The Empirical Manifesto

"One ^day you'll _be blubbery ^and fat, _with long ^strong tusks _for grousing ^at this _and that."

swashbuckler332

revolos55

1. My username is _____ because ____.


My username is ehowton because I'm not creative enough nor worried enough to craft a pseudonym in which to represent myself.


2. My name is _____ because ______.


My name is Eric because my father had just returned from his tour in Germany where he was obviously very influenced by a goodly amount of that great German beer. He occasionally reads this journal, so he can chime in if he wants to. I didn't know how lucky I was to have been named Eric until I followed in his footsteps and volunteered for a tour of duty in Germany. There I found a lot of men my age were named, Uwe.


3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.


My journal is entitled The Empirical Manifesto because I was being hounded for relying solely on my own experiences to make future decisions and felt that my old title, Why Me? didn't properly represent my goals here. Though the change was initially met with some mild resistance, I wanted readers to be forewarned where I was coming from, how I got here, and, as the title also implies...where I'm going.


4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.


"Friends Page" so it will be easy to find. Why mess with defaults? I go looking for people's friends pages sometimes and have to seek out things like, "MY PEEPS" and "THE GATHERING" or somesuch nonsense.


5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.


My default userpic is a photogoot original. I've only had three, and two of them have been from pictures he has taken. Again with the not hiding. I'm not an androgynous writer.

Turning in early, I was aroused only slightly at the storm's apex which caused me to fall into an even deeper slumber, knowing it was out there. The hail came with thunder and lighting then tapered to the pitter-patter of rain and I slept like Jayne during Firefly's last episode. Speaking of, I've been reading quicksilvermad's Firefly fanfic. She reminds me of Christie Golden (ST:V author) in being able to maintain the tone and quirks of the portrayed characters. I'm reading it slowly (approximately one chapter each morning, before work) but the best part is how I found her: RANDOM USER. I shit you not. How cool is that?

• My cell phone does not get a signal at my desk at work. However, if I lift it above my head, over my cubicle walls, and its a clear day, sometimes I can send a single text message. However, my wife eyes me with incredulity when I'm sitting at my home computer and suddenly lift my phone over my head to send a text message.


• I finally fixed my jumpstart issue by adding the following line in the sysidcfg file: nfs4_domain=dynamic. This however, does not fix my current problem, and that is, jumpstarting a Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise M4000 across a crossover cable from a Sun X4200 x86 box.


• We were given these 1GB thumb drives which mounted as "protected" filesystems but would allow you to write to them, and seemingly erase them, but the erased files were written to a (hidden database?) which 'restored' the files for you at each use. Oh, and you couldn't reformat the drive either. Being slightly more intelligent than the average bear, I stuck it in my linux box and attempted to fdisk it with the same problem - linux respected the 'protection.' Fine. unount, mount -o ro /dev/sdb, BAM! This caused the console to flood with errors. At a loss, I plugged it into my SPARC linux box, which auto-mounted it as write-protect off and a successful format. SPARC FTW!


• I'm finding Elmer Bernstein's Heavy Metal: The Score to be increasingly awesome, enjoying more and more every time I hear it. It reminds me an awfully lot of Ghostbusters sometimes. A better Ghostbusters score, if that makes sense.


• It was 50-degrees this morning; cool and overcast - a gorgeous morning after a night of storms. I put the heat on the floor, put the windows down, and hit the highway at 80. What a fantastic drive in this morning!