Mizblog

I’m again getting over a cold. This is my 7th illness this year! It’s really frustrating and crippling.

Saranya is still a clown. She’s figured out how to turn on the TV and likes to turn the volume up but then she panics and runs away when it gets too loud. Her dancing is getting a little bit more sophisticated. She jumps and waves her hands around now too. I bought new guitar picks but haven’t been playing much. I found my sunglasses in the video camera bag, along with a pen and a wooden spoon. I hope she’s over the habit of taking a big mouthful of milk and letting it run down her front and into the carpet. The whole living room smells like spoiled milk and I think we’re going to have to shampoo the carpet to get rid of it.

I can’t type anymore.

I’m getting over a cold. It seems that every time Saranya brings something home from daycare, it infects and sickens me.

Maybe it’s the illness, but I’m developing a new perspective on things. My apartment is cluttered and tainted by spilled milk, my laundry is (mostly) soiled and worn out, I eat the same kinds of things every day that I ate the previous day. I spend my free time reading, playing games, or hanging out with my family. We occasionally have a freakout and have to leave the apartment to get some change of scenery. One of our ongoing goals is to protect the world from the inconvenience of our child until she’s developed and trained enough to do this for herself.

Saranya is quite a clown. She likes to wear a bucket on her head while she plays. She’s getting interested in books, which she sits and “reads” in the dark. She sometimes walks around with a rubber band hanging out of her mouth and wiggling. She’s figured out how to turn off the TV but not how to turn it on. She can put a video tape into the VCR. She still really likes bouncing. She makes funny babble noises, and talks to me in the same “monster” voice that I use when I play with her. She likes taking things and putting them in or behind other things. I think she may have thrown away my sunglasses. All my guitar picks are gone. She makes me show her my hand when I’m playing guitar, to make sure I don’t have a pick. If I do have one, she has to take it and put it somewhere hidden. I used to know her hiding spots but not anymore. Maybe I’ll find a pick this evening…

I hurt my ribs. I don’t know how I did it, but it sure does hurt. I’m trying not to breathe or carry anything.

I didn’t realize I’d gotten so busy! Having a child is very taxing. It takes a lot of time and energy and attention to take care of the baby and make sure she’s doing okay. Saranya is doing okay. She’s starting to take her first tentative steps, and she babbles like a loon, sometimes making herself laugh in the process. It’s pretty funny when it happens, so it makes everybody else laugh too.

Work has been heating up this year too. I’ve made my first web deliverable PLM for an experiment, and we’ve collected data. I’m now working on two more. Trying to get out of the Windows-only trap. It’s been challenging, but I’m learning a lot and the rewards are potentially great.

I’m still playing World of Warcraft. I’ve also gotten myself a bicycle and I’m starting to learn to use one again. The crippling pain in my feet is almost gone, and my back feels healthy and not as delicate as it used to. I’m starting to lose weight after gaining so much while recovering from my injuries. Things are improving after a long downward spiral.

I seem to be writing less and less often. No time or energy to do more, I suppose.

We ended 2006 shortly after a day trip to Santa Barbara’s botanical gardens and Mission. It was the baby’s first trip out of Los Angeles. My feet didn’t hurt much as long as I walked slowly.

Now I’m back at work, trying to tackle 3 different projects at the same time. I’m too ambitious.

It’s Monday again. I haven’t written here much lately because I’ve been pretty distracted.

I’m developing a new program at work using Flash and PHP. This is surprising because I barely know how to do anything in both of these realms, and yet I’m planning to rebuild my application framework using these two technologies by the end of next month.

It’s been getting colder. Not compared with other parts of the world maybe, but sub-70F feels cold to me and I don’t like it. I prefer 90F or more, to be honest. More chaos.

Saranya is getting easier to manage and also cuter.

When I first registered to vote, I registered under the Natural Law Party. I did this because I saw all politicians as corrupt, and the most corrupt were drawn to the two most powerful parties.

As you can infer, I did not register thus because of my belief in Natural Law (whatever that was). But lately I’ve come to wonder what it was that I’d been signed up for all this time.

The first thing I found out is that the Natural Law Party has been subsumed by the US Peace Government. Soooo I’m now a registered “Independent”.

The second thing I found out is that Natural Law is mainly an assertion of the objectivity of moral norms. Now we’re getting somewhere interesting. I’ve got to study this Natural Law thing some more.

I’d just like to point out one of my personal heroes: John Brown. He was a white guy who tried to do the right thing about race relations in America. Of course they killed him for it and subsequently called him “crazy” but I really admire his stand for ‘the dignity of human nature’.

Yesterday I saw a tree fall on some girl. It happened right in front of me. I saw the tree start tipping and it just kept going. This girl was on her cellphone and walking away from the tree, when my coworker yelled “Look out!” so of course she stopped and turned around just in time to see the leafy top of the tree land right on here. Luckily for her the only solid things that hit her were the little top branches (which hit her leg) but maybe if it wasn’t for that warning shout she’d have escaped contact entirely.

We decided, my coworker and I, that it was probably a message from God. We failed to agree on its meaning, however. He asserted that it was a commentary on our previous conversation, while I argued that if it was a message, it was sent to the girl upon whom it landed and that in any case we couldn’t know its meaning.

What does it mean to be a good person? Does it depend on the opinions of all the people around you, or is it something you can do by yourself? If you were alone on an island, would “being a good person” have any meaning? Is it a social or an absolute construct? This is the big question of meta-ethics.

I think it must be social because all of the examples I can think of involve other people, either directly or indirectly. This is ethical subjectivism. This is not to say that there is no universal way to be a good person and that all morality is relative. The fact is that we’re all human and within this common framework there could very well be a set of behaviors which are always good or always bad independent of the community. My tentative conclusion is that the question is irrelevant outside of the context of a community.

My coworker pointed out that the question of what makes a good person only matters to the person making the evaluation of whether or not you actually are a good person. People have mixed opinions on whether or not I am a good person, for example. And since you yourself are a person, you should behave in such a way as you see yourself as a good person.

This is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It reduces in the individual case to “do unto yourself as you would have yourself do unto you” or “treat yourself however you would want yourself to treat you” or “do whatever you want yourself to do to yourself to yourself”.