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.
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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