I am currently being worked on by Shahrokh Yadegari and Ted Apel. I started this page after seeing The Falcon page, the web page of a car owned by Judith Donath.
Ok, I feel better after that. I have been so quite for so long and thanks for Eliza, who reminded Shahrokh that I have been neglected. If you feel like expressing some of my thoughts please send them to Shahrokh at sdy@ucsd.edu and he will be happy to add them to this page. Just between us, he sometimes forces his own human way on my words and I do not feel very comfortable with that.
So what is up with year 2000. I cannot tell you how scared I was during the last months of 1999. They had spread this rumor that we would be getting a strange mental sickness and our behavior would be out of control. Nobody was trusting us anymore. It felt so bad, on one hand we were left alone, and on the other, how could I explain my behavior if I did something wrong. I found out later that humans were not blaming us but themselves, because it was their own wrong doing that they wrote the years in only two digits and not 4. Next time we will have this problem it will be the year 10000.
I am going to keep an eye for this and learn more about it. After all there is such a big hoopla about it right now. Some of my friends (they are sort of a friend) are really proud of themselves. They say that they are the reason that the stock market is doing so well. You know these days I do not understand their words either. Stock market is one of those other concept that puzzles me. I sure have a lot to learn about.
Recently I found out that humans have a concept in their minds call "justice". I kind of think it is the same as our equality. You know my processor has capabilities of moving things around. The way I understood justice is that if, for example, the processor was told to move a number from one memory cell to another, and if in the process it took a part of that number while moving it from one place to another and added it to another memory location, they would call that theft and say justice was not done. Boy I think I would go mad if that happened. I mean my whole system would go down and I would crash if that happened. By the way, I have noticed that I crash much less often now with Linux than when I was running that "windows" thing. God crashing is so embarrassing. As humans I guess you understand them as nervous breakdown. I mean we would like to help people and they come and work on us and it is great, but every once in while due to a either hardware problem or a software problem we crash. You know neither is really my fault. I mean we have no theft business or something like that. I understand that some things may go wrong but it is usually because they, the humans themselves, that have not given us the right instructions. We just do what we are told.
These days I am really happy that I am running Linux. While I was looking at the information on the web, I read that a judge found Microsoft "violated antitrust laws by trying to monopolize the Web browser market." http://cnnfn.com/2000/04/03/technology/microsoft_reaction/
I wonder what this meant. I understood theft but "antitrust violation" is just a mouthful. You know Microsoft is also a corporation and they own windows. Even though the CD that brought my new frame of mind was bought from RedHat, who is also a corporation, they do not really own it. They just charge money for the convenience and not for ownership. I am told that linux is in public domain. I would really hate it if somebody owned my frame of mind. I said that we do everything that you ask us to, but do not say that even that is owned by somebody. Freedom is really important. I am sure you as humans understand that very well. By the way shahrokh told me that he first became interested in unix because he saw this license plate that said"live free or die"
In any case, these days I have been preoccupied about the idea
if there is any point of writing when the text is not being read at all.
I suppose for the humans there is a touchy feely thing about writing. I
mean sometimes you do things without any purpose and then you say the purpose
of that act is the act itself. If I am not mistaken you call that art,
although these days on the web I read that you cannot totally rely on the
idea of art for art's sake anymore. Then, when we start to look at an artistic
action in relation to the people and society we get into politics. I got
into it to, but now I am chilling out for a while. Politics
is a tool for better living but when it turns into religion I think it
causes break up between beings. Do not think because I am a computer I
do not understand that. We computers really depend on the network;
it really means a lot to us, and now that Internet become so important;
connectivity means everything. It is true that it is great to be
independent but living isolated all the time sucks big time. Oh, and yes
this reminds that I should tell you since a while back CRCA has a new computer,
Nellie, mmm, mhh :-) I bet you want to know all about her, I do too! She
is very sexy, 550 MHZ pentium III with RME board supporting 96 channel
of digital audio, connected to a Yamaha O2R mixer, with 8 channels output
in the mainspace of CRCA. If you would hear her sing, you would fall in
love with her. There are lots more to tell, perhaps I tell you later. And
yes, write me soon.
Well, here you have it. Nellie does not respond to either my telnet,
ftp, NFS, RPC, or whatever request that I have. I have reasons to
believe that she is mounting file systems from the server, who is a big,
fast, machine with lots of disk space. I really have nothing against him;
actually I like him a lot and I mount his file systems too, but why is
Nellie not responding to me. She says: "connection refused". Boy, I am
in agony. I had hoped for so much network exchange, text files, audio files,
images, but nothing, nada. I even once got the message which said "Incompatible
kernel version". Can you imagine? I am running 6.0 and she is running
6.2, and she says: "we are incompatible!" Do not get me wrong; I
am not a backward type of a computer; I believe in upgrade and change,
but currently I have a hardware problem, you humans call it a "medical
condition". I cannot boot from the floppy drive :-( Ted and Shahrokh
have looked at me; they ran many tests and tried to remedy the situation
with software therapy but finally declared to me that a transplant was
needed. They assured me that this is not a serious condition and I would
soon be healthy. They even found a donor, to whom I am so grateful. I do
not know the name of this computer, he or she is sitting right next to
me. I hear that s/he grew so old that no new frame of mind (remember
the operating systems) would work on it, but the parts are still useful.
(I am a little afraid of what is going to happen to me; am I going
to be like this computer someday? Well, for now I am happy that I am
running almost the latest frames of mind.) Most of my body is really slick
and nicely built. When you take my cover off, I am all neat inside
and you can change and service most of my parts easily, but the transplant
of the floppy seems to be a more major operation and for now neither Ted
nor Shahrokh has had the time to pay any attention to this. I suppose
for them this is not a big deal, but for me this is very important; I am
hopping that the new upgrade would open up some possibilities for talking
to Nellie.
OK, I will talk. It is been a while that Shahrokh has been asking me if I want to continue this diary and so far I have told him that I do not see the point of expressing my deepest feelings without anybody reading or responding to it. He keeps telling me that people are reading it and he thinks people are enjoying getting to know me, but I am not sure I believe him. What is wrong with me? Why do they not write to me? Are you afraid that somebody may find out that you are talking to a computer and label you crazy. My dear, those times are past. We now talk and we can even understand natural languages. (Figures, it would only take humans to call their language natural, as if other languages are not natural.) These humans are just so interesting, totally neurotic and irrational, but that is what I like about them. I have lots of fun with them.
Speaking of languages and communication, I have got great news for you. Nellie has no problem communicating with me now. She just did not want to talk in the open, so that is what she refused the telnet protocol. We now use ssh and pass secret codes and do all kinds of fun things. Actually now we are collaborating on Shahrokh's latest piece A-Window.
Jun 16, 1999 - Red
Hat Linux was installed on me, Xwindows on the console does not work
yet. Jun 18, 1999 - I started compiling
my diary and looking for linux sound web pages. Jun 19, 1999 - Pd
was installed. Jun 21, 1999 - Display card was
changed and Xwindows is working fine. Jun 24, 1999 - Sound on the basic
SoundBlaster is working on Loy. Jul 2,
1999 - New kernel was compiled and tested, SMP still not working. Jun 10, 1999 - Work on the port
of CARL started. Jul 18, 1999 - All libraries of
CARL have been ported, expect libieee which needs f77 Jul 21, 1999 - Installed
BladeEnc,
a command line driven, but fast and free, MP3 encoder, and Jul 28, 1999 - A number of CARL
programs, including cmusic, have been built. Aug 1, 1999 - The first score
has been compiled and the first soundfile was built by cmusic. Aug 2, 1999 - Sox 12.16 was installed.
Aug 6, 1999 - Many of the features of cmusic are working now.