Hoo hoo! We now have new eentsy-beentsy little cellular telephones, roughly the size of grains of rice. And they have grainy little cameras built in! And they come with free games that exit after a minute and a half and urge you to pay money to obtain the full version!
But alas we can't obtain the full version, because our phones say "network unavailable" whenever they try to do anything like that.
We called the cellular telephone people to inquire about this behavior. The first cellular telephone person said that we should remove the batteries and "SmartChips" (SIM cards) from the phones and wait awhile and put them back and try again. We (well, I) dutifully did this, and it didn't help.
The second cellular telephone person talked my through verifying that all the mysterious settings and IP addresses and so on were set correctly on the phone, and that didn't help either. Then he checked the Trouble Tickets and found that "many customers in the northeast are unable to access the data network".
Oh, he said, maybe that's what it is.
(You'd think it would have been more efficient to check that first, maybe, narf narf.)
So what do readers want to tell me?
Venice is sinking.
Five squared IS fifty-five imperCEPTible signS!!!
Kant loved his boils, yes indeedy! Thanks! - Daniel
Everyone I know likes intelligent and smart first off but I think thet're posing...they really like the sexy and cute
...and sexy and silly and cute, oh and intelligent and smart.
You are really something...especially when seen through the veuves Clicquot et Pommery filter. Do you have that on your Sims?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/ballmer_tongue.jpg
Muppets are mortal.
I say the Sims lose out to house painting or lovemaking or anything.
So there we are, told! (I, and for that matter my Sims, are as always inexpressibly grateful for your words, your thoughts, your jibes and wisdom and foolishness.)
They had a thing about consciousness and computation out in Almaden the other month. The web page has (enormous) videos of the talks and stuff (did I already log about this?). They even got John Freaking Searle to talk! I've only watched the begining of his bit so far, but it was discouragingly along the same general lines that I've complained about here before.
(My gawd, that was four years ago? Seems like last month.)
And finally, our Search Terms o' the Day: Temple Grandin, Faith Popcorn, and hyperencryption. (The last of which doesn't find this page as prominently as it should.)
These old folks [in the koan collections] spend an awful lot of time talking about the fact that nothing can be said, and figuring out clever and devious ways to trap each other into showing that the other knows more than they're pretending to.
Nothing that is said can be true. The truth cannot be contained by words, by gestures, by bodies, by minds.
The truth sounds forth in everything that's said, regardless of what it is. The truth presents itself in and as every lie ever told; in the greatest poetry, and the most mundane doggerel verse.
The truth has fingers and toes, but does not have fingers and toes. The truth embraces every apparent contradiction, because everything that is, is true in its very presencing.
It is because anything that is said is a lie, because what is true can never be the content of any word or phrase, it is very important that we try to speak the truth. The trying is very important.
It is very important that when we stand up we stand up, when we sit down we sit down. It is very important. Although we can never contain or constrain what is true, it is very important that we try to express it, and try so completely, so thoroughly, that all effort drops away. When all effort drops away, when there is no one trying to express what is true, then the truth that presents itself even as every lie rings forth in a way that can be recognized. If we try to grasp at what was recognized, and attempt to turn it into a doctrine, into a way of believing, a faith, a philosophical system, an excuse, then we've missed it. Recognition is a moment in which Knowing is known, not as a known, but as who you are. Practice is the practice of opening to this recognition and making this recognition real in each and every moment. Then, we can call it "realized-practice". But regardless of what we call it, it is something that we must do, something that must be embodied. In order to embody it, we must sit, walk, stand, and lie down in the midst of ambiguity, in the midst of uncertainty, in the more and more deeper and deeper unavoidably obvious fact that we do not know what anything is. When we become really, really good at not-knowing, then we'll have something interesting to say.
-- Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi, continuing "The Landscape of Reality," teisho 11: "Knowing Not-Knowing," May 21, 1997, Dainen-ji
That from some recent issue of this (back issues don't seem to be on the Web anywhere I can find), to which I'm for reasons that I forget subscribed.
None of it's true, of course. *8)
But I thought it was pretty neat.
And of course related to our sometime theme, that language cannot express truth (and that that statement is, naturally, not true).
Ha, well, so. We're writing in the log at least once a week, at least. Can't be bad.
Sunday is a nice day to write in one's weblog. We had bagels and watched cartoons in the morning. I went to the grocery, and finally folded up and put away the winter covers from the Big Tub of Water, which had been trying to dry out in the sun since we opened it, and finally they were mostly dry. The little boy mowed the grass again, and we got to stroll collegually around the yard discussing what needed mowing and what didn't.
And I checked some code into the real-live source tree after fiddling with it and testing it some more, and I struggled with Subversion (or really the Eclipse Subversion plugin) for some time to try to convince it that it had successfully checked it in; it was for some reason convinced that it hadn't. Eventually I just hid away the local copy and told it to forget it had ever existed, and then checked it out from the server. That seemed to satisfy it. Although it's still slightly confused about something.
Well, aren't we all, after all?
More of the Universe of Content: some Sims activity, and notes on two books. Neither one deeply significant, but both (like the Sims) a nice distraction.
Search Term o' the Day: Species 8472.
And I don't know, what else? The universe rolls on. I could tell funny stories about Cingular customer support: how the 800 number urged me to use the website's live chat, and how the live chat person when I described what I wanted told me to call the 800 number, and how at least three different people that I got via the 800 number suggested that I call the 800 number (one of them, when I said "yeah, that's the number that I called just now and got you", said "I don't know why they have it set up like that"). And how the answer to my question (how to use the website to sign up for a family plan and some new phones) was that I had to lie to the website and tell it that I wanted four individual plans, and that when the phones actually come and I call up to activate them, then I tell the person that I call what I actually want.
But you're probably tired of "how things are broken" stories anyway. *8)
If all goes well, we'll shortly have new Cellular Telephones, of the kind that have Little Cameras Built In! That will be strange. And they'll be so small that we'll be constantly losing them, or having them fall into the cracks between the floorboards, or yawning too wide and inhaling them without even noticing. ("Is this a tick?" "Hm, no, I think it's my telephone.")
I wonder if I'll start posting Cameraphone Pictures of Things.
That would be strange also.
