DeeLoaf

Global Warming - it gets hotter

Heat Wave - more AC running just to survive

Power Failure - overburdened grid fails at peak demand when needed most

Gas shortage - everyone runs out to get gas for the generators as the power is out

Transportation shortage - no gas to pump means no getting around

Food shortage - with no trucks running, the store shelves empty quickly

Money shortage - for the things that are left to buy, anyone who needs to buy quickly runs out of cash.

Life shortage - limited access to life neccessities leads to certain death.

If you can't buy it, you dont own it,
Is not yours and it certainly wasnt made in freakin China.
You dont have it but you need it
And now you're freakin dead.

I decided to try and upload a video to google video. This was after I decided to try messing around with DV some more and find a bloody satisfactory model for usage. I've settled. I think what I'll do is just accept that the highest quality of video is always only going to be on the DV tapes themselves and will probably degrade over time as they become unreadable or whatever. As for transferring video to the PC, well DV sucks. The files are just too unweildly, and the interlaced video is just gay. So what I'm going to do is just take a very lassaiz faire attitide, it is what it is, I only have so much disk space etc. So I'll deinterlace, resize to 512x384, and 2pass Xvid encode at 3000kbps and keep those on disk as "high quality originals" or at least, suitable for working with in editing programs. Maybe I'll change that to 4500kbps or higher, maybe not do the resize. But the de-interlace and xvid encode at high bitrate are going to be staples of my operation. And then, edit away, mix up, add text and effects or whatever, and then output at a more bandwidth friendly bitrate like 1000kbps (all the TeeVee shows I dl are about 1000kbps and they look fine). With the lower bitrate final output I dont think there will be much difference between 3000kbps xvid source files versus raw DV source files, so I think my little operating proceduce should work greatly to reduce my aversion to actually working with DV. Just bite the bullet son! ... Ok here is the video I was messing with and posted to google video. And of course, the quality is further degraded there.

Truly I am starting to believe that is what each of us is becoming -- nodes in a great network. Cells of a great body. Each of us doing our own thing, but at the same time working with those we are connected with. This is the beginning of a great p2p culture, the beginning of a new era of cooperation on this planet. One of abdunance and freedom. But we have a long way to go and many great challenges, primary among them is the looming energy crisis. It is my hope that the crisis will be solved not by money interests and capitalist greed, but by free agent actors on the fringes, doing something new for the excitement of it, for the inherent value to each of us. This is where the net came from. Peers working loosely with one another over great distances, and it was good. This is the future, and the new addition to the network will transcend the purely informational and now begin to move into the physical. Fabbers. Nano-manufacturing in your home with inexpensive and widely available materials. Machines that can replicate themselves. Machines that can produce cheap solar collectors. To be used to power the manufacture of more machines that can do the same. Cheap energy for all who want it, without the stranglehold of "intellectual property" constraints, free to replicate across the globe, and like wildfire it will. How fast did everyone jump on the napster bandwagon? It was very fast. BitTorrent? Very fast. A new idea that WORKS gets put into practice, people start using it, other people witness its effectiveness and start using it too, and soon anyone NOT using it is comedic in their toil. New ideas can spread very fast, especially with the net keeping us all in the loop on everything imaginable.

I am a cripple now without the net. Surely just as capable as any man would have been in the past, constrained to the limits of physical reality for all aspects of information, culture and human co-operation.

I should note that this post was inspired by something that happened last week, I was poking around and found a halton information site (hipinfo.info) and reading on the about us page I saw something quite ironic, they had 6 points under their explanation about themselves, point 1 and 3 were the identical text about reducing redundancy in information management. I thought it so funny and ironic that I called them up and let them know about the redundency in their information. I was just doing what I thought needed to be done, acting as a simple node in the network, taking on a responsibility that I felt I could initiate some action on. The duplicate text was removed within a few minutes. The other nodes in the network for this action did each of their jobs to perfection. The action would not have happend had I not initiated it, had I not sent that first signal to some hopefully responsible other node. This made me think about the human condition here in general, and gave me hope for the future.

I went to visit the Everdale Environmental Learning Center where my friend Paul is doing an internship and learning about farming and other fun stuff. I had planned to stay the entire weekend but it didnt work out as such. As is often the case with me, sleep trouble cut it short.

But I did have an enjoyable time while I was there. Upon arrival I met Jen and Meghan (interning), found a note left for me by Paul on the blackboard/public messageboard and helped Jen collect the day's eggs from the chicken coop. Then I met Spike the cat and Joe who is also interning. I went biking around the property a little bit and then I met up with Paul and Kelly who had returned from their trip to Erin (town). Paul and I caught up and enjoyed some popcorn then went to see the alpacas and spend a few minutes with some flowers in the hand-cranked-flashlit woods by the boardwalk. Paul showed me to my cabin and I watched my teevee shows on the laptop (had enough charge to get through TDS and TCR without dying) and then tried to fall asleep. Tried and tried. Toss here, turn there, scratch sound there, bird chirp here, sun coming up there. As you can guess it didnt go so well. I think I must have got an hour or two sleep in there because honestly the sun came up too fast but I was awake for a loooooong time that night.

By 5AM with the sun up and the birds chriping away 5 feet from my window I did the only thing that made any sense and got up and out to the main building where I searched for sustenance. That is, for me, first thing in the morning CAFFEINE DOSAGE!!! ... took a while. I couldnt find the coffee. I found the tea, so I got a start at least. By the time I had finished my tea (which I decided to try stevia to sweeten -- ok, mighta worked better if I was adding stevia EXTRACT but I was adding umm ... ground stevia leaf?? or something equally non-soluble haha. But it sorta worked, just had a little pile of green crud at the bottom of the cup after, and it did sweeten the tea) another person (I think it was Joe, might have been Kelly, I can't remember and before long everyone was there anyways) pointed me to the coffee grinds in the freezer and the clean decanter buried in the clean-pile in the sink. I was then all set, had 4 cups of coffee and a bowl of cereal. Ready to start the day!

First on the agenda was to get a fire started. There was a large pile of refuse wood, old fence posts, odd shaped lumber cutoffs, damaged lumber and plywood pieces, and other scraps. It was a sizable pile. Jen brought out some newspaper and a box of matches, I helped set up the tinder and she got it lit. We put a bit of the wood on it and then Jen went to the flower garden where she was going to be doing most of her work that day. I stayed with the fire for a few more minutes and then went over to help Kelly transfer the cow named Anne two pens over. Anne needed her own space away from the pigs and chickens she was in with. Moving the cow over was interesting. It was a matter of opening an obvious hole in the fence and then herding her into it. Cows can move faster than people though, so it took me and Kelly a little while to figure out our spacing and pacing but we got it soon enough.

Then Kelly and I went over to the flower garden to help Jen dig walkways between the beds. I think I dug about 3 and then decided that this was just a little too back breaking for me to engage in for a long time without my proper sleep. So I went back to the fire. Which definitely needed attention. Unfortunately when I returned to the fire I found that the box of matches and newspaper (which I'd even moved further from the fire than it initially was) was a smoldering pile of charred remains. Oh well. I decided that if this pile of wood was going to get burned through safely that the fire neeeded an attendant and so thats what I did for the rest of the day, burned it all. The poor tree under which the pile was stacked is about 10 feet away from the fire pit, which is a little too close for the kind of fire _I_ was running. So all the closest branches had their leaves dried out. It did not catch fire though, which is good.

Before lunch while the fire was still going Kelly asked me for help moving some picnic tables and other lawn furniture around out of the way for her to mow the grass. I needed to eat for energy so I stopped and ate a bagel with jam and a pickel. Yum, hit the spot, and back to work, moved the stuff with her and then back to my fire.

After lunch (thanks Alex!) and when the fire was pretty much done I helped Jen move some seedlings from the greenhouse down to the flower garden. I think a better tray design is in order, or I wasnt doing it right. Ah well I tried!

Then I was pretty exhausted and rode my bike around for a little while and decided that was about it for me and packed up my stuff and started getting ready to head home. If I could figure out how I would actually achieve sleeping then I might have stayed for the rest. Shit, maybe I should have just gone back to the cabin for a nap but I was just kind of starting to wonder what was I doing and so I decided I should go rather than be a drag. But I had a good time and I helped out, so it was a worthwhile experience. Heres my flickr photo stream for the pictures I took (all taken June 13 2006). Favorite shot is this nice landscape one.

And with this day I turn 27 years old. 27 years here on this planet, 27 years of lies, 27 years of state domination, 27 years of sleepwalking, though the last 4 I have been trying to wake up.

And yet I continue, chasing dollars for livelihood, to pay the rents, to burn the gas. And every day I want to walk away from it all more and more. And one day I think I will, for at least a while, for a bit of adventure, take some time to reflect on things, take some time to unplug and become a real person for a while. Soon with any luck, whatever that might mean.

So .. I'm getting rather ... uhh, unimpressed by nation states and thir bullshit. For example heres a few things that piss me off: Census, if I dont consent and dont want to deal with their little bitch national census that I dont believe in, I could be threatened with fiatdollar fines or potential jail time. Yeah, fuck you too. Seatbelt laws, fuck you too its my life. Car insurance. Yeah, um, if I get hurt and want money, I should have had insurance. If I accept the risk, and its my life, then fuck you. But no they'll try and fiatdollar fine you or jail you, or deny you your property (automobile) despite the fact that you'd caused no harm. No this is getting to be enough. Property taxes. Yeah fuck you Canada. Wheres a human who doesnt do usury fiatdollars supposed to build his little one room shack? If you dont do usury fiatdollars, you dont get that chance, save by squatting. Actually I think thats the eventual plan. Anything I invest myself in will bloody well have to have wheels on it for when the squat patrol / fiatdollar taxation deathsquad comes around I can simply up and move along like a goddan gypsy. If wanted to stay put ... well then I'd have to have a supporters, a crateload of these puppies (or similar) and start a revolution.

But I dont have any supporters and even if I did I dont want to be a revolutionary leader, I just want a place to build a home and be in peace.