If the rain comes they run and hide their heads
They might as well be dead
If the rain comes, if the rain comes

  Yesterday, March 12th, 2016, we had a moderately strong wind storm.  At my home, I lost power at 3:20PM and didn’t get it back until about 4:30AM the next day.

     This is the tree that took out our power for 13+ hours.

     Mei knows how to get comfortable.  She covered herself with this afghan, we didn’t throw it on her.

     Sunday, I was introduced to the church where my wife started attending while I was in prison and the almost four years since.

     I’ve been attending a Men’s accountability group sponsored by a pastor from that church since being released from prison in 2012.

     It went better than I could have hoped, at least from what I could see.  About a dozen people came up after the service and welcomed me.

     Hard to say if and how much behind the scenes backlash there will be.  But I get the feeling this is a group of real practicing Christians, that is to say people actually living Gods word instead of just spouting it.

     I feel like God has found me and now brought me back to the flock.  I can’t express the joy I felt after this.

     I had two weird networking dreams.

     In the first, there was a mangled version of IPv4 in which the second octet could be a number bigger than 256, it was so you could have addresses like 53.64509.251.83 and if all the interim networking infrastructure supported it, that IP would actually take you somewhere.

     It’s implementation was neither official nor stable so doing like ping 53.64509.251.83 might get a response or it might explode the network stack and crashed the machine.  These addresses were kind of underground like darknet.

     The second involved these Ethernet over your AC wiring devices.  People discovered that they would make it to neighbors houses, then people started chaining them together to create neighborhood wide LANS, NANS I guess.

     Also had a dream working for the telco but the technology was all modern (I left 21 years ago) and I didn’t understand how it worked except in theory so was struggling.

     Daylight Savings Time is one of my pet peeves.  Instead of changing TIME to make activities better fit the Earth’s light / dark cycle, how about just changing the time we do those activities?  Too dark for kids to go to school early, schedule school later.

     Instead we make 7 billion people less Arizona, and a few other sparsely populated regions, undergo a total screw-up of their circadian rhythms twice a year.  God only knows what the health impact of that is but it can’t be good.

     And if we ABSOLUTELY MUST do it, why the hell do we move our clocks forward at 2AM on Sunday when it screws us out of an hours sleep and an hour of the weekend?

     How about instead we move them an hour forward at 2PM on Friday, thereby shortening the work day and bring the weekend an hour sooner?

     If I had my way, the heads of all the legislators that passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would have their heads explode.

     Everybody says it’s about the artists ability to be compensated, that’s just so much bullshit.  Less than 1% of the income these people derive typically goes to the artist.

     But what it is doing is denying us access to our own culture and guaranteeing that our time on this planet will be forgotten as soon as the profit margin shrinks too far.

     What did artists do BEFORE the technology existed to make copies of their music?  They made money performing.  Why should they uniquely benefit, and even less so why should giant record labels benefit uniquely from copying technology rather than the whole of society?

     One kind of dream I sometimes have is one in which I am living a completely different life and I myself am a different person altogether with a different family, history, home, occupation, you name it, completely different person.

     Usually these different people are not extraordinary, they’re just not me.

     The extraordinary part of it all is the adventure of it.  When you’re living a completely different life, everything is new and novel.

    I have no idea what the meaning of it all is.  I’m not real big on the re-incarnation hypothesis.  I can’t imagine why I would want to be a human being on this planet again.

     My back is so unhappy today, my intestines and legs were so unhappy last night.  I go to a men’s group with some men who are mostly older than me although only for a few years and they all live with chronic pain and I just don’t understand how they do it.