We Should See Other Blogs

Only when your heart constricts
can you squeeze out the words
like a drop of blood, like blowback
into the needle.

Only when your pupils shrink
can you see past the glare and
say it’s like walking through
a forest with no trees.

Only when a hundred pound weight
is sitting on your chest can you say,
“I see storm clouds coming, I see the
clouds rearing up like black pillars.”

Only when you can’t feel your fingers
can you feel the periphery of this thing
flaking and burning and falling off and
can you can you can you can repeat
your mistakes.

So apparently laptop related crime is on the rise. For various reasons, probably. The article’s a bit alarmist, mind you. But it makes sense.

1. There are simply more laptops around. That means that more of them will get stolen, and let’s not even start talking about how people treat ubiquitious devices with less care than, say an executive might his sensitive laptop and its information.
2. WiFi is concentrated in places, and much like animals concentrated around a watering hole, WiFi hotspots have a much higher concentration of people with laptops.
3. It’s easy to unload hot laptops. Ebay, classifieds, friends.

The solutions are quite simple, I think.

1. Be vigilant. Criminals hate attention. They don’t want to be seen, and a lot of laptop thefts are probably crimes of opportunity. So don’t give them the opportunity.
2. Make it harder to unload the items. Not sure how this could be done.
3. Make WiFi access more widespread so you won’t have to converge on hotspots.
4. Let your average joe carry a concealed or unconcealed handgun. How many people would want to steal a laptop if, for instance, anyone watching would just pull his piece?

dan (not your ordinary Canadian)

I have this thing, and I call it being badly adjusted. It’s like trying to wrap my mind around life and failing, but also like trying to pick between polar opposites and not understanding which one to grab ahold of.

I think the choices you and I face are often quite easy and hard at the same time; I would like to be both an advertising executive and an automobile mechanic. Easy to say neither is a particularly bad choice, hard to pick which one. I want to have sex with my girlfriend, but I don’t at the same time. Easy to pick which one is right, hard to do what you choose.

But at the same time, it’s easy to idealise choices irrationally: if it’s hard then it must be right. The honest truth is, I think, that the easy way is not always the out, and the hard way doesn’t always build up something within you. Escape from situations may sometimes be easy, but it’s also sometimes right. Not having sex with your wife may be difficult, but it’s probably wrong.

Wouldn’t it be better if everything were on straight lines and coloured black and white? Ironically, you can’t even say in black and white which things are written on straight lines. You can’t say that all ecumenical activity is wrong, for instance, and you can’t say every emotional experience is good.

But one beast I’ve never met is the easy choice that’s easy to both choose and impliment. Maybe it exists, just not for me. But mostly it’s between hard/easy, easy/hard, and hard/hard.

Kind of points me to a place where all the choices are on a straight line. You can call this escapist fantasy if you will. But even the escapist fantasy is the hard and easy choice. Easy to say that you want heaven. Hard to get there. Or, easy to type the words, and hard on the shoulders because the posture is bad. Either way.

Think of a plant. A tree. What tree chooses where it’s planted? None that I can think of. Think of a tree growing in a place where it was impossible not to, no matter where you landed there was water and there were nutrients. I grow weary of the choice, of the illusion that I have control and landing in grooves beside the wall where there is no water. This evening, for a moment, it was glory. But I opened my eyes and I am still here.

Don’t fear: this is no death threat or wish for oblivion. But sometimes the lap of Abraham seems preferable to even the sweetest things I can find here. You, love, you are not enough to complete me. You aren’t enough to bear me up for the long or the short that we do or do not have: does that break you? Or does it cause you to fall on everlasting arms?

Yahwilling I will see you soon: in this moment I speak to both love and Love.

So today I aquired a Bluetooth headset for my work computer, complete with microphone and the whole lot. Seriously, how did I operate without said equipment before now? I can roam all over the office and call people from my Gizmo account (which I love). All I have to do now is purchase a few credits more than the 25 cents Gizmo gave me, and I’m in business! In fact, I plan on doing that tomorrow.

The neatest thing is, of course, that we’re already using Google Talk in the office, and once they have SIP support and can connect properly to the Gizmo network, I see no reason why we can’t call straight from the Talk client (at least it should be technically possible). Doesn’t really present a problem seeing as the Gizmo client can’t be how these people make money – instead, it’s through their VoIP offering – which we could use as we see fit.

Or Google talk could impliment call-out services into Google Talk, which would be very, very nice.

By the way, you can chat between Google Talk and Gizmo already. For instance if you have Talk and I have Gizmo, you can just add danieljosphxhan@chat.gizmoproject.com to your Talk contacts, and voila!

dan (oh what an exciting time to live)

I just watched a really, really good movie called Stay. You all should know what sort of movies I like based on what sort of books I read and what sort of stories I write: I like wankery. Sorry, but it’s true. Movies that give my mind a good shake and leave more questions than they answer. Even The Sixth Sense in its suprise ending but more importantly the foreshadowing that accompanies the ending.

But I also like movies with style. Multi-layered films with texture and subtlety: stories that use the medium they inhabit to tell the story as much as the script and actors themselves do. The Matrix did this with its symbology and cinemography.

Beware that if you continue reading this, I present spoilers galore. If you’ve watched the film already, you’ll probably come out with a better understanding of what’s actually going on. If you haven’t, the story will probably be subsumed in your attention to detail while viewing it.

First off, the entire movie happens as the protagonist is prostrate beside a burning vehicle in which his mother, father, and fiance have all perished; he himself is mortally wounded. Most of the film is the story of him choosing whether or not – as he lies there on the pavement – to live, or to die. It is secondarily concerned with his guilt over killing his family (though it’s not his fault).

The film, every bit of it, takes place in that limbo: the traditional life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment before you actually kick the bucket. But instead of seeing his life – although you will see his life in various places throughout the film – he halucinates, dreams, whatever you want to call it, melding things he sees before going unconscious and the important people in his life.

His psychiatrist, for instance, is the doctor who stands over him on the road; the doctor’s girlfriend in the dream is a nurse who he works with.

Throughout the film, you’ll notice the odd transition between segments: they blend into eachother un-naturally, they cut and weave, and as the film progresses, they become more eratic and disturbing. Audio elements start intruding on the narrative in places, like when the psychiatrist visits the young man’s mother in the disturbingly empty house.

All of these things are indicative of the mental state of our protagonist: as he dies, the narrative becomes more fractured; scenes repeat and the camera shifts awkwardly.

This is all fine and good. But there are some other significant factors that go unexplained. For instance, the significance of the number three. In one scene, the young man and his psychiatrist are walking through a college after an art lecture; as they progress around the building, there are sets of triplets in just about every corner of each shot. In another scene there are three out of focus metal globes; they appear in the next shot as well, though it’s in a different room. The psychiatrist’s girlfriend has three scars on her wrist from attempting to commit suicide. It is three days from the time the young man tells his psychiatrist he’s going to commit suicide till the day he says he’s going to it. Personally, I think these groups of three refer to the three other people in the car. Or perhaps it’s an allusion to the entire film taking place during the three – admittedly hypothetical – minutes he spends dying in real life.

The main characters, as well, exhibit characteristics that are, frankly, bizzarre but at the same time understandable in context. The psychiatrist is the side of him that doesn’t want to die and seeks to save him; his previous psychiatrist is the side of him that doesn’t care. The girlfriend is a sort of neutral ground. She has no real good reason not to die – other than that there’s so much beauty in the world – although she’s tried to kill herself (not to mention the three scars on her wrist from self-inflicted wounds, as if to say that even if he lives he’ll bear the scar of those three people dying in the car forever). The man he calls his father, who he heals of his blindness is his own understanding of what’s going on: when the blindness disappears, it’s a signal of his mental grasp of what’s going on. Shooting himself is his way of launching himself out of the dream and back into reality to finally die.

Do I agree with the film’s point? If it has one, not really. But on the other hand, you will have to watch this at least several times to get it down pat. It may even freak you out a bit. But at the end of the day it’s an excellent, excellent movie, and deserves to be seen.

Someday I will ask myself
why it was a stone and not a whistle:
I’ll toss it like salt over my
shoulder, but not give a dog
a headache.

As some of you may or may not have noticed, things are once again a-changing at ye olde blog. I’ve started upgrading those plugins I need to upgrade due to the recent version change of this WordPress install. This means that certain things have moved on for the moment, such as the beautiful theme once presiding over this kangaroo court, the shoutbox on the side that everyone has started ignoring, and several other useful and inspiring features.

In fact, this place is starting to look like a regular old-fashioned blog. But not for long! In some deep secret part of the interwood I am testing out my very own forum, a forum such that me and mine can converse amongst ourselves. I have Nick to thank for the webspace and whatnot. If you want to have a look and try this out for yourself, be warned that everything is in development.

17 Beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency is, according to Wikipedia, “eficiency of 17-beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase isozyme 3 which leads to male pseudohermaphroditism”.

Male pseudohermaphroditism, of course, being the incomplete differentiation of male genitalia during formation in the womb. (Interestingly enough, something like 0.1% to 0.2% of live births are completely sexually ambiguous, with a variety of causes.)

Apparently 17 Beta-hydoxysteroid dehydrogenase deficiency has high frequency in a particular inbred Arab community in Israel. If you want the gruesome details, click that link.

dan (my goodness!)

I don’t generally watch a lot of non-English movies, with the exception of some Anime, some French films, and several Russian titles. But I heard about a South Korean movie called Yeopgijeogin geunyeo, which translates roughly into “My Sassy Girl” and just had to see it. Which I did.

And it’s good. Really good. In fact, if there were more American movies like this, I might go to the theatre more than once a year. This is my advice: if you have a chance, rent this movie. You’ll like it.