After a series of false starts, mother is looking much better

Just got back from the hospital.

Mother can manage to get herself in/out of bed without paroxysms of pain and can sit up without help.
This means the pleurisy has cleared up.

Still got pneumonia though.
The drip should clear that up in the next few days.

She managed to have a cup of coffee (without a smoke!) in the fresh air for the first time in weeks which is a huge plus for her confidence I would suggest.

Still going to be a while in bed, at least another week, but they moved her to a new ward with a view and sunlight!

I'm still shattered, worn out and doing laundry every day, but feeling much more hopeful about how things will work out.

Odd. Just realised. Haven't written a line of code for over a week. Record!

No more bats! B-Mashina for Bats.

A recent story got me thinking. This is the original: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/12/industrial-music-scares-off-pesky-sydney-bats/

Industrial music?
Oh the possibilities...
Oh My Mind Is Exploding!!!

No more culling required.

And Ben went nuts and started on a wonderful flight of fantasy and stream of consciousness.

Rammstein, Laibach et al at high volume echoing across Queensland farms.

Rammstein Du Hast!
In (bad) German: "du hast mich gefragt, und ich hab nichts gesagt"
In English: "you have asked me, but i did not obey"

Can you imagine it? The sheer jaw dropping frickin' brilliance and gorgeous-ness of it. B-Mashina at full blast all over S.E. Queensland.

"The Horror. The Horror."

Here is my parody of the opening of B-Mashina (Go watch it btw) in English:

"Only one day is left.
Only one day.
We are leaving the others.
We're going away.
Today we all steal nectar but we have lost ourselves.
Our souls are from the wild and wings to reach the sky.
Let the sun fall into the ocean, let the earth erupt in loud music.
It is enough to have the strength and knowledge to raise our our wings into the sky.
Let them sleep who do not know the final day is here, the very last and we leave at dusk.
Millions of us have thunder in us.
There is no force and no power to stop us now and change our fate.
Before we rise now every problem is destroyed.
We raise our wings and bodies to the peak.
Into the Universe - towards the food we go.
Sending ourselves up to the sky."

B-Mashina for Bats. It's frickin' sad when you read it out loud as if you were thinking as a bat.

Du Hast indeed.

Maybe we could get Rammstein to do a special "nicht mehr Fledermäuse" for us.

Gold Coast TechSpace meet-up review

Cool.
Very cool.

Small crowd but very enthusiastic.
Not surprisingly as it was freezing cold and late on a Wednesday night.

Newcomer helped fix the magnetic sensor controlled roller door.
Ben, amongst others, tried unsuccessfully to open an ancient vending machine with a barrel lock of some kind for which there was no key. One guy will be bringing in a grinder to get at the back end of the lock.
RepRap running printing parts for a new Raspberry Pi case.
Arduinos running lasers and LED displays.
LEGO mindstorms running a Rubiks cube solver.
Raspberry Pi's being used in LEGO boxes to control TVs via XMBC.
Resolved a long standing issue with what to do with 20 or so busted OLPC machines with one of the newcomers having fixed various PCs in the past. They will shipping up for them to be fixed or frankensteined and given to needy school kids.
Young kid getting the goss on what languages and systems to learn to program in. (Python btw since Raspberry Pis and XOs use it)

Loads of talk as well as action.

Met a very nice man, Walther, who has this great idea for... Well... I was going to say 3rd world bootstrapping and transforming communities. But not really since it applies to everywhere from inner city places to remote Aussie towns to India or wherever. The idea is so simple is frightening. I could go into detail, but would need approval.

We suggested contacting the Global Village Construction Set (http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php) or just crowd fund it. Only $3,500 to get started and he has it planned in great detail.

So. If you wanna help or have ideas on how to get this going, go to http://gctechspace.org/ and leave a message!

And if you wanna muck about with robots, LEGO and just hang out with makey-people, then go!

There's a meet-up/hangout on this Sunday afternoon from noon or so on. See here: http://gctechspace.org/meetings-and-events/ and see their details at http://meetup.com/gctechspace/

We're definitely going and will be joining. If you can't, then just check out the web-cams from the site.

Oh. One more thing. They need shelving. Hammer lock style. They did a blog about it here: http://dalts.net/blog/2012/06/12/gold-coast-techspace-storage/ They need shelving!

Frickin' love it.

(Update: Forgot to add the facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Gold-Coast-TechSpace/355794701099212)

Book Review: "The Cosmic Code" by Heinz R. Pagels

I bought this book because it was yet another pop-sci theoretical physics book released in 2012.
It is actually a reprint of the original from 1982.
I felt disappointed as I felt that it was unlikely that I would learn anything new from a 40 year old book on such a dynamic subject.

I was wrong.
Very wrong.

The book is broken down into 3 parts.

Part I is the obligatory historical basics of Quantum theory.
Part II covers the detail of the specifics of the heart of the matter (if you will oblige me).
Part III is a personal take at the end of which I wept at the sheer beauty of it all.

No massive formulas. Just plain talk.

For example, he devotes chapters to Quarks, Leptons, Gluons, Fields, Vacuum Invariances as well as my favorite: Gauge Field Theory. Each has a plain talk explanation without the breathless enthusiasm of Greene. Each shows details and data which had my mind stand up and go "Woah! I didn't know that."

The explanation of the reasoning behind the dispute over EPR and Bells Theorem are cases in point. The invisible cross-correlation that is rooted in the fact that the defining factor that makes human human, is not opposable thumbs, but massively effective (and sometimes faulty) pattern matching and (sometimes faulty) abstract reasoning.

His discussion of Gauge Field Theory and his general discussion about fields in general cleared up several nagging issues I had. Nice.

I was sad to find out he died in 1988 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Pagels) in a climbing accident at the age of 49. Given the last words of this book this fact has me in tears right now. But there is a certain joy in me because of the very last line of the very last paragraph of the very last chapter:

"As I continued to fall into the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness."

Thoroughly recommended.

I go weep now.

Book Review: "EVE" by Tony Gonzales

This is one sprawling space opera.

Multiple space civilisations on the other side of some long dead Terran star-gate. Dozens of characters, masses of politics, pirates, commerce and war. Frickin space battles the like of which haven't been seen since the days of E.E. "Doc" Smith.

Makes Babylon 5 look simple.

I read it in just a few sittings despite it's 520 page length and I have to admit I kept getting lost. I had to keep going back and re-reading sections to try to figure out who the frick this new character was and why they seemed to be so important. I kept seeing details and had many "Who where with the what now?" moments because it seemed that this little paragraph I was currently reading was dripping with meaning and I just couldn't figure out why I wasn't seeing it. Gallenteen? Are they the "Federation?" Oh. I remember reading them referred together about 50 pages ago.

Wait. What? Vitoc? Oh yes. That's the slave drug. I vaguely remember reading about that a 100 pages ago.

It was only on the exact last page I figured out why I was getting lost in the supremely massive wealth of detail that seemed irrelevant and why so many terms were used as if you were supposed to just 'know' what was being spoken about.

EVE.

EVE online.

I should have realised, but I'm a bit dim sometimes. Or maybe it's because of recent events that had shattered my concentration.

Doh! It's a book set in the MMORPG. I've never played it. Never seen it. Never so much as looked it up on wikipedia.

Despite that, it's a darn good story and if you love politics, massive space battles, space pirates and chicanery, have played the game and want ideas, then go out and read it.

I don't frickin believe it. She may make it!

A fall.
Pleurisy
Pneumonia.
Death rattle breathing.
Her cardiologist said he was concerned that she wouldn't make the weekend.

But this afternoon she sat up and complained.

COMPLAINED that she couldn't have a cup of coffee and a cigarette out in the fresh air.

She is much better now.
Seems the anti-biotics are working. And, bugger me, is complaining.
COMPLAINING!

She complained about the 94 year old across the ward talking too much.
She complained about the food - "bloody awful".
She complained about the coffee - "bloody awful".
She complained about not being able to have a smoke - "It's just a cigarette! What do I have to worry about? Cancer? I'm f**ked anyway. I'll bloody die on my terms."

For f**ks sake they don't make women like that any more.

I'm dry-retching with stress and she's 81 and complaining about the food?
What the frick' do I have to complain about?
Fish and chips?

I worked with her in the 70's in a hospice, so I know the risks about a 'late' recovery.

But she looks so much better.
She may make it.

FYI on Tuesday I'm taking round a frickin' great pile of chocolates to the nurses.
If I believed in angels they're the archetypes.

I feel guilty

It's pneumonia now.

The reapers calling card.

I feel guilty.

I feel guilty when I walk across the room when my mother can't even get out of bed.
I feel guilty when I can breathe when she can barely get a word out.
I feel guilty when I have a drink and she can't.
I feel guilty when I eat a meal when she can't.
I feel guilty because I don't have any way to save her.

I feel guilty because:

I.
CAN.
DO.
NOTHING!!!

NOT A FRICKIN THING.

I even feel guilty that I'm writing this.

I feel guilty because I am alive and by the weekend she may not be.

Sigh. The roller coaster of life.

Mother had another fall last Sunday.
So off to hospital again.
Chest pains, back pains, breathless.

Spent most of the day with her on Monday, then half a day again on Tuesday.
She looked absolutely awful and was obviously in serious pain.
May be pleurisy or just a chest infection - X-Rays, ECG and so on while they figure it out.

So. Dialysis Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and again today.

I was finding myself wondering if this was 'it'.

Then I found myself on Wednesday morning at 6am washing her underwear with tears rolling down my face knowing I had to go to work after a visit to the hospital.

I realised I had to trim down the things I'm dealing with at present.
Mother, Health, Work.
Had to lose one.

Guess.

So I composed myself and a letter to the company I helped build and delivered it Wednesday.

So. This afternoon I have been dry-retching with stress and to top it off I seem to have developed a cold so I'm may now be an infection hazard. It's probably just stress but I can't risk it. So I can't go in and see my ailing mother this afternoon. I've advised the nursing staff, and in particular Imogen (A spectacularly nice person), to tell my mother. My sister has also been advised.

If I'm not in such a state late today or tomorrow morning, I will go in. Right now... Well. I need to calm down.

War Machine, Venom and Iron Man stumble upon a field of chocolate alien eggs

OMG. War Machine, Venom and Iron Man were talking a short walk after a day of action when they stumble on...

A field of Alien Chocolate Eggs!

(Didn't they listen to the background music?)
Oh What? Venom is having a close look...

It's opening. You twat! Don't you watch movies?

Oh That's it. They're f**ked.

Ah. War Machine has the right idea. He's off.
But No! Iron Man (Not LEGO But MegaBloks) says "Take it b*tches" and responds! With Fire!

I'm 56.
Is this normal?

This is Kenny. My travelling companion since 1981.

Since 1977 I have travelled all over the world.
From business class to rickety wooden trawler.
In 1981 I picked up this little cute fuzz-ball in San Francisco:

I immediately named him Kenny.

For the next 14 years he sat in the top pocket of my old M-65 jacket while I drove or flew to hundreds of mine sites all over Australia until around '95 my 'ex "accidentally" threw the jacket out.

Since then he has sat on the dashboard of multiple cars across the UK, Europe, US, Australia and a road-trip from Toronto to Vancouver alongside my other adorable travelling companion and now betrothed.

Ben.

Both Kenny and Ben were with me when I stood on the podium at Zeppelin field in Nuremberg.

It's Kenny's birthday today.
Happy birthday Kenny.