Yep. I'm a giant nerd. I try to hide this to some extent around a lot of you, cause I know my geek-speak can get rather boring for those of the cooler persuasions of life. No one ever wants to talk to a giant nerd and I rather enjoy being talked to. It's quite possible that, of the ten to fifteen or so people i've met or become reaquainted with since last semester, none of them have even an inkling of my dark secret.
But I can live this lie no longer. I will live this lie no longer.
As I get closer and closer to graduation and, thusly, deeper and deeper into my nerd-dom, you may start to notice this page itself, which will inevitably some kind of visual and... uh... informational (?) representation of myself, getting nerdier and nerdier. For example, i've recently signed as Dr. Baliga's research assistant (yay me!) in designing a better algorithm to solve the sat problem, which hasn't been dented since somtime around 1971. My exploits will certainly be talked about in great detail here. I will most likely be talking about our ACM project to teach a robot arm to play tic-tac-toe using a webcam and a pen.
None of you will have any interest in reading any of it. I promise you.
So why bother even putting any of it online? Because this is my journal. And contrary to popular belief, a journal is not necessarily a diary. This page will become, in many ways, my reaching out to the geek/hacker community. Which, sadly... probably doesn't include you.
Unless..... are you sure you're not living a lie as well?
no one has any idea how fucking cool i am. do you know what i'm doing right now?? I'M UPGRADING MY GODDAM FREEBSD PORTS VIA CVSUP, MOTHER FUCKER#@!@!
yeah, it's 5am. yeah i've been trying to get it to work for hours. but i got it. i'm a goddam genius. definitely smarter than you. and cooler. CAUSE I GOT UPGRADED PORTS. in a few hours, ima be "make installing" the whole fucking universe. ever program in the world. HELL. why not just "make world"! i think i might do that. just to see how it'd feel. then "make clean" and i'd delete everythign. EVERYTHING. and "make install" all over again and watch it all come back like nothing happened. cause i'm that awesome.
FINGERS OF GODS@#$@#%
just you wait. in a week or seven, i'll allow ssh or telnet access into my bsd machine and make all of you log in and STARE IN HORROR at the blinking cursor. i can hear you now:
"what? i have to type things? what do i tell it to do? is this all text??? i can't do things without pictures and buttons!!! where's my mouse? i need to start an x session? what the hell is an x session? a window manager??! what the fuck is that?!? i want my start menu! *cries*"yeah, that's exactly what it'd be like. you'd cry like a girl. or if you're a girl, you'd cry like a baby. then i'd write you mean letters in VI and you couldn't do shit cause you'd have no idea how to edit text.
everyone in the world is dumber than i am.
but i got a helmet. and i call my helmet "exploding dog."
JohnnyDuo: PICARD LEARNED TO PLAY THE FUCKING FLUTE IN HIS HEAD!@#
JohnnyDuo: HOW IS THAT NOT COOL??
gos: BECAUSE IT IS STAR TREK
JohnnyDuo: YOU'RE DAMN FUCKING STRAIGHT IT'S STAR TREK!$@$%@#$
that is all.
ahoy! do you know me? yeah, good. come to my house this coming friday, 10/31. halloween night. well, probably around dinner time.. but i'll be more clear on that as the 31st nears.
if you don't have a costume you gotta bribe your way in. $10 to be exact. i'd love everyone to come in costume, hence the steep fee. plus, y'know... we pirates love booty. noting that, the fine line between "costume" and "old clothes" is a subjective one and the sailor doing the subjecting will be none other than yours truly; the one looking to make back the precious gold he spent on all the liquor, food, and beer. so make it convincing.
Ar.
after my initial frustration with apple's new iTunes, i've come to a realization: i've got too many goddam mp3s.
i'm sure if mp3s were like cds and i could sell them iTunes for money or more music, i'd have a lot less. but i can't cause i stole them from soulseek and audiogalaxy. so now i'm left with the daunting task of deleting. perhaps i'll regret this a few weeks, months, or years from now, but there's just no reason to have all these damned mp3s i never listen to taking up all my harddrive space and clogging up my iTunes genre/band/album listings. besides... p2p is never going away so if i regret deleting something i can always go download it again.
...or buy it.
i have definitely overextended myself this semester. more so than others, which is saying quite a bit. i don't have any time for anything and i don't have the will power to sleep less. if i don't get 8 hours of sleep, i hate everything except more sleep. i mean hate. with the burning fire of a thousand suns. it's difficult to get up in the morning when you hate everything, i can assure you. of course, on those rare weeks where i get up and go to bed at the same time every night, i'm a ball of productive and energetic sunshine. but in order for that to happen consistently, i'd have to sacrafice a great deal of my social life, which i'm not quite so sure i'm willing to do.
at least not yet. i don't want to be old so soon.
should anyone venture over to mike's journal and read the comments on his post from 10/15, mike posted a series of short statements and thoughts. unless i'm mistaken, a few of them were thoughts of his relating to some previous philsophical/religious conversations we had. i've always been interested in eastern thought and religion, namely buddhism and taoism, and it comes up in our conversations pretty often, especially since i'm taking a religions course this semester taught by ad buddhist. the best part is that his thoughts on the matter couldn't be any more inverse to mine. i really enjoy disagreeing with people. especially when they're as bright a person as mike is cause i'm sure to have my own ideas challenged, something i wish happened more often. especially in class.
so rather than just reply in mike's comments section, i thought i'd open the conversation a bit, invite some other folks in to disagree with me. there's no dramatic history here... no name calling, no craziness... a nice change for this journal. just a fun discussion on philosophy and the like.
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mike: I believe that overthinking and overanalyzation is not a curse but a talent that should be encouraged.
response: but what about instinct? how often does overthinking/analyzing something lead to a different viewpoint than what we first felt? not very. more than anything, i find it's just a waste of time. life is short. why spend all our time trying to figure things out as if there were some kind of ultimate knowledge or Truth just out of our grasp. living requires an exhange between ourselves and the world around us. not only that, it requires attention to that exchange; something we can't give to it when we're busy thinking about ourselves; trying to figure things out. so really, who's better off? the person who tries to understand the world, or the person that just learns to love it?
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mike: Simplification is a copout
response: a copout of what? our western, goal-oriented, slothful, greedy lifestyle? show me a man who spent his life rushing here and there fullfilling one desire after another; a degree, a great career, wife and kids, and i'll show you dissatisfaction. i pose a question: with all our advances in science, technology, psychology, communication, and everything that goes with it, do you think people are any happier? any less? i can tell you one thing for certain... they're a lot fatter.
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mike: "stop thinking" is a cry for ignorance - which is bliss - so at times I will avoid subjects and topics but hey I realize it so I'm halfway to getting that worked out.
response: i really strongly disagree mike's main point here. namely "stop thinking" is a cry for ignorance. when we stop thinking, we start feeling. Our brains disconnect us from the world. It's our nature to try to organize, structure, label, and categorize things. thinking is our attempt at dealing with the chaos of our infinitely detailed, infinitely unknowable world. our emotion connects us to that chaos because our emotion is unpredictable and uncontrollable (provided that you agree with me when i say supression is not control). We could spend our whole lives swimming up-stream and end up very tired and not very far from where we started or we can relax, float on our backs, enjoy the scenery, and see where things take us.
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mike: desire causes suffering, but desire also causes progress.I desire progress because it is my instinct. I cannot reason why progress is my goal - I just "know" that it will bring me more to work with - more to think about - more to enjoy - more to fight against - more more more
response: but will any amount of progress make someone happy? anyhow, i'm not so sure progress is anyone's instinct. it's most likely a behavior learned in early childhood as a response to the positive reinforcement we got for improving in any way, shape, or form. furthermore, i'm not so sure i agree that desire causes progress. in many cases, i think it's the exact opposite. hell, scroll down this page for a few examples how crazy miserable it can make people. desire is only constructive when we're destroying it. otherwise it drives us mad. and watch how quickly that which you desire, once attained, diminishes. watch how quickly that recently fulfilled desire gets replaced. fulfilled desire fuels even greater desire. unfulfilled desire fuels dissatisfaction and suffering.
but to accept and destroy desire or to turn it into something positive, like a passive joy, is to reach an emotional and mental equilibrium in the presence of things we hate and the absence of things we love. why do you think the buddha is sculpted/drawn/painted with a smile? that is beyond progress. there is only enjoyment from that point on and our happiness becomes a huge curve of which the derivative at any point along it is all we want or need in that instant in space and time: nothing.
and while all this makes absolute and perfect sense to me, i find myself unable to make the necessary steps/sacrafices to start heading in that direction. i'm not really sure if that makes me a hypocrite, per se, and if that's something even worth noting. i'm only 22, afterall. but i guess that's what living and growing old is all about.
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ok, yeah. that was fun. i hope mike doesn't think i'm trying to cut him up or anything. i hope a lot of people have a lot to say. please forgive any misspellings or grammar errors. and i think my train of thought started to falter towards the end there. ah well. it's late and i've no time to proofread. time for bed.
on behalf of all the world's callees i would like to thank the callers; the selfless people who risk their ego, their time, and their phone minutes to call us and invite us out places to hang out and do things. the world would be a lonely place without you all. cheers.
i am cool in every way you couldn't give two shits about.
chew on that for a bit.