↑ AboutThisSite
Page Created: 8/1/2014 Last Modified: 8/2/2023 Last Generated: 4/22/2024
FAQ
There is a FrequentlyAskedQuestions page that I will update as time goes by.
Purpose
I felt that it was time I exercised this wonderful gift we have, the gift of speech.
(text of United States 1st Amendment which I painted on cloth a few years ago)
If we can protect this right, then it will protect everything else that is important to us.
The decades of me working privately on my projects with nobody that really understood what I was trying to do was getting to me, stressing me out. I had no treasures to bring back to people from my journeys. I realize that nobody can truly understand another person, that we are all isolated by design, but thought that perhaps this would provide me with an artistic and intellectual outlet. As the complexity of my philosophies and projects increased over the years, the pace at which I revealed my work to people has slowed, since I tried to take on giants this time around. The more work I performed, the less results people saw, which inverted their perception of my abilities. I also wanted to integrate some of the stories and work of my late father, grandfather, and grandmother, which went mostly unrecognized.
Many of the pages on this site were hard for me to write. I simply set out to convey the truth to the best of my knowledge and abilities. But like how an impressionist painter tries to depict reality in their art, I do not necessarily use an objective style of realism in my writing. Impressionist art doesn't appear real to the eye, but it is real to the mind, which is more important to cut through our sensory illusions, like how the Parthenon's architects employed curved lines to give the illusion of straightness, since our eye cannot not understand an ideal shape like our mind can.
You may notice that I seem to "talk through" a lot of things as if you don't already know them and use parables and analogies. Please bear with me on this--much of what I say is structural in design--I'm not making assumptions about you, but am working through my own ideas until they coalesce in a way where I can "refactor" them more concisely. Very often, new knowledge is discovered through the very process of writing down and then re-examining what I think I already know. Being a hypersystemizer, I'm optimizing the overall structure and filling in the details later. Internally, this site is a special type of Wiki that allows me to do that very easily, which is why you see the occasional hashtags peppered throughout these pages. They help me to visualize and categorize my writings, which may also help you find related content. You can also refer to the SiteIndex which contains a list of categories and short summaries of the pages on this site. If my writing style seems arrogant, it is because I am simply trying to convey something directly; I'm trying to uncover mysteries and truths and present them to you as I see them. One of the things I always liked about Isaac Asimov was his frequent use of first person. He wrote as if he was talking to me directly.
You might wonder who my audience is since much of my writing discusses subjects that don't seem to be in the same context. Sometimes I use my life stories, then switch to a technical language, then mention something about philosophy or the arts, or relate it to something scientific. To me, I am attempting to use my "full" life language, everything I know to describe things that exist in a larger context, or otherwise I wouldn't mention them. I have never been comfortable with writing within the confines of a specific audience, as this is assuming a role. Some people maintain different personalities for different friends or audiences, but they have to use a great deal of energy to do so, and they will eventually reach a state of internal contradiction, a battle with their subconscious. They are running wildly around the shores of knowledge, through the mud, weeds, and sand, but I have built a ferry to cut transversely across the lake, finding that secret cove in the region of feasiblity↗. My audience, I guess, is an idealized thinking being, your mind when you temporarily suspend the roles you have held in your life and ride the ferry with me. Hopefully I've provided enough examples, enough context, so that you can understand my language.
Civilization is under-appreciated today. Almost all that we are composed of is a conglomeration of ideas and work by other people. There is only a small part of each of us that is unique. It is easy to attribute great things to certain individuals, but place that individual in the forest with no language or education and you will quickly see how great that person really is.
Our true nature, therefore, is in our choices, a tiny spark. But our greatness is actually in our connections to each other. We don't all have to be outgoing and talkative, but we can communicate in different ways--through writing, oration, programming, music, art, dance, teaching, storytelling, archiving, engineering, building, crafting, sport.
If you have ever tried to create something, whether tangible or intangible, you may remember that there is something magical in the act of creation. The act itself draws on something special. I've spent a lot of time trying to determine exactly what this is--it is fleeting; mysterious.
In 2013, before I set out to compose these web pages, I decided I was going to do something unique. I wasn't going to use a standard web platform to serve them but decided that I would build my own platform from scratch using four $35 British Raspberry Pi computers and a modern, minimalist↗ philosophy. Since then, two of them have since been replaced due to my mistakes, and five years later, I lowered the cost and power even further by running this site on a $30 model B+ and three tiny $5 Pi Zeros, but I type and generate the pages on a more powerful Raspberry Pi 4. After a long day of working on computers, my brain is pretty fried, so I had to create something that I could manage in my off hours, and minimalism provides both flexibility and maintainability without complexity. It was a challenging and interesting project. If the site has trouble or goes down for any reason, I will update the SiteStatus page which is mirrored on a 3rd party host.
You may have noticed that I use a lot of CamelCase↗ on this site. No, this isn't an exercise in "Mammutworter" (giant German compound words). CamelCase has its critics, but I believe it is hugely under-appreciated. I designed my system to use Ward Cunningham or Foswiki-style camel case as its primary automatic hyperlinking mechanism instead of using Wikipedia-style linking because it promotes "accidental linking" and allows the system to link to itself in unexpected and beneficial ways. Also, the hyperlinks with diagonal arrows ↗ signify external (off-site) links.
Ultimately, my goal is to show you the world from a perspective that perhaps you haven't seen before, the world as it appears to me. Most of this site is about my philosophies, my projects, and childhood events that shaped my way of thinking. I frequently state the obvious, some of which may seem small and trivial. To me, the world is not trivial at all, but a magnificent construction, and only on inspection and re-inspection can we see its magnificence. Like a child, we must learn through repetition. Most people stop doing this when they become an adult, confusing childish with childlike. They stop revisiting the small things they thought they already knew. Its those small things that form the basis of everything else, and, like a particle in a quantum superposition, the more we study them, the more mysterious they become.
I have administered hundreds of "enterprise level" servers over my career, but I chose to run this site on four slow, inexpensive computers that can fit within the space of a sandwich bag. I didn't scale up for capacity, redundancy; I didn't virtualize; I purposely scaled down and built a tiny system hanging on threads. But if there is nothing to break those threads, they will hold.
Borrowing a couple of words from Eric Raymond, the Internet was originally designed to be a bazaar, a network of people and machines exchanging packets of information↗, but then the corporations got their large hands on it and started building cathedrals, monopolizing, creating "artificial scarcity", and prioritizing packets at their whim. This site is a proof-of-concept reminder to many in the United States that the bazaar is still there, just like amateur radio is a reminder that the airwaves are still there, and you do not need to use a "cloud" service, social network, or virtual machine owned by someone else. You do not need expensive computers or someone else's software to generate a web page. And finally, you do not even need to use javascript (there is only one page on this site that uses it).
When I threw away what mankind taught me about the Universe and conversed with it directly, I found that those small things I have neglected have a big voice. They rose up and shouted at me. They reminded me that they continue to exist in a kingdom that I am too ignorant to understand.
I am trying to understand it though. Trying very hard.
Copyright
All text, images, and blog entries on this site are copyrighted by me, Lee Djavaherian, with All Rights Reserved, including those attributed to KD0YJM (which is my amateur radio callsign), unless otherwise noted. An exception to this are the user comments on the Comments pages (the pages in the /comments path that end with Comments.html) that were created by the public and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. A few images are not mine and in those cases, a credit or explanation should be listed next to the image where appropriate. The interactive fiction story that appears on this site is also copyrighted by me with All Rights Reserved, but the software that compiled it and interpreted it into Javascript is Inform 7↗ and Parchment↗, respectively, which are not mine but have been created by other people. Please see their web site for more information. There are a few quotations that are not mine and, if so, are indicated as such. My SourceCode is also copyrighted by me, and this has been licensed under GPL 3.0 except for the SIMTHEO Decoder which is a C module licensed under LGPL 3.0. And finally, what should be self-evident, any algorithms that I have invented and revealed on this site, such as my SIMTHEO algorithm, are in the Public Domain (although the text itself is copyrighted), as algorithms are abstract ideas and not expressions↗, and should never be copyrighted nor patented.
Contact
If you need to contact me, you can use the contact form here. Otherwise, to leave a public comment, just use the Comments link at the bottom of many of the pages on this site.
Latest Comments Feed (Atom)
I created a rudimentary Atom feed showing the latest public comments. It's not the greatest, but it allows me to try and keep up with what people are posting. A link to it can be found here.
Comments