Online Journals, the voice of the unsure masses. For each online journal, I keep a mental tally of key phrases used within. If density of certain phrases passes a threshold, I feel assured that I would best use my time elsewhere.

Blacklist words and phrases:

• blessing
• very real
• epiphany
• soulmate
• cyber-*
• postmodern
• babbling
• geek

Yes, that's right. If you say "geek" too often, you get classified as annoying. Though, in a postmodern sense, having a cyber-soulmate epiphany can be a very real blessing to j. random babbling geek. Why should you stop saying "geek"? Because thinking too much about your geek image makes you more of a fashion or status twit than a brain geek. Isn't that right? Yes it is. Good work Andr00, you have once again laid out why it is that every dumb little thing bothers you.

I was drinking drip coffee at Bauhaus (a VERY COOL COFFEE PLACE on Pine St.) with friends Abha and Sean when a large contingent of khaki-wearing, cellphone-holstering, buzzcut-having white guys noisily yanked a bunch of chairs and tables together next to us and began a long conversation about computer stuff. In the valley, this is so commonplace as to be beneath mention. But here in Seattle, where we still think "C|Net" is a cool hi-tech thing to talk about, it is a little unusual. It's an example of how the this city is becoming a Xerox copy of Silicon Valley. Like a xerox, though, they weren't quite as detailed as the original. Whereas in the valley, I'd be hearing nearby guys talking about how SSH is part of the main thread in the IOS S-train and so if it crashes, IOS crashes (hypothetically), these guys were talking about how they had PCs with Pentium brand processors, and they would use them to look up things on websites.

Meanwhile, I was discovering that it had indeed been a long time since I had black coffee. In fact, the taste was so bitter and unpleasant, that I found myself starting to hate the coffee. Not in the "this coffee tastes terrible" way. In a visceral and antagonistic way. I hated the coffee and wanted it to cease to exist. So then I had another cup.

One of the things that was discussed in the pretentious discussion MY group was having was the inability of American Youth to unite for anything (except for hippies and racists). In Europe, the young folks are apparently much more involved in effecting political change. Here, we don't want to work together with people not exactly like us. One reason I thought this might be true is that Americans seem to be obsessed with the idea of individuality. We've all got to make a name for ourselves or emphasize some unique aspect of ourselves, or invent something, or be creative and passionate. This may be one reason we're pretty good at inventing things, but lousy at working on long term design improvements and solid implementations of things (see the ratio of "beta" software to "gold" software? ok.) Being unique is kind of scary and not for everyone, so we have a few ways that we can be individual in the company of other people who will reassure us that we are definately being unique in a cool way that they will accept! (tats, ave rats, frats...) This may all be just the caffeine talking. I am so twitchy right now, I don't know if I could pick up a cup-o-soup without spilling it everywhere.

If I came back later, perhaps all the self contradictions and nonlinearities in that paragraph would be apparent, but right now I'm having trouble even paying attention to entire words at once, let alone sentences. Bargh bargh bargh twitch twitch

Then this idea about "Lard Emitting Diodes" crossed my mind. If all the light emitting diodes in my house stopped emitting light and switched to lard-mode, my house would be spraying lard out every aperture at high pressure. Thanks caffeine, we're definately going to invent something this way.