The weirdest things happen sometimes. While running today I was passed by a car in which someone (a random East Indian Teenager whom I did not know) yelled at me as they passed what I could only identify as “yasreafasfasdfas asdn lkjfooowefszxdrf”. Or maybe it was “yasreafasfasdfas asdn lkjfooowefszxdra”, I’m not sure. At the time I figured it was either a curse or a blessing to white strangers who run at night. Anyway, I ignored this and kept on puffing away. When I got to the corner I found the car (and the one ahead, presumably a convoy of some sort) had stopped and the youth had gotten out and along with his friend were approaching me. As I pulled up to them I was asked if he had swore at me. I told him that I had no idea, I hadn’t heard. Apparently he had yelled something like “nice running with you” to me, thinking I looked like his teacher or something. His friend I guess thought he had sworn at me and insisted he stop and appolagize.
Wierd.
I kept on running, after taking my leave of them.
The run by the way, was good. Shorter than it should have been but much more intense. Short bursts of hard running, followed by fast walking, followed by more hard running. I felt good when I got back. And now I have supper in the works (spaghetti) and while Ragu is nice and all, my mom still makes the best spaghetti sauce and meatballs known to man. And if you have a problem with that come on over and I’ll show you (or beat you up and take your toys, whichever feels right at the time) 🙂
Mental Note: Get more sauce from mom, I ran out.
Weird computer crashes today. As you know I finally got my work HD set up last night (Debian, lovely Debian, with dselect and no more of this rpm shit!) and things were working fine when I left this morning, having returned my system to its normal state. However when I got home I had a kernel oops, and a rebooted system sitting at the Debian “enter root password or hit ctrl-d to continue” prompt. Rebooted and fscked, all was fine. Get into X, turn my back. Freeze. Fsck. Upped the cpu voltage a bit and rebooted. Now things are working ok. I guess the heat from the day got to it or something. I’ll take the core voltage down tomorrow night though if everything continues going well.
More Religious Stuff
In installing SETI@Home on my new box at work (did I mention how good it was to have that system finally going?) I got to thinking about ET and life on other planets and wondered how our ultra-religious salesperson viewed it. So I talked about SETI@Home and asked him if he believed in life on other planets, and he said no. “Why?” I asked, to which he replied that he didn’t know. “Well you must have a reason to believe or not believe” I said. He said there was no proof for it. “But there is no proof of God either and you believe in him right?” He responded with the expected “well there is proof of God”. I chose not to go into a discussion on that at this point 🙂 I asked that since there was no evidence one way or the other, why did he not believe. He didn’t know, but he said he could talk to someone who could explain.
Ok, it was a bit of a bait, I admit, but I wanted to see what the religious view of ET was and he pretty much answered that his upbringing and religious views didn’t allow for things that weren’t metioned in the bible (though when did the bible ever mention my Emerson CD player huh?) as things that were created. God created the universe and everything and nowhere does it say that he went off after and created another garden of eden.
But that’s not the point. The point is when he didn’t know why he believed or disbelieved something, and fell back on someone else. Now, this is a problem. I have always been taught and I have always believed that you should take something and think about it, analyze it and figure it out for yourself before you make some sort of decision on it. I know you can’t always do this, and you have to accept that there really is a Pluto out there somewhere, without having gone to see it yourself, but as humans we must always quest for some deeper truth, some other realization to the questions that are presented to us than what is handed down from our parents and teachers and fables and folklore and religious writings. This is not to say that you shouldn’t listen to these things, hell, take them and absorb all you can from them! But don’t take something without thinking about it and coming to a decision by yourself. This is a lot of times hard to do. If your parents for whatever reason completely disbelieve in say, life on other planets, and will give you no other explanation than “the bible tells us so” or “there just isn’t” or “uncle bob says so and he knows about these things” it’s very, very hard to stand in front of them and say that you think maybe they are wrong, or that you’d like to pursue this (in there minds) hopeless search for non-existant knowledge.
But this is something we must do or we do run the risk of turning into a race of machines. The race of mindless workers knowing nothing other than what they are told and with no hopes or dreams for anything beyond what exists around them. This is something that scares me about a few things (Microsoft being one of them, but this is not the purpose of this rant), and I hope that you, the gentle readers of this humble page, will take to heart and pass on as best you can to those around you.
ObRandomBitch:
And why the hell would the boss tell me to install another HD on a box with a bios from 1994 that doesn’t support more than 2 hard drives! Awk! Remind me to take my O2 mug to work tomorrow to make him jelous