2004-02-10-0131Z


Just bought my ticket to Deming, NM for $76, as the Amtrak ticketers here at Union Station told me I could, but wouldn't tell me when. Talk about annoying. I had to call their reservation line and get the ticket after dealing with an automated voice processing system. Once I finally got to a human operator, she told me I could have just pressed 0 at any time and gotten a human. To be sure, the system wasn't all that bad, and may have been useful if I'd wanted to do the normal thing, and reserve for a specific date rather than go for the lowest fare.

(picture of red fruit) 4 hours left to go for the universal edibility test on that red fruit I mentioned yesterday. I think I'll survive, so it apparently was edible, if a little tart. The ripest fruits are almost sweet though. I don't know how to describe the flavor, but it's more like an apple than, say, an orange or blueberry. I ate them unpeeled, and swallowed seeds and all. I did wash them, though, as well as I could. There was some droid out there today, in that harbor area on Long Beach, spraying a brownish-orange chemical on the grounds right next to the water. I asked "what's that stuff?"; he answered "weed killer". Weed killer? Poison? Where what doesn't fall directly into the water will get washed in the next time it rains? What are these fucking people thinking? Those white croakers I mentioned yesterday got their DDT and PCBs from when they contaminated the water 30 years ago. Hello? Silent Spring? Don't we ever fucking learn from our mistakes?

I'm thinking about writing a book on the homeless, or on homeless living. I wonder if the other homeless people I'm meeting will be willing to talk to me and have their stories published. At the very least, I might find out about resources I can use myself!

Also, don't remember if I mentioned this before, and too lazy to search, but I have an idea to increase the food base of hunter-gatherers by planting fruit trees and other plants like prickly pear in public places. For example, I clipped a second lobe of prickly pear today in addition to the one I trimmed for eating, and planted it in another corner of the parking lot. If I can get a bunch of people doing this every day, we may have a sustainable food base after a few years. The trick is to use attractive plants, and place them where they look "right", even to the point of making it look like a city department had done it. That way, hopefully nobody will question it and it will survive and grow.

This page is getting too big, I'm going to have to edit the CGI to show only one month at a time. I made some decent progress on my wav2mid program last night; it can't handle anything even mildly complex, but the closer you get to a pure sinewave sound source, sounding one note at a time, the output is nearly perfect. Also working on a licensing module, more on that later. So, I've got 12 days till I leave for Deming. Let's see what I can accomplish meanwhile.

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