Tenacitus' Tirades

Too Late the Rider Dodges Chaos Attractors

2011-04-08T17:34:00.000-07:00

I used to be a night rider,
the two wheels beneath me would spin,
I made sure the rims were trim.
Singing about starving in belly of whale.
Me and myself would be the geek chorus
on those summer nights, I would have a public burning.
With Tom Wait's Blood Money acting as the catalyst
for my private catharsis.

Since that time I am no longer a self photographing dork.
Nowadays instead of the brothers Gracchi I reminisce about Torn and Taxis.
There is no crying for my lot at 36.
Though my heart is full of regret,  I don't want the sleeping dogs to bark.
What is this but another doggerel verse
while I should be planning a monograph on data structures.
and asking art! art! whats the state of the art!

My mind no longer shoots off multiple threads instead
the processes are context switched out and move about.

Enigma Of Visions

2011-04-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

When I woke up Friday morning I was worked on worked on one of my bash projects
and the when that reached its next debug level I looked at the mysql tables 
that I had exported to csv files.

All the data was there except for the headers so I started to work on a script
that would capture the header info of a table with an arbitrary number of 
columns.

Now, most of the examples in our great electronic void of answers seeking
questions deal with specific cases when I wanted something a little more
general so that I can port the solution to differing problem sets.  So out of
my laziness I spent the next 10 hours working on a sql script that will do that.

By 11 some parts of it were working but I was stuck on a part and my all seeing 
left eye was tired.  Due to this problem I went and took out the concavity of
completeness decided to let the windows to my nonexistent soul rest.  Hopefully
in the morning with a fresh right eye a solution would become manifest.

Since I was not sleepy and after hours of chilling with Dre & Big Boi there was
no way I could walk with those bawdy bards to the board of empires.  Even though
they promised me that it would not be TV but HBO.

So in these mean times I closed my eyes and searched for rhymes worth a million
dimes.  Remembering Kasper Hauser I picked Enigma with a shiver of my finger,
which led to the mouse firing its eager trigger.

Now as I laid me down to weep I closed my eyes, my soul to keep,  The music
must have had a spiritual vibe because there were shapes and colours dancing
before my very eyes!  Once again my brain lies!

The last time I experienced something like this was almost 20 years ago.  When
I used to do 200 calculus and physics problems a week I was blessed with 
abstract dreqms.  In my sleep the worldy words about frictional forces,
acceleration's causes took me to the pythagorean plane.  Each problem appeared
out of the mist and would retreat when given a solution with a twist.

This time I did not see code flasshing in my mind's eye.  Instead it was a
mental visualization.  Like turning music into colours via FFTs wavelets of my
conciousness broke tympanum's eardrum. Fancy that rods & cones firing all
because I have a skull and tiny bones!

There I was rocking to a higher feeling gaining insight into my foresight even
with no clock on the wall to be approaching midnight.

Then someone's knock on the door and almost brought me back earth's iron core.
The vision changed to faces in slow rain.

When I heard the chanting "Bitches and Brew! Bitches & Brew! There's enough for
me and you!" I knew my wonderful experience was through.


Peace in the east to my sister that I have seen the least.

A salute to Wayne whose writing should be sung about in paenes.

Props to Shabazz the faithful disciple.  In your knowledge of the nation brook
no rivals.  May you have the pleasure to take a leisurely stroll in foreign
weather when IT schemes help you fulfil your dreams.

Hello
Good morning
Good bye

Jimeta

2011-04-08T16:30:00.001-07:00

I'll take Bombay the Hardway

if you will give up the quest for bread.

I now dwell in a land of subprime LATAs

where the battle of carnival lent was suppressed

here the pigs chant mo lu e before they kill and go

The archpoet was no jude Obscure

At my last party I was moaning o this modern world

full of techno, terror, free love,

where ipods uniote and mp3s fight.

in our kampf against god and state

hierachy is the mother of all enemies

caught between the rock and enoch

I pull out the sign of drawing restraint 9

you will not find this in daily sketch

or written as a column advocating peace in the concord

the streets are always raucous when the horns blow

on the flowing achabas

Waiting For The Siren's Call

2011-04-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

As I waited for the siren's call
the underbelly of urgency gnawed at my stomach wall.
As I thought of Monday and the email,
or spoken word from an employer
that either echoes approval of my professional views,
or pans my performance.

Once again I dust my empty suit,
make another pot of coffee
and pace the house in silence.
Restless ennui fills my heart on this
sun filled Sunday.

Earlier I had done an 8K and made golden, granola
and talked with my sister about Boston and the brahmins
who think they own her twisted streets
After my sister left the house is silent.

We went to Annie's so she could remember old times.
Back to boredom now,to much tension to type.
There is nothing I can write as I wait for the siren's call.
Putting on my coat and gloves

I step into the dark blue, haze of cloudy night.
In the sculpture garden the cherry and spoon shine like brand new dimes.
I walk over the blue bridge and look at its lovingly shaped logs.
A savage named Jack Pine came here with his friends from the north.
They came to make this city by the lakes.

But now the economy has changed.
No more construction based on raw human power.
No more warehouses full of flour.
No more riding the rails to Chicago with an empty lunch pail.
I cross the bridge and over the traffic's roar I think of Lavonne some more.

I imagine you sharp on the attack;
spiking the ball into the opponent's court.
You jump float and...
they try to anticipate what your topspin will bring.
But a feint to the left puts the right to the test.
I see you on the beaches of LA
making a bump,
despite the sun, surf & strategy of tension
Lavonne is always ready for receptions.

My chilled fingers are clenched
and I laugh at my old joke on The Wedge.
Past the black leather, biker's coffee bean store.
I see tattooed sadness drowning dreams of love in dark beer and bitters.
I see hipster's smoking American Spirit in all of irony's feigned nonchalance.
I circle Lake Calhoun like a midnight satellite.
I think of Lavonne and her little dog.

Has she heard Buckshot La Fonque?
What's her stand on US3?
Does she think Fishery Black is just another in the long train of sad, jazz hacks?
I think of your smiling voice & lusciousness.
I don't know the colour of your eyes.
Are they sultry?
Bemused?
Are they impassive?
On the surface appearing placid,
but underneath you look at things with laughter,
wear secret smiles,
have rages & intelligently display a sales agent's wiles.

I hope to stare into your eyes
And we shall look into the abyss of each other's souls
And then come up for air.
Now as I head back home Rembrandt's J'acusse flashes before me.
Speeding cars ignore me.
Winter cyclists bore me.
Drops of snot flow to the frozen snow.
And the moon hides in Minneapolis smog.

It is 3 am when I complete my long frozen tour and step into the door.
I plan my next repast,
filet mignon with asparagus and mushrooms in homemade tomatoes sauce.
Today has become Monday
By civil twilight I will know if I will be enjoying employment's delights.
If my dream is deferred I will continue
to write my story in a book of plans.

Write code so that I can switch from sysadmin to developer mode.
Exercise to get into a triathalon in the cold
Learn to make bread,
listen to Kropotkin when I goto bed.
Learn the politics of dance in the Dakota
listen to Armin van Buuren while I practice headspins.

The Snowboarder's Song

2011-04-08T16:20:00.001-07:00

faster, faster, went the speeding, snowboarder.

Doing a five-o-grind that made made the spectators rock 'n roll in their minds.

Working with gravity and other forces he did an ollie that was smooth as butter.

With the snow and the hill he felt such grace

that if he had been catholic he would have

said hail marys during the powdery race.

Traversing past trees,

leaving a wake of flakes he jumped

and thought,

"more tomorrow?"

Those Who Waited For Walt Whitman

2011-04-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

With only her raw talent

and cannibalized pieces of her life

she went to the International Bank of First Impressions

for loan of idioms.

She wrote prose which sold for pretty pennies

to hipsters seeking highs from

other people's lives.

At a reading of her passages

five hundred Buddhists who

were waiting for the return of Walt Whitman

(their bodhisattva) chanted "oohm"

and expired.

Through the triumph of their communal will

the sacred band

was buried on a barren hill.

Suddenly it was covered with a

billion leaves of grass.

The Swimmer

2011-04-08T16:17:00.001-07:00

I rise from the deep

swimming through a sea of troubles

I move from river to ocean in one smooth, continuous, jerky motion

I glide through the mists as unknown things creep

celebrating the mysteries in my lonely elation

The Question?

2011-04-08T16:16:00.001-07:00

What am I doing here?

What is this life of stupid cares?

Why do I spend time typing and sending packets through the air?

They go without the aid of wire;

Yet I am in a cloud, bound

to an imitation aeron chair.

Why can't I be like Prometheus

and rebel at three times treble?

What am I doing here?

maybe I should have killed my dreams

I should know by now that

they will only be dashed

like a piece of fragile earthen ware

why scheme and take on other people's dares

just to prove that we should be rated as men not mice

people get silly and throw the dice twice

don't tell me its because of the lexicon of the Rubicon

I won't buy your semiotics

As I travel like an unthinking missile;

eating up miles in the thin air

going through my mad career,

I pause and stare

what am I doing here?

personally many times I wish I did not want

would like to give up my silly cares

especially when life is ethereal

and after 3 generations people will forget me

just as much as they remember breathing yesterday's air

even though I am a progressive pilgrim

who did battle with the grim giant named Despair;

cleft him in two with not one stroke of my sword, but a pair

before he died he asked a question

whose damage I cannot repair:

"what are you doing here?"

"why must you persist with this life of stupid cares?"

Surfing

2011-04-08T16:15:00.002-07:00

The earth is my noose

seeking a life 450 absolute proof

Want to surf the universe as a light wave,

a photon traveling past Alpha Centauri.

Not existing as an eater of calamari.

Become abstract

Live beyond facts

One day I will play with ampax

while leaving my shit on wax.

But before then I look for open mic nights

standing under klieg lights

experiencing stage fright

Speaking in tunes in a smoky coffee room

But as I step into the arena

I will be brave and ignore any catcalling knaves.

Sailing a gravity wave

to th dawn of a new age

My board is a chaos attractor

it takes me to where macro and micro fracture

Immeasurable when I am measured

with structure in my destructure.

More basic than masers,

existing in the plane of phasors

But when the signal returns to zero

I go back to Asia from where I came.

Visit my home where the drums sing praise names

the wearers of agbadas rest their cellys on rotund bellies

They shy away and yell “fie!” at the dusty dadas

who recite the chants of the rastas

And in recompense get looks of scorn.

Silent Season

2011-04-08T16:15:00.000-07:00

The silent season

The ghosts of reason

the unburned weather

makes men clever

the advert is a red alert

feature creep in death's white keep

more junk on the heap

a stack of tools,

buried under a pile of useless fools

The vapor trail

in the hazer's tail

hung up with a five inch nail

a battle for more goods and chattel

I pay the rent with money already spent

Smoke your shitty mahorka

in the dead city of Katorga

In your crooked left eye

I see a mad gleam

are you cooking up another bankrupt scheme?

trying to revive another dead meme?

The death of cool

over an unused spool

two savior's duel

the crowd drools

in the afternoon heat

they found radiance in the cadence

unlike the Seleucid's their eyes are pellucid

from watching god

who sent a bard

down from yard

to lead us to Asgard

Remembering Sarzent the Mad Man

2011-04-08T16:14:00.001-07:00

A celebration of Sarzent,

no not Sargent the English painter

But Sarzent the Senegalese traitor.

I read about him when I was sixteen

It was a book that brought beatitude to negritude.

The Afro-French writers were celebrating a renaissance

as usual I acquired the book by chance,

it's funny Steve just mentioned serendipity

hah! Ain't life silly

But back to Sarzent the mad unholy saint.

The story was a piece of romantic fiction

not like those described in Barbra Cartland's pages.

And other bodice rippers designed for the ladies.

No more like the German who talked about the quest for He-man

Starting with Goethe, through the nineteenth century

they talked about those who try not to bleat like sheep

Why don't you read Keats?

In the present day there was Thomas Mann

But back to Sarzent

the writer's lyrical plan

left me stunned, he showed me a man who got himself canned.

Sarzent who forgot who he was not

he went insane

In mental anguish he forever will languish

and in his pain he did sing

a song about valuing the old age.

It has been more than ten years

the words he spoke I can no longer evoke

However my head still rings with his raucous chorus

“listen to things!”, “listen to things!”

It always made me want to sprout wings

discover the unknown

hold it in my hands

in the meantime I listen for my still, small voice

I see my fading secret self

but he responds with endless silence

it deafens me with notes about ancient tragedies now remote.

The lynching of the Gracchii

for poor romans they kept bitching

I daily mourn over their faded, jaded glory.

Thoughts as these bring a semblance of peace

but I still explore my wild places,

my dark horse kicks the traces

running to and from my ancient places

trying to set new paces

As I swim through my conscious stream

the sun reflects off another mad gleam

and once again I grasp it's supporting beam

May I never wake from this walking dream.

Maybe, next we shall talk about Daddy Mboya's cannibal ram

Procion

2011-04-08T16:13:00.001-07:00

While searching for Hiram Abiff,

I crossed the burning sands and died in seven deserted lands.

Raised triple blessed I saw a crescent sun

pay obeisance to the moon and stars.

While Ifrits and beings with seven digits

Wage cunning war ending in amours

All the way from Mars to the plain of Jars.

Two hundred and seventy three extinguished lights,

so the seekers read with three sixty candle lights.

Still, the questioners of I am cause ethereal blight,

Until Alice traveled through an organic singularity

no one could refute the pious claims of universal topology.

Capitalists discuss manifest destiny

Theorists advocate historical necessity

As the materialists become eclectic in their dialectics

Kant went ballistic and exploded,

Kierkegaard denounced low culture’s sadistic hedonistics

I hoist an iron flag and trod through the hyperplane in which I carried a little clay pot

That held a land that time never forgot,

for it is where Gog and Magog ran amok

With many heads operation phoenix was blessed

The diseased speak of peace,

their left hands caress grey, gun metal.

The right sells embalmer’s grease.

Till I rise like Osiris

there will be no end to the crisis

so we ask Horus to lead the mad chorus

We seek one whose oscillations are harmonic,

Travels like a photon that proves the existence of a Higgs boson.

In the meantime,

Industry researchers spend millions on useless chirals

to keep gluttons in an endless spiral

I cast seven cowries with bated breadth.

And wait for Ifa to predict the hour of my death

Listen to things and earthly kings.

But remember that Attila was the true lord of the rings

If while evading spirit sniper’s wiles,

and staring into the bamboo tiger’s hooded eyes

You react with a Buddhist smile

The Western Lands Saga

2011-04-08T16:12:00.001-07:00

The western lands

Traveling under an azure sky

I try and escape the father of lies

by crossing the bridge of sighs

With each step chanting a mantra

to break my inner cipher

trailed by cackling magpies

as Apook lurks in every nook

trying to snare me with his crook

impale me with his hook.

But by invoking my seven souls

I enter the realm of the bold

Dodging the crags filled with hags yelling

"evoe!" as golems dance on their arched backs.

I feel the heat closing in

The fuzz look placid from all the hits of acid

as the squealing pigs hallucinate, prevaricate

I call on Dr. Benway to operate.

But the old fucker just procrastinates, acts obstinate

Eventually he objects to the limited torture,

because he dislikes my high couture

After I carrying out the procedure

I suture and make a killing on pork futures.

I summon Kerouac for a game of jumping jacks

we write rhymes on one time

to a beat that is lax

Ogun on his way to Oshun, chants a sutra for smiling Siddhartha

As I free associate

Hoping that no prions act like ions, disassociate

making my brain lame before I achieve greater fame

I have never been sufficiently celebrated

However I am not yet a rotting corpse

But before you summon the hearse

I will read more tales of mystery and imagination

interact with tesseracts,

place infinity in a five sided box

eat my bagel with extra cheese and lox.

I will perspire after my desires and never retire unless I expire.

As the KGB and company sneak around Karlshorst

I play with Airsnort

The junkies with monkeys

carrying machetes and bringing flechettes

endure storms and scrapes

while hunting for rutile

but their endeavors are futile.

So we grab the 103 degree burning man

dance like people with no plan

Pagans in body paint dodge and feint

as our fearless leader tells them "bring it on!"

Bold Ares summons the dogs of war,

in a celebration for gore

as they pant and grunt

once again the poor unduly feel their brunt

they honor their paters

sacrifice to their maters

So we cast our bread on still waters

knowing we shall never have sons or daughters

From Damascus to Aleppo nobody weeps for the Azores

Instead celebration and elation for those who wiped out the canaries

(their interests were pecuniary)

Where are the Caribs to bear witness of what Columbus did?

Who knows the name of Tasmania before the rule of Britannia?

From the banks of the Niger

to the mighty old Miss

I watched the falls of Niagara

with a secret shiver

it traveled from my liver,

passed through my marrow

to the quiver with fifty arrows

She asks me for her locket

As I dig in my pocket

Mind coping struggling to cope, I feel out of hope

Grasping for rope I touch the note

written by Kassim it says:

Seek liberation through desolation

Avoid inebriation

it only leads to alienation and isolation

Only you can bring elation

So I turn my back on the hack

Make a mad thousand yard dash

up the thirty nine steps in time to see

a new sun rising over Proscion

This ends the saga of the Western lands

Go west young man!

Rape and pillage those indigenous heathens

ignore the pipe of peace

Shed blood in the streets

Go west till you reach the shining east

Pray and genuflect in the direction of Mecca

from the plain named Decca

Burn biscuits to Yoshi on the peaks of Mount Fuji

Who Am I

2011-04-08T16:11:00.001-07:00

Someone asked me how do I define myself.

I thought about it for a minute and replied in this wise:

Well I consider myself to be a poor righteous teacher

a spiritual prankster.

a constant wanker,

a jaded sage,

a glutton who does not care for mutton

who walks through the valley of death

avoiding the preachers and other hue-man leachers

when i reach the plain of fear maybe my third eye will see the clear

I seek what is real

with a will of steel cos I am full of insan kamil

I seek tales of the travails of those who rode the rails

I like to read about the wobblies and their battles

with the bosses who wanted to gobble the overrated capital

without music, politics, and the the electronic ether

my life would be one long bout of depression with a sliver of repression

all mixed together with a vacuum of obsession.

this would be the most terrible oppression

I think that explains part of how I see myself.

Liberty Marches With The People

2011-04-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

Liberty marches with the people.

Her bosom is bountiful, her figure full,

Last night her hunger was quenched on cornflakes dipped in patriot's blood.

She has been co-opted ever since Babangida kept the prize.

Nowadays she is content with a little yam pottage.

On the corner, see Liberty taking bribes!

But what do we expect when Justice is blind?

During Tai Solarin's failed caliphate she dwelt under Agbara expressway

In those days of street sweepers & roaming night soil keepers

Liberty only had a chipped enamel cup,

they said she only fucked around with area boys and touts.

To those unemployed louts she took the form of her twin sister,

the succubus named Dream Stealer.

Makanki carried Maitasini on a rusted shield when they on a conquest of bread.

There is no Paris commune,

see the mobile police with their speakers chanting

“body moving, body moving

tear gas screams are so soothing

our water cannons killed the next Frantz Fanon.

Our nylon bag teams uprooted Yggdrasil

even Loki cannot get out of this tough spot”

I see liberty marching with the people

today she has a wutang tattoo from her beau.

Her tee shirt says obey the antidistestablishment.

The liitle drummer boy now raps through a loudspeaker.

See Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz whispering to the tight pursed innkeeper

A petite bourgeois in his, dockers, and keds carries an ikea spread,

the fish wife questions pree teen asks them for the shibboleth of dreams.

As liberty marches with the people she becomes the world tree whose roots are you and me.

Ponder, Command and Conquer

2011-04-08T16:01:00.001-07:00

more signals at eleven

This is an object of type IOConciousStream

I am the invisible man

wandering the land of the ghosts

In triple darkness my cipher is manifest

without a living dharma would there be karma?

I create mad vibes for my tribe

While we ponder, and wander

about creation of our nation

Seeking ethereal simulation

by engaging in random procreation

can you have a sunflower sutra

without the creation of a latin sura?

I get high off seminal earth, the windy word and the cleansing fire.

While you and I verse we can deceive entropy and the hearse

This life is a trial on the truth forsooth none of can escape the noose

And while sipping on crushed grapes I contemplate

Ghandi the Askari sitting under Olumo,

dancing on Pluto and laughing at Profumo.

Well, I init call on PlanB which floats the function,

ActiveMeasures(int p*)

We issue a final call, a clarion to all or if you want

wear the grinning mask and engage in scheming tasks

but remember that the Ghostface Killer and Bobby Digital will overthrow your whole citadel

We close like Ibn Khaldun yelling koom fa ya koom

And voice cries out in the wilderness Iqra! Iqra! Before your doom Ahad laila Ahad !

I am the invisible man surrounded by ghosts and motes

I drop lyrics and rimes to hebephrenics

Integrate with surds and paralleize the new ontogeny

people instill fear in their progeny

due to their own mental dichotomies

we all commit crimes in chasing dimes

heed the word and weed your deeds

Thank you patient reader

Banji Trimegistus, Kassim Ibn Hammed

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Don’t make me get all iambic on your pentameter

Exploration

2011-04-08T16:00:00.001-07:00

The thoughts run in a cadence

the spark of radiance

is lit intermittently

the profound flows in cycles

being insightful is frightful

it leads to the death of sleep

would make a nonexistent wife weep

food becomes an irritant

frailty an unwelcome presence

the idea seeks the death of self

The mind walks around in a daze

extraneous emotions are repressed,

elation is manifest,

I stand at the door of discovery

eager, to find the ether.

Nothing else matters while I obsess

waiting for the new thing,

the alarm bell to wring

All faces look the same

I pause to remember my last name

I s today Thursday, Wednesday or Friday?

Better look it up on the newspaper stand

After two weeks the energy flags.

Beneath my bright, burning, tired eyes there are bags.

Now is the time for lazy torpor.

I will sleep all day

Desi Dreams

2011-04-08T15:59:00.001-07:00

Before you kill him make him holler

For you the club was worth the forty dollars

Standing in high heels that kill

The dj moves the wheels of steel.

Even though you claim Punjab

People mistake you for A-rab

Your parents schemes about a brokered marriage

Are nixed because of the dude's wack ass carriage.

But what the fuck do I know writing shit in this screed?

My last woman's appetite for destruction was an unending need.

Stoked by something inside her she would constantly feed.

Making enemies every where she peed.

she brought me low like burnt Njal's thrall

and now I drive slow with my homies

while listening to songs about the romies.

But now that its over

I will build a life in the clover.

Before you can ask a question

I apologize for the lengthy digression

That was old timey like three hour movie

with ten minute intermissions.

nowadays all things begin with commercial intercession.

Back to the people who created Chittalong

You were born like this

Into the world where black felt jackets

Are worn by the fantastic.

He has not seen your smile in a while and

In the frozen streets you make out

So that he knows there are no cold feet.

Into the great silence the speakers boom

like the birth of violence.

On Dancing

2011-04-08T15:58:00.001-07:00

As Patchenga plays their version of a Caribbean-Latin groove

I make smooth moves by which the eye is soothed

with my internal pilot I navigate through the valley of the octaves

Spelunking while petty dunking, exploring the caves filled with notes

I am lost in my own Eleusinian mystery

Will Orpheus send a girl to kiss me?

The squares sit in the high legged chairs

or else they stand and stare.

Their glasses are full of mixed drinks

Their minds are empty sinks

But I follow the beat of my hidden drum

A musician calls out with his fife

take away this musket!

Give back my undiscovered life!

Listen and feel loose when another plays the pipes of pan

we all dance to the bass guitarist named Stan

They glance at me with their deadly smiles

but in some I see looks of guile

Tom and Angel say “dont be like Marvin,

The paranoid android, created by Douglas Adams”

But I say there are people waiting for their chances

to go at me with their sharpened lances.

Because I am not caucasian some grimace

and internally question my right to existence.

I don’t want to end up like Othello, he became a very sad fellow.

There Shakespeare told a sad story; he never bores me.

Though I am sure that if not for Desdemona some would have found it comic

And laughed like in The Merchant of Venice

But Macbeth died with glory even though his deeds were one vast gory orgy

Oblivion

2011-04-08T15:57:00.000-07:00

I wake up in blurry, slurry haze.

Everything around me is as darker than deep space.

More empty than the void between the most distant galaxies.

This place is more remote than the earth's boiling core.

Am I floating face down?

Standing upside down?

Which direction is north by north west?

Am I now a being of pure intellect?

Has the body disappeared and left the mind at rest?

Is rest or infinite motion?

Remember the first law of mechanics, Newtonian!

But what is infinity in a place where time never exists.

Here no matter how you search there is no delta T in the mists.

Then as I become self aware

I return to me and remember the past.

Like orphic cultists in the land of the dead,

the true believers, the mystery seekers

who remember the life they lead.

Yes I recall, I am in my office.

Lying on the carpeted, cement floor.

It was Thursday, at one am, I was reading about computer deadlocks,

race conditions, and modern multitasking.

There air had become fetid, and stale.

I ad lain down on the floor for a brief rest.

I guess the power saving light plunged me into darkness.

What time is it?

Has the sun risen in the east?

I look at my luminous, diving watch.

The hands indicate it is ten minutes past two o'clock.

Time to get up!

Up I spring!

The lights are undimmed!

The computer's calender shows morn is yet to spring!

It is time to do more work.

Nayma

2011-04-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

I open the sliding window

watch which the direction the wind blows

send a message with 64 bits set to zero.

Through the eaves I see the departed

these ghosts have not yet started, instead their faces are mirages

which remember the weeping visages that threw down the burial corsages

in the gloaming I hear them moaning,

fighting the everlasting riptide, eventually as they lie drowning

I read the uncomprehending, unbending frowning.

like dead leaves twirling to the grey earth

that spiral in concentric swirls to the cosmic maelstrom

And the trees with their reds, browns yellows and greens

screen the river from these sights that would make it scream

Mirrors

2011-04-08T15:54:00.001-07:00

I ride past Franklin

Seward is now leeward

This is the block where Ali and Aki lived

I ride by their old home with a sigh in my heart

Smiling I reminisce, they needed a brand new start

The streets are the same, the buildings are early 20^th century plain

How times have changed.

We were all so young

my experiences were brave and new

setting on a voyage of discovery now I look for recovery

the grey yesterdays look sunny today

A remembrance of things past

old friends whose faces remain

their names are faded, forgotten stains

There was they guy I knew in '92.

with his MBA he was cool,

he traveled in Asia maybe even Istanbul

but it was a year of recession for fresh grads a great depression

In the old albums their faces make the mind reopen dusty cases

to find all the papers lost in the shuffle,

all collected in one great bundle

my inner voice answers with a great silence:

Kumar who taught me how to drive a car

Mai who filled my heart with doubt and angst

Musa the commie who was ultracool

There is still Brian with who I still chill,

Tom Magnuson when will we again talk about quiche?

In the Alexiad

2011-04-08T15:53:00.001-07:00

Went to Yosemite to experience an epiphany

'tho I'm highly rated

my daemon is unsated

what man can fight his 'chi

I can continue to ride one hundred miles to a thousand

As I write on this papyrus

the granite peaks, under my dusty feet weaken Osiris

But me, the vampire cyclist who grapples with Set

Loki is my chaotic aspect

Jumping off the precipice with Ophelia

into the waters of Lethe

In the meantime; try and fast, look to my last

seeking solace by sleeping under the stars

avoiding bars

consulting Mars

Doing yoga with ashuras

while Sun Tzu grins at you

As Apollo and Elegba I take a swigger of liquor

Putting my pedal to the metal

Revealing and deceiving with every word and breath

Distraction

2011-04-08T15:52:00.001-07:00

This will not be in a moldy précis

uncovered by dusty scholars using Lexis

maybe it will become part of the world’s lossage

but my words I would next exchange for a messy pottage..

When in an obscure province

Far from his lord and sovereign;

Machiavelli felt himself unable to cope

To prevent ending up dangling on a rope

He sought to return to court

Where he could engage in princely sports,

be a gentleman of scholarly comports.

I fasted for thirty days with Hindu ascetics

However my life is more hectic

I roll with neo-hippies, ex-yippies and those who get trippy.

But just down the block is my other spot

Where the Sufis in kufis meet their groupies.

Placing their souls in danger through their silly wagers

One or two wait for the beep of their pagers.

Our dialectics turn to ethics

But Amin strives to avoid sin

I hope he wins.

While our lives are static

We talk about mathematics

Seeking distraction in abstraction

Experiencing strange reactions while enjoying human interaction.

Logic is a constant topic ,

a long with the three religions Semitic.

All this prevents the bran from going lame

But what is this numbing pain,

am I the only one insane?

Just waiting to go down a western lane.

My folks think I am better off wed

I read this and shake my head

Dirge

2011-04-08T15:51:00.001-07:00

The aim of the dirge

Is to purge the heart

Of the urge to dwell on past sorrows.

Helps the mourner think of the morrow

After the desire to reminisce has expired

And memories are no longer bitter-sweet

The soul sprouts wings and leaves its’ dusty feet

No longer taking a look at the hindsight

Cutting off a forelock, drawn to the city of lost children

The mourner sails over to the bright lights

To wrestle with crocodiles

As Isis casts an inscrutable smile.

Boy

2011-04-08T15:50:00.001-07:00

Boy

Hey fun boy

run boy

rapid gun boy

don't act coy

we see through your silly ploys

I'll crush you like a useless tinker toy

don't hide behind those flimsy decoys

I will break you down like the walls of troy

rapid prototype you like dolomite

night after night I hear you cuss and fight

what a disgusting sight

your life is one fucked up sorry plight

you are needed as much as corn needs blight

remove yourself to the ends of the earth

or at least go and live on the island of Wight

You runt, stupid punk

how come you smell like moldy old cunt?

take your ass out of here before I hit you with your vanilla bunt

Maybe all you need is nine grams of lead

in the head

watch as I put the shining chrome to your dome

now I hear you moaning like an old crone

go ahead call your boy Roy

he's the next one I will destroy

he's hiding under that yellow traffic cone.

In the sweltering heat we eat a feast

beneath the aromatic pines

as we wash down a dish of fatted kine with glasses of falerian wine

we write myriads of lines about the art of seeking primes

this is our first recourse in hiding our discourse

from the prying eyes of onetime.

In the meantime..

you and your shady lady,

the one called Stacy who always acts crazy

we ignore your bleats and whines

no matter how much you pine for the old times

you and I both know you are the last of your kind

Lahab

2011-04-08T15:49:00.001-07:00

Scheming theoreticians and unethical logicians

Bamboozle the uninitiated with paradox

And tie eighty fivers in Gordian knots.

Leading astray with sharp cognates

laughing with sly prelates.

Wiping clean hands on bloody napkins

They summon Orpheus to sing

Stalin cooks fifty eight percent of his people in a cannibal stew

.the eloi prattle to the cattle about sacred battles

rantists are discredited as heretics and phantasists

Racing to the greener grass turns the humanity manic and frantic

The stewards make great sales

,quoting Thales and telling the

victims tales about great men, and,

how the march of history is inviolate,

Individual bliss is an unsure precipitate.

The fat man sits under the banyan tree

And laughs with glee

And tells you and me

to bear our doom

without looks of gloom.

Ciphers for Rowdy Snipers

2011-04-08T15:47:00.000-07:00

While the eighty fivers work

Their nine to fivers

Chasing the elusive dreams in the magazines

The poor righteous teachers, those perceiving fivers

Break the ciphers of the spirit snipers

I am the midnight rider

At this time Kelly is dreaming up another mad scheme

To make money off the Internet so that he can ride in a triple beam

Rasan reminisces about the mad science while renewing his license.

Clara has no cares, and Billy got rowdy when the piper said howdy.

Wily like a kufu you know not what we do

Why do you expect the devil to look after you?

But on this moonlit and foggy night as

I cycle through the mist think about what I miss

Look for a bird to hitch

At this hour the three witches cooked up a bitches brew

Macbeth gave in to his overweening ambition

But his grimy deeds killed his sleep made him weep and

Lead to an evil fruition.

I smash the icons with my steel fist

Like Abraham the son of Ham

Destroying the stones of the creators

who were prolific though their ideas were monolithic.

Cruelty's Calculus

2011-04-08T15:45:00.001-07:00

As we put a glide in our stride,

go down the streets of Verona

oblivious like its ancient owners

cruelty's calculus is derived from the algebra of need

The germ of arrogance created a harvest of bitter seeds

a lingering taste of despair in the air

mingles with the smell of a laissez-faire.

Meanwhile in twilight's last gleaming

at the fork in the road the dusty sacrificial leavenings

meant for the lares whose grimaces now produce barren, nonchalant stares

whereas before with every myopic glare the worshipers would gesticulate, perambulate and wave their fingers in the fetid air.

Now the household gods mumble, grumble and frequently stumble

as they come down from their crossroads perches

and travel in slow fits and lurches to the remains of their somber repast

In the meantime I seek a nice heterai,

ignore the daltroi who speak in blatnoi

about the new orders

to send to Katorga

the zeks, the filthy wrecks.

who as they come to the approaches

appreciate the lives of lowly roaches

again the daltroi speak in blatnoi

and the zeks in the project get no respect.

Instead in Kalyma they expire while wearing shitty attire

the killers of menshevik concentrate in their laager

and try to get more free labor

eventually Irgun is sent to the Shogun

Thoughts While Canoing

2011-04-08T15:44:00.001-07:00

Like Flavor-Flave I am cold lamping

Spent the summer camping

In the stormy ocean but see land’s end

We go canoing down the St Croix

What was it called in the time of the Iroquois?

How was the Mississippi in the time of the Anishinabe?

When the river was full of sand banks and dead logs made artificial bogs

What did De Soto see?

When he dreamed of gold his men chortled with glee

But he found a watery grave

His men went back to war, and wrote a conqueror’s history.

I wish I could see the time when Indians went father than the eye sees

I would travel for an age through five foot purple sage

Explore the Yucatan with pen in hand

See California with only native fauna

You may say I dream a lot

But even Beowulf could not restore the dead to Heorot

As we paddle down the murky stream

Antennas end my waking dream

The sight returns me to the current age.

Turn the page.

Currently we are taught to live by lease

From this practice I try to desist

Will end somehow my addiction to consumption.

It is a wasting disease.

Or else my work will never cease

But how when this world is based on rivalry?

Also all living things strive to increase.

Al I want is internal peace

Apart from bread we all look for three people to hold

What happens when your soul is sold?

Some turn to drugs,

hoping to see space fold

then they degenerate into a walking mold

Don’t be like Croesus who ignored the words of a bum.

For when Darius came he was stunned by the words of his surviving son.

Mountain Mansch

2011-04-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

We are the big headed ones

thick headed, prolific ones

The cranium is in equilibrium

moving from certainty to uncertainty

finding chaos in dynamics

and quantizing the sun, moon and stars

This one he designs a metric for desire,

took the mystery out of fire.

Knowing what others know not

he discovers that abstraction is a distraction

from a reality where imagination is enslaved by nations

imagination is used in the creation of smart duds, scuds

exploding mines that kill wearers of lugz

Should we like Nietsche drown in our sea of troubles

decree the soul is obsolete

and then sell it for less than a moldy antique?

Just remember that all the ubermensch

died in a stinky, shit filled trench

sixty years downwind I still hear stench

The national poet goes into a long kvetch

about stating without a doubt the evil has been wiped out

But look into the hearts of the men, talk to your spiteful friends

as we dance with our dijjns the game is called one man up,

don't worry about your sins.

The small man who looks like a louse

lets out a thunderous shout

so he implements his fiendish plan

jumps from the fire into the pan.

Ogbanje (Happy 30th Birthday!) :-)

2011-04-08T15:40:00.001-07:00

As the universe rotates

a Brahms symphony plays in the background while I meditate.

Give homage to the selves which are no more

The ogbanjes that returned to the land of before

Look! My old daimons just walked out the door!

Leaving behind a trail of atomic particulates,

the muons, protons, electrons and bosons

have all been replaced.

But there remains one cell which still oscillates!

So now that I am on a different dimensional gradient

how can I give the same name to the ones that are late?

Ifrits bathe my feet as I wrestle with my chi'

and we journey to the land of Osiris

at the crossroads where the willows weep over the slaying of Hiram Abiff

triple breasted Inanna sings a dirge to Gilgamesh,

the warrior defeated in his sleep.

Born under the Dioscourii, being of three minds,

ascending like a phoenix

dying triumphant at the zenith.

Thrice majestic, laughing at the tragic farce.

Born in the east traveling to a land where we fight for peace

I choose not to bow to Obatala,

left Sango a while ago,

drank from the well of Santeria,

Stood by the river with the deadly Yale

Sang an elegy for Elegba in a hidden vale

Loki the bored trickster became malicious

He caused the fall of Asgard, brought death to the righteous.

His construction of destruction lead Odin to kill without compunction.

Avoiding and seeking Jagua Nana

Solon never visited Ijekun-Yemoja

So why did Athens send bronze greaved soldiers

Wearing stove pipe hats, on ships full of rats?

The helots on Pelops goto sankofa

Leaving the men of rope to cope

with their perfidious notes that make the greeks weep

As they reap the fruit of the sinister miasma

Traveling from Laconia

spreading an Argive cancer.

Deeds and needs are never parsed

Syntax is not fantastic.

My dark horse is in anguish

‘cos like Prometheus bound my semantics languish

chained to a ball of clay

all I do is stalk with the feet of prey.

Daughter From Danang

2011-03-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

I originally posted this as a comment on Resist Racism and decided to put my comment here.

I saw it and found it fairly sad. She did not understand the desperate circumstances that her birth family was in. Unfortunately some of her cousins who assumed that she was wealthy were too much to handle. I think she became afraid that these people she had never known did not see her as a real person and she decided never to go back.
She was trying to get a long with her birth mother but the male cousins who assumed that she would understand the nature of extended familial relationships in Vietnam probably scared her off. The mother was very sad since she had never wanted to loose her daughter.
As to the daughter I think that without really knowing it she might have bought into stereotypes about Vietnamese people that her southern adopted mother her Caucasian husband, friends, neighbours and others might have unconsciously feed her without knowing.
I saw this film after spending a year reading what you have to say about international adoption and I think it raised many issues that you are familiar with and that you have probably seen already.
I felt some sympathy for everyone especially since I immigrated to the US from an African country and can see why the extended family people might have acted the way they did. I also know how people helping their relatives has been abused.
When I think about it too there might have been some things have to deal with gender since as I said it was some of her male cousins who asked her to help them.
As a person of colour I found the documentary somewhat problematic. On the other hand it was about the adopted lady and her family all speaking in their own voices and being who they are which was good. I don’t think she ever plans on getting in touch with her Vietnamese extended family which is unfortunate since she might be closing the door to an aspect of her self.

I saw the film in August and cannot remember all the details. I think that if I met an African who was taken from the land of his birth as a very young child ad returned there from the United States as a mid thirties adult to see their extended family and then decided that they never wanted to go back there I think I would be disturbed by that.
However, if the African-American was able to really articulate why and they had been spending time with their relatives via email, phone calls, facebook and other things for some time then it would be even more weird. However if they just up and left one day and had only been exposed to Boston Brahmin culture and then the next day are in Ivory Coast and decide to never go back to Ivory Coast I might think that they were a little naive in expecting it to be easy.
It would not mean that they are bad or anything like that simply that they were in over their head and might have setup potentially enriching relationship up to fail from not exposing themselves to their birth culture and its people on its own terms.
Their relatives would also be as naive and ignorant for expecting the person who has been separated from them throughout their childhood and adulthood to be like them.
The documentary could have got more into the people’s internal lives and showed us more about previous interactions between the woman and her extended birth family.
Again I watched the film some time ago and might have missed some things.

A Joke

2011-03-25T16:42:00.001-07:00

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=772#comic

It starts with sit down and tell us all a tale....

2011-03-22T20:38:00.001-07:00

I was tempted to fall in love with a Gun Street girl
who could blow a hole in a yellow corvette.
I saw her pole dancing in a Birmingham jail.
But I get nervous when I hear slamming doors.
and don't want to leave Waukegan anymore.

I saw a weeping Smith & Wesson wise man
fix a broken toilet with an old trombone and
day old bread soaked in kerosene. And he kept saying;
"John, John he's long gone. Gone to Indiana and he ain't never coming home."

Now I ride the rails to Barstow before the Free Train Riders of America finds me here.
Tomorrow I will buy a second hand nova from a Cuban-Chinese
As the Burlington-Northern went click clack on rain rusted tracks.
He kept one hand on his pistol and the other on the hatchback's driver door

The gun street girl bangs on the table with an old tin cup and sings about John, John
But he's long, gone to Indiana and he ain't never coming home.
So she get all liquored up on that road house corn.

We saw Zaitochi's moment of zen stitched onto a heart on a Saturday night,
It was special.
With his head full of bourbon and Kurosawa dreams in the straw. he stayed out
of circulation till his dogs got tired.

I took a hundred dollars from Slaughterhouse Joe
and bought a brand new Michigan twenty gauge.
As I walked out the door in my fireman's raincoat I said
I will never kiss a Gun Street girl again.
I will never kiss a Gun Street girl again.

The thunder and the roar
sumbitches never coming back here for more
I lay my hand of the pocket full of rain
Malcolm went up to Haarlem with a 45 in his jeans
He tried to use it on all his bad dreams
Steam steam, punk all those made schemes
Look at the shine, the shine of this Roosevelt dime
Its taking me to Baltimore because I am running out of time.
Riding on the the train in my Cincinnati jacket with a sad luck dame.

Steam, steam punk all those mad schemes
Malcolm went to Haarlem with a 45 in his jeans.
He tried to use it on all his bad dreams
Time, time, were running out of time
Can't buy principles unless you put them on the line.

We will hang down our heads tomorrow
Hang down our heads for Poe and his sorrow
Lend us your memories for tomorrow
So we can hoist that rag.

The sun is up and that will draw fire to the baby's cries.
Smoke is blackening out the sun
Tonight I read Company Aytch and clean my gun.
We have to open fire when we hit the shore
Incoming makes my ears ring as the tommy guns sing
Steel jackets with tracers declare all is fair in love and war
Hoist that rag.

Handsome Johnny cries for his mother and dies.
he drove an MG and listened to the Bee Gees.
I think of Keep The Aspiridita Flying as I lay dying
The sun is up and our world is flat
This rag will make damned good address for us rats.
Hoist that rag.

A Testament Of The Granola Chronicles

2011-03-05T18:32:00.000-08:00

And the Banji said let a glass mixing bowl be brought forth
And the mixing bowl was brought forth.

And the Banji said let a measure of the oats known as rolled be poured into the mixing bowl.
And as it is written so it was done.

And the Banji said let a pinch of salt, a tittle of vanilla, a jot of honey, a sprinkling of sugar brown, a graspling of cinnamon, and a pour of syrup of maple be added to the glass mixing bowl.
And as it is written so it was done.

And the Banji said let a handful of raisins be added to the bowl of mixing.
And the handful of raisins was added to the bowl of mixing.

And the Banji said let the contents of the glass bowl of mixing be stirred and mixed in a forthright and vigorous manner to ensure that the raisins, cinnamon, sugar brown, syrup of maple, honey, salt, and vanilla be homogeneously distributed among the oats known as rolled.
And is is written so it was done.

And the Banji said let the receptacle of heating be set to 325 degrees and
And as it is written so it was done.

And the Banji said let the contents of the bowl of mixing be poured into the pan of baking that has been greased with the butters of Wisconsin. Furthermore let the mixture be spread evenly on the pan of baking.
And as it is written so it was done.

And the Banji said let the pan of baking be placed into the receptacle of heating for a time of 7 time five minutes.
And as it is written so it was done.

And the Banji said, "Thus sayeth the Banji verily, verily I say onto thee that after a period of 7 times 5 minutes the mixture in the pan of baking will have turned a golden brown and I will bring it out of the receptacle of heating for its roasting and caramelizing will be complete."

And it came to pass that in the time interval of seven times five minutes that the Banji brought out the golden brown mixture for it was caramelized and it was roasted well nigh to completion.

And after an interval of cooling the Banji said, "Behold I have brought you forth granola for pennies on the dollar that granola mafia charges for the similar product. So from this day forth may all your birkenstock wearers, hippies, regularity chasers, and ancillary consumers of the oatmeally derived goodness cease to worship at the doors of Cascadian Farms, at Kashi, at Kellogs, or at the one known as Bare Naked brand."

After he had completed speechifying his speech the Banji poured the wonder called granola into the bowl of eating and added milk of soy. And the Banji said let the golden brown granola be tasted and he proceeded with the tasting and the snacking and the eating, and the chewing till the granola was eaten up and verily the soymilk was drunk up.

And after the completion of this act the Banji pronounced the granola good and he slept for he was sated.

Making Life Easy With Pgrep & Pkill

2011-02-24T06:14:00.000-08:00

When I was a young Unix wannabe and whenever I would need to kill a process I would go through this rigmarole.

Look up the process id with ps -elf | grep
Kill the process with kill

Nowadays on Fedora I do the same thing except that you know have to send kill the signal, which for my purposes is usually 9.

Now instead of doing all of that I simply type

pgrep

pkill

This is cleaner since it shows all the app's process ids and I do not need to filter.

Whipping the Donkey To A Randian Paradise

2011-02-22T06:44:00.000-08:00

In a better world blinkered idiots like Megan McArdle, Andy "Bellcurve" Sully, and David "fscking Bobo" Brooks who never let fact drage them away kicking and screaming from their tin foil where they heat their hits Ayn's Amphetamines and Conservatism's crack. The tin foil which is the valueless heterosexual dollar.

In a better world them and Thomas "Moustache of Misunderstanding" Friedman would be working in a strip mall of second hand shoe stores, Dollar Generals, and the Golden Corral is closing because Randy's Roadkill Restop has better food. In a better world these pundits for plutocracy would be selling ad copy at half a cent a word to The Montana Sandwich Board Marketers Association. Occasinoaly they would cough up the cancerous lies that they got from spending a thousand and one nights taking bong hits from toxic fumes of Atlas Shrugged in their pseudorandian sheesha pipes.

In a better world Steve Gilliard who was right about so much would be writing about Obama's America in the pages of Atlantic Monthly. Not dying in some gray fucking hospital that had been disinfected of its healing touch by nonchalance and neglect between incestuous sheets with neoliberalism and neoconservatism in a chemical wedding they gave froth children who wander the streets of earth crying rust! rack! ruin! With bills of attainder signed by GATT and letters of marquee and reprisal authorized by the WTO they sail ships of states bringing low intensity class warfare like the G7 like the G7

Driftglass Interviews Mario Savio About Cell Phones

2011-02-18T08:38:00.000-08:00

This interview took place at the Starbucks across the street from the Haight Ashbury communal chard garden. Not the Starbucks thats right next to the heirloom tomato nursery. The interview occurred on Monday February 30th 2009, When he found out that I am one of his big fanboys Mr DG gave me permission to excerpt this small part of the interviews since he hates everything about cell phones.

Driftglass: So do many people call you about protests they want to start?

Savio: Surprisingly yes but they are mainly evangelical students who want my advice on using the fairness doctrine as a way to bring Intelligent Design into Biology departments. Sometimes The Association Of Responsible Mountain Top Removal Companies will ask me to go to congress to give a protest speech. And most shockingly Free Teapartiers Of America hired me as a consultant for their campaigns.

Driftglass: How does it feel to have all these groups coopt your message?

Savio: Its very strange, sometimes it makes me feel that the real Mario Savio is dead, its kinda like an exercise in how to disappear completely. But then my phone rings.

Driftglass: What do you do when your phone rings?

Savio: At times the ringing of the phone becomes so odious, makes you sick at heart, you can't even hit passively hit mute. And you've got put your feet upon the nokias, and upon the androids, upon the iphones, drape your body upon the towers and make it stop, And you've got to indicate to the people that own it, to Sprint, and Glo that if they don't make texting after 5 pm free, the cellular network will be prevented from working at all.

Driftglass: Well thank you for your time Mr. Savio and thank you for protesting in the 60s.

Savio: It was a pleasure, I have to go now I hear Stairway to Heaven playing.

I Want A Cookie

2011-02-16T11:15:00.001-08:00

Zonet ZW2545 With Fedora 13

2011-02-14T19:13:00.000-08:00

Ha! Some of the reviews of this usb wireless dongle said that no configuration was needed to get it working with Ubuntu. So I ordered it and found out that some configuration was needed to make it work under Fedora13.

Running lsusb, dmesg will have you think that it needs an rt2870 driver but that information is misleading. As was stated in this Fedora Forum thread the modules needed are kmod-rt3070 and akmod-rt3070.

Once I installed them with yum and restarted the machine the wireless dongle was detected. I ended not changing anything in /etc/Wireless/RT3070STA/RT3070STA.dat though I did add rt2870 & rt3070 to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

A Lousy Limerick

2011-02-10T18:16:00.000-08:00

Paul drove a van into the dyk when it broke urbal beats gushed forth into the town of buuren
where Armin was cruisin' that oompah sound mixed big bass with humming bird tweets. nudged a reflections on his perspective. He kicked off his pants and danced like King Saul when he was in a state of trance.

Play Through!

2011-02-10T18:00:00.000-08:00

When the elephant of ennui
is carrying reluctant you
to the graveyard of lost hours
Jump off and play through!

Looking For Divisional Dreams In Cheap Thrill's Seams

2011-02-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

I once knew a girl who tried to sing with the voices of the two Js.
Janis Joplin & Joanna Newsom after a three day bender of
deriving rhymes to alcoholic patcholi scented beats,
distilled into a cup of exurban folk blues.

She roller skated through the pages of her book of days.
Down unnamed streets, dealing out impulsive cards
to which her friends raised selfish stares
and called her bluff of love.

She placed her bets with the cards marked cheap thrills
A smart man named tasty chard knew the fake ante
To her only one thing was real on the roulette of rules.
A girl with a David Lynch tattoo says he is her film beau.

A red great coat in a castle of mush and ice.
Once she beat my taut tummy like a ten foot sacrificial drum.
in a room where pachengas made us linger.
I laughed like a daimon sleeping in the Iroko tree's leaves.
All this was stencilled in the year two thousand and three.

Thunder Perfect Mind

2011-02-10T17:22:00.000-08:00

I walk among the baobab trees
as lightning flashes messages in the cool breeze.
black plastic bags, little flags to the death of elephant grass,
dance in the wind's summoning rapture,
before returning to give the ground a fouling embrace.

I smell the polymer sacrifice rising to a god of whom the people are dreaming.
Spies from the Lord of Flies grab their share of glass of star.
And I write another sentence, with my back hunched in a metal, ribbed, chair.

Outside, outside, under gray skies full of dust
I passed by patient cows,
dessicated and lean,
The egrets pick their children clean.

Inside, inside
Stare into the abyss of souls
and the birth of tragedy stares at you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the odium of joy flies past you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the clatter of consciousness questions you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the rites of reason spring past you.

Stare into the abyss of souls
and the pilot of passion directs you.

There you are in the underbelly of uncertainty,
reading the entrails of rancid revealators.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity
no straight thing was ever made.
So we might as well indulge in gin and tacos
while doing back flips with wacos.

Now in the winter of my discontent I will be lazy.
And face the book of womanist musings.
Alter the destiny of mad biologists
through lawyers, guns and money.
An angry asian man takes the hammer of resistance to racism.
Where a panda has gone to eat shoots and leaves.
I laugh with driftglass darkly
at the hullabaloo raised by Captain snarky.
In the fields of dark black
tenacitus starts a tirade on the intersection of madness and reality.
And Killadelphia's finest battles the president of Anon Inc.

This is the message of Thunder's perfect mind.
Some heard the music of delusional spheres
and others in the static scream saw trillions of electrons
discarding photons on the celestial dome.
Thunder perfect mind dwells in mankind.

A Kaddish While I Cling

2011-01-25T01:53:00.000-08:00

Tonight god is a DJ
mixing cords for a jumping horde.
in the land of strobe lights and fog
worshippers moving their hands to lift this.

Tonight god is a DJ who understands the music of spheres.
he improvises with the zeitgeist of our times.
preparing us for the age of spiritual machines.
programmers make a database of dreams
I need an algorithm to quantify sorrow.

Tonight god is a DJ wearing a thousand faces.
He went on a journey to bring us insan kamil
so we bop our heads to the rhythm of the collective unconscious.

Tonight god is a DJ whose rites led death to spring forth
as we render the flesh and sing.
about the imperative of categories

Tonight god is a DJ who embraces my loving paraclete,
who is a true solider of arete.
Reality, expediency's favourite whore
plays the triangle like a mercenary
so that I can dance for tips from
the motorcade of generosity.

Last night the DJ saved my life.
He synchronized it with terminal strife
Tonight I dance to the beat in my blood.
Tonight I hang my head celebrating sorrow.

Tonight god is a DJ
next door they play 300 variations of kama sutra
I listen to a song about sunflowers from a
long dead, aspiring, gay, bodhisattva.

Tonight god is a DJ who named his synthesizer a clockwork orange.
The crowd chants "Abraxas to that!"
Last night Kelly and I did verse , right now I think of my exwife
and our failed universe.

Listen o muse and sing about the body electric.
A timeless song about the triumph death wins.
I cling to the kaddish of researching
unknown worshippers of Samash
Better men were drive to dipsomania from dealing with life's mundania.

Its That Of Vim Buffer Foliding Command Trick

2011-01-23T12:23:00.000-08:00

:bn - goto next buffer
:bp - goto previous buffer
-PgUp - goto next buffer
-PgDn - goto next buffer

:tabe - open a tab before this one.
:tabc - close current tab
:tabo - close other tabs
gt - switches to next tab
gT - switch to previous tab

za - toggle current fold closed or open
zr - open one folding level
zm - close one folding level
zM - close all folds
zO - open all folds

zo

Fairly Rare Books I Want to Buy

2011-01-21T12:05:00.000-08:00

Every now and then find out some novel or work of history that The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

The Panchatantra

Shahnameh

Pharaoh

A Legend of Old Egypt

Anything I can get by Albert Robida

Replacing Vim Special Characters

2011-01-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

I wrote my first LaTeX macro today which makes some things much easier and prettier. As I was cleaning up my files I needed to substitue a string with the command \spath{}. Well vim did not put the "\" since its an special charater for the substitue function.
Five minutes of searching and I learned that to escape these special chars use the \\. So typing

%s#original-string#\\\spath{}#g

Made the change. Thank you internet machine!

All True Nigerians Like Pepper

2011-01-17T10:13:00.000-08:00

Especially with chillies in them. But no true Nigerian likes to get chilly weather.

China Vs USA

2011-01-14T02:48:00.000-08:00

via Battlepanda

Holy Fliberty Gibbet!

2011-01-11T20:31:00.000-08:00

Every time I see this video I think it needs to be washed down with Brughel's Triumph Of Death as a chaser. If every song brought out the same emotions in me as Carmina Burana does and every picture triggered the same thoughts as The Hanging Tree I think I would sleep with both eyes open and have dreams that consist of me seeing the word WOW! with every heartbeat. Fortunately most art is weak tea not 100 proof caffeine crystals This is truly the best of all possible worlds.

It was because of *ish like this I used to be up till 2 am watching the AARTS channel. Astound Cable of St Cloud you ruined me for other television.

Kicking And Pushing

2011-01-11T20:03:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I like about Mr. Fiasco is that in a number of songs with a few words he is able to conjure an image that describes the activities and passions that go with doing something that you love. I have never skateboarded but have known people do skateboard. Like most athletes they have a strong emotional need that they meet by skateboarding and of course there is feedback from doing it more.

I've always liked both versions of Kick Push and finally found a link to the official video. Right now in my life I am back to kicking and pushing, hoping that next year there will be opportunities to coast every now and then. Unfortunately they do not allow embedding of the video.

Reading PDFs & Jpegs In The Terminal

2010-12-30T06:33:00.001-08:00

Everynow and then I need to look at a pdf in the console. To do this fb is used to create a framebuffer to get fb install fbida-fg package.

Eclipse Autocomplete

2010-12-28T18:53:00.000-08:00

To get instant autocompletion in Eclipse goto Windows → Preferences → Java → Editor → Content Assist → Auto-Activation

Then set Auto-Activation to zero, or a number much smaller than the 200 ms delay.

Something Old

2010-12-28T09:04:00.000-08:00

This was the first thing that I ever wrote that seemed to be any good to me.

Ponder, Command and Conquer

more signals at eleven
This is an object of type IOConciousStream

I am the invisible man
wandering the land of the ghosts
In triple darkness my cipher is manifest
without a living dharma would there be karma?
I create mad vibes for my tribe

While we ponder, and wander
about creation of our nation
Seeking ethereal simulation
by engaging in random procreation
can you have a sunflower sutra
without the creation of a latin sura?

I get high off seminal earth, the windy word and the cleansing fire.
While you and I verse we can deceive entropy and the hearse

This life is a trial on the truth forsooth none of can escape the noose
And while sipping on crushed grapes I contemplate
Ghandi the Askari sitting under Olumo,
dancing on Pluto and laughing at Profumo.

Well, I init call on PlanB which floats the function,
ActiveMeasures(int p*)
We issue a final call, a clarion to all or if you want
wear the grinning mask and engage in scheming tasks
but remember that the Ghostface Killer and Bobby Digital will overthrow your whole citadel

We close like Ibn Khaldun yelling koom fa ya koom
And voice cries out in the wilderness Iqra! Iqra! Before your doom Ahad laila Ahad !

I am the invisible man surrounded by ghosts and motes
I drop lyrics and rimes to hebephrenics
Integrate with surds and paralleize the new ontogeny

people instill fear in their progeny
due to their own mental dichotomies
we all commit crimes in chasing dimes
heed the word and weed your deeds

Thank you patient reader

Banji Trimegistus, Kassim Ibn Hammed

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Don’t make me get all iambic on your pentameter

Fixing Update-alternatives' No such file or directory Messages

2010-12-28T00:02:00.000-08:00

I found out that if I get the message "failed to read link /usr/bin/: No such file or directory" removing and recreating the symlink helped. Below are the steps that I followed, this was all by trial and error, reading the alternatives man page and looking at what people have posted on the web.

When an error message in the form, failed to read link /usr/bin/: No such file or directory was sent by alternatives I would do an ls -l to see where the symlink was pointing.
Remove the symlink /usr/bin/ if it was pointing to /etc/alternatives.
Create a new symlink in /usr/bin/ pointing to /usr/java/jdk1.6.0.21/bin/.
Run /usr/sbin/update-alternatives –install /usr/bin/ $JAVA_HOME/bin/ $JAVA_ALTERNATIVE_PRIORITY
Do /usr/sbin/update-alternatives –auto

After I went through all the steps I did not get any complaints from Fedora and my Java seemed to be correct.

Update

To see exactly where the ymlinks are pointing too use the ll command. An example of its output is below.

$ ll /usr/bin/javasw
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Dec 28 01:20 /usr/bin/javasw -> /etc/alternatives/javasw

Unfortunately running ll /usr/bin/jar gives a no such file or directory message. Typing jar works but need to make sure its the right jar. so that when I call on libraries they will be the right ones.

Beautiful photos

2010-12-27T23:08:00.001-08:00

Come and see.

Configuring Alternative Packages in Fedora

2010-12-27T15:22:00.000-08:00

In this world of multiple Javas and other packages, and Debian created the alternative system to make it easy to pick which implementation of of a package should be selected. Though the man page is helpful Chris Taylor's Wednesday Why gives a succinct explanation of why Fedora adopted this technology.

Most of the time to set up an alternative do the following command:

sudo alternatives --install

For example if I have jdk1.6.0_21 & jdk1.6.0_23 installed and I want to use the latter's compiler I would do,

sudo alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23/bin/javac 16023

That way if jdk1.60.21's files are untouched by the symlink /usr/bin/javac now points to /usr/java/jdk

From what I have read so far alternatives is a good way of managing symlinks on your system.

Wporta shows how to install and configure Java for a 64 bit system. I might write a bash script to automate this configuration if there is a need. Another good resource is here.

An Old Vim Buffer Trick

2010-12-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

When switching between buffers I usually forget that instead of typing :nextbuffer I can simply do :b where is the number of the next buffer. Or even better yet;

<CTRL>-^ to switch to the next buffer

To open the buffer in a new window in a new window <CTRL>-w followed by <CTRL>-^

With all those short cuts why remap the keys as Gmikeus shows us. butin matters of workflow there is no disputation. I do like Gmikeus' article which contains a lot of cool info.

I still find it easier to type :b in command mode. Well if I ever forget again I will look at either the buffer FAQ or vtk.org's useful commands list.

Hopefully now that I've written this the vim short cuts will ne'er be forgot.

Hip Hop Was A Popular Art Form And It Still Is

2010-12-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

Almost all the shots in DWYCK are closeups. Its possible that they were made with a handheld on some kind of stand. Furthermore since there are a number of cuts they only needed one camera person. Having one camera person probably helped keep the costs of video production cheaper, its possible that Gang Starr got one of their friends to shoot and edit the video. I would not be suprised if the dancers were friends or around-the-way girls.

Oh My God! Fela Also Played Rock!

2010-12-27T08:07:00.000-08:00

The beginning of Confusion starts with something that sounds like Stereolab's mellow mix of drums, and horns with synthesizers. Then I heard a mix of rhythms that sounded like a dash of the Doors bringing the big beat from Texas Radio

But then ... in the Juju of Kollington & Sunny Ade, that my parents listened to, the same bars were caressed on electric guitars. Some Indian music is so eerie because the beats are familiar, but its all irie. Its funny that Fela's and The Door's keyboarding sounds comes from the same place..

The music is a mellow chill song till the horns blow. The eruption of woodwinds quickens the blood and attacks the heart with its urgency. Then the maestro's big, confident voice, bursts out telling us the meaning of trouble. The voice tells us; "we all know I am larger than life. This is the essence of man, by this riff I conquer, for I make all rhythms new."

And yet despite the power of his songs it was not enough. The Zarathustra of his country who spoke to the new age but we had not killed of the old one instead it got coopted into reaction.

The Junkie's Christmas Part1

2010-12-25T15:10:00.000-08:00

The first ever piece of William Burroughs spoken word material that I ever heard was The Priest they called him. Later on I heard the Christmas version and the film never disappoints.

Getting the other parts of this fil is left as an exercise to the reader.

Use The Shift Command To Iterate Over Bash Positional Parameters

2010-12-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

I was writing a script where both an array and a string needed to be passed to a bash function. As in the example below.
On the caller's side there is no problem doing that but in the function is where the magic happens.

Funcer "$var1" "${anArray[@]}"

Now in Funcer imagine that our code was as such as

Funcer ()
{
local hostname="$1"
local host_params=("${2@}")

Bash's interpreter will assume that our array of args has only one item and will ignore $2. You might think that using the the the statement local host_params="${2[@]}" will be copacetic but then the interpreter will show you this is very wrong. The thing you need to do is use shift to move to the next parameter as shown below.

Funcer ()
{
local hostname="$1"
shift
local host_params=("${@}")
for host in ${host_params[*]} ; do

echo -en "\"$host\","
done

echo '\n'

} # ---------- end of function Funcer ----------

There is more information at here and in the ABS.

ALL CAPS For My Jellied SQLed Soul

2010-12-24T19:19:00.000-08:00

I have not been able to do anything with my C# project or bash scripts for the past two days my brain has been like jelly when it comes IT which makes Banji sad. To cheer myself up I watched MF Doom/Danger Doom videos which inspired me to write the piece of hack verse about some of my favourite things.

Two MF Doom Imitators walk into a bar.......
After eating peanuts from jars
and talking about state of Monster Island's Czars
they compared rhyming scars

In the heat of arc lights
after much fuss, and a short fight
one sent out a stream of glossolalia in hex
The second pseudoinnovator cleared a cache with expect.
(he needed a place to store the beloved paraclete)

Then under the singing leaves
Deborah consults with a Bible Geek
about the location of the furthest babbling brook,
They need a place to dry the pages of a profane book.
while dancing to the tunes of Apook.
I guess this is no Burroughs material,
unlike his stuff my pages are ethereal

That is why I drove myself to Mexico.
so that I could here I on I's Dead City radio.
chanting "born like this", I wear horns like this.
Walk like a Tool Master of Brainerd
on a pilgrimage to the newest iteration of Hurd
I eat corn and fish, the two of them together are most delish.

The destroyer is here, but never fear
Since they cut down all the Yage
how can they take a gauge
on your bersker rampage?
Are you an archon engaging in a little kayfabe? ;-)

Now hear comes Elijah with his sacred hair on fire
Enoch recites the Babylonian King List for Enkidu who makes a moue
at the 365th, new you
Angel headed hipsters haloed in street lights
pick up the fight against reactionaries
in stalhhelm
All because the Cannon Group gave them a dare!
But this ain't no night of long knives,
or the rebirth of Dr Fibes.

Thats as silly as a mash up of Iggy Pop in The Land That Time Forgot.
The scissors of fate made their cut
to late and now
axis mundi has gone bye.
Louis! Louis! can you ken why?

Mlk holds us in his brass embrace.
Dipping us into the fire of Golgotha
As his Ashera sings us assurances
culled from the best of commercial occurrences
Parnassus on his wheels of steel laughs because
the sacrifices will not bring Carthage into the new age.
He read the entrails of a million snails to pierce the future's veil.
With one eye he peers into infinite night.

I drink rockstars while Carmela's daughter parks cars
The psychopomp on a horse
dances over Nietzsche's corpse
In the meantime King Geedorah walks in,
from looking at 42 views of sin.
With his mouth agape, and knees aquake he
sees;
the Germans with street sweepers
the MF Doom praise keepers,
the figments of imagination from many nations
And he asks what video brought about this strange discourse?
And we shout Why ALL CAPS of course!

A Flac to Mp3 Conversion Shell Script

2010-12-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

I've had to do it enough times that I wrote a script yesterday to automate the conversions for me. There is a related one for converting aac files to mp3. Eventually I will just build one app that will convert any audio format to mp3.

#!/bin/bash 

numOfArgs=$#

DIR_NOT_FOUND=12
DIR_FOUND=0

FLAC_FILE_UNREADABLE=7
HELP_DISPLAY_VAL=5

NUM_OF_TAGS=6

#Audio File Metadata Tags
artist=""
track_num=""
song_title=""
genre=""
album=""
year=""

trash="/home/griot/.local/share/Trash/files"
log_file="flac_conversion.log"

declare -a tagList           # Store the tags in this array

#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  DisplayUsage
#   DESCRIPTION:  Prints help information and exits  
#    PARAMETERS:  
#       RETURNS:  HELP_DISPLAY_VAL
#===============================================================================
DisplayUsage() 
{
    echo -e
    echo -e "usage: $0 [directory]"
    echo -e "Options:"
    echo -e " -h or --help or displays options for $0"
    exit $HELP_DISPLAY_VAL
} 

# Statements dealing with calling the help function.
# If no args are given to fix_permisions then call DisplayUsage.
if [[ "$numOfArgs" -lt 1 ]]; then 
   DisplayUsage
fi

# If first arg is -h or --help call DisplayUsage.
if [[ "$1" == "-h" || "$1" == "--help" ]] ; then
    DisplayUsage
fi 

flacDirectory="$1"

#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  FillsTagList
#   DESCRIPTION:  Fills the taglist array with a flac file's metadata
#    PARAMETERS:  Gets passed a flac file
#       RETURNS:  Should return an error if there is problem (not done yet)
#===============================================================================
FillsTagList ()
{
    local ftc_flacFile="$1"
    local count=0

    # Create a tmp file where the flac metadata is stored.
    touch flac_tags.tmp
    metaflac --export-tags-to=- "$ftc_flacFile" > flac_tags.tmp

    BACKIFS=$IFS
    IFS=$'\n'

    exec 0<flac_tags.tmp
    
    for line in $(cat flac_tags.tmp) ; do 
        tagList[$count]=${line##*=}
        ((count++))
    done

    # Now that we are done delete the tmp file.
    rm flac_tags.tmp
    unset count
}    # ----------  end of function FillsTagList  ----------


#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  GetSongMetadata
#   DESCRIPTION:  The data that we got from FillsTag is put into the tag
#                 variables.
#    PARAMETERS:  Uses global variables
#       RETURNS:  Later on will make it throw an error code if there are
#                 problems.
#===============================================================================
GetSongMetadata ()
{
    local fileName="$1"
    FillsTagList "$fileName"

    artist=${tagList[0]}
    song_title=${tagList[1]}
    album=${tagList[2]}
    year=${tagList[3]}
    track_num=${tagList[4]}
    genre=${tagList[5]}
    
}    # ----------  end of function GetSongMetaData  ----------


#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  ConvertsToMp3
#   DESCRIPTION:  Sends a flac file to functions that get its metadata.
#                 When the metadata is acquired then convert the flac to an
#                 mp3 using a bitrate of 256.  
#    PARAMETERS:  a flac file.
#       RETURNS:  FLAC_FILE_UNREADABLE 
#===============================================================================
ConvertsToMp3 ()
{
    local flacFile="$1"

    # We only want to convert files that are not copyprotected (DRM free).
    if  [ ! -r "$flacFile" ] ; then
        echo -en "$flacFile is unreadable.  ConvertsToMp3 error code "
        echo -e "$FLAC_FILE_UNREADABLE, (copyprotected flac file)."
        return $FLAC_FILE_UNREADABLE
    else
        # Next call GetSongMetadata to fill the IDv3 tags.
        GetSongMetadata "$flacFile" 
        
        flac -dc "$flacFile" | lame -b 192 -h --ta "$artist" --tn "$track_num"\
            --tt "$song_title" --tl "$album" --tg "$genre" --ty "$year" \
            --add-id3v2 - "${flacFile%*.flac}.mp3" &>>$log_file
    fi

    mv "$flacFile" "$trash"

}    # ----------  end of function ConvertsToMp3  ----------


#===  FUNCTION  ================================================================
#          NAME:  VerifyDirectory
#   DESCRIPTION:  Tests if the directory given as arg to script exists.
#    PARAMETERS:  $1 (directory to search for text files.)
#       RETURNS:  either DIR_FOUND or DIR_NOT_FOUND
#===============================================================================
VerifyDirectory ()
{
    local targetDir="$1"
    echo -e "$targetDir in VerifyDirectory"

    if [ -e "$targetDir" ] ; then
        return $DIR_FOUND
    else
        echo -e "$targetDir not found sending $DIR_NOT_FOUND back"
        return $DIR_NOT_FOUND
    fi
}    # ----------  end of function VerifyDirectory  ----------


VerifyDirectory "$flacDirectory"
dirTestResut=$?
#echo "$dirTestResut was the result of calling VerifyDirectory"

if [[ "$dirTestResut" -eq "$DIR_NOT_FOUND" ]] ; then
    echo -e "Cannot find $flacDirectory"
    exit $DIR_NOT_FOUND
else
   cd "$flacDirectory"

   for file in ./* ; do
       
       if [[ ${file##*.} = "flac" ]] ; then
           ConvertsToMp3 "$file"
       fi

   done
fi

Also I am finding out that the bashsupport plugin for vim is very cool.

Rebuilding My Fedora 13 Kernel

2010-12-21T10:51:00.000-08:00

When I would use Slackware I did Kernel rebuilds every six months. But the first time I tried to do one in Fedora 5 it did not go well. After spending 5 hours I decided to stick with the standard FC kernels. All of that changed about two weeks ago.

My laptop would keep crashing and the network modules would fail for some reason. It was doing this daily and I got so tire of it that I decided that I would have to do the following things:

Remove unneeded modules and options from the kernel.
If it still gave me problems first look in the logs for messages
Run strace & ktrace on the applications that I was using during the panic.
If its still giving me problems rebuild the kernel again but this time with logging.

To rebuild the kernel I mainly just followed the steps in Timme's Howtoforge article.

The Rebuild Process

First find out exactly what hardware I have by running the commands either one of these commands lspci, or lshw. I did not need to run lsusb to see the usb devices since either of the two latter commands will give you that. Then After I followed steps 2 - 2.5 of Howtoforge's fedora compilation guide. But during step 2.5 I would do the following;

As I was selecting options for each kernel subsystem the output of lswh -class & lswh -businfo the output of lshw guided me in choosing what to include or not in my kernel. This customization took sometime, it also involved me looking up what certain kernel features did to see if enabling them would be of benefit to me. It took sometime to verify specific hardware variants but after spending most of the night on that I was done with the kernel config.

After I followed steps 2.6 - 2.7 I was able to reboot the laptop with the custom kernel on the first try. The fact that my compile and build went so smoothly tells you that Falko Timme wrote a good article on the kernel build process and I am not going to duplicate his instructions here.

Recompile's Impact

After I did that the have been no kernel panics and power management is working again. Before the kernel recompile if the laptop got disconnected for more than 5 seconds it would shut down. Even though it was supposed to go into hibernate mode it would not instead processes would die an ugly groody death, the disk would need to be fscked and I would get irritated about the cable being jostled.

Now the battery's power levels are detected again so I can run it for half an hour on the battery. There are no kernel panics and the apps are running better. Unlike the times when I used to rebuild my kernel for Slackware I did not have to go through separate steps to make sure that the sound & wifi cards were working. I'm guessing that at least for the wifi card since its built in and not using the PCMCIA slot it makes it easier for Linux-2.6.34.7 kernel to handle it.

Possible Project

Since it took me so long to get done with make menuconfig I think I will try and automate that step by generating a list of a machine's hardware then using that list of hardware components and desired services to turn on options in the kernel .config file.

That might cut down on the time I have to review the hardware. Then to take it to the next level actually have the kernel be built and installed on VM to see if it boots the machine. And if the build fails I can review why. But since the system is a lot more stable right now I will not be doing anymore troubleshooting of crashes since there have not been any mission critical failures in the past two weeks.

The Return Of Tom Waits Fridays?

2010-06-12T08:04:00.001-07:00

Job Hunting In Nigeria

2010-06-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

I noticed that many job announcements in Nigeria say that only candidates who are 30 or less will be trusted. For examples of this see the advertisements here and here. In the States, which I know about from working there, its possible to find a good DBA, Java programmer, or Sysadmin who is under 30 since many kids start dealing with these things from their teens; so they might already have 15 years experience.

But in 9ja with the slow networks, shallow internet & computer penetration most people who are even 30 have never dealt with backup tapes, some, built a RAID array or used tools like RT for trouble ticketing. Let alone have the experience dealing with things like SLAs, contracts, a major failure and the recovery from the failure, getting requirements, creating documentation, dealing with version control, backups will be harder. I first became aware of this because someone asked me about building an employment website for their firm and mentioned that they did not want anybody over thirty two applying.

When I asked the gentlement why their age matters and not weather they can carry out the tasks I was told that maybe an older person might have poor vision so cannot work as efficiently, might not like being supervised by someone who is younger.

I was very surprised to be hearing such things and mentioned that doing such things might not be ethical, or good business practices since all that should matter is does the person have the right skill set and are they willing to do the tasks.

Other things that I have seen is that people will only hire women as receptionists. When I discussed this with Jude he told me that women would br nicer to the customers, I pointed out that some women are not pleasant to be around but some men are; so why not make the requirements for the job a nice, friendly personality with good customer service skills instead of a young woman. He then told me that some of the men who come there will feel like they have a chance with her so they will come again. I still think that the approach to hiring is wrong and that with their age and gender discrimination these Nigerian employers are preventing a lot of good people from working for them. And after being exposed to the business and government ioperations I can see that these policies have not worked.

A Truth About Existence

2010-03-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

I did not write the stuff below, it was a post on slactivist by Scaramouche that I thought really captures the silliness & tragedy of the human condition. Anyway I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

One of my favorite blogs, the Waiter Rant, speaks eloquently to what you described here. He once had this to say:

When looking death in the face things get very real very quickly……..

I’m twenty one and doing a stint as a chaplain’s aide in a large gritty urban hospital.

Part of my job is to bring Communion to people dying in the AIDS ward. Most of the people wasting away in their beds are uninsured junkies or prostitutes. This is long before antiretroviral therapy. AIDS is poorly understood. Some people still wear masks out of fear of contagion.

Many of the people dying in this place are wracked with guilt. Remember how people used to say AIDS was God’s punishment for sinners? That’s not an abstract concept for many of these people. A lot of them made disastrous life choices - the consequences of which are now, remorselessly, killing them.

I’m too young and emotionally under equipped to be any real help to these people. I just try and listen. That’s hard. Some patients scream at me, driven insane by secondary infections that are rotting their brains. Others are stonily silent – not wanting help from anybody. Occasionally people find peace but that's rare. They cry, they bargain, they pray. All the things people do as they rage against the dying of the light.

Maria is a drug addict. She got AIDS from years of mainlining heroin. Her baby, the result of exchanging sex for drugs, died of AIDS. She has no family or friends. She lies dying alone in a small room overlooking the hospital’s air conditioning plant. She hasn’t had a bath in days. The sweet sour smell of the unwashed is over powering.

“Hi Maria. I brought you Communion,” I whisper.

She looks at me weakly.

“Can I have some water?” she asks. She’s near the end.

“Sure.”

I look for her water bottle. There is none.

“Where’s your water bottle?”

“The nurses won’t let me drink water,” she says.

Must be something going on with her kidneys. Stupid doctors. The woman's dying.

“Let me go ask the nurse what we can do,” I say.

“Thank you.”

I walk to the nurse’s station. A large woman sits behind the desk yakking on the phone with what seems to her girlfriend. She looks at me with complete disinterest.

I wait patiently for her to finish. She doesn’t.

I wait some more.

“Pardon me, Maria wants some water. Can I give her some?” I interrupt.

“Can’t you see I’m on the phone?” the nurse yells.

“Yes but….”

“I’ll be with you when I’m finished!”

So I wait. The nurse ends her call.

“Now, what do you want?” she says angrily.

“Can I give Maria some water?”

“She’s on restricted fluids you can’t.”

“How about some ice chips then? I think she has dry mouth.” I ask innocently.

The nurse throws her hands up in the air in frustration. “Yeah, go get the girl some ice chips for what good it'll do her. You can get them on the next unit.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I go over to the neighboring unit and fill a Styrofoam cup with ice. I walk back to Maria’s room.

“Maria I got you some ice chips.”

No response.

“Maria?”

I walk over to the bed. She’s dead.

A wave of incredible anger sweeps over me. All this poor girl wanted was a drink of water. It turned out to be her last request

Even this small thing was denied her.

I crush the cup in my hands. Ice scatters on the floor. Hot tears run down my face. This girl had nothing – less than nothing. She died thirsty and alone.

It was then my innocence was taken.

I march out to the nurse’s station. The nurse is on the phone again. When she sees me a look of annoyance crosses her face. “Now wha….”

I slam my hand down on the counter. “MARIA IS DEAD!”

The nurse jumps out of her chair.

“DON’T YOU GIVE A SHIT YOU LAZY BITCH? SHE’S DEAD!” I bellow.

All hell breaks loose. A code is called. Security is called.

The attending shows up. There’s a do not resuscitate order. He pronounces Maria dead.

Security guards escort me to the pastoral care office where the Chaplin waits for me.

Instead of yelling at me for losing my temper he sits me down on his couch. He hands me a cup of coffee.

“What happened?” he asks gently.

I tell him everything.

A small smile crosses his face. “That nurse is a lazy bitch,” he says.

I laugh harshly.

“This is hard work son,” he says.

“I had no idea how hard.”

We’re quiet. I listen to the wall clock tick.

“When you were looking at Maria in that bed were you thinking about yourself?” the priest says suddenly.

The tears come again.

“Yes.”

“What were you feeling?”

“That I never want to be alone like that.”

“Do you feel that alone?”

A truth I had been hiding from myself came bubbling up from the depths.

“Yes,” I start to sob.

The priest gets up and sits next to me. He gently and puts his arm around me. I cry till I feel like I’m going to shake apart.

When I finish the Chaplain says, “If you’re honest - trying to help people makes you confront the darkness in yourself.”

“Yeah,”

“Maybe you should work on feeling alone,” he adds.

“Kind of tough when you want to be a priest,” I reply.

“Maybe you should think about that.”

I’ve given my heart and soul to being a priest for four years. I’m supposed to go abroad to study theology next year. Now, for the first time, I realize it isn’t going to work out.

“God doesn’t want you to be unhappy,” the priest says.

“Then why drag me here and put me through all this for nothing?” I whisper.

“I don’t know.”

“God’s a real asshole sometimes isn’t he?” I say sadly.

The priest leans back and smiles. “A gigantic asshole.”

We both laugh.

A few months later I quit. ……

The Water Fall

2010-03-02T21:48:00.000-08:00

In the summer I kept hearing the citizens of our lovely town talk about a waterfall, in a village far away. The journey to the waterfall was fairly arduous, Vince, one of our former finance people thought he was going to have a heart attack, so after he went there for the first time he started to work out a lot which made him a lot healthier and happier. Jordan, the Banner man, also said that it was a hard trek to the place.

Eventually, I decided to make time for a trip, the falls; from speaking to people I knew that we would need a four wheel drive vehicle, Mr Umar, the Transport Officer, said that I would assign me a driver who would take us there. I asked if I would have to speak to the driver but he said he would make those arrangements. To make it cheaper I invited about four people to come with me.

On the big day it turned when I called Umar about the truck and driver he told me to speak Mustapha. When I called Mustapha he told me it was his day off and he was going on a trip with his wife, and furthermore no one had told him about driving excursionists. When I heard this I complained to the TO about his broken promise which made him mad, since I did not want to get into a useless discussion of he said/he said I simply asked could me and Labaran pick up the truck? He agreed most readily to this so we picked up the truck and got the rest of our party. which consisted of;

Your narrator
Labaran the fixer
Young Victor, the aspiring poet
Charles "Indiana State of" Jones
Jamal "X Shabazz"
Melba the shrinker of heads.

After a long drive over dirt roads past villages, rice paddies, fields of 10 foot high millet, over streams we got to the village of the waterfall. The drive had reminded me of the time we drove my car through the Modoc National Forest so that we could get to the Rainbow Gathering. Just when I thought my lower back could not take it any more we arrived at Waterfall Village, this made me very happy since the truck was very crowded and uncomfortable in the back seat.

As usual whenever you go on excursions in Nigeria you will meet the villagers, spend some time with them, share kola, and give them a little something something. In return you will get a group of helpers who will carry your bag even if you don't want them to. going through all the protocols of Adamawa with the prominent elder we started the walk to our destination.

We walked past the flowering okra fields which Melba had never seen before and started to go up the highlands. The trip was okay for the first hour and then we came to the rough, steep part. Imagine if you will a path that is 1.5 metres from a sheer drop. At the end of this drop there is a rocky, rapid stream that has carved gullies in the valley. The path is overgrown with elephant grass, bushes, and other things, the path is also bisected by streams, in some sections its slippery because of the clays in the soil. and there can be a 40 degree incline in a few spots. While you are picturing all this imagine doing this on a humid day with temperature in the 40 centigrade range and you will have an idea of what the trip was like. Anyway, it was really hard for the 30 minutes it took to get over the hard part and my heart probably went up to 80 beats per minute during that half hour. But when I got done there was the waterfall in all its misty glory.

I took off my clothes stepped into the water and swam a little, let the water carry me down a couple of cataracts and had a great time. I even stepped under the waterfall and it was fucking cool. The force of the water wanted to push us away from the cataract, knock us down and carry us away. The only way me, Victor & Charles were able to stay under the fall was by holding on to each other..

After being there for an hour we all got dressed and went back. On the return I sat in the pickup's bed with Victor and it was a lot more comfortable though very un safe since there are no seatbelts there, though it was fun to watch the trees, roads and villages speeding away. It was also much cooler than the ride to the falls since the cool breeze made by the speeding vehicle was much more pleasant than the underpowered air-conditioner.

You've Got To Get Behind the Mule Every Morning and Plough

2010-02-14T01:52:00.000-08:00

When this semester started there were a few things that I wanted to get done so that I will feel a sense of accomplishment. Those things were;

Completing my rough draft of my Java textbook.
Finishing my rough draft of my Operating Systems book.
Writing an outline of our research project.
Getting money for our project
Training the swim team
Improve my running and swimming performance
Teaching my classes.
Finding a good backup solution for our environment and circumstances.
Getting automated installs working for our labs.
Getting up a LDAP server for our school.
Building a secondary Moodle server so that we can have failover.

All those things were very important, and I wanted to make some progress on every single one. Those that were work network related are very difficult since we have no budget, our equipment is failing and cobbled together. If I was not teaching instead of doing mainly teaching and some sysadmining I would have more time for that. Some of these tasks I am able to combine others have to be done in a certain order. I will be very happy when we get RT set up so that we can keep track of requests and IT projects that we are trying to finish we are also going to move a FC12 server to the data centre probably next week.

After thinking about it I found a backup solution that will work for our low tech network where I expect every device to fail and to not get replacements. It is related to the design I have come up with that will make our services more reliable. The main problem is the time to set it up now since we have been working on the issues that need to be fixed first such as automating deployments and figuring out what systems we have and what their states are. As to the swimming running & stretching that has been difficult but I have been running fairly regularly. I even did it in Washington.

On all the projects the has been some progress though it has been very slow, earlier I had even more stuff I wanted to get done but I thought it would be smart to scale back and wait till the summer to do stuff on data bases.

The one thing that I have tried to do is be pessimistic about what I can achieve so that I do not over schedule my self. The one thing that I have been doing is gettin behind the mule every morning and ploughing so that I make a little progress every day. As the song says I have been getting behind the mule everyday and ploughing.

The Mysterious Stranger

2010-02-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

When I lived in Anchorage I relied on the kindness of strangers to get hundreds of public domain audiobooks. One of the first public domain audiobooks was Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. As other people have said the title story is very existential, it looks at the flaws of humanity with a great deal of humour and clarity. In some ways its similar to Candide.

Anyhoo while paddling in the sea of interwebs I found a reference to angel called Satan which led me to a a clip in a TV show I had never heard of called The Adventures of Mark Twain. As you can see the we can enjoy the adventures of Satan. The readers for these istorirs are a credit to the whole Librivox community.

Nobody Expects Automated Expect!

2010-01-30T01:40:00.000-08:00

While I was trying to fix some issues with an expect script that runs checks on a server I found out that instead of having to write the scripts or having workstudys learn about expect on top of everything else I want them to do we can use autoexpect to basically create a script for us. When autoexpect is run it enters all the commands that were typed into a script.

I am always glad to find software that works hard so I don't have to, maybe later I will play with Pyexpect

What is This Diversity of Which You Speak?

2010-01-28T15:13:00.000-08:00

While I was at a house rave I ended up having a talk with an eager engineer about what is seen as good public policy, my conversationalist was not happy that the politicians were not able to sit down and do what is right for the country. I simply told the lady who was very proud of her engineering degree that there is disagreement about what people think is best for the nation so of course there will be debate, obstruction, gridlock and fighting because for one thing how do you define what is best for the country let alone on the means of achieving that end. This is a problem that I have noticed when folks about things like political parties in America, both the major parties talk about being democratic but they never have been. Foe example prior to the 1972 convention the democratic ticket was determined by machine politics that did not cater to the wishes of people who were racial minorities, women, nonchristian or nonheterosexual. By the 1972 convention people left out of the Democratic party's decision making process took over the organization and suppressed the ward heelers and machineites in the name of democracy. I guess that this problem occurred partly because both sides had different views of what a democratic process was. More recently when there was Michigan & Florida's democratic primaries were overturned there was a great deal of electrons loosed about how undemocratic that was. However having those primaries in the first place was undemocratic as well as the fact that most people never have a say in who their party's nominee is. But I only brought this up because the fact that so many people disagreed about what is a democratic process is similar to my question on what is diversity.

I first really thought about this when we went to a dinner in Homer, one of the things that makes Homer different from the rest of Alaska is that it is the only town in the state that the Republicans do not dominate in. Normally I would like such an accepting place except for the following problems. The first problem with Homer is that real estate is incredibly expensive a plot on a mountain 10 miles from town, with no amenities and a dirt track can sell for a million dollars, so a town that started out as a fishing village and a peninsula whrer hippies lived has now become a place where wealthy tourists come to live for three months. I met some of the wealthy Homerians, they are very nice, personable, and have good values and I really enjoyed their company. Despite how much I liked Homer's wealthy former hippies and salty fisherfolk Homer is one of the least ethnically diverse parts of Alaska, throughout the state there are lots of Alaskan Natives, Filipinos, Africans, African-Americans and others but I ran in to so few people of colour there. Though Homer is very welcoming to diverse lifestyles and different ways of thinking it is racially very homogeneous as well as being a place where most middle or working class folks will have to go outside of town to get work which is truly unfortunate.

In Anchorage there is a great deal of racial diversity but when it came to political diversity I did not run into that as much. I met a number of Alaskan Natives, Pacific Islanders, and Black folks who were all right wing. One example of a conservative person of colour was the President of Eklutna Inc, he had a plaque from a Republican party fund raiser. Even though I completely disagreed with these people about social policies, fiscal matters, and the role of government I was very happy to see that they were not of one mind as many left wing Caucasian people would assume about people of colour's political views. Most of the people that I met did not want restrictions put on fishing or hunting, were in favour of increasing the number of mining operations, and strongly against taxes and government oversight of industries. These views should not be surprising in a state that is as remote, rural, and conservative as Alaska, but one of the issues that it made me think about was what type of diversity do I value most? Would I prefer a place with more ethnic/racial diversity or somewhere that is racially/ethnically homogeneous but is culturally and politically heterogeneous.

After thinking about this for about a year I have come to the conclusion that neither situation is optimal for me, I wonder why can't we have both? I would prefer to live in a place that is diverse in diverse way, anything else will seem like a sham to me. Now that I am done with this post for now I will probably spend a year thinking about how Nigeria with its hundreds of languages and cultural norms which sometimes differ completely from each other there is no real diversity.

With Just The Right Bullets Tom Waits Will Drink Your Blood Like Milkshake!

2010-01-28T13:11:00.001-08:00

For some strange reason I have started posting again, hopefully I can make an entry a day. As the blind man said to the deaf mute, "We shall see!" When I started this thing called blogging I would post a Tom Waits video every Thursday, I guess I was trying to be like Driftglass. If I can ever right as well as he does and as often I will be a happy man. I first hear this album in 2000, when I borrowed it from The Ames Public Library. At that time I did not really care for it. However, eight years later it became one of the albums that I listened to the most. I find that each time I listen to Tom Waits' work I find a new song to appreciate, even though I have heard most of his songs about a hundred times already.

I wish you all a wonderful Thursday and maybe next week I will be a Black rider again since that will make me happy, with fifteen silver wishes left.

Just Another Day Running Past Luka's Paradise

2010-01-28T07:09:00.000-08:00

In the past I would use the treadmills at the university club, but, sometimes the machines would loose power in the middle of my run, or would not start at all. One of the most unpleasant things that you can experience is to have your workout come to a halt when your blood is up. These things happened so many times that I stopped running for five months and only swam. Though swimming 60metres is more tiring than running a 5K I was still not getting the best workout possible since I usually get bored with swimming after thirty minutes, and a better workout would involve 30 minutes swimming/ 30 minutes running, with me increasing the distance covered each week.

Anyway, after thinking about it this week I decided to run around Yola every morning to greet the sun, for added bonus points I would sing My Blue Sky continously, and reminisce about my favourite software commercials. This would be a difficult task since I do not know the lyrics to the aforementioned songs and tend to dislike software commercials. As a result of these problems I decided to make the task easy and only sing SwordFishTrombones during my half hour jog. So far it has been going well though the hamarttan dust, odour of burning plastic, smell of decomposing shit, partially burned petrol, get my allergies going at the rate of drunken cyclist who is pedalling on a foggy night. The actual running is not so hard, though I am trying to achieve a five minute mile, normally I run at a relaxed pace so I can do a 5K in 30 minutes, but to push myself and reach that higher level I am trying to do speed work each week.

At 6:30 am the water sellers are loading uo their carts and pushing them along. The wandering lunatics are psyching themselves up for a day full of rambling and ranting, The ackara lady is heating her wok full of oil while the little boy mixes the bean paste one last time. The early risers are on their way home from the mosque, street dogs are getting ready for a day of sleeping in the dusty, eroded road, and meanwhile the sun's shines on me. At seven I jog home with my lungs aching, my legs aching, my nose running and eyes bloodshot, like the day Steppin' Razor yelled "bumbaclot!".

Hemispheric Phonesick Blues

2010-01-27T14:37:00.000-08:00

One of the things that still surprises me is the variety of cell phones that people have here. So many people carry multiple phones so that if one provider's network is bad you can use your second or third phone to complete your call. However, it can be inconvenient to carry 2, 3, or four phones, but the Chinese made an app for that, a phone that takes two sims! I am waiting for the day when the mobile phones will be able to take 3 and four sims.

Apart from folks having two phones there are many smart, yesterday I bought a Tecno 0707 for $64.00, it has some nice features such as a qwerty keyboard, it takes two sims, has GPRS, and various VoIP and internet features. I think that it would work beautifully if I was running WindowsXP instead of FedoraCore10. As it is I think it compares favourably with the Smartphones that we were issued at Tekmate. One of the reasons why I think it might be cheap is the Tecno Telecom does not use WindowsCE, PalmOS, or any other well known, commercial embedded system. I would guess that its either some version of Linux or an off the shelf OS from China or India. The only thing that I am having problems doing is adding duplicate phone numbers to my contacts. Over here many folks have more than two numbers since the networks are so bad so you need to store all the numbers. Unfortunately I have not been able to add a second number to each contact, even though the phone support vcd version 3.0.

Some of the brands that I never heard of before are Itel, Tecno, there are many others that look very nice, in the states many of these would be popular but they are not available either because of tarrifs, Americans would not care for the features since they have full fledged laptops and desktops that masses of Nigerians use their phones for. There is also the possibility that they do not meet the technical and safety requirements that are enforced in the US, though I really do not think the phones are badly made at all.

Some of the things that are different from the United States is almost no one buys a phone and a plan. Everyone uses prepaid sim cards and they buy their phones separately. Some folks will keep the same mobile for six years and kust switch sims. As a result of this all the phones sold in Nigeria are unlocked. To add minutes you will buy a recharge card, phone calls in Nigeria are some of the most expensive in the world even though the networks are so unreliable. Another thing that is different is that since masses of the people do not have electricity they take their phones to phone charging shops where they will leave their phone for a couple of hours so that it can charge. It is also a good idea to keep a spare battery sometimes and buy a phone battery charger. The last thing that I will mention is that 90% of the phone have their volumes turned up to 11 so that you can feel the awesome awesomeness of the each humble stranger's ring tone, but then again this should not suprise me since the average Nigerian loves tweeter shattering bass.

The Theory of Social Revolutions

2010-01-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I like about Librivox is that there are lots of free audio books on the site. With my work I do not get to read as much as I used to, lot of the time I am reading papers or textbooks for my lectures. Lately I have also been reading lots of papers on distributed computing or other things from Redhat about LDAP, Apache, Subversion, Nagious or other things having to do with sysadmining. As a consequence the only times I get to read for pleasure nowadays are usually in bed or in the toilet. In both cases I am usually done in less than five minutes. As a consequence of this it can take me 2 months to read 200 pages, whereas, I used to be able to read 130 pages a day. One of the audiobooks that I finished listening to in December was Brooks Adam's The Theory of Social Revolutions, aka TTSR.

I consider TTSR to be somewhat similar in scope and approach to Charles Beard's An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constituiton in that he does not simply accept the notion that the founding fathers did not have a class or factional interests that might have differed from the masses of Americans who were supporters of the revolution. One of the themes of the book is that laws are created and enforced by people who have a partisan goals. He gave examples of how the constitution was created by agents such as Danton and Robspierre so that they could kill their political opponents. Prior to the republicans taking over the French government the first two estates made laws that suppressed the middle and lower classes. There were other examples of George "Hanging" Jeffreys used his position to kill the enemies of Charles I.

After showing how such politriking hurts the judiciary and civil society Adams discussed methods of keeping political actors from affecting legal decisions. He thinks that in some ways a British style constitution is better than an American one which relies on a single document.
Being that Adams was a constitutional lawyer and historian I figured that he is more aware of advanatges of various legal systems, even as recently as four years ago judges in the US Supreme Court were trying to decide if they should look at trends in other country's legal systems to see if American laws are consistent with best practices. I tfound the book fairly interesting and enjoyed the sections on the French revolution as well as the interactions between the first three US presidents and the judiciary.