Our photographer Kevin has posted a few preview pics of our wedding on his blog here. Thank you to all that could attend. More to come!

By now, most of you know I’m getting married soon. We have a wedding site up at www.baudburn.com/wedding that you take a look at. Our pictures turned out beautifully.

That is all.

“For he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.”

(Cephalus to Socratese in Plato’s Republic)

Over the weekend I finished a short book named “Herland” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman which I will comment on here for my own amusement.

The book falls squarely into my favorite genre of literature: Utopian Fiction. The story is set in a remote location in South America where a civilization that has been isolated from the world for 2000 years is found by three young men. Here’s the thing, all of the inhabitants of Herland are women or girls. There hasn’t had any men around for more than 2000 years! Now this sets the stage for some interesting plot development.

The three men that find this city are very different in many ways. One is a biologist and female-worshiper, one a rich adventurous womanizer, and one a level-headed sociologist. Throughout the story they are continually amazed by what this civilization has accomplished and embarrassed by their own society in comparison.

I found it to be very interesting and a quick read. Setting up the book this way lets the author question the ways our society functions from a pair of fresh eyes that are not already indoctrinated into our crazy society. I like it. I like it a lot.

Go read it [here](http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=GilHerl.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all) for free online!

To pique your interest, here is a few quotes:

Regarding Femininity:

>“These women, whose essential distinction of motherhood was the dominant note of their whole culture, were strikingly deficient in what we call “femininity.” This led me very promptly to the conviction that those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity — developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.”

Regarding Religion:

>“Religion is different. You see, our religions come from behind us, and are initiated by some great teacher who is dead. He is supposed to have known the whole thing and taught it, finally. All we have to do is believe — and obey.”
“Who was the great Hebrew teacher?”
“Oh — there it was different. The Hebrew religion is an accumulation of extremely ancient traditions, some far older than their people, and grew by accretion down the ages. We consider it inspired — ‘the Word of God.’”
“How do you know it is?”
“Because it says so.”
“Does it say so in as many words? Who wrote that in?”
I began to try to recall some text that did say so, and could not bring it to mind.
“Apart from that,” she pursued, “what I cannot understand is why you keep these early religious ideas so long. You have changed all your others, haven’t you?”

Regarding Heaven & Eternal Life:

>“It seems to me a singularly foolish idea,” she said calmly. “And if true, most disagreeable. What do you want it for?” she asked.
“How can you not want it!” I protested. “Do you want to go out like a candle? Don’t you want to go on and on — growing and — and — being happy, forever?”
“Why, no,” she said. “I don’t in the least. I want my child — and my child’s child — to go on — and they will. Why should I want to? Do not you in your country, with your beautiful religion of love and service have it here, too — for this life — on earth?”

Regarding Hell:

>“They believed that God was Love — and Wisdom — and Power?”
“Yes — all of that.”
Her eyes grew large, her face ghastly pale.
“And yet that such a God could put little new babies to burn — for eternity?”

Regarding Marriage:

>“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye.
“A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.

I guess this is the place where I whine about how I never have time to post to my blog, so here is the obligatory statement: I haven’t posted in a long time. It’s because I’m busy, but happy. Ok, now that we took care of that business, lets try to catch up on a few things.

I am highly disappointed that I never got to post about the excellent experience I had going to Chicago to see [BT](http://www.btmusic.com) do a laptop symphony. To make up for it, here is a great picture:

To all of you who didn’t get to go, you seriously missed out on one of the best shows I’ve seen. You should check out the [party pictures](http://baudburn.com/gallery/BTAtVision) in my [gallery](http://baudburn.com/gallery/), particularly [the best picture I took at the club.](http://baudburn.com/gallery/BTAtVision/BT_at_Club_Vision_22). The show was only tied by the amazing show that [Sasha](http://baudburn.com/gallery/sasha2004) put on in Atlanta some time ago. The weekend was the perfect antiodote to the going-back-to-long-distance-relationship blues. As you may have assertainted from [this post](http://www.baudburn.com/mt-admin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=104), I sadly took Barbara back to San Antonio after a blissful 8 weeks of oh-so-rare togetherness.

Sometime last week, Lea invited me to go to [artrageous](http://www.artrageous.org/) with the cares crew. How could I turn down an invitation to party with some of the coolest people in Nashville? Answer: I can’t. Of course at the time I had no idea what its all about, but I went along with it anyway.

Fast forward to the night of the event. Lea and Steven come to pick me up and we head on our way to the auditorium. Lea hands me my ticket, which is a bright yellow arm band with a “W” printed on it.. (WHY?! WHY!!!). We hop into a limo that the cares crew had rented. What was that? A limo? Yeah, A limo. The thing is, artrageous is a big party where you drive from gallery to gallery, eat good food and drink. So instead of dealing with riding around in separate cars (and dealing with DD’s) we got Bob, our limo driver for the evening to cart us around. I quickly discovered that I need to go check out the art galleries in town when they are less crowded. There is some really cool galleries that I didn’t even know existed here.

At 9, the galleries close, so we ended up back at the auditorium for a big dance party. As [dan](http://bastardface.blogspot.com/) said, “You know these artsy types, they craaaaazy!”. The music was just ok, but it didn’t matter everyone was having a good time. At some point, Dan and I busted into the obligatory game of capoeira, but I had a few to drink (free drinks! how can you pass that up?) so I’m pretty sure my game wasn’t so good.

Sunday, we stumbled onto a big sand pit (aka volleyball court) and worked on doing back flips. I still cannot do them, but we did learn how to do barrel roll style flips using the other person as support. More pictures of this soon.

Then I worked all Sunday night on this damn test for my semiconductor physics class. It’s hard… alot…

So Kerry lost. I feel bad about it, but when I expressed this feeling to one of my elders here, he had some words of encouragement for me. He told me to think of America as a giant ship always moving forward. Right now its swaying to one side pretty heavily, but soon people will see that it is off course and make corrections to set her back on course.

Maybe its optimism, but I like this line of thought. Right now I need something to keep me sane.

so cool that it makes you and your accomplishments seem lame. [The audiopad](http://web.media.mit.edu/~jpatten/audiopad/index.php) is just such a project. James Patten and Ben Recht, graduate students at MIT, created this electronic music controller as a means of researching human computer interaction. It uses some cool technology to produce a rather stunning result. Watch the video linked at their website to find out.

Damn it, why does their Phd research get to be flashy and cool, and mine is so not flashy and I have to explain to people why its cool.

A friend sent me [this](http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/_/id/6558540/thekillers?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single1&rnd=1097616001120&has-player=unknown) intersting story about how walmart is going to try to bully the music industry into lowering the prices on CD’s, something that I know I have wished would be the case for some time now. Anyway it’s an interesting read. What do you all think?

A tremendous success today. My parsing utility wrapped up and I was able to use my tetrahedron class in conjunction with the parsing utility to create an arbitrary complex geometrical structure from tetrahedrons. Check the picture out. It was created from 832 tetrahedrons created from 1840 faces. The faces are made up of 1248 edges, and the edges consume 241 unique vertices in 3D space.

I am highly amused (and well on my way to my masters).

IseGeometry Information:
Version: 1
Type: grid
Dimension: 3
Vertices: 241
Edges: 1248
Faces: 1840
Elements: 832
Regions: R.Substrate
Materials: Silicon

By in large, I agree with the notion of America being a [Culture of Fear](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465014895/103-3746329-5295856?v=glance), but [this](http://www.qsleeper.com) is taking it to a whole new level. People are seriously broken if this thing actually has a viable market place in America.

But then what do I know? I’ll be the first one wiped out by all the baddies. But you don’t have to be. That’s right, you too can own your own integrated high-level security system/bed. Will protection from Bio-Chemical attack, bullets, kidnappers, and natural disaster. Spend weeks, lying in bed with no worries about the outside world. There’s even a CD/DVD Player, Microwave, Refrigerator. And if that’s not enough to keep you busy, you can talk with your friends via Cellular phone, CB, or Short-wave radio while the nukes are going off! Yes folks, it’s all right here. Order yours today!