Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   laptop works in Dart
Wednesday, January 21 1998
T

he dream featured Jessika. We were on a drive through crazy mechanistic worlds common to my dreams of late. She was telling me a story in the back seat of my car, leaning towards me ever closer as she did so. In the end her lower lip was in my mouth in some kind of accidental kiss. Her lower lip was thick and heavy like a piece of lead, and saliva flowed copiously, though in the dream it tasted wonderful. No doubt the lip's imperfection was a reference to Jessika's wounding on Carter's Mountain.

I

've fallen into a pattern. In the morning during the Jerry Springer Show, I get a pot of coffee going and check my email, go through the logs, and eventually start work on various web projects I have taken on in exchange for the hope of pay. I haven't seen a paycheck since December, however, so I've been living on savings. And I'm even more frugal than usual.

As the evening rolls in and I am forced to turn on the light, I kick back, listen to the news, get myself a drink, and eventually watch the Simpsons. Sometimes I hang out with Matthew Hart, Deya and Angela. But often I stay in my room like a hermit. I can be myself, watch my own shows, live my life, and hang out with my nascent misery, which is more like a dark form in the corner of my vision than it is a cause of real discomfort.

T

onight, while my housemates sat around planning to go bowling, I modified my laptop's modem module so that it could power my laptop via a car's cigarette lighter. This involved careful measurements and the drilling of holes. After I was done with the modifications, I tested the laptop in the Dodge Dart. It powered up perfectly. The new powering system is so robust and reliable that the laptop would even stay up and running while I started up the car underneath it. It's amusing to think that when my Dart was manufactured in 1974, there was no computer on earth as powerful as this laptop. Now this same computer, with its 33MHz 486 DX, is considered quaintly obsolete. Yet the essential characteristic of the powering system is the same for both: 12 volts. The past can come to the aid of the future (as compensation, perhaps, for the Indians who used fallen telegraph wire to lash their teepees together). Now that I can power the laptop with either a car or a wall outlet, its range is essentially infinite. There will be few times when I won't have access to either. By the way, the NiCad battery that came with the laptop is very unreliable, but under what circumstances will I need to use it?

one year ago

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?980121

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