ChapterZero

Last night I was fighting my sister for control of the remote, when I hit my little toe against a foot stool. It didn’t hurt at first, but as the night went on, it started to ache in an unusual manner. I have stubbed my toe before, and usually it just hurt like h*ll for a few minutes, then calmed down. Well this time it hurt like h*ll for a few minutes, then subsided into a dull ache which would only seriously hurt if I try to bend the toe. BTW, it’s my right index toe (index? :). Point in case, I think I fractured the bone because it’s still hurting after 9+ hours of sleep. I’ve never fractured or broken anything before; I thought I had strong bones. Guess that was wrong. FMH.

Moving on to a less moribund topic, I just discovered yesterday that my uncle has an encyclopedic collection of volumes of great literary works: stuff like Kant’s Metaphysics, and Spinoza’s Mathematical analysis of Ethics. I’m trying to figure if I should skip them and just spend the rest of my time here in a peacable mindless tv induced trance, or take up the challenge. Most likely, and I just thought of this, I’ll write down all the interesting works I see, and look them up for future reference @ UH.

Last night (this morning, actually), I stayed up until 2:30am watching tv; I only went to bed because it was getting too cold for me to be watching mediocre, at best, tv shows. Tangentially, isn’t it amusingly irritating how, the more cable channels you get, the less value you’re paying for? Like, maybe you’ll get a good movie that you won’t see on regular tv every once in a while, but the rest of the time, you’re just flipping between channels looking for something worth watching. And invariably, it’s hard to access regular channels for whatever reason, so you don’t have your usual fallback shows. Conclusion: I watch too much tv. But back to the point, I think I’m setting a dangerous precedent for myself here. At school, the latest I should go to sleep is probably 12 if I want a good rest, but all vacation the earliest I’ve been sleeping is 1am.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Had a Bad Day Again (3/24/2002)
• My Father (11/28/2003)
• It’s Raining Outside (10/28/2002)

Don’t you just hate the way MSN makes you view msn.com right after you log on? It can be interesting sometimes though– I just read a unexpectedly unbiased review of the band Creed. They can’t sing like the good? bands, but they certainly have spirit. And supposedly, GenX loves spirit (because they don’t have any :). Isn’t it GenY now though? whatever…

Today I had a series of interesting conversations with my uncle, the type I really enjoy: about logic v. reasoning, human secularism, religion and Christianity, relativism v. absolutism, topicalization and stipulating the facts, cloning, law v. science, the nature of truth, the nature of science, statistics and proof, the thermodynamic laws, and hypocrisy. Of course, we didn’t specify the nature of the conversations, they just flowed from one topic naturally into another one, as he was driving me to and from church. I would love to get into them deeply, but that would take time and memory, both of which go against my grain of laziness. Suffice it to say that we both had fun, and more importantly, we learned from each other. I did finish that book Futureland but I have nothing to say about it except it wasn’t nearly as good as I thought, as I hoped it’d be.

I’m really trying to think up an idea for the layout of the site that’s at least moderately striking. So far, I’ve considered the usual colored background of each cell look, but that’s overdone. I have decided to add daily quotes, just cause I think they’re so cool. But I can’t do anything really graphical cause I don’t have access to Photoshop. Or rather, I don’t feel like torturing myself doing anything graphical without access to PS.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Graphical Programming (2/6/2003)
• Anticipation (6/19/2003)
• My summer plans (5/15/2004)

Well, I just edited the site template and added what is my one and only consession to the ’spirit’ of the season, namely the falling snow. I sure didn’t code it myself (view the source HTML for credits); I actually have enough of a life to consider coding in JavaScript to be just a little tedious and unrewarding. DHTML is after all a study in diminishing returns… actually all Web technology is. Once you know the basics: HTML, CSS, and PHP, the rest is sugar-coating. Back to the season: merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all. And yes, I know Christmas day was three days ago– ever heard of the twelve days of Christmas? Speaking of that, I’d appreciate it if someone could email me, or post in a comment, the body of Auld Lang Syne (probably misspelt, but you get the idea)

Wishing for world peace and an end to bigotry all over…

Possibly relevant posts:

• Merry Christmas, suckas! (12/25/2008)
• And now… Christmas! (12/25/2004)
• The why’s and wherefores of Heroes (3/21/2007)

I am not having fun right now, which is serious because the whole point of this thing is to have fun. I thought migration to Movable Type would give me some value added features (and it has) and I needed to transfer from F2S sometime before February, when they rip the guts out of all their freely hosted sites.

But it’s been rough. The thing about it is I’m trying to have more on my site than just this blog, but that doesn’t look like it’ll happen anytime soon. This is only my second posting from under MT. I ported my Blogger entries over in a rare and nightmarishly tedious night of work. And I’m now working on customizing the default template into something worthy of the nom ‘BackSpace’. That’s not coming along very well, as expected; I have no design skills and minimal creativity, after all. But my CTS is acting up, and I’m still determined to get this crap over with and the site in a reasonable semblance of doneness before I go back home. Looks like a race against time. And l33t isn’t the wonder host I hoped it’d be; all today its been acting screwy: this morning I couldn’t visit my website or l33t.ca, and tonight, the connections (SSH, FTP, and web) have all been veery slow. Que sera… at least it’s free slowness. :[

To make it worse, I’ve been using my uncle’s laptop to do all my work on, and although it definitely has more cool points than the desktop, it has its own idiosyncrasies, none of which I’m used to. For one thing, it has a keyboard layout just far enough from standard to cause me grief– when I think I’m pressing Ctrl+C, for example, I’m usually pressing Fn+C. Reminds me of switching from Windows to BeOS in a weird sort of way… Also, lately the internet connection has been acting up, cutting off in the middle of a MT admin task; having to reconnect and retrace your steps can be a pain and a real time drain. Even worse, it has just frozen several times, even in the middle of shutting down– arguably one of the most infuriating times to freeze; if you’re anything like me, when you shutdown, you like to watch the computer just to be sure– waiting for several minutes and listening to it grind away doing basically nothing, is a real teeth grinder.

On the brighter side, today my Aunt carried my sister and I shopping. First we went to Books-a-Million (actually she got the car washed, and whilst that was going on, we went to the book store). I bought a book on 3DS v.3 for a good price, $20? And something else… both nice bargains, I think, and worth the effort to read. Then we visited the Caribbean food store, which sucked you-know-what because it was a dump and didn’t have anything interesting. Next we visited another bookstore, in a successful attempt to seriously drain my wallet :), where I bought nothing but philosophy books. That’s unusual for me– I usually buy mostly computer books, and have never? bought a philosophy book; I guess that Human Sit. class opened a new side of my personality [or added one :]. So anyway, the best book, can’t remember the others, is an overview of all important philosophers, however vaguely and incorrectly they define that category, from the ancients to the moderns. Cool.. oh, the other books were a history of western morals and a book of Francis Bacon’s essays. Actually I would rather have gotten one of the books about sin, evil, and how they are just misconceptions, but I don’t feel like justifying my ways to my parents if they ever discover them. Hopefully they won’t wander into my bedroom while I’m away and discover my cached stack of Nietzsche’s works… tee hee– in a typically twisted mapping, my equivalent to the usual adolescent stash of porn.

I’m also reading a really? good book, FutureLand, that I hijacked from my uncle. I was pleasantly surprised to find him reading science fiction, but then I realized that all the protagonists of the book are black, it deals with black issues, and the author probably graduated from Howard. Need I say more? Why do I even bother challenging my preconceptions of people sometimes?

Well I’m going to go and live life now, just to get more thoughts to blog from. And when I finish that book, I’m definitely going to have a nice blog about that– fodder for the mill aye? … And now I remember why I bother with crap like upgrading to MT and switching to l33t– just so I can get the pleasure of writing my blogticles…

Possibly relevant posts:

• Internet road trip (9/27/2002)
• blogsurfing (7/2/2002)
• Speedier hosting Real Soon Now… (1/9/2002)

Wowsers. I’ve been busy since last I posted. Don’t know where to start, maybe I just won’t. Right now I’m blogging with Wicked Intellect’s new flash interface using the XML-RPC Blogger interface; an excellent proof of concept, but practically , not very useful. It doesn’t even do automatic line-breaking. Oh well, maybe that’ll come in a future version. I also dlled another, more traditional style blog tool. BlogBuddy provides an alternative to the browser-base interfaces: it runs as a traditional win app, but uses the blogger.com interface. Pretty cool, but it would be even more useful if you could write your blogs out, save them to the hd, and upload them later whenever you wanted to/had time to connect to the net. You could do that with a text editor, but would it be as cool? Probably not.

I’m so tired. I’m not used to going out for more than a couple of hours at a time, and then returning to the safety of my computer. But today, I was out and about for more than 6 hours. All because I’m visiting my uncle in Maryland for Christmas. Excuse me if my blog isn’t as coherent as it usually is, I feel strange. Plus too, my uncle is distracting me…

On the good side, I found a new web hoster to replace F2S- l33t.ca. You see how diligent readers are rewarded? There’s always something to learn from me =) Seriously though, l33t.ca is cool– they provide a motherlode of tech for free, and let you do virtual hosting off of them, and you can charge! It’s enough to make me cry. Compare that to F2S- the evil company that I thought for a while, was the best hosting service: they lured in hundreds(?) of sites’ webmasters with lures of free hosting and access to PHP/mySQL, and when they’d taken the bait, dropped the bomb. Pay up, or ship out; and so many people had designed their sites to use PHP/mySQL, myself included. And its so hard to find those offered for free… so you can understand why I love the people who own l33t.ca. Of course, they could just be plotting in the same manner, with a greater degree of seriousness, but I doubt it– they are nothing but a free hosting site. How wonderfully strange! So my new site ‘MindShare’ will be up @ nucoder.l33t.ca sometime soon. I dlled some site designs from OSWD and started messing with them, so I think this site will have some kind of coherent artistic look to it. Hopefully, I’ll also workout a way to base the site on MovableTyple– everysince I saw the site Streams of Consciousness based on that engine, I’ve been drooling to use it.

I also am renewing my knowledge in several areas: Scheme, Haskell, DHTML, CSS, history, and sci-fi =) Isn’t winter break wonderful?

Possibly relevant posts:

• LaTeX blogs– sounds sexy! (8/3/2001)
• It’s alive! Hum, ha ha ha! (6/25/2002)
• Blog Rolling (Rolo-dexing) (2/21/2003)

Last night I got my grades in all my classes off the voice information system @ UH. I did better than I thought I would: made the deans list, all A’s except one A-. The thing that spoils my elation is the fact that A- was in History! American History nonetheless, which I’ve been forced fed for most of my academic life. What a crock. Oh well, no accounting for some TAs crack habits– I just wish it didn’t have to affect my GPA. That’s really all my big news.

A friend also sent me an article on BeOS v. Mac OS X– the tail ends of an ongoing discussion we were having on their relative merits. A 17 page long article! I only read 14 pages and it took me 1:45 to read that much. Surprisingly the guy that wrote it, Scot Hacker, is the guy that wrote the BeOS Bible– I say surprising because MacOS X came out far ahead. Traitor! I did get some useful information from it though: I discovered livejournal.com, a site eerily like a low end, low tech, open source, yet promising blogger, and heard for the first time that Windows is planning to base Longhorn, its next generation OS, on a SQL filesystem. Can’t hardly wait for that… Bet it doesn’t live up to the you-can-bet-its-coming hype though.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Internet road trip (9/27/2002)
• Norbert Wiener (11/16/2005)
• Blog Rolling (Rolo-dexing) (2/21/2003)

Wow, I just finished my US History final. It was long– I actually spent almost all the three hours taking it. But I feel satisfied with my performance, only a perfunctory amount of BS. I better get a good grade too; for the first time ever, I wrote the essays to the recommended length. And I didn’t have to pad either. But, I won’t get too enthusiastic about it because the TA that grades my tests seems to be on crack, perpetually…

Now I have only two more finals to worry about about– Human Sit. and Chemistry. Actually, I have this weird feeling that my Chem final might be right now (I’m in the Honors Lounge typing this, after finishing writing about 12 pages for the US History final– strange aren’t I) and I’m missing it. But, I’ve been told that it is on Thursday; I’ll go with that, gives me more time to study. Plus too, the girl that told me that is right here– reading. Anyway, back on topic– where was I? Ah yes, Human Sit., the bane and joy of my existence, the conceptual self-antonym personified. I haven’t read an entire one of the selections and I don’t know it enough to BS it, so I’m basically screwed if there’s too many questions from that part. Guess I should go read… But this is my break from nonstop studying. I slept less than three and a half hours last night; just studying. I shudder to consider what would happen to my mental health if I didn’t live on campus.

Two more finals… I can do it! I can do it! Cheer me on!

Possibly relevant posts:

• Too much… (3/25/2003)
• And the grades are in… (3/23/2007)
• Pain & Chemistry (3/21/2002)

I just finished studying for the night– went over everything from the PreSocratic Philosophers to Thomas Paine’s Comon Sense. All my creative juices are flowing now, for what its worth. So, in lieu of actually manifesting talent or thought, I will palaver until I run dry… I had an interesting time reviewing Plato’s Republic, one of my favorite philosophical works (not that I’ve read many). The fact that I had been reading Nietzsche earlier added a new spin to my understanding of what Plato was saying. Plus, reading D.H.’s writings about viral belief systems and memes helped me to see how the PreSocratic philosophers had influenced Plato’s worldview: in response to Heraclitus’ position that the world is in constant flux, for instance, he formed the Platonic forms so that ideas such as virtue and goodness wouldn’t be subjected to the forces of flux.

This is like a mini-review session… Now I need to keep up this level of alertness and add a ton of synergism into the mix and I should be ready for my Human Sit. final on Wednesday. I can do it! Feeling Livy’s lactea ubertas right now– that made no sense, but had to be said. Maybe I can work in a way to use/mention Nietzsche’s views on how Socrates’ elenchus– precursor to the dialectic– helped bring about/ was a symptom of the Grecian decline. That would be sweet, as my sister says.

Anywho, back to reality. I finally went to Barnes and Nobles and spent that $50 gift certificate I received from my father’s kind-hearted friend, Condell, and his wife. I am proud of my purchases for once; there was no doubt concerning the topics of the books I would buy: only those which I will find of eternal utility– computer ’stuff’. But, instead of the usual one computer book for $50 that I end up wondering why I bought because a) I really don’t find it interesting or useful, or b) I could have just gotten it from the library, I managed to but three computer books. Anyone who has ever tried buying computer books from one of the bon ton bookstores knows what a thing that is! I got a pocket reference to HTML 4.0, one for CSS, and a ‘quickstart guide’ to DHTML and CSS (usually I wouldn’t buy a ‘quickstart guide’). So, expect a definite stylistic increase in this site soon. My main motivation in purchasing these books was to increase my pleasure in, and hence use of, the Internet as a publishing medium. I figure, if I enjoy creating beautiful writings on the net, I’ll write more. And I figure, if I write more, I’ll think/learn more– always a good thing. That’s why I love blogger.

I think I bring a new meaning to the phrase ‘one track mind.’ Or maybe I’m just continuing a grand tradition stretching back to Thales of Miletus, the father of modern philosophy :). Whatever. Se la vie.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Random plans for the week (3/7/2007)
• Writing MT Plugins (12/19/2003)
• Update (7/9/2002)

I’ve been wondering about my arrogance: why is it and what does it mean? I am arrogant, that much I’ve realized and am willing to accept. But is it a justified arrogance? Is there such a thing as justified arrogance? I’m wondering mostly because I’ve noticed whenever I’m talking to people, I have a tendency to ‘test’ them or talk in unusual words, or go off on a tangent. Not to mention when I blog, my thoughts are usually expressed in a self-congratulatory tone, “Oh how clever I am.”

The origin of this arrogance, as far as I can ascertain, is in my belief that I am intellectually superior to most people. I’ve never even dared to think that out loud until now, but voicing an observation won’t make it more or less true so there you go. Now, I defend this belief: no one I know is as interested in the intellectual realm, however vaguely defined that is, as I; exploring our world and trying to ‘think outside the box’ is what makes life interesting to me. I just can’t see how others can be content with living an unexamined life– probably a weakness on my part, but a truth nonetheless. So when I say intellectually superior, I don’t mean to imply that this stems from my being any ’smarter’, I believes it stems from my being more interested in the whys and wherefores and more appreciative of the answers to those questions. I would love to be politically correct and egalitarian in outlook, yet internally I value intellectuals more than anyother type of person– without them, where would we be? This is a paradox I’ve been struggling with for a long time– if all men are equal, why do I value some more? My conclusion is that some men are better than others– a heavily qualified statement. Very Nietzchean.

So is my arrogance justified? I still can’t say: I’d love to say it is, to do otherwise would be to make myself a hypocrite. Yet, I don’t like my belief that some men are superior. I feel uncomfortable with the historical consequences of such a thesis: slavery, oppression of women (incidentally, when I say men, I am inclusive of both genders), the Holocaust, etc.

Possibly relevant posts:

• arrogance, mine (p2) (8/23/2003)
• Whistling while I whine (10/17/2002)
• Whoa! (3/13/2002)