I’m in Nordeast Minneapolis tonight, working with Toby “Legs” MacGuffin, Marcus Harkus, & Jeanine Estime on a project, although everybody will of course deny this if axed. Also, I’m not sure that we CC’ed Jeanine or Marcus on this, and they are super busy obviously right now, so they may be unaware of what Toby and I have been up to, but basically, Nordeast is hollerin’ at North, and I’m just adjudicating over the process from my catbird seat in South.

(Isn’t metaphysics fun, kids? Try and triangulate THAT one, my fine feathered friends! Tee hee.)

We’re working together to integrate new functionality into our wide area network & hopefully make some strides in the politico/punditry arenas without stepping on anybody’s blue suede shoes or alienating any support bases.

As you probably know I am a non-card-carrying member of the Minnesota Green Party (having done some flyering & canvassing for them in decades past), but also volunteer on a number of projects for the Minnesota Libertarians for Pragmatic Government Policies (ML4PGP) and am primarily involved on projects specifically focused on solving NP-Hard problems in the micropayment/karma credit/neo-accreditation trifecta.

This is of course having massive side effects, both locally, and sometimes on a broader, more global scale. Usually we’ve been able to control the feedback loops fairly well with our proprietary Squelch/BackChatter/FlackBack software & hardware line of devices, but sometimes things get a little out of hand.

So I’ve also been working quite a bit with Colbert Nation/Jon Stewart followers to disperse some of the more important technological innovations and to make sure that information is getting to the right people in a timely, safe, secure manner. This is not as easy as it looks, by the way.

In any case, while I’m not thrilled with certain developments that came out of the recent electoral process, we’ve at least been able to inject a bit of levity, as well as brevity, into the most volatile elements of the political landscape, and were able to successfully avoid any major flamewars, hatemail tsunamis, industrial espionage scenarios, et cetera.

This is, as Martha Stewart might say, a Good Thing.

So anyway, I wanted to post this update for your perusal and I’m sure you’ll be able to understand some of the more intricate walls o’ text that have been circulating throughout the Reddit underground lately by putting a couple of these ideas into your virtual bong & sparking that shit up, if you would be so kind as to pardon the expression.

It hasn’t been all fun & games though; we’ve endured several losses lately that I’d like to take a moment to mention.

Locally, I’d just like to say that I was very sad to hear about the passing of Eyedea from the Rhymesayers collective. He was very talented and influenced several of my projects in many subtle ways. He will be missed and Toby, Ping, Brie and I would like to apologize if we didn’t express this sentiment as well as we could have at the time of his passing. R.I.P. my good man.

Lastly, I’d also like to say a few words about the passing of Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematician. First of all, he was one of my earliest influences in the vast unexplored regions of mathematics, chaos theory, game theory, set theory, discrete, discreet, and concrete mathematics. The fact that I was able to explore his work from a very young age has served me incredibly well over the course of my life, and I consider him to be a friend, mentor, and overall solid dude that was really fun to hang out with and correspond with over the years.

I will always associate him with the good times I’ve had working in immersive multidimensional spaces, whether it was in the game Tribes, which could not have existed without his marvelous contributions to fractal geometry, or in the core disciplines I learned from him, such as following the scientific method as meticulously as possible & observing stringent hygienic processes in the lab to eliminate quantum fluctuations & potential side effects from as many projects as possible.

He was also incredibly influential on me from a spiritual standpoint. Although I am a proud agnostic with a few superstitions hanging on as vestigial artifacts to my psyche, my various avatars, and my admittedly awkward but quite compelling and inevitably hilarious spiritual meta-swagger, I must admit that in this strange and inexplicable universe I would have given up long ago without his guidance. There have been so many trials and tribulations, and I have been pushed to the brink of extinction by the external forces that have created so much turbulence in my personal mythos, that there is no way I ever would have lived the life I have without knowing some of Benoit’s favorite magick tricks.

He mentored me when I had no other friends in this world and I miss him deeply and think about him every day. Hopefully, I’m not just hedging my bets with the whole “agnostic” thing, and also, hopefully Pascal’s Wager is mathematically sound, and hopefully, Mandelbrot theorems and derivative works will continue to converge for me on the ever-changing event horizons I face. Because his work drives about 50% of our proprietary software widgets and is responsible for making sure that Toby, Brie, Ping, and myself, as well as many of our friends and family are able to live a comfortable, sane existence without compromising our core beliefs.

And when I write that all down like that, it feels good to finally be able to talk about it. It helps me with my grief, to know I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I feel like I can confide in you about this, because you care about me, and I care about you. So his passing isn’t necessarily cause for suffering, but should perhaps instead be marked on my internal calendar, so that every year on the anniversary of his death, I am able to pay proper tribute to him in some small fashion and carry on the traditions that are so important to the continued evolution of the various inhabitants of this small turquoise sphere we call Mother Terra Firma.

Whew. That was kind of a lot, I’m sure you agree. But I’m glad we had this little talk. I’d like to leave you with one last thought, though; just a small proverb or parable or shaggy dog story or whatever, you can take it or leave it, however I am compelled to leave these words hanging in the air.

“Jupiter’s Clock / in perfect sync
pleasant to talk / with strangers I think
though they are rude / offensive to Ping
I am a rock / with a bird that can sing!”

<3 U ALL!

- Jack Merlot

P.S. Also, shouts out to my friends Lily Allen, Jay-Z, the Roots, Jimmy Fallon, Theo de Raadt, Marshall Mathers, President Barack & First Lady Michelle Obama, and of course, THIS-guy, THAT-guy, AnonymousRedditor#1337, Jedberg, HueyPriest, Saydrah, and a myriad of other names that I am going to have to omit until I am properly situated to mention at some hopefully not-too-distant date in the near future. Thanks for the assistance, my friends!

Such as, grammar and punctuation, which I’ve usually been a stickler about, but for all intents & purposes is kind of irrelevant to my current set of interests.

Do people actually care if I capitalize proper nouns correctly when they’re reading my posts? Or is it delusional for me to think that anyone out there is actually paying attention?

Will this be on the Final Exam, is what I’m trying to say? And what about prospective employers? Will they think less of me if my blog is not 100% serious in tone and isn’t written in a style straight from Strunk & White’s Elements of Style?

Because I think I don’t care enough any more. But on the other hand, I still want to post. I just don’t want people to think that if I miss a few capital letters here and there, or forget an apostrophe, that I’m trolling, or that I don’t care, because I do.

But more on that later.

A more urgent issue is this site’s theme. As noted, I just upgraded to WordPress 3.0, and I stuck with the default theme for now, because I’m primarily looking for ways to convey ideas through text, and don’t really care about how the page is formatted, except that I want it to look reasonably good in most reasonable browsers.

But I’m not writing this for web designers, so if you want to get into a giant flamewar about web standards or tell me that my page looks funny in Opera, well. Look elsewhere.

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It’s my kid sister’s birthday today. I didn’t get her anything except for a card that will inevitably be mailed out later than anticipated, but it’s the thought that counts, right?

We’re taking her out for dinner next week to actually celebrate. Hopefully by then I’ll have thought of a gift.

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I’m using some characters on this website that might render a little bit  funky in other computers. So if it just looks like blank spaces or empty boxes where you think words should appear, that’s why.

If you want the full effect, you should try browsing the site from an Ubuntu workstation with all the fonts installed. It’s pretty fun to have access to Byzantine Musical Symbols if I want or Tamil or Braille patterns or the myriad mathematical operators included with Unicode, which is a fancy way of me saying I don’t really know what the heck I’m talking about, but I like what I’m seeing so far.

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One thing that occurs to me is that I’ll probably be using this site to publish my blog recordings in the future, so I might as well test out some of those features pretty soon. So look for blog postings from me in the future that include MP3 recordings of these kinds of nonsensical blatherings. I’m sure you will find them as gratifying as I do.

Moving from Habari back to WordPress.

No particular reason, I just like WordPress.

a collage of various work filtered through open source tools

So, I’ll be back online posting stuff.

Expect less pictures of my cat & my niece & nephew, more writing about Perl/Catalyst/PHP/etc.