More quotes

I just saw these Bill Hicks quotes. Please, for the love of god, squeegee your 3rd eye before proceeding.

"What business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being on this planet. None of your business! Take that to the bank, cash it and go on a vacation out of my fucking life."

Freedom is a gift of life. Never accept anyone taking that from you. (That's me speaking).

"Life is just a ride. We can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all the money we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world -- which it would many times over, not one human being excluded -- and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace."

What would the man have to say today?

Fahrenheit 9/11

That's right. I saw it. And as before, I tried to find something to refute the claims. It's a lot harder this go around because the movie is so new (and since it takes a while to get some good caps on the net, nothing really comprehensive is readily available... at least, that I can find). What did find is this: Lies of Michael Moore, and this: Ray Bradbury, which is really funny IMHO. IP rights are so fucked up.

That article really isn't very good. It's more about the way Moore represents his views. So, it's not really refuting what Moore has to say, as much as the way he has to say it, only it's presented as an attack on his view.

So... what're my opinions of the film, you ask? I really don't know. It was disturbing. Even if I were to assume half of it were made up... it still leaves me wondering what's going on here. It's really hard for me to get my head around people that can justify the lost lives of our soldiers. That's not to say I'm a pacifist, because I'd be just happy to nuke the entire middle east as I would be to have anything else I didn't care about happen. What I have a problem with, is wasting the lives of American kids who trusted us to not take their sacrifice for granted. If that makes me some kind of racist... then I guess that's where I fit.

You know what gets me fired up even more? People who are pro-war and DON'T know anyone over there. If you happen to fall in that category, your opinion is worthless.

Where does this leave us? Same place we started. The world is a fucked up place. Whatever side you pick, them's still the cards. It's unfortunate nothing can be done to quell the amount of fucked up there is. I think it's a good time to reflect on what we've all learned from Bill Hicks. I am not special and neither are you.

I really hate extremists

I had the pleasure of viewing a screener of Bowling for Columbine last night. It's been a while since I've laughed so hard at the violence of modern America. But, being the kind of guy I am, I wanted to know what others were saying about the show. I'm what one might call naive... From time to time, however, I can admit to this and begin a slight investigation into what the real facts might be. This is hard. Very hard. I'll explain this in a minute.

After a bit of googling, I found this site: Bowling for Truth. This fellow exposes most of the claims made by Moore in his film. The nice thing about this site is that he provides sources for a lot of his claims (something Moore leaves out of his films). Sources are A Good Thing (tm). The problem is that, like Moore, he is an extremist. There is no middle ground. If Moore made an accurate claim, it's conveniently left off of the site. Not too disimilar from Moore's ability to leave certain facts out of his film.

The other problem comes when you see the fellow's other sites: Richard Bushnell and Richard Land. It's here that you begin to wonder just what kind of person is behind the rebuttal. It's kind of like in high school, when they tell you to be on your best behavior at other schools because you're representing the entire school, or when you go in for a job interview and everyone recommends you represent yourself well. If you can't represent yourself well on one site, why should anyone care about your others? I don't mean to say I'm any better at doing this (see this blog as an example), but I'm at least smart enough to not link to my bad sites from my good sites.

So why is trying to find the truth an NP hard problem (I like CS nomenclatures, don't you?)? Facts and details that cover the middle and present both sides of the extreme are far and few between. This is why I utterly despise extremists. A quick look at a statistics text will show that extremes cover truth. That's not to say they don't have their advantages, after all it is the extremes that uncover a lot of the lesser known facts about events. It's just somewhat depressing that both tend to tout their righteous adherence to presenting a fair and truthful view that is really just as tainted as those they run against.

On the plus side, coming across that site brought me to this site: Britney Clone. If that doesn't make you think about all those times you wanked to a Britney pic, I don't know what will.

Links

Got some links I wanna share... no reason for it though.

Penny Arcade
PVP Online
Megatokyo
... (This one doesn't open for me for some reason)

Here's some good news while we're on the subject. Slackware 10.0 hit a couple days ago. I would be creaming my geek shorts right now, but Patrick (we're on a first name basis here) decided the 2.6 kernel should wait... as should gcc 3.4.0 (which is pretty much the coolest thing to happen with gcc since the 2.95 line). You can still get them going via the /testing packages, but I'd prefer them as defaults. Oh well, perfect is a bit much to ask.

I ended up getting my free Athlon XP 3000 the other day. It's not what I'd hoped for (but it was free, so I'm sure not going to piss myself about it). I had a 2600 previously and they seem to perform about the same. The 3000 runs at 2.16Ghz, which is only 80Mhz more than the 2600 at 2.08Ghz, so it's not really much of a surprise. I think the biggest thing my current PC needs is another stick of DDR to get me running dual channel.

I actually learned a bit about how all this hardware stuff works internally in my computer architecture class this last semester... but most of it seems to have slipped out already, so I can't post much about it. What I do remember, however, is the rule of shrinkage. As the semi-conductor technology makes it possible to put smaller logic on the chips, space opens up. So why does this matter, aside from it being the reason we now have both L1 and L2 cache as well as the floating point logic on-die? Dual core processors! And it looks like AMD is going to drop their first one next year. Now if that doesn't get your spider-sense tingling... well... I sure don't know what will.

Quotes

A conversation today reminded me how much comfort I find in the ideas put forth in the movie Fightclub. I want to share some of my favorite quotes:

"It's the greatest moment of your life and you're off somewhere else. Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers failed, what does that tell you about God? Listen to me. You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, He hates you. This is not the worst thing that can happen. We don't need Him! Fuck damnation! Fuck redemption! We are God's unwanted children? So be it! First, you have to give up. First, you have to know, not fear. Know that some day you're gonna die. It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

"We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact. So don't fuck with us."

I think modern life has provided us with a certain perspective on what it means to really be alive. The internet is proof of this. A few minutes of searching will provide countless examples of people bickering over which application is the best for viewing compressed clips of Peter North money shots, people debating which of the big three provides the best cup holder and reclining, vibrating leather seat with the built-in DVD player and Playstation 2, and the ever popular sect claiming some such religion provides the obvious answers to the questions we all have to ask ourselves at some point... which just so happen to come from a 2,000+ year old book that has been translated and re-translated by more people than Jenna Jameson has managed to sack up with in her elustrious career (is that making my bias too obvious?).

Does any of that really matter when everything is lost? I think that's the point we should all hold onto. Of course the twist here is that I am a dependent of my own collection of consumables, so who am I to find such things truly philosophical?

Jesus Built my Hotrod

Rust is one surly ass bitch. Took me a good half hour to sand down just the tailpipe section of my exhaust. That's roughly half a foot of something like half-inch pipe. Using some fancy maths, that comes out to 9.14 square inches of surface area (one side... I can't get inside of the pipe). That's 18 square inches an hour. I know snails that can make better time than that.

As always, I digress. Tomorrow night will involve many hours of spraying down the underside of my truck to get the years of mud cleaned off. Hopefully I can get to cleaning up more of the rust and get the frame protected. It appears as though I need to find some rust protection that's safe for the exhaust, but I haven't come across anything yet.

On the upside, the fresh coat of scratch remover and wax has given the paint a burts of new life. I should borrow someone's camera and get some pictures when it's all cleaned up and the new shocks are on (that's another month away still).

So, basically, it's a love affair. Mainly jesus and my truck.

Oh... before I forget. I had a moment of clear headedness today and managed to come up with a system for loading video and audio modules that may just work for me. It's similar to a plugin system I came up with last year that I had fun with, but it's a bit more object oriented, which is always an exciting upgrade. I wish I could buckle down and get some real work done on that, but it's been hard to feel inspired since the semester ended.

Big one here

Morgan Webb posed for Maxim. Looks like only 4 pics, but she's looking Mighty Fine (tm) in them.

Interesting article

Check out that article linked up there. Joel knows his stuff (used to work at Microsoft). He also references some really good sources in his argument. It's about Microsoft losing the API war (a sad affair to say the least).

As a developer... I whole-heartedly agree with him.

Mmmm

Check out the link above. 200Mbps DSL. If only...

Finished KOTOR tonight. Almost 34 hours to get through it. I was really disappointed at the end of it. The game up to the Star Forge is really, really good and really, really fun. Unfortunately, somebody figured that since the first 30 hours were so much fun, they'd screw the last part of it with infinite waves of Dark Jedi and an end boss that has 9 (yes... 9) Jedi to pull power from. It's really lame to see the fucking dark lord of the god damn Sith running around sucking his power from Jedi that fell to a handful of Dark Jedi and Sith troopers. Very fucking lame indeed.

Aside from that gripe, it was a great game. I'm still confused as to the D&D rules it uses... but I did come to realise that if you the enemy gets a good roll (ie, a critical strike) you can always load your last save game and try again.

Oooh... last thing, I promise. Ground Control II is going to rock. I wish they would've released a LAN multi-player demo, but the one single player map they have is fun stuff. No micro-managing is A Good Thing (tm). I hope Blizzard takes note in case they ever make a Starcraft 2 (and on the side, my cube is drooling for Ghost).

Complete again

My truck's back. I missed it a lot. The new paint looks superb. Unfortunately, my bug shield needs a new installation kit since it had to be removed for the new hood. I'm hoping it shows up tomorrow so I can feel like a man again. Wish I could afford some 33 ATs for it... just have to live as a lesser human being until I can.

Does anyone else think the world could use another Bill Hicks?

I miss my truck

It's true... I really, really miss my truck. Friday can't come soon enough. The guy said I had enough large, shallow dents in my hood that it would be best to just replace the whole thing for a couple bucks more than the original job woulda cost. Two more days of driving hell...

I also wish I could stop being a wuss. I have an opportunity and I'm spending it trying to think my way around it. It's not like I'm afraid of what most people think I am... I'm afraid of just screwing it up and not getting the chance I should get. Fear of myself more than someone else. It makes me so pissed I could kick my ass were it not so pink and squishy.

But on the bright side... I get my truck back friday.... heh.

Seriously guys

I don't feel right inside. I see the man, but something is wrong with the look in his eyes. I read something a while ago... and it mentioned something about how if you no longer recognize the man in the mirror, it's time to go back and find out where he went. What do you do if going back is something you aren't in control of, and going forward scares you more than any other thing ever has? I... think I'm drifting... not sure of when or where to grab hold again. I don't know what to do... I feel like I've never known freedom, and the cost of the freedom I need is the loss of the person I've been up until now. Can you file a missing persons report for yourself? At least the anonymity of the internet and the sanctity of the few people that read this will keep my secret safe.

Let me close that leaking hole up with my favorite quote (but let me say thanks for indulging my seriousness for a moment first)... "Screw you guys, I'm going home."

Mace Windu

If you dig Star Wars, I recommend picking up the Shatterpoint book by Mathew Stover. It's all about Mace Windu skirting the edge of the dark side to save his former padawn. Here's a quote I really liked:

"'This isn't about good and evil,'" I told him. 'This is about the fundamental nature of the Force itself. Jedi are not moralists. That's a common misperception. We are fundamentally pragmatic. The Jedi is altruistic less because to be so is good, than because to be so is safe: to use the Force for personal ends is dangerous. This is the trap that can snare even the most good, kind, caring Jedi: it leads to what we call the dark side. Power to do good eventually becomes just power. Naked force. An end in itself. It is a form of madness to which Jedi are pculiarly susceptible.'"

Something about this seems to resonate even on a personal level.

I also recommend picking up the Star Wars: Republic line of comics from Dark Horse. They're really well drawn and the stories are superb. In case you couldn't tell, this whole Clone Wars deal has me fascinated. I'm dying to play Republic Commando and I'm getting the next Clone Wars novel as soon as it's released. Awww yeah.

Oooh... last Star Wars thing... I got my copy of Knights of the Old Republic yesterday (I'm behind the times, I know, but I was afraid of the RPG elements... now that it was $20, I don't feel so bad). This is a kick ass game, people. Long, but kick ass. There's lot's to do and many different ways to approach your character. I've been playing for 5 hours on and off and haven't even gotten to the point of being a Jedi. The only thing I don't like is that your main character can't be an alien... and I suck at saving, so I repeat a lot of spots...

On a more serious note... I've often wondered how much to heart it's safe to take ideas in novels. I know that there are some really good novels that present ways of looking at life that don't become apparent until late in life (Siddhartha comes to mind here), but that requires faith in the author... faith in someone I've never met. I've always known there are a lot of things that can be expressed in words that can't be understood until certain experiences are gained, so does this mean until those experiences pass, we should distrust the lessons put forth? It's kind of a Descartesist (if that's even a word) question, if we can no longer trust our senses, can we trust experiences that aren't even our own?

I don't really like reading Descartes... but some of what he put out there gets to me.

Good articles

Check out these cool articles:

AMD Socket 939 - http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040601/index.html
Finally going to be able to get an Athlon-FX that doesn't require registered DDR. Of course, if you've got over $500 to lay down for just a processor, I guess this doesn't matter to you...

Build a PC for <$1000 - http://www6.tomshardware.com/game/20040529/index.html

nForce3 - http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040420/index.html
This one's only going to get better as PCI Express starts expanding. I'm not sure if they'll incorporate a BTX model or wait until nForce4, but that's about enough to make any hardware geek cream him/herself.

Some thoughts

I was watching X-Play tonight and had a thought. People should be able to rate each other like we do games and other such facets of entertainment. However, instead of using a 5 or 10 point system, we should use a 2 point system. My reasoning being, on a 2 point system, it's easy to know when you've been wronged. If someone hands you a 1 out of 2, you know it's time to kick some ass. But if someone gives you a 2... well... you really don't know if you've just been insulted with mediocrity or given god-like status by a stranger. It becomes a guessing game; far more interesting than anything we currently have.

More importantly, this thought brought me to realize why we only have two real political parties (sorry outsiders, it's the truth). As the number of political parties grows, it becomes increasingly obvious who the loser really was. With two, unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to see without accurate count, who the losing team was. To give this a little more credance, let's observe the three party situation:

We can show that the loser in a three party situation can have no more than 1/3 of the votes (if we don't consider ties, it's actually less than 1/3). It's easy to see this by considering if the loser got more than 1/3. This implies second place took more than 1/3 (or else they were actually the loser), however this contradicts the fact that the winner must have more votes than second place, which is no longer possible when over 2/3 of the votes are taken.

Now, if we're this third party loser... well, we have a clear defeat on our record. *There was a statement here that wasn't right. Let it be known that a half assed proof of mathematics is no proof at all.* With two parties, however, we can have a win by a margin of just two votes (there must be a loss of at least 5 votes in a three party system with no ties), creating a blur between whether the loser is really the loser or not. In other words, it gives second place the opportunity to say "well, chalk it up to voter no-shows" or "electronic voting was a failure before it's conception". It's not so easy to do so when a loss is by a double count of votes. Surely we all agree that a loss is a loss, but somehow politics can turn a loss into something other than a loss. We've all seen this division in people, so you can't deny it.

So what does this mean? Some rhetoricical statement about cowards and their fear of failure running our country? Perhaps a stab at the very structure of American democracy? Beats me, chief... I just found it to be some interesting numbers.

Oh... and one last thing. Does anyone know where I can find an english description of the CPL? Perhaps some kind of GPL vs CPL discussion? I don't speak lawyerese but on certain obscure canadian holidays, and it doesn't appear there are any coming for the next few centuries. Thanks.