SoylentNews

It's been a month since the Soylent News Folding@Home team was established, and we've made major strides. As of the time of writing, we are currently in 1684th place, and rising quickly. Thanks for everybody's participation!

Currently, we have 33 active folders contributing 83 CPUs to the effort. We've completed a grand total of 2516 work units. Our top 10 folders are:

1. Beldin65
2. kurenai.tsubasa
3. tibman
4. LTKKane
5. Kymation
6. cmn32480
7. Runaway1956
8. SirFinkus
9. NotSanguine
10. crutchy_work

According to extremeoverclocking.com we'll be in the top 1000 in about 1.2 months.

I was in the Emergency Room Sunday night for a profoundly stupid reason. I got a chest X-Ray. It showed a mass on my right lung. The ER doc told me to ask my primary care physician for a referral for a CT scan.

Her receptionist was real clueful, got me an appointment for Friday morning. I expect the CT scan will be next week - they're not like MRIs, there's no real wait time for CT scans in the US.

It could be a benign growth. The usual practice is to watch the mass over some period of time. Cancer will grow quickly, benign growths slowly or not at all.

Cancer will have a rough surface, which will show in a CT scan but not an X-Ray.

It would suck to die young, but I feel I've accomplished what I set out to do, that being to teach others, in the form of my writing.

The stupid reason that I was in the ER is that my insurance and psychiatrist and so my pharmacy are all in Washington State. I've been staying in Oregon due to the ready availability of food and shelter. That means I need bus fare to pick up my meds.

I've had a real bad cold, so I could not sing on the street to raise the money for the bus.

Now there are other ways I could have gotten my medicine. I guess the stupid reasons are - overall - a good thing, as these resulted in my X-Ray.

Has anyone ever died here in Soylent? Kuro5hin has been around long enough that a few people have. Mindpixel and enterfornone committed suicide. trhurler dropped dead of a heart attack while hiking in the woods. I think someone was killed in action in Iraq.

The ER doc said my "cold" was really acute bronchitis. I should have realized that as my sore throat and stuffed-up nose both cleared up but I have quite a severe cough.

In other news, the housing division of the organization that runs my mental health clinic tells me I qualify for housing. I don't know yet how soon that will be. I have the number of the guy that handles the paperwork; I called him a couple days ago, he called back but just left his name and number, now my phone is out of juice. There are no power sockets where I'm hanging right now, but I expect I can rejuvenate my phone by mid-afternoon.

I've been in my current job for about a year and a half now, and it looks like I need to have a plan B. Things may improve, but it's unclear how and when they might.

It's about two and a half years since I started to look for the current job I have now. One thing I've noticed since then is the decline in the quality of recruitment agencies and consultants. In my previous role I was involved in recruiting, and so had to deal with them from the other end.

I registered with some agencies back then that never removed me from their database despite having been asked and during all that time I get daily spam for completely inappropriate jobs in completely inappropriate locations. The most absurd was for someone to operate an industrial furnace. I'm a software engineer (of sorts).

What is most incredible now is that I received a completely unsolicited email, out of the blue from someone I don't recall ever talking to inviting me to apply for a position, in the wrong location, with a major American company. He didn't hide the company name or the job details. He just emailed me the company name, location and job specs uninvited! I don't suppose that this supplier of very expensive printer ink would be too happy if they knew.

I did not furnish him with a reply.

There was a functionally-illiterate email a couple of days ago from an agency I registered with over five years ago. Spelling? Punctuation? Grammar? A sentence? Look and see.

Hi
Im looking for a couple of Software Engineers to work within a leading edge R&D organisation in Cambridge on long term contract. Im seeking experience of build, make file, GNU tools and C.
I was interested to know if you could be interested , please let me know

So I replied and he blurted out the name of the company, and would you believe I know people who have just run away from there screaming.

It's a small world, and shrinking.

One of the worst aspects of being homeless is being sick and homeless. I'm staying at the shelter, so I have a place to sleep at night, but I can't just stay in bed, they roust us out in the morning.

Portland has Right 2 Dream Too - "The Tent Camp" - a homeless shelter operated by the homeless themselves. It's forward thinking in that it permits one to sleep during the day. So I get up in the morning, eat breakfast, then go to R2D2 and sleep all day.

Today I've decided to stay up all night. I'm at Starbucks now, I will go to Shari's later. I was doing some open source work for haiku, but now I feel too out of it mentally to work competently. So I reload various web pages - kuro5hin, soylent, facebook - trying to entertain myself.

At least I don't have salmonella. I did once, that was awful. To have the shits when one is homeless would totally suck.

My case manager told me my housing paperwork "has been processed". He does not know what that means in terms of actually being accepted but will try to find out tomorrow.

  Andre is a good guy, but it still perplexes me that the mental health clinic thinks I need a case manager. Am I really that crazy?

Sometimes I look back upon the manifestoes I've written and conclude, yes I really am that crazy.

Others have commented on this, I don't think it is my imagination. I sometimes have the problem when I am delusional, that I think I'm just fine.

It is an odd experience. Actually rather dull. There have been times that I've yearned for sanity. Now I have sanity but it has come at the cost of not being able to write. Maybe they were paranoid manifestos but at least I had something to do.

The madness is likely to return; that is the nature of my condition. There are many things I can do to prevent that happening, but the madness will find some other way, a way that I do not anticipate.

There are two things that led to this. I was sleeping excessively, and getting depressed, so I requested the antidepressant imipramine from my psychiatrist. It is very old, and not commonly used anymore - my pharmacy had to special-order it - but my experience is that it works well for me.

I've been regulating my sleep better. Too much sleep makes me depressed, too little sleep makes me either manic or psychotic.

A while back I happened across a man and a woman at a crosswalk. I told them both that I was a Secret Service Agent, and that it was my job to protect the President. I am absolutely serious. About an hour after that, I admitted myself voluntarily to a psychiatric hospital but when they saw how loopy I was, they changed my status to involuntary.

Even so I am unable to sleep completely regularly, not like most people. I don't get tired when I need to sleep. My friend Rod said "It's like dying of dehydration because you don't feel thirsty". It really is very much like that.

I got some good sleep last night, even so I felt sleepy at breakfast this morning, so I slept all day at the Right 2 Dream Too tent camp - it is a homeless shelter operated by the homeless themselves, with the unique service that one can sleep there during the day.

I could have gone to dinner at the rescue mission, then entered the bed lottery, but then I'd be sleeping too much, that would make me depressed, so instead I'm going to sit up and drink coffee at an all-night restaurant. Despite that I have the money to pay for my coffee, there are two friendly and affectionate waitresses that give me free coffee, and often free meals. They like me, they enjoy my company.

The best way to be homeless is not to appear homeless. We can take showers and wash our clothes, there are facilities for that. I'm pretty good about shaving and brushing my teeth.

There are some people who have no choice. They are too far gone mentally. Rudy complained to me that he could not get a job despite having a hospitality degree; he could be a top restaurant chef. But the reason he is unemployed is that he smells bad, and pushes around a shopping cart loaded with trash.

The reason I'm unemployed is because of what I write. It would make sense were I to take offline what I could, like the stuff on my own website, or the stuff at Kuro5hin - Rusty would remove it were I to ask. But I don't. I want others to understand the nature of mental illness. I feel it is important to maintain the historical record.

It is my birthday tomorrow, the 24th. I'll be 52. That doesn't seem right, I still think like a teenager, but my hair is gray, I can't see close-up any more and I have all manner of unexplainable aches and pains.

What is most upsetting to me is that it appears unlikely I will ever have children. Bonita didn't want to have kids. She had reasons not to, but I am not at liberty to share them with you. That was a tough decision - what did I want more? Children, or Bonita? I chose Bonita. Now I think I should not have married her, for many reasons, not just my childlessness.

There are some men who father children when they are older than I, but it is uncommon, as I would have to court and marry a much-younger woman.

There is a woman I like, who obviously likes me, but she is hesitant. She enjoys my visits but so far that's all there has been. I kissed her on the hand once though, and she smiled.

Maybe one of those waitresses tonight. Maybe I can contrive to kiss _her_ on the hand. Women like that, they grow up dreaming of being fairy tale princesses but hand-kissing is long out of style. I am completely convinced that I am the only man who ever kisses women's hands anymore.

Following the discussion in https://soylentnews.org/meta/article.pl?sid=16/02/16/1210215 I thought there should be a way even without code changes to have private messages. Well, actually it's easy. Not user-friendly, but not complicated either. So, here is a gpg public key in case you want to send a message for my eyes only. Import the key and post your message as a reply to this journal entry.

Warning: I tend to lose my gpg keys once in a while. If I do, I will update the one in this journal entry.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1

mQENBFbENecBCADR4M3vJRAiH0tieDqiNlwRo93SAZm6bqKS9W2XCJfHo4jL+Qoi
r/vKhcoqcyUdravnuNwZeCa+YEm3rhp5OzTinUiQ0UjGsax4ju9yb8JvCLMN2f7D
DNv+2uG7QoE0A9yBZieSqz8ApGDQzQeMs/h56h2gCVpsnVP4GQkoYxIG73WpcmZE
2WVDKCIt3OOqbYss+/q0s3BLUN8Irv/0IaMMltsb3+b7n1ZHIm6DCmxPsJ6193Kb
vJfGonKN5KTCF2PWUDExM6zIAWYQIdAYtIktXZLQ6BtHPHOXVu0TK19MezBLeSQ3
/ePpGfP0xv9t7Uvu3VHYNpMbLs9+2LUqo/ylABEBAAG0KVEgS29udGludXVtIDxx
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eQz6ImdGQYNipZmE9HHLhti2vqLR1HnATlDFkkMWbDzSzTl0kKjljW/jaBAdK7h8
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rCSuu0KWlDH74GlgCu+VCMCnmkqYQWtk9R/+R+PgoD8AGiFmjC+QsLPTmI4G1/2d
BJkP9r/nrYxxmhK3X+mlv7nf33P3HRlpHXydnnXTWIdLABEBAAGJAR8EGAECAAkF
AlbENecCGwwACgkQ3MDPNndv3dIDfAgAom610F+0/i9xZeEhRbc3Hl7QCW4xJIox
x71BPvYQpij+SIRNimz0Ewi88gB8uhutzWwk8JUYelrhfCLMeuYNj9VjDlziTA2E
lyAsPoJK9iCM0+kJ7z6OeRB/H3suKkfqYHmCZo0EWn7hJtycxS2Pthc/wm+wzcaZ
rgu+7uSiiFyqA+5Qmbz39a1WiUcmv/M+G3yki5FkZYqcXHAutK7YE3RfKkejuipB
iJMQFxKcnSX33Kp1fVOI2cyDK1XNy63JLOsGoSJUoqgJJ71CUQfo5eB+GHCexd9r
57kPAYOhau8QlrLfENtOBO+vYapXXwl7L5wlSMVACOP4ewagTWkwdA==
=u25j
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

No, not the minimalist poetry, but the Haiku operating system. I was looking around for something productive to do, so I looked in Haiku's Trac. I'm going to work on silencing compiler warnings so as to enable the use of -Werror.

After I do some of that I'll have enough experience with the build that I could fix some real bugs.

My potential consulting client got back to me to say they would have some paying work for me soon. I'd feared they had wandered into the ether; their CEO explained that he'd been really busy. It's a small company.

Tomorrow I'm playing piano at a reception to celebrate the opening of a new housing facility for the homeless of Vancouver. It's not a performance exactly, in that I'll be playing background music for a party.

I don't know a whole hour's worth of material so I'll mostly be improvising.

I can play piano a lot better than I can read written music. It's very painful for me to learn new songs that someone else wrote but by contrast I can wail away at the keyboard, apparently randomly, yet it comes out sounding like real music. That's how I taught myself to play, making random noise at first but then doing more and more of what sounded good with less and less of what sounded bad.

I'm going to get paid for playing! I don't know how much yet but it will be the very first I've been paid for piano. I sing on the street for tips but really I'm not that good, I never make very much. I'm doing pretty good if I can buy a Starbucks every day.

I read up on jQuery yesterday and today. I'd like to write a real program, but purely as an exercise. Reading tutorials makes my eyes glaze over.

I contemplated a dead-simple message board, but even that is a little more complex than I want to deal with at first. I'd like to do something about as complex as the pure-JavaScript Conway's Life that I did at http://www.warplife.com/life/mumble/

jQuery looks quite cool, but I trip up on many of the tutorials' practice exercises. I need to write a real program.

Discuss. (25 marks)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Pinkerton

Interesting read... But his anti-union activity......