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) š
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 š
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