How many Elves are there in that brain, anyway?

Should I have different blogs?

I'm starting to wonder. I have my socio-political blog entries (tag: shrill) about religion, intelligent design, and then I have my life and family stuff (tags: life and kids, although I'm not reliable about these tags). I have my geeky things about Rails, databases, web design, C programming, living with Linux, and all the rest. I have my writing, of course, and I could always start a sex blog (although with my life the way it is right now, that might be more nostalgic than productive; I used to be able to go to events every week; now I'm lucky if I get out once every three months).

Just trying to figure out if my audiences would be bigger if there was stuff they didn't have to read to get what they wanted.

Is it The Future yet?

So, it's December, 2007. I have the 2001 British Telecomm white paper "The Technology Timeline" here, and let's see if their futurists got anything right at all. Here's the 2007 list:

• Artificial Inteligence & Artificial Life
  • Domestic appliances with personality and talking head interface
  • Systems to understand text and drawings (e.g. patent information)
  • People have some virtual friends but don't know which ones
  • AI students
• Business & education
  • Lifestyle brands dominate
  • Network based learning causes polarisation in classes - streaming is essential
  • Global classes used for multicultural immersion
• Environment & countryside
  • Virtual farming co-operatives
• Home & office
  • Emotional objects, switches etc around home
• Life & leisure in a cyberspace world
  • People reduce tax liability by being partially paid in information products
  • On line voting in UK
• Materials & electronic devices
  • Material with refractive index variable by 0.1 in electric or magnetic field
  • Self organising adaptive integrated circuits
• Processing, memory and storage
  • Optical neuro-computers
  • Quantum computer
• Robotics
  • Totally automated factories
• Security, law, war
  • Data mining use in trials
  • First net war between cyber-communities
  • Remote override capability on planes
• Shopping & money
  • Paper and coins largely replaced by electronic cash
  • Shops start being paid by manufacturers as try-on outlets
  • Electronic cash from internet migrates onto high street
  • Next generation space telescope launch
• Transport & travel
  • All new cars fitted with positioning systems as standard
  • Portable translation device for simple conversation
  • Kaleidoscopic clothes using materials with embedded pigment micro-capsules

I might have virtual friends, but I don't know of any AI students yet. Global classes is a joke, there aren't widespread "emotion sensitive" houses, and both quantum computing and neurocomputing are still gleams in the eyes of researchers. Data mining in law cases has happened, not all cars have positioning black boxes, and portable translation boxes are still a few years out.

Mitt Romney's Code Words:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Which is what all you nasty atheist, agnostics, and yes even you Buddhists, are gonna do when I'm president. Perish alone.

Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.

On the other hand, those of you who eschew faith in a supernatural sky daddy, you're screwed.

In recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God.

"If your religion is in the majority in your town or city, then by God you ought to be able to use the machinery of the state to ram your beliefs down the throats of others."

We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders - in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history

Which founders, exactly? Not Franklin, Jefferson, Payne, or even George Washington. When they spoke about God they were explicit in the private and personal source of that speech; they were not speaking as our Pastor In Chief. Our pledge and our currency don't mention god until much, much later than our founding. It's only been there for the past 70 years, not 221 years.

During the holiday season, nativity scenes and menorahs should be welcome in our public places.

Ah, that ought to make Bill O'Reilly happy. "I support the War on the War on Christmas."

Our greatness would not long endure without judges who respect the foundation of faith upon which our constitution rests.

"I have a litmus test for Supreme Court justices. They have to get Pat Robertson's OK."

Today was just...

Today was a beast. I had physical therapy at 7:30 this morning, and Ashley was just cruel. Extra weights on the ankles, a new exercise for my hips, the whole kit and caboodle of viciousness. My knee, however, is doing well and if I maintain my regimen over the next four weeks I should be able to go back to using stairclimbers and other advanced training materials.

After that, I had my annual eye exam. Now, you have to understand that to me, my eyes have been getting bad for some time. So I went in today and he checked my eyes against the prescription, did the glaucoma test, all that fun stuff. And when it was all over he told me that my eyes were 20/20R, 20/20(-1)L, which is apparently normal. The problem being, I used to have 20/10 vision and I miss it. So he wrote out a prescription for progressives that will give me back the vision I want. And when I showed him my ebook reader, the Palm V on the standard font size. He said, "You're quite lucky. By your age, most people can't read that at all."

For the rest of the day, my eyes itched. I couldn't really even see until about 1:00pm. I did get more testing done with WATIR, although my boss urged me to find a solution that used Python instead. The closed I came was something called DogTail. It only works on Epiphany, not Firefox or Internet Explorer; the Epiphany example says at the top of the demo file "This does not work"; it's not portable to Windows.

And the rest of my team is already Ruby-savvy and digging WATIR.

Kusanagi would boot, then freeze. Then boot, then freeze. I field stripped Kusanagi down to the motherboard, replacing the keyboard, blowing as much dust off the motherboard as I could, and replacing everything that could be replaced with spare parts fallenpegasus had given me: RAM chips, ethernet card, modem, DVD player. None of it helped. I eventually put the hard drive back into Lain. It's not great-- I can use Thunderbird, or I can use Firefox, but not both, and they can't be left running-- but it does mean that I'm not totally out of the loop. If I put one of Kusanagi's RAM into Lain, the BIOS says "256MB chip, yum!" and then refuses to boot. So I'm stuck at 128MB.

Kouryou-chan has a friend from school doing a sleepover tonight. They watched Disney's Fantasia and ate Omaha's delicious coconut batter fried shrimp dinner, and all three girls are right now getting ready for bed. There's a lot of giggling going on. I should go check on them.