thisc0rrosion

• Train to Berlin: Crowded, not pleasant, shoulder/back pain. One nice fragment, came back from toilet to find 3 seatmates with lockpick sets and teaching one of them to pick a lock (all were strangers going to the congress)
• Cashlines for tickets were down to software problems until 10 pm. Signs at conference said things like "cashlines open rand(6,12)"
• In the long fucking line, Ka-Ping started a massively-multiplayer thumbwar.  Awesome.
• While zoned out in long line, Andy provided some relief by plugging us into her company's software, "audio drugs" as she called it, RjDj. 3 of us plugged into her iPhone, which was giving us some trancy music plus mixing in sounds from our environment (our voices). Actually did mellow us out.
• Got to fondle and play with the new supposedly non-existent android Google phone for a few minutes. 

• Wandered in a daze, not sure which of the 2000 people sitting at tables hunched over laptops was doing something I might be interested in.
• Went to the basement and learned how to sodder, and made some neat circuitboard thingies, and made a WLAN antenna.
• Also started learning about how to program the circuitboards after soddering them

• At the moment, I'm limited to "der blinkenlights" things, just making LEDs flash. But this eventually leads up to freaking cool things like the Microkopter, 3 veterans next to me were soddering one of these things together.
• Everything that runs at the conference is running on hardware/software hacked together by the organizers, including a dedicated phone network. I'll skip the tech details.
• Saw a session called GSM: SRSLY? on crazy flaws and bugs in GSM encryption that should have been solved years ago, basically pointing out that off-the-shelf hardware can be used to ... ah, just don't transmit anything secret on your phone okay, because governments or corporations are probably listening already, that's their only explanation why easily exploitable flaws are not fixed years ago.  But you already knew they were listening, right?
• Saw a session on Tesla's wireless power transmission theories from 1900, by a physicist who had been working on modeling it and trying to reproduce it. Understood 10%.
• Didn't dare power on my Windows laptop without disabling wifi, and declined to plug it in to any network cables.

madhatte

frumiousb

But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound in space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away in the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfilment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.

But what is my God? I put my question to the earth. It answered, 'I am not God', and all things on earth declared the same. I asked the sea and the chasms of the deep and the living things that creep in them, but they answered, 'We are not your God. Seek what is above us.' I spoke to the winds that blow, and the whole air and all that lives in it replied, 'Anaximenes is wrong. I am not God.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but they told me, 'Neither are we the God whom you seek.' I spoke to all the things that are about me, all that can be admitted by the door of the senses, and I said, 'Since you are not my God, tell me about him. Tell me something of my God.' Clear and loud they answered, 'God is he who made us.' I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things, and that beauty was all the answer they gave.

Then I turned to myself and asked, 'Who are you?' 'A man,' I replied. But it is clear that I have both body and soul, the one the outer, the other the inner part of me. Which of these two ought I to have asked to help me find my God? With my bodily powers I had already tried to find him in earth and sky, as far as the sight of my eyes could reach, like an envoy sent upon a search. But my inner self is the better of the two, for it was to the inner part of me that my bodily senses brought their message. They delivered to their arbiter and judge the replies which they carried back from the sky and the earth and all that they contain, those replies which stated 'We are not God' and 'God is he who made us'. The inner part of man knows these things through the agency of the outer part. I, the inner man, know these things; I, the soul, know them through the senses of my body. I asked the whole mass of the universe about my God, and it replied, 'I am not God. God is he who made me.'

Surely everyone whose senses are not impaired is aware of the universe around him? Why, then, does it not give the same message to us all? The animals, both great and small, are aware of it, but they cannot inquire into its meanign because they are not guided by reason, which can sift the evidence relayed to them by their senses. Man, on the other hand, can question nature. He is able to catch sight of God's invisible nature through his creatures, but his love of these material things is too great. He becomes their slave, and slaves cannot be judges. Nor will the world supply an answer to those who question it, unless they also have the faculty to judge it. It does not answer in different language-- that is, it does not change its aspect-- according to whether a man merely looks at it or subjects it to inquiry while he looks. If it did, its appearance would be different in each case. Its aspect is the same in both cases, but to the man who merely looks it says nothing, while to the other it gives an answer. It would be nearer the truth to say that it gives an answer to all, but it is only understood by those who compare the message it gives them through their senses with the truth that is in themselves. For truth says to me, 'Your God is not heaven or earth or any kind of bodily thing.' We can tell this from the very nature of such things, for those who have eyes to see know that their bullk is less in the part than in the whole. And I know that my soul is the better part of me, because it animates the whole of my body. It gives it life, and this is something that no body can give to another body. But God is even more. He is the Life of the life of my soul.