sullust.org

Maybe I shouldn't be writting any code tonight, I'm having a hard enough time just using Blogger.

Oh my god! Twice! You fucking cock monger of a blog management tool!!!

So after writting an even shorter version of what I said the first time I'll write a shorter one still:

Me want Mac, Apple want too much money, OS X good, hardware slow, price high. Me want, but me not gonna buy.

This is a great big "fuck you" to blogger for ditching my post. I'm almost positive I clicked on Ok.

I really should proof read this thing, but right now I don't feel like it. Maybe later.

If I never have to watch Hilde butcher another room on Trading Spaces it shan't be too soon. My god that woman has the capacity to make an at least marginally good idea turn to complete crap. She also apparently pays no attention to details beyond the festering thoughts which initially fell into her mind. For example, the one where she covered every square inch of a bathroom's walls with fake flowers. Okay... sounds decent at first, but aside from the difficulty of putting all those things up, fake flowers are not made from the most attractive materials on close inspection, and they are not particularly resilient. So let us consider, a bathroom which is traditionally the smallest room in your house will have objects all over the walls which don't stand up well to close inspection. These cheaply made pieces of god only knows what material will also be exposed to a steam room environment every time somebody thinks it might be a good idea to take a bath. Yeah... I'm sure it smelled great when those things started to rot. This oversight however does not begin to compare with this evenings travesty. The victim is a dining room and her assault is relatively simple to describe, black on absolutely everything with the exception of very large (most of a wall) white drapes with some other white accents here and there. So far so good, however in the middle of the room sits the most garishly painted yellow table one can imagine made worse by the chairs which were painted the exact same color. Now the yellow looked cool with the black if you like the police tape thing, but this table was HUGE and really just took over the room. So now we've got a crappy room but it gets worse. The damned woman left the carpet as is. She left the beige carpet as is. No rug, no nothing. So now our color scheme is black, white, yellow, and beige. Lovely.

On to other more heady topics. Towards the end of The Matrix Revolution Agent Smith is prattling on to Neo as he is apt to do. During this particular diatribe he makes reference to love, hope, and compassion as foolish constructs of the human mind. Each an attempt to give purpose to purposeless lives. This got me to thinking about purpose in life and while Smith and Neo were flying around in circles (I was so waiting for Neo to use the Kame-ha-me-ha wave) this is the conclusion I came to.

I subscribe to the ethical theory of utilitarianism and have for quite some time. To this point nothing has convinced me that it is anything but the most sensible, consistent, and most importantly applicable moral principle in existence. Objective moral statements (i.e. the ten commandments) are perhaps easier to apply because they are so straightforward, but anything which attempts to define all the actions one should and should not do to be moral is either going to be broad or too long to remember. If you are not familiar with it utilitarianism goes something like this: happiness is, in principle anyway, quantifiable to a person. Meaning that if I get a million dollars in the mail I'll feel a happiness quotient of, say, 1000. Conversely if Bill Gates gets a million dollars in the mail, he'll feel a happiness quotient of 100. An action which causes a net positive happiness over all existence is good, an act which causes a greater increase in net happiness is better. There's the first mildly tricky bit, there are good actions, and there are better actions. An action which causes a net negative happiness is obviously evil. The theory is somewhat hedonistic in that it claims all goodness is derived from happiness and some people have a difficult time accepting that. Some feel that an act which makes you unhappy and nobody else happy is still the "right thing to do." I personally believe that's bull dookie but arguing the point is outside of what I'm talking about. Anyway, I'll go on about the theory a bit just to flush out the idea. Most of the standard axioms of morality are still true in utilitarianism. For example murder is almost always bad because it tends to make lots of people unhappy while generating happiness in few. There are of course exceptions, the most tired being "Wouldn't it be good to kill Hitler?" Probably so. "Would it be evil to kill Gandhi?" Yep, I imagine there would be allot of sad people over that one, and not too many happy ones. What about this one though, is it evil to kill, say, an unhappy hobo who nobody knows and nobody cares about. His death will go completely unnoticed. If you ultimately enjoy killing him, and his murder doesn't lead to some long term psychological problems that make you unhappy, then yes it is indeed a good and moral act to kill the hobo. He is personally pulling down the net happiness of the world, and you'll get some pleasure from killing him (you psychotic bastard). Once dead, the hobo ceases to factor into the equation because he's dead. Dead people, as far as we know, aren't happy or sad, they're neutral. Some folks get hung up on that too because "murder is always bad." Really? Killing Hitler wasn't bad, what's so special about a hobo? Anyway, I think you get the idea. If you wish to be a good and moral person you should create as much happiness in the world as you possibly can while minimizing the amount of unhappiness you cause. And don't bother bringing up how it's impossible to actually quantify happiness or the difficulties in extrapolating it across all people and into the future. No it's not possible, but we're not idiots, I think most people have a pretty good idea of what will generate happiness or unhappiness.

I must also mention that I doubt there is an afterlife. In deed I hope there isn't an afterlife. Things are just a damned site simpler if after we die our consciences poofs from existence. No it isn't depressing, no it doesn't make life pointless (I'll get to that in a bit). You won't care about whether your mind will live on because your mind won't exist anymore, there will be no mind to care if it continues on or not.

So those are the two positions I'm coming from, and they are why I don't feel bad if the following is true: life has no more purpose than does a random nebula millions of light years away. Our existence is merely the byproduct of an enormously complex chemical reaction which by chance happened to form in a way that provided it the ability to multiply itself. The chemical reactions which did not multiply themselves didn't and so we don't see them as much. Fire is just as much a life form as us only it's too good at multiplying and so often burns out its food source. Or it rains.

So life has no real purpose and no goal. Everything any human will ever do will be reduced to naught when the universe dies of entropy and that will be the end of that. In essence, life is pointless. I can't quite figure out how to segue into this so I won't bother (it is just blog after all). I feel there is a purpose in life, but one that is purely a construct of the human mind. It is by no means an objective purpose and if you don't follow it you're certainly not going to piss off some over being who carefully laid out a goal for humanity. You have been granted a consciousness which is capable of feeling, at the most basic level, pleasure and pain, happiness and unhappiness. So has everyone else. We're all big walking talking pleasure/pain receptors wandering around doing stuff until our time runs out and our chemical reactions stop functioning. It therefore seems that as long as we're all conscious we might as well make that consciousness at least pleasant. I certainly want the next 50-60 years of my life to be enjoyable. If they're just going to be years of unmitigated pain then I might as well die now and not bother. If I'm right about the afterlife, or lack thereof, I certainly won't care that I'm dead, I won't care about anything because I will no longer exist. However I'm not going to do that because there is the large possibility that I'll feel a good amount of pleasure in the future and quite frankly, I really like pleasure. I bet you like pleasure too, so lets make a deal. I'll try hard to make sure you have a good time if you'll make sure I have a good time. We'll live out our lives in relative happiness, have a good time with what we've got, and then it'll be over.

If that isn't quite gelling I'll state it a different way. You have been given the opportunity to feel happiness and so has everyone else. You have also been given the ability to generate happiness in both yourself and others. Your missions, should you choose to accept it, is to maximize both amounts. Yours so your life is worth living, and other people's just because it's a nice thing to do. If you don't want to maximize other peoples happiness that's fine, but if you start screwing with my happiness don't be surprised when I try to stop you. I want to be happy and I'll be damned if I'm going to let you cock it up. If you want to be self sacrificing and create as much happiness in the world as possible, even at the expense of your own, then I'm not going to complain. Just don't expect to get anything out of it other than gratitude and a shitty life, unless of course you acquire happiness from generating it, but that's getting more complicated than we need.

So that would be my poorly argued statement. There is no meaning to life, and the only purpose is to create as much happiness as you can. If that's not good enough for you I'm sorry, because happiness is about the only thing in life you have any control over.

You know, it's times like these that I start to realize I'm just not that good of a writter. That, or my own ideas are so poorly developed they cannot be properly expressed. Oh well, it is what it is.

Lets see...

I'm hungry with no food (worth eating), thirsty with nothing to drink but tap water, my contacts are killing me but I'm out of solution, and I'm sleepy as hell. So what better to do than engage in some good old fashioned American narcissism

You may notice the little comment thingy on the posts now. You can indeed add comments to your heart's delight. You may also notice that in internet explorer the comment kinda borks the layout. This does not happen in Mozilla. I'm not sure whose at fault (internet explorer for breaking the CSS standard in a bad way or Mozilla breaking it in a good way) but I have a pretty good idea.

Oh well, it'll stay there for now, layout screwups and all while I try to figure out how to fix it.

Yeah... so it's like 4:30 am and I'm finally finished with what I had to do. I would have been finished by about midnight or 1 but of course I had to screw around with this thing, the textamerica thing, and other stuff. At least I was entertained while periodically working.

While I'm awake though, I find this whole moblog thing fascinating. The concept is that the blogging site has to support the ability to create entries from a mobile device. The most common (and possibly only) means being to just email the post up and have it thrown up auto-magically. Of course the difficulty of mobile phone keypads hinders things, but with devices like this and this that becomes much less of a problem. The first one folds out into a full sized keyboard if you didn't know. Throw in the picture taking capability and things get pretty interesting. Amateur journalism aside, the ability to document vacations or just trips to any other interesting place become far easier. Spontaneous ideas which are impossible to post at the time become trivial to put online. Of course you could just write the idea on a piece of paper and post it later, but do you really think that's going to happen? I know I wouldn't do it.

Blah... I'm mega big time sleepy, but I know if I get in the bed the alarm clock will completely fail to wake me up and I'll miss the class I stayed up all night to work for. I can try my tried and true "go to sleep in the bath tub so that pain gets me up in the morning" but I always feel like shit when I do that. If you didn't know, being submerged underwater for around 30 minutes will make your skin sort of wrinkle up. Being submerged for three hours with cause quite a bit of pain in your fingers and toes. It makes it really hard to tie your shoes let me tell ya.

What better way to play with my new silly toy than to create a blog just for the pictures I take with it? I have to admit though this thing is maximum cool. Essentially you snap your picture then you may either email it to a given address through the phone (eating your precious monthly allotment of bandwidth) or wait and post it from a computer. Either way the pictures magically show up on the page all nice and purdy like. So bandwidth allowing I'll probably use that allot. Or maybe not, who knows.

Holy mother of god is it ever hard to find decent information about cell phone ringtones and what not online. I mean damn! What a pain in the ass. All I get are sites selling phones/ringtones, those weird auto generated pages that show up on google from time to time with really long weird url's, and silly blogs that don't help. Seriously, try to do a search on installing a new ringtone (without going through the call in with the phone business) and see how far you get.

See the deal is, I got a new phone. This one to be exact, which I would call a silly toy if it weren't freaking cheap! I mean, you've got a big old color screen, polyphonic and midi ringtones, internet connectivity, blue tooth, flash memory support, java, and a digital camera for $50. How can a human say no to that? My only complaint is that it's a bit on the big side. It's about the size of those Nokia phones every body has, you know, the ones they give away in cereal boxes and sell face plates for at gas stations? Yeah, that one. Anyway, turns out the OS for this thing is actually skinnable so I went looking for stuff on that. No such luck. I did find a site that would apparently let you download many skins. I say apparently because while the link to the site was in English, the site itself was in French. Le sigh...

So I thought maybe I'd figure out how to install these midi ring tones I downloaded (I will have the Final Fantasy chocobo song as my ringtone) with similar success. Man, this whole internet thing is a bunch of bull hookey if you ask me.

-p.s. did I hallucinate the new blogger interface or was it just for Safari when I was using the Mac?

Well this is different (they changed the blogger admin layout)

Anyway, I'm sitting here at the computer lab in front of an iMac and the only thing I can say is "Why oh why does aqua have to be so tasty?!" I swear this UI is just about the nicest thing I've used. I've slowly gotten more and more used to the Mac layout and the more I use it the more I dig it. This 17" LCD isn't hurting anything either. The specific reason I'm here is I knew these things had Bluetooth built in and my new cell phone supports it, so I was going to see if I could get some of the pictures I took off of the phone through Bluetooth. No luck so far, but that's because I'm not an administrator.

Still, while I'm using this thing, I'm really digging it. Even this weird keyboard is kind of cool. If you haven't used a new Mac keyboard, the layout is more or less the same a standard PC keyboard, but the keys are made out of some material that is really smooth and soft. It sounds silly, but it really does make things nicer. I remember reading somewhere about never skimping on your keyboard, mouse, and monitor because those are the only three parts of your computer you physically interact with, and their quality can go a long way in determining how much you like it. That axiom really seems true now.

So, the more I use my computer for just getting tasks done, and the less I use it for games, the more and more attractive Mac's become. I'm not saying that a Mac is any better for word processing than windows. Hell, for that particular task Linux works out just fine, but if you're going to be sitting in front of the thing doing nothing but reading email, browsing the web, and writing documents; you might as well be working on something with a slick ass user interface. And if it supports remote X sessions all the better! It's been a while since I've written a program through anything but SSH.