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Archive for May, 2009
May 30th
Last Sunday, I played through a round of Civilization IV. The game is pretty nifty and fun, and will easily drain away 6 hours of your day. As your little empire progresses throughout history, when a technology is discovered, a famous quote related to the technology is presented and dictated by Leonard Nemoy.
Now, you all know that I am a fan of amateur philosophy. I’ve never really spent any time reading quotes by famous people… and I am not sure why. I know all kinds of good movie and TV show quotes, but not famous people. Which is stupid, because people have explored much more about the human condition than most blockbuster fiction writers ever have.
In any case, famous people throughout history have some very interesting things to say. Here are a few.
“The best way to escape from a problem is to solve it.” – Alan Saporta
“Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.” – Steve Wozniak
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” – Galileo Galilei
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.” – Confucius
“You can’t direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails.” – Unknown
“You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.” – Al Capone
“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” – Oscar Wilde
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke
I was having a drunken philosophical argument with Tyler the other day. Basically, I said, we are going to be some of the people to influence Amber and Annah’s sons when they get older in about 8 years or so. I wonder what we will teach them? Tyler made the statement that the world of the future would change significantly and it would be impossible to know what things will be like now.
When Cole came back last Christmas from the Navy, I asked him what it was like seeing things in sudden jumps of change of 8 months at a time in Minnesota. Cole states that things don’t really change that much, its just like going away for a few days on a vacation, only its about a year, but things for the most part stay the way they are.
So, I went on to state that with the exception of the saturation of access to cheap and portable ways to access information and communication (desktop computers with internet access in every home, cell phones) that the world hasn’t really changed that much since at least the 50’s.
Tylers retort was, well what about music? Or personal freedoms or crime? 30 years ago you could walk in (he stated some area) and now you can’t because of the prevelance of crime and the heightened aptitude of skepticism by everyone which in part has been in fault by the “War on Terror” and fox news fearmongering. Ok, this may be true, but the rebuttal was there were still ghettos back in the 50’s, and there were other actions you couldn’t do in public, especially acting gay.
So think about this, the flavor of everything has changed, newer technologies are available, but we are far from living in a utopia of betterment from any point in the past. The overall way to live life, the sort of activities you can do, and the vices people cary are pretty constant through history.
Nerds in the 50’s had radios instead of computers, but there were still nerds. Music was different, but there still was music. Racial intolerance was against different groups and much worse back then, but there is still racial intolerance. There was corrupt cops back then, there is now. We use computers to access information, back then we used libraries. Kids still went to school and had a style of living which was contrary to their parents beliefs, kids still screwed around, and smoked pot. Cars were still there and you could use a car to get everywhere. There was still wars.
Hell, there are girls out there call rape on guys when the reality of circumstance was not rape in any way, and the accusation is to cover up some kind of fault of the accuser. This happened back in the day too, only it was witch hunting, and people burned at the stake.
May 23rd
Life keeps moving.
Katy and I broke up. This time, its permanent.
Josh moved in as our new roommate. He fits in well here. We’ve had some pretty fresh nights over the last few weeks biking, hanging out on the roof, or general parties. Lizz likes to stalk Josh and its a little creepy, but shes more or less harmless except on Josh’s mental state.
Work bounced back to fun again after I reverse engineered a file format produced by EDrawings (a free CAD file reader we are integrating into a site we are developing). The manager that’s been causing me all this stress has been out’sed for impeding the progress of the project I’m on, and has been forced to work more directly with us rather than stealing our work and calling it his own.
My car and house bills are 100% caught up. The side effect is Tyler and I are 100% broke. I’m eating stuff I don’t usually eat for food because I can’t afford anything else (stuff that doesn’t jive with my diet).
Speaking of diet, thats doing really well. I’ve lost 10 pounds so far.
This has been the first weekend in a long time I have absolutely no obligations and nothing to do. I don’t know if I want to take up a project right now. I’m really enjoying the clean house and perfect weather. I’m kinda dissapointed everyone’s at work.
Planning a trip to the Safehouse in Milwauke on Saturday, June 6th. This is all faceless_wonder’s fault.
Eh nothing to do today, more video games I guess. Maybe i’ll take a walk to a park.
Spring Cleaning
May 12th
Work has been stressing me right the f* off. Managers who pull political BS rather than just getting the project done piss me off. The company isn’t paying you $30/hr to impede progress and bitch about other peoples work.
I have probably spent the last 10 hours of freetime over the last 2 days cleaning up my room and emptying the constantly re purposed “office” so that Josh may move in. After completely emptying my room, I had the opportunity to redesign it into something new, and what I came up with is pretty neat. All thats missing is a 40+ inch TV to hook up to the computer. Now that my room is all spick and span, I have a huge pile of crap in the living room I need to figure out what to do with.
The thing is, my room is pretty simple right now, and I like it. I don’t think I need a good majority of the crap thats sitting in the living room to take up my living space. I think I am going to go through my wardrobe and belongings and store or throw away a good chunk of crap that I just don’t need anymore.
The problem is I am spending way too much time working and cleaning. I don’t have nearly enough time to relax and enjoy my freedoms, or to start entrepreneurial projects. I blame this all in part on the massive amount of crap that I have collected, both physical and responsbilitywise. It all needs to go.
Once I am done with upstairs, there is still the basement, back yard (lawnmowing), downstairs, a broken theater PC all to fix. This streak of cleaning is going to take me well into Friday.
I have all kinds of dreams for this summer. Here’s a new summer resolutions, most of which I will not make, but I can dream, right? :
- Get all bills current
- Get at least 2 months money buffered up in case of job loss
- Get a motorcycle license
- Rent a few jetskis and have friends out on a lake with them
- Acomplish Vegas trip, and stop by San Fransisco
- Maintain the diet I am currently maintaining and loose at least 40 pounds from the high point I had before
- Maintain exercise, to increase physical stamina and upper body strength
- Fix bike, and have quite a few good bikerides during the night before summer is up
- Fix my car’s air conditioner, so using my car in hot weather is fun again
- Repair damaged reputation at work
Have you guys seen the Mighty Boosh? It is downright crazy.
My personal life is pretty topsy turvy right now. I’ll write something about it when I feel comfortable with discussing it. However, I would like to thank Amber, Tyler, My Aunt Kim, and Josh for being behind me and discussing with me some of the most important questions I have ever had in my life. Thanks guys.
Language Devolution
May 10th
Spoken language is amazingly complex. For each idea you wish to convey, there is a ton of different ways you can convey it based on tone of voice to also convey some kind of emotional effect. This is considered common knowledge (Duh). However, beyond tone of voice there is hundreds of variations on what synonyms and sentence structures you can use to convey the same idea each with their own more subtle subconscious effect on the listener on what they are saying. The fact that you can convey intention, emotion, insult, or praise simply on your choice of words and the amount of words you say is simply astonishing. Furthermore, if you don’t realize other people do this to you, its very easy to get brainwashed by the subconsious effect of words rather than being able to catch the hidden meaning of them and giving the underlying meaning the same criticism as other words. I believe that political figures giving speeches (Obama) and Preachers employ these facts to cause their audience to have a greater tendency to unjustifiably agree with the speakers ideas based on emotional reaction.
For my whole life, I’ve had a special place for Scifi stories and general nerdness in my heart. The side effect of this is scifi written dialog is intentionally polished with a hefty dose of intelligent sounding words. As a side effect, without thinking about it, most of the language I use to communicate to people sounds much more analytical and intelligent than is appropriate at the time. This is great for workplaces because I sound like I have an above average understanding at the discussion at hand, when in reality I am daydreaming about what I am going to do later that night.
But, in the real world, this is taken as a sign of elitism, smugness, and pretentiousness. In order to communicate to your peers (unless they speak the same nerd jive that I can spew) it means I have to think about what words I say to not seem condescending.
For example, take the following sentence:
Initially, your ideas were intimidating, however I now understand what you were trying to convey.
Lets fix that up to lamens terms:
At first, that was hard to understand, but now I get it.
I told Byron (Kim’s Husband) yesterday about some managerial issues we are having at my job with a client that we are doing work for. He said that one interesting way to convey anger or disappointment was with long pauses of speech, because this shows deep thought, and subconsciously others understand that deep thought is usually the result of some sort of problem that needs solving, the problem being what the other person just said, so in shorter conclusion a long pause shows a calculated disapproving comeback being formed to an adverse statement. It really got me thinking about how some of the best ideas you can convey can be done silently, and your choice of when to speak and your exercised control on when to not speak means worlds to your ability to communicate a lack of bias when one very defiantly exists.
Also, smiling. Everyone loves a person that smiles.
God, I love spell check.