooting a serious Novell&#153 network server crisis for the last three days, and I’m feelin’ a little Irish, drinking a few brewskies and a wee bit o’ Scotch, and eating an excellent “Chris’s Special St. Patty’s Day Reuben,” and singing some fine old Irish tunes like Cockles & Muscles and The Lass with the Delicate Air, when The Lady Janet reminds me of Tubthumping by Chumbawamba, as seen at the first church of chumbawamba.

Got to admit, that’s a pretty cool Irish-y song, especially that part about “pissing the night away.”

If you’re feeling Irish, I highly recommend that you check out this page on chumba.com where they go to the trouble of listing rip-offs of the song Tubthumping, like this country version or this Mother Goose Rocks Humpty Dumpty version (click “Play” to start Flash video).

I don’t really need a reason to blog about Alan Turing and Turing Machines, you know, the idea that if you ask questions of something, and if you can’t tell whether it’s a human being or not, it’s the intellectual equivalent of a human being.

But I’m blogging about it anyway because this guy’s site came up very high in a Google&#153 search on “Cockles and muscles,” by which I hoped to find the old Irish dittie about Molly Malone that I’ve been singing for the neighbors’ enjoyment.

Update: I think I was already too Irish when I wrote this&#151a Turing Machine is just a system that can execute all of the instructions necessary to be a Universal Computer&#151in other words, everything that’s not excluded by Goedel’s Theorem of Incompleteness. The Turing Test is the one that says if you put slips of paper with English on them into a slot in the wall, and slips of paper with accurate translations into Chinese come back out of the slot, you have to assume that there’s a human translator in there who knows both English and Chinese, and if it’s simply a machine, that doesn’t matter.

This is all over the internet today, but it’s really cool and makes good intuitive sense – they call it Colorization Using Optimization and they start with an assumption that “neighboring pizels in space-time that have similar intensities should have similar colors” and do a costed weighting function to use a few scribbles of colors in the different areas to seed the system with a color guide. It’s much cooler than it sounds, so check it out!

Here is one of my favorite images of all time, Desire and Fulfillment by Jan Toorop, 1893. It’s a large pastel that hangs in the Musee d’Orsay, where I originally fell in love with it. They keep it in a glass case with some other fragile drawings in a room with black walls and very subdued lighting. Click the thumb for a closer look – the real one is about 3 feet wide (76 x 90 cm).

Well, here we are at last, reading Asparagus Pee at chrisandjanet.net.

I was listening to the radio on the way back from lunch, and they were playing the Argent classic from ’72 Hold Your Head Up, and it occurs to me that this could be the inspiration for Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die. Think about it.

I’m reading a library book of essays by my hero Abraham Maslow, and he quotes Alan Watts as saying:

“…in the moment of death many people undergo the curious sensation not only of accepting but of having willed everything that has happened to them. This is not willing in the imperious sense; it is the unexpected discovery of an identity betweeen the willed and the inevitable.”

So I’m guessing there is a god.

This week we bit the bullet and signed up for SBC/Yahoo! DSL service. The good news is that it works great &#150 we’re getting about 1.2 MB/sec on the download side, and it only took about an hour to get the new wireless router to work, so I’m blogging from my wireless laptop and it works from anywhere in our yard, including our old metal-sided garage, so that’s cool.

But I just read the fine print, and after a year, instead of the $26.95/mo that we’re at now (and this from responding to the ads during American Idol touting a rate of $19.95) the fine print says we’ll be paying the standard rate of $49.95 from then on. Oh well, beats dial-up, right?

But I’m really concerned about how to do this blog! Right now, I’ve got 25 MB of content at Inreach.com, and Yahoo! doesn’t have any “free” hosting except Geocities with ads, which is unacceptable, not only because of the ads, but because you can’t FTP content. They have an “upload tool” that does one file at a time, and I’d like to migrate the whole 25 MB, pictures and all.

So, as I understand it, my options are to pay for an upgrade to the tune of $4.95 – $8.95 a month to have an ad-free Geocities account with FTP access, to keep my existing setup with Inreach at $18.50/mo, or to go with some other free but awkward solution like Asparaguspee.blogspot.com, and use Picasa’s Hello bloggerbot to upload and host the pictures?

Any advice from my blogger buddies would be more than welcome.

And changing all the setups at Blogrolling, Sitemeter, Haloscan, Sacramento’s Top 25, Blogger, etc., and losing all my existing pagerank mojo on Google? Oh my.