If teleport technology develops along the lines currently posited - i.e. that molecules position and momentum can somehow be defined enough to duplicate a person exactly to the molecule at a different location - then it sets up a problem. Is it you that walks off the other teleport pad? Assuming that “you” were disintegrated on the ‘departure’ pad does that make you dead?

Recognising that You-2 who walked off the arrival pad has all your memories and remembers walking onto the departure unit, as far as You-2 is concerned, he is you. But - and this is interesting for me - I can’t feel that it would be me. I would have died on the departure pad.

Now this is interesting because it means I believe in souls - or at least that there is more going on within the body than just the sum of all the biological process. I hadn’t really firmed up whether I did or didn’t believe in this before now, but I guess I do.

So, does that means that teleporters are going to create an army of soulless monsters? What will the lack of a soul mean in practical terms?

Honestly, though, this is an angels on the head of a pin question, but I expect to progress further in my voyage of self-discovery once I start taking Lariam.

Fucks sake, *everyone* else spouts some line about ‘the cure is worse than the disease’ with nothing to back it up when everyone with medical qualifications says ‘quinine, take it as long as you’re at risk’. Forgive me if I don’t take half assed hunches as out weighing medical professionals - especially since I can tolerate malarone quite fine (though if other people react like Ronan did, then I can understand their reluctance).

And I’m reduced to scavenging other peoples medicine cabinets for whatever they didn’t use before they had an attack of invulnerability. I should have taken six months worth with me but it wasn’t fucking clear whether I was supposed to get them in UK or the corp would supply them here - by the time it all got cleared up I was flying at dawn and the clinics were closed. I tried to buy them over the shelf, the pharmacy wouldn’t sell them to me - thats deeply suspicious, but again, too fucking late, I was flying.

This crap I don’t need. I’ve got two weeks, I think one of the guys from the UK is coming down here on mission so he should be hitting the clinic in Aberdeen to get *his* meds, so it should be no problem for him to bulk out with a couple of months work and courier them down.

I should be able to wring a box - a fortnight out of the clinic here however much they whinge - and my office mate has offered to hit HQ when he’s home and get a prescription filled “for him” then give it to me - that would be Sept 22nd when he’s back… so if I can rustle up another half dozen so out of the bottoms of people medicine cabinets that should tide me over.

Once I can get back in November I’ll get it sorted but man, I think the technical term for this is ‘haimse’.

Of course, the harsh is in the form of ‘all my posessions bar some clothes and deoderant are in customs limbo’ and ‘my coworkers have politics’ and ‘the water can keeeel’ but frankly if it was easy then there would be no bragging rights. This is the utter, sine-wave opposite of my thought pattern at ~3pm which was “$%^ing why should I carry both my colleague and my boss? Why am I here? If I quit now, can I get my stuff shipped back out of customs?” but then, I have to remember that… um… that… well actually I’m still a little fuzzy on the ‘why’ and ‘what *is* the point’. Its sort of a race of attrition against ‘my patience’ versus ‘my mortgage’ and one or the other is going to wear down first.

The Super Plus Bonus Case scenario is that I get to work/take a six day week which doubles my holidays and pushes me into a quasi-rotation work pattern with four return flights and 4 weeks off a quarter - or if my boss is twitchy as reputed, he won’t like month long absenses (sp?) so it’ll have to be five sets of 3 week vacations. Which, while grim, would be survivable.

My coworkers are .. interesting. The French are sworn adherents of ‘misery loves company’ and delight in detailing the various horrors and futility of work at the corp. While personable and otherwise very nice and welcoming, were I not the iron willed individual you all know and put-up-with then I’d be very disheartened. Thankfully, once I can take a step back I become happier - the ‘truth’ as it is being revealed is close enough to the ‘low case’ scenario that I’d reckoned was quite probable. This is ok.

Hell, if I can stream The Dead Flags frankly, I don’t have great problems.

So, really the ’sprint’ started last weekend and frankly, I fucked it up. I left my phone charger in the flat, I’m sending letters to cancel/redirect credit card statements back to Europe in other peoples luggage, I have a dire lack of cleansing agents beyond soap which is more tiresome than you’d think. I did manage the macros - flat is emptied of major furniture bits and has been leased, I’ve landed, corpus intactus. Customs was less of an ordeal than I feared, positive attitude and willingness not to be buffaloed will get you through with all your stuff and without bribery.

My bug spray appears to be superfluous, I haven’t seen a single winged insect since arriving. DDT, its magic. I need to source more anti-malarials just in case.

Entertaining detail to trap the amateurs - Nigeria uses UK standard sockets - but the compound of course uses continental plugs. Had I not been a paranoid soul and checked during my look-see, god knows I’d be here now with 4 hrs battery time on my laptop from now to November. As it is my phone is a paper weight, but never mind, I’ll have skype once my headset clears customs.

I was gruesomely sick on the way down here - something I ate in Aberdeen, I didn’t even have a super pish up leaving spree - which has, oddly, put kind of a shine on things here - “hey, maybe everything else is crowsfeet, but at least I can hold food down”. Ill wind and all that :)

I’ve had one brave soul call me out on ‘mi casa su casa’ Port Harcourt. Many threatened, few arrived for Aberdeen, I wait to see what happens here :)

Oddly - without listening to my iPod for a couple of days, my mental playlist has become ‘74-75′ by the Connells, ‘Blue Heaven is a place on Earth’ by someone, I don’t know, and one other that I’m not picking up right now. Odd - a full early 90’s playlist. Obviously all those years listening to NWR FM ground in deeper than all hope of removal…

“We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time of life when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent … ”

– William James, “The Ph.D. Octopus”, 1903

Found on Philip Greenspun’s home page. He’s also the author of Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming:

“Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.”

This weekend at GenCon, no fewer than seven people gave me the now instantly recognizable wide-eyed look and said, “You look so familiar,” including one man dressed impressively in a feathered hat and full-length cloak who was too busy looking impressive to stop walking and talk to me beyond that sentence. I didn’t expect any of those people to actually know me.

The jaw-dropping moment of truth happened Saturday morning as I was waiting outside my hotel to either be picked up by the airport shuttle (transportation was complicated) or split a cab fare with a fellow gamer who was also waiting outside. A couple exited the hotel and looked at us. They offered us both a lift, as they’d rented a car, and we headed to the parking lot. On the way, the question came up and I launched into my stock answer involving genetics and blank features. “Unless you gamed in DC…or live in LA…” I ended, trailing off.

“Yeah, I live in LA.”

“Really? What part?”

The conversation spiralled this way until we determined that this stranger works in my building, one floor upstairs from me. Indeed, I looked familiar because he’d seen me in stairwells and at the adjacent coffee shop. The other passenger listened with the quiet amazement only possible when you’re up too early to create a more verbose response to astonishing phenomena. Not only did this person work upstairs from me, but he plays D&D (probably 4th ed.) and is looking to add another person or two to the game.

This neatly solves the question of how I will get my gaming fix between now and when I graduate, which is increasingly likely to happen in March.

What is interesting is that we do do well on some topics. This month, our top search has been for the Nigerian Embassy in Dublin, for which we have received several hits to said HP-fan’s entry about €40 well(?) spent.

All sorts of weird crap appears when I google my own name, so I think I will probably spend more time explaining which ones aren’t me than accounting for what I have written, if the Tavrchedl’ ever take me in for an interview.

(*Ok I probably made that up)

And if not, why not?

It was an argument with an old classmate, this is a guy who can wrangle a hot swedish blonde as a bedmate when a) wasted and b) on a train in the wrong direction on new years night. He’s lucky, in the Napoleonic sense, and yet he doesn’t, or possibly for spite refuses, to see the point of reassessing the priorities and capabilites of medical sciences come say, 2050 to see if they can do more for him. I think he’s nuts, but then I think you scrape on as long as you can to see what the future hold because goodness knows theres fusion up ahead and after that everything changes.

This has been typed with one eye shut to counter durkenss, this is tiring and thus I abed. Hasta.