Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

I hereby resolve to be famous. Or infamous. Either will do.

new rules:

1. Always smile like you know something they don’t.
2. If at all possible, know something they don’t.

The Democrats took the senate, too, and Rumsfield resigned today! Somebody pinch me, it’s like I’m dreaming I’m not living in a nation of dumb, lazy shitbags who get their news hypodermically shot into their eyeballs by Rupert Murdoch and Bill O’Reilly.

Ooo. Too harsh, maybe. Too harsh? Nyah.

I like, you like, he likes, she likes chicken bone…
Everyone loves like a crazy chicken bone…
My dog, my cat, my mouse want chicken bone…
I left my head over the chicken bone…(Chicken bone…chicken bone…)
(Chicken bone…chicken bone…)
(Chicken bone…chicken bone…) (Heh heh…Destroy!)
(Chicken bone…chicken bone…)Dreamin’ dreamin’ dreamin’ of this chicken bone…
Crazy crazy crazy ’bout the chicken bone…
Happy happy happy with the chicken bone…
From this spot and all my heart is chicken bone…

Roast it well with cajun sauce,together, together…
Oohh…Long as they don’t throw it away…
Bake it with asian sauce,together, together…Oohh…
It is good for your healthy life,Baby it’s true…
Coz when you love it to the bone,Woah…Bone…

The democrats appear to have picked up the house, and cut the Republican lead in the senate to one or two votes (tie votes are cast by Dick Cheney). I expect all of America’s working families will find their taxes raised fifty percent tomorrow, we’ll send an official letter of surrender to The Terrorists next week, and abortions will become mandatory, along with gay marriage.

We may have to call in the military to correct this obvious case of democratic vote rigging and restore Mark Foley to his rightful place.

I was dragging ass all day long. I’m going to go to sleep at like 10 and get up at 6 and go to work early and lay the smack down. I won’t be that guy dragging ass. My shit will be pristine by the time I leave tomorrow.

Lou Gerstner taught me that the fastest way to succeed is to increase your rate of failure. Well, as much as I’ve failed, I figure success must be just around the corner. I try in little ways every day and fail every day. I try new things, technological things, and discard them when they lose their shiny. I do this because I know that one of these things I try will be my next Fractals or Computer Graphics or PostScript or CJKV typography, the next thing that embraces me in its fascination. And this time, it will be something I can make a killing at, because those are the only things I’m trying right now. Where the money’s at.

Wired taught me that there are a billion people on the Internet, and if you can make a dollar out of each of the stupidest or most obsessed or trendiest one-tenth of one percent, if you can be interesting enough or provide a shiny enough service that one person in a thousand from all over the net and world wants to give you a dollar for it, then you’ll be a millionaire. Or, at least, you’ll have a million dollars.

Notice that I did not say cheat these people. Even the stupidest person will collaborate with others and realize they’ve been cheated, and won’t come back to the well again. You don’t have to cheat them, not as long as you can give them something shiny. You can give a dumb person a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head and they’ll gladly give you a dollar for the pleasure while they giggle and clap at the joy you’ve brought into their lives. For some people, all you have to provide is a social marketplace for them to meet each other. That’s what MySpace did on a grand scale, but it’s what many others have been doing for many years, and if you pick one of these meganiches, they are such a concentrated and generally, in our consumer society, consumer-oriented bunch that direct marketing or even advertising alone can make you a pretty comfortable sum.

Google AdSense has provided almost as drool-proof a method for getting advertising on your site as PayPal has provided a point-and-drool interface for people to give their money to you. This means you don’t even have to be a good deal smarter than the people you’re milking to turn a profit. This is good for me, because I pay $130 a month for cable I hardly ever watch.

George Gilder taught me that you can get rich by wasting what is plentiful to conserve what is rare.

Experience has taught me that people imbue things with their own value, and will give you money according to that value. Witness the pet rock.

The world has taught me that if you’re not getting a slice of this pie, Nike and Kraft and PepsiCo and Ugg will be taking yours at the same time as they give it to you. Up the wazoo, that is.

Technical support taught me the value of information arbitrage. You take it from smart people to stupid people, and it becomes more valuable. It is also very true that the information has value because the people you’re bringing this knowledge to don’t have it. They don’t even have to be stupid. Sometimes, they learn it the hard way. Look at the dot com bubble–information arbitrage. The people inside those companies had information about what was really going on, at a brass-tacks level, and occasionally even a good idea of what the future prospects were. The people on the outside did not, and so in the end they had less money–you didn’t think, when the bubble burst, that that money magically disappeared, did you? It had to go somewhere.

Marc Andreesen taught me you don’t have to be a brilliant businessman. You just need to have a great idea, or be able to put together others’ great ideas in a new way. You can get some sales guy to do the selling for you. They’re a dime a dozen. Just make sure you don’t get sold.

David Philo and Jerry Yang taught me that you don’t have to see years into the future. Just about six months will do it. Maybe a year.

Thomas Friedman taught me that if you can become the standard way of doing something, if you can own the de facto standard, then rich people will buy you, because they can make more money off being the standard than you can. This way, everybody wins.

Life has taught me that you can get it wrong a million times. You only have to get it right once. All I’ve got to do is figure out how to put all these observations together and into action. But first, you need an idea that’s at least really good. I’m getting pretty close. Any salesmen out there?

I sound like some kind of fucking motivational speaker. Shoot me.

coolest poster an HR manager ever ripped from a cube wall in anger:

There is no I in drunk.

epiphany

It’s important to leave your mark on the world, even if that mark is only your boot in someone else’s face. At least then you know somebody knew you were here.

phany

I must immediately get either new contacts or eye surgery. My beautiful brown eyes were not meant to gape, owl-like, from behind cokebottle lenses. Glasses, as much as I might wish otherwise, imbue my face with no panache and considerable weakness, and they completely fuck up my brow line, which is instrumental in making people do what I want them to.

Live, from the outer lysergic fringe: A post to be updated throughout the night:

Yeah, so that’s the new name. No more de|lusion. I’m done with the de|lusion. From now on, it’s Kelly Joyner’s Final Days. Cuz I had a heart palpitation earlier and I thought to myself…Maybe that’s how it ends. Just like that. beat beat beat …

Maybe these are my final days, and I just don’t know it yet. In any case, as long as I keep writing, it’s bound to be an accurate title in the end. Plus it’s got my name in it, and I’m vain like that. So unless somebody writes to tell me that’s the stupidest name evaaarrrr!!1!, that’s the name I’m going with.

People who wonder why there are still American call centers should mull this: the most profitable customer is the stupidest one. You don’t have to go out of your way to cheat these people. They come up to you with offers of how they want to be cheated. The eager look on their face and the earnest love in their eyes is almost too much. They buy features they don’t need on a rate plan they’ll never use and they do it all while paying $150 a month for cable they’ll never watch. Good tech support people make you money by lowering the IQ of your stupidest possible customer. No matter how well-trained, well-educated, or even well-payed the Bangalore competition may be, they will never be able to explain complicated things to the very stupidest people as well as a native-speaker of similar culture can. This connection between marginal IQ and high margins is why Dell, Samsung, Apple, and the rest employ American technicians today.

Think about the implications for American society and the future import of it, then, that the margin between the stupidest people that an Indian guy can explain things to, and the stupidest people that an American can explain things to, is the sweet spot, demographically speaking. That thin band of stupidity is worth paying three times as much to an American tech support guy than the Indian guy would cost you. That’s where your money comes from. What does that say about us? More appropriately, as I’ve recently come to realize, is: What does that say about you?

MMMmmMM!! Cattle!

With mushrooms, you hardly ever want to just go take a stroll. It’s not a strolly experience. Definite lack of strolliness. So tonight I learned the joys of the iPod Nano while walking and tripping and tripping and walking. Yoko Kanno’s Piano Black, Pushing the sky, and The Egg and I created some crazy cross-functional Japanese/Suburban reality overlay. I neglected at first to lock the controls, and didn’t notice that my every step was inching Papa Plastic higher up the volume scale until a sudden psychedelic pan from left to right almost made me fall down. It became my reality for a second. I liked it.

I can’t believe I never got a nano before. Thanks, Travis, for completely and permanently altering the way I experience communal reality on the ride to work every morning. I wear my headphones and the kids wear their headphones and the girls where their headphones and the guys wear their headphones, and we all nod and smile and all the while our audio realities, once aligned exclusively with our visual reality, transforms either into a reflection of our mental condition or a tool for controlling it, depending on whether you’re listening to music that reflects the mood you’re in or you’re listening to music to achieve a certain mood. I leave deterministic questions of that nature to somebody who is not going to go walking and tripping now.

Steve Jobs has obviously found the first best way to capitalize on this disruptive disjunction between the way things were and the way they will be, but if you concentrate on this dissociation of audio reality from the communal for what it is, what it does, what it makes possible, he need not be the last. Somebody’s gotta get rich off these suckers!

I speak above of the way everpresent all overpowering audio changes your daily experience. Tonight, when the barriers between objective and manufactured reality were at their thinnest, the music became a sonic yo-yo, sometimes a guitar riff sending my mind spinning forward like a godawful wheel of fire, throwing off showers of thoughts like sparks that flared briefly in the blackness and died, save the one that caught and burned fuse-like to the next fire-pot of spinning, explosive inspiration, sometimes a fat bass line sending me sliding and spinning backward down a trail of fire I’d travelled before, showing me new forkings and letting me savor the thought again and again, and turn it over and over and see what it meant, and, most importantly, figure out how to burn it into words, to throw it like burning flint onto paper, giving it whatever pitiful reality it comes to enjoy, a charred effigy of the thought that bore it forth. The music became a psychic finger on the scale of inpiration vs. consideration, playfully tossing the balance back and forth.

But what, above the experience itself, was it that I set forth to convey? I forget. Oh, no, wait, it’s everything you’re reading here. That’s right. I almost forgot. Cosmic truths tossed back verbatim across the rift between the reality that exists for you and me and the reality that I create.

I then glanced at the sky and discovered that I must immediately make my way to, and find a way to lay on my back in, my back yard, so that I could peep in on the sex the moon was having with the clouds.

I lay on my back and I watched the moon in the silky embrace of pearly clouds that swirled and courted and caressed, until a dark hand smote her from the sky. But the moon cannot be swept from the sky even by the hand of a god, and as her attacker was borne past on the winds of change, as all tyrants must be, her radiance cut through the haze, proving to all that the clouds, having no light of their own, cannot be but lens and mask for the beauty of the moon.

Radio Free Mars‘ eery, menacing drum and bass, slow jazz and tenor sax played solo set the tune to which this dance was set, and as a momentary tower of cloud obscured the moon from my sight, I wished that there was somebody there doing the same thing, plugged into the same iPod, being in the same place as I was. As the moon overstrove her attacker and her blinding light burned all of my lies to myself away with its purity, I realized that I was laying on my back staring at the sky like a madman by myself because of the very decisions I had made this very day, and that I had no one to blame for it but myself. The absurdity of wishing to share a moment I never would have had had I been sharing moments to begin with did not escape my notice. But I still wish it wasn’t so. It seems to me now like I was wishing for someone to be alone with. Impossible!

I begin to see how, back when there was only channel sky playing after dark each night, the dance of the moon across the sky gave birth to the myths that nurse us even to this day. Today we have Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing Greek gods and goddesses, but back in the day, The Greek gods and goddesses were Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the invented narratives that lent drama to the play of the stars and the moon in the sky.

I often find when I am writing words that I have the same problem as when I am writing code. There’s the simplest, most artless, most straightforward way of committing a thought to words, or a process to code, but when I’ve written it first in that form, I cannot help but go back over it and try to say the same thing fewer words, fewer instructions, less variables. I end up with something that is not the clearest and most meaningful to everyone, but, I think to myself, the person that does get it, they’ll see where I was trying to boil everything down to its purest essence, to strip off anything from the problem domain that wasn’t necessary to get to the solution domain. As Dijkstra would have it, the pigeonhole principle requires neither pigeons nor holes, and may be richer without them. The person that gets what I’m saying here, they get me pretty good. I send a right there with ya, buddy forward through time, a message in a bottle in search of someone else to catch this drift.

I had turned off all the lights in the house, since I was the only person here, and had been walking around by the light of the moon for fifteen minutes or so when from my head phones the disembodied voice of a japanese child reciting random english numbers in singsong fashion, a cappella, compelled me to turn on every light in the house. 8…7…9…5…4…6…10… Thus did I learn: it’s important to have a balance of light and darkness in your life.

Earlier, as I walked along the street, I stared too long at a passing Honda, staring too long to determine whether behind the wheel lay any familiar face, and with the coming of the next car from behind me had the momentary delusion that I was about to be gunned down, fallen victim to a gun-crazy Honda-driving gansta incensed that I’d been mad-dogging him through his wind shield.

When I was out walking earlier I wasn’t scared, because I was the scariest thing around, the walking hopped up nightmare that NIDA uses to scare soccer moms into barricading their daughters in their room each night. Attention soccer moms: I’m not that scary. I’m not after your daughters. I’m just out for a walk. I might be up for a piece of you, though.

My brother was out earlier with a friend of his whose boyfriend had decided they would spend her birthday playing pool with his friends. This may have been in part dictated by available rides, since he’d wrecked her car a few days previous. She told my brother that she thought her boyfriend was scared of commitment, because he was always saying he was going to do things, and not doing them.

epiphany

If he says he’s going to do things and never does them, it doesn’t make him scared of commitment–it just makes him a liar.

epiphany

Wake up every morning and say to yourself “What did I do to deserve this?” There’s usually an answer to that question, and if you can figure out what that answer is, it’ll be a happier question the next time you ask it.

epiphany

If you spend enough time staring up at the clouds, you’re bound to get rain in your eye.

epiphany

The best time to throw stones is before you’ve bothered to build your glass house.

epiphany

When someone is yelling at you, they usually stand to gain something by making you lose your cool. Don’t do it, or they win.

I’ve decided to take my phone and set the alarm on it so that I can sleep in my back yard and still wake up in time to shower and go to work tomorrow morning. I hope it does not rain tonight.

note to self: today de.lusion.org becomes canonical again. everything else is a pale imitation.

note to self: Asinine thought publishing system should be thought free. Current system requires thought to convey thought. To wit: I have to have some level of cognitive something going on in order to make my blog say things. That’s not right. I should be able to post a blog as easily as I vomit. It must be fool proof. Otherwise I am guaranteed to type things and lose them and curse them and type them again.

That’s really it for the night. Hope the me from tonight makes some kind of sense to the me from tomorrow. I usually do, though. I’m just as twisted up when you play the clock backward and when I’m on fast forward.

It turns out I lied. One too many memories of how much more pleasant it was to go to sleep outside on a cool autumn night than it was to wake up outside on a damp autumn morn changed my mind.

So’s I got to drinkin’ and I got to thinkin’, how the fuck does somebody end up as me? Don’t get me wrong, I kinda like being me. It’s got a few kicks in it. But why am I am whoever the fuck it is that I am today? I figure I got a few defining traits:

Smart — I was a dirt poor, shy kid. I spent all my time reading books and playing with computers and imagining my life as marine biologist. On top of that I had an almost magical ability to remember practically anything I read and even more of what I wrote down. No mystery there. I always had a fascination with how things worked and a tendency when I saw something complex to try to break it down to its roots, to examine everything that made it up and somehow divine how these parts made a whole. Must be the genes, baby.

Lonely — I hate to fall back on the “my mommy didn’t care enough about me” bit, but, I mean, who do you learn about women from? Your mom, basically. Or maybe it’s innate to me, just some inexplicable part of who I am. Oh, that’s not to say that there aren’t perfectly concrete reasons for it–maybe I seem too eager for attention or approval, or come off as too controlling, or maybe (as has been pointed out to me on several occasions) I find myself attracted to women that are physically or emotionally unavailable or just not interested because I’m scared of what’ll happen if I actually get one. Maybe I just aim out of my league out of some internal sense of entitlement. Hell, maybe there’s legions of dumb, ugly women that are looking for a guy just like me, and I just somehow don’t see them. Maybe I just don’t know how to connect with another human being. Maybe all of the above, maybe none. But it’s the reason behind it what concerns me here. The problem with figuring out the history of this one is that I can’t figure out what the cause is. It fucking irks me, to tell the truth. Why the fuck? Fuck! Arrrgghh….Next!

Sturdy — I guess I was always physically pretty sturdy, but I never really realized it until a few years ago. Mentally, though, that’s where the sturdiness comes in. It’s crazy to me that when I was a teenager I was always worried I was going to grow up into one of those AR-15-in-a-crowded-post-office kind of guys, so driven crazy by loneliness and the voices in his head that I would pump round after round into friends and co-workers. It wasn’t until I was damned near thirty that I realized that I was one of the most rock-solid guys, mentally, that I know. Even things that probably should disturb me don’t really. Don’t get me wrong–I spend a good chunk of time sulking or wallowing in self-pity or anger or hatred or whatever, but the thing is, no matter how hard I got knocked down, I get back up and start marching forward again. My physical ability to take a punch I have to credit to my dad, who I’ve seen take more than a few, but my mental ability to take a punch I pretty much credit to my whole life growing up. You spend enough Christmas mornings waking up to your parents in a fist fight on the living room floor, and pretty soon there’s not a lot you can’t handle. You just shrug it off and move on, because that’s what you do.

An Asshole — Technically, I must have gotten that from my dad. Really, though, It came through twenty-some-odd years of being a nice guy and realizing that there’s nothing in it for you. There’s only a sad sort of masochism that makes you feel better about yourself because you’re always trying to help people out who wouldn’t do the same for you, as evidenced by the fact that they don’t. Moreover, it’s a losing ploy in the battle of the sexes, because women always say they’re looking for a nice guy, but really, who do they end up with? Assholes. And men say they’re looking for a nice girl, but you show me an evil bitch and I’ll show you a girl showered in attention and gifts. So what is the fucking point? You can live like you’re waiting for the afterlife, but since I don’t believe in one, why am I gonna fuck myself over in this life?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going out of my way to fuck anybody over, but I don’t sees as how I ought to move for you.

Tell me, honestly, nice guys–and I know you’re honest because you’re nice–think back on the happiest moments of your life and tell me with a straight face that they happened because you were a nice guy and not in spite of it. I’lll bet quite a few of those times you thought of yourself as quite the asshole.

You’re fighting an uphill battle, and the view from the top isn’t even very good.

epiphany

The back is the best place to stab somebody. Quick, lethal, and they never see it coming.

Okay, I’m sure I’ve already told everybody and their cousin about the London broil at Louie’s 106. It’s an 8 oz. steak, served thinly sliced with onion confit, carmelized onion slices cooked in butter and oil, salted, with balsamic vinegar added. The onion confit is a small but hellaciously delicious side; half of the rest of the plate it taken up with garlic mashed potatoes topped with a ribbon of puréed carrot and a twiggy garnish I can only refer to as a tail. The last third is filled with a green bean and vegetable sauté that would be pretty damned good by itself but comes off a little bland and oily next to the culinary mastery that is the rest of the plate. It’s almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

It’s $12.50. Add tea ($1.50), tax, and tip, and you’ve got the best damned $16 lunch I’ve had in this town. And if that’s a little more than you’re willing to pay for lunch every day, they’ve also got Philly cheesesteak and pulled pork sandwiches that, while a little unconventional, are definitely worth the $8.75 they’ll set you back. They’re both served on what appears to me to be like a Ciabatta, but a little denser, with a more kind of tart sourdough-ey taste, and semi-battered seasoned fries sautéed with what I can only describe as “onion shavings”, delicious little curley-q’s of semi-battered onions. They’re the best $11 lunch downtown, and face it–you’re not going to get a fancy lunch downtown a whole lot cheaper than that. Hell, it’s hard to get an unfancy lunch downtown for cheaper than that. We’re talking Katz’s and 1886 and Noodleism and Joe’s Bar* territory here, at eleven bucks for everything.

I don’t think they make food to go, but it’s worth going to sit down in. It’s next to the Schlotzky’s at the corner of Congress and Sixth, sandwiched (no pun intended) between that fine establishment to the west and the 1886 to the east. It’s small enough to be described as intimate, but there’s usually enough room at lunch to walk in and sit down. The place shares the same black-and-white hex tile floor as the 1886 and Schlotzky’s, but from the baseboards up it’s all oak and glass and oak. It’s a classy joint, and the best way to eat lunch there is poring over the paper and taking your time. The wait staff is black-clad and courteous. It’d be a hella fine place to take a dinner date, too, I expect, but I’m not going to spend forty bucks to eat there alone. Reservations are probably important for weekend nights, as the place is crowded when I get off work.

I shill for the ones I love.

*–Thai Passion/Gumbo’s/Roaring Fork/Cantina Laredo/Thai Tara/Athenian Grill, too, but I can’t list ‘em all…

So I was at work the other day and somebody got to talking about this Cisco command, “show cam”. They were trying to figure out what “cam” stood for, and Wikipedia told me it stood for content addressible memory.

Not the moral of the story:

Content addressible memory looks about the same, on silicon, as a fully associative cache. Basically, instead of giving the memory a location and receiving back the content of that memory location, you give the memory a value you’re looking for, and it gives you back the location(s) that contain the value.

It’s not actually hard to do this in constant time, as long as you don’t care about how much glass you waste on it: Each memory bit (presumably a flip-flop kind of thing) in each location gets a line out that’s ANDed with the desired bit value for that location, and the output of that is split into as many different leads as there are memory location. Each lead goes into a series of AND gates that connect together the corresponding lead from each of the other bits, so that if they are all lit up, then the output line for that memory location is lit up as well.

The part where it gets interesting, though, is that content addressible memory of the sort we were speaking about is not actually binary, but ternary. There’s a third state for each memory bit (ternary digit? tit?), X, which means “don’t care”. It could also be on the input tits (I like tit. I’ll stick with that), but that’s beside the point I’m making.

That’s what I knew when I read the article. The rest I figured out on the bus ride home.

So, anyway, because we don’t have ternary silicon, this is generally implemented as a mask bit, which is OR’ed with the first AND gate, the one that compared the memory location to the input value. Right? So that’s how you implement “don’t care” on the memory locations, with one extra gate per bit. Now, the great thing is, what you’ve got here is a device that you give a number–say, an IP address–that you can, in constant time compare to a fixed number of memory locations (say, subnets), which because of their ternary nature have variable-length masking built right in, and out the other side falls an address, basically the index into this table of subnets.

But now what you do with that is, you use that index as an “on” switch. You break that into enough leads to address the number of output destinations, and AND each of them with the value of some additional, good ol’ binary bits, essentially the unsearchable lower five or six or eight binary bits of each memory location, that holds the output port identifier. So out of the bottom of this device falls real address lines. Then you need to have each of those address lines split into the number of ports, where the whole set, either the bit or its inverse (for each set of outputs) is ANDed together, according to the address of the port (the first port would AND the least significant bit with the NOT of each of the others, for instance), so that you end up with one line that is lit up if the given input address can be routed out that port.

Now, you could use that to light up an ASIC for a given port, with leads that come through a fully interconnected fabric or fabric of crossbars that connect the input data lines to the output data lines. Or, even if you don’t do that, even if you just dump that address on a bus for more complex operation, you’ve still essentiall routed the packet, but you did it like you were switching. And you did it pretty damned fast. The slowest bit in what I describe above is the part above the part where I said it gets interesting, and that only grows logarithmically relative to the number of memory locations, which, obviously, is the number of subnets in the table. None of the switching above requires a clock, although it must fall on clock boundaries, since managing the content of the table is a clocked operation, and it takes a good many entries before log₂ of the cache table size hits your propagation delay too bad.

If none of the subnet entries match, then another series of AND gates will tell you that, and you just send the incoming packet up to the same old-fashioned DRAM-and-Von-Neumann-machine routing engine you use to manage the content of the CAM.

I’m sure any EE major would look at the stuff I wrote above and laugh a condescending little laugh at my 1980’s terminology and failure to understand the 3-dimensional multilevel supergate whateverthefuckevers that constitute silicon design today, but even they would appreciate this: It’s terrifically expensive in silicon. That’s what left me dumbfounded when I first realized where I was bound to end up thinking about it.

It does something that Wired taught me recently can make you rich: wastes what is plentiful and cheap (silicon) to conserve what is precious (time). For N possible subnets, the time to find the correct subnet goes down from O(N) to O(log₂ N), a tenfold decrease for 1024 slots, and the number of transistors goes from goes way up, from O(N) to O(N^P), which is way more than a ten-fold increase, I’ll tell you that.
The moral of the story:

The brilliant bastards figured out how to freeze time, and it crystallized into silicon. Is that what a microchip is? A snowflake formed by the condensation of time? It’s a crazy world out there, man.

Not related to the story at all:

One more plywood panel down. About halfway done now. Don’t want to work very long or late with the hammer, so I don’t piss off my neighbors. Looks like I’m going to have to pull up the tackless strips on one side of my room to make the squeaks go away on that side. Haven’t had any new epiphanies in almost a week. Maybe I’m getting dumber.