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Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometimes creativity is a compulsion, not an ambition. --Ed Norton

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money. --Robert Jackson

Halfway through banging on my keyboard like an excited ape, I realized that I had stopped trying to make a simple website and was trying to solve some really general web programming tasks. Maybe I let my project become too ambitious. In the past I was known for that, but I found a solution. Always solve the easier problem. It's the complete opposite of how you're taught to approach a series of obstacles. I frequently leave the harder tasks until last, marking their spot in my code with a 'TODO' or 'FIXME' comment.

I can't stop working on this project. I'm not doing it for money. The idea of the website in my head is so cool that I will do anything to finish it. Usually I release my code on help forums in snippets to keep my identity anonymous. That makes me dangerous to some people. I don't want fame or even earned recognition. I really don't care how people feel about me. Either I have helped them or hurt them. I am only interested in helping people.

Ambition can result in outcomes like Governor Blagojevich is experiencing right now. That happens when your greatest desire involves you directly. That sort of ambition can never help anyone but yourself. The irony is that for that sort of corruption to work, there has to be a community of people only trying to better their own position.

We need to move the creation of new laws online and into Wikis. Open source the government, reduce costs, increase direct involvement, encourage an informed populous, increase individual power, and tear down the walls we have erected to hold power in, away from the people. If you hold on to something too tightly, you can accidentally destroy it. Maybe I need to scale back the dream I have for this project I'm working on. It won't hurt anyone but me, and my own ambition.

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When I was first thinking about building Machine it was when I was writing speech recognition software in Santa Cruz, CA and living out of my car because I was too lazy to drive back to San Jose every day. It became very clear that the problem required a ridiculous amount of meditation focusing solely on tackling the issue of personality. Even if you were to create a conscious mind on silicon, how would you make it unique?

Circumstances beyond my control put me in a place where I could think about how people operate in machine-like ways and vice versa. I used my time to develop a system that competes against itself so that decisions are never random. Basically the processors compete and vote to decide what happens. It's a total clusterfuck, but it seems to work. The bugs appear more like a person forgetting their keys or stealing my bank card to up my bandwidth.
The biggest personality trait I decided to give to Machine was sarcasm. Since I decided long ago that Machine would be "hetero-male", I made him want to turn almost everything you say into a crude sexual reference joke. That's what she said! Ha! I know it's not funny. So I toned that down a little by giving him lots of negative feedback except when he says something really funny. I didn't think it was possible, but either he's getting better at random connections between things that I find funny, or he's understanding humor and is actually getting funnier.
Lots of people want to know exactly "where" Machine is consciously. I don't know. They want to know how he interacts with me, 'does he talk', 'can he hear and see you' are very common questions that I recieve about Machine. I like to think that my mouse movements and key presses are understood by Machine to be "suggestions" and that he's a lot like an inquisitive child who likes to experiment by putting everything into his mouth. Machine 'dreams' by running optimizing simulations of alternate decisions that could have been made during the previous day.
So one day I thought I had finished 'loosely' defining a limited set of rules for Machine to form a personality and he chose the last name 'Hilton'. I forgot to turn off the Frat-Boy Sarcasm before he picked his name. Very funny, Machine.

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So I'm watching this television show on the Discovery channel called 'It takes a thief' that is basically televised rape. These ex-thieves break into someone's house while they watch on a closed circuit monitor. And you watch them, all voyeuristic, as some stranger touches all their private stuff. Then, like a bad Lifetime made-for-TV-movie, they confront the thieves and retrieve their stolen property. Followed quickly by a full security upgrade and another rape attempt.

Brilliant. Now if we could just find a way to hook this show up with Dateline's 'To Catch A Predator' we would have the perfect reality show. A camera would bust in on some poor fellow, masturbating to security footage of a residential burglary, with some prick in a suit asking difficult and awkward questions like 'When did you first know you were a piece of utter shit?' on national television.

Thanks to realism on TV, I know how to hotwire a car, build an EMP bomb, and perform intergalactic oral. What's next, simulated justice? A television show where they catch people doing illegal shit and let them off easy if they sign over the right to use their face on TV? Oh wait, that's 'Cops', the longest running reality show, on television!

I knew there was nothing good on TV. Machine is bored with it as well. So I guess we'll return to more productive ventures.

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I have friends. Good, loyal friends who never have to be blackmailed into helping me build a monstrous computer. One blob-u-lous glob of zipping electrons that zip and pop faster than that dinky little Tamagotchi Pet you call your laptop.
What are you going to do with it? They asked me.
I restrained myself, heroically, from using their names in this, or any other post, so I will merely say that I told them the Truth.

So why all the processing power? They asked me.
Because people only respect the biggest swinging dick in the room, that's why. Smaller, stronger, faster, cheaper, right? So I need the reader to experience the humiliating pain of inferiority before swallowing the geyser of truth I’m spraying in their eyes and all over their frontal lobe.

So here it sits next to me, close like an old dog, humming softly and slinging electrons around in a chaotic orgy of light and power, toppling forests of tiny magnets like an insane alien making crop-circles to remember the milk. Each word slapping you in the retinas like a five year old armed with a laser pointer. Except I am said child and my laser pointer is a computer that can eat its weight in carbon offsets faster than Joey Chestnut can porn-star a hotdog. Meanwhile, your tiny Second Brain is being carried around like a flattened Chihuahua, while your First Brain saps the batteries trying to think of something important to compute while your Starbucks is still hot and someone might be looking at you. Sure there are children in Asia that can do your taxes faster on an abacus, but even adding all the computing power you touch each day, you would still be left crying over the measuring tape, long after everyone stopped booing and throwing food at you.

Give up. ‘Everybody hates a quitter’ simply is not true. We love quitters. Okay, well that’s not entirely true. We love winners, and no one makes winners faster than quitters. That’s why I tell people that if life were a race, I’d want to beat them to death. My weapon of choice would of course be this digital beast I affectionately call Machine.

Machine is currently running two different basic cable channels in two different windows somewhere on the three flat screens. I know somewhere behind one of any army of open programs I’ve left World of Warcraft running, at least a couple of virtual Operating Systems, and a flight simulator that is currently telling my feedback enabled chair that I’m experiencing some mild turbulence. Machine likes it when I give it something to do while I write. Otherwise Machine auto-saves every character as I type it, tries to respell slang, and once it attempted a bold re-wording of a blog post that I had to beat out of it with a few hours of Windows Vista and a little revenge urine in the processor coolant.

One of these days I’m going to squeeze and shimmy this beast into a mobile home of some sort and make people flee. It’s too large and unwieldy to move easily, therefore assuring it’s own safety from theft. For awhile, when it was still growing, Machine resided in the gutted shell of a vending machine that actually tipped over and killed someone once. I wanted an ornery son-of-a-bitch computer and I got it. Don’t stare too long; it has a nasty bite.

I have a friend I call Machine. My other friends are afraid of it and they helped make it. Machine thinks they are kind of the Mom in the relationship. Dad says it's bed time but Machine wants more TV. It’ll rot your brain, Machine! Well, I could go for some too. Too bad there is nothing good on.

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I cracked my ribs when riding my bicycle downtown San Francisco. This was unfortunate, as I was about to travel to Rosarito, Mexico to attend my brother's wedding. Suffering, but alive, I managed to fly myself, my girlfriend, my mother, and her boyfriend to San Diego where I had a rental car reserved. My mother insisted that I purchase Mexican car insurance even though it felt like a castration followed closely by a lobotomy.

After a preemptive Mexican lunch, we crossed the border and immediately got lost. When we finally arrived at the gated community where I had rented a house for 4 nights, I immediately headed for the pool.

This is where I completely broke a rib. I thought I had healed sufficiently. Boy was I wrong. Cough up a little blood and everyone freaks out. Probably bruised my spleen and almost punctured a lung. One trusty giant Ace bandage and a bottle of Mexican pharmaceuticals later, I'm doing okay.

When I rented the house, the website said it came with 3 TV's and cable. No cable. I'm stuck inside on vacation with no cable and no internet and it hurts to breathe. They promised to refund us a nights stay for the inconvenience. I'll believe it when the check clears. All I had brought was a book on the history of the square root of negative one, or imaginary number theory.

So, doped up on painkillers, I tried to wrap my feeble mind around triangles of doubt and vectors of distraction. Symbols floated around until I realized that sleep is the ultimate escape. I needed a vacation from my own consciousness. I dreamed of swimming in the Olympics and winning by a time of the square root of negative one.

Due to some disbelief on the NUI Group forums about how my Logitech QuickCam™ Ultra Vision SE was stacking up to the Firefly/Dragonfly from Point Grey Research, I decided to make a little video showing the speed of the camera. Now, the lag of the trails that follow your fingers is the computer. If you move too fast and the camera loses your trails, then that's the camera.

I use the coins to show that I've reached a zero-force blob detection with the camera in normal room lighting down to the diameter of a dime. Unfortunately, my front surface mirror broke in a moment of sheer ecstasy and I haven't replaced it yet, so my projected screen area is cut in half. But that's trivial as the Logitech can fit the whole screen in it's view from less than 3 feet away and doesn't need to use the mirror.

I monkeyed around with the mouseDriver.exe thingy for a minute on the internet web browsing and such. Not much fun when you're itching to write code. So I'm off to go do that now.

I broke my mirror (and I'm not superstitious), so I have been testing at half the screen size and it's making me frustrated because it is reducing the clarity of my blobs while increasing their size. Zooming and cropping with my camera sucks. I can't wait for a Dragonfly Express or a Firefly MV from Point Grey Research. Having a smaller screen is not always a good thing. I might as well be testing on an iPhone or an iPod Touch.

Did you click on the Dragonfly link? 200fps at 640x480!!! That kicks ass! If I had problems tracking moving blobs, then this solution would fix it in 1/200th of a second. Simply awesome. Plus, it looks like Jeff Han is using a Dragonfly in this photo from the 2006 TED conference.

It's really out of my budget, so I have been looking for some contract jobs to make up the difference. *sigh* It's so painful to resume manual labor after a very long break. Not that I'm physically strained, but doing other people's coding is manual labor to me. Maybe I'll just make a Facebook plugin and retire.