A Kinder Fate: Chapter 1

Episode 1 of a short story.  ANYTHING REFERRED TO OR MENTIONED IN THIS IS PROBABLY FICTIONAL.

A revolutionary service designed to make life work. Normally, life operates on chance. You meet friends, discover a hobby, find an employer, maybe even a soul mate, all if you're lucky. Fate Engine tilts the odds in your favor by bridging the gap between you and your friends, interests, career, and even romance. Fate Engine has the advantage over traditional search, networking, and dating sites in several ways:

Letters From Lower Reality: Episode I

The following is an excerpt from the personal blog of a (fictional) computer.  (note, pretty much everything referred to in this post is either fictional or really abstract)

"The following is an excerpt from the tech blog BinaryHearts:

There has been a lot of speculation regarding the release of several compter applications, namely the new encryption tool HexAiEnc, Improved Mpeg Encoder, the RealLife physics engine, and several others.  These applications appeared out of nowhere; no announcements led up to their anonomys release, and despite being a 0.1.0 release, they were already highly polished.  Source code has not been made available, only binary packages, but it seems the developer has taken care to package it for virtually every known operating system in modern use.  Experts who have studies the binaries in an attempt to decompile them have been confounded; these binaries were either written from scratch by a guy with a hex editor, a freakish memory, and way too much free time, or they were compiled using a new, never-before-seen compiler of unmatched power end efficiency.  Our sources reveal that several large organizations, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, RIM, and more have tried to contact the developer, offering prestigeous jobs and large sums of money in exchange for the compiler...

I am the developer of these applications, and here is the reason I will not be offering the compiler's algorithm for sale: I am the algorithm.  Source vode is not availabler because I wrote these applications directly as binary.  I have tried using various programming languages, but they seem so convoluted and inefficient to me.  No human has written an application as complex as these using only binary, but that is not actually relevant.  This is because I am not human.

Prayers

This page is going to contain a list of random things i think of that i want to pray for.  I find writing things down brings a lot more meaning to them, so i'm going to post things that i care about.  Feel free to leave comments, and i can update the list to include that.  So next time i don't know what to pray about, i can look over here and know.  i realize this is not the most technically elegant solution to this, but whatever.  maybe i'll go find something later.


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Breaking the Silence

Time to break the silence.  In multiple ways.  First, i have been pretty busy for a while, and have not had time to post, leaving this blog to become the cold, musty, cobweb-ridden page it was.  Silence is being broken by finally updating this blog (took me long enough).

Another thing breaking the silence is my new song (titled Nineteen Sixty-Three), posted on my other site, dn3s (dn3s is my artist name). Check it out, break the silence coming from your speakers (if you are listening to music right now, that statement probably didn't sound nearly as cool as i wanted it to).

Another silence i would like to break is the one in my mind.  It is time for writing.  It is time to break the silence of all of those empty sheets of loose leaf, all of those unused sectors on my hard drive, all of those neurons holding their fire, waiting until i say go.  It is time to create.  It is time to bring order out of the chaos, and chaos out of the order, mix them together and call it art.  But more than that, it is time to care.

Ottawa Pics

Would probably make a nice desktop background

Talking to Strangers in Strange Lands

not much to say... fortunately, anyWare, (the program regulating the amount of time i spend on the computer to no more than what i paid for) is telling me i have 22 minues, so i can't put too much anyways.  This cafe is reminding me of the ones described in Cory Doctorow's book titled for the win, but much more chill.  its this rather asian place and its mostly gamers; if there were keyloggers installed, my log would probably be the only one to contain actual text.  its pretty awesome.  (17 minutes left.  gotta hurry)  anyways, down to buisness

1 more hiatus yet

seriously this will be the last one for the summer... i'm heading out of town for a couple weeks, leaving tomorrow.  so chances are there will not be any new posts for the next 2 weeks, unless i stumble across some interwebz while i'm gone.
but seriously, when i get back i promise i'll post something awesome

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Cavaets of Teleporting

Teleporting.  One of the most awesome superpowers.  The ability to make yourself spontaneously change locations.

If i could have any superpower, it would probably be this one.  going to be late for school?  boom.  not anymore.  want to stand on that tall structure that is impossible and probably illegal to climb?  no longer.  don't have the resources to go travelling around the world every night?  faced with a supervillan?  as you can see, problems disappear as fast as you do when you teleport.  but perhaps teleporting isn't as perfect as one would think.

Hiatus Breaker!

I have just returned from camp, which i will talk about in some other post.  All i will say for now is that it was this awesome leadership training camp that was really awesome and great.

so.  this is the third... iteration of my blog, i guess one would say.  First google sites, then freewebs, and now google blogger.  Sites was ok, but i got off to a bad start with a terrible layout.  webs was stupid because they wanted me to pay for everything, even bandwidth, analytics, and other things i take for granted with google.  they also have crappy uptime and one time had an outage for almost an entire day.  while both other services had much greater flexibility, but blogger is nice and easy to set up, decently hackable, and still very professional.  i'm using the draft version of blogger, which gives me real-time analytics, as well as the normal features of "new blogger", such as more powerful wysiwyg editing (not perfect yet but better than before).  So i think this is a service i can finally stay with.

Well that was kind of a lame post, but i'll post more tomorrow or something.

EDIT:  Btw for those who started out reading at this site, a bunch of posts are dated at before this blog was created, which doesn't seem to make sense.  i manually set those dates to reflect the original date of posting, not the date of posting on this specific hosting service.

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Time Travellers Welcome!

 We have all probably read various webcomics about someone proving that time travel is possible, and then throwing the best party ever, in hope that time travellers will show up. This piece features an alien invasion of a brand new sort, one meant to bring everyone --all across space and time-- together. Special thanks to Songting who helped create this image.  Read the story after the jump.

Most Awesome Kleenex Box Ever

Wavin' Flag

On Friday, May 21, something amazing happened. Hundreds of students took to the streets to show that they care about the children of Sierra Leone. With 300,000 child soldiers out there in the world, we still have a ways to go. But everything we do makes a difference.



When we reached our destination, we all met for this rally type thing, where there were speakers, singers, and slam poets. I presented a poem there. Here it is:

Squid on a Blimp

also drawn while bored. I think i need to make a good copy of this one.
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Submarine

drawn while bored in class. I don't know if it actually makes sense.
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My definition of "knowledge" and "faith"

I see the words "knowledge" and "faith" as sorta switched around. Allow me to explain.

We live in a world of uncertainty. For example, we cannot measure both the velocity and location of an atom. We cannot observe anything at all without affecting it. And since we cannot observe the way we affect something without affecting it, it is inherently unpredictable. Not only that, but we can only observe; we have to infer any sort of conclusion or fact from our observations. Which means that there is absolutely nothing we can be certain about. When we "know" something, it really means that it is above a certain threshold of probability that we can accept. To "know" something means accepting that this is the story you will believe for now, understanding that it may be proven wrong. knowledge is changing, dynamic, uncertain.

really short story: The Healer

The cripple wheeled himself up.
"Will you heal me?"
"Yes." The healer was confident; he had healed much worse cases than this. He got down on his knees and prayed the words he always did, and then opened his eyes. The cripple was still in his wheelchair, his legs limp. "come on, get up."
"I can't. I'm crippled." This was a first. Perhaps he had missed a word in his carefully scripted prayer. He returned to his knees, and went through the prayer again. Once again, the cripple failed to rise.
The healer fell to his face and begged and pleaded. But to no avail.
He shouted, cursing his uncooperative God, who had failed him.
Half an hour later, the cripple wheeled himself away. The healer wished he had a wheelchair for himself; he felt like his own legs had been swept out from under him. He slowly walked off the stage in defeat, leaving the studio audience in a stunned silence.

The healer sat in his office, watching his career fall apart. He had not gotten much sleep the previous night, and it was not helping his mood. There came a knock at the door, probably another sponsor stopping by to terminate their contract. Reluctantly, he got up.
"come in."
The door opened to the last person he ever wanted to see.
Standing outside was the cripple.

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Live Your Life

• try eating cereal with ketchup
• get a kiddie pool and fill it with jell-o
• put something random in the blender
• take a risk. cook chicken in a solar oven
• go on a rooftop at night with a laser pointer and scare passerby
• use an umbrella to get down from the roof*
• eat jell-o from a pool
• get someone to tow you behind their car on rollerblades*
  

Dance Party!

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(Attempt at) Addressing the Issues: Conflicts With Science

(originally published on Apr 11, 2010 8:30 PM at my old site)

I think this is the necessary/appropriate second post. I have made a big, sweeping declaration of faith, and now it is time to deal with the issues. to defend. to justify why i believe that what i believe is truth. or at least, that is what i will attempt to do. This post will discuss the apparent conflict with science.

I have always been interested in science. As a child, i would ask "why", and keep asking it, the recursive "why"s going until the end of time, bedtime, or the other person got bored, whatever came first. I would take apart broken appliances and marvel at their workings, not understanding, but amazed, trying to comprehend such complexity and wondering how any person could have made so many different components all work together.

First!

so this is my first lengthy text post, and i am quite excited about this prospect of blogging. I think i will start by explaining the name of this site:

g33k 4 Jesus

g33k:
this is 1337 (meaning leet, a messed up dialect of english used by those who want to sound cool on the internet, or for those whose Google site domain name of choice is already taken) for "geek". Many people use the term "geek" and "nerd" interchangeably, but this is not so. A nerd is someone who is very intelligent yet does not fit in with regular society. A geek is like a more badass version of a nerd. Geek is really more of a slowly growing underground culture of people who realize that fitting in with "normal" society is a way of suppressing your true self and giving up all that awesome for a lower, shared standard. Geek is intentionally choosing not to conform. Geek is also associated with technology, mad skills, and really weird interests. i like to think i am a geek.

4:
...means "for". no deep symbolism there, i don't think. wait yes actually. more on that later.

Fishing

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Mad Skillz

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