Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Bits and Pieces
No particular coherence to my life over the past few days - being 29, so far, seems to have gone by in a big blur. Here are a few paragraphs on all kinds of things.
Just finished watching a total lunar eclipse. Always been a bit of an astronomy aficionado, and I think that one of the most beautiful conicidences in Nature is that Rm/Rs = Dm/Ds. One of my aims in life is to see a solar eclipse properly. I was in Cornwall for the big one in 1999, but the clouds cleared about 2 minutes too late to see totality. I'd planned on seeing that one for about 20 years (sometimes I think I was a particularly hard child to parent!) The next easily accessible ones are in 2017 and 2024, which are both visible from the same small area in Arkansas and Tennessee. I should really start planning to see those ones soon...
Went out for Iasonas' birthday last Saturday in Leeds. It was an OK night, but I realised (for only about the millionth time) that I can't stand humanity en masse. Individual bits of it I can take, but put lots of people together, add in some alcohol and you just end up with something you might see on an Attenborough program. Still, I got 16 and 17 on the CNPS while standing starring out the window trying to avoid looking at the rest of the world.
In my spare moments over the weekend I've been reading a fascinating online book. It rings true with some thoughts I've had in the same direction recently myself. The broad premise - that the modern schooling system has arisen out of the desire by corporations to foster dependence on their products and the consumerist society by "getting into young minds while they're still fresh" - sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it has been difficult so far to see where any of Mr Gatto's logic falls down. Scary stuff.
God, the Net's slow today. Reckon it's all the Sasser traffic slowing stuff down. People should really use a proper operating system like Linux, BSD or OSX instead of Windows. There's always a lot of talk about how Windows is targeted so much only because it's so widely used. Well, firstly, that sentence in itself suggests a solution! Secondly, most other operating systems, being Unix-like, are usually written to be much less tightly self-integrated - Outlook Express's design to tightly couple the address book and the e-mail functions can arguably be blamed for pretty much every e-mail virus ever. Thirdly, open-source programs tend to get fixed a lot faster when problems like the one Sasser exploits is found - Microsoft knew about this in October, and took 6 months to release a fix, whereas there have been flaws of similar import found and fixed within 24 hours in the Linux world.
I'm not a Microsoft fan, as you might be able to tell.
Up to 96% on GTA Vice City. I've had this game so long (3 days less than I've been living in York, which makes it almost exactly 18 months), and I'm finally about to have it finished.
This is starting to get dull now, and I'm tired, so I'm going to bed. Good night!
Just finished watching a total lunar eclipse. Always been a bit of an astronomy aficionado, and I think that one of the most beautiful conicidences in Nature is that Rm/Rs = Dm/Ds. One of my aims in life is to see a solar eclipse properly. I was in Cornwall for the big one in 1999, but the clouds cleared about 2 minutes too late to see totality. I'd planned on seeing that one for about 20 years (sometimes I think I was a particularly hard child to parent!) The next easily accessible ones are in 2017 and 2024, which are both visible from the same small area in Arkansas and Tennessee. I should really start planning to see those ones soon...
Went out for Iasonas' birthday last Saturday in Leeds. It was an OK night, but I realised (for only about the millionth time) that I can't stand humanity en masse. Individual bits of it I can take, but put lots of people together, add in some alcohol and you just end up with something you might see on an Attenborough program. Still, I got 16 and 17 on the CNPS while standing starring out the window trying to avoid looking at the rest of the world.
In my spare moments over the weekend I've been reading a fascinating online book. It rings true with some thoughts I've had in the same direction recently myself. The broad premise - that the modern schooling system has arisen out of the desire by corporations to foster dependence on their products and the consumerist society by "getting into young minds while they're still fresh" - sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it has been difficult so far to see where any of Mr Gatto's logic falls down. Scary stuff.
God, the Net's slow today. Reckon it's all the Sasser traffic slowing stuff down. People should really use a proper operating system like Linux, BSD or OSX instead of Windows. There's always a lot of talk about how Windows is targeted so much only because it's so widely used. Well, firstly, that sentence in itself suggests a solution! Secondly, most other operating systems, being Unix-like, are usually written to be much less tightly self-integrated - Outlook Express's design to tightly couple the address book and the e-mail functions can arguably be blamed for pretty much every e-mail virus ever. Thirdly, open-source programs tend to get fixed a lot faster when problems like the one Sasser exploits is found - Microsoft knew about this in October, and took 6 months to release a fix, whereas there have been flaws of similar import found and fixed within 24 hours in the Linux world.
I'm not a Microsoft fan, as you might be able to tell.
Up to 96% on GTA Vice City. I've had this game so long (3 days less than I've been living in York, which makes it almost exactly 18 months), and I'm finally about to have it finished.
This is starting to get dull now, and I'm tired, so I'm going to bed. Good night!
posted by Chip : 22:33
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