So after 12:50 tomorrow (today), Friday, I wam “free” until…well…ok, I won’t actually try to summarize.

Fri @ 21:00 Jasmine (that’s my little sister, I think her link is on the left as “phenomenal”) and I get on a train to Miami. It will supposedly get there on Saturday @ 18:05. In October I took the train from here to Orlando and it took an extra 16 hours or so. That is 16 hours plus however long the original/planned time was. So while trains beat the pants off of planes (where does this come from? do I have issues with this? “beat the pants off” hmm is this about rape? i certainly hope not, btw, quick tangent, someone, who was it? um…Jared Brothers! said “herstory” today…I like that.) as far as passenger experience, I think they lose in reliability.

Anyway, we’re going to Miami b/c Aunt Mary offered to give me Grandma B (Aunt Mary’s Mother [in law])’s old car (I don’t know why Aunt Mary offered Grandma B’s car, maybe Grandma B gave it to her)! It’s a white “13 yr-old” Chevy Caprice. Think large cop-car sedan. This is great! SO we are going down to get that and hang out with Miami family for a while, then over to Naples family, then Ft. Myers family, Clearwater family, Orlando family(?), Charlotte family and hopefully haircut, then back to Chapel Hill by sometime Sunday 3/18.

Then, Monday, plane to LA (thanks IBM!) where I will be attending the Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference. Then Fri night, get on a plane and get back Sat sometime.

So yeah, two weeks of break should be nice, but I will need to do IBM and school work during both so…not REALLY breaks, but it’ll be WAY better than being here.

Got neat things to write about, but no time yet…I need to finish up with Sir Leds-a-lot on GChat, then sleep.

This post has a totally relevant subject.

So, paradoxes. I am reading GEB, or I am for now anyway, and he’s talking about Strange Loops, but while that’s pretty interesting (that’s what the subject is all about), I am more interested in a different paradox that I have encountered recently.

What is The Golden Rule? Simply put, “treat others as you would like to be treated.” That seems like a very nice idea, maybe even a good idea. Well, I think this is the best thing to do for strangers (ok, who just jumped ahead and got my point?! slow it down! i’m writing this, lemme present it con flabbit! I take that back, jump ahead, experience this however you will, so long as that means loving this [whether or not you agree]), because we do not know strangers, and it is probably safer/better/more appropriate (what should go here? if you have a suggestion, lmk via comment) to assume that they would prefer treatment similar to our preferences, than to be paralyzed and not know how to treat them, or to mistreat them. Well, what about people we know? What about friends we know quite well? This sounds (do i “hear” the words i’m about to write in my head or do i just think them? so i hear them in my head in my voice? i don’t think so) obvious to me now, (don’t you just love the way i change mid though, well, this is stream of consciousness, and don’t tell my potential employers, but I think this is actually a pretty [meaning mostly, not beautiful] valid picture of my thought processes) but shouldn’t we either know enough about our friend to know that they would rather be treated how they (I tried to type “string” instead of strong for the emphasis tags on “they”, both for the open and the close, is this a result of the stupid QWERTY i use, or of my programmer background? [or somet else?]) want to be treated? Or, if we are trying to interact with a friend in a way that supports, encourages, etcs them, shouldn’t we ask what that way is, esp. if our relationship with them is deteriorating when we try to guess how we need to treat/interact with them?

If this just seems so obvious to you, congratulations, maybe you could inform the rest of this, but it took me quite awhile to figure this one out, so I’m not trying to be like, sarcastic or scolding or condescending here, just sharing my intellectual/social development with you.

Okay, so don’t let The Great Body find out that I am picking up on it, but I am not feeling as Great as usual, well, that’s been true for a few months, but more recently, I have been getting…s*ck. I think there’s chest congestion, I really don’t want to have to find/buy medicine, but I really don’t want to get s*ck. Well, I say that, but last week I couldn’t convince myself to go to bed b4 4:00 (that’s not 4:00PM, because I prefer to write that as 16:00, and I don’t like ot call it “military time,” i am somewhat adamant about calling it “24-hour time” i don’t know why, i guess b/c i’m not in the military, and neither is NASA or [all] computers, and we all use it to - UH-OH! is that ca carpal tunnel warning?! shoot! i think so, i am SO concerned after I heard about alex’s severe case, but it turns out his is somewhat genetic), I dunno why, but I was only getting maybe 3 or 4 hrs last week. I’ve done worse, but that doesn’t mean that this was good. Well I’ll push vitamin C and fluids for now, does anyone know if echinacea actually works? I mean I bought some, but who knows?

Ok, I hope to have some news to share tomorrow (I’d actually hoped to have it tonight, but w/e). So, I need to stop writin’ this and IMin’ Kaitlin and read, so I guess i’ll go do that so that maybe I can be in bed by 2 or 2:30.

Briefly, I want to ensure all you avid readers, and frequent update-checkers-for-ems that I do not plan on going this long w/o an update again, but you should just subscribe to the rss feed anyway.

So, there exist these viral (copyleft) licenses for software. And, to make a long story short, I read some (and started to use it in my work for IBM). SO I get an email Friday morning to the effect of, “Michael, you are now what IBM considers ‘contaminated,’ please do not talk about your code with anyone in IBM, or look at anymore virally licensed code.” So this is a little ridiculous because as far as anyone within 3 levels of me (in the IBM Hierarchy of Power) is concerned, my work is to be open source and licensed under at least BSD, if not some other copycenter license. So, this was drama drama drama, and now it doesn’t seem relevant, either it will go away or I will have to edit my code, and then doublethink it.

Thurs, I interviewed with Amentra, and hoped to be able to say today that they had offered me a position…they haven’t contacted me yet, so I will call them tomorrow. I really hope to get an offer, because Amentra seems like an excellent company and an excellent opportunity for me.

So, in other happenings, I will be writing soon about Oppression. I have read Marilyn Frye’s take on it, and I feel that she is pretty much right with her birdcage. (more to come)

Ok, this is also from my Moral and Philosophical Issues of Gender in Society class, (which I think they renamed and shortened since I enrolled, but I’m sticking with the long, accurate title) should medicaid pay for birth control? So, for me, I’m all about women’s rights to their bodies, so I think so, also this would enable women on Medicaid to eliminate the possibility for unplanned pregnancies, so the conservatives out there, should be like “hellz yeah! fewer tax funds to the poor!” But the problem I am also wondering about is this, couldn’t this be called a sort of eugenics movement? That is, if we (the people) provide free birth control to only women on Medicaid, aren’t we saying, we REALLY want to reduce the number of offspring to poor families? If all insurance companies had to provide it it might be a little better, but even then, I think it would be most ethical to provide it for all people, the only detriment I can foresee is the cost, and a few religious collisions (that can be avoided on an individual basis by practitioners of forbidding faiths). Dr. Boxill wanted to bring up the fact that Medicaid (and may other insurance companies) pay(s) for ED remedies, which I don’t think is too cool, but ultimately less interesting than my question (-:. Oh, thanks to Boss Claws (boss @ IBM), I have started to write smilies backwards when possible, it’s neat, i think i like the wink better this way (-;

So, just to inoculate my audience a little, I would much rather just do this post as audio, but it’s late (early), and I fear my voice would be…yep I’m right, a little scratchy, and I don’t want to put anyone through all the uhs and ums that would undoubtedly be in the recording (it seems that I use the same system as Liss, I kind of list topics [though only mentally] and then just extemporize).

Today my RA staff had a staff development activity. Several of us went to Katelyn’s apartment, I brought Kingsley (my Wii), and my big knife (thanks Barrett), big cutting board, and all kinds of ingredients. I was the cook for the dinner we were going to have. I made tostadas (”I am down for Mike’s tostadas…they are basically the closest thing to an orgasm that comes on a hard shell circle of goodness” - John Greer warning: hideous site). While there are a lot of ingredients, and it always takes me about an hour to make them (when I [think] am cooking/making them for appx. 12 people), they really aren’t very difficult, and they are delicious. The nearest image I could find is not quite good enough, for starters, mine are vegetarian. Anyways, tonight the avocados were not yet ready, and I still had people eat several, so unless I find out tomorrow that they are all broken, these are pretty much the best (I tried to make them for Barrett and Dan while in Naples, but the Pube-licks don’t carry the tostada[shells?]).

The Great Tostadas (Recipe mostly stolen from Sra. Scerbo, la madre de Siroberto y Celia Scerbo)
Ingredients:

• Produce:
  • 8 Roma Tomatoes
  • 8 (not Hass) Avocados
  • 1 large (Vidalia, Red, White, Yellow, it is not Great to discriminate) Onion
  • 1 bunch cilantro (you can’t really have too much cilantro, so as many bunches as you like)
• Dairy:
  • 8 oz Sour Cream (not gonna contribute a lot, you could probably use fat free)
  • 24-32 oz of shredded (mild, sharp, w/e) cheddar cheese
• Other:
  • 2 bags of appx. 24 Corn Tostadas (round these parts, ya haf ter get em from Food Lion [HT, nor Le Target carry em])
  • 3 cans of refried black beans (some ignants thank the refried beans are only brown, which are refried pintos)
  • Valentina (yummy not too hot sauce, I do not agree with Wikipedia that it has a citrus flavor)

Directions:

1. Cut up all produce (I will post about how to do these tasks well later)
2. Mix all produce in a bowl
3. Put black beans in a microwaveable (Pyrex) bowl
4. Wet a paper towel, and spread it over black bean bowl
5. Microwave black beans on high 4-6 minutes
6. Have individuals make their tostadas
   1. put sour cream on shell (if you like it)
   2. put blackbeans on shell (which may now have sour cream)
   3. put cheese on beans (on shell)
   4. put some of the produce mixture on cheese
   5. put Valentina on top (try some on you finger first, don’t waste a whole tostada b/c you don’t like The Great Sauce
7. EAT/ENJOY/ORALGASM
8. Post praise here (post negative feedback with your mom)

So, Liss posted as audio the other day…I have been wanting to start a podcast since August, but I haven’t had time. Well, I have had a bit more time recently (due to not doing my reading for classes or to my underloading…who knows?), so I have been working on this blog, and Liss said how easy it was to get audio up here, that I just had to try it. This post is very uncharacteristic of what I plan to post on this blog, so if you don’t like it…good?

Oh yeah, this file is like 8 Megs, so I may have to quarter the sampling rate or w/e it’s called for the future, but I’ve never even approached my bandwidth limit, so I challenge each of you to listen to this on several different computers all at once.

So, in May I will graduate from UNC. My priorities for May are:

1. Live in Charlotte (for many reasons)
   • I need to heal a bit
   • I need to re-establish my relationships with my siblings and parents (in both cases my real and not just biological [more on this to follow...someday] families are included)
2. Have a job that pays well
3. Help Others

Eventually, I’d like to (read: I will, b/c I pretty much do all things that I want) combine #s 1 & 2, as I have been able to do for the past 1.5 yrs or so, but for May the priorities are a little more selfish.