Implicit Truths

I love advertisements with Rube Goldberg machines in them. They’re damn cool. Everyone remembers the Honda Cog commercial, but how about this new advertisement for a rack. I love it, especially because there’s a whole point to the Rube Goldberg machine, gives you a reason to buy their product and stuff. Pretty cool.

According to Wikipedia,
A Rube Goldberg machine is an incredibly overengineered apparatus that performs a very simple task in very indirect and convoluted fashion (thus absurdly violating the principle of parsimony).

Even the best of manuscripts sometimes get rejected by publishers, and after a while it doesn’t seem worth it to keep sending them in. Fortunately, if you have the money to back your book, you can get it self-published and then you won’t have to worry about negotiating royalties or advances or any of that because it’s your book and you own it all. With the Internet, you can do all of this without having to leave the comfort of your home or waste the time you could have spent writing. Online Book Publishing at WordClay.com makes everything trivially easy for you.

George is at it again, raking up old muck. I thought the whole Macs vs. Rest Of The World war was done, with all the apple fans saying that the premium one pays for an Apple laptop is because the OS is all that much better, not because the hardware is very good. That’s an interesting take, though, because OS X costs nothing near what Vista costs. But hell, you have to pay for the right hardware to use it on, because it isn’t allowed to use OS X on anything but Apple hardware.

Beats me how people want to get locked into stuff like that. Sounds like a bad idea, any way you look at it.

A lot of the time, project managers don’t put all the theory they’ve learnt into practice. Despite knowing that it’s best to have kick-off meetings, regularly scheduled status reports, or meetings to reallocate human resources, they choose to avoid doing all of these known best practices in favour of just getting what they’re working on done. In the interest of just starting work on the project, too many managers fail to analyse the plan of action and keep up to speed on how the project is by scheduling meetings to check on the status of specific subsections of the project.

Typically, this leads to the project meandering where it could have gone steadily. Sometimes, these regular meetings can point out flaws where a subordinate is not being used at his full potential. For instance, someone who went through MCIPT training could be accidentally working on a Python application on a Linux machine. Mistakes happen, and keeping a close eye on the progress of a venture can point out the silliest of flaws that could dangerous delay the project if not fixed early. Stick to good management practices, there’s a reason they’re called that.

I have to admit, this is freaking amazing. It’s like watching the science fiction of yesteryear coming to life in front of us. Methane fuelled (video) spaceships that travel to the outer solar system, refuel and return may well happen within my lifetime. That makes me so happy that they could find out that computer processors can’t get any faster and still not get me upset.

Ha ha, Arthur C. Clarke would be so happy if he were year. Now all we need is to get spaceships that travel on steam and we can make Asimov happy too. The more the merrier. I want interplanetary travel so much! Even if I don’t get to go! Armchair enthusiast out.

It sucks. It’s really bad. I’d typed out this long treatise on cancer, including a few solutions and some innovative applications involving using cancer cells to fight AIDS, but then what happened was that when I tried to place the trademark symbol on the name of the product, the whole damn thing died. And I hadn’t saved! I need Jesus!

PS: Is there a way I can tell search engines to ignore this post. It just struck me that I wouldn’t want to provide more noise for anyone searching for a cure for cancer. Shit, I already feel bad, but I don’t think a real cure for cancer would be on as obscure a site as this, so I needn’t bother, I guess. Then again, what about using cancer cells to fight AIDS. Is that worse putting that there?

Karthik posted about searching for books and the trouble involved in paying for them. Well, when I need a book I usually drive down to Pycrofts Road and there’ll be huge rows of used book sellers. I’ve gotten some really good books from there for dirt cheap because they charge you on the weight of the book or on what they think is its value. If you’re good at bargaining you can drop the price to 50% of what they ask, which will be a fraction of the cost of the book and you can get a book that’s worth 500 bucks at 80 bucks or so.

While on the topic of used book stores, these places are so awesome because of what you can find. One of my professors in college has a first edition of the Silmarillion which his friend got for him from a used book store for less that 200 bucks. Imagine!

We can’t, you know. If our own problems are anything to go by, the second we try to there’ll be crying about the sovereignty of the country and how other nations shouldn’t interfere in internal matters. Frankly, I think those politicians should shut the fuck up. Sure, we shouldn’t depend on other people to bail us out. It isn’t fair to the United States or Europe to call them in every time we have trouble and then hate them when they decide to take the pound of flesh they think they deserve as reward.

Still, I can still dream of having UN paratroops landing right in the middle of large scale communal violence. That would rock, blue helmets for the win. A slightly more blood-pumping dream is having blood-thirsty Blackwater mercenaries flying in on their huge helicopters and unleashing mayhem. Ah yes, we all love death and destruction. Mmmm…

So I noticed this alliterative blog post on digg the other day and all I can do is laugh. Sure he has a right to sell his music and stuff, but after listening to a sample of the crap they play I can’t honestly believe that anyone will actually download this music for free. In fact I’m pretty sure he must be paying all of his neighbours and friends to buy their stuff because the band frankly sucks. It just does, there’s nothing more to it, it’s awful, worse than the soundtrack of My Cat Vs. The Door, you know.

Frankly, the reason they aren’t making any money, if that’s what he’s complaining about, is that they don’t make anything that’s worth listening to. Heck, he’s probably flattering himself by thinking people are downloading his music. Sure they are, keep telling yourself that you’re popular.

The best bit is where he calls himself a ’sexual deviant pervert’. Jesus! Who gave this sixth grader a dictionary? He also goes on to say that it’s okay to steal from Microsoft, but not from him. Double Standards, don’t leave home without them.

I think I should admit this now, I’m addicted to tobacco. I should quit, but when I’m feeling down, it gives me a pick-me-up where people aren’t willing to. Tonight I got up from my seat and walked up to my bag and nearly rummaged around for a cigarette. That’s where I knew I’d lost it.

Sometimes I’ve tried denial. I don’t do drugs (pot doesn’t count, but PCP does) I tell myself, this is not me. I don’t commit crimes I tell myself, that’s not who I am. But that’s not really true, is it. If I look back far enough, I’ve been doing it for ages now, and all the time not realised. Just that recently I’ve let my ambition overleap itself and that makes it all very easy to see the bullshit I pulled. Guilt. Loads of it, and nowhere to put it.

If it’s any consolation, nothing I’m doing now holds a candle to what I have done.

If you let yourself go, allow every single sensation to pass right through to your brain, you can feel yourself the way you are. I do that sometimes, and I know myself in that instant, physically at least, every bone, every vein. And if you close your eyes when you do that, you aren’t here any more, you’re in that other place of peace. It can’t be the inner peace that everyone talks about, but it certainly is one hell of a feeling, knowing just every bit of you. Knowing it.

No movement, yet it’s some of the most trippy things I’ve ever done, and without any substance abuse involved. Give it a shot some time.

I’ve kept some all my life, and the ones I still hold are worse than the stuff that I have told. Even worse than the one that only one other person not involved knows, and that person doesn’t know it isn’t the worst, or that it never actually bothered me though it was a convenient excuse. I’m not really sorry, of course, of everything I did then, or what I’m doing now. I apologise without regret, recidivism evident in my past and in my present. That’s why I can’t sometimes handle it, you know, and that’s what bothers me: I sometimes feel guilty, and that makes some things not happen.

Guilt is a horrible thing, it’s probably the worst thing you’ll have to live with.

Yay for generalisations. But frankly, if you said that you wouldn’t want the LHC running because it will end the universe then you’re a fucking moron. Please go away. Idiots. Why can’t they go and live in a cave or something?

I bet they’ll read that article, see this little line there:

The LHC will generate data at a rate equal to the entire human population each making 10 telephone calls – simultaneously.

And then they’ll say something like, “So why don’t they just get us to all make calls at the same time, then?” Are they born without a brain or something?

There was a time when blogs weren’t common, and bloggers were the modern equivalent of Indiana Jones. Well no, there wasn’t such a time, unless you’re from the future. Every other word in a blog post was meant to be a link and if your blog had fewer than 5 columns you weren’t a blogger after all. Ah, the rigour of maintaining your own little news outlet.

Anyway, what got me started was that the brother of a certain friend has started a blog. He reminds me of that C&H strip where Calvin imagines that he is Frankenstein’s monster: Rehan Lives.

While some people have the luxury of choice, the rest of us must make do with nothing whatsoever when our computers fail. As did mine. So I was out of action for a little while. Now I am back, and I will make it count.

You know it isn’t too hard to buy a new computer for cheap? One with a Core 2 Duo and a discrete graphics card even. The question, of course, is whether the AMD processors are better than the Intel Core 2 series at the same price point; I’ve heard rumours that the higher end Athlon 64 X2 can hold its own against similarly priced processors from the Intel line. That’s a lot to check on, and compatibility for ports. I still can’t believe I bought a computer with only an AGP port just when PCI-e was catching on. Very well, that machine is showing its age now, and I can make a difference this time. Must be careful, don’t let the dad do the buying.