December 2004 Archives

I feel systemically unproductive and useless: as in the way that you imagine that those people who sit around and watch TV all day must feel. Jon's having a foosball tournament. I should have gone. He didn't call me back. So I watched scenes from the illegal copy of "Napoleon Dynamite" that he burned me for Hanukkah. I think that well over half of my friends either don't celebrate Christmas or celebrate Hanukkah instead. In fact, I can only think of a few people that do celebrate Christmas, or maybe I'm just exaggerating. But that's beside the point. In the past two minutes I just had two... well, since we're supposed to be in the holiday spirit, I'll call them "grand revelations".

Revelation the first:
I spent about 80 seconds reading some random blogs to which I have links on my site. It's absolutely unbelievable how appallingly awful and putrid AND nausea-inducing some of this writing is. Consider this: consider how indescribably worthless of a job I did writing that first paragraph. Now consider that the penmanship that went into that paragraph is probably better than the majority of the broad spectrum blog entries on the web. It seems like I'm repeating myself... have I written about this before? Probably, but that's not the point. The point IS, however, that I am a bad writer, and as a bad writer I am still better than most people of age similar to mine, which means that anyone who spends more time reading blogs of multiple people between the ages of 0 and 18 than they do the newspaper--or any other work that has actually been published, for that matter--is almost as stupid as me, not to mention becoming even stupider as the time goes on. You see, I actually write this godforsaken tripe, which, even if it were good, would still imply my stupidity per what I like to call "stupidity by association": which eloquently segues into more run-on sentences and ellipses:

La Segunda Revelación:
In the past several months, I have been making failing attempt to secure a free iPod from www.freeipods.com. Since craigslist no longer allows people to post advertisements for iPod referrals, I have to rely on trying to convince my friends and family who possess credit cards that this is not actually a scam. Needless to say, this is quite possibly the most futile enterprise on which I have ever embarked. I was feeling reflective and contemplative today, so I pondered the odds for this offer to succeed. I admit that in my enthusiasm to get the free iPod, I may have overestimated my ability to actually successful refer 5 people. Dad did sign up, for which I am grateful, but I think that beyond him and my mom there was a grand total of about zero people who would actually do this.

At the same time I figured out how www.freeipods.com can afford to offer free iPods! It's pretty brilliant actually. If every person who signed up for it actually completed the offer, then the site would go broke. Most people, like myself, probably get a few people to join and complete an offer, and then they either give up or forget about the whole thing. So rather than get 5 completions of offers per iPod, the Gratis Network probably gets somewhere between 10 and 20. At this point, they probably have a good chance of breaking even, especially considering their excellent publicity. Brilliant! Why didn't I think of this?? The only forms of capitalization on intrinsic human laziness that is more pure is the television. I think that the wave of the future in technology will focus on capitalizing laziness. We must be living in the future.

As I was saying, this contemplative mood involved a grand revelation. I realized that this iPod opportunity is a total waste of my time. I would have much better luck investing my money wisely and skimming off a few hundred dollars from the profits to buy and iPod. So that's what I'm going to do. Seriously this time. I already closed out and transferred one of my money market accounts to a new company, resulting in an increase in interest rates from 1.14% to a little over 1.9%. Once I get access to the AAII website, I can work on some stocks. It's just so difficult to find a stock that's worth buying, especially with my complete lack of experience. Despite what my closest advisor tells me, I think there's a method to the madness other than randomly trying stocks and watching them fail until you have a good idea of what NOT to do. But at this point, my instincts in the stock market are about as keen as a dead naked molerat.

As for the iPod, it's not that I don't have the money already, it's just that I have this irrational hatred of spending except on items of total necessity. Somehow, if I earn enough money beyond what I had before I wanted something, it somehow psychologically legitimizes my spending. Maybe it's because my net worth has not fallen below the initial level. Also, I find that I'm much more comfortable spending money that involved either very enjoyable work or no work at all. When it comes to spending money earned while doing something very awful, like trimming pyracantha (from Greek "puracantha" - fire + thorn), which I thankfully have never had to do, I am very protective the money. My theory is as follows: Since I don't have a steady income, I remember the occasions during which I make or receive money. So, when I spend money to purchase an item, I first psychologically associate an event and it's pains or joys with a quantity of money, and then the quantity of money is associated with an item that I purchase. So getting mauled by pyracantha, for instance, could hypothetically become associated with my new iPod. Gods, what an awful thought. Let's hope that never happens.

Die dritte Enthüllung:
While I'm at it, I may as well add a third revelation. I was staring at my Mom's laptop a couple of weeks ago. All things considered, I was probably on vicodin at the time. Anyway, I realized that being a DJ wouldn't really entail that much work, and the earnings could be significant. Take our dances at school for instance. We pay $300 to have a DJ play for 2-3 hours. I was talking to Jon about this, and I think it has real promise. If we undercut the competition by about 30%, scrimp on superfluous things like lights, download the top 10 downloads from the iTunes music store every few weeks, and split the profits 50/50, we could probably make a decent amount. Jon's dad is a lawyer, and he has a coworker who deals with copyright cases, so we could iron out all of the legal stuff pretty easily. Plus, I think that the record companies aren't as stringent on DJs as they are on radio stations. With that said, two problems remain. We would need a little venture capital: a few hundred dollars for used speakers, a receiver, music, and lights. We could probably split the financing easily. Also, we could let people give us CDs from which to play their favorite music, and while it was playing we could rip it to our hard drive. The legality seems a little sketchy, but I like it. The other huge problem is just who exactly would hire our services. We need an "in", so to speak. While tackling this problem, let me digress into a short anecdote. About six months ago, Leeor's younger sister had her bat mitzvah, and they hired this DJ and had this big extravagant party (in a Protestant church of all places). Anyway, to say that we (Jon Kadish, Dan Szymkowiak, and I) were "invited" to this fiesta is a possibly a mild overstatement. Actually, we just sort of showed up and dragged Leeor to coffee/tea afterward. But that's irrelevent because we supplied useful labor and assistance while we were there. Jon and I were reflecting on this experience while discussing our disk jockeying future, and he made the observation that we could get our start bat/bar mitzvahs. Collectively we certainly know enough people who could benefit from that kind of a service. Futhermore, Leeor could probably connect us with plenty of people directly since his sister is about 13 or 14 and probably has loads of friends having bat/bar mitvahs. So that's the plan. We have the resources, the legal advisor, and the high probability of operating at maximum PPF. The only thing that could be lacking is requisite knowledge of this more modern music that people probably would want. Leeor might know something... I certainly don't, and I doubt Jon does either. Then again, that what the iTunes top 10 list is for.

"We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts--the strong man as the typical reprobate, the 'outcast among men.'"

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist

"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be."

--Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

Have you ever read something, and had the strongest urge to go yell at the author because of the complete and total incompetance of their logic? I feel that way about Descartes right now. Trying to create geometric philosophical proofs is the most innane and worthless idea ever. Perhaps its not the idea that I dislike as much as his technique of trying to apply the techniques of the immutable and logical (math and geometry basically) to the inherently imperfect, imprecise, and ambiguous world of belief and opinion. But I try do that all the time too, so am I really realizing a deep-seated self-hatred...? Anyway, he thus comes to conclusions that are either wrong, occasionally correct (by pure chance, I think), or about inherently ambiguous topics--the body-soul separation, for instance (here he was clearly wasting his time). But rather than recognizing that his interpretation of reality is relativistic and unabsolute, he declares it as being precise because he has just made some overly embellished metaphor to Euclidean geometry in the process of establishing it. Following this process, a typical sentence might read: "If only all of the lesser minds of our continent could realize the higher plane of such reality as I have so simply deduced here, then humanity might raise itself from it dolorous state of mental obfuscation to see the light struck forth in this discourse and realize progress toward the greater Truth of God with the enlightened guidance of His most revered Scriptures..." I think perhaps not.

In other less messy news, I have a great new aspiration in life. I've been a ravanous patron of Portland's Thai eateries for many years, and I find that I'd like to have Thai food without the inconvenience of having to always drive to a restaurant. This is for three main reasons: 1) I can't drive (a consequence of my laziness in all matters outside the scope of my brain), 2) eating out a lot can be expensive, even if I know all of the hold-in-the-wall spots that are amazingly good and amazingly cheap, and finally 3) I'm incredibly busy and I don't have the time to go somewhere to eat (not that making it is much faster, but I can make more at a time and I can split the labor with my mom). So I'm endeavoring to learn to make some of my favorite dishes. The careful reader is probably doubting my resolve somewhat since they would be aware that I am very lazy in most matters, but I'm proud to say that I've made my first step! Sort of. I made some pretty reasonable traditional Yakisoba noodles today. This of course is Japanese food, which I also like very much. Not quite Thai, but I figure, Japan is on the way to Thailand, so its good enough for starters.

My studies of electricity and magnetism are well under way. I blazed through the section on electric fields with continuous charge distributions, which wasn't too difficult and involved some fun integral-building. It's a shame that my abilities are currently limited to only single-variable calculus, because it seems like you could do some really interesting things with more complex math. Anyway, I'm starting the section on Gauss's Law now, and I think this where things start to become somewhat challenging. Thankfully, difficulty is almost always directly proportional to the degree to which math and science is compelling.

Finally, I'll be taking votes on which American author I should pick for my paper in English. I have to read 3 books by the author and write a comparative analysis of sorts. Anyway, I've narrowed it down the following choices (I actually think that I already have made up my mind on who it will be, but give me your thoughts anyway):

1.) James Baldwin
2.) Henry David Thoreau
3.) James Agee

I wish everyone a happy "Kwanhanzmas" and a good winter-solstice-pagan-festival-break for all students.

In my recent leisure, I've been occupied with a great deal of reading. At the beginning of the break I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I finally can say two things definitively. Firstly, I'll never read another book by Ernest Hemingway. And secondly, that particular work is one of outstanding craftsmanship. I enjoyed it immensely, but I'm so sick of all of Hemingway's other books which I have not enjoyed, that I can no longer bear reading him. The Old Man and the Sea is the only other one worth reading in my opinion.

Following that, I read Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud. It's one of those incredibly confusing and perplexing books that is profoundly insightful. I unfortunately don't have a fraction of the understanding of psychology and psychoanalysis to fully appreciate, but I think that I comprehend the main point about the catch-22 of civlized life: man creates civilization to achieve security from natural aggression (i.e. strength in numbers), but furthering it requires a continual suppression of the sexual instinct whence the aggression originates; this is made possible through the introduction of the interalized super-ego, which also creates a sense of guilt, thereby increasing the strength of the aggressive urges. And so the whole process defeats itself! It's really very fascinating. This has led me to conjecture, outside the purely psychological realm, that "progress" in civilization is really an entirely self-defeating process. Our entire existence is spent in the pursuit of reducing our environmental stresses. To a large degree, we have accomplished this. But to reduce an environmental stress requires a certain input of labor, which in turn is a stress. So the elimination of stress requires, at least temporarily, an additional amount of stress. Furthermore, the elimination of environmental stress takes us further from our natural condition, thereby increasing the stress on the body in many ways. The net result is that humans create about as many problems for themselves as they solve in the solutions of their problems (very reflexive sounding...). So would we be better off sitting in a cold cave knawing on raw meat and tubers right now? Maybe yes, maybe no.

Anyway, now I've started reading Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy by Descartes, and I can't tell you how frustrated I am with his simple and obtuse logic. The first two parts of Method is on the actual method, and it's reasonable and somewhat insightful. But what hideous and false conclusions he comes too! I don't have time to write about it, but I think that the sheer number of conclusions to which he comes that we now know to be false, shows how incredibly presumptious his logic is. The method he prescribes for dealing with problems is rational and good, but his application of it is nothing short of appalling. More to come later, for sure...

Now that I'm out of school for awhile and have been muddling with a few things, my brain is really starting to ache and itch; real learning must finally be taking place.

Tomorrow is going to have to be a day of physics if I am to rectify my state of mental existence and self-satisfaction...

I have officially adopted a version of the Creative Commons copyright scheme, which allows one to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work from this blog with the stipulations that it is for noncommercial purposes only, I must be credited, and derivative works may not be produced. Creative Commons has a variety of flexible copyright schemes that allow one to protect their work in more customizable ways.

Also, please take note that this site does RSS feeds, so you can be constantly updated with the latest posts using an RSS aggregator, Mozilla Firefox, or Mozilla Thunderbird. It's pretty nifty stuff.

More progress has been made on this site, possibly to a point which I would characterize as "fully functional," if not entirely aesthetically coherent. I still need to figure out how to get the comment windows to popup rather than just linking to the individual archive page. As I am still actively performing maintenance on the site, all suggestions for improving its functionality or aesthetic quality are welcome.

On the note of progress, I should transcribe a brief record of my dealings in the past months since I last did any significant blogging. Mostly, I've been occupied with the routine nonsense like school, school-related things, and more school. A few things stand out in my mind from these recent events, however. You may recall that I was somewhat miffed and disappointed at the beginning of the speech and debate season because of my lower-than-expected performance. I seem to have reversed my failure in the most dramatic manner. I did open extemp at Tualatin and finished just about in the dead center of the pack. So, I got down to business, expanding the "ex-files" (my sobriquet for the extemp bin), writing a radio commentary, and working a little with our new debate coach (incredibly great). Finally the time came for the Clackamas tournament, and I was entered in extemp and radio. There were only 3 entrants in extemp, so it was cancelled. They therefore let me enter in impromptu at the last minute. I finaled in radio and took 1st in impromptu; a welcome change from my drought of success.

Then, last week was the Westview tournament. Because of the way the patterns and rounds laid out, Colin let me quadruple enter (he usually bars anyone from entering in more than 2 events): extemp, public debate (w/Colin Corbett), impromptu, and radio commentary all at the senior varsity level. The ratings tended in my favor as I placed 2nd in debate with Colin (going 4-1), 2nd in impromptu, 3rd in radio, and 3rd in extemp. I may have broken some kind school record at that tournament. We only sent 5 other people, and they all did very well. Jon placed 2nd in humorous interp, Colin placed 2nd in dramatic interp, Greg finaled in poetry, and Beth finaled in after-dinner speaking. Not too bad. I have to keep up over the break so we can win the Pacific University tournament when we return to school. We'll have the full team and should be able to make a major impact.

As for the debate results, our record for the season is 5-4, up from 1-3 after Sprague. There are not many things more satifying than debating and decisively defeating a good team, while seeing all of their mistakes and exploiting them to the fullest potential. In the final round of the tournament, the 1st place team was apparently already projected to be the winner, so we were debating for 2nd place. The resolution was "Resolved that: public schools have gone too far in banning religion" and we were the opposition. Thankfully, they defined the public schools to be those of America, not France (probably through ignorance of the legislation there). The beautiful part was that we were able to throw two Supreme Court rulings in their face (Wallace v. Jaffee and Lemon v. Kurtzman), use a handy bit of resolutional analysis to point out that they had no established threshold for what should be considered "too far," use their lack of a threshold to uncover a key contradiction, and destroy them. It's never fun to win in a landslide, but to win by successively beating down their contentions with contradictions out of their own mouths and using legal arguments is the nirvana of debate. I've decided that the Constitution and Supreme Court rulings are kind of like the heavy artillery of event, because most people have such an awful understanding of both, and they're difficult to argue anyway.

I have to go spray some stuff up my nose.

It's been a long time since I looked away from my computer, but I'm going to let it go. The archives are broken. Since I lost all of my old templates, I'm going to have to rebuild them all, but I'll do that another day. Despite all of my hellish trouble with MovableType, I'm exceedingly impressed with it. The new interface is nice too, especially with the improved control over comments.

In other news, I'm using a lot of new software which is extremely nice. With my new internet connection I don't have to use SPA for email, so I can now use Mozilla Thunderbird. Version 1.0 is incredibly cool. It's pretty fast with my new computer (handled my deletion of 1500 notifications of comment spam without a hitch), and it has an integrated RSS reader that is incredibly convenient and easy to use. Firefox 1.0 is, of course, really nice, but I've been using it for a while. I finally switched to iTunes! It's part of my long-term plan to get a free iPod from freeipods.com (help!). It's unbelievable how much simpler (and therefore better) it is than Windows Media Player. With each additional feature, the usability of WinMP goes down... "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" I got my hands on a free C++ IDE for Windows. It's called Bloodshed Dev-C++, and it should work well for my purposes. I'm using the MinGW C++ compiler with it. I think that it's some kind of port of the GCC to Windows, although I don't really understand it. Finally I was able to stop using Roxio software for CD compilations. From Jon I got an unused copy of the Nero OEM suite, which came with his DVD burner. It's a little cheesy, but far more stable than the Roxio garbage. The Roxio software actually crashed about 70% of the time I tried to use it. It was phenomenal.

Anyway, I highly recommend the preceding programs. They're pretty good. I need to take a shower so I can go to school and fill out some forms for science bowl...

I truly do sound as if I'm on Vicodin... Because I am! Or at least I was for a little while. The nose-job went well; my sinuses are a bit stuffy, but they're recovering and feeling better by the hour. The grogginess of the anesthetic has nearly departed, and I'm feeling okay. To put it in a more accurate and relativistic perspective, this equates to feeling quite well. At this point, my pace and style of writing is a bit scattered and incoherent: one might even call it frantic. The explanation for such is simple. In my unfortunate time off from school I have been engaged with the sole purpose of completing the program of renovations to all aspects of my computing life. My computer has been upgraded, I have reinstalled all my software, downloaded and installed Fedora Core 3, set up Bloodshed Dev-C++ with the MinGW C++ compiler, completely migrated to iTunes (involving the conversion of 2.75 GB of WMA files to AAC), performed a fresh installation of MovableType 3.121, updated all of my templates to work with the new version of MovableType, and deleted over 1500 comment spams. And that's just the work on the computer. I've also taught myself some physics (some electrical analogs to universal gravitation), the first declension and first conjugation present indicative in Latin, and I've read a little Hemingway. And don't forget that I actually spent 5 minutes writing all of the preceding junk. If I continue at this pace, I might just have a shot at finishing everything I have to do over the break.