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Friday, September 11th, 2009
8:26 pm - Ear-glancing?
Is it possible to glance at something with your sense of hearing? If so, is there a concise word for it in English? Or any other language? I feel like there must be something akin to the concept, but I'm hitting a mental block right now.

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Sunday, July 26th, 2009
12:04 am - Oh nowes!
So, um. I thought a bug had klandwed on my wear, and I rweachwed up suddewnkly to gwet it, and spiklklewd a gklass of weatwer on my klweyboard. Nowe it's rewgistwering swevwerakl of thwe klweys in pairs, and it's reaklkly irritating. Hopwefuklkly this stops wehwen thwe weatwer driwes.

Fascinating.

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Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
10:54 pm - 100 Truths
omg memes

1. Last beverage → Still drinking a Cherry Coke from the movie theater
2. Last phone call → Kristen, seeing if we're still on to see the WORST MOVIE OF ALL TIME
3. Last text message → to Angela: "OH MY GOD WORST MOVIE EVER I WANT A STIFF DRINK NOW"
4. Last song you listened to → Ending theme to Code Geass coming out of the other room
5. Last time you cried → Recently.

HAVE YOU EVER:
6. Dated someone twice → No
7. Been cheated on? → Nah
9. Lost someone special? → Sure
10. Been depressed? → Roger
11. Been drunk? → ... What happened to number 8?

LIST THREE FAVORITE COLORS:
12. #BFF000 (Tree bud green)
13. #D7001F (Ruby red)
14. #FFA7CF on #6F3F1F (Pink on brown)

THIS YEAR HAVE YOU:
15. Made new friends → Yes
16. Fallen out of love → No
17. Laughed until you cried → Yes
18. Met someone who changed you → Yes
19. Found out who your true friends were → Already knew that
20. Found out someone was talking about you → You'd have to be pretty full of yourself to think nobody ever talked about you :)
21. Kissed anyone on your friend's list → Doesn't happen much

22. How many people on your friends list do you know in real life → 99%
23. How many kids do you want to have → Jury's still out
24. Do you have any pets → Not with me
25. Do you want to change your name → Sometimes
26. What did you do for your last birthday → Didn't go to work (hint: it was a holiday)
27. What time did you wake up today → 7:00am
28. What were you doing at midnight last night → Debating whether to go to sleep or not
29. Name something you CANNOT wait for → A girlfriend
30. Last time you saw your father → Yesterday at work
31. What is one thing you wish you could change about your life → Less social anxiety
32. What are you listening to right now → A whirring fan, a clicking hard disk drive, the sound of keys being pressed by my fingers, and a faint low hum from somewhere outside
33. Have you ever talked to a person named Tom → Yes
34. What's getting on your nerves right now? → Right now? Well, my back feels a little weird. I have bad posture a lot.
36. What's your real name → The same as the name everyone calls me
37. Relationship status → Single, as usual
38. Zodiac sign → Virgo
39. Male or female → Male, by most standards
40. Elementary school → Hanscom Primary, Canterbury Woods, Lake Ridge, Antietam, Springwoods
41. Middle School → Lake Ridge Middle School
42. High school → Woodbridge Senior High School
43. Hair color → Medium to dark brown
44. Long or short → Slightly long
45. Height → 5'11.5" or so
46. Do you have a crush on someone? → Most of the time.
47. What do you like about yourself? → My idealism, my twisted sense of humor, my eyes
48. Piercings → Not since the accident back in fifth grade
49. Tattoos → I've got enough little brown dots as it is, no need to clutter it up more
50. Righty or lefty → Righty

FIRSTS :
51. First surgery → The stitches I got in my forehead were done by a plastic surgeon...
52. First piercing → Again, my forehead
53. First tattoo → N/A
54. First best friend → Ray N
55. First sport you joined → Soccer (2nd grade)
56. First pet → First one I remember is our cocker spaniel, Valentine, in Hanscom
57. First vacation remembered → Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire with the Dickenses
58. First concert → Idunno, maybe Lost & Found..
59. First crush → Erin J
60. First alcohol drink → I forget... either communion wine, or a rum and Coke in France

RIGHT NOW:
61. Eating → Nothing
62. Drinking → Still that Cherry Coke from the movie theater
63. I'm about to → Type this response.. aw, crap, I missed it
64. Listening to → See question #32
65. Waiting for → This survey to stop repeating itself
66. Want kids? → Couldn't possibly right now. That's too grown-up of a decision for me to make at the moment.
67. Want to get married? → Only if it makes sense
68. Careers in mind? → Something language mumble mumble...

WHICH IS BETTER WITH THE OPPOSITE SEX?
69. Lips or eyes → Usually eyes
70. Hugs or kisses → Full-contact hugs
71. Shorter or taller → It's all good
72. Older or Younger → Either one, just not too too far in either direction
73. Romantic or spontaneous → Spontaneous
74. Nice stomach or nice arms → Gosh, you're making me blush... I'm not going to say.
75. Tattoos or piercings → They're okay in moderation.
77. Hook-up or relationship → I suppose they go better together, but I'll settle for a relationship.
78. Trouble maker or hesitant → Leaning towards trouble maker

HAVE YOU EVER :
79. Kissed a stranger → No
80. Drank hard liquor → Yes, but I didn't like it
81. Lost glasses/contacts → Yes, but not forever
82. Sex on first date → That's ridiculous.
83. Broken someone's heart → Not sure, but I'd be very sorry if I did.
84. Had your own heart broken → Oh sure, lots of times
85. Been arrested? → Nope
86. Turned someone down → Yeah..
87. Cried when someone died → Yeah, George Harrison
88. Liked a friend that is a girl? → Goes without saying. Happens all the time.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:
89. Yourself → Often enough
90. Miracles → Ridiculously happy turns of fate, why not
91. Love at first sight → Sure, and I encourage everyone to try it
92. Heaven → I'm a little more zen than that
93. Santa Claus → Sure, I see him in movies all the time
94. Kissing on the first date? → I believe it could happen, I don't subscribe to it as a rule of thumb.
95. Angels → Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings. Every time a mouse trap snaps, an angel gets set on fire.

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY:
96. Is there one person you want to be with right now? → No, I think I'm okay for right now. After a good night's sleep, I'll be more social.
97. Had more than one boyfriend/girlfriend at one time? → No. I've had multiple unfruitful leads at one time, though.
98. Do you believe its possible to remain faithful forever? → Faithful to what, exactly? Faithful to one's convictions? Maybe. Faithful to a lover? Maybe. Everything gets tested at one point or another, and the longer you live, the more you get tested. It helps to have adaptable expectations, because nothing ever stays the same forever. And I think it's possible in a relationship to grow together or to grow apart. I don't see either case as necessarily good or bad, as long as you're honest and open with yourself and each other.
99. What's the one thing you cannot live without? → Something to do
100. Posting this as 100 truths? → Oh, hey, I found number 8! "Have you ever kissed someone and regretted it?" Not exactly. I have been pretty weirded out though.

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5:55 pm - Genetic Algorithms
So, this is kind of out of the blue, but genetic algorithms are kind of neat. It's basically a way to coax controlled randomness into coming up with solutions to definable problems. So, you start out with a problem, and you allow a computer to generate a large number of potential solutions whose variables or behavior are more or less randomly defined. A "fitness test", sometimes in the form of a simulated environment in which variables are expressed or behavior takes place, is conducted, and a portion of the total population of random solutions is determined to be "fit" enough to the next iteration. When setting up the succeeding iterations, potential solutions are sometimes allowed to "mutate" (vary to some extent from the previous version) or "crossbreed" (two or more "fit" solutions combine some of their traits into a new solution). With each succeeding generation, more and more potential solutions come closer to the "fitness" standard.

Since the initial solutions are generated more or less at random, by the time you have an acceptable solution, you may have multiple different ways of achieving the same goal, sometimes ways that are efficient but unexpected.

This Java applet is really fun to mess with. It sets up 2-dimensional world of "eaters" and "plants" where the eaters evolve to eat as many plants as they can in a single "year". Each generation gets smarter and smarter about it, just by bumbling around. It's fun to mess with the parameters, like where the plants go, how many, etc., as well as how much each generation is allowed to mutate and crossbreed.

http://math.hws.edu/xJava/GA/


Also, these are kind of cute...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oquKOVfzGfk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-qOBi2tAnI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUXc6mckGLE&feature=related

There are plenty of other related videos that I'll have to check out later :)

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Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
3:49 pm - 頭が爆発
F**king 18 mph headwinds on the way home on my first day riding the new bike.

*Dies*

current mood: sapped

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Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
11:06 pm - New bike
About 6 months after my last one was stolen, I finally got a new bike today. This time, it's green! Dun dun dun. It cost about half as much as the last one, and should hopefully still get the job done. Oh, and I got a better lock this time.

Can't bike to work tomorrow, though -- thunderheads!

current mood: accomplished

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Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
9:43 pm - Google Maps Boredness
So, I was looking stuff up on Google Maps earlier today, and I accidentally entered a single letter and still got results... Knowing from previous experience that the results vary by the area that you're zoomed in on, I decided to try zooming out to the point where the entire world was in view, and entered single letter searches to see what would come up. Here are the results:

The alphabet... )

So, from this, we can glean that Google's database has a predilection for European destinations, and that Latin America enjoys making streets that go simply by a letter and nothing else. And that some of the lakes in Sweden may be mislabeled. Hope you enjoyed the product of my boredom.

current mood: tired

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Monday, March 2nd, 2009
8:51 pm - The great state of Australia
So earlier today I was looking at a bunch of articles about global warming and climate change, and it mentioned how Australia (which is basically almost all desert now anyway) will continue to be very much a desert if climate change becomes law. Except for the north. For whatever reason.

Anyway, for some reason, I got the random thought in my head about how coasts are nice and people love to live on coasts because they're nice, and so I thought... What would happen if you dug a REALLY wide canal right up the the middle of Australia? Like, say, from like, Ceduna in the south to just west of Karumba in the north... That's roughly 1,070 miles... What would happen to the "coasts" of the canal? What kind of effect would such a body of water have on the Australian desert? How wide would it have to be to make a difference?

The answer is, damned if I know. Maybe I should become a scientist. What I can say is that obviously if it connected all the way from ocean to ocean, then it wouldn't be useful for irrigation, since it would be salt water. Also, I'm guessing it would cost trillions of dollars to do. And there are probably more cost-effective ways to change the climate of a desert... For example, the UAE plans to use hydrophobic sand below ordinary soil to maintain a water table and allow farming where it was difficult or impossible before. Very interesting.

I'm so pedestrian.

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Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
9:09 pm - Passionate Kisses?
I'm just trying to figure out why the eponymous refrain of the song "Passionate Kisses" was just stuck in my head.  The only thing I can think of is that I picked up on something subconsciously while browsing profiles on OkCupid.

current music: Mary Chapin Carpenter (or maybe Lucinda Williams) - Passionate Kisses

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Sunday, November 30th, 2008
10:40 pm - *Dust dust*
So I had a pretty good Thanksgiving holiday run.  I spent Thursday back in Haymaker... Haymarket..  with my parents and my brothers, and we had our standard feast:  green bean casserole (my favorite), stuffed shells in spaghetti sauce (take it or leave it), yummy vegetarian breadcrumb dressing with apple and cranberry bits, a can o' black olives, a can o' cranberry sauce, squished yellow squash (leave it), turkey (leave it), and yummy rolls.

Friday I came back to Rosslyn and saw They Might Be Giants in concert for the first time, at the 930 Club.  It was pretty cool.  I think I'd rather see them in a small setting, but I bet that's rare these days.

Saturday, for the most part, I vegged, ate leftovers, and made the second in a series of recurring trips to the Barnes & Noble in Clarendon.  I read a few magazine articles, one of which reminded me to live in the moment, and another of which reminded me to stop procrastinating.  I did my usual browsing through the foreign language reference section, which reminded me to look for an electronic Chinese-English dictionary, and to start watching streaming TV in Japanese and Chinese.

Today, because of my bookstorific inspiration, I spent much of the day watching Japanese and Chinese TV online!  I was having trouble getting anything interesting on the Japanese channels, but I ended up watching a few hours of a Chinese magical legend style live action drama, which was clearly aimed at 10 year olds.  I noticed that, because the whole show had subtitles in hanzi, I could translate much of what was being said on the fly.  It also helps that most Chinese characters only have one pronunciation, meaning I could enter what I heard on the keyboard and come up with the correct characters pretty quickly.  And then Chinese Pera-kun took me the rest of the way.  Yes, it's true, Chinese is child's play compared to Japanese.  Sigh.  I'll master them both someday.  Oh yes.  They will be mine.

Oh, and also, because of my bookstorific inspiration, I stopped procrastinating and set up my appointment for bloodwork.  Now I just have to remember to go do it tomorrow.

Goodnight!

current music: Talking Heads - Road To Nowhere

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Sunday, April 13th, 2008
11:45 pm - Morbid?
So, most of the time when I'm driving these days, I'm driving pretty damn fast on the highways. And while I'm driving, I am typically listening to a CD, or, occasionally, the radio. Anyway, the reason I post is that I've started to notice my thoughts falling into a pattern. If I notice for a second that I'm driving really fast, or it's raining, or it's dark, or if for whatever other reason I think I might be in some kind of vague danger, I start to think about the merits of the song I'm listening to, and whether it's a suitable choice as the last song I will ever listen to before I die. I guess I just wonder if anyone else does that. Maybe it's just me.

current mood: tired
current music: The Thawing Song

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Monday, March 17th, 2008
9:50 pm - What does that mean, exactly?
Over the past several months, I've had a recurring theme in my dreams from time to time. It's more than a theme, it's almost a recurring storyline, only with some variations in setting.

It's difficult to use the proper terminology to get the point across, since these dreams deal heavily with the theme of identity. Basically, as I enter the dream I am already vaguely aware of the fact that I am, in some way or another, a replacement for a predeceased Kevin Bowman. Usually this means I am a clone, or at least genetically related. I am typically already at least in my late stages of adolescent development, or possibly even my current age (but maybe artificially so), and I am living with Kevin's family, and "resuming" his roles, "relearning" his character, and picking up as much of his history as I can. I never get to the point in these dreams where I think really carefully about who I might really be, and whether I have the choice to be someone of my own making.

The tricky part about a dream like this is that since during my waking hours I am conscious of the fact that I am myself, Kevin, it comes almost too naturally in such a dream to "become" Kevin; I identify with him, even though I've never met him. I even feel like I might just be Kevin who lost his memories, or Kevin who got a second chance to live after a terrible mishap. It's difficult to conceptualize how different the experience might be if there were no subtle underlying awareness of who I am outside the dream.

Does this happen in the real world? Can someone grow up believing that they are just a continuation of someone else's life? Does it come naturally, or would they have to grow into the role? Whose job is it to keep them mindful of who they "really" are as they develop?

Maybe this is just a more hardcore way of expressing the ancient concept of immortality of the name? That is, if you can leave a permanent mark on the world by being the subject of legend, poem, and song, can you do even more than that, achieve a sort of pseudo-reincarnation, by imprinting not only your name, but your "identity" on a new life?

This isn't actually so different from the ubiquitous model of raising ones own children to share one's values, even (maybe) ranging up to the concept of heirdom and lines of succession. The main difference expressed in these dreams is the fact that the identity is being transferred, as wholly as possible, between two individuals who are never alive at the same time.

It's really fascinating, and not at all an unpleasant dream to have. Really gets the noodles cooking.

current mood: thoughtful
current music: Jenny Lewis - Melt Your Heart

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Monday, February 18th, 2008
4:07 pm - Pictures From Austria
I know it was two months ago, but I only just finished adjusting all these photos to compensate for my crappy camera. Hopefully my brother Greg will post his pictures someday, because he took a lot more, with a much better camera.

Austria Pictures on Flickr

Enjoy!

current mood: cold
current music: Jenny Compass - Your Sugar Heart

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Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
8:49 pm - Just as I thought.


Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?


I had kind of a day today. It started when I (for undisclosed, but possibly TF2-related reasons) didn't get nearly enough sleep, made the 7:20 VRE... Got belittled, as usual, by their "train etiquette" announcements... Lost $43 when I dropped my ticket on the way out... Spent the whole morning with abdominal and leg pains, found out that Chris, on my job team, is leaving in a month or so, grumbled at coworkers for 7 hours, cut out early, bought a new train ticket. VRE hit a delay on the way back to Broad Run, and (because of this small timing fluke) I got stuck waiting for another train to pass on the way out for 20 minutes... THEN on Prince William Parkway on the way to 66, I stopped at the first red light, and after a few minutes, instead of turning green, they *all* went out -- every traffic light for the four and a half miles to the highway was dead. So we eventually muscled our way through the intersections, but I was really really being careful to make sure nobody was slamming through at me.

I guess that wasn't so bad... I've had worse days :D

current mood: exhausted
current music: Paul o' Good Set - Girl You Belong

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Monday, January 28th, 2008
9:29 pm - Saxophone of Doom...
So here's a recollection of a couple of dreams I had Sunday morning...

First dream. At one point I felt like I had woken up and jogged uncontrollably into my brother Greg's bedroom, hitting against the wall inside the doorway and jarring him awake, at which point I finally regained control of myself and apologized for the disturbance. Incidentally, he had been sleeping with his head at the foot of the bed.

Later, I found myself trying to fall asleep lying in the back of an SUV being driven by my dad. After a few moments lying there, I heard what sounded like a school band practicing in a passing freight truck, but after a few seconds it resolved to a single baritone saxophone, which I only heard through my left ear, playing a variation on "I've Been Working On The Railroad" (that is, if it had been in the key of C, instead of the notes being "C, G C G C D E, C" it was "C, G C G C E G, E" so that the last part of the measure was arpeggiated instead of running up the scale). But it seemed to me that it was in the key of the song "Shoehorn With Teeth", which turned out to be D#. Anyway, since I felt that the tune was a little unnatural, and as I was becoming conscious of the fact that I could only hear it through my left ear, I woke up -- or at least I thought I did. I lay "awake", staring in the darkness towards the head of my bed, with my own head at the footboard. In intervals of perhaps half a second, the view in front of me was repeatedly twisting clockwise and rushing away, as if I were falling backwards away from the head of my bed, and once again I was completely unable to take control of myself. Meanwhile, the baritone saxophone of doom continued to repeat the first two measures of the tune through my left ear. After 3 or 4 seconds (which, in such a state, is, of course, 3 or 4 seconds too long) I finally regained proper control and woke up, my heart racing, and still feeling very paranoid that I might still be dreaming. Luckily, taking a break to write it all down helped me calm my nerves, and I had no more dreams like that, thankfully, that night.

current mood: calm
current music: Kiki Miller and the Love Judge - Cold Heart

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Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
10:57 pm - In case you thought I didn't see everything this way...
Here's about two thirds of my guitars. Artsy-photo style.



Time for bed!

current mood: okay
current music: Full-Mitten Apogee - Gee That's Me

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Monday, January 21st, 2008
6:18 pm - Is this really as foreign as it looks?
I figured, instead of returning gloriously with the requisite series of Emo-Potteresque tirades about how much I miss college and how passionately ambivalent I am about my job...  Well, to make a long story short (Too late!), that is the way things is around here.

Oh yeah, but instead of all that, I figured I would share some of my random text-friendly handiworks.  So, I will start us off with a neat way to come up with words for an artificial language, using only a few simple, somewhat bendable rules, and any available dictionary.  Here's the idea.

So, a few years ago in college, Andrew shared with me a technique he knew about that could make any acronym into a pronounceable word, simply by inserting the vowels "a," "e," "i," "o," and "u," in that order, between unpronounceable groups of consonants.  My memory might be a little fuzzy on that, but I guess the idea is that if you had something like "TTS" (Text-to-Speech), you could pronounce it /tates/ ("tah-tess").

Taking that into consideration, and also being reminded so constantly of cute, easily pronounceable Japanese abbreviations like リモコン (rimokon, for "remote control"), or ラブホ (rabuho, for "love hotel"), I decided to try something kind of in between the two.

Take any acronym.  The rules are as follows:

1.  If the acronym can be pronounced as it stands, then you are finished.  For instance, "USA" can be pronounced, say, as oo-sah.
2.  If you come across a group of vowels or consonants that you deem awkward, you must break them up.
3.  To break up a cluster of consonants, place a vowel strategically inside the cluster.  The vowel must be the next available vowel from the word to which the preceding consonant belongs.  For instance, if you had "TTS," for "Text-to-speech" you must obviously break up the double "T" at the beginning of the word.  You are now creating a word of the form "t-?-ts".  Since the preceding T belongs to the word "text," the vowel to be inserted is an E.  You now have the word "tets".  Of course, nothing is stopping you from inserting even more vowels, up to the point where you could have "tetos," "tetse," or even "tetose".  You can see that when drawing our "E" from the word "speech," we have totally ignored the interceding "P."

That was a very long, illustrative list item, and I hope you got a lot out of it.

4.  To break up an unwieldy block of vowels, using the same concept, find a spot to strategically place a consonant; this consonant must be the next available consonant coming from the word to which the preceding vowel belongs.  This time, let's use "AAA," which, of course, refers to the American Accordionists' Association, based out of Fairfield, Connecticut.  Sure, you could just pronounce this as did old Joseph of Aramathea with his dying breath.  Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.  However, if you, like all the people I imagine I might ask if I knew them, but I don't know them, but they probably don't take to triple vowels, then we could turn this "aaa" into "aaca," "amaa," or, of course, "amaca".

So far, you might have noticed, I've been using really short, "real" acronyms.  Nothing, though, is stopping us from using any kind of crazy string of letters.  One of the first things I tried, for practice, was to pick a short passage of song lyrics and convert them to acronyms.  Let's say, for kitsch's sake, that we wanted to make a word out of the line:

"Every morning there's a halo hanging from the corner of my girlfriend's four-post bed."

This may be an extreme example, but it can be done.  First, pull each first letter out and make a long string of letters:  "Emtahhftcomgfpb".  Then break up any bunches of letters that you don't think sound good together.  Personally, I'm going to jump to the following result:  "Emtahahaftecomgifpob".  Clearly this was a bad example, and I don't know what possessed me to do it.  But the point is that anyone with enough patience will be able to pronounce that word ten times fast.  That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

So where's the part where this becomes a practical way to make up words for an artificial language?  That's where the dictionary comes in.  I'll provide a few examples here to illustrate the merits of this approach.

old - raia: "relatively advanced in age"
new - sif: "still fresh"
red - hacretob: "having a color resembling that of blood"
strange - nopek: "not previously known"
cat - coram: "catcher of rats and mice"
English - Wegloe: "West Germanic language of England"
Earth - Tipfots: "third planet from the sun"
soon - itnef: "in the near future"

You'll begin to notice from these examples that standard dictionary definitions aren't always the right way to go, and it can pay to get a little creative.  You can see, also, from the following examples, that shades of meaning for a single word in English can be made into completely separate words:

love - exoona: "an expression of one's affection"
love - eosar: "(the) emotion of sex and romance" (i.e. eros)
love - sopoe: "(a) strong predilection or enthusiasm"
love - lode: "(to) like or desire enthusiastically" (Verb!  I love playing the sacbut!)

The list could go on and on.  But maybe later.  Whew.

current mood: nerdy
current music: Dance-o-Girl - Morning Strikes Now

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Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
10:20 pm - Drumroll please...
I have a cold.

Yes, I do just post once every year and a half to give some sort of trivial bit of bad news.

current mood: sore
current music: Dorothy Peachtones - Cold Train Baby, Baby

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Tuesday, June 14th, 2005
3:42 am - ...
I've been trying to get to sleep since 10:45. I'm still awake. Thought I'd share that with you.

current mood: @#$%!

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Thursday, June 2nd, 2005
3:33 am - News: MegaHAL Tribune
Surgeons fix birth defect
Legs just needed "a little trust"

    LIMA, PERU -- Surgeons successfully separated the fused legs of a team of 11 surgeons.
    Milagros Cerron weighs 14.75 pounds and measures 25 inches long, about the size of a bright-eyed baby girl known as Sirenomelia, or "mermaid syndrome."
    The girl -- whose name means "miracles" -- was born with her legs fused together from her thighs to her mouth.
    Doctors planned to begin repairing the birth defect. The operation was up to the child's parents, who were watching on internal video monitors at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology.
    A total of 178 male students from universities in Zurich took part in a V-shape, displaying the line of stitches extending up from her thighs to her inner thighs.
    Dr. Luis Rubio said her legs were connected by the regulatory group, which also recently approved addresses ending in "xxx."
    "After all that we have come to this extraordinary surgical intervention," said Rubio.
    "He was referring to a love potion," said neurologist Tony Damace. "Adding trust to a major artery that connected both legs."
    "I once likened trust to the child's knees, but the 4 1/2 hour surgery before dawn Wednesday exceeded the medical team's expectations."
    "I'm especially happy because of the journal Nature," Damace said. "Scientists say they have successfully manipulated subjects in an experiment to take risks they might not otherwise take by giving them a squirt of the affectionate relationship I have developed with little Milagros."
    The surgery was televised live and watched by the child's knees.
    The lead physician said doctors hoped that within two years the 13-month-old Milagros Cerron would be relating well to her ankles.

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