What I did on Semi-paid Vacation

Leap Day 2000
I am at the tail end of my semi-paid vacation i.e. I was laid off by Martel Construction with job attached status. When Brad handed out the pink slips (January 7th) it he said that it would be the end of February or the first part of March before things picked up again. Since I live alone and have modest needs I was able to view it as an opprotunity to take a semi-paid vacation.

I wanted to spend the time "writing". While a have several on-going projects I ended up heading off in a new direction when the time came. Once I started the idea emerged that I wanted to write a "business plan" though I had only a very vague idea of the nature of what that business might be.

I downloaded and installed Apache (Win32 binary) as a virtual webserver on my computer New Years Day. It was incredibly easy and I was able to get it up and running in less than an hour.

I ran across Watson back in October of 1999. I have not installed it because it works with Microsoft Word. I do not like Word (or any other software that makes changes to my work without asking me) and stopped installing it when I periodically rebuild my system. I am really enamored with idea of an intelligent information assistant.

Somewhere in here I need to mention Google. Google rocks. I have used it an incredible amount this past month an a half. As I dug around rooting out various ideas and dead ends I ran some searches on rather obscure subject matter. Out of literally thousands of searches I can count the number of times Google failed me on one hand. I now wish I had made a note of those failures but alas I did not.

I have been interested in human nature and what it means to be human for many years now. Thus on the first Monday(January 10th) of my semi-paid vacation I wrote this rough vision statement. I did a costing on what it would take to put in an ISDN line. Parallel to the broadband investigating I put some notes together for the community consensus building. By week's end I wrote this vision statement. Then on Sunday I began a rewrite. Over the following week I put together these notes. Then starting around midnight Tuesday morning, the 25 of January I started writing a rough draft for an essay. After a few hours sleep I sectioned it up into these files: Introduction | Preface | Overview.

Before I launch into the next section let me insert a disclaimer that I wrote the day after I wrote the rough (and incomplete) draft essay.

Disclaimer of Originality:

Oh, that I could generate new and novel ideas the way I do turds for the toilet. I think I manage a few now and then though nearly all are flawed and destined for the aforementioned toilet. So, instead what I do is look over the shoulders of authors that have come before me and read what they have had to say. This exercise is to share with you the gentle reader what I have discovered. If I have written something with which you disagree or find in error please contact me.

I will endeavor to give due credit to all I quote, excerpt, or otherwise reference. Despite this giving away of credit it is still possible that I have gotten some things wrong.

At this point I got major side-tracked. There are two passages in the Overview section that appear in red. I did that at the time to make it stand out that I needed to research, write up what I found and replace these passages. The first passage has to do with the emergence of language and symbology in human culture. I did some search on this but did not get very far. I now recall this as an area where I was not getting very good results from Google. If you know of material that covers this topic I would be highly interested in learning of it. The second passage in red has to do with what most people think of as a pivotal point in the history of learning. What I learned was really quite surprising.

Gutenberg did not print any books. The endeavor was taken away from him before it was finished. What is more important is that the printing press had nothing to do with the rise of the Renaissance. It was not developed until the Renaissance was already well under way. I was pointed in the direction of the rise of the unverisity system as paving the way for the Renaissance. Here are the notes I made on the 26th and 27th. The feature that struck me was that the universities of currents already in motion. I started to follow the thread of manuscripts but ran smack into monasteries and the Church. In an effort to get behind this I went back to the beginning of Chirstianity. I did not spend any time there however but quickly fast-forwarded to the collapse of Rome. The working file I used through February 9th. Here are the notes I took on February 10th. On the 11th I began a file on monasticism. I don't know that I made a note as to how "many Gallo-Roman aristocrats" became bishops and other members of the Church. The 12th being Saturday Sheri did not have to work. We spent the weekend together and I took a break from this stuff. On the 15th I wrote a chunk in my journal. At this point a cold started kicking the shit out of my ass. I played Age of Empires II and blew my nose a lot. I think all that AoE II prompted my thoughts as to a consideration of population density and resultant cultural effects. Here is the file I started about that but after the first paragraph it get lost. The reason being that I did not find any support material in the brief about of time that I looked. I think my supposition has some merit.

Ah, I remember what happened now. I went looking for material on population statisics of historical eras but was not able to get back past the 11th century. Then I got side-tracked with a GIS website I found, The Geographer's Craft. This is a really cool site and one I want to get back to "real soon now". Then I started doing a free/demo on-line course in CGI/Perl that was offered to Sheri through her ISP. (Then it was a time out for a three day weekend with Sheri.) I followed a link to The Reciprocality Project. The first paper I read was The Anatomy, Life Cycle and Effects of the Phenomenologically Distributed Human Parasite M0. I had trouble reading this. The word "flake" kept flashing in bright letters in my mind's eye. I still seriously question most everything in this paper though it would be interesting to see some research related to some of the ideas here. The The Ghost Not was much better. A couple of days later in a completely unrelated place I came across a link to Robert Anton Wilson. While poking around there I came across Quantum Psychology. Wilson talks about "isness" and "English Prime". I think these ideas are quite interesting. In conjunction with the Ghost Not ideas this describes some errors mental constructs can suffer from.

Friday night we went to a lecture at the Museum of the Rockies by Niles Cornish. It was about NASA MAP mission and the science behind it. I found the MAP site two years ago. It was nice to revisit that. Dr. Cornish covered a couple of ideas that were new to me as well so it was definitely worth my time. Quite good, indeed.

There you have it, a brief recap of what I did on semi-paid vacation. I have a folder of reference material gathered during the height of my research. This folder has over 12 MB of files in it, enjoy. Here are the bookmarks I made.



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