Labythan is a dish best served cold.
Archive for April, 2009
Apr 27th
So here is how it goes down.
Asim found me on Monster way before I was ready to have a career and money. I didn’t realize this. By him hiring me when he did, I skipped about 10 years of my life and faked the maturity that went with that.
The reality of it was I don’t want to be mature and correct. I just thought Katy wanted that. Katy was mature and correct looking because she thought I wanted that. We’re both just kids.
We had an argument where we were both extremely pissed off at how our lives were going and we should do something about it.
Its about time we started acting our age. You only are 21 once.
On a side note, this group of friends is NOT normal, we are all trying to handle our relationships like we are much older than our age. The only normal ones among us here is Adam and Amber. It may not be a strong relationship, but it is defiantly normal.
Apr 24th
Humans have this odd tendency to always want something better. I see it all the time with cars and computers. To make things easy, people define ‘better’ as having ‘more impressive numbers’. If you can make the numbers go up then that is ideal.
But what if what we think we want isn’t really what we want? I don’t need a fast car. I want a dependable car. I don’t care about performance, but I do watch the MPG number when I make a purchase on a car. I don’t care about processor cycles on a computer if the computer because every computer is going to accomplish what I want on it nowadays, which is the ability to use the web.
What if I look at the world all wrong? Maybe I don’t need a car at all. I could bike. I don’t need a computer. I have a pen and paper.
Why can’t people just be ok with what they have? Is it competition? You will never be the best off. Someone always has it better than you and someone always has it worse. I buy a house, I know other people have better houses. I get a good job, my coworkers are more skilled than I am. I get furniture, I want better furniture. But why?
If it wasn’t for looking for something better we would never teach ourselves to do anything beyond basic survival.
I could look at this from a technical standpoint. Investments like cars and computers improve the quality of life in the way that it takes less time and less effort to do a particular task, which frees that time up for doing something else. It takes me much less time to drive to anoka then to bike. Biking to bloomington is unfeasable in my current schedule of responsibilities.
Maybe I don’t need special transportation. Maybe I don’t need the ability to annotate and communicate thoughts. All of these things I think I need because the way I was raised told me I should find these things, and fulfilling these things will make you happy. These are all tools to an end. But what end?
I believe there is no point to accomplishing anything in the world except to share it with other people. People are the answer to the pointlessness of the world. I do things so I can help other people enjoy their lives. But maybe just doing things for other people doesn’t matter either. The only reason you do anything is so you can enjoy life with people. The future isn’t here yet, the past is history, all we have is now.
Think about how little the things you have accomplished matter. We spend so much time sitting in front of inantimate machines, typing away, hoping to get a sense of satisfaction and belonging. The machines are stupid and uncaring, they have no souls. TV has no soul. Entertainment derived from these things are a fabricated lie where you trade money for a fake generated sense of peace. When you stop consuming the artifical scripted soulless entertainment, you are left to your own miserable life again. In this sense, its an addiction.
All of these skills you are learning, once you are dead you probably won’t have made any significant impact on the world. In 10,000 years nobody will remember a single thing from your entire generation. In a few million years, the sun explodes and eats the earth and all of civilization is destroyed. America could be conquered in 5 years. Everyone you know is going to die. The grim reality of the world is you don’t matter, period, and the only reason to be alive is not to accomplish anything, but enjoy this gift that is life.
You only live once. The only people that even realize you are alive are the people you know. TV couldn’t give a shit if you’re alive. Neither does your computer. Your job can be replaced. Your car is just an extension of limbs, and we know that we can survive and get by without limbs. Nothing we interact with at all matters except for people.
So why do we spend so little time with people, and so much time on pointless endeavors interacting with intimate objects?
I hope I am not just a tool in a machine. I’m better than that.
I’m on a trip right now, escaping anything that resembles my current life. I wanted to leave everything electronic at home, but I think the best way for me to dump my thoughts is via computer. I don’t have internet connectivity (except right now, I’m doing my friday time at work). I don’t know how long I will be back or what I will find. I don’t know if anyone wants me back. I know that if I didn’t have a mortgage, I may quite possibly elope and just not come back.
Thanks for reading.
Yay life updates
Apr 20th
I’m 23 now. My, how the time has flown. I should start working on things like retirement planning and making a list of things to do before I die and all those sort of things old people do.
For my birthday, I got:
Really badass new Cannon Powershot with Image Stabalization and a 16 GB SD card from Katy
Ice Cream cake by Katy
Rice cooker from parents
Tupperware, salt and pepper shaker and grinder, and assorted razor cutting tools from sister
A few gift cards from relatives
Easter also came and went, and so did the Hanson Easter picnic, and Easter at Katy’s with her parents. I successfully did not touch Taco Bell during that entire 40 day duration, and with the exception of the trip to Chicago we went on with clay, did not eat any meat on Fridays. However, taco bell discontinued their spicy chicken burrito (which was one of my favorite fast food items period) during lent. I found out that the primary ingredient which made a SPCK taste like it did was Jalapeno Sauce (which is actually, upon further investigation, flavored mayonnaise). I’ve been adding this to various items on the taco bell menu to see what they taste like, and so far a fresco beef softshell taco and chicken fiesta burritos have been the 2 best things to add it to in order to simulate the taste of a SPCK.
It finally became warm out again. Katy and I plan on planting a garden this year. I think I will take this next weekend to do outside work, like digging up soil, fertilizing, cleaning up the yard, and stuff. I also have the goal to finish the fence on the yard this year. I think a underground sprinkler system is still unattainable and I will have to wait till next year.
Its hard to find time to do these things because of other responsibilities I take on. As it is, I only have about 5 hours of freetime a night. I work from 9 – 7 PM most days and Katy works 6 am till 9 am and then 1 pm to 9 pm most days. This means Katy and I only get an hour or two each night to hang out, and I only get about an hour to do some activity of my choice (outside of procrastinating time at work). We usually don’t do much with each night but aulcopocos on monday, and tgi fridays on tuesday. I think we should start planning wednesdays to be movie night (where I make some kind of sweet dish) and thursdays, well idk what we do on thursdays yet.
I am working with a guy named dave to do some work to local business web pages, because I need a designer to help with some sites I make, and I know php. However, I think I am going to terminate my business relationship with him after I am done with the 2 projects left I am doing with him. He uses table based layouts for his pages and develops his HTML in Suckweaver, and has no since of rounded corners, CSS, web 2.0 layouts, or anything. He can’t mark up a PHP application. The projects I’m on are taking more than a few hours of work and the compensation is low. In short, he’s not a very valuable resource to me, and I can think of better things I could do with my time.
On deck is finishing the Mortgage site, and possibly a site with a local guy who runs a twitter application which posts funny jokes randomly. The Mortgage site I am way behind on, and I fear my relationship with the guy is souring, so I am trying to find local PHP talent to help develop the site for me (I would share a portion of the profit paid to me for the site developed with the guy who assists me). Asim recommended I do this. I still have to make the craigslist ad.
I am developing a PHP framework with the best features I like in the Zend framework which I develop most of my applications in, but with a focus on making pages more dynamic and interesting (like how facebook behaves). I even have a site for it: http://katy.labythan.com. It still has a few weeks before its ready. My hopes are the framework will floor people at my job so much when I present it that they will contribute to it and also use it, giving me job security and prestige.
At work, I am on a project for a local plastic injection molding company. The project seems never ending and stagnant, which I think is due to questionable management skills by both my company and the company that we are developing the site for. Regardless, I am pushing ahead hard on getting the work done. If I had one critisism for the company I work at, I wish I had a more of a sense of “the sky is falling, work harder” that I had at other jobs. Sometimes, I feel that if I did or did not do work it wouldn’t make any difference in the progression of any project, which leads to procrastination and overall a less successful company. Being a habitual procrastinator, I need to analyze these kinds of things to death to the point that I think everyone is out to get me and my job is in danger to sometimes jump start my productivity and creativity again, which I had to do this last friday.
Compared to more service related jobs I’ve held in the past, its amazing to me how important things like sleep, time of day, caffiene intake, health, and peer input affect things at intellectual jobs like I have now.
I have a cat now. Her name is Yuilya. Shes adorable and noisy.
Defcon is in just over 3 months!!! I need to get hotel riviera tickets still 
damn you money priorities.
I’ve managed to get my hands on quite a few video games to play. I end up playing them when I have got alot of chores done and katy is hanging out with her friends, at work, or sleeping (we don’t hang out every hour of every day, lol. I am about 10 hours into Bioshock, 2 hours into Fallout 3, and I just got GTA IV working (which looks pretty cool). These games seem less like games and more like reading a book, well worth the experience, yes, but I would rather do other things with my time (like sleep). I mostly are playing them because they are cool experiences to complete and a valuable part of culture. The 2 games I currently have no problem sinking hours into are Dota and World of Warcraft (I don’t have a subscription to WoW at the moment though). Neither one of those games tell a story, they aren’t a work of fiction.
With the abundance of entertainment options and limited time, I defiantly prefer instant gratification. I shouldn’t be playing bioshock on anything else than easy difficulty as a result. Stupid me.
Watchmen, I thought, was brilliant. I would defiantly show it to people again. Transformers, Star Trek, and Harry Potter all put out incredible trailers lately and I am looking forward to seeing them.
Nerd time
Apr 10th
I Read something interesting:
Sure, one may dismiss the Daleks of Doctor Who and the Borg of Star Trek as fiction, but isn’t it obvious that they are really symbols of racism and other forms of intolerance, including religious bigotry? Christian fundamentalists natually favor a world in which there are only Christians like themselves, so they seek to “convert” others to their point of view, and when they fail to do so, they lable anyone who disagrees with them as enemies. The Muslims of terrorist groups like Al-Quida are much the same.
If we see the Daleks and Borg as evil, why not the spiritual Daleks and Borg in the real world?