Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Thursday, December 26, 2002

 

Darkest before the dawn



I spent christmas day with josh. We got halfway through the fisher king and he fell asleep. That was 9 hours ago. I hope this is the first good sleep he's got in a long while. I slept 8 hours myself, the most I've had in a row in weeks. The fire was nearly out when I woke up. More updates here.
 
Monday, December 23, 2002

 

Tales of the RH/CH-53D helicopter


Paul Fiorillo writes:

At the same time I was posting this, a CH-53 crashed in Kabul, killing all aboard, and two children. Seeing the best thing he could build get beat by Murphy ate my Uncle Bill's soul. He'd never see the his glorious bird powering through the air on TV. Never.

He'd only see a CH-53D when there was blood, and smoke, and wreckage. Usually on every channel on the news.

William Taht died of cancer 17 tears ago.

 

 

A knock at 9:08 AM


The property inspector for my house insurance wanted to measure the house. I gave her a copy of Uncle Bills Helicopter. I've been living here since august 27. In all that time, I've had 5 planned visitors, and four knocks from strangers.

I'm sure, somewhere in the piles of physical mail that lie unopened, that this visit was scheduled for this morning.

Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Feynman once told a great story about probability, which I'll post here when I can find it. I've been paging through his biography for an hour now, trying to find it.

I'm a good statistician. After thinking really hard about how search engines actually worked, (I've written two myself, and was a SQL database programmer for many years. Not only that, as a kid, I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. I rolled a lot of different many-sided dice.) and after analyzing the data I obtained from google, I came up with a mathmatical formula that would make a story rise to the top there. There's a few unknown values that I can quantify better since I started collecting specific data this week, but for a name as scarce as Josh Taht, the lower bound for l (links) was 3, and the upper bound was 9. At 3 known links, his story bubbled to the top.

Some others are now engaged in a little cultural jamming with me. Using these techniques, in only two days, Joshua Taht's story and Uncle Bills Helicopter moved to the top page of the google search results.


Becca writes in


TIA, Becca. We have some difficult things to do for Josh in the coming weeks.

I've also faxed Billy Joel's record company, with a request to be allowed to post "You're only human", on the web page http://www.taht.net/joshua. If anyone else would like to donate some music to this page, email me. I don't know if the fax got through, internet email to fax gateways are not very dependable.
 

 

Nightmare #2



I woke up with as 14,000 pound pillow over my chest, coughing. Off in the distance, I heard a tap tap tap tap tap.

There was no way I was going to get up, not that day, maybe not ever. I thought I was in the house I grew up in, in Ocean City, NJ, on the second floor, in the my bedroom. Going around the room I remember there was an air conditioner in a window, a fish tank on top of a dresser along the next wall. Then the door. Then my desk, with a CBM-64 on it, and CBM- 1702 monitor - all 320x200 lines of color glory. A box of 5 1/4 disks, then wall, then one of those tall cabinet things, with a speaker on top. Under the window, an old all-in-one stereo with a record changer in it glowed, an ELO record ("Time") on the spindle. My cat, Blackie, lay in a ball on the bed. I counted the knotholes in the ceiling.

The tap tap tap tap tap tap turned into knocking, then pounding, and I heard a voice crying out...

And I got up. And checked out all the windows, and both doors.

There was no-one there.
 

 

The Other Kid writes in


 
David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.


Resume,Songs,
My new blog, NeX-6, My facebook page
Orgs I like
The EFF - keeping free speech in the world
Musical stuff I like
Jeff, Rick, Ardour, Jack
Prior Rants - New song: Log Off Now Sharing your home network better in a time of covi... Designing for the disconnect Email lists going down the memory hole Instituting saner, professional source code manage... Wireless and Wifi in 2015 - not what I dreamed of Saving wifi! Fixing Bufferbloat! Fighting the vend... Virgin Media - Fixing the epidemic of bufferbloat ... 49... and trying to find my navel Wheels down on mars!
Best of the blog:
Uncle Bill's Helicopter - A speech I gave to ITT Tech - Chicken soup for engineers
Beating the Brand - A pathological exploration of how branding makes it hard to think straight
Inside the Internet Mind - trying to map the weather within the global supercomputer that consists of humans and google
Sex In Politics - If politicians spent more time pounding the flesh rather than pressing it, it would be a better world
Getting resources from space - An alternative to blowing money on mars using NEAs.
On the Columbia - Why I care about space
Authors I like:
Doc Searls
Where's Cherie?
UrbanAgora
Jerry Pournelle
The Cubic Dog
Evan Hunt
The Bay Area is talking
Brizzled
Zimnoiac Emanations
Eric Raymond
Unlocking The Air
Bob Mage
BroadBand & Me
SpaceCraft
Selenian Boondocks
My Pencil
Transterrestial Musings
Bear Waller Hollar
Callahans
Pajamas Media BlogRoll Member

If you really want to, you can poke through the below links as well.

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