Don’t you think?

I mean, the alcohol, the drugs, the neverending nights of feral sex, the uninspired blogging… it gets old, really.

Alright, so maybe not the booze, drugs and sex part. But the blogging part: definitely. I don’t mean the part about writing inane crap that nobody in their right mind should care about, in between two intense navel-staring sessions. I don’t think I’ll get tired of that part any time soon (I’m trying though). I mean, the sterile format that this blog has come to follow.

Oh, trust me, I am very aware of it. Sure, I have many excuses as to why my posting rate has dwindled to the levels of Bangladesh’s strawberry production on a bad monsoon year… Work, life, love (or pursuit thereof), happiness (idem) etc. But we all know there’s more to it. Truth be told, blogging here bores me, most of the time. There are a couple reasons for that, chiefly among them are:

• This blog started out on the wrong foot.
  When I decided to open my first self-hosted online space, it started as a bastard mix of for-friends-only (”hey guys, long time no see”) news reports and travel-journal (”lookee all the whacky things they have here”)… Both rather boring genres in the long run, neither something I really felt like doing much. But I have been pulled toward these roots ever since.

• It is read by all the wrong people.
  Quite expectedly (although I originally never intended it to be), this has become the place where all people who either have invested some DNA into me, or were court-ordered to stay at least a continent away, come to get their life update on Dave. Knowing that both your genitors (hi Mum! hi Dad!), extended family, past love interests (and potentiall future ones) are all reading this, puts a serious cap on any attempt at spontaneity.
• And therefore… I write elsewhere.
  Yes, I know, it hurts, but I have been seeing other people. In other locales, other languages even. Usually with completely different style and contents. Don’t even try to search the web: believe me you won’t find it. Those other writings are all that this isn’t: personal, fun, hyperbolic, unauthentic, uncensored etc.

Then why bother?

Good question. I suppose because this still serves a purpose for some writings, in some contexts. Also because I hate giving up. And closing that blog before I turn 50 would feel like giving up.

But things need to change. Not sure what, but they do.

Still working on details. I technically have about 10 days before the official 5 year anniversary of this blog. Do not expect grand announcement or sudden changes, just be warned.

Sorta.

I have only one ambition in life.

Well… Two ambitions, but the other one is more of a long-term goal. For now, I just want to become the first search result on Google for my given name. This in itself being a crucial step in my larger world-domination’s plot, since we all know Google controls the world already.

As it is, I already have pole position for my old ‘dr Dave‘ moniker. But, and you read it here first, I am hereby setting in motion the switch in online identity from ‘dr Dave’ to just plain ‘Dave’.

No, I wasn’t sued by the American Board of Medicine, or any equivalent local institution. Beside, that Honorary Ph.D. in Curse Removal and Sexual Healing from Kinshasa’s University of Black Magic is all but legit.

However, crazy as the idea may sound (I have a hard time believing it myself), I might one day not too long from now be a bona fide doctorate student: it is likely that my honorary ‘Doctor’ title would by then confuse many people (not that it hasn’t already) which was never the intent. Hence the shift to unambiguous, simple, likable ‘Dave’. I’m guessing there are only a couple millions of us out there, someone has to be the one.

So, how are we doing on the Google front? Well, guess what: not so fucking bad!

Six, if you count them, six people (or things) are standing in the way to intercontinental online stardom.

Of course, I could rely on the quality of my content, my shining bright personality and ever-increasing public appreciation to slowly climb to first place. But I know better.

Instead, I have devised an infallible 6 Steps Program that shall shortly take me there, whence I will finally be able to rest and contemplate the world at my feet, laugh and move on from that Internet fad once and for all.

Please allow me to develop. Note that for obvious reasons, I cannot allow my now mortal enemies any extra link publicity and you will therefore have to Google their websites for yourself. Do it while you still can:

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Don’t mind me saying so, but I would make one incredibly bad lawyer.

When I argue my cases, I can’t stay on track, I digress into oblivion, and whenever possible, jump on the most hyperbolic formulations, usually for my sole petty amusement, at great cost to the convincing potential of my arguments. Also, while I certainly love spending hours dissecting the law, I tend to focus on its spirit, and shun its letter altogether; a luxury I understand no sane lawyer could ever afford.

Yet, I have opinions (bet you hadn’t noticed), and I sometimes discuss them. I sometimes even discuss them with actual lawyers, pretty eloquent [French] bloggers at that. A while back the conversation wandered over to the topic of intellectual property. At the time, I did a pathetic job of exposing my somewhat moderate, if slightly provocatively formulated, views on the matter…

Then recently, while reading up on entirely unrelated matters, I stumbled upon a small text by Mr. Jefferson that happened to sum up most perfectly the essence of my thought on this.

The most basic courtesy would call for me to write this post in French, as I am after all reporting and threading on a discussion I had in French, but the quoted material is in English and there’s been a real dearth of pompous highbrow rants on this blog, so I hope my original debater will overlook this unforgivable faux-pas and not hesitate to respond in whichever language he may prefer… Anyway, here is what this famous American communist close to my heart, had to say on the topic of intellectual property:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

“The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 1905

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And before I permanently close this exciting chapter of my life, I would just like to add…

[clears throat]

YYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrgg

Thanks.

Moving on.

Don’t take it personally, especially if you got one of these yourself, but…

I think I’m way too smart to be blogging.

… something about serving it cold while listening to 100 Watts of bass-heavy electroclash?

Guess what the French Post finally delivered to my doorstep this morning (don’t ever use their “48 hour” delivery service if you fancy seeing your stuff in less than two weeks)…

How ironic my brand new speakers should arrive on the morning following one of my dear neighbour’s bi-weekly all-nighter.

9:30 am couldn’t be too early to run a full sound-test, now could it?

Chalk it up to a simple equation involving roughly 2 weeks of time, 50 pages of yet-unwritten report and 500+ pages of reading material… Blogging just hasn’t been a priority round here lately.

What has been a priority, though, was the quest for any combination of chemical aides, likely to make the required 250 hours of studies in 10 days, a technical, if not quite reasonable health-wise, possibility.

Thus, in the spirit of killing two heart-attacks with one stone, and without further ado, the first episode of:

Dr Dave’s Guide to Chemically-Enhanced Studying in Japan

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Remember that contest I started a while back?

You know: “Guess the songs and win a sample of refined Japanese spirit, straight from my own personal cellar“…

You thought I’d forget? I most definitely haven’t. Neither have a handful brave, who’ve been communicating to me all along their level of advancement through various means and methods.

So far, most contestants are staling at a puny two or three songs. And by most, I mean all. Save for two gentlemen who have made their strides to within close reach of the goal: the favorite, Mr. MacTuitui, seems well positioned to get that bottle, which might save me on postage stamps, seeing as we happen to be sharing residence on the same island in the Pacific.

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[Blogger Advisory: unspeakable nerdery, use of foul language.]

As promised: the answer to yesterday’s riddle (I know, suspense is killing you)…

Upon closer inspection, maybe I went a bit ahead of myself when I postulated the solution was “really easy”. Note that the explanation below, while somewhat tedious and longwinded, should be perfectly intelligible to anybody with very basic notions of arithmetic and a few sober neurons. If you don’t fit either criteria, feel free to skip to the last paragraph.

The Question

Does one stand better chances of: 1) getting at least one ace with 6 throws of a die, or 2) getting at least two aces with 12 throws?

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When not writing meticulous reports of my wonderful travels and everyday fight to vanquish universal evil and save the world. I also read blogs. Much less these days, busy as I am, self-hypnotizing myself into a bona fide mathematician.

When not posing as a 16-year old girl from Kansas in IRC chatrooms, I leave comments on the blogs I read, infused with my usual blend of sassy retort and insightful modesty.

Thanks to the wonders of a strict classical education, and the miracles of modern computer-assisted translation, I usually read and comment in all of four languages (at least that’s what Babelfish tells me). Struggling as I am for broadness of perspective amidst the perpetual echo chambering and intra-community navel gazing of each specific blogosphere… as well as wary to preserve my worldly credit at social functions, without much of the laborious skimming of foreign newspapers that used to come with it.

Among the unavoidable reads of the old continent, sits Laurent Gloaguen, phlegmatic, pipe-smoking, contemporary critique with the dedication of a pro and the tongue-lashing skills of… err… an unpaid expert. His blog usually attracts an eclectic, if not selective, crowd of readers, whose comments span the full spectrum of the childish to the very insightful. As many observers have cauda-venenumously pointed out in the past: “the comments sometimes surpass the content itself”. Which is both slightly unfair to the nice synthetic work Laurent does, and true of every other institutionalized fixtures of the blogosphere.

At times, I have ended up writing entire posts (long ones) in the comment section of some of his entries, instead of simply opening a parallel debate on my own blog: Often, I would find myself sucked into debate on ultra-topical issues I initially held little interest for, and ended up building strong opinions upon discussion… Also, I suspect, the sheer pleasure of using another language without the concern of boring a public that understandably prefers posts not written in some foreign gibberish (and often very much limited in their international scope). Actually, let’s be frank: a lot of my commenting on foreign blogs has to do with a will to practice otherwise unused languages skills, at one level or another.

Anyway, all that to say that I had a lengthy exchange of comments on one such blog in recent times, and not wanting to overstay our welcome, decided to take it on this blog, for added clarity and freedom of ranting. It’s all here. But beware, as it’s entirely written in this cheese-eating monkey patois they call “French”. Try Babelfish for added comic purposes.

Sorry and we will be back to ranting in a civilized language as soon as the next entry.

[Cue upbeat music, engaging footage of miscellaneous means of locomotion blended over map of Europe, traveling red dot drawing a sinuous line toward the southern edge of the continent...]

[cue beach sunset slowly fading into the horizon. fade to black]

[...]

My medications run out tomorrow.

Automated posting pre-logged on 05/25/05.

Today’s entry is brought to you by a few hundred monkeys trained in touch-typing, under the supervision of Mr. Public Domain & Mrs. Fair Use

You know, Love is a fucking Gipsy kid… We are all gypsies come from afar, after all…

And if you don’t love me, dear reader, know that I dearly, dearly love you. and beware.
You know, when he holds me in his arms and whispers to me, it does something to me. That love, mysterious, unattainable, the torment and delight of my heart… Just like when they sifted sand together on the beach, how she shook her bottom, how Chan Chan was turned on…
I saw her again the other night: it’d been such a long time. I got drunk listening to her and woke up to her kisses on my forehead. And she screamed out kicking on her side and said: j’ai perdu les pédales… Everybody knows that’s how it goes, that you live forever when you’ve done a line or two, that nothing’s ever safe: your strengths, your weaknesses… stand arms wide open in embrace: your shadow’s just a cross. There’s no happy love ending…

Dunno what this means, why I’m so sad, kind of like a dream from ancient times. Oh, Lord have mercy…

This last bout of sub-tropical temperatures has officially marked the end of Winter around here. And with the end of Winter, naturally comes the end of seal hunting season. Melancholic times indeed.

I was mournfully cleaning my seal clubbing gear, yesterday night, getting it ready for off-season storage, when Hiromi asked me, out of the blue, why I hated Nature so much.

Why do I hat Nature so much?

I don’t hate Nature.

Not on most days.

First, and without wanting to get too much into “who did what” etc, I can’t help but notice that Nature kind of started it.

Otherwise… Nature does have a few cool things: volcanoes, lychees and these crazy little squirrels that fly between trees. lemurs are way cool too.

Though for every little cool thing it does, Nature has to fuck it up with the details. Like the way lychees are mostly one huge annoying pit with minuscule bits of yummy fruit around it, or the fact that the squirrels in my garden most definitely can’t fly (I know that for a fact: even with assistance on the take-off phase, they just don’t seem to glide their way down at all)… As for volcanoes… well, we all know about the many small impediments that come with their cool visual effects.

Lately, my daily fight against Mother Nature has involved preserving a small parcel of my garden against the evil claws of certain furry creatures, whose sad lack of appreciation for the refined art of herb gardening, is only made more glaring by their persistence in picking that precise spot, out of my whole freaking garden, as their personal toilet.

The first strike came as both a shock and a bitter disappointment, seeing how I virtually considered these filthy felines, my own blood, secondary to the many food-bonding experiences we had shared over the past few weeks. But, ungrateful bastard that they are, my disinterested offerings did little in prompting their respect for my innocent sprouts of thyme and italian basil. It did however provide me with an easy way to solve the problem with its source. Or so I thought.

Unfortunately, deceitful as they are, cats also seem endowed with a powerful sense of smell and they disdainfully ignored my strychnine-laced bacon (fear not: it didn’t go to waste. good things these damn crows will eat about anything).

Then I remembered that old trick of using potato nets to keep cats away from your flower beds: apparently, these ostensibly intelligent critters will happily dig through your petunias, but freak out at the sight of a brightly colored plastic mesh. Only problem with this brilliant idea was that, as it turns out, the potatoes sold by my local supermarket are wrapped in… plastic. I kid you not.

Onions do come in a net. A small one. That’s two onions and 15 square inches of protection for my garden.

I did contemplate buying 40 onions in order to get sufficient covering capacity. But a short period of reflexion led me to realize that spending 10,000 yens in unneeded perishable products in order to preserve 300 yens worth of cultures, just wasn’t a very sound investment.

Landmines were considered. And ruled out.

I was busy carrying out the next option (sharpened chopsticks buried two feet under ground and covered with a thin mesh of dead leaves and dry twigs), when I figured it’d be worth a try to just stick them above ground, in a tight formation over the sensitive area…

Incredibly enough: it worked.

As it turns out, making half my yard into a giant wooden porcupine seems to have finally sent a message to the local cat population. Or at least made the whole bathroom experience sufficiently uncomfortable that they chose to take their morning habit elsewhere.

Dave: 1 - Nature: 0

And by the way, a word of clarification regarding baby seal hunting: Nothing personal, really. It’s just that they make such comfy slippers.

As I just lengthily explained, I have very little love for corporate hierarchies and all the folklore that goes with it. Ironically, the ostensibly “free” world of major Open-Source development never fails to irk me in the exact same way…

I have my theories about that, and they mostly have to do with the fact that Open-Source is full of the very same people, who, for one reason or another, might not have made it at the top of the corporate ladder in the traditional world, but are fiercely decided to enjoy the exact same privilege in their own version thereof. Less money, therefore a void to fill, usually by inflating the ego until it touches on all sides. These are all theories… But I do not care to expand on them right this second, if only to add very quickly that Open-Source Software is also filled with an overwhelming majority of selfless, dedicated, bright people, who, in the end, bring the balance way into the positive.

Yet, I do have my beef with many OSS practices in general, and practitioners in particular, but because I have yet to find the recipe for immortality (and just in case you are looking for it too, I can tell you so far that neither baths in young virgin’s blood, nor daily consumption of half a gallon of gin, work), I do my best to spend as little time as humanly possible on such crap. Sure I yammer. a lot. but I am also quite good at packing my marbles and moving to another side of the playground without sulking too much, whenever I really can’t take my little playmates’ bullshit any more…

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Of my years as a code whore for miscellaneous software joints, I really haven’t kept much at all…

Except, that is, a bottomless contempt and seething hatred toward all that ressemble corporations or corporate culture in all its incarnations. I really hated corporate life. And to be fair, the feeling was shared: most of my bosses hated my guts, more or less silently, and the ones that didn’t, usually shared my hatred of higher ranked execs. HR zombies probably spent entire afternoons mentally rehashing every details of my pink slips, PR bunnies’ smiles would freeze to a near-breaking point whenever their bullshitting activities required any sort of interaction or input from my person.

Never, though, was I ever mean to workmates or people reporting under me: they usually didn’t mind my behaviour in the slightest, enjoyed the show and placed bets, if anything… But anybody with a vested interest in keeping the corporate status quo certainly lost many layers of enamel to teeth-gritting, during my stint in some of these companies…

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