The Key is in the Balance
I saw the movie i (heart) huckabees tonight, and it proferred an intriquing exisistentialist look into several of the main dualisms in this world, and ended with a note that the key is in the balance. Similarly, the Oblongs is back on Adult Swim tonight, reminding me of its short-lived satirical look at some of these same dualisms. I have to love philosphizing on a Sunday, and I missed Church, so I'll portray a smattering of my random consciousness here in the open to perhaps intrigue, educate, or infiltrate someone else's conscious thinkings.
I guess it wouldn't surprise too many that know me how long I've been involved in philosophy. I've talked about it some about how odd a kid I was, and how I've realized that the one temptation in my life is a serenity to solipsism. It's funny, but Huckabee's portrayal of nihilism as a crazy, yet seductive, mistress resembles my own metaphors about solipsism. So, as cool as Huckabee's was, it was merely a rejourney of one of those old wartorn paths I've traveled.
But, it reminded me of the importance of balance. LoadedMouth has today, yet again, commented on the lack of balance in news. It irritates me that the balance is so obviously shifted to the Conservative, how Liberals obviously have such little control in any media, and yet everyone from shitheads to friends' uncles can't see it. The James Guckert/Gannon story alone is a big huge example of how bad the situation is, and how little people are actually listening to or paying attention to Liberals.
Maybe I feel so angry about it, because I am the eternal observer. I don't truly connect to either side, but I do have a ...
Message from the Senate Majority Whip
On November 2, 2004, President George W. Bush won an impressive victory carrying 31 states and recieving 286 electoral votes. Despite this clear win for the President, a small minority of partisans has raised concerns about the voting procedures in some states.
Emphasis mine. There's more to laugh at in the rest of the form letter I received, but this was the major passage. Apparently I should stop listening to the small minority of voices in my head and stop worrying about the accountability of the election process.
A starving man received a small tidbit this weekend...
I spent a night in Evansville this weekend. (For those following the blog, I mentioned Evansville last in my first (and possibly not last) [On Following a Lesson in Networking] post.) I'm not entirely sure why I went. Partly it was simply because an old friend asked me to, and as a reason it is a good one. Partly it was simply a chance to take a break and have a random road trip to somewhere I've never been before, and as a reason it isn't particularly good, but I've done it before. The remainder, I just can't quite seem to figure out.
The theme, I think, is that my sphere of friends doesn't contain all of the variety that I seek. As much as I enjoy hanging out with my friends, I have this nagging feeling that something is missing. The easy answer is that I'm a horny male who isn't getting enough (any) sex, and that is what is bothering me. I'm sure that's what a psychoanalyst might tell me after some time talking and perhaps an outrageous fee, but I don't think it is the answer I am looking for. Therein, I think, lies the rub: I think the sort of person I'm looking for is the sort of person who could tell me what the real answer, the hard answer, to my dilemma is. My loneliness is a much deeper one, it's almost what some would call a spiritual loneliness. I don't think I'm looking for sex, I'm looking for discussion, conversation, and an intimacy of the mind, and I don't know where to go looking for it.
It was easy to fall into old patterns of discussion this ...
The Louisville Cardinal fights for Liberalism
Story discovered in the school's official student newspaper: BDSM beats all for improving intimacy. The headline and its bad pun brought an immediate laugh from me when I saw it hanging from the back of the seat at the basketball game.
Truthfully, sex articles are more interesting than much of the stuff the Cardinal prints, and a couple of my friends agreed that maybe we should start reading the Cardinal again. Also interesting is the fact that the byline shows that this writer (she also wrote an article on Louisville's porn store culture) is a Women's Studies major, which is the third major "Conservative" degree (people studying it, PoliSci, or Engineering at Louisville all seem biased towards Conservatism).
(On the other hand, if Women's Studies meant what most guys jokingly hope it means, I'm sure it would be a very liberal degree program.)
Book of the Moment: Emerald Sea
I've been reading John Ringo's works since he was featured on Sluggy Freelance. Ringo writes just about the closest I'll get to hard military sci-fi. The key factor is his humor, which explains his Sluggy mention. Emerald Sea is the continuation of There Will Be Dragons, a tale of a post-singularity ("death has been conquered") sci-fi universe falling back "pre-singularity" due to actions of several politicians. I was amused by the end of one of the most recent chapters I've read containing some self-mockery as Ringo poked fun at his own writing style and habit of randomly creating characters, focusing them in a chapter or two, and then killing them off. The passage may even be ironic in the fact that it involved a character who was introduced in this second book, and possibly might not survive till the end. I think the character will survive, though, as he appears to be leading some where, but we'll see.
Music: Reloaded
This stuff was seperated in several old posts in the old blog, but I felt now was as good a time to bring people to it, if they haven't seen it before. It came up some this weekend, in fact. I have a large interest in music and a keen want to ethically obtain good cheap music. Obviously, people's opinions of good vary, but here are some of my thoughts:
I just pre-ordered Machinae Supremacy's first album. It's already in its second release. Machinae Supremacy is a Swedish "sidmetal" band. They mix metal (Metallica, et al) with a heavy influence from old school gaming music (one of their major "instruments" is the SiD chip, which was the music engine of the Commodore 64). It's fresh and enjoyable, and if you don't believe me, most of their catalog thus far is available for free download from their webpage (in Ogg Vorbis format, even).
I'm also planning to finally start buying some of the awesome albums on Magnatune. For those who haven't yet met Magnatune, they are a music label that is not evil. First of all, they support Open Music (they use the same CC license I apply to all of my own content). They promote a "choose your own price", promise that at least 50% of what you pay makes its way directly to the artist, and offer a wide range of formats to download your purchase in (from lossless WAV or FLAC to lossy MP3 or Ogg Vorbis).
I keep looking at buying a Neuros to carry my music around portably. Admittedly I can use my laptop for some of that, and I already have a Rio CD MP3 player, but the one is too large for just, say, random roadtrips ...
Optimism, from a friend, to be dashed on the rocks, with a dash of lime...
With this in mind, I think this group can push the SSSC back out of the "cruise control" rut we've been finding ourselves in of late. My vision for this term: to bring involvement in SSSC to the people; in short, to garner interest beyond the small group/class that has been council for the last couple of years. Speed Student Council is supposed to represent the people, but it hasn't really been doing that of late -- I want to make strides to change that.
SSSC is a representative democracy. In a perfect situation there is as little involvement as necessary to provide the most service to the constituents (without oppressing minorities and without coming too close to dictatorship). That is, you want a dedicated minority of the students willing to work for the majority of them. It sounds all well and good to "bring involvement", but it doesn't matter a hill of beans if it isn't doing what it needs to do.
Beyond that, your complaint against the "cruise control" rut is intrigueing. "Cruise Control" implies stability and a formula approach to the governship of SSSC. Typically, that has been procisely the Conservative want is that sort of stability. Conservatism, from name alone, wants that all future actions can be dealt with under the laws of the past and that stability can be reached. I've always been a fan of organized chaos, myself.
Scrapland
I was reminded today about how much American McGee rocks out. I learned of American McGee presents Scrapland today, which apparently was released for the PC in November. I walked to the nearby video game store after Ethics, picked up a copy, and I've liked it. It's so rare to find a good original PC release anymore, and seeing that this one did in fact hit the PC before the consoles was a nice surprise.
Some of the reviews were making it sound like American McGee presents Grand Theft Flying Vehicles, but it's actually closer to Freelancer or Beyond Good & Evil. Freelancer being poorly reviewed (I admit it could have been much more than it was, but it was adequate) and BG&E being well reviewed, but little played (it's cheap to find a copy and I would recommend buying it if you haven't played it).
I rock out
Ethics are a luxury for people who can afford new pants.
Reading some of my secondary and tertiary comics, plus one I was just forwarded to, semi-randomly in Ethics class. Not really unethical to be randomly wandering the Internets just now, simply a bit rude. My biggest problem was that I had a hard time keeping from laughing at the first occurence of the Futhark kids, partly because it would distract the class, and partly because I wasn't sure I wanted to explain the geeky joke.
My Bag Habit
I was just reminded about how much I've spent on stuff-carrying bags™. Just to provide more stuff for people to read from me that no one actually cares about, I thought I might share what I'm using. I blame it on Waterfield Designs that I've become somewhat obsessed with quality. For my laptop I bought a SleeveCase from them that has been genuinely awesome. I can quickly attach the shoulder strap and carry just the laptop (the piggyback gives me room to throw, say, power cables, mouse, and wireless card), or, I can put the SleeveCase into my backpack. Waterfield doesn't sell back packs (they have some really nice courier bags, but I prefer a backpack), and so when my 5 year old Eastpak died I ended up buying a nice L. L. Bean backpack. It took some searching... The Eastpak had spoiled me, but I wanted something bigger. A straw poll amongst my friends pointed toward L. L. Bean, and I became infatuated. I particularly like the fact that there are enough of them around that people won't suspect it of carrying anything more the textbooks (for those times I want to carry my laptop), but distinct enough that I can spot it from a distance. (The cheap monogramming helps, too.)
The Hula Project
I've been following some of Novell's efforts since they overtook Ximian because I've come to really respect the Ximian guys. This is particularly because I've become a big fan of C# and have been watching the Mono project with interest. It's good to see an open source C# compiler, and great to see Mono having come so far so quickly in terms of usability and cross-platform development.
The cool thing is to see how much the Ximian attitudes seem to have infused Novell. I'm not sure if it was some sort of memetic takeover from within or the company was truly heading in that direction anyway, but Novell seems to slowly over time not just move towards Open Source development, but to actually get it (more than I have in the past), unlike some that just seem to some days be providing lip service (IBM, Sun).
One of the neat new Novell open source projects is the Hula Project, found via this announcement. Hula is an open-source Mail and Calendar server, that was boot-strapped from Novell's existing NetMail code. UofL uses the NetMail product, and if Hula is the direction NetMail is heading, then I actually have a better opinion of NetMail now.
I'm particularly interested in the rich webclient code, which I think could be reusable in and of itself in other Open Source projects. Several I've had in mind could benefit from a good framework, at the very least.
XFN: A few icons...
As promised, behold my crappy Gimp skills! I've created a few [XFN] icons. I started with the more commonly used ones. They are based on the FOAF smiley face without a mouth iconography. Here's what I've created:
Friend
Acquaintance
Contact
met (Meant to symbolozie a hand shake, or perhaps two feet in opposite directions, as if face to face)
On Following A Lesson in Networking: Reconnection with one of my past lives...
Tonight, in between bouts of Differential Equations (just like bouts of the fever, but less fun), I had a conversation with a friend I hadn't talked to in almost 4 years now. I mentioned her briefly when I was talking about [the difference a semester makes], and was thinking about her again last night during a period of insomnia in which I couldn't force myself to do homework. I found her via the magic of Google across the span of the Internets, via a Psych 335 class photo (I won't link out of respect), which led me to learn she's been at College at the University of Evansville, which led to a school email which led to a post on Lakeside Poetry's forums, which led to her LiveJournal. Now, before you accuse me of stalking, this was mere boredom on my part and was actually a fairly quick progression once I opened up Google. (I have this odd habit of multi-tasked searching, which meant I was often following false leads and good ones simultaneosly, and thus I would say the above took maybe 10 minutes.)
The remainder of my insomnia was spent reading her LiveJournal, which was like any other LiveJournal in the very contextual posts that are occaisionally tough to decipher outside of a certain social group. Even then, it was interesting to see the progression in which she moved from being what I remembered of her to what she is now. I actually predicted such a progression, at some point in the past, and so I wasn't too surprised by it.
It's almost funny, but she sounded like she had surrounded herself with people like me (passed a Something Awful test with a friend of hers, via her IM). This interests ...
XFN: Simpler than FOAF
It's a big buzzphrase right now: "The Semantic Web". In fact, it isn't a new idea (it was actually hoped for in the early days of the web), so much as one finally understood and being realized. So, I've been doing my part to increase the size of semantic data on the web. If you remember I recently started using better [blockquotes], putting proper information in the CITE and TITLE attributes, then using a small javascript to output nice source lines.
Tonight I wasted some of my sleep time playing with "people relationship markers". This is one of the bigger areas I've found of the burgeoning Semantic Web world. The major work in this area is the RDF-based FOAF. The problem with FOAF is it can be a bit of work to write one and keep it accurate and/or useful (which reminds me that I've still yet to write one). On the other hand, XFN use the meta-data REL attribute of the HTML Anchor tag (links) to mark relationships between people based on the websites they have/run, and geared towards blogging and blogrolling. I put together a quick JS function (based on the [blockquote] JS) to list the REL attributes of a link. I'll officially release it "open source" later. Before I do that, I'd like come up with (so you can behold more of my crappy gimp skills) or find some sort of icons for the XFN relationships, which I think would make the script all the more useful...
Politics: Get Involved
- It's budget time again, which means, particularly if you haven't seen it yet, go check out the Oreos and how they relate to the federal budget.
- Help fix our country's elections, Senators Clinton and Boxer are sponsoring the Count Every Vote Act (which is not an Orwellian name, by the way), and looking for citizens to sign up and help support the Count Every Vote Act.
The Biology of SNL
Every now and then I'll write a lecture on this topic. I find it somewhat interesting, and apparently there aren't too many other authorities on the subject with which to compete... Plus, it's all pop-culture opinion so its not like I can be yelled at for not following good academic procedure. (Academics sometimes forgets about pop-culture.) Which basically means I'm free to give my educated bullshit and you can take it or leave it.
Saturday Night Live is a show of punctuated equilibria. It has to be. There is no other way a show like Saturday Night Live could last this long otherwise. There are two major types of SNL casts: equilibrium casts and transitionary casts. Everyone usually remember the good equilibrium casts, but the real importance is in the transitionary casts.
The equilibrium casts are when everyone "gels" for the most part and the humor works. A good equilibrium cast has their humor rooted in the present. This is an obvious requirement, as it keeps the show rooted. But, as obvious this is a requirement, people often forget the consequences of this requirement: No cast can remain forever (their humor and group dynamic are rooted in a particular time and become stale), and people become attached to equilibrium casts. The former is the more obvious consequence, whereas the latter is a more indirect consequence... Basically, people set down roots in years as well and those roots can lead to nostalgia and ties with the equilibrium casts of the same years.
There are people who have strong ties to the original cast. My parents continue to watch SNL to this day, but will often reminisce of the original cast from their college years. I myself felt that pull and almost stopped watching SNL at the end ...
Lessons learned from comment spam...
Just cleaning out my comment spam (Anonymous Dastard comments are filtered through an approval queue)... All of the comment spam I've gotten since I switched to Drupal has been for online gambling/poker places. A couple of weeks ago all of them were crude things with "ONLINE POKER" written several hundred times, every other time hyperlinked, which created something of an interesting rotating pattern that although ugly in reason for existence was a brief flash of beauty prior to pressing the delete button (Drupal shows the comment in the "Are you sure?" message). This time each comment was presented as a semi-reasonable text of a sentence or two, with the spammy portions constrained to the subject ("Free Online Poker!") and a byline ("by Online Poker", which I thought was a funny author for a quote). These segments of text I would assume were scraped from other blogs on the internet, and thus random and somewhat incomprehensive being taken so far out of context. One sounded like the prologue to some physics lecture (the author was making no apologies for using lots of fourth-dimensional geometry). Another offered an intriquing insight into our culture (and which I can only guess at where the real author may have taken this statement):
Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation...
Why I didn't participate...
I didn't participate in a majority of the protests and rallys that went on prior to the election because I felt they were futile. I think the people have forgot the meaning of a protest. Luckily for me, my position was vindicated from experiences and stories, which I'll use to illustrate my pointes later into this rant. It began life as a comment on LoadedMouth, and I've done little to reformat it.
This is a question that deserves to be pondered. Think about it: In the last 20 years, when has a staged protest changed or influenced policy on a public issue? What has protesting done? Can protests be successful if a strong movement isn't built around them, or do protests have to start small and hope that their fire sparks? Much like the way that the Vietnam War protests metamorphosized from infantismal to legendary? Why haven't strong movements formed around protests lately? And how come the meaning of protesting seems to have changed from something that was actually meaningful to what I witnessed in Montpellier, VT., yesterday afternoon: 10-15 people standing around holding signs for a short amount of time, then dispersing. Is this really something to people get a feeling of accomplishment from? Are protests outdated?
Perhaps that it is just the fact that we in this country have lost sight of the reasons and ways to protest. Look at the Ukraine, that was a hell of a protest: thousands of people descending upon the capital city to live in tents for several days.
But, I think it isn't the protestors in this country that have lost sight of the reasons and ways to protest so much as everyone else in the country has forgotten how to respond to a protest and ...
The difference a semester makes...
I'm genuinely happy. I guess I can call it the only real lesson I learned from my coop last semester. I was miserable, I was bored to tears, and I thought I was dying. It's amazing how coming out of a long dark period like that I've become so quickly and completely happy. So deliriously happy that I am indeed taking one of the biggest course loads I've yet undertaken, doing nearly all of the homework (gasp!), and even sticking to an excersize schedule (bigger gasp!). Of course, the latter is only thanks to a good friend living on the other side of the wall I'm facing... He's done a lot to help and has been gentle and encouraging. I've tried several times going on my own, but often chicken out, don't know what to do or don't develop the habits. My muscles are sore even as I type this, but it's a better sore than some of the pains that led me to realizing I needed to change some of my lifestyle, but I'm sure no one wants to hear the details...
Lately I've been thinking about this pattern that I've seen in my life. I believe that the only meanings to be found in our the lives are the ones we percieve, and which only have the significance we ascribe to them. Therefore this particular pattern may or may not be worth the movement of my sore muscles required to write it down, but I'll feel better having talked about it...
The "closest" thing I had to a girlfriend in high school, a platonic relationship that never went anywhere and never could have gone anywhere but provided someone with whom I could share a ...
