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Entries this day: AM_Dream
Farm
State_of_my_Life
zzz_digits.pl
AM Dream
5:36am JST Monday 17 April 2006 (day 13172)
In a large room with maps, working out a way to ride
my bicycle to Amanda's house, but actually choosing to take the train
because I had to get there quickly. I was going to take my touring
maps with me, though, so I could monitor the route with regards to
the maps and know what it would look like next time when I did ride
my bike.
Upon arrival, I was way down by a river, with a
supertall overpass passing over. Maggie et. al. were all down by the
river, but Molly was up on the overpass with my computer, prepared to
drop it down to me. I didn't want her to drop it, but she said she
wouldn't let it get hurt. I consented and she dropped it, and Molly
(also) carefully caught it at the bottom, and tossed it over to me,
where it hit a telephone pole because I wasn't prepared for her to
throw it to me. I heard a bad crack, and when I opened the screen,
the glass was cracked and broken and I was reallllly sad.
and really happy when I woke up.
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Farm
5:59pm JST Monday 17 April 2006 (day 13172)
Working on the farm today was a bit tiring, though none of it was
back-breaking.. I cut some dried bamboo so that it would fit in the
fire pit, did some light weeding in the beds of potatoes, cleared out
all the plants in one area to make a new bed, and then had lunch.
Lunch was quite a treat: the fire pit was used to roast vegetables
and a goose. First, I washed the veggies in the same water we use to
rinse off the shovels and stuff each night. It's murky water, but
cleaner than the vegetables had been. Then the veggies and goose were
individually wrapped in about a centimeter thickness of wet newspaper,
and then aluminum foil, and placed in the hot coals of the fire for
maybe an hour. Then we pulled them out and chowed. Totally
delicious! First time I had ever seen this done.
Back to weeding, and then carrying more dead bamboo that Tony had
cut out of the tiny grove of trees and bamboo near the entrance of the
farm. He asked if I could pull down a vine hanging from one of the
trees, but I could not; it basically supported my full weight. I
noticed the tree was dead, and should be removed entirely, so I got to
use my monkey-skillz and a saw and cut a significant amount of the
larger trunk-branches from this tree using the little hand saw
designed for cutting bamboo. The tree was like a siamese twin joined
at the base, with each trunk about 10 inches in diameter. There
weren't any real branches left, but the trunks each split a few times
and then just ended. I made about five cuts and lopped maybe 12 feet
off the top of both trunks in a few triumphant crashes of branches
down below.
I hesitated before beginning to cut at the next 6 foot interval:
the trunk was maybe 8 inches thick and my sawing arm was getting
tired. Tony suggested we declare ourselves finished for the day and
head back home for dinner.
おつかれさる。
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State of my Life
7:20pm JST Monday 17 April 2006 (day 13172)
State of My Life Address
I am living in Koji and Masako's house in Shima-shi, down about 3 or 4
hundred kilometers southwest from Tokyo. Koji was one of my students on PB
52nd voyage in Fantastic Rabbits. I've been here about a week now,
helping out on their farm (about a 2.5 minute drive from here).
It's been a really cushy lifestyle. Their house features low ceilings and door frames low enough
that I still sometimes hit my head. (This was the same in Millenium
House, but I remembered to duck after a bit.) They've also got a
shower with hot water (water for washing dishes must be heated on the
stove), but the tiled bath (built down into the shower floor) has a
couple holes near the bottom so cannot be used to hold (much)
water.
And they have a toilet that never needs flushing! It's a
composting toilet, with all the shit and stuff about three feet below
the floor. The weather has been cold, so it doesn't usually stink a
lot, but sometimes it does..
I've got my own room and futon.
As my house slippers, I use the ug boots Bryn bought me from
Australia back in the day. I've been without TCP/IP access for my computer since April
4th, when I got hooked up in that PC school. Holy fuck - basically 2
weeks. I may wander around this "neighborhood" tonight looking for a
WiFi signal.
I have, however, had basic email access with Masako's AOHell
account on dialup and Windows Sucks 98. I've still been on my computer a lot, even without internet I
find it comforting. Been learning/playing/tweaking Emacs a lot,
including having made several customizations to the sgml-mode.el file
to help make html pages (a bit) easier to write.
I have zone-mode on Emacs; it zones out after 2 minutes of
inactivity. During all this emacking around, I have decided to make all my
code GNU Copyleft freeware, instead of Sford's almost freeware (give
me appropriate credit, and document your changes, don't make money off
my (or other peoples') work). I've been cleansing old directories from as far back as 2002,
which I archived while working at FSD and nerding over at Dude and
Veronica's house. Lots and lots and lots of pictures to go
online. Also been reading The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien.
On page 111, where Frodo, Sam and Pippin have just started their
journey from their homes, though they are still in the Shire. I have not been using dvorak layout in a long time (basically
not since before PB 52nd voyage. I am "on a bicycle ride" from Tokyo to Kyoto, though I have
fully stopped here at Koji's, and no sign of emails from Richard, nor
a woman listed on couchsurfing.com, after asking each of them if I
could stay over a couple nights. I did hear recently from Kazzah (Karen) from PB, saying I
could crash over at her place, but that will be after Kyoto. In Kyoto I plan to do a 10 day silent meditation in the
Vipassana style: no reading, no writing, no speaking (to other
participants, though there is a nightly Q/A session with the leader),
and perhaps no alcohol, drugs, smoking, but those don't affect me.
Oh, and no killing any living creature.
The course is free, including food and lodging for the 10 days.
We can give a donation afterward if we found it useful.
Greg (teacher on 49th voyage) and Kentaro (CC on 52nd voyage) have
both done it and highly recommend it. Kentaro said, "it's really
really difficult,.. but you should do it!"
I think Rochelle (Portland / Jerusalem) has done it, or at least a
similar duration meditation, and said it gave her some profound
experiences. I haven't really meditated since PB. It doesn't look like I'll be on PB 54th voyage with Natalie as
coordinator, and Carla (my favorite NOVA teacher) from Detroit/Canada
as repeater, but I will probably try for 55th voyage with Phil. If I
don't get that, then I probably won't try again. Not sure, though,
really. In fact, I basically have no idea what I'm going to do after
the meditation. Basic plan is to go back to Tokyo, perhaps via Kaz's
house in Nagoya, (possibly) Eri's in Nagano (if she ever responds to
my email), and Alice's in northwest Tokyo, but I basically don't
know.
I'm hoping for some brilliant awakening or inspiration or at least
an idea for what to do next while I'm in meditation. I don't smoke (*), have never done drugs, basically never drink
alcohol, and have never been drunk.
(*) I can't say I've never smoked, because I tried it when I was
14ish, but never past that.
I do love sweets, though. And sex. Though I've officially not had
any since before 52nd voyage. I've got no girlfriend, no pets (it even seems I've lost touch
with Jennifer who is/was keeping Spot), no apartment, no job.
Just two suitcases at Jesse's house, TJ Bike downstairs, six small
bags (basically clothes and sleeping equipment), one beloved computer,
and 12,000 yen. And Francois.
And some stuff in the US, according to this list:
9:02pm Sunday 14 July 2002
Maggie:
Five boxes, including diaries, photo albums, some CDs, marble track, coin collection, high school and college files
Fred:
purchased all my CDs for $100 (and will give them all back for
$100), modified ball clock
Suzanne:
sacred box including Rabby, warrior photos, Jason's turtle-stick
from SWUUSI 1998 Haven't talked to Maggie nor Suzanne in a while. I hope they
are okay, and okay still holding my stuff. I enjoy telling people what Fred is up to:
Designing a system by which heart surgeons can do a simulated
surgery on their actual patient's heart given a CAT scan (?) MRI (?)
of the patient. This is his PhD project (in Computer Science,
Mathematics and Engineering), at he's getting an MD while
he's at it.
He may or may not agree with the deets, but that's what I tell
people. My computer is my Macintosh PowerBook G4 667MHz CPU, 133 MHZ
bus, with 512 megs of ram and 30 (27.94) gig HD (2.56 GB free), CD-RW
drive, 14 or 15 inch LCD screen at 1280 x 854 pixels and 32-bit color
that sometimes takes a bit of fiddling (gentle hits) to get it to come
all the way on, with two USB ports, 400 MB/sec FireWire port, AirPort
card (firmware 9.52), a modem I've never used, running OS X 10.3.9
(Panther, I think) on unix kernel Darwin 7.9.0
Right now with these applications:
I recently read The Gospel According to John in The New
Testament (English Standard Version), at Jesse's request, but I still
fail to be impressed that I should become Christian. Recently I have begun at times to simply be aware of my
breathing, and aware of where I am / what I'm doing. While weeding
today, I had the pleasant feeling of success: I have escaped the
cubicled world of computer programming every day; I am basically
carefree, chillin' in the sunlight on a beautiful day just picking
little tufts of grass from a bed of potatoes.
I began to thank each little tuft for having grown there just so I
could pick it and enjoy this moment. After my most recent Rob Update, someone (and I'm embarassed to
say I don't remember who) congratulated me on "doing it. Not someday,
but now." I think that blessing had a big positive impact on
my way of thinking about my life at this moment.
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zzz digits.pl
11:16pm JST Monday 17 April 2006 (day 13172)
For some reason I just wrote a program called digits that prints
the sum of digits in a list of numbers; basically:
1 = 1
2 = 2
3 = 3
...
10 => 1 + 0 = 1
...
15 => 1 + 5 = 6
...
258 => 2 + 5 + 8 = 15 => 1 + 5 = 6
I don't remember why I wanted to write it, but I remember wondering
if the pattern was simple or complex. It's simple. I think I've come
up with a proof by induction that the pattern indefinitely repeats in
the way it does in the first, oh, 2000000000 whole numbers.
#!/usr/bin/perl
#####################################################################
#
# digits.pl: print the sum of digits
# version 0.1
#
# Copyright (C) 2006 Rob Nugen, digits@robnugen.com
#
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
# WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
# General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
# with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
# 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
#
#####################################################################
#####################################################################
#
# This code is supposed to add digits of a number and then add those
# digits until a single digit is the result. I wonder if the pattern
# is simple or a bit complicated.
#
# The pattern is simple. I wonder if I can prove it to be true for
# all whole numbers?
#
#####################################################################
$prediction = 0;
for $number (1 .. 2000000000) {
$prediction ++;
if ($prediction == 10) {
$prediction = 1;
}
# print "$number: ", &sum_list($number), "\n";
}
sub sum_list {
($num) = @_;
my $string;
while (1) {
$string .= " " . &sum_digits;
if ($num <= 9) {
if ($num != $prediction) {
die "$number didn't match prediction of $prediction\n";
}
}
last if ($num <= 9);
}
$string;
}
sub sum_digits {
my $string = "$num";
my $sum;
my @array = $string =~ /(.)/g; # split the digits into characters
foreach (@array) {
$sum += $_;
}
$num = $sum;
return $sum;
}
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