Life Outside PLT1

A Post Longwards Bound

How easy is the task of creating a long post without making use of pronouns?

Not easy at all. Pronouns are like nuts and bolts in a large contraption — metaphorically, grammar. Very useful.

Especially confounding is the following fact: words can belong to multiple
parts of speech, being polymorphic. As a rule, no polymorphic pronouns are
used here. Just for fun.

Consequently, several natural idioms are precluded from use, severely
deforming the tone of the text, worsening as the length increases.

A programmer would relate, if given a similar rule: to not use local variables
in code. Lexical referencing is a powerful technique to have; otherwise
unnatural protracted constructs result.

Fortunately, however, not all referencing is lost without pronouns.
Adverbs can pick up the slack a little. For example, “here”, “thus”, etc are
helpful. Similarly with prepositions (strongly encouraging spatial thinking, for example: see below).

Perhaps circumventing the rules, as described above, makes the exercise too easy.
How about disallowing adverbs or prepositions too?

No wait. Sod that.

Fear and Loathing in Redmond.

Its escalated to all out war. Seriously. Microsoft are now screaming the corporate equivalent of “MEANY BUMS!!” at criticisms or observations of their last strategic decisions. They are facing difficulty breaking into wider markets than just their traditionl bulwark: the desktop OS. Windows CE is loosing ground to other embedded OSes (like linux for the OLPC, despite MS bullying; and ubuntu on intel’s MID; the iPhone runs a cut down version of Mac OS X; the Motorazr2 runs linux), and their recent jab at Linux by publicly claiming they own patents that Linux infringes, without revealing them (which is because their old stooge and puppet SCO is dying and this was EXACTLY what SCO was doing to the Linux community, the community (lead by Red Hat, Ubuntu and Mandriva is basically telling Microsoft to fuck off.). Zune is a failure (despite misreporting its sales targets: people said it had broken 1M units, and it was actually the sales VP saying that he EXPECTED it to hit 1M units within the next three months: worse still, i cant find any current sales figures, but heres some biased ones anyway), and the 44.6G USD offer on Yahoo! (that hasnt yet gone through). They did do well with the Xbox 360: thats a neat machine (I’m still buying a Wii though), but the original Xbox was a well marketed joke.

The interesting thing about the Yahoo! offer (which despite Gate’s call for “kinder capitalism” was pretty fucking hostile) is that naturally the official Google blog raised some concerns about inter-operability and of Microsoft repeating their business strategy for the desktop market with internet services. Microsoft issued a statement basically whining that Google is close to a monopoly and that they are going to make a more fair marketplace by doing so. How? you morons: if you take the Microsoft market share and the Yahoo! market share and unify them into the Microsoft market share, you havent changed the market use, you’ve just lessened the number of large players. well ha-ha: Yahoo! might just jump in bed with that sexy young Google, rather than the Microsoft old-man-with-bling-a-tan-and-a-porsche.

The other major event is the OOXML vs. ODF war. Its turned into all out name calling. IBM voted against fast tracking OOXML through the ISO standards application. For Good Reasons. but then Microsoft got angsty, and IBM responded. When Microsoft complain that its a standard: don’t listen, its not yet controlled by a standards body of the caliber of ISO or IEEE: its an ECMA standard and you can buy those. Also, don’t believe them when they say that Sun and IBM control ODF, they handed it on to an independent standards body: OASIS. whats really funny here is that Microsoft are supporting ODF (but probably not completely) in office ‘07, partly after pressure from the Belgians and others. This means that you can now use ODF on iWorks {edit: that was a rumour, and is not true}, KOffice, Open Office and MS Office. One piece that i thought interesting is that the OOXML example files don’t even validate against MS’s own XSD, which I find personally entertaining because I have had hell with MSXML in the past (such as not accepting chunked encoding for webservices and not documenting if a read method actually advances and consumes part of the input stream or resets to the last position (some do some don’t)), and I have never had any issues with SAX/Xerces/Xalan.

All this adds up to serious fear and loathing in Redmond, WA. Its like the Halloween documents all over again: but public and more desperate on Microsoft’s part. Desperation bought out of confusion bought out of an inability to understand and so capitalise on a shifting market (much like the RIAA). And this isn’t an “o yey, microsuck gonna go away” rant. They wont. Some of the stuff they do is damn useful, some, I daresay, even good: but they are used to operating from a dominant position like they had when the computing world was all about OS’s and sovereign applications, but now the computing world is about availability and services. But for services to be available and useful, they have to present in an accepted standard fashion: which means open standards. And the Microsoft strategy has been to offer their own standards and make them dominate. We seem to be moving away from that: standard data but with your preference for interface/services/performance. After all, if there was no difference between the document formats, would you still use MS Office with its pricetag? or would you install KDE on windows and use koffice or just install open office or maybe even go mac? When you have all the water, you can charge whatever you like, until someone digs a well…

For a finisher, heres a funny quote from somewhere…

A fatal exception in THE TRUTH has occurred at 0028:C0011E36 in MS BUSSTRAT (08) + 00010E36. The current business strategy will now close.

* Press any key to terminate the current business strategy.
* Press CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart your business. You will lose any market value in your current business strategy.

For what it’s worth

I am not an educated man in regards to the Christian faith. I have not studied. The most I can say is that I’ve read the Bible from start to finish (I have not read the Apocrypha) but I certainly cannot recall it’s entirety. I’ve read a significant proportion of the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book while sitting bored through sermons in those churches that utilize the full text (if you’re ever at Holy Trinity Cathedral and the center ribbon bookmarks have been plaited and knotted at the end there’s a reasonable chance I’m responsible).

But in these years, I’ve noticed a rather sorry state of affairs. On the outside you could assume that everyone who proclaims themselves a Christian is a nice person, and has a wealth of knowledge on their faith. After all, isn’t it the most important thing to them?

Well guess what. It’s not true. And I doubt it ever was.

The different denominations within the Christian faith are well defined, and you’d expect that their members would know what each believes. So a simple question of whether it’s okay to baptize infants should draw a monotone response no matter which person you asks who identifies themselves as Anglican or from someone who is a Baptist. It doesn’t. And the reason is thus:

Not once did they consider what they were saying when they decided to become Anglican, or Catholic or any one of dozens of denominations that differ themselves solely on the answers to these sorts of questions. That’s without even considering if they actually believe at all!

First we have a blue rectangle to represent the priests/ministers, etc of the church. They know stuff (well sometime they make massive mistakes, but they’re only human after all nobody is perfect) and it’s generally their job to maintain order and make sure that everyone is kept along the straight and narrow.

Then for our cyan segment we have the general non church population. Doesn’t believe, but there’s still a range of knowledge.

Green would be typical of any modern church denomination. Lots of enthusiasm but to be honest they’re in danger of becoming a creepy cult and they often teach lots of strange stuff. You might notice there’s a ‘doesn’t believe’ segment there, but I’ll get onto that later.

For me the most interesting is the red sector. Typical of a large mainstream church. Some of the congregation knows what’s going on, others don’t. But here’s the bit that a lot of people would find strange. The sheer number of people who don’t believe. Why are they there?

Religion is a bit of sticking point for a lot of people when it comes choosing partners. Typically speaking males will pick up the religion of their partner. Going out on a limb here, I’d say that if you can swap as easily as you change clothes, then you probably don’t believe since it’s obviously not important to you. And of course the Church knows about this. Anglicans are so lax about this they only require two or three services per year for you to be attendance of to be considered a member.

Hence you end up with a lot of people who have great knowledge of what you’re meant to believe but don’t believe. And to be quite frank I don’t mind, often they’re good people who get a lot of work done. I’d much rather have people who don’t believe, then people who do believe who are a danger to themselves and those around them.

Take the Exclusive Brethren for example. I hate them. The Church’s job is in fellowship or something like that, in my personal opinion it boils down to teaching people not to be little shits and looking out for one another. It’s not meant to be about controlling people’s lives and destroying them if they should dare question you. It is not about oppressing women. It is not about making people’s lives a living hell.

Even the larger mainstream churches are guilty of this.

Because of the flexible format of its 7 sessions, you can spread out the information over the course of a year, or whatever time frame best suits your needs. Good Sex offers options galore, so you can pick and choose among the many activities, discussion starters, and Bible studies to custom fit each session to your group’s needs and maturity level. In addition, Good Sex contains suggestions on how to get the support of church leaders, keep parents in the loop, and train other youth volunteers.

Good Sex: Youth Leader’s Curriculum

Asides from restraining a snicker over ‘activities’; Why is it the churches job to function in this area? If anything it was their parents or their schools. Why meddle where you don’t belong. How on earth can you justify arguing for the restriction of teaching evolution in schools. (It’s not just in America, even here in New Zealand there are schools that do this, that miss out massive developments in science. It does nothing for the kids, and puts them at a massive disadvantage). You simply cannot, it never was and never will be their jurisdiction. They should be using their truly enormous resources to try and make the world a better place, then waste time on stuff like that. Focus on the stuff that’s really important.

Simply put, stop using your religion as a crutch to force your own views on people. If you want to be ultra fundamentalist and try that, stop being so retarded. You’ve got a text that is self contradicting in places, don’t even try. It’s like trying to find the drop cable length in IEEE 802.3. You can’t live your own life like it says to if you take it literally, so don’t be a pain.

The Bible was never meant to be a thousand step program of things to do and not to do, that if you followed them all to the letter you’d magically goto heaven. I honestly can’t see God being annoyed with you for not showing the priest your clothes that have mildew on them. It sounds more like stuff the priests desperately would have wanted in there as they tried to keep everyone alive. As it was taking way too much effort to keep the Jews alive. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was stuff in there saying that trying to eat rocks is a bad idea. You could probably replace Leviticus entirely with warning labels. I can’t even really see God having a problem if you want to sleep around left, right and center, what I can see a problem though is where other people are getting hurt because of this.

Public service announcement #1

In a fit of madness I bought a bottle of Peach Vodka. By now I should be used to doing dumb stuff and avoid them, especially bottles which look like they’re filled with ditch water that’s settling. But no I decided to continue along this path and then try and drink the stuff.

Bad idea.

Grabbing one of the Johnnie Walker tumblers on my desk I proceeded to pour myself a shot.
Which smells like a the syrup you get let over in canned peaches. Here in lies the problem. It doesn’t taste anything like peach syrup, it just tastes like vodka. Trying to drink it is akin to thinking something is caramel sauce, when in fact is is salted Tabasco sauce. It’s incredibly hard not to gag while drinking. Don’t get me wrong, normal vodka isn’t a problem to drink, just not when it smells like it’s something else entirely.

So in an attempt to save the situation I went and got some coke. Surely coke can make _anything_ drinkable.

+ =

I’m unsure what is worse. Something that tastes entirely different to what you expect, and something that tastes like rotten peaches.

Then to further compound the problem, I thought to myself. Well maybe it gets better if you drink more…

Half a bottle later and it still tastes terrible, I just care less. But I can feel warm and fuzzy on the inside knowing that I’ve saved others from this fate. Chris swears that it might taste reasonable with Sprite. But I’m uncertain whether the bottle will last long enough for me to purchase some.

I went and saw Sum41 in concert when I was 16

I’m sitting here at my desk, bopping away to Sum41 - Fat Lip, drinking my 1.5litre bottle of water, having no idea why I am writing because I don’t have a topic to write about, so instead you are all going to get to know what tabs I currently have open and why:

Tab1: PLT1.com -> Posting
Tab2: Trademe.co.nz -> Looking for somewhere to live
Tab3: YahooXtra.co.nz -> Browsing Gossip Pages
Tab4: FitSugar.com -> Often updated site about healthy things
Tab5: RedStrawberries.co.nz -> My website
Tab6: YouTube.com -> Now bopping away to Numa Numa song
Tab7: Facebook.com -> Playing Scrabble
Tab8: Homeads.co.nz -> Looking at a place off trademe
Tab9: Tri.co.nz -> Thinking about doing this as a challenge
Tab10: Sourceforge.net -> Looking for free AVI file size compressing program
Tab11: FitMusic.com -> Looking for good playlists to work out too

Still bopping away. It’s nice and sunny today. I think I will go get an icecream later on. And I will enjoy the icecream as I scramble to stuff it as quickly into my mouth as possible so it doesn’t melt

Avoidance of work - surrealist rubbish and other ugandan space probes

A surrealist poem by Daniel Bertinshaw, featuring an interjection by Daniela Dunn.

fishes swimming in souffle, fishes dancing on a hat!
but these fishes have whiskers so they must be cats.
cats have no hats, so there are no hats, except on my head, which is where i lost it tomorrow.
–
CUTTLEFISH!
–
a cuttlefish without a cuttle would perhaps be some kind of farming machinery. except in the rain: then it would be a fine dessert.
or perhaps a desert. where there is nothing, so i shall go there and see everything.

Thoughts from the mind of a female

O man, the phrase what a week it’s been doesn’t quite cover it. For starters, it’s Tuesday. Then there is the whole fact that it’s not just what has been, but also what is coming. The whole christmas thing. I think that even if it wasn’t christmas time, well, no, long drawn out periods like this only happen in the coming up to christmas time. It’s the whole holiday thing. We have 2 parts to our year, the first half and the second half. The first half has *turns out google search is better than yahoo search and that the answer is most easily found on wikipedia* 11 statutory holidays + their city aniversary day. These are days that us normal people who work in offices and stuff get to have off. So out of these 12 days, 9 of them are in the first half of the year, meaning that the stretch for the second half of the year is LONG. 3 public holidays, but only one of them really count (Christmas and Boxing Day don’t really count because they are so close to New Years. So from the first Monday in June, till the 4th Monday in October, we have no public holidays. Bummer huh?

Work for the better part of the week does suck. It’s time you can’t spend playing WoW, going to the beach, sleeping during the middle of the day etc. You have to sit at your desk, serve the customers, restock the shelves, nail some wood together, whatever you do, that whilst it may or may not be fun at the beginning, it gets repeditive. PLEASE, just a little bit more variation. How about more cake, more lollies in the lolly jar, more game time at work! Because even Flash games get boring. And the ones that aren’t boring, that you can play for hours, DON’T HAVE A PAUSE BUTTON! This is, incredibly annoying, because the one piece of work that comes in when you are half way through this game is urgent, meaning you have to lose the game.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind working. In fact, I work at a great job. It’s just a lot to do with the “when there is a lack of work to do” you still need to be avaliable durning certain hours.

They took away our lolly jar of nice lollies and put yucky lollies in it, because we were eating too many of the nice ones. Now even the health fit lady is screaming for chocolate! I come prepared tho. I bring my chocolate chip museli bar and a few mini cookies in with me each day. I eat my breakfast cereal with fruit in the morning, chew gum to give me something to do, eat lunch then once it gets to the 3pm slug stage, i pull out my museli bar and cookies. They not only taste yummy, they also make me feel more speical than anyone else because i have cookies and they don’t! I also have managed to survive the whole drinking 3 cups of coffee a day so far. I just sit here with my mizone bottle drinking cold water (we have a ice water tap). Usally manage to get through 3ish bottles a day, only filled up my second bottle of the day tho today.

Still reading?

Me on the left, My mate Taz on the right. I like her hair this colour. Photo was taken almost three years ago. I still have both tops that I was wearing in that photo. I think the jeans ripped.

They have done up the park across the road from work. This means that there are swings. And these aren’t pissy kid swings either, they are designed to hold adults Swings are cool. Turns out I still get nauseas from going too high too fast tho. Doesn’t matter, swings are cool.

Someone buy me a 8800GTS.

Still no work to do.

My Site

Untitled Post

It’s times like these, drunk at 4am and unable to sleep due to the fact that I’ve just downed 2 cans of red bull, that I like to sit back and ponder the framework of things that are. I’m sitting in the dark, pounding on a keyboard like some Shakespearean monkey (of Hamlet fame), the soft glow of the screen providing just enough ambient light for me to type by. I consider the nature of society and how human failings are (at least in theory) compensated by being part of a greater whole. The question I now pose is; given an infinite number of humans (provided we don’t wipe ourselves out, re: nuclear/chemical/biological warfare, or nature wiping us out re:SARS, Superbugs, influenza), ultimately, is the direction that our society is headed in pre-determined by the nature of our communal existence, or is human group behaviour sufficiently random that our future cannot be predicted. This brings us to the classic Sci-Fi of Asimov in the Foundation series, where it is imagined that human behaviour in large enough groups is, while not completely deterministic, predictable to a large enough degree (and error is not compounded by recursive calculation in a manner that would reduce the the reliable timeframe to a useless length) that humanity can be steered around rough patches and (hopefully) avoid tearing ourselves apart.

The trouble with predicting the motions of large groups (assuming that soceity is predictable in a manner similar to the one outlined above) is that it falls down in the face of individuals that exist are more than a mere dimple on a population chart. People who live in society, but do not behave the same way as the rest of it, propagating ripples throughout our neatly arrayed functions and variables.

The trouble is, that given the question “Can’t we all just get along?” the answer is so often a resounding “No” when queried against the prevailing nature of the society the question is posed to (vis a vi, the middle east conflict).

Are we all horrible, selfish people who can’t see far enough past the end of our own limited existences to see the bigger picture? Has our society shaped us in a way that our children and our children’s children are not going to amount to anything more than we have? That they’ll continue the same petty grievances against groups of people they don’t know?

What do you want from life?

What do you want the next generation to get from life?

If you’re looking for some kind of clever argument, some final point that I’m building towards, I assure you I don’t have one. I’m just some drunk lunatic with a keyboard and a propensity to embarrass myself when I think too hard.

Ignorance and complacency will be the death of us.

(Also, your giraffe is on fire)

Sober Addendum: I’m not sure exactly wtf I was thinking, regardless here it is, make what you will of it.

Yet another reason why the bible was written by a bunch of small balls men

1 Corinthians 11:5

But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved.

1 Corinthians 11:7

For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man

 I point this in attention to all the little boy shagging priests out there.. You know who you are

I’M NOT UNIQUE!

The late night boredom of “Google yourself” revealed very little. But within the couple of DCI links and one back here to PLT1, I found this person:

Holy crap.

Now as you may have guessed “Laus” is an uncommon surname. Imagine my surprise when I found this guy! But wait there’s more!

MOAR Doppelganger!

Yeeeeerrrp. This seems to be the same guy, at least to my quick examination. So he also is deaf? And likes basketball? Funny old world. And it’s not like i selected this guy at random, he’s they only bloody one other than me!