So, really, who am I?

This may be incomprehensible drivel. Just a warning.

I need to step outside myself to see who I really am. Whats going on? My thoughts are all twisted and my body is tired, being creative isn't working, and I feel like I am swimming in a sea of indecision. I know what I need to do, but I want to see what will happen if I do nothing. Sometimes that's a good play in poker, right?

Right now I'm working for two companies at once, 6 days a week total, and it's a bit draining. I made this stupid work arrangement for the same reason I would accept even more work, payback, I expect that my time will free up eventually and my extra effort will be rewarded if I stay true to my goals. By cutting back hours on one job I'm hoping to migrate more hours into a more interesting one. Extra work would be awesome too, if it's interesting. Right now though - I almost want to take a vacation and take my little dog Shila with me to see if getting away from it all will allow me to focus and create the things I dream about. Just like painting, just like writing a book, just like sculpting the lawn I feel I need some solitude - I feel as though I need to get away in order to clear my head and find the few things I want to do that will make me happy. Sure, I could easily see how it looks like I just want to get away from daily responsibilities. I've never been very good at those anyways.

My thoughts lately are fluctuating constantly between my fiance and I, coding projects, politics, psychology, dreams about a more open world, more dreams about things I could do to make it happen, and thinking about how information is, or isn't, important in many different situations. I believe I see how information technology has modified our world and made certain aspects of our lives very lazy. Now of course I'm trying to keep a good perspective on this and entertain thoughts about 'why' we are handling our lives the way we are. Like what is the cause and effect of what we are doing and what are we overcoming? How do we accurately measure the effect? When will we know for sure if our awesome progress, even if it takes several mutations of our ideas over many more generations of our race, will ultimately fail us. At times it makes me upset to think about how basic we still are in spite of what we have achieved. Maybe that's the upwards arrow of progress that I'm just not seeing. Are we are establishing a good, broad, foundation for tomorrow minds. Maybe I'm a bit too narrow scope to see it for all it's worth right now.

Most of my spare moments are spent dreaming up theories on advanced Internet traffic routing, data management, distributed storage and odd network caching techniques. I know I'm not alone in thinking, or dreaming, about any of those either, I've learned that my ponders may sometimes be rare but never unique (and I kind of dig that). The more I look into ideas on data management the more I understand how truly obnoxious DRM (Digital Rights Management) is. DRM isn't just some fancy way for a company to sue you after invading your privacy, DRM also keeps people like me from implementing networks that temporarily store arbitrary data in an attempt to increase overall efficiency for network traffic. It's easy to guess that next generation networks will either be insanely high speed or insanely intellegent compared to our existing infrastructure, and I'm hoping for the later, and the model that DRM subscribes to is the first. Right now Internet2 is hoping to compensate for the amount of unique, protected, non-redistributable media that companies that have to comply to DRM will be pushing out of their servers one request at a time, over and over by implementing a super high speed backbones. You see, the way we designed networks depends on a lot of handshaking over long distance routes that traverse through a ton different networks which rarely ever works as well as it should. Eventually we will hit the physical limit on transmission speed (at least limited for health reasons) and we'll just have to outsmart ourselves and do math we should have done decades ago. I can't help but feel sorry for our future knowing that we will pointlessly lay down millions of miles of cabling containing massive amounts of non-renewable resources simply because we couldn't use what we have set up today intelligently. I hope our global state of mind will change and the progress of information will be distributed in unison over tree-like mixed manycast/unicast networks. It would be wonderful if large static data like images, media, and programs will be easily distributed through cached chunk networks as a standard.

My past is responsible for what I am thinking about now, and it's taken me a while to realize it. Everything I have ever read on the Internet, talked with my friends about, or banged my head up against a wall while trying to figure it all out so long ago is resurfacing and aligning itself into understanding. It's nice to find out I retained more information that I thought, but it sucks that I'm having such a hard time recalling it on my own. I'm beginning blame Mountain Dew and nicotine.

Am i rambling? yes.. THIS IS WHAT IT's LIKE IN MY HEAD LATELY. Incoherent babble that could turn into great things if only I could apply myself and make it all happen. Unfortunately I know exactly why it is what it is up in my stormy thoughts. It's too many thoughts compensation for too many of my weaknesses. That is after all why we create toothbrushes that almost brush your teeth for you, and chime when you haven't used them in a few days. I know I've failed at being a responsible person and completely sucked at setting a good model for my friends, my collegues, and just about any person that's ever spent more than a few minutes around me. I'm talking about *NOT* doing what needs to be done, *NOT* being a more active part in a larger movement that shares your ideas and goals, and definately *NOT* being employed or finding clients that believe in those same goals. I've unknowingly isolated myself away from the type of people I should be a part of by never actively involving myself into societies full of them. Instead I was probably a prick and swore those people would never have anything to do with me because they didn't understand my motives right off the bat, or some equally stupid bullshit. Those people were probably the people that are inexplicably drawn to me reguardless of my nasty mood. If I would have been nicer to them and formed better friendships I would probably be part of the society I want to be in right now.

Thats enough rambling today.