Last week I got 11 boxes in the mail, weighing around 280 pounds total. What else could it have been but my new desk?!?!?! Well, I suppose it could have been a high capacity UPS for the computers (this comes to me in the same tone in which some people say "food for the cats"), or two hundred and eighty pounds of gummy bears. But it wasn't any of those things, it was really my desk. This new desk is as great a leap in desk-tech from my old desk as the old desk was from the cardboard boxes it replaced. I was so happy to finally have a place to put all my computers that I created a photo montage of its assembly. I reconsidered posting it publicly because I eventually realized how outrageously boring the slow coalescence of a black desk looks.

I took all of my systems apart so I could rearrange my room. Then I put everything in my room into the living room. The living room already contained the 11 boxes that held the desk for shipping, which I have been advised to keep on hand in case I need to return everything. Right now, my desire to keep the option of returning something is slowly succumbing to my desire to not have a pile of boxes the size of a large automobile in my living room. I don't think I'd want to unscrew everything to send it back, anyway. The desk seems perfect. Unfortunately, it is not so simple as taking the giant heap of packaging and dumping it in the trash; I need to get it into the recycle bins. The bins here take the form of three blue, plastic, slightly-larger-than-a-kitchen-trash-can containers. There is already a sheaf of cardboard in my closet waiting for bin space to become available so I can throw it out. I'm still getting rid of the cardboard from when I bought this computer. At this rate, it will take me until late 2002 to get rid of all cardboard in my house. Alternatives include:

• Having a big cardboard bonfire in the driveway, which will catch the breeze and soar through capitol hill setting everthing alight.
• Building a tract of multi-story luxury housing for the local box-resident folk.
• Cover the entire walkable surface of my apartment in cardboard so that I can breakdance whenever the notion hits me.
• Make a bunch of "World Bank Is Bad For Some Reason" protest signs
• Reassemble a series of six very large boxes around the cars in the building garage and address them to the various owners
• Throw it all off my balcony and hope that no one notices

Why don't I just forget the recycling and toss it in the dumpster? Because then what's the point of me ever recycling again? This is more paper than I use for anything else in a year. Also, the garbage dumpsters around here say:

PLEASE DON'T
THROW AWAY
RECYCLABLE
MATERIALS (DUH!)

I don't know who wrote the signs, but I'd hate for that "Duh" to be directed at me! Ouch! The part of my week that hasn't been taken up trying to restore my house to some kind of livable state or worrying about a personal crisis has been devoted to programming issues at work. As they used to say at MIT, "you can't comb a hairy ball smooth".

I installed a 19" rack on my old desk, so it now holds a computer, router, and DSP in its steely clutches. I worry that a couple hundred pounds of gear is being supported by two bolts. The bolts are supposed to be attached to "Keps nuts", but the nuts were omitted from my rack kit by accident (instead I got a complimentary pair of 3 space rack rails), so I used two normal nuts and two nylon stop nuts. I hope that whatever keps nuts do is adequately emulated by this combo. Poor kep.

Good christ people. Do all men want to be wanted by every woman they meet, in posession of amazing intellect and ultra-badass demeanor, and richer than everyone in the immediate vicinity? Do all women want to be perfectly proportioned, outrageously sassy and attitude-laden, and to have survived an extremely harrowing life which, for some reason, is even more harrowing to them personally than it would be to everyone else? Okay, so everyone wants to be attractive and tough. And witty. What makes me think of this? The Web! I'm reading personal webpages, and it seems like everyone tries to portray themselves as some sort of secret god. What would people talk about if they weren't interested in impressing each other? Would they even talk? Maybe they'd only ever ask questions. Is trying to impress people less selfish than asking questions in pursuit of information? If you aren't interested in yourself and you aren't interested in other people, why would you ever speak?

I feel stupid when I think about how much of my speech is made of prefabricated speech elements, so that every sentence, while superficially different from the others, is made of a collection of familiar building blocks. Look at that sentence. How many times have I seen "...collection of familiar..[something]" written? How many times have I heard the phrase "is made of"? These may seem like insignificant links in a chain of important nouns and adjectives, but the fact is ("the fact is"! gah!) they are part of language, and creative language doesn't come easy. Some people use BIG WORDS in a corny attempt to make original sentences from obscure or clumsy phrasings. This may appear as evidence of aptitude at first, but eventually you realize how little information is spread out across all that paper/screen space/airtime. When people carefully put together words in an original order while trying to retain meaning and clarity, they speak or write slowly, like someone attempting a foreign language in the first year of learning. If they succeed, the result is sometimes poetry. (When you're learning a foreign language, you speak or write slowly as you put the words together for the first time in your head. In your native tongue, you already have a bunch of ready-to-eat speech chunks prepared so you rattle them off without hesistation.) ("rattle them off". Ugh. Cliches upon cliches.)

So what set that off? I was reading an allegedly creative text and the author used the phrase "hit her like a train". Not only that! The sentence was "the realization hit her like a train". In how many galaxies have how many realizations hit how many people like a bunch of trains?!?! Sixty five billion maybe?!?! It would be a tiny bit more interesting if it said "Crunch!! The realization train hit her!" or if it were about "A train hit her like a realization". Plus the word "realize" appears earlier in the sentence... blech. PLUS one doesn't realize they're falling asleep in the same manner as a train smashes into one. If you wrote this: BARF BARF BARF BARF BARF.

So what happens if you just string together randomly selected words, using the most used two and three word strings to go from one word to the next? Autoglot (this version can use the string libraries from two different people, currently, though not both at once).