Random Thoughts

Slightly bored late on a holiday Monday night. Feel like writing, but not much really to say, so I’ve decided to just free-associate or something. It’s been a quiet day of doing many things… the long weekend brings the end of the air conditioner for the season, the end of the air conditioner brings the re-installation of the bedroom window, perhaps for the last time here. Paddled the red canoe this aft, perhaps for the last time this year. I’m thinking about getting calendars made up at CafePress.com with digital photos I’ve taken over the last year to 18 months or so, and using them as christmas gifts, is this vain? Is it presumptuous to offer lucky snapshots as presents? Especially when everyone has already seen them on the laptop anyway? Do you want one? Our laptops are getting a bit long in the tooth, slightly gutless for playing the ToySight demo. And what about that US election anyway? Are they really going to put bully-bush back into absolute power? And Cheney? How controlled are Americans by the media? And someone made a joke the other day that “it’s all the media’s fault”… but I don’t think that’s a joke, I think it’s true. I learned that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear on TV. Why didn’t everyone learn that. Or why have they forgotten it anyway? On a completely different note, if we reproduce, will our child ever understand who we (the parents) really are as people? Will they in time? Is that something that matters? In this plastic economy it has become very difficult to give alms to the poor without a middle man with overhead. Plastic, with a slim hole punched in the middle, jammed onto a larger bolt, will hold heat shielding onto the body of your car better than the manufacturer’s clips will. This entire blog entry was typed into vi (gasp) on one single line. I think they should tunnel a light rail line under downtown Ottawa. I think tunnels, while expensive, are a great traffic solution to many sticky neighbourhood-violating issues like the Bronson Expressway because they can allow through-traffic to avoid community streets allowing urban expansion with access to downtown without destroying nice urban village communities which are unlucky enough to intervene — like mine. You can cycle longer than you can run. Jen has never built her bicycle generator. Taking care of plants is a big responsibility, like ants. And another thing, why has September 11th destroyed everything good. I think it would be cool to get married at the Parliament buildings, but now you cannot… you might be a terrorist. Why is everyone so scared these days? Oh, right, I already answered that question above. There are many things I could have done this evening, including work on my model, design the christmas calendar I am half-intellectually-committed to, revise SlimBatteryMonitor, write my time tracking program, find out why my hard disk is full, put real paper photos into a real paper album, clean things, tidy things, dust things :), organize things, bring up the dry laundry, search the internet for ideas about why my car squeaks only when the brakes are not on, run, swim, bike, eat crackers, etc. Why would someone want to lead a government, do we make this job seem appealing to some people? If so, who? Why do I not find this appealing. I think Arabic would be a great language to learn, and surprisingly useful in and about town, at least to eavesdrop on people; perhaps it is hard to become proficient enough for this. It has been several months since I last travelled out of the city. When I was a teenager I sometimes drove to the airport and sat looking at planes taking off, not because I had any destination in mind but because I loved the idea of having somewhere important to be that was far enough away to warrant travel by plane. I repeat, French is a much more graceful language than English, especially as written. Even Harry Potter is enhanced by le passé simple. Yes, Jen’s French classes are going well, and she bought a copy of book 1 in French. Actually they make good bread too. Tasty with cheese, or butter. The fact that the French named their wines by region (rather than grape name) and aggressively prevented other jurisdictions from using the region name to market similar wines grown elsewhere has backfired because the rest of the world had to start naming the wine according to the grape used; now no one can handle the French wine section because we’ve all learned the grape names and those region-labelled wines are like a blind date. Someone is clearing off the bed, meaning that either my iBook, or me-and-my-iBook must be cleared away. I select my iBook. Good night.

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