Strange Mood A-Brewin'

While playing with computer settings yesterday (adjusting MTU and RWIN for a Windows XP box to increase its ADSL average throughput from 1.2 Mbps to 2.75 Mbps; also tweaking the configuration of an old Westell 2200 ADSL modem), a strange mood fell over me. Tripped, it did. Snagged its toe on my body and went flying.

From that moment until now, I have adjusted my own settings, getting ready for the increasing daylight that post-winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere brings.

I've washed the main house windows. I've raked leaves out of the wet weather creek bed in the side yard. I've cleaned my “junk” out of the sunroom and set up shelves for my wife's scrapbooking hobby. I hung Charlie the Red Cat framed prints in the back hallway. I folded clothes. I washed dishes. I put birdseed in the backyard feeders. I cleaned out the gutters. I wrapped holiday gifts. I washed the back of the '95 BMW.

I had memorable thoughts in what we call the dream state, seeing an Internet friend of mine, Kay, years from now, as a very old woman in a wheelchair, still cheerfully chatting away despite setbacks and hardships that would silence the strongest of us.

I thought about my former employees, including Kris, Charlie, Rod and others, happy to hear about their accomplishments (how many of us would travel to Haiti to set up wireless communications towers and spend time training locals to maintain the network?).

I enjoyed an evening at a photo shop named Portrait Innovations, where crowds of frantic families gathered for last-minute holiday photos and special package pricing. To get our pictures, my wife and I posed for and played with the photographer (Zac?) before he returned to the world of crying babies and playful kids. We returned 30 minutes later (after greeting Veronica at Zaxby's) to retrieve our packet of photographs to give as gifts to family and friends.

My new year starts today. Happy New Year to you, too. Here, the sun showed its face all day, birds sang in the trees, my across-the-street neighbour had a large fallen tree chopped up - scenting the neighbourhood with sawdust and broken evergreen limbs - and I watched a chipmunk zip across the street while a hawk circled overhead. All is well with my world. Time to prepare a little more for solar system / galaxy-level communications and put thoughts of this world behind me, secure in the belief that the people can take care of our world on their own.

Do you believe you can use a laser beam to build a “living” creature millions and millions of miles away? Do you see the possibility of building a creature that can replicate itself using local material? Do you see that, like Carl Sagan and others believed, we don't need people in place to build and plan for future arriving people? Do you see what will happen when self-replicating creatures reach a critical mass of replication for replication's sake, a la the Sorcerer's Apprentice? Do you have contingency plans in place to change the replication “programming” of the living creatures, “teaching” them that they'll have to take each other apart to build something bigger and better? Do you think you'll have the right answer when the first one asks “Why?”? What about when they (or some of them) resist their new programming? Do you destroy them, try a different method to reeducate them, or let them go off on their own and try something you hadn't planned for?

What is a strange mood? What is strange about any one mood? What is a mood to begin with? If we are but states of energy that simulate what we call mass, atoms and molecules, then a mood is a combination of states of energy, is it not? Of course it is. Then you can see that interplanetary communications is just a different form of strange mood.

Today, we discovered millions of new methods for living. We repeated methods that quadrillions have repeated over and over. The rise and fall, the expansion and contraction, of changing energy levels.

You may sit in a prison or stand in a cafe. You may hold your hands on a steering wheel, by yourself in a vehicle, or hold hands in a circle of people. You may see yourself as one person, or as truly, wonderfully nothing of the kind. We share the same planet and the same solar system - that's a fact we probably agree on. I want to say more but I'm not ready to speak about the next topic yet.

Instead, I'll work on the capillary action of the roof tiles to improve the solar heating and cooling system that acts like living sails/scales on the back of a certain extinct species I liked when I was a kid. Are the walls of your house inelastic but alive like your skin or are they dead and dry? My house is not alive in the conventional sense but it and I live in a symbiotic relationship, along with my wife, cats and other creatures crawling around this domestic setting. We are the examples we are trying to set for other planetary situations. If we can do it here, we can do it anywhere. New Earth, here we come!