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Month: June 2009

ipod Shuffle Code Cracked (aka my iPod is Artificially Intelligent)

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in not worth publishing. No Comments on ipod Shuffle Code Cracked (aka my iPod is Artificially Intelligent)

While that title is relevant it is also a double entendre meant to bring the drooling apple fanatics by the thousands. Though they may be quickly disappointed, I still as ever ascribe to the philosophy that any attention good or bad is better than no attention at all.

So: I’ve been listening to my ipod “on the go” playlist on “shuffle” lately, which is as you’ve probably guessed if you’re not already familiar a random play of the 1400+ songs in my music library. What I noticed out of the corner of my ear yesterday and fully consciously today is that while, fer instance, Metallica may have found its way into my heart and therefore my library thanks to choice gems like “kill ’em all” and “whiplash” and “to live is to die” plus 28 other classics culled from the rest of the first four albums for maximum retro metal headbanging effect, and the band is proportionately underrepresented in relation to other bands (both the number of bands and the number of songs per band) in my library, I still managed in the space of an hour to hear three different songs by the band.

Three songs out of Fourteen hundred is point-two percent. So in an hour had my iPod been adhering to percentages I should have heard no more than approximately six seconds of Metallica. Yet I heard in that hour somewheres in the region of seven to ten relentlessly unrelenting hair-flinging headbanging minutes. Outrageous, I say!

Same with Unsane and Nick Cave yesterday. Not that I don’t love either enough to put them on my last gasp playlist, my death rattle shuffle, but when I say random I mean random and when I don’t get it I start to itch something fierce like fire ants in my socks or tomato juice in my paper cuts.

That’s not random I thought and therefore objected on a core level enough that the symptoms became more like fire ants in the pants or tomato juice in my eyes. But then it dawned on me, and all you mathematicians out there take heed, I’m here to set the record straight: avoiding a pattern is itself a pattern. Randomness must include seeming repetition.

In human terms, if you want to appear not to play favorites you have to play a little bit of favorites so as not to appear to be avoiding the favorite. I trust the iPod to do a little better than that. My meager little willful little mind may be able to muster, calculation- and desirelessness-wise, the semblance of random, but it will always fall shy one horse.

In the rarefied terms of High Art, i.e. the language of Hollywood Hitz, the objection made in “He’s Just Not That Into You,” that guys treating ladies like shit is not (surprise!) in fact a sign that they like you but is actually (reverse surprise!) true, the second-guess double-speak reverse-psychology that really really would in fact have a solid mathematical basis if only we could quiet ourselves like an iPod and not-at-all-randomly randomly play Metallica three times in an hour actually bears some scrutiny: the subtleties required to outhink Deep Blue are probably as subtle as the B in subtle.

Self-Soothing

Written by steve warrington on . Posted in navel gazing, not worth publishing, oh life. No Comments on Self-Soothing

In Sam Sheridan’s A Fighter’s Heart he talks about dogs that will fight for forty-five minutes without letting up versus the dogs that quit earlier.  He quotes a trainer: “All this care, you must love the animal, and if the animal loves you back, you will get a dog that fights past forty-five minutes, an animal with gameness. If there is love, the dog will fight to the death…without it, the dog will not show heart.”

A dog whose trainer beats it to make it mean will rage and tear but run out of steam early. It’s the loved (love here not taking an easy definition) dog, the dog that not only trains with but connects to its trainer, the dog with heart, that will die before it quits.

In eighth grade, we had to wrestle in gym class.  I wrestled Mike Haft, the bully. He was big and solid and he got me on my back and I let him take me without a fight. I’ve relived that moment differently in my mind at least a thousand times. I didn’t prove myself then and I’ve proven myself many times since but still that moment haunts me.

My friend has a two year old, and she and her husband are slowly going mad trying to get him to sleep through the night. They’ve tried letting him cry it out, and they’ve tried letting him sleep in the bed with them.  They’ve tried detachment and they’ve tried attachment, and are confounded by the hard fact that no matter how many childrearing philosophies there are out there telling you the right way to raise your kid, each is his own special little (hard) case. Some will be easy and some will be hard.  Some will sleep and some will slowly drive you insane.

Fourteen years ago I was a hardcore attachment parent.  I knew (knew!) that if I gave my baby everything she wanted she would not know need, and would know the world was a good safe place, and would be contented.  But my cute little Hobbesian bundle of complicatedness flew in the face of everything I thought I knew.  I gave her all I could and she only wanted more. Now, at fourteen, she wants me to tell her how to make jell-o.  Where’s the ice? she asks.

I don’t know how to self-soothe and so am consequently constantly flirting with compulsion (long ago cigarettes, now alcohol, now sex) — never quite permitting it to do harm but never quite able to get enough either.

It occurred to me last night, restless and agitated next to sleeping Courtney, unable to deep-breathe myself down into unconsciousness, thinking only of the one thing that would soothe me but unwilling to wake her (even if I had…), that I have heard of few if any successful rescue stories. You can love it and you can give it some peace, but can you ever get its tail out from between its legs? I am trying to learn that in our cores we are all good, and satisfied, and safe, but I see so much hurt and hardness and danger. If I were more religious it might feel easier to have this sin washed out of me suddenly in a moment but I just keep getting hung up on how many thousands of neural paths have to be rerouted. Old dogs, new tricks… Or, once a cur always a cur, isn’t that how it goes?

Dancer

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Two blog posts in one day I announced proudly to the freshly-napped missus. Thinking I naturally would have written about the very emotional baby sighting this morning she posted her own version of events, then checked on mine to see that yet again, I had only written about the stupid yard. Man is a slave in all matters of the heart baby, but in his yard? Oh yes, he is King….

Slavishly then, I submit my own meagre nugget.

We went in to meet the (one of 8 or 9 on staff so not really “the”) midwife today. And after she failed with the doppler to find the heartbeat and fetched the ultrasound machine and fumbled for quite possibly the longest 3 or possibly 576 minutes of my life there he was, the baby that I knew beforehand would have matured since the last time we saw it but still so shockingly big and human! Not a shrimp anymore mama, this thing was baby without doubt. Pumpkinhead maybe, human nonetheless. And, to make the moment all the more glorious, he was dancing like I have never seen. You think a baby might swim, being small and suspended in fluid, slow-motioning the breast stroke to pass the idle time, but no. He was doing the “come on down,” swinging his arms from way out to in like I had no idea could be done. Hyper already, inhe? I said. Wow, the midwife said.  Ha! Courtney said.

Wanted: Rhinoceros

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I want something unbelievably strange for the back wood. Look at it, sitting there all tame and smug. It’s virtually begging for it.

Something larger-than-life, something shocking, something that will scare the neighbors and send home values plunging. What I really want is this:

This is Xavier Veilhan’s Rhinoceros we saw at the Pompidou and I want it and I can’t have it and I want to make one but know I can’t and so want someone to make one for me.  And if I can’t have it then I want this:

Driving down the Coastal Highway last week, we passed these unbelievable metal dinosaurs, so well done, I couldn’t tell what they were made from until I saw that it was rusted steel, some dappled like dino skin, some smooth like this one, all life-size or close to it.  Amazing.  Beautiful.  Please can I have one please?

If anyone knows anyone that has or can make one of these things or something similarly big and weird please contact me. Rhinoceros, Hippo, Cow, Elephant, Dinosaur. Any of these will do just fine thank you.

Brag Blog

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To confirm my suspicions that the only reason I have a blog in my name is to enhance my status in others’ eyes, I will now proceed to boast nonstop for 500+ words (with pictures!).

When we moved into el rancho robino the back yard sloped from the sides of the house gently to the basement floor level in the middle, like a lot of houses with walkout basements. Like yay:

But it turned out that those slopes made it tough on croquet games, and hard to pitch a tent. Plus, it turned out, the slopes just offended me: where was the mark of man’s awesome manipulative hand? I am from the midwest. To me there is no more powerful or beautiful line than the horizontal. Not that a mountain doesn’t do it for me, but this? This pissy little hill?  Remove it.

So I set to flattening and opening the space, carving back the hills and retaining the earth with walls. It was a lot of dirt when you add it all up, definitely work more suited for a machine like a Bobcat or a backhoe, and that’s what the neighbors who stopped on the sidewalk to ask me what in hell I was doing kept telling me.  The builder down the street even offered the use of his. But no, I said. What I really want, when I’m done, is to be able to say “I did this all myself, just my shovel, my wheelbarrow, and my back.” Free gym, as the guys at Food Gatherers call it. Plus, machines are for the domesticated. None of that shuffle-shuffle obsequiousness from me in the old diad of house and field. I am now and always will be, an inveterate, incurable field nigger.

Well, I stand up next to a mountain And I chop it down with the edge of my hand

Well, I stand up next to a mountain/ And I chop it down with the edge of my hand

I started digging late Autumn ’07. Work languished during the yearlong-honeymoon Summer of Beer, and especially during renovations. I picked up again Fall ’08 and with the house finished and the area having looked so completely post-apocalyptic for so long that we were just too ashamed to let it go any longer I finished in one month-long burst of activity this May (’09).

I bought twenty tons (Twenty Tons!) of field stones and boulders from the Rock Shoppe for the walls. I don’t know how much a house weighs, but twenty tons must come close, yeah? Couldn’t I have shifted the earth’s rotation on it’s axis with that, pulling twenty tons from one spot and placing them in another? Did you feel the world wobble when it happened?

And b/c many of the rocks ended up being four or five hundred pounds each (what did I say about machines?) I rented a Bobcat for a day, and my brother and I hefted them into place with hydraulics. So fast, so easy!  When I had to finish moving the dirt with just a wheelbarrow and a shovel I cried out for my long lost bobkitty.  How spoiled I became, and how quickly!

And I bought 15 tons of compost to cover the clay that I had scraped down to so that grass would actually grow. And I planted the grass, and lo, it did grow.

See?  Now doesn’t that feel better?

And I did it. Just like I said I would: I moved all that dirt myself, with just a shovel* and a wheelbarrow and my back.

Now all I need is the T-Rex for the woods and I’ll be done I swear.


* Six shovels actually.  They don’t make ’em like they used to.

Frontiers

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Frontier Airlines is based in Colorado.  That used to be the frontier.  Then Oregon. Then we hit water.  But the beauty of Now is that we can cross that water and find our new frontiers so far West we’re East again.

This oscar meyer insight may be 18 years late but hey — you can’t blame a guy for tryin’ to resuscitate a brain on insomniacal musings: Iranq, AfPakistan — we’re blazing trails, panning gold, fighting savages, & cetera & cetera.

Hand me a homestead Daddy, I’m gonna farm me some papa-ver.