You know all those online quizzes you can take that give you little graphics to put in your signature or on your webpage or whatever displaying your results? Well, I decided to sort of collect some results.

So far I have What Finger Are You (ring finger), What Tortallan Character Are You (Alanna), What Egyptian Deity Are You (Isis), What Era Are You (the sixties), What Beauty Aura Are You (sexy), What’s Your Past Life (a cat), The Most Useless Quiz Ever (a dinosaur who’s too confused to plug in a desk lamp), and What Snack Food Are You (popcorn). I’m still looking for a couple I took a while back regarding elements and Lord of the Rings characters (not in the same quiz).

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Guess what! Today the New York Times published my letter to the editor regarding personal safety on the Internet. Check it out here (registration may be required, but it’s free):
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/21/opinion/L21DATE.html

They’ve edited it, and changed it a little, but it gets the gist of what I’m trying to say. Basically–if you are meeting someone from the Internet for the first time, even someone you know well… Be safe. Meet in a public place, or with other people around. Don’t under any circumstances invite them out to a remote farmhouse where you are all alone. Yes, Internet relationships of all types can be a good thing, if you just use common sense.

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Right, so I’m trying to figure out how to do recursion in LabVIEW. Well, I’ve got it, but I have a couple of weird problems going on here. Basically, it boils down to the fact that Code Block A and Code Block B should function identically, but only the second one works.It’s one of Those Things, isn’t it? Like when the empty output statement fixed Colin’s C++ program in high school. Or when fixing the code that centers the window on the screen made my VB calculation work even though the two were totally unrelated. Except this is in reverse; it’s broken by HPFM (hocus pocus fuckin’ magic), not fixed by it.

Weird.

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(Sorry about breaking off in the middle of my account of my trip. Lost Internet access over the weekend.)I came back to an apartment that was neither clean nor empty, and a house full of boxes. On Wednesday we went out late to do a double load of laundry. It wasn’t that bad, other than the fact that we didn’t get to sleep until 1am or so.

Then on Thursday the real work began. I had to finish the apartment in time for a 4:15pm move-out inspection. I got it done, but just barely and not as thoroughly as I would have liked. I think I made about a hundred trips up and down the stairs, out to the car, out to the dumpster, etc. Finally, though, it was done. Sore and exhausted, I went home for a relaxing evening.

The next morning, I was stiff and more sore than ever, especially my feet. But still I didn’t mind getting started on the unpacking. I got the bathroom and bedroom done, and got a couple of boxes cleaned out of the second bedroom. There, I began to run into problems. First of all, I couldn’t (can’t) unpack most of the kitchen stuff yet because we need to get the new shelves set up so I’ll have someplace to even put stuff. And what was in front and on top of the stacks? Yup. Kitchen stuff. Second, I felt like I was just moving the mess around. Anything going in the living room pretty much gets plopped into a pile because it’s not organized itself yet to do much with anything. A lot of the rest was going back into two boxes: one for garage sale stuff, and one for stuff to keep but put in storage. I made progress, but it seemed like very little.

Then there was Saturday. My unpacking effort on Saturday was to get out some spices and the coffee stuff–and that only because I needed those things. I couldn’t unpack in the morning because I didn’t want to wake Tim up; he slept until 1pm. Then we had to go to the grocery, among other places, and nothing got done.

Today, I am overwhelmed by it all. I’m so far gone, I just sat down and bawled because I couldn’t get this under-bed storage thingy to go together the way it was supposed to. I feel I should take a break, especially since my feet are STILL protesting the exertions of the past few days (they were a bit swollen last night), but I can’t do much more than sit down and have an Internet break without feeling like I’m slacking off. And I am. There’s just so much to do, and Tim wants to have a lot of it done this weekend, which means by tonight. And I just don’t know if I can DEAL with this. There I go again… The self-reminder of how much there is left set me off crying again. We don’t have enough closet space, we don’t have enough space at all, there’s no place to put things… I really like this house but right at this moment I’m regretting moving if only because there’s just too much stuff to do and too much stuff that needs bought and too much stuff that got packed wrong (knives thrown into a big box willy-nilly with no indication of sharps inside) or weirdly (things from almost every room in the apartment all in one box) or got packed but shouldn’t have (the stuff on top of dining room table was just dumped in without regard to what might be trash) and I am not going to get anywhere near the amount Tim wants done unpacked… And I’m STILL trying to recover from traveling, damn it! Don’t I ever get to rest again?…

I’d better stop now. I’m getting less and less coherent, I should shut up.

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I suppose I should have titled the last entry “Day One” and this one “Day Two”, since I’m really describing Day Two here. Then again, if you count the one day of travel, I guess Day Two of the class is really Day Three of the trip after all. Interpret the titles as you will.

I finally got rid of the taste of Wednesday night’s Angel Hair Martinique. For dinner last night, we went to a Tex-Mex place called Chuey’s. When we got there, it was happy hour! This is a novel concept for me; it’s illegal in Indiana, since you’re not allowed to change the price of alcohol in the middle of the day. In this case we got (relatively) cheap margaritas and free nacho-type chips and dip. The first bite of the salsa John chose immediately burned away the taste of the pasta. And it just got better from there. The best part was, this food wasn’t hot just for the hell of it; it was flavorful-hot. Which is how it should be. I had some veggie enchiladas, which were very good, and even came with rice and beans, which means I don’t have to worry about my protein intake for a bit. (While not strictly vegetarian, I have a tendancy to like “veggie” food, and I’ve recently realised that I probably haven’t been getting the amount of protein I should, because I’ve just forgotten to watch it.)

Back at the hotel, I once again got the pool to myself. Yay! There, I had a breakthrough on a lesson of that course I’m working on; I haven’t “mastered” this technique of not-thinking yet, but I’m getting there far faster than I had been. It helps at the moment to be in the pool, because (as long as I have it to myself) it’s a relaxing environment, but I’m hoping that with a couple of candles and some soft music I can relax enough at home to do this too. Of course, part of what helped was the movement of swimming around, and I’m not sure what I can replace that with. Dance, maybe, but I’m no good at it and the house is so small I’m not sure there will be space.

Today promises to be a good day overall. Class should be short. I get my car at lunchtime–though what this means for lunch, I’m not sure–and there’s a liquor store on the way back to the hotel, so I’ll stop there and get something for the weekend. I was thinking of stopping at a drugstore and getting a candle and some matches, too, but I’m not sure I should really do that in a non-smoking hotel room since I’m not clear on whether the whole smoking thing extends to include flame of any sort. Probably not, but I don’t need it and it would be one more stop on the way back, so I’ll probably skip it anyway. Then I’ll have the whole weekend to myself. I’ll probably order pizza, hole up in the room for a while reading (nonfiction, which I brought along specifically to make some progress on–Di Tregarde and Anita Blake can wait until evenings or when I need a break), catch a movie, do some swimming, and get a bit tipsy, in no particular order. Above all, the weekend will be for me. I’m here on business, but the only way that’s involved in the weekend is that they’re paying for my hotel room, car, and per diem. I plan on relaxing.

In other news, Tim is moving today. Exciting! He’s been doing minor stuff for the past couple of days, with Jess’ help, but today all the big things go over. I think he will make a descision about the kittens today, too–it seems our landlady has two which she would be willing to give to us, and Tim has met and fallen in love with them. I suspect I’ll be greeted by a pair of kitties when I get home. I’m not sure I’d really object. It’s a little sooner than we’d planned, and we’d only planned on one, but it’s not like we weren’t going to get a cat anyway. I wonder if he will name them before I get there. I’d rather get to know them first and see what they think their names are.

Babble babble babble. Time to end this for today…

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I had a nice rant prepared about some advice I’d found on “packing light”. However, I kept revising it. And revising it. And I only have so long here at class to do anything about it. So I threw it out the window.

Day Two of the Austin trip. So far, so good. The class we’re taking this week is turning out not to be as useful as we had thought, but it’s not totally useless either. Last night we ate dinner at a Carribean restaurant called Bahama Breeze. I wish Tim had been there; they had carpaccio (however you spell it) made with raw sushi-grade tuna, and I think he would have liked to try it. I wasn’t brave enough myself; I had the Angel Hair Martinique. It had some sort of tomato-based sauce, but not as pasty or chunky in texture as you’d normally expect. Tomato-broth based, maybe. It was all right, but I can still smell it on myself almost 24 hours later–and yes, I’ve showered and had a complete change of clothing. I could still taste it right up until lunch, too. It was good, but not so good that I wanted it hanging around that long.

I’ve decided, while we’re down here, to make a habit of going swimming each night (possible exception: weekend nights–don’t fancy sharing the pool with small children). Last night, I decided to try the next lesson in an online at-your-own-pace class I’ve been taking while I was in the pool. (In the pool alone, I might add; 8pm seems about the right time for that.) Quiet time. Taking a little while–maybe 15 minutes, maybe half an hour–where any thoughts just flow in and out. Make no attempt to stop them, but don’t dwell on them either. It almost worked. I came to the conclusion that the only way to really do this in the “water” setting would be to get a perfectly still pool. Which unfortunately would harbor mosquitos and maybe West Nile. The currents of the pool kept distracting me, because they would push me into walls and such. Oh, well. I got a good ten minutes in, but it was such a mixture of frustration and relaxation, as well as being so short, that I don’t consider it a success. I think part of my problem is that I’m just not used to that sort of thing. I have always had something to think about, ever since I dreamed up the first incarnation of Alex’s story, because in moments of inactivity my mind would go back to it. It’s gotten so that I think through scenes even when walking down the hall to the restroom (for instance) because I’ve just conditioned my mind to turn to that in idle moments. It’s difficult to turn that off. I’ll keep trying, though.

Time for more class. I guess I’ll update this thing each weekday (no Net access over the weekend)–it seems like as good a way as any to keep a personal trip log.

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Well, here I am in Austin. I’m on business; John and I are getting more training in the use of LabVIEW programming software, and National Instruments’ headquarters in Austin is the place to do that. This is the second time we’ve been down here, and John’s been down before that, but it’s still sort of a new experience.Austin is bigger than I had thought. For some reason I’d thought of it as a smallish city. Whether it is or isn’t, I don’t know, but it’s ten times the size of Bloomington in terms of population, and it’s far more spread out. To these people, distances that would get you from one side of Bloomington to the other are merely “down the street”. “Down the street” is a misleadingly simple phrase here, too. In Indiana, we’ve got the highway and that’s it. Here, there’s the highway, and then on either side of it there is a one-way suface road running the same direction as the nearest part of the highway. If that wasn’t confusing enough, the nature of this system necessitates a lane on the surface roads devoted entirely to U-turns which take you under (or over) the highway to the surface road going the other way. All in all, it’s very strange, but then I suppose Indiana has its share of strange road things happening too.

It’s definitely Texas here. They say Austin is in the “hill country”, for instance, but neither John nor I quite understand where the hills are supposed to be. To us, this area looks normal, perhaps a bit flat even. The Appalachians are hill country. This is the next thing to desert land. And it is–that much shows in other ways as well. When stopping at the Enterprise Rent-a-Car station at the airport, the attendants comment on how it’s been more humid than normal. We are more used to “humidity” in the sense of being immediately drenched in sweat upon setting foot out the door; we laugh and say that this weather is actually pretty nice compared to what we’ve been getting in Indiana. Another telling difference–there are few tall trees here. The vegitation is not quite as flat as the land, but in comparison to the wooded hillsides of southern Indiana, it almost seems that way.

I feel as though I should go on with this, expounding on the differences and the similarities, the things that bind us together and the things that divide us from one another. I am, however, running out of things to actually say. Perhaps this is essay material? I do, after all, need a new essay for when I put up the new version of my home page. We shall see. At the moment, I’ve got a class to pay attention to and the break is almost over.

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Warning. Rant ahead.

Well, by now the whole country’s heard of the required reading list at UNC, which includes a commentary on the Koran. I found an article from the Washington Post on the subject. (Link removed because it no longer works.) In the article it says the following:

But a national TV talk show host, Fox News Network’s Bill O’Reilly, compared the assignment to teaching “Mein Kampf” in 1941 and questioned the purpose of making freshmen study “our enemy’s religion.”

????

Gee, I don’t know, maybe it’s a good idea to know who we’re demonizing? Maybe we should try to see “Islam” not as a religion made up of scary inhumane monsters, but as a religion that can be beautiful and even sane if you just take the time to have a look at what it is rather than what a few of its fundamentalists have done? Are colleges now propeganda machines, that they aren’t allowed to show their students anything about the enemy which the government has not approved?

No, there’s no reason to study the enemy at all. Good grief. Even assuming that this silly notion of Muslims as terrorists is correct, what the hell happened to strategy? And how can you plan strategy without knowing your enemy?

Get a clue, Billy.

When I heard about this case, I thought they were requiring students to read the Koran. Period. It seems, however, that the book they were requiring was instead a commentary on the Koran and Islam. I don’t see the problem if this is the case. They’re not pushing Islam, they’re pushing understanding. Their choice of commentary seems to be almost as controversial as the very fact that they’re teaching anything about Islam. Yes, perhaps it’s a one-sided commentary, as this article indicates. It’s a commentary! Of course it’s going to be from one person’s perspective! And in the current social climate, perhaps it’s understandable that they chose one that leaves out the passages which inspired the terrorists. One can hardly expect to learn everything you need to know about any subject from just one book–surely a class which includes current events, or religious studies, or any number of things, could build on the information in this book and promote a greater understanding.

OK, rant over. Thanks for listening.

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I’m having trouble concentrating at work, and I seem to be in an odd, introspective mood. I thought I’d document it.There is a difference between religion and spirituality. I think I have always known this. Our inner Truth, the core of ourselves, the part of us that hears the voice of the universe speaking and replies, that is what some would call the soul. That is spiritual, and the conversation between us and whatever else is out there–that is spirituality. This conversation has no words; perhaps one could call religion the language in which we try to describe our spirituality to others. To me, that framework is secondary. The primary focus of my “religious” life is not religion at all but spirituality.

What in this world is spiritual? Music. Light, darkness, and the contrast between. Earth, air, water, and fire, each in their own way. And transcendant emotion–feelings so strong that even the good ones make you want to weep, with such depth that words do not adequately describe them. Those things are spiritual to me.

Is spirituality better than religion? No. Sometimes the words are necessary in order to make the conversation meaningful. There is no shame in needing those words–nor is there any in not needing them. Perhaps those who do not need them haven’t yet heard the conversation in their native language, to extend the analogy. It would be like watching a film in a foreign language with no subtitles. You get the basic intent of the whole thing, but unless you can speak that language fluently, you’re still missing things, and if you don’t speak the language at all, you may miss most of the movie.

That’s about all the introspection I can do right now. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything else.

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