Quantum Theology

I don’t dream much, but when I do dream my dreams are always fun.  I don’t get bad dreams anymore and they are never boring. Anyways, I dreamt that I fell in love with this girl and wonder upon wonders she actually loved me back. It was a good dream, and reality should never intrude on a dream. Of course, I had to wake up and reality is a hard master.

I’m going through a spell where I don’t really love anyone right now, and I LIKE IT. Yes, I like it very much indeed. I’m quite content to stay here for a while. I think I’m an overall much happier person here. This is strange perhaps, but it is only because my only experience with love has been a closed door slammed in my face and with my fingers stuck in the jamb. To be sure, sometimes I was the one who slammed the door - and on my own fingers to boot.

It’s not the pain of rejection, its the pain of a lost future. It’s the pain of knowing you will spend a lifetime without. Yes, the principle of Aversion Therapy is at work here. Err, only it’s not working. It’s kind of like some little guy who gets into a fight. He gets his ass kicked, but he keeps going back for more. That little guy has heart, and everyone respects that, but heart isn’t always enough and at the end of the fight he got his ass kicked so much more than he had to. So, I have no doubt that the cycle will continue again, and I will get my ass kicked yet another time, but I’m am most definatly enjoying where I’m at now.

Hehe, one day I might actually win the fight. I’ll look around and think ‘um….what do I do now?’

Today, like on every weekend, I was going to break out the motorcycle. The trip today would have been a jaunt down to a car show in Pueblo. I had this little feeling like perhaps I shouldn’t take the bike this weekend, so for no other reason I took my car. It’s a damn good thing, because on the way back I ran into the most severe weather I have ever driven my car in. A rather powerful thunderstorm rolled in on the drive back to the Springs. No doubt I would have been really jacked had I been on a motorcycle.

courtesy of Dilbert, used to describe management: inebriated simian miscreant

hehehe, this tickled my funny bone for some reason.

Adam knew Eve

or

Adam fucked Eve

or, if you’re a brit

Adam shagged Eve

Words are placeholders for things that we humans encounter in our lives. I find the Christian culture that prohibits the mention of the word ‘fuck’ to be obsurd. Words themselves do not have an intrinsic good/evil quality. Concepts, however, do have moral/ethical judgements associated with them. Whats the difference between a guy who knows his girlfriends mom, and a motherfucker. Remember ‘The Graduate’? I just described that guy in a ‘christian acceptable’ phrase, and a quite unacceptable phrase. Actually, motherfucker is only a single word, and a phrase was not even needed.
Before I forget, some people might need a biblical concept to take away from this. I will give you the concept of the cup and the whitewashed tomb. Children, open your Bibles to Matthew 25:25-27. Language is the ouside of the cup, and the underlying concept is the inside of the cup. Battle with the concepts first and check the language to measure your success and/or failure. And now to the whitewashed tomb. I have seen nothing to make me think that Christians are much different on the inside than everyone else. To be sure, there are some pretty significant differences, but on the whole we are all human and there are more similarities than differences. Certain things in the Christian subculture is nothing more than an attempt to ‘whitewash’ the tomb in an attempt to hide what’s on the inside. But Christians are not all alike, some want to whitewash, others just want to hide from the world and all its evil.
…And this is why I will never teach sunday school

…And this is why I will have problems finding a Christian girl.

…And this is a small part of the reason I am not enthusiastic about rejoining the Christian sub-culture.

The saga of my search for a more permanant home continues. This chapter involves home builders and my continuing distaste for individuals in sales.

The marketing information for the Saddleback Ridge condominiums claims that the condos are 1295 square feet. I am the trusting sort, so I initialy took that at face value. I’m not the trusting sort, I did my own pencil/paper calculation based off their floor plan. I did my adhoc calculation with some optimistic assumptions, and I still came up short. I was coming up with about 1150 square feet and I was quite clueless how anyone could get to 1295. I stopped by the sales office and obtained a square footage disclosure form. The square footage form clearly states that NONE of the square footage measurement standards were used, and that the claimed number was for marketing purposes only. The sales lady said that an exterior wall measurement was used. This being my first time buying a home, I don’t know the standards used for square footage measurement. It doesn’t matter too much how you measure as long as everyone else measures the same way.

Well, it was time to do some research. Apparently Single Family Homes are measured differently from condo’s. Your SFH is measured using interior wall measurements while the exterior wall measurement is used for condo’s. This is a bad thing, because ALL the units in this complex have three exterior walls, and only one shared wall. The shared wall might as well be an exterior wall because it’s the wet wall. Bottom line, the inside is MUCH smaller than 1295 square feet.

This was interesting, because I was planning to low-ball by 10k on their asking price. This low ball offer was based on an assumption of 1295 square feet. At this point, I don’t know I want to waste my time. I was curious as to the REAL square foot measurement from an appraiser, so I went over to that handy El Paso county website. All the units that have already sold have listed measurement of 1111 square feet. Furthermore, the appraised value is only 147k. The people who already bought paid upwards of 170k.

The bottom line is that I am not willing to pay what the developer things he/she is entitled to. I don’t feel obligated to line the developers pockets. It’s unfortunate that this is the only new condo development in the area I want. I suppose I will need be more aggressive with finding a used/older condo or a foreclosure home.

I had dinner with my Uncle last night, and the conversation turned to women. Uncle Tom claims to be quite the ladies man. He started to relay to me some tips on how to get a date. I listened quite attentively because it became obvious why I’ve been quite dateless for so long.

All of his tips involved some sort of acting on the part of the guy. Some examples:

• Go down to the laundry mat, don’t bring soap, and pretend to be completly clueless on how to do your laundry.
• Go down to the grocery store and ask a girl where you might be able to find even though you know perfectly well where it is.
• Find out that a girl likes something, and immediately make it your thing as well.

I’m willing to do none of that. Acting is akin to outright deception, and I despise the charades of the dating game. What you see is exactly what you get. Indeed, people who are so very skilled with the ladies are also quite skilled at deceit. I’m not willing to play that game.

Another thing that works towards my disfavor is that I am simply not interested in projecting an image of someone I’m not. It seems to me that the idea is to ‘con’ some girl into thinking you are something you are not so that you can get a date. I suppose the assumption is that by the time she discovers the real you, if she ever does, she will either dump your ass or decide that she can deal with the real you.
I wonder how it is with women. Are they equally conniving?

I was helping my 75 year old neighbor hook up her VCR to her TV so that she could watch some exercise videos. The neighborhood kitten was hanging out inside the place, and after I got a picture on the TV, I took to watching the kitten play with a small dog. My neighbor noted that I was watching the cat instead of watching the attractive women on the video. It appears that women have fallen below local animals on my interest scale.

…

oh the shame

The standing housing inventory in San Diego just broke the population adjusted all time high. The San Diego real estate meltdown correction is underway! The latter part of this year and next year will be VERY interesting!

I’ve been looking at possibly buying a foreclosure property here in Colorado Springs. The El Paso county website has a listing of properties up for auction. The addresses don’t mean much too me since I don’t know the area THAT well. I was resorting to copy and pasting addresses from the county website into google maps to get an idea of where the property is located. I got sick of that.

*busts out the programmer skills*

I decided to break into the world of JavaScript and AJAX and Google Maps and plot all the forclosure properties on Google Maps. It took me all day today, but I have some really basic functionality working.

The first thing was to obtain the data in a readable format. I wrote a PERL script to transform the website HTML into an XML document. This wasn’t that hard mostly because I’m getting much better at PERL.

So now I have an XML file, great! Part of the GoogleMaps interface is a handy object that will read in an xml file and create a DOM for you. Now it’s just a simple matter of parsing my XML and plotting the locations. Google Maps has a ‘Geocoder’ which takes in an address and gives you back the latitude and longitude, which is needed by the actual map in order to plot. This is actually not difficult and in a short time I am plotting.

Problem 1: I am plotting about 600 points, and each point requires a call to Google to get a lat/lon. That is pretty dang slow.

Solution: Back to PERL!!! In my script that converts the website data into XML, I add some functionality that calls Google, parses the response, and adds the lat/lon into the XML document. Voila, a cache.

It’s still very slow, after all it’s plotting 600 points in JavaScript, which is very slow. Perhaps later this week I will refine it to only plot points that are actually showing on the map. I could also implement some sort of filtering mechanism to make the dataset smaller.

If you want to take a look, go over to http://www.open-minds.info/app/test.html. If you wonder why there are big icons and small icons, I plot with a large icon if the property is available for auction at the coming weeks auction. The small ones have dates further than 1 week in advance. If you click on the icon, you will get the auction data in raw and cryptic form.

I think I have average luck. I have been really lucky in certain areas, and not so lucky in others and it kind of averages out. One of the areas I am not so lucky in is winning stuff. Whether it be at a casino, or a raffle , I just don’t win stuff. I thought this was changing for the better today. I had gotten a flyer in the mail from a local car dealership and the flyer had a scrachy thingy on in. If the number under the scratchy thingy matched the number on the inside of the flyer then I was a winner. Well, son of a gun I actually won. I took it down to the dealership today and got my prize - a $1000 shopping spree. I was slightly surprised at how underwhelmed I was at finding out that I had won, but I didn’t think all that much of it. I got home and I found out why I was underwhelmed. You have to go to this website www.goshoppingmall.com and order stuff from them. It works like a store credit, so you have to pay sales tax and shipping and handling. The catch is that they sell some really, really shitty stuff, and the S&H in many cases is almost half the cost of the item itelf! After it’s all said and done, this shopping spree works out to nothing more than a discount card… on shit. So now, I can get shit for half off!! yay!!!  I won’t be using this card for anything, perhaps I can sell it on ebay or something. Easy come, easy go.

The moral of the story is that fate is just fucking with me. But that’s ok. I’ve been pretty lucky in much better areas. I was thinking about how I probably should have been in at least one car accident by now. I’ve done some pretty retarded things on the road, but nothing that has turned into two cars colliding. I’ve also had some close calls on my motorcycle. Incredibly, I haven’t been stopped for speeding yet. Many times I’ve slowed down just as a cop comes over a hill, or as I round a corner. As long as my luck holds in these areas, I don’t give a prarie dog’s ass if I ever win anything useful ever.