Burning Books

I'm sitting by the fireplace drinking a little Ten Buck Chuck, tossing another book on the flames. Alton Brown's Gear For Your Kitchen. I've been putting it off but, between the heating bills and and my Google implant, I just don't need them any more. UNIX in a Nutshell. That and it frees up space for the living wallpaper from Home Depot. Adam Roberts' Salt. I did the usual, hiring a scrawny geezer to scan the isbns off my 1500 or so novels, text books, manuals, etc. and to package up the oddballs to FedEx for image/text scanning. Kanji Pict-O-Graphix. I can't complain about the upload times; Amazon did a great job, they were available the next day. Bullfinch's Mythology. Now I just "blink and think" and there it is. Value Migration. I have to be careful about new books, though. Studs Terkel's Working. I'm not used to paying by the read. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. The fire's warm and crackling, I'm feeling comfortable, and all I need is a little cheese for a perfect evening.

2012 Olympics: Augmented Athletes in Exhibition Sports

Did you see weight lifter do three tons? The 60 meter long jump? I still love the "natural" categories but the tweaked atheletes are pretty amazing. The new Nike implants are clearly an edge in basketball, and the Amlin reaction time boosters have changed fencing and the other martial arts.

New flute on eBay

Woh, built for 12 fingers (4 thumbs). Downloaded the upgrade yesterday and they're coming in nicely, just mild itchiness. Time for some glove shopping.

Another Internet found, connected.

A spokesman said "On Tuesday we discovered a whole other Internet with 298 million users. It's been running for 18 years. It works the same as far as users are concerned. But the specs for everything from IP addresses to the ways browsers work to domain name systems evolved independently from the main Internet." It apparently originated in Cuba to support biotech researchers, and spread worldwide, hugely popular in Latin America and rural India. Mostly wireless.

I took the Handsome pill today.

"Aargh! What did you do? Now you have a face only a mother could love."

I'm fine with that.

My last date.

"Why won't you open up to me? I need to know how you feel. About me. About us."

So I showed her my source code.

"I can't believe you're so shallow and so in need of refactoring at the same time. Look, get back to me when you've cleaned up all this stuff from previous relationships. And haven't you ever heard of an abstraction? Let me give you the private IM of a CMM7 developer in Cairo."

Somehow I haven't been the same since the rewrite.

Self Improvement, Open Source Style

When I upload my mind, what's my licence?

Am I covered under a Creative Commons license? Versions of myself may wind up enslaved, part of someone's machine. Others may be changed so much as to be unrecognizable. The scariest part is being exposed to ongoing tweaks to my senses, my awareness, my cognition, my dreams. By strangers. Without notice.

After all, one man's flair is another's flaw. Is all my charm just a quirk of a low level design defect? What happens when someone decides to infect me with the virus that repairs all levels of Oedipal Complex? Of emotional resistance to authority?

Has anyone seen my backup?

There must be a fresher version of me floating around somewhere. I can't be the latest release of Phil; too many bugs, design defects, and scope drift for any one person.

Searching for my name shows lots of my exhaust. Posts, cites, sites. Also breadcrumbs to a dozen other people named Phil Wolff. None of them me.