Waiting on the first leg of my journey to San Francisco. It’s going to be interesting, because its Amtrak bus)->train)->bus
Buses and Trains to San Francisco
Month: September 2018
Going to San Francisco
Tomorrow I’m going to San Francisco to get my passport and spply at the Philippines embassy for a 1 year multi entry Visa
Ambursen Street
One of my best friends and bandmates had a recording studio in his house on Ambursen Street in Houston, TX. Back in 1991 I stayed there for a week while he was out of town, and recorded some of my own music there. This is one of the surviving recordings.
The e foundation privacy phone & mobile OS
Recently I wrote that I was going to work on developing my own privacy-oriented, silicon-valley-free version of the Android mobile OS. Well, it turns out that a better guy than me is already way ahead of me on the same project, and he has a team. In fact the beta version of his phone is already out:
“At the end of 2017 Mandrake Linux creator Gael Duval announced an ambition to create a smartphone OS, one that didn’t rely on Apple or Google, with ‘my data is my data’ as his mantra. He saw the loss of respect for user data privacy, and the concentration of data power in the hands of a few giant corporations with its surveillance risks, and could see that something new was needed.
Today the e foundation, created to support the mission, announces the first beta of the /e/ mobile OS, for early testers to trial on a range of mobile phone models. They plan to have a stable version for general release by early 2019.”
Go to the /e/ foundation to read more.
So this obviates the need for me to develop my own Android version all by myself. I still will probably do it, just for fun, to learn, and to keep my computer skills sharp. In fact, I may just do some volunteer work for the e foundation.
My Time at Lake Tahoe is Ending
It was 4 years ago, in May 2014, that I moved from Vail, Colorado, to Stateline, Nevada on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. It’s been a tough 4 years – my wife disappeared with my son for a year, then when she made contact again it was by serving me with divorce papers. I was out on bail from a 2012 DWI arrest in Texas, my movements and behavior restricted. Then they finally adjudicated it in early 2016, when I pled guilty to a misdemeanor traffic offense and went on two years of probation, restricted to stay in Nevada, subject to random drug and alcohol tests and visits/inspections. I was the victim of two, very painful, scams during this four years. And, most difficult of all, my father passed away in December of 2016.
But now, September 2018, everything has worked out very well. My divorce was final 2 years ago, and my ex and I are both much happier, and our differences are settled. We are friends again, in fact I’ve been here helping her renovate her house. She moved back here with my son Z in 2015 and I’ve been close with my son ever since. I still miss my Dad, but I’ve gotten used to being an owner of our family businesses instead of an employee. And I’m now free to travel the world because of it. I’ve found a wonderful new girl, who is the best thing that’s happened to me since my son was born.
So, good things are happening now, as I leave Lake Tahoe, probably for a long time, and go to the Philippines to stay for a while.
Philippines, here I come!
I’m almost done helping my ex renovate her house here in South Lake Tahoe, so I bought my flight, ground transportation, and hotel reservations for Manila yesterday. I’m fully committed now! And so very thrilled, happy and excited about my move over there. I’m ready to start a new life with a new girl in a new place, and I have all of those lined up and waiting for me to arrive on October 10, 2018.
I’ve stayed within the borders of the USA for all of my life, except a few brief trips into Canada and Mexico. That’s a shame, but one I will be rectifying in just weeks. I’d speculate that most people around the world who have the means and opportunity to do so have left their country of birth and traveled internationally, making me somewhat of a provincial hick by comparison. But I’m going to be traveling internationally for years starting next month, and catch up with my peers!
To be honest, I’ve grown sick and tired of Americans seething hatred for each other and the bizarre politicization of every single aspect of life. Im tired of the constant mental bombardment of lies and bullshit and exhortations to buy this, think that, hate your fellow citizens because they think differently from you, admire and exalt uneducated and illiterate hollywood and media dumbfucks, and on and on and on. Every viewpoint pushed on the citizenry via the media is there because someone wants you to believe things that benefit them, not you. When someone or some idea is publicly promoted into fame and cultural status, it’s not because they are really wonderful and the people spontaneously came to admire or believe them. It’s always (with rare exception) been manufactured by someone who 1 either money or power or both from people believing some bullshit they’re selling. Here in the USA, billions are being spent in a constant battle to control the minds of the citizens, and thus control th11 culture and the nation. I want to get away from that, and be left alone by these interests and their thought control campaigns. I want peace, and freedom of thought, speech and conscience. I do not want to live in a country where people fear the PC thought police and their career destroying power. That’s what the USA has become, and that means it’s time to GTFO.
I think thoughts that aren’t my own – and so do you!
Many, maybe most of the thoughts I have are not my thoughts. I did not spontaneously think them myself. They were put into my mind by other people, often a group of people. These thoughts were put there by these people because they benefit from me thinking them. Usually it’s a financial benefit. So, I think many thoughts because someone else wants me to think them for their own gain. I do not think them for my own benefit, in fact many of them are detrimental to my best interests.
And that’s ME, and I’m a freak, the type who writes an essay like this one. Many, more typical people, are very close to ONLY thinking thoughts that aren’t their own, but are put there to benefit someone else. If you took all those out and left only their own thoughts, there would be nearly nothing in their mind at all!
So, how do thoughts that aren’t your own become part of your thinking? And who put them their for their benefit and not mine? Well, these thoughts have many trajectories into your mind. From parents taking thoughts that aren’t theirs and putting them into their kids, to the personal influence of friends, coworkers and classmates, to mass media and social media, up to overt efforts like commercial advertising and government propaganda, from birth onward we are bombarded by the efforts of others to give us thoughts they want us to think. Who are these people? The biggest and most successful thought control campaigns targeting your mind come from commercial interests, governments, and religions. But on a more personal level, friends and family also put thoughts into your mind. Sometimes it’s their own thoughts, but most often they are acting as contagious agents trying to infect you with the thoughts infecting them, that originated with one of the big three – commercial interests, governments, religions.
Learn to perceive these foreign thoughts now residing in your mind! I suggest that you start to watch your own thinking, and start asking yourself, “why do I think this? When did I first have this thought, and who taught it to me? And where did they get it? Who benefits from me thinking it? And were they involved in putting it there? Is this thought true, and how do I know it is true? Does what I’m thinking benefit me, or someone else?”
I intend to do a lot of mental hygiene and thought correction through this site, and help people plagued by false, biased, fallacious, irrational and detrimental (to the thinker) thinking. I wrote of this months ago here, but the real work on it has been on hold. The person I most seek to help with better thinking is myself. I have benefited greatly in my life from having my flawed thinking corrected. I enjoy finding and correcting flaws in thinking, especially my own. And I hope that anyone who reads of my mental hygiene efforts will benefit as well.
Intro to Tor
Tor is an acronym for “the onion network,” a network anonymity technology that originated Tor is an acronym for “the onion network,” a network anonymity technology that originated with the Office of Naval Research funding research back in 1995. The basic idea is simple, a network such that each node only knows about its neighbors one hop away, and all traffic goes through at least 3 nodes, thus hiding the origin endpoint of a packet’s route. That hides the source address of the traffic and the users location. Encryption hides the content of the packet through a key exchange. Tor, Orbot, and the Tor Browser for android are an important part of the toolkit I’m developing to prevent collection and sale of my personal data by Google and others with ad based business models. Here is s brief intro
In order to protect myself from having my private data stolen and used to extract money from me, I need total security for all aspects of my internet usage. That means the operating system and all software running on it, the browser, my WLAN, my phone and all of its software, my border router, my IP address, the contents of my network traffic, my location, everything must be protected from ad-based business model tech companies. So this will take several pieces of software and some configuration time.
How Tor Works
Jaron Lanier: 10 reasons to get off social media
I recently discovered Jaron Lanier, a world class computer scientist (he’s a capital S Scientist, I’m a lower case s scientist hahahahha – funny but true!) who was putting forth very similar criticisms and concerns to mine, but long before I fully accepted how evil our industry has become, and that I have an ethical obligation to help users by doing what I can about it. Internet users and Texas taxpayers paid for my education, training and experience. I owe them big time – I can’t forget that, either. So please give Jaron a listen, he wants users to be customers the internet industry serves, not data sources to be exploited and sold to people who only want to sell them more crap and take their money.
My (nearly) Google Free Android Phone.
I’m making big progress on my goal of eliminating Silly Valley and Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the other evil bastards who reside there from my life.
There are two primary subgoals to meet:
1) Eliminate all Silly Valley products from my my world. That means my computers (including my hand held ones) will be free of all their sick spyware and obnoxious and pervasive ads. My computers will actually be MINE again, with only code that I want running on them. My computers will be for my benefit, not designed as surveillance and advertising devices that extract money from me and transfer it to evil, obscenely wealthy sociopaths.
2) Attain absolute protection for my privacy and my personal data. That’s the only way to stop Bay Area bastards from stealing it, exploiting it for themselves, then selling it to the highest bidder, with no benefit to me whatsoever. In fact the stolen private and personal data of billions not only doesn’t benefit them, it’s actively used against their interests. Your private and personal data is stolen, then used to take ever more money from you. That’s the Silly Valley business model.
As of the time of this posting, I’m getting just about as close as I can get to being totally unobservable on the internet, without having root access to my handheld computer. I’m not going to risk bricking a thousand dollar phone until I get to Philippines and set up a new computer office/laboratory. I need equipment and tools to make more progress on my goals.
I’m going to build wired and wireless computer networks in my lab that I can use to analyze traffic to and from hosts inside the network like my Note 9. Now that I’ve started on this, I’m dying to see exactly what surveillance data is being acquired and sent to the evil empires by the bay.
Chris Salmon at age 40
This picture was taken in 2002, when I was a very busy and very successful internet entrepreneur, business and IT consultant, and network engineer. I had my own internet company, 15 employees, offers coming in constantly. Even better, I also had a wife, a cute little 18 month old baby, and a beautiful big home in Dallas with a shaded pool and hot tub overlooked by a home gym. Those were great days for me and everyone around me. Cyberstation’s best month ever was August 2002. The next year, it was all gone. The dotcom crash was 2000-2002, but the telecom and independent internet and hosting provider business crashed in 2003. Our biggest business partner, IP Communications, suddenly folded in 2003. (This was 100% due to the purposeful sabotage and malfeasance of Southwestern Bell, the incumbent baby Bell. I could tell horror stories of the crap they pulled on DLEC’S!) We used IP Communications to connect to tens of thousands of our accounts across 5 states, plus I had a $50/hr, 40hr/week min. side contract with them. I was paid this retainer whether I worked or not, to be available for any internet networking or services problems or development they needed, and to lock me out of helping any of their competitors. Money was just rolling in, we had a new (to us) house, new cars, new appliances, new baby hahaha and good times. But all things come to and end, don’t they?
I was no spring chicken here, but I do look quite a bit older at times now, Fall of 2018. Mean ol’ Father Time takes his unrelenting toll on us all!!
Brings back good memories, even so!
Vail, CO., Ducks in Gore Creek December 2010
I lived in the USA’s largest ski resort, Vail Colorado, from 2004 to 2014. From 2005 to 2011 we were doing travel and resort websites, producing content and reviews, selling hotel rooms, flights, car rentals, and advertising. One of these was for Vail, and this allowed me to ski and bicycle and go to events and generally explore the area as part of my job. I skied over 100 days a year for many years there, though at the end I was getting tired of it and didn’t ski much. I have dozens of hours of video and hundreds or pictures of Vail, in storage. Someday those will all be posted to this site.
I also worked at the Vail Ski Resort in 1985 and 1986 as an adventurous way to take a break from college and get over a broken heart, when I was 23 and 24 years old. I had no camera to carry about at that time, but I did do some nice drawings which I’ll post later. In my job as warehouseman for the Mid-Vail on mountain complex of shops and restaurants, I skied every work day, and night skied home each night with a miner’s headlamp after inventory. Then skied more every off day!!
It’s almost time for first snow in Vail. In the meantime and to prepare everyone for a new winter season, here is the peaceful view from my close friend Gary’s living room in Vail.
Breakfast at Ernie’s, South Lake Tahoe, California 9/5/18
Mmmm… GOOD!
I’m here helping my ex-wife renovate her house, which has been good, hard work.
New drawing – Lovely Lyca
This is a two layer drawing, I filled the eyes in on a second layer. Heres the under layer:
Picasso drew this when he was 12
We all need to be humbled. So I present this masterwork done by a 12 year old kid 120 years ago:
Most people don’t know of this Picasso. They only know of this Picasso:
Unstudied ignoramuses write this off as bullshit art by someone who can’t draw. But in fact, you are seeing a master artist so good at drawing that he aches to escape his own skills, and create something new.
Both things, his skills and his artistic drive, are beyond me. Light-years beyond me!!
But never let the lowly and humble nature of your skills stop you from using them and expressing yourself. That’s a fatal mistake of character, and is also cowardly. Do your best, strive to improve, prostrate yourself before the true Masters in reverence.
Talking to Dr. Payne / Leaving ol’ Ma Bell
One of my bestest and oldest friends is Dr. Jack Payne. One year from this month, will be the 40th anniversary of our meeting and becoming friends, as young college kids at University of Texas at Arlington. He’s a flat out genius, he’s actually Dr. Dr. Payne because he has a PhD In physics AND and an MD. I cannot express how much I admire Jack, he’s more than Ill ever be.
He’s going through some tough times right now, so, among other things, I shared with him the following story from my past. I think website readers might find it funny and inspiring, too:
You see, you don’t have to play their game by their rules, no matter who they are or what game is inside their head!! Which, by the way, is the only place their game exists. It’s all imaginary bullshit. The truth is, there are no rules, no boundaries, no limits that outside forces can impose on a free mind.
Another lesson from this tale is the awesome power of “fuck you money.”
New drawing – Kim Da Hyun (김다현) of Twice
Drawing people is the most difficult kind of realistic drawing, because the slightest flaws are easily spotted by anyone, no training needed. Even babies see them! Thank you, evolution!!
Drawing real people, from observation is another level. Imaginary people are easy by comparison. Drawing famous people is another level that opens the artist up to widespread criticism if the slightest flaws are present.
So with that, here is my first attempt at drawing Dahyun, of Kpop group Twice:
Dahyun is a lovely, talented and unbelievably hardworking girl that brings up fatherly feelings in me. I have long wished for a daughter. Perhaps one day still, I might be blessed!
Ive wanted to draw Dahyun for a long time. To be honest, this drawing is a monstrosity that didn’t know whether it wanted to be a fine line drawing or a shades and highlights drawing. There are parts of this version that are missing because I drew them in white, over a rosy background. But when posting only the top layer came across, for some reason. I need a real multilayer drawing app for this phone.
That’s another challenge with drawing pretty daughter Dahyun – she is a study in white and pink! Not easy to find actual lines inside her face. Trying to suggest them with a sharp black pencil was a failure. Dahyun’s smile is probably her most famous feature. Getting that perfect is crucial, yet I’ve failed here.
So here is this mess for now.
And here is the original video frame on my Xbox:
As you can see, my first attempt is humiliating. Poor fatherly me!
There’s an interesting note about this photo. This picture is much clearer than what was actually on the screen, what I was looking at while drawing. This Note 9’s badass camera software automagically cleaned it up!
Dahyun has the look of a classic beauty from antiquity. I am 100% certain I have seen her ancient mother recorded in sculpture. Evolutionarily successful DNA often reappears this way, and spreads through time in a population. (undergrad specialty in stratigraphy and paleontology here, thank you) This ancient girl was identical to daughter here, but centuries ago. I’m sure it was on the side of an ancient building. My image memory is honestly mind blowing. I can’t take credit for it, it was a gift, I put no effort into it. I will find this girl of antiquity for you readers. I can see her in my mind, but not sure where I saw it.
I believe this is part of the reason Dahyun is so beloved by fans, especially her Korean fans. Koreans wish to preserve their culture, Dahyun is a new generation of ancient beauty. Plus she’s a very good example of young womanhood.
She’s a very devout Christian, which I’m sure my girlfriend loves, too.
It’s funny, about the Twice girls. Dahyun, Jungyeon and Chaeyoung seem like daughters to me. Jihyo and Sana and Momo seem like wife material, especially Jihyo. The others I don’t have strong feelings either way, as of yet.
I’m not sure why I react this way to the different girls, I just know I do.
Chris Salmon, September 1, 2018
Chris Salmon, September 1, 2018
Chris Salmon, Sept 1, 2018
My Beautiful Girlfriend
This is Lyca, my lovely girlfriend. Isn’t she beautiful? How could I possibly be any luckier? I love this girl with all my heart!
Lyca is much more than beautiful on the outside. She is very smart and very wise. She is kind and honest. And most importantly, she has a beautiful and caring heart. She cares about others and about doing right and being good. All of this is what has captured my heart and mind! She is why I am moving to Philippines by mid October.