I spent all afternoon on a boat. It was a work thing, they took the whole team out on a little chartered cruise with some food and beer and stuff. We were out for about 3 hours, and it was pretty decent. The weather’s been pretty shitty all week, so I wasn’t sure if we were going to get rained out or if it would be too cold, but it was decent - the sun was out, and even though it was a little chilly, you could get around without a jacket.

The boat had a cabin with a kitchen and 4 booths that sat 4 each, with lots of wood, and a carpeted “living room”. The main deck went all the way around the boat, so you could go up to the front and hang out there. On top of the cabin was a second deck, and the cabin where they ran the ship (the cockpit?). There was also a third crow’s-nest deck above that. I don’t know how long or big the boat was, but it seemed pretty decent. The people who ran it were from Alaska, but they had a summer base up there and spent winters down in Seattle. They also had two little dogs, chiwawas or something, that sort of sat around the cockpit while we were out.

So when it was time to leave, we just crossed the street and went to the marina, and there was our boat, waiting in lake union. The cruise went all over, first back near the locks by Ballard , and then under I-5 and to lake Washington, and then back. The first part brought us through a lot of the more industrial parts of the water, where there were drydocks, old rusty ships, and lots of fishing boats. Lake union has some houseboats and stuff, too. And there are a lot of freaky business office buildings in Fremont that sit right on the water.

The western part of Lake Washington was cool, because we saw the 520 bridge up close, and also saw some of the rowing crew people practicing. A lot of UW is right on the water, too, and we saw stuff like the staduim up close. Then we crossed to the eastern side of the lake. If you’re on the east side of the lake, just south of 520, the first thing you see is the giant mansion that Bill Gates had built. First reactions, of course, have to do with how he can screw so many and build so big of a house. But when you continue north on the lake, you see that he is just trying to keep up with the Jonses, and I emphasize trying. I never knew there were so many billionairs around here! There were houses with yachts in the back yard, a house with a seaplane in the back yard, a lot of golf course green yards, giant verandas, decks, intricate architecture, marble staircases, long stretches of glass, and about everything else. It was like taking some kind of floating tour of the homes of the rich and famous or something. I liked seeing all of the neat architecture, but it was sort of a wakeup call that I would never become some kind of executive that could afford to spend 100 grand a year on their groundskeeping.

Oh well. It was a cool tour, and I liked seeing the houses and the boats…

It’s one of those days where you wish you could wander the streets aimlessly, with no purpose or goal. It’s cold enough outside to make it prohibitive yet seductive. Not like a hot and sunny summer day, where you biologically feel a need to escape and have fun. It’s more like a day when you wish you were clutching your coat against you, a wind blowing fliers and dead leaves down the street, and you watch the city as it works during the time you’re a part of it and working. You wander into a mall and it’s some geriatric ward, with the worst of the worst at the counters and muzak blaring in at 11. The small stores are empty, too. It’s all about the weather, though. It’s telling you “summer’s over”, like waking up with a hangover the morning after a party, your house filled with stale bags of half-eaten potato chips and mostly empty beer cans. It all sucks, but there’s something about that complete silence that tells you it’s over, but you survived it.

I once read a Bukowski poem where he describes the same feeling, where he sits in an attic drinking a beer and thinking that there’s all of those construction workers building houses or whatever, while he just sits there. My feeling is some of that, but also based on having such a weird student schedule for 6 years. I’d catch a couple classes or a shift of work at IUSB and then drive to Scottsdale Mall to blow my paycheck. The feeling of only me and my tape deck in the car, mixed with a city so busy at commerce, felt almost haunting, like being on the crashed Titanic’s hull, except it’s all alive.

The other strange thing about Michawaka and South Bend and my year their was that driving in downtown South Bend felt like really being in a city. There were buildings taller than 3 stories high, you had to parallel park in places, there were 6 lane streets and one way streets and overpasses and highways. Once I learned how to really drive around that mess of cities, I felt like it was better than being in Bloomington in some odd way. There was more going on in Bloomington, but it’s a small town compared to South Bend - compared to Elkhart, even.

The flipside to this is having the weird student schedule and being awake at 4 or 5 in the morning, and seeing the same city asleep. This happened to me almost every day back in school, and still happens sometimes now. It’s strange, but I think Bloomington had more stuff open late than Seattle. There are clubs and bars open past midnight, but you’re stuck with Denny’s or IHOP otherwise.

I just looked up some population stuff from the census page. My dad lives in Millersburg, which had a 1994 population of about 900. The city, or rather village, where I spent my time from age 1 to the first grade (Edwardsburg, MI), has a population of 1141. My birthplace, Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, is not listed, although the city of Grand Forks is around 50,000. My old hangout of Elkhart was 43,000. The city of Seattle itself is around 500,000. The greater metro area is about 3 million though. The strangest fact I’ve learned - there is a city named Starbuck, WA - population 170.

I’ve been thinking about Turing machines a lot, and doing some reading about them. The basic explanation, if I can remember it: there’s a machine that can read this paper tape (probably mylar if it was invented now). The tape looks sort of like a piece of movie film or something, and each square can hold a 1 or a 0. The machine can also move the tape left or right, to read another square. The machine has in internal state, which is basically like one memory location that holds a number. The machine is also constructed to follow a ruleset. The ruleset is a bunch of if-then statements that distate tape movement and the storage of new items on the tape. So, “if the tape says 0 and the current state is 20, change the current state to 27, write a 1 in this position, and move the tape left”

What the hell does all this mean? Turing designed this thing (on paper) in 1936 as the solution to a problem about designing a machine that could solve any mathematical problem without being physically rebuilt or modified. This seems pretty stupid if you’ve got a pentium on your desk, but back then, it was a big deal. And if you’ve ever worked with assembly language, you know the similarities between a Turing machine and a simple (i.e. non-Intel) processor. A Turing machine is sort of like a one-register RISC processor, except it addresses a bunch of paper tape instead of a bus.

It’s amazing that there are things in the Rumored to Exist draft from two months ago that I’ve completely forgotten about. I was just editing down an excerpt for the next zine, and I found about 10 pages of really incredible stuff that I don’t remember writing. So that’s pretty cool.

I have about four different things going on at work and in my mind, and I can’t just focus on one. Over lunch and last night, I was trying to edit some stuff for the zine, today and yesterday I was trying to learn enough javascript to fix something at work, I started thinking thismorning about how I could rewrite my auto-index program for this journal so it would include table support, and on the back burner is this game I’m writing. Lots of things to think about…

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I guess the tables thing works now. It really makes the list of journals look small though. And I’m not sure if there’s some weird year-2000-esque bug that will cause the whole thing to fail at the end of the year. It sorts the stuff in alphabetical order, not numeric. So 12/25/71 goes after 9/16/97. And if I start writing next year it will look like this in the list: 9/16/97, 9/16/98, 9/17/97,…

I no longer advocate Details magazine as a worthwhile publication. At one time I said it was a good read for its price, but all of the good parts have vanished in favor for their idiotic new look. Plus they have these 200 page advertizing layouts that are disguised as genuine articles that pad out most of the articles that are not there anymore. And what’s with this “Details guy” thing? They make it sound like every person who is anybody in my age demographic wears $4000 suits with $400 shoes, works out for 40 hours a week, climbs mountains or visits Europe on the weekend, does the “club scene” every weekend (also) and lives in New York City or in the Valley. It’s total bullshit. If that is my generation, I want to file for emancipation and go join the baby boomers with their mutual funds and quiet vacations to Lake Tahoe. Anything but this.

I saw the first Back to the Future movie last night, and now I want to own a DeLorean. I also want to own a bunch of useless/useful scientific gear. I watched a lot of movies yesterday, many of the same genre, but on accident. I saw Wargames, then some HBO movie about a Soviet sub with a reactor fire, then Independence Day, then I went home and saw Back to the Future. So all but one had some military theme to them, and three mentioned DEFCON.

In about two minutes of searches, I found several comprehensive DeLorean pages. They cost about $20,000 new, but sold for much more, and appreciated way more. I did see one of these at Universal Studios, but it might have been a fake. Oh, you can find a used one that needs some work for $12K-$14K, and a pristine one for around $20K-$30K.

I’ve always been interested in ham radio even though I don’t like CBs or walkie talkies. I can never hear what the people are understanding. My dad had a CB back when fucking everybody had one, and it seemed interesting, but I never got into it - I was only 6. He also had a set of walkie talkies which were fairly cool - the type with six foot antennae. We used to run around the neighborhood with those bastards, playing army or star wars or whatever. But they took about 600 batteries each, so there were only one or two times we had both radios going.

The packet radio thing sounds cool - the idea of having something like the internet but without all of the ball and chain connections to the computer industry sounds pretty cool. But I don’t know what I’d use it for, since I seldom use my modem and computer at home these days. It would also be cool to get some 2 meter antenna radio and talk to people on the Mir and in China and everything, but I guess I can do a lot of that on the computer, and I don’t.

Today’s been a geek day, because I’ve been trying to figure out JavaScript for the first time today. I have always considered it useless, but now I think it might be cool to write some kind of book catalog search or something with it. As long as it isn’t some annoying dialog box that comes up and says “My Site is K00L! Come on in!”.

I plan to blow 50 or 60 bucks at the grocery tonight. I’m hoping for a good evening.