Older blog entries for pfh (starting at number 29)

Heh, my new speakers actually have *fake* tweeters. It's just some fancy plastic moulding. Or maybe i should say "iconic" tweeters, indicating speakers capable of high frequency output. No, fake is definitely the word.

Makes you wonder: what are the consequences of surrounding ourselves with functional objects that are shaped like icons of previous devices that did their job. Hall of mirrors territory. Not to mention stupid.

This is of course endemic in computer interfaces. Calculator apps that look like... calculators. This surely has to be the stupidest interface design ever, if i want to type a number, i will type it on this keyboard i have right here. Python is easier to use as a calculator. Xine with its DVD-player icon. It's !@#$ annoying, all those fiddly inscrutible buttons, arranged in pointlessly neat grids. I want my pull down menus and tool bars. XMMS... an audio output application that takes all the worst design elements of actual CD players.

For that matter, buttons that look like physical buttons. Help systems that are actually separate from the application, like a physical manual. Windows that, like sheets of paper, are fully opaque, and sit on the desktop passively rather than flowing around each other as the focus changes. Toolbars with icons in neatly uninformative rows, where a well designed interface would emphasize some and push others to the background.

Until we embrace the full fluidity of computer displays, we're going to be stuck in the dark ages.

Weight: 113.1kg, Height: 1.88m. Two kilos less, thanks to the classic "Eat Less Food" diet :-).

I am reading The Great Unravelling. The USA is truly screwed. On the positive, I'm sure the various victims of IMF austerity measures will be amused when those wacky Americans do it to themselves.

Next year's politics should be... interesting. My prediction (er, random guess, whatever) is that the power balance in the world is going to tilt. It's currently focused in North America and Europe. But interesting things are happening in both Asia and South America, especially South Korea and Brazil.

Northern and Eastern Europe may also produce some surprises.

Africa, of course, will remain a basket case, without some really significant changes in attitude.

It would seem i am becoming an audiophile. I got sick of the lack of high frequencies on my old computer speakers, bought some new ones with tweeters. Much better. Occupational hazard when you do any sound editing i guess. I have some good headphones, but they're not so comfortable while Melbourne is slowly liquefying in the summer heat.

The ELECTRONIC SINGING TORTOISE now has a page to call its own. It was injured at a party last Saturday -- we think it broke the mind of one of our guests -- but a little super-glue put it right. So it is now the RESURRECTED ELECTRONIC SINGING TORTOISE.

I just read "Authentic Happiness", on the recommendation of Alex Chernavsky, and i'm impressed. Positive Psychology looks like some decent science, and that's not something I say lightly. The main thesis is that just as there are many ways to be insane, there are many ways to be sane, and that this is a worthy field of study. But there's rather a lot more than that. Worth a look. I haven't found a good summary of Positive Psychiatry on the web... i may have to write one.

My new laptop battery arrived. I can now record at least 3 hours of high quality audio with complete electrical isolation. Woot! This is going to make recording the choir's Christmas carols a lot easier.

I finished putting together a CD of the choir's last performance... it's an open music source music CD :-). Has a data track with the raw recordings in FLAC format, and MP3s of all the tracks for convenience.

Added BitPass microdonations to my website. I have it set up so that if you make a donation, the title-bar goes blue for a month, so it's easy to see if you have donated recently. All done with javascript and cookies. Would be nice to see this on other websites, since it is the kind of thing i would click on for the weblogs i read regularly. BitPass is a really nice cleanly designed system, looks like they've actually gotten the micropayments thing right at last.

I'm maintaining my medication schedule as described in my 24 November diary entry. Seems to be working moderately well, though i'm still tired and achey most of the time. My keyword of the week is "nonrestorative sleep". Getting a viscoelastic mattress for Christmas, yay!

I just had a religious experience. Well approximately religious anyway. I guess i can't hope for more, since i am approximately athiest. Let me recount it to you now, for it is very silly, and involves an ELECTRONIC SINGING TORTOISE. Or possible a turtle, i am not too clear on this point. Kind of like that Philip K. Dick story, but with singing.

Today i went for a walk. I wanted to clear my head a bit, and get a bit of exercise. It was quite hot.

I had walked for many miles, and reflected on my life so far and where i was headed, when i came across the first strange thing. It was the front garden of a seemingly ordinary home, but this garden was made of rocks, and in it was a dead tree, and on the tree were many strange ORNAMENTS, and no living thing grew there. And i thought to myself "neat", and then i thought "i wish i had brought a camera", and then i drank some electrolyte solution.

I continued on my way, walking beside the railway line. After some time, i came to the second strange thing. It was an ELECTRONIC TOILET. The door opened when i pressed a button. When i washed my hands, the toilet flushed automatically. Pleasant music played in the background. When it stopped playing, i took that as my cue to leave, for it was a self cleaning toilet.

I continued on my way. It was quite hot. I drank plenty of water, but i was feeling a little dissociated. Apparently some other guy, also called Paul, did something similar, some time ago, in a desert. Fortunately i did not go blind. Eventually i came to the city of Springvale, and this was heralded by the third strange thing, and it was as if i was in a foreign country. The third strange thing was a HOUSE WITH HORNS. And again i thought to myself "i wish i had brought a camera".

I wandered about Springvale for a time, and in something of a daze (as i had been out in the sun for several hours). Eventually i came to a shop selling many strange items, and all for a reasonable price. And while browsing about this shop, i heard a voice as of a child sing out! The voice greeted me, and proclaimed to me that it was feeling well. It then wished that i also be well. And i was filled with gladness.

From where had this voice come, with its marvelous and inspiring message? After some confusion, as there were many things in the shop, i discovered that it was the voice of the ELECTRONIC SINGING TORTOISE! I marveled muchly, for such a lovely voice to eminate from such an ungainly creature.

This is what it sang:

Hello, hello, hello, hello,
Hello, hello, how are you?
Thank you, thank you, I am fine,
And I hope that you are too.

And then it sang it again. And again. So i bought it.

Weight 115.8kg, height 1.88m. Blerg, time to loose a few kilos. The Chadstone Height And Weight Measuring Machine sayes it will see me again soon, and is probably right.

Been a while since my last diary entry, lots been happening...

My iBook battery has died in the ass. This apparently happens after two or three years with lithium-ion batteries. Have ordered a new one. Fortunately it didn't explode or catch fire, apparently due to some sophisticated (expensive) built in monitoring circuitry.

I am taking: 3 modafinil per day (morning, midday, evening), approx 4 propranolol per day (morning, midday, evening, night), and two temazepan every second day. Getting the temazepan involved the usual full on argument with my psychiatrist. Not entirely unjustified, the stuff is addictive, gives you a *nice* buzz. Result: I am moderately stable and productive at the moment.

Totally rethought the last third of my thesis (see here). I was planning on doing something on image compression, but this is much sweeter, and also easier to justify and write up. So my PhD is going quite well for once :-), just writeup now hopefully.

Finished polishing a recording of a performance of the choir I sing in. Lots of background noise to remove, a boost to the bass, and an annoying electrical hum to nuke. Hacked together some editing software with Python and Numpy, I really should clean up the code and release it at some point. Anyway, it's interesting that you can make a professional quality CD with a laptop, an iMic and a cheapish stereo microphone these days (well ok, not quite there yet myself, but with a little practice, no prob).

Went and got a second opinion, from a psychiatrist by the name of John Tiller. He's apparently Melbourne psychiatry's "second opinion guy". Works at the hospital I stayed in for a while last year, strange to go back there, if only for a consultation.

His suite was done up in classic psychological kitsch, which livened up the hospital architecture a bit. Nice "primitive" style statue of some guy screaming, and a sculpture of a child on a woman's back, crying. Which sounds slightly disturbing, but was really just a little self-conscious quirkiry.

Smart guy. We talked for about half an hour or so, then he dictated basically my whole personality in a letter to my usual psychiatrist (using some kind of voice recognition software, which was nifty).

And then, he did what is possibly the most insulting thing anyone has ever done to me, he refused to give me a copy of the letter to put in the public domain. He said I was not competent to make decisions about that kind of thing. My life has been quite unpleasant lately, but my sense of reality has never been compromised (sometimes i wish it was), i have never been psychotic (incidentally, my usual psychiatrist agrees with me on this (however, you'll have to take my word on that :-) )).

Anyway, here's what I can recall of what he dictated, blurred by memory and probably rather inaccurate:

• Tendency to Aspergers, doesn't seem to fit the depression profile too well.
• Flattened emotional affect, in excess of what would be expected as a result of taking propranolol.
• Taking modafinil at night is odd.
• Possibly "prodromal" (having symptoms typical before the onset of schizophrenia). Recommended (apparently rather unusually for him) further consultation with a specialist in the early treatment of schizophrenia.

There was quite a lot more, and put succinctly and with insight, but that is all that I can recall.

By the by, i'm more than a little disturbed by the concept of early treatment of schizophrenia. It may well be a good idea. But on the other hand, your typical anti-psychotic is a dopamine receptor blocker, and dopamine seems to be important in the experience of pleasure. So giving this kind of stuff to people who are basically still healthy is slightly worrying.

Continuing with the beta-blockers, seem to be still working. I am also doing a rather odd thing with the modafinil: i'm taking it at night as well, in combination with a sleeping pill. This may seem like a rather silly thing to do with a "wakefulness promoting agent", but it means that i can now dream.

I'm limping along. At least i know who i am now (i think it's from being able to dream properly), my memory is getting much better integrated and coherent. I'm probably pretty much unemployable at the moment, lucky i'm still doing my phd.

I keep noticing moments where I would have collapsed or freaked out or something (i was a complete wreck this time last year). My current mix seems to be keeping me upright and coordinated at least. Incidentally, the psychic toll of systematically experimenting with the functioning of your own mind is pretty harsh.

I've been giving some thought to medical data mining (see my notes). It's starting to look workable. One more little push towards excession.

Health/ Beta-blockers did the trick, atenolol. Nice and calm now.

Had to majorly twist my GP's arm to get them, poor guy. I just refused to go away until he gave me a beta-blocker. Fortunately he didn't call security...

If i'd only tried them last year, maybe i wouldn't be so fucked up now. But last year i still had some respect for the medical profession.

Hacking/ I've split off my hacking thoughts into a separate blog, here.

Health/ Spring in the southern hemisphere, getting a little twitchy again. Ah well. This time i'm coming out with all guns blazing, going to try to nip it in the bud.

Having a cold doesn't help.

Started taking Effexor again (after twisting my psychiatrist's arm pretty hard -- he doesn't like prescribing more than one thing at once (may be right too, we'll just have to see...)). I seem to be less evil now.

Still taking modafinil, occasional zopiclone.

Hacking/ Putting together a sound library/interface thing in python. This is going to be really sweet: cut and paste sounds like python lists with [:] and +, some nice fourier filters, splitting recordings into individual instruments synaesthesia style.

That's not the cute part though. The cute part is that it'll have a gtk interface that lets you alter the script, eg select part of a waveform and it generates appropriate slice code. Well that's one cute part anyway.

The other cute part is that it caches all calculations, and also doesn't bother to calculate anything till it needs it. So if you filter something then slice it, it might only ever apply the filter to the sliced section. Or if you reload a script, it will only recalculate the bits that have changed.