There is a common idiom in American culture that if you consider a glass to be half empty you are a pessimist, and if you consider it to be half full you are an optimist. Because of this cultural idea, a half full glass is different than one that is half empty. The difference exists only in our minds however, and therefore I say it is not real.

Perhaps the person who considers the glass half empty is also an optimist, because he or she considers, optimistically, that the half that was emptied was enjoyed. Perhaps the person to whom the glass is half full is a pessimist, because it's full of the same bullshit that he or she deals with every day in his or her life; just more shit to shovel.

So at this point I'm pretty sure that I'm going to need to either go to a tax counselor or directly to jail. I owe the IRS thousands of dollars, and I'm pretty sure that I've yet to pay a dime of it. Mostly because I was unemployed and didn't have a dime to pay.

How did I get in this mess? Independent contracting. It's the devil's work, I tell you. You get these big fat checks with no taxes taken out and it's like 'Party time woot!'. But really, you owe a third of it to the government. Like I've ever been able to save anything.

And it gets worse. I did more contracting this year, so there are thousands more dollars out there that should have gone to the government that I spent instead.

I guess I should just wait until I owe tens of thousands of dollars, and then settle for 653 bucks...like those people on TV.

"And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make"

I was listening to Abbey Road today during my morning commute and this part of the album brought me to tears. The reason was because I suddenly interpreted it to mean that there is no love in the world, not one bit. Love is a zero sum game and whenever someone takes some it's because they made it. There's none left over for anyone else.

Honestly that's how I've been feeling. I used to believe that love was abundant, that every smile, every laugh creates more love than we know what to do with (which is why a smile from a stranger can be arresting or even embarrassing). Now it feels like love is a scarce resource. If you happen to create some, you need to preserve it and be very selective with whom you share it.

I don't like the new feeling. I feel the urge to share love with every person I see shuffling groceries or spinning their iPod dial on the T. I want to grab their hands and start dancing, smiling. I want to teach everyone in the world to laugh, and compete to tell the silliest jokes that make you slap your forehead but you can't stop laughing.

In short, I want the love I make to be MUCH greater than the love I take. Maybe this one time McCartney was wrong!

Twoopsaphone is at: http://twitter.com/twoopsaphone
And it's radio station is at: http://tinyurl.com/twoops

Yes, that's great, but what IS it you ask. Well it's a collaborative loop-based synthesizer that you control using your tweets. Anybody can send Twoopsaphone a message using '@twoopsaphone play <music string>'

The music string resembles MML (music macro language) or really Ringtone Transfer Language or whatever, where it's just a string of notes:

8c 8c 4d5 4e#5

The first number is the duration (4-quarter note, 8-eighth note, 1-whole note, 2-half note, etc) and the second number is the octave. Single numbers on their own (ie '4 c 4 c') represent rests of the indicated length. If you don't use an octave number, 4 is assumed.

The synthesis engine is Bloopsaphone. So any command line that Bloopsaphone would accept is accepted by Twoopsaphone. Bloopsaphone + Twitter = Twoopsaphone.

As for the technical side, the whole thing is streamed to Nicecast via cycling 74's Soundflower. I hacked the Bloopsaphone source twice, once to calculate the duration in beats of a track (Track.duration, so I know how long to loop) and again to have it stream the output to soundflower instead of the default output.

The whole thing is running on my home iMac. You'll notice that the server shuts down every hour and restarts...that's me trying to weasel around Nicecasts trial limitation that they put static in the stream after an hour--I just don't have the 40 bucks to register it at the moment!

I pledged $25 dollars to support the campaign of anyone running against any Democratic senator who helps the Republicans filibuster healthcare reform.

Below is the copypasta of the email that MoveOn.org wanted me to send out. If any Democratic senators are reading this, though, you should know that I'm fully committed to this and I WILL scrape together and pay the money to your future opponents, should you help filibuster health care reform.

Subject: The nightmare scenario

Hi,

Here's the nightmare scenario: One Democratic senator joins Republicans
to filibuster and 2009 becomes just another year when health care reform failed.

But if thousands of us make it clear that we'd support a primary challenge
to that senator, and Democratic senators know it, we might just be able to keep
this nightmare scenario from ever coming to pass.

I just pledged to support a primary challenge if it comes to that, and it's
critical that all of us who would, say it now. Will you join me?

http://pol.moveon.org/hc_fund/?r_by=17769-9507010-b2c__qx&rc=paste

Thanks!