The Empirical Manifesto

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.

Downloaded an ID3 editor to modify the tags on the Independence Day album for the iTunes problem I'm having. It didn't work. Furthermore, even if it had worked, it would have been very tedious to modify everything that needed to be modified. The utility did identify about 3000 duplicates (mostly the reimport of the Final Fantasy album, but because I used the utility to remove the duplicates, I'm sure that's going to wrek havok on my iTunes database. Additionally, the utility identified many tracks which were not in iTunes, but on disk...again, it would be a nightmare to individually identify these tracks to re-import them. I'm beginning to believe iTunes is just not capable of keeping track of as many songs as I have. Next, I'm looking for a utility which will work with iTunes in helping me identify these rouge tracks automatically. Funny enough, the only thing I can find so far works only with iTunes on...Windows *sigh*

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Decided to make double-car payments until my car is paid off, then take that money and put it towards my wife's car. I'm figuring I can pay both cars off in about a year. Then save that money for another six months or so and just pay cash for my next car. That'll work...if I stop drinking beer. I think I'll stop drinking beer awhile, see what happens. Of course I was more impressed with that car this morning when I drove my POS into work than at the actual time of driving it...I liked that 3.0 V6.

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Finished my part on galinda822's desk project. This time I brought ALL my tools over, and we got it until it was done. Of course now she's needs a little wood putty and some stain - my work is far from flawless. But I did find that the bigger and more powerful the saw, the easier the job. Is that wrong? It's turning out to be a gorgeous "L" shaped desk, the two pieces fitting flawlessly together. Also, her mini may be arriving two days early - I still have to burn off her applications, but we successfully created a DVD-backup of her entire iTunes database. Speaking of, I'm going to try and clean up what I can tonight, burn some one-off's and delete (do I really need 6GB's of Final Fantasy online?) and then, once properly organized, burn off my entire database, delete the files and all databases, and...*sigh* re-import. Such is my life.

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"You're talking about a composer who has established a very identifiable sound that filmmakers have come to rely upon for a successful collaboration of sound and image. It's obviously a very successful approach, and he has maintained a great deal of musical integrity while pursuing that identity, which is no small feat. And I think one would do well to remember that composers of the stature of Haydn and Beethoven were known to sell the same piece of music to different buyers. Making similar accusations against contemporary composers of film who commonly come under extreme conditions of time restraint (among many other real obstacles) might be seen as being irrelevant in light of those historical facts. So, the short answer is: it's just you." -- Don Davis when asked if James Horner's score to Titanic sounded familiar.

Mac user.

I'm still trying to decide if Tony's glaciphobia pertains to fear of alpine glaciers, continental glaciers, or just fear of glaciers in general. Because this is a sensitive subject for him, I never discuss it outright, rather, I try to pick up on associated fears to pinpoint what exactly about glaciers frighten him (though even I admit that glaciofluvial sediments are a touch scary). I don't think his fear of swimming fish is a puzzle piece, (though I was hoping for a good lead) as its not quite ichthyophobia which leads me to conclude that his fear of swimming fish is not a true phobia, rather, taking my lead from psychologists from the University of Arkansas who claim that homophobia is not an actual phobia because it's caused by disgust, not fear or anxiety, that his is completely unrelated. As I discover more, I'll gladly post here on this fascinating topic.

Dreamed that danzigfried and I were going into business together. From what I recall, however, we were dodging the gangland underworld quite a bit. I have no idea why. Perhaps I suffer from bolshephobia, the fear of Bolsheviks?

In an unrelated dream last night, I was packing my stuff as quickly as possible to move the hell out of Missouri. We were going to back to Texas. galinda822 was quite distraught, and kept questioning why, but all I could tell her was, "I gotta get outta here." This one I'm pretty sure stems from my fear of change, metathesiophobia.

schpydurx suggested backing up my iTunes to prevent further corruption. After careful consideration I've decided that he's right. Although it's sure easier to make flippant comments than to actually troubleshoot solutions, I think I'll cron a script to backup the database. That should protect me from any future occurences of this nature. As to backing up the entire iTunes library however...And I'm pretty sure this one is dead balls on with sectoratychiphobia the fear of hard drive failure.

Echoing my chronophobia or fear of time, I would LOVE to see The Barber of Seville at the Saint Louis Opera, and since Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is an entire year away, this is something I could do in the meantime. I really don't have the time for these excursions, but I'd sure like to make time for some of them.