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The very minimal design is actually a marketing gimmick; the websites for all the truly expert coders look just like that. Even Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web, has a website that looks like that.

I'm going to make a new site for my music, art and photography but not my writing, my writing I'll leave where it presently is:

http://mike.soggywizards.com/

This second site is not configured yet, I'll do that tonight at Starbucks.

Someone is selling roast chestnuts in Pioneer Square today. Oh how I love roast chestnuts! - but it is quite rare to see them sold on the street, I only recall that from Italy.

"How much are they?"

"Three dollars."

"I sing on the street for tips. I'll be back after I sing three dollars worth."

They seemed skeptical but I came back with three dollars. "Sometimes I can almost make minimum wage".

I often sing on nasty days too but get few tips. Even so if I can earn just enough for one single coffee at starbucks then I have a warm place to spend my evening, a power socket, a table, internet and a restroom.

The problem with good days is that all the other buskers are out as well so it's hard to find a good streetcorner. Days like today I find new places, just now I sang at one corner of a block of food carts, where I had not performed before.

A woman listened to me the whole time she was eating her lunch then gave me two dollars. She thanked me for serenading her meal.

That was nice. Real nice.

I wasn't so confident I'd get anything else to eat other than the chestnuts but I was very determined despite getting a sore back because of the way the sidewalk was tilted.

For $5.50 I could have gotten an Al Pastor burrito but then I would have used up my last dollar bill. While not strictly necessary its helpful to put at least a dollar in my "tip jar" - really my hat - because most people don't really understand why my hat is on the ground in front of me.

But for $5.00 I could get the vegetarian burrito and have that dollar bill left over.

It was good. Real good.

I was planning to sing some more after taking a break but it looks like the rain will indeed come. I'm going to take the MAX light rail and C-Tran bus to CVAB in Vancouver. It's a day center for the mentally ill, there is a piano there that I can play anytime I care to make the journey.

I'm making the journey more often as of late because there is a lady there that I'm sweet on. She likes me too but she is very hesitant. If she's not into it I won't press it. I haven't had a whole lot of luck with women, just a couple days ago I asked a friend for her phone number, she told me she was married. I had no idea. She'd kissed me when we met see but then she is very flirtatious.

There is another that I don't know well at all but she's friendly and enjoys talking to me. I'm going to ask her for coffee the next time I see her.

She's a stripper. I'm not completely clear how one asks a stripper for a date but I know two different dancers who each have four children, so there must be some procedure for asking them out with appearing too lecherous.

Yesterday I added Gene Kelly's "Singing in the Rain" and John Denver's "Country Roads, Take Me Home" to my set. I didn't sound good at all when I sang them yesterday, but today Country Roads worked real well, some guy who was sweeping the sidewalk sang with me.

Singing in the Rain sounds lifeless without the orchestral accompaniment but I'll give it a few more days. My best song is Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

Melodically,

Mike

(Reposted from a mail to my friends and family, with the addition of the note about the stripper.)

I have a big family. I'm the oldest of 5 kids. I have something like 16 first cousins, maybe more. I have a mom, dad, and 'step-mom'. When we get together, it's a big crowd. Everyone smiles and pretends they are good friends, but in reality, no one really knows each other. We have this illusion of closeness, but it's just that - an illusion.

Everyone always presents their ideal self. For me, that means presenting my non-pot-smoking, non-vaping, non-poly version of my self. I can only assume that everyone (or at least a portion of them) are also hiding parts of themselves that they want to keep hidden, like I do.

As a result, we have a 'perfect' family. Everyone is happy, prosperous, and perfect, but it's all a facade. What appears to be a close family is actually a group of acquaintances that are all kept at arm's length.

This is true for both the extended family as well as the immediate family. My dad is a judge -- a high ranking judge that spends a lot of time working with drug offenders, and good man. I have a lot of respect for him. I smoke also lot of pot, so, naturally, I keep that on the down-low. He's conservative, so I'm not sure how he would react to my poly experimenting, so I hide that too. He wouldn't approve of my vaping, so I hide it. All this to keep up that perfect image that our family has.

I also still feel like a child to my dad. I place too much value on his acceptance of me, and that causes me to hide some of the less perfect truths, and as a result, we aren't all that close. I'm 32, make a good living, own my house and am married. I haven't borrowed money from him since I moved out almost 12 years ago. I am an adult who is fully independent, but for some reason still need that acceptance from my dad.

I'm sick of it. I'm tired of hiding my true self. I'm tired of my judgey family and the distance that it creates. I'm tired of walking on glass trying to meet their expectations.

Most recently my dad wants to schedule a ski trip for later in the winter. 3 nights, 2 days. I didn't really want to go for that long (because I feel uncomfortable being around him for so long holing up this fake image, and also I'm usually tired after one day of snowboarding, and the second day feels like a slog and is not as fun). I suggested that I go out with him, snowboard the first day, book a massage for the second day, and then leave after the massage (leaving a day earlier than originally planned). I think that dad wanted to do a boys weekend and because I want to cut it short, that hurt his feelings (I haven't heard from him since I suggested I leave early that weekend...).

So, yea. I feel bad and guilty if my dad feels bad about me trying to cut the weekend short, but I really don't think I can handle that much time being the 'perfect kid'. Maybe I'm just selfish. I want to smoke while snowboarding (because it's fun) and vape while drinking (because it's so satisfying) and not feel guilty. I'm tired of pretending to be something else.

I just want to spill the beans on everything and get it all out there. "No, this family isn't perfect! I smoke more pot than I care to admit, I love to vape because it feeds my nicotine addiction, and we are experimenting in poly. I don't care if you approve or not, this is how I choose to live my life."

Doing that is one of those things you can't undo though... My family is gossipy, and the poly news would spread like wildfire and would definitely result in some (a lot of) judginess. Plus, I don't know if I am far enough down that road to share it with the family... I don't know what to do. I'm tired of hiding. I hate constantly feeling guilty because I might/do disappoint my dad.

EDIT: So after writing this, I decided to call my dad. I better explained that I really didn't want to do a second day of skiing, and suggested we all do something else together on the second day. We'll be meeting this weekend and should be able to figure things out. I think everything will be okay.

I didn't mention the pot or vaping, but that will be something that I want to bring up either before the trip, or on the car ride out there. I'm pretty sure that I won't be sharing the poly thing for quite some time yet...

Anyways, the purpose of this journal was to help me organize my thoughts, and it worked. I also wanted to share a little about my family dynamic. I think it's weird that we are so concerned about appearances that we sacrifice the closeness that you get from showing vulnerability and trust. It bothers me. I think its because everyone in the family is relatively successful, everyone feels the need to present this image to 'keep up with the Joneses'.

I'll spare you how I had to hock my left nut to purchase the privelige of speaking to a live human at Fidelity, who AppliedMicro - formerly AMCC - told me would know how I could take a hardship withdrawal from my 401k.

My plan is to buy a van to live in. Just today I realized that if I had wheels I might find work as a carpenter; I was once a carpenter, I really enjoy the work, my father was a carpenter his father a general contractor. I have all my own tools and their tools as well.

Fidelity had records of my accounts at previous places I've worked but not AMCC. "Maybe 2008 was before they started using Fidelity. They changed their name - do you know when AppliedMicro started using your fine investment vehicles?"

Do you mean Applied Micro Devices?

No not AMD, AppliedMicro. Two different companies.

I called AppliedMicro's HR, who was really dismayed, said she'd get right on top of it then call me back tonight.

Wouldn't it be funny if Fidelity lost ALL of our money?

Recall that I reported that I was getting depressed.

Yesterday I sang on the street, just one set but I earned $4.50. Enough to buy a new charging cable for my phone. My previous charger was stolen, the main homeless-on-homeless crime around here in theft of phone chargers. Also I bought a day pass to get to my storage locker on the bus, to fetch my other coat, as the zipper broke on the one I was wearing.

I got up at ten o'clock. That's not early for most people but it is for me as I am a confirmed night owl.

Last night I practiced guitar for about an hour.

Going to the locker is a huge PITA even under the best of circumstances but actually I had a good day today.

I kissed a pretty girl on the hand this evening. Next time I see her I'm going to ask her to meet me for coffee. To do that I'm going to have to sing for enough tips to buy TWO coffees.

I think I headed off the depression. It would have been harder to do so had I let it go longer.

The Social Security Administration just pointed out to me that I have a little over seven thousand dollars in a 401k retirement account. I had totally spaced that. It's just like me to do stuff like that.

I am very chagrined to say that while I fixed the busted taillight that I got a fix-it ticket for back in 2010, I never got it signed off. California wants $900 out of me for that. Then there's insurance, and ~$56.00 for an Oregon driver's license (or something like that) plus when i buy the van I'm going to immediately replace at least some of the parts that are likely to go bad.

A used cargo van from craigslist is about $3000 so I'll have some left.

It's just as well I didn't find out about it until now, I would have blown it all on hats.

I'm sleeping too much. If I sleep too much I get depressed, if I get depressed I sleep too much. It can be a vicious spiral.

Today I got up at 3:30 in the afternoon. I wasn't up particularly late last night.

It's not just the sleep by I find myself uninterested in the things that usually interest me. I haven't been singing because the weather has been bad. I haven't been practicing guitar because I just don't have the gumption. Really there is no excuse.

If it continues I'll go to my p-doc and ask for some Happy Pills.

It took a few decades, but they came around to accepting a tenuous reinterpretation of the Second Amendment.

Rising up to the bait, I asked why and was pointed to three legal essays (labeled by authors Burton Newman, Anthony M. Sierzega (PDF of a project for undergraduate honors), and Saul Cornell). This rant is going to discuss the basic problems I noticed right away.

All these essays argue that the Second Amendment grants a collective right rather than an individual right, and that the "individual right" was a relatively new spin peddled in recent decades by the NRA and the libertarian movement.

The first thing I noticed was that two of the three essays ignored the actual writing of the Second Amendment.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

It seems kind of a huge oversight to ignore that the Amendment grants a right to "the people" (which has always been interpreted to mean anyone living in the US, not just US citizens) and then turn around and say that the right is clearly "collective". Is the previous amendment on free speech "collective" as well? For example, Newman writes:

In 1939 the Supreme Court issued the Miller decision. The justices ruled that "the Second Amendment must be interpreted and applied with the view of its purpose of rendering effective Militia." That was the state of Second Amendment law until the 2008 Heller decision. Prior to Heller, the Supreme Court never recognized that individuals had an individual right to keep and bear arms. It was the NRA propaganda, not the law of the land, that led the cry for unlimited gun ownership and protection of gun owner rights. The NRA myths allowed the cycle of expanded gun sales and NRA power to purchase political influence. Democrats and Republican alike announced their allegiance to the Second Amendment and the public grew to believe that the NRA view of the Second Amendment was consistent with constitutional law. The NRA controlled too many elected officials to allow for protection of our citizens from gun violence, gun deaths and unspeakable gun horrors in schools and public places.

Meanwhile Cornell writes:

The Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." What do these words mean? Well, the answer to this question depends on who you ask. Supporters of the so-called collective rights interpretation believe that the Second Amendment only protects the right to bear arms within the context of well regulated militias. Supporters of the so-called "individual right" interpretation view the right to bear arms as a right vested in individuals, much like the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.

The fact that there are two such divergent interpretations is the result of significant changes in how Americans view the 2nd Amendment that occurred during the latter part of the twentieth century. For most of the last century, the meaning of the Second Amendment was not particularly controversial: the courts, legal scholars, politicians, and historians endorsed some version of the collective rights interpretation. As late as 1991, Chief Justice Warren Burger described the individual rights view as an intellectual fraud. Yet, the growth of a revisionist individual rights theory of the Second Amendment in the years since Burger made his comment has been nothing short of astonishing.

This view was originally propagated by gun rights activists such as Stephen Halbrook, Don Kates, and David Kopel whose research was funded by libertarian think tanks and the National Rifle Association (NRA).

It's only Sierzega's essay that observes (via discussion of a legal opinion written by current Justice Antonin Scalia) that "the people" elsewhere in the Constitution (including amendments) referred to individual rights.

Next, Scalia turns to the language of the Second Amendment, once again arguing along the same lines as the libertarian individualists. He begins his analysis by dividing the amendment into two clauses: the prefatory clause (“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”), and the operative clause (“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”). Scalia believes the prefatory clause simply announces the purpose of the Amendment and does not limit the operative clause (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). He writes that while “this structure…is unique in our Constitution, other legal documents of the founding era, particularly individual-rights provisions of state constitutions, commonly included a prefatory statement of purpose” (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 3). For Scalia, the prefatory clause may offer clarification regarding the operative clause, but it in no way restricts its meaning. After defining several key phrases found in both clauses, Scalia offers a conclusion regarding the meaning of the structure of the amendment.

Scalia begins his analysis of the operative clause with an examination of the phrase “the right of the people.” The Bill of Rights uses the phrase three times: in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause, in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause, and in an analogous phrase in the Ninth Amendment (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 5). According to Scalia, each of these examples refers to the protection of an individual right, not a collective right. The use of the words “the people” by themselves is found three additional times in the Constitution, each regarding the reservation of power, not rights (District of Columbia v. Heller 2008, 6). The phrase “right of the people,” when used in its entirety, always refers to an individual right. “The people” used in these six examples has been read to describe the entire political community. Therefore, according to Scalia, the amendment does not just protect a subset of people, in this case the militia consisting of adult white males. Instead, it protects the rights of all Americans.

Seems strange to me that legal opinions would ignore an obvious interpretation of the amendment and instead go to great effort to portray the "individual right" interpretation as something novel.

There is also a remarkable glossing over of history. Once again, Sierzega is the only one to observe that the NRA's lobbying efforts started in 1934 not 1977 (when every one of the essays claims the NRA was taken over by "libertarians"). Further, he's the only one to observe that federal level gun control started in 1934 with the National Firearms Act as well with regulations presented by then President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) to restrict firearms which were commonly used by criminals of the day (such as bans on sawed off shotguns and silencers, and restrictions on machine guns). This law and similar ones of the day were, according to Sierzega, contributed to and supported by the NRA, whose leadership expressed support for the "collective right" model for the Second Amendment.

Even more surprisingly, the early NRA supported, and often helped write, many of the nation’s first federal gun control laws, including the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act (Rosenfield 2013). Testifying before Congress in 1938, NRA President Karl T. Frederick supported the National Firearms Act, stating that “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons. I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses” (Rosenfield 2013).

But on the other hand, it is quite clear that the NRA supported individual ownership of firearms and use of firearms for numerous purposes, particularly, hunting, self defense, and sporting/target practice. In other words, despite their public statements, they clearly have supported individual rights such as ownership and use of firearms since their very beginning in 1871 and immediately started to lobby to protect those rights from the moment that they were threatened at the federal level.

This leads to an issue of timing which was wholly ignored by these essays and Mr. AC, namely, that the distinction between individual and collective right was completely irrelevant to federal level gun control until 1934. So the alleged "revisionism" covers a bit over four decades before 1977 rather than almost two hundred years. It's been almost as long since 1977, the year that the NRA started explicitly supporting individual rights. The fact that US Congress didn't even see fit to regulate firearms till 1934 also indicates to me substantial implicit support for individual firearm rights.

The Supreme Court ruling which decreed a "individual right" was District of Columbia v. Heller. In 1976, Washington, DC in response to one of the worst crime rates in the US, passed a gun control law that severely impaired peoples' ability to protect themselves with firearms. Aside from firearms grandfathered in from before 1976, handguns were banned and all firearms had to be stored in a way that made them much harder to prepare for self defense on sudden notice. Newman's essay glosses over this harm and I doubt, for example, that the Supreme Court of the 19th century would backed such a law no matter how they choose to interpret it. The interpretation of an individual right is natural here because the situations of self defense are naturally individual. There is no collective right to self defense. And it was quite clear that the ability to not only bear firearms, but to be able to use those firearms instantly was crucial to a variety of self defense scenarios (such as a resident reacting to a nearby burglar).

Coincidentally, this law barely predates the alleged libertarian takeover of the NRA. It'll be interesting to see how much influence it had on the NRA power shift.

The last point I want to make here is that a collective right is rather dubious legal structure on moral and practical grounds. For example, the most common use of the expressly collective right was to give some classes of people advantages over other classes of people (eg, apartheid in South Africa). And it is dubious to claim you have a collective right without a corresponding individual right. For example, how could we have a collective right to free speech, if no individual also had that right? Eg, the US public could say whatever it wanted by say, a poll, but no one individually could? That would go wrong immediately.

Similarly, what is the point of a collective right to bear arms? As a counter to US military might, it's a joke. All of the states' National Guards forces are no match for the US military assuming they were even independent enough to fight the US military (say because the US military declines to provide them with weaponry and supplies). Nor does existence of the National Guard help the average citizen becoming a better soldier in an "effective Militia" (as described by the Supreme Court in the Miller decision above). OTOH, the individual right to own and use firearms does just that. It creates a huge group of people familiar with the care and use of firearms which would be necessary to any "effective militia" and it supports the above mentioned individual right to self defense.

And of course, all the essays had to mention former Chief Justice Warren Burger's opinion (here from Newman):

In a PBS News Hour interview in 1991, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger referred to the NRA Second Amendment myth as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by any special interest group that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

In sum, I find these peculiar essays (which may not reflect mainstream gun control advocacy) to have contained considerable hypocrisy with a bunch of revisionists complaining about other alleged revisionists and claiming "fraud" over an obvious interpretation of the Second Amendment and obvious historical support for it. Further, actual history shows no significant gun control regulation for 140 years after the US ratified the Bill of Rights with crudely two bouts of federal level gun regulation, the first in the 1930s and the second starting in the 1970s. Currently, we have what appears to me to be a near reversal of gun control regulation to the level prior to the 1970s with what appears to be a great deal of public support both for the reversal and for the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Ever wonder who the top trolls are around these parts? Yeah, me too. So I wrote up a quick script to find out. Now keep in mind our moderatorlog table only goes back so far; it gets the tail end trimmed off every so often by one of our slashd jobs. Without further ado, here are our top ten finalists, excluding Anonymous Coward and counting only Troll moderations:

1. Ethanol-fueled: 430
2. Runaway1956: 187
3. The Mighty Buzzard: 157
4. Hairyfeet: 129
5. jmorris: 114
6. frojack: 105
7. aristarchus: 98
8. zugedneb: 60
9. MichaelDavidCrawford: 59
10. VLM: 55

If you didn't make it this time, keep trying! If you want to have a gander at the whole list to see how close you got, here it is.

I dream quite a bit, but I'm not normally one to talk much about my dreams. Other peoples' dreams bore me, and I don't really think there's much wisdom or insight to be gained from studying them so I don't generally see a reason to share mine.

However this dream I had last night affected me somehow, and I wanted to get it off my chest. It was one of those long epic dreams that seems to last for days, even though in realtime it probably lasted only a few minutes or hours.

In my dream I was going about my normal business for a few days, and as is often the case when I've got a lot on I can go a few days without catching any real news. However I kept seeing headlines and short clips of news, which showed a weird red wibbly thing enclosed by some kind of space station, and footage of an astronaut aboard the ISS. I knew that something big was going on in space, because it was all over the mainstream news and space doesn't normally get much coverage. I gradually pieced more and more together until I finally thought I had the whole story, and then had time to sit down and watch a proper news report, to confirm my suspicions.

Turns out the Americans had either found or built (they weren't admitting either) some kind of device in close orbit around the sun that enabled instant access to any other star system in the galaxy. Somehow it also managed to teleport an astronaut from the ground to the ISS and back again. I remember watching the report in complete amazement, alternating between "this is impossible" and "this is awesome" for ages. In the meantime, all the people around me were entirely unimpressed, writing it off as boring nerdy space stuff.

By the end of the dream, there were adverts on TV selling land on distant planets, all of which appeared to be sparse rocky deserts with a little or no greenery. None of the planets had any animal life. There didn't seem to be any talk of infrastructure of any kind being built or artists impressions of how it might look in the future, just real footage of featureless land on uninhabited planets. There were also suggestions in the news that many countries were thinking of dumping all their incoming migrants onto one of these planets, where they would almost certainly starve. Footage of one planet showed evidence that the Americans had been there for some time, with a big military base / outpost of some kind built in the sea.

Weird, meaningless and probably dull I know, but the thing that got me was the profound sense of disappointment when I woke up and reality gradually asserted itself, and as the moment of confusion passed I realised that FTL exploration and settlement of the galaxy will never happen.

It did get me thinking though - if cheap and instantaneous access to the rest of the galaxy did suddenly magically appear overnight, how would humanity handle it? With resources and living space suddenly abundant would war disappear overnight, or would someone try to somehow hoard and control it all? Would the influx of cheap resources and materials from other worlds usher in a techno-utopia on Earth, or would it be too much for our environment to assimilate?

Union Gospel Mission served Sushi for lunch the other day. I Am Absolutely Serious. See, someone who distributes trays of sushi to grocery stores had too much of it, it would otherwise have exceeded its shelf life so they gave it to the homeless.

Two nights ago I stopped by Right 2 Dream Too, more commonly known as The Tent Camp, at 4th Avenue and Burnside in Oldtown Portland. They often have food set out for passersby to take with them. All they had was bread but what bread! What I took with me was a loaf of rye with caraway seed. There are vast quantities of bread made available to the homeless here even so much of it goes to waste.

One fellow saw me foraging for the bread and gave me two packaged sandwiches and a can of Dr. Pepper. One of the sandwiches was from Dave's Killer Bread. Dave was a felon who did fifteen years in prison until his brother took him into the family bakery business. Now 1/3 of Dave's Killer Bread's staff consists of people with criminal record; there are always fresh loaves on every table at the Portland Rescue Mission.

The problem here in Portland is not food but shelter many people sleep out in the cold, often in the driving rain. I myself have a tent and a warm sleeping bag, these because of the kindness of an old friend, also a propane campstove. Rod buys more propane when I run out.

When I had a short contract about a year ago - making good money but not for long - I bought a real wool sweater, wool thermal underwear and wool socks. I have a good coat that was given to me by my employer when I was an industrial control systems engineer.

A side effect of the startup boom, primarily mobile applications here in Portland, is that engineers are moving in from out of state, rents are skyrocketing and people are being forced out on the street. Making the problem worse is that Oregon has no-fault eviction - that is your landlord can evict you any time they please, for no reason at all. This is why I'm planning to buy a van to live in, were I to rent an apartment I would just be contributing to the problem while enriching a Portland landlord.

I have about 60-90 days left before my SSI starts. This is SSI just to start with, I expect to qualify for SSDI but there is a problem with my tax records from 2003 that I need to straighten out with the IRS. I have all the records I just haven't dealt with it yet. But with the SSI, possibly not when I first get it but if I can somehow save that money for a month or two I'll have the cash for a van.

A fellow I met on the train argued that I should buy a sailboat; he lives in one and it works well for him. A boat would cost more than a van but he argues that it is cheaper to live in. "Isn't the maintenance expensive?" "Not if you live in it, and stay on top of the maintenance," he told me.

When I get my SSDI I might buy two or three acres of unimproved land then build a house on it, also plant a vegetable garden and keep chickens. Maybe I'll keep goats as well I'm heavily into drinking milk. The SSDI is retroactive to the earlier of when one became disabled, to a maximum of twelve months. In rural oregon or washington one can buy two acres of land for $5,000.

I'm writing some code that I expect will make good money. When it does I'm not just going to blow it all on hats as I did when I was able to work regular coding jobs. I would put it into that house that I'm building, donate quite a lot to the portland rescue mission, R2D2, the Union Gospel Mission, the Salvation Army and the Blanchet House of Hospitality.

Just because something is a nonprofit that doesn't imply it's a charity - but all those are real charities.