Tonight, during my solitude, I watched Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk about education killing creativity. It’s a true fact (yes, I watched it). STEM is only half the picture; there’s an entire set of humanities and kinesthetics that’ve been overlooked. Maybe I’m more physical than I thought; certainly find myself thinking more clearly and creatively after a walk. Education in this country is designed to produce not smart and engaged people, but industrial workers and college professors. Professorship is the high-water mark of education, and this is wrong.

I was highly creative once upon a time. Eventually, I was cured of that. Now I require the excesses of alcohol and solitude to let it return. It’s a terrible shame.

I want a culture that celebrates the variety in culture before I’ll allow myself to stare at a window and daydream without worry that someone will think I’m slacking off. That’s more important to me this week now that I have a new job and a new manager who works near my desk. Even at work, I require downtime to let the wetware in my head put two and two together to create new ideas and a sense of purpose. Hopefully his heavy workload and high stress won’t color his perspective on my activities. Best I can hope for is the right metrics to speak well of my performance.

It’s not super-exciting-omg-yes, but it’s work. New lab, new team, new job functions: somewhere in the company, somebody wants to know how the data buses leaving the CPU behave electrically, and it’s the job of my team to use high-cost test equipment to find that out. I’ll be doing some of the actual execution of the work, at least for the short term, but during the downtime between product cycles, we’ll be planning ways to automate a large chunk of the test flow. My job during those periods will be to help write the code to manipulate the test equipment automatically so the not-so-smart monkeys can set it up, click Go, and have data by the morning.

Although I’ve been at the company in some manner for over five years, the learning curve in this lab is still a bit steep. I’m still battling with getting my badge to work on the doors, waiting for my login info so I can actually use my computer, and I still have to get all my email and work profile and all the other onboarding stuff done before I’m established enough to learn who’s who and where I fit in. First-week blues. And I know there’s a lot of work ahead of me, so I’m not really celebrating. I’m just relieved. Once I have a few paychecks in the bank, then I’ll consider letting my hair down for a moment (but only for a moment; I have to retire to bed early now).

Yawn.

When I saw “The Devil’s Advocate“, what impressed upon me most was the Devil’s ability to speak to anybody. The confrontation with the aggressive Chicanos on the subway; he got out of that by speaking fluent Spanish, omnisciently describing the color of the sheets the assailant’s girlfriend was cheating on. In the lounge, his whispering convinced the girl sitting with him to go down under the table and give him service. He was able to speak to anyone and have his way. He understood humanity, and his ability to talk to them in terms they understood gave him power.

Tonight, as I sit watching the horrible English dub of the excellent Swedish production of “The Girl Who Played With Fire” (part 2 of the “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series), I’m wishing that I could communicate in fluent Swedish, that I could enjoy it in its original tongue without having to read subtitles or listen to any out-of-synch translations with phony-sounding voice actors. I wish I could enjoy any movie, any song, or join any conversation in the speaker’s lingua franca and not miss a beat.

Language is a powerful force. The variation in languages serves to divide us from the Others and serves to unite us against the Outsiders. It is both a community-builder and a world-destroyer. Anybody who can leap from tongue to tongue like a Satanic goat who leaps between rocks on the mountainside, anybody who can transcend any language and cultural barriers that separate us, anybody who can sway and convince and enjoin, that man is a force to be reckoned with.

That is why I want the power of language.

Once enough of the broadband market increases to the higher symmetrical speeds provided by fiber, I visualize a larger demand for home-based cloud solutions. Enough with putting your files somewhere out there in the ether for someone else to maintain and snoop. Tell me true: if you could buy a device off the shelf, put it on your home network, install an app on your laptop / tablet / phone so you can access your own files and your own computers at your own house from anywhere, would you do it? I’d certainly do it if I didn’t have the ability already (which I do). It’s remarkably handy.

Now that “PC”, meaning “Personal Computer”, is a dying term, could “PC” soon mean “Personal Cloud”?

Went to Old Pecan Street Festival today. First time ever. And it is definitely a typical festival. If I had money and a ladyfriend to pull me into the booths, I probably would’ve bought some art or whatever. Miscellaneous bric-a-brac.

I made some progress on my JX-3P tape decoder. There were a few bad assumptions I made regarding the decoding algorithm, and I corrected them by completely demolishing my thinking and coming up with something much, much simpler that makes a helluva lot more sense. I over-thunk the solution to the problem, and ended up shooting myself in the foot. Things are fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

For those of you paying attention, I’ve been a little silent, and regret that.

For those of you maybe not sorta somewhat paying no attention, I regret nothing.

For the rest of you, I’ve written and posted a new song, and I want to play it for you. Find it at my music site. I preemptively love you all for listening.