More Solipsistic Than Ever

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I think many people (including myself) are getting resentful about using the internet to take the place of face-to-face encounters with other people, but the truth is for me that with people I don't have intimate personal relations with (none to speak of for nearly thirty years), communicating other ways than face-to-face is more useful and less time consuming.

I never thought it would come to this, and yet it seems natural and makes sense to me in a way I find difficult to explain. At least, explain in a way that might make sense to a fairly competent person. All I see in the world external to my own person is my idea of what's over there. Solipsism. Plain and simple. It's all been written before, and if you don't know what solipsism is, then all the explaining in the world would be a waste of time. Solipsism is a state of being one arrives at pretty much on their own. It's not something that's looked or as much as it finds you by reductionism.

It's strange how things work out, but in the last week I found myself as "friends" on Facebook with my ex-wife and our two daughters, and their children. My oldest daughter of that marriage had her first child last week. The youngest daughter has a six year old daughter. Up until I was invited to the oldest daughter's wedding in Seattle, I hadn't seen any of them for over twenty-five years.

I like the idea of being in touch with them again. My ex-wife's city of dwelling has been unknown to me. It became obvious she didn't want me to know where she lived right after we separated, and I stopped trying to keep up after that. I am happy to know what part of California she lives in because I still worry about her and the youngest daughter who also lives somewhere in California. The oldest daughter lives in Washington state, and I don't worry about her so much. I at least know the area she lives in.

All those earthquakes and forest fires are worrisome, but now that I know about where they live I won't worry as much. They don't have to worry about me showing up unexpectedly. I don't ever expect to be in California again. Maybe if I win the lottery so I could go in style, but that's the only way it'll happen. It's not possible for me to have any rich uncles to die and leave me a windfall, all my uncles are dead.

I have another ex-wife and daughter. I haven't seen them in a long time either. They live in the same state I do, but we don't stay in touch any more. I don't expect to see any of my ex-wives or children or grandchildren again before I croak. It'll be okay. They're all better off not seeing me again. It's be like opening old wounds all over again. I abide by the old saying, "If you love them, let them go."

I don't know what to say about my arthritis anymore except that I must have had it for a long time before it was diagnosed. When it was diagnosed I was experiencing more physical pain than at any other time in my life except with the ruptured disc. It was pretty bad, and I didn't think there was much that could be done about it. I was wrong.

I can't say that I'm totally pain-free, but I'm relatively pain-free except for some nausea that's one of the side-effects of the pills I take. I'm a little afraid to write about it. I type and play the piano as much as I like without a problem. I'm pretty sure if I stopped taking them medicine I'd have a relapse and the pain would return again in full force. But, as long as the US doesn't become a failed-state and my kidneys hold out, there is not much of a chance I'm gonna stop taking the medicine.

I can't say my enthusiasm for learning AppleScript is gone, but I'm realizing it's not something I'm gonna conquer overnight. I still read every post that shows up from the AppleScript e-mail discussion group with an disciplined attitude. I try to understand why and how the scripts that appear for discussion work.

The group discussion shifted to the new operating system that Apple introduced, and I didn't have the new Snow Leopard. I didn't think I could install it because my Mac Mini only has the Core Duo Intel CPU which is a 32-bit chip. Eventually I learned that I could install it on a system that only has a 32-bit chip as long as it's an Intel chip, because Snow Leopard only runs on a 32-bit kernel unless a 64-bit program is called.

When I found out I could upgrade to Snow Leopard even though I wouldn't get the full benefits a 64-bit chip would produce, the open CL aspect of Snow Leopard would still work to use the graphics chip on my motherboard when it wasn't busy, and upgrading to Snow Leopard would facilitate my transferring the files on my Mac Mini to a new computer that will come with the full-monte 64-bit Snow Leopard already installed.

I wanna stall getting a new computer for as long as possible. There are two very important technologies ready to go immediately, but for reasons I don't fully understand the chipset makers aren't putting them on the motherboard yet. SATA3 and USB3 are a big deal. The reason they're a big deal is because they are lots faster than the previous versions, and they need to be because of solid state storage drives or SSDs. The slowest one of the more popular SSDs including the Intel ones are ten times as fast as the fastest hard drive anybody makes.

What I read recently may make some sense, but I don't know why yet. Anandtech wrote about the same thing I have on the topic. Granted, I wrote what I wrote a few months earlier than he did, but I based my conclusions on what he wrote first, and he actually knows what he's writing about. He states something to the effect that Intel itself is holding back on putting SATA3 and USB3 in the next chipsets because they're not ready to deal with the speed of the SSDs yet.

Now, that's amazing. For the longest time hard drives were the bottleneck nobody apparently thought would be resolved so quickly, and now what was the bottleneck previously is waiting on the rest of the system to catch up with it, and from what's be speculated up, the speed of the SSDs is just ganna get faster still.

I haven't read much more about memsistors recently, but when products using memsistors come on to the market they're gonna be even faster than the flash memory presently used in SSDs and much much smaller. Small enough, so I'm led to believe, that they'll be able to put gigabyte upon gigabyte of it as DRAM and storage directly on the CPU block, and the dream of having a really fast computer all on one chip is closer than ever to reality.
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