The Empirical Manifesto

Watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Friday. Bought the book at midnight and have been reading it, slowly. Three books ago, I read the entire thing in a day, and then became pissed off and morose since I didn't have any new Harry Potter to read, so I read it again. Two books ago, I read every chapter twice - to force myself to take my time. That lasted about a quarter of the book. I finished the last three-quarters in a day reading it straight through. Last book - well, I was moving (again) so it was pretty much split-up and took me a week. This time, however, I want to blow through it, but life, it seems, has gotten in the way. I'm lucky to read 4-chapters, every other day. To assist me with this, however, I've burned every album onto a single mp3 disc which I listen to in the car, followed by all the albums back-to-back which I listen to on my iPod at work. I'm finding some real gems in there!



In other news, I've recently acquired another Rave System and am pimping it out with half a gig more RAM & a DVD-ROM drive to put Solaris 10 on it, I'm upgrading the 300Mhz/1280MB U30 at work with a U10 I'm filling with Rave System parts (a 440Mhz chip, two 60GB drives, a DVD-ROM & 2GB of RAM and possibly more importantly, a Raptor framebuffer to get the graphics off the CPU), and am thinking of restarting the Ampache project on the ubuntu-server box to see if I can glean anything at all from it. 13-hours at work today which is fine since my wife and kids went to Wichita to spend some time with her mother prior to school starting. I'm knee-deep in work, but work is such a joy! I can hardly contain myself.

And now, a word about schpydurx. To open this forum, I'll admit, I don't understand these Gen X'ers (or Y'ers or whatver the hell 'they' are being called these days). Sure I was young, and had periods of confusion because I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. But this whole angsty "I'm angry at the world because I'm retarded." just doesn't sit well with me. If you're angry because you're retarded, let's start with working on NOT being retarded. And if we can't fix that, then christ man, let's at least work on NOT being angry because of it. But that's just it, isn't it? Is it considered 'cool' to be retarded, to appear incapable of making decisions, or to follow through on the one's you have?

Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir.

But if that truly were the case, then why all the angst? Why all the frustration over your imagined oppression? And I'll be the first to tell you that your own stupidity has brought this on you. I won't pander to your depressive ways. I understand that life is a stage, BUT NOT EVERY PLAY IS A TRAGEDY! Dry those emo-tears, pony boy. No one else is going to make you happy - is that what you're waiting for? Its all on you, dude, and the rest of the world? We've evolved. You'd do best to try and keep up.

Case in point - a conversation I had with our young friend earlier this week:

schpydurx: I too am the eternal optimist. However, I am first and foremost a realist who realizes that life is shit and what can go wrong will go wrong. Therefore, I plan for the worst and if something better comes along, then hey, that's cool too. It's called contingency.

ehowton: I too am the eternal optimist. However, I am first and foremost a realist...
This contradicts itself.

...life is shit and what can go wrong will go wrong.
This is called a 'pessimist.' The opposite of an 'optimist.' Are you an optimist, a realist, or a pessimist? And you think I'm confused?

I plan for the worst and if something better comes along...
This is the most retarded way to do things I've ever seen. I think I just found the root cause of all your problems. Dude, you prepare for the worst, yes, but the flip side of that is expect the best! You dismiss a very important facet of this. Furthermore, that's a dumb contingency! A better contingency would be to prepare for multiple scenarios. But not you! You 'prepare for the worst' by waiting for something better to come along? YOU FUCKING PACIFIST! Grab the bull by the horns and go do something!

By getting this rare peek into the post-pubescent mindset, I see that inaction is the number one cause of his discontent. I'd like to offer him some advice here, publicly: It is better to do something, and fail, than to succeed at doing nothing.

There are often many different courses of action you could take given any particular circumstance, that's a given. And understanding that doing nothing at all is quite possibly the worse thing you could do, what do you do? Well, its really quite easy. Weigh the pro's and con's, pick one, and DO IT. Just...fscking...DO IT! Now then, there is a certain element of risk involved doing things this way, and occasionally you will fail. That's OK! If you never failed, YOU'D NEVER LEARN! Failing is a very, very important part of learning, often overlooked. Anyway, here's the clincher, the coup de tête if you will, which will make your every desire come true: Once you start taking these small risks, and begin a life of action, each next decision comes easier. And with the lessons learned from each event, you gain more experience, and the next one becomes easier. Its a cycle of success.

Those analysis droids only focus on symbols. Huh! I should think that you Jedi would have more respect for the difference between knowledge and... wisdom.

If you leave here with only one thing, please make it this: GET YOUR FAT ASS OFF THE COUCH AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

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its 2300 and I just finished a bowl of chili with Town House® Bistro™ Corn Bread Crackers. I crawled out of bed, brought my Vaio UX280P down with me, and cracked a beer. I went to bed at 2000 hours because I was tired and my eyes were burning and I wanted to catch up on some sleep but - that's not going to happen. It all began yesterday just as I arrived home...

The phone beeped and I was being paged to a Nationwide emergency meeting to battle a virus outbreak. I was up until 0200. Sure I slept in a little bit this morning, but it took me three cups of coffee to jump-start myself and at the conclusion of a very busy day I found myself wide awake in bed.

So I brought my minuscule little toy with me and loaded on it all the apps I would need to do remote unix administration with and had fun secure shell'ing into my box, chatting on tiny-AIM with galinda822, and bringing teh max0r across on vnc. Its fun, and convenient, and yes, you can post while laying flat on your back. The screen is bright, vibrant and sharp! But I wouldn't suggest it. While the stylus is fantastic, and the touch screen consistent in its ability, the font is so small that using the built-in "mouse" works much faster. However, there's no good position in which to lay while using the QWERTY keyboard. The stylus isn't meant to push the tiny buttons, and the fingers have difficulty because of a lack of tactile response. In short, I wouldn't suggest this as your daily tool. Unless of course you need to vpn via your wireless home network and solve unix jobs all without having to lift your head from your pillow - then its well worth its weight in gold!

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I was trying to get ampache working again the other night. I had assumed it was my NFS which was causing the catalog to not populate from the mounted volume, but that turned out to not be the case. Let me explain. For giggles, I fired up apache on teh max0r (an odd experience in itself) and installed ampache. Everything came up great, except the population of the catalog. Hmmmm. I then symlinked it to the root dir or the web server, still to no avail. Now, I know I've been away from sysadmin'ing awhile, but I wasn't expecting to delete songs within my mounted directory by use of the rm command! As soon as I saw the disc activity on my iTunes volume, I CTRL-C'd my way out of it. Yes, the symlink was still there, and yes, it was systematically deleting my songs within the mounted directory. Over 500 songs lost in a blink of the eye. I'll bring the dual-layer burner home again this weekend.