Bear Flag Blog

Say, this thing appears to still be on! Two years since my last post...

This seems like a good semi-public, semi-permanent place to record my latest prophetic dream.

As mentioned elsewhere, I occasionally see the future. Don't get excited, it's not terribly useful. In a nutshell, sometimes while daydreaming I will get a vision of a moment in my own future - a timeless slice, one that is generally visual but also full sensory (if other senses apply), and includes what is on my mind at that exact moment.

These visions have been uniformly useless - myself telling Jason A. about a burrito place that just opened (i.e. foreseeing myself doing so, months before said burrito place ever existed), scenes from movies, walking through an empty lecture hall, things like that.

How can I tell when a mental apparition is a prophecy, versus a normal daydream? The utter lack of context. When dreaming, stuff happens. I have regular daydreams all the time, had one this morning about stealing a truck. In contrast, these prophecies are still pictures, single slices, with no precursor nor consequence, unrelated to anything else I might be thinking or dreaming about. Invariably I find myself wondering "what was that?"

To the meat. Last Sunday, March 30, 2014, I had another one, one which was pretty clearly a prophecy. At Paul E.'s recommendation I am recording it here for later reference.

In it, I am looking at an image, related to a play, or possibly an opera. It's in the form of a poster, although it might be a web page, and it is wider than it is tall - somehow I know that it is definitely not a movie poster. I do not recall the text, although it has information in smaller font at the bottom, in the way of such posters.

The image is dominated by - in fact, consists entirely of - line art of a woman, seated on an elaborate chair, although it falls short of being a throne. She is in full profile, 90 degrees, looking toward the right; the position is reminiscent of Egyptian motifs. She has a strong, what I call 'aquiline' nose; note again that this is not a photograph. I think it is a drawing of the leading actress in the play/opera. The poster has a sort of border to it which is part of the art style. It seems art deco in style, although not so much that I would suspect it of being anything other than modern.

At the time, I am looking at the bottom of the poster for information - a date, perhaps? - that is transcribed there. I have a strange feeling that I can get access to additional information from the information on the poster, in a way strongly reminiscent of a hyperlink, so perhaps it's a web page, although for some reason I don't think so. Perhaps something one can do with a smartphone? Although to be honest it could be something like an interactive poster, on a theater wall, that I could touch to bring up other information. Note that I've never seen one of these interactive posters in real life, but hey, this is the future.

And that's it. Myself, looking for some somehow-interactive information from the minutiae of a theater poster, on which there is an art-deco inspired drawing of a woman seated on a throne, in profile.

Perhaps one day I'll have a vision of the Dow Jones average or something.

I recently had the enjoyable experience of receiving a 1944 quarter in my change. It has been a long-standing habit of mine to always check my coinage for silver coins, but as the years pass finding any has become increasingly rare. Still, it does happen, and when it does it really brightens the day. Aside from being worth about $5 (the coin is pretty worn, "Good" in numismatic circles) and being 90% pure silver, it's just cool to have something minted in 1944 - in San Francisco, in this case.

Which led to the idle thought - in how many countries is money from 1944 still legal tender? Darn few, I suspect. Regime change, rampant inflation, or redenomination would make a 1944 coin, although possibly collectible, worthless for its face value in a great majority of nations. I would have guessed the UK might have old coins, but no, they "decimalized" in the 1970s and the oldest circulating coins now are from 1971. Euros are obviously out. The Swiss Franc has valid coins going back to 1879; Canadian coins appear to be valid for about the same time range as American and Swiss.

I have sensitive hearing - I can sleep in a room with the lights on without issue, but any regular source of noise and no luck. The same goes for concentrating in general.

So today I am working at home, troubleshooting a lab, when I hear a high-pitched whine. Seems to be very nearby. And of course, once I hear it, I cannot stop hearing it - so I have to seek it out and put a stop to it.

I'm surrounded by at least three working computers, but upon aural inspection none of them seems to be the source of the whine. The ventilation system? No. I walk in and out of the room and around within and the whine is loudest at my desk.

Cell phone? No. iPod? No. What the heck...?

It's my Diet Pepsi. I had screwed the cap back on firmly enough to prevent spillage, but apparently not firmly enough to create an air-tight seal, and it's carbonated enough to force out a thin, reedy whine.

Which I dispose of with another firm twist. And back to work.

"TomTom admits to sending your routes and speed information to the police".

Well, if I'm ever in the market for a GPS, no way in Hell I'm buying from them. Sure it's a sensationalist headline, but the underlying information is that TomTom will hand out data about you to whomever they see fit. No thanks!

I finally changed the security protocol of our home wireless network over to WPA2. I have known that I should do so for years, but of course changing every device on the network would have taken like twenty minutes of work, and I am, in fact, that lazy. So we've been using WEP because, well, when I got the router set up initially its UI was so impenetrable that I was fooled into believing it only knew about WEP.

But the other day I was reading about the police breaking down someone's door because their neighbor was downloading society's current "worst possible material ever" via the hapless individual's unsecured wireless network. And I had just read about a firefox plugin that snoops on wireless traffic, so finally I checked up on exactly how easy it is to crack WEP, and that was enough.

Twenty minutes later, the laptops and the Wii are all happily running with WPA2. And I'm back to having only the government reading my network traffic.